PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN

On the flipside - Let's not act like ycombinator doesn't benefit from hn. YCombinator gets free advertising to a TON of good engineers for their companies roles (the posts that you can't comment on that mention X random ycombinator company is looking for Y role). Surely that has to be worth something...

I don't disagree with pg's statement here, but IMO yc gets pretty big benefit from running the forum.

Presumably one or two good hires would more than compensate for years of running HN, but forum moderation is still a difficult and stressful job.

Interesting. How do you account that? Two good hires can probably repeatably be obtained for under $100k in spending or giving away $100k of your company. Since Daniel G (dang) works on HN full time, and almost certainly makes more than $100k, that doesn't make sense to me.

is dang paid to do this? how does it work?

What does that have to do with how stressful he found it relative to other things at YC?

Yes.