Maybe karma/posts? So if you get 100upvotes per post, you get prio'd

Yeah, you're supposed to email hn instead of posting if you think it's an issue.

I've seen 3 point new posts up near the top before so I assumed that's what it was. 2 points top of the page is pretty aggressive tho, it might have been a near instant upvote by someone who was interested in the topic.

I submit about 10-15 and sometimes up to 20 a day.

I have developed a typical routine to submit articles. I tend to gather interesting links during the day, and when America’s West Coast wakes up, I submit them in batches of bursts over an hour or so before I retire for the day.

https://brajeshwar.com/2023/hacker-news/

That's one type of signal and gradient. There are lots of others. One of the best is traction with paying customers. The great thing is that investment capital can try many strategies at once. As can innovation capital and labor.

Collectively we are water, filling all the cracks. Marbles, exploring all the slopes and curves. The fitness gradients of the universe are all in front of us. Follow the ones that make sense and that pull at you. We're all programmed differently enough that the whole space is being sampled, even in the weird places, the well-worn yet unweildy paths, and the completely non obvious domains.

The algorithm focuses energy when certainty crystalizes.

You're wrong. YC's returns far exceed the returns of the S&P 500. This is why LP's throw money at YC's funds. And secondly, I've been through YC. It is very apparent after many many group office hours, which startups are likely to be in the 6% unicorn group and which are not. You are correct the vast majority of YC companies are failures. However this does not preclude that the *mean* of YC outcomes is very very good. If Bill Gates were in a room with me and my friends the MEAN net worth would be tens of billions of dollars, the median would be less than a $100k.

> There is a small group of companies that create the reputation on which everybody lives

>> Also called luck.

Startup skill is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. You also need luck. I doubt YC would claim otherwise.

Let's say each startup is a planet. Whoever gets hit with the most asteriods wins. Every conscious right decision and technical prowess that constitutes skill increases the size of the planet. The bigger the planet the more likely that more asteriods hit it. But space is a hig place, the largest planet is not guarenteed to have the most asteriod hits. A smaller planet could actually win. So it is with luck.

>YC investors cannot articulate what made them successful, or else they'd have better results.

Again, I doubt YC would contest this. But the power law so far has allowed them to be successful without having to guess correctly who in their pool would become the unicorn.

>You could flip a coin and beat YC

Where are you flipping this coin exactly? Are you flipping a coin in a pool containing all the startups in the world? If that's the case I'd like to see you take that bet. But if you flip a coin on Demo day, I'm sure you can beat some YC partners who additionally invest in a personal capacity.

Garry Tan posted some data recently on performance investing in demo day: https://x.com/garrytan/status/1927946812364574912

These returns outperform the S&P. Maybe these aren’t typical, but it’s pretty far from “you could flip a coin and beat YC”

Oh for sure, I think typical pitch decks have like 10 slides when they are submitted as part of the yc application, plus a video.

This is just some yc demo exercise