Show HN: Show HN

The general rule of thumb is: when a story hasn't had significant attention on HN in about the last year, a small number of reposts is ok. That's so good stories can have more than one crack at the bat.

We can adjust that for Show HNs like this: if a Show HN has already had significant attention on HN, there shouldn't be another Show HN for the same project. In other words, no one-year cutoff. But if a Show HN hasn't had significant attention yet, a small number of reposts is ok.

As the guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html point out, though, if a project has had a new and interesting breakthrough, it might be ok to make a new Show HN out of that. But not for routine feature releases.

In case anyone is wondering, yes, we're eventually going to add this information to the Hacker News FAQ. We're dragging our heels about that, partly because we want to change things slowly, and partly because we have ideas for more sophisticated dupe detection that we might want to try out first.

In that case you can do a Show HN. The guidelines are only trying to prevent Show HNs for things that can't be used yet. If you want specific advice, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. (That goes for anybody.)

We might need to relax this rule. Good work can get off the ground in many ways. Drew Houston got initial traction for Dropbox with a video rather than with working software. Our intention isn't to be overly strict—it's mostly to detach "Show HN" from vaporware landing pages and market tests that don't have serious work behind them.