Top all-time · #1217
eagereyes
Personal blog · eagereyes.org/blogdesigndata
eagereyes is a personal blog at eagereyes.org about design and data. Since 2009, 57 different Hacker News readers have linked it 74 times, most often “The Rise and Fall of Swivel.com”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (28) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Robert Kosara's eagereyes.org for data visualization writing, including pieces on pie charts, rainbow colour maps, Tufte criticism, and the rise and fall of Swivel and Verifiable.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- Good analysis of showing approval and disapproval together; a nice paper on connected scatterplots; issues 'summed up here pretty well'; a startup failures post
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 28 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
eagereyes – Visualization and Visual Communication
Most-linked posts?
- The Rise and Fall of Swivel.com5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2010-10-13
- New York Times has added a web-based Flash player to their archive website3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-01-09
- /blog/2011/you-only-see-colors-you-can-name3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-04-26
- How The Rainbow Color Map Misleads3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-07-19
- Spreadsheet Thinking vs. Database Thinking2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-04-25
- The End of Verifiable.com2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-06-23
- /criticism/tufte-and-the-truth-about-the-challenger2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-12-22
- The Connected Scatterplot for Presenting Paired Time Series2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-11-24
- Pie Charts No Longer Considered Harmful2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-04-14
- The Scrollytelling Scourge2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-05-25
What Hacker News says?
Boisjoly and others have argued that Tufte's criticism is misguided, as he misunderstands the engineering: http://people.rit.edu/wlrgsh/FINRobison.pdf . Shorter blog summary here: http://eagereyes.org/criticism/tufte-and-the-truth-about-the...
Comment linking /criticism/tufte-and-the-truth-about-the-challenger
on “Roger Boisjoly dies at 73; engineer tried to halt Challenger launch”Submitted What happens if all US ZIP codes are connected in ascending order? as a story · 94 points
HN discussionWell... sure, not as useful, but I still think it's interesting. For instance, in english we have multiple words (goat, sheep) for what in chinese is a single word (yang2). If an unsupervised model split our mammals which have fur and bleet into two categories 'concept 19281' and 'concept 19282', we might think that it's done well to separate the goats and the sheep, but the chinese speaker might think that it's fai…
Comment linking /blog/2011/you-only-see-colors-you-can-name
on “M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger”Submitted The Rise and Fall of Swivel.com as a story · 22 points
HN discussionI recently read Ben Shneiderman's review of Ted Nelson's Computer Lib (1974) in his list of books that were key influences on his professional and personal life, and his criticism of Ted rings true. His criticisms are fair and well thought out, and I definitely agree with him in this case, both his high praise of Ted and his books and other work, and his criticism of him for not joining the party the rest of the wid…
Comment linking /influences/ben-shneiderman
on “Ted versus The Media Lab [video]”Submitted New York Times has added a web-based Flash player to their archive website as a story · 15 points
HN discussion> There are no humans that "can't" hear the difference between L and R. You'd be surprised. There are no 100% objective sounds the ear directly hears -- interpretation and identification of sounds happens at the brain, and a person that was raised with a specific language/pronunciation can be "deaf" to the difference of certain sounds. Evidence from Best & Strange (1992) and Yamada & Tohkura (1992) suggest that Japa…
Comment linking /blog/2011/you-only-see-colors-you-can-name
on “Ikutaro Kakehashi, founder of Roland, has died”Submitted JavaScript: The Key to In-Browser Visualization as a story · 6 points
HN discussionNot in a web device/timeframe combination to give this a proper look, but definitely like what I briefly had a chance to read. Already saved to revisit later. For anyone else that enjoyed this and is not aware of Parallel Sets: http://eagereyes.org/parallel-sets Personally, I've found few good real-world use cases for PSets. But I've found it to be helpful for experimenting, even though I rarely use it for any end-p…
Comment linking /parallel-sets
on “Edward Tufte's "Slopegraphs"”Submitted The Dumbest User Interface of 2016 as a story · 5 points
HN discussionMy thoughts would be similar to the ones expressed by Robert Kosara (and Ben Shneiderman) on that point I think: https://eagereyes.org/blog/2016/the-personified-user-interfa...
Comment linking /blog/2016/the-personified-user-interface-trap
on “Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces”Submitted The New York Times now has a web Flash player as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAlso touched on in the sections on "Fisheye View" by Leung et al., "A Review and Taxonomy of Distortion-Oriented Presentation Techniques" in Card et al., "Readings in Information Visualization", Morgan Kaufman, 1999. A bit of googling also turns up http://eagereyes.org/blog/2008/fisheye-calendar-at-yahoo.htm... and a PDF of Bederson's paper on Fisheye calendars http://www.lib.umd.edu/drum/bitstream/1903/1201/1/CS-TR…
Comment linking /blog/2008/fisheye-calendar-at-yahoo.html
on “Logarithmic calendar view”Submitted How The Rainbow Color Map Misleads as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAnother bizarre example of reinvention, but unmitigated by ignorance: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... For comment: https://eagereyes.org/series/peer-review/1-quilt-plots First author is now an A/Prof at one of Australia's top Universities.
Comment linking /series/peer-review/1-quilt-plots
on “Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)”Submitted Pie Charts No Longer Considered Harmful as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSome of the engineers at Thiokol whose work Tufte criticized have responded over the years. There's at least one painfully academic paper out there, although if you wanted to you could start here: http://www.onlineethics.org/Topics/ProfPractice/Exemplars/Be... https://eagereyes.org/criticism/tufte-and-the-truth-about-th... It's been longer since I read Feynman but I recall his assessment as being a lot more grounded…
Comment linking /criticism/tufte-and-the-truth-about-the-challenger
on “The Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion and the O-ring”Submitted HTML5 and Visualization on the Web as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere is a presentation by Edward Tufte claiming that PowerPoint caused, in part, the shuttle disaster. Hang on... The claim is that PP's economy of words meant that the presentations to each level of management got more and more dismissive of the danger, the higher up the chain they went. Euphemisms got more and more bland, until the top people thought "screw it, we're launching." Note that I'm not endorsing that t…
Comment linking /criticism/tufte-and-the-truth-about-the-challenger
on “After years of setbacks, NASA’s SLS moon rocket is ready to fly”Submitted The End of Verifiable.com as a story · 3 points
HN discussion"Visualization is not Periodic, Period!" http://eagereyes.org/blog/2009/visualization-is-not-periodic...
Comment linking /blog/2009/visualization-is-not-periodic.html
on “Periodic Table of Google APIs”Submitted Curing A Sick Chart as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> The idea behind Chernoff faces (or using faces for data visualization) seems good: we humans are very good at distinguishing faces Except that: 1. We humans are actually _ABYSMAL_ at distinguishing faces ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect ) 2. The ability to differentiate between two things and the ability to translate attributes into metrics are fundamentally so different from each other that any p…
Comment linking /criticism/chernoff-faces
on “Deep Chernoff Faces”Submitted The Daily Solargraph as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYou're absolutely right. Everyone harps on pie charts for being awful for element-to-element comparisons. This mainly stems from Tufte's work and experiments from Cleveland and McGill. However, in part-to-whole relationship tasks, pie charts can outperform bar charts, since in bar charts there is no true "whole". (In addition to Few's post, Kosara has more on this: http://eagereyes.org/criticism/in-defense-of-pie-ch…
Comment linking /criticism/in-defense-of-pie-charts
on “Whatever It Takes: Visualizations in E-mail with d3.js”Submitted The New York Times has a web Flash player as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAn important mnemonic technique that visual programming languages can exploit is called the "Method of Loci" or "Memory Palace": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci >The method of loci (loci being Latin for "places") is a strategy of memory enhancement which uses visualizations of familiar spatial environments in order to enhance the recall of information. The method of loci is also known as the memory jour…
Comment linking /influences/ben-shneiderman
on “Taxonomies of Visual Programming (1990) [pdf]”Submitted Black vs. White Boys and the Punishing Reach of Racism as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis rings a bell inside my head; given people from a language/culture with two different words for what English speakers would identify as barely different shades of the same colour, they are objectively better at identifying those two shades than the native English speaker. Which essentially gives the answer "yes" to your question. Here's a reference that might be what's ringing inside my head: http://www.newscien…
Comment linking /blog/2011/you-only-see-colors-you-can-name
on “Contrast Rebellion”Submitted In Praise of the Diagonal Reference Line as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
