Oddly enough I'd never checked before, but as of now there are 1426 accounts. The reddits told me once that about 1 out of 10 visitors there is logged in, so this seems about right.
Do we have any metrics on liveness of accounts? I've certainly felt that the community of active, thoughtful commentators is pretty small (not a bad thing!).
Based on the stats of other web apps I would predict that there are around 140 active users who comment and submit articles. This is however just a guess.
That's a surprisingly low number, actually. The first SFP had 227 applications[1] and I assume it's grown since then. Based on nothing at all, I'll guess that the average application has 2.35 founders, so that's 533 applicants. YC has been pretty explicit that they want applicants to participate here.
It works, but only under the assumption that user liveness is constant or increasing over time. A liveness metric should differentiate strongly between a user who has commented 30 times in the past 4 days, and someone who commented 25 times in the first 4 days of news.yc. and 5 times since. Perhaps I'll hack something together.
