hnup.date is a simple online tool that displays a real-time feed of the fastest-rising stories on Hacker News before they hit the official front page, identifying content based on early upvote velocity.

The NSA is engaged in the mass surveillance of Americans and people around the world.

“I was able to compile the HN database. I’m making it available for download through bittorrent for the community to use. It’s in XML format. As of November 7, 2010 there are 1,707,850 items in the database, which covers most of what’s on HN. There’s a few missing items, mostly deeply nested comments – this will be fixed in time. “