Hacker News Logo Hacker News 2018 Year in Review
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Hacker News
2018 Year in Review
346+
thousand
stories
53+
thousand
new users
2.2+
million
comments
Hacker News Posts

2018

It's no surprise that 2018 was a busy year. With over 2.5 million posts, the hacker news community came together to discuss over 300 thousand different stories. We've taken time to explore some of the highest profile posts, and to celebrate the community contributions.

Cumulative Posts over the year of 2018


MOST ACTIVE DAY
2018 AUG 21
18,412 Posts
MOST ACTIVE Score DAY
2018 MAR 17
5,944 Score Points
Most Active Weekday
Tuesdays
418,196 Posts
responsible
teaches
positivity
civility
newsworthy
substance
thoughtful
trending

Top Posts By Score

#{{index + 1}}
{{post.by}} | {{post.title}}
{{post.score}} pts.

Stories with the Most Comments

#{{index + 1}}
{{post.by}} | {{post.title}}
{{post.descendants}} comments

A moment of silence
The top two posts of 2018 measured in score dealt with the passing of two high profile leaders.
Waves

Community

Hacker news has seen over 500,000 users join since it began, adding over 50,000 new users in 2018. PG built something people want... brilliant!

confetti_ball

Hacker news new users by month

Top Users By Cumulative Score in 2018

  1. {{user.by}} {{user.total}}

...and the winner is:

clap {{topUsers2018ByScore[0].by}} clap

Article submissions that helped put {{topUsers2018ByScore[0].by}} on top:

"The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill"

"For First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter Public Domain"


Top Karma By New User in 2018

...and the winner is:

clap {{topUsersByKarma[0].user}} clap

Article submissions that helped put {{topUsersByKarma[0].user}} on top:

"Vigilante engineer stops Waymo from patenting key lidar technology"

"Venezuela devalues the Bolivar by 95% and pegs it to ‘oil-linked’ cryptocurrency"

  1. {{user.user}} {{user.karma}}
7,529
rbanffy
Most posts by a single user

github.com
218,774
Top site by Score

medium.com
17,727
Top site by Total Posts

TOP DOMAIN

(by score)

github.com

TOP DOMAIN

(by posts)

nytimes.com

Top Poll Activity

Poll: Would you prefer no copyright to current copyright laws?

67 comments

On the Job

This user is the top job poster. Gratitude for looking out for your fellow hackers.

KMinshew - 47 Job Posts

Best day to look for a job?

Tuesday, Thursday and Friday were close runners up. (Sunday & Monday...not so much!)

Wednesdays - 234 Posts

All Time Score Leaders

  • tptacek - 309,329
  • pg - 155,111
  • jacquesm - 146,870
  • patio11 - 121,993
  • danso - 102,560
Notes

Karma vs. Score: If you add up all of the scores from all of your posts (stories and comments) and then compare that value to the karma value on your Hacker News user page, they very likely will not match. At the time of publishing this story (mid January 2019), my Karma score is 780 but my cumulative score is 688. There is some brief discussiom of Karma here: HN FAQ

Since scores are connected to posts, we can track those over time, like for 2018. Karma however is connected to a user in the Hacker News data model and does not have a time component. So for the karma chart above it is merely a snapshot in time at the end of 2018.

How is this built? We have created a copy of the Hacker News data set in AWS Redshift. We have update processes that load new stories and data hourly and also update scores for any story that lands in the popular list of the HN API.

The charts and several metrics we created using Chartly. You can see a demo of how our system works by watching the video on creating custom dashboards.

It would be cool if we could use the public Big Query data set in Google cloud, but it is missing some data that we'd like to report on. Namely users as well as enhancing the posts with fields like (domain name of a story).

Why did you do this? At Chartly we believe story telling with data is a powerful way to celebrate a community. Whether it is a company or a site like HN, there are interested stories buried in the piles of bits tucked away in your databases and 3rd party services.

We want to unlock those "data stories" and help you tell the world about your organization.

Can you create a story for my company? Absolutely! We can create data stories based on data from third party services like Google Analytics, Stripe and Mailchimp OR from data stored in a cloud database

Our team will work with you to give your story a personal touch and help your team, your customers and the world better know your triumphs and trials. I want to tell my story!
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