

Tell HN: Check out HNTrends.com - matt1
http://www.hntrends.com/

======
matt1
The idea for HNTrends has been bouncing around in my head for about a year as
one of those man-I-wish-I-had-more-free-time-type side projects. I recently
decided to take up learning Flash and ActionScript and this seemed like the
perfect opportunity to build it.

It's fairly straight forward: A Python script scrapes HackerNews every 15
minutes and saves the data in a MySQL database. A PHP script queries the
database and outputs the the last five hours worth headlines as neatly-
formatted JSON data, which the chart grabs and plots.

The older, less trendy news items are rendered with a slight transparency in
order to reduce the chart's business. You can hover over any of the lines to
see it in greater detail. Also, if you click any of the points it'll take you
to the comments. The links on the right take you to the actual news articles.

Hope you like it. Let me know if you have any suggestions -- Matt

~~~
andreyf
Suggestion, if you keep on keeping it up: release a simple API?

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jacquesm
What would be most interesting is to extend the list past the page with the
first 30 articles. That's what would really give you a chance to deal with HNs
front-page feedback loop.

There is lots of stuff that does not make it to the front page during busy
times.

Any chance of increasing the length of the list to 60 or maybe even 100 ?

That would really add value.

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tsally
Very nice. It'd be very cool to have a slider at the bottom that you could use
to go back to previous days.

~~~
matt1
I totally agree. This is mostly meant to be a Minimum Viable Product. The
feedback I get here will determine what to add in the future, if anything.

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tel
This is pretty fascinating. The most important thing I notice almost
immediately is that there are generally two classes of articles:

1\. those which reach the front page by virtue of quickly getting a few votes
while they are young and then dwindle

2\. those which barely reach the front page and have some kind of resurgence
(discernible by a large jump in front page rank).

It'd be interesting to group articles based on how they perform like this and
see if there are any other correlated factors. My feeling is that the ones
with resurgence are either long and require some amount of karma "activation
energy" before people are willing to dive into them or that they're ones with
long conversation chains which have a spike for similar reasons.

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gstar
Cute - excellent chart and interaction. Just be careful you don't offend the
dons with your scraping.

One criticism: Flash?

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trafficlight
Who cares if it's flash or not?

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Zev
Flash means that it takes up 25% of my CPU simply by having the virtue of
being opened in a tab.

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DTrejo
you're already looking at HN, it's not like you're really gonna need that 25
for anything else right?

~~~
jrockway
If he's using a laptop, he's now burning significantly more power. 4 hours of
battery life at idle can easily become 30 minutes at a constant 25% CPU load.

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bendtheblock
How about a link to the comments after each article title? I usually read
those first and then click on the link (otherwise I'd have to come to HN front
page anyway to see the comments on it). Works great though - good job.

~~~
timf
If you click on a data point it goes to the comments. (I'd personally rather
see it as a parenthetical link on the right of the story)

~~~
dhimes
Agreed. I've been using the site all morning, and it's really growing on me.
But I didn't see how to get directly to the comments until you pointed it out.

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10ren
Fullscreen version <http://www.hntrends.com/Plotter2.swf>

Incidentally, I _thought_ the lines looked blurry... in fullscreen it's clear
that they are.

The pop-up only appears for the datapoints - not if your mouse is over a line
segment between data points. In fact, it was a while before the any popup come
up, for me. Maybe make it attach to the closest data point? (google analytics
does it this way).

~~~
tel
It's not blur, it's overlapping line segments with some transparency effect.
Not great for visualization, I agree.

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alex_c
That's odd - most of the data is fairly linear, but as of right now, there's a
very sharp spike for 5 stories at 10:30pm (with a corresponding drop in 5
other stores), which is reverted back to "normal" at 10:45.

Strange voting patterns? Or a bug in your script?

~~~
matt1
Not a bug as far as I know.

Sometimes the numbers just works out that way.

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joshu
Why would you plot rank over time instead of actual votes?

Rank shows strictly less information.

~~~
mhansen
Less information, true. However, you can't downvote submissions, so the graph
will be rather boring. Just a ton of upwardly sloping lines, some sloping
upwards faster than others

~~~
spectre
You could show the rate of voting instead of number of votes.

~~~
natrius
I'd guess that wouldn't be much different from the rank.

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timf
Nice. I have trouble finding the data points _instantly_. Not a huge gripe,
it's just precarious moving the mouse along the line.

Maybe make circles there? Make a vertical line for each 15min interval where
they show up?

~~~
timf
I am actually mostly interested in finding a data point quickly in order to
get to the comments. Maybe just break out the comment link feature into a
"(comments)" link next to the article titles?

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matt1
Quick update: There was a problem with the script which caused it to go down
for a few hours. Should be fixed now. Graph might look a little off for a few
hours until the logging catches up.

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ivankirigin
You should overlay the last N stories that reached #1.

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mcav
Maybe a little less blur. Cool though.

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alanthonyc
Very nice.

Can you link to the article's comments instead of the article itself?

~~~
timf
If you click on a data point it goes to the comments. (I'd personally rather
see it as a parenthetical link on the right of the story)

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tzury
cool. yet I find it hard to understand why is it so important to see a trend
of a link. in other words, who can benefit from this information and how?

~~~
jacquesm
It's a great way to see how articles develop 'traction'.

~~~
tzury
It can be useful in a macro level, that is one might find out the best time in
a day (or else, the best day(s) in the week) to post a link in social media
site or an article in a blog.

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scharan
Really nifty! Really fascinating!

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alexkay
Very cool indeed. May be add a link to the comments?

Edit: thanks guys, I must be blind :)

~~~
JacobAldridge
Already there - you just click on a data point in the chart. (The titles on
the side take you to the article, which is also the comments for Ask HN /
Review my App type things).

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zackattack
can you please post the source to the FLA? cheers

