188,000 Show HN posts, 14 years of data: what predicts GitHub stars
A recent analysis of 188,000 Show HN posts over 14 years reveals insights into what predicts GitHub stars. The median Show HN score is 2 points, with a significant correlation between HN scores and GitHub stars. Posting on Monday at 00:00 UTC offers the best chance of achieving a high score.
- ▪The median Show HN scores 2 points, while a score of 50 places a post in the top 6%.
- ▪Show HN submissions have nearly tripled since 2019, with 28,302 posts in 2025.
- ▪Each HN upvote converts to approximately 1.4 GitHub stars within 48 hours.
Hacker News (Newest) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 5,306 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Daniel King |
| Canonical URL | https://danfking.github.io/blog/2026/04/23/show-hn-by-the-numbers/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 18 May 2026 00:04:26 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T00:33:21.159Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T00:33:21.159Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | TmAtu2fPDk3l |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Show HN by the Numbers: 188,000 Posts, 14 Years of Data, and What Actually Predicts GitHub Stars 23 April, 2026 Does it actually matter when you post your Show HN? And does a front-page run translate into GitHub stars? I scraped 188,085 Show HN posts and cross-referenced the top 500 with their GitHub star histories to find out. TL;AI The median Show HN scores 2 points. If you hit 50, you’re in the top 6%. Best posting time: Monday 00:00 UTC (Sunday 7pm Eastern), with a 10.8% chance of scoring 50+. Each HN upvote converts to roughly 1.4 GitHub stars within 48 hours. The half-life of a Show HN is 24 hours. After 48h, 92% of the star impact is over. Show HN volume has nearly tripled since 2019 (28,000 posts in 2025). Your post now competes with ~200 others per day.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Daniel King.
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