Ask HN: Pick startups for YC to fund - <AUTHOR> Here at HN HQ we've been wondering: if Hacker News could fund startups, what startups would it fund?
Hacker News users have many diverse perspectives on technology and business. Perhaps if HN picked startups, it would pick differently than YC. Maybe different startups would be motivated to apply, if they knew that the interviewing and deciding would be done by the HN community. Interesting things might happen, or they might not. We'd have to try it and see.
I ran this by Sam and he ran it by Kevin and we all got excited, so we're going to try this as an experiment. Starting today, there's a new track for YC applications: applying directly to the Hacker News community. We'll call it "Apply HN". Note that word experiment! We'll start small and figure it out as we go. But here are the initial conditions.
YC's Fellowship program will fund a minimum of 2 startups selected by the HN community for this summer's F3 batch. (They name their batches sequentially.) The Fellowship is the YC program that fits best here since it's designed to be experimental and inclusive and doesn't require people to move to the Bay Area.
All the interviewing and evaluating will be done in regular HN threads, and everyone is welcome to participate. For this summer's batch, Apply HN will accept applications starting now and ending April 27.
If you'd like to apply to the HN community for YCF funding, simply post a submission whose title begins with "Apply HN" and explain what your startup does. Hopefully community members will ask you questions and good discussion will ensue.
If you'd like to help pick which startups to fund, simply jump into any Apply HN thread that interests you. Ask questions and post comments that you think will help the community make the best decisions. These will be regular threads, with all the same voting and so on, but with one additional rule: Be Nice.
Be Nice is a stronger version of our usual rule, Be Civil. Anybody who applies to HN in public this way is putting both themselves and their baby in a super vulnerable position. We're going to rise to the occasion by being not only civil, but nice. When interviewing startups, by all means be curious and probing—but only if you can also be nice. The word "nice" originally meant "not knowing". Then later it meant "precise and careful". And now it means "kind and thoughtful". Let's put all those qualities together.
At the end of the month, we'll rank the startups and YC will fund two. The ranking will depend both on upvotes and on the quality of discussion, similar to how the ranking of stories works. We can talk about this in the comments, but to answer one question I know will come up: Upvotes are an important factor but they're too brittle to rely on exclusively; doing so would encourage the wrong kind of trying to game the system. So we're going to gauge community interest both by upvotes and comments, and in case of doubt I'll make the final call—or better, figure out a way to put the final call to the community.
That's what we're thinking so far. If it seems unstructured, that's on purpose: we don't want to bias it along the lines of how YC already operates. We want to see what the community comes up with.
Questions or suggestions? Let's discuss and refine this together.
Edit: As discussed below, we'll add a top link for these a la /ask and /show. I won't get to that till later, though, so in the meantime, use the following link to find Apply HN discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22apply%20hn%22&sort=byDate&d...
Edit 2: Here's the link describing how YCF works: https://fellowship.ycombinator.com/faq/. Read it to make sure you're eligible. It's a lot more flexible than YC Core, but there are still some restrictions.
Edit 3: There's now a ranked page of applications at https://news.ycombinator.com/applyhn, a complete list at https://news.ycombinator.com/applynew, and a random sample at https://news.ycombinator.com/applyrand. <comment><USER2> Hey everyone! I manage and run the Fellowship program at YC. I just want to build on top of what Dan wrote about being nice. We're not asking you to do this because we think it's good manners. We actually believe it's the right way to think and act like the best investors.

It's easy to form some really bad habits when you sit in a position of power to judge the potential of a person, a team, an idea and their execution—believing that you know better and focusing your time on finding weakness.

The best investors don't spend a lot of time on what can go wrong. They already know the odds are against every startup that ever comes into existence. They already know every startup is a shit show. Those will be the reasons why all the other investors will miss out on an unpredictable opportunity. The best investors try to figure out what can go right. They dream a little with the startup and they then sell that vision back to the founders.

Remember that the big wins in startups come from the margins. For you to find what no one else could have predicted, know that it will take the shape of something that isn't obvious.

Being nice gives you a good foundation for being open and optimistic, which is what we strive for when we read applications here at YC.

Thanks again for trying this out with us. I'm really excited about what we discover together.

<comment><USER3> For the sake of discussion, I'll offer a counterargument.

Be Nice is a good goal for Apply HN since it promotes civil discussion and stops the threads from devolving into semantic "lol no https u suck" that some Show HN threads tend to devolve into.

 _Users are not nice_. They don't comment on HN or Twitter, they just stop using it without fanfare. And what determine a startup's success in the real world is if _people want to use it_.

Hindsight is 20/20, yes. But I do have concerns that "Be Nice" may dissuade commenters/potential customers from pointing out legitimate, immediate flaws.

<comment><AUTHOR> > "Be Nice" may dissuade commenters/potential customers from pointing out > legitimate, immediate flaws.

I don't think HN users are going to have trouble doing that, but there are different ways to do it, and the nicer ways have the critical property of opening the discussion further instead of shutting it down.

We HN users are used to thinking of ourselves as the scrappy underdog, calling out incorrectness and badness with pristine honesty and with no particular effect on the situation, except occasionally a righteous one like forcing Google to do customer service. We don't think of ourselves as being in a position of power, but that's actually an illusion, as many who've walked into a wasps' nest of critical comments and come out stung can attest.

To me one interesting social aspect of this experiment, quite separate from who gets funded, is that it unambiguously puts the HN community in a position of power—a perspective that we're not accustomed to, and which requires developing different habits (edit: I mean a higher standard of conduct). Maybe those habits will end up translating to the community as a whole (yay!) Or maybe they won't show up at all (boo!)—but at least we can all keep reminding each other to be nicer in these threads.

<comment><USER4> "Hey, this looks really cool, but I notice you guys don't support TLS (i.e., if I change the 'http' to 'https', I can't connect). I know you have a million things on your todo list, but this one is extraordinarily important; your target users will simply close their browser windows once they see 'http'. Also, fixing this is easy! Just check out this tutorial [link] .. or let me know if you have any questions and I'll see if I can help you right here!"

<comment><AUTHOR> That's fine, and for those who don't feel so gushy, there's a different thing you can do: simply re-read your comments and edit out anything that isn't nice. You can always set 'delay' in your profile to between 1 and 10 minutes to give yourself some editing time. Mine is 3.

<comment><USER5> > _You can always set 'delay' in your profile to between 1 and 10 minutes to > give yourself some editing time._

I had always seen this, but never actually looked into what it did. For someone like me who typically makes a litany of edits immediately after posting, this is revelatory. Thanks!

For whatever reason, the textbox just isn't as good of a preview when compared to viewing the actual post.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _For whatever reason, the textbox just isn 't as good of a preview when > compared to viewing the actual post._

I know. Good lord do I know.

<comment><USER6> Is it possible to suggest existing projects (in which I do not participate) ?

I have few in mind like Unicorn engine ([http://www.unicorn- engine.org/](http://www.unicorn-engine.org/)).

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean post them as Apply HNs? No, but you could convince them to apply for themselves.

<comment><USER6> I mean a "Suggest HN" people can vote for with no obligation to Apply (nor for YC to do something, like a Show HN).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _we 're already seeing quite a few Apply HNs, so we'll add a link for those a la /ask and /show_

Quick poll for the community here: I run Hacker News Daily ([http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/](http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/)) which many people know about; but also Ask HN Weekly ([http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly-ask/](http://www.daemonology.net/hn- weekly-ask/)) and Show HN Weekly ([http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly- show/](http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly-show/)). In each case the methodology is the same: The 10 highest-scoring items which (a) appeared on relevant "front page" in the day/week in question, (b) and haven't appeared on a previous Daily/Weekly.

Would people be interested in having an "Apply HN Weekly" set up along similar lines? It's straightforward for me to copy the scripts and edit a few paths (once the HN link appears) but there's no point if nobody would want to read it.

EDIT: I'm seeing lots of upvotes to this comment, which I'm going to assume is an indication that people would like to see me implement this. If you were upvoting simply because you wanted to make more people aware that I had a really lousy idea, please add a comment to disambiguate.

<comment><USER8> Speaking for myself, I would never ever look at that. I did upvote you though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am not very sure about this for a few reasons:

1\. There is _possibly_ several ways to game the upvote system. HN community is not anonymous, and there are people who have more friends here than others. A lot of very good founders would probably not have enough friends here. That _might_ create bias once an Apply HN post reaches first page vs. another.

2\. Participating startups risk facing public bashing while hoping to get priceless feedback. This happens often here, even unintentionally sometimes. This also poses a risk that a lot of startups would not be 100% honest in one way or another to minimize bashing. This is commonplace on Reddit. But this is not Reddit and any founder cannot forever escape people here. This is an ecosystem forum which is extremely civil in Show HN (with a few exceptions) but might not be so when competing for a resource -- the 2 YCF spots. Maybe Reddit is the way it is because everyone is competing for points.

3\. Publicly applying for funding might step on private financing laws of several states and nations? It might also be against some by-laws. Would this constitute a public offer?

Maybe this could be helped better by doing one or more of these:

1\. Apply HN posts should not make it to homepage and should be a separate section.

2\. The heuristic should not be known publicly of what YC partners are looking for.

3\. Companies should still be required to fill a YC app before posting. Then it's a public contest rather than a public offer to sell shares.

This would be interesting for sure!

<comment><AUTHOR> We've put a ton of work into HN's anti-gaming software. There's no piece of code we've worked harder on. We also have a ton of experience looking at voting data. That's one advantage of keeping this process close to how HN normally works: that software and experience will apply here.

That's definitely not to say that there won't be new forms of gaming that we haven't seen before and don't know how to combat. It's a risk. We can mitigate that risk by emphasizing the quality of discussion in the threads. Experience has taught that genuine community interest is pretty recognizable. If a post gets lots of upvotes, but little community interest, or the interest doesn't seem genuine, HN users will notice, as will we. That should provide a measure of self-correction, and beyond that, we'll see what happens. If you think you notice fakery, firstname.lastname@example.com is the place to let us know.

<comment><USER10> He's not talking about someone automating voting, rather imagine if founder A is a very popular guy in Twitter and YouTube.

He makes a post saying 'Hey support my awesome startup '. Founder B might have a better idea, but not the followers.

However, Founders A existing popularity may provide a nice userbase for startup, which would be a key element of success.

Theirs no real way to make this 'fair'

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, perhaps I misread the GP. But I agree that there's no way to control for all these factors. It would drive one mad to try and probably make consensus harder to arrive at.

<comment><USER11> It's worth trying to figure out something as it's a problem here enough people occasionally leave. It's basically mob or follow-the-leader mentality that results in reflexive downvotes on hot-topics when dissenting comments appear. I encountered this when I got into battles with tptacek not knowing he was No 1 or whatever here. I barely care about the popularity or politics as I focus on getting right info to right people. So, I didn't stop when every comment I had was being downvoted at once multiple times. (shrugs)

Nonetheless, I still watched it with fascination in a group dynamics sense as any comment to him had this pattern: a single, nearly-instant downvote (him or biggest fan); a few more in a short period that grayed my post out; his own often going gray after a bit longer; mine ungraying; his ungraying hit and miss; stabilization at anywhere from like -2 to +4. Only happens with fan- favorite people (eg him), tech (eg Rust/C), or topics (eg anti-VC claims naturally) here as my other posts consistently get ignored, a few votes (good or bad), or major upvote for outliers. My net impression was that it represented mob voting by groups for and against those popular individuals as I was unestablished here at the time.

I guess what I'm getting at is there's gotta be an overlap between the spikes, where they're showing up, and who makes them show up. If a negative surge registers as fan-driven pattern, rather than diverse, then points in the other direction might counter it. Some fraction of the total fan-driven votes while ignoring the other votes which were independent. This might stop tyranny of the majority from making dissenting, but otherwise informative, opinions from disappearing. Or it could be as simple as noticing the effect, capping number of negative votes that can come in on that comment/thread, and preventing gray out. Keeps the numbers honest while achieving same objective. So, those are just a few ideas to throw around based on what I've seen.

The data also led me to counter the disinformation spread elsewhere that critiquing these hot people or topics will totally destroy your karma on HN. I've hit them all and consistently to the point that my account would've disappeared within 3-5 business days of beginning. ;) So, the mobs are there & have significant effect that can deter new or less aggressive commenters. Yet, the moderation & community culture keeps it minimal to point that a mix of supportive and neutral, informative comments brings in enough upvotes to easily counter it. Blocking their ability to disappear dissenting comments upon detecting fan-driven, vote surges might be all it takes.

<comment><USER12> It's really not about establishment, except for a particular few people. Informative opinions that are "out of the norm" will get upvotes, almost always, as long as they're written in a kind manner. They'll be downvoted first, and get a massive corrective upvote stream.

I feel like you're looking at commenting wrong here. You're not doing battle with people. Yes, sometimes you get downvoted "incorrectly", there are always stray votes in either direction. But I've found that politeness and care have always received upvotes, no matter what position stood behind them.

Maybe it's... a personal issue? I don't want to insult you, but being overly combative definitely garners downvotes.

PS: take note that you can't downvote a comment that is in reply to you. :)

<comment><USER11> "They'll be downvoted first, and get a massive corrective upvote stream."

That's actually exactly what I saw. I wasn't sure if it was a trend or tied to specific people/topics. So, a trend then.

" But I've found that politeness and care have always received upvotes, no matter what position stood behind them."

Oh I agree. That's been a good chunk of my karma. There are battle's of the minds on occasion, though, when people have strong opinions or attachment to topics. I actually get many upvotes on those but only when I stick to solid arguments with no personal attacks. I usually include references. Outside that, what you said about courtesy and facts is the majority of it.

"PS: take note that you can't downvote a comment that is in reply to you. :)"

Never even noticed that! Helps clarify some prior events. Thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ranking by upvotes/comments seems highly problematic, even with HN's antibrigade features.

A) There are _many_ external factors that can implicitly cap the number of upvotes/comments. (time submitted, amount of competition, etc.) HN has repost rules to alleviate this problem: would Apply HN posts be able to repost too?

B) Not to mention that it encourages sockpuppet voting/commenting, especially since there is a _high reward_ for doing so.

Product Hunt, for example, thrives on "how can I get exposure for my startup submission outside of the intrinsic quality of the startup itself?" and it would be an improper fit for HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think we're on the same page to some extent. What I meant by 'ranking by comments' is that we want the ranking to depend on the _quality_ of the discussion. That's the one thing that can't be faked.

That's how the ranking of HN stories works now. It's a combination of upvotes and human curation by users (e.g. flagging) and moderators.

So there's going to be some combination of technical and non-technical factors. How exactly will that work? We don't know yet. Let's see what happens and figure it out together. That's part of the experiment: we'll figure it out in the open and adapt to feedback. But let's wait until we have some data to look at.

FWIW, my experience with HN is that genuine community interest is relatively easy to recognize.

<comment><USER13> Would it be appropriate to ask our users of our startup to and vote for us on here? If they are invested enough in our service and community to do so, it seems like that would be a very positive and useful signal in it's own right. Or would that be considered gaming the votes?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, that would be gaming the votes, just as asking them to upvote for a blog post would be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I actually already wrote this as a reply to another comment, but I think it merits a comment of its own.

The best way to do the scoring for the applications is to actually make it into somewhat of a game. Each application should be given a starting elo of 1200. Every time a user wants to go and review applications they will be presented with two separate applications with a similar elo and then will be asked to vote on which one they think is better. Elo will then be added/subtracted with normal conditions based on the vote. This system would very quickly and accurately identify the best applications. I've seen this done before for other things and it's been proven to be very effective and prevent almost any sort of bias.

<comment><USER15> Would this be implemented as only showing pairs within a certain threshold of difference, or would it choose an application purely at random and then the application with the closest score (or even 50/50 the next highest or next lowest)? The former seems like it could lead to cases where applications end up in a void between clusters and stop appearing in votes, preventing late voters from giving an opinion on them.

Is there a name for this kind of voting process?

<comment><USER14> To ensure each application gets the same amount of views (with the exception of the top ranked and bottom ranked applications) you can pick the next highest/lowest and it will work out fine. My concern with this implementation was that it might be possible for the same applications to be compared multiple times at the high and low ends of the bell curve where elo becomes more spaced out. A better solution might be internally listing all the applications by their elo, selecting an application and random, and then selecting from an application within 5 ranks of itself. I.E. App #342 is randomly chosen and then an application between #337 and #347 will be randomly chosen to compare it with. I am not aware of any name for this voting process.

Each potential implementation has slightly better/worse corner cases, but the general quality of the ranking should still be extremely accurate regardless of the particular implementation. It takes surprisingly few comparisons for items to find their appropriate ranks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> To be frank, my first reaction on reading this idea was negative.

I think part of my reaction is because I'm not seeing a _useful_ goal: "interesting things" is certainly a goal, but strikes me as being too vague from which to extract useful information. What are interesting things? If you don't know what they are, how will you know if they happened? Are you set up to measure interesting things? If so, can you quantify them, and what sort of sensitivity/specificity, dynamic range, etc. do you expect your instrumentation to provide? What is the duration/endpoints of the experiment? Does the experimental design support the objective, and with what power does the experiment have to inform?

I think that the other part of my reaction is that, as an experimental scientist, I am specifically trained against doing something so unstructured. Practical considerations like safety and budgetary waste aside, _I am the person I trust least_ : it's very easy to fool oneself about the significance of a result with an ongoing experiment that one is conducting. Experimental discipline, like planning ahead (and preregistration) and blinding and good controls, serve to promote objectivity and help reduce bias.

I have no doubt that this experiment would produce "interesting things". I am very skeptical that, as presented, you would know _why_ it produced interesting things.

Of course, I'm just a dog on the internet. Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh agreed, it's definitely not an experiment by any research standard. In that sense we're using the word metaphorically. But there's a place for ad hoc trial-and-error, and it's common to call that 'experimental' in colloquial English. YC has done such things in the past, e.g. for a batch or two it was possible to apply with just an idea. Nothing interesting came of that—other than that nothing interesting came of it—so it got phased out. This is an 'experiment' in the way that was.

It's popular on HN to suggest making YC (or startup investment generally) more science-like via controlled experiments, but that's hard to do at all and extremely hard to do well, and we're not set up for it. Maybe one day. But this is not that—it's just trying something new to see what happens.

As for whether interestingness is a goal in itself, on HN it is for sure. That value is hard-coded in the DNA of this place. And there's a well-established if not easily reproducible path from "huh, interesting" to "undeniably useful". That's the nature of the creative process and it's a space HN (and YC, in a different way) particularly like to inhabit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Will there be a new toplink for "Apply HN" submissions? I think random sorting on that page would be a good idea to encourage all submissions get an opportunity for discussion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably a top link, yes, but in good minimalist form we'll wait until it's clear we need it. (Edit: we need it. In the meantime, please use the Algolia link I included at the top. It's not like we wrote code for this in advance or anything—that would be cheating :))

Random sorting is a good idea. We'll think about that.

<comment><USER18> at least make a magic url like news.ycombinator.com/applyhn even if there's no toplink yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think a mini application with a few questions from the normal YC app as a comment would be helpful. I see a ton of Show HNs in which I have no idea what the product does (either because the website copy is vague/confusing or because I don't know the market). Having a comment template or something reviewers can look at without have to ask the same questions in every thread would be great.

<comment><USER20> Yes, I came back to this thread to say I'm surprised how difficult it is to understand what it is they want to make. Also, I have read at least half a dozen and not a single one has mentioned how it's a business and how they will make money.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _I 'm surprised how difficult it is to understand what it is they want to > make_

YC partners complain about this all the time too.

> _not a single one has mentioned how it 's a business and how they will make > money_

I hope you asked them!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> About a year ago I ran a series of tests where I continuously posted the same 15-20 articles tracking the number of up votes within the first 10-15 minutes.

It turns out it was essentially random, and although every one of the posts were decent enough to make it to the front page 2 or 3 times sometimes it received zero votes, sometimes 10.

It seems somewhat unfair to use the standard ranking system with this being the case, since it's essentially random. I think there would need to be a way to randomly show them to users and have users vote. Similar to /r/starups[1]

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/)

BTW I eventually received an email from the YC staff, thank you for not banning me :) No one should do this.

<comment><USER22> Did you write up this testing? I would love to see some hard number on this effect?

<comment><USER21> I have all the data, never published it because I didn't have time... I'll get around to it soon though

The data isn't super solid because I was stopped before I got to 50 (which was my goal).

<comment><USER22> You should ask Dan to let you continue :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Truth is, I'd start writing code to copy any idea that I was totally blown away by, and I don't need any funding to start doing that.

Putting your idea right there in front of some pretty fast moving programmers has to be something people would think twice about.

Having said that, it's hard to imagine an idea being sufficiently compelling to start writing code to implement it immediately. The only ideas that really blow me away are my own and they usually turn out to be silly anyway, after I've spent six months building them to crickets.

I don't think ideas are worth nothing by the way. Just ask the Facebook twins.

<comment><USER24> There just aren't that many people out there who are willing and capable of doing the hard work it takes to bring something --anything-- to the point where it usable. Those who are have their own projects already, which they won't abandon based on a forum post. And if they do, they're going to abandon this new project the moment they read about an even cooler idea.

Besides, ideas grow and take on a life of their own as you work on them. By the time your interpretation of the idea takes shape it's going to be distinctly different from the original idea that inspired you.

The only way to keep people from stealing your ideas is by never talking to anybody about them. That's surely the worst of all options.

You can literally try to clone any YC company after demo day. All the startups get covered on techcrunch making their ideas public. Just pick the one you like best and open your favorite editor. They only got a 6 months head start, so what's stopping you?

<comment><USER25> > You can literally try to clone any YC company after demo day.

Not quite true. A growing number are hardware/robotics or biotech or some other field that require significant capital investment and highly specialist Phd-level expertise to even get a proof-of-concept off the ground, so you can't just "open your favorite editor" and get started.

Then you have those which cover a niche that again requires some kind of insider knowledge or connections (it helped for example that Facebook was created in Harvard). That's not to say these are impossible barriers, but again they're not broken by hacking away at node or PHP.

The pool of ideas that a) you, personally, can execute on today and b) have a hope of generating profit or funding within a reasonable timeframe is not as big as people like to think. Much of the low-hanging fruit of profitable ideas that can be executed by the single coder in the proverbial basement has been picked long ago.

<comment><USER24> Every time a new platform or a new device gets launched there are low-hanging opportunities aplenty. It is easy to overestimate how big the opportunity has to be in order to be worthwhile for a single programmer. Those opportunities don't get pursued by established businesses because they are too small, leaving the field ripe for the picking.

<comment><USER25> That's very true, I think there's a window of opportunity when a new device/technology becomes mainstream before it becomes commoditized/cornered by a few big players : thinking of the web, then mobile, now the app stores are saturated and very few people can make money from them. VR might be the next wave (although plenty of false starts in that space).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I see a lot of 'entrepreneurs' who spend their time getting their fb friends to vote for them in local startup pitch competitions, they don't actually spend any time making a company, but are very effective at getting votes.

The HN community might just be a better barometer, hope to see this experiment work out and bring attention to worthy and unnoticed startups.

<comment><USER27> I agree. Some kind of app that requires users to log in then randomizes what they can vote on.

<comment><USER14> Yea, expanding on this the best way to get the best results is to actually give each post an elo score. Then when a user goes to look at two applications they can vote on which application they think is better and award / subtract elo like you would in any other case. This very quickly will let the quality applications rise to the top and cause the bad ones to fall by the wayside. Note that it's also important to constantly compare applications with similar elo scores.

I've seen this done before and it's incredibly efficient.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Thought: in the original Wisdom of Crowds book, an important point was that people's selections need to be independent of one another, otherwise you get bandwagon/cascade effects. I don't know how that could be made to factor in to things.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd say this is not that model. The way HN works now is clearly by bandwagon effect, and we want this to be pretty close to the way HN works now.

If you think of HN users as 'investing' their time and energy into which stories they read and discuss here, then arguably this is kind of already happening. One way of looking at this experiment is to ask what happens if we take the existing system and permute its feedback loop, i.e. take one of the outputs (startups gets funded -> HN discusses them) and make it an input (HN discussion -> startups get funded). It's impossible to predict how a complex system will react and it's a fun kind of problem to think about. Of course, such permutations often just produce an unstable mess. That could happen here, i.e. the whole thing could turn into a trainwreck that produces no clear signal.

<comment><USER28> I'm a bit skeptical, since "commenting on HN" is so asymmetrical compared to sinking money into a startup in terms of how much you're invested, but I think it's an interesting experiment. I think if it goes right, with some iteration, it could help to pick out some interesting things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, but HN users aren't actually sinking any money here. They're just telling other people to. Which is maybe not _so_ different from regular HN comments? Who knows. We shall see!

<comment><USER28> > Sure, but HN users aren't actually sinking any money here. They're just > telling other people to.

That's what I meant by 'asymmetry' \- it's kind of the opposite of putting one's money where one's mouth is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> One concern I could see is around disclosing the idea. I know, I know, idea.pre_exectution_worth = 0, idea.post_execution_worth = $, but I have to think that some of the most interesting applications to YC or any other accelerator are at least partially executed hence giving out their intent, or some of the sexy secret sauce which might help them gain a favorable ranking is pitted against a desire to remain secretive. Obviously you have other submission processes but seems like perhaps something to consider, my 2 cents.

<comment><USER30> With the caveat that there are exceptions to any rule (and that this is also just my opinion), when it comes to a startup:

Team > execution >> idea

I'd also expect that the applications through hn that do well will have some sort of prototype or proof of concept. I guess we'll see!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Interesting idea, and kudos to you for kicking off the discussions to refine the approach - and for the "be nice" rule, which I think is very important here.

A question: What are the situations where you think it will benefit people more to go the open route than applying directly?

One way of thinking about it is

advantages of "Apply HN": getting significant calibration and feedback on an idea that improves it whether or not it is selected, a chance for a partial team to begin discussions with other potential co-founders, and the (small) chance of having an idea selected because of overwhelming support when it wouldn't have been chosen through the normal process

disadvantage: exposing the idea in a very early state to thousands of smart motivated people who are then have the time to come up with better variations on it

Obviously the tradeoffs are different for different teams and ideas ... and there certainly might be some advantages and disadvantages I missed. In any case, I'm curious about who you think might benefit most from this.

<comment><USER2> Honestly, we don't really know. We have very few hypotheses around this idea. We're just insanely curious to see what will happen. As far as the disadvantage you mention, that happens when you launch. That happens when you start getting press. That happens when you announce a large funding round. That happens when you're doing well.

In our experience, startups are far more likely to die by suicide than by homicide. Iteration is the only practice to greatness that we've ever seen and you can't do that well without talking about your idea to others. In a vacuum, you can only go so far.

My advice is similar to how we're approaching this experiment: don't over think it.

<comment><USER32> I agree. Even if someone was to take my idea and start working on it concurrently, I as the originator of the idea have an inherent advantage.

If the founders are resilient and resourceful, then the strength of their idea is more decisive than competition in determining success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Just read through a bunch of Apply HN's (~90) and realized how important it is for startups to clearly tell what their company does in the first sentence.

Even though many of the YC partners have mentioned the importance of this, I could feel the pain of reading through the first paragraph and not being able to picture anything about the company in my head. Might be a good strategy to stick in a summary of your startup in the apply hn corpus and ask close friends to see if they understand and get excited by the idea before applying to YC.

Another thing I noticed was how biased I was towards ideas which addressed problems I have had. So hopefully Apply HN will help YC look into companies which are catering to completely different industries and sets of problems which they haven't experienced.

This is a great experiment !

</comment><comment><USER34> The best part of this is YC's commitment to subverting their bias.

Whether successful or not, you guys (and your machines?) will learn something valuable about your process vs. the wisdom of crowds. Really commend your approach to experimentation.

</comment><comment><USER35> @dang: Apologies if this has been said elsewhere, and hopefully it doesn't get lost in the noise.

If upvotes are the most important metric, then vote counts should be hidden to viewers at least prior to their voting. This prevents the situation we have here with news articles where an initial small/fast scurry of upvotes is the only way to capture the attention of the larger audience. In this situation the first few votes likely have far more influence than they should.

</comment><comment><USER36> If I was to guess I'd say HN readers would be more impressed with innovative technology than how the company actually would make money.

I would be wary however of learning very much with a one time experiment with only two funded companies. That would be similar to giving a prospective angel investor the advice to invest in two companies in the next thirty days and then no more.

<comment><USER37> The post said a minimum of two. In other words, in a worst case scenario they are committing to two ideas. For all we know, they might decide to fund 20 in this first experiment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Dang, this is awesome!

I think it would be really cool if you did the experiment blind. E.g the startup applys to YC, if they want to participate they also do HN. you have your interview make what would be your decision, then do the HN piece. that way you can gauge the delta between how the community thinks & how you would've decided without our input.

Either way, this is pretty great idea. As you flesh it out a more, an in depth write up would be great!

</comment><comment><USER39> Well I for one think this is also a super cool idea. Agree with what many have said re: gaming -- just be particularly aware that people will try to figure out how to game this.

But I'd emphasize the qualitative side of the evaluation process -- it should be based on a somewhat opaque mix of upvotes, thoroughness of discussion, and thoughtfulness of answers.

I'd almost treat the various 'Apply HN' threads as open source interviews. Upvoted and the like should be a ROUGH filter, but I'd hope that the YC partners will look at the answers in the threads as a crowdsourced interview and select on the merits more than anything else.

Anyway, excited to see how this experiment plays out.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _mix of upvotes, thoroughness of discussion, and thoughtfulness of answers_

Yes! I'm glad to see someone arriving at the same basic vector that we did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think here is where the "you cannot unvote" design decision for HN breaks. It's one thing to vote several comments that deserved an upvote and whose subthreads I want people to see and comment with priority; and another thing altogether to manage votes that I know, in the end, will end on one company being selected at the detriment of the rest. Here I want to have the ability to vote only to the one that mattered the most, and I want to be able to unvote if further responses of the startup make me uneasy of my already casted vote. It's not sufficient to take my attention elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER41> Forgive me if this comment doesn't belong here: I wanted to say that I enjoy reading YC. While I'm not exactly sure what all HN or YC are about, and some of the topics are over my, I have learned some interesting things. It's awesome intelectual the exchanges can be. And at this moment I find the concept of being nice refreshing in an online forum. Anyhow good look with this startup idea. I'm sure some good stuff will surface and everyone will benefit.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think there's a definite disparity between the key formative aspects of a soon-to-be successful startup, and the popular image that people will vote for. Nobody on HN as enough time or motivation to perform the gritty research on the market or the founders, which means the votes will tend towards flashy sounding concepts. As long as you guys only take this as a cheap and plentiful way of judging the 'wow' factor of these ideas, I think the Apply HN idea is great.

<comment><AUTHOR> The counter-hypothesis to this is that HN's audience is broad enough that even on specialized topics, there's often someone (or surprisingly several) who actually knows something. It would be disappointing if all we got were 'wow' responses—but we'll be able to tell that by looking at the discussion quality of the Apply HN threads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Dan I think this is great idea (I am all for trying new things). One suggestion I do have is to score a startup not by up votes, but by the quality of the discussion that results.

The commentship of HN is not exactly a representative cross-section of the unwashed masses, but it is filled with amazingly knowledgeable and intelligent people. A startup that generates thoughtful and helpful discussion may well be a stronger signal of success than crude up votes.

Edit. arg! I see Dan already had this idea.

</comment><comment><USER43> Some sort of support for people working on building "lifestyle businesses" as side projects would be fantastic. Not all of us have megalomaniac dreams of running the next AirBnb. Question: would YC Fellowship be a good fit for that?

<comment><USER44> YC is in the business of making money (along with promoting substantial positive change in the world). Unfortunately lifestyle businesses don't really work towards either of these ends, and it doesn't make sense for YC to fund them.

<comment><USER45> The basic income experiment may end up encouraging more lifestyle business pursuits if successful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> You guys need to diversify and try to solve hard problems that have slow paybacks. Sure making the next twitter is cool, but how about funding a startup that makes does cheap inpatient monitoring,ordering,labs,diagnosis, drug interaction, of patients at hospitals? There are huge players in that space:Epic,Cerner, etc but if you look the sheer amount of $ a hospital is willing to spend on EMR systems...

<comment><AUTHOR> YC funds a lot of startups that do things like that, and I'm sure HN agrees with you too. You're preaching to the choir here!

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> > Questions or suggestions? Let's discuss and refine this together.

The upvote/commentary is likely going to be highly problematic:

A) I'm pretty sure Dang can't list all 9 accounts I've used on HN over the past few years. I'm also pretty sure 9 accounts in good standing [1500+ karma] would be enough to seed an initial vote if handled carefully. The ones he'd be able to name are the 3 most recent. This being the case...yeah. The danger of sock puppetry is way too high, particularly when combined with strategic downvotes and VPNs.

B) Anyone with control of an existing community/following can use it as a targeted campaign.

C) The reward from bypassing these functions is substantially higher ($20,000 + professional advice from YC) than previously existed for YC.

D) If you want to stick with a vote-based system, I'd offer a larger bounty [say, $50k for manipulating a post to the top of the pile for Apply HN] for finding a way to bypass the vote brigading and other countermeasures. This it is really the only countermeasure I can think of to counter manipulation problems.

E) All the other external factors (time of submission, competition around that time period, repost rules, etc.) are likely to bias the process in unexpected ways but that is probably less problematic than direct manipulation.

> I think we're on the same page to some extent. What I meant by 'ranking by > comments' is that we want the ranking to depend on the quality of the > discussion. That's the one thing that can't be gamed.

Put a bounty on that to test that theory.

I'm pretty sure someone could create a network of socket puppets that had "quality" discussions between them if the reward was $20k.

<comment><USER48> brb submitting a startup that specializes in handling your sockpuppets properly for situations like this

<comment><USER47> I don't use them for sockpuppetry. I just like changing accounts every so often.

I was just pointing out a direction someone could go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Curious coincidence? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11315774](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11315774)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm afraid so. But an impressive one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I am really curious to see how this plays out.

Kudos for the 'be nice' rule - rejections really really hurt, and if they are in public, even more so. Anyone who is willing to put themselves out there like that deserves to be treated with kindness - even if the actual feedback is critical. Snark is very easy.

</comment><comment><USER51> wow. this is really unprecendented. i know some guy who works at a different startup accelerator. one which is funded with EU money. he made some comment about his acc being a lot better on a value-for-equity basis (like obviously). i tried to explain yc would continue to be the #1 not just because of its size or the amount of funding per share to its startups but because of the way it is run. this is an excellent example.

</comment><comment><USER52> I have a question about the YC Fellowship model.

If I had an idea, which I knew would never likely grow beyond $1M in revenue, just because the market is so niche. B2C, but the entire consumer group is probably only in the region of 10,000.

I'd imagine the company would probably max out at 4 or 5 employees.

I have little to no interest in building a product out to $100M or aiming at an IPO.

The YC Fellowship rules indicate that the $20k funding, for convertible security, at least assumes the goal is $100M or IPO.[0]

I'd very happily offer 1.5% right up front for $20k, no need to worry about convertible security, as long as it was clear my aim was never to hit $100M or IPO.

Would such a view exclude me from a YC Fellowship grant and thus Apply HN?

[0] [https://blog.ycombinator.com/fellowship-v2](https://blog.ycombinator.com/fellowship-v2)

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm a little concerned that this experiment could attract the wrong kind of behavior on HN, and bring in new users for the wrong reasons. I'm excited to see how this goes, but it will be quite a shame if the quality of regular content on HN suffers as a result.

<comment><AUTHOR> If that happens we'll take corrective action. Quality of regular content is the most important thing here.

The problem of course is that there's broad disagreement about what counts as quality, but we have that problem no matter what.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Also, while I don't loce what I'm about to suggest it makes sense:

1 upvote = 1 + (Account Age In Years / 2)

Or some metric discounting (but not eliminating) new accounts while proportionately weighing soneones contribution/participation in the community.

while to some extent everyone should be represented, but some members of the community have been here much longer, are much more knowledgeable, and participate a lot more. they helped shape the community, etc and may have gone to YC in early days.

ive been here for ~2 years, i know a little bit about tech and startups, however(and this doesnt map 1:1) some people helped build this community and are core contributors, there votes (as their advice) is worth some percentage more.

<comment><AUTHOR> We can do things like that if we really need to, but my guess is we won't. Experience has taught that such measures make others feel less welcome, which is a bad outcome and not in the open spirit of this experiment. Good comments and insights speak for themselves; if those older users are as good as you say, they can sing for their supper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Can one apply to Apply HN if one applied to S16?

<comment><USER55> Or any other time in the past?

<comment><USER56> Yep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I'm curious to know how many companies from first Fellowship managed to end the program with a product. Will have more interview after you choose some from the HN ?I read all applications, and it seems to me that some of the startups are more suitable for Indiego or looking for a direct fund from VC than to apply for YC Fellowship. Fellowship is buying 1.5% of the company to 20k + counseling + other YC services. And you'll need to be fully dedicated to the company for at least 8 weeks in office hours. Some of the projects seem to need more money or perhaps the founder will not be able to be dedicated exclusively to the startup. As you said: "startups are far more likely to die by suicide than by homicide"

</comment><comment><USER8> This seems like a silly idea to me, frankly. What makes you think any of us are qualified to decide what the best company to fund would be? See this for precedence: [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/world/europe/boaty- mcboatf...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/world/europe/boaty-mcboatface- what-you-get-when-you-let-the-internet-decide.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I doubt that "qualified" is a helpful lens to view this through. The only thing that really qualifies you to pick startups, I suppose, is a track record of being good at it. By that standard the HN community certainly isn't qualified, but there still might be a chance of something interesting.

There's a lot of knowledge about technology and startups among HN members, and when good discussions happen here they can be very good. That seemed like enough reason to give it a try. If it turns out to have been a silly idea, we're fine with that; the best way to have more good ideas is to have more bad ones.

<comment><USER8> True true. Thanks for the reply and explanation of your thought process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Curious -- Are Apply HN threads only meant for existing HN users to comment/upvote? I'd be more interested in this if it were condoned and encouraged to have my startup's existing userbase upvote and post comments about why they love the product. My typical user is not a HN user. I know it can be done anyway, but if it's viewed as "gaming" the system I wouldn't want to do that.

<comment><AUTHOR> You definitely shouldn't do that. It's against the rules, and HN users sniff it out like truffle pigs.

<comment><USER58> Yea after reading some of the apply HN threads I realized it's really meant to gauge which startups existing HN users like, versus a general voting contest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I'm not sure about considering upvotes. People might send out message to all their friends saying "There's this thing called hackernews, can you sign up and vote for me?". Similar to how someone would launch a kickstarter. I don't think that this will be very common, especially not in the first few batches, but it will become common sense after a few years.

Remember, you're dealing with _hackers_ here. I worked my YC application from every angle and tried to get every possible edge and advantage. Not necessarily because I wanted to game the system, but because I'm a hacker, and it's my nature [1].

On the whole, this is a really good idea. It's kind of mind blowing that YC would seriously try this. The concept itself is a brilliant hack on the idea of startup funding. Maybe they'll find the next AirBnb/Cruise/Dropbox, but probably not. Either way it's a great example of pushing the envelope to find new ideas, which sama has been all about lately.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog)

<comment><AUTHOR> You may be right, but I'm pretty sure the community would hate it if we didn't consider upvotes at all. The idea is to fit this process in to how HN already works, and see what happens. HN's pretty good for discussing stories about technology and startups, and a lot of those discussions are a kind of vetting of investment decisions and startup pitches anyhow. Why not move that way earlier in the process and see what happens?

In the worst case, we'll at least get a lot more data for the voting ring detector.

<comment><USER60> Maybe limiting votes to people who have been registered X amount of days or have X amount of karma would help solve this issue with votes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe. But let's see how bad the problem turns out to be. One nice thing about ideas like that is they can be applied retroactively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> This is brilliant and immediately reminded me of "wisdom of the crowd" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOucwX7Z1HU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOucwX7Z1HU) (start at 2:00 if TLDW).

Basically average crowd > individuals. 160 people guess # of jelly beans in a jar. Few are close, but averaging all the guesses leads to 4 away from actual.

Would be fascinating if applied to this as well...

</comment><comment><USER45> If we read the answers to this thread as a meta lesson of what a founder would expect, I think the answers would benefit from a scorecard. A poll at the top could summarise scores. Here is my iteration for the idea of "Apply YC":

1\. Would I use this product? - Only for projects I have a lot of traction with and wouldn't mind competition for, or a project I am not sure/serious about (toss and see if it sticks). Anything in between would be risky if we're serious about the "What do you know that competition doesn't" question.

2\. Would I join this team? - hard to learn about team without much research on HN

3\. Would I fund/work on this problem? - Yes - a low friction way to vet and support startups is needed. I've worked on other iterations to find a way. I've thought about it a lot, reply/ping me if you want to discuss.

4\. What would I improve: For start, add a scorecard, so the founders can use brainpower to iterate instead of trying to interpret why they were not up- voted by strangers with different motives.

5\. Any concerns: A ton can go wrong here, but what matters is what can go right - what parts of the HN experience are conducive to solving this problem, and what tweaks will finish the job of solving it. If this works, you will see a rich data set of problems that people are attempting to solve, votes that show the demand for each problem, solutions who get to see traction by potential users, and VC analysts who are trying to crunch the data to direct their own funding/sourcing, competitors taking notes, etc.

Then there are also the projects that are just poor fit with the HN subset, would you reject those in YC if you see them down-voted here?

</comment><comment><USER62> This is the wikipedia model. The idea is so obviously bad, it just might be good.

</comment><comment><USER63> Simple question: If we've already done a Show HN can we do a Apply HN?

<comment><USER56> Yep, they are different things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Great idea. Can you also consider an equity arrangement for HNers who would like to invest in the selected startups?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the sort of thing that might make sense if this eventually becomes a thing. Which would be great. But it's way too early to tell. For now, it's just about curiosity and trying something new.

<comment><USER65> Why not just invest in someone inside the community trying to do just that? This entire experiment is exactly what we're trying to do at Baqqer. Crowdfunding (+equity) / social proof from the community to help build products people want from the start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Tom-Sullivan This is a wonderful idea. PicVidShare has been used in 83 countries in first month. This is important traction because being international is essential to really big success. Press Release The Future of Mobile Commerce f[http://buff.ly/1TPfqEk](http://buff.ly/1TPfqEk) Will Apply Y Combinator using Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER66> My couple cents: that which can be gamed will be gamed, especially in a community full of "hackers."

</comment><comment><USER67> Interesting idea, but I think the guidelines should be clarified.

Since it's under the umbrella of the Fellowship, is YC looking for anything well beyond the idea stage?

Also, it would be useful to have some kind of simple submission process after making a post on HN so its easier to track and view all of the applications.

</comment><comment><USER68> What are the dates for the fellowship? (As in, if accepted, when does the 8 weeks begin and end?)

Edit: Added comma.

</comment><comment><USER69> My idea: EcommerceBot [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11494458](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11494458) \- A platform that will allow ecommerce to have a bot in a few clicks.

</comment><comment><USER70> I think HackerNews itselve should mostly fund startups like Sendy. Eg. Have a Reseller-option ( or brands option) so you can manage stuff for clients, others and you can self host it. This adds a huge market of technical people that can create wealth for their own

That is a totally different approach then the "cloud apps" that get funded through YC or other investors, yet it supports the same "sort/type of apps".

It should require some technical experience ( i believe HN in it's core is still for technical people)

It would be interesting to see what reselling does for bootstrapping a startup ( faster sales because more brands/people can resell it ?)

Benefits, we can hack our way through the code :)

</comment><comment><USER71> Very nice! Should we publicly apply uf we have already filled a yc application for this batch?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're certainly welcome to. It's up to you.

<comment><USER71> Great, thanks for your response!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> This link indicates a March 24 deadline in the FAQ. It should be updated? [https://fellowship.ycombinator.com/faq/](https://fellowship.ycombinator.com/faq/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch. I'll alert the authorities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> This is an excellent idea. Do you need a prototype and a team in place before participating?

<comment><AUTHOR> The only thing you need is willingness to try convincing the community to fund you.

<comment><USER73> Thank you Dang.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Establishing a public forum for earnest discussion of startup ideas seems likely even more valuable than the actual funding of community-picked proposals. But also, the chance of receiving funding adds incentive for discussion and earnesty!

I'm excited!

</comment><comment><USER75> OK, I'll be the one asking this question:

Are you planning on compensating the people who participate in this experiment in any way.

Here's the point: YC will be receiving a massive amount of help in filtering and vetting dozens or hundreds of potential companies to fund. Once funded, they might fail but they can also be huge successes. YC stands to make millions, tens or hundreds of millions (or better if the starts align).

So, you got a bunch of smart people to use their time and intellect to act as filters for your investment. What do they get in return?

The fair approach would be to give them some ownership. Even a single share would have meaning.

<comment><AUTHOR> Someone beat you to it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11442018](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11442018).

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> I really love that you're bringing some of the process to the HN community. I remember the first YCF batch had huge numbers of applications and I think it's likely that many great ideas were lost in that volume. Will be interesting to see what surfaces :)

P.S have submitted my idea here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11461008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11461008)

</comment><comment><USER77> This is such an interesting concept that I'm excited to see it happen. This also perfectly answers the call for yc to release applications of rejected applications.

Can a group or an individual submit more then one application?

<comment><AUTHOR> By analogy with how HN treats reposts, I think it's ok as long as you don't do it a lot. i.e. two is ok, three maybe, four is probably bad. Obviously that assumes they're for distinct ideas and that each of them is a serious proposal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> My 2c: "Upvotes" is too noisy a metric, and will give too much importance to HN ranking. I strongly suggest tweaking the HN ranking model for "Apply HN" posts to be as random as possible.

</comment><comment><USER79> Great idea, I have a couple of questions.

Since YC Fellowship is intended for startups at the idea stage/prototype stage, is ApplyHN a catch all for businesses at the idea stage looking for feedback from the HN community?

Can you do an ApplyHN twice? Presumably once you get feedback from your initial ApplyHN idea post, you might flesh it out more and have a stronger application the second time.

If you're at the prototype stage normally you might do a ShowHN, should you create a separate post for an ApplyHN if you want to apply?

</comment><comment><USER80> If it will not bring about complications, can that category of submission be open for say one week.

Then the feedback and comments would be open for say another week.

Putting time restraints would help give applicants approximately the same amount of attention. And also allow members take out time and ask all questions they want.

In addition, can the submission be restricted too so we do not see 400 words submissions? I'll go for a maximum 2 mins video pitch alongside a link to a website.

Finally, great idea!

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the concern for fairness but those things would be more complicated to do and I'm not sure they would really help that much. Let's wait and see how this shakes out, and then if we do it again we can iterate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Promising ! This could be an interesting way to stimulate startups from around the globe. Last time I felt this way was when I discovered Stripe Atlas.

</comment><comment><USER82> Let's just joined with our idea to help people - Meet amazing people, & do fun stuff. Check us on: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11462402](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11462402)

</comment><comment><USER83> Vaultedge - private Google for private data. Please post your questions, comments in the thread. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11460485](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11460485)

</comment><comment><USER84> here's my idea, a new job board that brings together checkr match.com and careerbuilder [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11493368](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11493368)

</comment><comment><USER85> That's really awesome idea and I can't wait to see what kinds of cool applications come through.

</comment><comment><USER86> Y Combinator can't get more awesome than this! I hope something great comes out of this experiment.

</comment><comment><USER87> OK, this is very cool. Great idea!

</comment><comment><USER88> I went through the startups, but its really hard to make a decision from the description. I would suggest that the startups fill answers to the YC application form so there is more data and background to ask further questions.

</comment><comment><USER89> great way to discuss ideas! we are in... [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11452153](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11452153)

</comment><comment><USER90> We need your thoughts on Gift Card idea. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11447924](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11447924)

</comment><comment><USER90> Please provide feedback on our Gift Card Idea. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11447924](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11447924)

</comment><comment><USER91> If this existed a year or two ago I would apply, but now I can't :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry to hear that. There will be other things to participate in in the future and hopefully you'll be able to join some of those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> Given any consideration to giving some percentage of the profit YC makes to charity or something? After all, YC is benefiting from the wisdom of the crowd and the crowd gets nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're a long way from seeing whether there's any profit in this. The odds are surely against it, because they usually are. If something dramatic comes of this I'm sure YC will think seriously about how to structure it, but we can wait until we have that good problem.

In the meantime the community gets the same thing we do, which is the satisfaction of giving it a try and seeing what happens. That's much in keeping with the values of this site, i.e. gratifying curiosity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> For the purpose of selecting startups, HN should have an option to vote for each apply outside of up votes, and then the votes ought to be weighted by reputation and account age.

</comment><comment><USER94> Suggestion: Vote with money and use that to fund the company. The people who put their money in to fund the company become collective shareholders alongside YC.

</comment><comment><USER95> How much will the YC fund be normally? Will someone be concerned to disclose the product he/she is building here when stealth mode is preferred?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure I understand your question, but it sounds like [https://fellowship.ycombinator.com/faq/](https://fellowship.ycombinator.com/faq/) might have the answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> I think that for this experiment to be valid, only accounts created before today should be allowed to vote (or make a karma threshold for new accounts).

<comment><USER2> Nah. A lot of teams don't know about HN before they apply to YC. Many make it into the batch and are good.

<comment><USER96> Sorry, maybe I didn't explain myself well. What I wanted to say is that for the end-of-month ranking ("we'll rank the startups and YC will fund two. The ranking will depend both on upvotes and on the quality of discussion"), I think upvotes and discussion by current YC members should hold more weight (maybe the algorithms already take that into account :) ).

I agree that people that didn't have HN accounts previously should definitely be allowed to participate both as submissions and in the comments :) , only that the upvotes part could be gamed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> Such an awesome opportunity for a broader community! YC is making the an even playing field for everyone! Congrats YC and hope to see you soon!

</comment><comment><USER98> If it's both a "Show HN" and an "Apply HN" what do you recommend as a headline? Apply and Show are related but not the same.

<comment><AUTHOR> It has to be "Apply HN" for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> Great idea! Can we get a 'Apply HN' link added to the top menu bar as well? Would make participating in the community way easier

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's coming. Hopefully tomorrow, but I'm traveling tomorrow so I can't promise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> Suggestion: make links on Apply HN posts clickable. No reason to rely on that usual first comment "clickable here:"

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, we can do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> > we'll add a top link for these

Could you add an Apply HN endpoint to the Firebase API in the same style of ask and show too?

</comment><comment><USER102> Could you please unbreak /ask by moving apply posts elsewhere? /ask is much less useful now.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll do that when we put up the /apply link.

<comment><USER102> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> sounds like kickstarter on HN

</comment><comment><USER104> Do you expect "Apply HN" to continue in Winter's batch?

<comment><USER2> Don't know yet. Let's see what happens here. Also, Fellowship actually runs three times a year, so the next potential cycle is in the fall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> Hi there, is it possible to post/apply for more than one idea?

<comment><AUTHOR> HN tends to allow a small number of reposts, so I'd say yes but don't do it much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> dang, can you explain the ranking? How was all of this determined?

</comment><comment><USER107> I feel it would be less drama-inducing, and probably as effective, to run a lottery.

<comment><USER108> Personally I'm seeing this as an excellent test of precisely what sort of community HN really is. I'm sure this will be fascinating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> What's the incentive for helping you pick the next big startup? What if you gave users a trivial amount of equity for their input?

<comment><USER110> That seems way more like a curse (re: taxes) than a reward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> Do I get paid?

</comment><comment><USER112> sounds like my suggestion was a bad idea. (won't let me delete).

<comment><USER108> As members of the community, we're all able to have whatever requirements we want for our support of an application. In my opinion, the fewer that are "officially" imposed, the better.

<comment><USER112> I probably should have phrased it a different way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> We are two childhood friends who started company with focus and we built it without any fancy and bootstrapped it from zero to a million dollar company.

We never had time to even spend with family we just slept four to six hours and focused on what we wanted to built.

We never had any social accounts and never socialised in Internet not went to do networking.

We thought let's built a great product and enjoy doing it.

A Story of How Two Childhood Friends from Village has built their startup up from Zero to a million dollars

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11442047](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11442047)

Only time we spent time is registering and applying for YC.

Coming from a small town with no business background, learning all things ourselves and with self motivation and dream if we were able to do this much.

Joining hands with YC we can do a lot more faster and quicker to change the world.

This is the reason we applied for YC. Even our employees are from rural they can't even communicate good in English but they code like hell.

If you ask a guy how to built an ap. A may tell a good story but not actually do it. B may do an excellent app but not tell it in an effective way. A May have more friends but B may not.

So founders we play as a team. George does the coding and he has no social accounts. I do the design idea and also communicate and be active to know what's happening in the world.

This is a good initiative let's see how it goes.

</comment><comment><USER114> Small note: I recommend the search query to include quotes "Apply HN"

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch. Done.

<comment><USER115> I've submitted my stuff

digital teleportation = socialAR/VR [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11447923](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11447923)

No comments, no upvotes.

Following the link with all "Apply HN" I can see almost all applications have the same fate.

Too many ? Too boring ?

Is this experiment a failure ?

Too soon to tell ?

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll soon add pages to make these posts more accessible. Then if more is needed, we'll do more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER116> It would be nice if there was a link up top to filter the submissions similar to show/ask links.

Here is my submission: PaySQR - the new secure way to pay! [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444053](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444053)

</comment><comment><USER117> Bee Smart Technologies tries to tackle the Colony Collapse disorder. Cool use of technology, huge social impact, enormous monetary potential.

[http://www.beesmarttechnologies.com/](http://www.beesmarttechnologies.com/)

I'm not affiliated though.

</comment><comment><USER21> We are working to fix mental healthcare by adding analytics and bringing the healthcare to the patient.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11442000](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11442000)

</comment><comment><USER118> We have upvotes _and_ utterly no discussion happening. Thank you HN for your unquestioning support!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441507)

</comment><comment><USER119> Zippy self driving meal delivery robots, in: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444797](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444797)

</comment><comment><USER120> Love the idea, we are sold [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441183](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441183)

</comment><comment><USER81> Jam is in : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441225](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441225) \o/

</comment><comment><USER121> Right because the first thing I think as a founder is oh definitely I'd love to have my work judged by the insane neckbeard posse that is Hacker News Commentariat. That's totallllllly something I'd love and will likely to end up producing better and more diverse result. Sorry guys I should really not even get involved but this is baffling. HN is second only to Reddit in terms of its nasty, divisive, anti-anything that doesn't pattern match to the literalism horror show that is white men in technology.</comment>


At 500,000 users, The Fancy making more money than Pinterest's 20 million - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/04/18/fancy-hits-500000-users-with-pinterest-like-social-shopping-service/

<comment><USER2> After reading the article twice I'm not sure where the title comes from since that claim is never made.

Also not sure why The Fancy is touted as a David to Pinterest' goliath. The Fancy has 18M in funding from Andreesen Horowitz and has a pretty darn stellar board (Jack Dorsey, Chris Hughes, etc).

<comment><USER3> Yup, that pissed me off. $18 million is a warchest. I wanna hear about the dude who bootstrapped it to 500,000 users while working on a day job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Way to linkbait that post title. Revenue from either company isn't mentioned in the article.

</comment><comment><USER5> The light switch as a key holder is an interesting idea. But I think the keys would scrape against the wall over time.

</comment><comment><USER6> Anyone managed to get pass Fancy's signup? At 18M funding, why nothing happens when I press the signup button?</comment>


Awesome Inc: Y Combinator as a Reality TV Show? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/09/02/awesome-inc-y-combinator-as-a-reality-tv-show/

<comment><USER2> Check out Dragons' Den is a venture-capitalist television program that originated in Japan.</comment>


Show HN: Codebrag – No More Late Friday Fixes - <AUTHOR> http://codebrag.com <comment><USER4> _No more late Friday fixes_

Am I alone in not liking this line? I don't see the correlation with code review. I initially thought this site was yet another "prevent drunken code commits" tool, which I'm not at all interested in, and not a code review tool, which I find quite interesting.

Scrolling down the page, I came across:

 _Codebrag is not about code reviews. Well, not only about that. It 's about making your life easier by helping you write better code. And that means not staying late. And an empty office on Friday evenings. Because everything is "done done". Just kill the lights and enjoy your weekend._

This is where I closed the site. I don't think about code review as a tool to relieve me of work duties on a Friday night, I view it as a tool to help my software development. To be honest, as someone who works at a small company trying to become a big company, there has never been a moment where everything is "done done".

Just to clarify, I'm not dissing the site overall, it might be awesome, I just think the text on the homepage could be modified to tell potential users such as myself why I should be using Codebrag instead of Github for code review.

<comment><USER5> Well, we see code review as a part of ensuring our code quality and squashing potential bugs process. This has quite strong correlation with "emergency production fixes" etc.

Regarding Codebrag vs Github: not all companies are ok with sharing their code with GH, that's why Codebrag is self-hosted tool, you download it and install within your own, secure environment

<comment><USER6> Gerrit user here, how does it compare? Gerrit is terribly slow and pretty ugly even with a nice theme.

What's it written in? (On mobile can't inspect right now)

<comment><USER7> Codebrag is about completely different (lighweight, non-blocking review) philosophy than Gerrit. And yeah, it's nicer look :)

Technologies under the hood: AngularJS+Scala(tra)+H2 database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Given that you're in part competing directly with the free, built-in review tools in Github and Bitbucket, you need to specifically show what you're offering that they aren't.

<comment><USER9> I'd say that our two main differentiators are: * a clear "to do" list: you know at first glance if there are some commits to review, and the review process is made as simple as possible, not to get in the way of the development process * code likes - let the author know that some code is good, you like the design etc. Helps to make the reviews less negative, and in the future can be a great knowledge base!

<comment><USER10> So $25/mo per 5 users to 'like' a line of code, and the hassle of having another website or pice of software to use on top of my normal issue and source management tools. Not really worth it at all when I can just IM the dev and say 'good job, you didn't break the world haha'.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would say the the biggest value of CodeBrag is that it is a well designed tool that does one thing well; such tools are usually worth their price - <USER2> least for the time they save not fighting other tools. Or writing on IM :)

Besides, how often do you say to others that you liked their code? The simpler that is, the more often people will do it.

<comment><USER11> I've never found myself wanting a like button for code. It's a nice gimmick, but I don't see it providing enough value that would impact my decision to use a product providing it.

<comment><USER5> It's not all about this "Like" button. There are other things in Codebrag we think can make it worth trying: all your duties in one place (commits waiting for your review, comments and likes from other users you may want to reply to). Also it doesn't stand on your way, no tons of clicking, going through complicated lifecycles and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A quick skim over the landing page doesn't tell me why this is better than using Github Pull Requests

<comment><USER13> I kinda see the gamification point. That's pretty ... okay, I suppose. I do like how you can 'like' a given line. Might be even better if you could like a block/set of lines/function/etc. That little heart to the left is about the only thing I see about it that sets it apart from traditional pull-request-as- code-review.

Unfortunately, codebrag is single-branch only, and triggers reviews on commit. That's a little ... weird. That's how a team I was on did code reviews about seven years ago. But we were also using SVN at the time.

SOP these days is issue a pull request, the PR gets reviewed and when it passes muster is merged. I don't know anyone who does per-commit code reviews.

I guess you could set it up to track commits on your stable branch, and when merge commits come through from topic branches you can review then. But that seems a bit backward.

<comment><USER9> Well, I, for one, am doing per-commit code reviews :) And I think it is working quite well for our team. The feedback loop is very quick.

Not sure what you mean by "codebrag is single-branch", as we do support multiple branches (from 2.0, maybe you tried the previous version?).

Also, SVN promoted a radically different model of working (huge commits, instead of multiple, fine-grained small commits).

<comment><USER13> Ah, I got the info in re: single branch from the comments on this blog post: [http://blog.codebrag.com/post/72667221208/implementing- code-...](http://blog.codebrag.com/post/72667221208/implementing-code-reviews- with-codebrag-first-steps)

From the comment replies it sounded like it can only be on a single branch at a time unless you want to restart the app every time you switched branches. Does each developer run their own instance?

I'd assumed all of that post and the comments were about version 2.0, considering it was linked to from the 2.0 documentation "getting started," you can understand my confusion.

The FAQ only says it supports branches (not a word about multiple branches, unlike previous blog articles that took me a while to dig out) -- it makes it seem like 'sure, you can set up code reviews on a branch!'

The link to the blog from the docs page points to nowhere. I just found it by going back to the beginning.

I was also trying to find version deltas (e.g., what's new about version 2.0 from 1.x?), and I guess some 20 second youtube videos count but... if the code reviews are there, shouldn't there be documentation, too?

I haven't used the product; it looks kind of interesting... if extraordinarily light on the details. It gives me no incentive whatsoever to try it out - <USER3> only differentiating factor it has between the github pull request review cycle is the per-commit review (I still can't quite git over this) and the ability to heart a line.

If you have [wip] tags for larger e.g., refactors, how do you keep your single branch in a releasable state for production hotfixes? Does every commit kick off a regression test in jenkins? If a [wip] breaks your tests but leaves it in a releasable state, how do you know? If you did know and you needed to get a hotfix out ASAP for something else, do you revert the commit, or do you rebase to a known-stable tag? That just seems ... dangerous.

It doesn't seem like the most workable flow for a continuously live project. It might work fine for products that you can release a stable version of every couple of months.

"Because every commit gets reviewed" doesn't quite cut it for large codebases, even with small teams. Code reviews don't catch everything.

<comment><USER7> Hi - thanks for very detailed feedback.

I've just added/fixed/clarified info about support for _multiple_ git branches.

Regarding [wip], refactors and hotfixes - yeah, for larger refactors we create a separate branches, but this is more an exception than a rule.

<comment><USER13> Word. You're welcome - it looks like an interesting idea for a tool, I just don't have a use for it at the moment :) I'll keep an eye on it. My curiosity is definitely there, if the gamification bit gets fleshed out more (and if you weren't so adamant about no PR reviews ;) ).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Mhh, you can use it with BitBucket code.. but BitBucket provides already a nice UI for the code reviews with Pull Requests (same with GitHub?). What's the point of using CodeBrag, only the "likes"?

<comment><USER9> The likes - definitely - small things can make a huge difference :).

But for me, the main advantage is having a clear to-do list, so that I can see at first glance what is still waiting for me.

I think CB can work very well in conjunction with BitBuck or GitHub pull requests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've always wondered, do people actually like inline diffs? I personally think they're rubbish compared to side-by-side and I've always wondered if I'm a freak as the inline seems to have become popular again with github.

<comment><USER16> Inline diffs are good for small changes here and there throughout a file. They are pretty worthless for large changes to a file (eg. heavy refactoring).

Bitbucket (and probably Github, too?) uses inline by default on pull requests but has a button to show a side-by-side and another to see the actual file.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, good point. We have got side-by-side diffs planned for future releases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We use Gerrit at work, and having tried numerous tools in the past, we've settled on Gerrit because it's efficient with our time and is focused on doing CRs well. Things that I enjoy:

* Keyboard shortcuts. * Inline or side-by-side comparisons * Patchsets from changes * Makes it easy to check the change locally * Easy inbox/dashboard for CRs * Provides structure to passing code reviews (not everyone should be able to +2 a CR) * It actually has an interface that is useful

</comment><comment><USER18> I find it a bit too expensive.

It's the same price as the github "bronze" organization plan. And more expensive than their Medium personal plan.

I mean it does look nice, but you should probably create a cheaper plan to attract new customers.

Example:

25$ 5 users, unlimited plan

5$ 2 users, 1 project plan

And if possible I would even through a coupon code for 6 months on the 25$ plan.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for feedback!

1 project plan sounds like something to consider.

<comment><USER18> Just be careful with people abusing it.

For example at my work we technically have only one project, but our project root folder is over 4Gb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks very very similar to Crucible by Atlassian[0], can you offer any reasons why Codebrag might be better?

[0]: [https://www.atlassian.com/software/crucible/overview](https://www.atlassian.com/software/crucible/overview)

<comment><AUTHOR> We have tried Crucible a couple of times, and it just didn't fit our style of work and process.

Asking for a review and doing reviews in Crucible is a multi-step workflow. Also, there is no clear list of what's already reviewed and what's left for review. Overall the tool seems "heavy".

I'm sure Crucible works great in some teams. CodeBrag is designed more for smaller teams, which want to have tools be as simple as possible (while maintaining functionality, of course), and like a simple, streamlined process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> _Post-commit review_

It sounds like this means post-merge code review too? After getting used to a pre-merge code review tool that does hard-gating (gerrit), I have trouble with other tools.

</comment><comment><USER21> I like the look of it - unfortunately I'm not a Java developer, and gave up after 30 minutes trying to get the 1.7 JDK running on Ubuntu 12.04.

</comment><comment><USER22> I was actually expecting codebrag to be doing code review as a service. << that would be interesting

<comment><USER7> Do you mean having experts ready to review your code?

There are services like that - e.g. [http://www.paidcodereview.com/](http://www.paidcodereview.com/)

<comment><USER23> "As of April 2014, PaidCodeReview is no longer operational"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> i can't really tell what service is being offered. or maybe i am being naive and missing the point...

i guess work on the page so is clearer.

imo there is a very strong sell and not enough information on the product for me to determine what it does, if i need it and esp. if its worth forking out for.</comment>


Scientific/Coding/Invention Challange – A hedge fund algorithm - <AUTHOR> Where should we start? It's not about the code, it's about your mind combined with the code.
Given data, can you use your mind, combined with the ability to code, to produce returns that out match.
No takers, means opporutnity. <comment><USER2> I don't have much to add, but if this is a serious consideration of yours, you might want to explore Quantopian and QuantConnect.

</comment><comment><USER3> You might want to read about "statistical arbitrage", it's basically what you are describing, and it has been around for more than twenty years.</comment>


Massive cyber attack hits U.S. federal workers, probe focuses on China - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/05/us-cybersecurity-usa-idUSKBN0OK2IK20150605

<comment><USER2> Current discussion on front page: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9662421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9662421)</comment>