Sure, and Harvard is supported by ads, you just don't realize it.

(sell an education->create wealthy people->ask them to contribute->get endowment whose returns account for the largest source of its operating revenue[1])

but I find your semantics frankly ridiculous. yes hacker news belongs to ycombinator. but you can't just use the word ad however you want. No, not everything's an ad, and in particular you can't 'buy' a job ad on HN. It's not a good description of the situation.

[1] http://www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/harvard-glance/endowmen... "The endowment remains the largest source of revenue supporting the University budget."

I'm fairly certain those companies don't pay for those job listings.

Just because they give them out for free (to a very small specific group of companies) doesn't mean they don't have value.

Oh yes they certainly have value - but Those job listings aren't ads that pay for servers and bandwidth for hacker news.

Depends how you look at it.

Whether that value directly pays for servers or intangibly-or-directly increases their own startups' value doesn't seem like an important distinction.

Well, they are YC companies so they pay YC with a pretty significant portion of their equity.

Are you the same switz from #r/GlobalOffensive?