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I don't want to tread outside of HN policy, but in the spirit of a comment I saw Dang leave on a thread about wanting "surprising" comments on posts that tend t
by danShumway 6y ago
I don't want to tread outside of HN policy, but in the spirit of a comment I saw Dang leave on a thread about wanting "surprising" comments on posts that tend to go in predictable directions, the sheer predictability of what happens on threads that even mention the Uyghur as a people makes me wonder if there's a good data visualization blog post somewhere here.
I would be interested in seeing someone explore what keywords seem to trigger the reaction, how fast it is, etc... HN has a pretty open API, so it feels like it wouldn't be too hard to make some interesting graphs on how the posts/comments evolve over time.
Heck, I'd be interested in seeing a visualization like that for HN posts in general, but PRC posts are the ones where it seems the most like there's an obvious, reproducible process happening that could be explored and experimented on.
- minimaxir 6y agoI've done work in this area (example from 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8425385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8425385) and it wouldn't be too terrible to do a data viz on comment count trajectory on a thread given a certain keyword. Granted, given the responses to my previous work, it would likely not be well-received and it might be too niche for the effort involved.
- Daho0n 6y agoIt would likely look like a pixel perfect copy of data from a Tesla post.
- justaman 6y agoYou're not the only one to notice this. Take all your downvotes as a sign this project needs to happen.
- 99_Woodcutting 6y agoIt's okay, you are not violating HN policy. China is the sole exception to HN's "no controversial politics talk, only tech news" rule. They are an evil that must be destroyed.