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How to get upvoted on HackerNews

Hacker News regularly publishes a dataset to Kaggle. As I looked at my posts go dying quickly down the “new” section, I wondered what was the relationship between score and how long the story was remaining in the visible portion of the “new” section, raising the probability of upvote.

In this article I look at correlations between the score and different attributes of the story:

  • posting date/time, showing indeed a relationship between published story rate and score
  • type of story (Show HN, …)
  • efficiency of reposting
  • class of topic (clustering story from the title only with NLP)

How to post on Hacker News

  • Submit at 8:00 AM EST. If you miss the window (after 8:20 AM), simply post the day or week after.
  • Preferably on Wednesday. Weekends front page are easier to land for example, but Wednesdays seem to be the peak of traffic for HN (more eyeballs).
  • Have a great title. That means being relevant and catchy, use capitalization and potentially use slang (a simple “sh*t” in the title can go a long way).
  • Be opinionated. Having a strong opinion about something will help create some level of discussion and buzz among readers, which helps getting upvotes.
  • Be relevant. HN is a community of hackers and entrepreneurs, so either post about entrepreneurship, technology or the related lifestyle and interests of such kind of people.