What gets on this list
Every 10 minutes the collector pulls from 5 sources — Hacker News, Reddit
(top/hour + rising), Google News (top + topics), Google Trends (realtime),
and X/Twitter (live trending). Each item is tracked over time, then items about the
same thing are clustered into a named trend.
How each item is scored
• Heat — how prominent it is right now (HN points, Reddit/X/News rank, Trends volume).
• Velocity — how fast it's rising: brand-new + already prominent, climbing the ranks,
gaining points/minute, or flagged "rising" by the source. This is the breaking signal.
How trends are ranked
• Cross-source multiplier — the core signal. A topic on X and Reddit and
News and Trends at once is multiplied up (1 + 0.6 × (sources−1)). One platform
spiking ranks far lower than four agreeing.
• buzz = capped heat (top 3 items/source so 200 headlines can't dominate) × cross-source.
• breaking = velocity × cross-source + a small buzz nudge.
Time range
• Now — trends active in the latest 10-min cycle.
• 24h / 7d — trends seen over that window (with a sparkline of buzz over time); shows
the biggest, stickiest stories of the period.
Separate events
In the Now view, a developing story is broken into its distinct events, each its own
entry with its own timestamp — so "half time", "red card", and "final whistle" are separate cards,
not one merged blob. A card's ↳ topic tag shows the larger story it's part
of. The 24h / 7d views stay topic-level (with buzz sparklines).
Sort
• 🕐 Freshness (default) — each event ranked by its own recency-weighted prominence
(heat decayed by the event's age), so the newest development floats to the top.
• 🔥 Heat — current prominence first (the buzz score: capped cross-source heat).
Ages & descriptions
• The 🕐 age is how old the event is — the earliest source publish time, not bounded by how
long the dashboard has run. active shows the most recent update for a still-developing story
(so a live match dated by its pre-game live-blog still reads as fresh); "spotted here" is when this
dashboard first caught the buzz. ≥ is a fallback for trends with no datable source.
• Titles + 1–2 sentence summaries are written by DeepSeek V4-Flash from the real headlines;
bare X trends get a Google News context lookup first. If DeepSeek is unavailable it falls back to
the top headline.