Not to be overly melodramatic, but I think this is my last comment here on HN for better or worse, simply because this is exactly the microcosmic ideal I've hoped for HN from my beginning involvement--if it dies, there's no need to drag things out and I am grateful for all of HN's
relentless resourcefulness I've encountered. And if not, I'll probably be helping HN continue to develop this idea further through
action.
I think I can safely assume the majority of active members representative of YC here have startups that are in need of traction, but of a different kind not yet fully explored; but nevertheless, in need of resources. I hope I'm also not mistaken in the feeling most of us feel "not ready" or not in the right stage for official seed funding and don't necessarily fit into traditional crowd funding landscape, or simply don't want that much of a burden to worry about while developing.
Yes, money is a burden because it's an anchor you must tie yourself to in most cases, and is hard to come by. I've read it many times here before, as it should be, since this is the YC news. However, there could be something faster...
So, this new or new-old, dare I say model, is a natural progression--or in pg's adapted words, evolution (hopefully I am not putting words in your mouth). To where? Call it Crowd Ramen Funding (CRF), where the angels are the untold majority.
All that's needed is a standalone site to register your startup with the community, associate needed resources to your startup/project, and have others with those available resources either give or lend them to you while you're still getting off the ground. It doesn't have to be big; maybe some food, a sheltered corner to hack under, language manuals, maybe some light consulting, or other things of this nature. And like other crowd funding platforms, you make sure there are enough hands to help you down the edge so you don't have to take the dive by yourself. In return, the angels may receive the startup's product if it was something they personally wanted, or maybe simply the joy of having helped a hacker or two that is adding more value to the world than he or she is taking out, or maybe it's a kind of symbiosis not easily definable.
In short, I feel I'm not alone when I say this has much more potential than just being slash or pipe "Offer", and being so, it really is out of place in the header. HN community participation shouldn't be a function narrowed in scope by its site header, nor should the header sacrifice its functionality of directing users contributing and reading news. I think at heart it's really a classical inheritance problem, in which case, it's best to just extend rather than subtype the current functionality. May the entire community see this thing through to either a bitter end or choosing to forward it on into the future. That is all.