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Posted17 days ago
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Nah, that would be obvious marketing to most. More sneaky would be answering the question with the recommendation from a different account in a way to promote your service and have that upvoted, but that requires more effort and skill I assume.
But in general yes, this community definitely can also be manipulated, but I would say it is one of the hardest to fool. The standard mentality here I actually would rather describe as critical instead of curious, but there is just lots of garbage being pushed and also my curiosity is limited.
Obviously anything can be manipulated, but HN has been remarkably resilient and if there is one thing the collective here is good at then it is at spotting patterns, even over a longer period of time.
This makes me think of a fun idea: Once a year on HN (April Fool's Day?), we can have a nerd sniping competition where commercial projects try to nerd snipe HN readers with submarine adverts.
There are never "no levers" - the best you can do is make sure that the levers you know about are aligned with the purpose of the site.
And that works pretty well. Don't SEO-post, write a blog about some technical aspect of SEO-posting, and you'll do better.
HN-posting successfully can't really be done "at scale" - by design.
Here's a successful formula, but takes some time.
Participate, read things you know about and are interested in. Post comments. Eventually you'll find yourself repeating, or linking to previous comments. Write a blog post about that. Post it.
And if it did become a game, it would become pretty worthless (liked LinkedIn).
Two people that come to mind that normally generate an enormous number of upvotes and discussion are blog posts from Alyssa Rosenzweig (Asahi Linux GPU drivers) and Justine Tunney (Cosmopolitan Libc). Both of those projects trigger near-superhuman levels of nerd sniping (https://xkcd.com/356/). Few nerds can resist!
Final note: To me, this question feels like the "uncanny valley" of nerd discussion boards. Can you imagine posting something similar to LWN.net trying to figure out how to get your commercial project featured in a story?
I disagree, there are always levers. But the "comfort-zone" of HN's mods and crowd is much smaller and more specific, while the attention on misbehaviour is much sharper, so the lever are not as easy to pull as on other platforms. HN is basically hard-mode, compared to any big noisy platform.
> Anyone who comes to HN to create buzz, drive site traffic, do SEO, or market something, whether it be a product or themselves, can expect an extremely frosty reception, particularly since the rate of spam submissions is high lately.
That's only true if it's done poorly, or outside HNs core-topics. There is a good deal of sneaky marketing on HN, but usually well integrated into the normal flow of comments, so It's either accepted in context, or low enough to fly under the radar. In a nutshell, this means, everything is accepted, as long as it brings value, high entertainment or satisfy curiosity, and is not just selling stupidly in your face.
At the end, HN is still a platform of smarter and more educated people, and they want to be handled on their level. If you can match this, you can pull every lever they've given space for. But of course, that's not something many can easily do.
HN is very self-explanatory if you take it for what it is — a discussion forum. It’s a place where some people post ideas, questions, news, or projects and other people respond to them. That’s it. If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.
Your question makes me feel ancient because I fear that the concept of communicating to spark conversation (as opposed to communicating to promote or to manipulate or to drive traffic or to pull any number of other “levers”) is exceedingly a thing of the past.
That's an oversimplification. There are things that get responses because they're flamebait rather than interesting, and then even more interesting things that never get any discussion going.
I don't know if the residual factor is just "chance" or if there are controllable inputs involved.
(One thing I do suspect but cannot confirm is that article title has a large effect. Interesting stuff with bad title gets overlooked, and vice versa.)
This isn't unique to this technology: books with interesting titles and covers sell better than books with boring titles and covers, even if the latter has more interesting content.
I think what makes HN a little different is that a lot of places we might congregate online only exist for the flamebait, or are specifically built around engagement metrics to serve DAU/MAU numbers and advertising asks. You just happen to take a bit more chance on here than you would anywhere else, and that's absolutely 100% a good thing.
If there are controllable inputs that skew you to one side of the variance, I hope the moment someone discovers them, they are shut down - otherwise this place just becomes another hell-hole.
HN does have a much higher ratio of gems to dirt than any other place though, so I'm still here for the forseeable future :)
A simple way to refute this is to note that some links were posted multiple times and only got traction on the second or third time.
One sometimes sees suggestions from @dang to resubmit, and/or comments about giving stories another go around if they did worse than expected.
The only other manual intervention at that level I've heard of is to promote Ycombinator companies; but I'm not sure what complexion that takes.
There's possibly some manual actions around vouchs/flags, to revive comments that got flagged and have now been vouched for. Maybe it's all automated but I suspect there's judgement applied there; just based on how the site is run in general.
No particular insight, just been around here for ~15 years (eek!).
People accept that platforms should be centralised, and that they should harvest your data in order to sell it to adtech companies who will then feed it to an industry that learns in real-time how to prey on your darkest fears to sell you things you don't need but might make you feel slightly less sad for a second. And people just accept it: that's normal these days.
They even call it doom-scrolling, and don't ask "wait, should I want to scroll through actual doom? Is the occasional video that makes me smile really worth it all?"
Perhaps it's my age, but I can't understand anybody who says their main form of media consumption is YouTube. How? How do you actually put up with that, knowing what is behind every mouse movement and click, and the knowledge that every single pixel in front of you is being tweaked by robotic neuroscientists squeezing every drop out of A/B tests to make you feel like utter crap? Like, seriously, WTAF?
HN is popular within its niche precisely because it isn't like that. It is not "a platform", in the modern and now normalised sense. It links out to other sites and asks people to come back together to discuss what they saw there. Old school. No ad tracking. No doom scrolling. Pick what you like. Click it, don't click it. Discuss it, don't discuss it. Nobody is tracking "engagement". There's some gamification, but does anyone _really_ care?
This type of interaction is entirely native to my generation and older (I just squeak into millennial, on the older side), but feels completely bonkers to people who think Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are what is normal and how the Internet works.
Some of know they're not normal. We know they're aberrations, ghouls that prey on unwitting masses.
Not sure what else to say.
I suppose if you created an account today you'd be fed a lot of garbage, but I've been watching YouTube often for at least a couple years.
It's true that this place can be cryptic, and that has downsides—specifically, it can be confusing to newcomers, even to some newcomers who would make ideal HN users. That sucks.
But there's a key that unlocks most of the puzzles. That is to understand that we're optimizing for exactly one thing: curiosity. (Specifically, we're optimizing for intellectual curiosity, since there are other kinds of curiosity too.) Here are links to past explanations I've posted about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[editing - bear with me...]
Yesterday the top comment on two stories I went to discuss had deep and meaningful content, before the last line which was a "and I talk about this stuff all the time on my newsletter [link]", and I was conflicted. Same poster each time.
The poster had done the HN thing: responded with thoughtful examination of TFA, unique and interesting insight, and I don't feel it was AI generated.
And then they marred it. They pushed something just slightly out of context. Not entirely, just a smidge.
I hope we can keep an eye on that sort of thing around here, it feels like it could slide into something...
Flagging deprives everyone else of the comment, and is especially hostile if there's already a thread sprouting from that comment.
Constant self promotion is what is hurting so many other platforms, I'd hate to see this one take even a step in that direction.
The grey area is people constantly linking to their own blog, but the linked post is relevant (example [0]). Like, it's good when people post relevant links to diver deeper, but when it's constantly your own content, that irks me a bit.
[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
simonw is a smart guy, definitely an HN darling for anything LLM related nowadays but at the same time he is constantly pushing for his personal brand, IMO. Maybe unconsciously and just because he is very prolific but still, I get that feeling.
If he posted on the ML subreddit while I was still a mod there (left after the API kerfuffle) I would have messaged him and asked him politely to tone it down.
>Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
His submissions here are usually to his own work. Admittedly, that HN guideline is like an obscure 19th century law which is still on the books that few know of and is never enforced. Even so, he's clearly well-regarded based on the amount of conversation his blog posts elicit.
Clearly you feel differently and since your MO seems to be that you always wants the last word, have at it. I try not to be terminally online, so I'm not willing to engage further.
To read my full comment to you, visit my webpage.
My point was that the "creating the personal brand" part - which can seem something intentional - is just a byproduct of posting, writing and contributing. And he contributes because he has knowledge, opinions and things to say.
It's like writing your own blog with good content and getting organic traffic from search engines vs writing SEO content to get traffic and get noted.
Maybe I initially expressed myself not the way I really wanted.
I'd be unhappy if it's always the same link, for example to the top of his blog. Or different post to slightly related topics.
In my opinion, if they put thought into a deep and meaningful answer, then I think that's fine. If they say "Oh yeah I talked about this in my blog [link]" that's totally different.
I agree that linking to your own work in comments is generally bad form.
"The royal you"
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Then you can unlock posting when you realize it's "dan g" not "darn it, dang".
The use of em dashes looks pretty natural to me. This is how they were used before LLMs, and what LLMs learned from.
Em dashes have a useful place in written language. I hope we will not lose their utility because people treat them as enough of a signal on their own to automatically question the authenticity of absolutely well-written pieces of text, without giving the matter any further consideration.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45053933 (Aug 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27787448 (July 2021)
However, I feel like there's a lot more repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion on HN in the last few months than there has ever been.
I feel like every other thread on here devolves into an unhinged rant about AI, enshittification, privacy, or crazy conspiracy theories about age restrictions on social media and the politicians passing them (which I'm personally a staunch opponent of). It's all the same arguments over and over, most of them without a shred of evidence. It feels like people aren't arguing in good faith any more, we're all just screaming our politics at (or past) each other. This didn't use to be the case.
(yes I know I have showdead on, those are not the dead comments).
That's why people have been experiencing this "HN has gotten a lot more $BAD-QUALITY recently" since pretty much the origin of the site.
Anyway, thank you dang for your moderation!
Are there any other mods besides you?
Also it just occured to me, is dang one person or a account the represents all mods?
They used to share one account.
Hacker News can only be "figured out", relative to what looks like the biases and financial interests of ownership and its staff, where they do the "pushing" (elevating) and "demoting". This "state of curiosity", appears to be wanting readers to blindly accept what is fed to them, and ignore or not question strange inconsistencies.
Newcomers and outsiders would usually be expecting transparency, honesty, and impartiality. Their confusion, can be when they notice the difference in moderation based on adhering to a clear and obvious standard versus the hidden, strange, and inexplicable.
Traction here follows the general rules of what has been considered good SEO advice: just make (and discuss) things that people are interested in. You can start to see the matrix pretty quickly.
Sustained "success" here isn't about gaming the community, it's about being a part of it. You get to know what interests people because you're a part of that discussion.
Purpose of hackernews as you said is fulfilling curiosity, its not a place where people should try to post to get eyeballs or something because their investors said so.
Honestly hackernews to me is a place where tinkering as a hobby is appreciated. I have read so many large threads here and ended up sometimes having a new point of view on something and so many posts here which make me want to be curious and tinker around too. I cannot really name something exactly which clicks on hackernews but that is what makes it unique and this does mean I cannot explain it to others sometimes since my hobbies are tangential to hackernews too, I just end up saying my hobby is tinkering with computers (currently only software)
> What doesn't work—and this is good because we want it not to work—is approaching HN as a platform for promoting content.
There's a fundamental problem here. If I find something that gratifies curiosity, of course I am going to want to promote it. For example if I'm an artist creating original work that checks all of the boxes of a good HN submission, I'm still punished for "promoting" it, probably by automated systems. "Curiosity" and "promotion" are not mutually exclusive!
A lot of the comments and input here make sense. I’ll follow your advice and observe HN for a while, looking for interesting topics that suit me.
Don't tell the mods!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46310650
posted an hour ago with 4 measly upvotes among other threads with hundreds of upvotes on spot 10?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46311092
4 upvotes in 26 comments, also on spot 10 after refresh?
Still zero comments for both! If all you need to end up in the top 10 is 4 upvotes within 30 minutes I could start selling hacker news front page placements right here, right now.
I’d believe it’s the mods juicing it by hand, but perhaps there’s an algorithm filtering for subject distance from the core hn oeuvre?
The scoring is pretty simple:
- the older it is, the less score - the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score - penalties reduce the score ( eg. By moderator)
People browsing in newest, make it visible in the main page.
Most people see the main page
Ps. Since you try to find relevant people. Don't try to game it. It doesn't and shouldn't work that way :)
Unless this has changed, I don't think comments contribute positively to the score. Apparently they (used to?) contribute negatively if there are more comments than upvotes and the number of comments exceeds some threshold. See e.g. this very old article: https://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-reall...
> In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with "too many" comments will get heavily penalized as "controversial". In the published code, the contro-factor function kicks in for any post with more than 20 comments and more comments than upvotes. Such an article is scaled by (votes/comments)^2. However, the actual formula is different - it is active for any post with more comments than upvotes and at least 40 comments. Based on empirical data, I suspect the exponent is 3, rather than 2 but haven't proven this.
I bet that this isn’t an exaggeration. Being highly-ranked on HN can probably give a startup a huge advantage, in the hype department.
I guarantee that LLMs are currently being feverishly trained on HN front pages, for the last few years, and we’re gonna be seeing “link farm” sites, specifically designed to rank high on HN.
I enjoy it here. I don’t hang out on any other social media, so this place gets a lot of my time (I’m writing this right now, as I’m working up some tired, to go back to sleep). I’ve spent my entire life, hanging around people that intimidate and inspire me, so this place feels like home.
If it turns into a Dead Internet site, I’ll probably pack it in. I have left a number of sites, over the years. It would make me sad, as I’ve lasted longer here, than anywhere else.
Most of my karma is from comments, not submissions. I like to engage.
Best sentence of the day
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
There's even some pretty obviously shady ones doing stuff like purposefully evading LLM detection systems.
It also does not take that much of a search online to find people trying to buy upvotes, comments, accounts. A lot get banned, yet people are still obviously trying.
Generally agree with you. Lot of sites over the years that have eventually been turned into wastelands. Predictabot LLM SEO spew that eventually rendered interacting there meaningless. The auto-comment, auto-review stuff has been around longer than the LLM idea, it just wasn't quite so accessible. Now its like every teenager has been handed bioweapons.
Unfortunately, (opinion) most of the mainline World Wide Web has been reduced to content that's difficult to parse from Stock Market summary bots, and most of the old vibrant forums have slowly been obliterated, so there's not that many places to go to.
Huge portion of the World Wide Web that just goes from site to site ruining the experience until there's nothing left, and no reason to participate, or even glance. Their calculations wasted turning each "platform" into a pile of vomit no-one wants to interact with.
For instance I submitted an article three times (spaced a year apart). The first two times the article got no upvotes. The third time it got 600+ and hit the top of the front page. It's just a matter of who happens to be looking at the New page at the time.
If someone has less votes and its still something I find interesting, I am more critic of the whole situation to upvote
But if someone already has 400 upvotes and is on the top of the site, I will look more into it with ("woah a lot of people upvoted, lets see why" and then read the comments and some of the comments are really brilliant that it becomes the reason why I upvote the post itself too
I am sure that hackernews doesnt really recommend it but I do feel like its something that I do subconsciously that I have observed and wanted to share. It does feel like random stuff but still in a way which still makes sense for the whole ethos of hackernews.
Sometimes my friends post on social media platform A "Hey, I've just posted on platform B. Upvotes appreciated."
Or a newsletter will say "please share this post on…"
Or people on Discord / Slack / Matrix will say "people are being mean to me on platform C, where are my defenders at?"
HN feels organic - and is pretty well moderated - but it isn't immune to family & friends giving something an initial boost.
But if no one wants to discuss it, the post will falter.
As for the other levers, it is hard to say. Sometimes the posts I've worked hardest on with the most detail just die a death. But the half-finished thought casually tossed off will Do Numbers. Outrage sometimes works, but it is a fickle friend to tame. Catchy titles aren't clickbait (despite what some people say) but they work best when they are descriptive.
And, finally, people can and do resubmit stuff. What doesn't work at 0900 Monday will be popular at 1700 Tuesday. Why? That's just the way it is.
In the end, it is all luck. But, as the saying goes, the harder you work the luckier you get.
The root of HN is a thing called 'startup news', that was changed very quickly and since then HN has been a focal point for techies of all sorts but also lots of other people from all walks of life and from a large variety of countries. It isn't 'one thing' to everybody that participates, just like a hammer is a different thing for a carpenter than it is for a masoner or a farmer.
The fact that after being a member for a couple of years you have this question indicates a lack of participation, not a lack of understanding.
Sure, it can be frustrating if you're trying to promote a product or farm karma on posts. But the fact that mostly nobody cares about karma means that you can post something and have it be evaluated on its technical, economic, social merits.
Obviously, there are caveats to this - i.e., anything US- and FAANG-related is bound to get much more activity than otherwise - but the overall atmosphere of HN is refreshing compared to Reddit.
As to how I (or anyone) could show this, here are a few example questions:
1. How many examples of stealthy but otherwise blatant promotion do you see in the comments? Not every astroturfing campaign will be successful or original, so you'd be able to notice some patterns. Plus, HN is already commercially oriented, and there's the "Show HN" option, so it reduces the incentives for astroturfing.
2. Alternatively, how much controversy is there around the specific type of forum? For some subreddits, for example, you'd be able to see counter-subreddits popping up when participants feel the mods are abusing their power to promote one type of opinion.
3. Is a certain type of political/brand-related opinion or interpretation always at the top of your comment feed? For example, if upvotes determine the order of the comments, do you consistently see fewer critical comments on things that you'd expect the community to react to in different ways.
4. Do you consistently see some contributors having more power in discussions over others? Other than the mods, obviously. If this is the case, karma (i.e., number of upvotes) often has more value.
Still, I could be wrong.
Check out the treatment PG (and Garry Tan) got in the thread about defending YC's effective investment into Installmonetizer for a good example of news.ycombinator.com's response to such crap.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46309399
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
That’s a handwave trying to dismiss a host of valid concerns by lumping them together. It reads like “you probably want to game HN; stop doing so”.
Just a random issue that has been repeatedly brought up for at least a decade: HN is completely unusable for people with vision impairments relying on assistive technologies. It doesn’t use semantic HTML elements, it doesn’t use ARIA tags, its fonts and colors violate WCAG standards (which your browser’s dev tools will be happy to show you in detail), etc.
If the site is so blatantly unfriendly towards a significant minority of its potential users, apparently due to sheer negligence or “works for me” elitist attitude, I see no reason to believe that other aspects of the site are the way they are “on purpose”.
Yes accessibility would be nice, I agree, but if I’m understaffed, provide free as in beer service where being on the first page is worth millions in marketing spend and being top 1 for a few hours is worth tens if not hundreds so I’m constantly under attack from everyone and their dog who have anything at all to sell, it’s going to be hard to prioritize other things.
…yeah I agree they should hire an intern or something to just fix this on slow burn.
> Mr. Cook replied --with an uncharacteristic display of emotion--that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues. "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." It was the same thing for environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas that don’t have an immediate profit. The company does "a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it."
> Reportedly looking directly at the NCPPR representative, he said, "If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...
YES.
> HN is completely unusable for people with vision impairments relying on assistive technologies.
For one, this is unrelated to allowing marketers to game the system.
For two, how much are you hyperbolizing there? I only ask because I was having a conversation in comments with a blind HN-er only like 3 days ago.
Indeed, in spite of wearing glasses that correct me 100%, that font is way too small.
Accessibility is a problem and it really should be addressed, agreed.
But that's completely orthogonal to being hard to game.
Could it be better? For sure. Is it in the bottom 10% of sites I've ever seen? Definitely not.
Please stop trying to use a group you're not a part of for your own political purposes, especially if you don't know what you're talking about.
Its also the last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big.
You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer comes out of the woodwork to fix it, something that I've seen happen in the last week on nh for the first time.
That's up to you, really, you can just ignore them. I know I do.
> So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.
Probably, or maybe that is just an overly cynical take. If it were as bad as that I can think of a couple of very easy things they could do to improve on that and they aren't so for now I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Note that I'm not particularly impressed by anybody associated with YC except the mods here.
> Its also the last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big.
So you're saying there is hope for Haskell?
> You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer comes out of the woodwork to fix it, something that I've seen happen in the last week on nh for the first time.
There are some pretty funny instances of such interaction here, the best of which still has me in stitches after more than a decade.
I am not asking how you use it. I am asking what you believe is the reason the site operator is running it.
Why do I take in parcels for my neighbour if a courier knocks on my door? She doesn’t pay me. It wouldn’t cause me any harm if I didn’t. But it makes the place nicer to live, and I’ve become friends with her as a result.
She invited me to dinner recently and fed me delicious food, and we drank very good champagne. That was an unexpected bonus.
“To promote ycombinator” only works if there’s an audience worth promoting to. Building something great that brings people back day after day maybe has the result that it can also serve as a promotional tool - but that’s a bonus, not necessarily a purpose.
I’m not the person you asked the question of - but I think the purpose of ycombinator is to give relevant people a place to discuss things aligned with the ecosystem in which ycombinator operates, to help strengthen and champion that ecosystem. Does it have a payoff for ycombinator? Almost certainly. Was it created with that explicit purpose in mind? I doubt it. There are easier ways to make money.
They're not promoting startups to investors via HN, it's a different kind of promotion. But 'pool of eligible hires' is quite worth a few salaries to maintain, even if others get value from it.
If we take what he wrote at face value, I don’t think the purpose was primarily its promotional value.
https://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
_ Hacker News was two years old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news._
_ Hacker News is an experiment, and an experiment in a very young field. Sites of this type are only a few years old. Internet conversation generally is only a few decades old. So we've probably only discovered a fraction of what we eventually will._
_ Hacker News is definitely useful. I've learned a lot from things I've read on HN. I've written several essays that began as comments there. So I wouldn't want the site to go away. But I would like to be sure it's not a net drag on productivity. What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site that caused them to waste lots of time._
Everything has a cost. For the web, that's typically monetary or your data and attention to advertisers. If the cost of Hacker News is that my participation is lending some (tiny incremental) legitimacy to Y Combinator then that is absolutely fine by me. (I suspect it's also costing some tiny amount of my attention, in the sense that I may not have heard of Y Combinator if it weren't for Hacker News.) But I'm glad you made it explicit so that it's a conscious choice.
But the reason they won't tell you is that the entire reason it works is because you don't know.
Money. A spot as US citizen to get into startup school.
Money. An investment from a noble mind to another noble mind.
Money. Pass information to fellows at YC (who are from a different domain, see YC as a cool place) they crowd and promote (seems organic)
Money. Well, then the product or the tech fades, because its a bloatware.
They retry the same thing again with next batch of people. Keeps the forum running. The maintainers get retired or really tired.
Readers. I have seen this one before. Reader. Well, now, you are old
The only really opaque thing I’ve found is the anti spam/anti flame war rules but it’s not crazy to keep those secret and I say that as someone who gets temp banned by those rules on here frequently
Another part of the equation is topic and tone. There's no sophisticated algorithm, but it's an eclectic forum, so if your post sounds like pure marketing or self-promo, it will probably not make it far. You need to offer something of value to readers, not to you.
An interesting quirk of the system is that people who upvote or comment on stories don't necessarily read them. A lot of HN discussion boils down to people reacting to the prompt in the subject line. There are publications that learned how to game this. I don't think it's a template worth following, but it sells...
If there is one thing to note, it’s that obvious self-promotion is not good. Technical details are more interesting than sales pitches.
I found out, the other day, that if you post too many comments in too short a time (also undocumented) your final comment is deleted (sorry, you just lose it) instantly with a somewhat snarky message about how you post too much.
I am a little mystified about what community Hacker News serves. It doesn't seem to be the kind of hackers I grew up with (fiercely skeptical, a la 2600 magazine), because, as one example, skepticism about AI or self-driving vehicles is generally downvoted.
Not so much Hacker News as Next Shiny Toy News.
Even so, I know of no better way to discover interesting tools and trends than Hacker News.
Good: "Why I used Postgres to write a web app"
The HN audience upvotes it or downvotes it or flags it or ignores it.
From the reaction, you get an impression of the reception of the thing.
That's... it.
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