How long a story stays on the front page
About 91 stories reach the Hacker News front page daily and the median one stays 3.3 hours — measured from 3,543 tracked stories.
Data through 2026-07-28
Hacker News does not publish how long a story stays on its front page. This measures it directly: the top list is recorded every 5.0 minutes, and 3,543 stories were tracked from first appearance to last between 2026-06-19 and 2026-07-29.
About 91 stories reach the front page each day, and the middle one is actually on it for 3.3 hours. A quarter last under 1.1 hours; a quarter last more than 7.8. 23.9% never manage an hour.
The number most people would compute is wrong
Take a story's last sighting and subtract its first, and the median comes out at 5.6 hours — nearly double. That figure is easy to produce and easy to believe, and it is wrong, because 47.3% of front-page stories drop off the top thirty and come back. The span counts the hours they were absent. Time actually on the page is presence, not reach: captures times cadence.
The gap between the two is the more interesting result. The front page is not a queue that drains — it is somewhere stories visit, leave, and visit again.
The front page is decided in the first half hour
A story reaches the best position it will ever hold a median of 0.6 hours after arriving — about 36 minutes. 67.8% peak within an hour of showing up. Set that against the 3.3 hours of residency above and the shape changes: most of a story's front-page life is not a climb, it is a slide. Whatever decides how high it goes has largely happened before the median story has been up an hour.
This describes when the peak occurs, not what causes it. The captures record position, score and comment count; they cannot separate a story that rose because of its audience from one that rose because of when it landed.
Higher peaks last longer
| Peak position reached | Stories | Median hours on the page |
|---|---|---|
| peaked 1-3 | 969 | 7.0h |
| peaked 4-10 | 1,215 | 4.5h |
| peaked 11-30 | 1,359 | 1.6h |
Method
Front page is rank 1-30 of the top list, sampled every 5 minutes. On-page hours count captures times cadence, so a story that leaves and returns is credited only for the time it was there; first-to-last spans the absence too. Stories within an hour of either end of the capture window are excluded because their dwell cannot be known.
This is a current measurement, not a historical one. The rank captures begin 2026-06-19, so nothing here describes how residency has changed — the archive that reaches back to 2007 does not record rank. The underlying figures are published as front-page-dwell.json; see the methodology for how the captures are taken.