Vaguely recalling reddit, it started going downhill, albeit slowly, after 1 year. Interestingly, one of the articles on the front page of Hacker news is about Fidel Castro.
Hopefully the same does not happen with Hacker news.....
I'm not sure what I would do without my daily fix of news.YC (take up another hobby?). I find this site engages me, as I start to move from hiding in my cube to getting out of my cube, to startup-land or elsewhere.
Busts out the party hats, streamers, and Lisp tutorial manuals. . . . What, you think a Hacker News birthday would be anything but a Lisp study party? :-P
Dammit! Last week I was looking at the "created" date in my profile and was thinking that if I posted this before anyone else that it would make some great karma. PG beat me too it... Next year though... ;)
The thing is, with websites, launch dates are very elastic. The first line of code was written on day x, the first alpha was ready on day y, the public beta was day z, and at the official launch was after everyone already knew about it (and started using the site).
(This isn't HN's story, just a template for a hypothetical site.)
http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html?19feb08