> I wish more startups would achieve this, YC or not. Whenever I run across one that's trying to succeed on HN, I try to help them do so (YC or not)—why? because it makes HN better if the community finds things it loves here. Among the startups of today, I can think of only two offhand who are showing signs of maybe reaching darling status—fly.io (YC), and Tailscale (not YC).
Personally too both these companies are doing a lot of incredible things. I also love Litestream, phoenixframework and other things they are doing.
There's certainly power, that's at least inherent in modding a popular platform. But as a _very_ casual observer mainly lurking around, I'm satisfied with interpreting dangs stance as anything with any traction gets boosted, yc or not.
To the examples, fly.io caught my attention primarily by offering a useful free tier DB, and tailscale has my attention as a "beat this" offering for some homelab access stuff (meaning some stuff could but I at least have a benchmark). Until this post I didn't actually know one was YC and another wasn't. I'm interested in both purely because of HN posts.
We don't do that - it's important that the interest in these things be community-organic. We're interested in tracking what the community is interested in, and we never try to gin up interest in anything (ok, except APL). It wouldn't work anyhow; that's not how a technology becomes influential, at least not in this community.
There's one big exception to the above, which is the official Launch HN posts we do for YC startups - those are described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html - they get official placement on HN's front page, as explained there. But they're always clearly indicated by "Launch HN".
I personally find it super interesting which startups end up achieving HN darling status - the classic examples of this are Stripe and Cloudflare - I'd add Hashicorp - and it would be fun to make a list of others. But from a moderation point of view it doesn't matter whether such a startup is YC-funded or not and we try to be as neutral as we can that way. I'm not saying we don't have unconscious biases or conflicts of interest (such a claim is impossible!) but we're strict about how we approach this consciously, and we have quite a lot of practice with that.
It's a natural concern of course, and I'm always happy to answer questions.
p.s. Incidentally, there's at least one HN user who has made a long series of accounts angrily accusing us of secretly favoring a non-YC startup (the one mentioned in the GP comment). We haven't, but because that startup is well-loved by the community, it's easy to see how it could come across that way, with threads appearing frequently and filling up quickly with comments.
HN: one of the last remaining Great Good Places of the Internet, a lone tavern in an iconic gateway town to the now not-so-wild west.
Beyond the western borders of this little town, the tech gold rush has both expanded to epic proportions, affecting all the economies in the world, and also gone through enough booms and busts that the phrase "gold rush" seems somehow off.
As more and more young'uns join and jaded veterans return to throng the tavern alike, it often seems to be on the brink of either exploding with the largest gun fight in history, or jumping the shark.
The secret is the man at the corner of the bar @dang, always around with a friendly smile and a towel on his shoulder. The only sheriff in the west who still doubles as the friendly bartender: always polite, always willing to break up a fight with kind words and clean up messes himself.
Yes a cold-hard look from him is all it takes to get most outlaws to back down, yes, his Colt-45 "moderator" edition is feared by all men, but the real secret to his success: his earnest passion (some call it an obsession) for the seemingly sisyphean task of sustaining good conflict - letting it simmer but keeping it all times below the boiling point based on "the code":
"Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression."
May the last great tavern in the West and it's friendly bartender-sheriff live long and prosper.
> I wish more startups would achieve this, YC or not. Whenever I run across one that's trying to succeed on HN, I try to help them do so (YC or not)—why? because it makes HN better if the community finds things it loves here. Among the startups of today, I can think of only two offhand who are showing signs of maybe reaching darling status—fly.io (YC), and Tailscale (not YC).
Personally too both these companies are doing a lot of incredible things. I also love Litestream, phoenixframework and other things they are doing.
(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30066969