131–140 of 360 posts
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Bing really is a pile of garbage though (perhaps a little better these days but no where near as good as Google). I'm surprised he wasn't fired sooner. Was he friends with Ballmer?
How is Bing a pile of garbage? It takes some effort to come up with a search for which it or ddg are markedly worse than google. FWIW I still use google.
What about Uighur internment camps YC money will finance through taxes?
“Our mission at YC is to enable more innovation than any other company in the world, and to ensure that the benefits of that are fairly spread throughout humanity.”
Do you really think it’s possible to ensure that the benefits of innovation are spread fairly while simultaneously partnering with an oppressive, cruel government in order to create vast pools of wealth controlled by a tiny subset of individuals allied with that government?
I can understand why someone would try to get as rich as possible and would turn a blind eye toward obvious moral compromise. I can also understand the utilitarian impulse to “ensure that the benefits of [innovation] are fairly spread throughout humanity.” But I can’t understand ignorance of the wild contradictions between those two “missions.”
If you want to spread innovation equally, you should be working to support dissident voices in China and you should be putting 95% of you and your associates’ vast personal wealth behind the political project of reversing Republican-engineered inequality here at home.
Helping people in China who you deem most likely to succeed (working in harmony with the government, of course) to become even more successful is not, in fact, helping to make the distribution of benefits among humanity more fair.
TL:DR — Choose only one: fairness among humans or the accumulation of vast personal wealth by collaborating with governments that brutally oppress their own citizens.
The political concerns are real. It's too cynical to say that YC just cares about money, though. There would be better ways to create an incubator than to do it like this, if that were the case. One obvious question that hasn't been raised is: "Why not base it in Taiwan?" It's still "China" (for some definition of China), you can still get access to the talent that you want (you just have to try a little harder), and…
Native Chinese here. I don't think this is the case. It's not even close to ideal to base in Taiwan given the political environment between the straits nowadays. The policies are very unfriendly. Recruitment and market delivery is even more complicated than between foreign countries actually.
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to live in China, one could get by with little to no mandarin; but to do business in China, mandarin is a must.
Even that depends. A (young educated) Chinese can speak better English than a Laowai could probably ever speak Chinese. Plenty of foreigners work exec positions in Chinese companies with only very basic mandarin.
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Mandarin isn't strictly necessary to live in China. Plenty of my laowai colleagues only knew a few words and got along just fine in a tier one Beijing, which admittedly is a bit behind Shanghai and Shenzhen. The only thing that really drove us out was the pollution (a huge problem in Beijing that is supposedly finally getting better). Given the US visa policy, as bad as it is, still attracts far more many foreigners…
> Mandarin isn't strictly necessary to live in China Basic question: what do you do in China for browsing, emails and maps? I suppose Google doesn't work there and all the local services would be in Mandarin, no? When I travel I use Google search, emails, maps extensively but I have no clue what would I do in China. Also FB and Twitter also likely won't be accessible. So how do I even keep touch with folks outside Ch…
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China has startups, they are definitely many high in quality, but they aren’t really world class in terms of talent used (almost completely Chinese) and markets targeted (ditto). China will have trouble getting its tech companies to compete abroad when they have closed off their own market so much. Likewise, until China embraces immigration rather than emigration, talent is unlikely to flock to China in any significa…
That's not 100% true. Amazon and (previously) ebay operate in china without problem but don't get a chance facing alibaba. Microsoft also do things fine. Uber was also there. The market that's really closed off are mostly limited to companies that don't support censorship. Also speaking of world class, have you heard of DJI?
Not trying to move the goalpost, but DJI is more of a hardware company, it isn't really an internet one. Any company that can operate outside of a services model will do just fine in China, since they are just shipping product for export.
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Okay dang, have a link: http://time.com/5366225/china-uighurs-detention-report/ A million Uyghur and Muslims in camps. That's a sixth of a Holocaust.
It's unsurprising that you Godwinned this thread, since where else can monotonic escalation go? By doing that you've cemented the point. If you guys want to fling furious links around, you need to find another site to do it. It isn't part of thoughtful discussion—it's pure reflex.
So tell us, Dan, how would one criticize the Chinese government for imprisoning dissidents and genocide, while staying within your guidelines? How must one couch it to pass the Great Firewall of Hacker News? Serious question.
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China has startups, they are definitely many high in quality, but they aren’t really world class in terms of talent used (almost completely Chinese) and markets targeted (ditto). China will have trouble getting its tech companies to compete abroad when they have closed off their own market so much. Likewise, until China embraces immigration rather than emigration, talent is unlikely to flock to China in any significa…
Worldclass valuation maybe? Might be more controversial to say, but when it comes to internet, there is China and the rest of world, those are 2 disconnected system, quite literally. So I don't think YC China is priortized to create companies for the whole world, probably just companies that would operate mainly in China, built and run by the locals.
YC's got a very, very fine line to tread if they're serious about China - with its limits on human rights and authoritarian tendencies, the Chinese government is absolutely not to be trusted. I worry about what sort of concessions tech companies have made and will make to gain access to the Chinese market.