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).
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.
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?
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.
