Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

It's not cryptic. This was all hashed out on the announcement thread. Pinboard won HN's endorsement overwhelmingly, but Pinboard itself isn't a good fit for YCF. When "Apply HN" was conceived of, it wasn't clear that the winners would still need to be interviewed by YC. It became clear that they'd need to be. An interview step was added. Maciej talked to Kevin, Kevin decided not to move forward with Pinboard.

If YC does an "Apply HN" thing again, no doubt the interview step will be in the announcement, but it wasn't this time.

The rest is just miscommunication and bad optics.

View on HN

I read through that and I didn't really see anything that required an apology and $20k to be given to a charity.

'What' did Pinboard supposedly win? I can't find any poll or submission that appears to be contentious. I searched HN https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22apply%20hn%22&sort=byPopula... and found this joke submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441480

I mean, I think I've pieced together what's happened, but I'm still fairly confused and feel like I'm missing a lot of context.

Pinboard won by having the most votes, but was disqualified for vote brigading apparently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633278

And the "joke submission" wasn't joke at all

The vote brigading thing was just mud slinging. They were pretty clear that they disqualified him because they don't like him. Or at least don't want to work with him.

Was my vote "brigaded"?

> It's not cryptic.

Cryptic might be the wrong word, but having not been here for what happened as it happened, I'd say that trying to piece together what this OP post was about if this was your first exposure to the whole "Pick startups for YC to fund" idea is not at all trivial.

I skimmed enough of the two links dang posted above to know that it would take me more time than I was willing to devote to figure out exactly what went down. The way HN threads are presented makes sense when the threads are alive and active, but are terrible from a historical perspective of how things unfolded if you weren't there to see it live.

I actually crawled through enough of those links to get an idea of what happened and I still don't see anywhere that YC/dang really went wrong. I'm sure it's in there somewhere but I've already put in more effort than I really wanted to.

It became clear that they'd need to be. An interview step was added. Maciej talked to Kevin, Kevin decided not to move forward with Pinboard.

I think this interpretation gives YC too much credit -- it was clearly stated that all discussion would happen in public on HN, then they added a private interview without announcing that change, and the reason given for Maciej not passing the interview was that he made Kevin "uncomfortable" (which as many people noted in the thread, is basically Unconscious Bias 101). The optics of the affair were that the contest had been redesigned to exclude Maciej specifically.

I hope that for the next Apply HN there's no final vaperoom stage -- putting something to a vote them sending it off for final decision by the elite is not going to go well a second time. A better process might be an "Ask HN" for each finalist where the YC gatekeepers (along with HN members) could interview the applicant(s) in a public way.

Thanks for providing a summarized context of what happened.

This post wasn't cryptic, but could have used a retrospective or summary of facts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com