For disclosure - Jason and I were in the same YC batch and I've gone to him for advice a couple of times. The one thing I'll say about blogging this way, that perhaps a lot of folks don't appreciate, (particularly the incredibly candid way that Jason does it), is that it is really hard to be that honest. It's hard to be that honest with yourself (most people simply aren't, and I know personally that I spent a long time not being so, and in some cases I'm that way today) and its several orders of magnitude harder to be that honest with strangers, in a forum as public as this one.

Insofar as the HN community remains interested in discussing startup related topics, this personal candor/honesty about when things aren't going well is completely under-discussed; it happens all the time that things aren't going well (actually it's what mostly happens) but usually the only times you learn about it are in a post-mortem or a takedown piece. A founder whose currently building his company and willing to discuss these things is extremely rare and valuable to other founders and would-be founders (I on occasion give talks at my alma-mater and I try very hard to portray the unglamorous side of things. The audience always appreciates it).