Hacker News Reader

Comment by 24gttghh | Hacker News Reader

I really dislike these county maps. Darker color is shown as more fans, when in reality some of the largest, more intensely shaded counties have relatively few people in them. I believe it imparts a false impression of whatever the map is trying to inform the viewer on.

edit: douche points out that these maps are not purely based on county lines.

View on HN

But if you don't normalize by population, you just end up with a map of the most populous locations instead of a map of the highest popularity

I think you don't understand what that word 'popularity' means...

I guess you don't believe something can be popular in a small community.

It can be, that doesn't make it popular in general. Duck Dynasty has zero viewers in my living room, does that make it an unpopular show? Having a small number of absolute fans in isolated clumps does not make something popular unless you specifically scope the definition to make it appear so.

I think some HN commenters are having issue with how the map legend is labeled. The key labels darker colors as 'more fans' when they mean 'larger fraction of fans'.

I think NYT chose the right methodology, they just got lazy with the labeling.

I'm not sure what they are using to subdivide the maps, but it isn't county lines. There aren't that many counties in Maine or New Hampshire, for instance.

Damn, you're right. It appears to be zip-code based. I still stand by my opinion of county-based representations.

>When we looked at how many active Facebook users in a given ZIP code “liked” certain TV shows..

From the article:

> When we looked at how many active Facebook users in a given ZIP code “liked” certain TV shows, we found that the 50 most-liked shows clustered into three groups

Anyone on here know which Facebook API they were using for this data? I'd like to do some further research on the election outcome based on "liked" shows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com