I built a tool that helps predict HN front page success
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…
I built a tool that helps predict HN front page success launched on May 3, 2026 with 26 votes, #847 of 20,538 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
In plain words
This tool helps creators optimize Hacker News posts for frontpage success using a machine learning model trained on three years of HN data. It analyzes post elements like links, language, and technologies to predict engagement likelihood. The creator trained the model on a Hugging Face dataset and discovered that GitHub links significantly outperform other domains, open-source tools show strong virality rates, and certain phrasing choices improve performance. The model is available as open source for users who want to examine or retrain it.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Predict how well your Show HN post will perform before you submit.
In the maker’s words, at launch
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…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
I built an interactive HN SimulatorNov 2025 · news.ysimulator.run · ▲538Hey HN! Just for fun, I built an interactive Hacker News Simulator. You can submit text posts and links, just like the real HN. But on HN Simulator, all of the comments are generated by LLMs + generate instantly. The best way to use it (IMHO) is to submit a text post or a curl-able URL here: https://news.ysimulator.run/submit. You don't need an account to post. When you do that, various prompts will be built from a library of commenter archetypes, moods, and shapes. The AI commenters will actually respond to your text post and/or submitted link. I really wanted it to feel…
Exploring HN by mapping and analyzing 40M posts and comments for fun2024 · blog.wilsonl.in · ▲520Accessible end-to-end deep dive of crawling, embedding, projecting, and semantic searching all of Hacker News for my Hackerverse project.
- 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…
My recommendation engine for Hacker News2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me · ▲314Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…
Viral Potential PredictorDec 2025 · hn-ph.vercel.app · ▲34Hey HN, We analyzed 4,010,957 Hacker News submissions to find what actually makes posts perform well. Key findings: - 93.2% of posts never hit 50 points - Top 1% starts at 270 points - Certain keywords boost engagement by 1000%+ Built a free tool that scores your launch title and predicts viral potential: [link] The entire 4M post dataset is available as a single 700MB .mv2 file if you want to run your own analysis.
- FHFake Hacker News – See what HN has to say before you post2023 · fakehn.com · ▲107
Hi HN! I’ve been lurking for a while, but out of fear of being steamrolled by HN readers or maybe just natural introversion, I’ve always been too scared to post or comment. Which is why 1. this is my first real Hacker News submission 2. my friend Michael and I built "Fake" Hacker News, a place to post and see what AI-generated HN comments might say. Here’s a video of me using fakeHN to test this very submission: https://www.loom.com/share/4b9f4f9d7c77489a86baeb92ec55a1ed?... And an example of one of our generated posts:…
More dev tools this month
the category →
Contribute to oosexgang/hackios-xnu-kernel development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 1d ago · github.com
open-source IDE for thoughtful software design. Contribute to devdotfast/whiteboard development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 29d ago · github.com
Contribute to reladraw/reladraw development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 27d ago · github.com
OpenBot▲362Grok Bot alternative: free, local, open-source, multiplayer
Dev tools · 24d ago · openbot.run
Talanoa▲346Hi HN, I’m a fullstack developer, and honestly, I’ve lost count of how many side projects I’ve worked on over the years. But one idea kept coming back to me: a different kind of email client. It first came to me in 2014: “What if we could handle emails more like conversations?” Every year, I’d revisit this concept in my “Build Notes.” Ten years later, no one had built exactly what I had in mind — so I finally decided to do it myself. That’s how Talanoa was born. I wanted something focused on people, not timelines. I was tired of marking messages as unread just to remember to reply later, or…
Dev tools · 22d ago · talanoa.email
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, May 2026
the whole month →
Parallel agents, diff reviewer, and multi-model comparisons
Dev tools · May 2026 · kilo.ai
Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…
Life & fun · May 2026 · github.com
🌱 Private, quiet space for thinking. Simple app for .md files. - zakirullin/files.md
Dev tools · May 2026 · github.com