Hey, author here. I'm going to transgress my no-HN rule this one time because I did in fact look at HN Pickup very closely and I already have a follow-up post planned in which I was going to mention it.

Now the difference between my post and HN Pickup is it's a prediction tool, so it's trying to pin-point precise moments when it's best to post, whereas I'm analyzing past data.

So in my post today I talked about the best time to post on average. But, I can also look at my data and say, for example, last Monday from 10 to 11 AM, 30% of submissions reached the frontpage and so it was, in effect, a great time to post.

And with that I could look at HN Pickup's past predictions and tell you how accurate they were, ie. at a time when HN Pickup was telling you it's a "very good time to submit a story", what percentage of stories actually made it?

It so happens that I've actually been able to do that. HN Pickup's creator was kind enough to provide me with a history of predictions for every 15 minutes of a whole week, and after comparing it to observed pickup percentages I found a rather weak correlation (0.25). So it would seem HN Pickup isn't a very effective tool.

Also its goal is only to look at frontpage pickups, it doesn't account for the duration of the stay on the frontpage or HN's traffic at the time, which I do in my analysis.

> Hey, author here. I'm going to transgress my no-HN rule this one time because I did in fact look at HN Pickup very closely and I already have a follow-up post planned in which I was going to mention

I would have thought by posting you would have already broken that rule:)

   for example, last Monday from 10 to 11 AM, 30% of submissions reached 
  the frontpage and so it was, in effect, a great time to post.

But it might also mean that less people see your post, which is still better than not making the frontpage at all, but not the same as getting there on "prime time", this should also be taken into account.

It is taken into account in my article...

HN felt kind of frozen last week, maybe due to many people being out of power on the east coast. I imagine the amount of traffic gotten was lower, making the easy front page perhaps less cost effective. It might have been better for authors to hold articles until more audience was back online...