Sorry, maybe I didn't explain myself well. What I wanted to say is that for the end-of-month ranking ("we'll rank the startups and YC will fund two. The ranking

Sorry, maybe I didn't explain myself well. What I wanted to say is that for the end-of-month ranking ("we'll rank the startups and YC will fund two. The ranking will depend both on upvotes and on the quality of discussion"), I think upvotes and discussion by current YC members should hold more weight (maybe the algorithms already take that into account :) ). I agree that people that didn't have HN accounts previously should definitely be allowed to participate both as submissions and in the comments :) , only that the upvotes part could be gamed.