Hacker News Dataset
Dataset Summary
This dataset is derived from the official Hacker News data provided via the Hacker News Firebase API. It contains user-generated content including stories, comments, and metadata from the Hacker News platform.
Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science, entrepreneurship, and technology. The dataset captures real-world discussions, technical conversations, and community interactions over time.
The data was programmatically collected using the official API endpoints and processed into structured JSONL format suitable for large-scale language modeling and analysis.
Dataset Structure
Each sample in the dataset is stored as a JSON object with the following fields:
- Source: Dataset name (e.g., "HackerNews")
- Date: Year extracted from the timestamp
- Text: Main textual content (e.g., comment or story text)
- Token_count: Number of tokens computed using
tiktoken(cl100k_base)
Example
{
"Source": "HackerNews",
"Date": 2021,
"Text": "This is an example comment from Hacker News.",
"Token_count": 18
}
Data Collection
Data was collected using the official Hacker News API: https://github.com/HackerNews/API
Data Processing
The following preprocessing steps were applied:
Removed empty or null text entries Converted timestamps to year format Tokenized text using cl100k_base Split into multiple JSONL shards for efficient storage