

How I got 300+ HN points posting a 5yo+ link that made the front page for 20hrs - Hawkee

I thought I'd share my story about the link I posted the other day, Free VMs of Windows to test older versions of IE (microsoft.com).  I never realized this link would be worth 300+ Hacker News points, but I thought the story around it might be interesting enough to share.<p>I was working on a client site that required the use of IE 7 to test a particular bug. I had installed VirtualBox in the past, but after doing a fresh install of OS X I was trying to avoid that whole process.  In fact I was even considering installing the old, old version of IE 5.5 that was actually released for the Mac platform back in the stone age.  So I went to Google and searched for "ie os x" and found this: 
http://samvermette.com/256.  This was the first I heard of Microsoft releasing free VMs so I thought, "Hey cool, I'll share this on Twitter".  I posted the link, @stroughtonsmith retweeted it and before I knew it I had retweets and stars coming in at a consistent clip.<p>Through the retweets came a single mention pointing me over to https://github.com/xdissent/ievms which was quite useful for my case.  Knowing the original article was published in June of 2011 I knew this wasn't new information, but I figured I'd post the link to HN anyway. I figured somebody had to have posted it in the past, so I might get a duplicate link error or something.<p>Well that didn't happen and immediately it started to get points and comments, very helpful comments at that.  I chimed in a few times in the beginning and got bonus points for a couple of my early comments.<p>So a few things I learned from this: HN doesn't necessarily reward new, cutting edge information, chiming in early to a trending topic is worth a fair number of comment points, and you learn a lot more about a topic than you do posting a link to Twitter.  Finally I found HN points aren't worth anything toward my profile.  I got absolutely zero visitors to my website and I doubt anybody even clicked over to my profile to see who I am.
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Peroni
_Finally I found HN points aren't worth anything toward my profile._

There is literally nothing in your profile to indicate who you are or what
your website is.

All I can see is the following:

    
    
        user:	Hawkee
        created:	190 days ago
        karma:	344
        avg:	
        about:	
        submissions
        comments

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Hawkee
Well how about that. Guess I had assumed there was a website field on the
profile.

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Hawkee
One small detail I forgot to mention is that I posted the link late at night,
around 11pm EST.

