HN Explorer

Ask HN: What timezone is HN running on?

2 points by magma ↗ HN
I sometimes miss some good articles from the previous day, that were around earlier in the current day.

Is it subjective to the number of new stories being submitted? Is there a daily reset of top stories at some point? If it does, Is it possible to change it to use my timezone?

I am trying to reduce my visits to HN to max once a day. I'd like to come in around the last hour of the day. ;-)

Thanks.

4 comments

[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 23.3 ms ] thread
chunkyslink
Have you tried this site

http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

magma
Yes. I saw that I few days ago. It's a nice site. Wouldn't that mean 2 separate timezones, HN's and the Daily's?

I would still love to know how the rollover of each day happens.

wglb
I don't think there is a reset. Articles are ranked using two factors. One is the number of upvotes that the article has, and the other is how old the story is. The older an article is, the higher the "decay" factor.

Thus, an article with 100 points might stay on the front page for quite a while. An article with five points has a chance to make it to the front page if it gets those votes fairly quickly and the front page is not too crowded with higher-point articles.

So what seems to be important is the time zone of the readers/submitters. From the point of view of submitting stories, if you can get a potentially-popular submission in before the east coast wakes up, it has the best chance of getting to the front page. Votes of readers in Africa and Europe will possibly give it a boost.

So what this means for a reader is that stories submitted at 0700 east coast time will possibly roll off by mid-day as the pressure of good submissions from Central (go tqbf!) and further west push them off. So if you read HN at 1100, you are likely to catch those early stories and some of the west stories. But will the stories from yesterday still be there?

I wish you great success in reading HN just once a day, a problem that I find personally unsolvable.

The best way to be sure you get all the stories is to use an RSS feed reader, like google reader.

magma
Thanks, good stuff.

I am going to give the HN once a day a real go for a few weeks, see how it goes..