Dropbox had about 60 if I remember right (109 now) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863.

Wow, those comments are awesome.

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

I wonder how many other ten-figure business models can be developed from comments that begin "For any Linux user, this is totally trivial," or "Um, have you looked at the pricing for Amazon S3?" or "LOL, this problem was solved 20 years ago by XXXX at YYYY."

This is such a classy HN comment. "For 0.01% of the population, this is trivial to do by X, which is extremely complicated, and does not work at all, and evidently even the commenter himself had never done that"

It should be noted that HN in 2008 was a lot different than it is now.

Nah. Just the other day there was a big thread on how easy it is to run your own VPN on AWS and why should one ever pay for a glorified web proxy? :facepalm:

it's a weird metric.

Obviously a TOTALLY different league, but I have a small text editor plugin that got < 10 upvotes, and how has 500,000 installs. don't think I ever posted.it anywhere else.

My gut says low number of upvotes are probably indicative of a "thing people don't know they need" opportunity.

Can't imagine there are too many 100+ upvote use cases that don't already have substantial competition.

So 10-100 is probably a sweet spot in terms of "people are interested" and "there's an unfulfilled opportunity."

I believe 60 upvotes at the time is probably equal to >150 upvotes today.

Yeah, I felt it was pretty good at the time. BTW my comment here has 110 upvotes, many more people on HN then in 2012.

Upvote inflation, interesting!

Somebody should mine the data and calculate year-over-year inflation rate, we have a mini economy on our hands! :)

20 upvotes got me on the front page one time. It was the most views I've ever had on my blog. It got me a job interview! Nothing came of it, but still a wild ride.

I was once on the front page too, but sadly, no HS internship or job of any kind came out of it :(

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2120887 my estimate was 200% a long time ago

You wouldn't even need to mine it - https://github.com/HackerNews/API

Even easier: All Hacker News posts are ready to be analyzed in BigQuery.

- https://medium.com/@hoffa/hacker-news-on-bigquery-now-with-d...

Sorry, I meant analyze. I actually am writing a blog post right now on this (this thread was very inspiring). Should be up in a day or two at https://applecrazy.github.io/blog

Good luck downloading 16 million records...

Why? 16 million isn’t much, maybe 10 to 20 gigabyte if compressed.

I’ve seen IRC bouncers that have more messages stored for a single user (270 million, in fact).

You could do that with the Algolia API: https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all-hacker-news-submissions...

But as noted, BigQuery is more pragmatic.

I have a script running on aws right now.