The Words That Make Hacker News Tick

Ok, here's my crack at a great HN headline:

"Ask HN: Why doesn't Google make Python run on Android? And what you can you do about it? (Jonathan Ive)"

The words they ranked are also some of the most common words in the English language (Who, What, Why, How), words that get used in posts by theme (Ask, Developer), or pronouns (I, me).

What they should have done is to exclude these extremely common words and then rank what was left, like Google, Facebook, Steve Jobs. Those would have been far more valuable, but much noisier data.

Nice, but isn't Steve Jobs something of a statistical outlier due to his recent death? Also, I'd be curious to see the results after common words like "my, I, do, etc.." were removed.

Link to the actual source (which also contains a version of the infographic that hasn't been recompressed into illegibility): http://blog.futuresimple.com/infographic-the-words-that-make...

I would love to see an analysis that measures hotness in a different way: The ratio of the word making it to the front page to the word being used in any submission.

e.g. "Coffeescript" made it to the front page 90% of the time it was submitted. v.s. "ASK" which only made it 3%

No way this is right if CoffeeScript pros/cons isn't at the top of the list.

I'm curious as to when this data was collected. I can't imagine anything other than SOPA topping the list these days.

No way i can believe this results.

There is no mention of "Dropbox" anywhere. Are you kidding me?

Clojure isn't in the tools list at all? There's Clojure articles almost daily on the front page...

Is it just my bad eyes or did that infographic need to be much larger?

Site layout is broken in safari, had to use chrome to view it.