A Google Trends-style explorer for 18 years of Hacker News
A developer has built a Google Trends-style explorer for Hacker News that charts how often any topic, tool or person appeared across roughly 18 years of posts and comments. The index holds about 45 million items and runs on Upstash Redis Search.
A developer has built a Google-Trends-style explorer for Hacker News. Hacker Trends charts how often any topic, tool, company or person has come up on the site since 2007, drawing on roughly 18 years of stories and comments.
What the tool does
Type a single term and the site draws a line showing how many Hacker News posts and comments mentioned it each month; each point is an exact mention count rather than a weighted or fuzzy score. Several terms can be overlaid on one chart, up to five at a time, so the trajectories of competing tools or ideas can be compared directly.
Below each chart sits the material behind the line: the actual stories and comments that mention the term, which can be filtered by author or by type (story versus comment) and sorted by relevance, points, comments or recency. Selecting months on the chart zooms into a date range, and every view is stored in the URL, so a link reproduces the exact chart and filters.
Forty-five million items, queried live
The index covers about 45 million Hacker News items from 2007 to 2026. Each item's title, text, author, type, timestamp, score and comment count is stored as a Redis hash and indexed for full-text search; there is no separate analytics warehouse. The trend line itself is a date-histogram aggregation computed at query time, one monthly bucket per point, while the list of stories comes from a full-text search ranked by a blend of BM25 relevance plus upvotes and comment counts.
The project is built on Upstash Redis Search and is described as a free public demo showing what the service can do on a large real-world dataset. The code is published on GitHub.
Comparisons and what people look for
Beyond free-form search, the site offers prepared comparisons — vercel vs cloudflare, openai vs anthropic, vim vs emacs vs zed, docker vs kubernetes, x86 vs arm and dozens more — each with a short note on how the rivalry played out over time. Category pages collect recurring themes, from science and frontier tech such as fusion energy, quantum computing and LK-99 to open-source licence disputes, gaming, health and people.
There is also a page tracking the monthly "Who is hiring?" threads, and the whole index is presented as a way to date the tech industry's shifting obsessions by month rather than by memory.