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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Like I said in the announcement, one of the reasons we're pretty sure this will work is that we're already doing it. I.e. a lot of the people who applied to YC in previous cycles were applying without a viable idea; they just didn't realize it at the time.

Also (I'm starting to wonder if you read the announcement) we don't hand people ideas. We encourage them to solve problems they already knew about but had been overlooking.

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I didn't mean to imply that you would force an idea upon them, but helping someone come up with an idea can easily turn into that if you're literally accepting people with no ideas (which you state you are and yes I read the announcement).

In the end, the person is going to have to become passionate about the idea. That's hard. When you're talking about a group that comes in together and wants to start a company together, it is much harder.

Honestly, if someone comes in just wanting to start a company without an idea, it sounds to me like they are more in love with the idea of being a founder than solving a problem close to their heart. I don't think that I would be interested in people like that.

Well, it is a cheap experiment. What is the worst that could happen?

What's up with all the negative attitude at HN that's being up voted for things that until recently at HN would have been applauded. This announcement is one. Sam altman's exit also had a negative tone. Also fred's post on yahoo also had some BS comment about VCs encouraging patents being up voted.

This is a great idea and people at most should at least have a neutral approach.

edited- I didn't mean this as a comment to Daniel's comment. It was meant for the grandparent

HN is turning into Reddit /s

People calling it as they see it, by nature of this place YC is going to be very popular and generally have lots of fans and positive feedback. Not everything they do though has to be agreed with all the time by everyone.

Same with Sam Altman, just because someone is a very prominent YC founder doesn't mean everyone has to agree with everything they do.

As HN gets larger, it gets more and more likely that there will be some negative comment made. When it was smaller, there was just a greater chance that no one would make the negative comment.

Comments are getting meaner in general as the site grows larger.

It would be interesting to run sentiment analysis on the archives of various online communities to figure out where the likely phase transition point is. Probably a PhD in it for someone.

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