8 ms·

HN statistics

313 points by nhoss2 14y ago

adam-_- 14y ago
You should put the hire me call to action further up the page!
- vhf 14y ago
  Yep. You deserve it !
- rickhutcheson 14y ago
  seconded
alpb 14y ago
I'm wondering if you could ever discover daily commenting user count or even maybe monthly active user count somehow and share with us. That would be awesome.
cvursache 14y ago
A guy with nice skills like you shouldn't have '<div id="sorrow">' in his source code. Although it is funny.
dkroy 14y ago
I hope you get the money you need to continue your education, you are very talented.
dkroy 14y ago
If you want your d3 graphs to work in IE8 you might want to use https://github.com/shawnbot/aight https://github.com/shawnbot/aight
andreasklinger 14y ago
@nhoss2 Slightly offtopic: Love the honesty on your http://labs.im/ http://labs.im/ page. But you might be underselling yourself. You are saying you are willing to work cheaply because you are young and a risk. You are capable of using node.js, you use phantomJS, you seem to have good product and ux thinking and you are able to use github. Just the last one alone puts you on the upper 50% of the worldwide freelance market. Not to speak of the first three things i mentioned. As somebody living in UK i appreciate your modesty and i wish you all the best for your jobhunt. Projects like this are genius thing to do, continue until you find something :)
- DavidChouinard 14y ago
  I agree, this is top-notch work. I would drop the beatup negative attitude, it's a big turnoff. You could easily get a remote part-time job in the Valley for 100+$/hour — think of it, that's only 40 hours of work to pay off your tuition.
  - e12e 14y ago
    Really? Easily? I've yet to see anyone willing to hire someone to do off site work with a US company, in the Valley or elsewhere. At least not development work, or anything in the range of 100 USD/hour. I've always found that a bit strange, but maybe you know something I don't? For the record I'm based in Norway, and English is my second, not first language -- but even if it was just to recommend friends and acquaintances that are in a similar position as op -- I would really like to hear how you would suggest going about looking for such work?
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - mootothemax 14y ago
      Really? Easily? I've yet to see anyone willing to hire someone to do off site work with a US company, in the Valley or elsewhere. At least not development work, or anything in the range of 100 USD/hour. I won't discuss my rates in public, but I have clients in the States and UK. I'm a British guy based in Poland, and only one of those clients has been via a direct contact. All others have come to my. As briefly touched on in another comment, I'm also not a cheap option. The work's definitely out there - just look in the HN "who's hiring" threads. I've also had some enquiries via my various SaaS apps, which double as a nice side income and an advertisement of sorts. Edit: I'm willing to concede that this isn't easy per se; I'm highly competent at what I do, and I'm also happy to do lots of chatting over Skype or via email first. Without my talent or willingness to chat, I'm not sure that this would be as successful as it is for me.
    - btilly 14y ago
      $100/hour is indeed very doable. Stop and think. Suppose that you have have a $120k full-time dev. (This is by no means the top of the dev market.) Once you get through benefits, office space, HR, etc, at a typical company you cost 2x your salary, so that dev is costing you $240k/year. If that person works 50 weeks a year, 5 days a week, 6 hours a day (just because a person is present 8 hours does not mean that they worked 8 hours) the cost of that full-time dev is $160/hour. Day in. Day out. Contractors avoid many of those costs in return for higher direct pay. And you only hire that contractor when there is a good fit between what you need and what that contractor can do. A smart contractor who knows what to ask for is therefore able to get surprisingly good rates. And step #1 is knowing what you are worth. Step #2 is knowing how to negotiate. There are a lot of good books you can pick up on the topic. I personally picked up Start With No and Bargaining For Advantage a few years back. A 2 digit investment in materials, and a 2 digit expenditure in hours has easily been worth over 6 figures to my bank account. I expect it to have paid off 7 figures before I retire. Can you think of anything else with an equivalent ROI?
csomar 14y ago
Your labs.im pitch is probably going to send you the worst freelance jobs you'll ever have. Nobody gives a shit about your situation, and your University tuition fees. Actually, this signals a red flag for serious clients: You might drop their project as soon as you get some financing. Promote yourself as a young, intelligent and enthusiast developer with coding and design skills. Price your hourly rate at $80-100/hour; and get your tuition paid in the next couple weeks. Edit: Quite a discussion here. I'd like to add that an important part of doing business is trust. Clients are going to throw lots of money that's going to evaporate on HTML and JavaScript code. They want to be sure that you are the guy who is going to give them the right result. Tip: Make a decent lab page. Look at design agencies in sortfolio and copy them (not their design, their strategy). Build a couple more projects, and open source them on Github. Send emails to design agencies, and try to build a network. Finally, decide if you want to do this for a living or concentrate on EE. The overhead to get a single project is the same to get a constant stream of projects.
- DavidChouinard 14y ago
  I agree, I can't overstate how weak your labs.im pitch is, especially in regards to your clearly very impressive skills. That pitch easily cuts your market rate by half, probably more. And as csomar mentioned, it's going to get you the crappiest, bottom-of-the-barrel jobs. In all types of pitches — to employers, VCs, etc. — desperation is the absolute worst thing you should ever let transpire.
  - nhoss2 14y ago
    Hey, OP here. I realize now that it was a mistake to come off like that but there were a few reasons on why I did: - I just felt like a piece of shit when I wrote it because I have no connections and have had a very hard time trying to get a normal job. I also had no confidence that any of this would work out so that did not help my ego when writing. - When I submitted this to HN, it was fairly late and I went to sleep about half and hour later so basically I slept through the entire discussion going on here and it would have been a bit late to change anything after I woke up. - There was a comment or two saying that maybe I should change the post of labs.im (before I went to sleep) but I did not know what I could write. I didn't just want to write something like "im smart and can do this well" because anyone could say that and I particularly dislike talking about myself like that. Also, to anyone that has emailed me, I have not replied to any emails yet but I am starting now. And sorry for the late reply.
yread 14y ago
What is this for? Or is it just a cool way to try new technologies without any real purpose? EDIT: I didn't mean it in a bad way. Trying new stuff is a perfectly fine reason for doing things and this looks quite beautiful. I was just looking for an answer like "this helps you see whether more karma is given on weekdays or weekends". Statistics and visualization should answer meaningful questions, I think.
- danso 14y ago
  Even if it is just a way to try new technologies...it's a huge mistake to think that aggregation/visualization/analysis, even at this relatively simple level, is "without any real purpose." Such big picture views can be as valuable as the datapoints used to compose them.
zevyoura 14y ago
Very nice, but missing one thing that I think would be more meaningful: averages across weeks.
suhastech 14y ago
A bit off topic: I think I'm pretty much in the same situation as Nafis. I'm majoring in Electronics and have a passion for computers. Only difference is, tuition is quite cheap here in India (around $5000 for 4 years). So, small freelancing projects help me sustain. Though the quality of education here is questionable. One year into college, all I have learnt is * Stuff as much portions you can during the term * Write the exact things from the textbook on your exam * Forget or vaguely remember it in the holidays That's not really what I hoped for. Hopefully, it gets better over the years...
- pilom 14y ago
  If it makes you feel better, year 1 and 2 of my Computer Engineering degree in the US was all "memorize what the textbook says" and Calculus which is effectively the same thing. And I spent $40k per year on my education. That being said, it did indeed get way bettery.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  Your education is in your hands. Identify the resources which are available to you in college for improving your skills. Don't just coast along in your classes and complain about how they aren't doing a great job, that is normal. Put in extra time outside of your coursework or you will not have an education to match your degree. Keep doing it for 4 years and you will have a great education no matter what kind of backwater you are in. Also, be sure to pursue internships and if you have opportunities to network/get connected in areas that relate to your professional specialty, take them. Unfortunately this thread shows very clearly that whether you get good grades or bad, and whether you learn a lot or a little, your actual (even vividly demonstrated!) capabilities are comparatively much less important than the emotional tone and images you use to market yourself. So start also to think about those things.
  - suhastech 14y ago
    I'm doing all of that probably more than most of my peers but that makes me question the core values of a college education. Low Cost, Connections, Visa stuff are a few reasons I'm still sticking on to it. All of them are not core to college. I think this is something that needs to be fixed before people lose faith. At times, I feel I'm wasting time on coursework (around 9 hours a day) but I somehow convince myself that I'm not experienced enough to judge.
yitchelle 14y ago
Hey there, Great showcase of your skills. It shows great UX, presentation, some fu with git and getting stuff out in the wild. Shows some great initiatives! I would create a CV on http://labs.im http://labs.im rather than a text story about your situation. You should use your knowledge to create a kickass CV page. I agree the other comments that you are going to be peppered with low paying freelance offers, you might as well register on odesk.com or similar. But I believe that your software skills are much better than that. By the way, Some of the cities (Brisbane, Sydney & Melbourne) in Australia have a thriving startup scene, you should hit them up.
mootothemax 14y ago
A quick story regarding your frelance work. When I first moved to Poland, I had the mindset that since I was living in a cheap country, I should price my freelance work low as well. I'll hasten to add that this was my first attempt at freelancing, and for a PHP developer with over 10 years of experience, I was charging between $20 and $30/hour. Absurdly low prices. Anyway, this was meant to be temporary, and I got a job for a year, before deciding to return to freelancing. This time, however, I figured that I had little to lose by attempting to charge what I wanted to get paid. I also switched to charging on a per-day basis. What happened? In terms of work available, very little - there's lots of work out there. I found that I was able to spend longer on the initial discussion phase, as the cost of doing so was minimal compared to my overall day rate, and it led to happier clients - everyone wins. My rates have continued to rise ever since, and I'm on the verge of hiring other programmers to take some of the load off me alone. I could go on and on about the charge-by-the-day option, and how everyone wins with it: clients don't worry about whether having a conversation with me will be charged - of course it won't! - and it gives me the freedom to create huge amounts of client satisfaction if I do a ten-minute fix for free. So, charge good rates, in daily increments, and do so happy in the knowledge that you're charging a fair rate for valuable skills.
mqzaidi 14y ago
Now I know why my post on Sunday totally tanked without generating any karma. I should be posting on Tuesdays/Fridays instead :).
Sodaware 14y ago
Why is activity so much lower on a Friday? Is it because everyone has lots of work to catch up on and no time for HN, or is it because people are leaving work earlier on a Friday?
Void_ 14y ago
You're a great designer. You could get a job just as a designer. Then you know D3. You can sell yourself as a package that can create beautiful visualizations. Then you made it to the top of HN. This is no coincidence. You got here on purpose. You studied previous post and knew exactly what to make that would interest this crowd. All that makes you a smart person, way above average. Go charge a lot of money. Having said that, you're not too much of a marketer.
adelivet 14y ago
What could have been interesting is to know when to post on HN to maximize the chance to be in the top 10 or some insights.
- duck 14y ago
  I think this is what you're looking for: http://hnpickup.appspot.com/ http://hnpickup.appspot.com/
nwienert 14y ago
Would be cool to see it index further back.... I'd love to see how my best ranked post compares to others :)
sravfeyn 14y ago
I am curious where is the data behind these tables being stored inside DOM?
- mrjd 14y ago
  Looks like it's being pulled from separate JSON files.
Xcelerate 14y ago
This confirms my suspicion that the best time to post the articles I find is on Monday.
- e12e 14y ago
  Oh, no! You're feeding the bias! ;-)
zanny 14y ago
Just a bug I found: your svg "data_pointer" only points "straight" to the topmost listed week on the page, and if you select any other option, it points to the bottom of the div element of the week. Reading that, you might want to try using the <date> tag instead of divs there, just to make it more html5-ey :P It looks like it falls here: offset: $(this).offset().top - $('svg#data_pointer').offset().top + 18 I don't know exactly why the offsets are off for all except the topmost element of the list, but they seem to be off. I don't use firebug much so I don't know how to live edit the code to figure out the problem, but I just wanted to let you know! Note: I am in a vbox of Arch running Firefox Aurora 16, so I also don't know if it is a browser bug.

HN statistics

313 points by nhoss2 14y ago

adam-_- 14y ago

You should put the hire me call to action further up the page!

vhf 14y ago
Yep. You deserve it !
rickhutcheson 14y ago
seconded

alpb 14y ago

I'm wondering if you could ever discover daily commenting user count or even maybe monthly active user count somehow and share with us. That would be awesome.

cvursache 14y ago

A guy with nice skills like you shouldn't have '<div id="sorrow">' in his source code. Although it is funny.

dkroy 14y ago

I hope you get the money you need to continue your education, you are very talented.

dkroy 14y ago

If you want your d3 graphs to work in IE8 you might want to use https://github.com/shawnbot/aight https://github.com/shawnbot/aight

andreasklinger 14y ago

@nhoss2 Slightly offtopic: Love the honesty on your http://labs.im/ http://labs.im/ page. But you might be underselling yourself. You are saying you are willing to work cheaply because you are young and a risk. You are capable of using node.js, you use phantomJS, you seem to have good product and ux thinking and you are able to use github. Just the last one alone puts you on the upper 50% of the worldwide freelance market. Not to speak of the first three things i mentioned. As somebody living in UK i appreciate your modesty and i wish you all the best for your jobhunt. Projects like this are genius thing to do, continue until you find something :)

DavidChouinard 14y ago
I agree, this is top-notch work. I would drop the beatup negative attitude, it's a big turnoff. You could easily get a remote part-time job in the Valley for 100+$/hour — think of it, that's only 40 hours of work to pay off your tuition.
- e12e 14y ago
  Really? Easily? I've yet to see anyone willing to hire someone to do off site work with a US company, in the Valley or elsewhere. At least not development work, or anything in the range of 100 USD/hour. I've always found that a bit strange, but maybe you know something I don't? For the record I'm based in Norway, and English is my second, not first language -- but even if it was just to recommend friends and acquaintances that are in a similar position as op -- I would really like to hear how you would suggest going about looking for such work?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - mootothemax 14y ago
    Really? Easily? I've yet to see anyone willing to hire someone to do off site work with a US company, in the Valley or elsewhere. At least not development work, or anything in the range of 100 USD/hour. I won't discuss my rates in public, but I have clients in the States and UK. I'm a British guy based in Poland, and only one of those clients has been via a direct contact. All others have come to my. As briefly touched on in another comment, I'm also not a cheap option. The work's definitely out there - just look in the HN "who's hiring" threads. I've also had some enquiries via my various SaaS apps, which double as a nice side income and an advertisement of sorts. Edit: I'm willing to concede that this isn't easy per se; I'm highly competent at what I do, and I'm also happy to do lots of chatting over Skype or via email first. Without my talent or willingness to chat, I'm not sure that this would be as successful as it is for me.
  - btilly 14y ago
    $100/hour is indeed very doable. Stop and think. Suppose that you have have a $120k full-time dev. (This is by no means the top of the dev market.) Once you get through benefits, office space, HR, etc, at a typical company you cost 2x your salary, so that dev is costing you $240k/year. If that person works 50 weeks a year, 5 days a week, 6 hours a day (just because a person is present 8 hours does not mean that they worked 8 hours) the cost of that full-time dev is $160/hour. Day in. Day out. Contractors avoid many of those costs in return for higher direct pay. And you only hire that contractor when there is a good fit between what you need and what that contractor can do. A smart contractor who knows what to ask for is therefore able to get surprisingly good rates. And step #1 is knowing what you are worth. Step #2 is knowing how to negotiate. There are a lot of good books you can pick up on the topic. I personally picked up Start With No and Bargaining For Advantage a few years back. A 2 digit investment in materials, and a 2 digit expenditure in hours has easily been worth over 6 figures to my bank account. I expect it to have paid off 7 figures before I retire. Can you think of anything else with an equivalent ROI?

csomar 14y ago

Your labs.im pitch is probably going to send you the worst freelance jobs you'll ever have. Nobody gives a shit about your situation, and your University tuition fees. Actually, this signals a red flag for serious clients: You might drop their project as soon as you get some financing. Promote yourself as a young, intelligent and enthusiast developer with coding and design skills. Price your hourly rate at $80-100/hour; and get your tuition paid in the next couple weeks. Edit: Quite a discussion here. I'd like to add that an important part of doing business is trust. Clients are going to throw lots of money that's going to evaporate on HTML and JavaScript code. They want to be sure that you are the guy who is going to give them the right result. Tip: Make a decent lab page. Look at design agencies in sortfolio and copy them (not their design, their strategy). Build a couple more projects, and open source them on Github. Send emails to design agencies, and try to build a network. Finally, decide if you want to do this for a living or concentrate on EE. The overhead to get a single project is the same to get a constant stream of projects.

DavidChouinard 14y ago
I agree, I can't overstate how weak your labs.im pitch is, especially in regards to your clearly very impressive skills. That pitch easily cuts your market rate by half, probably more. And as csomar mentioned, it's going to get you the crappiest, bottom-of-the-barrel jobs. In all types of pitches — to employers, VCs, etc. — desperation is the absolute worst thing you should ever let transpire.
- nhoss2 14y ago
  Hey, OP here. I realize now that it was a mistake to come off like that but there were a few reasons on why I did: - I just felt like a piece of shit when I wrote it because I have no connections and have had a very hard time trying to get a normal job. I also had no confidence that any of this would work out so that did not help my ego when writing. - When I submitted this to HN, it was fairly late and I went to sleep about half and hour later so basically I slept through the entire discussion going on here and it would have been a bit late to change anything after I woke up. - There was a comment or two saying that maybe I should change the post of labs.im (before I went to sleep) but I did not know what I could write. I didn't just want to write something like "im smart and can do this well" because anyone could say that and I particularly dislike talking about myself like that. Also, to anyone that has emailed me, I have not replied to any emails yet but I am starting now. And sorry for the late reply.

yread 14y ago

What is this for? Or is it just a cool way to try new technologies without any real purpose? EDIT: I didn't mean it in a bad way. Trying new stuff is a perfectly fine reason for doing things and this looks quite beautiful. I was just looking for an answer like "this helps you see whether more karma is given on weekdays or weekends". Statistics and visualization should answer meaningful questions, I think.

danso 14y ago
Even if it is just a way to try new technologies...it's a huge mistake to think that aggregation/visualization/analysis, even at this relatively simple level, is "without any real purpose." Such big picture views can be as valuable as the datapoints used to compose them.

zevyoura 14y ago

Very nice, but missing one thing that I think would be more meaningful: averages across weeks.

suhastech 14y ago

A bit off topic: I think I'm pretty much in the same situation as Nafis. I'm majoring in Electronics and have a passion for computers. Only difference is, tuition is quite cheap here in India (around $5000 for 4 years). So, small freelancing projects help me sustain. Though the quality of education here is questionable. One year into college, all I have learnt is * Stuff as much portions you can during the term * Write the exact things from the textbook on your exam * Forget or vaguely remember it in the holidays That's not really what I hoped for. Hopefully, it gets better over the years...

pilom 14y ago
If it makes you feel better, year 1 and 2 of my Computer Engineering degree in the US was all "memorize what the textbook says" and Calculus which is effectively the same thing. And I spent $40k per year on my education. That being said, it did indeed get way bettery.
slurgfest 14y ago
Your education is in your hands. Identify the resources which are available to you in college for improving your skills. Don't just coast along in your classes and complain about how they aren't doing a great job, that is normal. Put in extra time outside of your coursework or you will not have an education to match your degree. Keep doing it for 4 years and you will have a great education no matter what kind of backwater you are in. Also, be sure to pursue internships and if you have opportunities to network/get connected in areas that relate to your professional specialty, take them. Unfortunately this thread shows very clearly that whether you get good grades or bad, and whether you learn a lot or a little, your actual (even vividly demonstrated!) capabilities are comparatively much less important than the emotional tone and images you use to market yourself. So start also to think about those things.
- suhastech 14y ago
  I'm doing all of that probably more than most of my peers but that makes me question the core values of a college education. Low Cost, Connections, Visa stuff are a few reasons I'm still sticking on to it. All of them are not core to college. I think this is something that needs to be fixed before people lose faith. At times, I feel I'm wasting time on coursework (around 9 hours a day) but I somehow convince myself that I'm not experienced enough to judge.

yitchelle 14y ago

Hey there, Great showcase of your skills. It shows great UX, presentation, some fu with git and getting stuff out in the wild. Shows some great initiatives! I would create a CV on http://labs.im http://labs.im rather than a text story about your situation. You should use your knowledge to create a kickass CV page. I agree the other comments that you are going to be peppered with low paying freelance offers, you might as well register on odesk.com or similar. But I believe that your software skills are much better than that. By the way, Some of the cities (Brisbane, Sydney & Melbourne) in Australia have a thriving startup scene, you should hit them up.

mootothemax 14y ago

A quick story regarding your frelance work. When I first moved to Poland, I had the mindset that since I was living in a cheap country, I should price my freelance work low as well. I'll hasten to add that this was my first attempt at freelancing, and for a PHP developer with over 10 years of experience, I was charging between $20 and $30/hour. Absurdly low prices. Anyway, this was meant to be temporary, and I got a job for a year, before deciding to return to freelancing. This time, however, I figured that I had little to lose by attempting to charge what I wanted to get paid. I also switched to charging on a per-day basis. What happened? In terms of work available, very little - there's lots of work out there. I found that I was able to spend longer on the initial discussion phase, as the cost of doing so was minimal compared to my overall day rate, and it led to happier clients - everyone wins. My rates have continued to rise ever since, and I'm on the verge of hiring other programmers to take some of the load off me alone. I could go on and on about the charge-by-the-day option, and how everyone wins with it: clients don't worry about whether having a conversation with me will be charged - of course it won't! - and it gives me the freedom to create huge amounts of client satisfaction if I do a ten-minute fix for free. So, charge good rates, in daily increments, and do so happy in the knowledge that you're charging a fair rate for valuable skills.

mqzaidi 14y ago

Now I know why my post on Sunday totally tanked without generating any karma. I should be posting on Tuesdays/Fridays instead :).

Sodaware 14y ago

Why is activity so much lower on a Friday? Is it because everyone has lots of work to catch up on and no time for HN, or is it because people are leaving work earlier on a Friday?

Void_ 14y ago

You're a great designer. You could get a job just as a designer. Then you know D3. You can sell yourself as a package that can create beautiful visualizations. Then you made it to the top of HN. This is no coincidence. You got here on purpose. You studied previous post and knew exactly what to make that would interest this crowd. All that makes you a smart person, way above average. Go charge a lot of money. Having said that, you're not too much of a marketer.

adelivet 14y ago

What could have been interesting is to know when to post on HN to maximize the chance to be in the top 10 or some insights.

duck 14y ago
I think this is what you're looking for: http://hnpickup.appspot.com/ http://hnpickup.appspot.com/

nwienert 14y ago

Would be cool to see it index further back.... I'd love to see how my best ranked post compares to others :)

sravfeyn 14y ago

I am curious where is the data behind these tables being stored inside DOM?

mrjd 14y ago
Looks like it's being pulled from separate JSON files.

Xcelerate 14y ago

This confirms my suspicion that the best time to post the articles I find is on Monday.

e12e 14y ago
Oh, no! You're feeding the bias! ;-)

zanny 14y ago

Just a bug I found: your svg "data_pointer" only points "straight" to the topmost listed week on the page, and if you select any other option, it points to the bottom of the div element of the week. Reading that, you might want to try using the <date> tag instead of divs there, just to make it more html5-ey :P It looks like it falls here: offset: $(this).offset().top - $('svg#data_pointer').offset().top + 18 I don't know exactly why the offsets are off for all except the topmost element of the list, but they seem to be off. I don't use firebug much so I don't know how to live edit the code to figure out the problem, but I just wanted to let you know! Note: I am in a vbox of Arch running Firefox Aurora 16, so I also don't know if it is a browser bug.