When Did AI Take Over Hacker News?
When Did AI Take Over Hacker News?August 17, 2025One in three top 10 Hacker News posts this month were AI-related. In 2025, that’s hardly surprising, but it made me wonder, when did this start? Was it ChatGPT? Was it GPT-4? Moreover, has sentiment shifted positive or negative over time? This pretty negative post topping Hacker News last month sparked these questions, and I decided to find some answers, of course, using AI. To help with this, I discovered that the Hacker News Big Query dataset is pretty well maintained and includes the title, URL, score, and comments of every post ever made. I decided to start my analysis in 2019, so I punched in a couple quick queries, downloaded the data (24,910 top 10 stories from January 1st, 2019 to August 15th, 2025), and got to work. I could just…
