

Show HN: Visual browsing of Hacker News and Pinboard popular links - heliostatic
http://poppin.bencohen.net

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mmatey
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?

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heliostatic
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.

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rouli
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?

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heliostatic
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.

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

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

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ArekDymalski
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.

