
Hacker News Rankings - interactive graphs of an item's fate - ColinWright
http://hnrankings.info
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marcneuwirth
Creator here, I would love to hear any feedback you all have.

I also have around 3 months worth of historical data if anyone is interested
or has a cool idea.

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jabo
I tried doing something like this a while ago. But HN kept blocking my IP
after a few days of screen scraping. How did you get past that rate limit?

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marcneuwirth
I am using the bigrss feed as described in the latest post:
<http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html>

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cooldeal
I wish it gave out the points the article had... does your data track that or
just the position?

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marcneuwirth
Just the position unfortunately, I would need to scrape the site itself in
order to get comments and points info. It would be awesome if that data was
added to the RSS feed

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mike-cardwell
The movies.io one is quite interesting: <http://hnrankings.info/4054568/>

I'm assuming it dropped suddenly because of flagging, but how did it get back
up? Manual intervention?

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Eduard
Very good service. Gives inside to Hacker News. Lately, I have the feeling
many submissions get gamed by YC-affiliated parties.

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marcneuwirth
Updated:

\- Changed the graph to a log scale

\- Added the ability to compare multiple stories from the list, you can also
query them directly in the url like: <http://hnrankings.info/4055256,4056649/>

\- Added timestamp to the tooltip

A search feature and some long term stats are next on my list

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ColinWright
Love your responsiveness - thank you.

Some feedback: the graph no longer fits on my screen vertically - the bottom
gets lost. Granted, I don't have a huge screen here, but the previous version
fitted nicely.

 _Added in edit: I see you've fixed that now - thanks._

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SkyMarshal
Nice site. Not that it matters but I'm always curious, what's it built with?

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marcneuwirth
Python, Django, jQuery and Highcharts

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ericabiz
FYI, we run an app that used to use Highcharts too, but we discovered flot and
never looked back: <http://code.google.com/p/flot/> Wanted to share in case
that's useful to you, too! (In particular, it will come in handy if you ever
need to develop a web app for commercial purposes, as Highcharts has a tricky
licensing scheme for web apps.)

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archivator
Frankly, having used flot for [http://burntbrunch.github.com/Silk-Rabbit-
Hole/html/index.ht...](http://burntbrunch.github.com/Silk-Rabbit-
Hole/html/index.html), I wouldn't recommend it. It was a complete pain to do
tooltips, since flot insists on drawing them with divs.

gRaphael looks a lot more customizable.

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ajp
How about being able to pick multiple items to view on the same graph.

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marcneuwirth
Good idea, I will definitely put that in

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ColinWright
Curious, when I look at the graph for this very item, the updates stop a
couple of hours ago:

<http://hnrankings.info/4058277/>

Any reason?

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marcneuwirth
Thanks, good catch. Something weird happened with memcached when I resized the
server. Restarting the service fixed it

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swernoxidation
I really like this. It would be interesting to be able to focus in on a region
of the y-axis to see the spread more clearly, or a log scale option.

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marcneuwirth
You should be able to click and drag on the graph to select a rectangular zoom
region

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sslemon
always testing things... so this is what happens when you pick most of the
highest parameters (kinda slowed down the browser on my side, but it was
manageable) : <http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/5519/hnalltheratings.png>

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kateroth
Cool idea - would be nice to be able to look for a specific item vs. rankings.

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ColinWright
You can. This item, for example:

<http://hnrankings.info/4058277/>

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kateroth
oh i meant to search for them somehow - it was apparent in the UI.

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ColinWright
Oops, it's gone down under the load.

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marcneuwirth
Sorry, I had resized the instance. It should be good now

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sparknlaunch
Really like. May help explain how some submissions trend better than others.
Think that similar submissions should be aggregated rather than duplicated.

One interesting use for the data may be trending user stats - showing karma
points from submissions and comments by day or week.

