Timeline of Hacker News
Hacker News from its 2007 launch as Startup News through 2026, tracing community traditions, search and data access, technical growth, and the people and policies shaping its discussions.
- Category
- Engineering & Technology
- Events
- 23 events 2007 – 2026
- Added
2007: Paul Graham launches Startup News
On February 19, Paul Graham opened a news-sharing site for current and future Y Combinator founders. Initially called Startup News, it also served as a working application for testing Arc, the programming language he was developing with Robert Morris.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4869402007: Startup News becomes Hacker News
On August 14, Paul Graham renamed the site Hacker News and broadened its scope beyond startups. The change welcomed material interesting to hackers generally, reflecting his view that intellectual curiosity extended well beyond business and company formation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html2008: Graham releases the language behind Hacker News
On January 29, Paul Graham released Arc, the Lisp language used to build Hacker News, and introduced a companion discussion site at arclanguage.org. That forum used largely the same code as Hacker News, connecting the community’s software to the language experiment that had produced it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1063982009: The Show HN label appears
On March 10, a face-recognition demonstration became the first post Y Combinator later identified as using the exact Show HN prefix. It followed a Show and Tell HN post from December 2008. The convention grew out of community submissions, years before the dedicated Show HN section.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5102642010: Ask HN gets its own page
On March 7, Paul Graham introduced a separate page for submissions without external links and tested adding it to the navigation. Readers had already been using Ask YC and Ask HN titles; the new page gave those questions and other text posts their own browsing view.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11738012011: Weekday page views reach one million
Near the site’s fourth anniversary, Paul Graham reported roughly one million page views and 90,000 unique visitors on weekdays. He also credited Robert Morris’s server and language-runtime adjustments with keeping the growing site responsive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21985382011: Monthly hiring threads adopt a regular account
On April 1, the whoishiring account published its first monthly hiring thread after proposing a shared schedule the previous day. Earlier readers had organized their own hiring discussions. The new arrangement aimed to stop competing early posts and keep the recurring threads together.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23960272011: Hacker News experiments with hidden comment scores
On April 11, Paul Graham began a round of interface experiments that included hiding other users’ comment scores. The change tested whether visible point totals encouraged arguments. By October, he said he favored keeping scores hidden because fights seemed less intense and possibly less frequent.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24343332011: Hacker News adds built-in search
On June 4, a search box appeared at the bottom of most pages, backed by Octopart’s ThriftDB search service. Paul Graham said building an in-house search system had proved too much work. The integration gave readers a way to search the site directly after years of relying on outside tools.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26197362013: Hacker News moves to a faster server
Robert Morris arranged a move to a faster server as weekday traffic approached two million page views. Paul Graham announced the migration for February 16 and confirmed the new machine was running in a later outage report. The upgrade addressed the growing demands on the site’s single-server setup.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52293642014: Algolia takes over Hacker News search
On January 24, Hacker News gained a new search service from Algolia, following the earlier service maintained by Octopart. Direct access to site data let Algolia index newly arriving posts and comments every two minutes, making the discussion archive available through instant search.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=71184962014: Paul Graham hands Hacker News to new stewards
On March 29, Paul Graham divided his Hacker News responsibilities among a new team. Daniel Gackle, who had already handled most moderation for 18 months, joined Y Combinator full time to lead the community and adopted the username dang. Kevin Hale took charge of design, while Nick Sivo continued developing the code.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=74938562014: Show HN gains a dedicated section and guidelines
On July 3, Hacker News opened a dedicated section for Show HN posts and published guidelines for sharing original work. The title convention had grown out of community practice in 2008 and 2009; the new section gave those project demonstrations a permanent place within the site.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=79848262014: Hacker News releases its official API
On October 7, Hacker News released its official application programming interface with Firebase. The initially read-only service gave developers near-real-time access to site data, offering an alternative to extracting information from web pages as the team prepared to modernize the site's markup.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84225992015: Community guidelines call for more constructive criticism
On April 3, Hacker News added a guideline against gratuitous negativity, extending a rule previously tested in Show HN discussions to the whole site. The announcement distinguished substantive criticism from empty cynicism and meanness, and asked readers to reinforce the standard through gentle reminders.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=93179162015: New tools reveal sources and past discussions
On September 15, Hacker News made story domains clickable and added links for finding earlier discussions and alternative sources. It also relaxed automatic duplicate detection to better match its reposting policy. The changes gave readers tools the moderators had built to check submissions and improve story quality.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=102236452016: Comment controls arrive alongside a public moderator
On July 11, Hacker News added collapsible comments, vote undo, favorites, hidden stories, and a view of earlier front pages. Daniel Gackle also introduced Scott Bell as a public moderator. Bell had already moderated behind the scenes and now joined Gackle in sharing the public responsibilities of the role.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120736752017: Launch HN opens founder discussions
On January 10, Hacker News began testing Launch HN with Y Combinator's winter startups so founders could introduce their companies and answer questions. Daniel Gackle proposed occasionally replacing Y Combinator's front-page job ads with launches. A later edit to his explanation clarified that this replacement was never implemented; launches and job ads used independent mechanisms.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134846442021: Hacker News makes its second-chance pool public
On April 30, Daniel Gackle presented the newly public list of overlooked submissions selected for another chance on the front page. Moderators and reviewers chose candidates, then software resurfaced them. The mechanism had operated since late 2014; publishing the list made that editorial process easier to inspect.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=269983082021: Hacker News announces grouped startup launches
On July 18, Daniel Gackle announced Meet the Batch, an experiment grouping several Y Combinator startups into one discussion. It addressed growing demand for Launch HN slots and the work of editing founder introductions, while keeping the number of launch threads on the front page from increasing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278772802025: Tom Howard becomes a public moderator
On April 2, Daniel Gackle introduced Tom Howard as a public moderator under the account tomhow. Howard had already worked on moderation for years, so the change made his role visible in discussion threads. Gackle continued in his role, giving the community two publicly active moderators.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=435586712026: The guidelines explicitly require human-written comments
On March 11, Daniel Gackle confirmed that the published guidelines now included the rule "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text." Moderators had enforced the principle for years; the written rule formalized Hacker News's commitment to conversation between people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=473417262026: Moderators explain temporary Show HN limits
On March 12, Daniel Gackle confirmed temporary restrictions on Show HN submissions amid an influx from accounts unfamiliar with the community. The linked notice asked newcomers to participate and learn the site's culture before promoting projects, making participation part of the response to growing submission volume.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346516