My experience is that quite a lot of people don't have success with HN even if this is their audience. The thing is - more often than not your post will not get any attention... just because of luck.
Yeah, my experience with HN is very similar - luck 'o the draw. Seems timing of day with particular attention to Pacific time zone in the US is key.
@OP - drop us a link here anyway! I'd love to see your software, and by all means if it solves a problem for me, I'm ALL ABOUT throwing (reasonable) money at you! I'd much rather deal with human beings and small business than $GLOBOCORP_X for my day-to-day needs!
My experience, too. That didn't help, and I do not know what does help. However, there are some things that I will not post them on, such as Facebook (although other people are allowed to post it wherever they want to do, if they want to do, but I will not do it myself). In some cases I find pages that I cannot post to; in one case, after typing in a message, I got an error about my IP address being banned (for something I didn't do), except that the IP address in the error message was not my own (maybe there is some kind of misconfigured proxy).
yes that is my experience as well. Additionally it will get into some other tangent like if you are providing some online service people will ask about self hosting, if you give them binaries for self-hosting they will ask about source code, if you give source-code they will crib about gpl/agpl etc. :-)
If it isn't right for the HN audience, you should know who your audience are, and how to find them.
You can't build if you don't know who you are building for, so that should be your starting point.