Hacker News

Hacker News (sometimes abbreviated as HN) is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by the investment fund and startup incubator Y Combinator. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."[1]

Hacker News
Type of site
News aggregator
Available inEnglish
OwnerY Combinator
Founder(s)Paul Graham, known as pg in the website
URLnews.ycombinator.com
RegistrationOptional, required for posting and voting
LaunchedFebruary 19, 2007 (2007-02-19) as Startup News
Current statusOnline
Written inArc

The word hacker in "Hacker News" is used in its original meaning and refers to the hacker culture which consists of people who enjoy tinkering with technology.

History

The site was created by Paul Graham in February 2007.[2] Initially called Startup News or occasionally News.YC., it became known by its current name on August 14, 2007.[3] It developed as a project of Graham's company Y Combinator, functioning as a real-world application of the Arc programming language which Graham co-developed.[4]

At the end of March 2014, Graham stepped away from his leadership role at Y Combinator, leaving Hacker News administration in the hands of other staff members.[5][6] The site is currently moderated by Daniel Gackle who posts under the username dang.[7] Gackle co-moderated Hacker News with Scott Bell (username sctb) until 2019 when Bell stopped working on the site.[8]

Vision and practices

The intention was to recreate a community similar to the early days of Reddit.[2][9] However, unlike Reddit where new users can immediately both upvote and downvote content, Hacker News does not allow users to downvote content until they have accumulated 501 "karma" points. Karma points are calculated as the number of upvotes a given user's content has received minus the number of downvotes.[2] "Flagging" comments, likewise, is not permitted until a user has 30 karma points.[10]

Graham stated he hopes to avoid the Eternal September that results in the general decline of intelligent discourse within a community.[4] The site has a proactive attitude in moderating content, including automated flame and spam detectors and active human moderation. It also practices stealth banning in which user posts stop appearing for others to see, unbeknownst to the user.[11] Additional software is used to detect "voting rings to purposefully vote up stories".[2]

Criticism

According to a 2013 TechCrunch article: "Graham says that Hacker News gets a lot of complaints that it has a bias toward featuring stories about Y Combinator startups, but he says there is no such bias. [...] Graham adds that he gets a lot of vitriol from users personally with accusations of bias or censoring."[2]

See also

References
  1. Graham, Paul. "Hacker News Guidelines". Archived from the original on 2020-09-16. Retrieved 2019-07-04.
  2. Leena Rao (May 18, 2013). "The Evolution of Hacker News". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 25 August 2014. Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  3. "Startup News Becomes Hacker News". Archived from the original on 2014-06-27.
  4. Paul Graham. "What I've Learned from Hacker News". Archived from the original on 2020-04-08. Retrieved 2009-11-08.
  5. Colleen Taylor (29 March 2014). "After Stepping Aside From Y Combinator, Paul Graham Hands Over The Reins At Hacker News". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 16 September 2020. Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  6. Isaac, Mike (29 March 2014). "Paul Graham Steps Down From Daily Hacker News Duties". Re/code. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  7. Wiener, Anna (8 August 2019). "The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 14 January 2021. Retrieved 15 January 2021.
  8. "Scott, alas, stopped working on HN about a year ago. | Hacker News". news.ycombinator.com. Archived from the original on 19 August 2021. Retrieved 19 August 2021.
  9. Paul Graham. "New: Y Combinator Startup News". Archived from the original on 2014-06-25.
  10. "Hacker News FAQ". Hacker News. Archived from the original on 6 March 2018. Retrieved 1 March 2018.
  11. "Pando: Can the democratic power of a platform like Hacker News be applied to products?". Pando. Archived from the original on 2020-04-24. Retrieved 2014-08-10.
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