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What I've Learned from Hacker News

paulgraham.com · 2,899 words · saved by 1 readers

February 2009 Hacker News was two years old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news. It's grown bigger and taken up more time than I expected, but I don't regret that because I've learned so much from working on it. Growth When we launched in February 2007, weekday traffic was around 1600 daily uniques. It's since grown to around 22,000. This growth rate is a bit higher than I'd like. I'd like the site to grow, since a site that isn't growing at least slowly is probably dead. But I wouldn't want it to grow as large as Digg or Reddit—mainly because that would dilute the character of the site, but also because I don't want to spend all my time dealing with scaling. I already have problems enough with that. Remember, the original motivation for HN was to test a new programming language, and moreover one that's focused on experimenting with language desig

What I've Learned from Hacker News --> February 2009 Hacker News was two years old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project-an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news. It's grown bigger and taken up more time than I expected, but I don't regret that because I've learned so much from working on it. Growth When we launched in February 2007, weekday traffic was around 1600 daily uniques. It's since grown to around 22,000. This growth rate is a bit higher than I'd like. I'd like the site to grow, since a site that is

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