Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments

# Hacker Trends: 18 years of Hacker News, charted Source: [https://hackernewstrends.com/](https://hackernewstrends.com/) ## Hacker Trends \- see how any topic, tool, or person trended across 18 years of Hacker News Charts how often any topic, tool, or person has come up on Hacker News\. Overlay a few terms to watch their traction rise and fall\. Each line is a live date\-histogram over 45M posts and comments, built on[Upstash Redis Search](https://upstash.com/docs/redis/search)\. Below the chart sit the actual stories and comments behind the lines, filterable by term or author\.[How Hacker Trends works](https://hackernewstrends.com/how-it-works) 2008201020122014201620182020202220242026click a month to filter, or drag across to pick a range loading… ## Popular Comparisons click to load above The deploy\-platform rivalry: Cloudflare carries the CDN/edge conversation for years, then Vercel surges on the Next\.js wave and the two trade blows as both push into edge functions and full\-stack hosting\. David vs Goliath of the lab era: OpenAI's repeated towers lead from 2023, until a sudden 2026 Anthropic surge pulls level and the lead changes hands\. The silicon baton pass: AMD leads 2017–20 on the Ryzen/Zen comeback, then Nvidia overtakes with the 2020–23 GPU\-and\-AI surge\. A three\-way relay across the JVM/mobile era: Scala is the hot language ~2011, Swift grabs the baton with iOS mid\-decade, then Kotlin overtakes both as Android goes Kotlin\-first\. Frontend's generations in a line: Angular leads the framework wars ~2013–14, Vue rises 2016–19, then Svelte takes the newcomer crown 2020–22\. The database lead\-swap: MySQL owns the conversation around 2009–11, then goes quiet as Postgres climbs to overtake it by 2017–20\. ML frameworks, generation by generation: TensorFlow launches the deep\-learning gold rush 2015–16, PyTorch overtakes research 2019–21, then JAX becomes the cutting\-edge favorite 2021–23\. Bundler changing of the guard: Webpack owns the build step 2015–20, then Vite arrives and overtakes it from 2022 on\. Crypto\-exchange lead\-swap: Coinbase is the exchange people talk about through 2013–21, then Binance takes over the headlines in 2022–23\. The editor wars, old guard vs new: Vim and Emacs trade the modal\-vs\-extensible argument year after year, then Zed bursts in and spikes hard across 2024–26\. The Twitter\-alternative relay: Mastodon spikes with the 2022 acquisition exodus, then Bluesky overtakes it as the destination in 2024–25\. Node\-alternative race: Deno is the buzzy replacement 2020–22, then Bun grabs the spotlight from 2023 onward\. A textbook changing of the guard: Flash burns hot across 2010–11, then HTML5 climbs past it into 2014–15, the open web eating the plugin alive\. Containerization handoff: Docker erupts 2014–15 as the new hotness, then Kubernetes inherits the spotlight from 2016 as orchestration becomes the story\. Succession within a dynasty: vim leads through the 2010s, then its own fork neovim ignites 2021–23 and takes the lead as the community migrates\. Two AI shockwaves, offset: ChatGPT's late\-2022 launch wall, then DeepSeek's lone Jan\-2025 tower, the “Sputnik moment” years later\. JS\-superset succession: CoffeeScript's 2011–14 hype cools, then TypeScript's 2019\+ rise shows which abstraction actually won\. The 2022 text\-to\-image explosion, month by month: DALL\-E 2 opens the era in spring, Stable Diffusion's open\-source release detonates in late summer, then Midjourney becomes the household name into 2023\. A CPU\-architecture shift: x86 dominates chip talk around 2020–23, then ARM surges with Apple Silicon and data\-center ARM into 2024–26\. The text\-editor crown, passed hand to hand: Sublime Text is the beloved editor of 2012–14, GitHub's Atom takes over 2014–15, then VS Code eats the world from 2018 on\. Video calling, dynasty to dynasty: Skype owns the 2010s, then Zoom spikes hard in the single March\-2020 lockdown month while Microsoft Teams rides the same remote\-work wave on Office's coattails\. CI changing of the guard: Jenkins is the CI tool of the mid\-2010s, then GitHub Actions takes over from 2021 on\. The AI\-coding\-tool relay: Cursor is the editor everyone talks about in late\-2024, Claude Code spikes hard across mid\-2025, then OpenAI's Codex takes its turn into early\-2026\. The config\-management wars: Chef leads the automate\-your\-servers era ~2011–12, Puppet trades blows through 2013, then Ansible's agentless approach pulls ahead 2014–15\. The functional language HN couldn't stop talking about: Clojure's Lisp\-on\-the\-JVM moment ~2009–11, Haskell's purity debates ~2012, then Elixir rides the Erlang revival 2016–18\. API design, era by era: REST becomes the web's default 2012–15, then the post\-REST generation splits: gRPC for service\-to\-service from 2016, GraphQL for the client from 2017\. Web servers across the decades: Apache rules the 2010–12 conversation, nginx overtakes it for the high\-traffic era 2011–13, then Caddy arrives with automatic\-HTTPS 2017–22\. The front\-end MVC wars: Backbone\.js is the first to give the browser structure ~2011, then Ember and Angular escalate to full frameworks 2013–14, the fight that set up React\. A decade of face\-computer hype, one tower each: Google Glass in 2013, Oculus with the Facebook deal in 2014, then Apple's Vision Pro in 2024: three spikes, ten years apart\. The full\-stack web framework baton: Django and Rails define the 2009–15 'MVC framework' era, trading the spotlight, then Laravel inherits it for the PHP world and surges 2019–21\. The JS build pipeline, three generations: Grunt's task\-runner era 2013–14, Gulp's streaming rewrite 2014–15, then Webpack absorbs the whole job as bundling becomes the story from 2016 on\. The 'just deploy it' platform, reinvented each era: Heroku defines push\-to\-deploy in the early 2010s \(and spikes again at its 2022 free\-tier sunset\), Netlify owns the JAMstack 2018–20, then Vercel takes the Next\.js era from 2023\. The NoSQL boom in order: CouchDB rides the early document\-store wave ~2009, Cassandra carries the scale\-out story 2010–12, then MongoDB becomes the era's default 2011–13\. Browser test automation, three generations: Selenium is the way to drive a browser through the 2010s, Cypress reinvents it for the modern front\-end ~2020, then Playwright pulls ahead and surges into 2025–26\. Cross\-platform mobile, baton by baton: Xamarin carries the write\-once dream ~2016, React Native takes over for the JS crowd 2017–18, then Flutter overtakes both and peaks into 2024\. The hybrid\-app lineage, renamed each era: PhoneGap wraps web apps in a native shell ~2011, its open\-source successor Cordova carries it 2014–15, then Capacitor inherits the job and spikes in 2024\. The post\-Webpack bundler scramble: Parcel's zero\-config pitch lands ~2019, esbuild's Go\-speed rewrite grabs attention 2021, then Rollup re\-enters as the library bundler of choice into 2022\. The observability stack, layer by layer: Prometheus owns metrics collection ~2020, Grafana takes the dashboards spotlight 2021, then Datadog rises as the all\-in\-one SaaS into 2023\. The cloud data\-platform relay: Redshift defines the cloud warehouse ~2017, Databricks rides the lakehouse pitch into 2021, then Snowflake becomes the era's default name by 2024\. Open\-weight LLMs, release by release: Llama opens the floodgates in early 2023, Mistral's European challenger surges late 2023, then Qwen carries the open\-model crown into 2026\. Voice assistants across the decade: Siri arrives first with the iPhone 4S in 2011, Google Assistant takes a turn ~2018, then Alexa peaks into 2022: three spikes, years apart\. Altcoin generations: Litecoin is bitcoin's silver in the 2013 boom, Dogecoin spikes as the joke\-coin of that same era, then Solana carries the next\-gen\-chain story into 2022\. Crypto's serial manias: the ICO token\-sale frenzy peaks in 2017, the NFT gold rush detonates in 2021, then DeFi carries the yield\-farming hype into 2022\. Three game engines, one shared earthquake: all three spike together in the Sept\-2023 Unity runtime\-fee fiasco \- Unity's self\-inflicted blow\-up, with Unreal and Godot surging the same month as developers threatened to jump ship\. The eternal hardware trio: CPU and RAM are the staples HN has argued about since 2007, while GPU climbs out of the pack through the crypto\-mining and deep\-learning booms\. ## People Founders, hackers and figures whose news moments spike the timeline\. ## AI & LLMs The launch\-by\-launch staircase of the generative\-AI era\. ## Products & hardware Launch\-day spikes for the chips and gadgets HN couldn't stop debating\. ## Languages & dev tools Languages, runtimes and editors rising on release\-driven spikes\. ## JS frameworks How JavaScript frameworks come and go: each era's darling, in order\. ## Startups & companies Launches, acquisitions, license blow\-ups and the occasional implosion\. ## Cloud & hosting The platforms we deploy on: hyperscalers, PaaS darlings and indie hosts, each with its own outage\-and\-launch rhythm\. ## Security incidents The sharp, datable spikes of the bugs and breaches that ruined a weekend\. ## Crypto & hype cycles Bull runs, blow\-ups and the fads that came and went\. ## Internet & culture Platform exoduses, federated protocols and moderation flashpoints\. ## Dev culture The perennial HN arguments that resurface in waves, year after year\. ## Industry zeitgeist Common words that crest in waves with the mood of the tech industry\. ## Science & frontier tech Lab breakthroughs and moonshots: the spikes that briefly made HN a physics forum\. ## Open\-source license wars Relicensings, rug\-pulls and the forks they spawned: each one a datable tower of outrage\. ## Gaming Launch\-day mania, GPU\-scalping rage and the occasional licensing revolt\. ## Health & longevity The biohacking, GLP\-1 and sleep\-optimization waves HN can't stop relitigating\.