What 18 years of GitHub links on Hacker News show
I counted every link to a GitHub repo in HN stories and comments since 2008. Here’s what came out.
A few weeks ago Wikihack and HackerBooks were on the front page, collecting the Wikipedia articles and books people mention on HN. I wanted the same thing for code, so I built Hacker GitHub. It counts every HN story and comment since 2008 that links to a GitHub repo.
That comes to 384,444 links to 44,192 repos, counting only repos linked at least three times. 77% of the links are in comments, not submissions. Most of what HN says about GitHub is people pointing each other at things in threads.
The most-linked repo of each year
- 2008raganwald-deprecated/homoiconic 13
- 2009raganwald-deprecated/homoiconic 51
- 2010raganwald-deprecated/homoiconic 30
- 2011jashkenas/coffeescript 67
- 2012rails/rails 105
- 2013TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks 106
- 2014rust-lang/rust 138
- 2015gorhill/uBlock 127
- 2016golang/go 136
- 2017golang/go 164
- 2018golang/go 174
- 2019golang/go 197
- 2020rust-lang/rust 166
- 2021golang/go 184
- 2022golang/go 220
- 2023ggml-org/llama.cpp 316
- 2024golang/go 164
- 2025golang/go 167
- 2026*anthropics/claude-code 429
The first three years belong to Reginald Braithwaite’s homoiconic, a repo he used as a blog. Then CoffeeScript, then Rails. TechEmpower’s framework benchmarks took 2013, which says something about what we were arguing about that year.
From 2016 it’s mostly Go. golang/go was the most-linked repo in 8 of the last 11 years, and most of those links point at a specific issue or proposal. Rust came second eight times and won twice, in 2014 and 2020.
Then the AI years. llama.cpp got 316 links in 2023, more than any repo had ever had in a year. claude-code has 429 so far in 2026, and seven of this year’s top ten are coding agents or LLM tools: claude-code, Codex, llama.cpp, opencode, pi, OpenClaw and antirez’s ds4. Go has 65 links this year, its fewest since 2014.
Which languages HN links to
- Python
- Rust
- TypeScript
- Go
- JavaScript
- Ruby
Show the numbers
| Year | Python | Rust | TypeScript | Go | JavaScript | Ruby |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 8.4% | 0.6% | 0.1% | 0.5% | 19.2% | 22.5% |
| 2011 | 10.1% | 0.5% | 0.6% | 1.2% | 20.3% | 15.2% |
| 2012 | 11.4% | 0.9% | 1.3% | 2.0% | 22.0% | 13.8% |
| 2013 | 11.1% | 1.9% | 1.6% | 5.1% | 20.8% | 9.3% |
| 2014 | 11.1% | 2.3% | 2.1% | 7.8% | 19.9% | 6.4% |
| 2015 | 10.9% | 2.7% | 2.8% | 9.1% | 18.7% | 3.8% |
| 2016 | 11.3% | 3.5% | 4.5% | 10.0% | 17.2% | 3.2% |
| 2017 | 12.2% | 3.7% | 5.6% | 10.9% | 15.7% | 2.7% |
| 2018 | 12.5% | 4.5% | 6.5% | 11.7% | 13.6% | 2.3% |
| 2019 | 11.8% | 5.8% | 6.3% | 10.8% | 10.8% | 1.8% |
| 2020 | 12.3% | 6.7% | 7.4% | 10.8% | 9.8% | 1.7% |
| 2021 | 13.1% | 8.2% | 7.0% | 10.1% | 8.1% | 1.7% |
| 2022 | 12.3% | 9.6% | 7.5% | 11.2% | 7.9% | 1.7% |
| 2023 | 17.7% | 9.6% | 8.3% | 9.7% | 6.5% | 1.6% |
| 2024 | 16.8% | 10.7% | 8.7% | 9.7% | 6.3% | 1.6% |
| 2025 | 16.7% | 12.1% | 10.9% | 10.8% | 5.8% | 1.2% |
| 2026 | 16.9% | 14.9% | 14.4% | 9.7% | 5.1% | 0.8% |
In 2010, Ruby repos got 22.5% of all links, more than any other language. This year they get 0.8%. JavaScript peaked at 22% in 2012 and is down to 5.1%. Rust and TypeScript went from almost nothing to about 15% each. Python jumped in 2023, the year everyone started linking model code.
One caveat: the language is what GitHub says the repo is written in today, not what it was back then. microsoft/TypeScript counts as Go, because that’s what GitHub lists for it now.
The hidden gems are mostly not code
I also wanted the repos HN loves and GitHub doesn’t: linked by many different people, starred by few. Counting people rather than links matters here. Count links and the top of the list is people linking their own projects a hundred times.
| Repo | HN users who linked it | GitHub stars |
|---|---|---|
| mozilla/standards-positions | 119 | 763 |
| explainers-by-googlers/Web-Environment-Integrity | 78 | 547 |
| github/dmca | 293 | 6.4k |
| rust-lang/rfcs | 352 | 6.6k |
| uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues | 93 | 1.2k |
| minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented | 205 | 3.8k |
| wting/hackernews | 90 | 656 |
| jcs/lobsters | 32 | 31 |
Most of these aren’t software. They’re documents: Mozilla’s position on a proposed web standard, a Rust RFC, a DMCA notice, Google’s Web Environment Integrity proposal (83 links in 2023 alone). People link them as evidence in an argument, and nobody stars evidence. github/dmca had its busiest year in 2020, the year of the youtube-dl takedown.
The rest is HN looking at itself: a mirror of the HN source code, a list of HN’s unwritten rules, and the code of Lobsters, which has 31 stars and 32 HN users who linked it.
Two made me laugh. MrMEEE/bumblebee had an install script in 2011
that ran rm -rf /usr, and HN has linked it in almost
every year since, whenever some tool deletes something it shouldn’t.
These days that tool is often an AI agent. And antirez/redis sits at
the very top of the gems list, with 142 people and 168 stars. That
isn’t a gem. Redis moved to redis/redis years ago, and what the old
name points to today has 168 stars. Renames were the hardest part of
counting all this.
How I counted
The HN data is the public ClickHouse playground’s live copy of Hacker News, and stars, languages and renames come from the GitHub API. A story or comment counts once per repo. Deleted and dead items are left out, and so are GitHub’s own pages and placeholders like foo/bar. Renamed repos are merged into their current name. Only links count, so a repo people mention by name without linking is undercounted.
All of it is browsable per year, language and repo at hackergithub.novian.works. It’s written in F#: ASP.NET renders the pages and Fable with Lit takes over the filters in the browser.