Into the woods: how one man survived alone in the wilderness for 27 years - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/mar/15/stranger-in-the-woods-christopher-knight-hermit-maine <comment><USER2> _All his life, he had been comfortable being alone. Interacting with others was so often frustrating. Every meeting with another person seemed like a collision._

If he were growing up today, they would likely give him some diagnosis on the Autism Spectrum or some related diagnosis and try to give him meds and force him to somehow fit in.

For as long as humans have existed, there have been those that don't connect well socially. We may label them and pontificate and categorize, but this has always been true and is not likely to change. Perhaps we should get over our arrogant idea of _normal._

<comment><USER3> I don't understand why parent is being downvoted.

As someone who was diagnosed with Aspergers, and someone that greatly dislikes annoying, confusing, and overly excited people that rely almost entirely on certain forms of non-verbal social cues to communicate (to the point I think they're just as broken as I am, just in the exact opposite way; they seemingly lack the ability to use words and logic to convey ideas, preferring emotions and impulsivity to interact with the world and others)...

I actually understand the hermit to some extent. I do believe that he could easily suffer from something the DSM V considers on the spectrum. It is unfortunate that society's supports fell through for him.

<comment><USER2> I sent the article to my oldest son because it made me think of him. He replied with: _I was sort of thinking about how, if I 'd had a different life, I could see myself doing much the same. Maybe a bit more planned. Maybe not._

I was always okay with him being him and did not try to force him to be more social. I helped him figure out how to interact with society on his terms.

For example, he likes going to stores with self-checkout so he doesn't have to deal with a cashier. Self-checkout exists and many people use them for many reasons. One of his big motivators is that dealing with people is hard, even for just the brief interaction of paying for his purchase.

<comment><USER4> > One of his big motivators is that dealing with people is hard, even for just > the brief interaction of paying for his purchase.

this is a fine line though. If you have some level of social anxiety, avoiding social contact is about the worst you can do for it. It's allowing the fear to control you. A better solution is to work your way through the social anxeity, learning organic ways to "grease the gears" and make situations pleasant to both parties.

I had to learn this in my late teens/early 20s. I was withdrawing more and more, stone-faced all the time in public places such as the grocery store. I'd park _behind_ the store just so I didn't have the hassle of interactions in the parking lot. That's letting anxiety reign over you. Cognitive distortions [1] can send you on a downward trajectory where avoidance is the norm and you to go greater and more extreme lengths to mitigate the "problem". I learned that a smile, saying "hi, how are you?" or "excuse me" seem to make most interactions at least 50 "percent" less uncomfortable compared to unemotional silence, which I've seen in psychology books as a sign of hostility.

Now, if you are autistic and have something inhibiting your ability to understand social cues, then "just facing it" wont work, but even people on the spectrum can learn to improve their situation through a skilled therapist.

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

<comment><USER2> You are projecting your issues onto someone you know nothing about. I have seen cashiers react as if they want to strip search him because he is trying to pay for a pizza. Other people react incredibly negatively to him in ways that are seriously problematic. This is a completely different situation from what you describe. His desire to avoid it when possible is in no way neurotic nor dysfunctional.

Additionally, letting him avoid it part of the time makes it easier for him to cope effectively the rest of the time. You can think of it as him having a limited people skills budget and not insisting he piss it away unnecessarily just because other people with a bigger budget don't find it to be a hardship to pay such things. For him, it amounts to being nickeled and dimed to death.

<comment><USER5> >I have seen cashiers react as if they want to strip search him because he is trying to pay for a pizza.

I'm having trouble picturing what this kind of reaction would look like. Can you explain what the cashiers did that make you think this way?

<comment><USER2> Can you explain why you seem to be reading everything I say in the worst possible light? It comes across like you are intentionally trying to bust my chops, not understand my point.

<comment><USER5> I don't think I'm reading this negatively. I'm genuinely curious as to what sort of reaction would make you think they wanted to strip search your son. The only image that comes to my mind when I think of someone wanting to strip search someone involves a cop, a latex glove snapping on the wrist and a menacing look and that seems so the opposite of every experience in a pizza place I've ever had.

<comment><USER6> Visible signs of anxiety might make the clerk think he was shoplifting. It has happened to me.

<comment><USER7> That makes sense, thanks for the insight. But I don't think there are too many store clerks that want to strip-search shoplifters...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm amazed at the way people are looking at this. I think we're very jaded when we lose our capacity to see just how remarkable homelessness is. Being homeless and living homeless is something amazing. Just because it is common, doesn't make it any less so. Just because it is common doesn't mean that we understand it.

The only thing that makes this more or less interesting than some tale of independence and "acceptable" survivalism is the contempt of the beholder.

One of my absolute favourite books as a child was The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by WH Davies. Perhaps it has coloured my vision, but I think we owe at least a grudging respect to people who can survive in the modern world (by any reasonable means) as such outcasts.

<comment> charles-salvia I don't understand why this guy is particularly more interesting or amazing than the countless other homeless people who have survived in our inner-cities for decades. The only thing that makes this guy different is the superficial aspects : the setting is more rustic, there's no drugs or begging involved, he lives in a forest instead of in an abandoned subway line, etc.

In some ways, this guy actually had a much _easier_ time surviving than many of the inner-city homeless. He essentially had access to a low-security, well- stocked resort town in rural Maine - entirely to himself with no other criminal competition and a very small police force to worry about. He didn't have to worry about getting killed by other desperate homeless people or by police, or having to constantly search for a different place to sleep every night.

Also, he wasn't even _forced_ into homelessness. He just made a willful decision to live this kind of parasitic lifestyle. Perhaps he was mentally ill in some way, but regardless, I can't be particularly sympathetic without further information about his motivations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> No one here interested in the concept of not having direct human interaction for 27 years? Regardless of how he achieved it?

There is much to learn from this case. I suspect only a few handfulls of humans in history have completed that epic journey.

I personally know poeple who have solo nonstop sailed around the world, speaking on the radio every day, and even that has a huge impact and is less than a year.

Perhaps we can put aside the moral aspects with how he achieved it and focus on the rest of this astonishing edge case?

<comment><USER10> > No one here interested in the concept of not having direct human interaction > for 27 years? Regardless of how he achieved it?

I guess we could also ask Thomas Silverstein. From his wiki page ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Silverstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Silverstein)):

> He has been in solitary confinement since 1983, when he killed prison guard > Merle Clutts at the Marion Penitentiary in Illinois.

I'm betting there are other people in US prisons who have been in solitary confinement for 10+ years.

<comment><USER11> A few people have been in solitary for more than 40 years.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/us/herman-wallace- held-41-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/us/herman-wallace- held-41-years-in-solitary-dies-at-71.html)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/us/for-45-years-in- prison...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/us/for-45-years-in-prison- louisiana-man-kept-calm-and-held-fast-to-hope.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER12> That's simply sickening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For those who wish to hear this sort of story from the author's own voice, Finkel was recently interviewed on Maine Public Radio: [http://mainepublic.org/post/north-pond- hermit](http://mainepublic.org/post/north-pond-hermit)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Previously:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8205993](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8205993)

<comment><USER14> Fascinating how two different HN Post titles for the same article have produced _vastly_ different reactions.

<comment><USER15> They're not the same article - just the same subject matter

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For anyone that wants to see the real deal, watch Alone in the Wilderness by Dick Proenneke:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M23j1U0esvc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M23j1U0esvc)

</comment><comment> charles-salvia This story... doesn't really strike me as that worthy of contemplating for too long. Really, how is this guy really particularly different from someone who is basically just homeless? I mean, instead of living on the outskirts of summer resort towns in Maine, he could be homeless living on the outskirts of Bayonne, New Jersey, sifting through trash or breaking into 7-11s at night. The whole "into the woods" thing is sort of almost beside the point here. The guy didn't actually live as some sort of pre-Columbian hunter-gatherer. He was just basically a homeless guy who robbed houses. I'm not sure why anyone thinks we can learn something from him... other than, perhaps, how to break into houses.

<comment><USER17> Never read "My Side of the Mountain" as a kid??

He steals in that too.

This guy is not homeless. He had a home.

I've read similar stories of people setting up semi-permanent homes in hidden urban spaces.

It's the hacking aspect that makes it interesting. Living within a community off the books. If his stealing hurt people, then his bad, but I kinda feel like it didn't. The urban legend itself had a value to the community.

There have been billions of 'pre-Columbian hunter-gatherers', this is different.

<comment><USER18> All theft hurts someone. People have this conception that home/store owners are millionaires. That is more often than not incorrect. The margins on products sold can be as low as 1 - 3%. Thus you have to sell 34 to recoup the cost of a single stolen item. The business owner would likely increase prices in order to respond to the theft, thus hurting the community as a whole. Now imagine you are a single mother attempting to feed your child, are you happy to pay higher prices so this guy can live " off the grid"?

In more primitive society this person would have simply been killed for this transgression of the social contract. This isn't a hack, its sociopathy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So what happens with the IRS if you disappear into the Alaskan wilderness for 20 years (or get hooked on meth and become homeless or whatever) and subsequently want to reintegrate into society? Do you get tossed in the slammer for failure to file?

<comment><USER20> You aren't required to file if you make less than 3000 dollars of income a year.

<comment><USER20> Actually it's a bit more than that, my bad: [https://www.irs.gov/publications/p17/ch01.html](https://www.irs.gov/publications/p17/ch01.html)

<comment><USER21> Since you found the answer, why didn't you mention it? It's nice that you gave a citation, but that's a 100-page document that you linked to.

The answer is that if you are single and under 65, then you don't have to file a U.S. tax return if your gross income is less than $10,350.

(As usual with the IRS, nothing is simple. There are reasons you might be compelled to file anyway and possible benefits to file even if you were under the threshold. But you can still give the short answer of $10,350, and a link for the long answer.)

<comment><USER22> As a practical matter, the IRS has bigger fish to fry. There's so many lower- income people who don't pay income tax, and a few get made an example of, but most fly under the radar indefinitely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> After 27 years, you'd hope he might have built his own accommodation or other useful tools in the style of Primitive Technology ([https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA)).

Interesting read, but I don't think there's much to take from it.

</comment><comment><USER24> not much of a "wilderness"

</comment><comment><USER25> I've first heard about this guy on Sword and Scale. Peanut butter. He loved peanut butter.

[http://swordandscale.com/sword-and-scale- episode-77/](http://swordandscale.com/sword-and-scale-episode-77/)

</comment><comment><USER26> This is a repeat. It hasn't even been 3 months before it comes up again?

</comment><comment><USER27> From a different article about the same dude:

"He'd not been sick in the woods, and his worst accident was a tumble on some ice, but his teeth were rotten, and no wonder. I dug through his twenty-five years of trash, buried between boulders, and kept inventory: a five-pound tub that once held Marshmallow Fluff, an empty box of Devil Dogs, peanut butter, Cheetos, honey, graham crackers, Cool Whip, tuna fish, coffee, Tater Tots, pudding, soda, El Monterey spicy jalapeño chimichangas, and on and on and on."[1]

[http://www.gq.com/story/the-last-true-hermit](http://www.gq.com/story/the- last-true-hermit)

</comment><comment><USER28> the title is misleading- it implies that he was outdoors as a rugged survivalist not however breaking indoors, and being the next moment outdoors....

<comment><USER29> Agreed. Not just a thief stealing from people for 27 years.

<comment><USER30> Not only misleading, but mildly offensive. He did not survive alone. Quite the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> just to save everyone the suspense: he "survived" so long by stealing resources earned by _other people_ who worked for them. Apparently the so- called "hermit" didn't mind people _that much_.

<comment><USER31> Well, he robbed vacation homes, so I don't know that owners were really put out as much as all that. What strikes me as funny is that he went to such lengths to rob them, it seems like gardening, hunting and fishing would have been easier. But I suppose it's possible it was the thrill of getting away with it that motivated him.

<comment><USER32> Robbery is robbery; the immorality of which has no dependency on how "put out" his victims were... as though it were for you or me to even make such a determination. He was a thief that stole stuff from people: nuff said. I hope at some point his victims got justice.

<comment><USER33> Robbery is not robbery.

Burglary is not armed robbery. They are different in the eyes of the law, and justly so.

Theft of a candy bar carries a different penalty from theft of an automobile, and justly so.

A thief is a thief, and a criminal is a criminal, but not all crimes are identical. There is a difference between the rigidity of ethics, and the flexible punishment-must-fit-the-crime nature of justice.

<comment><USER32> Of course, you are correct in your statements, but contextual application in this discussion would appear to be in error on at least one point.

You are correct in that I used an term incorrectly: I shouldn't have said robbery, I should have simply said "theft". Robbery indicates force: there was no indication of direct force/intimidation that I saw. Point conceded.

Where I think your criticism is incorrect. Your examples differentiate based on the what the criminal was trying to get away with. Trying to steal a candy bar is different that trying to steal an automobile: the resources involved in obtaining a candy bar legitimately are much smaller than the resources dedicated to obtaining a car. You rightfully call out that distinction, they are different (as individual acts) and I would not disagree that they should be different in what answer justice should demand of the criminal. Where you go astray is that the context of my criticism of was that the original commentator was differentiating the severity of the crime not on the value of the property stolen, but on some perception of the of the victim's "need". So, it's not the difference of the value of the good taken, but a judgment on how important that should have been to the victim. This is a very important distinction and changes the validity of the ethical judgement. I assert that, whereas the value of the stolen item is correctly a part of the determining the severity of the transgression, the "need" of the victim is not a proper factor in determining the severity of the crime. (And yes, this is a generalization. If I steal a hospital respirator from a medical supply company showroom floor, it is different than if I steal it while it's in use by a patient... though even then the theft aspect should likely be seen as the same and there are just other, different ethical/legal crimes in addition to theft.)

<comment><USER33> I see where you're coming from, but to be succinct:

If your argument were correct, then duress would never serve as an acceptable defense.

I'm not saying that Chris was under duress (his situation was due to his own choices, not forced upon him), but the fact is, some accused criminals are able to defend their crimes by saying "my actions were necessary to avoid a serious, immediate danger in a situation that was forced upon me." That is a form of need and it is a legally workable defense, at least in the USA and UK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Fake story</comment>


Gogland – New Go IDE from JetBrains - <AUTHOR> https://www.jetbrains.com/go/features/ <comment><AUTHOR> It will be also available for IDEA Ultimate users and is apparently a ~6 month old fork from go-lang-IDEA-plugin having quite a few new features [1]

[1] [https://www.jetbrains.com/help/go/1.0/faq.html](https://www.jetbrains.com/help/go/1.0/faq.html)</comment>


I like coding. I hate shipping software - <AUTHOR> http://codexlogica.com/2010/02/23/i-like-coding-i-hate-shipping-software/

<comment><USER2> Agree, speaking as a guy who's pushing a web product live now. And still sitting here, at 7pm.

</comment><comment><USER3> It makes me feel good to hear someone else say it like this.</comment>


Vayable Guides Travelers Off the Beaten Path - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/goldman-sachs-progress/archive/2012/11/vayable-guides-travelers-off-the-beaten-path/265495/ <comment><USER3> _Vayable launched with 70 guides in April 2011 [...] Since then, the company's been growing at a rate of 30 percent each week._

30% growth every week for 18 months would mean total growth by nearly a factor of a trillion. This doesn't seem likely.

<comment><USER4> I think it's more likely that Vayable just "grew at the same rate", where "rate" should really be "amount".

30% of 70 is 21 and April 2011 is about 86 weeks ago. 21*86 = 1806, so a rough projection of 1876 guides. The vayable website promises "2000+ tours", which with roughly that amount of guides with that projection actually makes sense :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm driving down to Mexico City through Guadalajara in late December - <USER2> signed up with Vayable and am thrilled to find a couple tours I hope to take on the trip.

Thanks for the link.

[http://www.vayable.com/experiences/135-guachimontones- tequil...](http://www.vayable.com/experiences/135-guachimontones-tequila)

<comment><USER6> Awesome, thanks for the support and let us know what you think!

<comment><USER5> Will do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My wife and I found some awesome tours/guides in Puerto Rico on Vayable when we were there. Couldn't actually do a tour because it was literally last moment, but I plan to check Vayable before each vacation now when I book my hotel and flights!</comment>


Hacking java bytecode - <AUTHOR> http://cory.li/bytecode-hacking/

<comment><USER2> _contestants are required to turn in their source, rather than compiled code_

If there's nothing about the language in which the source must be written in but only that it compiles to JVM bytecode that meets the requirements, I'd be very tempted to write most or almost all of it in bytecode... java.lang.ClassLoader is allowed and it provides some useful methods for that purpose. ;-)

 _At each block's exit, a checkpoint is injected with the block's total cost. During live execution, these checkpoints increment the AI's internal total bytecode counter. If at any checkpoint the running tally exceeds GameConstants.BYTECODE_LIMIT, the AI's execution is halted and execution of the next robot's AI begins._

That sounds to me like it might be possible to squeeze in some more extra instructions at the end.

<comment><USER3> I was excited to give a shot at Battlecode until I heard about the broken solution to limit resources.

>In order to hard limit each team's total computation, yet guarantee equal computation resources to each team, each team is given a bytecode limit, and their code is instrumented and allowed to run only up to that limit before it is halted.

They want to give each team equal cpu time, but when you have a bytecode that has instructions like invokevirtual and multianewarray the execution time isn't' exactly similar. And then there is the story about how in 2007 to make things easier the engine counted the bytecodes of various standard library methods as a predetermined fixed number no matter what happened. So of course someone put A* inside string.matches with a regular expression. ([http://realgl.blogspot.com/2013/08/battlecode.html](http://realgl.blogspot.com/2013/08/battlecode.html)).

Sadly whenever I hear about Battlecode I hear stories about how people abused and broke the bytecode limitation to get more cpu resources than everyone else not about how they solved the problem straight up better than everyone else.

<comment><USER2> _I hear stories about how people abused and broke the bytecode limitation to get more cpu resources than everyone else not about how they solved the problem straight up better than everyone else._

Isn't the whole idea behind the "hacker" movement to exploit the boundaries of the rules?

<comment><USER3> It all depends. If you are trying to learn more about vm's and bytecode then this was a success. If you were trying to learn how to make a good ai that uses few resources then you might have failed. The challenge seem to be about the latter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been writing Java for 15 years and I never knew about breaking out of arbitrary labelled blocks!

<comment><USER5> It's funny how there's still a considered-harmful goto buried in the language, even though they don't call it that.

<comment><USER6> It's also funny to sometimes see the same people who say goto is bad, use break and continue heavily in their loops. Which are only tad better than goto and often just as hard to read.

<comment><USER7> Loops in general are a problem.

Tail-Recursive functions would be a far better solution.

And almost every loop can be replaced with a simple map, fold, or filter.

<comment><USER8> Recursion can be expensive (call stack) depending on the language implementation.

For example Lua 5.1 and recent JS implementations have a proper recursive tail call implementation. The Lua manual explains it: "Without proper tail calls, each user move would create a new stack level. After some number of moves, there would be a stack overflow. With proper tail calls, there is no limit to the number of moves that a user can make, because each move actually performs a goto to another function, not a conventional call." \-- [http://www.lua.org/pil/6.3.html](http://www.lua.org/pil/6.3.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it is worth to mention that you can inspect Java bytecode [1][2] with radare2 tool (use the git version [3])

[1] [http://dso.thecoverofnight.com/posts/2014/04/radare-java- int...](http://dso.thecoverofnight.com/posts/2014/04/radare-java-intro/)

[2] [http://radare.org/get/radare_java.pdf](http://radare.org/get/radare_java.pdf)

[3] [https://github.com/radare/radare2](https://github.com/radare/radare2)

</comment><comment><USER10> very interesting !

>>There are some who may scoff at bytecode optimization, reasoning that it's a worthless skill for modern computer science, especially those working in high- level languages. Understanding what the compiler emits however is a skill still very much alive and well in embedded programming, FPGA programming, and other performance-oriented disciplines.

A few more use-cases are with building instrumentation modules, profilers besides byte-code analytic for automated-binary-audits,obfuscation amongst others.

</comment><comment><USER11> Cory's link to the instrumentation source doesn't seem to exist anymore, but here's the latest public version... [https://github.com/battlecode/battlecode- server/tree/master/...](https://github.com/battlecode/battlecode- server/tree/master/src/main/battlecode/engine/instrumenter)

Most of the interesting bits happen in RoboMethodTree.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this one!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I remember the good old days when I wrote a postcompiler for .Net, and I realized that I can jump back from a catch clause to the try block :)

<comment><USER13> A retry feature in C#/F# would be nice for sure!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Dexer, a .NET-based tool to work with Android Dalvik bytecode in a manner similar to Mono.Cecil:

[http://sebastien.lebreton.free.fr/blog/index.php?/categories...](http://sebastien.lebreton.free.fr/blog/index.php?/categories/4-Dexer)

The IKVM.NET blog covers a lot of low-level details as the author implements 'JVM on .NET CLR':

[http://weblog.ikvm.net/](http://weblog.ikvm.net/)</comment>


Why We Don't Invite Groups to Interviews  - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html <comment><USER2> The title can be parsed ambiguously. At first, I was surprised as I read it as: "We Don't Invite Groups to Interviews. Here's Why." and expected an article focusing on interviewing one team member at a time. It's perhaps better stated as "Why Some Groups Aren't Invited To Interviews".

<comment><USER3> The title is confusing. I thought I accidentally clicked the wrong link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Back _many_ years ago when I used to interview people for restaurant work we had a stock phrase that we would write on rejected applications: "others more qualified." It's as simple as that. Nothing especially wrong with the candidate, but we had better choices.

Interesting to see the same dynamic in place in the gamut between mundane restaurant work and YC applications.

<comment><USER5> "others more qualified" is more re-assuring than 'there was something wrong' or 'we don't like you' so i'd take that boilerplate response over silence/nothing.

<comment><USER6> And you would take that boilerplate response even if there actually was something wrong or they didn't like you. So there is every reason for them to put it on essentially every application which didn't involve felonies

<comment><USER7> Sorry to pick on you here: but why is being a felon considered a negative, as opposed to being convicted of something that isn't a felony?

Does the IRS tax your business differently if you employ a felon?

I mean, I get it: someone did something shitty at one point and got caught and convicted. In an absolute sense they're 'less reliable' than someone that hasn't been convicted.

I only ask because I've worked some blue jobs with ex-cons and felons (some of which were exceptionally bright) who were stuck where they were because of some dumb choice they made 10, 15, 20 years ago.

<comment><USER8> > Does the IRS tax your business differently if you employ a felon?

Actually, yes. The IRS often gives you breaks if you employ ex-convicts.

[http://smallbusiness.chron.com/tax-breaks-employers-hire- fel...](http://smallbusiness.chron.com/tax-breaks-employers-hire- felons-14421.html)

I have done this before and applied for the tax credit. The employee passed all his screens wonderfully and his ex-conviction history did not faze me at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's fine if you don't want to tell people since there are legitimate reasons not to. But this is mostly a cop out.

We know that YC application reviewers make notes and obviously do some sort of internal ranking. There may be cases where better startups just push slightly "worse" ones down, but there's obviously some startups that are passed over for specific reasons that YC knows about. I guarantee most of these reasons/notes would be very useful for an early startup.

Too bad they'll never know.

<comment><USER10> If YC states a specific reason, then what?

Does YC now have the responsibility to engage in a dialogue outlining the details for the reason.

It wouldn't be fair to write a single paragraph and say, "oh, we think your team dynamics suck, so we are rejecting you." What does that mean? Team dynamics compared to what? Do you write a more detailed response? Multiply that response by the number of rejections and all of a sudden you are left with a lot of new work that needs to get done. The reasons for rejection may make real sense for the reviewers but may have layers of context that can't easily be dictated in a simple email.

I'm sure this is some of the thinking that is involved with why it's easier to not give specific reasons.

If a team takes the YC rejection as confirmation that their startup isn't going to go anywhere then they never believed in the startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Somewhere YC is _doing_ ranking of applications. When ranking gets done some function _does_ get applied to each group. It might be beneficial for YC to know how this function works so they can debug it. For instance the YC's ranking function can generate set of components that contributes to final rank.

If YC wants to scale it is imperative to understand their own ranking ranking function. If we say that I have no idea why group A was considered better than group b then its not very scientific and there can be not much hope to improve something that we don't understand. Of course, it's different matter if this information is passed back to group because I suspect that would make ranking function more vulnerable to gaming.

<comment><USER12> I would be surprised if they're ranking every applicant. When I've been on hiring or admissions committees, I use a threshold. There's no point in ranking candidates clearly below the bar relative to each other, and there's no point in ranking candidates clearly above the bar either. For applicants on the bubble, it's often easier to decide for each individual whether you should interview him or her or not, and let the final number of interviews be somewhat fluid, than to rank them against each other.

Obviously, one could conduct an ex post ranking based on the decisions, but I wouldn't put a lot of weight on it.

I do agree that one should try to go back and check how the decisions worked out in a systematic way, but it's not obvious that there's an easy way to do it (and by "easy" I mean "a way that anyone will adopt for long enough for it to be worthwhile.")

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think most people would appreciate some feedback on something they work hard for, even if it's just an "atta boy, looks good, keep on going--sorry it didn't work out", or even better some productive feedback ("you need to narrow your focus" or "market already saturated").

I have never applied for YC, but I have applied to other things in life that seem like a black hole from the outside. Just an acknowledgement of something that surely took a lot of time would be a nice gesture. I mean, I'm sure you're nice folks, right? Would you ignore applicants if you met them on the street?

<comment><USER14> I imagine that the types of feedback you're suggesting, such as "market already saturated", would only be half of the story. A founder who is making such a mistake is automatically making a second mistake: not being good enough to realize the mistake in the first place.

A founder who fixes the one mistake pointed out by YC would be missing the big picture, likely making numerous other mistakes. I don't think that most applicants want to hear the truth, which is effectively, "Based on problems X, Y, and Z that we can see after a cursory analysis, we can only assume that you're not smart enough for other program, else you would have realized those problems yourself."

<comment><USER15> My entrepreneurial experience so far has been about making a lot of mistakes and learning from them.

I think for a lot (but not all) of issues in startups and in life, "not being good enough" or "not smart enough" really just means "not having enough exposure or practice". Based on this view, constructive, specific feedback goes a long way in helping dedicated founders improve so that they too, can add value to society via their startup.

I realize it is unfair to expect this from YC, considering they also have finite bandwidth. I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable fee for this type of feedback from YC and I suspect a lot of founders wouldn't either.

<comment><USER14> I agree that entrepreneurship is a great opportunity to make and learn from mistakes _in execution_. It's also an opportunity to try completely new things that may or may not work.

Other sorts of mistakes, though--like being ignorant of existing players, failing to explain why someone would use your product, or having no remote plan to profitability--are more troublesome. They indicate a lack of business acumen or even common sense that will make success incredibly unlikely.

As with execution mistakes, you can learn these things through experience, too. However, I would not want to invest my time and money teaching them to someone unwilling or unable to learn those lessons on their own.

Which gets back to my original point... Who wants to hear, "You seem to lack common sense"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is just one of those things you learn in life. You'll never find out the real reason someone rejected you. It doesn't matter if it's a girl or an interviewer. That's just how it is. The only thing to do is to take your best guess and improve on that next time.

Oftentimes, the people doing the rejecting may not even know the real reason. Sure, everyone can come up with something that sounds rational but how do you know it's not because you looked at them weird the first time you met because you were nervous?

<comment><USER17> I think there are better analogies than girl/interview rejection scenarios. More like TV gameshow where there are lots of applicants and only a few get chosen to make it onto the show. The producers have reasons of their own that have no bearing on how good you are. So rejection is not to be taken personally in a soul destroying way.

Just a lesson to learn, no feedback needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> there is still valuable feedback to be had, no? why are some companies "particularly good" where others don't get accepted? "no reason" _is_ paradoxical and i'm not really convinced it's a reason...

<comment><USER19> The YC partners have written extensively on what they are looking for in startups and what impresses them. As have many of the companies that have been accepted. pg has even participated in the comments here on those sorts of articles and blog posts. Barring their entire public persona being an elaborate conspiracy I don't think they could possibly be more transparent about what impresses them and what they think are red flags.

<comment><USER20> The thing is, the applicants would have read them too. I don't think most applicants would have the obvious red flags. Many that don't get in would be the corner case, ie, pushed down by those with a slight edge.

<comment><USER19> Reading those pieces and taking the advice seriously are entirely different things. For instance I knew two non-technical founders with a company who were outsourcing their app and had no users and were shocked they didn't get an interview. On paper and in person they are both very bright, had attended elite schools and done a lot of interesting things in their lives. But I think that was actually their downfall, they suspected they had enough good things going for them in general that they ignored a lot of very specific advice from YC.

My bet is the companies that don't get interviews are a lot more like my friends who just didn't pay attention than a sea of corner cases. It's actually really hard to meet the criteria that YC asks for. If you follow their advice you need the following things:

\- At least 2 founders who know each other well, preferably have worked together before or known each other for years

\- Have found your domain problem through personal experience

\- Are good hackers

\- Have already put together a decent product/have some semblance of a reasonable start

It can almost sound simple but that's really really hard. And I say that as someone who has spent the last couple years talking with my friends about whether they would be interested in being co-founders for startup ideas and searching for problems in my own experience that would make for scalable ideas. I go out and talk to companies and I don't see much of what YC explicitly asks for. It's not far fetched to imagine they interview nearly 100% of the teams that fit the profile above.

<comment><USER20> > It can almost sound simple but that's really really hard.

It really _is_ hard. No way is it easy

> I say that as someone who has spent the last couple years talking with my > friends about whether they would be interested in being co-founders for > startup ideas and searching for problems in my own experience that would > make for scalable ideas.

That is the biggest problem in getting it going. You have to be able to convince others to share your vision. But isn't it easier to do with long-time friends than that guy you met last summer? When you know someone for long enough, you will have the confidence that you'll stick together through the friendly breezes and the wild storms

> Are good hackers

That is a requirement for a good reason. The founders are the only guys initially who give a sh*t about the product. Say a customer makes a support call, being able to quickly respond and fix the bug can mean life or death. You need at least one hacker who can do this. Better if every founder is one.

> I go out and talk to companies and I don't see much of what YC explicitly > asks for.

YC in no way has the magic portion. They just have a set of things they believe are positive indicators, which are mostly right, but not fulfulling one/all of these no way means you can't build a successful startup

> It's not far fetched to imagine they interview nearly 100% of the teams that > fit the profile above.

That's not surprising, is it? If 70% of the slots were filled with applicants that fulfilled 100% criteria, then they might loosen some of the criteria (like single founder teams, idea stage etc), but with the momentum that YC's gotten, I bet 100% of the slots get filled with startups that fulfill 100% of their criteria (and more, those corner cases). So obviously, they'll stick to their criteria (which has been working for them)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hopefully the one who wrote this article is not a moderator on [https://news.ycombinator.com/](https://news.ycombinator.com/). Very misleading title.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think the only useful case for an explanation is if your application was defective per the outline, but I doubt that's the main reject reason anyway.

</comment><comment><USER23> I know this is nitpicking... but that box needs padding.

</comment><comment><USER24> So just to confirm, if we didn't receive an email or any notification on Hacker News, we were not selected, correct? Not sure if we were supposed to receive a 'Sorry' email.

<comment><USER20> They haven't sent out the mail yet. You will get a mail (be sure to have your mail id in the profile with which you applied) even if you are rejected</comment></comment>


Hosted Continuous Integration Comparative  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.clinkerhq.com/hosted-continuous-integration-comparative/

<comment><USER2> It's a good vision about Continuous Integration services.</comment>