Show HN - Posting Sol LeWitt on HackerNews

tl;dr

• 69 HN points → ~60k visitors
• Traffic surge held ~10 hrs
• Traffic remains 20–60x the pre-HN baseline
• Home Server + Cloudflare handled it flawlessly
• Spread to 9+ aggregators beyond HN
• I'm happy with it

This year I am developing a presence on Hackernews.

I submitted Tribute to Sol LeWitt as a "Show HN" post at 02/10/2026 12:02:05 PM PST.

Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.

Origin and Context of Project

Short History

While cleaning up some old bookmarks I came across solving sol, a project I saved 7 years ago. I created the repo November 14th, 2018. Yeesh.

Unfortunately, I committed a README.md and proceeded to never push any further local development. I remember experimenting with Canvas, making the first few drawings, and not being quite happy with the results.

Fast forward to 2026.

I still love art. I still love programming. And I still love Sol Lewitt. So I built it.

Bonus History

I read through solving sol and looked up the author, Brad Bouse.

Cool guy with a cool website. I snoop around. Finally get to his LinkedIn...wait a second.

HE WORKED AT YAMMER?!?!

What. Small world. Let me explain...

I did a single day job shadow at Yammer in 2010 that changed my life. It was the day I decided I was going to pursue programming as a career.

Sadly, according to LinkedIn, he had already moved on by the time I did my job shadow.

Welp. If you see this, Brad, I just sent you a message on LinkedIn :salute:.

Ok! Now for the stats...

Analysis

Here's how the day unfolded.

Hour One

Not even an upvote. I was plummetting to the bottom of the stack.

~220 hits on my site. Zero upvotes.

The post was sitting somewhere on Page 5.

I checked a few times, saw it hadn't moved, and figured that was it. I sent a text that said "nobody likes me" lol.

I know most HN submissions die a short death. That's just how it works.

Getting Traction

I kept glancing over at my other monitor where the real-time traffic was open. Nothing.

The gaps between checks got longer. Still nothing.

Just after 2pm...BANG!

A couple upvotes. Refresh. It jumps. Page 2.

Refresh again.

The Front Page. Sitting there between the usual mix of deep tech posts and Show HNs.

Stoked. I've been reading articles and checking links at this exact location for over a decade.

It peaked at #16. Not the top, but on the page. For a solo side project I built over a weekend, that felt pretty great.

The spike was sharp. A big burst over a few hours with a long tail through the rest of the day.

HN Comments

February 10th - Hourly Breakdown

Sharp ramp, sustained plateau, gradual tail-off.

07:00       9 hits  ·
08:00       5 hits  ·
09:00      14 hits  ·
10:00      19 hits  ·
11:00      22 hits  ▏
12:00     249 hits  ██  ← POSTED
13:00      52 hits  ▍
14:00   2,977 hits  ██████████████████████████████  ← PEAK
15:00   2,405 hits  ████████████████████████
16:00   2,012 hits  ████████████████████
17:00   1,779 hits  █████████████████▊
18:00   1,712 hits  █████████████████
19:00   1,639 hits  ████████████████▍
20:00   1,724 hits  █████████████████▏
21:00   1,760 hits  █████████████████▌
22:00     815 hits  ████████▏
23:00     755 hits  ███████▌

Peak hour: 14:00 PST (2,977 hits)

Sustained plateau: ~1,700-2,000 hits/hr for 6+ hours (15:00-21:00)

Traffic Overview (4-Day Window)

Here's what it looked like from the server side. My little Intel NUC was serving static files through Cloudflare, so it handled the load fine, but the numbers were wild compared to my normal traffic of basically zero.

From ~25 hits/day to 17,948...a 718x increase.

Data sourced from nginx access logs via GoAccess 1.9.3. All traffic routed through Cloudflare Tunnel to a local Intel NUC.

I've since added google analytics so my next post-op will have much more information!

Where Did They Come From?

I love hackernews for its lack of fluff, but there's a whole ecosystem of sites that mirror or enhance HN content: hckrnews.com, hnews.xyz, various RSS readers, and social media bots that auto-post trending stories.

They do pull metadata. Preview images, I didn't have one set. Annnnd my crappy favicon for intervolz. Welp! I'll do better next time.

I was #5 on hckrnews.com the first time I ever visited the site. Pretty cool moment.

Who are they?!

Device Breakdown

Platform

Linux and macOS significantly overrepresented due to HN audience skew.

Bot vs. Human Traffic

Bots include generic bot user agents, RSS readers (SpaceCowboys), and crawlers that followed the HN post.

12% cache hit rate via 304 Not Modified thanks to Cloudflare and browser caching doing their job.

Security Noise

The HN visibility also attracted the usual automated scanning:

All returned 404. There's no PHP, no WordPress, no .git, and no .env on this server. Real-world penetration test passed.

HTTP Status Codes

Notable User Agents

How I Survived the Hug of Death

1. Fully static: No database, no server-side rendering, no API calls. Just HTML, JS, CSS, and fonts.
2. Cloudflare caching: CDN absorbed repeat requests; only ~12% of requests hit origin with 304s.
3. Canvas 2D rendering is client-side: The expensive generative art computation happens in each visitor's browser, not on the server.
4. Small payload: Full page load ~170KB (compressed). The NUC never broke a sweat.
5. Zero downtime: 0 5xx errors on /sollewitt paths. Every single request was served successfully.

The Week After (Feb 11–17)

Data sourced from nginx access logs for the 7 days following the HN post. Feb 17 is partial (through ~11:30 AM PST).

Daily Overview

The Feb 13 Secondary Spike

Traffic saw a secondary surge on Feb 13 due to:

HN still driving clicks

Continued engagement from news.ycombinator.com with 920 referrals 3 days after submission.

Google search traffic peaked

358 Google referrals (vs 184 on Feb 11), suggesting the post had been indexed and people were finding it through search.

Crawler activity

958 bot/crawler hits mixed in, plus heavy overnight traffic (1,000+ hits/hr from midnight–3 AM) from indexing bots.

HN iOS app still active

1,484 combined hits from HackerNews/CFNetwork user agents.

The hourly pattern on Feb 13 was distinctly different from Feb 10 with traffic spread more evenly.

The Long Tail of Referral Sources

Referral traffic evolved as the post propagated outward:

lobste.rs delivered a consistent ~50 referrals/day for the entire week, outlasting both HN and Google traffic.

The first version of post you're reading now drove a secondary wave on Feb 12 (131 hits), as visitors who found the project on HN came back to read the writeup.

Continued Reliability

Zero 5xx errors across the entire post-HN period. Every request served successfully for all 7 days:

Yesssssssssssss.

Wrap Up

For a few hours, something I made for fun was sitting in front of one of the most technical audiences on the internet, being shared, and they liked it!

And then, just as fast as it arrived, the wave rolled back out.

But, for this afternoon, my weekend project was part of the front page of Hacker News.

Not bad.

Links

Sol Lewitt Tribute

Show HN post