Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
A tool that charts how often any topic trends across 18 years of Hacker News comments and posts.
Hacker Trends indexes 45 million Hacker News posts and comments dating back 18 years. Users can compare terms like Google Trends, view date-histograms, and click through to see actual stories and comments. The site includes curated comparisons (e.g., AI models, JavaScript frameworks) and a "Who is Hiring?" page tracking programming language mentions. Built on Upstash Redis Search.
What commenters are saying
The thread is overwhelmingly positive, calling the tool "sick" and "amazing." Multiple commenters request a normalization option to account for HN's overall growth, so trends aren't just a version of xkcd 1138. The Hug of Death hit the site hard, with users reporting 502, 504, and rate-limit errors. The author acknowledges the outage and says the site was briefly taken offline to recover. One user suggests adding sentiment analysis to the graphs.
Several users share links showing interesting comparisons, like the close correlation between "Linux" and "Windows" mentions. The author notes this was their first HN post.