Time of day definitely plays a part, but there’s also luck/randomness to it.
Even the same time and same day of the week there will never be exactly the same set of users online, and that’s even more true with regard to the users who are choosing to look at HN’s /newest page. So pure luck can determine whether a bunch of comic book lovers see it soon after submission and give it enough votes to get on HN’s front page, or just a bunch of people who think it’s a boring story worth ignoring.
(Personally I thought it sounded like it might have interesting comments worth reading, hence my being here, but I wouldn’t have found it interesting enough to upvote if I were one of the people who saw it on the new submissions page.)
> Funny how the time of day affects the visibility of posting
I have had that happen multiple times as well, but those are usually the ones I posted because I am interested in the thoughtful/knowledgeable comments that happen -- so it works out either way. I assume it's because my main source being BBC -- even though the website has a good variety of interesting (non-headline news) content that is well sourced/linked -- but also because I usually end up posting during odd/off-hours for US central. Think most of the ones I post that gain any traction had ended up in the 2nd chance pool.
This one was a bit of an anomaly for me on how quickly it picked up -- personally thought the one I posted before it was a little more interesting about Rolls-Royce finding ways to limit sand/dust from damaging jet-engines, but this here is Superman after all
I strongly suspect that a number of HN members have been training LLMs on HN headlines, then using these LLMs to recommend stories and times for submission. Maybe they have even set up the scripts to post submissions automatically.
That’s how we roll.
The results are likely to be that all HN front page stories will eventually be LLM-sourced.
I’m not entirely against that, if the scripts do a good job of selecting stories.
Hacker News is for human beings to share stories they find interesting so that other human beings can discuss those stories to gratify their intellectual curiosity. Automating that process with the goal of maximizing visibility and karma defeats the intended goal of the forum.
Not the actual goal, of course the actual goal of Hacker News for many people is gaming SEO and startup juice.
That said, I don't doubt for a second you're right. Trust a forum of tech bros and nerds to minmax away what little joy there is left to posting here.
I don't think it's that simple. It's my opinion that YC doesn't need much buzz, except within this very community. Since they own the venue, they get the benefit.
I think that a goal is to "cultivate" a startup community. Get nerds and tech bros together, and some synergy is bound to happen.
I'm not trying to start anything up, but I do enjoy the community. I'm not really what YC is looking for, but I suspect they like me, more than an LLM.
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