It would probably be worth more as a web application that allowed you to pretty much run your own reddit or news.ycombinator than as a "hacker news" site. A larger corporation might buy it for the actual software, not the audience.
Building a community is much harder than building a simple web application like this one. And not that by saying this, I'm not trivializing News.YC, I'm just saying you're placing value in the wrong place.