Looks like it isn't the most popular but still a frequently used submission on Hacker News.<p>What can it include? Are there any categories one should stick to?<p>Pretty recent HN user, appreciate your help! :)
Largely whatever the author chooses. What survives HN's automatic penalty (no-link posts get lower ranking than those with a link) and the submission queue rely on the interaction with the moderating readership at the time of submission.<p>There've been 319 front-page "Tell HN..." stories through 21 June 2023, of 178,882 total stories (I have an archive of front-page stories), with a random sampling of 30 of those being:<p><pre><code> Tell HN: Catch.com raises 7m. Didn't get in as solo founder (S08), kept pushing
Tell HN: Coming soon – “Meet the Batch” threads for parallel Launch HNs
Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline
Tell HN: You guys scared edw519 off Hacker News
Tell HN: Read Maxim and other trashy "guy" rags.
Tell HN: Doing a PhD is good
Tell HN: Thank you whoishiring, a.k.a. Matthew Walsh-Cloonagh
Tell HN: We just launched GeoAPI.com (read/write geo API)
Tell HN: just made my first dollar on the Internet from my freemium web app
Tell HN: Rails screencasts.
Tell HN: A $40B company killed my 2yo son. Now they force me to keep silent
Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public
Tell HN: A disabled 40-year-old person founded a startup and makes a living
Tell HN: Amazon fraudulently canceling orders as returned items
Tell HN: Stop surfing and start making things people want
Tell HN: I think I'm quitting my job today
Tell HN: The 10-bit timers are about to overflow on September 17th
Tell HN: Guess what Baidu and Yahoo China have already censored?
Tell HN: Do not store any funds in PayPal or use them for anything critical
Tell HN: Instagram demands I send a picture of myself to prove I own my account
Tell HN: Let's Be Civil
Tell HN: I wrote a website with a unique method of recommending links.
Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder
Tell HN: YC Application Responses Are Out
Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped
Tell HN: My startup is making money and I don't know what to do
Tell HN: The 2 best things I love about HN
Tell HN: Summary of HN User Directories
Tell HN: AWS warns us about irregular activity related to Log4shell
Tell HN: Take vacation
</code></pre>
(A random sampling should afford an unbiased view of what has made the front page in the past.)<p>Breakdown by year:<p><pre><code> 9 2008
51 2009
60 2010
19 2011
9 2012
7 2013
13 2014
8 2015
7 2016
10 2018
11 2019
13 2020
19 2021
62 2022
18 2023</code></pre>
The "Ask" posts can be accessed by navigating to /ask and the "Show" posts can be accessed by navigating to /show. "Tell" isn't official, just something people type. No real guidelines to it as far as I'm aware.