We have people from all walks of life here, from Silicon Valley startups in the ramen-munching phase to CEOs at companies with eight figures of revenues to a wide, wide assortment of folks with an interest in business and/or technology. Folks are generally pretty friendly and interesting things about non-YC companies get voted up all the time. Don't feel the need to be quiet just because you're not in YC.

I would say there's an enormous bias, (ycxxx) in the title gets a lot of early upvotes. Not to mention the obsession with PG - even his tweets get submitted, and fast.

But those stories aren't that frequent and once they get their friends' votes they're competing on a pretty level playing field ... if the submission's not genuinely interesting it won't last.

Oh, right. This post is an example. :)

I think he meant the posts like "YCS09" etc. from companies that have completed or a part of YC.

To be fair articles about startups founded but other non-YCers HNers get a similar boost, although they don't have the advantage of an easy tag to distinguish them from other articles.

"The algorithms tend to hold me pretty far from view, with a karma score of 30 something."

There are no algorithms that care about total karma.

I jumped to a conclusion there.

Curious--does anyone have a ratio of the total number of submissions to the "submissions that stick" for lack of a better term?

I posted a couple of fascinating (to me) articles that were pretty quickly subsumed.

Given the number of fascinating articles/resources that hold up on the front-page, the world is an even more interesting place than I thought.

There is a lot of overlap between the HN community and the YC community, largely due to PG's leadership role in both; but of the people on HN only a very small minority have been through YC.

Welcome! You'll learn pretty quickly what sort of stories get voted up and which ones get killed by the editors; let that be your guide to content.

Most of us are IRL outsiders. Maybe back when HN was started it was an inside club for YC folks, but now no way. The top 4 guys on the leaderboard--and probably four of the most respected HN users--are a security guru in Chicago, a couple freelance developers from Pittsburgh and Europe, and an expat living in Japan making his living from a bootstrapped bingo card software company. It's way more respected here to be an interesting person than to be a YC insider, or failing that, to be a person who says interesting things.

Just start posting. If you get a lot of downvotes, try to figure out what you are doing wrong. Learn as you go. You'll be fine.

Also, don't let downvotes discourage you. It's an experience to get a downvote on HN. Just try figure out why, a lot of the time it's unwarranted, a lot of the time it isn't. Learn from it as Mz says ;)

Downvotes are often from people who disagree with you, without being able to articulate why.

Honestly, I think that's the minority case here. I've rarely seen comments go to 0 or lower unless they were "objectively" bad, e.g. weren't interesting, were insulting, etc.

you forgot to mention smart ass remarks or lame attempts at humor. That's an easy way to get down voted. I've seen down votes also for opinions which go against the grain but those are rare, if you down vote something like that, at least post a reply.

Be polite, reread your post (I don't always do it) and bring something new.

And keep in mind that some downvotes are just a slip of the finger. I occasionally ask for feedback if I find it too baffling. I don't bother if I knew the odds were good that my sense of humor was leading me astray but I just had to say it anyway. :-P

Oh absolutely, many times I've wrongly downvoted people, specially while using the iPad.

I wish HN had a reddit like voting system, where you can downvote, oops, corrected, upvote without fear.

I submitted a very nice article about PG by forbes, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820805 which went unnoticed. That tells much.

That was a dupe though: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1813445

You have to be fast if you want to submit anything PG says. It kind of reminds me of XKCD on digg a couple years ago.

why it didn't go as up vote to existing ? wondering.

It won't show as an upvote to the other story if the URL is different, for example:

  domain.com/nameofarticle

vs

  domain.com/nameofarticle?view=singlepage