Hacker News (sometimes abbreviated as HN) is a

social news website A social news website is a website that features user-posted stories. Such stories are ranked based on popularity, as voted on by other users of the site or by website administrators. Users typically comment online on the news posts and these comme ...

focusing on

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

and

entrepreneurship Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values t ...

. It is run by the investment fund and startup incubator

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, St ...

. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." The word ''

hacker A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means. Though the term ''hacker'' has become associated in popu ...

'' in "Hacker News" is used in its original meaning and refers to the

hacker culture The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy—often in collective effort—the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software systems or electronic hardware (mostly digital electronics), to a ...

which consists of people who enjoy tinkering with technology.

History

The site was created by Paul Graham in February 2007. Initially called Startup News or occasionally News.YC., it became known by its current name on August 14, 2007. It developed as a project of Graham's company

, 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. The site is currently moderated by Daniel Gackle who posts under the username ''dang''. 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 Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, imag ...

. 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 Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning and comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not ...

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".

Criticism

According to a 2013

TechCrunch TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare. In 2010, AOL acquired the company for approximately $ ...

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

External links

* {{Y Combinator American news websites Social bookmarking News aggregators Computing websites Internet properties established in 2007 Y Combinator companies

History

Vision and practices

Criticism

See also

References

External links