This site is neither private nor secret. It's a forum where people post links to publicly accessible articles. Lots of technical blogs link to it. As you've alr

This site is neither private nor secret. It's a forum where people post links to publicly accessible articles. Lots of technical blogs link to it. As you've already discovered, anyone can join. There's even a Wikipedia page about this site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News To find out more about what this site is about and what its acceptable uses are, please read the "Guidelines" and "FAQ" links at the bottom of the page.