Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by Paul Graham's investment fund and startup incubator, Y Combinator. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".^[1]

The site was created by Paul Graham in February 2007.^[2] Initially it was called Startup News or occasionally News.YC. On August 14, 2007, it became known by its current name.^[3] It developed as a project of his company Y Combinator, functioning as a real-world application of the Arc programming language which Graham co-developed.^[4]

At the end of March 2014, Graham stepped away from his leadership role at Y Combinator, leaving Hacker News administration in the hands of other staff members.^[5][6]

In June 2019, Suhail Yazijy compiled the website's traffic since the beginning in 2007 (12 years) with annotations featuring major Hacker News posts and tech events.^[7]

The intention was to recreate a community similar to the early days of Reddit.^[2][8] However unlike Reddit where new users can immediately both up-vote and down-vote content, Hacker News does not allow users to down-vote content until they have accumulated 501 "karma" points. Karma points are calculated as the number of upvotes a given user's content has received minus the number of downvotes.^[2] "Flagging" comments, likewise, is not permitted until a user has 30 karma points.^[9]

Graham has stated he hopes to avoid the Eternal September that results in the general decline of intelligent discourse within a community.^[4] The site has a proactive attitude in moderating content, including automated flame and spam detectors. It also practices stealth banning in which user posts stop appearing for others to see, unbeknownst to the user.^[10] Additional software is employed to detect "voting rings to purposefully vote up stories".^[2]

According to a 2013 TechCrunch article: "Graham says that Hacker News gets a lot of complaints that it has a bias toward featuring stories about Y Combinator startups, but he says there is no such bias. [...] Graham adds that he gets a lot of vitriol from users personally with accusations of bias or censoring."^[2]