What we run
Hacker News growth, run for you.
Hacker News has no write API, its robots.txt disallows every write path, and its guidelines say plainly that HN is for conversation between humans. There is no compliant way to automate it. A person with a real account has to write the post and stay in the thread.
Last reviewed 27 August 2026
The failure mode
What breaks when AI does this alone.
Everything, and unusually it breaks at three independent layers. The official HN API exposes no write endpoints at all, so there is nothing to post through. The robots.txt disallows every write path to automated agents, including submitlink, vote, reply, flag, and fave, with a thirty second crawl delay. And the guidelines address the content itself, asking members not to post generated or AI-edited text because HN is for conversation between humans. Route around one and the next two still stand. This is the clearest example on the internet of a channel that a drafting product cannot finish.
What our operators do here
- Hold and maintain accounts with genuine comment history on HN
- Decide what is actually submittable, and rule out landing pages and newsletters
- Write the Show HN or submission text and the first comment by hand
- Time the submission and then sit with the thread for its whole active life
- Answer every critical reply directly, including the ones that are right
- Participate in other threads continuously, not only on launch day
- Refuse the launch outright when the product is not ready for that audience
Volume
What ships in a typical week.
| What | Typical volume |
|---|---|
| Substantive comments in other threads | 5 to 15 |
| Submissions, only when there is something real to submit | 0 to 1 |
| Hours of live thread coverage on a launch day | 6 to 10, continuous |
| Submission ideas declined as not ready | Logged and reported |
Volumes are typical rather than contractual. They move with what the channel is actually returning.
What good looks like
The metric that matters
A front page thread that stays civil, plus signups you can trace to it
Realistic timeline
Account history takes 3 to 6 months. A launch is one day and it does not repeat.
Three closed doors, not one
Most channels have one constraint you can argue about. Hacker News has three, they are independent, and each one is documented in public.
The first is technical. The official HN API, published on GitHub, exposes GET endpoints only: item, user, topstories, newstories, maxitem, updates. There are no write endpoints. Nothing to submit through, nothing to comment through, nothing to vote through. Not gated behind approval like Reddit's, simply absent.
The second is the crawl policy. The robots.txt at news.ycombinator.com disallows every write path to automated agents by name, including submitlink, vote, reply, flag, and fave, and sets a crawl delay of thirty seconds for what remains. That is not an oversight, it is a list of exactly the things a marketing bot would want to do.
The third is the one that actually settles it. The guidelines state, without qualification: "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans."
Route around the first door and the second is closed. Route around the second and the third is not a technical control at all, it is the community's stated expectation, enforced by people who read a great many comments a day and have become extremely good at recognising the ones a model wrote.
Why this page exists
We describe every channel we run in terms of where drafting stops and shipping starts. Hacker News is the case where the gap is not a matter of degree.
Every AI marketing product can write you a Show HN post. None of them can submit it. None of them can hold the thread for eight hours while the top comment asks why you built this on Postgres. And none of them can be the account that has been commenting usefully since 2023, which is the thing that determines whether anyone reads your submission at all.
If you are evaluating whether an automated growth product can actually execute, ask it to run Hacker News. The answer tells you everything about the rest of the offer.
What actually gets submitted
Founders lose this channel before the thread starts, by submitting the wrong thing.
| Submission | Eligible | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Working product people can try now | Yes, Show HN | This is what the format is for |
| Landing page with a waitlist | No | Sign-up pages are excluded from Show HN |
| Newsletter or blog post | No, not as Show HN | Explicitly excluded, may work as a normal submission |
| Genuinely interesting technical writeup | Yes, as a normal post | Judged on the writing, not the product |
| Launch announcement with no artefact | No | Nothing for anyone to engage with |
The other rule with real teeth is vote solicitation. The FAQ answers the question directly with a no, and states that they penalise or ban submissions, accounts, and sites that break it. Note the last word. The penalty can attach to the domain, which means one Slack message to your team asking for upvotes can cost you the channel permanently.
On self-promotion, the guidelines ask people not to use HN primarily for promotion and say it is fine to post your own work part of the time. There is no published ratio, and anyone quoting you one is inventing it.
How we run it
Slowly, and mostly before the launch.
An operator holds an account with real comment history and participates continuously, in threads that have nothing to do with your product. That history takes three to six months to build and it is the asset. It cannot be bought, generated, or provisioned.
The AI layer does research and preparation: what the audience is likely to object to, what comparable products got asked, what the weakest claim on your page is. That work is genuinely useful and it happens entirely before anything is posted.
The operator writes the submission and the first comment themselves, in your voice, and you approve both. Then, on the day, they sit with the thread for its whole active life and answer everything. Concede what is right. Answer the rest with specifics. The threads that go badly are almost always the ones where the founder posted and left.
What we will not do
We will not paste generated text into a comment box. The guidelines ask people not to, and pretending that is a technicality misreads both the rule and the readership.
We will not ask anyone to upvote, run multiple accounts in a thread, or submit the same link repeatedly. And when a product is not ready for this audience, we will say so and decline the launch, because there is no second first submission.
Hacker News questions
Can an AI post to Hacker News?
What do the guidelines say about AI-written comments?
Can I ask my team to upvote the submission?
What actually qualifies for Show HN?
How much self-promotion is allowed?
What happens if the thread turns hostile?
See what we would run on Hacker News.
Thirty minutes. You leave with the thirty-day plan either way.
30 minutes. You leave with the plan either way.