Ask HN: What are you working on? A reply teardown

The monthly Ask HN: What are you working on? thread is one of the few places on Hacker News where posting your own project is the point. Most replies get no answer at all. In the September 2026 thread, the ones that did were posted early, told a short problem story and ended with a real question.

This is a close reading of that one thread: what the replies that started conversations did, and what the silent ones did. The numbers come from the thread's public data on the Hacker News API, which returns every comment with its time and its replies. We counted them on October 23, 2026.

What the September 2026 thread looks like

The thread went up on September 13, 2026 and collected 381 points and 1,235 comments. Of those, 729 were top-level replies, each one a person describing a project. The opening post is one line: what are you working on, and what have you been curious about lately.

The thread keeps getting bigger. One commenter counted the projects posted in these threads per year: 6,220 in 2025 and 6,093 from January to September 2026, against 2,122 in 2024. More projects means more competition for the same readers.

Here is the plain arithmetic for the September thread. 729 top-level replies, and 586 of them got zero replies. That leaves 143 replies with any answer, so 143 / 729 = about 20 percent. Four in five projects posted there were met with silence.

What worked: the reply that got 38 answers

The most-answered project reply, a social app called Holler, got 38 replies. It is 193 words long. It opens with the founder's own problem: they are an introvert who hates the invite-and-excuse dance, and the coordination that follows. Only then does it say what the app does.

The answers it got are the kind a founder wants from strangers. People asked about Android and a web version, pointed out broken icons and a weak privacy policy, said they could not read the logo, and asked how it differs from a group chat. That is a free round of customer research.

Three things in that reply show up again and again in the replies that drew answers:

• A problem story in the first lines, in the person's own words
• Enough detail that a reader can picture using it
• A link, placed after the reader knows why they would click it

What the numbers say about replies that get answers

We split the 729 replies by a few simple traits and checked which share got at least one answer. These are counts from one thread, not a study, but the gaps are large.

• Length: 11 percent of replies under 40 words got an answer, against 32 percent of replies over 150 words
• Timing: 28 percent of the 71 replies posted in the first 6 hours got an answer, against 6 percent of the 51 posted after 48 hours
• Problem story: 30 percent of replies that said what the founder hated, needed or wanted got an answer
• Link: 21 percent of replies with a link got an answer, against 14 percent without one
• Opening with a bare link: 18 percent, a bit below the average for replies with a link

The worked example: a reply of over 150 words is about three times as likely to get an answer as one under 40 words (32 / 11 = 2.9). Posting in the first 6 hours instead of after two days makes an answer more than four times as likely (28 / 6 = 4.7). Neither of these costs money. They cost a calendar reminder and ten more minutes of writing.

Timing matters on Hacker News launches too. A 2025 paper on 138 AI tool launches on Hacker News found that posting time was a key predictor of how fast a project grew, while the Show HN tag showed no advantage once other factors were controlled.

What did not work in the silent replies

The silent majority shares a pattern. Many replies are a link and a product category, such as a notes app or a monitoring tool, with no reason to care. Some read like a feature list: tags, sync, exports, integrations. A reader skims past those because nothing invites a reply.

Asking for feedback alone did not help much. 46 replies asked for feedback, and 26 percent of them got an answer. That is better than the average of 20 percent, but well below a strong problem story. A general request for thoughts is easy to ignore. A specific question is not.

Tone matters as well. The Hacker News guidelines ask people not to use the site primarily for promotion, and say it is fine to post your own work part of the time. They also ask users not to post generated text and not to solicit upvotes or comments. A reply that sounds like an ad breaks the spirit of the thread, even where self-promotion is welcome.

How to write your Ask HN: What are you working on? reply

Treat the thread as a short conversation with people who might be your first users, not a launch. If you want the bigger moment, read how to launch on Hacker News with a Show HN post first. For the monthly thread, a simple shape works:

• Post within the first few hours of the thread going up
• Open with the problem in one or two sentences, as you lived it
• Say what you built and who it is for in one sentence
• Give one concrete detail: a number, a limit, a design choice
• Put the link after the reader knows why to click
• End with one specific question you want answered
• Come back and answer every reply the same day

The Hacker News FAQ adds a rule worth knowing: you cannot ask people to upvote or comment on your submission, and the site penalizes or bans submissions and accounts that do. So the only way to get answers is to write something people want to answer.

After the thread: where the real customers are

The monthly thread gives you feedback, but most of the people who would pay for your product never read it. They write their own posts, often asking for exactly the tool you built. Finding those posts across platforms is a separate skill, covered in social listening for B2B SaaS.

This is the part LitePal is built for. A founder pastes their site, and LitePal finds public conversations on Reddit, Hacker News, X and Threads where people ask for a product like theirs, with a reply drafted for each. The founder reads the draft, edits it and posts it from their own account.

The lesson from the September thread carries over to any reply you write in public. Lead with the problem, be specific, be early, and ask something real. Do that and a stranger has a reason to answer.

Paste your site into LitePal to see the public threads where people already ask for what you built, each with a reply drafted for you to edit and post.