I wouldn't call it a HN clone. It's not like HN was an original idea - it's just a news voting site (Reddit, Digg etc.) with a specific niche. The important part of each of these sites is the community, not the idea.
We'd like it to be differentiated. Discussions on how we view things can be quite different from how the tech community at large does. So we think there's value in other people seeing a discussion from that angle, as well as being the first online community in which you can directly engage in a discussion with a VC