20 years of Hacker News discussions, clustered and visualized

Name: 20 years of Hacker News discussions, clustered and visualized
Availability: InStock
Author: BohdanPetryshyn

by BohdanPetryshyn·Mar 22, 2026·7 points·7 comments

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AI Analysis

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Twenty years of HN topics clustered and charted—see AI overtake startups.

Strengths

•NLP clustering on 21K stories reveals genuine topic evolution, not just keyword tracking.
•Interactive timeline with zoom lets you explore specific periods like COVID remote work spike.
•Seventy-four distinct categories with trend percentages show real analytical depth.

Weaknesses

•Only top 3 daily stories—misses the richer signal from comments and broader submissions.
•HN analytics already exists (HN Trends, Algolia search), though clustering adds differentiation.

Post Description

We took the top 3 HN stories every day since October 2006 (~21K stories total), ran topic clustering on them, and visualized how topics rise and fall over time.

You can zoom into any period - some patterns are surprisingly clear (AI overtaking startup culture as HN's top topic, crypto's rise and fall, remote work spiking with COVID).

Happy to answer questions about the methodology.

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