119 comments

  • zX41ZdbW an hour ago ago

    I host a publicly open database with Hacker News data at https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUICogRlJPT...

    So you can create any sort of similar services in a single SQL query and an HTML page.

    I also hosted it as a publicly accessible data lake, which you can query from everywhere: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/29693#issuec...

    It is also updated in real-time.

    • linmer an hour ago ago

      Thank you for providing this, you are a hero!!! I'm gonna try to do cool stuff with it!

    • tgv an hour ago ago

      It probably also got swamped in real-time...

      • linmer 38 minutes ago ago

        Do you mean it's not updated? You gotta sort by update_time column. Looks sorted, but you gotta sort it with a query like:

        SELECT * FROM hackernews_history

        ORDER BY update_time DESC

        LIMIT 100;

        And yeah, I got that from deepseek because I don't have a brain.

    • GeoAtreides 44 minutes ago ago

      oh hey, per HN terms and conditions I license my HN data only to HN. Can you please remove my data from the set? Thank you!

      • snowwrestler 29 minutes ago ago

        Not sure if joking, but if this product is not republishing the text of your contributions (to which you hold copyright), you’re probably not going to convince a court to do anything here.

        Generally speaking it is not a violation to scrape, index, and analyze web content as long as you don’t republish copyrighted content without a license, or violate access controls. For example: search engine indexes.

      • linmer 33 minutes ago ago

        Wait, so I have to ask for every single person's permissions to use this data?

        uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

      • pelagicAustral 43 minutes ago ago

        You must be fun at parties

      • moralestapia 39 minutes ago ago

        By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed.

        @zX41ZdbW, you can safely ignore this guy.

        @GeoAtreides, next time read the actual terms of service before hallucinating.

        • codingdave 30 minutes ago ago

          > for any Y Combinator-related purpose

          That is actually the key phrase. HN can provide the API, no problem. People can consume the API, no problem.. But I'd ask an attorney if API consumers can then re-release the data for purposes not related to YC. By my reading, they cannot.

          • moralestapia 27 minutes ago ago

            You might want to read it again, then:

            https://opensource.org/license/mit

            • codingdave 27 minutes ago ago

              That is about the software, not the data.

              • moralestapia 11 minutes ago ago

                While a literal reading of the MIT license refers to “software,” many datasets have been released under it.

                In particular, if someone releases something that is only a dataset along with an MIT license file, the most reasonable interpretation is that the rights holder intended to release the data under the terms of that license.

                I looked for copyright cases involving this specific distinction, whether “data” versus “software” makes a legal difference, but didn’t find anything.

                So the question remains open (for you, for me it's pretty clear the dataset is MIT).

                You might want to sue and find out. It sounds like an interesting experiment.

        • GeoAtreides 36 minutes ago ago

          >Y Combinator and its affiliated companies

          is zX41ZdbW either?

  • Aachen an hour ago ago

    Google Trends is about searches

    This is about published text. More like if Google Trends counted word occurrences on webpages. Or if Google Ngrams counted webpages instead of books

    People don't write much about non-newsworthy things whereas many people search "burger" anytime they want a burger delivery. The datasets aren't usable in the same way

    Edit: not to say it's not a cool product! Just keep this in mind and enjoy using it :)

    • Aachen an hour ago ago

      Someone asked an imo good question (that I was going to vouch for, idk why it was dead), but deleted it. Not sure why, but so I'll not credit the username in case they don't want that and changed some words for stylometrics avoidance

      > The concept seems pretty comparable. From the title I had a good idea of what it was; when clicking on it, the visual presentation felt familiar & intuitive. \n\n Being a little less literal can be useful!

      That's why I'm pointing it out: the title leads you to think they're the same metric, the page looks visually similar, and so you treat it as the same data type; but when you read the data through this lens, you draw wrong conclusions. It took me a while, scrolling down the examples, before I realised why it felt so off and that my mindset is wrong. It's what's being written about currently, not what people on HN are actually looking for

      It's indeed not about being nonliteral, it's for me about having been confused about the data being shown

      • john_strinlai an hour ago ago

        >Someone asked an imo good question but deleted it. Not sure why

        it was me, and i deleted it because i realized my last sentence "being a little less literal can be useful" came across as unnecessarily blunt, which i didn't want. but i wasnt sure how to express what i wanted to say without it being that way. so i deleted it while rethinking my phrasing, and rethinking your comment.

        in the end, i kind of came around to understand where you were coming from, so i didnt bother to recomment.

        • Aachen an hour ago ago

          Thanks! Didn't come across like that to me though, all good

    • morkalork an hour ago ago

      Now if Algolia had a dataset of what people are searching for on HN that'd be it

      • Aachen an hour ago ago

        Was considering that as well, but I doubt that people use Algolia in the same way that they use Google

  • gslepak an hour ago ago

    Very cool! There seems to be a bug here: https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=vim&q=emacs&q=zed

    For some reason the results cut off at 2018-10 even though "Popular Comparisons" preview shows more.

  • kaelyx 2 hours ago ago

    Hello, /api/hn -> 502 {"error":"Your database has been temporarily rate-limited, please contact support@upstash.com for further details."}

  • simonpure 3 hours ago ago

    Hug of death

    ` /api/hn -> 504 An error occurred with your deployment FUNCTION_INVOCATION_TIMEOUT cle1::c8vgv-1782399959042-aeba3cae05ff `

    • docheinestages 3 hours ago ago

      If this project is an ad for their product (Upstash, promising "Highly Available, Infinitely Scalable"), then the last thing they'd want is a hug of death :/

      • ryan_n 2 hours ago ago

        Oof that would be hilarious/tragic

      • steve1977 2 hours ago ago

        Downstash

        • y1n0 2 hours ago ago

          Must stash

    • superxpro12 2 hours ago ago

      /api/hn -> 502 {"error":"Your database has been temporarily rate-limited, please contact support@upstash.com for further details."}

    • Roonerelli 2 hours ago ago

      I get

      /api/hn -> 502 {"error":"Search entry should have an initialized schema, command was: [\"SEARCH.AGGREGATE\",\"hn\",\"{\\\"$or\\\":[{\\\"title\\\":{\\\"$eq\\\":\\\"anthropic\\\",\\\"$boost\\\":5}},{\\\"text\\\":{\\\"$eq\\\":\\\"anthropic\\\"}}]}\",\"{\\\"by_month\\\":{\\\"$dateHistogram\\\":{\\\"field\\\":\\\"time\\\",\\\"fixedInterval\\\":\\\"30d\\\"}},\\\"top_authors\\\":{\\\"$terms\\\":{\\\"field\\\":\\\"by\\\",\\\"size\\\":6}},\\\"by_type\\\":{\\\"$terms\\\":{\\\"field\\\":\\\"type\\\",\\\"size\\\":4}}}\"]"}

    • jjordan 3 hours ago ago

      back in my day we called this a good ole' fashioned slashdotting.

      • lysace 2 hours ago ago

        Our startup (~20 people) got slashdotted in 1998 or so. I was the only one randomly awake at the time. Remember watching all the logs from our web server in realtime, ready to immediately kill anything or anyone threatening the overall availability.

        512 kbps uplink, I think. Even accidental DoS was trivial. We had a self-hosted little data center at our office with the only available stupidly expensive commercial connection.

        Felt some dread having to restart the main (async, single-process) web server a few times to keep things going due to bugs in our code. So many* people on dial-up patiently waiting for the page to load.

        It was exhilarating though :).

        *) Surely at least a hundred!

        • mysterydip 2 hours ago ago

          One of the things I love about HN is having stories like this in the comments from otherwise random unassuming usernames

      • Onavo 2 hours ago ago

        Its funny that these days the bottleneck is usually the data layer. Servers are so powerful now that even your average $5 server can handle HN levels of load if configured correctly.

    • ytkimirti 2 hours ago ago

      We will be with you shortly :)

    • aNapierkowski 3 hours ago ago

      yeah we killed it :(

  • maxignol 6 minutes ago ago

    Funny one x) Though I ain’t sure if even more data is useful on hackernews

  • kpw94 2 hours ago ago

    The huge spike of "lk-99" in science & frontier tech is amusing...

    This is cool concept, would love a positive/negative sentiment computed for each comment that refers to a given word, so you can see trends of "cloudflare (positive)" vs "cloudflare (negative)" where first one counts comments only if sentiment confidence is greater than say 0.6 and the other one counts comments only if sentiment is less than 0.4 (assuming [0,1] sentiment score)

  • arjie 2 hours ago ago

    One useful feature would be to normalize by total so that I can see changes in something as opposed to just total site growth. Right now I have to chart a single generic parameter but if I pick poorly it’ll confuse the issue.

    • apitman 29 minutes ago ago

      I'd love to see the opposite as well, ie how much has HN grown over time.

  • smalltorch 2 hours ago ago

    Reminds me of this side project I'm working on.

    https://gitlab/here_forawhile/torum

    It's a HN clone, that syncs with HN that allows you to basically establish smaller private communities who can discuss anything that's on HN without actually being on HN.

    It also indexes and let's you search through the DB which I find is really useful to find things that peak my interest.

  • linmer an hour ago ago

    Cool! I want to suggest something, Imagine I want to got to a specific date where some topic was hot, I can read it from your website and then go to that date. But it would be better if I could click on some sort of button, or on the points on the graph to go to that date. It would be easy to implement, you just need links like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2026-05-24

  • Petersipoi 39 minutes ago ago

    It's funny how "trump" dwarfs just about any other term. Truly a hacker forum.

  • upmostly 15 minutes ago ago

    Looking at this makes me think HN is peak design aesthetic.

  • bluecoconut 2 hours ago ago

    Very cool!

    one subtle consistency bug that made it hard for me to interpret when I was clicking around: the small thumbnail plot vs the full plot often (always?) seem to use different colors.

    The blue / orange gets assigned to the opposite labels in the A vs. B when you click, which made it confusing to understand.

  • jtolmar an hour ago ago

    It looks like some of these terms aren't indexed (or the site is just too hug of deathed right now), but I'd like to see the graph of like, social media, iot, cryptocurrency, ai.

    The transition between crypto and ai on the graphs is already pretty funny. https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=crypto&q=chatgpt

  • aberrahmane_b an hour ago ago

    Great project.The popular comparisons are probably the most useful part because they show the relay race between tools pretty clearly.

    One thing I’d like to see is normalization by total HN activity over time.

  • dwoosley an hour ago ago

    Almost all of the major vulnerability and hack are just single spikes at the time it happened and it tails off after that… except Stuxnet. Stuxnet is was much more interesting that most other attacks since it was very political and openly published. Of course, the thing that attack was about is still a news headline today as well

  • jianfenglin 36 minutes ago ago

    Glad to see that the raw data is also shared. Very cool, but why the openai vs anthropic graph has no data post 2019?

    • titzer 15 minutes ago ago

      I don't see any data for anything past 2019.

    • ytkimirti 33 minutes ago ago

      Yeah we had to refill the dataset due to an error, it will be fixed in a few minutes

  • Insanity an hour ago ago

    This looks quite nice! But suspiciously absent data points.. no Java or Go for the languages? Seems odd. No Amazon in companies, yet I think it's often mentioned.

    I wondered if "go" got filtered out because it's also just a regular word.

    Either way, very cool!

  • sinuhe69 3 hours ago ago

    IMO, using AI to assign keywords to a broader group of strict synonymous keywords would make the comparison much more helpful.

    Because in general we want to know the trend of categories more than of a word, asking for “auto pilot” for ex. should include “self driving”, FSD etc.

    • marky1991 2 hours ago ago

      I would not like this. This is the kind of change that made google search so annoying. (Eg what if I want to track the history of 'self-driving' vs 'auto pilot' in sales pitches? Or more basically, what if the system wrongly interprets me wrongly?) Better to support | or similar old-fashioned search engine syntax and dwis and not dwim.

      • Pikamander2 2 hours ago ago

        Synonym functionality is good as long as there's an easy way to disable it, either globally or by wrapping the term in quotes.

  • ytkimirti 4 hours ago ago

    Hello HN,

    This was a small project of mine after I've found out that I can simply the whole hackernews archive (~48GB) and play around with it.

    You can compare terms just like in google trends and you can also see the exact posts & comments from that time.

    I like that you can discover what went crazy in the timeline, they just come up as small burst of activity, it's quite fun to play around with it. https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=litecoin&q=dogecoin&q=solana...

    I also have a seperate page for the "Who is Hiring?" posts, here is the distribution of programming languages over each monthly "Who is hiring?" post in HN ever. https://hackernewstrends.com/who-is-hiring

    Any kind of feedback is welcome.

    • omoikane an hour ago ago

      > https://hackernewstrends.com/who-is-hiring

      Currently it says "no job-post mentions in this window" for everything. Transient error?

    • jupr 3 hours ago ago

      Honestly the HN archive is very valuable. If you had it all on a local db with everything indexed you basically end up with a offline search engine.

      Where is this archive located you speak of?

    • cbeach 2 hours ago ago

      This is excellent.

      A minor suggestion - I'd like to be able to render the current graph taller (full height of my browser window).

      Also some sentiment analysis on the "people" graphs would be very insightful (particularly for the likes of Edward Snowdon, Julian Assange, Elon Musk and Sam Altman). Perhaps colour the area under the graph red-orange-green based on the sentiment?

      • ytkimirti 2 hours ago ago

        Thanks for the feedback, noted the full-screen request.

        The sentiment analysis is very interesting, I can do that easily. Could be a new page as well. Did you see this anywhere else or just your idea?

        • cbeach 2 hours ago ago

          Just my idea. I'm working on a side project https://newsavista.com/invite/ASAD68923E that aggregates news and tracks news trends and changing sentiment on the major stories. With cheap cloud LLMs (and "free" local LLMs) it turns out to be a trivial feature to build.

  • jazzpush2 an hour ago ago

    This is a great project. It'd be fun to look at some of the more popular startups over time, both those that ended up successful and those that didn't.

  • chfritz an hour ago ago

    great idea! Now, you are running into the same issue Google Trends had to solve: term disambiguation. For instance, "atom" is ambiguous in a comparison of editors like this: https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=sublime&q=atom&q=vscode. Given LLMs it might be possible to use an embedding vector (with context) instead of a text string for indexing, and if you do, this problem might go away.

  • dom96 3 hours ago ago

    Very cool idea. Shows programming language trends pretty well.

    https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=Nim&q=Rust&q=Zig

  • dacox 26 minutes ago ago

    very cool! not sure if something is broken, but there seems to be no data past 2019 on any of the queries that i can see

  • stopachka an hour ago ago

    Nice! Would love a brief explanation of the infrastructure. I see the Powered by "Upstash Redish Search", but why choose Upstash Redis Search vs something else?

  • linzhangrun an hour ago ago

    Great job! I've also been wanting to do similar statistics recently, wanting to know when LLMs becoming the absolute dominant topic on HN. Now it seems like half of the posts were about LLMs.

  • ltrg an hour ago ago

    It would be super interesting to see if HN mentions serve as a leading indicator of company performance/valuations -- I wouldn't be surprised.

  • cloudkj 3 hours ago ago

    This is great, I was just hoping to find a tool like this and specifically scoped to "Show HN" posts? Is there a way to do that?

    • ytkimirti 2 hours ago ago

      Great idea actually, I'll add that as well for sure

  • scarecrw 3 hours ago ago

    Very cool!

    I'd love to have some sort of normalization option to separate more subtle positive trends from the general increase in number of posts.

  • corv 2 hours ago ago

    The 'flash vs html5' chart looks strange juxtaposed with that conclusion

    • al_borland an hour ago ago

      There are a few technologies with pretty generic names which don’t lend themselves so well to this kind of trend analysis.

      I was curious about Atom. According to the trend it’s still neck and neck with VS Code. But are people really talking about Atom the text editor that much still, or other types of atoms?

      • linmer an hour ago ago

        I think atom is no longer being developed, so it must not be a that popular topic. is that what you meant?

      • fg137 an hour ago ago

        I think Google Trends is actually smart enough to suggest which topic you want to see for the same keywords -- it understands the semantics.

  • ytkimirti 2 hours ago ago

    We had to take the site down for a second, it'll be online in a few minutes. Thanks for trying it out

  • WhitneyLand 19 minutes ago ago

    First great work.

    Reminds that I wish there was a modern way to do this for the words people speak and write online with. I want to literally know when people started putting literally twice in sentences.

    Ngram seems is out of date a piece meal. Now Corpus seems like they try but UX terrible.

  • NoSalt 3 hours ago ago

    Woah, great work!

    I am really liking the trend for "linux": https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=linux

  • SoKamil 2 hours ago ago

    Are those raw numbers or adjusted for active users at given point in time?

  • igcorreia 2 hours ago ago

    The colors of the lines of the big graph are inverted compared to the smaller ones.

  • flakiness 3 hours ago ago

    The example comparisons made me smile. Well done!

  • rightbyte 3 hours ago ago

    Nice. Is the data points y-axis normalized by total amount of comments at that time?

    Edit: Nvm seems like absolute count if you click the graph.

  • jahala 2 hours ago ago

    Really cool! Where would you get the data for something like this? Is it open, or its scraped?

  • chris_money202 2 hours ago ago

    Love this, seems to struggle with newly indexed words. Will try again when the FP load is gone

  • NooneAtAll3 2 hours ago ago

    I'd be interested in "google ngram for hacker news" instead

    • ytkimirti 2 hours ago ago

      What is missing from it? I've used ngrams as well and I this was partly inspired by that.

  • Cider9986 an hour ago ago

    Scrolling is totally broken for me.

  • joelres 2 hours ago ago

    Really beautiful, informative, and functional layout. Great work!

  • docheinestages 3 hours ago ago

    But can it discover new trends without having to type the keywords?

  • mkgeorge7 2 hours ago ago

    This is actually very cool@

  • mkgeorge7 2 hours ago ago

    This is actually very cool!

  • joe_the_user an hour ago ago

    The topic comparisons are pretty boring and search is disabled. Perhaps I'll remember to return to this. But I can't think of much it gives that plain Google nGram viewer doesn't.

  • GL26 3 hours ago ago

    insane ! I don't know if it's possible but it would be huge if we had access to the localisation of the trends

  • thomasgeelens an hour ago ago

    oeeh hug of death, congrats!

  • drchaim 2 hours ago ago

    too slow or broker right now

  • lazystar 3 hours ago ago

    nice. i guess AWS still had nothing to fear from GCP/Azure. ty for this

  • some_furry 3 hours ago ago
  • k33n an hour ago ago

    This is quite useful at-a-glance

  • jdw64 3 hours ago ago

    COOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!!

  • vachina 3 hours ago ago

    This is the only HN submission I ever upvoted because it is amazing

    • ytkimirti 2 hours ago ago

      Thanks, it was my first ever post here as well, would you look at that

    • fragmede 2 hours ago ago

      If more people spent time on /new looking for awesome stuff and vouching for dead items, HN would be a better place.

      • linmer an hour ago ago

        Has anyone tried to make some sort of algorithm to find cool stuff on HN or sort by upvotes etc? I know it's cool and intended that such things don't exist, but has anyone tried?

    • frankzero 3 hours ago ago

      I know right

  • ProofHouse 2 hours ago ago

    Yup your upstash is rate limited

  • clacker-o-matic 3 hours ago ago

    ooh this is sick! really nice ui too!

  • nailer an hour ago ago

    > API design, era by era: REST becomes the web's default 2012–15, then the post-REST generation splits: gRPC for service-to-service from 2016, GraphQL for the client from 2017.

    No. Looking at the diagram, REST becomes the webs default until 2017, GraphQL is briefly popular around early 2020s, then the web resturns to REST.

  • oystersauce8 3 hours ago ago

    love it