A Week in Hacker News

I started posting to Hacker News recently. The rise and fall of submissions through the rankings is really hypnotic. I wrote a screen-scraper to track my stories' trajectories, one thing led to another, and suddenly it was a bit of an art project:



(Play this in full-screen to see the text. Watch at Vimeo for HD resolution.)

The x-axis is time since submission, y-axis is karma. For ranking, stories are sorted by points divided by a power of the time since they were submitted. That means on this log-log plot there is a straight line separating front-page stories (of which there are 30) from the rest.

Front-page stories are green (with the #1 story brightest). Other stories are red. Each article leaves a dot behind at the moment they leave the front page and start to fade away.

You can see roughly where the interface is at any given time. During the day activity is fast and furious, with rapid overturn. Late at night things are quiet, with articles at a given karma lasting much longer. The slope of the interface looks to be about 1.5. (Would take more work to find exactly, because the scraped submission times are imprecise, and the interface moves around.)


Software used: Python, with Matplotlib for plotting.