[galaxyLogic]

Good to know. So what is the reason that yCombinator maintains and curates HN? It must cost them money even if it does not make them money. So why do they do it? Is it just good publicity?

Contrast this to Reddit. It is a big company with rather similar product, which is its only product and which makes them a lot of money I believe. How can YCombinator offer a similar product for free?

[mattashii]

Reasons I can think of (unrelated to YC/HN though):

Fostering a community of tech-savy people interested in the latest technologies increases their brand size. HN is also a place where YC-related companies can advertise to and hire like-minded people. This in turn would increase the chances for those companies to succeed.

Regarding costs: I believe this site is hosted on one somewhat beefy machine, maybe two for redundancy. Compared to reddit, this site is (I believe) comparable to one active subreddit (Reddit has 100s of those), without image or video support. It has a rather simple domain model, only marginal styling, and has generally only a low overhead per page loaded, making it a rather lightweight application for the amount of traffic it receives.

Also, if you're interested, (parts of) the sources of HN are available here[0], it's a rather lightweight server in a dialect of Lisp.

[0] https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/tree/master/apps/news

[threeseed]

> So what is the reason that yCombinator maintains and curates HN?

1) Dealflow. People start with HN then learn about PG/YC. HN is also free and ad-less and so there is a lot of goodwill.

2) Promotion. It's a great value-add for YC companies to be able to use HN to find talent, promote their products etc.