An 18-hour half-life for mixed launch feeds
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 ×…
An 18-hour half-life proved to be the ideal compromise for the ranking system on LaunchSignal. Too brief and GitHub wouldn't receive enough visibility, while a longer half-life would allow yesterday's Product Hunt winner to dominate the homepage for an entire week. The ranking formula takes into account the original score from each platform, adjusted by the exponential decay function exp(-hours / 18).
This means that as time passes, the influence of each source on the overall ranking gradually diminishes, with GitHub stars being the most heavily weighted component at 2 × stars + forks. By keeping the half-life at 18 hours, LaunchSignal ensures that the combined score reflects recent activity while still providing fair representation for all contributing platforms.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
