Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11440627
We ran a poll for the top applications and the voting was so close that we decided to fund one extra startup. Here are the winners:
AutoMicroFarm (264 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11454342
Feynman Nano (208 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11443122
Casepad (200 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11452884
I’ve talked to the founders of these three startups on the phone already and I’m really excited about working with all of them. We’ve disclosed all the vote totals in the original poll thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11615639). Of course, the application that got the most votes isn’t on the final list and we’ll discuss that in the thread below.
We received 343 applications via Apply HN and over 1700 comments were generated across those posts. I was quite impressed by the quality and depth of the discussions on these applications and really loved the moments when HNers would take the time to provide quality feedback to the founders on their applications.
Thank you to everyone for participating in our little experiment. It takes a lot of bravery put your passion out there to be judged publicly and it takes a remarkable community to treat that courage with kindness and respect. It makes me very proud to be part of HN.
While we haven’t definitively decided whether we’ll do this again at this point (we’ll want to see how the companies do in the batch), I’m delighted and optimistic about what the community accomplished here.
We’ve already received a lot of great feedback from many of you on how to do this better, but please feel free to share more below.
(and then the correct thing for him to do is either politely turn it down, or donate it to a charity or something of mutual agreeableness)
> rewarding him for being obnoxious.
What about rewarding honest HN community members who voted for him in good faith? Ignoring their wishes is a big slap in the face; we've been reminded that we're all just plebes and real power will always lie with Big (White) Men and their gut feelings.
Of course not. But I haven't seen any evidence that anyone was doing that.
honest HN community members who voted for him in good faith?
How many such people exist? I don't think anyone knows. Unfortunately the vote spam which he solicited via twitter overwhelmed any other signal.
Even if this was supposed to be entirely decided on the basis of votes -- which is explicitly not what was planned from the start -- when people cheat they normally get disqualified. You don't say "this Olympic athlete took steroids, but maybe he should keep his medal... after all, he might have won even without the drugs".
> How many such people exist?
raises hand
Hi, my account is 3000 days old today, only a little less old than your own. I went back and checked and it turns out that I didn't vote for Pinboard, but that's largely because I hadn't been active on HN in quite a while and I didn't think it was necessary. I did voice support for Maciej in the comments there.
I genuinely wanted to see him go through the program ("like a bowling ball through a python"), and not just for entertainment purposes. I think it would have been a valuable cross-pollination for everyone involved.
I've generally felt that HN -- and to a greater degree, YC -- aren't particularly welcoming towards people like me. I got fed up enough that I wrote a news reader to mine HN for articles just so that I wouldn't be tempted to visit HN as often, and when that broke a while back, I never bothered to fix it. Literally the only reason I'm here now is because Maciej mentioned it on his Twitter account. I've always been an outsider here. Seeing YC accept another, more successful outsider would have been nice.
This fiasco has all the scent of cliqueish hostility towards Maciej, you have been non-stop and relentlessly accusing him of being a troll (and you're smart enough to know better than to claim to know someone's psychology better than they do over the internet), and the results stink like a US election.
If the outcome is the same then the twitter-promoting explanation is simply a smokescreen.
I would not have cared at all about some contest on HN for a YC acceptance if it weren't for him mentioning it on Twitter. In fact, I would not have even known it was happening.
And now that I've seen the way both HN and YC has handled this throughout, including the attitude you've had towards his application since the beginning, I wish that he hadn't mentioned it on Twitter at all and my nearly 6-month-long streak of forgetting that HN exists had continued unbroken.
We could probably keep sparring over this, but the results are clearly not going to change and HN does not look any more like a community I want to be a part of than it did so many months ago.