Since we wanted to share Myriade on SHOW HN, a good mentor recommended us to post on Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday.
We somewhat rationalized it. “People are not working on Friday, busy on the weekends & Monday is to catch up”.
Then, we realize that we could probably check this one with Myriade !
The Hacker News Dataset is available publicly on BigQuery. So we just had to connect to it and ask.
The dataset includes 157k+ "Show HN" posts since 2009.
So, when is it the best time to post on “SHOW HN:” ? Not what we thought.
Here is the result. 👇
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Let's define what "success" means.
Our goal is to get some visibility for Myriade, in order to reach interested users and to get feedback.
We asked Myriade to plot the number of posts per score.
75% of posts have less than 6 votes.
Myriade Recommendations for "Breakout" Definition
Moderate Success: 30+ votes (top 10%) - These posts got significant community attention
High Success: 83+ votes (top 5%) - These are genuinely popular posts
Viral: 275+ votes (top 1%) - These are the rare posts that truly go viral
We settled to define breakout success at 30 votes, as it would be enough to achieve our goal.
What is the best day to post ?
Key Findings by Day
Sunday: 11.75% breakout rate (BEST) 🥇
Saturday: 11.08% breakout rate 🥈
Weekdays: 9.45-9.90% breakout rate (consistently lower)
Contrary to our intuition, the weekend worked better.
What is the best time to post ?
Times shown are UTC. For reference: 12:00 UTC = 8:00 AM EDT / 5:00 AM PDT
Optimal Time Windows
Peak hour: 12:00 UTC (12.2% breakout rate) 🥇
Golden window: 11:00-16:00 UTC (all above 10.5%)
Avoid: 3:00-7:00 UTC (lowest rates ~8.2-8.4%)
We are a bit surprised by the 12:00 UTC score, given the early time on the West Coast. 12:00 UTC likely benefits from moderate European midday activity plus early North American readers, with limited competing fresh posts. A post at 12:00 has little competition, and a time to get some votes before it's seen on the West Coast, 2–3 hours later.
Which day + hour are ideal for posting content?
🎯 Best Opportunities:
Sunday 0-2 UTC - Up to 15.7%
Sunday 11-16 UTC - 12-14%
Saturday 14-20 UTC - 12-14%
Timing seems to matter more on weekends, while weekdays offer more predictable but modest success rates.
Let's check a few more things…
Since Myriade allows for fast exploration and analysis, we decided to check a few more things:
Does it hold during summer? Yes, but…
Late evening US time (Friday/Saturday night) becomes optimal in summer
Traditional business hours (11-16 UTC) are less effective in summer
Do we have the same result if we count the number of comments? Yes, but…
Monday shows stronger early morning performance for comments.
1-2 UTC (Sunday evening US time)
Saturday has more consistent performance throughout the day for comments
Wrapping things up
Weekends are 20-30% more effective than weekdays for breakout potential
Sunday offers the most flexibility - multiple good time windows
Avoid Friday 6-7 UTC and Tuesday 2-3 UTC - consistent low points across the data
Weekday posting works best around 11-13 UTC for consistent ~10-11% rates
If you want to explore yourself, just head to hn.myriade.ai to run your own analysis on Hacker News Data.
