Hacker News is strange... Post that describe a product that was built in a weekend manage to reach #1 all the time, but when I submit my project that I've been working on for more than a month, everyone collectively ignores is, and it receives 0 upvotes.
In a "weekend" peaks people's interest just like a 12 year old that raises money does.
My guess is that if you said "Look at what I built that took 15 years" that would peak people's interest.
Along those lines many things that appear on HN are really of the same quality as HN comments (just an opinion nothing particularly special) but since they appear as a post people focus on them and a discussion ensues and they get voted up more than the same exact thing appearing in a thread.
Join the party. Anyways, HN is probably not the best place to show off your project; these days its more about startup business, politics, and travel....a more refined reddit but not about hacking.
1) There are certain things that click with the majority of the HN audience (or at least the ones who up vote) and the weekend hacks go into this category
2) HN is unpredictable and some luck is involved. If you get a couple of up votes from people early, you are more likely to get more clicks from the /new page, which leads to more upvotes... Social proof, kind of.
It's not that. Just keep resubmitting the story, at the end of the url add a "#" so it counts as a brand new submittion.
It's all about timing. You can write a rockstar post and have it ignored one day, then resubmit it 4 times and finally get on the front page with 14,000 unique visitors in 24 hours.
