Can Y Combinator buy the domain hackernews.com?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7971415

by aml183 • 12 years ago

25 51 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Why has YC never purchased hackernews.com. I always accidentally go to hackernews.com. It would great if they just purchased it. What does the community think?

Tarang• 12 years ago

I use http://hackerne.ws which works well too.

mathattack2• 12 years ago

I suspect it's that it's a hefty price tag for a simple website that doesn't directly generate revenue.

aml183• 12 years ago

Two companies in their portfolios are worth $10B+. I am aware their equity portions are still very small, but I would be surprised if they didn't have the money to afford it.

exelius• 12 years ago

Many of the YC partners are themselves independently wealthy. Regardless, the domain seems like good branding for YC. Removing the "ycombinator.com" from the address would lessen the connection for new users.

bdcravens3• 12 years ago

I doubt it's for sale.

bsilvereagle• 12 years ago

Having money doesn't necessarily mean you frivolously spend money.

davmar• 12 years ago

This is hacker news dude. Just edit your /etc/hosts file.

joeblau• 12 years ago

This is probably the best answer I've heard. It's so obviously simple and true to the culture of this site.

alexserver• 12 years ago

that's lying to yourself :p

koberstein• 12 years ago

or defining your own reality :p

Paul_S• 12 years ago

I think the percentage of people who physically type in the url is miniscule.

arnorhs• 12 years ago

I type it in. Though usually (sad, maybe) just typing "n" is enough.

BrandonMarc• 12 years ago

I type it all when I come to a browser I've never used before ... and then it's always a few seconds of "wait, what was the domain again? was it .net or .com or .org?"

Yep, usually "new" is all I get before it's near the top of the list. Sometimes I even use the "bookmarks" menu, but that's pretty rare.

chatmasta2• 12 years ago

"n" + enter is all I need.

cataract• 12 years ago

ditto

chatmasta2• 12 years ago

And now you're making posts, too. Down the rabbit hole you go!

josefresco• 12 years ago

Same here, in fact it's an ongoing trade off between news.google.com and news.ycombinator.com in my browser's address bar.

pr0zac• 12 years ago

Space Rogue has owned and used hackernews.com since before Paul Graham had even sold Viaweb to Yahoo. I think maybe we should let him keep it.

bdcravens3• 12 years ago

Pretty sure it's not a matter of letting him keep at. I don't think selling would be consistent with L0pht's ethos.

sp3322• 12 years ago

L0pht was always for-profit :)

sp3322• 12 years ago

Exactly! Just because aml183 thinks of this site as "hacker news", that doesn't mean everyone on the internet should.

naturalethic• 12 years ago

From my perspective it's about 1/3 "hacker" news, 1/3 startup/tech news and 1/3 mainstream liberal politics.

uptown• 12 years ago

Maybe we should ask Microsoft.

rubbingalcohol• 12 years ago

It is nice of YC to host Hacker News at all (I mean, it makes sense for business reasons and all), but I don't think it's fair to expect them to pay for a hefty domain name purchase on top of already providing a free service.

krapp2• 12 years ago

pg could probably pay for it with the change in his couch cushions, so I doubt cost would be much of a issue.

Although, the YC staff might consider the influx of new users to be counterproductive, and also the current url does have 'ycombinator' in it.

But in any case, first come, first serve. Just ask Nissan Motors. Or whoever owns nissan.com

jonny_eh2• 12 years ago

Wouldn't that money be better spent going to a charity or a startup?

santiagogo3• 12 years ago

what for? nobody types it in, and it's probably in the hundreds of thousands. And keeping it on a subdomain probably keeps away a lot of idiots.

Retr0spectrum• 12 years ago

How does using a subdomain keep away the idiots? Would some people try to go to www.news.ycombinator.com?

santiagogo3• 12 years ago

they keep trying to go to hackernews.com because sombody told them about ¨hacker news", and lose interest once they get there and dont find it there.

s_m• 12 years ago

Keeps away idiots?! You clearly haven't been here long.

santiagogo3• 12 years ago

hmm, you clearly haven't been on reddit. haha

lelf• 12 years ago

It's nice as it is. Also I believe YC people see it as some sort of brand (and even ad).

asda12345• 12 years ago

badhell12335@gmail.com

bdcravens3• 12 years ago

Ironic, given the number of YCombinator startups with "Get", "Try", "The", "App", etc prefixes and suffixes in their domain name, to say nothing of the various TLDs like .io, .ly, .co, .es, etc.

themonk• 12 years ago

Nice Try.

notwedtm• 12 years ago

http://hackerne.ws works.

giancarlostoro• 12 years ago

Am I the only person who uses hackerne.ws?

lucb1e• 12 years ago

Besides one other commenter, looks like it. I never knew! But then again, I typically type it like twice a year, the rest of the time n+enter does the job.

kmkemp• 12 years ago

Vimium: type b to search bookmarks (or shift+b for new tab), and then h to bring up Hacker News

mercer• 12 years ago

I use hckrnews.com, which is a much more convenient version for me. I even wrote a bookmarklet so I can use it on my iPad while the links still point to hn.algolia.com (which is my preferred tablet experience).

drinchev• 12 years ago

Interesting enough the most popular news clone of HN - designer news has a similar domain ... news.la????????.com .

That's classic example of "Content is king" principle and how domain names might be irrelevant if you have enough popularity.

gremlinsinc• 12 years ago

a lot of people I imagine don't actually go to news.ycombinator... I always go to hckrnews.com instead--much better interface imho.

ufmace• 12 years ago

Notice that Hacker News is kind of hard to find and use in a number of ways. Once I'd heard of it, it took me a little while to actually find the forum, figure out how it works and how to create an account. Slightly annoying, but I tend to think now that it's better this way - it probably encourages high-level discussion and discourages trolling and lame jokes by making it so that low-effort commentators will get tired of trying to figure it out and go to Reddit or something instead.

runjake• 12 years ago

Space Rogue (of L0pht fame) owns hackernews.com and (at least, up to a few years ago) publicly pondered reviving Hacker News Network, his old infosec news website, which was immensely popular back in the day.

glomph• 12 years ago

I always type hckrnews.com (but it is an alternative front page design)

Grue3• 12 years ago

I use http://hckrnews.com/

Just two letters short...

Can Y Combinator buy the domain hackernews.com?

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