On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

In Submissions

Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

If you submit a link to a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title.

Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.

If the original title ends with the name of the site, please strip it off, because the site name will be displayed after the link anyway. If the title begins with the site name, you can leave it on if you prefer.

You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it.

Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead.

If you're announcing your startup, please don't describe it as associated with YC unless it's funded by YC.

Please don't use News.YC to ask YC questions. If you have a question, send it to info@ycombinator.com.

Please don't submit so many links at once that the new page is dominated by your submissions.

In Comments

Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile.

Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Apply | What We Do | People | Jobs | Quotes | FAQ | Contact | Lib | Legal