# 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.

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## 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

```json
{
  "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