You are cloning Hacker News, not Y Combinator. Unless you are planning to fund startups.

Hacker news is a social news aggregator like many other, what makes it special is the community (us!).

In spain there is a digg-clone called Meneame, which is free software. You can get the source from http://svn.meneame.net/index.cgi/branches/version2/ so maybe you can skip some steps ;) (The bad news are that it is a piece of PHP...).

OTOH, if what you enjoy is programming and are doing it to learn/practice/whatever keep us informed :)