We investigated posts from Hacker News - a social news website, under the startup incubator Y Combinator, with a focus on computer science and entrepreneurship. You can find the original dataset for Hacker News posts here. For this project, we use the hacker_news.csv dataset, a modified dataset, of which approximately 300,000 data rows have been trimmed down to 20,000 rows.
We will be analyzing the posts that begin with 'Ask HN' or 'Show HN' in the title:
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Identifying the type of post that is more popular between 'Ask HN' and 'Show HN'.
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Finding out if 'Ask HN' or 'Show HN' receive more comments (engagement) on average?
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Checking if posts created at a certain time receive more comments on average?
From our analysis, we found out that:
- 'Ask HN' (Ask Hacker News) posts are more popular than 'Ask HN' (Show Hacker News) posts.
- Ask HN posts receive more comments engagement than Show HN posts.
- 8:00pm and 9:00pm (EST or GMT) are the best times to post in Ask HN, where the most user engagement happens.