[sctb]

I don't think it's unfair to ask someone to back up a claim, especially when the dataset is publicly available through the API or (more conveniently) in BigQuery:

  SELECT count(*) FROM [bigquery-public-data:hacker_news.comments] 
  WHERE parent IS NULL;

Story and comment IDs are also simply incrementing integers. We're not making it easy on ourselves to hide this sort of thing!

[angersock]

Oh nifty. When did you all add that stuff to BigQuery? The Firebase API suggests that that dataset is going away in like a month.