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Comment by banana_giraffe | Hacker News Reader

It feels wrong to me to view it this way. The first column of a table should be the item, and the remaining columns should be the details of the item. This implies 77 total medals is the item, and the detail of that is the US. It just parses wrong in my head.

I almost wonder if the proper order isn't some sort of % of medals won vs participants for each country, so countries that have few athletes in the competition but all medal in most of the events they're in show highly.

Then again, I'm willing to admit I have no clue what people that look at these charts are after.

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"these charts are after."

That "their" country is as high on the list as possible, and better than "neighbours".

This should be "number of medals per capita" to adjust for the population of each country.

It's already commonplace to put other columns left of the "item" or "id" column. Every golf leaderboard does this, for instance.

The ones I checked have rank and player name first followed by the detailed scores

https://www.espn.com/golf/leaderboard

Yes, the rank is always displayed leftmost - whereas OP was saying that the leftmost column should be the label (in the case of golf, the player name)

The rank goes with the label. Who got first? Tiger Woods got first. It isn't helpful to know that someone shot a 68 and got first without knowing who it is.

> The rank goes with the label.

I don't understand what you mean. Why does the rank go with the label, but the score doesn't?

> It isn't helpful to know that someone shot a 68 and got first without knowing who it is.

But you do know - the name is right there next to the score.

In your examples for the Olympics, the name is the very last column. So I would need to scan through Rank, Gold Medals, Silver Medals, Bronze Medals, and Total Medals to find the name that the Rank belongs with. Compare this to Rank and Silver Medals which have nothing to do with each other. You can be rank 1 with 0 silver medals. If sorting by Total Medals you could have 0 gold medals and be in rank 1. So the rank belongs with the name. The most basic question everyone answers with the table is “which country is in first?”. Some people may wonder “how many silver medals did the first place country get?” and obviously the point of a table is to allow them to find this information too, but it’s of much lower interest to most readers. For example, you’d never find a table that just showed Rank and Silver Medals (or even Rank and Gold Medals) but it’s common to see a table that only shows Rank and Country or in the case of golf Rank and Player Name. Who won the Masters? It wasn’t the score that won, it was the player

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