I used a dataset from HuggingАace to analyse all Show HN posts for the past 3 years. Here is what influences if the post gets on the front page.

- Niche technical topics have the highest viral rates (Rust, Postgress, Lua, etc) - Open source tools are the top performing category with 13.9% viral rate - "I built" outperforms "We built" - Sunday noon UTC has the highest chances to hit the front page - Titles with a parenthetical work much better that those without.

More insights in the blog article.