Hacker News Religion Poll

Hacker News user post polls from time to time – the following code constructs a bar chart based upon the responses to a recent poll on the stated religious affiliation of Hacker news users (parsed straight from the site).  The chart above is as of the date of this post – users may still be voting.


library(XML)
u=’http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1486594′
DF=readHTMLTable(u)


# Clean up the data
data=DF[4]$`NULL`$V2
data=data[!is.na(data)]


# Remove the word ‘points’
data=gsub(‘ points’,”,data)


# Put in a matrix format
m=as.data.frame(t(array(data, dim=c(2,14))))


rownames(m)=m$V1
m=m[-1]


# Plot
par(las=2, mar=c(14, 4, 4, 2) + 0.1, cex=0.85)
barplot(t(m))
title(‘Hacker News Religion Poll’)