Hacker News is a place for people to discuss interesting things, while being generally associated with Y Combinator, a startup incubator. I've said this before

Hacker News is a place for people to discuss interesting things, while being generally associated with Y Combinator, a startup incubator. I've said this before, and dang has corrected me, but I believe this is a good thing for Y Combinator, because it attracts smart people to the YC brand, and gives YC companies a pool of talent they can pick from to build companies. The "Hacker" part has always, to me, been about makers, not about ethics per se. I've always found the notion that there is a shared "hacker" set of mores to be kind of curious. Ripping things apart to see how they work vs. kludging something together to solve a specific problem vs. adversarial digital trespassing for fun and profit -- none of that lends itself, to me, to some specific shared morality. Certainly a few personality traits will show up, but folks trying to build a set of acceptable behaviors out of that will probably not find a ton of consistency across the people who engage in the aforementioned activities.