[chaostheory]

to me if pg really wants Hacker News to be more like the old Reddit - to me this is the heart of the problem: http://news.ycombinator.com

It's context. By associating Ycombinator with Hacker News the people visiting it and the people attracted to it will have certain assumptions. Afterall YCombinator is seed funding and business mentoring for the technically and entrepreneurially inclined... is it really a surprise that the content reflects that?

if people really want a generic Hacker News as opposed to something just renamed from Startup News, YC needs to be disassociated with it (at least in name).

Besides as other people have already pointed out there are already plenty of other sites that meet general "hacker" news needs that are "good enough" (programming.reddit, dzone, slashdot, the list goes on...)

Startup News is a unique (and popular) niche of a niche (I haven't seen anything else with a following quite like it) - why change that?

[hhm]

I think the "Hacker" part of the name is a bigger problem. In the old reddit you could found scientists, mathematicians, people from Nasa and so on, none of which would generally understand what's the matter with being a hacker or not.