Hacker News Reader

I'm assuming you mean a 'www.news' subdomain. I'm not aware of any other Best practices used by webmasters to handle naive/new visitors.

Also, I don't know about the flexibility of news.yc's custom Arc webserver. I suppose it might be much more work than adding a new VHOST conf file.

A subdomain of 'news' in this context is everything that ends on news.ycombinator.com. That is what you are asking for.

Technically speaking ycombinator is a subdomain of com and news is a subdomain of ycombinator.com and so on.

www.news is not a valid subdomain name afaik, because it incorporates the separator in to the domain name.

So to make things work like you suggest a subdomain of news.ycombinator.com would have to be created.