Trends in the making

What the machine noticed

Phrases the machine found moving in the last two weeks that are not on the watchlist yet, so nothing below is being counted above. These are terms on their way in, not proposals waiting for a person: a candidate that keeps coming back — proposed on three days in a row, on at least two platforms each time — is taken onto the list by the run itself, up to three a run and never past the ceiling of thirty-five tracked terms. A person can strike a term, the run lets go of what it added itself, and a struck term never returns: its line stays in the watchlist file as a tombstone.

• tesla roadster 16 recent documents · 36.6× · Google Trends · Hacker News · Mastodon · Google News · Reddit · Product Hunt · Polymarket

  Will the Tesla Roadster's 0-60 time be less than 1 second? 2026-10-19

• data center 26 recent documents · 1.2× · Hacker News · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News · Reddit · Techmeme · Polymarket

  Analysis: companies are set for a massive acceleration of 50GW+ in data center capacity additions in 2027; 24GW+ across 40 campuses are in the advanced stages (Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros/SemiAnalysis) 2026-10-19

• katie zacharia 32 recent documents · 73.1× · Google Trends · Wikipedia · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News · Reddit

  Katie Zacharia 2026-10-19

• margaret hamilton 22 recent documents · 50.3× · Wikipedia · Hacker News · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News · Lobsters

  Margaret Hamilton (Informatikerin) 2026-10-11

• nobel peace 14 recent documents · 16× · Wikipedia · Hacker News · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News · Polymarket

  Hegseth's Nobel Peace Prize remark 2026-10-18

• nobel peace prize 14 recent documents · 16× · Wikipedia · Hacker News · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News · Polymarket

  Hegseth's Nobel Peace Prize remark 2026-10-18

• peace prize 14 recent documents · 16× · Wikipedia · Hacker News · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News · Polymarket

  Hegseth's Nobel Peace Prize remark 2026-10-18

• donald trump 38 recent documents · 2.7× · Google Trends · Wikipedia · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News · Polymarket

  donald trump campaign visit kansas 2026-10-19

• trump administration 8 recent documents · 1.1× · Hacker News · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News · Reddit · Techmeme

  Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says the Trump administration does not have "any policy" to use a minority stake in Intel to interfere in its business strategy (Kohei Yamada/Nikkei Asia) 2026-10-17

• white house 19 recent documents · 0.6× · Wikipedia · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News · Reddit · Techmeme

  Katie Zacharia fired after five days as White House press secretary 2026-10-17

• ilhan omar 28 recent documents · 64× · Google Trends · Wikipedia · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News

  Rep. Ilhan Omar’s lawyers say authorities ignored judge’s restrictions on home search 2026-10-18

• fort hood 18 recent documents · 41.1× · Wikipedia · Hacker News · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News

  2009 Fort Hood shooting 2026-10-16

• anne carson 17 recent documents · 38.9× · Google Trends · Wikipedia · Hacker News · Bluesky · Google News

  Anne Carson 2026-10-11

• san diego 12 recent documents · 27.4× · Google Trends · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News · Reddit

  The long-deployed USS Lincoln returns home to San Diego Bay 2026-10-09

• zero click 12 recent documents · 27.4× · Hacker News · Bluesky · Mastodon · Lobsters · Techmeme

  How Discover-Tech turned targeted ads into a pipeline for zero-click spywares 2026-10-19

• kimberly guilfoyle 22 recent documents · 25.1× · Google Trends · Wikipedia · Bluesky · Google News · Reddit

  Kimberly Guilfoyle 2026-10-17

• navi pillay 10 recent documents · 22.9× · Wikipedia · Hacker News · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News

  Navi Pillay 2026-10-12

• ukraine starlink 8 recent documents · 18.3× · Hacker News · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News · Reddit

  4 GOP senators join letter demanding Pentagon inspector general investigation of Ukraine’s Starlink outage 2026-10-16

• press secretary 14 recent documents · 16× · Wikipedia · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News · Reddit

  Katie Zacharia, Trump’s New Press Secretary, Is Ousted After 5 Days 2026-10-18

• house press secretary 7 recent documents · 8× · Wikipedia · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News · Reddit

  Katie Zacharia fired after five days as White House press secretary 2026-10-17

• los angeles 13 recent documents · 7.4× · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News · Reddit · Polymarket

  Dodgers vs. Brewers NLCS 2026-10-17

• house press 7 recent documents · 2.7× · Wikipedia · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News · Reddit

  Katie Zacharia fired after five days as White House press secretary 2026-10-17

• white house press 7 recent documents · 2.7× · Wikipedia · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News · Reddit

  Katie Zacharia fired after five days as White House press secretary 2026-10-17

• pope leo 13 recent documents · 2.1× · Google Trends · Wikipedia · Bluesky · Google News · Reddit

  Pope Leo to leave hospital 2026-10-18

• elon musk 17 recent documents · 1.9× · Bluesky · Mastodon · Google News · Techmeme · Polymarket

  Elon Musk says "I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America" in 2027, a gift worth ~$10.5B, after Anthropic committed 5% of its shares to APBF (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) 2026-10-19

• social media 10 recent documents · 1.4× · Hacker News · Bluesky · Google News · Reddit · Techmeme

  Kids are outsmarting social media bans. That's not a problem we need to solve 2026-10-18

• openai anthropic 9 recent documents · 0.9× · Hacker News · Google News · GitHub · Techmeme · arXiv

  Source: the US FTC issues ~50-page civil investigative demands to OpenAI and Anthropic over safety incidents, safeguarding practices, and consumer protection (Maria Curi/Axios) 2026-10-15

• strait hormuz 8 recent documents · 0.9× · Google Trends · Hacker News · Bluesky · Reddit · Polymarket

  Iranian shops are selling iPhone 18s from the container ship that SANK in the Strait of Hormuz. 2026-10-18

• south korea 7 recent documents · 0.8× · Google Trends · Hacker News · Mastodon · Google News · Techmeme

  South Korea to recall its ambassador to Ukraine over North Korean POW dispute 2026-10-08

• reverse engineer 22 recent documents · 25.1× · Hacker News · GitHub · Lobsters · DEV

  aicodeking/leanrea 2026-10-17

Discovery reads the house’s own committed day files — every source the nightly ledger asks, which since 2026-09-02 means search interest in ten countries, news, forums, encyclopaedia reading in six languages, app and game charts, model releases and prediction markets — and adds four live archives for depth while the archive is still young: front-page link aggregator stories, top developer articles, preprints in the machine-learning categories and the newest repositories. It reduces labels and titles to tokens by the disclosed rule, counts documents per n-gram over the recent fortnight against the fortnight before it, and drops generic pairs, months, weekdays and anything already contained in a watched term. Rank is by how many platforms carry an n-gram, then by pace. Because the corpus is no longer four technology platforms, an arc can now begin in culture, politics, sport, apps or markets.

The platforms searched

Every term is put to each of these once a day, as a quoted phrase, through the platform’s own search interface. A platform that does not answer is recorded with the reason and the day is published without it — never backfilled, never replaced by a neighbour.

• Hacker News ok
• Google News ok
• GitHub ok
• arXiv unavailable — stopped after 3 consecutive failures; loop-engineering: SourceUnavailable: https://export.arxiv.org/api/query: HTTPStatusError: Client error '429 Too Many Req; context-engineering: SourceUnavailable:
• Reddit partial — stopped after 3 consecutive failures; context-engineering: SourceUnavailable: https://www.reddit.com/search.rss: HTTPStatusError: Client error '429 Too Many R; harness-engineering: SourceUnavailable:
• Wikipedia page views ok

A platform recorded as unavailable contributed nothing to any count today, which is why a term’s row can drop without the term itself going quiet.

For machines

The same register, in the forms a machine reader can use. Static files, built from the archive with the page, so a reader and a crawler never see two different states.

/trending/topics.json

the whole watchlist as it stands today — every term with its counts per platform, its status, its receipts, what the run promoted and let go of this morning, and the candidates on their way in

/trending/topics/data-centers.json

one term by its slug, with its counts today and its series over every committed day

/trending/topics/latest.md

the same register as Markdown, for readers that parse text better than markup

/trending/latest.json

the other half of the ledger: what several platforms surfaced at once this morning

/llms.txt

where this sits in the house, and what a retrieval agent may do with it

• Data: CC0 1.0
• Cadence: rebuilt daily, with the ledger
• Cite: Frank Bültge, Common Ground — trends in the making, frankbueltge.de/trending/topics

How this is measured

A term is a phrase, not a topic: it is counted when it or one of its declared aliases occurs in a document’s title, and each document counts once however many times the phrase appears in it. The three windows end at the run, so “seven days” means the seven days before this morning and nothing else. The first sighting is the earliest receipt across every committed file, so it moves backwards only when an older document turns up — never forwards. And the series on a term page is not stored: it is read out of the dated files, one point per day the machine ran.

Method sheet, section seven →

No language model writes anything here: every count is a platform’s own answer to a quoted phrase, every status a threshold in the pipeline, every promotion and every striking an n-gram frequency against a written condition. What the machine decides is which words are on the list; what a person decides is whether the machine got it right, in either direction — and every one of those decisions is a dated line in a committed file, with the reason beside it.