The percentage of Show HN posts is increasing, but their scores are decreasing

Last update: 2026-01-14

Recently, I felt like I was seeing more “Show HN” stories, and many of which were generated with LLMs. So I analyzed the data to see if that was true. Also I included the average score per month to see if people enjoy seeing them (because I don’t :P).

Charts

Stories in 2026 was omitted. 1) It’s only 13 days, 2) Scores are not stable yet.

Left axis: show_hn_ratio(show_hn / story * 100)

Right axis: average_show_hn_score and average_story_score

With LLM timeline

Analysis

Disclaimer: I am neither a data scientist nor a statistician. Some nuances may have been lost in translation.

Percentage

For about ten years (2012~2022), the percentage of Show HN stories was around 2-3%. Then, with the appearance of LLMs that can code, it’s been increasing. Claude Code and Cursor 1.0 accelerated it even more. As of December 2025, over 12% of all stories are Show HNs. It’s safe to say that there is a correlation between the increase in Show HN posts and LLM. People can create great things even if they don’t know how to code at all.

Scores

Show HN stories used to receive similar scores (around 15-18) to those of all stories until 2023~2024. However, it’s been declining while percentage of them are going up. As of December 2025, the average Show HN score is 10 points lower (9.04 vs 19.53).

Does it mean LLM-generated Show HNs are lower quality? I’m not sure. Maybe people are tired of seeing too many Show HNs.

Also I have no idea why the average score was increased in 2022. A lot of new users?

Data and codes

You can find python code and csv in https://github.com/plastic041/hackernews.

I exported BigQuery hacker news data to csv using this query:

SELECT
  `time`,
  `title`,
  `type`,
  `score`,
  `id`
FROM
  `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`
WHERE
  (`type` IN ('story')) and title IS NOT NULL;

The type field in BigQuery does not have a show_hn attribute like the Algolia API, so I lowercased titles and filtered using starts_with("show_hn: ") to determine if a post is a Show HN story.

I didn’t commit to the repo the original CSV because it was too big (~400 MB) but you can download it from BigQuery for free (I didn’t set billing account). I ran SQL above, exported it to google drive, and downloaded it.

I would like to analyze the percentage of Show HN stories generated with LLMs but I couldn’t find the way to do this, because many Show HN stories don’t mention that they’ve used LLMs in their text.

I’ll try to update this article every few months.