A couple of things you can do: type in your idea and see who already tried it, look up your username and see what you were working on in 2020, see who’s been working on the same thing for a decade, or what founders posted before they had a company.
I built it using Claude Code. Claude Sonnet read all 20,982 top-level replies and pulled out a name, description, topic and how AI was involved. One finding is that AI went from 1% of answers in 2009–11 to 33% this year.
A few limits of the result: labels are model output, and I only spot-checked them. The HN thread only went monthly in 2024, so early years are thin. If I’ve mislabeled your project, or you’d rather not be included, please tell me.
If you’ve been posting here for years, I’d love to hear what happened to those projects.