Ask HN: What can “Tell HN” include? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What can “Tell HN” include?

7 pointspenaazv8 comments

Looks like it isn't the most popular but still a frequently used submission on Hacker News.

What can it include? Are there any categories one should stick to?

Pretty recent HN user, appreciate your help! :)

Largely whatever the author chooses. What survives HN's automatic penalty (no-link posts get lower ranking than those with a link) and the submission queue rely on the interaction with the moderating readership at the time of submission.

There've been 319 front-page "Tell HN..." stories through 21 June 2023, of 178,882 total stories (I have an archive of front-page stories), with a random sampling of 30 of those being:

  Tell HN: Catch.com raises 7m. Didn't get in as solo founder (S08), kept pushing
  Tell HN: Coming soon – “Meet the Batch” threads for parallel Launch HNs
  Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline
  Tell HN: You guys scared edw519 off Hacker News
  Tell HN: Read Maxim and other trashy "guy" rags.
  Tell HN: Doing a PhD is good
  Tell HN: Thank you whoishiring, a.k.a. Matthew Walsh-Cloonagh
  Tell HN: We just launched GeoAPI.com (read/write geo API)
  Tell HN: just made my first dollar on the Internet from my freemium web app
  Tell HN: Rails screencasts.
  Tell HN: A $40B company killed my 2yo son. Now they force me to keep silent
  Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public
  Tell HN: A disabled 40-year-old person founded a startup and makes a living
  Tell HN: Amazon fraudulently canceling orders as returned items
  Tell HN: Stop surfing and start making things people want
  Tell HN: I think I'm quitting my job today
  Tell HN: The 10-bit timers are about to overflow on September 17th
  Tell HN: Guess what Baidu and Yahoo China have already censored?
  Tell HN: Do not store any funds in PayPal or use them for anything critical
  Tell HN: Instagram demands I send a picture of myself to prove I own my account
  Tell HN: Let's Be Civil
  Tell HN: I wrote a website with a unique method of recommending links.
  Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder
  Tell HN: YC Application Responses Are Out
  Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped
  Tell HN: My startup is making money and I don't know what to do
  Tell HN: The 2 best things I love about HN
  Tell HN: Summary of HN User Directories
  Tell HN: AWS warns us about irregular activity related to Log4shell
  Tell HN: Take vacation

(A random sampling should afford an unbiased view of what has made the front page in the past.)

Breakdown by year:

Couldn't have asked for a better reply. This is insane (in a good way)

Thank you so much!

My pleasure.

It's fun having an archive and finding new / different ways to query it.

The "Ask" posts can be accessed by navigating to /ask and the "Show" posts can be accessed by navigating to /show. "Tell" isn't official, just something people type. No real guidelines to it as far as I'm aware.

Yeah, looks like people created it themselves. I couldn't find something official either.

Anything that you have created that you want to share and can spark interest or debate. Say an application of some sort, a blog, some cool hack.

That's Show HN

True, my mistake.

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