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I built a tool that helps optimize your post for hitting the first page of Show HN.
How it works: I used a Hugging Face dataset of all Hacker News posts from the past 3 years and trained a model that predicts how successful your post might be. There's still a lot of randomness on HN, so nothing is guaranteed, but the tool helps optimize your post for higher odds.
A couple of interesting findings:
- GitHub repo links work x3 better than regular domains - Open-source tools have a steady virality rate (13.9% - one of the highest) - "I built" outperforms "We built" - Using parentheses and mentioning technologies (Lua, Postgres, Rust, etc.) helps a ton.
You can try the tool at wannalaunch.com or read the blog posts for more insights from the analysis. The model is also available as open source if you want to retrain it or look under the hood.
Happy to hear the feedback!
Discussion (23 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
This seems to mention the score and how likely something is to be on the frontpage, none of those things would mean "success" to me.
The value from Show HN isn't from the eyeballs, your website analytics reaching higher than before or the score of the HN submission, the value sits in the conversations and discussions you'll end up having in the comments, how you think about all of those things afterwards and what you end up acting on.
There are few communities where you can (hopefully constructively) criticize a project and also receive proper criticism of your project, usually backed by real arguments rather than just emotional pleas, HN is one of these, and I'd say Show HN is the place where you can really receive good and actionable feedback as long as you're also able to look past and ignore the less thoughtful comments.
But I think that requires eager participating from the submitter as well, not just drop your project and not replying to anyone, or not replying with an open mind/required perspective.
Good to know this and yes, ShowHN gathers more discussions with the author. One question: is it still true, that a submission can stay for days on /show for days? I read here recently that with the LLM trend of creating software /show became very overcrowded.
I think focusing on intended users / customer base for feedback is better than a bunch of students and wannabe entrepreneurs who will never actually buy your product
Yes, absolutely. Over the years I've probably done 10-15 Show HNs that had comments that had direct impact on either features or the whole direction of the project, to great effect. Sometimes it's the comment itself, sometimes it's the thoughts that the comment spawns, doesn't have to be direct.
I think getting feedback from intended users is needed as well, but it doesn't replace more honest and forthcoming feedback which you'll receive from HN, but feedback from HN won't replace feedback from users coming from other sources.
https://imgur.com/a/KyXNICb
- Title: Show HN: I built a tool that helps predict HN front page success
- URL: https://wannalaunch.com/
Only gave you a 49 out of 100. And gave this advice: `Consider adding a parenthetical. Top Show HN titles often include one: "(written in Rust)", "(open source)", "(YC W25)".`
There are still a lot of random factors on HN, so nothing can predict things perfectly, but I like that the model gives you feedback based on real data behind it.
I doubt it will. From everything I have posted, it's quite random what sparks peoples interest. It really depends on many factors such as what the topics where in the last weeks and on current events.
Heh, I'll add a few:
- Apple finds LLMs can't [blank]: +100 points
- Something AI something bad / makes you stupid / can't think / losing your touch: +200 points
- Something spaceman bad: +30 flags in 10 minutes
- Something simple but sounding modern (1992): +1000 points
https://github.com/bike-fridge
Show HN
100/100
Good game.