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Life & fun · December 30, 2025

IA

I analyzed 297k HN posts – your fate is sealed in 2 hours

I built an archiver that tracked every HN item for 27 days (Dec 3-30, 2025) and captured 72k temporal snapshots to see how posts gain and lose attention. Key findings: - Early velocity (points&#x2F;hour in first 2 hours) predicts final score with ρ=0.82. A simple classifier achieves 98.4% precision for viral prediction. - No Matthew effect: high-scoring posts don't get more upvotes per hour than low-scoring ones (ρ=-0.04). HN's gravity penalty actually works. - Yet extreme inequality persists: Gini=0.89, meaning bottom 80% of posts get <10% of total upvotes. Inequality without cumulative…

I analyzed 297k HN posts – your fate is sealed in 2 hours launched on December 30, 2025 with 5 votes, #2,550 of 11,628 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was not reachable when checked in September 2026.

Visit papers.ssrn.com ↗Alternativestop 22% of December 2025

What it does

In the maker’s words, at launch

I built an archiver that tracked every HN item for 27 days (Dec 3-30, 2025) and captured 72k temporal snapshots to see how posts gain and lose attention. Key findings: - Early velocity (points&#x2F;hour in first 2 hours) predicts final score with ρ=0.82. A simple classifier achieves 98.4% precision for viral…

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