Hacker News Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
80 free Hacker News trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Hacker News trivia quiz is for people who read the orange site: it covers HN itself (who built it, in what language, the karma you need to downvote, who dang is), Y Combinator (the founders, the batches, the standard deal, the SAFE, the presidents), Paul Graham's essays and companies, and the origin stories of the YC alumni that HN readers know by heart: Airbnb's cereal boxes, Drew Houston's forgotten USB stick, Instacart's late application and six-pack of beer, Reddit's rejected first idea, Coinbase's name, Twitch's spin-off from Justin.tv. It ends with the wider startup vocabulary: unicorns, Sand Hill Road, Slashdot, Digg and TechCrunch. If you want general tech questions, our tech trivia quiz is the broader page. The easy questions are ones any regular could answer half-asleep: which firm runs HN, who founded YC, what Airbnb's name is short for. Then it goes deep: how many karma points to flag, what the 2022 deal changed, which YC partner wrote the SAFE, who the tenth Palantir employee turned YC CEO is, and what YC did after a bug accepted 15,000 applicants. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry for the company or person before publishing, and the sentence that supports it is stored with each question. Because HN's own history is thinly documented outside a few sources, this page runs to 80 questions rather than 100.
30 of 80 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What kind of organisation runs Hacker News?
A startup accelerator
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.
Q 02Hacker News guidelines say a good submission is anything that gratifies what?
One's intellectual curiosity
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.
Q 03Hacker News was written in which programming language?
Arc
Arc is the language Paul Graham wrote with Robert Morris, and he built the site partly to have something real to sharpen it on.
Q 04On Hacker News, what does an account unlock once it reaches 501 karma?
Downvoting comments
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.
Q 05Which tag marks Hacker News posts that stay hidden unless you turn on a profile setting?
[dead]
[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.
Q 06Which Hacker News moderator posts under the username 'dang'?
Daniel Gackle
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.
Q 07What happens to the text of a Hacker News comment as it is downvoted?
It fades towards grey
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.
Q 08Hacker News was built to avoid which fate that befell Usenet?
Eternal September
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.
Q 09What can Hacker News users with enough karma do to revive a post they think was wrongly killed?
Vouch for it
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.
Q 10What is the practice of hiding a Hacker News user's posts from other readers without telling them?
Stealth banning
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.
Q 11What is Y Combinator's motto?
Make something people want
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.
Q 12The name Y Combinator comes from an idea in which field?
Computer science
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.
Q 13Until 2009, Y Combinator split its year between Mountain View and which other city?
Boston
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.
Q 21Who succeeded Sam Altman as YC president in 2019?
Geoff Ralston
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%.
Q 22What went wrong with applications to Y Combinator's Startup School in 2018?
A bug accepted all 15,000 applicants
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.
Q 23Which YC-backed cloud platform did Salesforce buy in 2010 for about $212 million?
Heroku
Q 14Which firm led a $2M investment in Y Combinator in 2009?
Sequoia Capital
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.
Q 15Which billionaire investor teamed up with SV Angel in 2011 to offer every new YC startup $150,000?
Yuri Milner
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.
Q 16Which charity became the first nonprofit Y Combinator ever funded, in 2013?
Watsi
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.
Q 17Sam Altman was in YC's very first batch as a founder of which company?
Loopt
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.
Q 18Which Twitch co-founder and former YC partner served briefly as OpenAI's interim chief in November 2023?
Emmett Shear
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.
Q 19Under Altman, YC's standard deal became $150,000 for what stake?
7%
The 7% figure survived the 2022 revamp.
Q 20Which investor was a part-time partner at YC from 2015 to 2017?
Peter Thiel
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.
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.
Q 24Who founded the self-driving car company Cruise in 2013?
Kyle Vogt
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.
Q 25Which former Baidu COO was named head of YC China in 2018?
Qi Lu
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.
Q 26Who wrote the SAFE, YC's Simple Agreement for Future Equity?
Carolynn Levy
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.
Q 27In 2018 YC replaced the original SAFE with which version?
Post-money
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.
Q 28Which Posterous co-founder and Palantir's tenth employee became YC's CEO in 2023?
Garry Tan
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.
Q 29The 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.
Q 30Which YC founding partner wrote 'Founders at Work', a 2007 book of startup interviews?
Jessica Livingston
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.