I like to use Twitter to analyze HN datasets. It's mostly limited to links, because that's what I'm after mostly.
https://twitter.com/newsycombinator https://twitter.com/HackerNews .. And a few other accounts. Try to avoid Bitly wrapped links.
Use something like Greptweet to harvest the tweets and parse out any noise.
You have to look at both the good and the bad.
One thing though: Greptweet has an archive somewhere with a huge trove of tweets that users of the service have searched for, and were thus logged and kept. (Some even go over the 3200 limit). It's a massive Tarball, so set aside time to download it and parse out boring/noisy links.
A lot of HN links are tech-press posts which consist of hearsay and merely proxy the thoughts of others. The recent changes in HN with regards to more academia-style posts is refreshing.