Scraping Hacker News: Building a Tech Trend Tracker

Hacker News is one of the best sources for tracking emerging tech trends. In this guide, we'll build a Python scraper that monitors HN stories and identifies trending topics over time. Why Scrape Hacker News? HN's official API is great, but it doesn't give you trend analysis out of the box. By scraping and aggregating data, you can: Track which technologies gain momentum week over week Identify emerging frameworks before they go mainstream Monitor sentiment around specific tools or companies Setting Up the Scraper First, install the dependencies: pip install requests beautifulsoup4 pandas Fetching Top Stories via API HN provides a public API. Let's start there: import requests import time from collections import Counter from datetime import datetime def get_top_stories ( limit = 100 ): url = " https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json " story_ids = requests . get ( url ). json ()[: limit ] stories = [] for sid in story_ids : item = requests . get ( f " https://hacker-news.f