When the code interpreter plugin for ChatGPT was first announced, I didn’t think much of it. I thought it could be a useful tool for learning to program, but that it wouldn’t have much utility for experienced technical users.

Boy, was I wrong

Data Analysis

When is the best time to post on Hacker News?

We could start by querying a week of hacker news posts and comments from the public dataset hosted on BigQuery.

We’ll save the results of our query as week-of-hacker-news-data.csv so we can upload it to the ChatGPT Code Interpreter.

Plot Development

The initial plot isn’t perfect by any means. Notice that it ignored my instructions to put the week day on the x-axis. Still, this is impressive and immediately useful for the few minutes it took to get here! It’s a great place to start for further tweaking and analysis.

Finale

These are all the prompts I entered to get to this point, verbatim:

1. I'm looking to render an hourly heatmap of user activity on hacker news with the week day on the x-axis
2. could we switch the axes and convert the time to PST?
3. this is great! let's flip the y axis

🤯