All playbooks
Hacker News Show HN playbook
Before you Show HN.
Hacker News readers are engineers — they'll curl your headers, check your TLS, and roast missing privacy policies. Five-minute clearance beats a front-page flame thread.
T-48h
Engineer-grade pass
- Security headers: CSP, HSTS, X-Frame-Options
- No mixed content, valid TLS chain, no cert warnings
- robots.txt and sitemap sane — no accidental noindex
T-12h
Show HN essentials
- Landing explains what it is in one sentence above fold
- Privacy policy reachable — HN moderators check
- No login wall on marketing page — demo or screenshot visible
Front page
Handle the spike
- Monitor uptime — HN can DDoS small servers accidentally
- Rate limiting on signup and API endpoints
- Re-scan after scaling or hotfix deploy