Hacker News

History

The site was created by Paul Graham in February 2007.{{cite news | access-date = 10 August 2014 | archive-date = 25 August 2014 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20140825152206/http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-news/ | url-status = live | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20140627111301/http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html | archive-date = 2014-06-27 | url-status = dead}} 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.

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.{{cite news | access-date = 10 August 2014 | archive-date = 16 September 2020 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20200916150138/https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/29/after-stepping-aside-from-y-combinator-paul-graham-hands-over-the-reins-at-hacker-news/ | url-status = live | access-date = 15 January 2021 | archive-date = 14 January 2021 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20210114223907/https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news | url-status = live | access-date = 29 June 2025 Gackle co-moderated Hacker News with Scott Bell (username sctb) until 2019 when Bell stopped working on the site.

Vision and practices

The intention was to recreate a community similar to the early days of Reddit. 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. "Flagging" comments, likewise, is not permitted until a user has 30 karma points.

Graham stated he hopes to avoid the Eternal September that results in the general decline of intelligent discourse within a community. 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. Additional software is used to detect "voting rings to purposefully vote up stories".

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."

References

References

1. Yagoda, Ben. (2014-03-06). "A Short History of “Hack”". The New Yorker.
2. Paul Graham. "What I've Learned from Hacker News".
3. (29 March 2014). "Paul Graham Steps Down From Daily Hacker News Duties".
4. "Scott, alas, stopped working on HN about a year ago. {{!}} Hacker News".
5. Paul Graham. "New: Y Combinator Startup News".
6. "Hacker News FAQ".
7. "Pando: Can the democratic power of a platform like Hacker News be applied to products?". Pando.