2 hours ago
That’s a pretty wild quote from Matthew Duke Pan, one of the PearAI “founders”:
> dawg i chatgpt'd the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there's a problem with the license just lmk i'll change it. we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal
[https://x.com/anothercohen/status/1840515897804623882/photo/...]
5 hours ago
> In the wake of all this drama, a blog post titled "Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth" went viral and hit the top of Hacker News. Which you might have missed, because Hacker News — which is owned by Y Combinator — seems to have manually dropped the post lower in the rankings to suppress its visibility.
Is this true? I never thought HN moderated content critical of itself
3 hours ago
Yes, that's true. The thread reached the top of Hacker News, then disappeared. I had to use HN Algolia to find it again.
3 hours ago
an hour ago
Really not to sure which direction you're going with "this happens very, very frequently".
Like the CA admissions thread wasn't on the frontpage initially for under 24h and it had 3x the comments as the YC thread. https://hnrankings.info/41697032,41700516/
an hour ago
So this shows a rapid climb and rapid fall.
I understand that articles don’t just climb due to the magnitude of upvotes, but also the velocity or upvote rate.
All kinds of articles don’t stick to the top, to me the more likely explanation is that the rate of upvotes was not sustained.
an hour ago
Can you provide more examples?
3 hours ago
dang has said on multiple occasions they don't and he has never given me any reason to doubt his integrity. Quite the opposite.
2 hours ago
There are a lot of HN folks here ( startups, ... )
Dang said they didn't do it and it's being flagged by users.
Which obviously makes sense of you think about it.
2 hours ago
The flags on hn are extremely powerful, so I don't doubt this. Just a few flags obliterate a post with tons of upvotes. It wouldn't take many people to kill it, and it doesn't require a conspiracy
an hour ago
I will frequently flag posts that are rage bait or where the comments are just the same few people arguing. I haven't flagged this one because I commented in it but it's a very low value post.
12 minutes ago
What makes it low value in your opinion? The story combines AI, YC, software licenses etc., which are generally of interest to the HN community.
an hour ago
“You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge” - George Carlin
4 hours ago
I'm sure nobody has hard proof either way, but there's certainly an ongoing pattern of the symptom. This place only exists to promote YC, so you can decide for yourself which is the simplest explanation.
3 hours ago
Don’t know why the link doesn’t go to the article correctly. Here’s the working link: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/starting-up/the-ai-startup...
5 hours ago
Saved you two clicks “PearAI, an open-source AI code editor. When people looked at its code they found that it was a clone of an existing open-source project called Continue.dev.”
31 minutes ago
Also worth noting that continue is also YC backed
5 hours ago
Why should people be dissuaded from clicking twice to develop a more nuanced take of their own than a two sentence summary from a stranger with unknown biases?
3 hours ago
Regardless of what you think of Pear, making the claim that they have damaged Y Combinator's reputation is pretty dramatic.
Knowing the title is in reference to Pear (and not something that could be _actually_ damaging to YC's rep) lets me know the article is probably isnt worth the time.
2 hours ago
> Regardless of what you think of Pear, making the claim that they have damaged Y Combinator's reputation is pretty dramatic.
YC's main value is in subsequent fundraising, wherein companies are pre-vetted by YC before being invested in by VCs. If they lose the confidence of VCs as being a reliable arbiter of preseed startups, the better startups will just go elsewhere (already happening) and soon the VCs will too. Thus harming YC's reputation massively.
3 hours ago
If the link is to indiehackers it's just going to be a forum post from another stranger with unknown biases.