
The Worst Part of YC - dmnd
http://blog.samaltman.com/the-worst-part-of-yc
======
zt
While I was in college, I was put on a committee to choose a new Director of
Admissions. One of the internal candidates said during his interview: "There
is a good reason that everyone who is accepted gets in, but there is not a
good reason why people are rejected."

It many ways that seems obvious. To get in you have to have something going
for you. To not get in you don't have to do anything wrong, you just have to
not have a thing that does get you in. It would be just as hard for my college
to write high school seniors a letter saying, well, you were 2nd in your class
and had a 1500 but noting stood out as would be for YC to write people direct
feedback at scale. What would it really mean? How do you action that? No
special sauce isn't really feedback. You can't point to anything wrong other
than you can't point to anything great.

This has proven true for me in the admissions processes I've gone through on
the other side: whether at a consulting firm, or Stripe, or Standard Treasury,
or Echoing Green (I read semi-finalist apps). Most people self-select to apply
for good and just reasons but some people really excite you and some people
don't. Some people just have that something special, and the people who don't
don't really have anything wrong with them.

So to me this commentary rings true and is honestly put.

~~~
adamzerner
> "There is a good reason that everyone who is accepted gets in, but there is
> not a good reasons why people are rejected."

Yes there is - because they aren't the best _of the best_.

I don't see a reason to sugar-coat it. Being rejected means that YC doesn't
think that you're one of the 50 or so best startups who applied. Nothing more,
and nothing less.

~~~
dredmorbius
You're assuming (or implying) that there's some canonical scale of quality,
that it's absolute, and that it can be perfectly determined.

None of these are true.

There is, frequently, a _probabilistic_ scale of quality -- there are works or
instances which will, generally, be considered "good" and some which are
considered "bad", and, say in an iterated experiment model you'll generally
come to at least _some_ level of agreement as to what's what. Sometimes there
are even very clear winners and losers.

But there's a _hell_ of a lot of variance. There are things which people,
often _many_ people, like, often a lot, which others simply despise. I am, for
example, not a fan of rap, hip-hop, house, and similar music. I _really_ like
Beethoven's late string quartets. I'm aware that by popular vote my
preferences are likely unpopular.

And even where there _is_ widespread agreement after the fact on something,
experts in the field may not come to agreement. The Beatles were panned by
several early music critics and record labels. Rob Malda's initial review of a
new cellphone was less than whelmed. Oh yeah, it was called the "iPhone", you
may have heard of it.

Tests for categories as seemingly refined as classical music performance --
both auditions of performers, and trials of classic vs. modern instruments,
and fine wines, show that there are huge differences in non-blinded vs. blind
trials (for music), and that wine experts are incredibly unreliable in how
they grade, or even describe the qualities of, wines. Though this _does_ make
for an entertaining way to spend an afternoon or evening with friends.

[http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Blind-Auditions-
Putti...](http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Blind-Auditions-Putting-
Discrimination-on-2855410.php)

[http://freakonomics.com/2010/12/16/freakonomics-radio-do-
mor...](http://freakonomics.com/2010/12/16/freakonomics-radio-do-more-
expensive-wines-taste-better/)

In another interesting study, unreleased music was introduced to several
different "worlds" of test subjects -- within a world the experiences were
shared, but not between them. The result was that, from the same starting
selection, different "hits" were selected by each.

[http://www.npr.org/2014/02/27/282939233/good-art-is-
popular-...](http://www.npr.org/2014/02/27/282939233/good-art-is-popular-
because-its-good-right)

And that's the whole point.

In _any_ competitive selections process, especially where there are far more
_qualified_ applicants than there are positions, there will be many qualified
applicants who aren't admitted. The reasons for denial will vary, but
ultimately the selectors must adopt some arbitrary mechanism. Lottery would
probably be the fairest, say, by assigning a rough percentile ranking to each
candidate (perhaps by decile), selecting all within the top category (the
clear winners), none below some cutoff, and a random selection within the grey
range. More often culture, bias, hubris, or other factors will lead to other
bases for decision.

But thinking you can, perfectly and without error, assess the quality of
something as both nuanced and capricious as the possible value of a technology
start-up concept based on a few brief exposures is really pretty arrogant. And
all but certainly wrong.

~~~
adamzerner
> But thinking you can, perfectly and without error, assess the quality of
> something as both nuanced and capricious as the possible value of a
> technology start-up concept based on a few brief exposures is really pretty
> arrogant. And all but certainly wrong.

I never said that they could assess it "perfectly and without error". I said
that it means that "YC _doesn 't think_ that you're one of the 50 or so best
startups".

~~~
dredmorbius
And you're still making an attribution error.

YC can't _unambiguously_ tell whether or not a particular rejected candidate
should have been in the top 50 or not, at least not for a significant number
of those rejects.

My point remains: quality or success cannot be foretold in advance.
Particularly when much of that success depends on passing prior selection
phases.

In evolutionary biology, as a comparative example, there's _no question_ that
luck plays a role in evolution. Your ancestors had the bad luck to live in an
asteroid strike zone, on a tidal-wave flood plain, or within the affected
region of an ancient pandemic? Pity, you're not here now. So the _influence_
on survival exists.

The relevant part to evolution though is that _luck is not an inheritable
trait_. It cannot be selected for. It's part of the random noise.

Similar logic holds true for YC prospects: some are successful, some are not.
Passing the bar itself comprises in significant part a random "lucky" event.
Yes, that can be influenced, but you cannot eliminate the error.

------
wildermuthn
At West Point, I was one of ten cadets in my class of one thousand to make the
parachute team. For some reason, the parachute team had become a symbol-status
and a fast track to cadet success.

What's interests me the most is that I had no idea, no clue, that the
skydiving team was a fast-track to promotion. I just wanted to jump out of
planes. That wasn't the case with many of my teammates. We had some great
talent on the skydiving team — the most talented men and women at West Point.
But some of them hated jumping out of planes, and they did poorly.

Sama writes that the number and quality of YC applications has risen. That
might not be a good thing. Talent and ambition aren't the greatest indicators
of startup success.

I don't think its a coincidence that Dropbox, Reddit, AirBnb, Justin.tv,
Loopt, and Stripe all came within the first few years of YC's existence, and
that YC's more recent companies haven't taken off in the same way. It might be
because immensely talented people see YC as their avenue to success.

If being immensely talented and ambitious was the prime requisite for startup-
success, then YC would be in a great position. But as I understand it, having
talent and ambition don't matter as much as having a determined, cohesive, and
visionary team.

~~~
jbooth
Someone mentioned in another thread that it seemed (allegedly, I don't know
any of these people) like the type of people who apply for investment banking
jobs are now applying for YC.

I think the most salient fact about this stereotypical type of person is that
_they don 't know why they're doing it_. They wouldn't be doing it if it
weren't prestigious. You lose something there, even if the person is
theoretically better on paper.

~~~
hindsightbias
Michael Lewis said somewhere (I think the intro to The Big Short) that he
never expected to write another Wall Street book after Liar's Poker. He
thought it was the be-all, end-all warning to IB wanna-bees.

But he kept getting letters from college students to the effect of "I read
your book, where is that kind of opportunity now?"

It wasn't just the money, or the power, it's just being more whatever than
anybody else...

------
zbruhnke
It's nice to see the side of investors that still have a passion for startups
so much so that they feel sad when they reject people.

It often feels like noone in that world has empathy.

For the ones getting rejection emails tonight don't sweat it. I got into YC on
my Third try and it was worth every rejection.

We're building a company now and spent months getting rejected about raising a
seed round before suddenly becoming one of the "hot" companies with investors
and being in a position to turn the same people who were turning us away down
for a change.

All this to say Sam is right. If you're working on something, there is
traction and/or you truly believe in it don't give up.

The only validation to worry about at this stage of the game is user
validation.

Talk to Users. Write Code.

Best of luck with whatever you're building and if I can ever be of help feel
free to email me (email in profile)

~~~
cynic2
"It leaves me feeling down for many days after our application process."
Nothing about this statement suggests he feels empathy for the people he
rejects; much more, he feels bad for himself because he had to make a decision
that makes him feel bad. Play the world's smallest violin.

------
rafeed
Rejection is inevitable. If you're not rejected now, somewhere down the road
you will be. If you haven't been rejected, get practice in getting rejected.
If you have been rejected, feel the frustration and use it as motivation to
prove whoever rejected you wrong.

The best analogy I can find for this is that applying to YC is like trying to
pick up a girl or asking her out on a date. (I know many of us have yet to
try, too). Get over the fear of rejection, and put yourself out there. Will
your way to success. YC is like the smartest, most beautiful woman with the
amazing personality everyone falls in love with (well, there's always the
haters). Don't give up. Exercise, eat right, sleep, and strive to be better.
You never know, one day that beautiful woman might actually say yes.

(To all the women on HN, replace girl/woman with guy/man and beautiful with
handsome.)

~~~
dougabug
Feynman describes being rejected by Bell Labs several years in a row for an
internship, and each year coming back and cheerfully taking the tour. He
finally got the job, but the war intervened. His attitude towards rejection
seemed pretty constructive.

~~~
zodiac
Hey where was this from? I probably just forgot but I don't recall reading
this in any of his books...

~~~
hboon
“Surely you're Joking, Mr. Feynman” mentions this.

------
rvivek
We got into YC only the 3rd time in summer 2011; applied for the two earlier
batches. Both of our earlier applications had bad ideas and very little
traction.

So, don't give up.

~~~
mrchess
Out of curiosity, the 3rd time you applied (and got accepted), did you have
traction?

~~~
jlteran
I'm also curious to hear the answer to this question. Last time I applied, it
was only with an idea that had not yet been implemented. Now, I am waiting to
see if my current idea has traction before applying to YC. I think they see
traction as a very important factor in accepting you into YC. I might be wrong
though.

~~~
namenotrequired
I have no experience with HN personally but I remember pg saying they tried to
ignore early signs of traction, as there's no correlation between how far a
company is when it's accepted, and how well it ends up doing.

I can't find the comment now, but here's at least half of it:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6897904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6897904)

------
VaedaStrike
As I go through the rest of my life I'll likely be applying just about every
cycle simply for the way applying focuses my mind and energies.

And the funniest thing...I get more excited each time. Rejection after
rejection, I get more and more certain that I'm getting closer and closer.
Totally counter-intuitive from what I thought, both the excitement side of it
and the applying for the 4th or 5th time... :) "Y" I ask you...

~~~
nomadcam
This could be the beginning of a great graphic novel...Zen and the Art of Y
Combinator Rejection

------
ipince
It's hard (or impossible) to give detailed feedback to every applicant. But
maybe telling them roughly in which bucket they fell ("shortlist", "pretty
good", "okay", "stopped reading after 30s") would be useful.

~~~
dctoedt
> _But maybe telling them roughly in which bucket they fell ( "shortlist",
> "pretty good", "okay", "stopped reading after 30s") would be useful._

Yes, it would be useful, but YC's lawyers probably advised against it. Doing
this could open the door for a rejected applicant to allege some flavor of
unlawful discrimination (pick one: race / ethnicity / gender / age / etc.).
I'm not sure the anti-discrimination laws would even apply to a situation like
YC, but at a minimum the allegation could turn into a bandwidth-sucking
distraction and PR headache.

~~~
afarrell
Everyone that reviews applications to MassChallenge rates them along a few
dimensions and then gives them at least 30 words of feedback, so it is
possible to do. Then again, we pitch, "you get feedback even if you don't get
in" as part of the value of our program.

(disclosure: I work for MC)

------
eggbrain
Back about 5 years ago, a prominent VC behind TechStars came to my college and
talked about entrepreneurship. I was so enamored that I decided I wanted to be
an entrepreneur and apply to their incubator program.

I applied about 5 times with various ideas to various programs (Boulder,
Seattle, New York). I got close once -- I was a "finalist" for the Seattle
program (Top 30), but didn't get chosen as the top 10.

Each time left me pretty crushed. But I decided early on that I could sit
around and feel bad about myself, or I could use it to become better. After
each time I was rejected, I contacted the head of the incubator and thanked
them for their time, and if they could give me any tips towards success. And
more often than not, I got responses that helped me become a better
entrepreneur.

The first rejection is always the hardest. And so is the second, the third,
the fourth, and the fifth. But Edison is widely quoted as saying:

    
    
      "I have not failed 1,000 times.  I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb."
    

Despite what you may think of Edison, I try to take the same mentality. To
those who got rejected -- think of it not as the end, but as the beginning.
You'll enjoy the ride if you do.

------
dctoedt
FTA: _[I]t was really striking how much higher the average quality of
applications was for this batch compared to any previous batch. Most of the
partners independently mentioned this to me._

To me that was the most interesting part of the article.

------
tdullien
Perhaps as a "cheer up" story: We applied to YC in their very first batch and
got rejected. It is unclear what the reasons were -- but there were many
reasons why it was understandable for YC to reject us. Among other things, the
company had already been incorporated in Germany, we already had a few
customers, we had decidedly nonexistent mass-market potential, the entire
company was a bad idea from a purely business perspective, and just in almost
every imaginable way did not fit the mold.

This did not deter us from continuing; our company was profitable already, and
we worked our butts off for the next few years (without any reasonable
perspective of ever getting acquired, or even growing the company to be big).
The work was interesting, and for a company that size, we had a surprisingly
large impact (indirectly) on the wider world, but it was heavy toil with
little reward.

Either way - history then shifted under our feet, and it turned out in
2010/2011 that we had the combination of technology and team that out of a
sudden had become pretty important to Google, and then after a long and
painful negotiation process, we got acquired in 2011. Not a gangbusters
acquisition by any stretch of the imagination, but one that worked out nicely
for everyone involved.

So perhaps the takeaway from this is: YC is great, but perhaps the great
redeeming quality of modern capitalism is that you do not require gatekeepers
in order to be successful. "You play shit that they like, and people will
come, simple as that." \- e.g. if you build a product that people like, people
will give you money to build more of that product. Decentralized decision-
making and the ability to bootstrap with nothing but a compelling product may
be the one thing that led to our current economic system to out-compete the
others.

When we started the company, I wanted to build X. This was a huge endeavor,
and I knew that on the way to X I'd need to build Y and Z; so I ended up
building Z first, then used income from Z to bootstrap development on Y, then
I got sidetracked a bit on B because we found a surprising application of our
technology to a different field, and just when I was about to get back to X,
we got acquired principally for B and Z. So up until today, we have made very
little progress on X itself, but that doesn't matter :-)

So if you're rejected from YC, don't despair. Use it to re-examine what you're
doing, understand that investment is like dating (some people are just not
made for each other, and it will end in horror if you pretend to be someone
you are not), and then channel your disappointment into velocity :-P

(PS: pg, if you folks have _any_ notes whatsoever on reasons for rejection in
the first YC batch, I would _love_ to have more background info - but it is
also pretty understandable if no memory at all exists ;)

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
It seems you are a German startup, is that correct? If so, where are (were)
you based?

~~~
tdullien
We were originally based in Bochum, Germany; the entire team was moved to
Google Zurich post-acquisition.

~~~
EvaK_de
Can you tell us the name of your company and the field you are/were in?

~~~
tdullien
The company was initially called "SABRE Security", then rebranded "zynamics"
after a trademark dispute. We built high-end reverse engineering software for
purposes of security review and malware analysis. In essence, we built tools
for analysis of what is now called "APT attackers", and also tools needed to
perform patch analysis / third-party closed-source security review.

~~~
Trufa
As someone who works as a webdev, though I sometimes have trouble explaining
what I do to non technical persons, I always have the "I do websites"
explanation.

I cannot even imagine the faces when you answer: "We built high-end reverse
engineering software for purposes of security review and malware analysis."

You should sum it up to "I do... computering stuff" :)

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
The "cocktail-party answer" in this case would be "we help businesses make
sure their websites are secure."

~~~
tdullien
We had lots of hilarious answers to the question of what we do, but none are
fit to post :-). As soon as you mention "reverse engineering", you end up in
long discussions about EULAs; so you're immensely popular at cocktail parties
frequented by lawyers.

------
pincubator
We all know that it's almost impossible to provide custom feedback to those
who are not selected. But is it also impossible to point out what portion of
our application went wrong?

E.g. there might be 4-5 checkboxes for reviewers:

\- Ideas are not clear

\- Ideas are not profound/original

\- Not profitable

\- No demo

...

So at least we could know what went wrong. As most of the applicants, I think
my idea was pretty cool and I am not sure what part I screwed up.

~~~
_sentient
Check out
[http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html](http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html)

------
davidw
Just as the ever-increasing low cost accessibility of technology has made YC
possible in that you can give someone just a little bit of money to build
something, self-funded startups are also becoming possible for more and more
things. Here are some resources:

[http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/](http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/)

[https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23microconf](https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23microconf)
\- lots of information on the recently concluded MicroConf with patio11 and
many others from HN.

[http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/](http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/)

And Rob's book, which is a great starting point: [http://www.amazon.com/Start-
Small-Stay-Developers-Launching/...](http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-
Developers-Launching/dp/0615373968?tag=dedasys-20)

Granted, bootstrapping is not viable for some things, but for many others,
it's a good path.

------
exo_duz
Whilst not everyone can get in. Best of luck to all that were accepted. We'll
try again in 6 months.

------
maximgsaini
That is the Best Part of YC!!! If Albert Einstein had not been 'rejected' for
2 years, we might not have had that revolutionary glimpse into our own world
(just saying). He might've accepted those stale old ideas by joining the
academia of the time. Rejections force you to improve, rejections liberate you
from previously held ideas, rejections force you to jump higher.

Inside YC, you help 50 companies. Outside YC, you help 2950 companies by
giving your opinion on their performance. Some of these 2950 companies will
someday blow everyone away!! They will give everyone a glimpse into a new
world, just like the greats of the past did. And the likes of YC will be
thanked, because every rejection will have some contribution in shaping them.

------
hyp0

      If you’re working on something that users love,
      you like working on it, and
      you have a plan for how to build a business around it
    

Even with the mad hiring of new partners, there still aren't enough to take on
all the applicants they'd like to (I assume that's the key resource
bottleneck, not funding or space etc) - and the number and quality of
applicants are increasing. It sounds like the YC we know so far may have just
been the beginning.

A great release, both in facts and vibe; Elon standard.

------
sbuccini
Will we be notified regardless of our application's status?

~~~
adamzerner
> We are going to send out YC summer 2014 interview decisions (both yes and
> no) before 10 pm PDT tonight.

~~~
jasondrowley
How will they let applicants know? Via email?

~~~
sbuccini
Yep!

------
jameshk
For everyone who get rejected: don't give up. keep working on your startup and
apply next batch, even Drew Houston got rejected the first time.

------
fayyazkl
The best I think that can be done is to tell objectively why you didn't fund a
company so either they focus on resolving those issues or at worst quit asap
or move to a new idea. I dont know how much feedback is provided currently but
it is immensely important even to those who got selected so they can focus on
their strengths and fix their issues

------
mfrank
Interesting that this is pretty different than what other VCs say is the worst
part of their job: [http://www.quora.com/Venture-Capital/What-is-the-worst-
part-...](http://www.quora.com/Venture-Capital/What-is-the-worst-part-of-
being-a-VC)

------
hotpockets
I always think about the bubble groups. Darn it would suck to right on the
bubble. Maybe they could create a separate, remotely managed cohort of bubble
groups, that are adopted by HN.

------
650REDHAIR
How many companies that reapply get accepted during the next batch?

------
tpae
This. This is one of the biggest reasons why I want to get in so bad. Never
give up. Thank you for this!

------
notastartup
What is the benefit of joining YC? If you are just making a profit and
reinvesting some of that into the business, do you have an advantage of
joining YC? Why should you give up a piece of your action?

~~~
hrrsn
YC gives a usually quite small amount of money for a small %age, however the
value is really in the networking and mentorship.

~~~
notastartup
I guess that is pretty good deal.

what are the % like? What are the criteria and what are they looking for?

~~~
namenotrequired
[http://ycombinator.com/faq.html](http://ycombinator.com/faq.html)

------
cynic2
Pass me a bucket. Fund or don't fund. You didn't pick the companies you didn't
pick for a reason. Don't be warm and fuzzy about it. Having a Kumbaya moment
is just patronising -- and I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but that's
how at least one person perceives it.

------
datamingle
15 minutes old, with 1 comment: #1 post on Hacker News.

~~~
Killswitch
As of this comment 66 upvotes in 27 minutes. Popularity will do that.

~~~
djt
YC employees have boosted stats, it makes sense to me as this is their
business

~~~
dang
I'm responsible for that stuff with HN, and you have it backwards, both about
this post and about the site in general. If anyone were "boosting" YC's
"stats", I'd know: I look at the data obsessively. And I'm no stats-booster.
As for this post, the votes on it look as genuine to me as on any popular
story.

Everyone here agrees that the way for HN to benefit YC's business is simply to
have the best possible content. So we spend all our time working on the global
optimum—how to get quality up—and zero time promoting this or that.

While I'm at it, if any of you have ideas about how to get HN's quality up,
please send them to hn@ycombinator.com.

~~~
jacquesm
I believe you. At the same time, even if HN does not boost YC related threads
I strongly suspect that you do occasionally penalize threads critical of YC
backed companies.

~~~
dang
We—and I personally—go out of our way not to do that. I could cite several
recent examples of critical threads about YC cos that were on the front page,
which we might have penalized had they been about anybody else [1]. But I'm
not going to list them because that wouldn't be fair.

[1] We sometimes penalize posts castigating companies for something the poster
didn't like, because the resulting threads tend to be indignation-fueled
rather than substantive.

~~~
jacquesm
Again, I believe you, but this _has_ happened in the past unless I'm very much
mistaken.

To date I've been very much impressed with your efforts to bring transparency
to the moderation. Thanks for all the hard work.

As for your caveat: that's a very fine line. And if selectively enforced it
could still have the same effect. I know that YC owns HN and that's all fine
and good until there is a conflict of interest. And I personally feel that HN
is more important than YC (though, of course the YC founders & partners would
probably disagree with that, as is their good right).

edit: thanks, downvoter.

edit2: by the way, how about this one:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069)

That seemed to drop off the frontpage suspiciously fast even though it had an
incredible number of upvotes.

~~~
dang
Thanks! Now how about some more highly technical jacquesm classics? :)

Not sure I'm getting you about the caveat, unless you mean that we shouldn't
penalize any threads. If we didn't do that, the front page would be overrun
with low-quality controversies and shouting matches: in davidw's words,
"articles that get you riled up, but really don't lead to any productive or
interesting discussions". [1]

So there's editorial judgment involved. There always has been. HN has always
been a blend of voting and curation.

What I'm saying above is that we exercise that editorial judgment _less_ , not
more, when YC-startup-related controversies crop up—precisely because we don't
want to be accused of censorship for venal purposes. Of course people accuse
us of precisely that anyway, but that goes with the territory. I don't expect
not to get acccused; I do want to be able to reply in good conscience.

Two more caveats for you. I'm not saying there aren't unconscious biases—that
would be foolish—just that we consciously try hard to guard against them. I'm
also not saying that every bad story about YC gets a free pass to the front
page. The bar may be lower, but it still exists. When articles come up that
are just plain terrible, we don't, in Mrs. Thatcher's immortal words, go
wobbly.

The "Drop Dropbox" story you cite is an example of all this. I initially
penalized it. Why? Because it's a classic specimen of the riler-uppers davidw
was talking about. The penalty made it go from #1 to the lower part of the
front page. However, I forgot that Dropbox was a YC company (perhaps they're
so big that I don't think of them as a startup any more). When someone
reminded me of that, my first thought was that we needed to lighten the
penalty and I immediately went and did so. That made the post go to #9. From
then on, we didn't touch it at all [2]. The reason it fell from there was
because, as incredibly many votes as it got, it got even more incredibly many
flags. I just wrote some code to scan the last million posts to HN and sort
them by flaggedness. That post is the most flagged by far; it has 3x as many
flags as the next. (In the same data set, it is the third most upvoted story
and has 11% more votes than the next.)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7495446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7495446)

[2] Actually, we did. A moderator fat-finger later that evening caused several
things to happen, one of which was killing that story. I saw that in the
moderation log and immediately reversed it, along with all the other effects
of the fat-finger. I think the story was in that killed state for a couple
hours. And now you have a complete dump of my memory about "Drop Dropbox". For
the love of God or at least Mrs. Thatcher, please, no more "examples" tonight!

(Also, once Kevin's mobile-friendly markup is out, there should be no more
moderator fat-fingers.)

Edit the morning after: I hasten to add that my Thatcher references were
merely an attempt at a joke, not an oblique political statement.

~~~
jacquesm
That matches my recollections perfectly.

More technical jacquesm classics take a while to produce :) But I'm sure
something will pop up sooner or later, as soon as my current batch of
commitments has been dealt with.

Thank you very much for the explanation, much appreciated. Interesting facts
there about the flags. I've long since lost my flagging, posting and upvoting
ability so none of that was mine, I merely wondered as an observer because the
rankings of that page made absolutely no sense at times and I did spot it when
it got deleted and then re-appeared.

------
mempko
The worst part of YC is that they make groups of people compete with each
other, instead of cooperate. The results are startups that have mediocre ideas
that fill the needs of people who have money. If the phrase "vote with your
dollar" is true, then it becomes obvious that the services and products
society creates will cater to those with the most money.

