Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

I wish you'd consider investing less time in technical countermeasures to dumbness (all of them are gameable, and the brand of dumbness you're fighting is not at all incompatible with an intuitive talent for that gamesmanship) and more time into just setting better community norms.

It is hard to imagine that the site guidelines you write years and years and years ago when this place was tiny are, intact and without change, the optimal guidelines for the site in 2012.

It's also the case that the things you say to guide the tone of the community, for better or worse, have a huge impact on how the community works.

If it should be a norm of HN that criticisms be kept constructive, and that the community should have a default position of supporting entrepreneurship (and, more generally, of supporting attempts to build anything) --- and, that should be a norm. --- why can't you just say so? Not in comments, buried in random threads, but in somewhere prominent on the site. Like, for instance, the guidelines. Which you need to update. Please.

Why is there this myth that there is a "community" or "family" of entrepreneurs?

Startup founders are actually competitors - for funding, for sales, for attention etc etc etc

The scale that should be expected between entrepreneurs goes from "Open Hostility" on one end to "Cold War" on the other.

You should expect any "positivity" you get to be fake, stupid or both. If you receive better, you should take it as a bonus.

It's the same way Corporate HR is not the employee's friend.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urGVKx3H_Rk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ0BQUufUpE&feature=relat...

I think it's part of a larger trend in startups. When there is no startup boom, people who do startups do them b/c they love building things. When there is a boom, ambitious people do startups b/c it is part of their calculation of how to achieve power and wealth, the competition for which is a zero sum game.

The true visionaries who build amazing products and companies are not the kind of people who, in the midst of a boom, decide to do a startup instead of applying to a prestigious MBA program.

YC's new approach of choosing founders who have no idea is part of the problem. The people who can get funding just b/c of their pedigree (how they look on paper) is exactly the selection approach used by top MBA programs and investment banks. For these people, life is a reputation game which they are good at winning.

It's no surprise that YC went in this direction, b/c it clearly helps get companies funded. The founder simply becomes a risk asset, just like a racehorse, who clearly has a certain level of sophistication and metal ability, and who will follow the guidance of the YC team. This works great for attracting capital b/c the person with great paper credentials can be puffed up and made to act the role of visionary by pantomiming the style of successful entrepreneurs.

This is all in pursuit of capital, since to a large extent companies that are well capitalized and not staffed by idiots can generate a nice ROI, and the cynical investor view is that if you have n companies in a space where you expect growth, then some percentage will fail, some percentage will succeed, etc.

Ironically, though, it's never required less capital to do a tech startup, and much of the capital is being burned up on young people who put off their MBA and want to live in a major city for a few years and gamble on the boom.

This is just startups becoming mainstream, and attracting the same kind of people that have always gravitated toward iBanking and other MBA oriented fields. Sooner or later some of the startup funding will dry up due to routine, cyclical forces, and the startup scene will once again consist mostly of hackers and builders.

So I view it as both a good and a bad thing. The investor class is slowly learning who makes a good bet, aided by tons of cheap capital thanks to quantitative easing and stimulus. But for now nobody is being too picky and in the midst of tremendous uncertainty people who look good on paper are a hot commodity.

Just keep building and learning and ideally find a great team of people who love your product and what you are trying to accomplish, and you will eventually triumph.

I'll add my tuppence and agree that I've noticed quite a few more "he's an idiot" comments recently. Coincidentally, I've tried to assess whether this is partly due to frustration with the quality of the original post. In some cases, I think it may be a reaction to some fairly out there opinions; in other words a kind of de facto criticism of genre rather can content.

The hammer of Thor seems to be wielded a little more. There's a lot more players now, and defenders of the castle will mow down the barbarians, to use a metaphor.

It's natural selection at work, but as any club owner can tell you, don't let the doormen / bouncers get too self important.

Most companies fail. It's a safe bet to predict failure. It's pretty lame to celebrate that failure from the sidelines.

Vision is not "how is this guaranteed to fail?" but how could it possibly succeed despite the odds?

Which voice do you want to bring to this community?