90 Fun Facts About Hacker News

What kind of organisation runs Hacker News?

Y Combinator, launched in 2005, is also a venture capital firm.

In which year was Hacker News created?

Paul Graham built it that February as a test of his Arc language; it was first called Startup News.

Hacker News was written in which programming language?

Arc is a Lisp dialect co-developed by Paul Graham and Robert Morris.

How many karma points does a Hacker News user need before they can downvote?

Flagging comments needs only 30.

How many karma points are needed to flag a comment on Hacker News?

Karma is upvotes minus downvotes on your content.

Which Hacker News moderator posts under the username 'dang'?

Tom Howard, as tomhow, moderates alongside him.

Which co-moderator worked with dang until 2019 under the username 'sctb'?

He stopped working on the site that year.

What did Paul Graham say Hacker News hopes to avoid?

The term describes the decline of discourse when a flood of newcomers arrives.

Which community did Hacker News set out to recreate?

Unlike Reddit, new users cannot downvote at all.

What practice does Hacker News use, in which a banned user's posts silently stop appearing?

It also runs software to detect voting rings.

According to the site, what can be submitted to Hacker News?

'Hacker' is used in its original tinkering sense.

In what month and year was Y Combinator launched?

It has since been used to launch more than 5,000 companies.

Who were the four founders of Y Combinator?

Graham, Morris and Blackwell had built Viaweb together.

Y Combinator originally ran parallel programs in Mountain View and which other city?

The Cambridge, Massachusetts program was closed in January 2009.

In which year did Y Combinator relocate to San Francisco?

The summer 2020 batch was then run entirely remotely.

Which firm led a $2M investment in Y Combinator in 2009?

It followed up with $8.25 million in 2010.

In 2011, Yuri Milner and SV Angel offered every YC company how much in convertible notes?

The Start Fund amount was later cut to $80,000.

Who was the first non-founder partner at Y Combinator, joining in 2010?

He later co-founded Triplebyte and returned as a group partner in 2020.

Which nonprofit did YC use to test funding nonprofits, before opening the door in 2013?

Its Startup School followed in 2017.

Sam Altman was in YC's very first batch as a founder of which company?

Green Dot bought Loopt in 2012 for $43.4 million.

In which year did Paul Graham appoint Sam Altman president of Y Combinator?

Altman changed the deal to $150,000 for 7%.

Under Altman, YC's standard deal became $150,000 for what stake?

The 7% figure survived the 2022 revamp.

Which investor served as a visiting partner at YC from 2015 to 2017?

That was under Altman's presidency.

Who succeeded Sam Altman as YC president in 2019?

He had created Yahoo! Mail in 1997.

What went wrong with Startup School applications in 2018?

After the outcry, YC accepted all 15,000 anyway.

YC's revised January 2022 standard deal totalled how much?

$125,000 for 7% plus $375,000 on an uncapped SAFE with an MFN clause.

By how much did YC cut its summer 2022 intake?

From 414 companies down to 250.

Which former Bing and Baidu CEO briefly ran YC China in 2018?

The same year YC announced new startup schools.

Who wrote the SAFE, YC's Simple Agreement for Future Equity?

YC released it in late 2013 as an alternative to convertible notes.

In 2018 YC replaced the original SAFE with which version?

The investor's ownership percentage is set at signing rather than at conversion.

Which Posterous co-founder and Palantir's tenth employee became YC's CEO in 2023?

He also founded Initialized Capital and wrote Coinbase's first seed cheque.

Garry Tan's blogging startup Posterous was bought by which company in 2012?

For $20 million; he then co-founded Posthaven.

Which YC founding partner wrote 'Founders at Work', a 2007 book of startup interviews?

She and Graham hosted weekly dinners for early founders at their Cambridge home.

YC co-founder Robert Tappan Morris is best known for creating what in 1988?

He became the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Robert Morris released his worm from which university, to disguise its origin?

He was actually a PhD student at Cornell.

YC co-founder Trevor Blackwell founded which humanoid-robot company?

He had written Viaweb's image rendering and order software.

What was Paul Graham's 1995 startup, arguably the first web application, called?

It was originally called Webgen, until another company turned out to have the name.

Graham's online-store startup was sold to Yahoo in 1998 for stock worth about how much?

455,000 Yahoo shares; the product became Yahoo! Store.

Graham's online-store startup was written mostly in which language?

Graham's essay 'Beating the Averages' argues that Lisp was the secret weapon.

What is the name of the hypothetical language in Graham's essay 'Beating the Averages'?

A Blub programmer cannot see what more powerful languages offer.

Which publisher put out Graham's essay collection 'Hackers & Painters'?

The cover is Bruegel's Tower of Babel.

Paul Graham announced Arc in 2001; when was it finally released?

29 January 2008; it was originally written in Racket.

Where was Paul Graham born?

He has kept a permanent home in England since 2016.

Besides computer science, what did Paul Graham study at RISD and in Florence?

His Cornell degree was in philosophy; his Harvard PhD in computer science.

The Harvard talk that led to YC was later published under what title?

He gave it to the Harvard Computer Society in 2005.

Sam Altman dropped out of which university to co-found Loopt?

He was 19 and had studied computer science for two years.

Which company bought Loopt in March 2012?

For $43.4 million, after the app failed to gain traction.

How many days passed between Sam Altman's 2023 ousting from OpenAI and his reinstatement?

Employees and investors revolted, and a new board was formed.

Which Twitch co-founder was briefly interim CEO of OpenAI in November 2023?

He was Twitch's CEO until March 2023.

What is Airbnb's name short for?

The founders rented air mattresses in their San Francisco living room during a design conference.

How did Airbnb's founders raise $30,000 before joining YC in 2009?

Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's, mostly at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Why did Airbedandbreakfast.com shorten its name to Airbnb in March 2009?

By then it had 10,000 users and 2,500 listings.

What did Drew Houston keep forgetting, inspiring Dropbox?

He was an MIT student at the time.

Under what company name did Houston found Dropbox in May 2007?

YC seed funding followed shortly after.

How much free storage did Dropbox offer when it launched in 2008?

Basic accounts still started at 2 GB years later; the service launched publicly at TechCrunch50 in 2008.

The Collison brothers who founded Stripe come from which country?

Patrick won Ireland's Young Scientist exhibition at 16.

Stripe is dual-headquartered in Dublin and which Californian city?

It moved to Oyster Point in 2021.

Which two PayPal-linked figures were among Stripe's 2011 investors?

Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and SV Angel joined the $2 million round.

What was Reddit's founders' rejected first idea for YC?

My Mobile Menu flopped; the 'front page of the Internet' came from a brainstorm.

Reddit was originally coded in which language?

Aaron Swartz later helped rewrite it in Python using web.py.

Where were Reddit founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian college roommates?

They met Paul Graham at a lecture in Boston during spring break.

Which publisher bought Reddit in October 2006?

For a reported $10 to $20 million; the team moved to San Francisco.

Under what ticker did Reddit list in March 2024?

Its market cap was about $10 billion by July 2024.

Aaron Swartz's company that merged with Reddit was called what?

He helped develop RSS, Creative Commons and Markdown too.

Coinbase is named after what?

Brian Armstrong got $150,000 from YC in 2012.

Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong had been an engineer at which YC alumnus before 2012?

Co-founder Fred Ehrsam, a Goldman trader, found him through his Reddit posts.

As of 2025, where is Coinbase headquartered?

It is the largest US crypto exchange.

DoorDash began in 2013 as a site with what name?

YC put in $120,000 for 7% that summer.

How did Instacart's Apoorva Mehta get a YC meeting after missing the deadline?

He used the app itself, from 21st Amendment Brewery.

What is Instacart's legal corporate name?

Mehta founded it at 26, having grown up taking the bus to the shops in Canada.

Twitch was spun off in 2011 from which general-interest streaming site?

Justin Kan had 'lifecast' his whole life from a webcam on a hat.

Amazon bought Twitch in 2014 for how much?

Justin.tv itself was shut down that August.

Cruise, the self-driving company from YC, was acquired by which carmaker in 2016?

GM stopped funding it in December 2024.

Which YC partner created Gmail and suggested 'Don't be evil' as Google's motto?

He was Google's 23rd employee.

Who coined the term 'unicorn' for a $1 billion startup, in 2013?

There were 39 of them at the time; CB Insights counted 1,248 by 2024.

What is a private company valued at over $10 billion sometimes called?

Over $100 billion, it is a hectocorn.

Which Silicon Valley street is a metonym for venture capital?

It runs through Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Woodside.

Which social news site billed itself 'News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters'?

Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda founded it in 1997.

What happened to Digg after its poorly received 2010 redesign?

Kevin Rose sold it to Betaworks in 2012 and bought it back in 2025.

Who founded TechCrunch in June 2005?

AOL bought it in 2010 for about $25 million.

Product Hunt, whose voting system resembles Hacker News, was founded by whom in 2013?

It is now owned by AngelList.

Techstars, YC's accelerator rival, was founded in 2006 in which city?

Its first program in 2007 had ten companies.

What is the 'hug of death', when a small site collapses under sudden traffic, also called?

It is also called the hug of death.

What did Paul Graham originally call the site he launched in February 2007?

Occasionally styled News.YC, it took its current name on August 14, 2007.

Which moderator posts on Hacker News under the username 'tomhow'?

He moderates alongside Daniel Gackle, better known as dang.

What was the name of Rob Malda's personal website that preceded Slashdot in October 1997?

Malda, known as CmdrTaco, was then a computer science student at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.

What was Rob Malda going for when he registered the Slashdot domain?

Try saying h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slashdot-dot-org out loud, as he put it.

To which Linux site was Slashdot sold in June 1999 for $1.5 million cash plus stock?

Andover.net merged with VA Linux in 2000, later becoming SourceForge, Inc. and then Geeknet.

For how much did Betaworks buy the Digg brand, website and technology in July 2012?

Fifteen staff went to The Washington Post for $12 million and the patents to LinkedIn in a three-part sale.

With which Reddit co-founder did Kevin Rose repurchase Digg in 2025?

The reboot restored digging and burying under the tagline 'The front page of the internet, now with superpowers.'