Hacker News
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Type of site | News aggregator |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Y Combinator |
| Founder(s) | Paul Graham, known as pg in the website |
| URL | news |
| Registration | Optional, required for posting |
| Launched | February 19, 2007 as Startup News |
| Current status | Online |
| Written in | Arc |
Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by Paul Graham's 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]
The word "hacker" in "Hacker News" refers to the original definition of white hat hackers, not black hat hackers (also known as crackers).[citation needed]
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 using the username dang, and Scott Bell.[7]
Vision and practices
The intention was to recreate a community similar to the early days of Reddit.[2][8] 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. The same FAQ, that lists this fact, also contains parts of moderation guidelines the team follows.[9] Moderators, currently 3, speak in the 1st person plural when they apply moderator actions.[10][11]
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.[12] 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
- ^ Graham, Paul. "Hacker News Guidelines". Retrieved 2019-07-04.
- ^ a b c d e Leena Rao (May 18, 2013). "The Evolution of Hacker News". TechCrunch. Retrieved 10 August 2014.
- ^ "Startup News Becomes Hacker News". Archived from the original on 2014-06-27.
- ^ a b Paul Graham. "What I've Learned from Hacker News".
- ^ Colleen Taylor (29 March 2014). "After Stepping Aside From Y Combinator, Paul Graham Hands Over The Reins At Hacker News". TechCrunch. Retrieved 10 August 2014.
- ^ Isaac, Mike (29 March 2014). "Paul Graham Steps Down From Daily Hacker News Duties". Re/code. Retrieved 10 August 2014.
- ^ Wiener, Anna (8 August 2019). "The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News". The New Yorker. Retrieved 15 January 2021.
- ^ Paul Graham. "New: Y Combinator Startup News". Archived from the original on 2014-06-25.
- ^ "Hacker News FAQ". Hacker News. Retrieved 1 March 2018.
- ^ "We banned the account that posted that, so I'm not sure what the complaint is. | Hacker News". Hacker News. Retrieved 2020-09-24.
- ^ "We banned the site and changed the link. Thanks wslh and dgritsko. | Hacker News". Hacker News. Retrieved 2020-09-24.
- ^ "Pando: Can the democratic power of a platform like Hacker News be applied to products?". Pando.
