- Replacing an 11.6GB Parquet file every 5 minutes strikes me as a bit wasteful. I would probably use Apache Iceberg here.
- The best source for this data used to be Clickhouse (https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIG1heCh0a...), but it hasn't updated since 2025-12-26.
by robotswantdata
4 subcomments
- Where’s the opt out ?
- My Hacker News items table in ClickHouse has 47,428,860 items, and it's 5.82 GB compressed and 18.18 GB uncompressed. What makes Parquet compression worse here, when both formats are columnar?
by epogrebnyak
1 subcomments
- Wonder why median votes count is 0, seems every post is getting at least a few votes - maybe this was not the case in the past
- Could you also release the source code behind the automatic update system?
- Yay! So much knowledge in just 11GB. Adding to my end of the World hoarding stash!
- This comment should make it into the download in a few mins.
by politician
0 subcomment
- This is great. I've soured on this site over the past few years due to the heavy partisanship that wasn't as present in the early days (eternal September), but there are still quite a few people whose opinions remain thought-provoking and insightful. I'm going to use this corpus to make a local self-hosted version of HN with the ability to a) show inline article summaries and b) follow those folks.
- Static web content and dynamic data?
> The archive currently spans from 2006-10 to 2026-03-16 23:55 UTC, with 47,358,772 items committed.
That’s more than 5 minutes ago by a day or two. No big deal, but a little bit depressing this is still how we do things in 2026.
- Good for demo but every 5 minutes? Why?
by alstonite
2 subcomments
- What happened between 2023 and 2024 to cause the usage dropoff?
- Please upload to https://academictorrents.com/ as well if possible
- > At midnight UTC, the entire current month is refetched from the source as a single authoritative Parquet file, and today's individual 5-minute blocks are removed from the today/ directory.
Wouldn't that lose deleted/moderated comments?
by 0cf8612b2e1e
0 subcomment
- Under the Known Limitations section
deleted and dead are integers. They are stored as 0/1 rather than booleans.
Is there a technical reason to do this? You have the type right there.
by Imustaskforhelp
0 subcomment
- As someone who had made a project analysing hackernews who had used clickhouse, I really feel like this is a project made for me (especially the updated every 5 minute aspect which could've helped my project back then too!)
Your project actually helps me out a ton in making one of the new project ideas that I had about hackernews that I had put into the back-burner.
I had thought of making a ping website where people can just @Username and a service which can detect it and then send mail to said username if the username has signed up to the service (similar to a service run by someone from HN community which mails you everytime someone responds to your thread directly, but this time in a sort of ping)
[The previous idea came as I tried to ping someone to show them something relevant and thought that wait a minute, something like ping which mails might be interesting and then tried to see if I can use algolia or any service to hook things up but not many/any service made much sense back then sadly so I had the idea in back of my mind but this service sort of solves it by having it being updated every 5 minutes]
Your 5 minute updates really make it possible. I will look what I can do with that in some days but I am seeing some discrepancy in the 5 minute update as last seems to be 16 march in the readme so I would love to know more about if its being updated every 5 minutes because it truly feels phenomenal if true and its exciting to think of some new possibilities unlocked with it.
- what's the license for HN content?
- Is is possible to only download a subset? e.g. Show HNs or HN Whoishiring. The Show HNs and HN Whoishiring are very useful for classroom data science i.e. a very useful set of data for students to learn the basic of data cleaning and engineering.
- what’s the license? “do whatever the fuck you want with the data as long as you don’t get caught”? or does that only work for massive corporations
by GeoAtreides
4 subcomments
- is the legal page a placeholder, do words have no meaning?
https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/
Mods, enforce your license terms, you're playing fast and loose with the law (GDPR/CPRA)
- You are the product
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