alt Hacker NewsShow HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments
Comments
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 :)
Hug of death
` /api/hn -> 504 An error occurred with your deployment FUNCTION_INVOCATION_TIMEOUT cle1::c8vgv-1782399959042-aeba3cae05ff `
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.
Hello, /api/hn -> 502 {"error":"Your database has been temporarily rate-limited, please contact [email protected] for further details."}
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
It's funny how "trump" dwarfs just about any other term. Truly a hacker forum.
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
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.
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
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!
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.
Funny one x) Though I ain’t sure if even more data is useful on hackernews
Very cool idea. Shows programming language trends pretty well.
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.
Glad to see that the raw data is also shared. Very cool, but why the openai vs anthropic graph has no data post 2019?
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.
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.
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?
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?
Looking at this makes me think HN is peak design aesthetic.
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.
It would be super interesting to see if HN mentions serve as a leading indicator of company performance/valuations -- I wouldn't be surprised.
We had to take the site down for a second, it'll be online in a few minutes. Thanks for trying it out
The 'flash vs html5' chart looks strange juxtaposed with that conclusion
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
Woah, great work!
I am really liking the trend for "linux": https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=linux
The example comparisons made me smile. Well done!
Are those raw numbers or adjusted for active users at given point in time?
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.
The colors of the lines of the big graph are inverted compared to the smaller ones.
Really cool! Where would you get the data for something like this? Is it open, or its scraped?
Love this, seems to struggle with newly indexed words. Will try again when the FP load is gone
I'd be interested in "google ngram for hacker news" instead
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.
Scrolling is totally broken for me.
Really beautiful, informative, and functional layout. Great work!
But can it discover new trends without having to type the keywords?
This is actually very cool@
This is actually very cool!
insane ! I don't know if it's possible but it would be huge if we had access to the localisation of the trends
too slow or broker right now
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.
nice. i guess AWS still had nothing to fear from GCP/Azure. ty for this
https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=furries&q=furry
Hmm, did I break something?
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.