Hacker News Reader

I love this ranking because while all rankings have flaws, this at least is very transparent on how it works, it's parsimonious, it is entirely numerical, easily reproducible, and it gives us at least a small amount of cross validation via two (mostly) orthogonal variables. Now all we need to do is to animate the plot over time.....

View on HN

I know right? The fact that the metric makes absolute sense is beautiful. Yes it probably misses out on a ton of factors that contribute to ranking (see TIOBE index metrics) but the transparency and simplicity of it all make up for it. You can directly see how each metric is contributing to the factor and the numbers are very easily verifiable.

The reasons you cite are certainly the reasons we found the original analysis by Drew and John compelling.

It's not a perfect analysis, in part because there isn't one, but we've found it interesting both as a snapshot in time and for observing long term trends.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com