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Can Y Combinator buy the domain hackernews.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?
- drinchev 12y agoInteresting 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.
- Tarang 12y agoI use http://hackerne.ws http://hackerne.ws which works well too.
- mathattack 12y agoI suspect it's that it's a hefty price tag for a simple website that doesn't directly generate revenue.
- aml183 12y agoTwo 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 12y agoMany 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.
- mathattack 12y agoExactly - the branding is to ycombinator, not just news to hackers.
- bdcravens 12y agoI doubt it's for sale.
- asda12345 12y agobadhell12335@gmail.com
- bsilvereagle 12y agoHaving money doesn't necessarily mean you frivolously spend money.
- davmar 12y agoThis is hacker news dude. Just edit your /etc/hosts file.
- joeblau 12y agoThis is probably the best answer I've heard. It's so obviously simple and true to the culture of this site.
- alexserver 12y agothat's lying to yourself :p
- koberstein 12y agoor defining your own reality :p
- Paul_S 12y agoI think the percentage of people who physically type in the url is miniscule.
- arnorhs 12y agoI type it in. Though usually (sad, maybe) just typing "n" is enough.
- BrandonMarc 12y agoI 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.
- chatmasta 12y ago"n" + enter is all I need.
- cataract 12y agoditto
- chatmasta 12y agoAnd now you're making posts, too. Down the rabbit hole you go!
- josefresco 12y agoSame here, in fact it's an ongoing trade off between news.google.com and news.ycombinator.com in my browser's address bar.
- pr0zac 12y agoSpace 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.
- bdcravens 12y agoPretty sure it's not a matter of letting him keep at. I don't think selling would be consistent with L0pht's ethos.
- sp332 12y agoL0pht was always for-profit :)
- sp332 12y agoExactly! Just because aml183 thinks of this site as "hacker news", that doesn't mean everyone on the internet should.
- naturalethic 12y agoFrom my perspective it's about 1/3 "hacker" news, 1/3 startup/tech news and 1/3 mainstream liberal politics.
- uptown 12y agoMaybe we should ask Microsoft.
- rubbingalcohol 12y agoIt 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.
- krapp 12y agopg 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_eh 12y agoWouldn't that money be better spent going to a charity or a startup?
- krapp 12y agoProbably. As an investment, I don't think the domain has much value for them since Hacker News isn't their brand, it's just the name of the forum. But I don't think getting the money would be an issue - though I guess a lot depends on how much the domain is actually worth, and whether they planned to do something crazy like add paid accounts to take advantage of the higher visibility.
- VLM 12y agoThere the unfounded assumption that the old domain owner will spend the vast stacks of cash on the proverbial "blackjack and hookers" and waste all the rest, instead of spending it on charity and startups.
- jonny_eh 12y agoSpending money on "blackjack and hookers" is a better spending of money than a domain name. It would be more fun at least.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- santiagogo 12y agowhat 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 12y agoHow does using a subdomain keep away the idiots? Would some people try to go to www.news.ycombinator.com?
- santiagogo 12y agothey 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 12y agoKeeps away idiots?! You clearly haven't been here long.
- santiagogo 12y agohmm, you clearly haven't been on reddit. haha
- lelf 12y agoIt's nice as it is. Also I believe YC people see it as some sort of brand (and even ad).
- asda12345 12y agobadhell12335@gmail.com
- bdcravens 12y agoIronic, 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.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- themonk 12y agoNice Try.
- notwedtm 12y agohttp://hackerne.ws http://hackerne.ws works.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- giancarlostoro 12y agoAm I the only person who uses hackerne.ws?
- lucb1e 12y agoBesides 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 12y agoVimium: type b to search bookmarks (or shift+b for new tab), and then h to bring up Hacker News
- mercer 12y agoI 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).
- gremlinsinc 12y agoa lot of people I imagine don't actually go to news.ycombinator... I always go to hckrnews.com instead--much better interface imho.
- ufmace 12y agoNotice 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 12y agoSpace 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 12y agoI always type hckrnews.com (but it is an alternative front page design)
- Grue3 12y agoI use http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ Just two letters short...