Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaysonelliot | Hacker News Reader

In my experience so far, posting to HN is more like carving my name on a tree in a mostly uninhabited forest.

My various attempts to post an Ask or Show HN have mostly gone unnoticed. I think it would be great if there were a place that Ask / Show / Tell / etc. posts could get more traction in general.

View on HN

Yes. I've requested such a section here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5692540

HN has become pretty useless for posting projects since the site has become so large. It's a shame, because this my favorite part of the site.

Check. As a developer and entrepreneur i like seeing new and interesting projects from same-minded people. Most of the articles posted on HN are interesting. But sometimes i just want to see what is created by HN people to test it, support them or to get inspired.

Yeah, I've tried several times to get some feedback from the HN community (most recently for flatnik.com, if you're interested I'd love to hear what you think!).

Simply posting with the "Show HN: " prefix puts you on a couple of twitter feeds/meta-sites. Reddit is normally a better option, because you can post to the niche subreddits and get a bit of interest, even if you don't hit the front page of the whole site (good luck with that, if it's not an image).

Just gave flatnik a spin and the concept looks pretty good.

Might be an idea to add an option to separate out the journeys into bus/tube/OG lines since the TfL Route Planner sometimes give strange routes when all mixed together?

Edit: Silly typo's

Glad you liked it!

I'll have a look at adding some options for customising journey types.

> Simply posting with the "Show HN: " prefix puts you on a couple of twitter feeds/meta-sites.

Very true. I announced a new javascript storefront the other month with Show HN. It got four upvotes and 1400 unique visitors in the first few hours, almost all from automatic Show HN aggregators.

Have you checked out this section? https://news.ycombinator.com/ask

I normally never visit it, but it is available.

"I normally never visit it"

Therein lies the problem :) It doesn't matter if the parent visits it, if no one else does.

Then exploit this market inefficiency for yourself and fix that.

I try to make it a point to visit the /newest page, and find that I have disproportionate influence on the content of Hacker News as a result. At slow times, it only takes about 3-4 votes in quick succession for a story to crack the top 30 on the front page. If a story is sitting on /newest with 3 votes, you can be the one that starts a voting cascade that brings it to the top. And as an added bonus, if you add an insightful comment, you can rake in hundreds of karma points as your comment is the first thing that thousands of readers see.

I would say, now would be a good time to post something, as a lot of people would have checked out /newest after reading your comment :)

Wow, I didn't know what that link was and never bothered to find out... I assumed it was something like a suggestion box or something.

I visit the Ask section daily, and indeed found this thread by doing so.

The best time to post to Hacker News, on average, is about 8:30 p.m. EST. Comparable times are when the New page's last entry (#30) was submitted over an hour ago.

insightful

What data are you using to come to this conclusion? I would love to see an analysis on this.

There have been a few analyses. Here [1] is one of them.

1 = http://nathanael.hevenet.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker...

That account says 7-8 AM EST is the easiest to get on the front page, whereas in the evening will stay on the front page the longest (notably mostly during the middle of the night). (tl;dr 9-10 AM is the overall best)

That's for maximizing your likelihood of hitting the front page.

If you continue reading, it also states that to maximize time on the front page, submitting between 8-9 PM EST is optimal.

It concludes with an overall optimal posting time of 9-10 AM EST, or 7AM - noon more generally.

I was specifically using Jacques Mattheij's Unofficial Hacker News FAQ[1], but I'm aware of other analyses that have been done. 8:30 is what's usually agreed upon by the people who have been around and give an answer to this sort of question, in my experience. Hope that helps.

[1]: http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ

I wonder if 8:30pm EST correlates to a particular phase in a Hacker's daily cycle? ie it is when the folks is enjoying some downtime by catching up with news on HN, particularly for folks living on US's east coast.

Well, it's also 5:30pm on the west coast, so presumably a lot of people are getting off of work, and hopping onto HN there too.

One possible update the HN website is to be able to set the start page when you initial load up the website.

I normally do a quick scan of the front page, and then go the "New" page. I find stories there that are quite interested but failed to show up on front page due to the lack of upvotes.

edit: better context.

Yes, I've been there as well. I posted two Show HN without "any trick" or "any attention to details like the best time, best title, or whatever" just to watch my link drops to oblivion. Soon I realize that it would be much harder to get attention, and my just launched Startup would need a lot of SEO, Blog Articles, Build awareness using twitter, facebook, build a amazing land page, etc, etc...Well, I think about that for a while (one week actually) and I ended up deciding that I don't need SO MUCH traction or attention now. I need some clients that I can talk personally and smart enough to help me to evolve the product, and the next day I start to study Erlang (that is amazing btw) and NPL, so I can start to do the cool stuffs that I dream. I will focus in the product only. And if for some merit the product stands out without any "advertisement", so I actually know that I'm building something that people really want.

I'm glad you came to those conclusion, but know in the future that when you're ready to try and show the community your work again, there are some times when it's a fair bet more than others that you'll get to the front page. Don't let one experience discourage, I would love to give you feedback, I always enjoy doing so on Show HN threads.

It's funny. I posted a project once and it got only the upvotes I asked my friends to make, never made it to the front page. Later I removed the first and re-posted it with almost an identical title, just to see. That one got to the top of the front page for hours receiving tons of upvotes and a-lot of great feedback.

My guess is that luck as a great deal to do with it.

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