I think it would be good to have a sub.news setup here, where submitted stories were classified and users could choose how much of each type was on their home p

I think it would be good to have a sub.news setup here, where submitted stories were classified and users could choose how much of each type was on their home page. If users liked lots of general discourse, they would only see the highest rated Startup/Hacker stories. If users only liked hacker/startup stuff, they would never see the general discussion, except when the other ones went off topic. I think the core hacker/startup culture would still survive in such a setup. This drastically improved reddit, but it was already too late to save reddit. I think implementing sub.news.arc roughly as implemented on reddit would only improve news.ycombinator.com.