YC puts effort into Hacker News to find new prospects for investing and, secondarily, to have a solid place to read interesting stories and try out language-cre

YC puts effort into Hacker News to find new prospects for investing and, secondarily, to have a solid place to read interesting stories and try out language-creation. How are you able to assess the ROI, when even YC takes a 5-10-year look at their portfolio, and a 100-year look at language design?