Hacker News
Type of site | News aggregator |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Y Combinator |
| Founder(s) | Paul Graham |
| URL | news |
| Registration | Free |
Hacker News is a social news website that caters to programmers and entrepreneurs, delivering content related to 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]
History
The site was created by Paul Graham in February 2007.[2] Initially it was called Startup News or occasionally News.YC. On August 14, 2007, it became known by its current name.[3] It developed as a project of his 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]
Vision, practices, and criticism
While the intention was to recreate a community similar to the early days of Reddit,[2][7] Hacker News differs in that there is no option to down vote submissions; submissions can either be voted up or not voted on at all, although spam submissions can be flagged. As of 2013[update], approximately 100 votes were need to promote a story to the site's front page.[2] Comments however can be down voted after a user accumulates 500[citation needed] "karma", which is computed as the "number of upvotes on a user’s submission and comments minus the number of downvotes."[2][clarification needed]
Graham has 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. It also practices hellbanning in which user posts stop appearing for others to see unbeknownst to the user.[8] Additional software is employed to detect "voting rings to purposefully vote up stories".[2]
According to a 2013 Tech Crunch 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]
After a thread defending Titstare was posted on Hacker News, Valleywag's Sam Biddle characterized Hacker News users as: "people who hope their Thing is the next Big Thing.... It's mostly men—the oblivious, money-hungry, self-righteous men of Northern California—and they didn't see anything wrong with Titstare. The rest of us were the problem." Biddle also wrote that the thread was ultimately "rendered invisible".[9]
See also
References
- ^ Graham, Paul. "Hacker News Guidelines". Retrieved 2009-04-29.
- ^ a b c d e f Leena Rao (May 18, 2013). "The Evolution of Hacker News". TechCrunch. Retrieved 10 August 2014.
- ^ "Startup News Becomes Hacker News".
- ^ 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.
- ^ Paul Graham. "New: Y Combinator Startup News".
- ^ http://pando.com/2013/12/04/can-the-democratic-power-of-a-platform-like-hacker-news-be-applied-to-products/
- ^ Biddle, Sam (9 September 2013). "Tech's Grossest Website Hits a New Low". Valleywag. Gawker. Retrieved 10 August 2014.