I'm actually surprised at that volume, given this is a text-only site. Humans have managed to post over 20 billion bytes of text to it over the 18 years that HN existed? That averages to over 2MB per day, or around 7.5KB/s.

I'd imagine these days typescript or node might be taking over some of what would have hit on javascript.

I used a function based on the age for staleness, it considers things stale after a minute or two initially and immutable after about two weeks old.

    // DefaultStaleIf marks stale at 60 seconds after creation, then frequently for the first few days after an item is
    // created, then quickly tapers after the first week to never again mark stale items more than a few weeks old.

    const DefaultStaleIf = "(:now-refreshed)>" +
 "(60.0*(log2(max(0.0,((:now-Time)/60.0))+1.0)+pow(((:now-Time)/(24.0*60.0*60.0)),3)))"

Shouldn't that be The Fall Of Rust? According to this, it saw the most attention during the years before it was created!

Day/Hour activity maps for a given user are relatively trivial to do in a single query, but only public submission/comment data could be used to infer it.

Hmm. Personally I never look at user names when I comment on something. It's too easy to go from "i agree/disagree with this piece of info" to "i like/dislike this guy"...

...is that supposed to pose some kind of problem? The problem would be in the other direction, surely?

Undefined, presumably. For what reason would there be to take time out of your day to press a pointless button?

It doesn't communicate anything other than that you pressed a button. For someone participating in good faith, that doesn't add any value. But those not participating in good faith, i.e. trolls, it adds incredible value knowing that their trolling is being seen. So it is actually a net negative to the community if you did somehow accidentally press one of those buttons.

For those who seek fidget toys, there are better devices for that.

Like when someone says GUIs are better than CLIs, or C++ is better than Rust, or you don't need microservices, you can just hide that inconvenient truth from the masses.