Show HN: Charts for Hacker News Polls

http://hacksandthoughts.posterous.com/charts-for-hacker-news-polls

by sbashyal • 15 years ago

40 15 15 years ago

hacksandthoughts.posterous.com

SudarshanP• 15 years ago

Awesome! It would be nice to have prev and next button for the chart detail page. Even better if u could add a swipe for mobile devices

awaz• 15 years ago

That's a good idea for frontpage and best polls.

zacharydanger2• 15 years ago

I hear JGC's Pie Chart Challenge calling... http://blog.jgc.org/2011/09/pie-chart-challenge.html

Tichy• 15 years ago

I must admit I don't fully get his argument. Is there research into the perception of pie charts, or is it just an assumption that people are bad at judging areas and angles?

zacharydanger2• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_chart#Use.2C_effectiveness_...

Looks like research has been done. Yes.

rcfox• 15 years ago

I'm not a web developer, so maybe I'm misremembering, but wasn't there something in HTTP that let you check the last time a page changed? Scraping the poll pages every 10 minutes seems like it would cause a lot of unnecessary requests to HN.

Also, you probably consider any poll that's not on the first few pages of the 'news' or 'newest' sections to be complete. Sure, they might change, but they're not going to change by enough to affect your graphs.

sbashyal2• 15 years ago

The only way to 'listen' to page changes is to scrape it unless the web-page provides a notification service. Since that is not the case with HN, I had to resort to scrapes.

mooism2• 15 years ago

If-Modified-Since? You still have to issue the http request.

icebraining• 15 years ago

There are ETags too, but they suffer from the same problem (and usually dynamic pages don't serve them).

jrberger• 15 years ago

great job, Shishir. are the legend/poll options in the same order as shown on the original poll? i ask because the colors are a wee bit difficult to differentiate. feature request: link to the original page.

crntaylor• 15 years ago

This is cool, but you really should have used bar charts rather than pie charts. Humans are really good at comparing lengths, and terrible at comparing areas. As an example, your chart of which database systems HNers use is almost meaningless to me - it conveys less information than staring at the raw data does. If you were able to rewrite to use bar charts instead, this would be a kick-ass tool.

sbashyal2• 15 years ago

Okay, I will make bar-chart the default view with an option to switch to pie-charts if desired.

grammr• 15 years ago

Relevant discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2990768

gordonbowman• 15 years ago

This is great. I think it would be helpful to add the percentages here too. Perhaps in the key so as not to clutter?

hmigneron• 15 years ago

This is cool.

The results of the first poll I looked at surprised me and I wanted to read the comments, so I think it would be useful to have a link to the actual poll (on HN) because I had to google it. Another small thing is that the "HN Charts" in the nav bar doesn't really behave as expected. For example, on that page : http://hnlike.com/hncharts/chart/?id=3298905 the link doesn't do anything. On other pages it brings you back to the home page.

Show HN: Charts for Hacker News Polls

Related Stories