A data almanac of Hacker News, 2007–partial 2026. Every reported value is traced to a query, with coverage limits kept visible.
Annual share of retained Hacker News story titles matching the AI / LLM family: ai, llm, gpt, chatgpt, or neural. This is title language, not front-page placement.
Full retained census through 2025, followed by partial live 2026. Annual title shares are exact within retained live stories; event proximity is context, not proof of cause.
See AI stories on Hacker News ↗Continue here · verified briefing
The hero establishes the lead shift; these checked findings add contrast and context.
Next question: Compare the startup and AI arcs
Show evidenceEditorial contract: a local editor may reorder verified candidates, but it cannot author or alter their facts. Invalid guide data leaves this checked HTML visible.
Attention shift
Title share moved from 12.0% to 16.6% versus the same dates last year (+4.6 percentage points).
Inspect the exact annual path →Most discussed now
1,190 on the HN comment counter in the liveliest story from the current three-day window.
Open the HN discussion ↗Week’s score leader
1,633 points · 941 comments · 9to5mac.com
Open the HN discussion ↗The front page as of — UTC — Hacker News' own numbers, polled every 5 minutes; deltas are movement since the previous poll.
The current Hacker News front page — the live top 5 stories by rank, straight from the official HN API.
A live passthrough, not the verified almanac — these numbers are Hacker News' own, deep-linked to the source. New entrants since the last poll show without deltas.
Distinct HN surfaces
Compare the official Ask HN, Show HN, and Jobs lists without folding their different communities into the general front page.
Forward-only observations of HN’s official lists; historical rank cannot be backfilled.
Derived archive view
Yearly volume and stored final engagement for the selected surface. Collection-era labels keep unlike archive coverage separate.
| Year | Collection era | Items | Avg score | Avg comments | 100+ breakout |
|---|
2026 is a partial year; these are shares (not raw counts), so the comparison stays era-safe — the tracked-topic set from the momentum board ↓.
Words in far more titles this week than their all-time norm — specificity-weighted (this-week share ÷ all-time share) so a specific spiking term surfaces over a common word, with a rarity floor + this-week minimum to keep out noise. Live 2026, regenerated each build; the counts are facts, not forecasts.
Each line is one story's position on Hacker News' front page over the last day — #1 at the top; follow a line to watch a story climb, peak, and get pushed down by newer stories.
Drawn from our forward capture — rank history HN itself never exposes, snapshotted every ~11 minutes since capture began. Three notable stories from the window: the peak-reacher, the longest-dweller, and the freshest riser. Regenerated at every publish; a live record, not the census almanac.
The stories drawing comments the fastest right now — peak comments per hour, from the same forward capture as the flight paths above. Climbing the ranks and igniting a debate are different signals: a story can rise on quiet upvotes, or set off a fast argument that never tops the front page.
Peak comments/hour over any consecutive ~11-minute snapshot pair — the comment history HN itself never exposes. The top of the list is usually one thread briefly exploding. Regenerated at every publish; a live record, not the census.
One row per year — the highest-scoring story submitted on today's calendar date, with its points and source; oldest year sits at the top, this year at the bottom.
The highest-scoring retained story submitted on today’s date, one per year, regenerated daily from the full 2007–2025 census plus partial 2026. A missing year means no eligible retained story for that date.
Hacker News ↗Hacker News’s biggest stories in the selected window — the top posts by score and discussion, ranked.
Top stories by score, regenerated from the corpus each update. “This year” reflects the live capture (which began May 2026). Titles and links only — the discussion lives on Hacker News.
The best on Hacker News ↗One row per topic, showing the single highest-scoring thread whose title matches that topic keyword, with its all-time point total and source domain.
The single highest-scoring thread whose title matches each topic (keyword-approximate). Titles and links only.
Hacker News ↗Less about what’s discussed — more about how the site itself behaves, for the curious.
Each dot is a topic, placed right for higher average score (approval) and up for more comments per upvote, a rough proxy for how contested it is.
Right = more upvoted; up = more comments per upvote (a contention proxy). AI & open source are loved and calm; Apple, startups & crypto draw more argument. Census, keyword-approximate.
Read the debates on Hacker News ↗Each line links a technology's rank by how often it's mentioned (left) to its rank by average score (right); the more the lines cross, the more the two rankings disagree.
✦ Insights Rust received 2,810 mentions and an average score of 43.7, representing the rarest talk with highest esteem.
Left ranks by how often a tech is mentioned; right by average score per mention. Crossing lines = loud ≠ loved. Census, keyword-approximate (“rust”, “java”, etc.).
See how HN rates these ↗Each polygon is a post type across five structural measures; axes are scaled to the top type, so shapes compare profiles while the legend carries the real numbers.
✦ Insights Ask HN posts received significantly more comments and discussion per upvote than Show HN or Plain link stories.
Census era, structural metrics only (no sentiment). Each axis is scaled to the highest of the three types — the shape shows the profile, the legend carries the real numbers. Averages, not medians; a few viral posts lift every type.
See Show HN & Ask HN on Hacker News ↗Each bar is a title-length band, in characters; its height is the share of stories in that band that reached 100+ points — an association, confounded by topic.
Median story still scores ~2 in every band — the edge is purely on the front-page tail. Association, confounded by topic and big-brand launches; not a lever.
HN title guidelines ↗Each cell crosses a weekday (rows) with a four-hour UTC block (columns); brighter means a higher share of stories that hit 100+ points, peak cell outlined.
Brighter = higher breakout rate; the outlined cell is the observed peak (Sun 12–16 UTC, ~5.0%). Fewer competing submissions may contribute, but this view does not isolate a causal timing effect. Times are UTC; historical 2007–2018 window.
See what’s new on Hacker News ↗Each bar shows the share of submitted links whose final retained record is marked dead or deleted. The archive does not establish when, why, or how that status changed.
Final stored dead/deleted share: URL shorteners 97% (bit.ly 99.7%, goo.gl 99.6%, youtu.be 94%) versus 21% for all links and 2% for the listed primary-source domains (arXiv, Nature, EFF). The corpus does not preserve moderation timing or reason, so this is not evidence of automatic filtering or removal on arrival. Census 2007–2018.
HN submission guidelines ↗This comparison separates plain-link titles beginning “I / We / My / Our…” from every other plain link, then reports average final points and comments.
This is descriptive, not a writing prescription. Averages are sensitive to breakout stories, and topic, source, author history, and selection effects may explain part of the difference. Population: live plain-link stories in the 2007–2018 census.
HN title guidelines ↗Each line tracks a topic's yearly rank among HN titles, #1 at top; follow a line's rise or fall and read a crossing as one topic overtaking another.
✦ Insights AI / LLM first reached the top title-share rank in 2017 and held it from 2019 through partial 2026.
Ranks compare within-year title shares, not front-page position, readership, or importance. The retained corpus is complete through 2025; 2026 is partial.
Hacker News ↗The line is the yearly share of retained HN story titles matching bitcoin, crypto, or blockchain. Peaks describe title attention, not asset value, adoption, or cause.
Observed local highs: 2014 1.371%; 2018 2.089%; 2021 1.515%.
Two lines track each source's yearly share of high-scoring (50+) HN links: the solid line is GitHub, the dim line hosted blog platforms.
✦ Insights GitHub’s share of high-score Hacker News links increased significantly from 0.5% to 8.3% between 2008 and 2016.
Hosted personal blogs (Blogspot/WordPress/TypePad) fell 5× as Medium rose and code moved to GitHub. Census-only, share-based — not a coverage artifact.
See GitHub links on Hacker News ↗Each dot is a domain's breakout rate — the share of its HN submissions that scored 100+ — read against the vertical line marking the 4.0% site-wide average.
Personal blogs & trusted institutions dominate; high-volume aggregators (YouTube, Vimeo, news wires) rarely clear 100 points. Census only (2007–2020); domains with 400+ stories. Every rate is a verified claim.
Hacker News ↗Among domains represented by retained stories scoring 100 or more points, GitHub held #1 while TechCrunch, Ars Technica, and NYTimes ranked lower in 2020 than in 2012. Each line shows one plotted domain's within-year rank.
Descriptive rank among domains of retained stories scoring 100+ in each census year. This is not a historical front-page ranking, a measure of reading behavior, or evidence that source type caused engagement.
Two title-only series from the same tracked-topic model: startup/startups and the AI / LLM family (ai, llm, gpt, chatgpt, neural). This is not front-page placement.
✦ InsightAI / LLM-family title share first exceeded startup-family title share in 2017; partial 2026 is 16.6% versus 0.5%.
HN launched in 2007 as “Startup News.” Both lines are annual shares within retained live-story records. The retained corpus is complete through 2025, and 2026 is partial.
See “startup” on Hacker News ↗Each line is one company's yearly share of HN story titles; the y-axis is how often the name appears, so lower means a smaller slice of titles.
Partial 2026: Google 1.209%, Facebook 0.075%, Microsoft 0.576%.
All three terms occupy a smaller share in partial 2026 than in 2007. This is descriptive title vocabulary and does not identify a cause.
See these on Hacker News ↗Three keyword families — ChatGPT, LLM/LLMs, and agent/agents/agentic — are plotted as yearly shares of retained HN titles. The generic agent family cannot isolate AI-agent usage, so interpret it as vocabulary rather than a clean topic measure.
Partial 2026: ChatGPT 0.460%, LLM / LLMs 2.399%, Agent family 6.551%.
Exact title-token shares; the terms can overlap, remain keyword approximations, and partial 2026 is not a complete-year comparison.
See AI agents on Hacker News ↗Each line is a programming language's yearly share of retained HN titles; read the slopes across 2007–partial 2026 as title vocabulary, not language adoption.
Partial 2026: Python 0.642%, Rust 1.033%, JavaScript 0.235%.
Exact title-token shares; language names are keyword approximations, and 2026 is partial.
See “rust” on Hacker News ↗The line is the share of each year's retained HN story titles containing the phrase “open source,” from 2007 through partial 2026.
Partial 2026: Open source 1.904%.
Exact phrase-match shares. The current 2026 value is partial, and nearby events do not establish why the share changed.
See “open source” on Hacker News ↗Each line is one front-end framework term's yearly share of retained HN titles; crossings describe title vocabulary, not technology adoption.
Partial 2026: React 0.213%, Angular 0.010%, jQuery 0.006%.
Exact keyword shares with complete years through 2025 and partial 2026. “React” can also occur as an ordinary verb, so all three series are approximate topic measures.
See React on Hacker News ↗Each line is a tool term's yearly share of retained HN story titles. The sequence describes observed title vocabulary and does not imply substitution or cause.
Partial 2026: Docker 0.152%, Kubernetes 0.153%, Serverless 0.044%.
Exact title-token shares with complete years through 2025 and partial 2026. Sequence and co-movement do not establish product substitution or cause.
See Docker on Hacker News ↗Each line tracks one database term's yearly share of retained HN titles; slopes describe title vocabulary rather than adoption or market share.
Partial 2026: Postgres 0.375%, MongoDB 0.023%, NoSQL 0.004%.
Exact keyword shares with complete years through 2025 and partial 2026. These are title mentions, not database adoption or market share.
See Postgres on Hacker News ↗Two ranked lists of title words — Rising and Fading — with each word's share of titles and how many percentage points it moved from the 2014–16 census to the partial 2026 corpus.
Auto-discovered — the title words whose share of titles moved most from the census (2014–16) to the live, partial 2026 corpus. Share-based (era-safe); HN post-type words and stopwords removed. Each links to its Hacker News search.
Hacker News ↗Each stem is one named security event; its height is that event's peak-month share of HN titles, all rising from the same 0% baseline.
✦ Insights Heartbleed reached 2.28% of titles in April 2014, with a peak share that rose from 0.
Named-event keywords are absent for years, then dominate in the exact month of disclosure. The absolute share is the signal — the from-zero z-score is degenerate.
See Heartbleed on Hacker News ↗Each row is a topic pair on a fixed −1 to +1 correlation axis. Hollow marks use monthly title-share levels; filled marks use month-to-month changes after first-difference detrending.
The hollow neutral mark uses monthly title-share levels. The filled accent mark uses first differences—the change from one month to the next—to reduce shared long-run trend. Both use Pearson r on the same fixed −1 to +1 scale.
These coefficients describe linear co-movement in the retained monthly title-share series. They do not show that one topic influenced another, and sampling noise or other events can affect either estimate.
The line is average comments per story each year, plotted across the full census from 2007 on the left to 2017 on the right.
✦ Insights Comments per story increased significantly, rising from 3.2 in 2007 to 7.8 in 2017, demonstrating a 2.4-fold expansion.
Comment volume grew ~32× while stories grew ~13× across the census. Census-complete; the cultural-vs-UI cause is not established.
HN’s very first item ↗Each line tracks one depth bucket's yearly share of all comments — top-level versus replies nested four-plus deep; watch where they cross.
✦ Insights Top-level comments decreased from 48 percent in 2007 to 21 percent by 2018, while deep threads increased around 2015.
Climbing every comment’s parent chain to its story: top-level comments fell as depth-4+ replies grew, crossing ~2015. Census 2007–2018 (every comment); the cultural-vs-UI cause isn’t established.
HN comment guidelines ↗Each bar is a comment-tree depth; its height is the share of comments at that depth that drew at least one reply, in the 2016 census.
✦ Insights Reply probability increased from 46.2 percent at depth 1 to 51.3 percent at depths of 10 beyond.
A reply is about as likely at depth 6 as at the top — even rising to 51% at depth 10+. Census 2016; this is why threads got so deep, and it means the never-replied comments are the short ones, not the deep ones.
How HN threads work ↗Each line is a keyword's yearly share of HN titles — NSA and COVID — sitting near zero except for one sharp spike, then settling back.
✦ Insights COVID reached 3.4% of titles in 2020, marking the largest single-event spike observed.
The world surfaces sharply in the conversation, then fades — Snowden (2013), the pandemic (2020), the invasion of Ukraine (2022), all census-exact from the frozen 2007–2022 census. Ukraine's spike was held back until 2022 finished crawling — the thin early sample read 0.6%; the closed census says 1.1%, nearly double. We don't chart a number until we can stand behind it.
See these on Hacker News ↗Each bar is a leaderboard size; its height is the share of census stories that land on both the points-ranked and comments-ranked top list at that size.
✦ Insights The top 500 stories show a 35 percent overlap with comment-ranked top lists.
Ranking the census by points vs by comments gives near-different lists — 16–35% overlap across sizes — and 37 of the 100 most-discussed are Ask HN (mostly “Who is hiring”), though Ask HN is ~3.5% of posts. Discussion and approval are different axes.
The hiring threads on HN ↗