It's almost entirely the latter. Only a small percentage of HN users actually apply to YC, and I can only think of one who became abusive on HN after being rejected (and he sent me an email recently apologizing).

Most of the nastiness we get here is from new users who show up and think they can behave like they do on other sites. This has been happening for years. But I wouldn't attribute to them such complex motives as not being able to see a good thing without being tempted to destroy it. I think they're just 13, or nuts.

Slightly off-topic, but what about the inverse of that: how many YC applicants are active HN users [1]? Just curious as to how much of the applicant pool comes from HN.

1. Since you have to create a HN account to apply, I'm assuming 100% of YC applicants are HN users, so maybe how many actively participate?

    > (let ids (applicant-ids "w2011") 
        (percent (/ (count [> (uvar _ karma) 100] ids) 
                    (len ids)))) 
    17

Anyway, not that it matters since a good application is still a good one (and vice versa), but it's possible to find a higher YC/HN participation rate if you include the cofounders.

I think it's more revealing this way if you are interested in how increased traffic and site participation is effecting this 6% you mentioned above or that "days alive" value; IOW, how is increased traffic and new user participation effecting the rate at which this sample is posting comments?

In the end, I don't think increased traffic is effecting the discussion to the extent that it really matters; I think what really keeps everyone else in check is the frequency at which older members are posting comments.

I was amazed that PG recognized my username at the acceptance brunch...I guess his statistics might explain why (I had ~1,000 karma but it was built up from small posts/comments, nothing too controversial).

This was in part because some of the stuff I saw tossed around was very strongly targeted at YC and you personally, not so much against HN.

But I'll take your word for it and I really hope that those that get rejected by YC see it for what it is and don't take it personal.

But people lacking the same incentives will probably unknowingly slide into some form of bad behavior even if they've been active on the site for years - it will just happen naturally, because their economic equation is "amuse myself" with no mitigating factors. But most of the time it probably doesn't cause overt vandalism, just poor commenting hygiene.

I am not so sure about that - I come here and post comments in the hope that people will like them (doesn't work that well) because I derive my sense of worth from how much karma I have

Can't be the only one.

Arguably selfish motivations, but they work out well for everyone.

I never read comments under the articles linked here because I know they are polluted by a lot of useless noise, so I just read comments here on HN. But it could be interesting to see if nasty comments related to HN, like the ones mentioned by the OP, appear in other places as well (not that we can do anything about it, anyway).

What percentage of HN users apply to YC?

  >>  I suspect that some of them are people that took rejection by YC a bit harder than they should have

What does a hacker have to gain from taking something apart, poking at it, and putting it back together again?

Also you gain skill of knowing that you can take something apart and be able to put everything back together again, which is often harder than it sounds.

The answer that's related that I was trying to elicit is "because it interests me to know how things work." By the same token, trolls derive the same sort of intellectual pleasure from trolling: to anger someone is to own them. They do it "because I can."

Real trolls aren't the ones that are going "lulz obama is a socialist," "ruby is better than python," or anything so obvious. The real trolls are the ones that sound reasonable, but slowly end up destroying your community by creating discord much more subtly.

This is a worrisome statement. You get enough flags on a submission and it's automatically deleted, right?

The YC deadline is coming up in two days. Should we not submit cool new hacks to YC right now? It seems like people who are insecure about their applications might be incentivized to kill submissions where people demo something cool, under the premise that they want to stifle potential competition for YC slots. (Which is dumb, because the URL will still be on the application, but I never said this was rational.)

[edit: I know jacquesm was talking about previous YC applicants, but this led me to speculate on whether flaggings were performed by current YC applicants.]

I did not mean that you should not be submitting cool new hacks here, that's no problem at all.

What I meant was that there may be characters out there that have been rejected by YC in the past that vent their frustration by being less than good citizens of HN.

So it's nothing to do with people that are insecure about their applications or submissions to HN today, it's got to do with people that were rejected during previous rounds that took it personal instead of as constructive criticism and/or limited resources.

You can add to that list the medium of books, articles, presentations, artwork, fiction, poetry, non-fiction, drawings, music, film, interviews, and and other vehicle for personal expression.

To those who would be abusive, all I have to say is to remember that everyone begins somewhere. There was a time when you yourself was very mediocre at coding. And if your work had been completely trashed, how likely would you have been to pursue a career in programming?