Y Combinator's First Web Site | Hacker News Reader

Y Combinator's First Web Site

web.archive.org

65 pointsjohns16 comments

Ehy, "Hacker News" was "Startup News" at the time http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombi... . I didn't know, and thought that Russ Cox was joking here https://plus.google.com/116810148281701144465/posts/h95SSbSJ...

I remember there was a debate when the name changed.

"The Fourth Man wants to remain anonymous for now" lol makes you wonder how long that lasted :P

There was some speculation at the time about who it might be, but the explanation was simply that Jessica hadn't quit her job yet.

Incidentally, "The Fourth Man" was not an attempt to conceal her gender; it was a reference to the Guy Burgess spy ring.

Here's the HTML without the Wayback Machine addition in case anyone's interested:

https://gist.github.com/2053395

Thanks! I would've missed the little easter egg in there if not for you:

Looks almost identical to the website they have today.

A good news. This showed their consistency over time.

I barely see the difference. (And I like it.)

Not much different to today. I guess you can't improve on perfect!

Yes, perfection is a 50% chance of "unknown or expired link."

That just means you're browsing too slowly ;)

AIUI and as you've probably figured out when you Googled for the error message, Hacker News stores state in closures, and there's a finite amount of space for closures. So if you wait for a long time, then click e.g. "Next Page", the HN software has already garbage collected the closure storing the information necessary to generate your specific next page.

So have you read HN's website code? Do you know where to find it? It must be somewhere, since I remember seeing a sort of "Quant Finance News" website whose appearance was identical to HN. They must have used the same codebase -- where to look?

EDIT: that's the site using HN code: http://quant.ly/

http://arclanguage.org/

Yes, that's one of HN's biggest annoyances. When you consider HN's user experience (open article in new tab, read for five minutes, then return to HN tab) it's a misplaced 'feature'

That text is not small enough for my taste.

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