<i>Interesting is the start of the real growth roughly a year after the launch, coinciding with a broadening of the scope of HN.</i><p>This isn't true. What you're seeing there is the usual holiday dropoff, followed by the huge bump that happened when Arrington outed us.  Actually HN's growth rate has been pretty consistent throughout.  A graph of x^n generally looks as if it's nearly flat initially and then takes off at some point, but this is an illusion.<p>It also isn't true that the change in focus happened then.  We changed the site from "Startup News" to "Hacker News" after 6 months.