I think one of the challenges of hosting a "sub-HN" is that the hosting costs are hard to justify. This raises the question: How does YC justify hosting costs?

I think one of the challenges of hosting a "sub-HN" is that the hosting costs are hard to justify. This raises the question: How does YC justify hosting costs? My completely-off-the-cuff-assumption-take-this-with-a-huge-grain-of-salt is that YC benefits by having a huge audience to make announcements to, like job postings at YC funded companies, various pg essays, or just investing in overall goodwill from the HN audience. Probably the most likely reason is to increase deal-flow to YCombinator itself, though.