> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies.

That's up to you, really, you can just ignore them. I know I do.

> So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.

Probably, or maybe that is just an overly cynical take. If it were as bad as that I can think of a couple of very easy things they could do to improve on that and they aren't so for now I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Note that I'm not particularly impressed by anybody associated with YC except the mods here.

> Its also the last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big.

So you're saying there is hope for Haskell?

> You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer comes out of the woodwork to fix it, something that I've seen happen in the last week on nh for the first time.

There are some pretty funny instances of such interaction here, the best of which still has me in stitches after more than a decade.