I did several different things while I was working on Hacker News, and these will now be taken over by different people.

Kevin Hale (HN id kevin) will be in charge of design.  I don’t think he plans to change much about the appearance of the site, but users will be happy to hear he has a plan to make it work better on mobile devices.

Kat Manalac (katm) and Garry Tan (garry) will be the voice of YC on HN.  They’ll be the ones who respond to most “Ask YC” posts and individual comments related to YC.

Nick Sivo (kogir) is going to continue working on the code.  He’s been working on HN for a while, and is the reason it’s actually faster now than it was a couple years ago, despite increased traffic.

Finally, I’m delighted to announce that Daniel Gackle (pronounced Gackley), who has already been doing most of the moderation for the last 18 months, is going to join YC full-time to be in charge of the HN community.  Many HN users know Daniel as gruseom, though now he’s going to switch to the slightly more legit sounding dang. Daniel is one of most thoughtful (in both senses of the word) people I’ve ever met. It kills him when people say mean, stupid things in comment threads. Moderating an anonymous forum is hard, and the fact that we get roughly equal grief for HN comments being bad and for being too quick to ban people is a sign he’s been doing a good job so far.  He has plans for new tools that may not merely arrest the decay of HN comment threads, but actually improve them.

I’ll still be around as a user, but less frequently than when I felt I had to check the site every hour or so to make sure nothing had broken.