Hacker News Pickup Rate Source Code Rationale

Web App development notes

Very first version of the app (~8h to implement):

Comments and suggestions on HN

Refined look using own esthetic values and comments from HN (way more than 8h):

Big chunk of the time was on documenting the code and making it conceptually sound. Code and variable names should match the conceptual model of what we are trying to do. That's not possible with the first write-up.

Reasons for publishing the source code

I'm sharing this code to flourish web based data mining applications. There is a ton of data that needs to be abstracted and presented to a user in a nice visual format. Hacker News Story Pickup Rate is just an example of such program. In general, data mining can be divided into three sections:

1. ETL - extract, transform, and load the data
2. DM - use ETL data and statistics to extract useful information
3. VISUALIZE - present the data in an eye catching format

Which also translates to:

1. GET THE DATA
2. ADD VALUE TO THE DATA
3. USE THE DATA

Please use my code to create spawn simple data mining projects that can run on Google App Engine. I think G. A. E. is even easier than Heroku. If you are interested in analytics of the Hacker News Story Pickup Rate, please go here:

Hacker News Pickup Rate Visual Analytics

If you want to know what happens when you publish you app on Hacker News, please go here:

Hacker News Pickup Rate Web App Statistics Snapshot

Discussion about the app release:

Comments and suggestions about the app on HN

Working version of this app is available here:

Hacker News Pickup Rate

Thank you for your interest.