Ask PG: Why is Hacker News not Open Source?

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.

rbanffy 13y ago ↗

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.

dfc 13y ago ↗

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

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

rbanffy 13y ago ↗

Sorry. Forgot the <sarcasm> tag.

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

mqzaidi 13y ago ↗

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

replax 13y ago ↗

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...