Show HN: Hacker Atlas - A map of what Hacker News talks about | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Hacker Atlas - A map of what Hacker News talks about

hackeratlas.com

88 pointsandrearitossa41 comments

I built a tool to explore HN topics and how they change over time.

Currently covers 2024 to today. Is it useful? What's missing?

Just a heads up: Your classifier thinks Sun (the company) is actually Sun (the star) and hence it[1] shows up among the posts under Astronomy topic.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49787436

It seems unlikely for a Sun worshiper to develop a philosophy of total brotherhood. Sun worship is usually a primitive superstition religion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNfTwGu9FpU

I had the same problem with "Deep Seek" classified in "web search" :>

I'd list it as limitation of embedding models pipelines. Fetching the link would drastically help, but I wont for now.

Ideas on solving the issue?

Cool idea!

From the name, I was expecting it would be a spatial tool, i.e. some kind of semantic graph I could navigate. I think that is fruitful territory.

Edit: Oh hey! There is almost exactly what I was visualizing, on the Connections page! This is the coolest part, why isn't this on the front page? (Also, please add scroll to zoom!)

As for the grid, I don't see the value of pagination. I'd rather have it all on one page, so I can scroll, Ctrl+F, etc.

Also, like half of the first page are different kinds of AI? If we want to visualize what % of HN stuff is AI, maybe it would make sense to have a meta-category for that.

(Would also be cool if HN itself supported tags you could toggle... show/hide AI :)

I'm also very curious about the evolution of this data over time. The popularity stats seem to be limited to last 30 days. Would be cool to see stats for all time, and maybe filter by range. (Or graphs? Graphs are cool!)

Hi, great feedback!

I took the suggestions: now the connections are first page; cut pagination.

Because 5 of the first 8 topics are AI-related then these topics gets displayed on top when ordering per activity, it might look different in a couple of years :> for sure I could make a graph topic popularity by time and see the major tech trends by time, non trivial would be to compare it against the YC call for startups.

Giving this to YC would be super cool for me! Any suggestion on how to give this to them?

Can you add some statistics about comment lengths averages over time. I swear comments are substantially longer on average today than they were even just 1 year ago, but I might be seeing things. It's easy to assume why this is if it really is the case.

I thought it's a collection of maps (what an atlas is). Instead it's a list, 9 items per page, 23 pages - it's an index. A map lets you see the full picture in a glance. It seems like a missed opportunity to actually make it an atlas.

You might be interested in this: https://hnheatmap.com/

thank you! that's nice looking! one thing from OP that's useful is the topic rather than the post. a mix between the two :)

It is a map :> try again

The count of posts are probably not a metric for quality though (not that you claimed it is), I would like to see at least the number of words accounted for! It might just be the case there are way too many more of two word sentences! :D (And it still would not be a good metric, not sure why I brought up quality exactly, I am just wondering what would actually be a good metric here for that. :P)

The formular righ now for selecting in "the conversation now" is:

(points-1)× e^{-age in days / decay}

I am testing right now with decay: it was 14, I am wondering between 7 and 3.

Do you have suggestions on a different way to do it? Comments?

One thing I've been doing lately is asking for "presidential briefings" on hot threads. I like to read the comments but some threads get really really dense and I just want the gist of it and to get a feel for the general sentiment so I task claude to do a 2 or 3 page max pdf with charts and literally just that a presidential style brief of wtf is going on. It never disappoints =)

This seems like more effort than just skimming

I think it makes sense. I love the system to select comments of youtube and instagram (for different reasons). From a consumer perspective it seems that on yt time matters while for instagram personalization matters a lot.

Here personalization might be the most straightforward way to do this but it destroyes the beauty (for my little experience) of HN.. To have something based on where you're reading would be a crazy cool add on: comments of the text while you read through and final discussion comments.

What do you think?

I'd like to be able to search if any of my content made the list. Also search the entire stack for stuff not likely to rise high enough for its own category but definitely in there, like less popular languages to see what people are saying. I check HN every couple of hours all day long but its amazing the stuff that you can miss.

Then all your feedback for the app is greatly welcome!

Is there a particular language or piece of content you'd try searching for?

Looked at this for 20 seconds and wondered, where's the gigantic, planet-sized blob representing AI?

Is it not present because your classifier breaks things down into subtopics until the weightings are quasi-comparable? Or is it just not as hot a topic as I anecdotally perceive?

Good input: I just deployed a treemap of the topic post count over time.

How does it look? :>

hey hey, get in touch if you want a better embedded graph

https://garphield.com as seen on https://gdb-engines.com/graph/query-languages/

After two minutes, I discovered a post that is valuable for the current project I'm developing. Thank you.

Great to hear :>

Good luck with your project!

Graphs are great for data structures, not so great for visual navigation. As the nodes increase it becomes less comprehensible.

The pace of conversation is a nice graph. Are you still ingesting articles? I see data going back to 2020.

Yep! I deployed some hours ago a daily cronjob to keep up to date.

Great idea. UI looks good and clean as well as mobile-friendly. Thanks for this, bookmarked.

Thanks :>

Pagination limits usability; consider an infinite scroll instead.

Infinite scroll may be illegal in some jurisdictions, and banning users from those areas would also limit usability.

Scrolling through ~200 items is not really "infinite scroll", as in reels/shorts etc.

I honestly thought this was going to be a joke and just be a giant circle that said “AI” haha

I have to confess to a lol on that one tho interestingly enough this page would be useful to just see if theres any non AI articles lately

Check out the trends over time!

Is Wikipedia on there?

this is good, hn's frontpage is sort of tiresome lately

Any way you know I could contact the yc team to give them a quick heads up?

- part of a major reason i want all the IPOs for frontier AI to crash badly is because I want it take out the AI hype completely from HN and go back to interesting stuff

- I am sorry to say this but "here is our new model XYZ with benchmarks ABC" is only interesting the first 65535 times you read it. after that my mind overflows

Most active topic is actually governance and society impacts around AI - in other words AI opinion slop. This actually became super annoying on HN. I‘d love to learn about new technology related to AI (no matter if LLM or other)

then you'd love the tool! You can follow your favourite topics

Go spend an hour scrolling n-gate.com if you really want to know what's needed.

Apple Ecosystem lmao.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com