For my money the answer is yes! What Techcrunch did well back in the day is that it covered the startup scene -- HN improves upon that by acting as a link toolk

For my money the answer is yes! What Techcrunch did well back in the day is that it covered the startup scene -- HN improves upon that by acting as a link toolkit of sorts. Also unlike Techcrunch which was top/down this site is really about the community (i.e. the quality of the comments) so you've captured some of the magic of reddit/digg. What's interesting to me is that this has nothing to do with the technology, but with the curation skills of the community.