Hacker News
| Company type | Social news website |
|---|---|
| Industry | Internet |
| Founded | February 2007 |
| Founder | Paul Graham |
| Headquarters | United States |
| Owner | Y Combinator |
| Website | news |
Hacker News (abbreviated as HN) is a social news website centered on topics related to computer science and entrepreneurship, managed by the startup accelerator and investment firm Y Combinator. The submissions generally cater to an audience driven by "intellectual curiosity."
The word hacker in the name "Hacker News" alludes to the original hacker ethos embraced by technology aficionados.
History
The platform was launched by Paul Graham in February 2007, initially under the names Startup News or News.YC, before officially becoming Hacker News on August 14, 2007. It functions as a live demonstration of the Arc programming language, which Graham co-created, operating within the Y Combinator framework.
In March 2014, Graham relinquished his leadership position at Y Combinator and transferred responsibility for Hacker News moderation to other personnel. Presently, Daniel Gackle (known as dang) and Tom Howard (tomhow) oversee the site's moderation. Gackle formerly co-managed the platform alongside Scott Bell (sctb) until Bell ended his involvement in 2019.
Vision and practices
The goal was to build a community reminiscent of early Reddit, but with more stringent user permissions. Unlike Reddit, users must accumulate 501 "karma" points—earned through positive net votes on their posts—before gaining the ability to downvote. Similarly, flagging comments requires a minimum of 30 karma points.
Paul Graham aimed to avoid the deterioration of conversation quality associated with events like the Eternal September. The site enforces active moderation through a combination of automated detection systems for flame wars and spam, vigilant human moderators, and stealth banning methods that make offending posts invisible to other users without alerting the poster. Additional algorithms are employed to identify and suppress coordinated voting schemes designed to artificially boost certain stories.
Although accusations frequently arise alleging favoritism toward Y Combinator startups, Graham asserts that no such bias exists, despite facing considerable criticism from users who claim censorship occurs.