Enabling Codex to Analyze Two Decades of Hacker News Data

by ronfriedhaber on 4/2/2026, 10:42:23 AM

https://modolap.com/publication/hn-analysis-1

Comments

by: voidUpdate

When searching for references to Go, what does it actually look for? "Go" is a relatively common word, and I hardly see anyone referring to it as Golang

4/2/2026, 2:05:07 PM

by: mike_hearn

I don't quite understand how Modolap differs from just asking AI to use any other OLAP engine? Both your website and the github readme just emphasise that it's idiosyncratic and your personal approach, without explaining what that is or why anyone should care.

4/2/2026, 11:59:40 AM

by: zeroxfe

I've done this kind of thing many times with codex and sqlite, and it works very well. It's one prompt that looks something like this:<p>- inspect and understand the downloaded data in directory /path/..., then come up with an sqlite data model for doing detailed analytics and ingest everything into an sqlite db in data.sqlite, and document the model in model.md.<p>Then you can query the database adhoc pretty easily with codex prompts (and also generate PDF graphs as needed.)<p>I typically use the highest reasoning level for the initial prompt, and as I get deeper into the data, continuously improve on the model, indexes, etc., and just have codex handle any data migration.

4/2/2026, 1:15:03 PM

by: throwaway290

HN data is open? Under what conditions it's distributed?

4/2/2026, 1:04:33 PM

by: avib99

[dead]

4/2/2026, 1:17:30 PM

by: benreesman