[Felix21]

When I first saw this, I was excited thinking this will be something about making the code base of HN available so we can use it to deploy similar sites on other topics with relative ease.

But to have the hacker news itself the product of an open source project, HELL NO. I can't even think of one way that would be a good thing.

Hacker news is perfect the way it is.

[Zak]

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, HN is already open source in that sense. See http://arclanguage.org/ - it's the example app (news.arc). A git mirror is here: https://github.com/wting/hackernews