I don't know what your ultimate goals with news.yc are, but I like the site how it is. Unfortunately, as has been seen at reddit and digg, the bigger the site gets, the lower the quality of the posts and conversations (see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September ). While I appreciate that you want to see growth, I'd hate for it to turn into yet another collection of amazing pictures. I'm happy with the high quality crowd of 4000 daily ips. I don't know what the tipping point would be, but if it doubled or tripled from here I have a feeling the quality of posts would drop significantly or the initial community will have to be more active in voting/moderating posts.
Regards.