Show HN: Hacker News historic upvote and score data

Are you sure this data is correct ? There is a listing of the "Most Upvoted Story" at 390, but I feel like I have seen regularly items higher than that.

One example I see today is : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44174965

with 393.

If I understand correctly it does only show stats for the current frontpage (aka top 30). So it's the "Most Upvoted Story (on the frontpage right now)".

Yeah it would probably be better to phrase it that way

Looking at the charts they all seem to take off. To me that begs the question, do they take off because they hit the front-page and get all the attention, or are some of them bought upvotes like on Reddit?

Isn't this because upvotes "early" are worth more than upvotes later?

Thats my guess; also survivorship bias. Those that make it have to show quick promise early on in order to hit the front page

It's probably all of it.

I mean professional influence campaigns exist. Especially on social media. And HN also has its own required dynamics with respect to reaching the front page.

I've yet to see anyone selling HN upvotes on the usual dubious forums like BHW. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I don't believe there is any commercial service being advertised.

Malwarebytes warned me about this site.

Website blocked due to riskware. IP 37.27.51.34 port 443

Firefox error reported as Problem Loading Page:

>SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length.

Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG

Could be my machine. I'm on Win7Pro with FF 115.24.0 so old and out of date here.

I see it on VT [1] "Bfore.Ai PreCrime"

[1] - https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/eab0487f9da6dd832f69dbbe0...

the firefox error is also caused by malwarebytes blocking.

oh hmm; the website is running off a tilde server I share with 500 ish other kids so something might have gotten flagged

You made it to the frontpage :D

I honestly cant believe it lol; first project of mine to make it

Related: https://hnrankings.info/

Oooh that has some nice graphs

Nice site, slick. Not sure what use the data has to me, but I don't make posts, so that's my fault.

It would be nice if the chart would move down or something when you select a post that's lower in the rankings. I had to scroll back to the top after clicking one of the bottom posts.

That’s a good idea; shouldn’t be terribly hard to implement

it's easy:

1. add `position: relative;` to `main-container`

2. add `position: sticky; top: 0;` to `graph-container`

you need to figure out what to do in the mobile display though

Thanks!!! My sleep addled brain couldn’t quite figure it out last night

> Highest Points 461 Most upvoted story

Not sure that's accurate. If you look at just yesterday, you have this story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163063

Which has over 2200 points.

its highest out of the current data from the front page

Nice site. Looks slick!

I wonder though how the data is actionable? What can I do with it?

Honestly nothing, i really made it to scratch an itch lol

nice job! I once created [Track HN](https://track-hacker-news.com) which does similar things! I've already archived historical data of scores/comments/ranks. It seems our projects overlap - maybe we can combine our efforts to hack something even cooler :).

Ooh! Id love to talk!

According to your stats, when is the best time to post to get noticed?

Behind this question is a road that leads to all kinds of horrible things.

When you have something to say. As opposed to meeting your "engagement" quota.

10 months is definitely not a while in my book.

yeah i only made an account and started commenting here a bit ago; i've been silently reading for far longer

so cool krn!

This is done with claude . You know why I know. looks awesome.

Lol fair; i used this project as a bit of a playground for zed agent mode. My conclusion is that its okayish for ui but generally terrible at responsive design and really bad at db queries. I had to fix most of the ui since it would just flat out not work on mobile

I’m curious what specifically tiped you off; i know that border on the cards is pretty indicative of claude but curious what else

Because Claude generated that exact dashboard for me more than 20 times

The problem with analyzing HN comment and submission voting is we don't (AFAIK) have access to downvotes and that changes everything. We used to know the net votes for comments but that was removed years ago. Only submissions have net votes.

But what you find is that position matters, both for submissions and comments. There's a world of difference between being on the front page or not and being on the first page of cvomments (nad the higher on that page the better) for getting eyeballs (because people only scroll so far) and thus votes.

I mention this because both submissions and comments are heavily curated. It's more obvious with submissions where one post can stick around for 12 hours with 30 net votes on the front page while another will disappear within 15 minutes with 200+. Part of this is known. For example, the moderation team tends to dislike "political" submissions. I put that in quotes because what is and isn't "political" can be open to interpretation. Often on the Internet in general something is "political" if you don't agree with it and it's not if you are. You might even hear descriptions like "common sense" about the latter.

Comments are heavily curated too. Some of this is just rotating the top comments for freshness. Some of it is some sort of commenter rating where their comments will tend to be ranked high or low when fresh. And some of it is simply downranking certain comments.

On Reddit this would all be both more transparent and easier to visualize and analyze because we could sort by different critera, we could see total votes and we could see up/down vote breakdowns.

To be clear, no shade to the moderation team here. Just observing what happens.

One side note: I believe Shipwrecked isn't you but as a general observation to anyone, it reverses the mousewheel direction. Don't mess with scrolling.

Good work here. Just a few comments about your graph:

1. This may be personal preference but I would find the chart more reasonable if there was a horizonal line for where the cursor is. The way you have it, it feels a bit "disconnected" but maybe that's just me. I'm thinking of, say, how Google Finance does their charts;

2. You can probably compact the header into a single row/line;

3. I'm visually impaired and would like more contrast in the colours used accessibility-wise;

4. You have the submitter's name. That could be a link to their profilee;

5. This may just be preference but the tooltip feels "off" to me. This may be related to the above point about not having a line for the cursor maybe? But also the dark background doesn't seem to fit. Maybe it's the color too. I could just be nit-picking here;

6. Show number of comments maybe?

And the dashboard:

1. The cards themselves have a lot of wasted space. Again, you could link to the profile in them;

2. If you're scrolled down the page, when you click on a card you don't see the graph;

3. There's no hover over effects on the dashboard graphs. There easily could be I suspect;

4. I'm not sure a graph for raw score makes sense. It can only go up. Maybe show how many upvotes gained in that period?

5. The legend has different styling on the dashboard graph for some reason;

6. If you scroll down, click a card then scroll up you see the graph but you can't see what submission it belongs to. Maybe put some indicator on the graph or rethink how the layout works in general so you can see both the graph and selected card at the same time regardles of scrolling.

Anyway, good work.

thats some amazing feedback! i'll try to implement that tonight. Agree with you on the scrolling for sure; I know the people that made the website so i'll pass that on to them :)

took me 3 days but I got all of that implemented! the graph for raw score was more to see rate of score vs position on the page but upvotes gained kinda makes sense (probably not going to change for now since I love the pretty slopes). I spent quite a while tweaking all the colors to meet or exceed the webaim accessibility contrast ratios so hopefully thats better :)

fire dude

:)

I'm also collecting this data, and it allows rendering beautiful heatmaps like here: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/59020

Try: ssh play@play.clickhouse.com

    SELECT id, max(score) AS s, max(descendants), argMax(title, update_time), arrayStringConcat(arrayMap(x -> format('\x1b[38;2;{0};{1};{2}m\xE2\x96\x88\x1b[0m', least(greatest(sqrt(x / 10) * 255, 0), 255)::UInt8::String, least(greatest(sqrt((x - 10) / 50) * 255, 0), 255)::UInt8::String, least(greatest(sqrt((x - 50) / 250) * 255, 0), 255)::UInt8::String), arrayDifference(arrayFill(x -> x != 0, maxResample(now() - INTERVAL 2 DAY, now(), 3600)(score, update_time))))) AS bar FROM hackernews_changes_items WHERE id IN (SELECT arrayJoin(ids) FROM (SELECT ids FROM hackernews_top WHERE type = 'top' ORDER BY update_time DESC LIMIT 1)) GROUP BY id ORDER BY s DESC LIMIT 10

Oooh thats awesome

i'm actually pretty sure I remember you from a few months back. didn't you post this then? if not i might have seen it in a comment or smthing

It's likely I've posted a link to playground before, https://play.clickhouse.com/ but it's unlikely I've posted a way to connect to it with ssh and this particular query.

Feel free to share if you like!