

Turn Hacker News' headlines & comments into ambient histograms - elzr
http://elzr.com/posts/backbars-on-social-link-sites

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lsb
I'm sorry, but I don't understand what it's a histogram of.

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elzr
Ah, sorry! Such an oversight! (You get so involved in a project you think it's
all natural...)

The histograms are:

For Reddit, they are of a headline's votes, of a headline's number of
comments, and of a comment's votes.

For Delicious, they are of the numbers of users that have bookmarked a link,
or applied a tag.

For Digg, of a headline's diggs, of a headline's number of comments, and of a
comment's diggs.

For Hacker News, of a headline's upvotes, of a headline's number of comments,
and of a comment's upvotes.

For StackOverflow, of a question's views, of an answer's votes, of the number
of users that have applied a tag, of a user's reputation score.

It's hopefully all obvious once you install the script.

Adding larger versions of the screenshots in a sec..

~~~
imp
A histogram shows a distribution of values. This just looks like a bar graph.
Still useful, but I don't see how it's a histogram.

~~~
elzr
Ah, I see, I didn't even know there was a difference, thanks for pointing it
out. I've always like the word "bar graph" more (it's more transparent), so
bar graphs they are now!

~~~
breck
i like it

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cl3m
Really nice =)

Check it on <http://news.ycombinator.com/best>

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elzr
It works on MetaFilter now! Also, comment backbars are now more accurate.
Download the latest script for these changes
<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/51281>

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htsh
Minor thing - it seems to have messed up the comment threading. Check it:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/hitesh/3618708763/>

edit: here it is with 4 comments. check out the whacked-out indentation of the
comments -- the nesting is all off:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/hitesh/3618714801/>

~~~
elzr
They are somewhat off indeed. This ironically only seems to happen in this
particular comment thread. I'll look into it right away, sorry and thanks for
the bug report!

~~~
htsh
oh not a problem. seems to be ok on digg & reddit so far and now that I get
it, its kinda nice to have ..

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truebosko
Are all the histograms based on popularity, diggs, upvotes, etc? The
thumbnails are too tiny to make out and they link to the site, not a larger
picture.

