SIK

Author here! There seems to be some confusion about this visualization, but we can solve it with just two words: Start Clicking!

The thing that makes this visualization different than other visualizations is that you can see the individual components of what makes up the large departments. Just double click on any of the boxes. If you single click on any box, you can see how that box changed over time.

So, for example, you can see that in 2012 that 2.89% of the budget went to education, but if you double click, you can see that only 13.73% of that went to elementary and secondary education.

You can also single click anywhere and see a graph of how things have changed over time. So you can see that in 2009 there was a huge spike in elementary and secondary education, and you can go to 2009 to further investigate, and find there was a "State Fiscal Stabilization Fund" in 2009 that sent $14 billion to education, and then went away.

As many have noted, this doesn't do a good job at comparing different departments to each other over time. This isn't a surprise, since a treemap is the completely wrong format to be able to do that. However, it is a very good format for exploring what agencies, bureaus and line items make up the large departments, which is data I've never seen anywhere else before, and why I built this visualization.

yes! this is how it already works! if you click a box, it will show you a graph of how that item has changed over time. If you double click, it will create a new treemap made up of the underlying data for that box.

you can use the visualization to see exactly what makes up the health and human services budget item, by double clicking on it. Then you can also see the individual programs that make up medicare and medicaid.

if you double click on the department of labor, you can see what makes up the spike!

are you on the latest version of chrome?

this is cool, will check it out tonight

not sure if you saw that you could click for a graph or double click to see a new treemap of any department. This visualization is built for people to explore what's in each of the departments, not really to compare departments with each other.

For example, you can see that in 2012 that 2.89% of the budget went to education, but if you double click, you can see that only 13.73% of that went to elementary and secondary education.

You can also single click anywhere and see a graph of how things have changed over time. So you can see that in 2009 there was a huge spike in elementary and secondary education, and you can go to 2009 to further investigate, and find there was a "State Fiscal Stabilization Fund" in 2009 that sent $14 billion to education, and then went away.

I think another visualization comparing departments would be pretty cool, and might build that one next.

The base year for inflation is 1976, so the multiple is because a dollar in 1976 is worth multiples of a dollar in 2013.

Are there any other ones that let you explore what makes up the agencies and departments? I was looking but couldn't find any that let you explore beyond the high level amounts.

this is because some blocks are added and removed from year to year. In this type of visualization, it's impossible to keep things the same size and position while also changing the amounts.

The best way to use this isn't to switch between years. If you click on any cell, you can see a graph of how that changes over time. If you double click on any of the cells, you can see a new visualization of everything that makes up that cell. For example, double clicking on the department of justice will show you it is made up of X billion from the department of prisons and X billion from the FBI.

this is exactly how the visualization works! If you click on any cell, it shows you how that has changed over time. If you double click, you can see more details about whatever you clicked on.

For example, if you double click on the department of Justice, you can see it is made up of X billion of the FBI, X billion of the department of prisons, etc...

if you click on any cell, you can see a graph of how it changes over time.

I would have a few alternatives ready to go, and then send over an offer about 1/2 of what your max offer would be.

The whole thing about not being interested in resale is completely false. They are lying to your face. They are completely 100% interested in selling, and are only saying that to give justification to ask for a huge price.

To me, hacker news is my startup hub.

I have chance encounters all the time with people who have interesting knowledge about startups and startup tools that could help me.

There is a huge social group who don't think starting a startup means being unemployed. The numbers are certainly on my side at hacker news.

At hacker news, starting a startup is both fashionable and reasonable.

I'm just a lurker, but already I get huge benefit. My guess is that people who interact a lot get even more benefit.

What does San Francisco have that hacker news doesn't?

This seems like a false dichotomy.

We all just want to make things work. Oftentimes with programming, having a better understanding of your tools helps you become better at "making it work."

I am in the process of doing exactly this.

If your ventures are web apps, my recommendation would be to learn Ruby on Rails. You will be able to build demo apps within a few months of 8-10 hours per week.

I started with RailsTutorial.org, which is a free book that will take you from installing Ruby to building a twitter clone. From there, get a few books, I recommend Agile development with rails and The Rails 3 Way, and continue to work on some smaller apps. There are also great screencasts you can find by searching for "railscasts."

If you are using windows computers, install Ubuntu Linux which is really easy with Wubi. I have found it makes things easier. If you have a mac, stick with it.

For text editor, I use Sublime Text 2, and if you're on mac, just go with Textmate.

Sign up for Github and learn about version control. Also, go through projects on Github and learn by reading other people's code.

After you have a semi-grasp of the basics, start building something substantial.

Search Stack Overflow when you have questions, and if you've been trying to figure something out for over six hours, ask a question on Stack Overflow.

For html and css questions, I generally just google any issues I have and fool around in firebug, which is a firefox extension that lets you edit html or css and see the changes on your screen.

Best of luck!

I recently did something similar using anemone to crawl the website, and Hpricot to scrape each individual web page and add to the database.

Anemone is great because it can focus your crawl to only url's that match a certain pattern, which really helps you traverse a small portion of a larger website (like a University site). You can also do specific actions on pages that match a certain pattern.

For scraping, anemone natively supports nokogiri, so since you're coming from a blank slate, it might be easiest to learn nokogiri. Before discovering anemone, I had already written what needed to be done on each page in hpricot, so my code is a bit messy, but it's not that difficult to get anemone and hpricot to work together.

What city do you live in? Can you break down the $1.5k and $2k rates?