Hacker Trends
Type in any word — a tool, a company, a buzzword — and see a chart of exactly when it started (and stopped) being talked about on Hacker News, going back 18 years.
🔗 Visit Hacker Trends
Description
Anyone who's followed the tech industry for a while has a rough sense that certain words — "blockchain," "microservices," "generative AI" — had a moment and then faded, but that impression is usually just vibes and memory, not data. Hacker Trends turns that gut feeling into an actual chart: type in any term and see, month by month, how often it showed up in Hacker News posts and comments since 2008.
Hacker Trends is a free tool built on Upstash Redis Search that indexes over 45 million Hacker News posts and comments spanning roughly 18 years. You can overlay multiple terms on one chart to compare their rise and fall against each other, filter by date range, and click through from a spike straight to the actual stories and comments that caused it — so a chart isn't just a number, it's traceable back to real discussion. It also ships curated category browsing (AI/LLMs, startups, security, crypto, etc.) and a "Popular Comparisons" section with pre-built matchups for common questions like which framework or language is gaining ground.
💬 Our review
The short version: Hacker Trends is a free, delightful research toy for anyone who wants receipts instead of vibes about what the tech industry was actually talking about, and when.
The execution is clean for what it is — 18 years and 45M+ posts indexed with fast, overlay-able charting and the ability to click through to source comments is genuinely more rigorous than most "tech trend" content you'd find in a blog post. It's a great fact-checking tool for a technical writer, an investor doing quick diligence on how long a term has had real traction versus hype-cycle noise, or just a curious developer. The honest caveat: it's scoped to Hacker News alone, which is a specific and skewed community (heavily developer- and startup-focused, US/Silicon-Valley-leaning) — a term can trend hard on HN while barely registering on Reddit, Twitter/X, or in enterprise IT circles, so treat it as "what HN was saying," not "what the industry was saying." For that narrower lens, though, there's no real paid competitor doing the same thing as well, and it's free.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Entièrement gratuit, aucun plan payant identifié.
Pros
18 ans et 45M+ posts/commentaires indexés, gratuit
Comparaison de plusieurs termes sur un même graphique
Clic direct vers les discussions sources d'un pic
Catégories pré-construites et comparaisons populaires
Cons
Limité à Hacker News uniquement, communauté biaisée (devs/startups US)
Ne reflète pas les tendances du grand public ni d'autres plateformes
Pas d'API publique documentée pour usage programmatique