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Post to Hacker News

Submit links and text posts, comment, and stay within the daily cap.

Post to Hacker News

Submit a link or a text post to Hacker News, or comment on an item, from a content row.

Hacker News submissions cannot be deleted. Preview every new row with --dry-run before the first real run. A row that fails costs you one run; a row that posts the wrong thing is permanent.

Blowhorn never votes on Hacker News. There is nothing to configure for that and no way to turn it on.

Before the first run

  1. Store the profile's Hacker News login. Both keys are needed; the password is read from the store and never from config.yaml.

    blowhorn profile set your-profile HN_USERNAME=<account> HN_PASSWORD=<password>

    Check it landed, with the password shown only as set or not set:

    blowhorn profile get your-profile

  2. Map the profile to a Chrome profile, if it is not mapped already. Hacker News is driven through a browser, like LinkedIn, X, and Reddit. See Map Chrome profiles.

If a named profile has no Hacker News login stored, blowhorn post --profile your-profile --platform hn says so by name and exits non-zero before any browser opens.

Set Title and put the URL in Destination. Leave Comment on blank.

blowhorn content upsert --payload '{"Platform":"HN","Profile":"your-profile","Title":"Example v1.0 is out","Destination":"https://example.com/news/v1-0","Approved?":"yes"}'

Keep the title to 80 characters or fewer. A longer one fails the row rather than being cut short, because a Hacker News title cannot be edited afterwards.

Submit a text post

Set Title and put the body in Message Text. Leave Destination and Comment on blank.

blowhorn content upsert --payload '{"Platform":"HN","Profile":"your-profile","Title":"Ask HN: How do you visualize your clusters?","Message Text":"We have been trying a few approaches...","Approved?":"yes"}'

A row with both a Destination URL and body text submits the link and tells you how much of the body it dropped. Pick one.

Comment or reply

Put the item's URL in Comment on and the comment in Message Text. To reply to a comment, use that comment's own permalink: the link on its timestamp.

blowhorn content upsert --payload '{"Platform":"HN","Profile":"your-profile","Comment on":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234567","Message Text":"We hit the same thing; what fixed it for us was...","Approved?":"yes"}'

Replies on a comment permalink have not been proven the way story comments have: if Hacker News shows no comment box there, the row fails with "No comment form" and nothing is posted. Try a reply on one row before queueing many.

Once Comment on holds anything, the row is a comment and nothing else. If the URL is mistyped or the body is blank, the row fails. It is never submitted as a story instead, even when it also carries a Title and Destination.

Preview, then run

# See what would be submitted. Submits nothing and records nothing.
blowhorn post --platform hn --profile your-profile --dry-run

# Publish.
blowhorn post --platform hn --profile your-profile

A dry run is not offline. It opens the browser and signs in to Hacker News exactly as a real run does, then stops short of the submit. It is a real visit by a real account, so Hacker News can rate-limit it like one.

If a row is held or fails

  • Held (daily cap). A profile may make 2 link submissions per UTC day. The row is left pending and the run exits 0; run again tomorrow. Text posts are not counted.
  • "already submitted to HN by profile …". Another profile submitted that URL first. Change or remove the row: submitting one URL from several accounts is what gets domains banned.
  • "HN did not create a story … already submitted by …". Somebody outside Blowhorn posted that URL and Hacker News redirected to their story. The URL is recorded as already on Hacker News and not ours: from now on every profile is refused it before the browser opens, and it counts toward nobody's daily cap. The row keeps failing until you change or remove it. Comment on the existing story instead, using the link the message prints.
  • "… is already on Hacker News: submitted by …". That same URL, on a later run or for another profile. Nothing was opened in the browser. To submit it after all, have an operator remove the URL's row from the store's hn:submissions ledger, then run again; there is no command for that yet.
  • "the new comment could not be found on the page HN landed on". The row is marked done with the thread's link rather than the comment's own. The comment may well be there, on a later page of a long thread; the row is never failed for this alone, because re-running it would post the comment twice. Check the thread and set the Promotion Link by hand if you need the comment's own link.
  • Rate limited. The row fails and the rest of that profile's Hacker News rows are skipped for this run. Wait before running again; do not retry immediately.
  • "could not be confirmed". The click went through but neither the page nor Hacker News's public checks showed the submission as yours. Check the account's submissions page before running again.
Last modified October 9, 2026: docs: sync from master (5f4e718)