

Ask PG: Why is Hacker News not Open Source?  - combataircraft


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tokenadult
See previous discussions of this issue, which are easily revealed by Google if
the fitting keywords are used in the search:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494421>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=711613>

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4285617/how-do-i-
install-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4285617/how-do-i-install-arc-
to-get-a-hacker-news-clone-website)

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mqzaidi
Unrelated, but there are good open source clones like
<https://github.com/antirez/lamernews>

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tomasien
Ask OP: Why SHOULD it be open source?

1\. Asking "Why isn't it this" without a "this is why it should be this" is
such an easy argument it must always be ignored

2\. Hacker News is a Y Combinator entity. If it were to be open source, it
would be open source to YC people only I can only assume.

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rbanffy
1) because we could then help make it better (or make a couple HNs)

I believe there is an old version available.

2) open source for some people but not for others is an interesting concept.

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dfc
Open source for some people but not others? Thats not open source...

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tomasien
I know we're considering a new model for open source. I'd say that's a
semantic argument but it's more of a semantic observation

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replax
also, if e.g. the algos for the rank of the articles would be known exactly,
it would make it substentially easier to game them...

