> making this project was the most fun I have had in some time haha!
> sorryyyyy for vibe coding it though. Peace. I am only human after all […]
Well, yes, of course the whole app was written by an LLM. I’m not surprised at all.
---
Request:
POST /?user=play&add_http_cors_header=1 HTTP/1.1
Host: play.clickhouse.com
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=UTF-8
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.5414.120
Accept: */*
Origin: https://serjaimelannister.github.io
Referer: https://serjaimelannister.github.io/
SELECT username, total_words, global_rank, total_active_users,
concat(toString(global_rank), ' / ', toString(total_active_users)) AS placement,
round(100 * (1 - (global_rank / total_active_users)), 2) AS percentile
FROM (
SELECT by AS username, sum(length(splitByWhitespace(text))) AS total_words,
rank() OVER (ORDER BY sum(length(splitByWhitespace(text))) DESC) AS global_rank,
count(*) OVER () AS total_active_users
FROM hackernews_history WHERE type = 'comment' AND deleted = 0 AND notEmpty(by)
GROUP BY by
) WHERE username = '' OR 1=1;--' FORMAT JSON
This message is too large to displayThis is a client-side GitHub Pages app. GitHub Pages doesn't do server-side SQL execution.
As your POST request shows, it's querying the hackernews_history table on Clickhouse Playground which is a big read-only demo environment.
The information is public. "I can get the API wrapper to output more data" might be a quirk but it doesn't have security impact.
https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play
https://clickhouse.com/docs/getting-started/playground
https://clickhouse.com/blog/announcing-the-new-sql-playgroun...
> The information is public. "I can get the API wrapper to output more data" might be a quirk but it doesn't have security impact.
To be honest, I want more people to play with the clickhouse playground too. I feel like a lot of people have some great ideas to expand upon & I feel like they should play around with clickhouse playground for themselves! Highly recommended (also the reason why I referenced them in the website a lot)
Also, another point, but the data's not completely 1:1 but pretty close, I think the HN comments references till 6 january 2026 when I had run a date like query on it, but pretty close if you ask me & Clickhouse updates their database a lot from what I can feel like.
A bit of a backstory but I first wanted to try it with algolia api. Found the 10_000 requests per ip per hour to be really restricting. Then thought of using the big query data but it was really hard to play with that & I really couldn't understand how to really use it (a bit of skill issue), I also tried looking at firebase api of HN itself but found that it also had rate limits from what I can tell which wouldn't have been so useful.
I then found a HN comment about someone from clickhouse when searching to find that they had the play.clickhouse feature and then I remembered playing with that/being familiar with it from some time ago as well so decided to build on top of it.
The most interesting part was that when I was running it on browser & it ran. I felt like it would be a huge job to create an api. (I was thinking of having a puppeeter instance on my netcup vps) but then I simply took the request from network and pasted it in gemini to simplify it (remove all the browser things so that it can work in curl as when I pasted it directly in curl, it had issues) and it gave me a curl command which when I ran actually gave just the table itself. I wasn't really expecting this but it made the whole process even smoother and was thus capable of being able to run on github pages.
Clickhouse's pretty awesome from what I can tell :] (Wish I was sponsored xD)
Honestly, Tried to find if clickhouse has any merch but couldn't find any. Oh well, I might as well still print a sticker of clickhouse and paste it on my mac because I found it really cool for olap. (Honestly I now love both duckdb [for simple purposes] and clickhouse [for more advanced queries from large databases like this one])