
Can Y Combinator buy the domain hackernews.com? - aml183
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?
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davmar
This is hacker news dude. Just edit your /etc/hosts file.

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alexserver
that's lying to yourself :p

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koberstein
or defining your own reality :p

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pr0zac
Space 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.

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bdcravens
Pretty sure it's not a matter of letting him keep at. I don't think selling
would be consistent with L0pht's ethos.

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sp332
L0pht was always for-profit :)

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chatmasta
"n" \+ enter is all I need.

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cataract
ditto

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chatmasta
And now you're making posts, too. Down the rabbit hole you go!

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Paul_S
I think the percentage of people who physically type in the url is miniscule.

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arnorhs
I type it in. Though usually (sad, maybe) just typing "n" is enough.

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BrandonMarc
I 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.

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notwedtm
[http://hackerne.ws](http://hackerne.ws) works.

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rubbingalcohol
It 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.

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krapp
pg 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

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jonny_eh
Wouldn't that money be better spent going to a charity or a startup?

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VLM
There 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.

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jonny_eh
Spending money on "blackjack and hookers" is a better spending of money than a
domain name. It would be more fun at least.

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VLM
Eh, who here wouldn't trade that away to post on hacker news...

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ufmace
Notice 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.

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mathattack
I suspect it's that it's a hefty price tag for a simple website that doesn't
directly generate revenue.

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aml183
Two 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.

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exelius
Many 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.

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mathattack
Exactly - the branding is to ycombinator, not just news to hackers.

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Tarang
I use [http://hackerne.ws](http://hackerne.ws) which works well too.

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lelf
It's nice as it is. Also I believe YC people see it as some sort of brand (and
even ad).

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drinchev
Interesting 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.

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bdcravens
Ironic, 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.

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mercer
I 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).

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runjake
Space 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.

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santiagogo
what 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.

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Retr0spectrum
How does using a subdomain keep away the idiots? Would some people try to go
to www.news.ycombinator.com?

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santiagogo
they 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.

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giancarlostoro
Am I the only person who uses hackerne.ws?

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lucb1e
Besides 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.

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Grue3
I use [http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/)

Just two letters short...

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kmkemp
Vimium: type b to search bookmarks (or shift+b for new tab), and then h to
bring up Hacker News

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glomph
I always type hckrnews.com (but it is an alternative front page design)

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gremlinsinc
a lot of people I imagine don't actually go to news.ycombinator... I always go
to hckrnews.com instead--much better interface imho.

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asda12345
badhell12335@gmail.com

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themonk
Nice Try.

