I built a tool that helps predict HN front page success
Details
- External ID
- 47996094
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I built a tool that helps predict HN front page success
- Website domain
- wannalaunch.com
- Launched
- May 3, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 26
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.778675282714055
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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!
Enrichment
- Theme
- Hacker News clients, datasets, and tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Analytics & BI
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- predictor for hacker news front page
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes The product analyzes post headlines/timing against a public Hugging Face dataset of HN posts using a standard pre-trained NLP/regression model accessible via a web UI wrapper.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Random factors make prediction unreliable despite model, LLM trend overcrowded /show with submissions, Shadowbanning and domain-related moderation issues, Success metric ambiguity (frontpage visibility vs. meaningful feedback)
Feature requests: Add parenthetical suggestions to title recommendations, Factor current event trends into predictions, Distinguish between frontpage metrics and discussion quality
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 147 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #41 of 148 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 179 days after the earliest competitor.
- Viral Potential Predictor · hn · 2025-12-28 · 34 upvotes · similarity 0.69
- I built an interactive HN Simulator · hn · 2025-11-24 · 538 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- I analyzed 297k HN posts · hn · 2025-12-30 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- Credible brings credibility scores directly on Hacker News · hn · 2025-12-19 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- One RSS Feed for the Most Popular HN Bloggers (2025 Rankings) · hn · 2026-01-13 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- ReadHn · hn · 2025-12-25 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- HN Buffer · hn · 2025-11-22 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Show HN submissions have tripled since 2023 · hn · 2026-01-11 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.50
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.