

Ask HN: Ask HN? - nerdhard

I never really looked at the &quot;Ask&quot; section. I was expecting it to be something like the &quot;Show&quot; section and that posts that start with &quot;Ask HN:&quot; go there. But looking at it now, I see these as the first posts:<p>Bitstamp Accounts Frozen<p>A Chinese startup cracks New Relic&#x27;s code<p>What&#x27;s the cheapest living situation<p>Is this a bug? Is &quot;Ask&quot; something completely different? In &quot;Show&quot; there is a link to guidelines at the top. &quot;Ask&quot; seems not to have those. So what is &quot;Ask HN&quot;?
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jcr
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> _" Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us
> questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If
> you want to say something to us, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com."_

If you want to ask a question about HN or how it works, the guidelines linked
and quoted above ask us to use email. With that said, there are two types of
"story" posts on HN, url-based stories (i.e. filling in the title and URL
fields) and text-based stories (filling in the title and textbox fields). All
of the text-based stories are, by default, sorted under the "ask" list/link
(a.k.a. "Ask HN:") in the top menu. Of course, there is an exception, namely
text-based stories where the title starts with "Show HN" and these get sorted
under the "show" list/link in the top menu.

As for junk getting submitted as either text-based or url-based stories, this
kind of abuse happens constantly. When a HN user reaches a karma threshold,
they gain the ability to "flag" stories. Flagging the junk stories helps the
moderators find and delete it. If enough "known good" users flag something, it
will get "flag killed" automatically. Some flag-killed stories are due to the
stories being spam or junk, but it also happens when a story is a dupe of
something that was recently submitted and discussed (I always use Algolia HN
Search on the bottom of the page to find dupes before submitting new stories).

Historically, "Ask HN:" stories are for asking a question to the whole HN user
community, but they're also occasionally used to announce things (you'll
sometimes see those marked as "Tell HN:").

