What Works on Hacker News

Across 251,434 high-scoring stories, the best-performing submission hour is 16:00 UTC (219 points on average, from 17,006 stories), and the best weekday is Wednesday at 215 points.

This measures the hour a story was submitted against how it eventually scored. It is a correlation over a large sample, not a promise: the hour with the best average is also one of the quietest, and posting into a quiet hour is not the same as being good enough to survive a busy one.

An Ask HN thread averages 161 comments against 47 for a Show HN post — 3.4x the discussion, and more points too (213 against 137).

Worth stating plainly because the assumption usually runs the other way: launching something looks like it should move the site more than asking it a question. Across 251,434 stories it does not. What this does not tell you is why — a question invites everyone to answer, while a launch invites the subset who care about that product.

These are the winners, not the field. Every story here scored at least 100 points, so the tables describe how stories behaved among those that already did well. They cannot tell you your odds of doing well. An hour with a high average is an hour where the stories that broke through broke through hard — not an hour that makes breaking through likelier.

Times are UTC. 16:00 UTC is US Pacific 09:00, US Eastern 12:00, London 17:00, Madrid 18:00, Tokyo 01:00. The hour is when the story was submitted, not when it peaked.

Correlation, not causation, and the confound is visible in the tables themselves: the hours with the best averages are also among the quietest, and posting into a quiet hour is not the same thing as being good enough to survive a busy one. How we measure everything.