Exploring Hacker News Posts

Hacker News is a site started by the startup incubator Y Combinator, where user-submitted stories (known as "posts") are voted and commented upon, similar to reddit. Hacker News is extremely popular in technology and startup circles, and posts that make it to the top of Hacker News' listings can get hundreds of thousands of visitors as a result.

You can find the data set here, but note that it has been reduced from almost 300,000 rows to approximately 20,000 rows by removing all submissions that did not receive any comments, and then randomly sampling from the remaining submissions. Below are descriptions of the columns:

id: The unique identifier from Hacker News for the post title: The title of the post url: The URL that the posts links to, if it the post has a URL num_points: The number of points the post acquired, calculated as the total number of upvotes minus the total number of downvotes num_comments: The number of comments that were made on the post author: The username of the person who submitted the post created_at: The date and time at which the post was submitted

We're specifically interested in posts whose titles begin with either Ask HN(submited when user want to ask the Hacker News community a specific question) or Show HN(Submited when user want to show the Hacker News Community a project) We'll compare these two types of posts to determine the following:

Do Ask HN or Show HN receive more comments on average? Do posts created at a certain time receive more comments on average?