Show HN: Viral Potential Predictor

#1

Post by salebanolow » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 12:48 AM UTC

Hey HN,

We analyzed 4,010,957 Hacker News submissions to find what actually makes posts perform well.

Key findings: - 93.2% of posts never hit 50 points - Top 1% starts at 270 points - Certain keywords boost engagement by 1000%+

Built a free tool that scores your launch title and predicts viral potential: [link]

The entire 4M post dataset is available as a single 700MB .mv2 file if you want to run your own analysis.

Show HN: Viral Potential Predictor
hn-ph.vercel.app

Re: Show HN: Viral Potential Predictor

#2

Post by mitexleo » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 1:37 AM UTC

Let's see if this goes viral

Re: Show HN: Viral Potential Predictor

#3

Post by delichon » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 2:01 AM UTC

Here are the result for this username, this title and this description:

https://hn-ph.vercel.app/results/ZT06GF

It got a 62, a C+, predicting that this won't be very viral. So you either didn't test this submission on your own product, or you did, but didn't feel that the low score was a handicap? You don't seem to be dogfooding. If this post does well it would be evidence against its own accuracy. If it fizzles out, congratulations on being correct.

Re: Show HN: Viral Potential Predictor

#4

Post by asciii » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 2:16 AM UTC

mitexleo wrote: post #2

Let's see if this goes viral

o7 see you in the 1% someday

Re: Show HN: Viral Potential Predictor

#5

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 2:29 AM UTC

delichon wrote: post #3

Here are the result for this username, this title and this description: https://hn-ph.vercel.app/results/ZT06GF It got a 62, a C+, predicting that this won't be very viral. So you either didn't test this submission on your own product, or you did, but didn't feel that the low score was a handicap? You don't seem to be dogfooding. If this post does well it would be evidence against its own accuracy. If it fizzles out,…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Viral Potential Predictor

#6

Post by simonw » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 2:37 AM UTC

(Replaced my original comment here which was a little unkind.)

Question for OP, who created Memvid (the .mv2 file format that's used to distribute this data). Are you still taking text, chunking it and then storing those chunks as QR codes in a video file? That seems like an inherently inefficient storage mechanism to me compared with something like SQLite or Parquet - do you have concrete numbers or a demo that shows that your file format really is more effective for storing data for "AI agents" than those existing solutions?

Re: Show HN: Viral Potential Predictor

#7

Post by codybontecou » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 2:37 AM UTC

Well, he made it to the front page so there’s that.

Re: Show HN: Viral Potential Predictor

#8

Post by tverbeure » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 2:41 AM UTC

Current nr 3 in the leaderboard: "Show HN: I built a Rust compiler in Rust with Rust"

Could use some more Rust to boost it to nr 1.

Re: Show HN: Viral Potential Predictor

#9

Post by baobun » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 2:49 AM UTC

tverbeure wrote: post #8

Current nr 3 in the leaderboard: "Show HN: I built a Rust compiler in Rust with Rust" Could use some more Rust to boost it to nr 1.

I'm calling it: Some AI controversy in Rust core will be in the top 5 of 2026.

Re: Show HN: Viral Potential Predictor

#10

Post by baobun » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 2:51 AM UTC

delichon wrote: post #3

Here are the result for this username, this title and this description: https://hn-ph.vercel.app/results/ZT06GF It got a 62, a C+, predicting that this won't be very viral. So you either didn't test this submission on your own product, or you did, but didn't feel that the low score was a handicap? You don't seem to be dogfooding. If this post does well it would be evidence against its own accuracy. If it fizzles out,…

Uncharitable and assumptious of the goals. I prefer submissions to not be hyper-optimized for virality.