How to Use Hacker News: Reading, Searching, Posting and Show HN (Without Getting Flagged)

Why I'm Writing This

Disclosure first, because Hacker News readers expect it: I build CMO Owls, and one of our agents, Hacker News Owl, finds HN discussions related to a product. Building it meant reading HN's rules more carefully than most people ever do. Most of what follows comes straight from those pages, and I've linked every one so you can check.

The short version of everything I learned: HN isn't a marketing channel that happens to have readers. It's a community that tolerates a little self-promotion from people who mostly show up to be curious. Get that order wrong and nothing else here will help.

What Hacker News Is (and Isn't)

Hacker News is a news and discussion site, read heavily by programmers and founders, and it's owned and funded by Y Combinator, the startup accelerator. The HN FAQ says the HN team is editorially independent, and that YC gets three things: job ads and startup launches placed on the front page, and YC founder names shown in orange to other YC alumni.

Its guidelines set the tone. On-topic is "anything that good hackers would find interesting," which includes far more than code. Off-topic is most politics, crime, sports and celebrity news: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." The design is famously plain, which is part of the point. Nothing competes with the text.

How stories are ranked

The FAQ describes the basic algorithm as dividing points "by a power of the time since a story was submitted." So a story's rank falls steadily with age, and early votes count most. Rank is also affected by user flags, anti-abuse software, software that demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action. That's why, as the FAQ puts it, "you can't derive rank from votes and time alone."

How karma works

Karma is "roughly, the number of upvotes on their posts minus the number of downvotes." It doesn't make your posts rank higher: the FAQ answers that question with a flat "No." Karma gives you a few extra abilities, such as downvoting comments and flagging, once you pass small thresholds. Stories have no down arrows at all.

How to Use Hacker News as a Reader

Read the front page for what's popular now, /newest for everything as it arrives, and /show and /ask for people's own work and questions.

If you only ever read the front page, you miss most of the site. Reading /newest for ten minutes is also the best way to see what fails: plenty of submissions never get a second vote.

How to Search Hacker News

HN has no search box on most pages. Search is provided by Algolia at hn.algolia.com, and the search box at the bottom of HN pages sends you there. You can search stories or comments, sort by popularity or date, and limit results to a time range. It's the fastest way to answer "has anyone discussed this before?", which you should always ask before posting.

Useful habits:

• Search your own domain to see whether your site has been submitted before, and how it went.
• Search your category ("self-hosted analytics", "invoice software") and sort by popularity to see what this audience values and complains about.
• Search comments, not just stories. The most candid product feedback on HN lives in comment threads under stories about something else.

Following HN Without Living On It

HN has an official RSS feed of the front page at news.ycombinator.com/rss. For anything more specific, the community-run hnrss.org builds custom feeds:

A comment-search feed for your product's name or category is the cheapest listening tool in tech marketing. hnrss also offers Atom and JSON Feed versions of every feed.

If you'd rather read once a week, Hacker Newsletter has hand-picked the best HN articles into a weekly email since 2010. It's a side project by Kale Davis and, as it says itself, isn't affiliated with Y Combinator.

The Hacker News API: Two Ways to Pull Data

There are two public APIs, and both are free with no key.

The official API (Firebase)

The official HN API exposes everything as items (stories, comments, jobs, polls) at hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/. Its README says there's "currently no rate limit." Lists are capped: up to 500 top and new stories, and up to 200 of the latest Ask HN, Show HN and job stories. It's built for reading the live site, not for searching history.

# The current top stories (a list of item ids)
curl "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json"

# One item: title, author, score, comment ids
curl "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/8863.json"

# The latest Show HN stories
curl "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/showstories.json"

The Algolia search API

For searching, use the Algolia API behind hn.algolia.com. It has two endpoints, search (by relevance) and search_by_date (newest first), and filters by tag and by numbers such as points:

# Stories mentioning "sitemap", most relevant first
curl "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=sitemap&tags=story"

# Newest Show HN posts
curl "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=show_hn"

# Front-page stories with more than 100 points
curl "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?tags=front_page&numericFilters=points>100"

# Comments by one user
curl "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?tags=comment,author_USERNAME"

Be polite with either. The FAQ notes that requesting many pages from the site itself quickly can get your IP banned, and HN's guidelines ask people not to automate posting at all. Reading data is fine; posting by script is not.

How to Post on Hacker News

Make an account, click submit in the top bar, and enter a title and either a URL or text. The rules that matter are short, and they're in the guidelines:

• Submit the original source, not an article about it.
• Use the original title, unless it's misleading or linkbait. Don't editorialize.
• No uppercase or exclamation marks, and don't say how great something is.
• Crop gratuitous numbers. "10 Ways To Do X" becomes "Ways To Do X", unless the number is meaningful.
• Remove the site name from the title (HN shows the domain anyway), and add [video] or [pdf] when relevant.
• Don't delete and repost. If a story got no significant attention in the last year or so, the FAQ says a small number of reposts is OK.

And the one founders forget: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." An account that only ever submits its own domain stands out.

Before you post a link to your own site, check how it will look when people share it elsewhere. Our Open Graph Checker and Meta Tag Checker show the preview and title, and our guide to writing meta titles covers the rest. A surge of HN visitors also means a surge of phones: the Mobile-Friendly Checker is worth a run first.

Show HN: The Rules Most Launches Break

Show HN is "for something you've made that other people can play with." To post one, start your title with "Show HN". Every Show HN appears on /shownew, and once it clears a small points threshold it appears on /show as well.

Two newer lines are worth reading twice. The project "should be non-trivial. Don't post quickly-generated one-offs; anybody can do that now." And: "Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails." A demo behind a sign-up wall gets less feedback, and often gets told so.

A shape that works for the first comment on your own Show HN, written in your own words:

What it is, in one plain sentence.
Why I built it: the specific problem I had.
How it works: the interesting technical part, briefly.
What's rough or missing (be honest; people will find it anyway).
What feedback would help most.

Then stay. The guidelines ask that the project be something "you're around to discuss," and the first hours are when the questions arrive.

Ask HN and the Monthly Hiring Threads

To post an Ask HN, submit with the URL field blank and your question in the text. You can't add a link to a text submission. The FAQ explains why: it stops people putting a link "in a privileged position at the top of the page." If you want to share a link with commentary, submit the link and add your thoughts as a normal comment.

Job ads don't go in submissions. A "Who Is Hiring?" thread appears on the first weekday of each month, and only an account called whoishiring may post it, which stops a race to post first. Most job ads are welcome as comments there. A companion "Who wants to be hired?" thread is where people looking for work post.

Commenting When You Have Something to Sell

Most useful HN marketing isn't posting at all. It's a good comment in a busy thread where your experience genuinely answers the question. The guidelines say exactly what good looks like: "A good critical comment teaches us something," respond to "the strongest plausible interpretation" of what someone said, and don't post shallow dismissals.

Three rules I'd add from watching what works:

1. Lead with the detail only you know. A number from your own logs, the trade-off you hit, the thing the article got wrong. Adjectives get skipped.
2. Disclose plainly. "I work on X, so I'm biased, but..." is respected. Hidden promotion gets noticed, and the guidelines ask people not to accuse others of shilling partly because so many try.
3. Write it yourself. The guidelines now say it directly: "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans."

That last rule shapes how to use any tool here, including ours. Hacker News Owl does the finding: it takes keywords from your site with plain code, searches HN's official search for stories, keeps discussions that share at least two words with your keyword, and orders them by points, then comment count. It also drafts a suggested comment from the story, its top comments and one line about your product, with no links, and never posts anything. Given HN's rules, treat that draft as notes. Read the thread, decide whether you have something real to add, and write the comment in your own words from your own account.

Threads close to new comments after two weeks, so the window for joining a discussion is shorter than it looks. For other communities with similar discipline, Reddit Owl does the same job for Reddit threads, and X Owl for researched X threads.

What Gets Posts and Accounts Penalized

HN is unusually explicit about this. From the FAQ and guidelines:

• Asking for upvotes or comments. "We penalize or ban submissions, accounts, and sites that break this rule." That includes asking friends, a Slack channel or a newsletter.
• Promotion as the main use of an account.
• Automated posting and generated text.
• Deleting and reposting the same story.
• Editorialized or clickbait titles.

When something breaks the rules, you'll see [flagged] or [dead] next to it. Flagged means users flagged it; dead means software, flags or moderators killed it. If you think a moderation call was wrong, the guidelines point to [email protected] rather than a public complaint.

When Should You Post?

There's no official best time, and I'd be wary of anyone who quotes one with confidence. What the ranking does tell you is that early votes matter, because points are divided by time since submission. So the practical answer is: post when your likely readers are awake, and when you can stay for the next few hours to answer questions. A good discussion in your comments does more for a post than a clever timestamp.

HN also matters beyond its own readers: busy threads get quoted and linked elsewhere, and public discussions like these are part of what AI assistants can read and cite. Our guide to checking your AI visibility shows how to see whether that's happening for you, and how AI agents are changing SEO covers the wider shift. For picking the rest of your toolkit, see our list of AI marketing tools for small business.

If HN is one channel among several, put it on the same plan as the rest. Our guide to building a content calendar covers how to space launches across channels, and Scheduler Owl keeps that calendar for you. For LinkedIn, where the rules are looser, LinkedIn Owl writes posts in a format that reads well there.

People Also Ask About Hacker News

What is Hacker News?

A link-sharing and discussion site at news.ycombinator.com, owned and funded by Y Combinator, focused on anything that "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity": technology, startups, science and much more.

Is Hacker News part of Y Combinator?

Yes. Y Combinator owns and funds it, but the FAQ says the HN team is editorially independent. YC gets front-page placement for its startups' job ads and launches, and YC founders see each other's names in orange.

How do I post on Hacker News?

Create an account, click submit, and add a title plus a URL or text. Use the original title and source, avoid uppercase and exclamation marks, and don't ask anyone to upvote it.

What does Show HN mean?

It's a post sharing something you made that people can try, such as software, hardware or a book sample. The title starts with "Show HN". Blog posts, sign-up pages and landing pages don't qualify.

How is Hacker News karma calculated?

Roughly, upvotes on your posts minus downvotes, though some votes are dropped by anti-abuse software. Karma doesn't make your posts rank higher.

Is the Hacker News API free?

Yes. The official Firebase API needs no key and currently has no rate limit, and the Algolia search API is also public. Neither lets you post; they're for reading data.

Does Hacker News support Markdown?

Only a little. Blank lines separate paragraphs, text in asterisks is italicized, text indented by two or more spaces after a blank line is formatted as code, and URLs become links (except in a submission's text field).

Can I downvote a story on Hacker News?

No. Stories have no down arrows. Comments can be downvoted once you reach a certain karma, but never as a direct reply. You can flag a story that breaks the guidelines.

Why did my Hacker News post disappear?

It may have been flagged by users, killed by anti-abuse software, or marked as a duplicate. If you think it was a mistake, email [email protected] rather than deleting and reposting.

Where These Facts Come From

• Hacker News Guidelines, Hacker News.
• Show HN Guidelines, Hacker News.
• Hacker News FAQ, Hacker News.
• Formatting Options, Hacker News.
• Hacker News API documentation, HackerNews on GitHub.
• HN Search, Algolia.
• Hacker News RSS, hnrss.org.
• Hacker Newsletter, Kale Davis.