Just wanted to say that I think your Heatmap.js plugin is awesome and I've used it extensively in a school project last semester. I have one question about it. Is there a feature to remove some data points, or perhaps keep only some max number of data points in the heatmap so that the older ones are removed as new ones stream in kind of like a queue? Or is the only way to clear points redrawing the heatmap? I think something like this is important because it allows for seriously real time heatmaps without getting too big and slow.

Wonderful work.

Frankly speaking, I have some similar idea the other day, what i thought then was to collect the top news.

I have the habits to read HN news everyday, mostly through my smartphone. News with more comments (>100 is hot) usually get more attentions. And I will bookmark news with more than 100 or 200 comments.

So thank you for your nice work, it will certainly make my life more easy~

Look cool, two comments:

- The heatmap is sometimes off some pixels, see http://imgur.com/FyqOG

- It's not possible to click links any more after applying the heatmap. This basically makes it useless, as you have to refresh to page in order to click a popular link.

thanks for the feedback, I should probably gather the row height of HN dynamically instead of having a hardcoded value that seems to work for my devices g

You should be able to click on the links again after closing the heatmap (there's a little x on the right upper corner of the heatmap control that makes the heatmap disappear)

I really like the idea. It's a nice way to go to what "probably" are the most interesting topics when you don't have much time.

I think that being able to click directly on the heatmap instead of having to close it first, and therefore not losing your visual aid, will be a big improvement.

Anyway, nice job.

P.S. I also have a problem with the height of the rows, tested both with Chrome and Firefox on W7.

Nice concept, unfortunately you get some strange results if you apply it to the new page (where I think it would have a much better use): http://i.imgur.com/afSPm.jpg

Is there a reason it seems to highlight at random?

It seems it pulls data from the HN homepage no matter what, so it's not analysing the contents of your current page. It then decides on the heat locations based on that data.

Script is here (hope that's OK to link to!):

http://www.patrick-wied.at/projects/hohn/hn-heatmap.js

there is a reason but it's rather incompleteness than an actual bug. the current version of the script only visualizes the posts of the front page.

Doesn't seem to work for me. I see an 500 error in the Chrome console.

http://api.ihackernews.com/page?format=jsonp&callback=hm...

If you find this interesting, you may also like this Chrome extension:

http://github.com/wuzhe/social-hotness

What does it do? What does "hot" mean? I think it would be great if you could answer these questions in very briefly on the site.

You're right, the description on the site is not very helpful, I'll add that.

TL;DR It's just a visualization layer above the HN frontpage. Hot means a post has either 'a lot of comments' or 'a lot of points' (configurable with the filter dropdown). It's not much but I was wondering whether anyone would be interested in having such a way of looking at HN. If there's someone who found that useful I'd probably develop it further

So how does it work?

I was wondering the same thing. I expected this to be about click tracking, but it is just using the hacker news api to count the points or comment counts to produce the overlay.

drag the 'HN heatmap' link to your bookmarks bar, go to HN frontpage, click the bookmarklet, enjoy. It's basically just the visualization for now.

Love the site design, has some serious impact. Any tools/software used when doing that design or was it just notepad?

By the way, your heatmap download contains a .png that takes up 99% of the size. I'd suggest taking it out.

I appreciate you're liking it, the only tool I used for it was vim. Thanks for the hint, makes sense to remove that from the archive