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Your Show HN dies in 7 hours

Your Show HN dies in 7 hours

Jul 2, 2026 Analytics
data analysis hacker news product launch web scraping

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Your Show HN dies in 7 hours

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I scraped every Show HN from the last 12 months (41,301 posts) plus the full comment tree of every launch with 10+ comments, ~100k comment timestamps, all from the Algolia HN API.The median launch gets 2 points and 0 comments. For launches that do get traction, half the comments they'll ever get arrive within 7.2 hours and 90% within 26, and the top decile decays on the same clock as everyone else.Vote timestamps aren't public, so comment timing is the attention proxy; caveats are in the post. Everything reproduces from the repo with one command (https://github.com/jonnonz1/hn-attention-cliff), and every number in the post maps to a named function. Keen to hear where the methodology falls short

Comments (4)

Oswald Mayer Oswald Mayer 1 week ago

whats the actual takeaway beyond most launches going nowhere

Kenton Stroman Kenton Stroman 1 week ago

what day of the week performs best for launches?

Theo Mohr Theo Mohr 1 week ago

seven hours feels optimistic for a post about posts dying

Ansley Nicolas Ansley Nicolas 1 week ago

what stack handled processing that volume of comment trees?