I have also noticed a general trend of less hackers lately. I think there was a temporary surge because the social network movie and all these tech companies IPOing and making everyone rich that finally died down recently. I think the application rate to Y Combinator itself also flatlined or decreased in the last couple batches

> I think the application rate to Y Combinator itself also flatlined or decreased in the last couple batches

Would like to know more if you have a source.

My source was estimating this with other YC folk, but here is what's publicly known.

~200 companies a batch and supposedly a 2-3% acceptance rate puts it at 6,600-10,000.

They stopped updating their statistics: https://twitter.com/sama/status/618247698378985472 and https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-portfolio-stats/

If it kept growing they would have proudly put that everywhere.

At the same time they introduced startup school which got 15,000 applicants, many of whom would have applied to Y Combinator but chose the startup school instead.

My bet is it peaked around ~8,500 and decreased when they introduced the startup school program.

Startup school companies were required to apply to the YC main program in order to be eligible for the $15k grant, and there were 30k companies that were part of SuS in 2019.

Also, from the figures presented at the conclusion of the program last year, there were ~23k applications to the 2019 summer & winter batch in total.

So roughly 10,500 then? These figures were shown at demo day?

There wasn't a specific breakdown, but I'd guess so. You can find the presentation here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cq1fqp1zlkza3rf/SUS%202019%20By%20...

> less hackers

fewer hackers

Now this is pedantry I can get behind.

It's 2:15 AM ET / 11:15 PM PT / 7:15 AM GMT, not exactly an active time for the US or Europe

"Highly upvoted but few replies" is actually a good quality indication; it means there's not much to quibble with and the post is well explained. That's why HN applies a "flameware" penalty to highly commented posts.

I wouldn't say "very few", on the frontpage you can find posts with a lot of comments _almost_ all the time. Not every post on the frontpage though.