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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Probably. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadYep, 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.
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
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.
That's classic example of "Content is king" principle and how domain names might be irrelevant if you have enough popularity.
Just two letters short...