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Ask HN: Y Combinator Focus?

33 points| techbio | 15 years ago | reply

I really appreciate this community. Found it through PG and "Hackers & Painters" originally, and simply consumed passively before registering for an account several months ago.

I wanted to ask before I start making too many posts. Is news.ycombinator.com biased toward Y-Combinator people and the startup school schedule? And if so, would it be more polite to stay quiet?

The algorithms tend to hold me pretty far from view, with a karma score of 30 something. But I would like to participate, even as an IRL outsider.

Edit: The guidelines and community feedback, are really very clearly biased toward the 'informative/thought-provoking'. I am hoping the algorithms detect that more and more alongside account aging and points gained. Cool.

Thanks for the replies. Pretty close to my best guess.

21 comments

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[+] patio11|15 years ago|reply
We have people from all walks of life here, from Silicon Valley startups in the ramen-munching phase to CEOs at companies with eight figures of revenues to a wide, wide assortment of folks with an interest in business and/or technology. Folks are generally pretty friendly and interesting things about non-YC companies get voted up all the time. Don't feel the need to be quiet just because you're not in YC.
[+] benologist|15 years ago|reply
I would say there's an enormous bias, (ycxxx) in the title gets a lot of early upvotes. Not to mention the obsession with PG - even his tweets get submitted, and fast.

But those stories aren't that frequent and once they get their friends' votes they're competing on a pretty level playing field ... if the submission's not genuinely interesting it won't last.

[+] techbio|15 years ago|reply
Oh, right. This post is an example. :)
[+] ig1|15 years ago|reply
To be fair articles about startups founded but other non-YCers HNers get a similar boost, although they don't have the advantage of an easy tag to distinguish them from other articles.
[+] pg|15 years ago|reply
"The algorithms tend to hold me pretty far from view, with a karma score of 30 something."

There are no algorithms that care about total karma.

[+] techbio|15 years ago|reply
I jumped to a conclusion there.

Curious--does anyone have a ratio of the total number of submissions to the "submissions that stick" for lack of a better term?

I posted a couple of fascinating (to me) articles that were pretty quickly subsumed.

Given the number of fascinating articles/resources that hold up on the front-page, the world is an even more interesting place than I thought.

[+] cperciva|15 years ago|reply
There is a lot of overlap between the HN community and the YC community, largely due to PG's leadership role in both; but of the people on HN only a very small minority have been through YC.

Welcome! You'll learn pretty quickly what sort of stories get voted up and which ones get killed by the editors; let that be your guide to content.

[+] philwelch|15 years ago|reply
Most of us are IRL outsiders. Maybe back when HN was started it was an inside club for YC folks, but now no way. The top 4 guys on the leaderboard--and probably four of the most respected HN users--are a security guru in Chicago, a couple freelance developers from Pittsburgh and Europe, and an expat living in Japan making his living from a bootstrapped bingo card software company. It's way more respected here to be an interesting person than to be a YC insider, or failing that, to be a person who says interesting things.
[+] Mz|15 years ago|reply
Just start posting. If you get a lot of downvotes, try to figure out what you are doing wrong. Learn as you go. You'll be fine.
[+] lachyg|15 years ago|reply
Also, don't let downvotes discourage you. It's an experience to get a downvote on HN. Just try figure out why, a lot of the time it's unwarranted, a lot of the time it isn't. Learn from it as Mz says ;)