If engagement is the priority, my suggestion would be to build this curation into HN itself instead of using a post on a separate blog. Give the admins a way to tag a comment as highlighted, then present those comments in some visually distinct way and add a link to the nav that jumps you to a list of all highlighted comments.

After reading the post, I feel like maybe not everything needs to be optimized for well-defined priorities. :)

You can subscribe to receive the emails. I do and often there's pretty interesting stuff in there.

Is the subscribe link at the bottom of that page specifically for this type of stuff? There is nothing visually connecting that to the article and it only uses the vague phrase "updates from Y Combinator". I am one of those HN users who comes here for the tech topics much more than the startup topics. I therefore don't have much interest in Y Combinator outside of being thankful that they host this site. I don't really want every blog entry they post to be emailed to me but I will happily sign up if it is more this type of content.

It's all the blog entries, but usually formatted fairly well. There aren't too many blog entries (five or so), and typically ones that make HN are highlighted more.

All that being said, I see your point.

There's an RSS/Atom feed, so you could set up a filter in IFTTT or a similar app or service.

> these have been put together sporadically for at least the last three years with seemingly little engagement. I wonder why that is.

Because HN readers are more likely to engage with the comments themselves?