It obviously depends on site activity and thus varies each day, but usually around 7~8am and 5~6pm eastern times work well. I wrote a little app that tracks this for you:
http://hnnotify.leknarf.net/. The graph is slow to load, just wait a little while.
I wrote a more detailed blog post that explains how this works, but the core concept is as follows.
Assuming you want your HN submission to reach the front page, then it’s important to post at times when scores on the new page are relatively high compared to the front page.
This assumes your goal is to reach the front page. I don’t actually know how many people skim over the ‘new’ links, but it’s fairly obvious that a far greater number of people only look at the first 30 links on the home page.
For the purposes of discussion, I’m going to assume a very simplistic model of the HN front page: new stories with more points will outrank older stories with less points. That is, I’m ignoring any effects existing karma has on a user’s submission and any factors related to when a story gets upvotes. If we assume that a new story needs to get more points than an existing story in order to replace it on the front page, then the following is straightforward:
- It’s a good time to submit when scores on the front page are low. If the lowest-ranked story has 10 points, it will be much easier to replace than if the lowest-ranked story has 100 points.
- It’s a good time to post when scores on the new page are high. If the highest-ranked story on the new page only has 2 points, it doesn’t seem likely that your submission will fare much better.
http://leknarf.net/blog/2013/03/13/find-out-when-to-post-on-...
