Very nice. I actually thought of implementing this a few months ago but a quick Google search brought up http://hackerslide.com/ (also open source), which works fine as well.
I've learnt two things from this project in particular. First, that most similar projects don't seem to stick around very long (the Reddit one it was based on disappeared after a few months as have several others - http://hckrnews.com/ is an exception I can recall). Second, these tools seem to be popular at first but then rarely used over time. Luckily I still find it useful to catch up after vacations, etc ;-)
"Perhaps one minor bonus to HackerSlide for now is anyone can take the data collected."
Indeed, may I make a suggestion here:
1) Why not make a datadump so people wouldn't need to scrape ~800*24 json files individually?
2) OP ought to load this data into his version so the timeline goes back further
3) It seems quite a few people get the urge to tinker like this with HN, I'm sure pg doesn't mind the scraping, but it strikes me as vastly more efficient if some sort of shared resource was setup and perhaps added to the footer, in the vain of HNsearch, so people don't waste time get crawling data setup.
I'm sure somebody else has a dataset just like yours that goes back further still. :)
Also, thank you for making this and OP for making his. Fun.