Does anyone seriously believe that your chances of getting into YC go up linearly with your karma? If I had to guess, past a certain threshold, your chances of acceptance probably drop.
If you have high karma, but most of your comments are noise, that can't help. Or if you have low karma and rarely post, but your posts are mostly "thoughtful", that probably helps.
I suspect it varies like that.
Most high-karma people on HN (like, 5k+) get there by being thoughtful. I'd imagine pretty much everyone in the top 100 would be helped rather than hurt by their HN presence. I suppose it's theoretically possible to amass a lot of karma without making any useful contributions, but I haven't see anybody do it yet.
PG has said quite a few times that if your HN contributions are 'thoughtful' (which is a fairly arbitrary criterion) that that helps. Of course there is no linear relationship, and anybody that believes that is not likely to make it in to YC anyway.
edit: I've added a bit of text there in case someone might interpret it this way, but I think the risk of that happening was fairly low.
I'd imagine Patrick would have no problems, but that may be in spite of the karma score, not because of it.
Personally I don't care one bit about getting in to YC, and I highly doubt you would either, it seems you are pretty well established, most likely that's 'mutual'.
As for Patrick, only Patrick could answer that question, but his route so far suggests he's a bootstrapper far more than someone that would go looking for funding.
Though I doubt it would be hard for him to find funding through YC or elsewhere he at least seems to have chosen for the moment to forgo that option.
I don't know what the 'something else' is that you're referring to, but to make a stab at it for myself, HN is the replacement of something that I used to have, which is people to work with, remotely or in person.
As a result of that I spend an inordinate amount of time on HN, but the result - as far as I can see - has been an absolute net positive, I've gotten to know quite a few people 'in real life' that have enriched my life in many ways and I've been able to learn from quite a few people as well.
If HN karma translates in to 'work' then my own score would probably represent upwards of 4 months full-time since I became a member, I'm fortunate enough that I actually can spend that time, and when expressed in money, at a very conservative 75 euros per hour would be the equivalent of about 50K euros, so approximately 1 euro per 'karma point' invested.
I'm in the wrong place (Europe), in the wrong age group (45+), in the wrong 'mindset' (more like grizzled and scarred tomcat than a fresh and young kid) that is pretty opinionated and so on. Too much impedance mismatch between me and YC to make me even think of applying, besides that I wouldn't live in the US if you paid me for it.
Don't worry, I have even more karma than you; this is what I do instead of IRC and Usenet.
I've had my 10 year long stretch of 16 to 18 hour days and it served me well enough, I'm not going to feel at all bad about 'not being focused' and 'allowing myself too much free time', though I can see why for YC that would be a red flag.
You spend a lot of time on HN commenting? ;)
As num_comments->oo, karma->oo.