

Show HN: visualize HN polls by building charts - egor83
http://hn-stuff.appspot.com/poll_chart/intro/

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DanielStraight
This is cool, and it showed me something that I should've noticed a long time
ago but only just now did.

For all their weaknesses, pie charts are much better at showing what percent
of the total a _combination_ of options makes up. At a glance, you can tell on
the SICP pie chart that about 50% of people have never looked at it and about
50% have read at least some of it. This is not at all obvious from the bar
chart.

~~~
gjm11
For combinations that happen to end up adjacent to one another in the pie
chart. For other combinations, it's not really any more obvious than in the
bar chart.

Perhaps pie charts would be less sucky if they were interactive and allowed
you to rearrange and/or re-colour the slices. Then at least you could go
looking for subsets that add up to 50% of the pie (or 31.42%, or 99.94%, or
whatever). Though I can't help thinking that there are better ways to do that.

