One of the other commenters brought up an interesting point: the audience for HN and the teams YC pick are completely different demographic groups.<p>I don't think it started out that way; in fact I know it didn't. But over time we went from "watercooler for hackers" to "stuff that interests hackers" to "stuff that interests hacker wannabes" to something-else, not sure what to call it. Maybe "stuff that hacker wannabes like and most techies are interested in"<p>That probably sounds overly-critical of HN, and I apologize if I could have said it better. I just don't think the comparison works the way this author intended it to.<p>The key issue here is this: does HN have a progression? Is there some sort of goal where after consuming it for a while you become a better person or learn something <i>useful</i> about the world or yourself? (useful enough to offset the time you spend here) In YC there's a format, a goal, clear steps, and <i>you're going somewhere</i>. HN -- anymore? -- it's a hangout. A place you could spend all day picking up little shiny things.<p>I believe it would be very easy to find more value added by HN, here and there. One guy learns how to program, one guy hooks up with a founder, one guy learns critical things about startups, and so on. And I think if you added up all of those cherry-picked cases, you'd probably end up with more value than YC (for some definition of the word "value"). As an aggregate, however, it's a no-brainer. YC wins. They teach teams to have a clearly-defined <i>external</i> goal and then teams begin a journey towards reaching that goal.<p>(Note that you can't do this analysis with numbers. This is an entirely subjective question along the lines of "Do you like ice cream?" and should be treated as such)
That $45.2m figure was not the average valuation of all cos we've funded, but the average valuation of companies <i>with known valuations</i> (either by raising an equity round, being acquired, or dying, in which case the value is 0).<p>I realize that unless something is changing, the more recent companies that don't have fixed valuations yet should have the same sort of distribution. But that quote in Wikipedia still makes me a little uncomfortable, because it's not strictly correct.
I think that more than hacker news, y combinator has funded reddit which has more far reaching effects and contributions. Also, wasn't HN created for y combinator people to discuss stuff ? As I see it, HN is an investment by YC because time was definitely invested in creating the community, this obviously further complicates the calculation of value considering they aren't completely independent.
HN is ultimately just a podium for YC companies to market themselves. I don't think there is much value to it beyond that other than a 'little reddit' kind of value.<p>As a tech news aggregator it's just OK, a lot of stuff is mainstream fluff that digg in its early years used to be full of - you could probably replace half of HN with <a href="http://web20.originalsignal.com/" rel="nofollow">http://web20.originalsignal.com/</a>.<p>As a community of intelligent people ... there are some very smart and very experienced users who create companies that matter or at least matter for a while, but the average user is just here for average tech news.
Without pg and Hacker News, I would still be coding Java in "enterprise", instead of Rails in startup. I would not know about Lisp, Ruby, Clojure and other cool stuff. And probably would have quit coding altogether in frustration.
HN comes up in discussion among startup types here in Berlin a lot - it's definitely having an impact with more reach than individual YC investments, but what that impact is seems like it would be impossible to quantify.<p>I know that I became an entrepreneur at least in part because I started reading HN in 2009.
I like the premise, but I felt let-down by the conclusion.<p>Really thought you had some clever proxy to calculate the value of HN.<p>I do agree that it is hard to quantify it exactly, but feels like you just re-hashed the Wikipedia article and copped out on the interesting part.
If we include all the second- and third-order effects, the "value produced" by both goes far beyond the measurable financial results generated by Y Combinator's investment portfolio and the personal impact Hacker News has had on its community members.<p>For example, many other "incubators" around the world have been inspired by, and are trying to emulate some elements of, Y Combinator's startup program. Similarly, pg's influential essays -- there's nothing else quite like them on the Web -- have inspired countless individuals around the world to become entrepreneurs and/or angel investors.
When measuring Hacker News's value, you want to know its <i>marginal</i> value: how much it adds compared to the next best alternative, since that's how much better off you are made if Hacker News exists and how much you will lose if Hacker News ceases to exist.<p>Hacker News and Reddit are close substitutes: if Hacker News shut down tomorrow, everyone could jump on a /r/HN subreddit and not be much worse off. So its marginal value is far smaller than a quick estimate from traffic or users would indicate.
Without YC, HN becomes less interesting as well though. I mostly come here to read "interesting stories from the world of tech entrepreneurship" and because the filtering for good tech stuff is nice as well because the technology discussed tends to be relevant for quickly moving/agile type of companies.<p>I don't really think it makes all that much sense to separate the two.
Author here—I changed the name of the repo that was hosting this .md file in order to set up a github 'pages' page and it broke the url.<p>You can find the article here: <a href="http://cgcardona.github.com/2013/02/07/whats-produced-more-value--ycombinators-investments-or-hacker-news/" rel="nofollow">http://cgcardona.github.com/2013/02/07/whats-produced-more-v...</a>
Well, Just hours back I attended a campus recruitment drive from a core development company(probably my last chance, in college to get in the industry) and I failed.
I came home depressed of whatabouts of my future, I opened hacker news and all of a sudden, the world seems a bigger place with way more space, than it was a few minutes ago!
Since cgcardona had to change the location of this file, only a day after submitting it, here's the new location:<p><a href="http://cgcardona.github.com/2013/02/07/whats-produced-more-value--ycombinators-investments-or-hacker-news/" rel="nofollow">http://cgcardona.github.com/2013/02/07/whats-produced-more-v...</a>
Age 21: Get married.
Age 22: Have first kid.
Age 25: Have second kid/adopt
Age 27: Have third kid/adopt.
Age 29: Have fourth if you want.
Age 47: Start business now that kids are out of house and you have experience.
The occasional worthwhile submission justifies reading HN regularly, but I consider the general signal/noise ratio rather low - some parameters ought to be tuned.
I don't know about the YC companies but I agree that HN has been a great inspiration to me also. Got me thinking about companies and that it is possible!<p>Thanks HN.