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.

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 `

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

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.

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)

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 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.

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.

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.

Very cool idea. Shows programming language trends pretty well.

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

This is dangerously time-consuming. Nice work.

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://hackernewstrends.com/?q=furries&q=furry

Hmm, did I break something?

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

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?

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?

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.

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)?

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Woah, great work!

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

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.

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?

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

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.

It would be super interesting to see if HN mentions serve as a leading indicator of company performance/valuations -- I wouldn't be surprised.

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

The example comparisons made me smile. Well done!

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.

Glad to see that the raw data is also shared. Very cool, but why the openai vs anthropic graph has no data post 2019?

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

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

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

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

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

When searching Fastly it seems to match "fast".

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terms with spaces seem to be an "or"

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

insane ! I don't know if it's possible but it would be huge if we had access to the localisation of the trends

awesome site. bookmarked for future use

Scrolling is totally broken for me.

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

This is quite useful at-a-glance

Yup your upstash is rate limited

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

too slow or broker right now

This is actually very cool!

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

> 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.

COOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!!

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.

ooh this is sick! really nice ui too!

oeeh hug of death, congrats!

This is actually very cool@

love it

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

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