It's a voting system. If you don't have anything to show, people probably won't vote to let you in. You need a minimum number of votes to get in, so I'd get crackin' on those impressive projects 8)

Uhg, talk about a community that I don't want any part of. Can you imagine submitting sample code to be 'allowed' into Hacker News or a similar service? No thank you.

You say that so negatively, but I bet, at the very least, it would mean we could skip the "HN Sucks now" threads that pop up every month.

Edit: I just wanted to say that I was joking there, since it might not be obvious. The detriment of course would be that we'd lose out on the advice of the non-technical members we have here.