Ok, I am not paying for reading the news feed on HackerNews. I suppose you aren't paying either. Are both of us HackerNews' products?

Actually I think hacker news is the Google in this scenario. They are profiting off aggregating the content of other news outlets. I’m not sure it’s right/wrong or how it’s going to work but if Australia says you make money off aggregating their news you must pay some legislated amount, I’m not sure I agree with the precedent of that

Have you stopped to think what YCombinator is getting out of paying the bills to keen this site running?

Is it costly for them? I assumed they thought it was good, cheap PR.

>Are both of us HackerNews' products?

Yes. We the users of HN are product - both individually, and also as a market segment, and also as a smart[0] crowd.

From [1],

  Y Combinator provides seed funding for startups.

To Y Combinator, the HN is both entry to the sales (investment) funnel, and a PR machine. And also early opinion & commentary, early beta-testing, load testing [2], and more.

That is not to detract from the (very probable) angle of pg & team wishing to render a public service for the public good :-)

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[0] the occasional bad thread notwithstanding ;-)

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/about/#whatwedo

[2] aka HN hug of death

>Are both of us HackerNews' products?

At least the product supporter ;)