Go to this repo (https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/HackerBook): you can download it. Big Query -> ETL -> npx serve docs - that's it. 20 years of HN arguments and beauty, can be yours forever. So they'll never die. Ever. It's the unkillable static archive of HN and it's your hands. That's my Year End gift to you all. Thank you for a wonderful year, have happy and wonderful 2026. make something of it.
Question - did you consider tradeoffs between duckdb (or other columnar stores) and SQLite?
It's different in that it is tailored to analytics, among other things storage is columnar, and it can run off some common data analytics file formats.
It has transparent compression built-in and has support for natural language queries. https://buckenhofer.com/2025/11/agentic-ai-with-duckdb-and-s...
"DICT FSST (Dictionary FSST) represents a hybrid compression technique that combines the benefits of Dictionary Encoding with the string-level compression capabilities of FSST. This approach was implemented and integrated into DuckDB as part of ongoing efforts to optimize string storage and processing performance." https://homepages.cwi.nl/~boncz/msc/2025-YanLannaAlexandre.p...
So you can dump e.g. all of Hacker News in a single multi-GB Parquet file somewhere and build a client-side JavaScript application that can run queries against that without having to fetch the whole thing.
You can run searches on https://lil.law.harvard.edu/data-gov-archive/ and watch the network panel to see DuckDB in action.
Doesn't scream columnar database to me.
With all due respect it would be great if there is an official HN public dump available (and not requiring stuff such as BigQuery which is expensive).
I have a much simpler database: https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIHRpbWUsI...
Thank you btw
I've been taking frequent "offline-only-day" breaks to consolidate whatever I've been learning, and Kiwix has been a great tool for reference (offline Wikipedia, StackOverflow and whatnot).
[0] https://kiwix.org/en/the-new-kiwix-library-is-available/
I did something similar. I build a tool[1] to import the Project Arctic Shift dumps[2] of reddit into sqlite. It was mostly an exercise to experiment with Rust and SQLite (HN's two favorite topics). If you don't build a FTS5 index and import without WAL (--unsafe-mode), import of every reddit comment and submission takes a bit over 24 hours and produces a ~10TB DB.
SQLite offers a lot of cool json features that would let you store the raw json and operate on that, but I eschewed them in favor of parsing only once at load time. THat also lets me normalize the data a bit.
I find that building the DB is pretty "fast", but queries run much faster if I immediately vacuum the DB after building it. The vacuum operation is actually slower than the original import, taking a few days to finish.
[1] https://github.com/Paul-E/Pushshift-Importer
[2] https://github.com/ArthurHeitmann/arctic_shift/blob/master/d...
> 20 years of HN arguments and beauty, can be yours forever. So they'll never die. Ever. It's the unkillable static archive of HN and it's your hands
I'm really sorry to have to ask this, but this really feels like you had an LLM write it?
Ooh, I used “sequential”, ooh, I used an em dash. ZOMG AI IS COMING FOR US ALL
Also for reference: “this shortcut can be toggled using the switch labeled 'Smart Punctuation' in General > Keyboard settings.”
I wonder if there's something like this going on here. I never thought it was LLM on first read, and I still don't, but when you take snippets and point at them it makes me think maybe they are
Ending a sentence with a question mark doesn’t automatically make your sentence a question. You didn’t ask anything. You stated an opinion and followed it with a question mark.
If you intended to ask if the text was written by AI, no, you don’t have to ask that.
I am so damn tired of the “that didn’t happen” and the “AI did that” people when there is zero evidence of either being true.
These people are the most exhausting people I have ever encountered in my entire life.
But it didn’t read LLM generated IMO.
I watched it in the browser network panel and saw it fetch:
https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/static-shards/shard_1636.sqlite.gz
https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/static-shards/shard_1635.sqlite.gz
https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/static-shards/shard_1634.sqlite.gz
It's reminiscent of that brilliant SQLite.js VFS trick from a few years ago: https://github.com/phiresky/sql.js-httpvfs - only that one used HTTP range headers, this one uses sharded files instead.
The interactive SQL query interface at https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/?view=query asks you to select which shards to run the query against, there are 1636 total.
Looks like it's still on PyPI though: https://pypi.org/project/sqlite-s3vfs/
You can see inside it with my PyPI package explorer: https://tools.simonwillison.net/zip-wheel-explorer?package=s...
https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-s3vfs
This comment was helpful in figuring out how to get a full Git clone out of the heritage archive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37516523#37517378
I’ve used it in production to self-host Australia-only maps on S3. We generated a single ~900 MB PMTiles file from OpenStreetMap (Australia only, up to Z14) and uploaded it to S3. Clients then fetch just the required byte ranges for each vector tile via HTTP range requests.
It’s fast, scales well, and bandwidth costs are negligible because clients only download the exact data they need.
Converting 22GB of uncompressed text into video essay lands us at ~1PB or 1000TB.
Best locally of course to avoid “I burned a lake for this?” guilt.
> Next, we've got more than just two tables. The quote/paraphrase doesn't make it clear, but we've got two tables per thing. That means Accounts have an "account_thing" and an "account_data" table, Subreddits have a "subreddit_thing" and "subreddit_data" table, etc.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/z9sm8/comment/...
Nonetheless, random access history is cool.
Guess its common knowledge that SharedArrayBuffer (SQLite wasm) does not work with FF due to Cross-Origin Attacks (i just found out ;).
Once the initial chunk of data loads the rest load almost instantly on Chrome. Can you please fix the GitHub link (current 404) would like to peak at the code. Thank you!
It would be nice for the thread pages to show a comment count.
Such as DB might be entertaining to play with, and the threadedness of comments would be useful for beginners to practise efficient recursive queries (more so than the StackExchange dumps, for instance).
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asdefghyk•5h ago
keepamovin•4h ago