Gives you an opportunity to practice another buddhist/zen concept: letting go

It's no good if you're of a competitive nature though, which I believe to be an essential trait if you want to do startups.

You don't see many buddhist monks creating successful businesses.

Points seem easier to get now than back then. There are more upvoters.

I think it's easier to lose karma now becuase there are more people who disagree by downvoting a la reddit (see my comment above for a prime example).

But it really feels like people are more stingy with upvotes, especially at the story level. Gone are the days of nickb getting ~1k upvotes from a single submitted story over and over, now it's a much more reserved upvote culture where you have to submit a lot more material and interact more to get those big numbers.

I disagree. I think it's much easier to earn karma now that the HN community is much larger and diverse than when it was smaller. It's simple math; even if only 0.1% of HN members will upvote your post, you'll get votes much more quickly with 15,000 users (15 votes) versus 2000 users (2 votes).