I hadn't realised that the site was live that early. I have fond memories of discovering Hacker News in the early days (sorry, Startup News, as it was initially called). I'd been lurking on Reddit but the Reddit was rapidly losing its tech focus back then and the comments were starting to be dominated by silly jokes. This new site that Paul Graham had created seemed to capture some of what had previously made Reddit good and I've been (mostly) lurking here instead ever since.

Day 2 has this as one of 9 submissions on it ;

Google Acquires YouTube For $1.6B : 12 points - no comments

Right below ;

MySpace: Not a purely viral start : 9 points - no comments

Apparently the same ^ could be said of HN.

Think about that when starting a new venture. Puts things into perspective.

What does the "&birth=pg" at the end of the URL stand for? I know pg is Paul Graham, but removing the "&birth=" parameter doesn't change the page

Maybe a way to avoid the duplicate filter, as I'm sure this URL has been submitted before.

I actually found the link by going to pg's profile and clicking the created date. You can try it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg

Curiously the "birth" param doesn't seem to work by itself. Maybe a HN bug? e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/front?birth=pg is the same as https://news.ycombinator.com/front

Is that “Arrington” user I see in so many comments the Arrington I think it is (TC)?

Arrington has been discussed before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=454679

7 of the 18 links are broken :(