Show HN: Visual browsing of Hacker News and Pinboard popular links | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Visual browsing of Hacker News and Pinboard popular links

poppin.bencohen.net

6 pointsheliostatic9 comments

It's an interesting visualization, but thumbnails of the sites for HN links just don't seem that powerful to me.

The power of a HN post is the text.

If you could implement something like what Arek is asking that would help.. maybe change the background of the tile from blue to red depending on the popularity?

Color is a good thought. I was thinking about using sparklines to show activity over time inline, but color might be simpler and more arresting.

I see that you are using url2png's api, which means that even rendering a fraction of the monthly links will be costly. I'm creating a similar tool and opting (for now) to create the thumbnails offline and on my own (using webkit2png). Can you comment on your decision?

Originally I was just hitting the Pinboard popular links, which don't change much day to day, so the least expensive url2png plan seemed good. Now, I'm thinking about setting up a phantom.js system for generating the thumbnails.

All that said, the url2png guys are great, and the system is stupidly simple to use, which is great for getting something off the ground quickly.

Following up, I'm going to try implementing this post: http://www.cambus.net/creating-thumbnails-using-phantomjs-an... over the weekend.

Thumbnails are ok, but when you'll somehow visualize the heat of the discussions I'm gonna be an fully engaged early adopter.

That's an awesome idea. I've been playing with something like that, but what would you like to see?

I have to think about it for a while and will let you know, because there are 2 important things to consider: what will be visualized and how. In case of how you've got plenty of options: colors, size and even some icons or graphs. But before deciding on the form the crucial part will be what. And that requires defining some kind of methodology for measuring the dynamics of what I've called 'the heat of discussion'. I personally (probably like mmatey) come to HN to learn something new and discover new opinions, reflections and reactions of the people. Some important metrics of a good thread might be: number of commenters, length of comments, number of 1-on-1 ping-pong comment exchanges where the answers are upvoted by other people. You know discovering the threads where people are actually discussing something, because current system of HN ranking doesn't differentiate such threads from topics where 200 hundred people comment "Yeah, me too" ;) Well, these were just few unstructured reflections, I'll get back to you later if I'll have something more interesting and you'll be interested.

Before I dived into abyss of overthinking I've got a dead simple solution to my need called "How to detect the valuable discussions on HN". What do you think about opening the links in 2 frames? One contains the source page and the other contains the discussion thread on HN? It still doesn't solve the main problem "Should I even click on the link?", but would be nice anyway.

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