Five Years of Show HN
Five Years of Show HN launched on May 3, 2016 with 16 votes, #1,609 of 3,824 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 10 years on.
In plain words
This is an analysis of 10,000 Show HN submissions from Hacker News, examining trends across five years of the community's project showcase. The author manually reviewed the top 100 submissions to assess their longevity, finding that 11 percent no longer function. The analysis explores patterns in creator success, revealing that most successful makers have few projects and derive most of their visibility from single submissions, with only rare exceptions showing consistent success across multiple launches.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
I manually checked the status of the top 100 Show HN submissions. Eleven of them happened to be dead. The others still deliver what they promised in the original submission: The connection between age and death is not evident here, but it reveals itself in a larger sample, as we'll see later. Top makers have few projects. In Top 100, the mode is one project. Only few authors, like afshinmeh , have more than a dozen. Even in these cases, most scores come from a single submission. The best examples of systematic success are ianstormtaylor and erohead : they have a high median score in six and three projects, respectively. To explore commercial success of Show HN projects, I combined…from antontarasenko.github.io
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- SHShow HN submissions have tripled since 2023Jan 2026 · imgur.com · ▲18
I analyzed 10 years of Hacker News data (2016-2025) to track Show HN submission trends. - Show HN posts went from ~900/month (2016-2019) to 3,315 in Dec 2025 - Share of all stories: 2.4% (2016) → 12.8% (Dec 2025) - Notable spikes: COVID-19 (2020), AI boom (2023), and accelerating growth through 2024-2025 Data source: HackerBook (144k Show HN posts / 3.4M total stories)
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