Hacker News Rankings - interactive graphs of an item's fate | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News Rankings - interactive graphs of an item's fate

hnrankings.info

103 pointsColinWright40 comments

Creator here, I would love to hear any feedback you all have.

I also have around 3 months worth of historical data if anyone is interested or has a cool idea.

I tried doing something like this a while ago. But HN kept blocking my IP after a few days of screen scraping. How did you get past that rate limit?

I am using the bigrss feed as described in the latest post: http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

I wish it gave out the points the article had... does your data track that or just the position?

Just the position unfortunately, I would need to scrape the site itself in order to get comments and points info. It would be awesome if that data was added to the RSS feed

Were you hitting it more than once every 30 seconds?

No, I hit it once in 15 minutes!

Very nice. I like it a lot. Would be nice if it showed more than 6 hours though, I'd like to see what's happened to the 'WhosHere' threads :)

But why on earth redirecting to news.ycombinator.org? The official one is .com I think, and in the past couple years I've been visiting HN I've never seen anyone using .org (people link to previous HN threads all the time, and they all end in .com), so I think you should redirect people to .com domain.

And It's not really important, but just FYI: It crashed when I tried zooming on iPad 2 (iOS 5.1.1). It's the second time ever my iPad's Safari crashes (first time being Linux's network on Github, that crashes every single browser on every platform, so don't even try opening it: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/network)*.

Fixed the .org domain, thanks for pointing that out.
You actually _can_ look at up to the past 12 hours if you change the URL manually, but I have found the graph to be less useful from 6-12 hours
How much data were you looking at when the iPad crashed? I use this daily on the new iPad and havent experienced any problems unless there was a ton of data on the screen

Also, it would be nice to show timestamps (see http://hnrankings.info/4054568/ for example. I have no idea when it dropped. When I move my cursor, it just shows 'Saturday, Jun 2, 2012').

Very cool - nice work. I like the idea of charts to see change over time(your charts are great - sparklines might be useful for seeing an individual post's status over time).
Some ideas based on my similar project over at http://hn4d.com.
Another are of interest that I track is the change in the number of comments over time. This also provides an indication of current activity and interest over time.
Since you have historic data, perhaps a search would be useful. It might be interesting to see "longest lasting posts" or posts with the "greatest increase."
In any case - very nice site, well implemented and easy to understand.

Your project looks awesome, are you just scraping the homepage directly?
Great suggestions, thanks

In case anyone hasn't already seen it, "A journey through the bowels of proggit"
http://corte.si/posts/socialmedia/redditgraph/index.html

All the curves are in a giant jumble at the top and are nearly indistinguishable from each other.
Perhaps a log scale on the y-axis would improve readability?

It's probably because I'm colorblind, but I find it hard to follow the lines in the default chart even when selected/highlighted. Can you increase the width of the selected line a little bit more?

The movies.io one is quite interesting: http://hnrankings.info/4054568/
I'm assuming it dropped suddenly because of flagging, but how did it get back up? Manual intervention?

Very good service. Gives inside to Hacker News. Lately, I have the feeling many submissions get gamed by YC-affiliated parties.

Updated:
- Changed the graph to a log scale
- Added the ability to compare multiple stories from the list, you can also query them directly in the url like: http://hnrankings.info/4055256,4056649/
- Added timestamp to the tooltip
A search feature and some long term stats are next on my list

Love your responsiveness - thank you.
Some feedback: the graph no longer fits on my screen vertically - the bottom gets lost. Granted, I don't have a huge screen here, but the previous version fitted nicely.
Added in edit: I see you've fixed that now - thanks.

Nice site. Not that it matters but I'm always curious, what's it built with?

Python, Django, jQuery and Highcharts

... which I had just discovered on your effective and well-designed alt-resume page:
http://marcneuwirth.com/projects/
I love how you have thumbnail links to each project next to icons of the languages/frameworks/tools you used to build them.

Also like the resume site. Would be nice to see a small description of the project under the title.

Thanks, I appreciate it. Descriptions are on my TODO list, but have been on the back burner in favor of more projects. I will have to bump up their priority.

FYI, we run an app that used to use Highcharts too, but we discovered flot and never looked back: http://code.google.com/p/flot/ Wanted to share in case that's useful to you, too! (In particular, it will come in handy if you ever need to develop a web app for commercial purposes, as Highcharts has a tricky licensing scheme for web apps.)

Frankly, having used flot for http://burntbrunch.github.com/Silk-Rabbit-Hole/html/index.ht..., I wouldn't recommend it. It was a complete pain to do tooltips, since flot insists on drawing them with divs.
gRaphael looks a lot more customizable.

How about being able to pick multiple items to view on the same graph.

Good idea, I will definitely put that in

Curious, when I look at the graph for this very item, the updates stop a couple of hours ago:
http://hnrankings.info/4058277/
Any reason?

Thanks, good catch. Something weird happened with memcached when I resized the server. Restarting the service fixed it

I really like this. It would be interesting to be able to focus in on a region of the y-axis to see the spread more clearly, or a log scale option.

You should be able to click and drag on the graph to select a rectangular zoom region

always testing things... so this is what happens when you pick most of the highest parameters (kinda slowed down the browser on my side, but it was manageable) : http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/5519/hnalltheratings.png

Cool idea - would be nice to be able to look for a specific item vs. rankings.

You can. This item, for example:
http://hnrankings.info/4058277/

oh i meant to search for them somehow - it was apparent in the UI.

Oops, it's gone down under the load.

Still works fine for me, and I'm writing this six minutes after you posted. Still down for you?

Sorry, I had resized the instance. It should be good now

Really like. May help explain how some submissions trend better than others. Think that similar submissions should be aggregated rather than duplicated.
One interesting use for the data may be trending user stats - showing karma points from submissions and comments by day or week.

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