The Hacker News (Y Combinator) effect

A link to my post “Implementing bookmarklets in JavaScript” became popular on Y Combinator’s Hacker News. This post briefly describes the consequences.

The main consequence was a large spike in traffic (middle of the last quarter):

Statistics:

• Over 8000 page impressions for that post alone within 18 hours. Note that the above diagram shows all traffic, including to other posts that people coming from Hacker News visited. Comparison:
  • Another popular post of mine, “The void operator in JavaScript”, had 6,290 page impressions within 16 days and that included traffic from Reddit.
  • All of my blog got 12,356 impressions in April and 23,632 in May.
• Visitors by country during the last day:
  1. USA: 42%
  2. United Kingdom: 7%
  3. Germany: 5%
  4. Canada: 4%
  5. India: 4%
• Visitors by browser during the last day:
  1. Chrome: 40%
  2. Firefox: 26%
  3. Safari: 17%
  4. Mobile: 8%
  5. Internet Explorer: 2%
• Visitors by operating system during the last day:
  1. Macintosh: 34%
  2. Windows: 31%
  3. Linux: 13%
  4. iPad: 8%
  5. iPhone: 6%
  6. Android: 3%

Percentages did not change much during the last day, except for the distribution of operating systems: Normally, I get twice as much traffic from Windows as from Mac OS. With Hacker News readers, this has (temporarily) changed.

A nice side effect of my post being linked on Hacker News was that I got very good feedback in the comments for the link.