The matter of whose history is "revisionist" depends on perspective, and it's really hard to say whether your or my perspective here is the right one. That said, painting my notation as revisionist appears to be inaccurate.

> YCombinator was started in 2005. The "Hacker News" was started in 2007.[1] The audience it intended to serve was the type of "hackers" mentioned in the 2001 essay.

Are you sure about that? Plenty of large companies have worked to build cultures around their products. Should we really trust YCombinator's motives more than, say, Apple's when they build a product that claims to be geared toward makers while gradually pulling said makers into a particular ecosystem?

In other words, just because YCombinator / Paul Graham claim Hacker News to be geared toward technical-loving programmers and tinkerers v. VC-backed (or prospective VC-backed) entrepreneurs doesn't mean that neither of them are lying to us or themselves.

> PG also later uses "hacker" in the sense of a tech nerd who would rather focus on a startup rather instead of being discontent working at a corporate job.

That happens to describe a lot of people who wouldn't be classified as "hackers", or even future ones in their larval stage. It also happens to describe many (if not most) startup founders of the variety being criticized in the article.

> One can look at Internet Archive Wayback Machine[2] and see that the front page was dominated by topics unrelated to "chasing the money".

There were a lot of technical topics, yes, but "dominated by topics unrelated to 'chasing the money'" seems to be false, seeing that the top result has a plug for a startup called "ThriveSmart" and is basically how why some startup uses Rails, result #4 is Betteridge's-Law-invoking clickbait rhetorically implying that VC-backed startups should for some reason be ashamed of themselves for not towing to puritannical sensibilities regarding pornographic content (though, to be fair, Paul Graham did post in that article's comment section calling it out on said puritannical and rather hypocritical bullshit), result #7 is about having dinner with YC folks and being acquired by Conde Nast, result #8 is about Caterpillar making money through "Web 2.0", result #16 is a WSJ piece praising the open-office concept and disparaging cubicles "because it's what Silicon Valley does, and therefore deserves attention for some reason", result #29 is some blog post about entrepreneur burnout, and result #30 is a rather-uncritical NYT piece on advertising strategies of large businesses. I haven't even gotten to the second page yet.

And yet you cite this as proof that my viewpoint is revisionist somehow. Yeah, there were quite a few awesome technical articles back then, but even back then the Valleyesque distortion cuts through the purported hacker-centric focus of HN.

This isn't to say that Paul Graham wasn't or isn't an excellent hacker, nor is it to say that his own definition of hacker back in 2001 was somehow incorrect or out-of-line with the proper (and admittedly nebulous/vague) definition, and nor is it to say that he or YCombinator had motives out-of-alignment with the purported target audience. Rather, it's to suggest that maybe - just maybe - folks around here are taking the "hacker" part of "hacker news" too strongly at face value when its YC heritage ought to be warranting at least a small grain of salt, and that a lot may very well have changed in six years.