Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments
This "Show HN" introduces Hacker Trends, a fascinating tool that visualizes topic mentions across 18 years of Hacker News comments and posts. It acts like a "Google Trends" for HN, offering unique insights into the ebb and flow of tech trends and community interests. The project quickly garnered significant attention, leading to an immediate "hug of death" for the underlying database, a testament to its compelling utility and popularity.
The Lowdown
Hacker Trends is a new web application that allows users to explore the popularity of terms, tools, and people mentioned in Hacker News posts and comments over the last 18 years. Built on Upstash Redis Search, it offers live, interactive date-histograms of over 45 million indexed items.<ul><li><b>Core Functionality:</b> Users can input multiple terms to compare their discussion frequency over time, similar to Google Trends.</li><li><b>Detailed Views:</b> The tool provides not only trend lines but also the ability to drill down into the actual stories and comments behind specific spikes in mentions.</li><li><b>Curated Comparisons:</b> The site features numerous pre-defined "Popular Comparisons" highlighting shifts in tech, from editor wars (Vim vs. Emacs vs. Zed) and JavaScript frameworks (Angular vs. Vue vs. Svelte) to cloud platforms, AI advancements, and even cryptocurrency cycles.</li><li><b>Specialized Pages:</b> A dedicated section charts the distribution of programming languages mentioned in "Who is Hiring?" posts over the years.</li><li><b>Technology Stack:</b> The project leverages Upstash Redis Search, which ironically faced rate-limiting issues upon launch due to its immediate popularity on HN.</li></ul>In essence, Hacker Trends transforms the vast, historical Hacker News archive into an insightful, dynamic infographic, providing a captivating retrospective on the tech world's evolving interests through the lens of one of its most influential communities.
The Gossip
Hugs, Hops, and Headaches
The immediate surge of traffic from Hacker News effectively "slashdotted" the new service, leading to frequent 502/504 errors and rate-limiting messages from the backend database (Upstash). Commenters humorously noted the irony of an "infinitely scalable" product being overwhelmed, while the developer actively communicated efforts to restore service and some reminisced about similar "hug of death" incidents from earlier internet eras. This theme strongly indicates the project's instant popularity and the challenges of launching on HN.
Statistical Sensibilities and Feature Fantasies
Many users immediately proposed improvements and additional features to enhance the tool's analytical power. Key suggestions included normalizing data by the total volume of posts/comments to better reflect relative trends rather than just absolute growth, adding sentiment analysis for discussed terms (especially for people), and incorporating AI-driven synonym grouping (e.g., "self-driving" and "autopilot") while also ensuring an option to disable such grouping for precise keyword tracking. The developer was responsive to some of these suggestions.
Aesthetically Arousing and Analytically Appealing
Despite the initial technical hiccups, the overall sentiment was overwhelmingly positive. Users lauded the project's innovative concept, clean user interface, and the valuable insights it provided into Hacker News's historical discussions. Many expressed excitement over the "coolness" and utility of being able to visualize trends, and the curated "Popular Comparisons" were particularly highlighted as entertaining and informative examples of the tool's capabilities.