Ask HN: Where are all the old Show HNs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where are all the old Show HNs?

284 pointsbehnamoh159 comments

Searching for "Show HN" posts (using hn.algolia.com) reveals a sad story: Many of them are gone. I wonder what happens to Shown HNs, esp. the ones that are featured on HN, but then end up not existing anymore. Is it the server costs? Do they sell to other companies? Did the developer pass away and so did the link?

View on HN

When I was working as a full-time lawyer, one of my colleagues told me to join HN and consider posting my side project there. I literally posted my Show HN [1] from my desk at the law firm, before going to lunch one day. My post made it to the front page, I took a screenshot, and then went off to lunch — figuring that was as good as it would get.

While I was gone, my post entered the top 3 and then hit the top spot. It stayed there for most of the rest of the day, and into the wee hours of the morning.

I happened to have been invited to a VC mixer that afternoon, and I remember everyone was super impressed that some random lawyer had posted a Show HN that was literally-at-that-moment the top post on HN. Some guy from Samsung introduced me to his boss' boss and said they should license it (the first of many leads I failed to convert on!) I left my legal job a while later to work on BeeLine full-time, and it's been 7 years since then.

We didn't go the traditional VC route, partly because we didn't have huge capital needs. Instead, I've mostly bootstrapped the thing, and we now have customers like Blackboard and Stanford (and a couple partnerships with HN/YCers, too! [2] [3]). There have been times where I considered going back to my legal career, but I would have kept BeeLine running in the background if so. I'm super appreciative to the community here, since it was what prompted me to make the transition to this very rewarding path!

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784

2: https://insightbrowser.com/

3: https://www.programaudioseries.com/

I didn't even know that this popped off from HN, but I used to used this on my gen 1 iPad to read Cory Doctorow ebooks. I had completely forgotten it but I loved it and want to set it up again. So cool!

How did you read ebooks with BeeLine back then? There's one ebook app [1] (confusingly called ReadMe!, which is the name of a YC company) that has integrated our tech. But the ebook space has been a trouble spot for us because the platforms are so closed/DRM'd.

In other news, we just released an iOS Safari extension, now that iOS 15 allows extensions. If you liked using BeeLine, I'd highly recommend checking it out, especially since we made it free for early adopters! [2]

1: https://readmei.com/

2: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/beeline-extension/id1571623734

Is there a way for me to utilize this in my Hacker News app for the comment text? I am the developer of HACK - iOS, MacOS and Android:

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.h...

Yes! I'd love to work with you to make this happen (and not just so I can use BeeLine on your app, which I have on my phone!). Shoot me an email: Nick at startup domain

Cheers, I will email you next week when I return from my vacation!

I just installed and tried out HACK and I think it is pretty neat! I am a long time user of BeeLine, been using it on HN and on the interweb in general. Would love to have a mobile app like HACK for HN with BeeLine integration! Nick is very prompt with his email, I am sure both of you can get it running very soon!

Thanks, I will be working on adding that in next week onwards when I return from vacation.

YES IT WAS README! I remember that speed reading feature was really cool too! The one where it shows only a single word on screen and highlights a few letters and you set a tempo to change the words. Since they needed DRM-free ebooks, I spent some time to find some authors who published their works that way officially. Doctorow was one of the few that really cared to do that.

I've always remembered the name 'BeeLine' but couldn't find that app again. The name ReadMe has been used for too many other things for me to link it to a lesser known e-book app.

I've created so many failed projects.

In a sense, I've intended for these projects to fail.

I throw something out there, see if it sticks, and is worth pursuing. Most things aren't worth pursuing. I get bored, distracted, and find something else "shiny" to do for a while. That "shiny" thing is usually my actual business. Sometimes one of my projects succeeds, and becomes an "actual" business. Other times, it sort-of hangs on for years on auto-pilot. Sometimes one of those auto-pilot things takes off. If not, that's fine.

Many of these projects can be thought of like R&D; most R&D, really, is a dead end, or something that quietly gets folded into a pre-existing project, or just gets turned into "useful knowledge" for the next bit of research.

There is a market for almost anything as long as the marketing is done right. With right strategy you can even launch a "uber for potatoes" and be successful. Building a project is overnight task, the next few years are growing the customers and marketing it.

If your secret sauce is marketing you have to be a great marketer, or I think you will just be proving the market for someone with deep pockets and better marketing.

But if you have above average engineering skills and make some technically engineered part of the business your secret sauce, that doesn’t save you from having to do the marketing but it does mean when other people enter you can compete on technical excellence with those above average skills.

That seems like a better plan? Maybe it’s a trap for engineers like me who want to keep focusing on the engineering, but it seems more viable than me marketing potatoes.

Does anyone know of a good marketing guide for engineers? I sort of grew up engineering-wise with a "if you build it, they will come" attitude to products and I've realized that isn't very realistic anymore, but at the same time I'd still like a guide to marketing that lets me do a bare minimum set of easy actions that should work marginally well. I don't really want to churn out marketing content all the time, or pursue affiliate deals, nor do I want to create spam in people's inboxes, etc., and I've always, I think, looked down on companies that have to do this, telling myself "bad products need a sales/marketing team, good products sell themselves". So what resources should someone like myself consult? Multiple times in my life I've had that situation where I work on a side project for several years, "launch it", and nothing happens, so I'd like to avoid that going forward if I can, even if it means learning about marketing.

I think a better route is getting someone to handle the marketing. As engineers, even when we know what to do in terms of marketing, we still find it hard to do because it's not something we enjoy like engineering.

There's no real magic trick.

- You can post it in places where people might be interested, like HN, Reddit, ProductHunt, Twitter, forums, etc. (carefully and thoughtfully, so it doesn't come across as spam).

- You can email it to people who might be interested (very carefully and thoughtfully, with an individually tailored message, so it doesn't come across as spam).

- You can email it to tech journalists, bloggers, and other people with influence, hoping that they'll help you publicize it.

- You can email it to a pre-existing audience you've built up if you're fortunate enough to have one.

- You can buy ads.

- You can produce content or do cross-promotion (which you say you don't want to do--it can work but certainly isn't required).

If none of the above is getting any traction, most likely the product and/or pitch isn't compelling enough and you should iterate on that before investing more time or money into marketing.

This is a very high value comment, thanks for sharing the insight.

You can also add indiehackers onto that list; great community of makers

I majored in "Strategic Communication" (a mix of PR/advertising/marketing with a bit of journalism for good measure) and transitioned to software engineering because I decided I didn't want to make a living pitching my ideas to stakeholders. Joke was on me, I'm still doing that.

Anyway, my favorite book on the topic that I've read is "Disruption by Design" by Paul Paetz. One of the core ideas I took from it is about identifying the "Job to be done" that you're selling. As a marketing mentor once told me, nobody buys drills. They buy the hole.

Another important concept is knowing your audience (this was also the golden rule I took away from my degree program and has also served me well socially). Nothing is for everyone. Know that your audience actually needs the thing you're selling them. This also means that you can in good conscience be confident in selling it to them because you know they actually need it. Where marketing comes in is that they may not yet understand how your thing delivers the value they want and it's the job of your marketing/advertising to convince them that it does. Or they might see the value but think your price is too high. Then you have to decide whether you agree with them or explain why your price is fair for what you're delivering.

Anyway, as an engineer with a marketing education, I found it an enjoyable and inspiring read that was more direct and, I felt, insightful than other, fluffier marketing resources I've read. But it is more about the concepts and not about the gritty details (though for my money, observing marketing efforts at the companies I've worked for, doing your own legwork and meeting directly with your customers to understand their needs and pitch a trial of your product if it fits those needs is miles more effective than Facebook or Google ad campaigns - the only thing they have going for them is sheer scale at the expense of everything else).

Fair disclaimer, though: I have never run a business and never plan to. I just want to make cool stuff and my current employer is sufficiently fulfilling in that regard.

I'm building an app completely centered around this issue. The H1 is:

"A growth platform for hackers that hate selling."

It's a systematic approach to growth targeted at developers and based on the book Traction [0] by DuckDuckGo's founder.

https://www.wax.run

0 - https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu...

Find hot potatoes in your area.

IIRC a while back there was a thread on HN about a successful “Uber for heirloom onions” business.

Whether you make the software or sell someone else’s, it’s still software sales. That’s the job we’re all in. Making your own is more risky but can be* more lucrative long term. But if you want to be a success NOW, sell an existing, proven, in demand app as an affiliate.

How do you know which products will not fail? What is your marketing strategy?

I usually post my projects to Hacker News or Reddit or something. None of them every turn into businesses, although I'd like them too.

When I start on something, I usually think about all of the components it would actually need, in order to succeed. A 'half-baked' business plan, so to speak. Sometimes, I start a project in order to test the entire plan, but usually, I start a project either to test just one aspect of it, or, as often as not, just to scratch an itch. There should always be an idea of the "growth engine" that could potentially drive the business. (Which may change.) If you want it to be a business, don't think of it as a product, think of the entire business. Though, you don't have to implement the entire business right away. Find out, as quickly as possible, if there's any chance of viability, whether you'd actually like to spend more time on it, and whether some of your assumptions are true or false. A project isn't a business.

> I usually think about all of the components it would actually need, in order to succeed. A 'half-baked' business plan, so to speak.

For all the focus that HN has on startups I still feel like the vast majority of threads I am reading sorely lack focus on business model.

Perhaps I am not reading the right threads, or I am not reading them deeply enough. Admittedly I tend to read most about technologies that I find interesting. But even when I try to keep an eye out for the business side of things I rarely see it.

The main things I know about covering this area of things are:

- YC Startup Library https://www.ycombinator.com/library

- YC Startup School https://www.startupschool.org/

- Actually applying to YC and, if you get accepted, getting guidance that way https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

But beyond that, aside from a couple of sites that are sometimes posted and whose names escape me at the moment, I can’t think of any.

What are some good keywords or specific threads to look into further regarding business models and getting customers?

Random data point. My "Show HN" [0] for my side project back in early 2018 is now a 20+ people company. It was bootstrapped by me but we went the VC route later.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16608812

Congrats! That's a great story. How long did you work on it solo? Who was the first person you brought on?

I worked on it close to two years by myself. But I mixed in a minimal amount of freelancing to pay the bills. Took quite a while to get the first 10 customers: we're in a busy market.

I brought on a CEO and CCO first, essentially two extra cofounders. Then mostly engineers.

Congrats and thanks for sharing. Would love to hear the journey and thought process that you went through.

Thanks, it's a pretty long story and still very actively developing I guess. Let's try and boil it down:

- Started working on the product to scratch an itch. Essentially couldn't find an easy, dev friendly synthetics solution.

- Quit job, started freelancing. Coded first version on the side.

- Launched on HN and Producthunt. No upvotes, no one noticed.

- Kept working and working. Code -> Ship -> Talk to users.

- First year had 10 customers.

- Second year more and more traction. Some really cool customers joined. Zeit (now Vercel) etc.

- Noticed that doing this all by yourself is crazy. Actively looked for co-founders. Got lucky and found two excellent ones.

- Decided to turn the bootstrapped company into a VC backed one because of ambition and timeliness (e.g. organic takes too long to make a dent right now in a very busy market)

- Raised a round. Hired basic team. Mostly engineers.

- Spent ~12 months turning a one-man show into a real company.

- Changed pricing model and got more and more traction.

- Raised another round after figuring out the basics of marketing/distribution, product vision and customer traction. I guess you call that product market fit.

- Right now ramping up the team and delivering on a vision.

Most of this was done remote and basically right when Corona lock downs started happening.

thank you for sharing, this was a fascinating read. Especially not giving up after a failed launch and turning it into something great..

Just wondering, when no one noticed on HN and PH, how did you get your first users and eventually grew bigger?

My team and I launched a workflow tool which was not ready for the dev community yet, just recently [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28392756]. Low engagement on SHOW HN was somewhat expected, but similarly to your case, we're launching again soon.

Blogging helped a lot. Really detailed, high value blogs. I was on the front page of HN many times because of the blogs.

Great product and agree that high value blogs work on HN but...

It's only worth writing blogs and posting them to HN if this website is where your target audience hang out!

Can you share a bit more how you found your Co-founders?

Sure. I got "lucky" but I mostly activated my tiny network. I just mentioned to everyone I was looking. I did get invites from some big players in the market quite early on for possible acquisitions (more acquihire...). One of those was a big player in the testing space. The general manager there asked me about my plans. I said "I'm looking for co-founders". He quite some months later and joined me.

We're using Checkly for our startup[0], had no idea about your backstory! We're very pleased with your service – thank you! :o)

(N.B. I'm not affiliated with Checkly, other than being a happy customer!)

[0]: https://www.paperworker.se

Thanks, this is amazing! Happy to have you!

Two years ago, I posted a Show HN about a music streaming service I've been working on for about four years at that point. It was my first serious project I've ever worked on.

Check out the Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20309255

I'm still actively working on that project, and a countless number of features have been added. Yeah, a few people here and there use it, and it is costing me about $100 a month to host on AWS, but I'm not bothered. I'm still very passionate about this space, and nothing else really interests me as much.

If anyone is interested in checking it out, the site is https://ampl.fi/

wow man! Really appreciate

what is your motivation behind it? I understand that you are working on this from quite sometime but similar service giants like spotify, (Apple|Amazon|Youtube) Music etc exists right? So how do you find the motivation to continue working on it. Also do you expect something out of it, like you are giving it your time & effort so what is the expectation out of it?

Sorry, if my comment sounded rude. I'm just curious to know :)

Hey, no problem!

I bill the site as more of a music streaming and storefront service. It's much more in-line with services like Bandcamp and Soundcloud, where users can upload their own music. The site leans more towards Bandcamp in that users can monetize their work, and the site takes a very small fee for transactions. I'm focusing more on community aspects, like remix and sample competitions, as well as live music sharing, to help differentiate it even more.

Looks awesome! It doesn't appear to work in Safari :(, but Chrome works great

* Person makes product, shares it

* Nobody uses product

* Person eventually retires product

* Person makes product, shares it

I'm starting to think the business books that say find the audience first might be onto something honestly. I still don't want to do it, but yeah

only make products you yourself gonna use, that way you always have an audience of 1

So you're saying that pets.com should have tried eating their own dog food?

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/dotcom-pets-dot-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sICSyC9u5iI

(Classic 1999 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade clip at 3:38: "Pets Dot Commitment"!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food

The non-founder users of any pet-supply business are also not consuming edibles or clipping leads onto themselves.

can you elaborate - also what business books are you talking about?

You'll see the find-your-audiance-first mantra in most modern business books. If you want a specific title, then The Lean Startup is a decent startup business book.

I didn’t write a book on this subject but I made a site: https://bloatedmvp.com

Thanks for this. It looks like a really useful resource. I recently had a Show HN and got zero traction. I'm definitely going to work through each item and hopefully see where I went wrong.

Cool, I'm also happy to chat about this stuff if people hit me up on email

I can never remember the title of books sorry, other than The Mom Test because it was on HN recently[1]. Probably Company of One mentioned it too, I read that recently.

They all say in some form or other: find where the people with the problems hang out, learn how they express their issues with the problems, fix the problems, explain to them in their own style and wording how your thing solves their problems, customers

At least that's how I remember it, pinches of salt all round on the exact learnings please!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28667439

This is a central tenet of the Lean Startup by Eric Ries and the Startup Owners Manual by Steve Blank et al.

Lean Startup is the faster read but if I recall correctly Steve Blank was Ries' mentor/inspiration.

Arvid Kahl - The Embedded Entrepreneur

https://embeddedentrepreneur.com/

I haven't read The Embedded Entrepreneur yet, but I can recommend "Zero to Sold" by Arvid. (Zero to Sold isn't specifically "audience first", but TEE is).

FWIW, apart from his books, he also does a lot to encourage and promote other founders. He seems like a decent guy.

haha, I'm sort of one of these people, but may be starting to learn my lesson. The last app I built is basically a less distracting and systematic way to get eyes on your work (mostly on Twitter to start).

I did a Show HN eleven years ago for something called Dropmocks, which was an early use of the HTML5 drag and drop API to make image sharing convenient - it sat at the top of HN for that weekend, got Techcrunch coverage[0] etc, which made me feel nice.

A few things happened after that:

- A startup took the open source code and put it up a day or so later and got a few million dollars in funding to do image sharing, which made me feel bad at the time, but they later disappeared so it's fine

- Larry Page got a bit annoyed that I didn't do it as a Google project, and Sundar/my boss had to explain that I was just a Chrome staff member who got a bit excited about a new API - both of them were correct

- I had to panic-build a content moderation system from the airport on my honeymoon in response to some unsavory content

- It eventually got to 3TB of stored data, which was fine until billing policy changes at my storage provider meant that my monthly costs would've gone from tens of dollars to hundreds or thousands of dollars

- My day job was more fulfilling, so after a few years I shut it down

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/dropmocks-chrome-designer/

Back in 2013 I posted a Show HN (was changed to Tell HN) for our one year old mattress startup Tuft & Needle. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6900625

The post resulted in a Fortune article (https://fortune.com/2014/01/22/meet-the-warby-parker-of-matt...) which helped to catalyze hockey stick growth and triggered a wave of vc money into the industry, we turned the interest down. The vc money resulted in new competitors for us (Casper/Purple/+200 others as barriers fell). This collectively caused massive change.

We grew to 250mm arr before we merged with serta simmons in 2018.. to disrupt within their brand portfolio. We’ve been working on their brands to mimic our model.

Our growth was 100% bootstrapped with no more than $6k. My co-founder and I seriously attribute our show HN as one of the reasons we were able to build our company the way we did and for spurring interest in our competitors to enter the market. The competition also accelerated our growth without the need of funding, their VC money fueled advertising raising awareness.

Anyways, one data point for you. Super grateful for this community.

Heard from HN. Saved up a ton of money in college for one. Miss how good the original beds used to be. We went with another 3 years after our first in 2013 and it was horrible in comparison. Used to recommend the brand to everyone until that point. Sounds like you made a great exit however

If you’d email me (jt@tn), I’d love to send you our newest iteration. We’ve progressively improved customer sat since founding so I wonder if this was potentially a defect. There were a few seasons where our manufacturing struggled with capacity and quality suffered for a while. I’m hoping that’s what happened here. Pls email me, would love to try one more time if you are open to it.

Tangentially, I wish that more Show HN threads made it to the home page and stayed there longer.

Show HN threads are probably my favorite feature of this community. The "Show" sort at the top is great, but it feels like there used to be more threads on the main page and more participation years ago (perhaps I am imagining that?)

Also tangentially, I agree, and definitely enjoy these too, but have noticed that a lot of Show HN posts miss out on more visibility due to some basic omissions by the submitters.

My suggestion for people posting a “Show HN” would be to always write a brief comment describing the project (even if it’s just a sentence).. Don’t just blind post with zero context.

And most importantly be available to engage with any comments promptly. This is critical.

I’ve commented (as the first commenter) on a few recently and I’ve either never had a response to questions I’ve asked or it’s taken several days for replies to come in.

Not being engaged in replying to comments just negates half the benefits of posting it in the first place, not to mention makes others less likely to engage too if they see that existing comments are not being replied to.

On the flip side (and probably in the majority) I’ve had some great follow up with Show HN posters who are naturally very happy and excited to talk more about their project - and I always find these discussions positive and uplifting.

People who make things are cool.

The biggest problem with early startups is finding retention: Finding a niche that will stick and continue to use your product.

Most of the projects on Show HN don't have retention figured out, so most of the traffic from Show HN will not convert into useful numbers for them.

I also want to point out that many Show HN projects wrongly assume that HN is the niche for them, simply because they themself are a "hacker". But this is not a useful distinction. If you're looking for your niche, for product market fit, you want to slice into small concrete audiences, like maybe "developers at 10-50 employee startups in credit building fintech within the bay area". Posting a Show HN isn't a cure to not having a niche of users, unless you're specifically targeting this niche.

I used to have a very successful Show HN for my 3D audio app spatialsoundcard.com

We got close to 2000 app installs in 24 hours. Plus it was picked up by a gaming news website, which led to further marketing opportunities for us. I have since sold the project to my cofounder and he redirected the domain to his main webshop. So while it looks offline, the product is actually still alive and well.

As for why there are no new ones: I decided to up my game by doing a riskier and more challenging project next. Maybe others did the same and then you'd naturally expect to see more time in-between two Show HNs from the same person.

Your English is otherwise excellent, but "used to have" implies that you had an object/thing for a period of time in the past, and don't any more. "I used to have a hovercraft".

In this case, "had" seems more appropriate. "I had a very successful.."

Curious as a native English speaker you parsed that sentence. It is awkward, but I did not think it is actually incorrect. Is it?

Correctness is subjective. I didn't have trouble understanding it but it is not idiomatic.

Could mean "I used to have a product that I demonstrated in a Show HN (which product I later sold)".

From what I read, it means exactly that. Interesting pick.

Well I always thought that a "Show HN" was a discrete event. So 'used to have' doesn't make sense to me unless there was something about it which was enduring.

Like bckr says below, if a "Show HN" is a product class, then the statement makes sense.

Obligatory net search:

'Used to is a phrase that can mean “accustomed or habituated to” or refers to something from the past that is no longer true.'

Thanks for the correction :)

I meant to say that I once had an app which was launched as Show HN, but that the app isn't mine anymore.

BTW, closer to the original topic, I just had a lot of fun in the past 1-2 hour(s) twiddling around with Bomberland, the Show HN from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28640804#28647120.

The second sentence says that it was sold, so "used to have" makes sense?

I went through my Show HN submissions. Wow, I did 7 in total. Conclusion in the end.

A breakdown of each one with how much $ I've made for each one:

1) Show HN: Pygooglenews – Python library for advanced Google News data mining [0]

Result: 165 HN points, 1k GH stars, some user flow to our website (later about this one)

2) Show HN: Nuntium – API to track the media presence of any organization or person [1]

Result: 2 HN points, a side project which gave 0 results because we were just coding instead of thinking about what users want.

3) Show HN: News Extract API – Pull structured data from online news articles [2]

Result: 130 HN points, 200 GH stars, one 29$ recurring customer

4) Show HN: Newscatcher API Beta – JSON API to search for relevant news data [3]

Result: 4 HN points, 6 digits ARR startup we're still running!

5) Show HN: Py package to collect normalized news from (almost) any website

Result: 26 HN points, 2.5k GH stars

6) Show HN: A simple RESTful API to extract structured data from news articles

Result: Nothing

7) Show HN: 100k+ labeled news dataset

Result: Nothing

CONCLUSION: it's fine to fail on HN: success here doesn't mean a successful business, and vice versa.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23701343

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22946676

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22924869

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22746586

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22407835

I love number 4! :)

thx ;)

I have a couple of old projects, some also on HN, that I abandoned. Most of them had static sites, so I moved them to GitHub Pages, but didn't renew their domains.

To answer why: these were all side projects. Over the years, I created at least a dozen, and I can't maintain them all. Most are obsolete. Their last update is many years old. The websites are usually not mobile-friendly. Some had links to sites like Google+ that do not exist anymore.

Every minute I spend on updating old sites is a minute I can't spend on the newer stuff I am working on.

We tend to view the tech industry through rose-tinted lenses because we mostly hear about the companies/projects that didn't fail - but statistically the vast majority of tech companies/projects fail.

I don't think it's terribly surprising that a high percentage of early projects demoed here don't make it to market.

The vast majority of _companies_ fail, tech or non tech. Depending on sectors, survival rates after two years are typically 5% to 25% in most "capitalist" countries.

The survivor bias is strong with the tech industry

My Show HN for "Fig", with 15 points and a quip about it not working on clusters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7002634

This got acquired by Docker and became Docker Compose. Swarm was the attempt at making clustering work.

How does this kind of acquisition work? Did they just contact you and foist money on you? Do you retain any control?

Also I prefer 'fig' to 'docker-compose', maybe I'll alias it.

I submitted a "Show HN" post recently and watched it sink down the "new" page without any interaction.

I wonder if it's because I created a new account to post it, or more likely I had a terrible/generic sounding post title.

It's also difficult to pick the right time of day to post. I thought I had it right - picking Monday morning west coast (US) time, but I guess there is a big difference between just before and just after people get to work!

I would have liked to hear what people think, even if it's "This is bad, and you should feel bad".

Edit: https://defaultcharacter.com/2021-09-bookmark-controller-int...

/newest is a firehose, so timing is important. You have to submit at just the right time so that the users who are interested in your Show HN happen to be looking at /newest at that exact time.

We launched WorkOS as a "Show HN" last year. [0]

Now we've raised almost $20M, employ 30 people, and have a ton of happy customers.

(Thanks HN! :))

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22607402

I recently posted my brand new Android (also iOS and MacOS) client for Hacker News called HACK. I was hoping to get more traction as I have seen many posts here asking about what mobile clients people use, so I thought people might be interested in my app. But not sure why it didn't get much traction :(

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28366991

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.h...

3 years ago, I had also created the iOS & MacOS client for my Hacker News app HACK:

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer...

It has all the awesome features - login with your HN account and swipe to vote, favourite, reply. You can submit new posts too.

I believe my app is the only HN client to have:

1. The app has a built in reader mode as well as text to speech for an article or comment.

2. Push Notifications for replies to your post or comment.

3. Easily access an article via archive.is or archive.org or google cache

4. Built in browser has an ad blocker.

5. All the endpoints of HN.

6. Updated often. I have been updating both the iOS and Android versions as often as needed to implement customer requests.

There's tons of customizations settings and colours, fonts, font size change etc available in the app.

The Android version is brand new, so any feedback is appreciated.

I use and love HACK!

Thank you! :)

I switched to using HACK I think when you first came out with the iOS version, and I still use it now. It works great, thanks!

Thank you! Glad to hear :)

Lots of Show HNs are just projects, not products. If that project costs money to host, and the person loses interest in it/doesn't acquire a dedicated fanbase, they'll probably stop paying the bills

Host is $5 a month, I don't think it is the deterrent factor.

Sure, most side projects could be hosted for $5 month (for a VM) + $10 a year (for the domain). Total cost about $70 a year.

However it is clear that a lot of people build on more complicated tech stacks or use cloud services that become expensive once the free tier is used up.

If I've got a dozen projects and most of them get virtually-zero traffic, I'm gonna start shutting some down.

I love seeing the experimental stuff and open source personal projects myself - they generally don't vanish after 6 months.

New products and startups will often pivot away to something else, so it you see a post highlighting www.fastchargers.io the company might well pivot into www.advancedknittedjumpers.io due to reasons - yes I am being a little cynical, but it really does happen.

I posted several and they never got any upvotes. My personal projects are here https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak

I created a way to run GitHub actions on Jenkins.

Brought IDE completion to Jenkins pipelines.

Created a framework for testing AWS cloudformation without needing credentials or deploying resources.

> I created a way to run GitHub actions on Jenkins. > Brought IDE completion to Jenkins pipelines.

That sounds very interesting. I looked through your github, which project are those part of?

You can find the GitHub actions stuff in the jenkins-std-lib https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/jenkins-std-lib it has both javadoc documentation or there is a jobs folder with examples.

For groovy auto-completion I have the vscode plugin groovy-guru. https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/groovy-guru

I also have the Jenkins extension pack for vscode https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/jenkins-extension-pack

And in a few weeks at the Jenkins contributor summit I'll be giving a presentation on developing pipelines with vscode.

Posting on HN has become an artform that Im not skilled in. Years ago, you could just post an interesting post you can across and wrote, and frequently they would jump to the top.

Today it seems to need shadow accounts, or buy booster packs or some such. Suffice it to say when I announced ZimTik, noone noticed.

caveat: I could be generalizing based on a few personal experiences.

I don't think shadow accounts are necessary, and given the ring detection HN uses, this could actually hurt you.

My experience has been that sometimes you post something and it absolutely takes off. Other times you post something and it falls completely flat. I can't tell what causes the difference, but it's good that they're doing things like the second-chance pool to blunt the extreme variability.

That would be a great writeup. If someone tracked them down and figure out why they failed, how many were bought out, etc.

I'm sure there are a lot of lessons to learn in there.

Eight years ago, I launched a desktop website editor with Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7023071

The post got to the front page and brought in the first two sales. That got the ball rolling and I was able to focus full time on the project since then, building a small team and continuing improving and expanding the app.

Here is the story of our first year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8878381

And, I'll soon post another Show HN. This time for a side project created with my son.

Thank you HN :)

A week ago I posted one of the 10 most popular Show HNs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967

It's an app that aggregates book mentions on HN. Dev costs (server, gpu training etc) would be one concern going forward. I can't monetize the app to cover the cost due to my current visa status (even donations are tricky to handle). Nevertheless, I'm more than happy to maintain the site up given that many people on HN find it useful. :)

I used a "Tell HN", but mine from 11 years ago is still going strong. :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494362

That said, I think most of them die because of a lack of time and/or other interests come along. I can't even count how many folks have reached out about starting a similar newsletter and only one or two kept going for more than year. With side-project especially, it is hard to find users, and that can be pretty discouraging.

My domain registration and hosting is usually set to expire after 1 year if I don’t renew, so that’s usually the check in point where I decide to let something live or die.

Sharing my experience: I posted four Show HNs over the last 7 years

* Genewarrior.com: A DNA sequence manipulation tool for Biologist. A handful of upvotes, almost no feedback. But the website is still up and running, mainly because I am using it from time to time and I still believe it's one of the most accessible tools of its kind on the web.

* Sunlocator.com: an Android app for interactive Sun position calculations. A couple dozen upvotes and some good comments. My most successful project, the free version has more than half a million downloads and it generates some nice pocket money. Definitely still up and running.

* Touch Remove: an Android app to remove objects from pictures. A fewv upvotes, almost no interest. It's still in the app store but retired. There are much better apps out there that do the same job.

* Nuftu.com: the most recent one, a NFT minter for people without any crypto expertise. No upvotes, no feedback on HN. On the other hand I've received good feedback and some paying customers from Producthunt. So I'm still considering on how to continue (ramp up marketing?)

I've never gotten a project far enough to be able to be shown off.

Every project I've started includes some sort of technical challenge that I need to figure out. For example, one of my projects was a clone of an arcade game called Killer Queen (this was before Killer Queen Black came out for PC and Switch). I wanted to make an online PC clone, so I needed to figure out how to keep all the game clients in sync, account for latency, while also preventing cheating.

And I figured it out. Clients stayed in sync, cheating was impossible, and I could even handle clients disconnecting mid-game and could re-join and continue.

...but then I got bored and never actually implemented the game mechanics. Two years later, Killer Queen Black came out, making my clone obsolete, since I didn't have any features planned beyond what the original developer had done.

I've had other games I've written where the core mechanics and game loop are implemented, but I got bored and didn't want to do the tedious polishing to make it look and feel nice enough to be marketable.

I've released a lot of stuff^. My first rule is to simplify like your life depends on it. Remove everything you don't need. You can add more back in later. Make it ugly. Make a tiny part of it. But make something you can RELEASE.

^ Yeah, much of my stuff sucks, but it lived, for a while. To OP's point, I shut it off after a year or two without any interest.

Maybe what we need is a help HN. I would certainly love that too.

Like a job opening but for HN people’s projects

Another Show HN I posted was my ResumeToPDF site which gives you a simple and effective template in the browser where you can fill the fields in and download the PDF of your resume. Unfortunately, it didn't get any votes :(

Unlike many online resume builders which uses an "image" of the resume embedded in the PDF making it impossible for your resume to be read by many company's resume reading software, the PDF my site generates has actual text. Also my site does not collect your resume data and it NEVER leaves your device. The entire resume editing and PDF generation occurs locally on your device. The service DOES NOT contain ads, trackers and other such garbage.

https://resumetopdf.com/

https://resumetopdf.com/privacypolicy.html

My project 1) is a side project, meaning I can commit as much or as little time as I'd like 2) is something I use myself 3) doesn't cost too much to run.

I think these factors help the survival of a Show HN submission. Been running https://cinetrii.com for years.

Hey, I really like cinetrii, I've wanted something like that for years.

Do you mind me asking what the tech stack is for this? I love how smooth it is and that the search is instant, but using the BuiltWith Firefox add-on doesn't show me any framework or technology that would do that apart from PHP/JS. Is it pure AJAX?

Thanks, it’s just good old LAMP. Search is AJAX with https://tarekraafat.github.io/autoComplete.js/

I’m no web dev and to understand modern web frameworks and their ecosystems just seems like a tremendous undertaking at this point.

Sorry but no one answered the OP question yet right? This thread is very weird, btw, I think they are buried in the archive, which you can only dig them up by using Google: 1: Go to Google 2: search this:" site:ycombinator.com ask HN

Sure, it may not reveal all of them, but if that post indexed before, it should be seen.

I posted a Show HN about a new social news discussion site last December and it shows up in algolia. Also, still working on it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25470672

By "gone", I think they mean the project/website associated with the "Show HN" is gone/failed.

I use to post here my experiments and whacky projects, but I don't seem to have the time anymore.

From my experience with ShaderGif, which had some success (144 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18666146 It's still online, but I'm thinking of turning it off every now and then.

The show HN did bring a big traffic spike for maybe a week, which brought a lot of dopamine. At this point I thought that I got the ball rolling, but the traffic faded away. After this, promoting the project became more difficult because every other channel brings much less traffic than what you see during the Show HN.

Maybe there is always something like a post-Show-HN depression, either because you got no upvote or because the traffic spike fades away.

We launched Transistor.fm three years ago with a Show HN [0].

The company's gone on to do better than we could have dreamed. We're profitable, paying ourselves well, have hired two people, and have a pretty calm existence (during the pandemic we averaged 25 hours per week).

Three things that helped:

1. Self-funding meant we needed to get to profitability as quick as possible.

2. We targeted a market we understood, where there was demonstrated demand. We weren't trying to invent a new category.

3. Having a co-founder (Jon). We had complimentary strengths (full stack dev for him, marketing and sales for me) that really helped us run fast.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16755754

I have mentioned this before in other discussions, but there in a large element of luck in whether a Show HN post finds success on HN, or rouses the interest of HN readers.

There are many excellent projects posted in Show HN that get no traction (upvotes) at all. And then there a few lucky ones that suddenly take-off and make it to the HN front page.

There's no "wisdom of the crowds" moment that propels one Show HN entry to success over another because it's more worthy or excellent. In many cases it's simply down to random luck: capturing the attention of HN readers at a fortunate moment. Or not.

Our electronics project sharing site https://kitspace.org is slowly but steadily improving since we did our Show HN [1]. We are working on a v2 [2]. Will do another Show HN once that's live :)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16537374

[2]: https://github.com/kitspace/kitspace-v2/

I did one show hn for 20-things.com, but I received 0 comments. I highly doubt that anyone saw my post :) The project is alive and kicking, and I intend to keep it alive for many years to come.

Maybe because there are so many in progress, like mine: CxO Industries [1] is a SaaS I'm building to help founders create successful businesses. Creating a business is a very daunting task that many people fail at, especially the first time.

1: https://cxo.industries

You can find that along with the full backlog of several of your other favorite podcasts now exclusively on Spotify.

Which query are you using where you see missing data?

I checked ten in the most popular and all resolved correctly. When sorting by date, I see a ton of Show HNs posted recently.

I was surprised to see so many Show HNs posted recently, I personally don't see them hardly ever on the front page anymore. Are they no longer shown as much?

My understanding is that this post is about where Show HN projects ultimately end up, not about the rate of new Show HNs.

Personal anecdote: one ShowHN I did with a friend [0] did not take off and an update to iOS APIs made it very tedious to update. Thus we retired it.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23497520

Many show hns use temporary domains.

all domains are temporary

content-addressable hashes are forever

Content-addressable hashes are also "temporary" if you have only a single party storing the files (and that party goes away), which would be the case with most of the Show HNs.

Nitpicky maybe, but the content-addressable hash is indeed forever. What's not forever (that you call "temporary") is what that hash is pointing to/is generated from. But I'm sure you knew this, just offering a clarification for the ones that might not.

But if the live mirrors go away and the hash method or chunking method change (and they do) then the hash is permanently useless.. so having the thing the hash was generated from isn't enough to make the hash live again. But that's just IPFS... we really deserve a better content address system.

> But if the live mirrors go away and the hash method or chunking method change (and they do) then the hash is permanently useless

No, it might be permanently useless but it could also become useful in the future. Not only could you ask around archives if they have that hash, some random peer might also appear with the content in the future. Although unlikely. Although infinitely better than location-addressing that will for sure break at one point.

> so having the thing the hash was generated from isn't enough to make the hash live again

Of course, if it was that easy it wouldn't be a hash :)

> But that's just IPFS... we really deserve a better content address system

I was not considering IPFS, just thinking about content-addressing in general.

One thing that I think is quite cool in that realm is that if ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proofs) advance a bit further you could easily proof that two hashes come from the same input without having to have access to the input. With that migrations of hash functions, and in practice providing alternative download locations from multiple content-addressable storage systems would be possible.

I don't think this would be easy.

Maybe host the content on archive.org to begin with? Still not indefinitely permanent, but it might last 100 years or until archive.org shuts down.

In that sense, domains are also forever. What changes is its ownership and (hence) what it is pointing to.

> all domains are temporary

That's even intended and part of the specification as a "Expires at" field!

My show HN was for Leftronic (YC, 2010), a company that makes dashboard software. We sold to AppDirect who now sells it as AppInsights. The exit was not "retire right away" but it significantly improved my quality of life and career prospects.

Ok, so OP asks where are all the Show HN's and all the comments are advertising people's past Show HN's instead of addressing why OP isn't finding many of them?

Maybe I am overthinking this because I resent advertising disguised as something else.

I think people are just replying with their experience. Who knows better about what happened to a project than the creator.

It's not like the dude who made docker compose needs to advertise.

Show HNs were great years ago, but due to the sheer size of the community here nowadays nobody gets noticed without a prearranged horde of up-voters at the ready and/or a little "help" from the mods.

Where are all the Show HN comments? Most submissions get 0-1 comments.

It could be that some of them simply moved to a different domain, and possibly changed their name. Or got absorbed into something else.

side project idea: create a bot that takes a screenshot of all new Show HNs, and post a comment to the thread with the screenshot

not just HN but also on reddit and producthunt etc.., great ideas are everywhere, sometimes you just have to wake them up from the dead [0]

[0]: https://laskie.substack.com/p/idea-graveyards

Ah, such is life. The cycle continues.

9/10 new businesses fail. Most Show HNs are not even businesses yet.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but technoatrophy is setting in.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...

OP means many (most? Most of the older?) links don’t work implying the projects are not active.

I think they mean the websites/products featured in Show HNs don't exist anymore.

I just submitted one! Give it some love https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682499

Reply on news.ycombinator.com