Revisiting 2011 in 365 HN stories | Hacker News Reader

Revisiting 2011 in 365 HN stories

rrrewind.com

126 pointsearlyriser28 comments

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It's a great idea but there should really be links to the actual discussion on HN for this to make any sense.

That's a good point. Anyone else feel the same?

Yes.

With HN comments links at http://rrrewind.com/assets/yearly/2010hn_comments.html

You can use this excellent bookmarklet that I snapped from here a good handful of months ago—

    javascript:function hn_bc(r){if(r.hits>0){window.location=%22http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=%22+r.results[0].item.id;}else{if(confirm(%22This URL is not yet added to Hacker News. Would you like to submit it?%22)){window.location=%22http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22&t=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.title);}}}hn_b=document.createElement(%22script%22);hn_b.setAttribute(%22src%22, %22http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?callback=hn_bc&filter[fields][url][]=%22+escape(document.location));document.getElementsByTagName(%22head%22)[0].appendChild(hn_b);

It submits the article to HN, but if it's already been submitted, it redirects you to the relevant discussion.

Neat idea. At a glance this was the year of Git. Appears 13 times. Anyone with some spare minutes wanna do a quick top-word-distribution on the titles? I'd be curious what else trended as popular.

http://philh.net/hn-2011-titles-dist.txt

Nothing stands out. Google gets 26 hits, YC gets 14, Apple gets 13 (between 'apple' and 'apples'), HN gets 10.

I am moderately surprised that github (9) gets more hits than facebook or twitter (7).

The other surprising one was __, but that turns out to be three hits in one title after stripping punctuation. (http://adamcecc.blogspot.com/2011/01/javascript.html)

27 : google

15 : yc

12 : apple

10 : hn

9 : github

9 : twitter

8 : hacker

8 : jobs

8 : news

7 : steve

7 : facebook

6 : amazon

6 : gmail

6 : developers

6 : startup

5 : sopa

4 : tracking

4 : launches

So "steve" + "jobs" == "yc" for equal second :D.

'Jobs' could be misleading. Maybe there are new job opportunities, eh that have brought forth really popular articles.

Good point and since I was curious, a quick count yielded 2 of the "jobs" variety, 6 of the "Jobs".

It would be cool if it had a link to the HN comments that go along with each article. I find a lot of value in the discussion that accompanies each story most of the time.

Here's a word cloud of the 365 HN stories (in the shape of the HN logo). http://i.imgur.com/AqmeK.png

Hey, what tool did you use to do that? I kinda want to do the same for my site but I am in a bad terms with photoshop. Maybe you can send me the psd file, please?

Try Tagxedo http://www.tagxedo.com (which I wrote).

I created a better one (based on pg's essay) a while back: http://www.tagxedo.com/shop/y-combinator

Note to self: this could be a data mining web app if encumbered with proper algorithms

earlyriser: would you mind sharing what is the logic when deciding which article is "the most" popular? is it a simple time snapshot or something more intricate? have you considered using Instapaper API?

Nothing fancy. Just a snapshot every 24 hours.

I'm collecting more infos that what is available at this moment, but I need to find time to implement it. In which way are you suggesting Instapaper? Do they have something like the most popular? I quickly checked their API but I couldn't not find anything for rrrewind.

Instapaper is for bookmarking and reading. It strips unnecessary clutter. You provide links to interesting stories - one might want to read them in a more readable format or send it to Instapaper and read it later on a tablet.

Here is my rumble: I'm thinking about an algorithm that would work like singnal-to-noise ratio detector. This requires a lot download bandwidth. It means counting how fast people like, +1, or any other on the internet (techcrunch, etc). Simply, replicating similar logic that HN uses for moving articles from newest page to the front page just for the top 10-20 most popular tech websites (techcrunch, gizmodo, etc). Then you add nice readability features (e.g., Instapaper) and you have a business. I might have a prototype next year but it seems that you have infrastructure that sets you ahead.

I just want to provide links to the stories. No content because I'm not sure it's ok with Copyright laws and honestly it's just a pet project. Go for it, rrrewind will remain in this form basically, maybe a mobile version and that's all.

I'm happy with this project, it gives me the content I missed and I get in contact with interesting people.

I cannot tell if I should be proud or disappointed that I remember reading the vast majority of these.

The Apple floor-plan is so cool. It is easy to forget that Apple was once a tiny company going through the same problems every startup goes through.

http://cdespinosa.posterous.com/plan

Too much room allocated for tennis courts?

If I recall from the original article, they didn't know what to put there yet, it was just undesignated space, and they jokingly labeled it "tennis courts".

http://cdespinosa.posterous.com/plan

This is rrrewind first year and I wanted to make a recap of the year for HN. Happy holidays!

Every night rrrewind takes a snapshot of the top stories on HN. This 2011 recap is taking the top story from each day.

A pity none of my two (two?) "hits" were #1 in the harvesting time :(

Good work :)

Just FYI: 'Comming Soon' has 1 too many 'm's in it : 'Coming Soon'

thanks. fixed.

This is great summary of the year

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