09 PLATFORMS ✣
Hacker News.
Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) is the single most influential text-based community for the senior end of the technology industry. It is small in raw user count compared to Reddit or X, but its readers disproportionately include the f…
Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) is the single most influential text-based community for the senior end of the technology industry. It is small in raw user count compared to Reddit or X, but its readers disproportionately include the founders, engineers, investors, and decision-makers whose attention determines what tools and companies succeed.
History
- Launched. February 2007 as “Startup News” by Paul Graham.
- Renamed. Hacker News, August 14, 2007.
- Operator. Y Combinator. Functions partly as a public face of the YC community, but the moderation, software, and culture stand on their own.
- Software. Originally written in Arc (a Lisp dialect designed by Graham); has remained on Arc throughout, an unusual technical choice that the community sometimes notes with fondness.
- Notable moderators. Daniel Gackle (dang) — the longest-tenured public moderator; widely respected for tone and judgment.
What HN is and isn’t
Is.
- A text-only ranked feed of links submitted by users, with attached comment threads.
- A relatively senior audience by tech-community standards.
- Heavily skewed toward backend, infrastructure, programming languages, startup-news, and AI/ML.
- Effectively a primary distribution channel for many launching products.
Isn’t.
- Representative of all developers (skews older, more Anglo, more individual-contributor, more US/EU).
- A friendly place for beginners (newcomers are often treated harshly).
- An effective place to “drop a link and run” (this is detectable and counterproductive).
- A predictable channel (algorithmic ranking and moderator decisions can move stories arbitrarily).
The karma system
- Users earn karma by having their submissions and comments upvoted.
- Downvoting comments requires 501 karma — a deliberate friction to slow new-user negativity.
- Submitting has no karma requirement.
- Show HN posts have their own conventions (small, building-in-public-style launches).
- Ask HN posts are conversational questions to the community.
What ranks
- Long-form technical writing that says something non-obvious.
- Engineering deep dives on real systems.
- Launches with a working public product and a candid technical writeup.
- Programming-language and tool announcements.
- Notable open-source releases.
- Investigative or analytical pieces about the tech industry.
What doesn’t:
- Marketing posts.
- Listicles.
- Vague thought-leadership without substance.
- Anything that smells of SEO content.
- Outrage bait.
How DevRel teams interact with HN
Effective.
- Publish substantive technical posts and let them rise organically.
- Build a culture of engineering-led writing where authors are real engineers, not ghostwriters.
- Engage candidly when a post about your product gains traction — answer technical questions, acknowledge criticism, do not deflect.
- Pre-announce nothing; HN does not appreciate “we’ll be on HN tomorrow” coordination.
Ineffective and often counterproductive.
- “Submission rings” or coordinated upvoting (HN actively detects and penalises these).
- Replying as a faceless company account.
- Defensive arguing with critics.
- Repeated re-submissions.
”Show HN”
The Show HN format deserves particular attention from DevRel teams launching new products or features. It is the closest thing technology has to a daily public launch venue with concentrated developer attention.
Conventions:
- Must be something the submitter built personally.
- The title is
Show HN: <Name> – <Short description>. - The first comment from the submitter should be candid and substantive.
- Working public link required.
Show HN launches that became flagship products of their categories include the early launches of Vercel, Linear, Cal.com, Plausible, Fly.io, Supabase, and many others. Major Stripe and Twilio product launches have used variations of the format.
The Hacker News effect
A front-page placement (top 30) reliably produces:
- Tens to hundreds of thousands of new visitors over 24–48 hours.
- Hundreds to thousands of GitHub stars on linked open-source projects.
- Significant inbound traffic to documentation, signups, demos.
- Reposts to Reddit, Lobste.rs, and downstream coverage.
- Conversations that LinkedIn, Twitter, and Slack channels reproduce for days.
A #1 placement produces an order of magnitude more. Most companies’ best single-day traffic of the year is a top-five HN ranking.
Adjacent communities
- Lobste.rs. Smaller, invite-only, comparable culture, often more senior on systems and security topics.
- Reddit r/programming, r/hackernews, r/programmingcirclejerk. Different cultures.
- The Tildes alternative (tildes.net). Smaller; similar values to HN.
Stay-out-of-trouble guidance for DevRel professionals
- Disclose your affiliation when commenting on threads about your own employer.
- Don’t ask employees to vote for your post.
- Don’t post your company’s link repeatedly.
- Don’t claim community endorsements you don’t have.
- Take criticism with humility; the audience values that more than defensive responses.
HN moderation publishes shadowbanning notices to users via email and through dang’s public comments; serious manipulation attempts are surfaced publicly.