beehiivYou posted your Show HN at 8am Pacific. Now you’re flipping between the Show HN page, your post, your analytics and your signups table, refreshing each one in turn.
Four tabs, and the one you most want to watch is the one you can least do anything about.
What the board shows
The list you pick: Front page, Best, Newest, Show HN or Ask HN. Twelve stories at a time, each with its points, who posted it and how many comments it has.
Your own post: its points as a big number. The board keeps its readings, so a line draws the climb through the day, and you can see the moment it took off.
Beside it: what the post is doing for you. Visitors from Plausible or Google Analytics, signups from Supabase or PostHog, new customers from Stripe. The countdown and checklist come with the Launch week template, Show HN feed already on it.
Where the numbers come from
Hacker News publishes a free public API. The board reads it on its own server, with no account and no key. For the list, it takes the first twelve stories of the one you picked and reads each story’s title, points, author and comment count.
For your own post, the board reads the item’s address on the same API. It’s an ordinary JSON address, so Connect shows the numbers in it and you tap the score. Or ask your agent to add it, and it connects the source itself.
All of it runs while the board is open. The feed reads again about every 15 minutes by default, so the order you see is never much older than that, and you never press refresh.
Nothing on the board posts, votes or comments. Hacker News asks launchers not to solicit upvotes, and the board has no way to anyway. It only watches.