Hacker News Reader

I've added [ and ] to the filter list, though I'll have to remove some stuff from the db to get rid of the past results.

When I was developing it I saw Google trending all the time. I think Google just comes up in conversation on HN very frequently.

I suppose I could remove Google it if it doesn't have meaning. But maybe it does. This is interesting: if Google stops trending, perhaps that's a canary signal that it's not relevant anymore.

View on HN

I think what the parent means is that the derivative of the appearances is a lot more interesting than the number of appearances (and possibly as a percentage of the total number of appearances). Google moving from 100 to 105 isn't very interesting, but a new language going from 0 to 10 mentions might be very significant. (edit: and Google owning x% and staying there isn't very interesting either)

In other words, frequency of occurrence is interesting, but statistically unlikely occurrences (more or less frequent than expected) is even more interesting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com