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Because it's taken.

I know that -- I mean, has YC tried to buy the domain from the current owner?

Not that I know of. But since the site mostly exists to promote ycombinator, and doesn't directly make money, I would see no point in their doing so.

I understand where the original poster is coming from. news.ycombinator.com is not a very intuitive url for a website that is known as hacker news.

http://hackerne.ws works if you want a more intuitive url.

If this were a startup that was trying to grow as fast as possible, it would be a good idea to own the domain. It would make the site easier to find. But we're not trying to grow, so we don't want to make HN easier to find.

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