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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

15,000, huh? That’s a lot more than I expected.

How many had you originally accepted? (And thus, how many have advisors?)

We had originally accepted about 4000 - although our goal has always been to make our MOOC as much about "open" as we possibly can. Our own misstep has caused us to accelerate things.

Does that mean you have 160 advisors scheduled for this?

yes, in that neighborhood.

For the lucky ones you will share one adviser with other 24 peers, that's quite a workload for the adviser.

Good luck to all.

Could you explain what happened more?

4,000 companies were accepted but 11,000 received acceptance emails?

Yes, and the 4,000 received rejections. It was a big boolean fuckup.

hahahaha that really sucks. Well, I think its gonna be an interesting outcome. Im excited to particpate and see what happens.

Cornell University did a similar thing one year, needless to say, they did not resolve it the same way.

While Cornell was the first big example in 2003, it's been done many times since:

http://time.com/3637980/college-admissions-mistakes-johnshop...

It actually happens dozens of times per year on a one-off basis, usually with college coaches telling recruits they've been accepted when the admissions office has only provisionally accepted them.

SUNY Buffalo seems to have held the previous record of 5109. https://www.cnn.com/2016/04/18/us/us-university-buffalo-acce...

Wild Speculation: typo in a limit clause. Probably only a few extra thousand got accepted but instead of weed them out they figured fuck it.

I'm going to also guess and say user accounts were created in a not easily rolled back way after the fact.

Actually, we just literally reversed the SQL queries for the emails we sent out for accepted/rejected companies – and then didn't immediately realize our mistake.

It's been a pretty tough day here at YC but we're all really happy with the final decision we came to!

Looks like you do mailing old (hackers) way - via SQL queries :)

Yes, that's about right. Companies which were intended to be placed in an audit-only track were accepted.

Does it mean competition for 100 10k was between 4000 and now 15000?

I'd suspect that there are some pockets within YCs funding resources that will open up to this experiment.

It would be foolish for the tech industry as a whole to not take significant raised eyebrows at what can come out of this.

Surely there will be some "holy crap we couldnt have predicted this to happen" moment in store for the world to see now...

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