Your Show HN dies in 7 hours — jonno.nz
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published
2026-07-01
reading<br>5 min · 1,345 words
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datastartupfoundershacker-news
At 1pm UTC on a Friday last June, an airline pilot posted a Show HN:<br>interactive graphs and globes built from years of his own flight logs. It went<br>huge. 1,539 points, the third biggest Show HN of the entire year. By dinner he<br>had 123 comments.
On day three the thread got 3 comments. In week two it got zero. The third<br>best launch out of more than forty thousand, and the conversation was over<br>before the weekend ended.
I wanted to know whether that shape is the exception or the rule, so I scraped<br>every Show HN from the last 12 months using the<br>Algolia HN API: 41,301 posts, plus the full<br>comment tree of every launch that got at least ten comments. About 100,000<br>comment timestamps. The scraper, the analysis, and the data are all in<br>one repo if you want to<br>check my working.
The pilot's flatline is the rule. The only unusual thing about his launch is<br>that it had a peak.
The median launch gets two points
I went in to measure decay speed. The distribution of outcomes stopped me<br>before I got there.
The median Show HN in my 12 months of data earned 2 points and 0 comments.<br>61.7% of launches got no comments at all, and 78.9% got one or none. A<br>single upvote from a stranger puts you in the top third.
The distribution is a power law with a brutal knee. The 90th percentile is 8<br>points. Fewer than 2% of launches clear 100. Picture your launch day and you<br>picture the front page. Picture two points and silence instead: that's the<br>median experience, by a wide margin.
I've launched products before (Shopim in 2014, Spotrisk in 2020) and I still<br>found these numbers confronting. Every founder I know treats the launch as<br>the milestone. The milestone, statistically, is a shrug.
The half-life is 7.2 hours
HN doesn't publish vote timestamps, so I'm using comment timing as the proxy<br>for attention. That's a real limitation and I'll come back to it, but<br>comments are the visible half of engagement, and they're what founders<br>refresh the page for.
For the 2,066 launches with at least ten comments, I built each launch's<br>cumulative comment curve: what share of its lifetime comments had arrived by<br>each hour. The median curve crosses 50% at 7.2 hours.
Half of everything anyone will ever say about your launch is said before the<br>first workday ends. 90% is done by hour 26. Even the slow quartile of<br>launches crosses halfway by hour 18.
The mechanism is no mystery. HN's ranking formula divides a story's points by<br>its age raised to the power 1.8, which Ken Shirriff documented years<br>ago.<br>Time sits in the denominator with a bigger exponent than votes get in the<br>numerator, so gravity wins no matter how good your day is going. The front<br>page is a conveyor belt into a furnace, by design. It's why HN stays<br>interesting, and it's why your launch can't stay visible.
I sanity-checked the half-life two ways (median of per-launch crossing times,<br>and the crossing of the median curve) and they agree within 20 minutes.<br>Excluding founders answering their own threads, 19% of all comments, moves<br>the number by four minutes. The 7-hour figure is not an artefact of chatty<br>founders.
Success buys volume, not time
My first guess was that big launches would decay slower. A front-page hit<br>keeps earning impressions, so surely the conversation stretches out.
It doesn't. The top decile of measurable launches (268 points or more, the<br>year's genuine hits) has a median half-life of 7.6 hours. Everything below<br>that decile: 7.1 hours. The biggest launches of the year run on the same<br>clock as a launch that scraped together ten comments.
Look at the top 12 launches of the year, the ones every founder dreams about.<br>Homebrew 6.0.0: half done in 8 hours. The 3,346-point monster at number one:<br>half done in 6.3. Two of the twelve flatlined at launch and only took off a<br>day or more later, which is HN's<br>second-chance pool<br>doing its thing, where moderators re-launch overlooked stories with a fresh<br>timestamp. The rescue mechanism exists because without it, nothing gets a<br>second look.
Success multiplies how many people show up. It does nothing to change when<br>they leave.
After hour 48, it's over
For the median launch, 4.2% of lifetime comments arrive after hour 48. Pool<br>every comment in the dataset together and the number rises to 17%, because<br>the giant launches have longer conversations in absolute terms. Either way<br>you cut it, the second-day cliff is real: 71% of launches are more than 90%<br>finished by hour 48.
And comments are the durable end of attention. Traffic dies faster.<br>Harrison Broadbent's front-page traffic<br>data<br>shows over half the visitor spike gone within 8 hours of submission. The<br>comment thread is the long tail. The clicks are gone by tea time.
A launch is a moment, distribution is a campaign
The takeaway I keep landing on: the launch spike is real, and it's worth<br>having, and it cannot be your distribution...