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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Are all YC founders' usernames orange?

Wouldn't that have the same effect as a voting ring?

I don't know if it's all YC founders or all YC employees, but at least at one point it was public knowledge (as in, Paul Graham repeatedly posted about it) that everyone in YC had an orange username.

It was at least leaked 1 year ago by Techcrunch[1,2]. The search string is: "If you are a YC founder, your username will show up in orange to other YC"[3]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5730720

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-new...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=If+you+are+a+YC+founder%2C+your+us...

I don't think you can call that "leaked"—it was an interview with PG!

Also, the orange name thing had been discussed on HN long before then. More than once, IIRC. (Sorry, I don't have citations—too tired to dig them up.)

Thanks for the clarification! I agree, leaked was not a proper way of describing it.

Definitely all founders, and definitely some employees who aren't also founders, but I'm not sure if all employees have it. They may; there aren't that many.

It's actually more so we don't get into unnecessarily acrimonious arguments with one another.

Sounds like a feature the whole site could use. ;)

Although I'm guessing that was facetious, it's actually a variant of the truth: it's there to foster the YC network. PG added it years ago when he realized that the number of YC founders had gotten too large for them to know who each other were.

> Wouldn't that have the same effect as a voting ring?

Perhaps, but those votes are caught by the ring detector the same as others, and the same penalties are applied.

It may interest you to know that when PG added the orange name thing, he also added a page showing stories submitted by YC founders. That really did have the same effect as a voting ring—which wasn't the intent, so he got rid of it. (This has also been discussed on HN in the past, btw.)

yes, yes

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