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vb-8448today at 3:08 PM2 repliesview on HN

Complaining about "bad charting" and posting a chart with y-axis that doesn't start at 0 is kinda weird.


Replies

paimapitoday at 3:26 PM

to be fair, you don't need to start the y-axis at zero [0] but for some of the graphs where the lowest value is close to 0 the best practice is to do so

there's a fun Excel artifact where it auto-selects the 'relevant' range with no adjustment for how proportionally close to 0 the values are - a professional researcher publishing to a journal should know better (and should be ridiculed for not incorporating best practices) but for a personal blog by an SWE this really isn't the worst sin

[0] https://digitalblog.ons.gov.uk/2016/06/27/does-the-axis-have...

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andaitoday at 3:19 PM

Yeah, this doesn't include older models, some of which were already saturating many common tasks a year ago. I'll often add them to the AA graph for reference.