"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There's no obligation to give useful feedback. Just to not waste people's time with unuseful feedback. We want to maintain the high signal to noise ratio. If you don't feel like providing signal is worth your time, the correct alternative is not to add noise.

You may not owe Sam or any individual better than this, but you do owe quite a bit better to the community you're participating in here.

I thought these were all very relevant questions. Fit is everything, and presumably they already have the candidate's resume / portfolio to review, so they're digging into more qualitative stuff

Fit of what to what? If it's a fit of candidate to the event, then YC doesn't have information about potential applicants. If it's a fit of somebody already well inside YC circle, then that should be stated - but I don't think YC would limit their intent that much, even though the size (120 people) suggests otherwise.

So, no, I don't think this kind of fit is good here.

These seem poorly phrased, too broad and not connected enough to succinctly answer in 1 minute. How about:

1. What do you want to accomplish with your life's work?

2. What have you accomplished so far to get there?

3. What's next?

1 and 2 seem like good questions, but 3 does look like a bullshit question.

To me, 1st and 3rd are way more reasonable, than 2nd.

I like it. I’m curious what makes you say it’s terrible?

It self selects for people who are great at talking about themselves i.e narcissists.

I think the intent behind question 3 is to find people who want to work on something that defines their life enough it makes it on their obituary.

Selecting for life passion, not temporary dreamers.

Bit obvious for that, isn't it? (Although I guess "willing to say whatever they think YC wants to hear" might be part of the filter too, possibly in multiple ways)

If you don't have anything interesting to say about yourself or your ambitions, maybe you just aren't that interesting of a person...

But maybe not?

i don't think you're imagining the selection process properly.

i think to get the right mental model, imagine instead that they only wrote "send a one-minute video and convince us to invite you".

That exactly how it looks, and this approach seems wrong here. For somebody who can articulate - on video, no less - you have some who can't. Not sure who's more promising.

Really puts a damper on people who are interested in immortality.

that's actually really funny (still chuckling)

It’s adorable because initiatives like this are designed to get fresh blood into a system, but the people running the system are afraid of fresh blood, so you get selection criteria like this. :)