
Show HN: Charts for Hacker News Polls - sbashyal
http://hacksandthoughts.posterous.com/charts-for-hacker-news-polls
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crntaylor
This is cool, but you really should have used bar charts rather than pie
charts. Humans are really good at comparing lengths, and terrible at comparing
areas. As an example, your chart of which database systems HNers use is almost
meaningless to me - it conveys less information than staring at the raw data
does. If you were able to rewrite to use bar charts instead, this would be a
kick-ass tool.

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sbashyal
Okay, I will make bar-chart the default view with an option to switch to pie-
charts if desired.

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hmigneron
This is cool.

The results of the first poll I looked at surprised me and I wanted to read
the comments, so I think it would be useful to have a link to the actual poll
(on HN) because I had to google it. Another small thing is that the "HN
Charts" in the nav bar doesn't really behave as expected. For example, on that
page : <http://hnlike.com/hncharts/chart/?id=3298905> the link doesn't do
anything. On other pages it brings you back to the home page.

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zacharydanger
I hear JGC's Pie Chart Challenge calling... <http://blog.jgc.org/2011/09/pie-
chart-challenge.html>

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Tichy
I must admit I don't fully get his argument. Is there research into the
perception of pie charts, or is it just an assumption that people are bad at
judging areas and angles?

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zacharydanger
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_chart#Use.2C_effectiveness_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_chart#Use.2C_effectiveness_and_visual_perception)

Looks like research has been done. Yes.

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rcfox
I'm not a web developer, so maybe I'm misremembering, but wasn't there
something in HTTP that let you check the last time a page changed? Scraping
the poll pages every 10 minutes seems like it would cause a lot of unnecessary
requests to HN.

Also, you probably consider any poll that's not on the first few pages of the
'news' or 'newest' sections to be complete. Sure, they might change, but
they're not going to change by enough to affect your graphs.

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mooism2
If-Modified-Since? You still have to issue the http request.

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icebraining
There are ETags too, but they suffer from the same problem (and usually
dynamic pages don't serve them).

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SudarshanP
Awesome! It would be nice to have prev and next button for the chart detail
page. Even better if u could add a swipe for mobile devices

~~~
awaz
That's a good idea for frontpage and best polls.

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gordonbowman
This is great. I think it would be helpful to add the percentages here too.
Perhaps in the key so as not to clutter?

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jrberger
great job, Shishir. are the legend/poll options in the same order as shown on
the original poll? i ask because the colors are a wee bit difficult to
differentiate. feature request: link to the original page.

