alt Hacker News>It doesn’t deal with code, it deals with chat transcripts, and only those in the directories you explicitly choose to share (yes I know transcripts include some code but you’re not sharing a working app codebase or anything close to it).
What's more important, the code? or the source?
It's the source. The mistake thousands of people are making is that the source no longer looks like code, and the target code now looks like what source code used to be. They are looking at the aesthetics instead of the fundamentals.
You ignored the rest of my comment. The maximum theoretical benefit to YC from “stealing” IP or trade secrets from chat transcripts is immaterial, relative to the benefit to YC of finding good talent and building positive, trusting relationships with them over the long term.
It's literally the hardest thing in business for investors and employers by far: finding good talent to invest in or employ, and earning/keeping their trust. YC spends unimaginable amounts of money and effort each year to keep doing that, as it has done for two decades. Startup School is just that latest and biggest example of that.
It doesn't even pass basic logic that YC would steal some gem of an idea from someone's transcript and hand it to someone else to build. Everyone who is talented enough to build it is busy building products based on their own ideas, and the very best person to build a product is the person who had the idea to build it.