Hacker News Trends: 18-Year Topic Analysis Tool
Original: Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments
Why This Matters
Provides quantifiable historical view of tech adoption patterns on developer community platform; useful for market research and trend analysis.
Developer created Google Trends-style search tool for Hacker News, indexing 45 million posts and comments across 18 years. Platform charts topic frequency over time, powered by Upstash Redis Search, allowing users to compare trends like OpenAI vs Anthropic or Docker vs Kubernetes.
A developer built Hacker News Trends, a search and charting platform that visualizes how topics, tools, and people have trended across Hacker News over 18 years. The tool indexes approximately 45 million posts and comments, enabling users to overlay multiple search terms and track their relative prominence over time. Each chart displays live date-histograms showing mention frequency, with underlying stories and comments filterable by term or author. The platform is powered by Upstash Redis Search and includes pre-loaded comparisons such as Vercel vs Cloudflare (showing how Vercel surged with Next.js adoption), OpenAI vs Anthropic (displaying Anthropic's 2026 surge), AMD vs Nvidia (charting Nvidia's GPU-AI dominance shift), and framework rivalries like Angular vs Vue vs Svelte. Additional comparisons cover databases (MySQL vs Postgres), ML frameworks (TensorFlow vs PyTorch vs JAX), editors (Vim vs Emacs vs Zed), and other technology stacks. The code is available on GitHub, making the methodology transparent and reproducible.