When Did AI Take Over Hacker News?

Summary

One in three top 10 Hacker News posts this month were AI-related. In 2025, that's hardly surprising, but it made me wonder, when did this start? Was it ChatGPT? Was it GPT-4? Moreover, has sentiment shifted positive or negative over time? This pretty negative post topping Hacker News last month sparked these questions, and I decided to find some answers, of course, using AI. To help with this, I discovered that the Hacker News Big Query dataset is pretty well maintained and includes the title, URL, score, and comments of every post ever made. I decided to start my analysis in 2019, so I punched in a couple quick queries, downloaded the data (24,910 top 10 stories from January 1st, 2019 to August 15th, 2025), and got to work. I could just use simple keyword analysis at this point to answer these questions, but that wouldn't be very fun. Instead, I decided to plug every single top 10 Hacker News story, and part of its comment section, into GPT-5-mini and have it classify them. To start, I needed LLM readable versions of each attached web page. I used the Jina.ai reader to get these (when possible due to scraping restrictions). I also fed all top level comments in for additional context when classifying. After I downloaded all the Jina reader pages, I used the OpenAI Batch API to process structured outputs classifications of each Hacker News story. I decided to generate these three fields: Summary A short summary of what the post is. This helps when the title isn’t descriptive and could support future low-cost LLM classification. AI Mention Does it talk about AI? (True/False) AI Sentiment If AI is mentioned, is the sentiment positive, neutral, or negative? In case anyone wants to use the data I collected for their own analysis, I'm linking the GPT-5-mini classified dataset here and the downloaded Jina pages here. So I get the data back from the Batch API and start playing around with it, and the big thing I find, and this will probably come as no surprise to anyone, is...