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…
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
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 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 parentheses and mentioning technologies (Lua, Postgres, Rust, etc.) helps a ton. You can try the tool at wannalaunch.com or read the blog posts for more insights from the analysis. The model is also available as open source if you want to retrain it or look under the hood. Happy to hear the feedback!
Does the same job
all alternatives →- IBI built an interactive HN SimulatorNov 2025 · news.ysimulator.run · ▲538
Hey 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…
- VPViral Potential PredictorDec 2025 · hn-ph.vercel.app · ▲34
Hey 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:…
- ADA discovery-focused search engine for Hacker News2024 · hn.trieve.ai · ▲193
We (Nick, Dens, Denzell, Fede, Drew, Aaryan, and Daniel) have been building HN Discovery, a discovery-focused search engine for Hacker News, in our spare time for the past 6 months and are excited to show it! It adds the following features relative to the existing keyword search interface and preserves the existing ones: - no-JS version (hnnojs.trieve.ai) - site:{required_site} and site:{negated-site} filters - public analytics - LLM generated query suggestions based on random stories - recommendations - dense vector semantic search - SPLADE fulltext search - RAG AI chat - order by…
- SHSearch HN for interesting comment sections2024 · searchhacker.news · ▲60
I built this tool to help me find interesting discussions on Hacker News. I love reading HN discussions almost more than the articles themselves. However, I found that full text search, although highly performant, is not always good at surfacing interesting discussions on a certain topic -- especially if you don't know what to search for exactly. I built this by scraping the most recent ~6 million posts (that's about 2 years of history) and putting the resulting posts and their vector embeddings into Postgres. Let me know what could be improved, and if you'd like a more detailed writeup of…
- HNHacker News Outliers2024 · hn.moritz.pm · ▲147
I made a little website with a server that collects only HN submissions with > 500 upvotes chronologically. https://hn.moritz.pm/ It's quite simple because I wanted to learn from the project. But I think it's useful, to get a summary of what was important over the last days. The UI is almost identical to the HN frontpage, you can click on the comments to view the thread and on the username to see the profile. The rest of the cards takes you to the submitted URL.
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