It's just a business expense, right? If you're actually going to be building a business on a domain name, it doesn't necessarily make sense to cheap out, just like any other business expense.
It's not about cheapening out, it's an exorbitant amount without much real customer value. "news.ycombinator.com" apparently works just as well as if this was "techtalk.com" or "bizchat.com" or whatever.
Yahoo isn't about cowboys, Amazon isn't about rainforests, uber isn't a firm from Germany, Google isn't about mathematics... It really doesn't seem to be correlated with business success.
Any made up name will do. Blorpblip, flipturf, dundrill, yepyip, nodnod, whatever. Those only look weird because it's your first time seeing it. Substance comes before brand
The meaning is assigned by the business praxis, not the other way around.
Yeah all this agonizing over domain names makes me think of middle school "bands" I was in where we spent more time riffing on possible names than we did practicing.
Does it though? There's little doubt in my mind that this site would have far greater reach (the actual desirability of that aside) if it were located at hackernews.com. I have no idea what the current owner would want for it but I'm sure it's substantial and rightfully so.
If they really cared they could come up with something. There's countless clones and proxy sites with closer and shorter names but they don't have large audiences because having a 4 (cuil) versus a 10 letter domain (duckdudckgo) doesn't actually matter - only what you put there.
