A Great Deal of Information About Hacker News | Vale.Rocks

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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<br>A positive vote for a post or comment.

Downvote<br>A negative vote for a comment. Posts cannot be downvoted.

Karma<br>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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024089). A leaderboard of the users with the most karma can be found at https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Parent<br>The item above the current item. Depending on context, it can reference the above post, comment, or user.

Grandparent<br>The parent of a parent.

OP<br>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<br>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<br>When conduct moves on from critique and discussion into attacks and anger.

Flamebait<br>Similiar in usage to the term ‘ragebait’. To flamebait is to intentionally stir angry retorts and unconstructive arguments rather than thoughtful discussion.

Shadowban/Hellban<br>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<br>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. 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.

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...