Get the latest tech news

Mapping Hacker News to find who knows what in the HN community


40 million embeddings to find who knows what on Hacker News After the semantic map from the previous post, where I embedded 40 million posts and comments from Hacker News, I saw how the community not only supported the project with encouraging suggestions but also discovered how quickly the community shrinks from across the world into real life relationships. Robert (robg) reached out and we began discussing his work in the neural basis of semantic knowledge and how he built social semantic algorithms way back in 2008.

Despite the intervening 16 years, we're amazed that social networks, even Hacker News, don't compute and display the trusted voices across topics. The semantic map of the community, in effect, breaks down to computable regions based on the ways people use language to talk about their knowledge and interests. For every user, based on their HN comments, I've computed their place in the complete semantic map of the entire community.

Get the Android app

Or read this on Hacker News

Read more on:

Photo of HN community

HN community

Photo of Mapping Hacker News

Mapping Hacker News