I have also noticed a general trend of less hackers lately. I think there was a temporary surge because the social network movie and all these tech companies IPOing and making everyone rich that finally died down recently. I think the application rate to Y Combinator itself also flatlined or decreased in the last couple batches
If it kept growing they would have proudly put that everywhere.
At the same time they introduced startup school which got 15,000 applicants, many of whom would have applied to Y Combinator but chose the startup school instead.
My bet is it peaked around ~8,500 and decreased when they introduced the startup school program.
Startup school companies were required to apply to the YC main program in order to be eligible for the $15k grant, and there were 30k companies that were part of SuS in 2019.
Also, from the figures presented at the conclusion of the program last year, there were ~23k applications to the 2019 summer & winter batch in total.
"Highly upvoted but few replies" is actually a good quality indication; it means there's not much to quibble with and the post is well explained. That's why HN applies a "flameware" penalty to highly commented posts.
