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Ask HN: Can we get a "Show HN:" section

Seems obvious that people would like to showcase their launched product (including me). I am thinking that once a "Show HN:" post got enough upvotes it would be added to the possible front page pool of links.

CatsoCatsoCatso 12y ago
Now that I've got paid hosting (a first time for me) I'm wary of posting a "Show HN:" out of fear that a possible surge of traffic will knock out my site, or even cost me extra cash for the bandwidth use hike (Assuming that the "Show" is a popular one.).
- tomasien 12y ago
  Assuming you want what you've built to eventually be successful, you need to put aside that and all related fears immediately.
  - loceng 12y ago
    Indeed, that would be a short-term spiked cost. Best case scenario is your product or service page is ready, tested and optimized so it has the impact on viewers that you want. And if your bandwidth persists in being higher then that's a good problem to have.
- justinpaulson 12y ago
  What are the goals for your project if not getting popular/traffic/use?
  - CatsoCatsoCatso 12y ago
    The enjoyment of creating it, often my projects are small demos exploring a new method or idea I've discovered. Sharing them would be great but I don't think it's worth crashing my site or paying extra for. I'm happy to share within friends or have the odd stranger stumble across them.
- kbar13 12y ago
  "I made a thing, but I don't want it to be successful"
  - Navarr 12y ago
    "I made a thing. I want it to be successful, but not that fast!"
- yen223 12y ago
  If your project is popular enough to be knocked out, that's a good thing ;)
- iambateman 12y ago
  So...don't do it?
- Spittie 12y ago
  Which kind of paid hosting? Many will just suspend your account when you hit your bandwidth cap instead of making you pay more (at least, the one I'm familiar with). AWS is a different beast, but that's what you get with the pay-on-demand model.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- account2473 12y ago
  Other problems: 1. Wordpress, phpbb, mediawiki installations will get server hacked. Databases dumped on pastebin. I think updating all software and using Docker containers may fix this problem. 2. I'll get stalked, doxed. 3. Negative comments, or even worse - it gets ignored.
duiker101 12y ago
There was hnshowcase.com but seems to be down ATM.
- ch0wn 12y ago
  There's also http://showinghn.com/ http://showinghn.com/ https://twitter.com/JustShowHN https://twitter.com/JustShowHN and https://twitter.com/ShowHNDaily https://twitter.com/ShowHNDaily
zekenie 12y ago
producthunt.co is kind of like that, but I agree it'd be great.
ddod 12y ago
I built ShowingHN. It doesn't do voting since that would require polling for updated tallies all the time, and because most good Show HNs don't typically get that many points. Perhaps a dedicated section on HN would fix that. If there are any specific changes you'd like me to make on ShowingHN to make it more useful, let me know and I'll see if I can implement them. P.S. I also added an RSS feed output recently: http://showinghn.com/feed.xml http://showinghn.com/feed.xml
- PeterWhittaker 12y ago
  I don't know if HN supports this, but would it be possible to display the HN scores next to each item (should be, see hckrnews.com), and to allow upvoting, if logged in to HN (guess: requires capabilities not supported by HN)?
brudgers 12y ago
There is a feature request link at the bottom of the page for this sort of thing. The guidelines, rightly or wrongly, consider meta discussions about features to be low quality.
charlieirish 12y ago
I've been looking for something like a combination of these for a while: - Show HN - Beta List It would be great to be able to submit products and get the collective feedback from those reading Hacker News. This is something that Product Hunt is trying to solve but it's still early days. Another interesting inclusion would be Product Hit as they try to crowd source feature requests. http://www.producthunt.co/ http://www.producthunt.co/ http://www.producthit.io/ http://www.producthit.io/
Arjuna 12y ago
I realize that this may not be exactly what is being requested, but in the mean-time, you can get nice results via search. Here are some non-exhaustive examples: 1. "Show HN:" in the last 24 hours https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/last_24h/0/%22Show%20HN%3A%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/last_24h/... 2. "Show HN:" in the past week https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/past_week/0/%22Show%20HN%3A%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/past_week... 3. "Show HN:" in the past month https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/past_month/0/%22Show%20HN%3A%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/past_mont... 4. "Show HN:" in forever https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/forever/0/%22Show%20HN%3A%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/forever/0... 5. "Show HN:" points>1000 in forever https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/forever/0/%22Show%20HN%3A%22%20points%3E1000 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/forever/0... * * * Finally, there are "Advanced search syntax" options: Use " to match a particular sequence of terms "search engine" Use - to ensure a word won't appear in the result set 'search -optimization' Use author:USERNAME or by:USERNAME to filter by author Use story:ID to filter by story Use points>NUMBER or points<NUMBER to filter by points Use date>TIMESTAMP or date<TIMESTAMP to filter by date
- redmaverick 12y ago
  Or you can do site:news.ycombinator.com "Show HN" and use Google' search tool to filter results based on time.
  - atmosx 12y ago
    Or you can write a web crawel in logo fetch, sort and regexp the 'Show' articles :-) The point of the post is to make it easier, since the 'Show' tag is used more often than not! I like the idea, would make the frontpage clearer.
jeswin 12y ago
I'd absolutely love "Show HN" being a link on the top bar. Many of us are here because we love making things, because we want to get inspired and because we want to learn. - It might increase the quality of discussion here since these are likely to be more technical. Even more so if the "Show HN" work comes with source code. - I don't think a separate app on another domain will work. There will be no community around it. - In the long run, maybe YC will fund a few startups which started life as a link on Show HN. sama, pg and others, please do consider this.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
bennyg 12y ago
My iOS app doesn't necessarily aggregate them into one area, but it highlights them in the main list. I believe that the Show HN posts are actually the best part of this community, so I wanted to visually distinguish and highlight those within the app. It's free, so you can check it out if you have an iPhone. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news-yc/id592893508?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news-yc/id592893508?mt=8 ShowHN Highlighting screenshot: http://a5.mzstatic.com/us/r30/Purple/v4/8e/8e/cc/8e8ecc01-c11b-6834-bc57-1bd20282d26d/screen568x568.jpeg http://a5.mzstatic.com/us/r30/Purple/v4/8e/8e/cc/8e8ecc01-c1...
thejerz 12y ago
You could read every book on Amazon about feature creep, but nothing beats a real-world example like this.
- angersock 12y ago
  It's not really feature creep--it's adding a hard-coded and easily-accessible filter for content that the site was originally about, which is to say stuff hackers find interesting.
bigredtech 12y ago
There used to be SkimHN which was awesome: http://skimhn.com/ http://skimhn.com/ It hasn't been working for a while now, but when it was up you could quickly find the top stories in topics of your interest. Would be great if it got resurrected.
- panabee 12y ago
  hi bigredtech, we whipped together something for ourselves: http://www.panabee.com/show-hn http://www.panabee.com/show-hn. it lists "show hn" posts from the last 24 hours and also offers a daily email. mind trying it? thanks!
rrhoover 12y ago
100% agree, pumpkinattwelve (btw, awesome username, sir/ma'am). I started Product Hunt (http://producthunt.co http://producthunt.co, essentially a "Hacker News for products") and the popularity of "Show HN" is one of the signals proving people love this stuff.
thomasfromcdnjs 12y ago
We are experimenting with a new feature on cdnjs.com where our users can submit the projects -> cdnjs.com/news
lucb1e 12y ago
I personally very much like having everything on one page. How about a general homepage and specific pages for "Show HN" and -"Show HN"?
murtza 12y ago
Check out r/SideProject. It's a subreddit I created to share and get feedback on side projects and startups. http://www.reddit.com/r/sideproject http://www.reddit.com/r/sideproject
coinspotting 12y ago
You might also like http://firespotting.com http://firespotting.com
staunch 12y ago
One of the things that has ever made this site truly special. Companies have gone from launch on HN to being worth $10+ billion. Let's see more of that. Of course.
dang 12y ago
Yes. We're planning to put a "show" link at the top alongside "ask", and it will point to a list of Show HNs. We're also going to publish rules about what does and doesn't count as a Show HN: basically, it has to be something you made that people can play with. So things like email signups, landing pages, and fundraisers won't count. Implementing this, along with dozens of other things we want to do, is currently bottlenecked on my not having any time to write code. I'm going to have to pull back from moderation somewhat, or these features will never get built. (Besides which, moderating HN never has been and never should be anyone's full-time job. But I digress.) Finally: please re-read the HN guidelines. You're supposed to send requests like this to hn@ycombinator.com, or post them to the feature request thread. You're not supposed to post them as stories, because (as should be obvious) they're not intellectually substantive. Unfortunately, the strange fascination that is Meta causes them to get lots of upvotes, and then they sit hogging space on the front page that they don't deserve. I'm going to bury this one now.
iaincollins 12y ago
I'd really like this. I've been reluctant to post things I've worked on (mostly open source projects, some commercial) that I think some people might be interested in because I don't want to add to the noise ratio for others (I've set a high threshold for posting, which seems appropriate, and most of those things are early stage and I don't think they are quite there yet). It would be great if there is an area for products - including non-profit open source / vanity projects - where it felt a little less disruptive and intimidating to post new projects - particularly early life ones.

CatsoCatsoCatso 12y ago

Now that I've got paid hosting (a first time for me) I'm wary of posting a "Show HN:" out of fear that a possible surge of traffic will knock out my site, or even cost me extra cash for the bandwidth use hike (Assuming that the "Show" is a popular one.).

tomasien 12y ago
Assuming you want what you've built to eventually be successful, you need to put aside that and all related fears immediately.
- loceng 12y ago
  Indeed, that would be a short-term spiked cost. Best case scenario is your product or service page is ready, tested and optimized so it has the impact on viewers that you want. And if your bandwidth persists in being higher then that's a good problem to have.
justinpaulson 12y ago
What are the goals for your project if not getting popular/traffic/use?
- CatsoCatsoCatso 12y ago
  The enjoyment of creating it, often my projects are small demos exploring a new method or idea I've discovered. Sharing them would be great but I don't think it's worth crashing my site or paying extra for. I'm happy to share within friends or have the odd stranger stumble across them.
kbar13 12y ago
"I made a thing, but I don't want it to be successful"
- Navarr 12y ago
  "I made a thing. I want it to be successful, but not that fast!"
yen223 12y ago
If your project is popular enough to be knocked out, that's a good thing ;)
iambateman 12y ago
So...don't do it?
Spittie 12y ago
Which kind of paid hosting? Many will just suspend your account when you hit your bandwidth cap instead of making you pay more (at least, the one I'm familiar with). AWS is a different beast, but that's what you get with the pay-on-demand model.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
account2473 12y ago
Other problems: 1. Wordpress, phpbb, mediawiki installations will get server hacked. Databases dumped on pastebin. I think updating all software and using Docker containers may fix this problem. 2. I'll get stalked, doxed. 3. Negative comments, or even worse - it gets ignored.

duiker101 12y ago

There was hnshowcase.com but seems to be down ATM.

ch0wn 12y ago
There's also http://showinghn.com/ http://showinghn.com/ https://twitter.com/JustShowHN https://twitter.com/JustShowHN and https://twitter.com/ShowHNDaily https://twitter.com/ShowHNDaily

zekenie 12y ago

producthunt.co is kind of like that, but I agree it'd be great.

ddod 12y ago

I built ShowingHN. It doesn't do voting since that would require polling for updated tallies all the time, and because most good Show HNs don't typically get that many points. Perhaps a dedicated section on HN would fix that. If there are any specific changes you'd like me to make on ShowingHN to make it more useful, let me know and I'll see if I can implement them. P.S. I also added an RSS feed output recently: http://showinghn.com/feed.xml http://showinghn.com/feed.xml

PeterWhittaker 12y ago
I don't know if HN supports this, but would it be possible to display the HN scores next to each item (should be, see hckrnews.com), and to allow upvoting, if logged in to HN (guess: requires capabilities not supported by HN)?

brudgers 12y ago

There is a feature request link at the bottom of the page for this sort of thing. The guidelines, rightly or wrongly, consider meta discussions about features to be low quality.

charlieirish 12y ago

I've been looking for something like a combination of these for a while: - Show HN - Beta List It would be great to be able to submit products and get the collective feedback from those reading Hacker News. This is something that Product Hunt is trying to solve but it's still early days. Another interesting inclusion would be Product Hit as they try to crowd source feature requests. http://www.producthunt.co/ http://www.producthunt.co/ http://www.producthit.io/ http://www.producthit.io/

Arjuna 12y ago

I realize that this may not be exactly what is being requested, but in the mean-time, you can get nice results via search. Here are some non-exhaustive examples: 1. "Show HN:" in the last 24 hours https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/last_24h/0/%22Show%20HN%3A%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/last_24h/... 2. "Show HN:" in the past week https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/past_week/0/%22Show%20HN%3A%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/past_week... 3. "Show HN:" in the past month https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/past_month/0/%22Show%20HN%3A%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/past_mont... 4. "Show HN:" in forever https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/forever/0/%22Show%20HN%3A%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/forever/0... 5. "Show HN:" points>1000 in forever https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/forever/0/%22Show%20HN%3A%22%20points%3E1000 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22Show+HN%3A%22#!/story/forever/0... * * * Finally, there are "Advanced search syntax" options: Use " to match a particular sequence of terms "search engine" Use - to ensure a word won't appear in the result set 'search -optimization' Use author:USERNAME or by:USERNAME to filter by author Use story:ID to filter by story Use points>NUMBER or points<NUMBER to filter by points Use date>TIMESTAMP or date<TIMESTAMP to filter by date

redmaverick 12y ago
Or you can do site:news.ycombinator.com "Show HN" and use Google' search tool to filter results based on time.
- atmosx 12y ago
  Or you can write a web crawel in logo fetch, sort and regexp the 'Show' articles :-) The point of the post is to make it easier, since the 'Show' tag is used more often than not! I like the idea, would make the frontpage clearer.

jeswin 12y ago

I'd absolutely love "Show HN" being a link on the top bar. Many of us are here because we love making things, because we want to get inspired and because we want to learn. - It might increase the quality of discussion here since these are likely to be more technical. Even more so if the "Show HN" work comes with source code. - I don't think a separate app on another domain will work. There will be no community around it. - In the long run, maybe YC will fund a few startups which started life as a link on Show HN. sama, pg and others, please do consider this.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

bennyg 12y ago

My iOS app doesn't necessarily aggregate them into one area, but it highlights them in the main list. I believe that the Show HN posts are actually the best part of this community, so I wanted to visually distinguish and highlight those within the app. It's free, so you can check it out if you have an iPhone. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news-yc/id592893508?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news-yc/id592893508?mt=8 ShowHN Highlighting screenshot: http://a5.mzstatic.com/us/r30/Purple/v4/8e/8e/cc/8e8ecc01-c11b-6834-bc57-1bd20282d26d/screen568x568.jpeg http://a5.mzstatic.com/us/r30/Purple/v4/8e/8e/cc/8e8ecc01-c1...

thejerz 12y ago

You could read every book on Amazon about feature creep, but nothing beats a real-world example like this.

angersock 12y ago
It's not really feature creep--it's adding a hard-coded and easily-accessible filter for content that the site was originally about, which is to say stuff hackers find interesting.

bigredtech 12y ago

There used to be SkimHN which was awesome: http://skimhn.com/ http://skimhn.com/ It hasn't been working for a while now, but when it was up you could quickly find the top stories in topics of your interest. Would be great if it got resurrected.

panabee 12y ago
hi bigredtech, we whipped together something for ourselves: http://www.panabee.com/show-hn http://www.panabee.com/show-hn. it lists "show hn" posts from the last 24 hours and also offers a daily email. mind trying it? thanks!

rrhoover 12y ago

100% agree, pumpkinattwelve (btw, awesome username, sir/ma'am). I started Product Hunt (http://producthunt.co http://producthunt.co, essentially a "Hacker News for products") and the popularity of "Show HN" is one of the signals proving people love this stuff.

thomasfromcdnjs 12y ago

We are experimenting with a new feature on cdnjs.com where our users can submit the projects -> cdnjs.com/news

lucb1e 12y ago

I personally very much like having everything on one page. How about a general homepage and specific pages for "Show HN" and -"Show HN"?

murtza 12y ago

Check out r/SideProject. It's a subreddit I created to share and get feedback on side projects and startups. http://www.reddit.com/r/sideproject http://www.reddit.com/r/sideproject

coinspotting 12y ago

You might also like http://firespotting.com http://firespotting.com

staunch 12y ago

One of the things that has ever made this site truly special. Companies have gone from launch on HN to being worth $10+ billion. Let's see more of that. Of course.

dang 12y ago

Yes. We're planning to put a "show" link at the top alongside "ask", and it will point to a list of Show HNs. We're also going to publish rules about what does and doesn't count as a Show HN: basically, it has to be something you made that people can play with. So things like email signups, landing pages, and fundraisers won't count. Implementing this, along with dozens of other things we want to do, is currently bottlenecked on my not having any time to write code. I'm going to have to pull back from moderation somewhat, or these features will never get built. (Besides which, moderating HN never has been and never should be anyone's full-time job. But I digress.) Finally: please re-read the HN guidelines. You're supposed to send requests like this to hn@ycombinator.com, or post them to the feature request thread. You're not supposed to post them as stories, because (as should be obvious) they're not intellectually substantive. Unfortunately, the strange fascination that is Meta causes them to get lots of upvotes, and then they sit hogging space on the front page that they don't deserve. I'm going to bury this one now.

iaincollins 12y ago

I'd really like this. I've been reluctant to post things I've worked on (mostly open source projects, some commercial) that I think some people might be interested in because I don't want to add to the noise ratio for others (I've set a high threshold for posting, which seems appropriate, and most of those things are early stage and I don't think they are quite there yet). It would be great if there is an area for products - including non-profit open source / vanity projects - where it felt a little less disruptive and intimidating to post new projects - particularly early life ones.