About
About Us
Track HN is a Hacker News analytics platform that captures continuous snapshots of score, rank, and comment count for every front-page story. The dataset has been collecting data since 2023, recording how stories gain traction, peak, and decline—enabling research into Show HN launch velocity, Ask HN discussion patterns, user activity, and topic trends over time.
How Track HN works
Track HN connects to the official Hacker News API via real-time Server-Sent Events (SSE) feeds. When a story appears on the front page, the system begins recording snapshots of its score, rank position, and comment count at regular intervals. This produces a time-series history for each story, stored in a PostgreSQL database available for dashboards, reports, and direct SQL queries.
What Track HN does
- Historical tracking — view score, rank, and comment history over time for every story
- Dashboards and reports — ready-made views for exploring stories, trends, and activity with drill-down detail
- User activity — check posting history, activity patterns, and reputation trends for HN users
- Direct DB access — connect to our database directly and run your own queries (beta)
- Browser extension — overlays score/rank history charts on news.ycombinator.com
- @TrackHN on X — a bot posting trending stories, score milestones, front page alerts, and weekly recaps
- Topic radar — spot topic shifts earlier with AI-powered trend signals
- Sentiment analysis — analyze sentiment in active discussions with AI-powered signals over time
- Newsletter and alerts — weekly summaries and alerts for keywords, competitors, and milestones
- Fuzzy search — advanced search across stories and comments, including fuzzy matching
Built for HN power users
Developers, indie creators, founders, investors, and researchers who care about how stories move through the Hacker News ecosystem. We optimize for clarity over flash—compact data density, precise labels, and minimal UI chrome.
Browse our Hacker News research reports or see pricing plans for Pro and Pro Deep features.
Contact
Questions or feedback? Email us at [email protected] or reach out on X / Twitter.