HN Sentiment API

What is HN Sentiment API?

HN Sentiment API is an open-source tool that analyzes sentiment in Hacker News comments at scale. The API extracts named entities from comments and classifies the sentiment expressed toward each entity as positive, negative, or neutral. It also determines overall comment sentiment and categorizes entities by type, including person, location, date, technology, organization, and other classifications. The dataset currently includes over 505,000 comments collected from October 31 onwards, providing a substantial corpus for analysis. The API is designed for developers, researchers, and data analysts who need programmatic access to sentiment data from Hacker News discussions. Use cases include tracking community sentiment toward technologies, organizations, or public figures, analyzing discussions around specific topics, or conducting research on online discourse patterns. The tool addresses the gap between raw comment text and actionable sentiment insights by automating entity extraction and classification. Because it's open source, users can access the API documentation, understand its methodology, and contribute to improvements. The combination of entity-level and comment-level sentiment analysis makes it useful for more granular understanding of how Hacker News community members feel about specific subjects within broader conversations.