what we are trying to do is open up our link sharing to the public so everyone can see what we are thinking about, reading, and discussing
and while doing that, we thought it would be great to let others do the same
i did give PG a preview of this about a month ago in case he was upset about it. he replied to me and did not seem to be
HN used to have a lot more in-depth "AskHNs" before Quora came along. Quora never tried to compete with HN, but rather it solved the problem that people were using HN for.
Plenty of people who use HN want curated startup content and intelligent discussion and will go wherever that's found.
In any-case more high-quality startup communities are good for everyone (YC, VCs, founders, etc.) so I don't think that competition is likely to be a significant issue for anyone.
HN is useful to see what is hot. Hot does not mean it is relevant to all of us. If I am raising money, I would be interested in topics tagged to raising money - the fact that you (fred wilson) posted, up voted, commented the topic is a good signal that topic is relevant.
I also like the idea of commenting system that rapgenius and medium deploys. I believe that the idea of seeing the most up voted comment is broken. You might have something to say on a particular sentence in fund raising article- I'm interested to see that. Others may have interesting things to say about other sentences. If USV can pull content online and allow people to comment each sentence, I believe this would really add value to our community.
in general we're very pro-open source