Show HN: See what words are trending on HN

This is a little something I did for fun. The trending hash tags on twitter are an interesting metric for what people are talking about, so I thought it would be cool to make something like that for Hacker News. But we don&#x27;t have hash tags, so the app just uses words.<p>Note that you can click on a word to get some of the posts it&#x27;s mentioned in.<p>Edit: Also, a heads up -- it&#x27;s running on a Heroku free dyno, and it&#x27;s already feeling a little slow.

I posted this on Twitter this morning, but watch <a href="http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=bitcoin#q=bitcoin&amp;cmpt=q" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;trends&#x2F;explore?q=bitcoin#q=bitcoin&amp;cmp...</a> and the chart in this post carefully if you bought Bitcoin speculatively (ie, not because you actually care about Bitcoin or want to be long on it). When the Google chart drops and this goes off the top 5 on HN but the price hasn&#x27;t plummeted, you&#x27;re at a mid-term peak and you should sell.<p>The price of Bitcoin is being driven by media and hype right now - deserved or undeserved, in the near term there WILL be a dip in that and the price will drop for no &quot;good&quot; reason. Keep an eye on that if you&#x27;re looking for a peak at which to sell, or (maybe more importantly) a bottom at which to buy.

Couple of suggestions:<p>Exclude commonly trending words such as Google. It isn&#x27;t trending if it&#x27;s already huge.<p>I&#x27;ve got &#x27;[&#x27; and &#x27;]&#x27; for the last week, exclude these too.<p>EDIT: As a matter of fact something seems to be wrong if Google is classified as trending. There haven&#x27;t been a big surge in posts about Google in the recent past. Either something is wrong, I am wrong or the algorithm is still training (e.g.: learning what is the normal rate of appearance of certain words)

Fun to browse, and I could certainly see this enabling me to notice some interesting things I had missed on HN.<p>Two minor things I noticed:<p>Currently, 7 is listed as tending now with seven mentions. Not that numbers trending could never be interesting e.g. if 600 were trending due to the discussion about the lowering of the prime gap [0], but 7 seems to be trending just because of submission titles.<p>Both [ and ] are tending in the past week. This seems to be due to submission titles tagged with e.g. [video], [pdf], [&lt;year&gt;].<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6784383" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6784383</a>

Wow! Top5 has &quot;bitcoin&quot;,&quot;income&quot;,&quot;bitcoins&quot;, and &quot;bank&quot;.<p>Is HN all about the money?<p>EDIT: also, very neat work! However, you should consider excluding &quot;]&quot; and &quot;[&quot; from the list.

Right now &quot;ockhams&quot; is trending with 17 mentions and &quot;razor&quot; is trending with 15 mentions.<p>Does that mean that someone just said &quot;ockhams&quot; twice?

Hnwatcher.com provides graph that shows numbers of time a specific word was mentioned on HN over time.

Nice work. Before clicking, I knew bitcoin would hold the top spot. Kind of hope this craze dies down a bit so more non-bitcoin stories can appear.

Are you using Lucene or Elastic search for indexing words?<p>I would be great to read about your project more.