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Hacker News is in the same camp as any of the big platforms-it’s entirely subsidized by a billionaire VC or it would not exist the way it does.

• jjav 3y ago
  > Hacker News is in the same camp as any of the big platforms-it’s entirely subsidized by a billionaire VC or it would not exist the way it does. Do you know the operating costs of HN? How can you judge it takes a billionaire to subsidize it?
  • edgyquant 3y ago
    It’s literally a pet project of Paul Graham, a billionaire. That was my point.
    • jjav 3y ago
      That's not really relevant. The question is how much are the operating costs to run it? I know it doesn't take a billionaire. I can't find it right now but I remember some of the infrastructure details have been posted in the past and it was quite minimal. It doesn't take much to run an efficient site like this one.
      • edgyquant 3y ago
        That was your question and not related to the point though. They don’t matter, HN is what it is because a well connected rich person pays for it out of pocket and associates his giant seed fund with it.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • jazzyjackson 3y ago
        Operating cost is nothing compared to bootstrapping cost. Paul had to go and create a whole VC firm just to bring everyone here together ;-P
  • vGPU 3y ago
    Last I heard HN ran on a single server with a second as a backup. Likely couple hundred/mo in electricity and bandwidth. They do retain at least two full time staff members though, so that’s going to be 10k/mo+ at the minimum.