[dang]

Most of the Show HNs on HN's front page get there organically. Sometimes we see ones that fell through the cracks and put them in the second-chance queue (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and links back from there) or email repost invites.

As lwansbrough said, a small number of reposts is explicitly ok (this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Reposts aren't a good thing per se (and can drive the, shall we say, detail-oriented segment of the community crazy sometimes), but it's worse for good submissions to fall through the cracks, so we make the tradeoff that way.

Edit: Taking a quick look at your post, I think you may be falling into some of the traps that prevent a project from attracting attention here: for example, the "I can't tell what this does" problem, and the fact that the intellectually interesting details aren't up front, so curiosity isn't engaged in the first couple seconds. Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14841231, which are some tips that we send to YC startups and HN users who email us.

[EGreg]

From my experience, things I used to submit 5-7 years ago got to the front page organically. Literally nothing I submit now gets to the front page, and you can see the wide variety of things in my profile, including SHOW HN, ASK HN, etc.

Here is an example SHOW HN that had all the elemnents you speak of but went nowhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13474714

Now one can say that they were just all things that shouldn't have hit the front page, but these days I really believe that you need to ask a few HNers to upvote something for it to hit the front page. I think it's a dirty little secret of reddit and HN. Perhaps it can be fixed with algorithms somehow, but I am not sure how.

PS: there was one exception when I made a clickbait title with the word "hacked" in it, like a year ago. That hit the front page organically.