Hacker News Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
8correct to beat the crowd
83 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 83 questions rather than 100.
30 of 83 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What kind of organisation runs Hacker News?
A startup accelerator
Hacker News is run by Y Combinator, the startup accelerator Paul Graham co-founded in 2005, which also invests in the companies it admits.
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
The downvote arrow on comments appears only once an account reaches 501 karma, which keeps brand-new accounts from burying replies.
Q 05How many karma points are needed to flag a comment on Hacker News?
30
An account needs 30 karma before the flag link appears on comments; karma is the net of upvotes minus downvotes on your posts.
Q 06Which Hacker News moderator posts under the username 'dang'?
Daniel Gackle
Daniel Gackle posts as dang, a contraction of Dan Gackle, and took over day-to-day Hacker News moderation from Paul Graham.
Q 07Which co-moderator worked with dang until 2019 under the username 'sctb'?
Scott Bell
Scott Bell, posting as sctb, co-moderated Hacker News with Daniel Gackle before stepping down in 2019.
Q 08What did Paul Graham say Hacker News hopes to avoid?
Eternal September
Paul Graham said he hoped Hacker News could avoid Eternal September, the 1993 Usenet flood of newcomers that degraded its discussions.
Q 09Which community did Hacker News set out to recreate?
Early Reddit
Paul Graham built Hacker News to recreate the feel of early Reddit, which had been in Y Combinator's first batch in 2005.
Q 10What practice hides a Hacker News user's new posts from everyone except that user?
Stealth banning
Hacker News uses stealth banning, also called shadowbanning: a banned account's posts are hidden from every other reader without any notice to the poster.
Q 11In what month and year was Y Combinator launched?
March 2005
Y Combinator launched in March 2005 in Cambridge, Massachusetts; its first Summer Founders Program that year funded eight startups, including Reddit.
Q 12Who were the four founders of Y Combinator?
Graham, Livingston, Morris and Blackwell
Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell founded Y Combinator in 2005; Graham and Morris had earlier built an online-store startup together.
Q 13Y Combinator originally ran parallel programs in Mountain View and which other city?
Boston
Q 21Which investor was a part-time partner at YC from 2015 to 2017?
Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel joined Y Combinator as a part-time partner in March 2015 and had left its partner list by November 2017.
Q 22Who succeeded Sam Altman as YC president in 2019?
Geoff Ralston
Geoff Ralston became president of Y Combinator in March 2019 when Sam Altman stepped down; Ralston had helped build RocketMail, which Yahoo bought in 1997 and turned into Yahoo Mail.
Q 23What went wrong with Startup School applications in 2018?
A bug accepted all 15,000 applicants
A 2018 software bug emailed acceptances to all 15,000 Startup School applicants instead of the 3,000 planned; after the outcry, YC accepted everyone anyway.
The Boston program ran summers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with winters in Mountain View, until Y Combinator closed the Cambridge office in January 2009.
Q 14In which year did Y Combinator relocate to San Francisco?
2019
Y Combinator moved its headquarters from Mountain View to San Francisco in 2019; the Summer 2020 batch was then run entirely remotely because of the pandemic.
Q 15Which firm led a $2M investment in Y Combinator in 2009?
Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital led a $2 million investment in Y Combinator in 2009 so it could fund more startups per batch, then led an $8.25 million round in 2010.
Q 16In 2011, Yuri Milner and SV Angel offered every YC company how much in convertible notes?
$150,000
The 2011 Start Fund from Yuri Milner and SV Angel offered every Y Combinator startup a $150,000 uncapped convertible note; the amount was later cut to $80,000.
Q 17Which nonprofit did YC use to test funding nonprofits, before opening the door in 2013?
Watsi
Watsi, a crowdfunding charity for medical care, was the first nonprofit Y Combinator funded, in its Winter 2013 batch, before YC opened applications to nonprofits later that year.
Q 18Sam Altman was in YC's very first batch as a founder of which company?
Loopt
Loopt, Sam Altman's location-sharing app, was one of the eight startups in Y Combinator's first batch, the Summer Founders Program of 2005.
Q 19In which year did Paul Graham appoint Sam Altman president of Y Combinator?
2014
Paul Graham stepped back and named Sam Altman president of Y Combinator in February 2014; Altman had been a part-time partner since 2011.
Q 20Under Altman, YC's standard deal became $150,000 for what stake?
7%
The 7% figure survived the 2022 revamp.
Q 24YC'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 25By how much did YC cut its summer 2022 intake?
40%
Y Combinator cut its Summer 2022 batch by about 40%, from 414 companies in Winter 2022 to roughly 250, citing the market downturn.
Q 26Which former Baidu COO was named head of YC China in 2018?
Qi Lu
Qi Lu, who had led Microsoft's Bing division and served as Baidu's president and COO, became CEO of YC China in August 2018; YC wound the unit down in late 2019.
Q 27Who wrote the SAFE, YC's Simple Agreement for Future Equity?
Carolynn Levy
Carolynn Levy, a lawyer and Y Combinator partner, drafted the SAFE, which YC released in late 2013 as a simpler alternative to convertible notes.
Q 28In 2018 YC replaced the original SAFE with which version?
Post-money
The post-money SAFE, introduced in 2018, fixes the investor's ownership percentage at signing, instead of leaving it to be diluted by later SAFEs at conversion.
Q 29Which Posterous co-founder and Palantir's tenth employee became YC's CEO in 2023?
Garry Tan
Garry Tan became president and CEO of Y Combinator in January 2023; he co-founded Posterous, was Palantir's tenth employee, and started Initialized Capital, an early Coinbase investor.
Q 30Garry Tan's blogging startup Posterous was bought by which company in 2012?
Twitter bought Posterous in March 2012 and shut the service down in April 2013; Garry Tan then co-founded Posthaven to host the blogs that moved over.