[JacobAldridge]

I had a phone call this morning with our national GM, where I had to explain why HN is noted as consistently in our top 5 referring sites (which is to say I had to explain what HN actually is).

That's attributable to the fact that I'm active in this community, so I was surprised to see it accounting for so much traffic on a larger sample, but there's certainly evidence that even links that get no votes and no comments still drive traffic (though not as much as links that add value and create discussion).

[statictype]

I suspect that getting a lot of visits from 'Hacker News' doesn't sound very comfortable to many people.

[JacobAldridge]

Yes, I note the OP refers to YCombinator rather than Hacker News, but as the profile of both grow outside of the tech community not making the distinction will become more and more inaccurate.

[dotcoma]

to many (dumb) people.