1 comments

  • namiwang an hour ago

    Ask HN: Anyone want my realtime-snapshots dataset of Hacker News?

    so I've been maintaining a project [Track HN](https://track-hacker-news.com) since 2023. it continuously takes snapshots of Hacker News, recording how the score/rank/comments of stories/comments change over time. I think this is a unique HN dataset in its own way.

    I don't have enough time to maintain this project anymore and wondering if anyone would find the data useful and want to take it over and keep it alive.

    ## the dataset

    the dataset is over 200M rows in a postgres instance, plus a clickhouse instance to speedup the analytics.

    - stories/comments/users

    - ~6.38M Stories, ~43.2M comments, ~1.15M users, since the epoch (2006-10-09)

    - story score/comment count history - ~21.5M snapshots for ~900K stories, since 2024-03-22

    - story rank history - ~145M snapshots for ~178,120 stories, since 2024-03-28

    - http status of popular posts

    ## the product and stack

    I've build a product around this dataset with a stack:

    - a web app (with rails) to crawl and serve the data;

    - dashboards with metabase;

    - another set of dashboards with retool (retool kindly sponsored a postgres instance back then);

    - a browser extension;

    - few data reports;

    ## ideas

    things you could look at from the data, for example:

    - analyze activities of specific HN user

    - see how stories moving through the front page

    - find patterns between early score and eventual score

    - see how long stories survive at different ranks

    - find posting time/weekday effects, domain/user patterns, etc.

    - detect/extract topics/keywords from comments for brands/products/languages, etc.

    Let me know if you're interested, send your proposal/questions/cool ideas to me#nami.land. thanks!