Top all-time · #6350
W
Whaly
Company blog · whaly.io/postsdatabusiness
Whaly is the company blog at whaly.io, writing about data and business. Since 2022, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 32 times, most often “A Year on Hacker News”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
No feed foundVisit the blog
32mentions?
12HN people?
2022–2025first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Whaly's posts for statistics about Hacker News, such as the 2021 retrospective and the list of top 10k commenters, and the posts are cited as data sources for traffic and user questions.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Transform your CRM and store data into actionable field insights. Discover Whaly, the AI sales copilot to optimize your commercial performance.
Most-linked posts?
- A Year on Hacker News8 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2022-01-02
- Top Hacker News commenters of 20215 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-01-03
What Hacker News says?
HN, as with virtually all user-generated content sites, leverages both member actions and automation heavily. Annually HN sees about 150k active users, 400k stories, and 4m comments: < https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective > (2021 retrespective by Whaly.io). It has one public-facing moderator (and apparently a few others who don't post publicly on the site). HN's own mods see very little of the total…
Comment linking /posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
on “Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?”Submitted Top Hacker News commenters of 2021 as a story · 59 points
HN discussions/algorithm/dynamic/ HN doesn't have an algorithm, per se. There are voting mechanics, and some sites gain or lose a penalty based on content or type (most generic news sites, for example, are slightly penalised). There are keyword / topic penalties too for issues that are dominating the hivemind for a period. But mostly what you're seeing is simple mass-media power-law effects, along with early-action advantage: -…
Comment linking /posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
on “I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse”Submitted A Year on Hacker News as a story · 5 points
HN discussionwtf edit: Oh I see, you're that guy that comments on everything [0]. Sorry for responding in the first place. [0] https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-...
Comment linking /posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-2021
on “Russia to legalize software piracy”Submitted What happened this year on Hacker News? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMaybe not exactly what you are looking for but https://whaly.io can do the trick !
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Tools to visualize data in SQL databases?”Submitted The Startup Data Dilemma as a story · 2 points
HN discussionExactly. I'd made this point a bit over a year ago with regards to Hacker News, based on my own work scraping a full history of Front Page views from the "past" archive. Note that there are only 30 stories which make the front page per day, total submissions run somewhat higher, typically a bit over 100, and about 400,000 per year per research by Whaly.[1] As of 21 June 2023, there were 52,642 distinct sites submitt…
Comment linking /posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
on “Why won't some people pay for news? (2022)”Submitted Scaling a Business Intelligence System as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWhaly analysis (2021 data): < https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective >
Comment linking /posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
on “History of Hacker News Search from 2007 to 2024”There's also the Leaders list which shows the 100 highest-karma members: < https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders > That's ... pretty constant over time, more so amongst the highest-ranked members than, say, positions 75--100. Whaly did an analysis of the most-active HN participants in 2022, looking at 2021 data. That's also fairly constant. < https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-... > Discussio…
Comment linking /posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-2021
on “History of Hacker News Search from 2007 to 2024”Front-page space is limited and a precious resource. There are 10,950 slots in a regular year, 10,980 in a leap year, and ~400k submissions, such that if you're batting average about 2.7% of your submissions stand a chance of making the front page.[1] Resubmissions are permitted for that reason, and going through the New submissions and flagging and voting appropriately does help keep front-page quality higher. ____…
Comment linking /posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
on “Book and Dagger: How scholars and librarians became spies during World War II”You can find answers to the first question here: https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective And here: https://app.whaly.io/hacker-news/public/report/3596f39c-5a56...
Comment linking /posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
on “Top Hacker News commenters of 2021”> There was 150k+ active users of Hacker News in 2021 and below is the list of the 10k most active users.[1] - [1] https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-...
Comment linking /posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-2021
on “Top Hacker News commenters of 2021”Spez employs an all-too-common, in all senses of that word, rhetorical trope of dismissing action by a core community of Redditors as "a small group". By that same token, Reddit's executive staff and board are also a "small group", though ones that happen to hold considerable official power . As with many domains, media behaviours follow a power law distribution: "a small group" is responsible for the majority of po…
Comment linking /posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-2021
on “Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company”Interesting side note. A discussion elsewhere had me looking at how much front-page HN activity is attributable to what number of profiles. Using my crawl data mentioned above: - 2 submitters with > 1,000 stories - 170 w/ >= 100 - 2,812 w/ >= 10 - 19,165 w/ >=2 That very nearly perfectly follows the rule I'd given above: reducing the items by a factor of ten (here: number of front-page posts) increases the submitter…
Comment linking /posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
on “What Reddit Got Wrong”This was a similar one from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778994 https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-... https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
Comment linking /posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
on “Hacker News Insight”Notes: 1. "A year on Hacker News" < https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective?ref=wh... > 2. Many more examples: < https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... > 3. One tool used by other outlets is a scheduled discussion for specific topics. Conventions such as "X day" or "Y month" (e.g., Mother's Day, Black History Month, Earth Day, Pride Month) afford opportunities for such discussi…
Comment linking /posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective?ref=whaly.ghost.io
on “Why I’m quitting Hacker News”Your broad statement is ridiculous. I am not friends with 3 billions of people, but many people I care about are on the fediverse; everyone (within the margin of error) is on the fediverse. No one (within the margin of error) cares about a tech forum hosted by a VC (from https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective ). And yet here we are. Please don't use only your tech and stats goggles to analyze the situ…
Comment linking /posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
on “Teddit Is Shutting Down”> I have started assuming that most of the people here have some kind of side project that makes them money. I haven't paid attention to it, but probably the people who mention "my side projects" aren't regulars, and it's probably a Baader-Meinhof thing for you. If you want to be methodical (or me, since I'm just guessing with no data), you could go through the top 10k commenters here: https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k…
Comment linking /posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-2021
on “Ask HN: Do most of the regulars have their own side projects that make money?”Recognising that HN discussion will go where HN discussion wants, I'll point out that my principle point was that suggesting "subscribe to sources" simply does not scale for HN, or any site or service with a similar dynamic (Digg, Reddit, Mastodon, FB, etc.), where stories are submitted from a large number of online sources. Answering your question quantitatively: Whaly did an analysis based on the HN API about a ye…
Comment linking /posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
on “Hacker News and “Paying for Media””Have you seen https://www.moderndatastack.xyz/ ? On this page: https://whaly.io/product/mission It's says pairs well with Airbyte, but right above that you say Whaly handles ETL. Those two seem to conflict, do you use Airbyte for the ETL?
Comment linking /product/mission
on “Show HN: Complete catalog of data connectors and ETL providers”I am not sure about this, because if so, then you'd see submissions at a constant rate. But they tend to cluster around business hours Pacific: https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective I've posted on Sunday and the new page is super slow then. It might be a function of the number of submissions + the number of people available to upvote them (both increase during the work week and decrease on the weeken…
Comment linking /posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
on “Ask HN: How much traffic does HN get?”HN stats a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581 > Roughly 2.6M views a day, 300K daily uniques, 3 to 3.5M monthly uniques. It depends on how you count, of course. It would be curious to see how this compares to 2023... but I doubt you'd see an order of magnitude change in either direction. Some 2021 stats (not from dang though) https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
Comment linking /posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
on “I've skimmed 66520 newsgroups trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)”OT: hijacking to reply to a past comment: < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36147435 > You might find my work based on the HN front page of interest: < https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/110437783957361794 >. Note that this is a subset of total HN activity, though a significant subset. There's also Whaly.io's retrospectives based on the HN API: < https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective > < https://whal…
Comment linking /posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-2021
on “Hair dye and chemical straightener use and breast cancer risk (2019)”As of 21 June 2023, there were 52,642 distinct sites (as defined by HN) which have made just the front page (30 items/day). That's roughly 3% of all submitted posts, which would be a rather larger site tally. How many of those 52,642 sites do you suggest HN members subscribe to? If we restrict that to only the sites with 100+ front-page submissions, that number falls to 149. Of the sites I've identified as "general…
Comment linking /posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
on “The Vanishing Family: Life in the Shadow of a Cruel Genetic Mutation”Drop me a line if you'd like to discuss this / share w/ reports. username at Protonmail. I'm sort of a Can Haz All The Tables sort of guy, and I'm largely processing via awk (and a few other shell tools). So pasting that here would get a bit tedious... It's also been interesting to look at how HN has, and hasn't, changed over the years. Your categorical analysis would be an interesting filter to look at over time, e…
Comment linking /posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
on “What gets to the front page of Hacker News? A data project”So, oddly enough, I've also been looking at HN front-page characteristics, based on the same corpus (the "past" page links). And that whole section on caveats over what that archive represents is something I could have written... The front page, both in its dynamic and archived forms is strongly subject to many influences in complex ways. A couple of tips: - It's possible to crawl the page using wget, given a reason…
Comment linking /posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
on “What gets to the front page of Hacker News? A data project”
