Building in Public

I was curious about what happens to repositories after they are posted to Hacker News. I pulled Show HN data from BigQuery and combined it with GitHub API calls. Data covers 2021-2025 (with GitHub API calls through mid-January 2026). Repositories are dying faster The first chart shows when repositories die after their HN submission. 2025 data is brutal: more repos either died before posting or die within 6 months after. In 2021, 13.4% had no commits since HN. By 2025, that’s 24.2%. The 6-month death rate jumped from 8.5% to 17.3%. The middle is disappearing. Projects either stay maintained or die quickly. ...