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Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Only after you had voted and reloaded the page. Otherwise the effect would be to promote the most popular options.

Ideally when you hadn't voted, the ordering would be random.

Has anyone written a little web app to turn an HN poll into a nice chart, automagically? (Extra hipster points for using D3 and some random and inappropriate visualisation no one has ever heard of.)

Results as chart: http://hnlike.com/hncharts/chart/?id=7729603

Nice!

I suppose it really depends on the poll. Answering ‘What is your age?’ would be frustrating if all the options were scrambled. But anything subjective like ‘What’s your favourite programming language?’ would certainly benefit from random ordering.

This is not a popularity vote, it's a vote on what DB you actually use. For a "Best DB system" question, you need to evaluate each DB and rank them all.

It has a lot of options, people will answer a few, get bored... scroll down and read some comments.

The options towards the bottom of the list may not get as much attention and votes even if they are used by people.

If it were alphabetical, people might hunt and peck for the one they use most, e.g. PostgreSQL, they might then see things around there (memcached) but fail to scroll back up and vote for Custom too.

Random deals with it well enough without even knowing the poll content or number of options.

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