Track Developer Trends on Hacker News
Measure recurring technical topics across Hacker News feeds using snapshots, stable item IDs, transparent keyword rules, and rank-aware metrics.
Trend tracking becomes misleading when a moving front page is treated as a fixed sample. Collect regular snapshots with the Hacker News Scraper, retain the feed and rank, then deduplicate by item ID for unique-story counts.
Create a versioned topic dictionary with phrases, exclusions, and an owner. Report both appearances and unique items. For visibility, weight rank carefully or show separate bands such as top 10 and top 50 instead of inventing an opaque score.
Compare weekly shares within the collected feed, not raw counts across runs with different limits. Read a sample of matched titles each week to catch taxonomy drift. Hacker News can reveal what this community is discussing; it cannot establish total developer-market demand on its own.
Frequently asked questions
Is Hacker News representative of all developers?
No. It is one technical community with its own audience and voting dynamics.
Which feeds should be compared?
Top, best, new, Ask HN, and Show HN answer different questions; store the feed on every row.