lokimoona minute ago
You are the product
alstonite8 minutes ago
What happened between 2023 and 2024 to cause the usage dropoff?
ghgr3 minutes ago
I'd say it's less a usage dropoff and more a reversion to the mean after Covid
gkbrkan hour ago
My Hacker News items table in ClickHouse has 47,428,860 items, and it's 5.82 GB compressed and 18.18 GB uncompressed. What makes Parquet compression worse here, when both formats are columnar?
0cf8612b2e1ean hour ago
Sorting, compression algorithm +level, and data types can all have an impact. I noted elsewhere that a Boolean is getting represented as an integer. That’s one bit vs 1-4 bytes.
There is also flexibility in what you define as the dataset. Skinnier, but more focused tables could be space saving vs a wide table that covers everything -will probably break compressible runs of data.
xnxan hour ago
Parquet has a few compression option. Not sure which one they are using.
hirako2000an hour ago
Plus isn't the least wasteful format, native duckdb for instance compacts better. That's not just down to the compression algorithm, which as you say got three main options for parquet.
xnxan hour ago
The best source for this data used to be Clickhouse (https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIG1heCh0a...), but it hasn't updated since 2025-12-26.
lyu072824 minutes ago
Please upload to https://academictorrents.com/ as well if possible
tonymet2 minutes ago
what's the license for HN content?
mlhpdx44 minutes ago
Static web content and dynamic data?
> The archive currently spans from 2006-10 to 2026-03-16 23:55 UTC, with 47,358,772 items committed.
That’s more than 5 minutes ago by a day or two. No big deal, but a little bit depressing this is still how we do things in 2026.
0cf8612b2e1ean hour ago
Under the Known Limitations section
deleted and dead are integers. They are stored as 0/1 rather than booleans.
Onavo2 hours ago
Is is possible to only download a subset? e.g. Show HNs or HN Whoishiring. The Show HNs and HN Whoishiring are very useful for classroom data science i.e. a very useful set of data for students to learn the basic of data cleaning and engineering.
nelsondev2 hours ago
It’s date partitioned, you could download just a date range. It’s also parquet, so you can download just specific columns with the right client
GeoAtreidesan hour ago
is the legal page a placeholder, do words have no meaning?
https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/
Mods, enforce your license terms, you're playing fast and loose with the law (GDPR/CPRA)
Retr0idan hour ago
Which terms are not being enforced? (not disagreeing I just don't feel like reading a large legal document)
GeoAtreidesan hour ago
> By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies
The user content is supposed to be licensed only Y Combinator and (bleah) its affiliated companies (which are many, all the startups they fund, for example).
jmalicki15 minutes ago
Curious why it should be on HackerNews to enforce restrictions on content they only license from you?
If it's owned by you and only licensed by HN shouldn't you be the one enforcing it?
zamadatix10 minutes ago
If you carry on the quote two more words:
> ... a nonexclusive
I.e. this section is talking to additional rights to the content you post to also go to YC.
ryandvm24 minutes ago
That agreement is largely about "Personal Information", not the posts and comments.
That said, there are "no scraping" and "commercial use restricted" carve-outs for the content on HN. Which honestly is bullshit.
ungruntledan hour ago
None that I could see:
Your submissions to, and comments you make on, the Hacker News site are not Personal Information and are not "HN Information" as defined in this Privacy Policy.
Other Users: certain actions you take may be visible to other users of the Services.
GeoAtreidesan hour ago
I mean, just because they say the comments are not PI doesn't make it so.
ungruntledan hour ago
That’s a good point. I’m only referring to the terms they used in the privacy policy.
ryandvm26 minutes ago
Eh, fuck that agreement. I'm kind of old school in that I believe if you put it on the internet without an auth-wall, people should be allowed to do whatever they want with it. The AI companies seem to agree.
Then again, I'm not the guy that is going to get sued...
kmeisthax3 minutes ago
"I'm kind of old school in that I believe if you put grass on the ground without a fence, people should be allowed to do whatever they want with it. The noblemen with a thousand cows seem to agree."
And that, my friends, is how you kill the commons - by ignoring the social context surrounding its maintenance and insisting upon the most punitive ways of avoiding abuse.
Ylpertnodi9 minutes ago
> I believe if you put it on the internet without an auth-wall, people should be allowed to do whatever they want with it.
I agree. It's the owners of the sites that have to follow rules, not us.
hsuduebc2an hour ago
How is is he breaking gdpr here?
andrewmcwattersan hour ago
They already refuse to comply with CPRA, instead electing to replace your username with a random 6(?) character string, prefixed with `_`, if I remember correctly.
I know, because I've been here since maybe 2015 or so, but this account was created in 2019.
So any PII you have mentioned in your comments is permanent on Hacker News.
I would appreciate it if they gave users the ability to remove all of their personal data, but in correspondence and in writing here on Hacker News itself, Dan has suggested that they value the posterity of conversations over the law.
bstsb2 hours ago
what’s the license? “do whatever the fuck you want with the data as long as you don’t get caught”? or does that only work for massive corporations
palmoteaan hour ago
> At midnight UTC, the entire current month is refetched from the source as a single authoritative Parquet file, and today's individual 5-minute blocks are removed from the today/ directory.
Wouldn't that lose deleted/moderated comments?
BoredPositron3 minutes ago
I guess that's the point.