151–160 of 312 posts
The brilliance of YCombinator, IMO, is HackerNews. It's turned YC into a self-perpetuating machine by getting smart people to congregate and talk about news YC itself partially generates. I heard about YC, PG, and sama all through this outlet.
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My gaydar had already told me, but I did not know he was out. I'm guessing it's not easy at all being an openly gay VC within this small community in the Valley. Kudos to Sam, I already had a great respect for him; much more now. I hope he can disrupt minorities and bigotry too.
The city of Paris used to have a gay mayor and a gay man is the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world, so I'd say bigotry is largely disrupted already.
The apparently approved YC company attitude of utter naïveté about social reality anywhere other than your own back yard (consider the negative impacts of airbnb, for example) is distressing. As I read it, the New Yorker piece makes it abundantly clear that YC is unfit to be leading the changes it thinks are appropriate, "creating the future" etc.
What's the size of the overlap between YC-involved people and those involved with Black Lives Matter? I'd love to be proved wrong on this but everything I've seen suggests it's more or less non-existent, and if so, this is a massive elephant in the room and a disgrace. For the privileged people who think they have a mandate to create the future to be so apathetic when it comes to huge sections of society...
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> The brilliance of YCombinator, IMO, is HackerNews.... Before HN there was PG's blog.
> Before HN there was PG's blog. Before pg's blog, there was /., before /. there was Carmack's .plan file ~ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12575501
I do admire all the ambition. But does it really have to be mixed in with views such as "Democracy only works in a growing economy. Without a return to economic growth, the democratic experiment will fail. And I have to think that YC is hugely important to that growth." I'm sure Sam (and other SV types) is well aware of the complexity of reality and that YC, as one company, cannot be hugely important to that growth.…
I believe Sam is better at making such connections than most people I know.
Doesn't this confirm that VotePlz is mostly just a smokescreen to "get-out-the-vote" for a favored candidate?
The brilliance of YCombinator, IMO, is HackerNews. It's turned YC into a self-perpetuating machine by getting smart people to congregate and talk about news YC itself partially generates. I heard about YC, PG, and sama all through this outlet.
If you mean the fund(s), I disagree. The strength of YC is the relatively large value they provide in exchange for your equity. Their "price" is still excellent and continues to clear the market. This becomes rapidly obvious if you attempt to raise early stage funding and start comparing options. Aside from the actual cash and the famous network, YC and its partners have earned a reputation for sticking with their in…
And, thanks for the feedback OldGeekJobs. It's been making rounds on HN over the last two weeks.
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Although we banned this account for abuse elsewhere in the thread, I'm unkilling this comment because it's so patently untrue. It doesn't resemble the Hacker News I look at, and I look at HN a lot. It's also factually incorrect, both re idlewords (whose latest piece spent most of the day at #1 on HN) and everyone else who uses this site in the intended spirit. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.…
"It doesn't resemble the Hacker News I look at, and I look at HN a lot." Given your position, do you think that you can look at HN objectively?
I spend a lot (too much) time here, I've been quite critical of PG, a fair number of YC investments that I think behaved in an un-ethical way, and have read most of what Maciej has written through HN (and the associated comment threads).
When PG was still at the helm I would not have come out in support of the balance in the moderation and some of what you wrote would have stuck but those times are gone (at one point he called me a 'concern troll' for raising a legitimate issue which I haven't forgotten about).
But Dan and Scott have been as clean as could be in running the site, the only link there is is that YC still pays their salaries but afaik they have a completely free reign to moderate as they see fit and if you're going to make claims like the ones above then you probably should back those up with specific cases where you feel the moderation wasn't even handed. I know of no such cases off hand.
> Nothing came of Paul Graham’s plan for tech to stop Donald Trump, but Altman, after brooding about Trump for months, recently announced a nonpartisan project, called VotePlz, aimed at getting out the youth vote. Looking at the election as a tech problem—what’s the least code with the most payoff?—Altman and his three co-founders concentrated on helping young people in nine swing states to register, by providing the…
I do admire all the ambition. But does it really have to be mixed in with views such as "Democracy only works in a growing economy. Without a return to economic growth, the democratic experiment will fail. And I have to think that YC is hugely important to that growth." I'm sure Sam (and other SV types) is well aware of the complexity of reality and that YC, as one company, cannot be hugely important to that growth.…
Connecting our day to day efforts to a larger unifying purpose is a powerful driver of change and an essential leadership skill. I believe Sam is better at making such connections than most people I know.
Thinking democracy's success is tied to economic growth is a pretty dim worldview. I hope he's wrong about that.
The logic behind it, I think game theory, is simple and does not just apply to democracy but any system of corporate or state government. It goes like this: Suppose there exist 2 parties to a conflict of interest. I want Z, but you also want Z, and this is a rival good, only one of us can have it at one time. Then it is possible for 1 party to play ball with the other party, but IFF there is a different, separate con…