it could also be that on weekdays people tend to slack work and post on HN :D

As for your question about weekends, i am in a doomed profession which requires me to give certain exams (so is my wife).. so we end up studying on most weekends :)

Yuck. Considering that you are most likely working full time over the week, it's quite sucky to have work encroach on your weekend like that :-\

yup.. can get nasty. its all those perks at end of the tunnel which keep us at it. A qualified actuary can really go places..

Like many in the accursed technology realms, I am doomed to releasing my software over the weekend (it's business-oriented, so the greatest drop in usage is over the weekend, hence ideal time to release).

So generally I spend Saturday doing an end-to-end test in our pre-prod environment to make sure everything looks fine, and then I tell capistrano to do the release, and then I go and perform such standard human activities as spending time with my girlfriend or doing a little bit of sport.

This doesn't exactly address your question, but HN submissions generally come from other sources of news around the net. These generally drop off over the weekend, so it is only natural that HN traffic does as well. I imagine that there are significantly fewer of us using this site over the weekend, but there is also less for us to talk about.

Which is probably why this post got to the front page :-)

Traffic everywhere slows down over the weekends. I get some of my best work done over the weekend though.

None of my competitors and potential competitors work. People are nicely surprised to find a new feature or two working when they come back on Monday. Gives your site a sense of momentum.

I run the most popular Ruby and Rails blog, and readership drops a solid 10-15% every weekend in FeedBurner numbers. I think there are a lot of what I'd call "institutional" programmers and techies who only talk shop during the week (mostly because they're in the office).

Most people don't work on weekend and only have time to surf on hn when they are at work!

I like to make some time for myself on the weekends, even if I have a lot of work to be doing. It's necessary to have a mental and physical recharge period.

maybe it is just a coincidence but the traffic on my blog also slows down over the weekend...

In other news, rain is wet. Pretty much every website sees a drop in traffic on the weekend.