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How It Works

HN Arcade is a community-driven directory of games discovered on Hacker News Show HN posts. Here's how games make it into the directory.

Automatic discovery​

A scraper runs every 12 hours and searches Hacker News for new Show HN game posts using the Algolia API. When it finds a game that isn't already in the directory, it creates a submission issue on GitHub for review.

Community submissions​

Anyone can submit a game by opening a GitHub Issue using the structured submission form. The only requirement is that the game was posted as a Show HN on Hacker News.

Review and publish​

Every submission — whether from the scraper or the community — goes through the same pipeline:

  1. A GitHub Issue is created with the game details.
  2. A workflow automatically generates a pull request with the game's page.
  3. A human reviews the PR to make sure everything looks good.
  4. Once merged, the game is live on the site.

Open source​

HN Arcade is fully open source. The site, scraper, and automation are all in the GitHub repository. Contributions and feedback are welcome.