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20 hrs in Hacker News Top 10

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Last weekend I was in beautiful sunny San Francisco for 3 days to present our paper on mining URLs posted by developers on Stack Overflow at MSR2013. Along with the paper we wrote, I also launched a website (linkedlists.net) that allows users to interactively explore our dataset.

Following my short talk I posted the link to Hacker News and then sat back and watched as my world exploded.

In about 5 minutes we were on the Hacker News front page, in another 5 minutes we were at number 2 fighting with a TechCrunch article about Hacker News for the top spot. While we didn’t (I think) get to number 1 we did stay in the Top 10 for almost the next 20 hours and only fell out of the top 50 a few days later.

The reaction has been, in a word, incredible. I don’t think any of us were expecting the level of interest and positivity that we received from the developer community. To give you an idea of what being in the Top 10 of Hacker News looks like from the perspective of a server this is a screen shot of the requests per minute our AWS load balancer was dealing with.

linkedlists_requests_per_minute

Now I agree it’s not exactly Google scale, there are plenty of small websites that easily handle worse every day, but for a small software engineering research project it’s pretty substantial.
As of right now Google analytics is telling me that since launch we have had over 29K unique visitors and almost 36K page views. Importantly we are starting to see people are coming back with our numbers of returning visitors currently at a couple of thousand and average time on the size creeping over the 3 minute mark.

I would like to thank everybody that helped with the research and testing the site, the 100’s of people that helped spread the word on twitter and finally all those who submitted feature requests.

We have lots of great ideas about what to do next so please stay tuned by following us on twitter @listslinked

TagSEA for IDA

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TagSEA is a CHISEL project from 2006 by Jody Ryall, Del Myers, and John Anvik - it’s an Eclipse plugin that allows developers to add tags to their code – bugs, works-in-progress, and so on. That looks something like this:

CHISEL has been doing a bunch of work with Defence Research and Development Canada, on reverse engineering. Like most reversers, they use the mighty IDA Pro to do their hacking. So, we made them a port of TagSEA. It looks like this:

Those tags can be filtered, sorted, and explored using the tree & table. Tags can be added via comments, like in the Eclipse verison: “#tag MainTag.Subtag: Comment About A Tag”.

That is to say, make a tag called “Subtag”, under MainTag, with the comment “Comment About A Tag”. You can also add a specific author, or multiple tags per line: “#tag MainTag.Subtag OtherTag -author=Some Guy: Comment About A Tag”.

TagSEA is built in Python, courtesy of IDA’s IDAPython plugin, and the PySide framework for QT.  Further work may include simplifying the sharing of tags, and making the syntax & search more robust.

Welcome

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We are interdisciplinary researchers with diverse backgrounds based in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria. Our offices are located in the Engineering/Computer Science building.

Our research interests include:

  • cognitive support and technology diffusion
  • human computer interaction
  • human and social implications of technology use
    (social informatics)
  • interface design
  • knowledge engineering
  • software engineering
  • technology and pedagogy
  • visualization

Our primary objective is to develop tools that support people in performing complex cognitive tasks. Our projects benefit from the collaborative approach taken within our group and with other researchers. As a group, we operate by thinking creatively, exploiting our synergies, and applying innovative research techniques.

Contact us

We’re on Twitter and Facebook.

Collaborators

We frequently work with several other groups in the department: