I analyzed 297k HN posts
your fate is sealed in 2 hours
Details
- External ID
- 46434575
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I analyzed 297k HN posts
- Website domain
- ssrn.com
- Launched
- Dec. 30, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.10400763358778627
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
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=5910263Code + data: github.com/philippdubach/hn-archiver
Enrichment
- Theme
- Hacker News clients, datasets, and tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Analytics & BI
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- analysis of 297k hacker news posts
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes This is a data scraper/archiver using the Hacker News Firebase API and basic statistical/correlation analysis in Python or R.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 95 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #92 of 96 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 58 days after the earliest competitor.
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- I built a tool that helps predict HN front page success · hn · 2026-05-03 · 26 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- Viral Potential Predictor · hn · 2025-12-28 · 34 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- One RSS Feed for the Most Popular HN Bloggers (2025 Rankings) · hn · 2026-01-13 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Most Penalized HN Stories · hn · 2026-09-13 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Running Analytics on 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite · hn · 2025-12-31 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Was tired of drowning in HN comments, so I built an AI Chief of Staff · hn · 2026-01-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Show HN submissions have tripled since 2023 · hn · 2026-01-11 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.46
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a analytics & bi tool for Legal yet.