Show HN by the Numbers: 188,000 Posts, 14 Years of Data, and What Actually Predicts GitHub Stars | Daniel King

Show HN by the Numbers: 188,000 Posts, 14 Years of Data, and What Actually Predicts GitHub Stars | Daniel King

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.

HN score and GitHub stars correlate at r = 0.29. Significant, but your HN score explains only 8% of the variance in stars.

Comments don’t predict stars (r = 0.10). Discussion doesn’t mean conversion.

The dataset

Every Show HN post from 2012 to April 2026, pulled from the HN Algolia API. 188,085 posts total, of which 51,338 (27%) link to a GitHub repo. For the GitHub correlation analysis, I fetched stargazer timestamps for 491 of the top 500 repos by HN score (all scoring 258+), using GitHub’s star-with-timestamps API.

Some caveats upfront. The Algolia API records final scores, not time-series, so I can’t tell you how long a post sat on the front page. The stargazer API caps at 1,000 stars per repo in my sampling window, which means the 48h star counts for very popular repos are underestimates. The dataset is biased toward high-scoring posts for the star analysis, since I couldn’t practically fetch star histories for all 51k repos.

With those limitations acknowledged, the patterns are clear enough to be useful.

Show HN is booming (and getting noisier)

The most striking trend in the data isn’t about timing at all. Show HN submissions have exploded. From 2012 to 2019, the platform saw a steady ~10,000 Show HN posts per year. COVID lockdowns pushed this to 15,000 in 2020. Then came ChatGPT.

Starting in late 2022, submissions began climbing steadily, and 2025 hit 28,302 posts. That’s nearly a 3x increase from the pre-COVID baseline. Whether this is because more people are building things (thanks to AI-assisted development) or because more people are treating Show HN as a launch channel is hard to say. Probably both.

The practical implication: your Show HN is now competing with roughly 200 other Show HN posts on any given day, up from about 30 a decade ago. The signal-to-noise ratio has changed dramatically.

What “normal” looks like

The median is 2, the 90th percentile is 24, and the 99th percentile is 263.

Before talking about what works, it helps to calibrate expectations. The median Show HN post scores 2 points. The mean is 13.5, dragged up by the long right tail.

If your Show HN gets 5 points, you’re already above average. If it hits 50, you’re in the top 6%. And if you crack 250, you’re in the top 1% of all Show HN posts ever submitted.

Most Show HN posts simply don’t gain traction. That’s not necessarily a reflection of quality. The new/rising page is a crowded, fast-moving queue, and a post can easily get buried in minutes if it doesn’t catch an early upvote or two.

When to post: the heatmaps

This is the question everyone asks, and I have both the expected answer and some surprises.

Where the scores are

Mean scores show a pattern that differs from post volume. The highest mean scores cluster around 12:00 to 15:00 UTC (7-10am Eastern), which is just before the main wave of competition hits. Sunday morning UTC also performs well. Fridays at 12-15 UTC (mean 18.0) and Sundays at 16-19 UTC (17.3) are the best blocks.

Your actual odds

The best individual slot is Monday 00:00 UTC (10.8%). The worst is Thursday 06:00 UTC (2.6%).

The most actionable view: what percentage of posts at each timeslot score 50 or higher? (Recent data only, 2021 onwards.)

The best slot, by a significant margin, is Monday at 00:00 UTC (Sunday 7pm Eastern), where 10.8% of posts reach 50+. The worst slots are mid-week during the early UTC morning, particularly Thursday at 06:00 UTC (2.6%). This makes intuitive sense: you’re posting when the audience hasn’t yet arrived for the day.

Note that the 4-hour blocks above smooth out the granular peaks. The individual best hours are Monday 00:00 (10.8%), Sunday 02:00 (9.8%), and Saturday 19:00 (9.2%).

Score vs. competition

The gap between competition (post volume) and score is where the opportunity sits. The widest gap, where scores are high relative to competition, is around 00:00 to 01:00 UTC (US evening). The narrowest gap is around 15:00 UTC (US late morning), where both volume and...