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> It's a fun, experimental distraction

It seems to incur maintenance costs and reputation hits that are avoidable though, isn't that reason enough to invest some time in building a reliable solution?

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No-one's going to say "Yeah I was going to apply to YC but HN keeps going down so I don't think I will after all".

Speak for yourself

Could you elaborate on why that's a factor at all? Given that YC's core business has nothing to do with HN, I wonder if the idiosyncrasies of HN aren't actually contributing something like intermittent reinforcement training to community members.

Why's it a factor at all? Because I wouldn't want to work with an organization that half-asses things. I don't understand the second half of your comment.

"Positive reinforcement" would be a bar which gives some food to a rat who pushes it three times. If a rat is hungry, he pushes the bar enough times to get as much food as he needs. "Intermittent reinforcement" is a bar that gives some food after a random number of presses each time. A rat will push the bar frantically until he's exhausted, even if he's not very hungry. The technique works pretty well on humans too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Intermittent_rei...

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