What is HN thinking? Real-time sentiment and concept analysis
Hi HN, I made Ethos, an open-source tool to visualize the discourse on Hacker News. It extracts entities, tracks sentiment, and groups discussions by concept. Check it out: https://ethos.devrupt.io This was a "budget build" experiment. I managed to ship it for under $1 in infra costs. Originally I was using `qwen3-8b` for the LLM and `qwen3-embedding-8b` for the embedding, but I ran into some capacity issues with that model and decided to use `llama-3.1-8b-instruct` to stay within a similar budget while having higher throughput. What LLM or embedding would you have used within the…
In plain words
Ethos is an open-source tool that analyzes real-time discourse on Hacker News by extracting entities, tracking sentiment, and grouping discussions by concept. It is designed for anyone interested in understanding trends and sentiment in Hacker News conversations. The tool stands out for being built as a budget experiment, operating at under $1 in infrastructure costs using open-source language models like Llama 3.1 for processing and analysis.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, I made Ethos, an open-source tool to visualize the discourse on Hacker News. It extracts entities, tracks sentiment, and groups discussions by concept. Check it out: https://ethos.devrupt.io This was a "budget build" experiment. I managed to ship it for under $1 in infra costs. Originally I was using `qwen3-8b` for the LLM and `qwen3-embedding-8b` for the embedding, but I ran into some capacity issues with that model and decided to use `llama-3.1-8b-instruct` to stay within a similar budget while having higher throughput. What LLM or embedding would you have used within the same price range? It would need to be a model that supports structured output. How bad do you think it is that `llama-3.1` is being used and then a higher dimension embedding? I originally wanted to keep the LLM and embedding within the same family, but I'm not sure if there is munch point in that. Repo: https://github.com/devrupt-io/ethos I'm looking for feedback on which metrics (sentiment vs. concepts) you find most interesting! PRs welcome!
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