As I remember it HN was initially a “response” to Reddit written in Arc, as by that point Reddit had already become focused on politics and some other more general stuff and had left its programming focus behind. HN was meant to fill that gap, with the important addition of the “entrepreneurial” / start-up business mambo-jambo behind which I could never get, but there were a lot more people that did get it seriously back then and which now have a lot more assets than people like me (didn’t care about start-ups, we were in here only for the programming stuff) now happen to posses. Lesson learned, I guess.