Make Things and Show Them | Hacker News Reader

Make Things and Show Them

blog.ycombinator.com

151 points_pius17 comments

So I woke this morning to the surreal email from Daniel @ hn claiming that I had invented (errr... Discovered?) the "show hn" style post. As I said in the quoted reply, from what I recall, it was just a play on "ask hn".

By far, your most important accomplishment. Don't be modest. ;)

I've noticed a marked change for the better since dang came aboard. Links are generally more informative with less controversy and comments are overall good and nice with less flaming trolls. Just great to see the efforts really paying off for a fantastic community. Thanks Dan!

I think the mods are influencing the frontpage a bit more than before, with good mods this is working really well.

Replies to an Ask HN post almost four years ago were instrumental in gathering feedback and cementing the direction for my then fledgling site. A bit later it went from side project to full-time work, so I always keep an eye out for Tell HN and Ask HN posts.

Awesome. Is there an RSS channel for Show HN only?

Good idea. Let's do it.

Edit: it's done and will go live with the next deploy.

Any chance of having the new functionality's source code released, or at least some of it?

Check out:

http://hnapp.com/api/items/rss/9205b686fc8b9b396a0d40e436631...

I found out that I had the “first” Show HN post this morning when someone mentioned it on Slack. It's nice to think I might have some small footnote in a bit of Hacker News history.

Actually, about 5 months before I posted “Show and Tell HN”, I posted a link called “Show and Tell YC” (the link and domain is now owned by someone else, but the original post is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=237544).

As lbrandy said, it was a play on the “Ask HN” or “Ask YC” posts going around at the time.

If you want to know what it feels like when a Show HN post takes off, check out this blog post I wrote a while back: https://web.archive.org/web/20121030145412/http://blog.akshe...

I have yet to reproduce that initial success we had with Akshell with StartHQ (https://starthq.com), my latest venture, but maybe that's for the better. Steady growth beats riding a roller coaster any day.

I love how just the introduction of the new section has already triggered a chain reaction of Show posts. I guess people are taking the chance to show what they have done (and maybe never shown to anyone). Good job!

Title reminds me of 'Do Things, Tell People' http://carl.flax.ie/dothingstellpeople.html

I was thinking of "make something people want" and "move fast and break things". But you're right, that's another. No claims to originality here.

Really glad to see this! The 'Show HN' posts were one of the main reasons I started Hacker Newsletter (http://hackernewsletter.com) four years ago and from the very first issue it has been one of the most popular sections.

Off topic, but #999 on #FFF (author title and background color, respectively) fails the WAG guidelines for color contrast.

I propose we have an "Ask me" to follow reddit's great success with such posts.

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