Reaching the front page of hacker news
I've written a number of articles (eg. Google Cloud vs AWS Onboarding Comparison, A Tale of Two Buckets, etc) that for one reason or another have ended up on the front page of hacker news.
A bunch of people have asked if I had any advice on how they could write content to do the same.
What has worked for me is ranting about things that I feel are absolutely ridiculous. The fact that there are a dozen different ways to set S3 permissions , that google's idea of helping startups is to put you in touch with a sales rep - these are things that drive me to write long notes on because writing notes is how I cope and why I developed a system to manage the tens of thousands of notes that I have.
Sometimes, my rants strike a chord and other folks pick up on it. Sometimes, I (like to) think that its because of my witty titles. The title part does make a difference on HN at least since its your five second pitch for folks to read your article.
When I first launched Dendron, I published on HN with the following:
Show HN: Dendron – a local-first, markdown based, hierarchical note taking tool
This post got 7 points and 2 comments.
A week later, I posted again with an alternative title
Show HN: Dendron – a roam like open source markdown note taking app
This one got 127 points and 39 comments.
A lot of time, its just perseverance and hoping you catch people at a good time. That's all I have to say about it at the moment.