How to Do a Show HN (2026): Timing, Title, and What Gets Upvoted

Show HN is a convention, not a launch slot

Hacker News is a news community for engineers, founders, researchers, and technically literate operators. It has been around since 2007. Show HN is the house convention for something you made. A normal submission is a news link. Show HN is a plain-text post about your own work: no hunter, no thumbnail, no gallery, and no private Slack you can rally without getting flagged.

This catalog does not treat it as a launch board. The cycle is ongoing. Listing cost is free. Paid options are none, and paid promotion is against the culture and the guidelines. The backlink is nofollow in most cases. The SEO value this page records is the thread itself ranking, often for years, from a domain cited around DA 91. The platform page with those facts is /platforms/hacker-news.

The bet, in this catalog’s words, is whether the artifact is interesting to skeptical engineers. Write like an engineer explaining a side project. If the product cannot survive “why not just use X?”, it is early for this room. The guides index is /guides.

The title is one dry clause

The Hacker News page states the title pattern directly: Show HN: Name – one clause of what it does. No superlatives, no emoji, no “game-changing.” This site’s one-liner guide uses the same standard: “Show HN: sqlite-backed uptime checks with a 40-line Go binary.”

That clause is the whole pitch. Category labels and mission statements fail the same way they fail on a hunter card. State the artifact. The people who open the thread will judge the thing, then the sentence.

• Show HN: Name – one clause of what it does.
• Cut slogans, emoji, and words like game-changing.
• Use the same clause on the homepage H1 if the product is technical. Drift between the title and the page reads as a campaign.

When to post: a weekday morning, not a magic hour

This site’s Hacker News data says “Weekday morning in US time. No scheduler.” The FAQ on that page is explicit: post when the product is tryable and you can spend the day in comments. Weekday mornings (US) are the usual window. There is no perfect slot. Post quality matters more than the clock.

Read that as the whole timing rule. This catalog does not publish a magic hour, a minute past the hour, or a timezone trick. The scheduling note elsewhere on the site is the same idea in shorter form: no clock, a thread rather than a slot, and hours free to answer blunt comments. Keep the morning clear of Product Hunt, Reddit, and X. Those rooms want the same hours.

Product Hunt is a different clock: 12:01am Pacific, Tuesday through Thursday, with an Upcoming page and about 18 hours of comments. That prep lives at /guides/how-to-launch-on-product-hunt. The four-week sequence puts Show HN on a later day — Thursday, or the following week — after a mid-week Product Hunt if you are doing both. The sequence is /guides/four-week-launch-sequence.

The first comment is the post

The submission steps on the Hacker News page are short. Explain the work in the first comment: what you built, why, what is still rough, and what you want feedback on. Sound like a person, not a brand. If you have launched before, say what changed. The page says the community rewards the work, and a failed thread is still product research if you read the objections.

Stay in the comments. Answer technical objections. The same steps say flagged threads die fast when the maker is absent or salesy, and that arguing with the community is a losing use of the day. Plan the calendar around that presence. A Show HN you cannot staff is a post you should not make.

• What it is, in the same clause as the title.
• Why you built it, including the constraint or the thing you refused to abstract away.
• What is still rough. Name the gap before the comments do.
• The specific feedback you want. A vague “thoughts?” invites a vague thread.

Link the thing people can try

Guidelines, as this catalog records them, expect something people can use. A demo, a public repo, or a working signup beats a waitlist screenshot. The URL is the product. Do not cross-post a Product Hunt link as the Show HN URL.

For open source, this site’s GitHub page is the matching instruction: ship a README that installs, then do Show HN with that URL. GitHub trending cannot be booked. DevHunt is the weekly rehearsal for developer tools — free, GitHub-verified voting, a small qualified room — and it belongs on a different day. Those pages are /platforms/github and /platforms/devhunt.

What this catalog actually says gets attention

There is no upvote formula on the Hacker News page, and this guide will not invent one. The planning ranges already published there are the numbers to use. Most posts: little. Front page: hundreds to several thousand visits. Top posts: 1,000+ upvotes and outsized referral spikes. Signups: high variance, with 0–200 as a realistic planning range and outliers higher. Front-page threads, in that page’s words, can send more qualified visitors than a Product Hunt #1. Treat every one of those lines as a range, not a promise.

What the same page says earns that attention is the artifact and the tone. Best fits are developer tools, infrastructure, open source, and products with an interesting build story, posted by someone willing to defend design decisions in public. Poor fits are marketing-speak, “we’re excited to announce,” consumer apps with no technical depth, and anything that looks like a growth hack. Generic GPT wrappers get dismissed. Tools with a novel constraint, eval, or workflow can do well. Coordinated voting is the fastest way to get penalized.

Failure modes that show up before the comments do

The misses this catalog names are visible in the draft, before you post. An unfinished demo is the common one: a waitlist screenshot where a tryable URL should be. A marketing tone is the other: superlatives, a brand voice, a Product Hunt URL, and a maker who will not be in the thread.

• Title with emoji, a superlative, or “game-changing.”
• First comment that reads like a launch announcement.
• URL that is a Product Hunt page, a coming-soon form, or a screenshot of a waitlist.
• Same morning as Product Hunt, DevHunt, Reddit, X, or a Hunt-network board.
• A request for upvotes, or a private list asked to vote on a schedule.
• A consumer app or a thin model wrapper with nothing technical to defend.

Where Show HN sits in a technical launch month

Use Show HN as its own day inside the four-week sequence at /guides/four-week-launch-sequence. Warm the sentence on a smaller board first. Product Hunt, if you want that audience, is a separate morning — see /guides/how-to-launch-on-product-hunt. DevHunt is the developer-tool rehearsal. GitHub is the canonical URL when the artifact is a repo.

Aura++ is the daily Hunt-network board if you want a lasting project page before or beside that technical day. Launches commonly go live at 8:00am UTC. There is a free tier. Premium is about $29 and Premium Plus about $69 per launch, with a dofollow from a domain commonly cited around DR 70–72. IndieHunt is the Monday 8:00am UTC weekly for indie SaaS and AI tools; Premium is about $19 for a guaranteed dofollow, and free launches are often slot-capped and nofollow. This site’s publisher operates Aura++ and does not boost it. One daily Hunt board and one weekly Hunt board in a month is the usual cap. They are warm-up and SEO rooms. They are a different job from Show HN. Pages: /platforms/aura-plus-plus, /platforms/indiehunt, /platforms/product-hunt.

Checklist before you post

Run this against the draft. If a line fails, fix the product or the sentence. The Hacker News page will still be there tomorrow. All of these guides are listed at /guides.

• Someone who is not you can try a demo, a public repo, or a working signup.
• Title matches “Show HN: Name – one clause of what it does.”
• First comment covers what, why, what is rough, and what feedback you want.
• The URL is the product. It is not a Product Hunt link.
• The slot is a weekday morning in US time, and you can stay in the thread. No magic hour is claimed here.
• Product Hunt, DevHunt, Reddit, X, and any Hunt-network board are on other days.
• Nobody has been asked to upvote.