Hacker News In Uncompromised Detail

Hacker News is a popular news aggregator and web forum created and run by United States-based venture capital firm Y Combinator. The site officially launched on the 20th of February 2007 as ‘Startup News’. The idea of the site was for potential founders to establish themselves and become known to Y Combinator before they applied for funding and to bring back the atmosphere of Reddit (a Y Combinator-funded startup) when it first launched and before it became popular. The site was also partially a chance for Paul Graham to put to use the Arc language, a dialect of Lisp which he co-created with Robert Morris. A news app, known as news.arc was created to demonstrate the language and was used as the basis for Hacker News. News.arc does not use a conventional database, instead writing content as files into directories. In 2024, Hacker News moved from using Arc-on-Racket and instead embraced Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) via a compiler dubbed Clarc. In August 2007, the site rebranded from Startup News to Hacker News, as we know it today. This rebrand saw the expansion of topics from just startups to also including more general ‘hacker’ topics. ‘Hacker’ as used in the site’s name refers not to people who maliciously exploit systems, but to people who tinker with and explore technology, possibly using it in ways unintended by the creators – The Conscience of a Hacker (The Hacker Manifesto)-style. Terms & Jargon There is a decent amount of jargon on Hacker News. Many are standard forum colloquialisms, though there are also many phrases bespoke to the site. Upvote A positive vote for a post or comment.Downvote A negative vote for a comment. Posts cannot be downvoted.Karma A point value assigned to users based on the number of upvotes they’ve received minus the number of downvotes they’ve received (and some anti-abuse shenanigans). It is possible that stories also have a slightly different karma system. A leaderboard of the users with the most karma can be found at https://news.ycombinator.com/leadersParent The item above the current item. Depending on context, it can reference the above post, comment, or user.Grandparent The parent of a parent.OP Short for ‘Original Poster’. Usually refers to the person who posted a thread, though is sometimes also used to refer to the parent poster of a commenter.Hug of Death When a linked site falls offline due to the sudden influx of users from Hacker News. People will often follow up when a site has been hugged to death with an archive of the content.Flamewar When conduct moves on from critique and discussion into attacks and anger.Flamebait Similiar in usage to the term ‘ragebait’. To flamebait is to intentionally stir angry retorts and unconstructive arguments rather than thoughtful discussion.Shadowban/Hellban To ban a user without informing them they have been banned, such that their content is just not shown (or is shown less).news.yc Another way of referring to Hacker News, which references the site’s domain name of `news.ycombinator.com`. It is also a reference to ‘news.arc’. It is less commonly used now but was a popular way to refer to the site in its earlier days. Voting Posts can be upvoted by any user of the site. If a user submits a link post with the same link as another recent post, their post is not submitted separately and instead they’re counted as an upvote of the earlier post. Comments can be upvoted by any user, but only downvoted by users with over 500 karma. The lowest score a comment can have is -4,1 and comments cannot be downvoted more than 24 hours after their publication. Users also cannot downvote a comment if it is a direct reply to them. When a comment has a score in the negative, it becomes desaturated. To avoid flamewars, the display of comments is delayed more the more nested they become. Users with more than 30 karma can flag submissions, which has the effect of a more strongly weighted downvote. Flagging is intended to be used for cases where a submission breaks the site guidelines. Flagging has impact even before an item is noted in the interface as being flagged. Submissions marked as ‘dead’ have been designated as such by either Hacker News’ heuristics or by a moderator. They cannot be seen unless showdead is set to true on the viewing user’s account. In September 2015 it was made so that users with more than 30 karma can vouch for dead submissions, and enough vouches will unkill it. Submissions can be simultaneously both flagged and dead. Posts do not show as ‘[deleted]’ if flagged or killed. They only show as deleted if the post author removed it or if they asked a Hacker News moderator to remove it. Posting Any register user can post on Hacker News, provided that moderation actions haven’t been taken against them. The site has two main types of posts: link posts and text posts. Posts with a link in the link fields are considered link posts, and everything else is considered a text post, even if links are included in the post body. The most common style of text post is Ask HN, for asking Hacker News users questions. A format commonly used for both link and text posts is Show HN, for users showing off something they have created. Polls can also be created by users with over 500 karma, though people very rarely use the feature. It isn’t an official content type, but ‘Tell HN’ is often used for public service announcement-style posts. Post titles have a maximum length of 80 characters, and the guidelines outline they shouldn’t be editorialised unless it is misleading or linkbait. When submitting videos and PDFs, their title should be appended with ‘[video]’ or ‘[pdf]’, respectively. Titles for posts linking to content over a year old should also be appended with their publication year, for example ‘Big News (2020)’. If a user fails to do this when submitting, a site moderator will usually change it for them. Submissions can be edited by the post author within two hours of posting, but after that time they are unable to be changed. Submissions can be deleted within those two hours, but only if there have been no child comments to avoid discussion from being deleted. Submissions can be replied to within a fortnight of their publication but upvoted at any time. Ranking The Hacker News front page – especially a top spot – is a fairly major driver of traffic and discussion. Vale.Rocks has found itself featured there multiple times. The core ranking function (frontpage-rank) from the arc.news codebase was written as: (= gravity* 1.8 timebase* 120 front-threshold* 1 nourl-factor* .4 lightweight-factor* .3 ) (def frontpage-rank (s (o scorefn realscore) (o gravity gravity*)) (* (/ (let base (- (scorefn s) 1) (if (> base 0) (expt base .8) base)) (expt (/ (+ (item-age s) timebase*) 60) gravity)) (if (no (in s!type 'story 'poll)) .5 (blank s!url) nourl-factor* (lightweight s) (min lightweight-factor* (contro-factor s)) (contro-factor s)))) If PP = points and TT = time in hours, this works out to: Rank=(P−1)0.8(T+2)1.8\text{Rank} = \frac{(P - 1)^{0.8}}{(T + 2)^{1.8}} There are also further complexities in that original code to handle submissions with more nuance, but the main thing is that posts are presented based on the points they receive with a diminishing returns curve to avoid long-term domination of the front page. Text-only posts that do not have a URL are explicitly penalised. Additionally, tutorials are downranked by moderators, and there have historically been certain terms which have penalties associated with them. The algorithm shown above is a very simple approach, and the ranking system has become more complex with time to avoid gaming of the system. There is voting manipulation such that voting rings are thwarted. Sharing a link with other people or using alt accounts generally doesn’t work, nor does telling people to go to the newest page and upvote from there as a bypass. The exact details of Hacker News’ protection heuristics are not public, as making them so would allow them to be bypassed trivially, but they do seem to be effective. In addition to the standard front page, there is also a classic ranked page. It uses the same ranking algorithm as the front page, though only factors in votes from users who registered before the 13th of February, 2008. It was originally announced as being ‘ranked using only votes from accounts over a year old’. There are also a number of filtered lists for different post types. Hacker News is editorially independent from Y Combinator and has a policy of moderating ‘less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the topic.’. Y Combinator does, however, advertise batch applications in the site’s footer. Y Combinator-funded companies have the ability to post job advertisements on Hacker News, which appear at position 6 on the front page and have a fixed decay, and may also post Launch HN posts. There is a degree of randomness to what ends up on the front page. A post can be submitted at one time and see no activity, then submitted again at another time and go to #1 on the front page. A post can even be submitted multiple times and not see any success. Hacker News attempts to address this in a few ways to give links multiple chances at success. Articles aren’t considered duplicates if they haven’t seen significant attention and users are able to submit the same link multiple times. There is also the second-chance pool and invitations to resubmit posts. Second-Chance Pool & Invited Links Oftentimes Hacker News submissions will be overlooked, even if they are extremely good and of high quality. Moderators often notice these links and will frequently give them another chance. Users can also email the moderators to request that a submission be given a second-chance if one really deserves it.