464 pointsby ytkimirti4 hours ago62 comments
  • zX41ZdbW2 hours 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.

    • linmer2 hours ago
      Thank you for providing this, you are a hero!!! I'm gonna try to do cool stuff with it!
    • tgv2 hours ago
      It probably also got swamped in real-time...
      • linmeran hour 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.

    • GeoAtreidesan hour 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!
      • snowwrestleran hour 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.

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

        uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

      • pelagicAustralan hour ago
        You must be fun at parties
      • moralestapiaan hour 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.

        • codingdavean hour 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.

          • moralestapiaan hour ago
            You might want to read it again, then:

            https://opensource.org/license/mit

            • codingdavean hour ago
              That is about the software, not the data.
              • moralestapiaan hour 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 released under MIT).

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

        • GeoAtreidesan hour ago
          >Y Combinator and its affiliated companies

          is zX41ZdbW either?

          • moralestapiaan hour ago
            Oh, now I see my comment might be a bit harsh.

            I didn't consider you might now know about:

            https://github.com/hackernews/api

            • GeoAtreidesan hour ago
              yes, and per HN terms and conditions only YC and YC affiliated (as you quoted) can use the api legally. I don't license my content to anyone else and so it shouldn't be use by anyone else, even if it's available on a free-for-all API (nice move HN, btw).
          • fartcoin67an hour ago
            [dead]
  • arikrahmana minute ago
    Despite being for trends this is actually a good tool to find articles that are interesting but sometimes buried.
  • Aachen2 hours 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 :)

    • Aachen2 hours 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_strinlai2 hours 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.

        • Aachen2 hours ago
          Thanks! Didn't come across like that to me though, all good
    • morkalork2 hours ago
      Now if Algolia had a dataset of what people are searching for on HN that'd be it
      • Aachen2 hours ago
        Was considering that as well, but I doubt that people use Algolia in the same way that they use Google
    • 2 hours ago
      undefined
  • simonpure3 hours ago
    Hug of death

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

    • docheinestages3 hours 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_n3 hours ago
        Oof that would be hilarious/tragic
      • steve19773 hours ago
        Downstash
        • y1n03 hours ago
          Must stash
    • superxpro123 hours ago
      /api/hn -> 502 {"error":"Your database has been temporarily rate-limited, please contact support@upstash.com for further details."}
      • 3 hours ago
        undefined
    • Roonerelli3 hours 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}}}\"]"}

    • jjordan3 hours ago
      back in my day we called this a good ole' fashioned slashdotting.
      • lysace3 hours 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!

        • mysterydip2 hours ago
          One of the things I love about HN is having stories like this in the comments from otherwise random unassuming usernames
      • Onavo3 hours 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.
    • ytkimirti3 hours ago
      We will be with you shortly :)
    • aNapierkowski3 hours ago
      yeah we killed it :(
      • 3 hours ago
        undefined
  • gslepak2 hours 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.

  • kaelyx3 hours ago
    Hello, /api/hn -> 502 {"error":"Your database has been temporarily rate-limited, please contact support@upstash.com for further details."}
  • smalltorch3 hours 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.

  • kpw942 hours 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)

  • arjie3 hours 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.
    • apitmanan hour ago
      I'd love to see the opposite as well, ie how much has HN grown over time.
  • linmer2 hours 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
  • bluecoconut2 hours 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.

  • ytkimirti4 hours 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.

    • omoikane2 hours ago
      > https://hackernewstrends.com/who-is-hiring

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

    • jupr3 hours 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?

    • cbeach3 hours 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?

      • ytkimirti2 hours 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?

        • cbeach2 hours 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.
  • Petersipoian hour ago
    It's funny how "trump" dwarfs just about any other term. Truly a hacker forum.
  • jtolmar2 hours 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

  • sinuhe693 hours 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.

    • marky19913 hours 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.
      • Pikamander23 hours 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.
  • dwoosley2 hours 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
    • 2 hours ago
      undefined
  • Insanity2 hours 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!

  • dom963 hours ago
    Very cool idea. Shows programming language trends pretty well.

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

  • aberrahmane_b2 hours 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.

  • maxignolan hour ago
    Funny one x) Though I ain’t sure if even more data is useful on hackernews
  • chfritz2 hours 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.
  • jazzpush22 hours 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.
  • jianfenglinan hour 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?
    • ytkimirtian hour ago
      Yeah we had to refill the dataset due to an error, it will be fixed in a few minutes
    • titzeran hour ago
      I don't see any data for anything past 2019.
  • linzhangrun2 hours 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.
  • cloudkj3 hours 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?
    • ytkimirti3 hours ago
      Great idea actually, I'll add that as well for sure
  • stopachka2 hours 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?
  • scarecrw3 hours 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.

  • upmostlyan hour ago
    Looking at this makes me think HN is peak design aesthetic.
  • ltrg2 hours 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.
  • ytkimirti3 hours ago
    We had to take the site down for a second, it'll be online in a few minutes. Thanks for trying it out
  • corv3 hours ago
    The 'flash vs html5' chart looks strange juxtaposed with that conclusion
    • al_borland2 hours 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?

      • fg1372 hours 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.
      • linmer2 hours ago
        I think atom is no longer being developed, so it must not be a that popular topic. is that what you meant?
  • dacoxan hour 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
  • NoSalt4 hours ago
    Woah, great work!

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

  • flakiness3 hours ago
    The example comparisons made me smile. Well done!
  • rightbyte3 hours 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.

  • SoKamil2 hours ago
    Are those raw numbers or adjusted for active users at given point in time?
  • igcorreia2 hours ago
    The colors of the lines of the big graph are inverted compared to the smaller ones.
  • jahala3 hours ago
    Really cool! Where would you get the data for something like this? Is it open, or its scraped?
  • chris_money2023 hours ago
    Love this, seems to struggle with newly indexed words. Will try again when the FP load is gone
  • NooneAtAll33 hours ago
    I'd be interested in "google ngram for hacker news" instead
    • ytkimirti2 hours ago
      What is missing from it? I've used ngrams as well and I this was partly inspired by that.
  • WhitneyLandan hour 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.

  • Cider99862 hours ago
    Scrolling is totally broken for me.
  • joelres3 hours ago
    Really beautiful, informative, and functional layout. Great work!
  • docheinestages3 hours ago
    But can it discover new trends without having to type the keywords?
  • mkgeorge72 hours ago
    This is actually very cool@
  • mkgeorge72 hours ago
    This is actually very cool!
  • GL263 hours 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
  • drchaim3 hours ago
    too slow or broker right now
  • joe_the_user2 hours 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.
  • lazystar3 hours ago
    nice. i guess AWS still had nothing to fear from GCP/Azure. ty for this
  • some_furry3 hours ago
  • thomasgeelens2 hours ago
    oeeh hug of death, congrats!
  • k33n2 hours ago
    This is quite useful at-a-glance
  • jdw643 hours ago
    COOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!!
  • vachina3 hours ago
    This is the only HN submission I ever upvoted because it is amazing
    • ytkimirti3 hours ago
      Thanks, it was my first ever post here as well, would you look at that
    • fragmede3 hours ago
      If more people spent time on /new looking for awesome stuff and vouching for dead items, HN would be a better place.
      • linmer2 hours 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?
    • frankzero3 hours ago
      I know right
  • ProofHouse3 hours ago
    Yup your upstash is rate limited
  • clacker-o-matic4 hours ago
    ooh this is sick! really nice ui too!
  • nailer2 hours 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 is the default until 2017, GraphQL is briefly popular around early 2020s, then the web resturns to REST.

  • oystersauce84 hours ago
    love it
  • ethanlipson32 minutes ago
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  • robertpduncan41 minutes ago
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  • JFGAi3 hours ago
    [dead]