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YC Annual Letter 2017

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#141

Post by nickpsecurity »

bartmancuso wrote: post #67

Re YC Research, please consider a project looking at the challenges surrounding climate change communications. To state the obvious, the science on climate change is settled, but many people are still skeptical/resistant or in outright denial. Heated arguments and throwing around citations to journal articles really doesn't change anyone's mind. There is a deeper, nuanced communications challenge at play, and it's th…

It's not about nuance. It's just echo chambers reinforced by the media those in support or denial consume:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)

Consolidation of corporate media combined with algorithms of biggest, online providers have really cemented the effect in. Past few years, esp election, had strongest effects on isolation and reinforcement I've ever seen.

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#142

Post by nickpsecurity »

Schwolop wrote: post #129
yawgmoth wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually seems worse to me that people who have been around to achieve that threshold (it's 500, right?) don't have exhibit the etiquette I'm asking for. They should know better, right?

I'm going to respectfully disagree. Part of why I like HN is that meta-discussion of the "why did you downvote me?" and "downvoting because ..." are actively discouraged. Better to silently downvote and move on, which I do frequently for all many of reasons. This has next to no impact unless multiple readers do the same thing, at which point greying out comments serves the intended purpose of conveying that the commu…

"serves the intended purpose of conveying that the community as a whole doesn't think the comment is valuable."

No, it says that more people downvoted it than upvoted it by a certain number of votes. Says nothing about the community as a whole which may have never seen the comment due to the downvotes.

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#143

Post by DanBC »

nsgoetz wrote: post #40
yawgmoth wrote: post #34

On the HN front - I would like to see a discussion and then the implementation of measures to encourage meaningful discussion, discourage low-effort comments, but also to discourage "negative lurking". Like other users noticed, there are a lot of lurkers -- some of which downvote and move along. Because frequently I do not understand why a post has been downvoted (my own or otherwise), I am discouraged from contribut…

Maybe just making the downvote button more like the "report" button on facebook. Force people to either select from a few common reasons, or leave a comment to explain their downvote. This could also gently enforce norms for what the downvote is for, since some people new to HN might not realize it isn't the same as reddit. Obviously there are details to iron out, but I think it would be helpful.

Reddit and many subreddits have rules that downvoting should not be done for disagreement.

HN has no such rule.

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#144

Post by moflome »

sama wrote: post #53
danvoell wrote: post #33

Hi sama, great letter. The only thing I would suggest for the next round is to identify some misses. What are some RFPs that you tried to solve and didn't and what are your insights on this? The two annual letters I like the most are Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. From Bill Gates, I don't mind the endless optimism since it is a foundation. From Warren Buffet, I expect the ole hoe hum, we'd be trillionaires if we had s…

Thanks! Will add this in next time. Plenty of misses to write about!

I you're still reading, I was glad to see you mention the international funding successes and would like to learn more about the internationalization of the YC program. Thanks!

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#145

Post by nickpsecurity »

mvp wrote: post #117
angersock wrote: post #73

Nice writeup sama, but the history is a bit revisionist: > We are only about 30 years into the age of software, about 20 years into the age of the internet, and about 2 years into the age of artificial intelligence. Software has been around--and actively making bank!--for over 40 years. The internet has been around longer in the form of academic institutions, email, and BBS than you mention. And AI has, of course, be…

Those time periods are what most tech people consider as when those technologies really took off. And therefore it makes sense to say that. If he was writing a history of computer science, I agree that it would have been inaccurate to say that.

An example to support your view might be the switch to the trend of paying to use server resources like a utility. Centralized resource managed by people other than users that ran many parties' workloads with metered CPU, RAM, etc usage. Then, the various devices access it through a standard UI instead of native apps recoded in many OS's. Quicker setup for new users than rolling their own. Increased flexibility with the virtualization. Better physical and online security due to the centralized monitoring.

On the software side, people found that safety, scalability, and maintenance were important. They needed high-level languages that did things like bounds-checks or stack protection. They needed the ability to freeze and inspect errant programs instead of crash them. They needed the software interfaces to check for right data being passed. They needed to scale on multiple CPU's. They preferred their OS's to come with source code for easier fixes or extensions.

Im sure you know all about those two mainframes from IBM (1963-1970's) and Burroughs (1961) that did those things. Then came to power most large business and government institutions critical apps to this day. Anyway, I hear people made incremental improvements doing similar things with x86, Linux, and vastly lower cost-per-resource. Incremental improvements on capabilities that took off in the 60's. ;)

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#146

Post by hyperpallium »

mbesto wrote: post #100
austenallred wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the issue is you not understanding the companies' missions. What you're describing is products, which represent a manifestation of one piece of the mission, and are a building block that helps construct a world in which the mission is possible. Google, for example, is (and was) on a mission to do much more than build a really sweet search engine. Their goal from the beginning has been (though now refined): "t…

> (though now refined) That's exactly the point. Google didn't start with that mission, it had to be refined. And Google, meaning Larry and Sergey working on algo's prior to actually starting a commercial entity. The parent's point is that many of the most successful tech investments have come from businesses that are generally dismissed as toys in their initial phases. YC invests in companies at their earliest stage…

Yes. I'll add that Google's initial goal of a search engine that is actually helpful (not just algorithmically, but without clutter and without paid-placement) was plenty inspiring... especially for great developers. And, being more concrete than their general abstract corporate mission statement, it was actually more inspiring.

I want to add the mechanism of success-due-to-toy: incumbents dismiss you, not as incompetent, but as irrelevant to them. You're not stealing their customers, because you're meeting a different need, and are worse at what their customers want - further, the incubents couldn't fight you even if they wanted to, because they can't afford to desert their customers.

Then, over time, you improve til you are good enough for their customers - while stll meeting those other needs. The exodus begins.

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#147

Post by ForrestN »

sverige wrote: post #47
ForrestN wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny you say this—the first thing I did, even before reading the article, was search for "Thiel." It's going to be hard for me to take this sort of thing seriously, this telegraphing of benevolence which is so central to YC's branding, until they address the fact that one of their "partners" is such an obviously destructive force within society. They don't even have to do anything but say goodbye, and they won'…

Actually, the fact that they have not bowed to the pressure to "disavow" Peter Thiel merely for his political views in one of the things that makes me think highly of YC.

Yes, that sounds much more useful to the world than, you know, not partnering with people that are happy to harm it.

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#148

Post by hyperpallium »

nopassrecover wrote: post #90

We are only about 30 years into the age of software, about 20 years into the age of the internet, and about 2 years into the age of artificial intelligence Which innovations over the last 2 years most indicate a new age of artificial intelligence? I undertook some research, and noticed: 3 Months Ago: Google Translate AI had a breakthrough 5 Months Ago: Amazon/Facebook/Google/IBM/Microsoft launch an AI Partnership 1 Y…

We're about 2-3 years into the latest iteration of neural networks (aka deep learning), and the first one with practical application. IBM Watson didn't use neural networks.

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#149

Post by throwaway934261 »

optimusclimb wrote: post #62

> 4) Does this company have a clear and important mission? > Without this, I usually get bored. More importantly, companies that don’t have this usually have a hard time recruiting enough great people to work with them, and thus struggle to become very large. I find this one interesting. When Google started, there were many incumbent search engines. Their mission was to provide better results than what existed, i.e.…

> 4) Does this company have a clear and important mission?

> Without this, I usually get bored. More importantly, companies that don’t have this usually have a hard time recruiting enough great people to work with them, and thus struggle to become very large.

Says the man whose first big exit was Loopt, a drain-circling "Grindr for flip-phones" that only got acqui-hired because a Sequoia Capital board member who'd invested in Loopt pulled strings to get Green Dot to buy it and cover his investment. Harsh, I know, but hardly inaccurate:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385178

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3687816

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#150

Post by optimusclimb »

sebleon wrote: post #140
optimusclimb wrote: post #62

> 4) Does this company have a clear and important mission? > Without this, I usually get bored. More importantly, companies that don’t have this usually have a hard time recruiting enough great people to work with them, and thus struggle to become very large. I find this one interesting. When Google started, there were many incumbent search engines. Their mission was to provide better results than what existed, i.e.…

Ha, classic straw man argument

I wasn't really arguing with sama - just making some commentary on a small part of a larger document.
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