See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=524470 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84039

An HN member bought the domain and pointed it at news.ycombinator.com

Edit: There's also http://y.ww.com/ which was created by jacquesm when he was giving out subdomains to ww.com (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1796231)

> whois hackerne.ws

...

    Registrar Name: GoDaddy.com
    Registrar Email: dns@jomax.net

> whois ycombinator.com

...

    Registrant:
     Y Combinator LLC
     320 Pioneer Way
     Mountain View, CA 94041

In other words, someone bought the domain, and pointed it to the same IP. It's been mentioned before, but pg should do a redirect to the correct canonical domain, since there is nothing stopping the domain owner from hijacking, or doing otherwise bad things with it.

Doesn't appear to be owned by YC.

http://who.godaddy.com/whois.aspx?domain=hackerne.ws&pro...

Do a DNS lookup -- both point to same ip:

veyron:~ veyron$ nslookup

> hackerne.ws

Server: 192.168.1.1

Address: 192.168.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:

Name: hackerne.ws

Address: 174.132.225.106

> news.ycombinator.com

Server: 192.168.1.1

Address: 192.168.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:

Name: news.ycombinator.com

Address: 174.132.225.106

> ^D

Hm, is that good news? I am not well versed in those black hat search engine scams. Like what if now Google gradually thinks hackerne.ws is the real hacker news, and eventually the owner of hackerne.ws makes it point somewhere else?

Which is not to say that they couldn't change it at some point in the future, but for now, they are pointing to the same server.