Can Y Combinator buy the domain hackernews.com? | Hacker News Reader

Can Y Combinator buy the domain hackernews.com?

25 pointsaml18351 comments

Why has YC never purchased hackernews.com. I always accidentally go to hackernews.com. It would great if they just purchased it. What does the community think?

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This is hacker news dude. Just edit your /etc/hosts file.

This is probably the best answer I've heard. It's so obviously simple and true to the culture of this site.

that's lying to yourself :p

or defining your own reality :p

Space Rogue has owned and used hackernews.com since before Paul Graham had even sold Viaweb to Yahoo. I think maybe we should let him keep it.

Pretty sure it's not a matter of letting him keep at. I don't think selling would be consistent with L0pht's ethos.

L0pht was always for-profit :)

Exactly! Just because aml183 thinks of this site as "hacker news", that doesn't mean everyone on the internet should.

From my perspective it's about 1/3 "hacker" news, 1/3 startup/tech news and 1/3 mainstream liberal politics.

Maybe we should ask Microsoft.

"n" + enter is all I need.

ditto

And now you're making posts, too. Down the rabbit hole you go!

Same here, in fact it's an ongoing trade off between news.google.com and news.ycombinator.com in my browser's address bar.

I think the percentage of people who physically type in the url is miniscule.

I type it in. Though usually (sad, maybe) just typing "n" is enough.

I type it all when I come to a browser I've never used before ... and then it's always a few seconds of "wait, what was the domain again? was it .net or .com or .org?"

Yep, usually "new" is all I get before it's near the top of the list. Sometimes I even use the "bookmarks" menu, but that's pretty rare.

http://hackerne.ws works.

It is nice of YC to host Hacker News at all (I mean, it makes sense for business reasons and all), but I don't think it's fair to expect them to pay for a hefty domain name purchase on top of already providing a free service.

pg could probably pay for it with the change in his couch cushions, so I doubt cost would be much of a issue.

Although, the YC staff might consider the influx of new users to be counterproductive, and also the current url does have 'ycombinator' in it.

But in any case, first come, first serve. Just ask Nissan Motors. Or whoever owns nissan.com

Wouldn't that money be better spent going to a charity or a startup?

Probably. As an investment, I don't think the domain has much value for them since Hacker News isn't their brand, it's just the name of the forum.

But I don't think getting the money would be an issue - though I guess a lot depends on how much the domain is actually worth, and whether they planned to do something crazy like add paid accounts to take advantage of the higher visibility.

There the unfounded assumption that the old domain owner will spend the vast stacks of cash on the proverbial "blackjack and hookers" and waste all the rest, instead of spending it on charity and startups.

Spending money on "blackjack and hookers" is a better spending of money than a domain name. It would be more fun at least.

Eh, who here wouldn't trade that away to post on hacker news...

Notice that Hacker News is kind of hard to find and use in a number of ways. Once I'd heard of it, it took me a little while to actually find the forum, figure out how it works and how to create an account. Slightly annoying, but I tend to think now that it's better this way - it probably encourages high-level discussion and discourages trolling and lame jokes by making it so that low-effort commentators will get tired of trying to figure it out and go to Reddit or something instead.

I suspect it's that it's a hefty price tag for a simple website that doesn't directly generate revenue.

Two companies in their portfolios are worth $10B+. I am aware their equity portions are still very small, but I would be surprised if they didn't have the money to afford it.

Many of the YC partners are themselves independently wealthy. Regardless, the domain seems like good branding for YC. Removing the "ycombinator.com" from the address would lessen the connection for new users.

Exactly - the branding is to ycombinator, not just news to hackers.

I doubt it's for sale.

Having money doesn't necessarily mean you frivolously spend money.

I use http://hackerne.ws which works well too.

It's nice as it is. Also I believe YC people see it as some sort of brand (and even ad).

Interesting enough the most popular news clone of HN - designer news has a similar domain ... news.la????????.com .

That's classic example of "Content is king" principle and how domain names might be irrelevant if you have enough popularity.

Ironic, given the number of YCombinator startups with "Get", "Try", "The", "App", etc prefixes and suffixes in their domain name, to say nothing of the various TLDs like .io, .ly, .co, .es, etc.

I use hckrnews.com, which is a much more convenient version for me. I even wrote a bookmarklet so I can use it on my iPad while the links still point to hn.algolia.com (which is my preferred tablet experience).

Space Rogue (of L0pht fame) owns hackernews.com and (at least, up to a few years ago) publicly pondered reviving Hacker News Network, his old infosec news website, which was immensely popular back in the day.

what for? nobody types it in, and it's probably in the hundreds of thousands. And keeping it on a subdomain probably keeps away a lot of idiots.

How does using a subdomain keep away the idiots? Would some people try to go to www.news.ycombinator.com?

they keep trying to go to hackernews.com because sombody told them about ¨hacker news", and lose interest once they get there and dont find it there.

Keeps away idiots?! You clearly haven't been here long.

hmm, you clearly haven't been on reddit. haha

Am I the only person who uses hackerne.ws?

Besides one other commenter, looks like it. I never knew! But then again, I typically type it like twice a year, the rest of the time n+enter does the job.

I use http://hckrnews.com/

Just two letters short...

Vimium: type b to search bookmarks (or shift+b for new tab), and then h to bring up Hacker News

I always type hckrnews.com (but it is an alternative front page design)

a lot of people I imagine don't actually go to news.ycombinator... I always go to hckrnews.com instead--much better interface imho.

badhell12335@gmail.com

Nice Try.

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