This thread is confusing to me so I'm probably misunderstanding a few things.

First Ryan's post says he's saying something similar, except it appears to be opposite to the post he's replying to.

Then you say you can't see the times where YAGNI helped you, but that's neither true literally and also in spirt. Literally because it wouldn't be YAGNI if you did actually need it. But more importantly I have often discovered some architectural choice or unused feature stubbed out from years prior that saved me a ton of time in the here and now.

I was replying to pavel_lishin's parent comment, in which he noted that he has been burned many times by not optimizing early for flexibility:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5003341

My experience is similar to pavel_lishin's, and our experiences are contrary to the author of the article.

I hope that helps to clarify the first bit, anyway.