Do you use one of the HN APIs or do you have all HN posts stored locally?
I am a bit confused about the interface. Sometimes I get charts and sometimes I don't. The "Yearly" and "Monthly" links don't work for me. I am using Firefox.
It would also be nice to have a percentage view that gives relative numbers.
The results are somewhat fuzzy. For example "coder" and "coders" give the exact same graph. Looks like "coders" also finds posts that don't contain "coders" at all but only "coder".
Yeah, I used http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api to download the data into a postgres database, which I then uploaded to cloudsearch to power the trend analyzer. Cloudsearch maps words that are close to each other (ex :coder and coders) and searches the text of both.
Thanks for the suggestion RE: relative numbers. Since HN is growing, it's hard to tell which topics are growing on a relative basis to HN's population.
Looking into your firefox bug right now, hopefully Ill be able to reproduce it.