The Pudding
pudding.cool · Group blog · on HN since 2017
The Pudding publishes visual, data-driven essays on culture, music, and society using interactive graphics.
What HN saysCommenters praise its visualizations and say its design and animation complement the text, naming it among the best digital-first publishing.
346HN people shared it
114linked it in comments
506stories submitted
14Kstory points
2 months agolast shared
2017people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The Human Terrain – 3D map of population25 people · 55 points · first shared 2018 · 1 comments on HN
- 2The Pudding24 people · 4 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 3Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive? (2017)20 people · 318 points · first shared 2017 · 51 comments on HN
- 4Let's Learn About Waveforms10 people · 22 points · first shared 2018 · 2 comments on HN
- 530 minutes with a stranger9 people · 1.1K points · first shared 2025 · 375 comments on HN
- 6Women's Pockets are Inferior9 people · 136 points · first shared 2018 · 52 comments on HN
- 7Analyzing All of the Words Found on NYC Streets9 people · 23 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 8The Physical Traits That Define Men and Women in Literature9 people · 12 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 9Can Data Die? Tracking the Lenna Image8 people · 35 points · first shared 2021 · 26 comments on HN
- 10Are super-rich people just better at making money?8 people · 1 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 11The Musical Diversity of Pop Songs7 people · 129 points · first shared 2018 · 69 comments on HN
- 12How to implement scrollytelling7 people · 2 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 13Invisible Epidemic: The Loneliness Epidemic (2023)6 people · 66 points · first shared 2023 · 18 comments on HN
- 14Film Dialogue from 2,000 Screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age6 people · 11 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 15Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise6 people · 10 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
samwho · 2025-05-08
I loved distill.pub. Usually didn’t fully grasp what the papers were about but they were beautiful and I usually got _something_ out of them.
Was very sad when they announced their hiatus. Made me nervous about the viability of this sort of content.
You may also enjoy https://pudding.cool.
amjoshuamichael · 2024-11-20
Graphics programming analysis done using examples written in WebGL–genius. Hypertext that takes full advantage of the medium. This reminds me of something I'd see on https://pudding.cool/, but it goes far more in depth than anything there. Absolutely fantastic article.
I've been using MSAAx4 in my rendering engine for some time and only recently have considered switching to a FXAA / TAA implementation. I'm actually not sure I'm going to go through with that now. I definitely learned a lot here, and will probably use the analytical approach for UI items, I hadn't heard about that anywhere.
Not often you see graphics-programming stuff on HN. For anyone interested in more graphics write-ups, this list of frame breakdowns is one of my favorite resources:
https://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/
circustaco · 2023-01-22
What do you think of The Pudding (https://pudding.cool/)? They make beautiful “visual essays”. Unlike some fanciful animated sites, I feel like The Pudding’s design and animation complement the text to make the result ‘greater than the sum of its parts.
gkoberger · 2021-10-07
If you like this, definitely go down a https://pudding.cool rabbit hole. There's some really amazing visualizations they've built out.
vineyardmike · 2021-03-29
The best digital-first news I have seen is https://pudding.cool/ (which is very niche).
As others mentioned, i think the news-tablet is very "take a newspaper and add internet" view when we everyone already has internet connected devices. It almost seems even more tunnel visioned.
prawn · 2017-05-17
Hit their index for lots more great stuff. This is at least the third of their pieces I've come across and I've been impressed each time.
https://pudding.cool/
wattenberger · 2019-06-13
Exactly! I should probably have a section (or at least a link to a resource) that talks about _why_ you would want to learn this.
I have an image in the book detailing the spectrum of data viz tools on the web. At one end are the quick-pickup tools that aren't customizeable, and at the other end you have.. d3. Which isn't really a framework so much as a collection of tools that can help with making web charts.
What I probably failed to communicate in this post is that there are tons of opportunities to help communicate data with the web. Tooltips are just the most common interaction, but you could easily envision using scroll as a trigger, or adding a way to "zoom in" on parts of a chart.
The learning curve is definitely steeper, but once you have the skills, the world is really your oyster for visualizing data online. The pudding (https://pudding.cool/) is a great showcase of possibilities, or even uncommon chart types like at https://wattenberger.com/fishing
ForHackernews · 2026-08-21
You should consider publishing some of your work at https://pudding.cool/ - I think it would fit in well there.
mbo · 2026-08-04
Love it!
I was looking at this a little while ago, and used some of The Pudding's data on makeup/foundation shades (https://pudding.cool/2018/06/makeup-shades/) and plotted it into the Oklab colorspace (https://observablehq.com/@55th/foundation-shades). The shades form themselves into that same crescent as seen in the article.
shimman · 2026-07-22
Honestly in regards to data visualizations just look at others and copy them. For inspiration I heavily go to these two sites:
https://pudding.cool/
https://www.datasketch.es/
One of the people behind data sketches recently came out with a good book on how to think regarding data vizs (and making them unique):
https://www.visualcinnamon.com/chart/
Halfway through the book myself, lotta good techniques on how to think about visualizing data sets. Found it way more accessible than many of the more academic books.
monkeydust · 2026-06-28
Very cool. Recommend walking through the curated story here first then exploring the menu visualization
https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-story/
some_guy_nobel · 2025-12-11
SVG has been transforming web-experiences (particularly for viz) for quite some time now, see:
- https://mlu-explain.github.io/neural-networks/
- https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/graphics
- https://pudding.cool/
Rendello · 2025-10-17
I love it. If you track your mouse over the graph, the image of 50 Cent expands with inflation.
It reminds me of another great interactive rapper graph: "rappers, sorted by the size of their vocabulary":
https://pudding.cool/projects/vocabulary/index.html
OG_BME · 2025-08-13
Is there an API? I'd love to make a music video like the one in https://pudding.cool/2025/07/street-view/
calmbonsai · 2025-08-08
This is Daniel Bogan's (aka Waferbaby's https://waferbaby.com/ ) jam.
I've been a long-time fan. Among other things, it's how I discovered The Pudding https://pudding.cool/ .
itsjustmath · 2024-10-02
Once of my favorite visual breakdowns of comedy structure is the interactive site The Pudding did for an Ali Wong standup show a couple years back: https://pudding.cool/2018/02/stand-up/
Brajeshwar · 2024-09-06
I think NY Times started long back and this style was kinda "cool" that goes well with the narrative. Then, there is https://pudding.cool that does this pretty well. Now, many just copy and tries without a meaningful treatment and is just there - kinda not working-out in most cases.
Tip: Try reading with Reader Mode.
neom · 2024-04-16
We really do love pudding.cool[1]- I'd never bothered to go look at what it's actually all about till today, and you should too if you've not, because it wasn't exactly as I expected: https://pudding.cool/about/ - these people seem great, we should probably support them. I noticed they have a Patreon if you're feeling generous[2].
[1]https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&q…
[2]https://www.patreon.com/thepudding
Antrikshy · 2024-02-28
Also check out https://pudding.cool if you’re unfamiliar and enjoy extremely high effort visualizations alongside editorial and educational text content.
madeofpalk · 2024-02-19
I think Apple Music's playlists and algorithmic recommendations are much better and have more variation. Unfortuantely, Apple Music is terrible at playing music. OP can rightfully complain all they want about homepage customisation, but Apple Music, even on iOS, will just regularly refuse to play music files. Even worse with their embarrasing web or Windows clients.
I think Spotify's problem may stem from their quest from incresingly precise taxonomy for music https://pudding.cool/2023/10/genre/
sashikumar · 2023-10-21
An excellent interactive visualization of how our economy (or any free market economy) inevitably creates super-rich people.
https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/
"This is the crux of the Yard-sale model. In a free market, one person ends up with all the wealth – completely by chance."
nat42 · 2023-07-06
https://maxwelldulin.com/Resources - short summaries of highly technical security posts (4/wk)
https://portswigger.net/research - web security research from the geniuses at portswigger (1/wk)
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/ - project zero's research (1/mo)
https://hn.invades.space/hn_gems_rss.xml - top links extracted from comments on top hn posts (85/wk)
https://kevinlynagh.com/ - posts regularly contain a great selection of links (1/mo)
http://www.paulgraham.com/ - classics (1/mo)
https://www.bellingcat.com/ - open source research (1/mo)
https://pudding.cool/ - art using web technology (1/wk)
https://www.experimental-history.com/ - psychology (1/wk)
RobLach · 2022-12-25
There's a fundamental model as part of the equation here called the yard-sale model.
This is a great explanation: https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/
culi · 2022-12-03
Well I was *hoping* you'd pick up on many of the tropes of male-written femme characters brought out in that sub were applicable to the character mentioned above.
But here's an article to list some of the tropes out more explicitly:
https://baos.pub/what-happens-when-men-write-women-b89bf325c18b
I admit I'm not very familiar with the Monkey Island series but literally the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article for it points out that the primary purpose of this character is to be the primary love interest of the (male) protagonist
Bonus, here's some really fun visualizations that I think you'd enjoy regardless of whether you agree with me or not :)
https://pudding.cool/2020/07/gendered-descriptions/
https://pudding.cool/2017/08/screen-direction/
https://pudding.cool/2017/03/film-dialogue/
sargstuff · 2022-09-22
Some stories not safe for work viewing!
Longform data journalism stories (aka visual statistics case studies): https://pudding.cool/
Small corrolation of book covers (~5,000) : https://pudding.cool/2019/07/book-covers/
neilk · 2022-06-11
https://pudding.cool/
Visual essays with data, that could only exist on the web
jwilber · 2021-08-24
Yo! That’s awesome you’re working o skatevideosite! O just read your guys interview on Jenkem [0]. I used your old data years back for an article for The Pudding
[1] years ago - invaluable resource. Growing up I would spend so much time on the site just finding music and skaters. If there’s an issue board or something please plug it, would love to contribute!
[0] https://www.jenkemmag.com/home/2021/08/16/meet-minds-behind-skatevideo…
[1] https://pudding.cool/2018/06/skate-music/
IfOnlyYouKnew · 2021-01-12
They existed, yes. but there were about eight men on the bestseller list for every woman in the 60s: https://pudding.cool/2017/06/best-sellers/
(Switching to "counts" makes it more obvious)
O_H_E · 2020-11-09
I recently discovered https://pudding.cool/
About: is a digital publication that explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays.
Really cool stuff
wenc · 2020-11-02
As someone who's interested in writing, I have noticed things changing over the last few decades so I was interested in the how the situation has evolved over time based on data. I dug this up:
Bias, She Wrote: The Gender Balance of The New York Times Best Seller list
https://pudding.cool/2017/06/best-sellers/
There seems to have been an inflection point in the 1990s, which the author posits is due to the rise of MFA degrees (2/3rds granted to women). Commercially, the gender ratio seems to have approached parity overall, even if in specific categories the large imbalances exists (owing to various factors, some self-selection effect exists). Even though commercial success seems to be at parity, the author posits that the publishing industry lags behind in reflecting this and that there remains a funnel bias in the industry (from critics to publishers).