Re:Item 10^6
by kurtosis on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @08:20PM
(#1000176)
is there somewhere else where this convention is used?
if the Id of the most recent post is an exponentially growing function of time then the time between any two posts should be proportional to the log of the ratio of their IDs.. so
shouldn't it be log(ID most recent / ID first post) ?
Re:Item 10^6
by davi on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @08:36PM
(#1000194)
I made it up.
But for exponentially growing ID, log(ID most recent / ID first post) is proportional to age of account & that's boring -- the nonlinearity is what makes the measure 'fun' (I use the term loosely). It agrees with some notion of the 'good old days' when Startup News was a fishbowl we could all look in on, and early HN participants were Founders not only of startups but also an online community.
I agree though, there are probably more interesting measures one could come up with.
Re:Item 10^6
by rms on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @09:39PM
(#1000289)
Only some trolls think Nickb is dead. The best solid evidence for him not being dead is that even if he doesn't answer his cell phone, he seems to be paying the bill. Though I suppose that's not very good evidence with automatic payment being so common.
Re:Item 10^6
by philwelch on Thursday December 17, 2009 @12:08AM
(#1000454)
Every so often in the news you read about some elderly person in one of the developed countries found dead in their apartment, having been dead for months. Their pensions keep getting direct-deposited and their bills keep getting paid automatically so no one suspects anything for awhile.
I lurked for a while before participating, maybe you did the same?
Incidentally that makes pg 1000205 / 17 = 59,000 HNyears old -- and that seems about right, I bet the average reader here cares ~10,000x more about what pg writes than what I write (pg HNyears / davi HNyears = ~10K). :)
The reason pageviews peaked in Aug is that we got better then at shutting down over-aggressive crawlers. The big spike in uniques was when the HN thread about _why became the de facto condolence page for the whole web.
Re:Item 10^6
by whyme on Thursday December 17, 2009 @12:45PM
(#1001455)
Congrats on the growth. I think you're going through some growth technology problems as well?. I find the responsiveness of HN has changed for the worse. I notice the main page doesn't respond sometimes and trying to check out the submissions for top leaders / heavy users yields no results. Just an observation.
Re:Item 10^6
by vaksel on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @09:18PM
(#1000254)
those numbers are pretty good, although the ratio is lower than I expected. 12 page views per user, per month? I view more than that while I eat my breakfast.
Every number is interesting somehow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_number - and the quote: "Every positive integer is one of Ramanujan's personal friends."—J. E. Littlewood, upon hearing of the taxicab incident.
Re:Item 10^6
by gjm11 on Thursday December 17, 2009 @05:05AM
(#1000750)
From Littlewood's (wonderful) "Mathematician's Miscellany":
I read in the proof-sheets of Hardy on Ramanujan: "As someone said, each of the positive integers was one of his personal friends." My reaction was, "I wonder who said that; I wish I had." In the next proof-sheets I read (what now stands), "It was Littlewood who said ..."
(What had happened was that Hardy had received the remark in silence and with poker face, and I wrote it off as a dud. I later taxed Hardy with this habit; on which he replied: "Well, what is one to do, is one always to be saying 'damned good'?" To which the answer is "yes".)
Until now I've always taken these paragraphs as saying that it wasn't really Littlewood who made the remark about Ramanujan, but on rereading it I've changed my mind: I think the point is that he did say it, and was annoyed that Hardy didn't credit him, and made a little joke about it which Hardy interpreted correctly. Maybe I'm overinterpreting. Littlewood's second paragraph doesn't quite make sense to me (i.e., what it proffers as an explanation doesn't seem to explain very well) on either interpretation. If he didn't say it, then (having seen that second set of proof sheets) he and Hardy effectively conspired to credit him for something he hadn't said, which would be quite a breach of academic etiquette...
Finally RiderOfGiraffes' nickname, since they've demonstrated to me that once you start looking at those little commentid fields it does interesting things to my obsessive-compulsive tendencies.
Sorry so obtuse. My head's been down in code all day long. If I could post in binary it might be easier :)
Re:Item 10^6
by russell on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @10:54PM
(#1000381)
Well, I figured out the first and third parts. So the the Sieve of Giraffes returns every number. I guess the next step is to include it in the Java library.
How old are you in HN years? (ID of your most recent post / ID of your first post)
me: 1000140 / 174632 = 5.7 HN years
edw519 (current leader after pg): 999538 / 9357 = 107 HNyears
RIP, nickb: 685017 / 2649 = 259 HNyears
mechanical_fish: 999416 / 22714 = 44 HNyears
if the Id of the most recent post is an exponentially growing function of time then the time between any two posts should be proportional to the log of the ratio of their IDs.. so
shouldn't it be log(ID most recent / ID first post) ?
But for exponentially growing ID, log(ID most recent / ID first post) is proportional to age of account & that's boring -- the nonlinearity is what makes the measure 'fun' (I use the term loosely). It agrees with some notion of the 'good old days' when Startup News was a fishbowl we could all look in on, and early HN participants were Founders not only of startups but also an online community.
I agree though, there are probably more interesting measures one could come up with.
999899/425 = 2352 HNY
latest: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=999899 first: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=425
This tangent is not a pleasant one, but I couldn't resist making a citation.
There may be earlier ones - I couldn't retrieve comments before about Jun 2007, so I went by my earliest submission:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243
Or perhaps my memory is going. They say the mind is the first thing to go. Or at least I think they do.
I lurked for a while before participating, maybe you did the same?
Incidentally that makes pg 1000205 / 17 = 59,000 HNyears old -- and that seems about right, I bet the average reader here cares ~10,000x more about what pg writes than what I write (pg HNyears / davi HNyears = ~10K). :)
Since it's somewhat an anniversary, can you tell us what kind of traffic HN is getting? users wise, pageviews wise. Or is that a trade secret?
http://ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-16dec09.png
The reason pageviews peaked in Aug is that we got better then at shutting down over-aggressive crawlers. The big spike in uniques was when the HN thread about _why became the de facto condolence page for the whole web.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048576
Perhaps for any given point in a increasing number series there is an infinite number of interesting numbers just around the corner.
Sigh.
It's the sieve of Giraffes
Or the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox
Every number is interesting somehow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_number - and the quote: "Every positive integer is one of Ramanujan's personal friends."—J. E. Littlewood, upon hearing of the taxicab incident.
I read in the proof-sheets of Hardy on Ramanujan: "As someone said, each of the positive integers was one of his personal friends." My reaction was, "I wonder who said that; I wish I had." In the next proof-sheets I read (what now stands), "It was Littlewood who said ..."
(What had happened was that Hardy had received the remark in silence and with poker face, and I wrote it off as a dud. I later taxed Hardy with this habit; on which he replied: "Well, what is one to do, is one always to be saying 'damned good'?" To which the answer is "yes".)
Until now I've always taken these paragraphs as saying that it wasn't really Littlewood who made the remark about Ramanujan, but on rereading it I've changed my mind: I think the point is that he did say it, and was annoyed that Hardy didn't credit him, and made a little joke about it which Hardy interpreted correctly. Maybe I'm overinterpreting. Littlewood's second paragraph doesn't quite make sense to me (i.e., what it proffers as an explanation doesn't seem to explain very well) on either interpretation. If he didn't say it, then (having seen that second set of proof sheets) he and Hardy effectively conspired to credit him for something he hadn't said, which would be quite a breach of academic etiquette...
It's a word-play off three concepts. The First is the famous filter for finding primes, the Sieve of Eratosthenes. Sieve of Eratosthenes
Then there is the concept of "Interesting Numbers" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox (every number is interesting).
Finally RiderOfGiraffes' nickname, since they've demonstrated to me that once you start looking at those little commentid fields it does interesting things to my obsessive-compulsive tendencies.
Sorry so obtuse. My head's been down in code all day long. If I could post in binary it might be easier :)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=87846