90 free Hacker News trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Hacker News trivia quiz is for people who read the orange site: it covers HN itself (who built it, in what language, the karma you need to downvote, who dang is), Y Combinator (the founders, the batches, the standard deal, the SAFE, the presidents), Paul Graham's essays and companies, and the origin stories of the YC alumni that HN readers know by heart: Airbnb's cereal boxes, Drew Houston's forgotten USB stick, Instacart's late application and six-pack of beer, Reddit's rejected first idea, Coinbase's name, Twitch's spin-off from Justin.tv. It ends with the wider startup vocabulary: unicorns, Sand Hill Road, Slashdot, Digg and TechCrunch. If you want general tech questions, our tech trivia quiz is the broader page. The easy questions are ones any regular could answer half-asleep: which firm runs HN, who founded YC, what Airbnb's name is short for. Then it goes deep: how many karma points to flag, what the 2022 deal changed, which YC partner wrote the SAFE, who the tenth Palantir employee turned YC CEO is, and what YC did after a bug accepted 15,000 applicants. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry for the company or person before publishing, and the sentence that supports it is stored with each question. Because HN's own history is thinly documented outside a few sources, this page runs to 90 questions rather than 100.
30 of 90 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What kind of organisation runs Hacker News?
A startup accelerator
Y Combinator, launched in 2005, is also a venture capital firm.
Q 02In which year was Hacker News created?
2007
Paul Graham built it that February as a test of his Arc language; it was first called Startup News.
Q 03Hacker News was written in which programming language?
Arc
Arc is a Lisp dialect co-developed by Paul Graham and Robert Morris.
Q 04How many karma points does a Hacker News user need before they can downvote?
501
Flagging comments needs only 30.
Q 05How many karma points are needed to flag a comment on Hacker News?
30
Karma is upvotes minus downvotes on your content.
Q 06Which Hacker News moderator posts under the username 'dang'?
Daniel Gackle
Tom Howard, as tomhow, moderates alongside him.
Q 07Which co-moderator worked with dang until 2019 under the username 'sctb'?
Scott Bell
He stopped working on the site that year.
Q 08What did Paul Graham say Hacker News hopes to avoid?
Eternal September
The term describes the decline of discourse when a flood of newcomers arrives.
Q 09Which community did Hacker News set out to recreate?
Early Reddit
Unlike Reddit, new users cannot downvote at all.
Q 10What practice does Hacker News use, in which a banned user's posts silently stop appearing?
Stealth banning
It also runs software to detect voting rings.
Q 11According to the site, what can be submitted to Hacker News?
Anything intellectually curious
'Hacker' is used in its original tinkering sense.
Q 12In what month and year was Y Combinator launched?
March 2005
It has since been used to launch more than 5,000 companies.
Q 13Who were the four founders of Y Combinator?
Graham, Livingston, Morris and Blackwell
Graham, Morris and Blackwell had built Viaweb together.
Q 21In which year did Paul Graham appoint Sam Altman president of Y Combinator?
2014
Altman changed the deal to $150,000 for 7%.
Q 22Under Altman, YC's standard deal became $150,000 for what stake?
7%
The 7% figure survived the 2022 revamp.
Q 23Which investor served as a visiting partner at YC from 2015 to 2017?
Peter Thiel
That was under Altman's presidency.
Q 24Who succeeded Sam Altman as YC president in 2019?
Q 14Y Combinator originally ran parallel programs in Mountain View and which other city?
Boston
The Cambridge, Massachusetts program was closed in January 2009.
Q 15In which year did Y Combinator relocate to San Francisco?
2019
The summer 2020 batch was then run entirely remotely.
Q 16Which firm led a $2M investment in Y Combinator in 2009?
Sequoia Capital
It followed up with $8.25 million in 2010.
Q 17In 2011, Yuri Milner and SV Angel offered every YC company how much in convertible notes?
$150,000
The Start Fund amount was later cut to $80,000.
Q 18Who was the first non-founder partner at Y Combinator, joining in 2010?
Harj Taggar
He later co-founded Triplebyte and returned as a group partner in 2020.
Q 19Which nonprofit did YC use to test funding nonprofits, before opening the door in 2013?
Watsi
Its Startup School followed in 2017.
Q 20Sam Altman was in YC's very first batch as a founder of which company?
Loopt
Green Dot bought Loopt in 2012 for $43.4 million.
Geoff Ralston
He had created Yahoo! Mail in 1997.
Q 25What went wrong with Startup School applications in 2018?
A bug accepted all 15,000 applicants
After the outcry, YC accepted all 15,000 anyway.
Q 26YC's revised January 2022 standard deal totalled how much?
$500,000
$125,000 for 7% plus $375,000 on an uncapped SAFE with an MFN clause.
Q 27By how much did YC cut its summer 2022 intake?
40%
From 414 companies down to 250.
Q 28Which former Bing and Baidu CEO briefly ran YC China in 2018?
Qi Lu
The same year YC announced new startup schools.
Q 29Who wrote the SAFE, YC's Simple Agreement for Future Equity?
Carolynn Levy
YC released it in late 2013 as an alternative to convertible notes.
Q 30In 2018 YC replaced the original SAFE with which version?
Post-money
The investor's ownership percentage is set at signing rather than at conversion.