Hacker News Reader

Comment by woolion | Hacker News Reader

This solves a longstanding problem. When recommending "hacker news" to people, they would immediately get suspicious. What's up with this weird address? Why combinator? It would immediately devolve into weird discussions. It's actually linked to Haskell Curry, who was neither Indian, nor Greek, despite this lambda thing. And no, this is not a new Covid variant. A real nightmare. But thankfully, all this is over now.

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I feel the opposite. The harder to get here, the more exclusive it feels.

The problem isn't recommending, it's that HN is a niche community that most people are not going to find very interesting. We all adore this place because where else can you casually comment back and forth with folks that run VC firms and unicorn startups and other legends of this field.

But that's the thing, if you're not in this field, it's very hard to tell someone why they should care. You can be all excited that you just had a back-and-forth on here with Paul Graham, tell your friend, and your friend is probably not going to have a clue who you are talking about.

And TBH that's a good thing. HN is a niche community that will never appeal to many people, but we love it because to the folks that it does appeal to, its a truly magical place on the internet.

I don't think that's true. I meet people all the time who love HN and have no particular connection to "this field", if by that you mean startup investing, or even technology. The mandate of the site is to gratify intellectual curiosity, which literally everyone has.

That's what HN needs, more paranoid idiots.

Trying to close this community would be a disastrously bad idea. All are welcome, as long as they want to use the site as intended.

Not all newcomers want to use HN as intended, but not all oldtimers do either. Discriminating in favor of the latter would be a grand way to shoot this place in the foot, if not the head. As my son used to say when he was 2: that what we not do.

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