Show HN: I measured the half-life of 41,301 Show HN launches. It's 7 hours
A developer scraped 41,301 Show HN posts from the past year and analyzed comment timestamps to measure attention decay. The median launch gets 2 points and 0 comments; for those gaining traction, half of all comments arrive within 7.2 hours and 90% within 26 hours. The analysis is fully reproducible from a public GitHub repository.
Background
- Hacker News (HN) is a social news site run by startup incubator Y Combinator. Its "Show HN" section is where makers launch side projects, MVPs, and early-stage products to the tech community.
- The Algolia HN API is the official, searchable database of all HN posts and comments, commonly used by researchers and developers for data analysis.
- "Half-life" (here ~7 hours) means that for a typical Show HN post that gets any traction, half of all the comments it will ever receive arrive within that window — a measure of how quickly the site's attention fades.
- The post is a data-driven critique of the platform's dynamics: even successful launches get a very narrow, fixed window to gain traction, which has practical implications for when founders should post and how they should handle feedback.
- The author links to a fully reproducible codebase, inviting methodological scrutiny, which is a common norm in HN technical culture.