The New York Marathon is a contest. Contests are not necessarily lotteries. If there are winners and losers it's definitely a contest. And with Y Combinator there's usually about 30 "winners" and more than 1,000 "losers."
Is it just me or have the major bloggers taken an interest in HN recently? I noticed that Dave Winer started engaging about two months ago and now Scoble. Did something major happen to prompt this or is it just a general response to the increasing levels of traffic that we send to the various blogs?
Was that intended to be a compliment? :)