Does YC require its participants to practice polygamy? I checked the FAQ but this wasn't covered.
Only serially: the concurrent case has still not been handeled satisfactorily.
YC is a cult
131–140 of 159 posts
Re: YC is a cult
#132And several years ago the same thing was said about Schools.
With much more justification.
Re: YC is a cult
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think starting a company is less demanding than being a member of the Manhattan Project or Apollo teams? "Scale" is exactly the right word -- Apollo didn't happen because one person worked more insanely hard than anyone else had worked in the history of the universe. It was a large project with a lot of people (and a lot of science). Yes, a lot of them worked hard. But please, measure effort on a human sca…
Except, in Apollo people died/can die. They didn't work 18 hours a day because you make mistakes at that point. If your "web application" fails, no one really bats an eye. But if you start killing people - it is a bit different. Please don't compare these toy companies that get created, which barely have a business model much less a purpose, to one of the greatest achievements of all time just because you sit in fron…
Missing the point. This is not about how important your project is to "society" or how much risk there is of other people dying. This is about what goes on inside your head.
When your brain decides how fast to make your heart pump, or how fast to breathe, or how tense to make your muscles -- it can't tell the difference between flying to the moon and building an ajax alarm clock. All it knows are what your emotional hot-spots are, the parts of you that matter to you... you are entirely capable of inflating the significance of whatever project you're working on just as large as the significance of Apollo to one of its engineers.
Likewise, it's just as easy for the Apollo engineer to say "I was just doing my job" as it is for me to say "Holy shit I'm responsible for my baby nephew's livelihood because his dad is a partner in this startup"...
Other people may not bat an eye when your web app fails, but you sure will.
Re: YC is a cult
#134It's sad to see this trollish content rising to the top of news.yc.
I made some comments about this, YC is slowly but surely going down the reddit way. Unfortunate, since there are so many smart folks that make insightful submissions and comments.
I'm interested to see how HN avoids its eternal September. I'm optimistic. There's more than one way to go about it.
Re: YC is a cult
#135Actually there's a fundamental incompatibility between cults and startups. Cult followers tend to be people who want someone to tell them what to do. There are a lot of people like that, but they're the opposite of the kind of people who make good startup founders. What you want in a startup founder is the sort of tenacious independent mindedness that makes you start a new search engine in 1998, when everyone else th…
Y'all need to read these quotes from PG:
Re: YC is a cult
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apollo engineers make a design mistake, it kills people. If you don't like that because it doesn't effect enough people (Sorry I didn't realize that since Facebook serves 100 million people it is more of a feat than going to the moon) lets talk about Boeing. Boeing makes a design mistake, hundreds of people die. That has happened and will continue to happen. Now you compare that to Facebook - if Facebook or Google go…
I know plenty of Boeing engineers and my impression is that they don't feel that way. Several engineers will be jointly designing that hatch door you mention, and they know there will be plenty of careful review by other engineers of everything they do before their thoughts become matter.
Although they are not software engineers or scientists, but they adopt open source attitudes long before open source movement in software industry! The process of peer review is exactly what software teams have to learn from those disciplines.
Re: YC is a cult
#137It's sad to see this trollish content rising to the top of news.yc.
I don't think it's as bad as it might seem. I'd rather have this on the frontpage than lolcats or accident pictures. In fact, I think some of the people who upvote or submit things like this do it as a way of keeping News.YC good. They don't want the site to degenerate into an intellectual monoculture. That doesn't mean they necessarily agree with everything it says. Back in the 1960s, the Communists used to get so m…
What falls in the deemed YC monoculture and what lies outside of it?
Re: YC is a cult
#138It's sad to see this trollish content rising to the top of news.yc.
I don't think it's as bad as it might seem. I'd rather have this on the frontpage than lolcats or accident pictures. In fact, I think some of the people who upvote or submit things like this do it as a way of keeping News.YC good. They don't want the site to degenerate into an intellectual monoculture. That doesn't mean they necessarily agree with everything it says. Back in the 1960s, the Communists used to get so m…
I think trying to resist the monoculture is a mistake.
Your stated aim for the constituency of the news.yc community is "the 10,000 best hackers and nobody else". If you achieved that aim, you'd have a monoculture. It would be a slightly different monoculture than the current one and less in your image, but a monoculture nonetheless. If it's even possible to move away from monoculture without moving toward Digg, I don't think it's worth the risk of trying.
Re: YC is a cult
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's as bad as it might seem. I'd rather have this on the frontpage than lolcats or accident pictures. In fact, I think some of the people who upvote or submit things like this do it as a way of keeping News.YC good. They don't want the site to degenerate into an intellectual monoculture. That doesn't mean they necessarily agree with everything it says. Back in the 1960s, the Communists used to get so m…
I think trying to resist the monoculture is a mistake. Your stated aim for the constituency of the news.yc community is "the 10,000 best hackers and nobody else". If you achieved that aim, you'd have a monoculture. It would be a slightly different monoculture than the current one and less in your image, but a monoculture nonetheless. If it's even possible to move away from monoculture without moving toward Digg, I do…
It could be that in order to get the 10,000 best hackers, he has to resist the monoculture.
Good hackers usually get that way because they're curious and like to learn new things. It gets boring when the same few dozen people submit the same thousand articles.
Re: YC is a cult
#140It's sad to see this trollish content rising to the top of news.yc.
I don't think it's as bad as it might seem. I'd rather have this on the frontpage than lolcats or accident pictures. In fact, I think some of the people who upvote or submit things like this do it as a way of keeping News.YC good. They don't want the site to degenerate into an intellectual monoculture. That doesn't mean they necessarily agree with everything it says. Back in the 1960s, the Communists used to get so m…
I do wonder how many upvotes this got because people wanted to see a good discussion/ rebuttal.