HN is open source. You can download from Github and install it yourself. https://github.com/wting/hackernews

Awesome. Thanks for the info!

Hi,

I'm actually a building a network for teen/high school development at http://teen2geek.com, and one of the things that is part of the initiative is a social news application not too different from HN to discuss teen and high school development. I would love to have you on board, whether it be as a user, or as an open-source contributor considering you are in high school :) We already have a group of high schoolers working on this, and I would love to have you on the core team if you're interested (email in profile).

To answer your question, Telesc.pe is gaining popularity, although I'm refraining from using it in favor of Lamer News, simply because Telescope is not as established and runs on Meteor, which isn't even 1.0 and does not heed to progressive enhancement principles.

- Krish

HN is just a basic web CRUD. Something you could build in many languages without much trouble. You don't even need to write code due to the amount of free web discussion boards available. What sets apart HN is the community. That is the hardest thing to develop.

Even though HN is open source, you might want to use a more "modern" and approachable project like https://github.com/jcs/lobsters