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I got into YC Startup School by hacking it
- moomoo11 3mo agopaxel and how it works sounds so dumb. so i’m not at all surprised at how it is used and by whom.
- cleverpotato479 3mo agoPaxel seems like a tool that would cause brand damage to YC if it were better known.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- siva7 3mo ago> I uncovered Y Combinator was scoring 100k+ founders around the world through Paxel Alright, my ears are wide open. Tell us more, how did YC use the private submission data from thousands of founders to score them? They fed some 3rd-Party AI all personal data to score who should get an interview? I can't be the only one here seeing a bad news story unfolding in real time...
- pixiemaster 3mo agosure….
- TZubiri 3mo agoYC is currently polarizing against companies that are rejecting the philosophy of giving (a single user) AI full read access to company data. They find that resistance frustrating and the complain publicly about it, calling such an attitude outdated "so 2024". https://youtu.be/B246K_G7mHU?si=UVJei9Jpk7ZvREnH&t=1483 https://youtu.be/B246K_G7mHU?si=UVJei9Jpk7ZvREnH&t=1483 https://youtu.be/B246K_G7mHU?si=ikHZD4MwxA5JtXLj&t=1716 https://youtu.be/B246K_G7mHU?si=ikHZD4MwxA5JtXLj&t=1716 I understand that YC and startups in general have less incentive to worry about security because they don't have much to lose. But I think the big winners will care about security from the start, because it's a bottleneck at the top, what would whatsapp be if they vibecoded security from day 1? It would never have been able to fix its reputation after the fact. They then switch the topic and talk about token spend and how one can spend millions or billions of dollars in tokens, so it's a bit clearer what their incentives are. I don't want to be negative and personal, but this is business, I listen to CEOs like Garry Tan and Satya Nadella, and I feel that I'm on an opposing team, my personal bet is to skip this cycle and wait for the next cycle of CEOs. I'm focusing a lot on security on this cycle, hopefully that will pay off.
- moomoo11 3mo agoceo of vc firm and ceo of msft have different priorities
- rationalist 3mo ago> YC wanted me to use something called Paxel on my computer as part of the application. > I should run a script, a very easy-to-use cURL one-liner that installed something on my computer and analyzed every line of code I’ve written with a coding agent, compile a report, and upload it to YC’s servers. Yikes! I hope this is NOT the future of hiring.
- moomoo11 3mo agoits for G brain types you wouldn’t understand
- jaggederest 3mo agoFor those like me who didn't understand the reference: https://github.com/garrytan/gbrain https://github.com/garrytan/gbrain
- baby_souffle 3mo agoIt can't possibly be an inevitable future. Something this would be super easy to game. From their perspective, it's code running on an untrusted third person/adversary's computer... If only last 40 years of computer history could be any guide as to what might go wrong here ..
- moomoo11 3mo agomost VCs aren’t founders and those who are ex-founders usually made pretty terrible companies. very few exceptions. actually i can think of only one. but once you have some money (like >5m which is achievable), you can throw it around a bit and you just need a handful of success stories built by someone actually talented. then you take credit for it and craft a narrative instead, which is easier just like collecting management fees instead of building something yourself.
- prerok 3mo agoHow is 5m easy to achieve? Asking for a friend.
- smcnc 3mo agoI could be mistaken, but isn't Paxel a tool that YC *itself* built to understand how founders/applicants apply AI? If so, this feels less scary than some of the comments (i.e. not 3rd party). Also, not trying to take shots, but should the title be "I got into YC Startup School by hacking it" instead? Isn't that different than the main YC program? All in all, you did them a solid by finding and responsibly disclosing. Nice job.
- qphe95 3mo agoThis is how you end up with gstack. When you believe too hard in secret metrics because when people know about metrics it stops working you inflict psychosis chasing correlations that don't mean anything.
- jedberg 3mo agoFor the longest time, the YC application included the question "What was your greatest (non-computer) hack?". They have always liked people who think of ways to work around existing systems. So it's no surprise that their response was positive. Also, all the principals are ex-founders, mostly engineers, who totally understand hacking culture. Sadly, it looks like they took that question off the application though.
- nhumrich 3mo agoExcept this was a computer hack. So technically wouldn't qualify.
- jedberg 3mo agoSure, I wasn't saying it would. I was saying that the question on the application demonstrates YC's acceptance of this type of creativity.
- a_t48 3mo agoThat question is still there, it lives in the founder profile.
- Aurornis 3mo ago> Based on Paxel’s own site, 1.2 million+ coders have so far uploaded their reports to YC. I checked the Paxel website and it says this: > So far, 1,543,553 sessions have been uploaded and analyzed. The count is for sessions, not coders. I assume the tool uploads a lot of sessions from each person who uses it. That’s a large number, but it’s not a million different people. I am surprised that so many people think it’s a good idea to download a run a program which gathers up their coding sessions and submits information about them.
- actionfromafar 3mo ago"They trust me."
- classified 3mo agoI feel so tempted to post the next two words that famously follow that utterance.
- OtherShrezzing 3mo agoAm I misreading this, or is ycombinator running a tool that transfers IP from an applicant’s machine to OpenAI and then transfers the generated summaries into their own servers. And that tool has some “webapp security 101” level vulnerability in it. Feels like a disaster waiting to happen.
- tomhow 3mo agoIt doesn’t upload code (it’s not meant to, anyway); it uploads coding agent transcripts. It’s meant to be a fun app like Spotify wrapped - that’s how it was described when presented internally.
- minimaxir 3mo agoThose transcripts generally contain code edit diffs.
- tomhow 3mo agoSure - though that’s all generated by the coding agents. So it shouldn’t be uploading original hand-written code (unless the coding agent is running on a legacy codebase). Obviously it’s not something everyone is going to be comfortable sharing, but YC is transparent about what is shared and how it’s used. Edit: I now see you have to explicitly run it in every directory you want shared - i.e., it doesn’t t scan your whole disk looking for stuff to upload. So there’s every opportunity to limit what it uploads to only what you want to share.
- TZubiri 3mo agoIt's very common nowadays to claim that something doesn't have access to X when it does in fact have system level access to X, but the application code just doesn't use X (or a prompt is being asked not to use X). >curl -fsSL https://paxel.ycombinator.com/upload.sh https://paxel.ycombinator.com/upload.sh | bash Point in case. Trustworthy people will ask you to give them the right amount of access, they won't ask you for infinite access and ask you to trust them that they won't use it. Would you trust a contractor that asks for root, and your master password when they could have requested a specific user or some specific files?
- paxys 3mo ago“Got into YC” is being used a bit loosely here. They got invited to startup school, which is a two-day event hosted by YC.
- speedgoose 3mo agoDon't read this horror story before bed time if you care about information security. Perhaps running the script outside a heavily sandboxed system should trigger an automatic rejection.
- TZubiri 3mo agoOh, I remember that thing, it wanted to see my prompt and my code in exchange for telling me my horoscope. Some hands you have to fold, and I'm folding this one. Patiently waiting for the "let's give all our data to a single AI user" bubble to bust with some massive exploits.
- JCharante 3mo agosurprised running paxel doesn't disqualify you, the program sounds sus
- pudgywalsh 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- marioegie 3mo ago[flagged]
- Hasz 3mo ago[dead]
- yellow_lead 3mo ago> I found that this year, YC wanted me to use something called Paxel on my computer as part of the application. > I should run a script, a very easy-to-use cURL one-liner that installed something on my computer and analyzed every line of code I’ve written with a coding agent, compile a report, and upload it to YC’s servers. This is ridiculous. Any kind of application (job, startup school, whatever) should not do this. Honestly, wtf is YC thinking with this?
- rationalist 3mo ago> (what) is YC thinking with this? They want people who do what they say and don't challenge them?
- a_t48 3mo agoAgainst better judgement, I ran it on my repo. Poking at the "Ask anything about the report" bot, it penalizes me heavily for not having "positive tracked outcomes", as I don't report back to Claude what the outcome is. It wanted me to do this: "At the end of research-heavy sessions, add a tiny closure note: Decision: Use CacheMountStore with registry/local/GHA backends. Why: GHA cannot expose the same content.Ingester path, local import has discovery issues, registry can resolve by tag. Proof / current artifact: See files X, Y, Z. Subagent found A, B, C. Next action: Implement interface in package N. Do not add new cache-mount flags yet. Use mode=cache-mount on existing cache flags." There's no need for this, Claude is not my task tracker. It also penalized me for: - Using Claude to introspect a codebase as throwaway work and ` not close with a crisp “acceptable / risky / copy this / avoid this” decision this session.`. No action was needed, it wasn't an actionable session! - Using Fable for code review. `Several BuildKit subagent sessions produced research reports, but the transcript does not show whether those findings became implementation choices.` Yes, Fable launches subagents to code review. Valid findings get turned into fixes or WONTFIX. - `The Cloudflare CI upload failure got narrowed well, especially after you supplied the exact timestamp and challenged the /v2 routing recommendation, but the session ended without a chosen next diagnostic owner or action this session.` There's no need to pick a next diagnostic owner when I'm a solo founder with no employees. I'm choosing not to attach a report to my application. As a side note, nobody needs to see "my greatest crashout", it's embarrassing enough for me to see it for myself, much less show others.
- drawnwren 3mo agoI had the exact same experience. Claude is not my validation engine, I do not tell it when it has completed. I verify that in the code/project and end the session. I also got this, > A useful next habit is to end each correction with a concrete acceptance test, owner artifact, or stop condition: “write it into PROGRESS.md,” “make nix run .#bench fail until this is real,” “rerun this exact command,” or “do not proceed until these two choices are explicit.” > You already do this well in the biggest penance sessions. Apply it to the smaller ones too. Which I have found to be counterproductive in my personal work. Current models can generally infer acceptance tests of this level of granularity (not true for larger project-level prompts, but those don't produce good enough code for me yet -- even with specific acceptance criteria). I also got penalized for using claude in read-only mode for the same validation reason? > For read-only work, end with one of: “turn the top finding into a PR-sized plan” “mark these as accepted/rejected/deferred” “write a cleanup checklist” “give me the exact command I should run safely” “stop, no action recommended” No thanks, I'm literally just exploring the codebase. I don't want any of these. It's a little sad to be honest, I would actually enjoy a product that helped me improve prompting + ai usage.
- tacker2000 3mo agoWhy does the author keep mentioning that a one line bash command that downloads a bunch of crap is “great UX”?
- jppope 3mo agoSo let me get this straight... technical founders are providing limitless access to their IP, and this is supposed to be a positive indicator that they would be a good founder? Thats wild
- tomhow 3mo agoNo. It uploads only the AI coding agent transcripts in the directories you explicitly run the upload script in.
- cobertos 3mo ago[flagged]
- cobertos 3mo ago`cd ~/path/to/your-project && curl -fsSL https://paxel.ycombinator.com/upload.sh https://paxel.ycombinator.com/upload.sh | bash` is the command from Paxel's website. So you're literally just piping whatever the hell they want into bash. It's long, lots of comments, and honestly would be time consuming to audit properly. Supposedly this is what it does from the opening comment # Paxel upload script # =================== # # What this does (up to 17 steps): # On your machine # 1. Check Docker is installed and running # 2. Sign you in (browser-based device auth) # 3. Pull or build the Paxel Docker image # # Inside the container — file bodies stay local; only aggregate metrics + # metadata (paths, commit numstat, session events) are uploaded # 4. Discover projects and sessions (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor) # 5. Read your git history # 6. Parse transcripts # 7. Summarize each session (cloud Haiku via YC proxy) # 8. Group git commits by session # 9. Group sessions into multi-day work streams # 10. Extract steering traces # 11. Extract decision exchanges (cloud Haiku) # 12. Redact code before upload (regex pattern redaction) # 13. Link decisions to outcomes # 14. Analyze code quality (L1 deterministic) # 15. Score episodes across 5 axes (cloud Haiku) # 16. Assemble your report # 17. Upload redacted summaries + scores to the server # # Then: opens your results in the browser
- 3mo ago
- sgarland 3mo agoSo if you built something without the use of an LLM, you’re automatically disqualified now? What a world.
- jrflowers 3mo ago> I’d also disclosed it in private through email 12 days earlier to no response. But publicly at least the process works. lmao “I got into the YC Startup School by publicly embarrassing them”
- greenlimetea 3mo ago[flagged]
- kundejenny 3mo ago[dead]