Project
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HN Trend Tracker
Hacker News data pipeline and read-only app for tracking stories, score changes, comment changes, and trend-oriented analytics over time.
- Stack
- Python · Next.js · SQLAlchemy · Postgres · Plotly · Docker · dbt
- Next milestone
- Add richer trend views and continue improving the historical analytics pipeline.
This was me flailing around for an idea, any idea, that could be worth a Saturday. Staring at Hacker News posts, desperately inviting inspiration, it struck me: I could be a copycat. Easy enough.
Hacker News provides a publicly accessible API with all their posts, and they invite the general public to trawl through the contents of their entire history. So, I can just set up a little service to pull from their API, fill in a database with all the posts, comments, etc that have ever been on the site, and then use that data for my own devices. My own devices are boring and derivative, but at least I could exercise instructing agents to do literally anything.
At the moment, this extends HN in the following ways:
- It allows you to see the most commented and highest-rated posts in the last 24 hours.
- It labels each post as a Repost if the same normalized URL has appeared in the past.
It is publicly reachable now, which is useful, but it is still very much a work in progress rather than a polished product.