Hacker News is actually relatively cheap to run, because Y-Combinator owns and maintains the server hardware in-house. Instead of paying a monthly bill to a clo

Hacker News is actually relatively cheap to run, because Y-Combinator owns and maintains the server hardware in-house. Instead of paying a monthly bill to a cloud company, they opted to pay a lot (relatively) for a dedicated server and amortize the cost. The only ongoing costs are electricity, internet bandwidth and (I assume) offsite backups. The last information 'dang confirmed was that Hacker News is a server with something like 256GB RAM, dual 3Ghz decacore Xeon CPUs and 10TB of storage space (I'd guess maybe closer to 20 these days). That costs a few thousand to build, including the motherboard, case, power supply and a good cooling solution. Unfortunately, you'd probably pay the total cost of the hardware per month with a cloud service :) So that's the hardware. Y-Combinator also has (at least two) full-time moderators who need to be paid. But while it might not directly bring in any revenue, Hacker News is one of the best industry watering holes. It's a powerful brand mechanism that brings together a lot of high-signal people that are either worth investing in for startup ventures or who are capable of helping those that Y-Combinator chooses to invest in. It doesn't need to see direct returns on the forum because it offers excellent human capital for seeding investments and ideas (see Dropbox, for example).