Don't forget one of the side functions of hacker news is advertising for YC. There's a reason hacker news is news.ycombinator.com and not it's own separate domain.
(Viaweb was originally called Webgen, but another business was already using that name (and had the trademark, I think). They offered the other Webgen something absurd like 5% of the company to let them keep using that name. They said no, so they changed to Viaweb. I think Viaweb is a better name, and it almost certainly wouldn't have made them 5% more successful if they had been called Webgen.)