HNTrends makes it debut on HackerNews
Cross-posted form the HackerNews thread:
The idea for HNTrends has been bouncing around in my head for about a year as one of those man-I-wish-I-had-more-free-time-type side projects. I recently decided to take up learning Flash and ActionScript and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to build it.
It’s fairly straight forward: A Python script scrapes HackerNews every 15 minutes and saves the data in a MySQL database. A PHP script queries the database and outputs the the last five hours worth headlines as neatly-formatted JSON data, which the chart grabs and plots.
The older, less trendy news items are rendered with a slight transparency in order to reduce the chart’s business. You can hover over any of the lines to see it in greater detail. Also, if you click any of the points it’ll take you to the comments. The links on the right take you to the actual news articles.
Hope you like it. Let me know if you have any suggestions
Launching is exhilarating.
Matt Mazur 
This is fantastic, well done!
very cool. did you get authorization from pg? if so, was it difficult to obtain?
i sent him an email after i had the chart done but before i built the site (didn’t want to waste time if he said no). i included a screenshot of the flash app and explained my intent. he replied within 15 minutes–pretty amazing for a guy with so much on his plate.
if your intent is good i don’t think you’ll have any problems.