Hacker News Reader

Anyone else think it's interesting that he described the Y Combinator application process as "holding a contest"?

I guess it fits the technical definition, but it sure makes it sound like PG is drawing names from a hat.

The New York Marathon is a contest. Contests are not necessarily lotteries. If there are winners and losers it's definitely a contest. And with Y Combinator there's usually about 30 "winners" and more than 1,000 "losers."

Like I said, you're technically right. But nobody describes Harvard admissions as some contest that they hold. YCombinator is a lot closer to that than the New York Marathon.

Heh. OK, I'll give you that. Language is such a funny thing.

Oooh, Scoble is on HN. Welcome Scoble!

Is it just me or have the major bloggers taken an interest in HN recently? I noticed that Dave Winer started engaging about two months ago and now Scoble. Did something major happen to prompt this or is it just a general response to the increasing levels of traffic that we send to the various blogs?

YCombinator [admissions are] a lot closer to [Harvard admissions] than the New York Marathon.

Was that intended to be a compliment? :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com