When we say we're looking for "substance" or "depth", we mean we're looking for projects that have had some significant thought and effort put into them. We're looking for a backstory, a real world problem that was causing real costs or difficulties for people, which set the developer on a journey of discovery and led them to an "a-ha" moment, where they figured out how the software should or could work, then built it in a way that's impressive (it needn't be polished just proven to work). That's the ideal.

At the other (low-substance) end of the spectrum is "lead generation tool" or "resume generator" that was built in 3 hours (and not much works other than a signup page and a link to Product Hunt). Not much of that kind of stuff makes the front page, but we see plenty of it submitted.

You can look down the list of most highly-ever upvoted Show HNs here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Most things getting 1000+ upvotes and hundreds of comments are high-substance, in that they have a back-story, some kind of deep work and/or ingenuity, and they make a great platform for curious conversation, which is, after all, what HN is for.

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Imustaskforhelp 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Thanks for your response sir! and I have had such a project where I feel like such depth can be provided.

Much of what I try to build is for my own difficulties/curiosities so this works perfectly for me!

I do have a question and I am interested if you can answer but does there have to be a single aha moment or can there be a multiple of aha moment which can build something enjoyable (atleast to me)

I don't know if it counts as promotion and sorry about that but in this comment here but like how I first went from building a yt extension for screenshot (I watch youtube lectures for studies and slides can change and I wanted to make a screenshot tool which can take photo of 2s or x seconds ago) store it in a folder and have a tool which can auto generate a slideshow of sorts with all new pictures and pdf/laser tool as well.

A lot of these were just when I had created the snapshot tool, I went into deeper and deeper because of curiosity.

Now firstly I am not sure if this is a unified tool, its 3 different products and much of the code was actually generated in less than 3 hours individually but let's say I had to connect the dots and build on them on what I feel like I can do better and better about it & added like this.

Now I don't know if this is worth a show hn given its 3 different products mashed together for my own use case. but supposing if it was one product with continuous aha-s but the original prototype was built in 3 hours as you mention, would it still be considered depth/substance (supposing that they actually give the product after multiple aha's and not just after one because at that point even to me it does feel like there is virtually no difference between that and the resume idea you mentioned)

Would Hackernews be more interested in something like this? Because I sometimes show HN when my project's the 3 hour thing but I still use it myself and build upon it and continue doing so and if I feel like I can have multiple aha's in my project, do you feel like it passes the substance test that HN is looking out for?

If so that's the case, So the feeling I get from this is that I can deploy it in a more tightknit community first (thinking a discord server) /personal use/friends, then slowly build it and once the project has had a decent bit of thought put into it, I can add a show HN article?

Because I just prototype and keep on growing what I feel like I would personally want but in most cases, there really isn't a single aha but continuous of small aha's :)

(for context about the other message) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46702099#46703977]

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tomhow 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Most projects contain multiple small "a-ha" moments, but many (most?) also contain one big breakthrough, in the sense that the project didn't/couldn't work until that breakthrough happened, and after the breakthrough happened everything else flowed naturally. That breakthrough and the learnings that emerged in discovering it are always what's most interesting to learn about. If there's no big breakthrough like that, then it's probably not a very novel or impressive project.

But it's hard to answer these kinds of specific questions in the hypothetical. The HN audience prizes originality, and sometimes the thing that gives a project substance is different to much of what's come before. Sometimes it's just a case of "we know it when we see it".

	▲	Imustaskforhelp 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks, I do feel like though as such one has to create their own standard of what a good show HN means if they don't want to flood show HN or are more interested in having a snowball effect in first place. Like, not every project should be a show HN and that's okay. One can always create an interesting takeaway from any project and create an article about it and publish it on Hackernews as well. I think what I get the feeling is to find out how original your idea is. If your idea is really original, you can greatly benefit from SHOW HN. But if not, which is okay as well, creating a normal article might be more correct (if a key takeaway from a project can be established?) Or would you recommend a seperate place for such instead of Hackernews in this particular context? > Sometimes it's just a case of "we know it when we see it". Yes but isn't this also causing the issue where people think that their projects are great and upload show HN and just with AI the amount of projects have grown so large and the signal ratio has just been shrinked impacting real projects as well I feel as if the people who Submit show Hn needs to ask themselves internally what they would feel about the project without any bias if the project was randomly viewed by them with 0 upvotes, would they ignore or click and read me or upvote and comment and if the project doesn't fit the sense then to not fill SHOW HN with complete garbage AI slop deployed on lovable or something.