Y Combinator is a startup accelerator based out of Silicon Valley in California. They’ve invested in very interesting startups and are known to be very selective in choosing participants for their cohorts. I don’t run a startup at this point, and neither have I applied for Y Combinator, ever. But I can take a guess as to how their environment must be.

It was founded mainly by tech geeks and hence you’d expect it to generally geeky in nature. And sure it seems to be - their application FAQ screams “non-standard”! But what I find personally very interesting and something that I’ve been compelled to visit multiple times a day is their “Hacker News”.

When you open the page, there’s nothing extraordinary; rather, it seems like a very plain HTML-only website. But that’s the beauty of it - it’s meant to be a platform oriented towards content rather than excess design (one of YC’s founders, Paul Graham studied painting at some point; maybe it’s got something to do with it). It seems to follow the principles reddit’s earlier design followed.

Users can submit posts of any nature, with the only main rule being that those posts should have interesting content - “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity”. It’s a nice description, and the nature of the posts and related comments clearly shows how well it is followed! It probably requires some level of moderation (removing abusive content, duplicate posts, and so on) but the general quality of the content is really high.

It is slightly computer science-oriented but there are occasional posts on other interesting stuff too. Check it out.

And I wasn’t even paid to write all of this; I just felt like it. The idea and philosophy behind the website is really appealing!