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Ask PG: Why don’t you open source HN?

114 points muellerwolfram | 1 comments | 04 Jan 13 02:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.352s | source

I hope it didn’t get asked before, I couldn’t find anything.

There was a question recently, about why you don’t improve the HTML of HN, where you said "When the HTML is the most important thing to work on."(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4927231)

I agree that the markup is relatively unimportant compared to features that I think could really improve the functionality and quality of the site, and I bet you have a long wishlist of features yourself.

But between the lines I interpreted that that list might be way longer, than the time that is available to you, allows you to work on it.

So why don’t you open source HN? I get that with a project that is important to someone, it’s hard to give away control. But you can still be the project lead, you could still have the last call and I feel to open up the project will lead to great feature discussions and ultimately a better hn.

Have you ever considered open sourcing it? And what’s the thought process on your decision?

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Felix21 ◴[04 Jan 13 07:36 UTC] No.5006671[source]▶
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.

replies(1): >>5007141 #
1. Zak ◴[04 Jan 13 11:14 UTC] No.5007141[source]▶
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