5 tactics for hitting the Hacker News front page

I was recently chatting with a friend who wanted to reach more software developers. I recalled some of the advice I gave him in my latest post at LinkedIn, which I’ve republished below: I’ve hit the front page of Hacker News 10+ times for Figma and other companies, and picked up five tactics along the way: 1. A post has a good shot if it picks up 10 to 15 upvotes in its first 30 minutes. I’ve seen advice suggesting 5 or 6 upvotes in the first five to ten minutes, but that feels risky to me. A big announcement from Anthropic or OpenAI might pull that kind of traffic on its own. A regular blog post from a less high profile company is usually slower. 2. If you’re going to ask friends to upvote, don’t send them the direct URL. Make sure each person actually uses Hacker News regularly, not just for this one favor. Have them go to /newest and search for your title with cmd+F. Make sure they’re not all on the same Wi-Fi network, use personal hotspots instead. I actually prefer asking friends…