Hacker News Data Map [180MB]

Maybe browsers should have resource limits and ask the user if they want to continue loading the page beyond some sort of threshold...

It is a cool visualization, so I don't want to diminish the effort to make it in any way. And as an experiment in visualization, it is interesting. (If a bit large and laggy.) But if the authors expect people to use it to navigate content, it has a few problems:

1) The topics don't seem to be hierarchical, so as I drill down on one area, I get all kinds of things that don't seem related. I have no idea what I'm missing unless I zoom into the whole thing.

2) I don't know where my browser is going when I click a link. That is a security problem.

3) I cannot tell how this data is sourced. Are these all the links posted to HN? Just the ones that got upvotes? Something else? Because while we have some great links here, we also get a lot of stinkers.

4) Much of the value of HN is the discussions. I didn't see a way to navigate to discussions related to any of the links.

these data maps should incorporate level of detail so unnecessary data isn’t loaded on first load, the way mimic does it.

Repo: https://github.com/lmcinnes/datamapplot_examples

Also, lmcinnes is the author of UMAP and HDBSCAN!

This seems deeply flawed. Every 'category' I drill into has mostly articles that are nothing of the sort.

"Writing and Gaming" has 6+ Sieve of Erasthones articles (generating prime numbers), the Lehmer sieve (also primes), and "Migrating from Procmail to Sieve", along with a half dozen articles on the death of cursive. The only vaguely gaming related articles are one on Katamari (nothing about writing) and an exercise of naming big numbers.

Math/Tech/Gender Representation is articles about Magic the Gathering, or about Larry Wall of Perl fame.

Monty Hall Problem Explanation has several articles about "The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation", articles about the name of the Ogg container format, mythbusting 6 misconceptions about learning english, "in defense of swap common misperceptions", adages have opposites - a list, the Assange case, and an article ("I've got some things to say") about poverty and american football.

Animal Cognition & Development - an article about chinese spies (Operation Fox Hunt), a Schnier on Security post about an NSA program called FOXACID, an examination of Bill Ngyuen's investments, articles about github merges and security metaphors about food delivery by zebra, a traffic calming mechanism in La Paz Bolivia, a complex journey to the middle ear, 6 Creatures by Hieronymus Bosch That Could Be Pokémon, crippling digestive problems, the wikipedia list of organisms named after the Harry Potter series, an article about the Cumberland County New Jersey election board, the scientific evidence for discarding a glass of wine that a fruit fly has touched, a 17th century european blood sport of tossing foxes high into the air, an article about the standard english pangram sentence of fox and dog, a hate-filled rant (sierra juliet foxtrot) about "skulking juvenile fascists" and a Mozilla project to incorporate image processing into their browser.

Lobster News - articles about the sky being blue, in literal and metaphorical senses both. Microsoft Azure. BlueSky, the twitter alternative. An article about 3d engine lighting. The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggests Intelligent Life is Rare. Keeping a grocery store lobster as a pet. Lobster.rs launched 8 years ago. Bootstrapping Ikarus Scheme. Project Daedalus, a theoretical insterstellar drive. An article about the metaphorical fall of icarus, with visualization of the Chutes and Ladders boardgame. A youtube music album called Land Locked Blues. An rpi car pc. Murmation - the flocking pattern of starlings. Articles about the abuse of a font. An Israeli mining company unearthing a rare mineral. ICARUS, the swiss neutrino detector. An article about "His Majesty’s Airship No. 1, the rigid, phallic Mayfly". A podcast about the stages of color terms in langauge and blue's position at the end.

Black Swan Theory - A cluster of "I fell in love with a female assassin" (literal, an account of the Cambodian civil war), joined with a cluster around "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" a 4,500 word nonfictional article by William Gibson (of Neuromancer fame) about Singapore's governance as an authoritarian and austere city-state, an article about PMS, the Bill Nye the Science Guy reddit ama, the Bill Nye - Ken Ham debate, Bill Nye on the abortion argument, a capitalist named Bill Ackman's views on a possible pyramid scheme called Herbalife, and a big cluster on Covid vaccine's effect on periods and vaginal bleeding,

I'm sorry, what?