This is a project carried out during my Data Analysis course on DataQuest
Hacker News is a site started by the startup incubator Y Combinator, where user-submitted stories (known as "posts") are voted and commented upon, similar to reddit. Hacker News is extremely popular in technology and startup circles, and posts that make it to the top of Hacker News' listings can get hundreds of thousands of visitors as a result.
You can find the data set here, but note that it has been reduced from almost 300,000 rows to approximately 20,000 rows by removing all submissions that did not receive any comments, and then randomly sampling from the remaining submissions. Below are descriptions of the columns:
id: The unique identifier from Hacker News for the post
title: The title of the post
url: The URL that the posts links to, if it the post has a URL
num_points: The number of points the post acquired, calculated as the total number of upvotes minus the total number of downvotes
num_comments: The number of comments that were made on the post
author: The username of the person who submitted the post
created_at: The date and time at which the post was submitted
I'm specifically interested in posts whose titles begin with either Ask HN or Show HN. Users submit Ask HN posts to ask the Hacker News community a specific question. Below are a couple examples:
Ask HN: How to improve my personal website?
Ask HN: Am I the only one outraged by Twitter shutting down share counts?
Ask HN: Aby recent changes to CSS that broke mobile?
Likewise, users submit Show HN posts to show the Hacker News community a project, product, or just generally something interesting. Below are a couple of examples:
Show HN: Wio Link ESP8266 Based Web of Things Hardware Development Platform'
Show HN: Something pointless I made
Show HN: Shanhu.io, a programming playground powered by e8vm
I compared these two types of posts to determine the following:
Do Ask HN or Show HN receive more comments on average?
Do posts created at a certain time receive more comments on average?