Hacker News Reader

There will be obvious winners and losers, but I'm interested in the long tail results.

The poll quantifies a community's thoughts as only the vocal minority comment while the majority lurks. It provides a snapshot for comparison with other communities or even to Hacker News 18 months ago.

Language threads will provide more insightful commentary, but a general poll is useful for macro trend discussion.

View on HN

I think it's very interesting to see some changes in the Hacker News community. For example, CoffeeScript's like/dislike ratio seems to be much lower now that 18 months ago. I bet some articles had an important impact in its popularity. Same would happen with MongoDB for example. It'd be nice to run this kind of poll every month, and try to correlate with specific articles that changed the mindset of the community.

For me at least I liked the concept of CoffeeScript, but had a couple issues with the implementation. I was originally very interested in it, but after experimenting with it for a little while decided not to use it as I felt it didn't really gain anything over using a particular style/subset of javascript itself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com