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An 18-hour half-life for mixed launch feeds

A developer built LaunchSignal, a public feed that merges Product Hunt, Hacker News, and GitHub launches into a single ranked list. The ranking uses a heat formula with an 18-hour half-life, and source-native scores to normalize different platforms. The project is live at launchsignal.ai/feed.

read1 min views1 publishedAug 28, 2026

Product Hunt, Hacker News, and GitHub do not speak the same language. One is votes in a 24-hour window, one is comments on a Show HN, one is stars on a repo that may have been created last month. I wanted a single public list of what just shipped — not another idea-validation landing page (that is a different product at launchsignal.io).

The ranking bet is boring on purpose:

heat = score × exp(−hours / 18) Eighteen hours is a guess. Too short and GitHub never shows up. Too long and yesterday's PH winner sits on the homepage all week. Score is source-native: PH's public feed has no vote count I can trust, so every PH row starts at 12; HN is points + 0.4 × comments; GitHub is 2 × stars + forks. Then the same decay hits all three.

GitHub Search taught me not to get clever. A long OR query came back 422. The surviving query is short: created recently, plus (ai OR llm OR gpt OR openai OR claude OR gemini). If that source dies, the board still has HN and PH. Recency and heat, nothing else — no classifier.

Live list (same payload as JSON): [https://launchsignal.ai/feed](https://launchsignal.ai/feed)

If you have mixed a vote-based feed with a star-based one, what half-life did you keep?
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