rHXN - Show HN: 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite

simonw - 1day 1h ago

Don't miss how this works. It's not a server-side application - this code runs entirely in your browser using SQLite compiled to WASM, but rather than fetching a full 22GB database it instead uses a clever hack that retrieves just "shards" of the SQLite database needed for the page you are viewing.

I watched it in the browser network panel and saw it fetch:

  https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/static-shards/shard_1636.sqlite.gz
  https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/static-shards/shard_1635.sqlite.gz
  https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/static-shards/shard_1634.sqlite.gz

As I paginated to previous days.

It's reminiscent of that brilliant SQLite.js VFS trick from a few years ago: https://github.com/phiresky/sql.js-httpvfs - only that one used HTTP range headers, this one uses sharded files instead.

The interactive SQL query interface at https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/?view=query asks you to select which shards to run the query against, there are 1636 total.

keepamovin - 2h 7m ago

A recent change is I added date spans to the shard checboxes on query view so it's easier to zero dates you want if you have that in mind. Because if your copy isn't local all those network pulls take a while.

The sequence of shards you saw when you paginated to days is faciliated by the static-manifest which maps HN item ID ranges to shards, and since IDs are increasing and a pretty good proxy of time (a "HN clock"), we can also map the shards that we cut up by ID to the time spans their items cover. An in memory table sorted by time is created from the manifest on load so we can easily look up which shard we need when you pick a day.

Funnily enough, this system was thrown off early on by a handful of "ID/timestamp" outliers in the data: items with weird future timestamps (offset by a couple years), or null timestamps. To cleanse our pure data from this noise, and restore proper adjacent-in-time shard cuts we just did a 1/99 percentile grouping and discarded the outliers leaving shards with sensible 'effective' time spans.

Sometimes we end up fetching two shards when you enter a new day because some items' comments exist "cross shard". We needed another index for that and it lives in cross-shard-index.bin which is just a list of 4-byte item IDs that have children in more than 1 shard (2-bytes), which occurs when people have the self-indulgence to respond to comments a few days after a post has died down ;)

Thankfully HN imposes a 2 week horizon for replies so there aren't that many cross-shard comments (those living outside the 2-3 days span of most, recent, shards). But I think there's still around 1M or so, IIRC.

ncruces - 21h 16m ago

A read-only VFS doing this can be really simple, with the right API…

This is my VFS: https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/blob/main/vfs/readervf...

And using it with range requests: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/vfs/readerv...

And having it work with a Zstandard compressed SQLite database, is one library away: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/SaveTheRbtz/zstd-seekable-form...

keepamovin - 11h 35m ago

Your page is served over sqlitevfs with Range queries? Let's try this here.

pdyc - 15h 57m ago

this does not caches the data right? it would always fetch from network? by any chance do you know of solution/extension that caches the data it would make it so much more efficient.

ncruces - 15h 8m ago

The package I'm using in the HTTP example can be configured to cache data: https://github.com/psanford/httpreadat?tab=readme-ov-file#ca...

But, also, SQLite caches data; you can simply increase the page cache.

keepamovin - 16h 19m ago

Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed the sausage being made. There's a little easter egg if you click on the compact disc icon.

And I just now added a 'me' view. Enter your username and it will show your comments/posts on any day. So you can scrub back through your 2006 - 2025 retrospective using the calendar buttons.

oblosys - 6h 30m ago

I almost got tricked into trying to figure out what was Easter eggy about August 9 2015 :-) There's a clarifying tooltip on the link, but it is mostly obscured by the image's "Archive" title attribute.

keepamovin - 6h 27m ago

Oh, shit that was the problem! You solved the bug! I was trying to figure out why the right tooltip didn't display. A linked wrapped in an image wrapped in an easter egg! Or something. Ha, thank you. Will fix :)

edit: Fixed! Also I just pushed a new version with a Dec 29th Data Dump, so ... updates - yay!

oblosys - 30m 7s ago

Happy to help!

nextaccountic - 23h 31m ago

Is there anything more production grade built around the same idea of HTTP range requests like that sqlite thing? This has so much potential

Humphrey - 22h 39m ago

Yes — PMTiles is exactly that: a production-ready, single-file, static container for vector tiles built around HTTP range requests.

I’ve used it in production to self-host Australia-only maps on S3. We generated a single ~900 MB PMTiles file from OpenStreetMap (Australia only, up to Z14) and uploaded it to S3. Clients then fetch just the required byte ranges for each vector tile via HTTP range requests.

It’s fast, scales well, and bandwidth costs are negligible because clients only download the exact data they need.

https://docs.protomaps.com/pmtiles/

simonw - 22h 32m ago

PMTiles is absurdly great software.

Humphrey - 22h 28m ago

I know right! I'd never heard of HTTP Range requests until PMTiles - but gee it's an elegant solution.

keepamovin - 12h 39m ago

Hadn't seen PMTiles before, but that matches the mental model exactly! I chose physical file sharding over Range Requests on a single db because it felt safer for 'dumb' static hosts like CF. - less risk of a single 22GB file getting stuck or cached weirdly. Maybe it would work

hyperbolablabla - 11h 44m ago

My only gripe is that the tile metadata is stored as JSON, which I get is for compatibility reasons with existing software, but for e.g. a simple C program to implement the full spec you need to ship a JSON parser on top of the PMTiles parser itself.

keepamovin - 5h 42m ago

How would you store it?

seg_lol - 8h 8m ago

A JSON parser is less than a thousand lines of code.

Diti - 3h 14m ago

And where most of CPU time will be wasted in, if you care about profiling/improving responsiveness.

nextaccountic - 19h 41m ago

That's neat, but.. is it just for cartographic data?

I want something like a db with indexes

jtbaker - 14h 8m ago

Look into using duckdb with remote http/s3 parquet files. The parquet files are organized as columnar vectors, grouped into chunks of rows. Each row group stores metadata about the set it contains that can be used to prune out data that doesn’t need to be scanned by the query engine. https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/guides/performance/indexing

LanceDB has a similar mechanism for operating on remote vector embeddings/text search.

It’s a fun time to be a dev in this space!

simonw - 23h 27m ago

There was a UK government GitHub repo that did something interesting with this kind of trick against S3 but I checked just now and the repo is a 404. Here are my notes about what it did: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/7/sqlite-s3vfs/

Looks like it's still on PyPI though: https://pypi.org/project/sqlite-s3vfs/

You can see inside it with my PyPI package explorer: https://tools.simonwillison.net/zip-wheel-explorer?package=s...

simonw - 22h 34m ago

I recovered it from https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/origin/directory... and pushed a fresh copy to GitHub here:

https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-s3vfs

This comment was helpful in figuring out how to get a full Git clone out of the heritage archive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37516523#37517378

Here's a TIL I wrote up of the process: https://til.simonwillison.net/github/software-archive-recove...

QuantumNomad_ - 21h 52m ago

I also have a locally cloned copy of that repo from when it was on GitHub. Same latest commit as your copy of it.

From what I see in GitHub in your copy of the repo, it looks like you don’t have the tags.

Do you have the tags locally?

If you don’t have the tags, I can push a copy of the repo to GitHub too and you can get the tags from my copy.

simonw - 21h 41m ago

I don't have the tags! It would be awesome if you could push that.

QuantumNomad_ - 21h 35m ago

Uploaded here:

https://github.com/Quantum-Nomad/sqlite-s3vfs

simonw - 21h 31m ago

Thanks for that, though actually it turns out I had them after all - I needed to run:

  git push --tags origin

QuantumNomad_ - 21h 29m ago

All the better :)

bspammer - 20h 4m ago

Doing all this in an hour is such a good example of how absurdly efficient you can be with LLMs.

socialcommenter - 2h 29m ago

From reading the TIL, it doesn't appear as if Simon used LLM for a large portion of what he did; only the initial suggestion to check the archive, and the web tool to make his process reproducible. Also, if you read the script from his chat with Claude code, the prompt really does the heavy lifting.

Sure, the LLM fills in all the boilerplate and makes an easy-to-use, reproducible tool with loads of documentation, and credit for that. But is it not more accurate to say that Simon is absurdly efficient, LLM or sans LLM? :)

AceJohnny2 - 22h 18m ago

didn't you do something similar for Datasette, Simon?

simonw - 22h 2m ago

Nothing smart with HTTP range requests yet - I have https://lite.datasette.io which runs the full Python server app in the browser via WebAssembly and Pyodide but it still works by fetching the entire SQLite file at once.

AceJohnny2 - 22h 5s ago

oh! I must've been confused with your TIL where you linked to an explainer of this technique

https://simonwillison.net/2021/May/2/hosting-sqlite-database...

https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2021/hosting-sqlite-database...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27016630

billywhizz - 17h 51m ago

i played around with this a while back. you can see a demo here. it also lets you pull new WAL segments in and apply them to the current database. never got much time to go any further with it than this.

https://just.billywhizz.io/sqlite/demo/#https://raw.githubus...

__turbobrew__ - 17h 59m ago

gdal vsis3 dynamically fetches chunks of rasters from s3 using range requests. It is the underlying technology for several mapping systems.

There is also a file format to optimize this https://cogeo.org/

ericd - 23h 21m ago

This is somewhat related to a large dataset browsing service a friend and I worked on a while back - we made index files, and the browser ran a lightweight query planner to fetch static chunks which could be served from S3/torrents/whatever. It worked pretty well, and I think there’s a lot of potential for this style of data serving infra.

omneity - 19h 31m ago

I tried to implement something similar to optimize sampling semi-random documents from (very) large datasets on Huggingface, unfortunately their API doesn't support range requests well.

mootothemax - 17h 1m ago

This is pretty much well what is so remarkable about parquet files; not only do you get seekable data, you can fetch only the columns you want too.

I believe that there are also indexing opportunities (not necessarily via eg hive partitioning) but frankly - am kinda out of my depth pn it.

tlarkworthy - 16h 36m ago

Parquet/iceberg

6510 - 21h 3m ago

I want to see a bittorrent version :P

nextaccountic - 19h 43m ago

Maybe webtorrent-based?

maxloh - 17h 32m ago

I am curios why they don't use a single file and HTTP Range Requests instead. PMTiles (a distribution of OpenStreetMap) uses that.

keepamovin - 16h 16m ago

This would be a neat idea to try. Want to add a PR? Bench different "hackends" to see how DuckDB, SQLite shards, or range queries perform?

meander_water - 18h 46m ago

I love this so much, on my phone this is much faster than actual HN (I know it's only a read-only version).

Where did you get the 22GB figure from? On the site it says:

> 46,399,072 items, 1,637 shards, 8.5GB, spanning Oct 9, 2006 to Dec 28, 2025

amitmahbubani - 18h 7m ago

> Where did you get the 22GB figure from?

The HN post title (:

keepamovin - 16h 18m ago

22GB is non-gzipped.

meander_water - 18h 5m ago

Hah, well that's embarrassing

tehlike - 1day 1h ago

Vfs support is amazing.

sodafountan - 17h 51m ago

The GitHub page is no longer available, which is a shame because I'm really interested in how this works.

How was the entirety of HN stored in a single SQLite database? In other words, how was the data acquired? And how does the page load instantly if there's 22GB of data having to be downloaded to the browser?

keepamovin - 16h 14m ago

You can see it now, forgot to make it public.

- 1. download_hn.sh - bash script that queries BigQuery and saves the data to *.json.gz

- 2. etl-hn.js - does the sharding and ID -> shard map, plus the user stats shards.

- 3. Then either npx serve docs or upload to CloudFlare Pages.

The ./toool/s/predeploy-checks.sh script basically runs the entire pipeline. You can do it unattended with AUTO_RUN=true

sodafountan - 14h 18m ago

Awesome, I'll take a look

yread - 23h 47m ago

I wonder how much smaller it could get with some compression. You could probably encode "This website hijacks the scrollbar and I don't like it" comments into just a few bits.

Rendello - 22h 37m ago

The hard-coded dictionary wouldn't be much stranger than Brotli's:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27160590

maxbond - 15h 19m ago

You can use a BPE variant like SentencePiece to identify these patterns rather than hard coding them.

jacquesm - 22h 41m ago

That's at least 45%, then you can leave out all of my comments and you're left with only 5!

hamburglar - 18h 33m ago

It might be a neat experiment to use ai to produce canonicalized paraphrasings of HN arguments so they could be compared directly and compress well.

rossant - 14h 19m ago

Guilty.

kamranjon - 20h 6m ago

It'd be great if you could add it to Kiwix[1] somehow (not sure what the process is for that but 100rabbits figured it out for their site) - I use it all the time now that I have a dumb phone - I have the entirety of wikipedia, wiktionary and 100rabbits all offline.

https://kiwix.org/en/

codazoda - 17h 21m ago

I love that you have 100r.ca on that short list.

endofreach - 15h 49m ago

what dumb phone do you use?

and why do you want wikipedia in your pocket, but not a smartphone? where do you draw the line?

(doing a lot of work in that area, so i am asking to learn from someone who might think alike)

kamranjon - 15h 31m ago

I use the Mudita Kompakt specifically cause it allows sideloading so I can still have a few extras. Right now I have Kiwix and Libby. It works really well.

I have a $10 a month plan from US cellular with only 2gigs so I try to keep everything offline that I can.

Honestly it's mostly the news... so I draw the line at browser, I'll never install a browser, that's basically something I can do when I sit down at a PC. I read quite a bit and I like to have the ability to look up a word or a historical event or some reference from something I read using Kiwix and it's been great for that, just needed to add a 512gb micro sd card. And Libby I just use at the gym when I'm on the treadmill.

zkmon - 1day 1h ago

Similar to Single-page applications (SPA), single-table application (STA) might become a thing. Just a shard a table on multiple keys and serve the shards as static files, provided that the data is Ok to share, similar to sharing static html content.

jhd3 - 1day 6m ago

[The Baked Data architectural pattern](https://simonwillison.net/2021/Jul/28/baked-data/)

jesprenj - 1day 41m ago

do you mean single database? it'd be quite hard if not impossible to make applications using a single table (no relations). reddit did it though, they have a huge table of "things" iirc.

mburns - 23h 55m ago

That is a common misconception.

> Next, we've got more than just two tables. The quote/paraphrase doesn't make it clear, but we've got two tables per thing. That means Accounts have an "account_thing" and an "account_data" table, Subreddits have a "subreddit_thing" and "subreddit_data" table, etc.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/z9sm8/comment/...

rplnt - 22h 45m ago

And the important lesson from that the k/v-like aspect of it. That the "schema" is horizontal (is that a thing?) and not column-based. But I actually only read it on their blog IIRC and never even got the full details - that there's still a third ID column. Thanks for the link.

Paul-E - 1day 1h ago

That's pretty neat!

I did something similar. I build a tool[1] to import the Project Arctic Shift dumps[2] of reddit into sqlite. It was mostly an exercise to experiment with Rust and SQLite (HN's two favorite topics). If you don't build a FTS5 index and import without WAL (--unsafe-mode), import of every reddit comment and submission takes a bit over 24 hours and produces a ~10TB DB.

SQLite offers a lot of cool json features that would let you store the raw json and operate on that, but I eschewed them in favor of parsing only once at load time. THat also lets me normalize the data a bit.

I find that building the DB is pretty "fast", but queries run much faster if I immediately vacuum the DB after building it. The vacuum operation is actually slower than the original import, taking a few days to finish.

[1] https://github.com/Paul-E/Pushshift-Importer

[2] https://github.com/ArthurHeitmann/arctic_shift/blob/master/d...

Xyra - 12h 25m ago

Holy cow, I didn't know getting reddit was that straightforward. I am building public readonly-SQL+vector databases optimized for exploring high-quality public commons with Claude Code (https://exopriors.com/scry), I so cannot wait until some funding source comes in and I can upgrade to a $1500/month Hetzner server and pay the ~$1k to embed all that.

s_ting765 - 1day 1h ago

You could check out SQLite's auto_vacuum which reclaims space without rebuilding the entire db https://sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_auto_vacuum

Paul-E - 21h 26m ago

I haven't tested that, so I'm not sure if it would work. The import only inserts rows, it doesn't delete, so I don't think that is the cause of fragmentation. I suspect this line in the vacuum docs:

> The VACUUM command may change the ROWIDs of entries in any tables that do not have an explicit INTEGER PRIMARY KEY.

means SQLite does something to organize by rowid and that this is doing most of the work.

Reddit post/comment IDs are 1:1 with integers, though expressed in a different base that is more friendly to URLs. I map decoded post/comment IDs to INTEGER PRIMARY KEYs on their respective tables. I suspect the vacuum operation sorts the tables by their reddit post ID and something about this sorting improves tables scans, which in turn helps building indices quickly after standing up the DB.

carbocation - 1day 2h ago

That repo is throwing up a 404 for me.

Question - did you consider tradeoffs between duckdb (or other columnar stores) and SQLite?

keepamovin - 1day 2h ago

No, I just went straight to sqlite. What is duckdb?

simonw - 1day 1h ago

One interesting feature of DuckDB is that it can run queries against HTTP ranges of a static file hosted via HTTPS, and there's an official WebAssembly build of it that can do that same trick.

So you can dump e.g. all of Hacker News in a single multi-GB Parquet file somewhere and build a client-side JavaScript application that can run queries against that without having to fetch the whole thing.

You can run searches on https://lil.law.harvard.edu/data-gov-archive/ and watch the network panel to see DuckDB in action.

keepamovin - 16h 41m ago

In that case, then using duckdb might be even more performant than using what we’re doing here.

It would be an interesting experiment to add the duckdb hackend

fsiefken - 1day 1h ago

DuckDB is an open-source column-oriented Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). It's designed to provide high performance on complex queries against large databases in embedded configuration.

It has transparent compression built-in and has support for natural language queries. https://buckenhofer.com/2025/11/agentic-ai-with-duckdb-and-s...

"DICT FSST (Dictionary FSST) represents a hybrid compression technique that combines the benefits of Dictionary Encoding with the string-level compression capabilities of FSST. This approach was implemented and integrated into DuckDB as part of ongoing efforts to optimize string storage and processing performance." https://homepages.cwi.nl/~boncz/msc/2025-YanLannaAlexandre.p...

cess11 - 1day 2h ago

It is very similar to SQLite in that it can run in-process and store its data as a file.

It's different in that it is tailored to analytics, among other things storage is columnar, and it can run off some common data analytics file formats.

1vuio0pswjnm7 - 21h 59m ago

"What is duckdb?"

duckdb is a 45M dynamically-linked binary (amd64)

sqlite3 1.7M static binary (amd64)

DuckDB is a 6yr-old project

SQLite is a 25yr-old project

1vuio0pswjnm7 - 19h 13m ago

I like SQLite

jacquesm - 22h 35m ago

Maybe it got nuked by MS? The rest of their repo's are up.

keepamovin - 14h 15m ago

Hey jacquesm! No, I just forgot to make it public.

BUT I did try to push the entire 10GB of shards to GitHub (no LFS, no thanks, money), and after the 20 minutes compressing objects etc, "remote hang up unexpectedly"

To be expected I guess. I did not think GH Pages would be able to do this. So have been repeating:

  wrangler pages deploy docs --project-name static-news --commit-dirty=true

on changes and first time CF Pages user here, much impressed!

jacquesm - 12h 36m ago

Pretty neat project. I never thought you could do this in the first place, very much inspiring. I've made a little project that stores all of its data locally but still runs in the browser to protect against take downs and because I don't think you should store your precious data online more than you have to, eventually it all rots away. Your project takes this to the next level.

keepamovin - 11h 5m ago

Thanks, bud, that means a lot! Would like to see your versions of the data stored offline idea, it's very cool.

jacquesm - 5h 20m ago

pianojacq.com

It's super simple, really, far less impressive than what you've built there.

3eb7988a1663 - 1day 2h ago

While I suspect DuckDB would compress better, given the ubiquity of SQLite, it seems a fine standard choice.

peheje - 12h 22m ago

the data is dominated by big unique TEXT columns, unsure how that can much compress better when grouped - but would be interesting to know

3eb7988a1663 - 4h 57m ago

I was thinking more the numeric columns which have pre-built compression mechanisms to handle incrementing columns or long runs of identical values. For sure less total data than the text, but my prior is that the two should perform equivalently on the text, so the better compression on numbers should let duckdb pull ahead.

I had to run a test for myself, and using sqlite2duckdb (no research, first search hit), and using randomly picked shard 1636, the sqlite.gz was 4.9MB, but the duckdb.gz was 3.7MB.

The uncompressed sizes favor sqlite, which does not make sense to me, so not sure if duckdb keeps around more statistics information. Uncompressed sqlite 12.9MB, duckdb 15.5MB

keepamovin - 16h 43m ago

i forgot to set repo to public. Fixed now

linhns - 1day 2h ago

Not the author here. I’m not sure about DuckDB, but SQLite allows you to simply use a file as a database and for archiving, it’s really helpful. One file, that’s it.

cobolcomesback - 1day 2h ago

DuckDB does as well. A super simplified explanation of duckdb is that it’s sqlite but columnar, and so is better for analytics of large datasets.

formerly_proven - 1day 2h ago

The schema is this: items(id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, type TEXT, time INTEGER, by TEXT, title TEXT, text TEXT, url TEXT

Doesn't scream columnar database to me.

embedding-shape - 1day 1h ago

At a glance, that is missing (at least) a `parent` or `parent_id` attribute which items in HN can have (and you kind of need if you want to render comments), see http://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/46436741

agolliver - 1day 1h ago

Edges are a separate table

kristianp - 21h 51m ago

I tried "select * from items limit 10" and it is slowly iterating through the shards without returning. I got up to 60 shards before I stopped. Selecting just one shard makes that query return instantly. As mentioned elsewhere I think duckdb can work faster by only reading the part of a parquet file it needs over http.

I was getting an error that the users and user_domains tables aren't available, but you just need to change the shard filter to the user stats shard.

piperswe - 18h 41m ago

Doesn't `LIMIT` just limit the amount of rows returned, rather than the amount read & processed?

SQLite - 10h 17m ago

That depends on the query. SQLite tries to use LIMIT to restrict the amount of reading that it does. It is often successful at that. But some queries, by their very nature, logically require reading the whole input in order to compute the correct answer, regardless of whether or not there is a LIMIT clause.

lucb1e - 18h 19m ago

That's what it does, but if I'm not mistaken (at least in my experience with MariaDB) it'll also return immediately once it ran up to the limit and not try to process further rows. If you have an expensive subquery in the SELECT (...) AS `column_name`, it won't run that for every row before returning the first 10 (when using LIMIT 10) unless you ORDERed BY that column_name. Other components like the WHERE clause might also require that it reads every row before finding the ten matches. So mostly yes but not necessarily

faxmeyourcode - 15h 7m ago

The limit clause isn't official/standard ansi sql, so it's up to the rdbms to implement. Your assumption is true for bigquery (infamously) but not true for things like snowflake, duckdb, etc.

ncruces - 21h 24m ago

That's odd. If it was a VFS, that's not what I'd expect would happen. Maybe it's not a VFS?

keepamovin - 14h 18m ago

What is a VFS?

ComputerGuru - 3h 22m ago

Awesome work.

Minor bug/suggestion: right-aligned text inputs (eg the username input on the “me” page) aren’t ideal since they are often obscured by input helpers (autocomplete or form fill helper icons).

Xyra - 13h 48m ago

Similar in spirit to a recent tool I recently posted Show HN on, https://exopriors.com/scry. You can use Claude Code to SQL+vector query HackerNews and many other high quality public commons sites, exceptionally well-indexed and usually 5+ minute query timeout limits, so you can run seriously large research queries, to rapidly refine your worldview (particular because you can do easily to EXHAUSTIVE exploration).

keepamovin - 8h 6m ago

This looks cool but can you make a "Google Search Box" page where I don't have to sign in but can use it? It's just a bit of friction and I feel unbothered to overcome it. It's not personal to you - it's just how I feel about anything that looks unknown and interesting I just want to try, not have to sign up. For now. You know?

visarga - 9h 10m ago

I like your concept of indexing high quality sources for RAG. For many queries we might not need the usual search engines.

m-p-3 - 22h 24m ago

Looks like the repo was taken down (404).

That's too bad, I'd like to see the inner-working with a subset of data, even with placeholders for the posts and comments.

3abiton - 22h 10m ago

That was fast. I was looking into recent HN datasets, and they are impossible find.

xnx - 22h 6m ago

Complete and continuously updated: https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIG1heCh0a...

gettingoverit - 18h 23m ago

If the last story on HN was at December 26, that is.

rolymath - 14h 13m ago

Continuously updated != instantly updated

dspillett - 8h 46m ago

Continuously would suggest to me that the data is never far out of date, and a few days might be considered far in this case.

Perhaps “regularly updated” would be less contentious wordage?

scsh - 17h 47m ago

It's available on BigQuery and is updated frequently enough(daily I think).

octoberfranklin - 17h 12m ago

But why would they take it down?

keepamovin - 16h 41m ago

Sorry i just forgot to set it to public! It’s there now

WadeGrimridge - 10h 30m ago

threw some heatmaps together of post volume and average score by day and time (15min intervals)

story volume (all time): https://ibb.co/pBTTRznP

average score (all time): https://ibb.co/KcvVjx8p

story volume (since 2020): https://ibb.co/cKC5d7Pp

average score (since 2020): https://ibb.co/WpN20kfh

WadeGrimridge - 10h 15m ago

added median too.

median score (all time): https://ibb.co/gZV5QVMG

median score (since 2020): https://ibb.co/Gfv8T7k8

keepamovin - 8h 31m ago

This is fascinating, I love this! What do you create these heat maps with? Did you use the BigQuery data or download from the site?

WadeGrimridge - 7h 37m ago

thanks! i downloaded them and used python to make these

keepamovin - 6h 43m ago

So cool! Would it be impossible fro me to use them on the Archive stats page (https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/?view=archive) ? If you're okay with that any links/credit line details?

Totally cool if not, just super interesting!

WadeGrimridge - 2h 16m ago

yes, please, that'd be cool! you can link my site grimridge.net if you'd like. here are the numbers so you can plot graphs that fit the site's style:

mean (all time): https://katb.in/yutupojerux

mean (since 2020): https://katb.in/omoyibisava

median (all time): https://katb.in/kilopofivet

median (since 2020): https://katb.in/ukefetuyuhi

setnone - 10h 3m ago

can confirm, i'm usually very generous with upvotes on sundays at noon

7777777phil - 9h 21m ago

Absolutely love this!! I have been analyzing a lot of HN data lately [1] so I backtested my hypothesis on your dataset and ran some stats: https://philippdubach.com/standalone/hackerbook-stats/

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46434575

keepamovin - 9h 2m ago

That is so cool! I love that this passion fun project inspired and helped your paper. So cool!

zX41ZdbW - 1day 2h ago

The query tab looks quite complex with all these content shards: https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/?view=query

I have a much simpler database: https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIHRpbWUsI...

embedding-shape - 1day 2h ago

Does your database also runs offline/locally in the browser? Seems to be the reason for the large number of shards.

zX41ZdbW - 16h 43m ago

You can run it locally, but it is a client-server architecture, which means that something has to run behind the browser.

sieep - 1day 1h ago

What a reminder on how text is so much more efficient than video, its crazy! Could you imagine the same amount of knowledge (or dribble) but in video form? I wonder how large that would be.

jacquesm - 22h 40m ago

That's what's so sad about youtube. 20 minute videos to encode a hundred words of usable content to get you to click on a link. The inefficiency is just staggering.

Rendello - 22h 10m ago

Youtube can be excellent for explanations. A picture's worth a thousand words, and you can fit a lot of decent pictures in a 20 minute video. The signal-to-noise can be high, of course.

ComputerGuru - 3h 25m ago

Unfortunately even the videos that do contain helpful imagery are still dominated by huge sections of low entropy.

For example, one of the most useful applications of video over text is appliance or automotive repair, but the ideal format would be an article interspersed with short video sections, not a video with a talking head and some ~static shaky cam taking up most of the time as the individual drones on about mostly unrelated topics or unimportant details yet you can’t skip past it in case there is something actually pertinent covered in that time.

Rendello - 2h 23m ago

Ay, there's the rub. Professional video makes tend to be pushed into making videos for a more general audience, and niche topics are left to first-timers who haven't developed video-making skills and (tend to) go on and on.

I've produced a few videos, and I was shocked at how difficult it was to be clear. I have the same problem with writing, but at least it's restricted in a way video making isn't. There's so many ways to make a video about something, and most of them are wrong!

ivanjermakov - 1day 1h ago

Average high quality 1080p60 video has bitrate of 5Mbps, which is equivalent to 120k English words per second. With average English speech being 150wpm, we end up with text being 50 thousand times more space efficient.

Converting 22GB of uncompressed text into video essay lands us at ~1PB or 1000TB.

keepamovin - 16h 39m ago

Right? 20 years, probably 10s millions of human hours of interactions, and it’s only as much as a couple DVDs.

fsiefken - 1day 31m ago

one could use a video llm to generate the video, diagrams or the stills automatically based on the text. except when it's boardgames playthroughs or programming i just transcribe to text, summarise and read youtube video's.

deskamess - 1day 2m ago

How do you read youtube videos? Very curious as I have been wanting to watch PDF's scroll by slowly on a large TV. I am interested in the workflow of getting a pdf/document into a scrolling video format. These days NotebookLM may be an option but I am curious if there is something custom. If I can get it into video form (mp4) then I can even deliver it via plex.

fsiefken - 19h 48m ago

I use yt-dlp to download the transcript, and if it's not available i can get the audio file and run it through parakeet locally. Then I have the plain text, which could be read out loud (kind of defeating the purpose), but perhaps at triple speed with a computer voice that's still understandble at that speed. I could also summarize it with an llm. With pandoc or typst I can convert to single column or mult column pdf to print or watch on tv or my smart glasses. If I strip the vowels and make the font smaller I can fit more!

One could convert the Markdown/PDF to a very long image first with pandoc+wkhtml, then use ffmpeg to crop and move the viewport slowly over the image, this scrolls at 20 pixels per second for 30s - with the mpv player one could change speed dynamically through keys.

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i long_image.png -vf "crop=iw:ih/10:0:t*20" -t 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p output.mp4

Alternatively one could use a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation / Speedreading / Spritz technique to output to mp4 or use dedicated rsvp program where one can change speed.

One could also output to a braille 'screen'.

Scrolling mp4 text on the the TV or Laptop to read is a good idea for my mother and her macula degeneration, or perhaps I should make use of an easier to see/read magnification browser plugin tool.

Barbing - 1day 17m ago

Can be nice to pull a raw transcript and have it formatted as HTML (formatting/punctuation fixes applied).

Best locally of course to avoid “I burned a lake for this?” guilt.

fsiefken - 19h 52m ago

yes, yt-dlp can download the transcript, and if it's not available i can get the audio file and run it through parakeet locally.

Sn0wCoder - 23h 7m ago

Site does not load on Firefox console error says 'Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: can't access property "wasm", sqlite3 is null'

Guess its common knowledge that SharedArrayBuffer (SQLite wasm) does not work with FF due to Cross-Origin Attacks (i just found out ;).

Once the initial chunk of data loads the rest load almost instantly on Chrome. Can you please fix the GitHub link (current 404) would like to peak at the code. Thank you!

keepamovin - 16h 39m ago

Damn. Will try to fix for FF.

edit: I just tested with FF latest, seems to be working.

Sn0wCoder - 6h 2m ago

Strange now the first few days load (getting a new error) 'Ignoring inability to install OPFS sqlite3_vfs: Cannot install OPFS: Missing SharedArrayBuffer and/or Atomics. The server must emit the COOP/COEP response headers to enable those. See https://sqlite.org/wasm/doc/trunk/persistence.md#coop-coep'

But when go back to the 26th none of the shards will load, error out.

Using Windows 11, FF 146.0.1

Since you tested it seems its just a me problem and thanks for fixing the GitHub link

keepamovin - 4h 40m ago

No I've seen that error too, on Safari. I think it's related to the wasm being sent with wrong headers. CF pages _headers file should be ensuring correctness. Can you try busting your cache (or wait for a new Dec 29 Data dump version coming in a couple minutes), or from incognito to see if that fixes the issue? It's possible an earlier version had stale headers or sth. Idk.

abixb - 1day 1h ago

Wonder if you could turn this into a .zim file for offline browsing with an offline browser like Kiwix, etc. [0]

I've been taking frequent "offline-only-day" breaks to consolidate whatever I've been learning, and Kiwix has been a great tool for reference (offline Wikipedia, StackOverflow and whatnot).

[0] https://kiwix.org/en/the-new-kiwix-library-is-available/

keepamovin - 16h 23m ago

Oh that's a cool idea. If you want to take a crack at writing the script, the repo is open!

Barbing - 1day 22m ago

Oh this should TOTALLY be available to those who are scrolling through sources on the Kiwix app!

diyseguy - 21h 44m ago

link no workie: https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/HackerBook

keepamovin - 15h 46m ago

Fixed now. Forgot to make public. I also added a script:

  ./toool/download-site.mjs --help

To let you download the entire site over HTTPS so you don't need to "build it" by running the pipeline.

That way it's truly offline.

tevon - 1day 1h ago

The link seems to be down, was it taken down?

scsh - 1day 1h ago

Probably just forgot to make it public.

rcarmo - 7h 24m ago

Nice. I wonder if there’s any way to quickly get a view for a whole year.

keepamovin - 4h 40m ago

You mean like stuff ranked per year?

Edit: Good idea! I implemented a "year" selector so all main views (front/show/ask/jobs) will be from that entire year rather than just a single day.

adamszakal - 8h 50m ago

Is it a thing that the design is almost unusable on a mobile phone? The tech making this possible is beyond cool, but it's just presented in such a brutal way for phone users, even though fixing it would be super simple.

keepamovin - 8h 46m ago

Really? Let me know how I can help. What would you like to see fixed?

adamszakal - 2h 24m ago

Just following the ordinary guidelines when doing responsive designs, like increasing the text size and sizes of buttons and inputs, so my fat fingers don't missklick every other try. HN has gotten better, but is still below average, hence why I thought it was some kind of aesthetic choice.

RyJones - 10h 52m ago

Neat. I keep wanting to build something like this for GitHub audit logs, but at ~5 tb, probably a little much

modeless - 19h 19m ago

It's really a shame that comment scores are hidden forever. Would the admins consider publishing them after stories are old enough that voting is closed? It would be great to have them for archives and search indices and projects like this.

pilingual - 16h 51m ago

I wrote to hn@ and asked for this as a feature request:

"1. Delayed Karma Display. I understand why comment karma was hidden. I don't see the harm in un-hiding karma after some time. If not 24 hours, then 72-168 hours. This would help me read through threads with 1300 comments."

This was last January. While I asked for a few more features, it is the only one that seems essential as HN grows with massive threads.

keepamovin - 16h 38m ago

Fear not. I have a collaborative project designed to address this.

vunderba - 16h 8m ago

They're referring to scores on individual COMMENTS - this information isn't available via the HN Firebase API.

The only way you could theoretically extract everyone's comment scores (at least the top level ones) would be like this if you're a complete madman:

1. Wait 48 hours so the article is effectively dead

2. Post a new comment using an account called ThePresident

3. Create a swarm of a thousand shill user accounts called Voter1, Voter2, etc.

4. Use a single account at a time and upvote ThePresident

5. Recheck the page to see if ThePresident has moved above a user(s) post

6. Record the score for that user and assign it to the tracked story's history

7. Repeat from (4)

keepamovin - 16h 7m ago

I know that! I have a collaborative project to make it sort of available.

But the idea I have is not like that at all - it's much nicer on everyone's ethics. Stay tuned! :)

3eb7988a1663 - 19h 23m ago

Did anyone get a copy of this before it was pulled? If GitHub is not keen, could it be uploaded to HuggingFace or some other service which hosts large assets?

I have always known I could scrape HN, but I would much rather take a neat little package.

dspillett - 22h 49m ago

Is there a public dump of the data anywhere that this is based upon, or have they scraped it themselves?

Such as DB might be entertaining to play with, and the threadedness of comments would be useful for beginners to practise efficient recursive queries (more so than the StackExchange dumps, for instance).

thomasmarton - 22h 37m ago

While not a dump per se, there is an API where you can get HN data programmatically, no scraping needed.

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

keepamovin - 16h 37m ago

Yes, you can see the download HN bash script in the repository now that simply extract the data to your local machine from BigQuery and saves it as a series of gzip JSON files

dspillett - 8h 48m ago

Ah, the repo was 404ing for me last time I checked (seems fine now) so I couldn't inspect that. I'll have a play later.

yupyupyups - 1day 2h ago

1 hour passed and it's already nuked?

Thank you btw

spit2wind - 23h 24m ago

This is pretty neat! The calendar didn't work well for me. I could only seem to navigate by month. And when I selected the earliest day (after much tapping), nothing seemed to be updated.

Nonetheless, random access history is cool.

keepamovin - 16h 23m ago

Cna you let me know? I'm sure there's some weirdness lurking there and I want to smooth it out. Calendar is essential.

fouc - 17h 39m ago

Suddenly occurs to me that it would be neat to pair a small LLM (3-7B) with an HN dataset

codazoda - 17h 16m ago

Does the SQLite version of this already exist somewhere? The github link on the footer of the page fails for me.

layer8 - 22h 52m ago

Apparently the comment counts are only the top-level comments?

It would be nice for the thread pages to show a comment count.

keepamovin - 16h 36m ago

Yes, because comments in a thread can span shards. It’s just a bit too heavy to add comment counts of an entire thread. So I give a low bound ha ha

wslh - 1day 2h ago

Is this updated regularly? 404 on GitHub as the other comment.

With all due respect it would be great if there is an official HN public dump available (and not requiring stuff such as BigQuery which is expensive).

scsh - 17h 39m ago

The BQ dataset is only ~17GB and the free tier of BQ lets you query 1TB per month. If you're not doing select * on every query you should be able to do a lot with that.

joshcsimmons - 21h 38m ago

Link appears broken

ra - 21h 32m ago

confirmed - I wonder what happened?

KomoD - 22h 19m ago

How do I download it? That repo is a 404.

sirjaz - 1day 1h ago

This would be awesome as a cross platform app.

keepamovin - 16h 22m ago

Good idea. HN.exe

dmarwicke - 23h 45m ago

22gb for mostly text? tried loading the site, it's pretty slow. curious how the query performance is with this much data in sqlite

solarized - 21h 52m ago

Beautiful !

2026 prayer: for all you AI junkies—please don’t pollute H/N with your dirty AI gaming.

Don’t bot posts, comments, or upvote/downvote just to maximize karma. Please.

We can’t identify anymore who’s a bot and who’s human. I just want to hang out with real humans here.

DenisDolya - 13h 7m ago

Hahaha, now you can be prepared for the apocalypse when the internet disappears. ;)

fao_ - 1day 1h ago

[flagged]

jesprenj - 1day 44m ago

I doubt it. "hacker news" spelled lowercase? comma after "beauty"? missing "in" after "it's"? i doubt an LLM would make such syntax mistakes. it's just good writing, that's also possible these days.

fao_ - 4h 49m ago

> it's just good writing, that's also possible these days.

As someone reskilling into being a writer, I really do not think that is "good writing".

walthamstow - 1day 1h ago

There's a thing in soccer at the moment where a tackle looks fine in realtime but when the video referee shows it to the onpitch referee, they show the impact in slo-mo over and over again and it always looks way worse.

I wonder if there's something like this going on here. I never thought it was LLM on first read, and I still don't, but when you take snippets and point at them it makes me think maybe they are

Insanity - 23h 47m ago

Even if so, would it have mattered? The point is showing off the SQLite DB.

But it didn’t read LLM generated IMO.

rantingdemon - 1day 1h ago

Why do you say that?

sundarurfriend - 1day 1h ago

Because anything that even slightly differs from the standard American phrasing of something must be "LLM generated" these days.

JavGull - 1day 1h ago

With the em dashes I see you. But at this point idrc so long as it reads well. Everyone uses spell check…

naikrovek - 1day 33m ago

I add em dashes to everything I write now, solely to throw people who look for them off. Lots of editors add them automatically when you have two sequential dashes between words — a common occurrence, like that one. And this is is Chrome on iOS doing it automatically.

Ooh, I used “sequential”, ooh, I used an em dash. ZOMG AI IS COMING FOR US ALL

fao_ - 4h 49m ago

I also use Em-Dashes, this is about how weird the thing is tonally

3eb7988a1663 - 19h 24m ago

Anyone demonstrating above a high-school vocabulary/reading level is obviously a machine.

Barbing - 1day 20m ago

Ya—in fact, globally replaced on iOS (sent from Safari)

Also for reference: “this shortcut can be toggled using the switch labeled 'Smart Punctuation' in General > Keyboard settings.”

deadbabe - 1day 1h ago

Sometimes I want to write more creatively, but then worry I’ll be accused of being an LLM. So I dumb it down. Remove the colorful language. Conform.

ssl-3 - 21h 6m ago

Fuck 'em.

Always write what you want, however you want to write it. If some reader somewhere decides to be judgemental because of — you know — an em dash or an X/Y comparison or a complement or some other thing that they think pins you down as being a bot, then that's entirely their own problem. Not yours.

They observe the reality that they deserve.

deadbabe - 19h 15m ago

You’re absolutely right. It’s not my problem, it’s their problem.

fao_ - 4h 50m ago

It feels like a LLM doing it's usual "gushing out appreciations"

naikrovek - 1day 48m ago

> I'm really sorry to have to ask this, but this really feels like you had an LLM write it?

Ending a sentence with a question mark doesn’t automatically make your sentence a question. You didn’t ask anything. You stated an opinion and followed it with a question mark.

If you intended to ask if the text was written by AI, no, you don’t have to ask that.

I am so damn tired of the “that didn’t happen” and the “AI did that” people when there is zero evidence of either being true.

These people are the most exhausting people I have ever encountered in my entire life.

jacquesm - 22h 37m ago

You're right. Unfortunately they are also more and more often right.

asdefghyk - 1day 3h ago

How much space is needed? ...for the data .... Im wondering if it would work on a tablet? ....

keepamovin - 1day 3h ago

~9GB gzipped.

asdefghyk - 17h 37m ago

FYI I did NOT see the size info in the title. Impossible to edit / delete my comment now ........

abetusk - 22h 30m ago

Alas, HN does not belong to us, and the existence of projects like this are subject to the whims of the legal owners of HN.

From the terms of use [0]:

"""

Commercial Use: Unless otherwise expressly authorized herein or in the Site, you agree not to display, distribute, license, perform, publish, reproduce, duplicate, copy, create derivative works from, modify, sell, resell, exploit, transfer or upload for any commercial purposes, any portion of the Site, use of the Site, or access to the Site. The buying, exchanging, selling and/or promotion (commercial or otherwise) of upvotes, comments, submissions, accounts (or any aspect of your account or any other account), karma, and/or content is strictly prohibited, constitutes a material breach of these Terms of Use, and could result in legal liability.

"""

[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou

tom1337 - 19h 56m ago

But is this really a commercial use? There doesn’t seem to be any intention of monetising this so I guess it doesn’t as specify commercial?