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first of all, very cool. how is it normalized? every single thing I type in has an upward trend, which to me just suggests that interest in Hacker News has inc
by edge17 15y ago
first of all, very cool.
how is it normalized? every single thing I type in has an upward trend, which to me just suggests that interest in Hacker News has increased over the last few years... and I don't really need a chart to tell me that since I live in silicon valley :)
- sant0sk1 15y agoGood point. I wasn't really thinking about normalization as I was more interested in comparing trends on multiple terms, but I don't think it'd be too much work to change the algorithm to account for HN's growth.
- suking 15y agoYah, you could easily do it by total # of posts to account for the growth. Cool stuff man.
- hammock 15y agoThe trends on multiple terms are actually easier to read after normalization anyway. Right now the power-law curve growth of HN in total is making it hard to read the difference in growth between, say, FB and twitter. Easier for our brains to process if you took the ln() of them - which is definitely the fastest way to fix the charts - or normalized in some other way.
- retube 15y agoCame to say exactly this. The chart seems to start (by default anyway) at the beginning of 2007. I'm guessing the user-base and thus activity of HN has increased considerably since then. So yes it would be good to be able to re-normalise in some way. By the number of registered users would probably be the simplest. By number of comments posted would be another, by number of submissions or even number of words would all be interesting. Btw - my suggestions got me thinking - I assumed this is looking at posts and comments. Whether just submission titles or if includes comments will affect best way to normalise.
- sant0sk1 15y agoIt uses submission titles AND comments. How would you suggest going about normalization?
- retube 15y agoIn that case I would do it by number of submissions (posts) + number of comments for each period (3 months I think, looking at your graphs?). I would normalised all quarters to the last complete quarter. So if say in q1 2011 there were 1m posts + comments, and in q1 2007 10k, multiply the count for q1 2007 by 100. It would be truly great to have this normalisation optional, e.g option to normalise by comment+post count and maybe also normalise by number of users (could be an interesting comparison). And perhaps have them super-imposed on each other!
- sant0sk1 15y agoThanks, I will definitely implement the multiplier as you suggested. I like this better than showing as a % of total. I'm storing the total hits so I will do the calculations on the client-side, which means I just might be able to add some toggles for the normalization schemes ;)
- retube 15y agoThinking a little bit more about this, there are of course lots of submissions that don't get voted up or commented on - spam, off-topic, not interesting etc. Maybe you should only use posts that have either at least one upvote or comment, just to filter out the crap.
- sant0sk1 15y agoA first version of this has been implemented. You can't toggle the normalizations just yet, but I figured I should get the fix out there as soon as I could. Check the "Learn More" section where I give you props for the help :)
- 15y ago
- hammock 15y agoDoesn't seem to be normalized at all. The easiest way to fix would be to chart the y-axis on a log scale.
- sant0sk1 15y agoJust an update to let you know that the site now accounts for HN's growth. I used retube's suggested adjustment scheme. Let me know what you think!