

Ask HN: Y Combinator Focus? - techbio

I really appreciate this community. Found it through PG and "Hackers &#38; Painters" originally, and simply consumed passively before registering for an account several months ago.<p>I wanted to ask before I start making too many posts. Is news.ycombinator.com biased toward Y-Combinator people and the startup school schedule? And if so, would it be more polite to stay quiet?<p>The algorithms tend to hold me pretty far from view, with a karma score of 30 something. But I would like to participate, even as an IRL outsider.<p>Edit: The guidelines and community feedback, are really very clearly biased toward the 'informative/thought-provoking'. I am hoping the algorithms detect that more and more alongside account aging and points gained. Cool.<p>Thanks for the replies. Pretty close to my best guess.
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patio11
We have people from all walks of life here, from Silicon Valley startups in
the ramen-munching phase to CEOs at companies with eight figures of revenues
to a wide, wide assortment of folks with an interest in business and/or
technology. Folks are generally pretty friendly and interesting things about
non-YC companies get voted up all the time. Don't feel the need to be quiet
just because you're not in YC.

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benologist
I would say there's an enormous bias, (ycxxx) in the title gets a lot of early
upvotes. Not to mention the obsession with PG - even his tweets get submitted,
and fast.

But those stories aren't that frequent and once they get their friends' votes
they're competing on a pretty level playing field ... if the submission's not
genuinely interesting it won't last.

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techbio
Oh, right. This post is an example. :)

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tgandrews
I think he meant the posts like "YCS09" etc. from companies that have
completed or a part of YC.

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pg
"The algorithms tend to hold me pretty far from view, with a karma score of 30
something."

There are no algorithms that care about total karma.

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techbio
I jumped to a conclusion there.

Curious--does anyone have a ratio of the total number of submissions to the
"submissions that stick" for lack of a better term?

I posted a couple of fascinating (to me) articles that were pretty quickly
subsumed.

Given the number of fascinating articles/resources that hold up on the front-
page, the world is an even more interesting place than I thought.

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cperciva
There is a lot of overlap between the HN community and the YC community,
largely due to PG's leadership role in both; but of the people on HN only a
very small minority have been through YC.

Welcome! You'll learn pretty quickly what sort of stories get voted up and
which ones get killed by the editors; let that be your guide to content.

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philwelch
Most of us are IRL outsiders. Maybe back when HN was started it was an inside
club for YC folks, but now no way. The top 4 guys on the leaderboard--and
probably four of the most respected HN users--are a security guru in Chicago,
a couple freelance developers from Pittsburgh and Europe, and an expat living
in Japan making his living from a bootstrapped bingo card software company.
It's way more respected here to be an interesting person than to be a YC
insider, or failing that, to be a person who says interesting things.

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Mz
Just start posting. If you get a lot of downvotes, try to figure out what you
are doing wrong. Learn as you go. You'll be fine.

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lachyg
Also, don't let downvotes discourage you. It's an experience to get a downvote
on HN. Just try figure out why, a lot of the time it's unwarranted, a lot of
the time it isn't. Learn from it as Mz says ;)

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dstein
Downvotes are often from people who disagree with you, without being able to
articulate why.

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edanm
Honestly, I think that's the minority case here. I've rarely seen comments go
to 0 or lower unless they were "objectively" bad, e.g. weren't interesting,
were insulting, etc.

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nkassis
you forgot to mention smart ass remarks or lame attempts at humor. That's an
easy way to get down voted. I've seen down votes also for opinions which go
against the grain but those are rare, if you down vote something like that, at
least post a reply.

Be polite, reread your post (I don't always do it) and bring something new.

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skbohra123
I submitted a very nice article about PG by forbes,
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820805> which went unnoticed. That tells
much.

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benologist
That was a dupe though: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1813445>

You have to be fast if you want to submit anything PG says. It kind of reminds
me of XKCD on digg a couple years ago.

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skbohra123
why it didn't go as up vote to existing ? wondering.

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lotharbot
It won't show as an upvote to the other story if the URL is different, for
example:

    
    
      domain.com/nameofarticle
    

vs

    
    
      domain.com/nameofarticle?view=singlepage

