Life & fun · September 5, 2026
Getting to the top of Show HN is getting harder
Fifteen years of Show HN: the thirty-four repeat fliers and the top ten of every year. Volume 2 of 2.
Getting to the top of Show HN is getting harder launched on September 5, 2026 with 15 votes, #874 of 8,094 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.
In plain words
This is a data analysis project examining fifteen years of Show HN submissions on Hacker News. It identifies thirty-four repeat posters who have achieved high visibility (250+ points) multiple times, with the top performer reaching six successful posts. The project provides historical rankings and trends showing how increasingly difficult it has become to reach the top of Show HN over time, serving as a resource for understanding the platform's competitive landscape and what constitutes notable success in the community.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- FYFive Years of Show HN2016 · antontarasenko.github.io · ▲16
Best of Show HN2019 · bestofshowhn.com · ▲249Discover standout projects launched on Hacker News Show HN from 2008 to 2026, organized by date, topic, and Y Combinator batch.
- ATAnalyzing top HN posts with language models2022 · ▲117
Hi HN, I spent a few weeks looking at the top HN posts of all time. This included exploration, clustering, creating visualizations, and zooming in on what (to me personally) seems like some of the best discussions on here. Three things in this post: 1- The interesting groups of HN posts 2- The interactive visualizations that you can explore in your browser 3- The data from this exploration -- this includes CSV of the titles as well as the text embeddings of 3,000 Ask HN articles. Blog post about this whole process here: [1] ============ 1- The interesting groups of HN posts From the…
- 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)
Show HN posts p/month more than doubled in the last yearJan 2026 · petegoldsmith.com · ▲34Show HN posts per month more than doubled in the last year
- HNHacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT2025 · gally.net · ▲377
The use of the em dash (—) now raises suspicions that a text might have been AI-generated. Inspired by a suggestion from dang [1], I created a leaderboard of HN users according to how many of their posts before November 30, 2022—that is, before the release of ChatGPT—contained em dashes. Dang himself comes in number 2—by a very slim margin. Credit to Claude Code for showing me how to search the HN database through Google BigQuery and for writing the HTML for the leaderboard. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45053933
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