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Which topics get the upvote on Hacker News?

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Re: Which topics get the upvote on Hacker News?

#3

Great analysis. You got me interested in the particular java libraries you use for content analysis. so according to your analysis. this particular post won't be getting too many comments :P

> so according to your analysis. this particular post won't be getting too many comments :P

Unless you take into account an unpredictable bias that will increase the number of comments.

Re: Which topics get the upvote on Hacker News?

#5
post #4

I'm surprised language wars didn't show up. It seems to me "X is better than Y" threads always get a lot of heat and light.

The topic "language-type-program-code" is the 6th ranked topic out of 30 in terms of comments, so it's pretty high. Considering the error bars, it could possibly be even further up.

Re: Which topics get the upvote on Hacker News?

#7
some interesting chains pop up from the data!!

  - google-microsoft-windows-video-browser-user-support-chrome
  - security-key-attack-password-hacker-encryption-network-secure
  - language-type-program-code-programmer-java-write-class
  - number-point-algorithm-value-example-result-set-problem
  - space-nasa-tesla-rocket-launch-start-china-nuclear
  - data-database-map-table-analysis-information-graph-model

Re: Which topics get the upvote on Hacker News?

#8

Great analysis. You got me interested in the particular java libraries you use for content analysis. so according to your analysis. this particular post won't be getting too many comments :P

Now I'm conscious of skewing the data by posting this comment...

I don't think the API is exposed but the aggregate up vote of comments with a post might be interesting. It's one thing to have a lot of comments, but measuring the quality of the discourse would worth knowing.

Re: Which topics get the upvote on Hacker News?

#9
For what it's worth: a scatter plot with lots of huge points, like the one you've drawn for "upvotes vs. comments", is pretty useless for drawing conclusions about the data. It tells you about the support of the joint distribution (the region on which it's non-zero) but very little about its shape.

In particular, that graph could represent a fairly strong correlation (in the R^2 sense), or a fairly weak one, or anything in between. If you want to say something more quantitative about the data, you can do a linear regression and look at the coefficients and residuals.

Re: Which topics get the upvote on Hacker News?

#10
post #9

For what it's worth: a scatter plot with lots of huge points, like the one you've drawn for "upvotes vs. comments", is pretty useless for drawing conclusions about the data. It tells you about the support of the joint distribution (the region on which it's non-zero) but very little about its shape. In particular, that graph could represent a fairly strong correlation (in the R^2 sense), or a fairly weak one, or anyth…

The correlation between individual upvotes and comments isn't really what's the post is about, it's purely an illustration and has no impact on the topic extraction or interpretation. For what it's worth, I did check the correlation coefficient between the two sets (it's 0.81)
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