Hacker News is a minimalist news-aggregation and discussion site run by startup accelerator Y Combinator. It ranks #9 among developer community platforms at roughly 19.6% usage share. Its plain-text, no-algorithm-tricks design is read heavily by founders and senior engineers for tech industry news, startup discussion, and comment threads that go deeper technically than almost anywhere else online.
HN's front page is ranked by a simple age-decayed vote score, not personalization, so the front page is genuinely the same for everyone at any given moment. Two post conventions matter for developers specifically: "Ask HN" for direct questions to the community, and "Show HN" for launching your own project — both have unwritten but strict etiquette about not being self-promotional.
// standard title conventions
Ask HN: "Ask HN: How do you handle secrets in a monorepo?"
Show HN: "Show HN: A local-first note app with no telemetry"
// score decays with age -- ranking is roughly:
score = (upvotes - 1) / (age_in_hours + 2)^1.8No real signup friction — create an account only if you want to comment or submit. Skim the front page (news.ycombinator.com) daily, and use the "newest" tab to catch and support fresh Show HN posts before they're buried.
# find developer-relevant threads
news.ycombinator.com/newest
hn.algolia.com/?query=rust+performance&type=story