I scraped every Show HN post from May 2025 to May 2026 that crossed 200 points and ran a quick analysis. There were 334 of them. Here is what landed.

#analytics #data #sideprojects #webscraping

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 push directly 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.