It’s not free: Only storage and egress, which are trivial.

Running the query in BQ is free up to 1 TB and the 16000 row download is free so I recommend that if necessary.

I think an alternative option could be to have a torrent (or other file sharing mechanism) with the public HN information. Am I missing something? 16k rows seems very tiny for doing an analysis of HN.

The vast majority of potential HN analysis can be done in SQL alone within BigQuery, which is the proper way to handle a data warehouse regardless.

You mostly need the raw data for ML model training which is a very niche use case.