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Comment by djrobstep | Hacker News Reader

I think the most important thing to convey straight off is the overall structure or order, and the importance of an individual column is secondary to that.

I don't think the most important column necessarily has to be on the left - in fact these tables already often have the rank to the left of the country name. There are many other ways to convey column importance, such as bolding the values.

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The rank being on the left is like a row index. It helps you count without needing to count from the beginning of the column. For this reason, many data-oriented languages like R don’t even consider the row index to be part of the data.

If anything the ranking reinforces the idea that a given country is in a given position which is the overall structure and intent of the data (in my view). I’m not likely to look at the table to extract the fact that “7 gold medals is 17th place.” I’m going to see that “country X is 17th place.”

Not opposed to a ranking on the left. Rank and score have equal sorting order precedence (one is derived from the other) so based on what I'm suggesting a golf leaderboard would look like:

    -8  |  1  |   Tiger Woods   |   [other columns]

Or:

    1  |  -8  |   Tiger Woods   |   [other columns]

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