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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

> We're not quoting numbers anymore

I'll be blunt and ask: why not?

PG says it's cause of the competition. The comment is "pre-10K-era", so it doesn't seem to be available on news.yc, but you can see it here:

http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/search1/?q=disclose+application+...

The old items are back. They were only gone for a couple days.

The problem is bitrot in that search app; they use the old url. Try http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9066

Bitrot isn't the primary problem - you broke the old url. I save notes on what I read, so it'd be nice if the urls were real permalinks.

I'm guessing it would discourage potentially good candidates from trying if the odds look too long?

My very vague recollection is that it's because there are lots of YC competitors/clones now. Not wanting to get into a pissing match over the number of submissions or something?

Yes. And more precisely, anyone could inflate their numbers by encouraging large numbers of weak groups to apply (e.g. college students during the summer), knowing that they were going to reject them.

So if we quoted numbers, competitors would be tempted to do bad things in order to get higher numbers, and then we'd either have to the same bad things ourselves, or look as if founders liked us less.

Are you doing this for profit?

If you are congratulations for sharing so much of what goes on at ycombinator, you have been a great inspiration.

If you are not why not help other "clones" become better by opening up a little bit more about how you achieve your magic, kind of open sourcing technology "incubation" processes, so that people from the rest of the world can enjoy such an opportunity.

Does that really outweigh being transparent in this case? I think one thing that a lot of people admire about YCombinator is how up-front you guys are with everything reasonable to be up-front about.

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