If memory serves me correctly, it was (is) [1] open sourced on the Arc language, but certain spam catching and ranking algorithms were made closed to prevent gaming.<p>[1] <a href="http://arclanguage.org/install" rel="nofollow">http://arclanguage.org/install</a>
IIRC Lobsters[0] is an open-source[1] alternative, if you want.<p>[0] <a href="https://lobste.rs/" rel="nofollow">https://lobste.rs/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/jcs/lobsters" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jcs/lobsters</a>
HN is basically an instance of the arclanguage's example app, 'news.arc'.<p>See: <a href="https://github.com/wting/hackernews" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wting/hackernews</a>
It's a product intended to benefit for-profit companies, and it doesn't require community input to function. What benefit is there for anyone if it's open-source? It's hardly the best UX in this category of software.
There is also open source Telescope app, Meteor self-hosted hacker news/reddit website<p>[1] <a href="http://www.telescopeapp.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.telescopeapp.org/</a>