A few years ago, on my birthday, I quickly checked the visitor stats for a little side project I had started (r-exercises.com). Instead of the usual 2 or 3 live visitors, there were hundreds. It looked odd to me—more like a glitch—so I quickly returned to the party, serving food and drinks to my guests.
Later, while cleaning up after the party, I remembered the unusual spike in visitors and decided to check again. To my surprise, there were still hundreds of live visitors. The total visitor count for the day was around 10,000. After tracking down the source, I discovered that a really kind person had shared the directory/landing page I had created just a few days earlier—right here on Hacker News. It had made it to the front page, with around 200 upvotes and 40 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12153811
For me, the value of hitting the HN front page was twofold. First, it felt like validation for my little side project, and it encouraged me to take it more seriously (despite having a busy daily schedule as a freelance data scientist). But perhaps more importantly, it broadened my horizons and introduced me to a whole new world of information, ideas, and discussions here on HN.
> it felt like validation for my little side project
Yep, that can be useful motivation to get a side project past "works for me" through to "works for others".
The pgautoupgrade project (https://github.com/pgautoupgrade/docker-pgautoupgrade) was one of those. It seems to be going ok too, as others have come along and picked up the majority of development (I'm ~outta time). :)
Gee, today is my birthday (36). I've never managed to get anything I've built to the HN front page. Always wondered if that means my ideas just weren’t that interesting, or if it's just the luck of the draw.
*edited my original comment without mentioning my project*
Ha, thank you for that! I actually didn't have prior experience in wearables. My background was in mobile app development. I co-founded a company during the app boom, and we built a lot of iOS and Android apps. The transition into health sensors happened pretty organically and I also felt there was nothing that let me measure my own data and make use of it, so I decided to create a wearabke + free SDK for that. There is a quite nice article of how it all started here: https://howtoware.com/aidlab (good reading for anyone wondering what the struggles are when running a wearable startup).
We (and you) can never be sure why people downvote things, and whilst I think the parent commenter was well-intentioned, I think perhaps the downvotes were due to the perception of intruding on someone else's comment/subthread with promotion of one's own project.
As for your own comments, you seem to have a campaign against HN going on. Yes the HN audience can be hard to understand sometimes, but on the whole it seems easy enough to do well here if you bring a generosity of spirit, and not so well if you bring combativeness and hostility.
The guidelines [1] make it clear what we're expecting, and the first two words of the "In Comments" section are "Be kind". If you start with that then you'll be on solid ground.
Regarding your username, we can't have usernames like this, because it effectively trolls the community every time you comment. So I've banned the account for now. You're welcome to register a new account with a normal username, or email us (hn@ycombinator.com ) asking us to change the username. We'd certainly be very happy to have you post interesting comments from your experience as a retired aerospace engineer or any other life experience you no doubt have.
They weren’t trying to get on the front page of hn age 1 so it’s not 36 years in a row. Why do you need to be unpleasant to someone you don’t even know?
I think I've been on the HN front page something like 30 times now since August 2021, with maybe half of those hitting it out of the park and lingering for over a day.
There are real diminishing returns in terms of follow-up traffic and follow-up effects. As to be expected, but it's worth keeping in mind that this is something that generally happens over time as the novelty of whatever you're writing about wears off. The good part is that as part of this you'll gradually get more regular readers, so there's less pronounced feast-or-famine cycles.
(Here I don't measure visits as there's so much bot traffic noise especially on anything that hits HN, but mostly focus on whether I get actual engagement, if people reach out to me, send me emails and so on)
I think ultimately a blog post isn't interesting because it's on HN, it's on HN because it's interesting.
Tryharding with regards to the HN frontpage is more likely to come at a cost of writing quality, and thus reducing the likelihood of making the front page.
> There are real diminishing returns in terms of follow-up traffic and follow-up effects
I’m probably in the minority, but whenever I read a good blog or article on HN I scan for social media links and follow the author. It has been helpful to find their future work when it doesn’t catch the upvote wave on HN.
A lot of HN participants turn their nose up at other social media sites but I’ve found it very helpful for exactly this purpose. I unfollow people if they’re too chatty or they start engaging in culture war or other topics I don’t care about, which keeps my feed high quality.
> Tryharding with regards to the HN frontpage is more likely to come at a cost of writing quality, and thus reducing the likelihood of making the front page.
Agreed. I'm always surprised by what hits on the front page.
I think the most important thing is to write something that is interesting and true for you.
Being on the front page of HN is like a TED talk--an effect, not a cause.
You're self aware enough to realize that there's "some undercurrent stuff", but not self aware enough to pick any other username than F0UKYOU-HN, which just maybe might prejudice users and moderators against you. It's like wandering into a bank with a hoodie, face mask, and a gun, and wondering why security is all up in your grill about a "mysterious" something. You're being profiled at the very start by something you set for yourself. If someone comes into your house and the first thing out of their mouth is "f0uk you!", would you really be inclined to sit down and listen to them and have a thoughtful conversation, or are you going to kick them out at the first sign of trouble? At the very least, you're going to keep a close eye on them, yeah?
In meat space, you can do things to change your appearance somewhat, but people gonna people and they're gonna judge you, some times fairly; sometimes not. Online, the only thing people have to go off here is your words, and choosing F0UKYOU-HN belies a certain amount of aggression that is naturally going to start people off on the wrong foot. How do you want people to see you? You could have chosen anything, maybe something bland or generic, like mikelovesbikes32, but in choosing what you chose, you wanted to make a statement, and with your statement, you're "baffled" by why the human being on the other side of the screen might take offense?
>I post a few comments here and there and the site tells me I am commenting too often.
A moderator probably took one look at your username and comment history, decided you were a troll and rate limited your account. You need to learn how to play the game better.
But the "you're posting too fast" filter is applied by the mods. I know because I've had one for a while. The expectation is that you either apologize for your behavior and have it removed or get frustrated and quietly leave. But like many of HN's operant conditioning features it doesn't really work as intended.
And the aggressive and demeaning tone of a lot of your comments seems intended to invite downvotes. Are you surprised that when you call people simps and angry and selfish that you get downvotes?
The validity of your comments matter far less than your tone and demeanor around here. I don't know if this is your first account here but if it isn't you should know this place is aggressively and mercilessly tone policed.
edit: also editing your comments like that is just lame. For someone who constantly calls other people butthurt you really do seem to be the most butthurt and triggered person here. Sorry I tried to engage with you like a person. Bye.
I have made the front page a few times, and I loved it. The discussion is so good, not to mention the random emails and LinkedIn connections. It's very validating when the topic would be too niche for other communities.
Having a high-visibility post on Reddit meant a stressful few hours and some of the most toxic interactions I've experienced.
Still happens here, especially when people publish open source libraries.
"Why should I use your library, when there's ABC that does XYZ much better?" and other variants, as if the original poster was selling something.
Doesn't happen as often when people publish final projects/products (even closed source).
Maybe it's just a dev thing. Some programming languages can have some really toxic fandom :D
I’ve had 2 blog posts hit the front page of HN and the top of popular subreddits.
The quality and type of comments were identical on both platforms.
HN specifically seemed to be commenting based on the title and other comments alone. The most common thread of discussion was clearly explained in the first paragraph.
I really appreciate seeing those comparisons, always learn about projects I've never heard of. And practicing an answer here is low stakes way to develop a response, that might be useful later at an in-person meeting.
I believe that all platforms with voting eventually become an echochamber. Unless they are partitioned into several smaller chambers, like reddit.
Here the partitioning also exists, but is invisible (only some people interact with programming posts, only some with company posts, ai stuff, politics and so on), so that gives a certain "illusion" of many viewpoints.
Illusion (imho) because I don't think those viewpoints interact with each other.
I was about to make approximately the same comment. My site has been front-paged on HN multiple times, as well as in some big subreddits.
A link from HN: Usually comes with thoughtful discussion, and a detectable but temporary uptick in site donations (it's an ad-free, reader-supported project). There are always some detractors, but that's to be expected.
A link from a popular subreddit: A LOT of site traffic and server overload (once in 2015, Google Analytics showed over 6,600 concurrent visitors from /r/TodayILearned), and a lot more bile in the inbox and discussion thread. No uptick in donations.
No surprises there really, but it's useful to verify assumptions.
My theory is that smart people have a mischievous side and get banned pretty quick by reddits insane moderators, so you're left with the middle of the road petty gotcha people.
HN mods are pretty lenient overall and really seem to only ban after numerous rule violations after giving numerous warnings.
Smart^ people don't get banned on Reddit they just get downvoted.
People come to HN comments to have a constructive debate, so they are less likely to downvote for disagreement. I often upvote comments I disagree with if the point is well made.
People come to Reddit to have their beliefs confirmed. The subreddit structure reduces mixing between users with different beliefs, and where that mixing does occur, e.g. on the large subreddits, it tends to turn into a downvote battle.
^ It's not really about intelligence but openness to new ideas. You can have one without the other.
Same here!
I am now actually working in compilers, which is one thing I'm really passionate about, but not something I was doing professionaly. I managed to turn a toy project and some blog posts into an actual job at almost 40, so, thank you HN!
I work at ServiceNow, which sells an enterprise platform and a ton of products built on top of it.
Internal teams and customers can extend the platform by writing JavaScript, hence we have a JS runtime in the platform (the venerable https://github.com/mozilla/rhino/), which our team works on.
I have a model that, given a headline, predicts if the story will get >10 votes. It’s a terrible model, for a few reasons. The most fundamental is that if the same article is submitted 10 times it could get wildly different scores, that’s the way it does. The tail end of the model [1] is logistic regression because it deals gracefully with this kind of situation. I wish I knew how to treat this as a regression problem (predict the score), there is probably a better loss function than what I use, but when I treat it at as a regression problem I get an even worse model.
The highest score this model ever gives is 70% for something like “Richard Stallman is dead”
I have another model that predicts If the comment/score ratio > 0.5 which is about the average for the site. This is a much better model, close to the first recommender models I made. Trained on articles with score > 10 the input is less noisy for one thing. It’s how a learned y’all like to talk about cars.
There is surely a combination of location and sleep schedule contributing to this, and each have cultural implications: maybe British users gravitate toward certain topics, maybe the best developers tend to be night owls, etc. -- and then you've got folks who use these sites while they work, while they commute, while they fall asleep...
It would be interesting to see some sort of personas-over-a-day graph.
I've thought about it. I think of the people who are active in the 11-8 EST window when I'm not active as "the night shift" and I imagine that they're mainly geographically different from me. I imagine it skews towards Asians and Europeans.
Submission time is not such a good indicator of who interacts with a post because a post could be active for 12-24 hours and considering most people are awake 16 hours a day you're going to get people from all time zones. It's probably fair to say that comments written around 2am EST were not likely to have been written by North Americans and the same is true for submissions.
I've done some experiments that involved looking at submissions on days of the week individually or looking at dayparts (say the 5am-6am EST slot) or daypart+day-of-week and never felt I got a much better model as a result.
Every few days I submit one that doesn’t get a lot of traction but I come back in 2-3 days and it is on the home page, I think these are responsible for maybe 1/3 of my karma but well under 5% of actual submissions. I dunno if these got resubmitted but still attributed to me or if it is part of dang’s “a good submission got missed” program.
That's a good point that different types of users gravitate toward certain types of content. Certain passes the sniff test.
Would be interesting to see you could back things out.
I also think there's an effect based on just how fast the new page is refreshed. I sometimes post in the early morning (US MT) and stuff can hang on there for a while (hour or two). By mid-day, it's more like a 30 minute lifetime on that page.
It seems predicting the score directly (regression) is almost impossible without considering the associated domain. E.g. headlines with the letters GPT in it from openai.com, get an order of magnitude more votes than similar headlines from other sites.
My best model was developed about two years ago and hasn't been updated. It uses bag-of-word features as an input into logistic regression. I tried a lot of things, like BERT+pooling, and they didn't help. A model that only considers the domain is not as good as the bag-of-words.
This kind of model reaches a plateau when it has seen about 10,000-20,000 samples so for any domain (e.g. nytimes.com, phys.org) that has more than a few thousand submissions it would make sense to train a model just for that domain.
YOShiNoN and I have also submitted so many articles in the last two years that it would be worth it for me personally to make a model based on our own submissions because ultimately I'm drawing them from a different probability distribution. (I have no idea to what extent submissions behave different depending on whether or not I submit them, I know I have both fans and haters.)
I see recommendation problems as involving both: "is the topic relevant" and "is the article good quality?" The title is good for the first but very limited for the second. The domain is probably more indicative of the second but my own concept of quality is nuanced and has a bit of "dose makes the poison" kind of thinking. For instance I think phys.org articles draw out a conclusion in a scientific paper that you might not get from a superficial read (good) but they also have obnoxious ads (bad). So I feel like I only want to post a certain fraction of those.
So far as regression goes, this is what bothers me. An article that has the potential to get 800 votes might get submitted 10 times and get
1,50,4,800,1,200,1,35,105,8
votes or something like that. The ultimate predictor would show me the probability distribution, but maybe that's asking too much, and all I can really expect is the mean which is about 120 in that case. That's not a bad estimate on some level, but if was using the L2 norm I'd get a very high loss except in that case where it was 105. The loss is going to be high no matter what prediction I make so it's not like I can make a better model can cut my loss in half, but rather I can make a better model and reduce my loss by 0.1% which doesn't seem like too great of a victory -- though on some level it is an honest account of the fact that it's a crap shoot and the real uncertainty of the problem which will never go away. On the other hand, the logistic regression model gives a probability which is a very direct expression of that uncertainty.
It's an interesting problem. If most of the votes concentrate on the first submission, I wouldn't bother including subsequent submissions in the model. However if this is not the case (as in your example), you could actually include the past voting sequence, submission times, and domain, as predictors. In your example, the 800 votes might then (ideally) correspond to a better time slot and source/domain than the first single vote.
Hit the frontpage maybe 4-5 times, I concur that most people don't convert, especially if you shared a blog post related to your startup; but it's a seal of approval that unlocks a lot of things down the road.
A lot of newsletters, twitter accounts, youtubers, etc. will read the front page and highlight it in their respective medium. Usually, those ones are more niche, and the people who come are more interested. Not counting the SEO boost and the marketing opportunities to share that success on linkedin.
Yeah, I will post something 2-3 times, often with days or weeks between them.
I've also re-posted some things that others have posted (and others have re-posted stuff I've posted).
I think the key thing is to not spam. I share other people's posts mostly. 90-95% of my posts are what I find that I think the community might be interested in, as opposed to posts of my content.
It's a tough position to be in. I feel that I finally have some expertise worth sharing but at the same time I want to avoid backlash from the community for promoting my own content and projects. At the same time, I really do enjoy reading what others share and think without having to voice my own take. So when I miss the window, I miss the window.
My business was built by repeated Show HN and posting on HN front page. The spikes led to interest, emails and GitHub stars which eventually led to thousands of stars, constant Google search traffic, and a stream of inbound leads. Even now around 10% of converting leads come from old HN content related to remote browser isolation and BrowserBox.
A seeming paradox was that often a high quality comment in another thread led to higher quality leads than a direct post with its spikes.
It is probably not how you’re supposed to do it but it worked for me, and I don’t know another way.
Not sure if "have a CDN" advice is as sure as is claimed. My projects site has been #1 on the front page many times, and my dinky little $3/mo VPS had no issues at all in any of those cases.
This is likely because the default MySQL connection limit is only 100 connections and your web server is trying to make more than 100 connections (MySQL is not available error). Then if you are using fpm, the default is just a small worker pool. A cheap server can likely handle thousands of requests, but all the defaults will limit you to under 100.
Back when I hosted my search engine on a PC out of my apartment, it survived several supposed HN death hugs.
Seems mostly to be a problem where your website is backed by a DBMS, especially when each page impression generates multiple queries. In that scenario, running out of connections probably isn't particularly difficult.
Only time I've actually been knocked offline was when Elon Musk tweeted a link to a blog post I made. That legit drove some real traffic. I'm not sure if it was the filedescriptor ulimit or the number of open connections that killed me, but I did actually blip for a few minutes.
For one popular project of mine that hit the front page I had a 2% sign-up rate. It was a free service that used GitHub for authentication, which likely helped.
I had a Netlify landing page (CDN), and the web app was a Django app on a single DigitalOcean droplet. I didn't see any complaints of performance issues / resource usage stayed low.
I used to run a subscription box called "Candy Japan", and got #1 on Google for "japanese candy" for after posting about it on HN. The position lasted for years AFAIK.
Embarrassingly, I used to submit my own website’s article. A few of them have hit the front-page of Hacker News. I remember, once submitting it and waiting for it to hit, when it did, I recorded a video of the first few minutes. Then I went to sleep.
> I’m on an adventure to create beautiful and meaningful products to improve the world for my daughters and their friends.
Keep sharing, please. From my POV there’s a lot of shallow, cliche, group-think-y sites / content shared on HN. If you’re true to this mission, yours would be a refreshing change. Thanks.
A post went viral here for a culture magazine I work for. It led to the writer getting employee of the month at a big all hands meeting, along with our host shutting down our Google indexing thinking that we were under attack.
I’ve had a couple of things make the FP. One was #1 for a while.
I submitted them both, but I don’t usually submit stuff, and most of my submissions are one-pointers. These were tutorials or side projects that I thought might be useful to folks. I guess some people agreed.
Most of my karma is comments. There’s really almost no value for me, in limelight. My work is usually “below the radar,” so to speak, and I’m retired. I’m not looking for work or notoriety. I actually kind of like hanging around the joint. I spent most of my career, being the dumbest guy in the room, and that’s sort of what I get, here.
I'm still happy that a few of my blog posts have hit the frontpage here. Two were rants about fake agile[1] and standups[2], which helped me feel not so unhappily alone at the state of the industry. There were others too, such as my post on why I think browser push notifications are terrible, another one was a stupid kludge to fix Cloudflare breaking my SVGs.
There is also another one about dark/light modes that made it to frontpage but got some pretty nasty comments which surprised me, especially from one person in particular who seemed to make it their mission to write absurd comment after absurd comment ironically acting like exactly the kind of person I described in my blog post.
It's always a pretty scary few minutes suddenly seeing a traffic spike, my usual thought is "oh no today isn't going to be good", which is mostly a thought process I have thanks to Reddit being incredibly toxic and unpleasant almost 100% of the time. Any time my blog posts have made it there I dread taking a look at the comments.
I hit the front page of HN about two years ago with https://andrew-quinn.me/fzf , and I concur with this list. Among other things it taught me the invaluable lesson that only a surprise $100 bill from my (excellent!) hosting provider could have that I really should optimize my GIFs and cache them before that happens.
As my father always says, experience is cheap at any cost!
Having made the front page more a few times, the value is really minimal. Yes, I've made sales from HN traffic, but not that much in the grand scheme of things.
But the value from all the links SEO wise was more valuable. If you make the front page normally people are going to post you in other places, translate it, or something else, which increases your SEO.
The hug of death isn't that large. I had a 5 euro DigitalOcean droplet running Nuxt, which handled 30k visitors in a single day without CloudFlare caching it. So if you have a decent setup you should be good.
Agree with the gist of 1. & 2. but was hoping for a more analytic-scientific approach to measuring the impact of the HN Front Page. That is probably impossible though. If you invent github/sliced bread then hitting the front page might be the best thing to happen to your idea. If your profitable business of scamming grannies gets the same exposure it will probably be removed from the iOS/Android App Stores within minutes. Launching Dropbox here is likely somewhere in the middle.
What was really interesting is seeing how many people are scraping the front page of hackernews and storing their data in public github repos. Dozens of them.
> Engage and ask questions that show you have thought about their comment. The best time to do this is right after they make a comment, but even a day later you’ll get some replies.
And then get rate limited for arbitrary reasons, from arbitrary user behavior, for arbitrary amounts of time (2 hours), preventing involvement in this culture
Downvotes and flags can come from arbitrary reasons and preferences, arbitrary user behavior alluded to above.
The platform shouldn't then work against someone trying to address a curious user base, but it does. The reasoning is unsubstantiated, not A/B tested, and not the only way to keep a higher signal community.
Most likely a network thing. Changing browsers will not help. Changing a network might. If you have a dynamically allocated IP, just restart the router. Or try connecting using your mobile data plan (if you have one).
My blog post reached #1 on HN two years ago. The 1000+ comments were extremely interesting and encouraging. I learned a lot and engaged in highly insightful discussions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402
I can attest to the follow-on traffic. I had a showHN on the front page for a brief moment. A few weeks later it was featured in a popular Chinese newsletter. There's also been a few smaller spikes that is attributable to HN.
I hit the front page with ClassicVideoPoker.com (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37763098) and got around 52k hits that day. That was over 1.5 years ago, and to this day, I still get a steady stream of users. A small percentage of them return daily to play, with some racking up hundreds of hours.
Unfortunately, I wasn't running any decent stats at the time, but I see now that I'm still getting referrals from "hackernewsletter," although I'm not sure of the source.
It was great to see the traction, but at the same time, it terrified me. I had all kinds of plans: logins, contests, a community, and new retro-styled games. Unfortunately, the "HN effect" paralyzed me. I was too afraid to push updates, fearing I might break something and lose the users I had. That fear persists even today, with a much smaller but extremely loyal user base.
A year or so ago, I posted a link that you can help Anna's Archive by seeding their torrents [0]. I monitored (eye-balled) their stats [1] to see whether there was a bump in seeding afterwards, and couldn't see one. So, the "low conversion" comment might be true.
I don't think you can draw any conclusions from this. Maybe that the avg HNer does not have feel like allocating 500TB of space and bandwidth to host copyrighted material...
A few years ago, on my birthday, I quickly checked the visitor stats for a little side project I had started (r-exercises.com). Instead of the usual 2 or 3 live visitors, there were hundreds. It looked odd to me—more like a glitch—so I quickly returned to the party, serving food and drinks to my guests.
Later, while cleaning up after the party, I remembered the unusual spike in visitors and decided to check again. To my surprise, there were still hundreds of live visitors. The total visitor count for the day was around 10,000. After tracking down the source, I discovered that a really kind person had shared the directory/landing page I had created just a few days earlier—right here on Hacker News. It had made it to the front page, with around 200 upvotes and 40 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12153811
For me, the value of hitting the HN front page was twofold. First, it felt like validation for my little side project, and it encouraged me to take it more seriously (despite having a busy daily schedule as a freelance data scientist). But perhaps more importantly, it broadened my horizons and introduced me to a whole new world of information, ideas, and discussions here on HN.
Thank you HN for this wonderful birthday gift!
> it felt like validation for my little side project
Yep, that can be useful motivation to get a side project past "works for me" through to "works for others".
The pgautoupgrade project (https://github.com/pgautoupgrade/docker-pgautoupgrade) was one of those. It seems to be going ok too, as others have come along and picked up the majority of development (I'm ~outta time). :)
Gee, today is my birthday (36). I've never managed to get anything I've built to the HN front page. Always wondered if that means my ideas just weren’t that interesting, or if it's just the luck of the draw.
*edited my original comment without mentioning my project*
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44961660 - Interesting project - how did you get into the wearables field? What was your background before setting up this start-up?
Ha, thank you for that! I actually didn't have prior experience in wearables. My background was in mobile app development. I co-founded a company during the app boom, and we built a lot of iOS and Android apps. The transition into health sensors happened pretty organically and I also felt there was nothing that let me measure my own data and make use of it, so I decided to create a wearabke + free SDK for that. There is a quite nice article of how it all started here: https://howtoware.com/aidlab (good reading for anyone wondering what the struggles are when running a wearable startup).
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We (and you) can never be sure why people downvote things, and whilst I think the parent commenter was well-intentioned, I think perhaps the downvotes were due to the perception of intruding on someone else's comment/subthread with promotion of one's own project.
As for your own comments, you seem to have a campaign against HN going on. Yes the HN audience can be hard to understand sometimes, but on the whole it seems easy enough to do well here if you bring a generosity of spirit, and not so well if you bring combativeness and hostility.
The guidelines [1] make it clear what we're expecting, and the first two words of the "In Comments" section are "Be kind". If you start with that then you'll be on solid ground.
Regarding your username, we can't have usernames like this, because it effectively trolls the community every time you comment. So I've banned the account for now. You're welcome to register a new account with a normal username, or email us (hn@ycombinator.com ) asking us to change the username. We'd certainly be very happy to have you post interesting comments from your experience as a retired aerospace engineer or any other life experience you no doubt have.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In recent years it seems we're getting more people who have been banned elsewhere looking for more outlets for their rage.
glad there are a few supporting comments including yours (I thought I was the only one who felt the criticism was excessive)
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They weren’t trying to get on the front page of hn age 1 so it’s not 36 years in a row. Why do you need to be unpleasant to someone you don’t even know?
I think I've been on the HN front page something like 30 times now since August 2021, with maybe half of those hitting it out of the park and lingering for over a day.
There are real diminishing returns in terms of follow-up traffic and follow-up effects. As to be expected, but it's worth keeping in mind that this is something that generally happens over time as the novelty of whatever you're writing about wears off. The good part is that as part of this you'll gradually get more regular readers, so there's less pronounced feast-or-famine cycles.
(Here I don't measure visits as there's so much bot traffic noise especially on anything that hits HN, but mostly focus on whether I get actual engagement, if people reach out to me, send me emails and so on)
I think ultimately a blog post isn't interesting because it's on HN, it's on HN because it's interesting.
Tryharding with regards to the HN frontpage is more likely to come at a cost of writing quality, and thus reducing the likelihood of making the front page.
> There are real diminishing returns in terms of follow-up traffic and follow-up effects
I’m probably in the minority, but whenever I read a good blog or article on HN I scan for social media links and follow the author. It has been helpful to find their future work when it doesn’t catch the upvote wave on HN.
A lot of HN participants turn their nose up at other social media sites but I’ve found it very helpful for exactly this purpose. I unfollow people if they’re too chatty or they start engaging in culture war or other topics I don’t care about, which keeps my feed high quality.
> Tryharding with regards to the HN frontpage is more likely to come at a cost of writing quality, and thus reducing the likelihood of making the front page.
Agreed. I'm always surprised by what hits on the front page.
I think the most important thing is to write something that is interesting and true for you.
Being on the front page of HN is like a TED talk--an effect, not a cause.
If HN had some kind of Hall of fame - you would be hanged there as a local (?) celebrity.
We kind of have a hall of fame: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
I've been scraping /bestcomments[0] since May for https://hcker.news and here are the top users golf ranked by # of best comments.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcommentsIf the karma from all my blogposts were associated with my HN account, I'd have so many Internet points I wouldn't know what to do with them!
... and you have one more now.
In your FACE 'JumpCrisscross.
I hope we wouldn’t hang him... lol
With how fickle and dichotomous HN can be, don’t put it past them.
I really don't understand the underlying "rules" here at HN. Yes I've read the "written" rules, but there is some undercurrent stuff that baffles me
You're self aware enough to realize that there's "some undercurrent stuff", but not self aware enough to pick any other username than F0UKYOU-HN, which just maybe might prejudice users and moderators against you. It's like wandering into a bank with a hoodie, face mask, and a gun, and wondering why security is all up in your grill about a "mysterious" something. You're being profiled at the very start by something you set for yourself. If someone comes into your house and the first thing out of their mouth is "f0uk you!", would you really be inclined to sit down and listen to them and have a thoughtful conversation, or are you going to kick them out at the first sign of trouble? At the very least, you're going to keep a close eye on them, yeah?
In meat space, you can do things to change your appearance somewhat, but people gonna people and they're gonna judge you, some times fairly; sometimes not. Online, the only thing people have to go off here is your words, and choosing F0UKYOU-HN belies a certain amount of aggression that is naturally going to start people off on the wrong foot. How do you want people to see you? You could have chosen anything, maybe something bland or generic, like mikelovesbikes32, but in choosing what you chose, you wanted to make a statement, and with your statement, you're "baffled" by why the human being on the other side of the screen might take offense?
>I post a few comments here and there and the site tells me I am commenting too often.
A moderator probably took one look at your username and comment history, decided you were a troll and rate limited your account. You need to learn how to play the game better.
OK sir, I apologize... (anything change?)
But the "you're posting too fast" filter is applied by the mods. I know because I've had one for a while. The expectation is that you either apologize for your behavior and have it removed or get frustrated and quietly leave. But like many of HN's operant conditioning features it doesn't really work as intended.
And the aggressive and demeaning tone of a lot of your comments seems intended to invite downvotes. Are you surprised that when you call people simps and angry and selfish that you get downvotes?
The validity of your comments matter far less than your tone and demeanor around here. I don't know if this is your first account here but if it isn't you should know this place is aggressively and mercilessly tone policed.
edit: also editing your comments like that is just lame. For someone who constantly calls other people butthurt you really do seem to be the most butthurt and triggered person here. Sorry I tried to engage with you like a person. Bye.
I have made the front page a few times, and I loved it. The discussion is so good, not to mention the random emails and LinkedIn connections. It's very validating when the topic would be too niche for other communities.
Having a high-visibility post on Reddit meant a stressful few hours and some of the most toxic interactions I've experienced.
Can definitely concur about the Reddit part. Feels like commenters there are always looking for a gotcha
Still happens here, especially when people publish open source libraries. "Why should I use your library, when there's ABC that does XYZ much better?" and other variants, as if the original poster was selling something. Doesn't happen as often when people publish final projects/products (even closed source).
Maybe it's just a dev thing. Some programming languages can have some really toxic fandom :D
I’ve had 2 blog posts hit the front page of HN and the top of popular subreddits.
The quality and type of comments were identical on both platforms.
HN specifically seemed to be commenting based on the title and other comments alone. The most common thread of discussion was clearly explained in the first paragraph.
I really appreciate seeing those comparisons, always learn about projects I've never heard of. And practicing an answer here is low stakes way to develop a response, that might be useful later at an in-person meeting.
That is not all people say though, plenty of people are like you and will bring up dropbox etc in response to that.
The important part is that HN isn't an echochamber, you get many viewpoints here.
I believe that all platforms with voting eventually become an echochamber. Unless they are partitioned into several smaller chambers, like reddit. Here the partitioning also exists, but is invisible (only some people interact with programming posts, only some with company posts, ai stuff, politics and so on), so that gives a certain "illusion" of many viewpoints. Illusion (imho) because I don't think those viewpoints interact with each other.
If you don’t want this to happen, maybe stop shilling ollama when vllm exists and is better?
I mean collectively to this website, not to you in particular
I was about to make approximately the same comment. My site has been front-paged on HN multiple times, as well as in some big subreddits.
A link from HN: Usually comes with thoughtful discussion, and a detectable but temporary uptick in site donations (it's an ad-free, reader-supported project). There are always some detractors, but that's to be expected.
A link from a popular subreddit: A LOT of site traffic and server overload (once in 2015, Google Analytics showed over 6,600 concurrent visitors from /r/TodayILearned), and a lot more bile in the inbox and discussion thread. No uptick in donations.
No surprises there really, but it's useful to verify assumptions.
My theory is that smart people have a mischievous side and get banned pretty quick by reddits insane moderators, so you're left with the middle of the road petty gotcha people.
HN mods are pretty lenient overall and really seem to only ban after numerous rule violations after giving numerous warnings.
Smart^ people don't get banned on Reddit they just get downvoted.
People come to HN comments to have a constructive debate, so they are less likely to downvote for disagreement. I often upvote comments I disagree with if the point is well made.
People come to Reddit to have their beliefs confirmed. The subreddit structure reduces mixing between users with different beliefs, and where that mixing does occur, e.g. on the large subreddits, it tends to turn into a downvote battle.
^ It's not really about intelligence but openness to new ideas. You can have one without the other.
does HN even have a downvote button?
For comments, yes, for stories, only flag but not downvote.
But both flag and downvote are karma-gated (I think the threshold is 500 for both, but I could be wrong.)
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I once got a job from a post on my blog that hit the front page. So the value to me was enormous.
Relevant:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7833251
That was over 11 years ago.
I still work there.
Same here! I am now actually working in compilers, which is one thing I'm really passionate about, but not something I was doing professionaly. I managed to turn a toy project and some blog posts into an actual job at almost 40, so, thank you HN!
If I might ask what does you employer need compiler experience for?
I work at ServiceNow, which sells an enterprise platform and a ton of products built on top of it. Internal teams and customers can extend the platform by writing JavaScript, hence we have a JS runtime in the platform (the venerable https://github.com/mozilla/rhino/), which our team works on.
Huh, interesting. Thanks!
That's amazing! Can you share more?
Did they reach out to you? What was the interview like? Was the post adjacent or directly related to the job tasks?
Same here. And same day from posting to interviewing even.
same. except was an oss lib on github.
Re: “HN is very fickle“
I have a model that, given a headline, predicts if the story will get >10 votes. It’s a terrible model, for a few reasons. The most fundamental is that if the same article is submitted 10 times it could get wildly different scores, that’s the way it does. The tail end of the model [1] is logistic regression because it deals gracefully with this kind of situation. I wish I knew how to treat this as a regression problem (predict the score), there is probably a better loss function than what I use, but when I treat it at as a regression problem I get an even worse model.
The highest score this model ever gives is 70% for something like “Richard Stallman is dead”
I have another model that predicts If the comment/score ratio > 0.5 which is about the average for the site. This is a much better model, close to the first recommender models I made. Trained on articles with score > 10 the input is less noisy for one thing. It’s how a learned y’all like to talk about cars.
[1] what attention folks call the “head”
> I have a model that, given a headline, predicts if the story will get >10 votes.
Do you incorporate post time into this model?
This is pure anecdata but I've found that certain posting times lead to more upvotes for what feel like the same type of stories.
There is surely a combination of location and sleep schedule contributing to this, and each have cultural implications: maybe British users gravitate toward certain topics, maybe the best developers tend to be night owls, etc. -- and then you've got folks who use these sites while they work, while they commute, while they fall asleep...
It would be interesting to see some sort of personas-over-a-day graph.
I've thought about it. I think of the people who are active in the 11-8 EST window when I'm not active as "the night shift" and I imagine that they're mainly geographically different from me. I imagine it skews towards Asians and Europeans.
Submission time is not such a good indicator of who interacts with a post because a post could be active for 12-24 hours and considering most people are awake 16 hours a day you're going to get people from all time zones. It's probably fair to say that comments written around 2am EST were not likely to have been written by North Americans and the same is true for submissions.
I've done some experiments that involved looking at submissions on days of the week individually or looking at dayparts (say the 5am-6am EST slot) or daypart+day-of-week and never felt I got a much better model as a result.
> Submission time is not such a good indicator of who interacts with a post because a post could be active for 12-24 hours
Posts that make it to the front page are good for 12-4 hours, I agree.
But if a post gets less than 4 upvotes in the first 15ish minutes, my experience is that 99% of the time it won't get to the front page.
Every few days I submit one that doesn’t get a lot of traction but I come back in 2-3 days and it is on the home page, I think these are responsible for maybe 1/3 of my karma but well under 5% of actual submissions. I dunno if these got resubmitted but still attributed to me or if it is part of dang’s “a good submission got missed” program.
My guess is that those links are added to the second chance pool. https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
But the ways of the HN are deep and mysterious, so that's just a guess.
This is the best guide I've found: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
That's a good point that different types of users gravitate toward certain types of content. Certain passes the sniff test.
Would be interesting to see you could back things out.
I also think there's an effect based on just how fast the new page is refreshed. I sometimes post in the early morning (US MT) and stuff can hang on there for a while (hour or two). By mid-day, it's more like a 30 minute lifetime on that page.
It seems predicting the score directly (regression) is almost impossible without considering the associated domain. E.g. headlines with the letters GPT in it from openai.com, get an order of magnitude more votes than similar headlines from other sites.
To go into more detail.
My best model was developed about two years ago and hasn't been updated. It uses bag-of-word features as an input into logistic regression. I tried a lot of things, like BERT+pooling, and they didn't help. A model that only considers the domain is not as good as the bag-of-words.
This kind of model reaches a plateau when it has seen about 10,000-20,000 samples so for any domain (e.g. nytimes.com, phys.org) that has more than a few thousand submissions it would make sense to train a model just for that domain.
YOShiNoN and I have also submitted so many articles in the last two years that it would be worth it for me personally to make a model based on our own submissions because ultimately I'm drawing them from a different probability distribution. (I have no idea to what extent submissions behave different depending on whether or not I submit them, I know I have both fans and haters.)
I see recommendation problems as involving both: "is the topic relevant" and "is the article good quality?" The title is good for the first but very limited for the second. The domain is probably more indicative of the second but my own concept of quality is nuanced and has a bit of "dose makes the poison" kind of thinking. For instance I think phys.org articles draw out a conclusion in a scientific paper that you might not get from a superficial read (good) but they also have obnoxious ads (bad). So I feel like I only want to post a certain fraction of those.
So far as regression goes, this is what bothers me. An article that has the potential to get 800 votes might get submitted 10 times and get
1,50,4,800,1,200,1,35,105,8
votes or something like that. The ultimate predictor would show me the probability distribution, but maybe that's asking too much, and all I can really expect is the mean which is about 120 in that case. That's not a bad estimate on some level, but if was using the L2 norm I'd get a very high loss except in that case where it was 105. The loss is going to be high no matter what prediction I make so it's not like I can make a better model can cut my loss in half, but rather I can make a better model and reduce my loss by 0.1% which doesn't seem like too great of a victory -- though on some level it is an honest account of the fact that it's a crap shoot and the real uncertainty of the problem which will never go away. On the other hand, the logistic regression model gives a probability which is a very direct expression of that uncertainty.
It's an interesting problem. If most of the votes concentrate on the first submission, I wouldn't bother including subsequent submissions in the model. However if this is not the case (as in your example), you could actually include the past voting sequence, submission times, and domain, as predictors. In your example, the 800 votes might then (ideally) correspond to a better time slot and source/domain than the first single vote.
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Hit the frontpage maybe 4-5 times, I concur that most people don't convert, especially if you shared a blog post related to your startup; but it's a seal of approval that unlocks a lot of things down the road.
A lot of newsletters, twitter accounts, youtubers, etc. will read the front page and highlight it in their respective medium. Usually, those ones are more niche, and the people who come are more interested. Not counting the SEO boost and the marketing opportunities to share that success on linkedin.
An open source project I was working on was on the front page for about 2 days:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44292103
And heres the analytics from that time:
https://imgur.com/XGsiot4
I don't reallly bother tracking sign ups as its a totally free app, but from then to now, it looks like i've picked up about 1600 new accounts.
Previously:
The Value of Hitting the HN Front Page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44584461 - July 2025 (6 comments)
This means that there is one more piece of advice: "If your post didn't hit the front page in the first attempt, try again later".
Yeah, I will post something 2-3 times, often with days or weeks between them.
I've also re-posted some things that others have posted (and others have re-posted stuff I've posted).
I think the key thing is to not spam. I share other people's posts mostly. 90-95% of my posts are what I find that I think the community might be interested in, as opposed to posts of my content.
It's a tough position to be in. I feel that I finally have some expertise worth sharing but at the same time I want to avoid backlash from the community for promoting my own content and projects. At the same time, I really do enjoy reading what others share and think without having to voice my own take. So when I miss the window, I miss the window.
Please share your stuff! Just don't spam.
If you don't promote cool stuff you write, who will?
My business was built by repeated Show HN and posting on HN front page. The spikes led to interest, emails and GitHub stars which eventually led to thousands of stars, constant Google search traffic, and a stream of inbound leads. Even now around 10% of converting leads come from old HN content related to remote browser isolation and BrowserBox.
A seeming paradox was that often a high quality comment in another thread led to higher quality leads than a direct post with its spikes.
It is probably not how you’re supposed to do it but it worked for me, and I don’t know another way.
Not sure if "have a CDN" advice is as sure as is claimed. My projects site has been #1 on the front page many times, and my dinky little $3/mo VPS had no issues at all in any of those cases.
I'm running wordpress on a weak shared server, so it has fallen over in the past.
I think if it was a static site generator (jekyll, hugo, 11ty) then there'd be no issue.
This is likely because the default MySQL connection limit is only 100 connections and your web server is trying to make more than 100 connections (MySQL is not available error). Then if you are using fpm, the default is just a small worker pool. A cheap server can likely handle thousands of requests, but all the defaults will limit you to under 100.
Back when I hosted my search engine on a PC out of my apartment, it survived several supposed HN death hugs.
Seems mostly to be a problem where your website is backed by a DBMS, especially when each page impression generates multiple queries. In that scenario, running out of connections probably isn't particularly difficult.
Only time I've actually been knocked offline was when Elon Musk tweeted a link to a blog post I made. That legit drove some real traffic. I'm not sure if it was the filedescriptor ulimit or the number of open connections that killed me, but I did actually blip for a few minutes.
For one popular project of mine that hit the front page I had a 2% sign-up rate. It was a free service that used GitHub for authentication, which likely helped.
I had a Netlify landing page (CDN), and the web app was a Django app on a single DigitalOcean droplet. I didn't see any complaints of performance issues / resource usage stayed low.
That sounds like my preferred setup! I use a static site deployed to cloudfront backed by a Django app on Digital Ocean :)
It might not work for all applications, but it tends to hold up great against traffic spikes and the hosting costs stay in the low teens (USD)!
This post is pretty meta now that it's on the front page. A nice follow-up post would be:
The Value of 'The Value of Hitting the HN Front Page' Hitting the HN Front Page
I guess the value would be people might be more likely to prepare with CDNs or engage with comments etc. I wonder if that's measurable.
I'll get busy writing that :)
People fiddle with SEO with a lot of effort and some mixed success. While it takes a single solid hit at the HN (or Reddit) to get on the top.
Of course, it means that a post needs to have more than suitable keywords. So, I never sacrifice the quality of a post just too boost its SEO.
I used to run a subscription box called "Candy Japan", and got #1 on Google for "japanese candy" for after posting about it on HN. The position lasted for years AFAIK.
And the quality of the product must be good I guess? Or at least the right product at the right time
Embarrassingly, I used to submit my own website’s article. A few of them have hit the front-page of Hacker News. I remember, once submitting it and waiting for it to hit, when it did, I recorded a video of the first few minutes. Then I went to sleep.
https://brajeshwar.com/2011/how-is-it-like-during-the-first-...
Now, I consider my site as something rather personal, bland, just my babbles, and kinda s**t compared to many of the ones that pops up on Hacker News.
Some of the best stuff I read on HN is submitted by the author's themselves - like Jake Seliger's posts from his blog
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jseliger
> I’m on an adventure to create beautiful and meaningful products to improve the world for my daughters and their friends.
Keep sharing, please. From my POV there’s a lot of shallow, cliche, group-think-y sites / content shared on HN. If you’re true to this mission, yours would be a refreshing change. Thanks.
A post went viral here for a culture magazine I work for. It led to the writer getting employee of the month at a big all hands meeting, along with our host shutting down our Google indexing thinking that we were under attack.
I’ve had a couple of things make the FP. One was #1 for a while.
I submitted them both, but I don’t usually submit stuff, and most of my submissions are one-pointers. These were tutorials or side projects that I thought might be useful to folks. I guess some people agreed.
Most of my karma is comments. There’s really almost no value for me, in limelight. My work is usually “below the radar,” so to speak, and I’m retired. I’m not looking for work or notoriety. I actually kind of like hanging around the joint. I spent most of my career, being the dumbest guy in the room, and that’s sort of what I get, here.
I'm still happy that a few of my blog posts have hit the frontpage here. Two were rants about fake agile[1] and standups[2], which helped me feel not so unhappily alone at the state of the industry. There were others too, such as my post on why I think browser push notifications are terrible, another one was a stupid kludge to fix Cloudflare breaking my SVGs.
There is also another one about dark/light modes that made it to frontpage but got some pretty nasty comments which surprised me, especially from one person in particular who seemed to make it their mission to write absurd comment after absurd comment ironically acting like exactly the kind of person I described in my blog post.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31074861
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40557347
It's always a pretty scary few minutes suddenly seeing a traffic spike, my usual thought is "oh no today isn't going to be good", which is mostly a thought process I have thanks to Reddit being incredibly toxic and unpleasant almost 100% of the time. Any time my blog posts have made it there I dread taking a look at the comments.
I hit the front page of HN about two years ago with https://andrew-quinn.me/fzf , and I concur with this list. Among other things it taught me the invaluable lesson that only a surprise $100 bill from my (excellent!) hosting provider could have that I really should optimize my GIFs and cache them before that happens.
As my father always says, experience is cheap at any cost!
Having made the front page more a few times, the value is really minimal. Yes, I've made sales from HN traffic, but not that much in the grand scheme of things.
But the value from all the links SEO wise was more valuable. If you make the front page normally people are going to post you in other places, translate it, or something else, which increases your SEO.
The hug of death isn't that large. I had a 5 euro DigitalOcean droplet running Nuxt, which handled 30k visitors in a single day without CloudFlare caching it. So if you have a decent setup you should be good.
Agree with the gist of 1. & 2. but was hoping for a more analytic-scientific approach to measuring the impact of the HN Front Page. That is probably impossible though. If you invent github/sliced bread then hitting the front page might be the best thing to happen to your idea. If your profitable business of scamming grannies gets the same exposure it will probably be removed from the iOS/Android App Stores within minutes. Launching Dropbox here is likely somewhere in the middle.
my vibecharts [0] site got 35k views a few weeks back. Made it feel worth spending $22 on a domain for a joke.
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44830684
What was really interesting is seeing how many people are scraping the front page of hackernews and storing their data in public github repos. Dozens of them.
> Engage and ask questions that show you have thought about their comment. The best time to do this is right after they make a comment, but even a day later you’ll get some replies.
And then get rate limited for arbitrary reasons, from arbitrary user behavior, for arbitrary amounts of time (2 hours), preventing involvement in this culture
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Downvotes and flags can come from arbitrary reasons and preferences, arbitrary user behavior alluded to above.
The platform shouldn't then work against someone trying to address a curious user base, but it does. The reasoning is unsubstantiated, not A/B tested, and not the only way to keep a higher signal community.
OP, a friendly heads up: I'm stuck in a recaptcha loop when trying to visit your site on Chrome, Safari, and firefox.
Most likely a network thing. Changing browsers will not help. Changing a network might. If you have a dynamically allocated IP, just restart the router. Or try connecting using your mobile data plan (if you have one).
My blog post reached #1 on HN two years ago. The 1000+ comments were extremely interesting and encouraging. I learned a lot and engaged in highly insightful discussions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402
I made a map of all the request last time I hit the front page. Timestamp 1:40 in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzpU8-jCV7k&t=100s
I can attest to the follow-on traffic. I had a showHN on the front page for a brief moment. A few weeks later it was featured in a popular Chinese newsletter. There's also been a few smaller spikes that is attributable to HN.
I hit the front page with ClassicVideoPoker.com (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37763098) and got around 52k hits that day. That was over 1.5 years ago, and to this day, I still get a steady stream of users. A small percentage of them return daily to play, with some racking up hundreds of hours.
Unfortunately, I wasn't running any decent stats at the time, but I see now that I'm still getting referrals from "hackernewsletter," although I'm not sure of the source.
It was great to see the traction, but at the same time, it terrified me. I had all kinds of plans: logins, contests, a community, and new retro-styled games. Unfortunately, the "HN effect" paralyzed me. I was too afraid to push updates, fearing I might break something and lose the users I had. That fear persists even today, with a much smaller but extremely loyal user base.
That was from my newsletter: https://hackernewsletter.com/. :)
Here was the issue: https://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/672
Wow - thank you!. I'm really grateful for this.
It's nice to see HN relatively safe from the likes of r/gamedev ChatGPT-generated "postmortem post" spray-and-pray marketing.
A year or so ago, I posted a link that you can help Anna's Archive by seeding their torrents [0]. I monitored (eye-balled) their stats [1] to see whether there was a bump in seeding afterwards, and couldn't see one. So, the "low conversion" comment might be true.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40672215
[1] https://annas-archive.org/torrents
I don't think you can draw any conclusions from this. Maybe that the avg HNer does not have feel like allocating 500TB of space and bandwidth to host copyrighted material...
Lots of us browse from work where torrents aren't exactly allowed, or mobile where it's not practical
Thanks Dan, as usual, deep and insightful
related : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41808941
gah. just what we need, articles about engagement and monetizing hn
do we have to go there?
Yet another "Hitting HN = 30k visits" breakdown from a friend of mine (in 2022): https://www.reproof.app/blog/the-hacker-news-effect
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