Show HN: I measured the half-life of 41,301 Show HN launches. It's 7 hours https://ift.tt/aPTtkRW

Show HN: I measured the half-life of 41,301 Show HN launches. It's 7 hours 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://ift.tt/9udb8kD ), and every number in the post maps to a named function. Keen to hear where the methodology falls short https://ift.tt/CdF8u6T July 2, 2026 at 01:38AM