Sometimes capitalism works!
The concept of "private ownership" is not definitionally identical to the concept of "capitalism", I hope you realize...
Capitalism doesn't mean "earn[ing] enough through its service to support itself". Why do you think that people are not free to finance sites that promote other branches of their business under capitalism?
Spend money to make a thing -> sell that thing for more than it cost to make it. That's not happening here.
> an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.
I synthesized this to what I wrote above. If you disagree that's fine, but I think "for profit" is a critical aspect of capitalism, and while it's arguably true that HN provides YC with "a profit" it's an intangible and indirect one, which to me is not "straightforwardly capitalistic".
Anyways, my final argument is if an individual asset of a company doesn't directly generate revenue yet increases company profit, would it not be "un-capitalistic" if that company were to extinguish that asset? It seems to me that throwing away profit would be antithetical to that definition of capitalism.
The $30k espresso machine in the Google office does nothing to generate revenue, however it helps Google become more competitive in the labor market which (at least they think) increases profit. None of these situations are edge cases, they are just natural outcomes that exist when people are free to compete. If it is expected that a decision will lead to a profit, it seems straightforward that one would make that decision.
It was fun discussing this with you, I hope you have a good day.
Maybe more companies should be more open to more weird edge cases and maybe that would make them richer and therefore more capitalist? I don't know.
It's definitely capitalism, and arguably highly effective at that, I just don't think it's "straightforward" is all.