You're on a board ran by somebody who wrote books and articles about hacking. Every time any of us posts, we're helping somebody else self-promote somewhere down the road.
Life is self-promotion. I can't read a zillion articles looking for you. If you write something we might like, go for it. I want to read it.
I'd much rather have people write and submit their own article than the usual crap we get where one famous person writes something (usually a rant) and the crowd gathers around and cheers. Celebrity does not equal potential relevance -- you might have great ideas to submit on subject X that we'll never hear about unless you submit.
In fact, given my druthers, I'd limit the number of articles we could see from famous writers to only so many per week. After a while, it all starts to look like so much noise. Fresh voices welcome.
There are no rules against that, and if you put in the work to write a thought-provoking piece, it deserves attention.
I would prefer others submit them, but until the community is large enough and my site's following also large enough, I'll submit my own content if I think it is good and relevant to HN. I tend to err on the side of caution though, since HN is a pretty tight and specific community.
Please do. I would much rather read what you have to say and provide some advice than read yet another frikkin' article on how Obama's new toilet is now Internet-capable and just cleared for top-secret access by the NSA.
Ask-HN posts are often some of best threads on this site: http://top.searchyc.com/commented
but it would have to be specifically high quality and relevant. all else would not be submitted.
There's a karma threshold for downmodding comments.
I'd say don't get discouraged when the articles you submit gets no upvotes and Google Analytics tells you that nobody even clicked the link. I wish I could follow that advice.
But there's probably no problem with submitting your own stuff.
What's weird to me, then, is the frequency of crappy submissions getting enough upvotes to hit the front page while the inevitable good submissions slip through. (This, obviously, is bigger than my own submissions, which I'm not particularly interested in seeing on the front page given that I've already seen them -- I'd like to see all the good submissions, and less of the crap.)
Can you believe the site they describe is the same one people tore apart here two years ago?
It says in the guidelines to do just that: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead.
Seriously, though, I think this is where the voting comes in and the community will decide if the article is interesting or not.
Remember the golden rule, if you give people stuff that's relevant to them, you are giving them something of value It's ok to promote yourself if you do that. If you aren't you are spamming.
Most importantly, you get no penalty on submitting lame stories.(I am not saying that your stories are lame.) And, that's why there are no "down vote" button for stories submission.
If I find the article is interesting, I really couldn't care less who submitted it, I'll upvote it anyway. The only time I actually look at the usernames is in the comments anyway.