I'm sure some of those Show HN posts are knocked out over a weekend, and I might have done that when I was 20 and had oceans of time, but not now that I'm 34 and have too many other things going on besides programming.
My own submission from a year ago [0] which is quite meager compared to most of those Show HN posts was developed in the free time I could scrounge out over a period of 3 months. I spent another month or so after that polishing a first version. Then I took a break from hobby programming for half a year to play some games that were sitting in my steam account, and now over the course of the past few months I've been developing a javascript library to sync JSON data in a P2P way, which will take another few months until it's ready to post to HN (if I ever finish it ;) ). It's not easy to find time for programming hobby projects when you have a family, a job, a life and a collection of books/games/movies to get through :)
Anyway, the way that I see it you have to do these projects for yourself, not for anyone else. You write them to scratch an itch, to see an idea blossom or wither, to enjoy the act of coding. Posting them online is the thing you do after you've done the thing you wanted to do.
My own submission from a year ago [0] which is quite meager compared to most of those Show HN posts was developed in the free time I could scrounge out over a period of 3 months. I spent another month or so after that polishing a first version. Then I took a break from hobby programming for half a year to play some games that were sitting in my steam account, and now over the course of the past few months I've been developing a javascript library to sync JSON data in a P2P way, which will take another few months until it's ready to post to HN (if I ever finish it ;) ). It's not easy to find time for programming hobby projects when you have a family, a job, a life and a collection of books/games/movies to get through :)
Anyway, the way that I see it you have to do these projects for yourself, not for anyone else. You write them to scratch an itch, to see an idea blossom or wither, to enjoy the act of coding. Posting them online is the thing you do after you've done the thing you wanted to do.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5184926