That's a pretty simple matter.<p><a href="https://hackernews.com" rel="nofollow">https://hackernews.com</a> does not have "ycombinator.com" in it.<p>There is zero upside for Ycombinator to let Hacker News off the connected leash or muddy the waters around HN. There is no great reason to waste the money to buy the domain, short of (ab)using the position it holds in the tech community to attach paid services to it and attempt to turn HN into a newly commercial start-up on its own (which would disastrously compete with what YC already does and would harm their reputation in the process).<p>You got to this premise by not putting yourself in the shoes of YCombinator and what their purpose is for HN. Owning HackerNews.com does nothing of consequence for them based on the purpose that news.ycombinator.com fulfills for YC. One part marketing, one part community bonding agent, one part public service.<p>It would probably cost the equivalent of ten plus years of hosting/server expenses to buy HackerNews.com, given how inexpensively HN operates. Purely a waste of money. They don't need the bit of traffic going to HN.com, and they don't need the branding confusion (as though Hacker News is independent from YC, which it's not).
It's a great and strong brand, it must certainly have tons of traffic.<p>It's been registered in 1998 [0] but surely by the time YC could have made an offer to acquire it and redirect its traffic here?<p>[0] <a href="https://who.is/whois/hackernews.com" rel="nofollow">https://who.is/whois/hackernews.com</a>