I'm the owner of both #4 and #140 on the Top-scoring Show HN Stories that Didn’t Survive... but both are very much alive!

#4 StackSort was a Github.com page, but on 2021 they made it so only Github.io wroks. If dang sees this, I'd really appreciate if you could change the URL for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5395463 to use github.io!

#140 ReadMe has the same io/com issue, in the opposite direction! we redirect readme.io to readme.com now, which seems to be why it's flagged.

I'm assuming someone else owned it, whenever I see that and all the "make an offer" links I move on and ignore it. Was the process easy?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6397526

For the first few years, we used readme.io as our domain. When we did our Series A, I finally bought the .com for $170k. By that point I knew we were successful, and I figured the longer I waited the more it'd cost.

It's worth that much to any business that wants readme.com and believes it to be worth 170k. You don't need to be called Readme to want that domain. There are plenty of tech companies that want vanity domains to point to parts of their offering. I can easily imagine Microsoft, Jetbrains, Atlassian, or Replit making an offer for it.

That said, by far the most likely way any company would acquire it would be as part of acquiring Readme as a whole. If you want to exit by selling (rather than IPOing) the value of your assets still plays a small part.

I once registered web.site. I had it for a week or two before I tried pointing it at a server at which time someone noticed and took it off me.

This... isn't how domain registration works.

^(?:https?:\/\/)?(?:[^@\n]+@)?(?:www\.)?([^:\/\n?]+).

It even gave reasonable detailed explanations which convinced me. Later tests revealed that this regex doesn’t work for url with @ in path, such as https://foo.com/@./bar. The correct one should be

^(?:https?:\/\/)?(?:[^@\/\n]+@)?(?:www\.)?([^:\/?\n]+).

---------------------

The trick is to ask ChatGPT what the right tool for the job is in your language of choice. For python, ChatGPT will happily give you:

  from urllib.parse import urlparse
  extract_domain = lambda url: urlparse(url).netloc.replace('www.', '', 1)
  # Example usage
  url = 'https://foo.com/@./bar'
  domain = extract_domain(url)
  print(domain)  # Output: foo.com

I don't think RegEx is typically the "most" correct tool for the job for things which likely have built-in parser libraries (XML, HTML, URLs, JSON, etc)

I'd actually be interested in factors that make a Show HN a success vs failure.

Objectively, there's an obvious one your dataset: time of submission. Tuesday afternoon (which timezone? I assume US west coast?) seems to be key. No way this correlates with the quality of submissions.

Subjectively: it seems to become much harder recently. I managed once a couple of years ago for a short time to reach the front page with an Android app, now I'm barely able to get above 20 points, even though the product is (again, subjectively) cooler and has a possibly wider audience (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35671245).

Not complaining, but perhaps nowadays Show HN is not an easy way anymore to "get the word out" and get some early user feedback for and from indie hackers? Any other sites that might be of interest?

(I suppose I'd use it - and pretty much anything - but just not put 'omg #1' badge on my site, if I had something to launch myself.)

Completely tangential now, but I think its problem is right in the title - who is hunting a product? It's a complete echo chamber, surely nobody who doesn't have something to launch is actively using it - 'it's Wednesday so I need a new Gmail-integrating Jira spline reticulator'.

I’m wondering the same. Earlier in the article he mentions UTC.

So it’s either afternoon or early in the morning Pacific time.

Spot checking the top results might give a better estimate for how many are actually alive vs. just using bot protection.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35543668

I was curious about the top post that didn't survive - an HTML5 game called "airma.sh" - and I wanted to check it out. I think I found a working mirror: https://www.crazygames.com/game/airmash

It's possible that this is a different game, but it seems to fit the description.

Interestingly, the person who submitted that post stopped being active on HN after that discussion.

The original author was never to be heard from again.

I apologise in advance for the hours you’ll lose to these (again?)

Here is the database with publicly available SQL endpoint: https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUICogRlJPT...

A torrent containing a single sqlite file would be good for a snapshot in time, but each update would require a new torrent, even if it only contains the updates since the base or last release.

IIRC IPFS can be used to distribute files that change over time, with only the changes being transferred, although of course there would need to be a place where OP publishes the hash of the most recent file.

In either case, someone would need to seed the file to guarantee it's always available.

Curious choice to highlight Show HNs that didn't survive, but not the ones that did.

Is there a reason for this?

I'd be interested to see what the top Show HN posts were, after adjusting for the growing size of the HN community. That is, posts from 10 years ago would not have garnered as many upvotes simply because the community was smaller, and presumably posts were upvoted less back then, in general.

I don't know the best way to measure this; it could be normed based on the median number of upvotes for the top story each week, bucketed by month. Probably someone has a better idea for this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22650725

In fact we were so successful that we were able to shut it down less than a year after we started (It's on the list as a very reasonable Type II error ;))

Thanks to the HN community for helping us get an amazing Temporary product out and shut down successfully

What I found instead were about 3/4 dead links – even though the threads were all from the last 4-5 years. I found that quite sad, because people often talked with great passion about their websites and they sounded really cool. Also i LOVE those small, personal islands in the big, commercialized and in many ways centralized web.

Same is true for another couple of projects I’m running now. I’m collecting personal websites and quirky small web experiments and the same is happening there.

Somewhat related is the phenomenon of dead blogs. Plenty of those with a couple of interesting posts and then abandoned.

The Oracle Cloud Free tier is a great deal. They give you 4 Ampere A1 Cores + 24 GB RAM + 200GB storage for free. More than enough for a 20G (40M rows plus indices) Posgres instance.

From what I know, HN posts are often used as a signal for viability of a project. In that case, you can't make a conclusion on the effectiveness of Show HN posts, because some of them will die off by design.

[0]https://github.com/tomnomnom/unfurl

https://github.com/curl/trurl

From TFA:

> For this analyze, I considered submissions made before May 31, 2023, 23:59 UTC. The dataset consists of 4,714,023 stories and 30,363,533 comments from 867,097 users.

Did you have any conclusions?

I had a look at the page, couldnt see anything you'd written up :-)