Hacker News Reader

I think you're actually completely wrong about that. I think most people will assume it's an actual update when the animation moves. It's the devs that will stop to think if they're actually doing that or not, and have the knowledge to check for themselves.

Exactly :) I agree with what you said elsewhere in the thread as well, it's certainly a way to retain users on the page longer and have them stare at the gauges very attentively. I actually love this on so many levels.

I'd imagine scaling out a single static file and sending a CDN purge every half a minute is significantly easier than maintaining millions of live websocket connections