How to schedule and publish to Hacker News with Sheevook
Technical, skeptical audience. Substance over marketing, always. Sheevook turns one approved idea into a Hacker News-native post - grounded in the platform's real rules, not a generic cross-post - then schedules it and measures what it drove.
Sheevook publishes to Hacker News for real, through a live connection: write once, tailor natively, schedule, and it goes out on time.
Is Hacker News worth your time?
Worth it exactly once per genuinely interesting thing you build, and worth nothing at all for anything else. It is the highest-quality traffic in software and the least forgiving audience for marketing.
Hacker News at a glance
- Character limit
- 20,000 (sweet spot 200-1200)
- Hashtags
- None - they read as spam here
- Best times
- Weekdays 7–10am ET (US morning, before the front page churns)
- Links
- Links stay clean in the copy. The tracking is recorded on our side instead of hanging off the end of your URL, so the post reads like a person wrote it and the click is still attributed.
The ranking formula is public, and it is unsentimental
Hacker News ranks a story on its points raised to a fractional power, divided by its age in hours raised to a power of about one point eight, multiplied by any penalties. Two consequences follow directly. Points compress hard, so ten times the upvotes is only about six times the score. And decay is steep, so the first one to two hours are decisive; a story that does not accumulate votes while its denominator is small never recovers.
There are real, documented penalty multipliers. A text submission with no URL is scored at a fraction of an equivalent link post. An overheated thread where comments arrive much faster than upvotes gets demoted by design, to damp flamewars. Individual domains can carry standing penalties. Moderators can add penalties, remove them, and rewrite your title at any time, and the FAQ says so.
What high karma does not buy you is rank. The FAQ answers that question with a flat no. Karma buys you the ability to flag, vouch, and downvote comments. Stories cannot be downvoted at all; they are suppressed by flags and penalties instead.
What gets a Hacker News post buried
Asking anyone at all to upvote
Asking friends, colleagues, or a group chat for votes or comments is prohibited, and the FAQ says submissions, accounts, and sites that break the rule are penalised or banned. This is the one that ends companies' relationships with the site.
A title that sells
Superlatives, capital letters, exclamation marks, and editorialised titles get rewritten by moderators or flagged into oblivion. State what the thing is, in the source's own words.
Submitting a landing page as a Show HN
Show HN requires something people can actually try, ideally with no signup. A marketing page is not a valid Show HN, and a signup wall defeats the point of posting one.
Deleting and reposting
Explicitly prohibited. A good story that got no traction can be given a second chance by the moderators; a delete-and-repost is a rule break.
Publishing to Hacker News with Sheevook, step by step
- 1
Get your Hacker News account ready
Create the account: Sign up at news.ycombinator.com. Use a plain username tied to a real person - HN distrusts obvious brand/marketing handles. Build a little karma first: Comment substantively on stories you actually read. Submitting is gated behind minimum karma/account age, and a brand-new account that only posts its own launch reads as spam. Read the guidelines: Read the HN guidelines and FAQ before submitting - especially the 'Show HN' rules and the stance on self-promotion; moderators (and flags) enforce them hard.
- 2
Connect Hacker News to Sheevook
Hacker News has no standard sign-in handoff, so you connect with your own account login. It is held on the server and used only to post on your behalf.
- 3
Write once, let Sheevook tailor it
Write your post once. Sheevook re-authors it natively for Hacker News, inside the 20,000-character limit, with a per-platform diff showing exactly what changed, and it blocks a near-copy of another platform's version before it schedules. The voice it writes in: Direct, technical, intellectually honest. Curiosity over persuasion; concede the tradeoffs.
- 4
Schedule or publish
Pick a time (or let Sheevook choose the best open slot for Hacker News), or publish now. Turn on Repeat weekly to make it recurring - each run gets fresh copy automatically.
- 5
See what actually worked
After it publishes, Sheevook reads back the real engagement Hacker News reports, and where a link was posted it ties clicks and conversions to the post. Results rank on outcomes, never on vanity reach.
What wins on Hacker News
- Lead with substance a builder can evaluate: what it does, how it works, the tradeoffs
- Use 'Show HN:' for something people can try and 'Ask HN:' for a real question
- Disclose plainly that you built it - HN respects makers who show up honestly
- Answer every serious technical question in the first hour; early engagement decides the front page
- Point the link at the real artifact (repo, demo, docs), not a marketing page
Hacker News questions people actually ask
- When is the best time to post to Hacker News?
- Weekday mornings US Eastern are the conventional answer, because that is when the site is busiest and the first two hours decide the outcome. The larger factor is whether the thing you are posting deserves the front page at all.
- Should I post a link or a text submission?
- A link, wherever you honestly can. Text submissions with no URL carry a documented scoring penalty, so a text post starts at a structural disadvantage against an equivalent link.
- Can Sheevook post to Hacker News?
- Yes, through a live connection, and the tailoring here mostly consists of taking things away: no hashtags, no emoji, no marketing voice, no exclamation marks. Hacker News is the one platform where the tailored version is almost always shorter and plainer than the master.
