How the analysis was done
I used camelAI with a ClickHouse database of every HN story to do all analysis. You can use it for free with no login here to explore the data interactively yourself.
18 years • 1.8 million headlines • 13 database engines
Hacker News is a real-time barometer of developer excitement. I mined every story title from February 2007 to June 2025 and asked three questions:
How has headline volume for each database changed over time?
Which engines are accelerating the fastest right now?
Which ones are losing steam?
1 · Raw popularity through time
The chart below shows monthly headline counts for the eight most-talked-about engines, plus DuckDB (small base, big growth).
Click on the individual database names to toggle their visibility. Double click to isolate a single database.
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