Show HN: I built a tool that helps predict HN front page success

Predict how well your Show HN post will perform before you submit.
25 points by margotli 172 days ago wannalaunch.com 22 comments
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Hey HN community,

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!

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