

Show HN: Hind-cite.com – Hacker News Charts and Data - rrosen326
http://www.hind-cite.com/

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mlmilleratmit
In our spare time, we're researching this dataset in detail. Here are some
questions that we're interested in. Would love to hear other ideas and to have
folks dig into the data. I think this dataset may be of interest to hackers,
researchers and marketers.

1\. Are the trajectories (e.g. rank vs time) for all popular posts of the same
shape? They look ~logarithmic.

2\. Are there identifiable clusters when you look in 4d space for rank vs
points vs comments?

3\. How does the impact of a post depend quantitatively on its respective
cohort. I.e., what's a good model to normalize performance based on what else
was happening that day?

4\. What fraction of posts have comment threads that are "hijacked" by the
first comment? Is their a quantitative way to find this, perhaps by looking at
(2) above?

5\. What are more detailed metrics to collapse "performance" of a post onto a
single number?

6\. How does performance on HN compare to reddit, etc?

7\. How is the HN community different than other communities, if at all?

8\. Given the time-dependent data, can we create a good estimator for the
number of active HN users per day? Or can we at least create a relative
ranking of the number of unique users between different days?

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kordless
9\. Sentiment of comments, via comment downvotes and/or contextual analysis.

Also, frequent violators of 'hijacking' the most popular comment by commenting
on _it_. :)

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mlmilleratmit
Good thought. I've been trying to think of how to do that without crawling the
comments, too.

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dewey
That's pretty sweet! Shameless plug: I built something just for your personal
points a while ago using the Agolia API. It's not that sophisticated and
detailed but it's good enough for my personal usage.

[https://hn.notmyhostna.me/](https://hn.notmyhostna.me/)

~~~
mlmilleratmit
Hey, that's a million times prettier. Maybe you could drop some of that UI
goodness onto the public hind-cite dataset?

~~~
dewey
Thank you! Credit goes to Chart.js [0] and FlatUI [1], they are doing the
heavy lifting ;)

[0] [http://www.chartjs.org/](http://www.chartjs.org/)

[1] [http://designmodo.github.io/Flat-UI/](http://designmodo.github.io/Flat-
UI/)

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jbranchaud
I think you missed a big opportunity not calling this hndcite.com

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DanBC
Some things that might be nice to see are:

i) how many different people post URLs from a particular domain?

ii) how many different domains does a particular person post?

There's also iii but I'm not sure how to word it. It's something like "given a
particular domain, what's the average[1] number of different domains posted by
people who've posted this domain at some point?"

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rrosen326
All of these questions, I believe, can be easily answered with the existing,
Algolia-based, HN API. (Though good questions all.) What hind-cite adds is a
time-based component. (The existing api shows the end result - number of
points, comments, etc. etc.) Just an FYI.

I think marrying the two datasets (probably at a client level with two
separate calls) would give a pretty complete picture.

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jcfrei
Very cool tool! Regarding the rank graph: I would also like an alternative
display, where you show a time line on the x-axis.

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dalek2point3
very cool. I've been thinking of building a distributed analytics service like
this -- can you talk about what the architecture of something like this is? If
I had to build a custom chart, I would have to go get my own data?

It would be awesome to have a service that provides hosted data, allows anyone
to make charts / random transformations / add extra data and then add that to
the main dashboard.

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rrosen326
I'll leave the architecture of the cloudant db to the Cloudant guys. Being
able to add data, though, is interesting. If people want to add different
views (which basically trasform the data using map/reduce), we can add those
to the db so they are available to all.

For charts, you just create a new chart and assuming it works and all, we'll
host it on the site. It will pull the data directly from the db via the REST
interface.

So, basically, yeah - we are hoping to do exactly what you are asking.

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stickperson
I could be way off here, but why are you still using jquery for the ajax if
you're using angular?

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rrosen326
Just a bit more generic. Cloudant sponsored this, so I wanted the db calls to
be simple templates anyone could learn from (and everyone uses jquery, while
angular is less common).

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reubano
This is likely the first cloudant hosted app I've come across. Can you comment
on your exeperience using it vs heroku or any of the other platforms?

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codebeaker
I'll probably be down-voted to hell, but whats with all the redirects that
make "back"ing out of the site back to HN so painful, I counted three
redirects before I landed on the final page, and had to long-click my back
button to avoid the obnoxious redirect trap. Looks like your tracking (I
assume) might drive people away.

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rrosen326
Fixed. I had to remove my cool embedded, recursive chart showing how the post
itself was doing. But yeah, that redirect back loop was maddening. So now to
see the chart, you have to click on the Post History page or this
[http://www.hind-cite.com/multiPost?postIds=8075216](http://www.hind-
cite.com/multiPost?postIds=8075216)

