80 Fun Facts About Hacker News

What kind of organisation runs Hacker News?

A startup accelerator, Y Combinator, launched the site in 2007 partly so that it could get to know would-be founders through their posts before they applied for funding.

Hacker News guidelines say a good submission is anything that gratifies what?

One's intellectual curiosity is the test Paul Graham set in 2007; the guidelines add that if TV news would cover a story, it is probably off-topic.

Hacker News was written in which programming language?

Arc is the language Paul Graham wrote with Robert Morris, and he built the site partly to have something real to sharpen it on.

On Hacker News, what does an account unlock once it reaches 501 karma?

Downvoting comments unlocks at 501 karma, though never on direct replies to your own posts; stories have no down arrows at all and can only be flagged.

Which tag marks Hacker News posts that stay hidden unless you turn on a profile setting?

[dead] posts were killed by software, moderators or user flags and vanish unless you enable showdead in your profile; [deleted] posts, by contrast, stay gone even then.

Which Hacker News moderator posts under the username 'dang'?

Daniel Gackle took charge of the community in 2014 when Paul Graham stepped back from the site, having already been doing most of its moderation.

What happens to the text of a Hacker News comment as it is downvoted?

It fades towards grey the lower its score falls; clicking the comment's timestamp opens it on its own page, where the text can be read at full strength.

Hacker News was built to avoid which fate that befell Usenet?

Eternal September dates from 1993, when internet providers opened Usenet to the public and the usual autumn wave of new students never ebbed; Graham had watched Reddit's hacker culture thin out the same way.

What can Hacker News users with enough karma do to revive a post they think was wrongly killed?

Vouch for it: a 'vouch' link sits beside 'flag', and when enough users click it the software restores the post, a fix for good comments caught by bans and filters.

What is the practice of hiding a Hacker News user's posts from other readers without telling them?

Stealth banning, nicknamed hellbanning, works by silence: a troll who is never told keeps posting to no one and, the theory goes, gets bored and leaves instead of returning under a fresh name.

What is Y Combinator's motto?

Make something people want was coined about a month after YC began; Graham later noticed that, paired with not worrying too much about money, it also describes a charity.

The name Y Combinator comes from an idea in which field?

Computer science has a Y combinator, a function that runs other functions; the founders liked the parallel with a company that helps start other companies.

Until 2009, Y Combinator split its year between Mountain View and which other city?

Boston, or strictly Cambridge across the river, hosted the summer batches until 2009; Graham said the move had nothing to do with startups: his first child was due, and Silicon Valley seemed the better place to raise kids.

Which firm led a $2M investment in Y Combinator in 2009?

Sequoia Capital led a $2 million investment in Y Combinator in 2009 so it could fund more startups per batch, then led an $8.25 million round in 2010.

Which billionaire investor teamed up with SV Angel in 2011 to offer every new YC startup $150,000?

Yuri Milner's Start Fund offered each startup a $150,000 convertible note with no cap and no discount, and about 90% of the batch had accepted by the next day.

Which charity became the first nonprofit Y Combinator ever funded, in 2013?

Watsi, which crowdfunds medical treatment for patients in poor countries, joined the Winter 2013 batch as an experiment; that September YC opened its applications to nonprofits generally.

Sam Altman was in YC's very first batch as a founder of which company?

Loopt, an app for sharing your location with friends, was one of the eight startups in YC's first batch in 2005; Altman left university at 19 to build it.

Which Twitch co-founder and former YC partner served briefly as OpenAI's interim chief in November 2023?

Emmett Shear was named OpenAI's interim chief after the board fired Sam Altman; within days nearly all of the staff threatened to quit, and Altman was reinstated.

Under Altman, YC's standard deal became $150,000 for what stake?

The 7% figure survived the 2022 revamp.

Which investor was a part-time partner at YC from 2015 to 2017?

Peter Thiel joined as one of ten part-time partners in March 2015; to avoid an unfair edge, he agreed not to invest in any YC startup until three months after its Demo Day.

Who succeeded Sam Altman as YC president in 2019?

Geoff Ralston took over in 2019 after Sam Altman stepped down; under him YC's batches swelled past 400 startups, until the summer 2022 intake was deliberately cut by 40%.

What went wrong with applications to Y Combinator's Startup School in 2018?

A bug accepted all 15,000 applicants by email, and hours later YC took the surprise acceptances back; after the outcry, it simply let everyone in.

Which YC-backed cloud platform did Salesforce buy in 2010 for about $212 million?

Heroku, from YC's Winter 2008 batch, began as a host for Ruby apps; after the sale it hired the language's creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto, as its chief architect.

Who founded the self-driving car company Cruise in 2013?

Kyle Vogt, who had earlier helped build Twitch, led Cruise until November 2023, when he resigned after California suspended the company's driverless permits over a pedestrian collision.

Which former Baidu COO was named head of YC China in 2018?

Qi Lu left Baidu, where he was chief operating officer, and took charge of YC China in August 2018; YC closed the unit in November 2019 and Lu carried on independently as MiraclePlus.

Who wrote the SAFE, YC's Simple Agreement for Future Equity?

Carolynn Levy, a YC partner, wrote the SAFE in 2013 to replace convertible notes: it is not a loan, so there is no interest to pay and no maturity date hanging over the founders.

In 2018 YC replaced the original SAFE with which version?

The post-money SAFE, introduced in 2018, fixes the investor's ownership percentage at signing, instead of leaving it to be diluted by later SAFEs at conversion.

Which Posterous co-founder and Palantir's tenth employee became YC's CEO in 2023?

Garry Tan joined YC in 2011 as a designer in residence, built the venture firm Initialized Capital into an early backer of Coinbase and Instacart, then took over as YC's chief in January 2023.

The blogging startup Posterous was bought by which company in 2012?

Twitter bought Posterous in 2012 and shut the service down the following April; one of its founders then co-founded a successor, Posthaven.

Which YC founding partner wrote 'Founders at Work', a 2007 book of startup interviews?

Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work collects her interviews with founders such as Steve Wozniak; she was working at an investment bank when she and Paul Graham hatched the plan for Y Combinator.

Robert Morris released his worm from which university, to disguise its origin?

MIT was only a decoy: Morris was a Cornell graduate student, was convicted under the then-new Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and years later joined MIT's faculty as a professor.

YC co-founder Trevor Blackwell founded which humanoid-robot company?

Anybots, which Trevor Blackwell started in 2001, built Dexter, a two-legged humanoid designed to learn walking and jumping by balancing dynamically, as a person does.

Which 1995 startup did Paul Graham co-found to let merchants build online stores in a browser?

Viaweb ran entirely on its own servers, so shopkeepers needed nothing but a browser, which is why Graham calls it the first software-as-a-service company.

Which company bought Paul Graham's online-store startup in 1998 for about $49 million in stock?

Yahoo paid 455,000 of its own shares and renamed the product Yahoo Store; Graham left the company the following year.

Graham's online-store startup was written mostly in which language?

Common Lisp let the team add features faster than rivals writing in C++ could copy them; Graham's essay 'Beating the Averages' calls the language their secret weapon.

What is the name of the hypothetical language in Graham's essay 'Beating the Averages'?

Blub sits midway up Graham's scale of language power: its programmers can see what weaker languages lack, but stronger ones just look weird to them, a trap he named the Blub paradox.

Which publisher put out Graham's essay collection 'Hackers & Painters'?

O'Reilly Media published Hackers & Painters in 2004; its title essay argues that programmers and painters are alike because both are, above all, makers.

Paul Graham's 2002 essay 'A Plan for Spam' popularised which technique for catching junk email?

Bayesian filtering scores a message by how often each of its words has appeared in spam, so the filter learns from the user's own mail instead of relying on hand-written rules.

Paul Graham built his career in America, but where was he born?

Weymouth, England, is on the Dorset coast; Graham, a British citizen by birth, moved his own family back to England in 2016 for what was meant to be a single year.

Paul Graham studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and at an academy in which Italian city?

Florence's Accademia di Belle Arti followed his doctorate; he turned to painting, he wrote, because software goes out of date while paintings last for centuries.

The 2005 student talk by Paul Graham that led to YC was later published under what title?

How to Start a Startup urged founders to seek money from people who had built companies; Graham realised afterwards that he had never made such investments himself, and days later YC was born.

Sam Altman dropped out of which university to start his first company?

Stanford lost him in 2005, two years into a degree he never finished; nine years later he was running Y Combinator, which had funded that first startup.

Which company bought Loopt in March 2012?

Green Dot, the prepaid-card company, bought Loopt for $43.4 million in March 2012 after the location-sharing app failed to gain traction.

What colour is the bar across the top of Hacker News?

Orange (#ff6600) is only the default: once an account has earned a few hundred karma, a profile setting lets its owner repaint the top bar any colour they like.

What does a green username on Hacker News signify?

A new account shows in green; YC founders get a marker too, since their usernames appear in a special colour, though only to one another.

Airbnb began in 2007 when its founders rented air mattresses to visitors attending what in San Francisco?

A design conference had left the city's hotels fully booked, so Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, struggling with their rent, laid air mattresses on their floor and served the guests breakfast.

How did Airbnb's founders pay down their debts before joining YC in 2009?

Selling election-themed cereal: during the 2008 campaign they repackaged ordinary cereal as Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's, and the proceeds cleared most of what they owed.

What did Drew Houston keep forgetting, inspiring Dropbox?

His USB flash drive kept getting left behind while he was a student; his 2007 Y Combinator application, posted on Hacker News, was titled 'Throw away your USB drive'.

Hacker News launched its official API in 2014 in partnership with which real-time database company?

Firebase, itself a YC company from the Summer 2011 batch, serves the data in near real time; until then, developers had to scrape the site's pages to build readers and apps.

How much free storage does a basic Dropbox account start with, as of 2026?

2 GB is all a free Basic account starts with; rather than raise that floor, Dropbox hands out extra space to users who refer their friends.

The Collison brothers who founded Stripe come from which country?

Ireland: Patrick and John Collison grew up in rural County Tipperary; Patrick won the national Young Scientist prize at 16, and the brothers sold their first startup for $5 million while still teenagers.

What was Reddit's founders' rejected first idea for YC?

Huffman and Ohanian pitched My Mobile Menu, for ordering food by text message; Graham rejected it, then called them back to build something else, which became Reddit.

Which Reddit co-founder returned as CEO in 2015 and led its 2024 IPO?

Steve Huffman came back as Reddit's CEO in July 2015 after Ellen Pao resigned, and was still chief executive when Reddit listed on the NYSE in March 2024.

Where were Reddit founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian college roommates?

University of Virginia seniors Huffman and Ohanian spent spring break 2005 driving north to hear Paul Graham lecture; he talked with them afterwards and invited them to apply to Y Combinator.

Which publisher bought Reddit in October 2006?

Condé Nast bought Reddit in October 2006 for a reported $10 to $20 million, and the team moved to San Francisco.

Robert Morris, who wrote the 1988 internet worm, was the son of a chief scientist at which agency?

The NSA employed his father, also named Robert Morris, as chief scientist of its computer security centre, so the worm's author was the son of one of the government's top security experts.

Aaron Swartz's company that merged with Reddit was called what?

Infogami, Swartz's site-building startup from YC's first batch, merged with Reddit in November 2005; at 14 he had already helped write the RSS 1.0 specification.

Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong had been an engineer at which YC alumnus before 2012?

The home-rental marketplace Airbnb hired Armstrong as an engineer in 2011, where he worked with payment systems across the 190 countries it served before leaving to found Coinbase the next year.

Which monthly Hacker News thread lets companies post job openings?

Who is hiring? appears on the first weekday of each month, and only an account named whoishiring may submit it, a rule that stops users racing to post the thread first.

DoorDash began as a simple website with what name?

PaloAltoDelivery.com was built by university classmates Tony Xu, Andy Fang, Stanley Tang and Evan Moore; in the early days Xu and his colleagues made the deliveries themselves.

What is Instacart's legal corporate name?

Maplebear Inc. is still the name on Instacart's stock filings; founder Apoorva Mehta missed YC's 2012 deadline and won a late hearing by using his own app to send a partner a six-pack of beer.

Twitch was spun off in 2011 from which general-interest streaming site?

Justin.tv co-founder Justin Kan had 'lifecast' his whole life from a webcam on a hat; the general-interest platform spun off Twitch in June 2011.

Which company bought Twitch in 2014 for about $970 million?

Amazon closed the deal in August 2014, the same month Twitch's older sister site was shut down so that the company could concentrate on gaming.

Cruise, the self-driving company from YC, was acquired by which carmaker in 2016?

General Motors bought Cruise in March 2016 and made it the core of its self-driving effort, then stopped funding the robotaxis in December 2024 and folded the work into its driver-assistance systems.

Which YC partner created Gmail and suggested 'Don't be evil' as Google's motto?

Paul Buchheit, Google's 23rd employee, created Gmail and suggested the motto; his idea of showing ads beside emails also produced the first prototype of AdSense.

Who coined the term 'unicorn' for a $1 billion startup, in 2013?

Aileen Lee picked the mythical animal for its rarity: her November 2013 TechCrunch post found just 39 US software startups from the previous decade valued at $1 billion or more.

Which prefix marks a Hacker News post sharing something the poster built?

Show HN is for things people can try out, such as an app or a tool, so blog posts and sign-up pages don't qualify; plain questions belong under Ask HN instead.

Which Silicon Valley street is a metonym for venture capital?

Sand Hill Road became the address of venture capital after Kleiner Perkins opened the first such office there in 1972 and rival firms clustered around it.

Which social news site billed itself as 'News for Nerds'?

Slashdot, founded in 1997 by student Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda, drew so many readers that small sites it linked to often buckled under the sudden traffic.

Who founded TechCrunch in June 2005?

Michael Arrington started TechCrunch in June 2005 as a blog about new web companies; five years later AOL bought it for about $25 million.

Product Hunt, whose voting system resembles Hacker News, was founded by whom in 2013?

Ryan Hoover launched Product Hunt in November 2013; it raised money from Andreessen Horowitz and was bought by AngelList in 2016 for about $20 million.

Techstars, a rival to Y Combinator, was founded in 2006 in which city?

Boulder, Colorado, is where David Cohen, Brad Feld, David Brown and Jared Polis started it; Polis later became the state's governor.

Which kind of post on the Hacker News front page is reserved for YC-funded startups?

Job ads from YC startups sit partway down the front page with no vote arrows, points or comments and slide steadily off it; other employers must use a separate monthly thread.

What was Hacker News called when Paul Graham launched it in February 2007?

Startup News lasted six months: in August 2007 Graham widened the focus and renamed it, admitting that he and his colleagues were getting bored of stories about nothing but startups.

Hacker News announced a second public moderator in April 2025; which username does he post under?

tomhow is Tom Howard, a YC batchmate of dang's from 2009 who had been doing moderation work for years before he was introduced in a 'Tell HN' post.

How did the founders of Kiko, a calendar app from YC's first batch, sell the company in 2006?

In an eBay auction: the founders listed the whole company, the bidding reached $258,100, enough to pay back their investors, and their next startup grew into Twitch.

What was Rob Malda aiming for when he named Slashdot?

A silly, unpronounceable URL was the whole joke: read aloud, the address comes out as 'h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slashdot-dot-org'.

The social-feed startup FriendFeed, co-founded by a future YC partner, was bought in 2009 by which company?

Facebook bought FriendFeed in August 2009; the smaller site's 'like' button, launched two years earlier, had already found its way onto Facebook.

Which magazine profiled Hacker News in 2019 under the headline 'The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News'?

The New Yorker's Anna Wiener found two wildly polite moderators who coach readers in long email exchanges and treat moderation as a conversation, not a purge.

Who joined Digg founder Kevin Rose to buy the site back in 2025?

Alexis Ohanian co-founded Reddit, the rival that drew away Digg's users after 2010; in March 2025 he and Rose bought the site and relaunched its voting-based news feed.