About HN Pulse
HN Pulse is a single-page public analytics dashboard showing the long-term vitals of Hacker News — updated daily, hosted at hnpulse.hena.dev, designed to operate at $0 forever.
Where the data comes from
All metrics are derived from the public dataset bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full.
How fresh it is
The pipeline runs daily at 14:00 UTC, ~1 hour after the BigQuery public dataset's own daily refresh (~13:00 UTC). It performs a freshness check and exits cleanly if the source isn't ready, retrying on the next cron tick.
What each KPI means
- Stories per day — Avg story submissions per UTC day, excluding deleted/dead.
- Comments per day — Avg comments per UTC day, excluding deleted/dead.
- Active commenters / submitters — Distinct authors per day.
- Median / p90 story score — Daily quantile estimates over stories.
- Comments per story — SUM(comments) / SUM(stories) over the range.
- Success rate (≥100) — Stories scoring ≥100 / all stories.
- Top domains share — eTLD+1 of stories' URL.
- Show HN / Ask HN / Jobs — counted by title prefix or item type.
- Dead/flagged ratio — Items with
deadordeleted.
Domain extraction
Registrable domain via the Public Suffix List (eTLD+1). Subdomains and www. are stripped. Stories without a URL (Ask HN, Show HN text-only) are excluded from domain stats.
Period comparison
For range N days, delta compares the trailing N days against the prior N days. Formula: (current − previous) / previous · 100. When the previous window is zero, a positive current shows as +∞.
Open data
Source code & license
github.com/hena-dev/hnpulse — MIT.
Privacy
Cloudflare Web Analytics, no cookies, no PII.