Every minute for a couple of month, we collected a snapshot of the 1500 newest stories of Hacker News with this scraper. A current version of the dataset can be accessed via the open science framework (osf).
You can fetch the data and create the database with:
> ./run.sh
The database along with the raw data should be in the /data/ folder.
[1] Hacker News Scraper
[2] Exploratory Data Analysis
[3] Improving the Hacker News Ranking Algorithm
[4] Simulation to Test New Ranking Formulas