7 ms·

Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments

822 points by ytkimirti 3mo ago

mkgeorge7 3mo ago
This is actually very cool@
joelres 3mo ago
Really beautiful, informative, and functional layout. Great work!
ytkimirti 3mo 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&from=1512345600000&to=1514937600000 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 https://hackernewstrends.com/who-is-hiring Any kind of feedback is welcome.
- jupr 3mo 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?
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    It's on firebase, per https://github.com/hackernews/api https://github.com/hackernews/api
  - jupr 3mo ago
    found : https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news
- cbeach 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
      Just my idea. I'm working on a side project https://newsavista.com/invite/ASAD68923E 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.
- omoikane 3mo ago
  > https://hackernewstrends.com/who-is-hiring https://hackernewstrends.com/who-is-hiring Currently it says "no job-post mentions in this window" for everything. Transient error?
- aaron695 3mo ago
  [dead]
clacker-o-matic 3mo ago
ooh this is sick! really nice ui too!
NoSalt 3mo ago
Woah, great work! I am really liking the trend for "linux": https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=linux https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=linux
- dgellow 3mo ago
  Funny how closely that tracks with windows https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=linux&q=windows https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=linux&q=windows
  - addandsubtract 3mo ago
    Does the trend only show absolute numbers? Because I think it should be divided by the number of posts during the time frame (day?).
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
oystersauce8 3mo ago
love it
simonpure 3mo ago
Hug of death ` /api/hn -> 504 An error occurred with your deployment FUNCTION_INVOCATION_TIMEOUT cle1::c8vgv-1782399959042-aeba3cae05ff `
- aNapierkowski 3mo ago
  yeah we killed it :(
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- jjordan 3mo ago
  back in my day we called this a good ole' fashioned slashdotting.
  - lysace 3mo 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 3mo ago
      One of the things I love about HN is having stories like this in the comments from otherwise random unassuming usernames
  - Onavo 3mo 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.
vachina 3mo ago
This is the only HN submission I ever upvoted because it is amazing
- frankzero 3mo ago
  I know right
- fragmede 3mo ago
  If more people spent time on /new looking for awesome stuff and vouching for dead items, HN would be a better place.
  - linmer 3mo 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?
    - fragmede 3mo ago
      There's that one side that tracks were a post ranks overtime and you can see things drop off quickly when they get flagged for being flame bait and there's a lot of cool stuff on/new that other people kill cool stuff makes it to the front page but a lot of cool stuff doesn't. There's a second chance pool, but maybe there should be a third and fourth one as well.
- ytkimirti 3mo ago
  Thanks, it was my first ever post here as well, would you look at that
scarecrw 3mo 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.
GL26 3mo 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
some_furry 3mo ago
https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=furries&q=furry https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=furries&q=furry Hmm, did I break something?
- linmer 3mo ago
  Indeed you did! That made me look into this: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=1826-05-24 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=1826-05-24
dom96 3mo ago
Very cool idea. Shows programming language trends pretty well. https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=Nim&q=Rust&q=Zig https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=Nim&q=Rust&q=Zig
docheinestages 3mo ago
But can it discover new trends without having to type the keywords?
flakiness 3mo ago
The example comparisons made me smile. Well done!
lazystar 3mo ago
nice. i guess AWS still had nothing to fear from GCP/Azure. ty for this
sinuhe69 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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.
cloudkj 3mo 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 3mo ago
  Great idea actually, I'll add that as well for sure
rightbyte 3mo 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.
jdw64 3mo ago
COOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!!
drchaim 3mo ago
too slow or broker right now
ytkimirti 3mo ago
We had to take the site down for a second, it'll be online in a few minutes. Thanks for trying it out
smalltorch 3mo 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.
- hk__2 3mo ago
  Fixed link: https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torum https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torum
- all2 3mo ago
  *pique 'peak' refers to the top of a thing, commonly mountains
  - smalltorch 3mo ago
    *find things that align with my intrest peaks
    - all2 3mo ago
      Perfect. I love it.
chris_money202 3mo ago
Love this, seems to struggle with newly indexed words. Will try again when the FP load is gone
arjie 3mo 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 3mo ago
  I'd love to see the opposite as well, ie how much has HN grown over time.
- jcgl 3mo ago
  Agreed. That would make this way more insightful. Otherwise most searches will basically be a version of https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/ during periods of site growth.
jahala 3mo ago
Really cool! Where would you get the data for something like this? Is it open, or its scraped?
kaelyx 3mo ago
Hello, /api/hn -> 502 {"error":"Your database has been temporarily rate-limited, please contact support@upstash.com for further details."}
JFGAi 3mo ago
[dead]
NooneAtAll3 3mo ago
I'd be interested in "google ngram for hacker news" instead
- ytkimirti 3mo ago
  What is missing from it? I've used ngrams as well and I this was partly inspired by that.
ProofHouse 3mo ago
Yup your upstash is rate limited
corv 3mo ago
The 'flash vs html5' chart looks strange juxtaposed with that conclusion
- al_borland 3mo 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?
  - fg137 3mo 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.
  - linmer 3mo ago
    I think atom is no longer being developed, so it must not be a that popular topic. is that what you meant?
    - al_borland 3mo ago
      That’s my assumption, yes.
mkgeorge7 3mo ago
This is actually very cool!
igcorreia 3mo ago
The colors of the lines of the big graph are inverted compared to the smaller ones.
bluecoconut 3mo 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.
SoKamil 3mo ago
Are those raw numbers or adjusted for active users at given point in time?
kpw94 3mo 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)
Cider9986 3mo ago
Scrolling is totally broken for me.
k33n 3mo ago
This is quite useful at-a-glance
Aachen 3mo 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 :)
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- morkalork 3mo ago
  Now if Algolia had a dataset of what people are searching for on HN that'd be it
  - Aachen 3mo ago
    Was considering that as well, but I doubt that people use Algolia in the same way that they use Google
- Aachen 3mo 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
  - 3mo ago
linzhangrun 3mo 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.
zX41ZdbW 3mo ago
I host a publicly open database with Hacker News data at https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUICogRlJPTSBoYWNrZXJuZXdzX2hpc3RvcnkgTElNSVQgMTAw 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#issuecomment-4755761107 https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/29693#issuec... It is also updated in real-time.
- tgv 3mo ago
  It probably also got swamped in real-time...
  - linmer 3mo 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.
- linmer 3mo ago
  Thank you for providing this, you are a hero!!! I'm gonna try to do cool stuff with it!
- GeoAtreides 3mo 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!
  - pelagicAustral 3mo ago
    You must be fun at parties
  - moralestapia 3mo 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.
jtolmar 3mo 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 https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=crypto&q=chatgpt
dwoosley 3mo 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
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
ltrg 3mo 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.
thomasgeelens 3mo ago
oeeh hug of death, congrats!
stopachka 3mo 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?
chfritz 3mo 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 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.
Insanity 3mo 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!
linmer 3mo 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2026-05-24
- ytkimirti 3mo ago
  Good idea, noted
jazzpush2 3mo 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.
joe_the_user 3mo 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.
gslepak 3mo ago
Very cool! There seems to be a bug here: https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=vim&q=emacs&q=zed 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.
- ytkimirti 3mo ago
  Fixed
aberrahmane_b 3mo 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.
nailer 3mo 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.
Petersipoi 3mo ago
It's funny how "trump" dwarfs just about any other term. Truly a hacker forum.
- throwaway29812 3mo ago
  [dead]
- onestay42 3mo ago
  You could say... it trumps them
- eecks 3mo ago
  google and ai are the most used that I have found
jianfenglin 3mo 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?
- ytkimirti 3mo ago
  Yeah we had to refill the dataset due to an error, it will be fixed in a few minutes
- titzer 3mo ago
  I don't see any data for anything past 2019.
dacox 3mo 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
WhitneyLand 3mo 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.
upmostly 3mo ago
Looking at this makes me think HN is peak design aesthetic.
maxignol 3mo ago
Funny one x) Though I ain’t sure if even more data is useful on hackernews
robertpduncan 3mo ago
[dead]
ethanlipson 3mo ago
[dead]
arikrahman 3mo ago
Despite being for trends this is actually a good tool to find articles that are interesting but sometimes buried.
- ytkimirti 3mo ago
  Exactly, I found lots of weird moments in history on the most random topics ever. I let the LLM generate hundreds of terms and ran a “shock value” metric script to discover the interesting ones.
zarlss43 3mo ago
I thought Grunt was still popular after all these years. But I'm pretty sure this is picking up the trend of "grunt work" instead of the task manager.
jasonjmcghee 3mo ago
Terms with spaces seem to be an "or"
kasince2k 3mo ago
/api/hn -> 504 An error occurred with your deployment FUNCTION_INVOCATION_TIMEOUT sfo1::rbqk2-1782415926647-577d5c5ed030
toozitax 3mo ago
used it to query finance and tax launches and how they did and it was helpful. thanks
Cakez0r 3mo ago
LLMs spotted https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=Genuinely https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=Genuinely
- joshmaker 3mo ago
  Curve looks a lot like total Hacker News volume but with a bigger spike in the last year. Would be interesting to see this adjusted relative to average content volume
pabzu 3mo ago
That's so cool! is it possible to add a linux distro trends ?
joshmaker 3mo ago
Fun project and well executed. It would be cool if it had the option to adjust for relative volume. For example, a search for “iPhone” dips around 2025, but did interest in it decline or were there just fewer comments on Hacker News that year (based on searches for generic words like “the” or “is” I suspect it was actually the latter)?
jayd16 3mo ago
Be careful with non-alphanumeric characters I guess. For example, C# actually just matches C in the graph even though it only highlights C# in the example article titles.
casey2 3mo ago
2024-2026 year of Claude 2026-2028 year of GLM
gnarlouse 3mo ago
I'm still "trying to make 'fetch' happen" with the whole "billionaire alignment problem" thing. Maybe the phrase will catch on.
crunchiepooker 3mo ago
That’s fantastic! I want to be the only row saying “Sam Altman eats digleberries”
paravz 3mo ago
Top prometheus story at https://hackernewstrends.com/compare/prometheus-vs-grafana-vs-datadog https://hackernewstrends.com/compare/prometheus-vs-grafana-v... is about wrong Prometheus (Remove CO2 from Air)
svara 3mo ago
When searching Fastly it seems to match "fast".
wodenokoto 3mo ago
Was surprised to see Anthropic mentioned all the way back in 2008, only that it is not the company (obviously) So for the sake of online human conversation I’m gonna ask here and not Claude: What did Anthropic mean before the AI company completely captured this word?
zftnb666 3mo ago
Finally, a way to prove to my boss that "AI agent" is not a new topic we just discovered.
Reuben_Santoso 3mo ago
awesome site. bookmarked for future use
bigboss2700 3mo ago
This is dangerously time-consuming. Nice work.
takmae1116 3mo ago
[flagged]

822 points by ytkimirti 3mo ago

mkgeorge7 3mo ago

This is actually very cool@

joelres 3mo ago

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

ytkimirti 3mo 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&from=1512345600000&to=1514937600000 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 https://hackernewstrends.com/who-is-hiring Any kind of feedback is welcome.

jupr 3mo 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?
- fragmede 3mo ago
  It's on firebase, per https://github.com/hackernews/api https://github.com/hackernews/api
- jupr 3mo ago
  found : https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news
cbeach 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
    Just my idea. I'm working on a side project https://newsavista.com/invite/ASAD68923E 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.
omoikane 3mo ago
> https://hackernewstrends.com/who-is-hiring https://hackernewstrends.com/who-is-hiring Currently it says "no job-post mentions in this window" for everything. Transient error?
aaron695 3mo ago
[dead]

clacker-o-matic 3mo ago

ooh this is sick! really nice ui too!

NoSalt 3mo ago

Woah, great work! I am really liking the trend for "linux": https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=linux https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=linux

dgellow 3mo ago
Funny how closely that tracks with windows https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=linux&q=windows https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=linux&q=windows
- addandsubtract 3mo ago
  Does the trend only show absolute numbers? Because I think it should be divided by the number of posts during the time frame (day?).
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]

oystersauce8 3mo ago

love it

simonpure 3mo ago

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

aNapierkowski 3mo ago
yeah we killed it :(
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
jjordan 3mo ago
back in my day we called this a good ole' fashioned slashdotting.
- lysace 3mo 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 3mo ago
    One of the things I love about HN is having stories like this in the comments from otherwise random unassuming usernames
- Onavo 3mo 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.

vachina 3mo ago

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

frankzero 3mo ago
I know right
fragmede 3mo ago
If more people spent time on /new looking for awesome stuff and vouching for dead items, HN would be a better place.
- linmer 3mo 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?
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    There's that one side that tracks were a post ranks overtime and you can see things drop off quickly when they get flagged for being flame bait and there's a lot of cool stuff on/new that other people kill cool stuff makes it to the front page but a lot of cool stuff doesn't. There's a second chance pool, but maybe there should be a third and fourth one as well.
ytkimirti 3mo ago
Thanks, it was my first ever post here as well, would you look at that

scarecrw 3mo 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.

GL26 3mo 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

some_furry 3mo ago

https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=furries&q=furry https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=furries&q=furry Hmm, did I break something?

linmer 3mo ago
Indeed you did! That made me look into this: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=1826-05-24 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=1826-05-24

dom96 3mo ago

Very cool idea. Shows programming language trends pretty well. https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=Nim&q=Rust&q=Zig https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=Nim&q=Rust&q=Zig

docheinestages 3mo ago

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

flakiness 3mo ago

The example comparisons made me smile. Well done!

lazystar 3mo ago

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

sinuhe69 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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.

cloudkj 3mo 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 3mo ago
Great idea actually, I'll add that as well for sure

rightbyte 3mo 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.

jdw64 3mo ago

COOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!!

drchaim 3mo ago

too slow or broker right now

ytkimirti 3mo ago

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

smalltorch 3mo 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.

hk__2 3mo ago
Fixed link: https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torum https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torum
all2 3mo ago
*pique 'peak' refers to the top of a thing, commonly mountains
- smalltorch 3mo ago
  *find things that align with my intrest peaks
  - all2 3mo ago
    Perfect. I love it.

chris_money202 3mo ago

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

arjie 3mo 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 3mo ago
I'd love to see the opposite as well, ie how much has HN grown over time.
jcgl 3mo ago
Agreed. That would make this way more insightful. Otherwise most searches will basically be a version of https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/ during periods of site growth.

jahala 3mo ago

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

kaelyx 3mo ago

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

JFGAi 3mo ago

[dead]

NooneAtAll3 3mo ago

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

ytkimirti 3mo ago
What is missing from it? I've used ngrams as well and I this was partly inspired by that.

ProofHouse 3mo ago

Yup your upstash is rate limited

corv 3mo ago

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

al_borland 3mo 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?
- fg137 3mo 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.
- linmer 3mo ago
  I think atom is no longer being developed, so it must not be a that popular topic. is that what you meant?
  - al_borland 3mo ago
    That’s my assumption, yes.

mkgeorge7 3mo ago

This is actually very cool!

igcorreia 3mo ago

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

bluecoconut 3mo 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.

SoKamil 3mo ago

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

kpw94 3mo 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)

Cider9986 3mo ago

Scrolling is totally broken for me.

k33n 3mo ago

This is quite useful at-a-glance

Aachen 3mo 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 :)

deleted 3mo ago
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morkalork 3mo ago
Now if Algolia had a dataset of what people are searching for on HN that'd be it
- Aachen 3mo ago
  Was considering that as well, but I doubt that people use Algolia in the same way that they use Google
Aachen 3mo 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
- 3mo ago

linzhangrun 3mo 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.

zX41ZdbW 3mo ago

I host a publicly open database with Hacker News data at https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUICogRlJPTSBoYWNrZXJuZXdzX2hpc3RvcnkgTElNSVQgMTAw 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#issuecomment-4755761107 https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/29693#issuec... It is also updated in real-time.

tgv 3mo ago
It probably also got swamped in real-time...
- linmer 3mo 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.
linmer 3mo ago
Thank you for providing this, you are a hero!!! I'm gonna try to do cool stuff with it!
GeoAtreides 3mo 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!
- pelagicAustral 3mo ago
  You must be fun at parties
- moralestapia 3mo 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.

jtolmar 3mo 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 https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=crypto&q=chatgpt

dwoosley 3mo 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

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

ltrg 3mo 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.

thomasgeelens 3mo ago

oeeh hug of death, congrats!

stopachka 3mo 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?

chfritz 3mo 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 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.

Insanity 3mo 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!

linmer 3mo 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2026-05-24

ytkimirti 3mo ago
Good idea, noted

jazzpush2 3mo 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.

joe_the_user 3mo 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.

gslepak 3mo ago

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

ytkimirti 3mo ago
Fixed

aberrahmane_b 3mo 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.

nailer 3mo 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.

Petersipoi 3mo ago

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

throwaway29812 3mo ago
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onestay42 3mo ago
You could say... it trumps them
eecks 3mo ago
google and ai are the most used that I have found

jianfenglin 3mo 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?

ytkimirti 3mo ago
Yeah we had to refill the dataset due to an error, it will be fixed in a few minutes
titzer 3mo ago
I don't see any data for anything past 2019.

dacox 3mo 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

WhitneyLand 3mo 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.

upmostly 3mo ago

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

maxignol 3mo ago

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

robertpduncan 3mo ago

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ethanlipson 3mo ago

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arikrahman 3mo ago

Despite being for trends this is actually a good tool to find articles that are interesting but sometimes buried.

ytkimirti 3mo ago
Exactly, I found lots of weird moments in history on the most random topics ever. I let the LLM generate hundreds of terms and ran a “shock value” metric script to discover the interesting ones.

zarlss43 3mo ago

I thought Grunt was still popular after all these years. But I'm pretty sure this is picking up the trend of "grunt work" instead of the task manager.

jasonjmcghee 3mo ago

Terms with spaces seem to be an "or"

kasince2k 3mo ago

/api/hn -> 504 An error occurred with your deployment FUNCTION_INVOCATION_TIMEOUT sfo1::rbqk2-1782415926647-577d5c5ed030

toozitax 3mo ago

used it to query finance and tax launches and how they did and it was helpful. thanks

Cakez0r 3mo ago

LLMs spotted https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=Genuinely https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=Genuinely

joshmaker 3mo ago
Curve looks a lot like total Hacker News volume but with a bigger spike in the last year. Would be interesting to see this adjusted relative to average content volume

pabzu 3mo ago

That's so cool! is it possible to add a linux distro trends ?

joshmaker 3mo ago

Fun project and well executed. It would be cool if it had the option to adjust for relative volume. For example, a search for “iPhone” dips around 2025, but did interest in it decline or were there just fewer comments on Hacker News that year (based on searches for generic words like “the” or “is” I suspect it was actually the latter)?

jayd16 3mo ago

Be careful with non-alphanumeric characters I guess. For example, C# actually just matches C in the graph even though it only highlights C# in the example article titles.

casey2 3mo ago

2024-2026 year of Claude 2026-2028 year of GLM

gnarlouse 3mo ago

I'm still "trying to make 'fetch' happen" with the whole "billionaire alignment problem" thing. Maybe the phrase will catch on.

crunchiepooker 3mo ago

That’s fantastic! I want to be the only row saying “Sam Altman eats digleberries”

paravz 3mo ago

Top prometheus story at https://hackernewstrends.com/compare/prometheus-vs-grafana-vs-datadog https://hackernewstrends.com/compare/prometheus-vs-grafana-v... is about wrong Prometheus (Remove CO2 from Air)

svara 3mo ago

When searching Fastly it seems to match "fast".

wodenokoto 3mo ago

Was surprised to see Anthropic mentioned all the way back in 2008, only that it is not the company (obviously) So for the sake of online human conversation I’m gonna ask here and not Claude: What did Anthropic mean before the AI company completely captured this word?

zftnb666 3mo ago

Finally, a way to prove to my boss that "AI agent" is not a new topic we just discovered.

Reuben_Santoso 3mo ago

awesome site. bookmarked for future use

bigboss2700 3mo ago

This is dangerously time-consuming. Nice work.

takmae1116 3mo ago

[flagged]