Hacker News is a social news aggregator run by the startup accelerator Y Combinator, launched in 2007 and built by Paul Graham in his own Lisp dialect, Arc. In his essay on the site, Graham explains its modest origins: “Initially it was supposed to be a side project, an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news.” It quickly outgrew that purpose to become one of the most-read discussion sites for programmers, founders, and technology workers.
The site’s design is deliberately spare: a ranked list of links, each with a points count and a comment thread, and almost no graphics. Submissions rise and fall on a ranking algorithm driven by upvotes and time decay. Users accumulate karma from upvotes on their submissions and comments, a mechanic that, like Slashdot’s before it, ties a visible reputation number to participation.
Hacker News publishes its norms in a short guidelines page rather than a long rulebook. On topic, the guidelines say to submit “anything that good hackers would find interesting” and “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity,” while discouraging stories about politics, crime, sports, or celebrities unless they reveal some interesting new phenomenon. On conduct, they ask users to “reply to the argument instead of calling names” and not to use the site “for political or ideological battle,” an explicit attempt to suppress the flame wars that defined earlier forums.
A signature convention is the “Show HN” post. The dedicated page defines the category plainly: “Show HN is for something you’ve made that other people can play with.” It became a recognizable ritual for launching side projects, open-source tools, and early startups, with the author expected to be present in the thread to answer questions. The companion “Ask HN” format serves the same community for open questions.
Moderation on Hacker News combines software and a small human staff. Automated systems penalize flamebait and detect voting rings, while moderators can demote or detach off-topic subthreads. The culture that resulted is admired for high signal and technical depth and criticized for contrarianism and pile-ons, but it has remained, for nearly two decades, a central gathering place for the programming world and a barometer of what that world finds interesting.