As someone who submitted yesterday [1], I'd think we need to give new applications more days to catch up with early applications before making a decision.

Also, I think in order to give more reliability to the HN votes and ranking we need to find a way to give a similar exposure to all the applications, this would make up for other bias like time of submission.

One idea is to feature a subset of the applications in the front-page for a given amount of time. (not sure if that's what you're trying to do with /applyrand)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11586948

I'm definitely biased, but I say YC should have someone comb through the top ~100 upvoted submissions and pick the best 20 or so. Let those that get picked write up a really solid short pitch, and then let everyone with a certain level of karma vote. That would allow real HN members a chance to seriously review submissions so that the best ones can be chosen.

I think it's possible to game the system as it is now. You can get your buddies to upvote you, submit at the right time, etc.

What I don't think can be gamed is the quality of the discussion. I mean even if someone sock puppets good "technical" questions in order to provide good "technical" answers, that just demonstrates there is depth behind the application. On the other hand, sock puppeteering "Awsome! +1" won't generate quality discussion.

How do you quantify quality discussion?

I think the whole point is to qualify the quantity not the other way around.

I don't know if you're serious, but I'll bite. "Quantify" == express or measure a quantity (thus having an objective measurement that can be compared with other quantitative measurements). GP's point was how to you create a measurement for "quality of discussion" that isn't subjective.

And my point was that the whole thing is subjective and the value is in the subjective quality of the discussion.

328 Apply HN's currently [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22Apply%20HN%22&sort=byPopula...].

Personally, cadwolf (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441930) was the most interesting to me. I think they're biting off too much... but it's an opportunity rich environment.

Not sure if this is the best place for this comment but is the CADWOLF focus ME only, could it be expanded to EE as well?

Would like to see a way to help contribute to product / market fit on this and other Apply HN's, btw.

EE problems will be addressed in later versions of the system. The hope is that it will be able to monitor voltage and current requirements and tie those into the math. Circuit board type problems are a back burner thing for now.

If you want to contact me, you can get my email from the team page on cadwolf.

I really like your concept. I'm curious how you think it compares to a LaTeX workflow though.

For example, I have MATLAB generate figures and *.tex files containing LaTeX formatted tables. I have C# Solidworks macros to generate PDFs of CAD. If the analysis changes, the MATLAB outputs automatically update, and the same with CAD files. These 'outputs' get picked up by LaTeX on compile. Other than a WYSIWYG editor vs a 'compiler', are there any fundamental benefits to the cadwolf workflow you're envisioning?

There would be both logistical and technical benefits.

1. A direct link between the CAD, the math, and the documentation. I don't believe that Solidworks will update its models without pulling the matlab output onto the server and the documentation won't update without creating the PDFs and pulling them into the PDFs.

2. CADWOLF will allow you the ability to create template items like fittings or trusses that consist of a CAD model and the math. Your junior engineers drop this into their designs and give defined inputs like loads and the truss redesigns itself.

3. The part tree system organizes all of these facets and gives you the ability to see real time system weight/cost/whatever instead of having your people update spreadsheets.

4. A link between your work and neighboring parts/systems. Although the stack you described "works" whenever the jackhole sitting in the cube next to you updates his model, you have to wait for him to tell you and then go through the entire redesign/upload/redo process. CADWOLF will see those changes and update accordingly.

5. One system vs Matlab, Solidworks, C#, PDFs, LaTex, etc. Since it is browser based, it can be seen by anyone/anywhere. This is more logistics, but it prevents you from having like six pieces of software running and it prevents you from making a mistake somewhere.

6. Scale. We will have an AWS server side that can be scaled up instead of being limited to your desktop. This will also help small companies that don't want to buy large computing systems.

7. Process. Since you have access to every person's documentation for a system through a part tree, you can open that doc and check their work from anywhere. A checkoff system will eventually be implemented.

I did something similar to what you are doing with all of the different pieces of software. It really doesn't seem that bad until you realize that it could all be done automatically. There are also far fewer engineers capable of doing what you are doing than most people realize. You're like in the top 10% of production in my experience.

Hi. Really appreciate the mention.

This is indeed a huge bite, but it has the legitimate potential to change the way we design and build everything. The comments on the original thread are closed, but I'd be happy to answer any questions in this thread.

Why aren't you encrypting communication with the web client via ssl? Please do this -- I would love to check this out, but transmitting my password in plaintext does not bode well for treating my other data securely.

Sort of ironically, my attempts to report a bug, and request a feature, have both been stymied; one by a 500 error, and one with a warning from chrome that synchronous xhr requests have been deprecated.

Wow. I am very embarrassed about that. I appear to have broken something recently. The bug report and feature request are working again.

I am also in the process of moving from a lamp stack to python/Django on AWS. I'll have to look at the ssl and see what's happening.

I would love to see Pinboard in YC somehow (although might make more sense for Core vs. Fellowship); more people with some level of cost-consciousness in how they build infrastructure would be a win for the alumni network, plus it is a great product. What would be interesting to me is if Maciej would actually enjoy the process; I think he would.

The poll sounds good, but tbh I'd consider granting an automatic entrance wildcard to "Pinboard McPinboardface", without having it on the poll. It's well-deserved and there is no point in reiterating that the internet has a sense of humour.

I would have found it easier to review these Apply HN threads if each applicant had completed the full YC Fellowship application and posted that in their thread as well. For many of the existing threads, there's just not very much to go on, but you have to read each thread before you can work that out. You can feel the inefficiency begin to drag at you as you go through the review process.

Question: Why don't you require all Apply HN applicants to complete the full YCF application, and open those applications to the HN community? Each YCF application includes an option to generate a corresponding Apply HN thread. Comments from the HN community are made available to YC reviewers. The applicant consents to disclosure by ticking the Apply HN box.

Anyone who posted an Apply HN thread could have just lodged their own YCF application anyway, which the YC team would have had to review and determine in the usual way—but completing the application mandates a baseline level of information about the applicant's team and startup. So why not leverage the existing process and help the HN community help you to review them.

Unfortunately none of that will help you choose applicants from among the existing Apply HN threads (sorry), but it might be worth considering for the next stage of the experiment.

There wasn't a lot of guidance on how to format the Apply HN post. I was really early with my submission and made the mistake of posting it as a link and then writing a short comment describing what it was. So my comment ended up mixed up with all the other comments, any you couldn't see the description on the algolia page and probably got skipped over a lot.

James I don't think we need a full application (who wants to watch hundred of videos), but we do need more details from the short list. The 2000 character limit of the original application process was just too limiting for many applications.

I think James in is on the right track though. A short intro to gather interest and get discussion going with a link to the application might work for the future.

What's wrong with using the already expressed intentions of the community, as expressed by the upvotes on each submission, as the 'final say'?

You should give the money to Pinboard.

I don't understand how YC could not invest in Pinboard, given the opportunity.

It cost $37,000 to send Maciej to Antartica to write about it.

At $20,000 for the YC Fellowship, it seems like an absolute steal. I for one would love to see the results of this experiment.

My understanding of the Fellowship was to fund very early ideas, not to just be a way to sneak into YC funding.

The problem which I understood the Fellowship to be addressing is that so many later stage companies apply to YC that it is very difficult for a pre-revenue company to compete.

If YC 'should' invest in Pinboard, why not invest as part of YC and not YC Fellowship?

If you read the YCF page, Pinboard hits basically all the criteria:

- Single founder, not a large group

- Hasn't raised any outside capital

- Working on idea full time.

He's even local to YC!

The YCF page says you don't need traction to apply. It doesn't say you can't have traction.

Moreover, it turns out that the funding structure for "Apply HN" is "YCF terms". But that doesn't mean "Apply HN" and "YCF" are the same concept.

Finally, isn't Pinboard basically running away with the HN vote for "Apply HN" at this point?

Good points. I understand that Apply HN and YCF are not the same concept, but I was under the impression that Apply HN applications were going to take 2 YCF positions.

Linky: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441480

His actual response when a YC partner sincerely offered to work with Pinboard:

> I feel like after seven years, I have a pretty good sense of what bookmarking/archiving needs people have, but am at the limits of what I can personally build. If the votes swing my way, I'd be happy to have a good-faith conversation with you.[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441978

I like money!

Plus, how else are you going to pay Delicious' AWS bill if you actually succeed in buying it?

I do not understand the point of this comment at all. Everybody doing 'Apply HN' is looking for outside capital. Pinboard has a loyal following that would probably be interested in additional value being added to it.

I think it is clear. When someone invests in your business, it is not your money. It belongs to the business and is there to help the business grow.

Personally, the 20k is a steal when you imagine the tweets and blogposts that will come from Maciej given that he is out through the YC process.

Steal for whom? You?

There are a lot of interesting ideas in the submissions, so I wouldn't be surprised if Pinboard is one of them. It seems like an interesting pick.

Personally, if I could only pick one, I'd pick Eat My Dust - Home testing for dangerous materials. I know there's products that do this already, but I think there's a lot more that could be done.

As much as it would be a good investment for YC, I think the fellowship program is not the appropriate program for Pinboard.

Someone commented recently on older submissions being closed for comments: If it is technically possible without too much effort, you should open all the threads for comments for X days before/during the "vote" (however it looks). Many people are going to pay attention (again) to the threads, and they should be able to ask questions and receive answers before they vote.

My suggestion:

1) Filter out troll applications and applications with fake votes and other ineligible applications.

2) From the sanitized list find out the top 10

3) Start a poll where users can choose from the top 10 (but don't rank them in the poll, randomize the placements and don't show live voting stats to prevent bias)

4) Give every applicant on the poll the opportunity to post why one should vote for within a short word limit. As we have seen from low engagement after the first few days, extremely few users will read 10 complete threads and make their choice.

Hey HN! I'm Vishal. One of the team members behind WedWell(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441020).

We're somewhere in the top group of entries with 43 points. I wanted to say that regardless of whether or not we get selected, we really appreciated the ideas and exposure that came from our discussions on HN. A handful of our first clients named HN as the reason why they came to us! Some of the ideas discussed are already being planned for our service. We applied to YC the regular way, and didn't get in. This way we got a bunch of feedback and some traction. Net positive for us.

Dang asked above how best to sift through the applications to give the community final say. I was reading through some of the ideas posted here on how to do that, the one that seem to resonate here with me was the one abhi3 posted above. I'm just worried that a public vote is easily gamed.

Another way to do this is to select the top 10, and get the YC partners (or some trusted groups within YC - perhaps the last group of YC alum?) to vote on the list of 10. I think it would be nice to see what the end vote looks like (release the vote count), and have select YC partners provide some quick feedback for those who are voted on.

Thanks again.

Jack from wantobuy here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11477823 - also somewhere on the first page - I agree with you Vishal and abhi3.

Moreover, we were rejected the standard YC way too but have got some really great feedback from the HN community which we're implementing already!

I just think the whole Apply HN buzz fizzled out, favouring those that got in on day 1..we were about a week late..

I am curious as to why you may have been rejected. Seems like a decent idea and you guys are programmers. Do you have a MVP yet?

I think limiting voting to accounts with say, minimum 10 karma will get rid of almost all fake voting.

My gut feeling is that YC wouldn't want to some how alienate those with low karma points, but they could do something like only allow those to vote who have commented on Apply HN posts (or something along those lines).

> 1) Filter out troll applications and applications with fake votes and other ineligible applications.

How exactly do you identify "troll" applications? The most important ideas are often the most likely to be perceived as an act of trolling.

I've seen very low quality submissions in the /new queue. Basically a single sentence, no information about team, no contact information in the profiles and no upvotes either. Looking through the 300 submission in the /applyhn queue I can't find an example so they could have been filtered already or flagged at one point or another. With more than one submission I thought "you have 2000(?) characters to present, why didn't you invest some time?", again I see that as low quality, not trolling.

Since "Apply HN" is for fellowships and the idea of fellowships is that the business is not necessarily ready to go into business mode, I'm not sure that application polish is an ideal metric. It measures application quality rather than something more meaningful like potential impact multiplied by potential execution.

You can often tell when someone is being a wise guy in their application. Sometimes their application contains a virtual sarcasm tag when they self-identify as being a wise guy.

What basis do you have for claiming it's a joke?

From https://fellowship.ycombinator.com/faq/:

"The only restrictions on acceptable teams are founders must be willing to work on their ideas full-time, and teams can’t have previously taken money from investors."

Huh. It appears I have been lawyered.

From the same page:

What if we haven’t yet received investment, but we have a ton of traction, users, revenue, etc.?

We want YC Fellowship to really help teams that are just starting off, or have been struggling to get traction. If you’re doing really well, we’ll likely ask you to apply for the next batch of Y Combinator.

This says nothing about eligibility. It only suggests that such teams—which are allowed to apply—are unlikely to be selected.

In this case, the normal selection process has been changed by throwing the decision to Hacker News. And the people have spoken!

What are you using as a basis to say that Pinboard's submission was a joke?

Any examples?

I met the stated criteria and dominated the voting. I want my twenty grand.

Accusing me of trolling is not just dismissive, but implies I'm acting in bad faith. That's a pretty serious thing to say about someone.

> Accusing me of trolling [...] implies I'm acting in bad faith.

Not necessarily. I troll people all the time by saying things that are true but sound wrong to the average person, and never in bad faith. PG and Zed Shaw frequently do the same thing, albeit in different ways, and I wouldn't say that they're acting in bad faith either.

To the extent the book Made To Stick is correct that people are much more likely to become engaged with and ultimately remember things that seem wrong or counterintuitive at first, trolling at it's best is just a highly effective didactic technique.

I think he just said he wasn't trolling.

How about having users post their "Top 10" picks and aggregate the results.

One issue with having a single poll is that there is the possibility that a good startup will miss out due to statistic abnormality.

> then run a poll to let the community produce a final ranking

Given the voting patterns on some of the Apply HNs so far, I hope that the voting ring detector on the poll is extra-strict. :P

(Fortunately, such patterns have been in in the minority of Apply HN submissions from what I've noticed, though.)

Maybe the next step in the process could be a period for those interested to go back and read through the applications. This could be followed by a brief period where the threads were reopened for relevant questions and answers. This could be followed by the polling.

My take is that this would sort of parallel the regular YC process of application->interview->selection except that it would eliminate "rolling selection". My gut is that the implication of "rolling selection" may have encouraged problematic "Apply HN" strategies. Not to mention it's too late for it to be part of this cycle anyway.

Good luck.

A polled ranking sounds good but that may not be a reliable gauge of a project's ultimate "interestingness" or viability, just a gauge of HN community's preferences. E.g. a project with great potential (market, usage, etc) may not seem so simply because very few HNers find it interesting. Activity and discussion also dropped after the first couple of days - I reviewed and asked questions on some then forgot about it. I'll take final run through the list now. For future iterations, some sort of opt-in notification system might help.

I'd like to see some YC people (dang? kevin?) go through the entire list and find 25 or so great ones. Then, ask those people to flesh out their apps a bit more, then have discussion and community voting.

I'd be fine trusting YC to make the first pass, and community make the final selection.

I think the whole point of the experiment was to select applicants YC would not normally pick. This would bring back all YC biases.

Quoting dang "If it seems unstructured, that's on purpose: we don't want to bias it along the lines of how YC already operates. We want to see what the community comes up with."

Having read through many of the applications, I think that we could safely get down to 25 without risking throwing out any that deserve the win. There just weren't all that many applications that clearly described a remotely plausible business idea and that had founders who posted thoughtful responses. I would say that at least half of the applications seemed like a hobby or an idea that had been simmering in the back of someone's mind, with little to no thought given to how it could turn into a viable business.

I made exactly the same suggestion having read through most of them now. Many of the applications are good, but they seem to not be a match for the fellowship program.

I'd be ok with YC or someone doing an extremely loose first pass filtering, even if that results in 100, too.

Note about discussion on submissions - the comments closed at the standard time so when people looked at old submissions they couldn't participate in the discussion.

How will "most interest" be defined?

Seconded. Additionally, I'd love to see a distribution of comments/upvotes by date of submission (such data I think could be gleaned from HN search). My eyeballs tell me posts submitted within the first 2 or 3 days of Apply HN got much more traffic/discussion. Certainly it is possible that those first posts warranted such discussion and subsequent posts did not. Or maybe I'm completely wrong in my observation, which is why I'd like to see such data.

Also, after ApplyHN became randomized (around midway thru the experiment) it seemed like discussion dramatically fell again, but it was definitely tough to tell since refreshing showed new applications every time.

Fun experiment though and I'm excited to see what types of projects the community picks.

I second this. After the first 2-3 days there was a sharp drop in engagement in general, though there were some applications that did break through.

When ranked by upvotes, of the top 5 applications, 2 were posted after the first 3 days.(https://medium.com/@ApplyHN/top-5-applyhn-submissions-ranked...)

And 6 applications posted in the first 3 days reach top 10 and only 4 from the remaining 18 days.

Yeah, what was the criteria for making it to the main Apply listing? Was it number of votes? Comments? Our application never showed up there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11467813

Yep, mine never made it to the front of ApplyHN either. It seemed like unless it got at least one or two immediate upvotes, it disappeared into the abyss, thus making it even less likely to get traffic.

Upvotes * Comments ? Of course that wouldn't be great for one where everyone thought, "yup, that's perfect", upvoted and didn't say much. Upvotes + Comments. Maybe top 10 upvotes, top 10 comments, top 10 multiplied and remove duplicates?

Edit: or maybe the cases where "everyone thought" "yup, that's perfect", upvote and no comments is an indication of fraud?

Many comments may mean that the submission is good, or it may mean that the submission is bad and the comments try to show the problems. Usually lot of comments mean more "polemic" than "good".

Good point. There should definitely be a manual culling of the set of 30 (besides duplicate removal). To make sure there aren't just a bunch of people saying "that idea sucks!" and that there isn't a vote rigged entry (a poorly presented, low commented proposal that magically has a bunch of upvotes).

He made it clear in the last post it would not be literally most votes in the case of someone beating their fraud detection.

Beyond passing fraud detection, someone with a large, strong social network could get a lot of votes. Is that a good signal for a startup? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

The quantifiable attributes of Apply HN should not be the main factors in determining which one makes it. I think we should vote on the most thoughtful, helpful commenters and let those people chose 1 apply hn that they think should survive.

Most of these ideas will not have mass-market appeal, precisely because this is a tech-centric market.

I could have submitted an idea like this:

    Instagram for Pets
    OR
    Tinder for food

I would probably get about 3-4 upvotes on HN, but a "stupid" idea(s) like this could easily get 1+ million app users the same way "Yo" did.

What you guys should have used the Apply HN for is to fund ideas like "open-source as a business". Rather give that money to GitLab-type ideas so that even if the founders fizzle out, the IP remains in the open and can be used by everyone.

This effect is especially true for those of us who are non-profits.

"Give food to the poor and needy" often understandably has more appeal and is a quicker reference point to the normal citizen than the stuff we do: "Hey it's becoming more dangerous than ever for a small amount of the people who deliver the food to the poor and needy, so let's think of a open source technical approach way to make it easier." Both are very worthy/important, but some messages are just easier/clearer for people in a voting process.

First time I see GitLab being used to name a type of idea. Thanks for the compliment.

I went through most of the applications and comments earlier in the month (I need to do the rest) and it took me around 6 hours [1].

I think the best option might be for someone at YC (Dan this is going to be you) to make a top 20 list and ask those applicants to put in a longer application that we can then rank and comment on - the 2000 character limit of the initial application process was too limiting in my opinion to use for the final ranking.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11477879

How about this:

-1st round: Submit application (with this we get all submitions and all users that spent time submiting so we already have filtered users that have knowledge on startups)

-2nd round: Every user that submited for 1st round gets to pick for example 3 of 10 other random submitions we present to them that are then evaluated on that votes (This way we avoid ring voting and dumb mass voting. Note that for next cycle we can allow users from previous cycle to evaluate too!)

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Therapy: P2P Therapy Phone Calls.

Wanderlust: Recommended Trips Based on Budget.

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its hard to identify a good candidate. I think a combination of votes, the discussion that happened and then obviously standard evaluation of idea, market, etc is a good strategy.

So many ideas are amazing. May the best ideas win. I think for the ones that do make to top list but not to yc fellowship, it would be really helpful for them if one of the YC partners can provide brief feedback/advice/direction to them.

It'd be nice but they probably won't for the same reasons they don't provide feedback to real YCF or YC applications.

Although I was initially against it, having another "round" where partners narrow the list could allow for a number of questions to be answered. Most of these questions could not be addressed in the 2000 character limit of the initial post. These questions include things like whether or not the applicant(s) have the ability to complete the project, what is their domain expertise, have they worked on the project on their own, what is the market size, how are they better than the competition, can they explain how the idea is really a worthwhile company and not just a neat idea that is really more of a feature on an existing product.

It would also allow for more conversation since the readers would not have to comb through as many applicants.

I am against the idea of anonymous voting. There is too much gaming involved here. I think only HN accounts that are identifiable to a real person should be allowed to vote. Not sure how you can enforce this though.

I think there has already been a ridiculous amount of gaming, regardless of real person or not. I mentioned in a previous comment about this that even the time of day you post can dramatically impact how many votes you get because of the way the system works.

i don't think you can vote with newly created throwaway accounts.. i might be wrong

Could someone enlighten me about Pinboard, the founder idlewords and the back story/relation with YC.

The comments regarding Pinboard and idlewords are very interesting.

Note: I am only asking out of curiosity.

I'll take a crack at it. A long time ago, idlewords and pg were both active here and they were the opposite ends of some kind of spectrum. pg would write things and idlewords would throw rocks at them and sometimes write his own things in response. At some point idlewords got temporarily hellbanned. It was supposedly some kind of innocent error but at that point idlewords took his ball and went home.

At some point he started up a bookmarking service to compete with Delicious, and it really took off after Yahoo bought Delicious and then made an unholy mess of it. A lot of early Delicious users (myself included) went looking for an alternative, and there was pinboard, waiting for us, and it was better in a lot of respects.

So he's done pretty well at running pinboard, it is a lifestyle business, and he's an excellent writer and it's hard to tell whether he's a writer that happens to own a bookmarking service or a programmer that happens to be a decent writer. Anyway, a lot of the stuff he's written has gotten some exposure and he's given some talks. I've started to see people talking about his website obesity presentation (http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm) in circles WAY removed from HN.

He uses his twitter feed to poke fun at the SV startup scene, too. Overall he's a foil to some of the sillier aspects of Silicon Valley.

What is Apply HN? Somehow I missed this.

Same here. It's such a shame that we allow for such important things to be miss-able.

Yep, hundreds of comments on the original post, 300+ submissions on the new Apply tab on the top nav of the site -- and I'd missed it completely as well. Even though I read this site far more than I should do.

Of course somebody has to miss these things, you can't reach everyone. It just feels strange when it's you.

I would love to see the pattern of how those 300+ submitters came to hear of it.

Media outlets like Tech Crunch covered it as well :P

http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/06/y-combinator-flirts-with-ha...

Ah, not even a full-blown case of FOMO will induce me to read TechCrunch.

I agree. But it's surprisingly difficult to disseminate knowledge to this community—even to all the highly active users.

Other forums have an announcements page or a box at the top of the page template for bulletins. It might undermine the minimalism of the site a bit, but it could only be used for special occasions.

dang, I really like apply HN. I think it helps not just ycombinator fund the right ones, but also really helps inspire the ecosystem to come up with good ideas.

> but also really helps inspire the ecosystem to come up with good ideas

Let's talk about that, since we're on the subject. Most of the ideas presented in Apply HN submissions reminded me of the old "Idea Sunday" threads. To quote dang (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7693640)

> Having all these ideas in one place makes the whole less than the sum of its parts. [...] Ideas are better in the wild. Let's discuss them as they come up organically, rather than try to organize an idea-fest.

The most popular Apply HN submissions I've seen are "LinkedIn that does not suck!" which is not a high bar of innovation. However...that is the bar for the YC Fellowship, which allows for unformed ideas, so I'm unsure whether I should be criticizing such submissions.

agreed, idea sunday was awesome. removing it was really really dumb.

Does anyone have contact information for chroem-, who submitted the application for Mechanical Mind? It's too late to comment on the listing, and there's no contact info on his profile.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11442038

I was trying to get in touch with him too. The images on the application can be traced back to an ME page for Carnegie Mellon but there is no contact info on that site or on the imgur site that hosts the images.

Is there a singular landing page to track official posts related to "Apply HN" updates?

Why were some users ban for posting "Apply HN" apps?

Hi everyone! I'm Gabriel, one of the founders of Casepad which is currently the second most upvoted Apply HN Post [0].

Before I launch into an argument for how to conduct the selection process I wanted to say thanks to everyone who contributed to Apply HN. The feedback and support that we received went beyond our wildest expectations and regardless of what happens we're glad we participated.

<argument>With that being said, I would suggest that upvotes and comments should have serious weight in the decision of who receives the fellowship. My understanding of this process was that it was an opportunity for members of HN to express their voice in the YCF selection process and it seems to me that the way they do so is via comments and upvotes. While the idea of a "runoff" selection with the top five or top ten most upvoted posts is appealing in practice it also disregards much of the work that the community put into vetting and discussing existing submissions. A runoff also doesn't solve the problem that it purports to solve, that some submissions got more structural attention than others, because it is also being conducted on an anonymous message board over an arbitrarily selected period of time (not unlike the first 20 odd days of Apply HN). As an example, someone who had the chance to vote or comment on ApplyHN might miss the runoff because of a bad week at work, and that means that their voices could be washed out.

I have a vested interest in saying this, but I am skeptical (until I see data) of all of the oblique suggestions that the front runners' posts only made it there because of bandwagoning. I like to think that we, along with many of the other front runners, presented a strong idea that deserved the attention it got. A separate but related point is that this is HN, not a randomized controlled experiment in selecting companies, so the habits and voting patterns of the community should be seen as a feature rather than a bug.

If I were running this selection process I would say that some combination of comments + upvotes + the judgment of the partners who will work with these companies would be the best way to choose the fellowship recipients.

But, that's just me :). </argument>

Thanks again to everyone who upvoted, asked questions, and gave feedback. More thoughts + feedback are always welcome. (I'm at gajbotelho@gmail.com if anyone wants to reach out privately.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11452884

EDIT: Small edits for clarity.

EDIT2: Removed "(a more focused version of /u/baron816's suggestion)" because it just wasn't that accurate of a statement

I think you are justified in feeling the way that you do. Nobody is suggesting that the "front runners' posts only made it there because of bandwagoning"

I think you and all other applicants deserved all the community interest they got.

What is being highlighted by myself, and other users (who have no vested interest, unlike me and you) is that engagement did fall off sharply after the first 2-3 days. As a result of which applications submitted after the first few days didn't receive the as much scrutiny from the community.

HN ranks posts by upvotes/square of time since submission. It is possible that a mere 2-3 votes can make the difference between a post reaching the front page and receiving several times more eyeballs vs getting buried. And the sharp drop in interest in ApplyHN's from the community can and did make such a difference for several applicants.

Co-Founder of Brightwork here. This is great and would echo this sentiment.

May the best thread win...

People gonna copy idea, its that easy i think.