Which topics get the upvote on Hacker News?

Re:Which topics get the upvote on Hacker News? by teraflop on Friday February 13, 2015 @06:13PM (#9047813)

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.

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Re:Which topics get the upvote on Hacker News? by datalink on Friday February 13, 2015 @06:34PM (#9047893)

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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Re:Which topics get the upvote on Hacker News? by imh on Saturday February 14, 2015 @12:30AM (#9048856)

When there's too much data for a scatter plot, a heat map will do nicely.

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Re:Which topics get the upvote on Hacker News? by ced on Saturday February 14, 2015 @01:12AM (#9048907)

Or pass alpha=0.3 to the plotting function.

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