Thanks! This opens up a number of really interesting possibilities when mixed with people's expertise in search and machine learning / natural language processi

Thanks! This opens up a number of really interesting possibilities when mixed with people's expertise in search and machine learning / natural language processing. A long time ago I got hold of a large chunk of Slashdot's stories and comments. The text and karma ratings for each post lead me to try some fun experiments automatically extracting the community's sentiment towards certain topics or trying to mine Slashdot memes. I've wanted to play around with the comments of Hacker News for some time due to the wealth of knowledge most comments hold but felt that crawling would be a bad idea as I certainly didn't want to cause PG's bandwidth cost/server load to increase. Think about it - HN's a community full of people like me and if we all crawled HN to get that data it would be somewhat ugly, so thanks for sharing your data ;)