Top 15 Show HN posts of the year
| Rank | Points | Comments | Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3346 | 965 | Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now |
| 2 | 1557 | 363 | Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files |
| 3 | 1539 | 197 | I'm an airline pilot – I built interactive graphs/globes of my flights |
| 4 | 1325 | 241 | isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC |
| 5 | 1278 | 209 | I built a synth for my daughter |
| 6 | 1184 | 333 | A store that generates products from anything you type in search |
| 7 | 1145 | 144 | I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display |
| 8 | 1094 | 144 | Term.everything – Run any GUI app in the terminal |
| 9 | 1032 | 323 | I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio |
| 10 | 1030 | 263 | Tinder but it's only pictures of my wife and I can only swipe right |
| 11 | 1003 | 361 | Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model |
| 12 | 964 | 187 | A game where you build a GPU |
| 13 | 958 | 495 | Ten years of running every day, visualized |
| 14 | 935 | 234 | Draw a fish and watch it swim with the others |
| 15 | 915 | 134 | I built a tiny LLM to demystify how language models work |
Almost all of them are personal projects from individual builders. No SaaS launches in the top 15. No corporate product reveals. Just hobbyists with a story.
github.com is the dominant domain on Show HN
| Domain | Posts that crossed 200 pts | Avg points |
|---|---|---|
| github.com | 134 | 334 |
| huggingface.co | 2 | 471 |
| gitlab.com | 2 | 330 |
134 out of 334 successful Show HN posts pointed straight at a github.com URL — about 40%. No fancy landing page, no marketing site, just README.md doing the selling.
If you are about to ship a Show HN, the data says you can absolutely point at the repo. A polished landing page will not save a weak idea, and a strong README will not be punished for being on github.com.
What were the top github.com Show HN's actually about?
- Term.everything – run any GUI app in the terminal (1094 pts)
- Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-only open-source TTS model (1003 pts)
- A tiny LLM to demystify how language models work (915 pts)
- Workout.cool – open-source fitness coaching platform (827 pts)
- Needle – distilling Gemini tool calling into a 26M model (751 pts)
-
Unregistry –
docker pushdirectly to servers without a registry (726 pts) - ChartGPU – WebGPU-powered charting library (670 pts)
- Whispering – open-source local-first dictation (591 pts)
- WhatCable – tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables (566 pts)
The pattern is clear: small, single-purpose, often local-first, often open-source. Tools developers might actually use tomorrow.
Most-mentioned keywords in titles
| Keyword | Posts |
|---|---|
| AI | 20 |
| open-source / open source | 22 |
| browser | 17 |
| LLM | 11 |
| Claude | 10 |
| Rust | 10 |
| macOS | 10 |
| agent | 8 |
| MCP | 3 |
AI/LLM/Claude/agent show up in roughly 50 of the 334 top posts. The "open-source" framing is more popular than the platform-specific ones (macOS, Rust). The browser is having a moment, with 17 posts about browser-related projects.
Aggregates
- 334 Show HN posts crossed 200 points
- Total: 132,288 points and 44,998 comments
- 325 unique authors (most made it to the leaderboard once)
- 187 unique domains
- Median Engagement Score: 70 / 100
Reproduce on your own data
I packaged the analysis as an Apify Actor — search the entire HN archive by query, tags, or date range, or just capture the live front page.
Hacker News Insights on Apify Store
Source code (MIT): github.com/sab0tajue/hackernews-insights. Engagement Score formula is in src/insights.py, around 30 lines.
Tell me what other slices you would like to see. Show HN of the last 3 months? Specific keyword cohorts? Drop a comment and I will run it.
Related: I previously analyzed 200 popular Python repos on GitHub and the top 100 PyPI packages for supply-chain risk.