

Hacker Slide: HN front page over time - franck
http://hackerslide.com/

======
dasht
Oh, please, please someone toss in some animation (and also expand the sample
set to a much longer time frame).

By animation I mean that the transition between two "frames" should be titles
moving smoothly between positions. It would need some clever use of color and
exact path to make it legible.

The user-facing purpose of such animation is to make it easier for people to
perceive (viscerally) the bouncy dynamics of the ranking system.

(It's a neat hack as is, too, of course.)

~~~
petercooper
_(and also expand the sample set to a much longer time frame)_

Sure - it only started to collect data about 10 hours ago but that's certainly
the plan.. though I've realized it's already useful for me to catch up with HN
while I was asleep.

Regarding animation, thanks for the idea. I'm really just a JavaScript
"dabbler" but I'll have a think about how it could be done. Rather than just
rendering a JSON file into HTML it seems I'd need to start storing the data as
it comes in and perform manipulations as necessary. This might be a bit too
much for me for a quick project but I'm open sourcing the code so it could
happen.

~~~
wvl
Interesting idea. I built <http://hckrnews.com/> so that it would be easier to
track what is new as well as catch up on what had been posted since my last
visit. I'm not sure why I'd visit this instead?

~~~
petercooper
I like that.

However, the reason I'm _currently_ visiting mine is that it's great to see
how the front page looked merely hours ago. I'm familiar with the "top 30" and
stuff can fall off of it so fast. A site like yours is okay and the info looks
nice but it's a "different" thing to the HN front page, less of a facsimile.

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matt1
If you thought this was interesting, you might also like:

<http://www.hntrends.com>

Which is a site I built about a year ago that takes a somewhat different
approach to visualizing HackerNews front page data.

~~~
jacquesm
When I read the title of the post the first thing that popped in to my head
was hntrends.

It would be nice of PG could spare a static page on HN for all the user
contributed stuff.

~~~
ximeng
The site below is a nice alternative until then

<http://resourcey.com/site_details/2/news.ycombinator.com/>

------
petercooper
Thanks for the interest folks!

As _mhill_ notes, the inspiration for this was
<http://redditsnapshot.sweyla.com/> but I decided to go with sliding through
hours rather than days due to the lack of data. I quickly realized, though,
that even having the last 48 hours or so would be useful to me in order to
"catch up" with items that pass too quickly from the front page overnight/etc.

Several people have suggested adding colors or other notifications of "new"
items appearing over time, movements up and down, etc, and I'm adding some
stuff to track that and will add CSS classes to signify those events.

I'm also planning to upload the code to GitHub once I clean up a horrible tab
mismatch disaster that befouled it..

For anyone who cares about such things, it's currently a Ruby based "crawler"
that runs once a hour and saves the items into JSON files which the then
almost-pure-JavaScript page loads as you use the "selectToUISlider" control
built by Filament Group, see
[http://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/update_jquery_ui_slider_fro...](http://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/update_jquery_ui_slider_from_a_select_element_now_with_aria_support/)

------
earnubs
Would be nice to see the articles coloured by the change in their movement
since last version, one colour for rising another for falling.

~~~
jpwagner
...reword: _some way to quickly perceive each entry's change from the previous
time step. Maybe color?_

Separate the requirement from the solution.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Good idea in political, corporate, America.

Here on the internet, you can go ahead and speak your mind.

~~~
jpwagner
If only you had noticed that the other response to the comment confused the
requirement...

good luck!

------
mhill
I saw a post in Reddit doing frontpage snapshot yesterday
<http://redditsnapshot.sweyla.com/> and thought to myself, this is pretty
cool; I should make one for HN. Today someone already has done it. Congrat.

~~~
petercooper
I had the same thought (as you can tell!) and thought that after the whole
*Instant fad, I should quickly whip something up since I had a few spare hours
;-)

I'm a little perturbed by the whole "whip something out in a few hours" craze
of late but have adopted a "if you can't beat em, join em" approach for the
moment.

------
scottyallen
This is really cool, and seems like it will be even more fun once you've
collected a bit more data.

One minor usability tweak: having the slider "snap" to the hour doesn't quite
feel right. The end result is that the ball is never actually under my cursor,
which feels broken. Might be more usable if the mall always stayed with your
cursor, but snapped back to the nearest hour when you let go.

Nice stuff though - it will be cool to see how you evolve this.

------
xtacy
It looks like a nice interface to something like Web Archive:
<http://archive.org>. It should be there for every website!

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Tycho
This should settle the 'HN has changed...' arguments once and for all! I think
the only thing you really need to add is a way to flag/highlight one article
so you can watch how it slips over time.

------
pinstriped_dude
Another suggestion - Allow readers to choose timezone

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chrisdes
IMHO Reddit version feels better. It has both the hour as well as day sliders
and multiple controls for the same.

~~~
petercooper
It is, but this was just whipped up in a couple of hours this morning to get
going fast ;-)

That said, something about the Reddit one's approach to separating days and
hours doesn't feel right to me. Two interfaces for controlling one variable
(in essence). Copying that would be easy but it doesn't smell right to me
though I'm open to opinions and suggestions.

~~~
torme
I totally agree with this sentiment, but you do have two ways that people want
to interact with the data. Scrub by day, scrub by hour, depending on what
level of detail is wanted. You might need still two controls, but they should
at least be the same type of controls.

Alternatively, you could add a drop down to select the granularity and then
use a single slider control.

Edit: This is based on just seeing the reddit one, BTW. I tried to check out
yours, but it seems that it's popularity has flooded the server.

~~~
petercooper
You have a good point. I'll give it some thought now..

 _it seems that it's popularity has flooded the server._

Try again - it's not the load but something weird in my Apache setup (I'm
suspecting Passenger) that causes it to pass out every now and then load or
not :-(

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CWIZO
What does the pink background on some items mean?

~~~
japaget
The highlighted item is no more than 1 hour old, as measured by the time of
its first appearance on the front page.

~~~
abeppu
Highlighting to find new stuff would work better if each article could show up
highlighted at most once. For instance "The Original Microsoft Windows 1.0
Press Release" is highlighted and marked as "0 hours ago" both at 05:00 and
06:00.

~~~
petercooper
This is only a temporary hack. I only added "new" detection after it had been
going several hours but once enough time has passed, I'll remove the hack
based on hours under 2.

