> In the wake of all this drama, a blog post titled "Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth" went viral and hit the top of Hacker News. Which you might have missed, because Hacker News — which is owned by Y Combinator — seems to have manually dropped the post lower in the rankings to suppress its visibility.
Is this true? I never thought HN moderated content critical of itself
8 of the current top 10 stories have been on the front page for longer than the submission that is critical of ycombinator and every single one of them has vastly fewer upvotes and comments. It's not even close, the story that is currently in position 6 has 1/4th the upvotes and 1/10th the comments. It has been on the front page since its submission.
It is impossible for the velocity, given any reasonable common sense examination, for the upvotes on that post to be greater than the story that was nuked after 2 hours.
There is no submission on the front page, some of which have been on the front page for over 24 hours, that has more upvotes, comments, or any conceivable rate of upvoting or commenting that even approaches 1/10th of the nuked story.
There is one submission that has an average of four upvotes per hour.
Assuming that upvotes fall off precipitously after leaving the front page, which I would say is a safe assumption, the nuked story had an upvote rate of several hundred per hour.
There's something fishy going on and that smell isn't the strong odor given off by Salt Water Dimmers, a submission to a barren wikipedia page about an obsolete technology with 13 upvotes and 5 comments that debuted on the front page, and has been there for several hours.
I'm not joking. On the front page of HN for several hours is a link to a 200-word wikipedia article about dimmers used in stage productions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687950
For what it's worth, stories about Boom (a ycombinator joint) SEEM to get nuked extremely rapidly when non-VC non-techbro domain experts start chiming in about what their chances for success actually are and how there's a 50% chance they're the next OceanGate and a 50% chance they're just a scam that got way too big for its britches.
Is this supposed to assauge the concerns of the public? Is dang not employed by, and thus a representative of, Y Combinator? There is every reason to believe he is directly responsible for protecting the interests of the company.
"Company investigated Company and found that Company did nothing wrong"
I don't really care about your concerns. If you are willing to lie for an employer we are ethically distant. I've seen no indication dang is willing to do that either and seen him being very open about things he didn't need to be. Also the way ownership works isn't so simple anymore as HN is YC. More like YC is HNs major sponsor these days.
I would hardly consider "moderating a public forum in accordance with your employer-mandated job description guidelines" to be "lying."
"dang" is a detail--the point is, if someone is being cut a paycheck by a company, the public is well within reason to believe that person has a job obligation to favorably represent the interests of that company.
> and he has never given me any reason to doubt his integrity
in other news: man kills his family, neighbours swear they were a normal happy family, It's totally unexpected, we never would have thought something like this could happen
past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior if and only if nothing else changes.
not speaking about dang specifically, but IMO it's a bit different to not do something when it benefits your reputation and to not do anything when it can harm your job safety.
The flags on hn are extremely powerful, so I don't doubt this. Just a few flags obliterate a post with tons of upvotes. It wouldn't take many people to kill it, and it doesn't require a conspiracy
I will frequently flag posts that are rage bait or where the comments are just the same few people arguing. I haven't flagged this one because I commented in it but it's a very low value post.
It's gossip rage bait to feel the feelings of superiority in the writers community vs VC land. It doesn't dive into any of those things, if it did that could be valuable, it's just reporting events to drive feelings.
I'm sure nobody has hard proof either way, but there's certainly an ongoing pattern of the symptom. This place only exists to promote YC, so you can decide for yourself which is the simplest explanation.
That’s a pretty wild quote from Matthew Duke Pan, one of the PearAI “founders”:
> dawg i chatgpt'd the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there's a problem with the license just lmk i'll change it. we busy building rn can't be
bothered with legal
If you are depending on an open source project for your startup, why say “Get dat shit outta here” after you change its name to your product? If its shit then why use it?
Saved you two clicks
“PearAI, an open-source AI code editor. When people looked at its code they found that it was a clone of an existing open-source project called Continue.dev.”
Why should people be dissuaded from clicking twice to develop a more nuanced take of their own than a two sentence summary from a stranger with unknown biases?
Regardless of what you think of Pear, making the claim that they have damaged Y Combinator's reputation is pretty dramatic.
Knowing the title is in reference to Pear (and not something that could be _actually_ damaging to YC's rep) lets me know the article is probably isnt worth the time.
> Regardless of what you think of Pear, making the claim that they have damaged Y Combinator's reputation is pretty dramatic.
YC's main value is in subsequent fundraising, wherein companies are pre-vetted by YC before being invested in by VCs. If they lose the confidence of VCs as being a reliable arbiter of preseed startups, the better startups will just go elsewhere (already happening) and soon the VCs will too. Thus harming YC's reputation massively.
> In the wake of all this drama, a blog post titled "Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth" went viral and hit the top of Hacker News. Which you might have missed, because Hacker News — which is owned by Y Combinator — seems to have manually dropped the post lower in the rankings to suppress its visibility.
Is this true? I never thought HN moderated content critical of itself
Yes, that's true. The thread reached the top of Hacker News, then disappeared. I had to use HN Algolia to find it again.
@dang is that true?
decide for yourself
https://hnrankings.info/41697032/
this happens very, very frequently
Really not to sure which direction you're going with "this happens very, very frequently".
Like the CA admissions thread wasn't on the frontpage initially for under 24h and it had 3x the comments as the YC thread. https://hnrankings.info/41697032,41700516/
So this shows a rapid climb and rapid fall.
I understand that articles don’t just climb due to the magnitude of upvotes, but also the velocity or upvote rate.
All kinds of articles don’t stick to the top, to me the more likely explanation is that the rate of upvotes was not sustained.
The current top post has been in that position for >8 hours.
With both fewer upvotes and comments.
https://hnrankings.info/41721668/
8 of the current top 10 stories have been on the front page for longer than the submission that is critical of ycombinator and every single one of them has vastly fewer upvotes and comments. It's not even close, the story that is currently in position 6 has 1/4th the upvotes and 1/10th the comments. It has been on the front page since its submission.
https://hnrankings.info/41721318/
It's been on the front page for 11 hours.
It is impossible for the velocity, given any reasonable common sense examination, for the upvotes on that post to be greater than the story that was nuked after 2 hours.
There is no submission on the front page, some of which have been on the front page for over 24 hours, that has more upvotes, comments, or any conceivable rate of upvoting or commenting that even approaches 1/10th of the nuked story.
There is one submission that has an average of four upvotes per hour.
Assuming that upvotes fall off precipitously after leaving the front page, which I would say is a safe assumption, the nuked story had an upvote rate of several hundred per hour.
There's something fishy going on and that smell isn't the strong odor given off by Salt Water Dimmers, a submission to a barren wikipedia page about an obsolete technology with 13 upvotes and 5 comments that debuted on the front page, and has been there for several hours.
I'm not joking. On the front page of HN for several hours is a link to a 200-word wikipedia article about dimmers used in stage productions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687950
For what it's worth, stories about Boom (a ycombinator joint) SEEM to get nuked extremely rapidly when non-VC non-techbro domain experts start chiming in about what their chances for success actually are and how there's a 50% chance they're the next OceanGate and a 50% chance they're just a scam that got way too big for its britches.
Can you provide more examples?
[dead]
dang has said on multiple occasions they don't and he has never given me any reason to doubt his integrity. Quite the opposite.
Is this supposed to assauge the concerns of the public? Is dang not employed by, and thus a representative of, Y Combinator? There is every reason to believe he is directly responsible for protecting the interests of the company.
"Company investigated Company and found that Company did nothing wrong"
I don't really care about your concerns. If you are willing to lie for an employer we are ethically distant. I've seen no indication dang is willing to do that either and seen him being very open about things he didn't need to be. Also the way ownership works isn't so simple anymore as HN is YC. More like YC is HNs major sponsor these days.
I would hardly consider "moderating a public forum in accordance with your employer-mandated job description guidelines" to be "lying."
"dang" is a detail--the point is, if someone is being cut a paycheck by a company, the public is well within reason to believe that person has a job obligation to favorably represent the interests of that company.
> I would hardly consider "moderating a public forum in accordance with your employer-mandated job description guidelines" to be "lying."
Explicitly saying you don't do X while doing X is lying, whether or not you are getting a paycheck for it.
(And to be clear, I doubt dang is lying; there’s no need to resort to centralized moderation to explain the observed behavior.)
But dang has on multiple occasions said he doesn't do this so that would be not just lying up unnecessary lying.
Would anyone stop using HN if you knew they buried negative stories about YC? You're all still here so likely no.
> and he has never given me any reason to doubt his integrity
in other news: man kills his family, neighbours swear they were a normal happy family, It's totally unexpected, we never would have thought something like this could happen
past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior if and only if nothing else changes.
not speaking about dang specifically, but IMO it's a bit different to not do something when it benefits your reputation and to not do anything when it can harm your job safety.
There are a lot of HN folks here ( startups, ... )
Dang said they didn't do it and it's being flagged by users.
Which obviously makes sense of you think about it.
The flags on hn are extremely powerful, so I don't doubt this. Just a few flags obliterate a post with tons of upvotes. It wouldn't take many people to kill it, and it doesn't require a conspiracy
I will frequently flag posts that are rage bait or where the comments are just the same few people arguing. I haven't flagged this one because I commented in it but it's a very low value post.
What makes it low value in your opinion? The story combines AI, YC, software licenses etc., which are generally of interest to the HN community.
It's gossip rage bait to feel the feelings of superiority in the writers community vs VC land. It doesn't dive into any of those things, if it did that could be valuable, it's just reporting events to drive feelings.
“You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge” - George Carlin
I'm sure nobody has hard proof either way, but there's certainly an ongoing pattern of the symptom. This place only exists to promote YC, so you can decide for yourself which is the simplest explanation.
[dead]
That’s a pretty wild quote from Matthew Duke Pan, one of the PearAI “founders”:
> dawg i chatgpt'd the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there's a problem with the license just lmk i'll change it. we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal
[https://x.com/anothercohen/status/1840515897804623882/photo/...]
Whoa! I saw that quote in the article and thought it was some random twitter snarky satire. Not the actual founder.
I genuinely don't understand how you can make a business based on open source and not get IP lawyers involved.
The other cofounder is not far from him: https://x.com/secemp9/status/1840517950060855431
If you are depending on an open source project for your startup, why say “Get dat shit outta here” after you change its name to your product? If its shit then why use it?
The difference between 20-somwething founders and adults
As an investor I'd probably pick passion and dedication over maturity and responsibility too
Don’t know why the link doesn’t go to the article correctly. Here’s the working link: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/starting-up/the-ai-startup...
It is becoming increasingly clear that YC is a recruitment pipeline for megacorps with the fringe benefit of a successful company launch.
Saved you two clicks “PearAI, an open-source AI code editor. When people looked at its code they found that it was a clone of an existing open-source project called Continue.dev.”
Also worth noting that continue is also YC backed
Wait, so that's.. three open source AI code editors backed by YC so far, or more?
Including Void, Continue, and PearAI.
There’s probably a few, but it’s funny bc Pear is a fork of Continue
Why should people be dissuaded from clicking twice to develop a more nuanced take of their own than a two sentence summary from a stranger with unknown biases?
Regardless of what you think of Pear, making the claim that they have damaged Y Combinator's reputation is pretty dramatic.
Knowing the title is in reference to Pear (and not something that could be _actually_ damaging to YC's rep) lets me know the article is probably isnt worth the time.
> Regardless of what you think of Pear, making the claim that they have damaged Y Combinator's reputation is pretty dramatic.
YC's main value is in subsequent fundraising, wherein companies are pre-vetted by YC before being invested in by VCs. If they lose the confidence of VCs as being a reliable arbiter of preseed startups, the better startups will just go elsewhere (already happening) and soon the VCs will too. Thus harming YC's reputation massively.
If the link is to indiehackers it's just going to be a forum post from another stranger with unknown biases.