To post on Hacker News, submit something intellectually interesting to technical readers, use a plain title, choose the right post type, stay around to discuss it, and never ask for upvotes or comments. The site can send serious attention, but it is hostile to obvious promotion.
This guide is about posting without looking like spam. It covers regular submissions, Ask HN, Show HN, titles, timing, comments, and what gets posts killed.
How to post on Hacker News: the short version
- Submit the original source when possible.
- Use a neutral title. Do not add hype, site names, exclamation points, or marketing language.
- Use Show HN only when people can try something you personally made.
- Use Ask HN only when you genuinely want answers, recommendations, or discussion.
- Do not ask friends, followers, users, or teammates to upvote or comment.
- Reply to comments like a human. Do not paste generated or AI-edited replies.
- Expect many good submissions to die. Hacker News is not a predictable launch channel.
The fastest way to fail is to treat Hacker News like Product Hunt with worse design. This is what you are trying to avoid:
Oops!
What is Hacker News
Hacker News is a social news aggregator dedicated to discussing stories and topics relevant to startup founders and engineers.
It was launched in 2007 by Paul Graham and is owned by Y Combinator. The official Hacker News Guidelines define on-topic submissions broadly: anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity.
In practice, that means HN can work for technical essays, firsthand founder stories, research, open source projects, deep product writeups, dev tools, engineering demos, and unusually interesting business lessons. It is a bad place for launch copy, listicles, press releases, generic startup advice, and anything that smells like a traffic grab.
Which Hacker News post type should you use?
Most mistakes start here. Choose the format that matches what you actually have.
Regular link submission
Use this for blog posts, technical writeups, research, essays, news, tools with detailed launch pages, or anything where the link itself is the main thing. This is usually the right choice for content marketing.
Ask HN
Use Ask HN when you want answers from the community. A good Ask HN is specific and useful to others. A bad Ask HN is a launch pretending to be a question.
Show HN
Use Show HN when you made something and people can try it. The official Show HN guidelines are explicit: blog posts, newsletters, lists, sign-up pages, and landing pages are not Show HNs because they cannot be tried.
Show HN works best for dev tools, apps, hardware, open source projects, experiments, and weird little things that are interesting enough to play with. It does not need to be polished, but it should be non-trivial, personally made, and ready for feedback.
Show HN guidelines
Use this checklist before submitting a Show HN:
- The title starts with
Show HN:. - You personally worked on the thing you are showing.
- Other people can try it, run it, inspect it, or give meaningful feedback.
- It is not just a blog post, newsletter, reading list, landing page, fundraiser, or waitlist.
- It is easy to try without a signup or email gate if possible.
- You can be around in the thread to answer questions.
- You are not asking friends to upvote or comment.
Hacker News title guidelines
Hacker News titles should be boring in the best sense: clear, neutral, and close to the original title. The official guidelines say not to use uppercase, exclamation points, praise, site names, gratuitous numbers, or editorialized titles.
- Bad: “10 Amazing Lessons From Our Product Launch!”
- Better: “Lessons from launching our database migration tool”
- Bad: “We built the best AI agent for developers”
- Better: “Show HN: A local agent for reviewing pull requests”
This is not just etiquette. Hacker News titles are treated as shared labels for discussion, not as ad copy. If the title is misleading, linkbait, or too promotional, users or moderators may change it.
What actually reaches the Hacker News front page?
A front-page Hacker News post usually gives the community something to think about, test, correct, or argue with. That is why useful blog posts, technical writeups, founder stories, research, and small tools often fit better than product announcements.
In a 30-day manual study of Hacker News front-page stories, Amplify Partners found that blog posts were the largest category, while corporate blog posts and company announcements were much less common. The useful lesson is not “write a blog post.” It is: publish something that can stand on its own without needing the reader to care about your company yet.
For company content, the safest angles are:
- A technical lesson learned while building something.
- A surprising failure, tradeoff, benchmark, or teardown.
- A firsthand founder story with numbers and consequences.
- A tool, demo, or dataset that readers can inspect.
- A clear argument that invites informed disagreement.
The weakest angle is “we launched a product.” On Hacker News, the product is rarely the story. The interesting thing you learned while building it might be.
Is the Hacker News front page manually curated?
Partly, yes. Hacker News is not a pure voting leaderboard. The official FAQ says story ranking is affected by votes and time, but also by user flags, anti-abuse software, overheated-discussion demotion, account or site weighting, and moderator action.
That means two posts with similar points and age can behave differently. A story can fall because users flagged it, software downweighted it, a domain or account has weighting, or a moderator intervened. Moderators can change titles, kill posts, turn unfair flags off, move submissions, and downweight stories that do not fit the site.
There is also an explicit second-chance pool. Moderators and a small number of reviewers look through older submissions for links that seem in the spirit of HN. Software can then place one of those links onto the lower part of the front page to see whether the community responds.
So the practical answer is: write for the community, not the algorithm. You are trying to pass several filters at once: readers, voters, flaggers, software, and moderators.
Best time to post on Hacker News
There is no magic hour. Timing can help at the margin, but title fit, topic fit, early discussion, flags, and moderator action matter more.
If you have to choose, post when the US technical audience is awake and you can spend the next few hours replying. For many founders that means a weekday morning in US time. A practical default is 9am-12pm Eastern Time, but treat that as availability planning, not a magic ranking trick. Do not post right before a meeting, a flight, or sleep.
Prepare the page before you post
Hacker News traffic is impatient. Before you submit, make sure the page can survive a skeptical technical reader arriving cold.
- Load fast. Do not make people wait through tracking scripts, animations, or giant assets.
- Remove popups, newsletter gates, chat widgets, and aggressive signup walls.
- Put the demo, screenshots, code, result, or core argument near the top.
- Explain the technical details and tradeoffs. HN readers punish vague launch copy.
- State limitations honestly. A small useful thing beats an inflated claim.
- Make pricing, availability, source code, or access rules clear when they matter.
- Have analytics ready, but judge the result by feedback, links, signups, and follow-up conversations, not only points.
The submission is only one part of the launch. The page itself has to answer the obvious objections before the thread does.
What gets a Hacker News post killed or flagged?
The Hacker News FAQ says a dead post may have been killed by software, user flags, or moderators. You cannot fully reverse-engineer the system, but you can avoid the obvious mistakes:
- Do not use HN primarily for promotion.
- Do not ask people to upvote, comment, or submit your link.
- Do not delete and repost because the first try failed.
- Do not submit a duplicate if the story already got significant attention recently.
- Do not disguise a landing page as Show HN.
- Do not paste AI-generated or AI-edited comments.
Can you ask for upvotes?
No. Hacker News explicitly says not to solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions. This applies to friends, users, employees, communities, newsletters, social posts, and launch groups.
HN readers are sensitive to vote requests, and the site has anti-abuse systems. Even when a coordinated push technically works, it can poison the discussion and make the post look like spam.
Be careful with old Hacker News marketing advice. Some older guides recommend lining up helpers, asking friends, using multiple accounts, or writing catchier titles. Those ideas conflict with the current rules and with the way regular HN users judge promotional posts.
What happens if you do?
This Indie Hacker post is a useful warning:
And this is how quickly the Hacker News thread noticed:
See the thread here.
What to write in the first comment
If you submit your own work, add one calm comment after posting. Do not repeat the landing page. Give context that helps the discussion start in the right place.
A useful first comment usually covers:
- Who you are and why you made the thing.
- The specific problem, constraint, or weird observation behind it.
- What is new, incomplete, or technically interesting.
- What kind of feedback would actually help.
A bad first comment asks people to support you, explains the market, or turns the thread into a sales page. HN readers do not need to be told that your market is large. They need a reason to care.
Marketing on Hacker News through comments
Comments are often a better marketing channel than submissions. A submission asks the whole site to care about you. A comment lets you help inside a conversation that already exists.
Harry Dry from Marketing Examples wrote about Adriaan van Rossum of Simple Analytics. By comparing public traffic spikes with Hacker News activity, Harry showed that useful HN comments became a major traffic source for Simple Analytics.
The repeatable strategy: monitor, react, add context
The repeatable Hacker News marketing strategy is not launching every month. It is noticing relevant threads early and adding something useful before the discussion has moved on.
- Track product categories, competitor names, problem phrases, and adjacent technologies.
- Reply when you can answer from experience, share a useful caveat, or point to a concrete example.
- Disclose your connection when you mention your own product.
- Skip threads where the only thing you can add is a link.
This is where Syften’s Hacker News alerts fit naturally. Track topics relevant to your product, then reply when someone asks a question you can actually answer. Do not force a link into every reply.
Another example: A comment worth $140.
Marketing on Hacker News through posts
To reach the top of Hacker News, you need topic fit, timing, discussion, luck, and usually something that gives the community room to respond. That can be a technical lesson, a surprising result, an honest failure, a new tool, or an argument that is interesting enough to correct.
Alas, as Harry Dry shows us himself, this cannot be gamed reliably. Maximize your chances, post something worth discussing, and stay around to reply.
Hacker News culture and moderation
Hacker News users enjoy being right, and many active threads are centered around articles that are subtly wrong, incomplete, or provocative enough to produce corrections. This can feel harsh, but it is also why good technical comments can be valuable.
In the beginning, the site was moderated by Paul Graham. Later the main visible moderators were Daniel Gackle and Scott Bell. The moderators can change titles, kill posts, turn flags off, and move submissions when they think it improves the site.
You can contact the moderators at hn@ycombinator.com. They can take time to reply, but in my experience they are kind and thorough. Email them when you think there has been a moderation mistake, not to ask for a post to be promoted.
Title moderation and the birth of lobste.rs
Title moderation is part of Hacker News history. Paul Graham once argued that submission titles are common property because everyone reads and discusses them, not just the submitter. Some people strongly disagreed.
On June 12th, 2012 Joshua Stein was banned from Hacker News for making this post:
Joshua “jcs” Stein, an OpenBSD developer and the maker of PushOver, was a prominent figure. Internet drama ensued which led to the creation of lobste.rs.
Post reach
Other than the top of Hacker News, a successful post will also appear in other places.
- Alternative front pages like hckrnews
- /r/hackernews on Reddit
- Top submissions from Hacker News inevitably end up on Lobste.rs (and vice versa)
- There are automated newsletters containing top stories
Hacker News posting FAQ
Can I post my own work on Hacker News?
Yes, part of the time. The guidelines say not to use HN primarily for promotion. If your normal use of the site is curiosity and discussion, posting your own work occasionally is fine.
Can I submit a blog post as Show HN?
No. Show HN is for things people can try. Blog posts, newsletters, lists, landing pages, and sign-up pages should be regular submissions.
Why is my Hacker News post dead?
It may have been killed by software, user flags, or moderators. If you think that was a mistake, enable showdead in your profile to inspect dead posts and email the moderators when appropriate.
Can I email Hacker News moderators to put my post on the front page?
No. Moderators can affect front-page visibility, and the second-chance pool can give overlooked links another shot, but emailing the moderators should be reserved for moderation mistakes: wrongly killed posts, unfair flags, title issues, account problems, or similar cases. Do not treat it as a promotion channel.
Do high-karma users rank higher?
The FAQ says no. Karma may affect other site features, but posts by users with more karma do not rank higher just because of that.
Can I put links in a Hacker News text submission?
No. The FAQ says text submissions cannot include links. If you want discussion about a link, submit the link and then add context in a regular comment.
Hacker News alternative
The story with Lobste.rs started with a Hacker News moderation dispute. One day Joshua "jcs" Stein got banned from Hacker News. Angry, he started Lobste.rs. The community is purely about technology, no politics. Read the full story here.
Resources
- Hacker News Guidelines. Official rules for submissions and comments.
- Hacker News FAQ. Official explanation of ranking, Ask HN, Show HN, dead posts, reposts, and voting rules.
- Show HN Guidelines. Official rules for Show HN posts.
- Show HN: Second-Chance Pool. HN moderator explanation of how overlooked links can get another chance on the front page.
- Lobste.rs: A Better Hacker News Alternative.
- A Comment Worth $140.
- The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News. An interview with the moderators.
- The Undocumented Hacker News Guide.
- How to Get 30,000 Hacker News Visitors to Your Website. Harry Dry’s guide.
- What Gets to the Front Page of Hacker News?. Amplify Partners’ manual study of front-page stories.
