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Beware the temptation to post on HN in order to look smart for your YC application. Better to spend time working on your company and save your HN comments for w

• jwhitlark 17y ago
  Beware the temptation to do anything just to look smart for your YC application, (or life). As beneficial as I think YC is, it's not magic pixie dust, and you're in just as bad of shape if you get in on false pretenses. The reason why some people succeed, even when everyone tells them they're wrong, is they do something they believe in. Everything else is secondary.
• jacquesm 17y ago
  HN is a great place to learn, there are tons and tons of people here that are a lot smarter than me and some debate helps to enlighten my sometimes dark and isolated viewpoints. I'm living in a fairly out of the way location as far as the IT world is concerned, HN is pretty much the only contact I have with fellow hackers working on a myriad of interesting stuff. There hasn't been an ask HN post that I put out that didn't come back with several insightful options, the sum of which was larger than the experience of any one live person that I know. It's a fantastic resource, and a place where you can make friends that are hackers too. That it's a factor in getting your YC application judged can safely be ignored, the very few edge cases where that's applicable do not make it worth the effort for those that might be inclined to try to game the system by flooding hn with 'insightful' comments. In fact it's probably statistically pretty easy to puncture that balloon.