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

79 points by andrearitossa a day ago on hackernews | 26 comments

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

Apple Ecosystem lmao.

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.

andai | 19 hours ago

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!)

magicmicah85 | 19 hours ago

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

cjlm | 19 hours ago

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/

alfg | 17 hours ago

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

random3 | 17 hours ago

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.

livinglist | 16 hours ago

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

: random3 | 6 hours ago
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 :)

forgetfreeman | 16 hours ago

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

pelagicAustral | 15 hours ago

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 =)

: Boss0565 | 15 hours ago
This seems like more effort than just skimming

vivzkestrel | 14 hours ago

- 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

DylanMerigaud | 14 hours ago

Pagination limits usability; consider an infinite scroll instead.

hellon3wheels | 12 hours ago

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

: nairboon | 12 hours ago
Scrolling through ~200 items is not really "infinite scroll", as in reels/shorts etc.

johnisgood | 13 hours ago

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)

finger | 13 hours ago

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.

kmaitreys | 13 hours ago

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

: DonHopkins | 9 hours ago
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

nephihaha | 12 hours ago

Is Wikipedia on there?

einsteinx2 | 10 hours ago

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

: cowboylowrez | 2 hours ago
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

benfortuna | 10 hours ago

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

rkagerer | an hour ago

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?