However much anyone is willing to pay for it, like anything else.

"What Is My Blog Worth"says:

$172,749.24

http://www.business-opportunities.biz/projects/how-much-is-y...

Should it vary by site content? Reddit turned into a general purpose social news site, but Hacker News is more of a niche thing. Would a larger corporation buy a site like this? I'm not saying they wouldn't; I don't know how it works, maybe someone could explain.

It would probably be worth more as a web application that allowed you to pretty much run your own reddit or news.ycombinator than as a "hacker news" site. A larger corporation might buy it for the actual software, not the audience.

The software is trivial, or close to it. Sure, there are a few smart/hard bits, but any competent developer could resolve them with a month or less of development time.

Building a community is much harder than building a simple web application like this one. And not that by saying this, I'm not trivializing News.YC, I'm just saying you're placing value in the wrong place.

Agreed, but you can only sell a community once, you can sell the software many times.

fun exercise: come up with 5 different ways of valuing news.yc, each of which seem reasonable and each of which give wildly different answers.

If you want the stats for YC, you can look them up on Alexa:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=http%3...

As per dnScoop ( http://dnscoop.com/?site=www.ycombinator.com ): The estimated value of http://www.ycombinator.com is: $2,231,230

This value is calculated based on several factors shown above, including: Links, Traffic (Alexa), age of the domain, site category, domain keyword popularity, and overall occurrences of the domain name on the web.

The value of news.yc is the input of pg and the other moderators. Without them, news.yc is just another reddit.

It's worth exactly $48,493.63 USD.

if we are going to play this game, don't we need the stats on the site?