Life & fun · December 30, 2025
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/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…
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/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 advantage. - Attention decays as a power law (α=0.52), slower than exponential; quality content has longer tails. Paper (open access): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5910263 Code + data: github.com/philippdubach/hn-archiver
Does the same job
all alternatives →- IMI measured the half-life of 41,301 Show HN launches. It's 7 hoursJul 2026 · jonno.nz · ▲37
I scraped every Show HN from the last 12 months (41,301 posts) plus the full comment tree of every launch with 10+ comments, ~100k comment timestamps, all from the Algolia HN API. The median launch gets 2 points and 0 comments. For launches that do get traction, half the comments they'll ever get arrive within 7.2 hours and 90% within 26, and the top decile decays on the same clock as everyone else. Vote timestamps aren't public, so comment timing is the attention proxy; caveats are in the post. Everything reproduces from the repo with one command…
- IMI made a tool to track the upvote/ranking history of HN submissions2021 · upvotetracker.com · ▲144
- IBI built a tool that helps predict HN front page successMay 2026 · wannalaunch.com · ▲26
Hey HN community, I built a tool that helps optimize your post for hitting the first page of Show HN. How it works: I used a Hugging Face dataset of all Hacker News posts from the past 3 years and trained a model that predicts how successful your post might be. There's still a lot of randomness on HN, so nothing is guaranteed, but the tool helps optimize your post for higher odds. A couple of interesting findings: - GitHub repo links work x3 better than regular domains - Open-source tools have a steady virality rate (13.9% - one of the highest) - "I built" outperforms "We built" - Using…
- HThnlive.tk – A tool to estimate activity on HN before posting2016 · hnlive.tk · ▲109
- AHArchivy-HN – automatically save and download your upvoted HN posts2020 · github.com · ▲144
- IBI built a tool for viral Reddit posts after analyzing 562 subreddits2025 · ▲6
It took me six months to analyze 562 subreddits. I systematically parsed titles, post bodies, and user interactions to identify statistically significant patterns and evaluate if it was possible to create a model that could predict the likelihood of a post going viral based on specific features. The key findings were unexpected: while the title of a post has a direct correlation with engagement, there is another highly influential factor I initially overlooked, timing. The optimal time to post on Reddit, in terms of engagement, can significantly vary based on geographic distribution. The…
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Hi HN, I built Eigendrum, a web tool that solves the 2D wave equation for arbitrary shapes so you can hear what they sound like as drums. How it works: * Solves -∇²u = λu using finite element analysis (Kφ = λMφ) on a triangle mesh. * Validated to <0.1% error against closed-form solutions for circles (Bessel zeros) and rectangles. * Sound model factors in strike location, Rayleigh damping, and mallet width. * Includes Kac drums I & II to demonstrate identical sound spectra from different geometries. * No frameworks, build steps, or dependencies. Repo and tests:…
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Launched alongside, December 2025
the whole month →- GP
Life & fun · Dec 2025 · dosaygo-studio.github.io
- JG
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Community, All the HN belong to you. This is an archive of hacker news that fits in your browser. When I made HN Made of Primes I realized I could probably do this offline sqlite/wasm thing with the whole GBs of archive. The whole dataset. So I tried it, and this is it. Have Hacker News on your device. Go to this repo (https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/HackerBook): you can download it. Big Query -> ETL -> npx serve docs - that's it. 20 years of HN arguments and beauty, can be yours forever. So they'll never die. Ever. It's the unkillable static archive of HN and it's…
Dev tools · Dec 2025 · hackerbook.dosaygo.com
