
Show HN: Hacker News Trends - UglyToad
http://eliot-jones.com:5690/
======
UglyToad
Some more background on what this is and why I built it here: [https://eliot-
jones.com/2020/1/hackernews-trends](https://eliot-jones.com/2020/1/hackernews-
trends) And the source code here:
[https://github.com/EliotJones/HnTrends](https://github.com/EliotJones/HnTrends)

As I mention in the blog post this is hosted on the lowest tier DO droplet so
will probably fall over soon.

~~~
jcims
FWIW your cache appears to be case sensitive but searches aren't.

~~~
UglyToad
Good spot, I'll fix it.

------
davidjnelson
Frontend framework comparisons:

React: [http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=React&allwords=tru...](http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=React&allwords=true)

Angular: [http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=Angular&allwords=t...](http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=Angular&allwords=true)

Vue: [http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=Vue&allwords=true](http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=Vue&allwords=true)

~~~
listenallyall
From a purely dataviz standpoint, this is a fail. The optimal visualization
would allow for all 3 terms to be shown on the same graph, or at least the
same page. 3 distinct graphs could be a decent comparison, if the y-axis
remained constant. But since it doesn't, every graph peaks at the same
approximate height, so really the only thing an end-user, seeking a comparison
of similar concepts/terms, would likely find useful is the max displayed value
on the y-axis.

I recognize this is little more than a proof-of-concept at this point, so
perhaps "fail" is a strong word, but hey, it's what the author chose to
submit.

~~~
UglyToad
This is a fair criticism and from the feedback represents a fairly major
missing functionality in the site. For what it's worth I only realised this
might be a useful feature after I finished version 1. From my write up[0]:
"Allow multiple trends on the same plot. It would be interesting to compare
Kubernetes with Docker directly, or PyTorch with Tensorflow to get an idea of
the relative trends in attention".

Initially I built the front end to analyse a single term (recession) rather
than for trend comparison but it would definitely be useful and I'll look at
adding it.

[0]: [https://eliot-jones.com/2020/1/hackernews-trends](https://eliot-
jones.com/2020/1/hackernews-trends)

------
eigenvalue
For the monthly view, it should probably truncate the ending date so as to not
show a partial month number. February just started so it makes every search
term look like it is plunging.

~~~
UglyToad
Yeah it's annoying, I think I'll add a toggle "Display data for incomplete
period" or similar so the user can switch between views (for something like
"coronavirus" the data from the first few days of the month exceeds that from
the previous full month so I don't want to discard it entirely).

~~~
pbhjpbhj
A simple linear projection could be a good additional option too.

------
brlewis
Slow, steady upward trend for racket: [http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=racket](http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=racket)

Would be nice, though, to compare relative to an evergreen term like
"computer" the way stock performance gets compared to an index.

------
blobs
I assume the amount of HN articles per day has increased over the years since
2007 along with the growth of HN popularity. So, when I see a trend in some
subject would it take that into account? Otherwise it could easily not be a
trend but an increased amount of HN users.

Just curious before I get excited.

~~~
UglyToad
Yeah, peaks in story count nowadays are relatively smaller than peaks from
2007-2009ish. You can use the "Display as % of stories" button which is right
of the "Group data by" drop-down to show the data as a % of
daily/weekly/monthly stories posted to the site.

------
ssalka
HN Bitcoin indicator [http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=BITCOIN&allwords=t...](http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=BITCOIN&allwords=true)

------
lancewiggs
Interesting searches: Bitcoin (2 peaks, now down) Drone (up and down) Machine
learning (post peak) AI (post peak with a sudden new peak) SaaS (steady rise
to steady high, then fall and return) Dropbox - rise and gradual fall Quora -
sharp start, low gradual fall Kickstarter - stunning fall over time

and so on. These & Uber, Slack, Tesla and other company names give a good
picture of how 'exciting' these companies are to this particular market of
tech early adopters, where exciting is defined as either new or controversial,
which is the very definition of "news".

------
kick
Neat:

[http://eliot-jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=APL&allwords=true](http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=APL&allwords=true)

[http://eliot-jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=k&allwords=true](http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=k&allwords=true)

[http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=arrays&allwords=tr...](http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=arrays&allwords=true)

------
masukomi
It's now responding with

    
    
        An error occurred during a connection to eliot-jones.com:5690. SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length.
        
        Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG

~~~
ColinWright
It's been doing that to me right from the beginning[0] and I've been
bewildered as to how people are reading it at all[1].

No one has answered that question, and I've even been downvoted for asking it.
I've given up.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22237285](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22237285)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22245516](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22245516)

------
dullroar
Nice. One thought I had is it would be cool to be able to click on any (non-
zero) point on the graph and see a list of the articles from that day, sort of
a drill-down on WHY was that term peaking in popularity then?

~~~
UglyToad
That's a good idea, thanks. It might challenge my limited JavaScript but it's
definitely worth adding. At the moment you can get the full data from a graph
using the API endpoint. For Tensorflow: [http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/api/results/tensorflow](http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/api/results/tensorflow)

------
jonbaer
Something I found a bit interesting (via trends)[0], did a search for
"coronavirus" and there were a few small bumps several years ago[1]

[0] [http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=coronavirus&allwor...](http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=coronavirus&allwords=true)

[1]
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=23&prefix=true&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=23&prefix=true&query=coronavirus&sort=byDate&type=story)

------
davidjnelson
This is really cool. Seems the backend is a bit slowed down with the traffic.
Would be cool if the graph had more horizontal space on a small phone without
rotating it and re running the query.

------
Schiphol
Shouldn't you provide as a baseline the absolute number of posts? I tried
three different searches and all showed monotonic growth.

~~~
UglyToad
You can use the "Display as % of stories" button just above the results plot
which should account for the growth in the total submissions per day, or did
you mean something else?

~~~
Schiphol
I meant exactly that. Thanks!

~~~
Schiphol
(I apologize, I cannot edit my previous comment from the client I'm currently
using.) I'm not seeing that % option, though. I'd be happy to send you a
screenshot somehow, if it helps.

~~~
UglyToad
That is odd sorry about that, you can email it to me "elioty at hotmail dot co
dot uk" or stick it in a github issue:
[https://github.com/EliotJones/HnTrends](https://github.com/EliotJones/HnTrends)

------
dgudkov

       504 Gateway Time-out
    

When searching for "Google". I assume the number of mentions is too high.

------
lettergram
For those interested, if you'd like to compare trends (by sentiment or
volume), I built a similar application.

[https://hnprofile.com/compare?search=AWS,GCP%20|%20Google%20...](https://hnprofile.com/compare?search=AWS,GCP%20|%20Google%20Cloud,Azure)

~~~
cheesedoodle
Hi, this is cool but you have hijacked the back button!

------
contingencies
Robotics/robot: [http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=robotics%20robot&a...](http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=robotics%20robot&allwords=false)

Potentially interpreted as interest peaking 2015-2019, currently in decline.

~~~
tsukurimashou
I was randomly thinking about that a few days ago, seems to me like robotics
is not seen as the "future" as it was before, that's a shame.

I think the potential for home robots is huge, but people probably now realize
they are also very dangerous because of all the information they could gather
on individuals.

I guess I'll wait for selfhosted decentralized robots then :(

~~~
contingencies
Here is a sarcastic view that has elements of truth.

The old sales is model is consumers owned houses. The could then buy an
'appliance' to last many years for goodly-portion-of-monthly-or-annual-wage,
on the promise it will 'save you time' and 'improve quality of life'.

The new model is consumers rent forever. They buy an 'experience' to last a
second for ripoff-price-but-compares-well-to-drinking-or-theater-tickets, on
the premise it will keep them unfocused and temporarily fulfil their deeply
vacuous lives, thus staving off an expensive shrink or a higher does
prescription of antidepressants.

In this new model, robots will not be owned by consumers, but will be public
service infrastructure. This is because the consumers have nowhere to put them
(don't own a home), move too often to justify purchase, and cannot afford a
substantial outlay anyway.

------
Jap2-0
Every time I try to reach this site I get "This site can’t be reached, eliot-
jones.com took too long to respond." (ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT). Going to the
website without the port works, but apparently the port is necessary to reach
the trends page. Chrome(OS) 79.

------
11thEarlOfMar
It would be illustrative to show the rate (%) as an alternate to the absolute
number of posts.

~~~
UglyToad
This should be possible using the "Display as % of stories" button, or does
that do something different to what you want?

~~~
11thEarlOfMar
That's exactly it. I missed it.

------
sillysaurusx
Neat! Feature request: Let us graph a specific HN member's submission count
per day.

------
tmporter
[http://eliot-jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=--&allwords=true](http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=--&allwords=true)

Searching for "\--" results in an Error page.

~~~
UglyToad
Thanks for the bug report, I should probably add some front end validation for
the search term since in the current design Lucene will only index letters and
numbers (which is a problem for searching languages like C++).

------
ColinWright
How are people reading this? When I try to load it in either Chrome or Firefox
I get "502 Bad Gateway" and "Secure Connection Failed" respectively.

I assume people are somehow accessing this ... how?

------
pixelN
the last data point is a little irritating.

maybe disregarding or scaling the last data point for the whole month would
make the graph smoother

~~~
pixelN
also, i am really enjoy it

it would be nice to add multiple terms for a search to compare them in the
chart

~~~
davidjnelson
Also was trying to compare multiple terms.

------
dpix
HN seems to be much more interested in Trump than it ever was in Obama:

[http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=obama&allwords=tru...](http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=obama&allwords=true) [http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=trump&allwords=tru...](http://eliot-
jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=trump&allwords=true)

------
tsukurimashou
"NSA" keyword gives an interesting result

------
sramsay
Hacker News: Hyperventilating about Rust Since 2010.

------
numlock86
The link is dead for me. Anyone else?

~~~
UglyToad
It should be back now, though you might be running into the same SSL issue
ColinWright was elsewhere in the thread.

------
du_bing
great work! Is it possible to open source the 2.8 Million Hacker News posts
database?

~~~
UglyToad
I definitely want to but I'm not sure what the situation would be with
copyright (or indeed if I'm allowed to use the posts for indexing in the way I
have). I'll email HN and see what they say.

~~~
du_bing
thanks, great to see the data!

------
mesaframe
I don't think Hacker News trends are representation of popularity worldwide.

------
DrFell
Ah trends, the modern replacement for getting it.

------
ColinWright

        Secure Connection Failed
    
        An error occurred during a connection
        to eliot-jones.com:5690. SSL received
        a record that exceeded the maximum
        permissible length.  Error code:
        SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG
    
        Please contact the web site owners to
        inform them of this problem.
    

Can't do that, this will have to do.

~~~
UglyToad
Does Firefox do this by default or is there a setting to upgrade http to
https?

As mentioned briefly on the blog I didn't want to spend any money on this
(currently not employed and living off savings) so it's sitting on the droplet
also running the blog, I assume only 1 thing can run off 443? If that's the
case I won't be looking to enable ssl for this, apologies.

~~~
ColinWright
I have no idea, but I assume that if one asks for https and is only offered
http, that would be a security hole. I just tried asking for http and it
reverted to https.

I can't help, I have no knowledge of these things. Sorry 8-(

~~~
UglyToad
Ah, OK, sorry to hear it doesn't work. It's strange, it shouldn't be
attempting to use https (though for security reasons it should so I assume Ive
been testing against outdated browsers). Sorry.

