Top
Best
New

Posted by ytkimirti 5 hours ago

Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments(hackernewstrends.com)
499 points | 131 commentspage 2
arikrahman 46 minutes ago|
Despite being for trends this is actually a good tool to find articles that are interesting but sometimes buried.
ytkimirti 38 minutes 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.

ytkimirti 5 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.

omoikane 2 hours ago||
> https://hackernewstrends.com/who-is-hiring

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

jupr 4 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?

jupr 2 hours ago|||
found : https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news
fragmede 3 hours ago|||
It's on firebase, per https://github.com/hackernews/api
cbeach 3 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?

ytkimirti 3 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?

cbeach 3 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.
bluecoconut 3 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.

linmer 2 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
ytkimirti 36 minutes ago|
Good idea, noted
sinuhe69 4 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.

marky1991 3 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.
Pikamander2 3 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.
jtolmar 2 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

Petersipoi 2 hours ago||
It's funny how "trump" dwarfs just about any other term. Truly a hacker forum.
throwaway29812 2 hours ago|
[dead]
dwoosley 2 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
dom96 4 hours ago||
Very cool idea. Shows programming language trends pretty well.

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

Insanity 2 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!

More comments...