[HN Gopher] Show HN: 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite
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Show HN: 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite
Community, All the HN belong to you. This is an archive of hacker
news that fits in your browser. When I made HN Made of Primes I
realized I could probably do this offline sqlite/wasm thing with
the whole GBs of archive. The whole dataset. So I tried it, and
this is it. Have Hacker News on your device. Go to this repo
(https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/HackerBook): you can download
it. Big Query -> ETL -> npx serve docs - that's it. 20 years of HN
arguments and beauty, can be yours forever. So they'll never die.
Ever. It's the unkillable static archive of HN and it's your hands.
That's my Year End gift to you all. Thank you for a wonderful year,
have happy and wonderful 2026. make something of it.
Author : keepamovin
Score : 681 points
Date : 2025-12-30 17:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (hackerbook.dosaygo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hackerbook.dosaygo.com)
| asdefghyk wrote:
| How much space is needed? ...for the data .... Im wondering if it
| would work on a tablet? ....
| keepamovin wrote:
| ~9GB gzipped.
| asdefghyk wrote:
| FYI I did NOT see the size info in the title. Impossible to
| edit / delete my comment now ........
| carbocation wrote:
| That repo is throwing up a 404 for me.
|
| Question - did you consider tradeoffs between duckdb (or other
| columnar stores) and SQLite?
| keepamovin wrote:
| No, I just went straight to sqlite. What is duckdb?
| cess11 wrote:
| 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.
| fsiefken wrote:
| 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-YanLan
| naAlexandre.p...
| simonw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| I like SQLite
| linhns wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Edges are a separate table
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| While I suspect DuckDB would compress better, given the
| ubiquity of SQLite, it seems a fine standard choice.
| peheje wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| jacquesm wrote:
| Maybe it got nuked by MS? The rest of their repo's are up.
| keepamovin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thanks, bud, that means a lot! Would like to see your
| versions of the data stored offline idea, it's very cool.
| jacquesm wrote:
| pianojacq.com
|
| It's super simple, really, far less impressive than what
| you've built there.
| keepamovin wrote:
| i forgot to set repo to public. Fixed now
| wslh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| zX41ZdbW wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Does your database also runs offline/locally in the browser?
| Seems to be the reason for the large number of shards.
| zX41ZdbW wrote:
| You can run it locally, but it is a client-server
| architecture, which means that something has to run behind
| the browser.
| yupyupyups wrote:
| 1 hour passed and it's already nuked?
|
| Thank you btw
| abixb wrote:
| 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/
| Barbing wrote:
| Oh this should TOTALLY be available to those who are scrolling
| through sources on the Kiwix app!
| keepamovin wrote:
| Oh that's a cool idea. If you want to take a crack at writing
| the script, the repo is open!
| Paul-E wrote:
| 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...
| s_ting765 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Xyra wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| tehlike wrote:
| Vfs support is amazing.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Is there anything more production grade built around the same
| idea of HTTP range requests like that sqlite thing? This has so
| much potential
| simonw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I recovered it from https://archive.softwareheritage.org/br
| owse/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...
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| didn't you do something similar for Datasette, Simon?
| simonw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I don't have the tags! It would be awesome if you could
| push that.
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| Uploaded here:
|
| https://github.com/Quantum-Nomad/sqlite-s3vfs
| simonw wrote:
| Thanks for that, though actually it turns out I had them
| after all - I needed to run: git push
| --tags origin
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| All the better :)
| bspammer wrote:
| Doing all this in an hour is such a good example of how
| absurdly efficient you can be with LLMs.
| socialcommenter wrote:
| 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? :)
| billywhizz wrote:
| 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.githubu
| s...
| ericd wrote:
| 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.
| Humphrey wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| PMTiles is absurdly great software.
| Humphrey wrote:
| I know right! I'd never heard of HTTP Range requests
| until PMTiles - but gee it's an elegant solution.
| keepamovin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| seg_lol wrote:
| A JSON parser is less than a thousand lines of code.
| Diti wrote:
| And where most of CPU time will be wasted in, if you care
| about profiling/improving responsiveness.
| keepamovin wrote:
| How would you store it?
| nextaccountic wrote:
| That's neat, but.. is it just for cartographic data?
|
| I want something like a db with indexes
| jtbaker wrote:
| 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/perfo
| rmance/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!
| 6510 wrote:
| I want to see a bittorrent version :P
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Maybe webtorrent-based?
| omneity wrote:
| 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.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| 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/
| mootothemax wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Parquet/iceberg
| ncruces wrote:
| 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...
| pdyc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Your page is served over sqlitevfs with Range queries? Let's
| try this here.
| ncruces wrote:
| I did a similar VFS in Go. It doesn't run client-side in a
| browser.
|
| But you can use it (e.g.) in a small VPS to access a multi-
| TB database directly from S3.
| meander_water wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Where did you get the 22GB figure from?
|
| The HN post title (:
| meander_water wrote:
| Hah, well that's embarrassing
| keepamovin wrote:
| 22GB is non-gzipped.
| sodafountan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Awesome, I'll take a look
| maxloh wrote:
| I am curios why they don't use a single file and HTTP Range
| Requests instead. PMTiles (a distribution of OpenStreetMap)
| uses that.
| keepamovin wrote:
| 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?
| keepamovin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Happy to help!
| keepamovin wrote:
| 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.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Is it possible to implement search this way?
| sieep wrote:
| 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.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| 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.
| sieep wrote:
| Cheers to you for doing the math, I hope 2026 is excellent
| for you!
| fsiefken wrote:
| 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.
| Barbing wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| deskamess wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| keepamovin wrote:
| Right? 20 years, probably 10s millions of human hours of
| interactions, and it's only as much as a couple DVDs.
| sirjaz wrote:
| This would be awesome as a cross platform app.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Good idea. HN.exe
| tevon wrote:
| The link seems to be down, was it taken down?
| scsh wrote:
| Probably just forgot to make it public.
| zkmon wrote:
| 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.
| jesprenj wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jhd3 wrote:
| [The Baked Data architectural
| pattern](https://simonwillison.net/2021/Jul/28/baked-data/)
| yread wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's at least 45%, then you can leave out all of my comments
| and you're left with only 5!
| Rendello wrote:
| The hard-coded dictionary wouldn't be much stranger than
| Brotli's:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27160590
| maxbond wrote:
| You can use a BPE variant like SentencePiece to identify
| these patterns rather than hard coding them.
| hamburglar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Guilty.
| dmarwicke wrote:
| 22gb for mostly text? tried loading the site, it's pretty slow.
| curious how the query performance is with this much data in
| sqlite
| spit2wind wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Cna you let me know? I'm sure there's some weirdness lurking
| there and I want to smooth it out. Calendar is essential.
| Sn0wCoder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Damn. Will try to fix for FF.
|
| _edit:_ I just tested with FF latest, seems to be working.
| Sn0wCoder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| Apparently the comment counts are only the top-level comments?
|
| It would be nice for the thread pages to show a comment count.
| keepamovin wrote:
| 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
| dspillett wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| abetusk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| m-p-3 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That was fast. I was looking into recent HN datasets, and they
| are impossible find.
| xnx wrote:
| Complete and continuously updated: https://play.clickhouse.co
| m/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIG1heCh0a...
| gettingoverit wrote:
| If the last story on HN was at December 26, that is.
| rolymath wrote:
| Continuously updated != instantly updated
| dspillett wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's available on BigQuery and is updated frequently
| enough(daily I think).
| octoberfranklin wrote:
| But why would they take it down?
| keepamovin wrote:
| Sorry i just forgot to set it to public! It's there now
| KomoD wrote:
| How do I download it? That repo is a 404.
| solarized wrote:
| 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.
| kristianp wrote:
| 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.
| ncruces wrote:
| That's odd. If it was a VFS, that's not what I'd expect would
| happen. Maybe it's not a VFS?
| keepamovin wrote:
| What is a VFS?
| ncruces wrote:
| https://sqlite.org/vfs.html
|
| While designed for OS portability, you can use it to
| convince SQLite to read from something other than a file on
| disk.
| piperswe wrote:
| Doesn't `LIMIT` just limit the amount of rows returned, rather
| than the amount read & processed?
| lucb1e wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| SQLite wrote:
| 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.
| diyseguy wrote:
| link no workie: https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/HackerBook
| keepamovin wrote:
| 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.
| joshcsimmons wrote:
| Link appears broken
| ra wrote:
| confirmed - I wonder what happened?
| kamranjon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I love that you have 100r.ca on that short list.
| endofreach wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| 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.
| modeless wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Fear not. I have a collaborative project designed to address
| this.
| vunderba wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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! :)
| fouc wrote:
| Suddenly occurs to me that it would be neat to pair a small LLM
| (3-7B) with an HN dataset
| codazoda wrote:
| Does the SQLite version of this already exist somewhere? The
| github link on the footer of the page fails for me.
| Xyra wrote:
| 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).
| visarga wrote:
| I like your concept of indexing high quality sources for RAG.
| For many queries we might not need the usual search engines.
| keepamovin wrote:
| 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?
| DenisDolya wrote:
| Hahaha, now you can be prepared for the apocalypse when the
| internet disappears. ;)
| RyJones wrote:
| Neat. I keep wanting to build something like this for GitHub
| audit logs, but at ~5 tb, probably a little much
| WadeGrimridge wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| added median too.
|
| median score (all time): https://ibb.co/gZV5QVMG
|
| median score (since 2020): https://ibb.co/Gfv8T7k8
| keepamovin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| thanks! i downloaded them and used python to make these
| keepamovin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| can confirm, i'm usually very generous with upvotes on sundays
| at noon
| 7777777phil wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That is so cool! I love that this passion fun project inspired
| and helped your paper. So cool!
| adamszakal wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Really? Let me know how I can help. What would you like to see
| fixed?
| adamszakal wrote:
| 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.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Nice. I wonder if there's any way to quickly get a view for a
| whole year.
| keepamovin wrote:
| 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._
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| 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).
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