Show HN / what got attention
211,150 posts · +941 this week
What actually got attention on Hacker News
Every Show HN post since 2011, measured — paste your title and see the ones shaped like it.
never seen — under 30 upvotes
got no comment at all
reached 100 upvotes
The report · every Show HN of the past twelve months · 46,586 posts
Everyone tells you when to post. It hardly matters.
The hour you pick moves you by 3.4 posts in a hundred.
Best hour 00:00 UTC: 5.6% of posts reach 30 upvotes. Worst hour 07:00 UTC: 2.2%. Sunday beats Wednesday by 4.6% to 3.7%. That is the whole timing effect, and it is the thing every other tool sells you.
| 00 | 5.6% |
|---|---|
| item 2 | 3.1% |
| item 3 | 3.0% |
| item 4 | 2.3% |
| item 5 | 2.6% |
| item 6 | 3.5% |
| 06 | 2.5% |
| item 8 | 2.2% |
| item 9 | 2.6% |
| item 10 | 3.1% |
| item 11 | 3.4% |
| item 12 | 4.0% |
| 12 | 3.9% |
| item 14 | 3.7% |
| item 15 | 4.4% |
| item 16 | 4.5% |
| item 17 | 5.3% |
| item 18 | 5.5% |
| 18 | 4.7% |
| item 20 | 4.1% |
| item 21 | 4.4% |
| item 22 | 4.0% |
| item 23 | 3.9% |
| item 24 | 4.1% |
The confound, said first: people who post at a sensible hour are also people who prepared. The clock did not do the work. That applies to every number on this page.
One word in your title costs about what the best hour gives you.
of the 14,608 titles that say AI, LLM, GPT or agent reached 30 upvotes. That is 31.4% of everything posted.
of titles that name a language instead — Rust, Python, Zig. Every title with no AI wording in it: 4.5%.
Show HN got 13 times busier and 3.2 times harder.
2,980 posts in 2011, and 12.7% of them reached 30 upvotes. 38,911 in the first 10 months of 2026, and 4.0% do. The grey bars are that rate falling. The orange bars underneath are the share of titles saying AI, over the same years — it is the one thing on this page that changed shape rather than drifting.
| 11 | 12.7% |
|---|---|
| item 2 | 13.4% |
| item 3 | 11.1% |
| item 4 | 11.1% |
| 15 | 9.1% |
| item 6 | 10.0% |
| item 7 | 9.7% |
| item 8 | 9.9% |
| item 9 | 9.5% |
| 20 | 9.3% |
| item 11 | 11.8% |
| item 12 | 12.6% |
| item 13 | 10.0% |
| item 14 | 9.2% |
| 25 | 5.9% |
| 26 | 4.0% |
| 11 | 0.1% |
|---|---|
| item 2 | 0.2% |
| item 3 | 0.1% |
| item 4 | 0.1% |
| 15 | 0.3% |
| item 6 | 0.7% |
| item 7 | 1.0% |
| item 8 | 1.4% |
| item 9 | 1.6% |
| 20 | 1.6% |
| item 11 | 2.2% |
| item 12 | 4.8% |
| item 13 | 23.5% |
| item 14 | 20.1% |
| 25 | 25.3% |
| 26 | 32.4% |
Short titles win, and almost nobody writes one.
38.2% of posts use 70 characters or more — the largest group on the site, and the weakest at 3.7%. Show HN: Elevators is 18 characters and took 1,680 upvotes.
| 10s | 6.4% |
|---|---|
| 20s | 5.9% |
| 30s | 4.5% |
| 40s | 4.4% |
| 50s | 4.2% |
| 60s | 4.1% |
| 70s | 3.7% |
| 80s | 3.8% |
Any subject you like
Nobody shows you the posts nobody saw.
Every list of great Show HNs is a list of winners, which teaches you nothing: you cannot see what the seen ones did differently without the posts that did the same thing and were ignored. Look up any subject and you get both columns.
Words that got attention
Words that never did
Words in at least 120 titles of the past twelve months, and how often those posts reached 30 upvotes. Across every post it is 4.0%. Press one to see both columns of posts behind it.
This week · 941 new posts
The ones that got attention, in the last seven days
Everything here is rebuilt every night, so these numbers move. Posts from the last two days are counted in the total but left out of every rate, because their upvotes are still moving.