Show HN: 20 years of Hacker News discussions, clustered and visualized

#1

Post by BohdanPetryshyn » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 10:38 AM UTC

We took the top 3 HN stories every day since October 2006 (~21K stories total), ran topic clustering on them, and visualized how topics rise and fall over time.

You can zoom into any period - some patterns are surprisingly clear (AI overtaking startup culture as HN's top topic, crypto's rise and fall, remote work spiking with COVID).

Happy to answer questions about the methodology.

Show HN: 20 years of Hacker News discussions, clustered and visualized
app.lenzy.ai

Re: Show HN: 20 years of Hacker News discussions, clustered and visualized

#2

Post by BohdanPetryshyn » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 10:52 AM UTC

Yeah it's a bit slow right now. Some queries were never meant to handle public traffic. Does it load ok for you folks?

Re: Show HN: 20 years of Hacker News discussions, clustered and visualized

#3

Post by MrCoffee7 » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 12:20 PM UTC

This is really great! One thing I noticed is that there seem to be some formatting problems when I actually go to view a thread, as I see many alphanumeric strings sprinkled in the text that looks like they probably had some kind of formatting information.

Re: Show HN: 20 years of Hacker News discussions, clustered and visualized

#4

Post by BohdanPetryshyn » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 12:22 PM UTC

MrCoffee7 wrote: post #3

This is really great! One thing I noticed is that there seem to be some formatting problems when I actually go to view a thread, as I see many alphanumeric strings sprinkled in the text that looks like they probably had some kind of formatting information.

Thanks for reporting, I'll check!

Re: Show HN: 20 years of Hacker News discussions, clustered and visualized

#5

Post by Remi_Etien » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 12:23 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Show HN: 20 years of Hacker News discussions, clustered and visualized

#6

Post by Degenroll » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Show HN: 20 years of Hacker News discussions, clustered and visualized

#7

Post by alanne » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 7:36 PM UTC

Really nice, thanks. You can sure tell when AI went from a CS class to real world.

Re: Show HN: 20 years of Hacker News discussions, clustered and visualized

#8

Post by boricj » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 7:44 PM UTC

This appears to be organized top-down, with categories as the entry point. How do we reverse-lookup a story? That is, given a story, how can I find it (if it's there) and walk it back up into its category?

Re: Show HN: 20 years of Hacker News discussions, clustered and visualized

#9

Post by BohdanPetryshyn » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 10:55 PM UTC

boricj wrote: post #8

This appears to be organized top-down, with categories as the entry point. How do we reverse-lookup a story? That is, given a story, how can I find it (if it's there) and walk it back up into its category?

Interesting, I wanted to add that soon actually. What’s your use case?

Re: Show HN: 20 years of Hacker News discussions, clustered and visualized

#10

Post by boricj » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 12:46 AM UTC

BohdanPetryshyn wrote: post #9

boricj wrote: post #8

This appears to be organized top-down, with categories as the entry point. How do we reverse-lookup a story? That is, given a story, how can I find it (if it's there) and walk it back up into its category?

Interesting, I wanted to add that soon actually. What’s your use case?

I have stories (assuming that they've made the cut) that are either in my favorites or that I've submitted, that I'd like to know how they were classified and alongside what other stories. So instead of browsing this from the outside in, I'd browse it from the inside out.