By animation I mean that the transition between two "frames" should be titles moving smoothly between positions. It would need some clever use of color and exact path to make it legible.
The user-facing purpose of such animation is to make it easier for people to perceive (viscerally) the bouncy dynamics of the ranking system.
(It's a neat hack as is, too, of course.)
Sure - it only started to collect data about 10 hours ago but that's certainly the plan.. though I've realized it's already useful for me to catch up with HN while I was asleep.
Regarding animation, thanks for the idea. I'm really just a JavaScript "dabbler" but I'll have a think about how it could be done. Rather than just rendering a JSON file into HTML it seems I'd need to start storing the data as it comes in and perform manipulations as necessary. This might be a bit too much for me for a quick project but I'm open sourcing the code so it could happen.
However, the reason I'm currently visiting mine is that it's great to see how the front page looked merely hours ago. I'm familiar with the "top 30" and stuff can fall off of it so fast. A site like yours is okay and the info looks nice but it's a "different" thing to the HN front page, less of a facsimile.
disclaimer: I have no association with ubounce.com, I just wandered on their page yesterday and those animations really stayed with me I guess :)
http://github.com/blaines/hackerslide
Quicksand + CSS3