Hacker News Comment Data

This repo contains some basic scripts for downloading and visualizing your personal comment history on Hacker News.

Requirements

• jq for parsing JSON
• pup for parsing HTML
• http-server (or any other static HTTP server) for serving the website

Downloading Data

You'll need a cookie from Hacker News in order to scrape comment scores - these are not available via the API as far as I can tell. To find your cookie, log into HN, and open up the developer console. If you inspect the network request for news.ycombinator.com, you'll find your cookie. Copy that and run

HN_COOKIE="<your cookie>" ./download.sh

This will regenerate data.js with your own HN data.

Viewing the Data

Use http-server or simply open index.html in your browser. You should see your data visualized. There are a few options in chart.js and table.js that can be tweaked to change the visualization. This is a work in progress.

Contributing Data

I'd like to start compiling a larger dataset here - if you're interested in contributing your data, open up a PR!