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Comment by gruseom | Hacker News Reader

If I get the essence of it right YC offers personal counseling to overcome the fear of failure

YC offers product and company advice, not "personal counseling". So no, you don't have the essence of it right.

> Y Combinator transforms this force from a weight on your shoulders that keeps you down, to a powerful rocket that propels you to the sky.

Your point escapes me. All the OP is saying is that getting into YC made it easier to override his initial fear of failure, after which the process took on a life of its own. The subject of the sentence you quoted is not "The YC partners personally" but "The experience of YC" (cf. the title of the post).

I think we are at the edge of my language skills here.

To me it sounds like someone that has just had some kind of epiphany.

If a dutch person would say:

"Y combinator verandert deze kracht van een gewicht op je schouders dat je naar beneden haalt tot een krachtige raket die je de lucht in schiet"

We'd think they might need help. Or at a minimum that they should stop smoking that stuff ;)

It never occurred to me that this might be a language problem, but I do find it somehow hilarious to imagine a Dutch person saying that (assuming you've translated the sentence literally). This makes me wonder how, shall we say, zany we must generally appear to the Dutch. It also makes me wonder how many other such misunderstandings are lurking under the surface with continental Europeans who appear (damn you) to have native-speaker-level command of English.

I do my best, but there isn't a week that I don't put my foot in my mouth in some form or other.

For instance the 'zany' in the text above I had to look up, and even after looking up it doesn't make much sense to me.

1) a subordinate clown or acrobat in old comedies who mimics ludicrously the tricks of the principal

2) a slavish follower

3) one who acts the buffoon to amuse others

None of the three are a preferred candidate when I do a simple substitution.

gruseom was using "zany" as an adjective, rather than as a noun. If I am the person in definition #3, then I am acting like a buffoon and I am very "zany".

Zany just means wacky. It's an older word (deriving, I just learned, from commedia dell'arte). I was looking (jokingly) for a euphemism to approximate your implicit category of this-person-is-either-crazy-or-smoking-something.

Ok, thanks!

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