The pain of a successful Hacker News launch

I emailed them and they replied very soon and fixed the problem within a day, though, so at least response time was excellent.

I can sympathize with the challenges of running a web scale analytics tool, after helping build and run an analytics stack for an ad network. Even with our relatively small group of customers and lots of planning, the data was abundant, the queries became quite slow, and the pipeline was never "real-time" enough for some.

The web is a noisy place! URLs parameters are tricky to canonicalize into pages when dealing with many properties. There is a constant stream of nonsensical referrers and even referrer spam. Traffic can be exceptionally spiky, and cascading failure in the pipeline is inevitable without careful planning. Data loss is irrecoverable, and any incident needs to be carefully explained to users of the product so they don't deceive themselves into making decisions based on missing data.

One specific point I'm concerned about from the post is that while comparing HackerNews traffic to organic search, their analysis fails to account for relative traffic volume. Its always easy for a small volume traffic source to show outstanding metrics, but miss the broader point: quality traffic sources usually don't scale. A useful analysis should assign weight to overall volume. ORDER BY MAX(CTR) will tell me that some keyword/referrer was the top performer at 80%, but without knowing that was for 3 visitors I could easily get the wrong ideas. I think analytics tools aspire to make it difficult to come to incorrect conclusions, acknowledging that most of their users will have no meaningful background in statistics.

All of those challenges are surmountable, but it definitely gives some credence to the talented engineers who have make analytics stacks look easy. I wish Volument luck in their journey and will keep an eye on their progress, because their pitch remains quite appealing.

Does it show that people coming from HN want to glance at your startup and see what it does, whereas people coming from Google have no idea what to expect and take longer to work out who you are and what you do?

Does it show that neither Google users nor HN users know what you do, but HN users are more experienced with websites and spend less time mentally categorising them?

Does it show that HN users are less interested in marketing / conversion than people who Googled for a related term enough to find your site?

What's the super-valuable insight and how will you use it?