[nomilk]

Easiest way might be to use google cloud's 'bigquery' tool which lets you query hn data with SQL

I just tried

    SELECT *
    FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` 

and it returns 47049059 rows. And

    SELECT
      MAX(timestamp) AS most_recent_timestamp
    FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`;

gives 2026-02-21 09:12:49 UTC, so it checks out.