It's all about real AI today (not based on words and rules - lookup CTM - the real bots have this and its based on vector space). Get the companies and groups that are making very small breakthroughs in this area. The days of regurgitated cut-n-pasted text entry boxes and js (geocities, friendster, myspace, facebook) are over. Time for the new Googles of the world that will solve things bigger than SpaceX like extending human lifespan which is a requirement for space travel.
You do realize that we're still dealing with the world of models that need be trained. Models are only as good as the data that is given to them, and data is only as good as those who collect it. Neural Networks aren't even close to real AI, they're black-box models - believe them blindly and catastrophe will follow. An excellent example I recently read pertains to a hospital attempting to use a neural network in determining whether to send pnemonia patients home or have them stay in hospital for treatment. The model told them to send asthmatic patients home. Why you may ask? Well, asthmatic patients were always triaged to the ICU, thus the results told the hospital to send this group home. We don't even understand cognition in the human brain, how can we expect to stumble upon it with digital systems?
"Economic growth" can exist on a computer screen completely decoupled from the "real world" and independent of a strong middle class.
IMHO An economically strong middle class is needed to maintain social order. This mitigates the public from hunting and and killing the rich and keeps the public from displacing their social frustrations on to each other and creating riots. Generally its a better existence for everyone.
Historically speaking, I don't feel like the basic way that society fails is by "hunting and killing the rich." I mean, you can MAYBE gloss the communist revolutions of the early 20th Century that way. What else?
I think he's referring broadly to the fact that startups are net job creators whereas established companies are net job destroyers. In other words, without a continual stream of new startups and entrepreneurs, there would be no job growth in the economy at all, in which case there'd likely be significant political instability.
It is solved because the inequality has to be bounded inequality. You can visualize it as the stretching of an elastic band. Too little stretching, and the band has no utility, too much and it snaps.
Obviously those are both failure modes. We want the quality of stretchiness, to use a technical term :) because the requirements of what the elastic band has to put up with are changing over time.
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 conflict of interest where the trade can be reversed.
So I win A, but only if I allow you to win B. 'the next time'
This logic only can work if we allow each other to be winners.
Suppose our economic incentive was to 'defect' in game theory parlance, and defect always. Why would this be so?
Perhaps because we're in a zero sum game instead of a positive sum game. Perhaps I must win or I will die, in which case my non-cooperation with you is non-negotiable.
"I want Z, but you also want Z, and this is a rival good, only one of us can have it at one time."
sama, and Thiel, believe technology solves this by turning a potential rival good into non-rival goods. Or put more simply; if everybody can have stuff they are happy.
There can be exceptions to this logic, like a mother choosing her child's survival over her own in a pregnancy gone wrong. But in a world without growth, without those potential negotiations 'violence' becomes selected for.
The important realization is not the trivial 'more stuff makes people happy'. It does, but the real reason why growth is a big deal is that in the long run it selects for outcomes which don't lead to deadlock leading to violence.
Where I part company with Sam, is the belief that democracy is worth saving. It is worth saving representation, each entity's self interest in a system must be recognized yes, but not democracy. Ironically equal voting must lead to unequal outcomes. Right from the initial premise it does not hold up against physical reality. Like genetics, circumstance, and all of history. There are other systems in G-space that have the potential to be much better at governing. That includes systems in which people would feel much more represented than they do in our current system. Equality of votes is like a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. I mean even the NSDAP had policies on the environment and health most people agree with in the present. What does that say about our ability to select?
tldr; The relationship is close to axiomatic in game theory and democracy when looked at in the cold light of day is a pretty dim worldview to start with.
Sure. For clarification: by G-space I meant 'how to govern well' or 'how to solve problems about, with, or in governance'.
This is obviously an enormous topic area. It is also a dangerous and highly contentious subject matter filled with many taboos, due to its nature and importance.
That said political scholars, like economists, have come to many consensus realizations. This is kind of amazing since Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are clones from a political science perspective, there exists a great diversity of thought.
This means that there is not as much of a gap between somebody like Francis Fukuyama and Moldbug as is popularly imagined. If you have a sincere interest in outcomes you find unexpected allies.
Here is a good start:
Volume 1: The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama
Volume 2: Political Order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama
Seeing Like a State by James Scott
Exit, Voice and Loyalty by Albert Hirschman
The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer
The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joesph Tainter
The majority of the time these authors are interested in outcomes, not in winning for whatever their home team is.
Outside of academia Silicon Valley itself is having a serious discussion on this topic from our perspective:
If somebody is aware of an interesting line of thought around these issues I'll be happy to hear it.
One thing is perfectly clear and that is with the advent of the Internet we see the world differently and that this will lead to different forms of governance for the first time in several hundred years.
I also half seriously recommend you listen to audiobooks by Lovecraft to get into the appropriate mood for studying or reading about government.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
I don't agree with his statement but it feels familiar after reading the books I recommended to you. This stuff has scale and is scary, the last person to seriously tinker with the subject on this level was Karl Marx.
That is why Patri's ideas may eventually win the day, but I leave you to it.
I found the most interesting point in the whole article the publicly stated consideration of establishing a China presence.
It would appear to make a lot of sense given current capital availability in China, world-leading mobile payment penetration, and US/SF issues with visas, overheads, component sourcing. Get over here!
How is China with 'innovation' though? The portrait we seem to get so often in the West is that China excels at imitation and fails at original thinking. Maybe innovation isn't needed for domestic success, but it is for creating things that penetrate the rest of the world (and, these days, dare I say universe?).
Well we have perfect mobile payment penetration, the only significant electrical vehicle fleet in the world, and the world's most successful social networking platform. None of these things are copies.
What's stopping these things penetrating the west? For payments, mostly incumbents. For e-vehicles, mostly protectionist levels of government regulation that make small vehicles too expensive to approve as roadworthy or illegal to drive, and foreign SNS platforms have outright announced they are planning on emulating WeChat.
This was a pretty good article -- certainly one of the better portraits I've read of SA.
However, I usually see better writing in the New Yorker. Take "as a result, the once nerdy Y Combinator is now aggressively geeky." What the hell does that mean? (Nothing.)
OTOH, a few memorable quotes:
> Growth masks all problems. (Steve Huffman)
> Despite having raised a robust $1.6 million after Demo Day, the founders were ridden with angst. Fredrik Thomassen said that they wanted to make their war chest last forever, and Sondre Rasch mentioned that he’d frugally chosen to live in a twelve-entrepreneur collective in a nearby forest.
"what intrigues him is their potential effect on the world. To determine that, he’ll upload all he needs to know about, say, urban planning or nuclear fusion."
Yep -- this one puzzled me so much that I assumed I was in the wrong, because surely there's no way that a writer for the New Yorker would make a mistake that egregious. I must have read that sentence twenty times.
I read it as somewhere between "skim" and "learn" - it's probably a term sama used himself in the interview. If you think of yourself as a machine it's probably a term than makes sense; it doesn't feel particularly aspirational to me :)
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.
Makes sense. I personally read some of the comments before jumping into an article, mainly because comments most of the time loop me in on something that I am completely clueless or have little aware of. Also to see if the article is worth reading into because obviously if you read 20 people saying "The author of the article doesn't know what he is talking about" then its more possible that indeed the author has written about something he doesn't know or understand.
Also a lot of the times the solutions given or explanations are amazingly good and entertaining. Thanks to YC I've become a better person I'd say.
Great point, now that you wrote it I realize I often do the same -- use HN comments as a signal on whether the article is worth reading. Coupled with the "do not be nasty" tone overall (a rarity online) it gives a very positive prior to YC.
> Also a lot of the times the solutions given or explanations are amazingly good and entertaining. Thanks to YC I've become a better person I'd say.
I couldn't agree more, on both counts. It's such a thrill seeing a link to a research paper or exceptionally well written essay, and have the author answering questions in the comments. I can't even estimate how much general science, history, and literary education I've received this way, almost by accident. No doubt I am a much more well rounded person as a result.
I rarely read TFA. I'm here for the discussion, and if the discussion is extraordinarily interesting, I'll read the article for clarification. To me, HN is the "guild" that teaches fundamentals, and keeps me abreast of the state of the industry (and many, many unrelated topics that are equally interesting!). Normally this level of access to illuminating dialog would be restricted to universities, but I can get it here for free, in my underwear. I've spent a good part of my life geographically isolated from centers of learning and industry, and being able to remain in the loop is priceless. I doubt my personal and professional growth over the last 10 years would be a fraction of what it is if I hadn't had this resource. Yes, I am a fanboy.
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 investments through tough times instead of writing them off. This seems relatively rare amongst early stage investors, especially outside the US. In my relatively few years of experience in business, I've learnt to value people in the "cooperate cooperate" quadrant of the Prisoner's Dilemma very highly, and it's not a reputation you can "buy" quickly.
HN is a place to have civilised discussions thanks to both a seed of core tech personalities for historical reasons drawing a network of quality, and thorough and active moderation. I think "self-perpetuating machine" is harsh and not quite representative of most of the value derived by those of us who are not part of the YC ecosystem and unlikely ever to be (and yes, I haven't read the original article).
PS: nice site! Light, fast and with just one tracker (but "old geeks" would crunch web logs, surely?)
> I've learnt to value people in the "cooperate cooperate" quadrant of the Prisoner's Dilemma very highly, and it's not a reputation you can "buy" quickly.
This is a great way to put it. People who act in good faith are the only people I'd want to do business with, and YC has (rightfully IMO) earned a reputation for being a partner you can trust.
Even today when startup resources abound, Sam's Startup Playbook [0] and the course How to Start a Startup [1] are in another league, particularly with their directness and clarity.
Edit: Getting downvoted, but these resources are really great, so I'm not sure what's going on. I just added links in case people are unfamiliar.
I read a lot less about YC companies on here than I did a few years ago. The site's popularity has partially eclipsed its original intent, for better or for worse.
Agreed but you have to credit PG's earlier work that makes this all credible as an uber-nerd watering hole (i.e. his guide to Lisp, Arc, Hackers and Painters, etc.).
I agree, and it's very frustrating that most articles are unreadable unless I change their font or colour choices. I should have to have an extension installed that makes text readable. And, unless people speak up the people who create these broken designs will never know that they are choosing to say "fuck you" to a sizeable proportion of their audience.
But: it's about the least interesting thing that can be said about this article. And whoever is responsible at the New Yorker will never see these comments.
I think dang has said these kind of comments are off-topic.
I personally don't think "The choices you've made exclude part of your audience, and may not be compatible with laws around accessibility" is bike-shedding, but I have stopped commenting on design choices.
Musk strikes me as an imaginative but a very rational person who deeply thinks about stuff, so this is confusing to me.
His argument that our world is most likely a simulation does seem logical given our current knowledge. However, breaking out of the simulation is completely another matter, more in line with Hollywood thinking than with anything that scientists can be engaged to do, at least currently.
It's completely wacky, but if you've got a few mil to drop on wacky ideas, it starts to seem a bit less wacky in the grand scheme of things. It's basically a wager: "There's a small, but perhaps nonzero chance I'm living in a simulation. I've got the throwaway cash to fund an escape attempt. This investment has a massive chance of being completely wasted, even if this is a simulation. But if there is even a tiny chance of figuring something out, I might as well take it."
What would it even mean to 'escape' a simulation? In my mind I'm imagining when I write code to model a real process and even at some super high-fidelity simulation I can't imagine an 'escape'. Maybe if the simulation were so self-aware it could conduct local privilege-escalation attacks and replicate itself like a worm/virus?
EDIT: aside -- "Microcosmic God" [1] was a great short story along these lines
Assume a non omnipotent being, with non-infinite resources is creating a universe simulation. What decisions would we expect a person like this to make, when designing this simulation?
Since they do not have infinite resources, they would likely take shortcuts, and make compromises and tradeoff when designing the simulation
For example, if light did not have a speed limit, and interacted with the entire universe instantly, this would be very hard to simulate. You would save resources by giving light a speed limit.
We also expect that they might abstract out the nitty gritty details of how things work at the atomic level. If you don't really care that much about how very small particles interact with each other, you might have these numerous calculations evaluated lazily, when they are "observed" by the higher level entities.
Things get really interesting when you start thinking about what kind of bugs a god programmer might be likely to make when designing their simulation.
Are there any weird natural processes, that would be much more elegant if our equations modeling them were changed very slightly, almost as if the equation was a mistake in the first place? Another attack avenue is to combine two natural processes in unexpected ways, to try and find "edge cases".
How do you know your own thought processes aren't a part of the simulation? Logic is a great tool to analyze the simulation unless it's been baked on purpose by our overlords.
On a different note, does simulation hypothesis strike anyone else as the idea God just explained in pseudo scientific/computing terms?
The difference is that God is an unfalsifiable claim.
The simulation argument is one that can be supported or argued against using evidence.
For example, if scientists find some new nature process that would be very difficult to simulate, (infinite speed of light is one such example) then that is strong evidence that we aren't in a simultion.
Of course, even if we keep observing things about the universe that would make it easier to simulate, that doesn't mean we actually are. It could just all be a coincidence. Or maybe it doesn't make any sense for a universe to be difficult to simulate.
The basic idea is to ask the question "Assume someone lives in a simulation. What would that person be likely/unlikely to observe?". and "Assume someone does NOT live in a simulation. What would they be likely/unlikely to observe?" And see how much this stuff matches up with reality.
When you find an exploit that lets you execute any code you want on a remote server, you can find out all the internal details of that server, and you can make that server do whatever you want.
That's actually a pretty cool idea for a movie. Scientists hacking the universe to achieve alchemy and time travel. Maybe it could be a sequel to the Matrix. It's strange how they only ever made that one Matrix movie.
Really.. It doesn't make sense. This is like the Star Trek episode where a holodeck character wants to live in the real world. (Spoiler alert..) Picard just traps him in a bigger simulation and makes him think that he escaped!
Essentially that's what Agent Smith does in the Matrix sequels. He can't "escape" the Matrix, but he can basically make it his own. (For the purposes of this analogy I'm intentionally ignoring the ridiculous scene where he somehow transfers himself to the physical world.)
Interesting to consider: if we ever discovered ourselves to be living in a simulation and attempted to do something about it, would the simulator simply reset the simulation (a la The Matrix trilogy)? Or would the simulator be intrigued by our self-awareness and allow the simulation to continue?
But anyhow, that's enough of a digression for one day.
'accelerando' had a great throwaway line about that:
And then there's the weirdness beyond M31: According to the more conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower – maybe a collective of Kardashev Type Three galaxy-spanning civilizations – is running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of space-time itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath.
> “The merge has begun—and a merge is our best scenario. Any version without a merge will have conflict: we enslave the A.I. or it enslaves us. The full-on-crazy version of the merge is we get our brains uploaded into my butt. I’d love that,” he said.
I had to disable the extension to verify that it was its work and not the actual quote.
To call people monkeys because they didn't accomplish as much as Mark Zuckerberg? Yes it's very wrong! And ironic given that MySpace had a much better exit and impact than FriendFeed (the company created by the partner quoted)
It's particularly unfitting when you're asking people to run startups with an uncertain future. It might boost moral in the short run, but doing so on other peoples expense always comes back to haunt you. To quote the article:
> Graham wrote an essay, “Mean People Fail,” in which [...] he declared that “being mean makes you stupid” and discourages good people from working for you.
Yeah. It's a post hoc explanation of something better explained by luck. Tom Anderson of Myspace really is a spooky-smart hacker with great intuition, and no one was calling Zuckerberg a visionary until truly recently.
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. In other words, if YC simply stopped functioning tomorrow, I can't imagine the GDP growth of the United States would be at all affected. Guys, what you're doing is very, very impressive, but, c'mon, let's get off the idea that you're instrumental in saving democracy for all of us (and all the other delusions of grandeur).
And if you think about it, most of these disruptive companies are not offering real growth. Both Über and Air BNB, for instance are diverting dollars from the legacy provider. And they're doing this by offering better service and/or lower prices. There is no value creation to see here.
Well they are funding very ambitious stuff like nuclear power startups and AI initiatives, which most others usually shy away from. This is potentially extremely disruptive and a massive boon to the economy.
And your assessment of Airbnb of just "diverting dollars from the legacy provider" is wrong in my opinion, it turns an unused space into cash (creating a new market/enabling an underserved market), just like early-eBay turned unwanted stuff in your house into cash. I'm not fully sure where I stand on Uber, but they're certainly offering a much better customer experience than traditional taxis.
AirBNB turns my unused space into cash but also keeps me from staying at a hotel. These businesses are certainly adding value for their shareholders and customers. They are not generally expanding the economy. I should also admit that many existing business models should be disrupted.
It doesn't keep you from staying at a hotel, that's a choice you make. Also, I've stayed at AirBnb locations where there was no other accommodations options, so it's difficult to argue it's taking business from a hotel in these scenarios. Additionally, I wouldn't be surprised if bigger hotel chains legally evade loads of tax like virtually all large multinational companies do, which isn't an option for most AirBnb hosts, who must pay full tax on everything (or face the consequences, e.g. the situation in New York).
"keeps" was a poor word choice. I've never stayed at an AirBNB (or VRBO, etc) on the same night I also stayed at a hotel, so if I choose one, then the other (in general) isn't getting my business.
Reading the rest of your comment, I don't really think we disagree except that you seem to think AirBNB is driving additional revenue into the economy ("Also, I've stayed at AirBnb locations where there was no other accommodations options") - before AirBNB was there, what would you have done? You would have either stayed at a hotel that was further away than you'd like, or stayed home.
Think what you will about Uber and AirBnb (I happen to dislike Uber as a tech employer) -- they are certainly offering real growth. I have used Uber (and Lyft) and Airbnb (and VRBO/HomeAway) to do things that I otherwise wouldn't have done. In other words, rides I wouldn't have called a taxi for, and trips I wouldn't have taken because I find the typical hotel experience to be more trouble than it's worth with two small children. I think you should also consider the utilization side of things -- people are getting value out of a depreciating asset that would otherwise be unutilized. Simply from an account perspective this is valuable (and probably more economically valuable than helping support rent-seeking medallion owners).
The Freakonomics podcast had a really good economic justification for Uber specifically that goes beyond what I've described here. It's worth listening to (and I can't seem to link to it directly: http://www.npr.org/podcasts/452538045/freakonomics-radio -- September 7th).
That's great (though it can be an employment dark pattern, as it were), but that's not what's going on here. Sam isn't saying, hey, I think a healthy startup ecosystem contributes to a healthy economy which contributes to a healthy democracy. No, he's saying something far more grandiose.
> At Graham’s table, he [Altman] and others discussed how to stop Donald Trump
> If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend Peter Thiel
Is this true? How does it work?
Thiel is a very vocal supporter of Trump and yet he's Altman's friend, a friend so close they would want to spend the rest of their life alone together, in the event of a catastrophe.
Altman can certainly have all the friends he wants; but he shouldn't get to pretend he opposes Trump at the same time.
You guys surprise me. Obviously friends can disagree, including about important things. I'm trying to think of a sublime historical example but I'm tired and all that comes to mind is Camille Paglia and Rush Limbaugh. Oh well.
If the article is to be believed, this is not just "some friend", it's someone Altman would want to spend the rest of his life with in the event of a catastrophe: it's his favorite human being on the planet.
And it's not just one's opinions or even party affiliation; Thiel is working very hard and very publicly to get Trump elected.
It's not just politics, like one would be a little more conservative and the other a little more liberal.
A Trump presidency would be an extinction-level event (for example -- and this is just one small example -- he doesn't "believe" in global warming, and would dismantle the EPA).
How far can friendship go?
The only way to explain this is, Altman doesn't think Trump is that big of a threat. Which makes me question his judgement very much.
I love Sam and just wish they would have used a different metaphor than "Manifest Destiny". Isn't manifest destiny what led to the genocide of native american populations?
That's iteresting. I was not aware of such a connotation - to me the term manifest destiny just meant "a destiny that can be clearly seen and that cannot be changed" [1]. Maybe the article's sub-editor was equally ignorant of 19th century US history.
No way. That's a deliberate choice of words and the parallel is actually pretty striking. From Wikipedia:
> In the 19th century, manifest destiny was a widely held belief in the United States that its settlers were destined to expand across North America. There are three basic themes to manifest destiny:
The special virtues of the American people and their institutions
The mission of the United States to redeem and remake the west in the image of agrarian America
An irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty
Pretty much the template to justify colonialism i.e "The current inhabitants are savages. They would do well with our civilisation and rule of law. We are the exceptional people to do that. If they don't want it... Well we can't have that sort of thing, can we?"
Sometimes it is blatant. See Congo Free State. The nominal justification was to bring civilisation and thus improve lives. Instead the people were enslaved in a state owned and controlled by private enterprise.
And just to add to this, Manifest Destiny had some very concrete related beliefs. Such as "the rain follows the plow", the belief that if you settle and farm somewhere, the climate will magically change to make this workable
This led to people settling in unwise places. And you know what, even though the Wikipedia page says that climatologists now regard this as mere superstition, these areas of the US are now well-populated: A critical mass did settle, so in a way it's all worked out.
> This led to people settling in unwise places. And you know what, even though the Wikipedia page says that climatologists now regard this as mere superstition, these areas of the US are now well-populated: A critical mass did settle, so in a way it's all worked out.
Sounds like a classic case of survivor bias though? Where would Chicago be today if it wasn't for the trains? What would be the state of Phoenix Arizona if not for things like CAP? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Arizona_Project
I think the author was likely aware of that. YC wants, and will probably get, great power. But with great power comes great responsibility, and the potential to do harm as well as good. YC may succeed in "settling the West" (metaphorically), but at what price? That's one question it has to ask itself.
Don't Sam and other YC folks thinks that technological innovation will put most people out of a job, necessitating a "basic income" which makes them permanent government dependents?
I think it's definitely intentional. This profile isn't meant to be purely congratulatory--the undercurrent that some of this is creepy and undeserved that other commentors have picked up on is deliberate.
It is about the American outlook where the perception is warped to the extent that all that is seen and wanted is only meant for them.
Or in another sense; because it exists, then it exists only for them. It ties into their earlier religion where they warped the belief that an entity called God created the world for mankind and humans, where they only reason and believe that only they themselves to be human and man.
Personal attacks aren't allowed here. You poison HN by doing so, and we want this place to be better than that. I'm sure you know that.
Please don't create accounts to break the site guidelines with.
Edit: In case anyone is confused, the parent comment has been edited several times. This has crossed into outright abuse, so we're going to ban the account.
I think this would be more convincing if it were less acidic. If you really need to make a negative comparison between Altman and someone else, for example, literally almost anyone would be less distracting than Trump.
I don't have any insider knowledge, but I think YC is structured as a partnership, and I assume the other partners could throw Altman out if he were obviously screwing up.
This is neither here nor there: I'd never read about Sam Altman's sexuality before this article, but when watching him interview Mark Zuckerberg a few weeks ago on the making the future series, it crossed my mind and I wondered if he's gay. Something in the body language. A certain type of light on Sam's face. So reading this, I've loudly exclaimed to myself, "I thought so!"
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...
I recognize my comment is far removed from the OP.
The only sympathetic argument against minority rights that I know of comes from Dr. Claude Anderson, an African American economist and philosopher.
His theory is that Black people fought for affirmative action in the late 60's in response to the affirmative action that benefited White Europeans(e.g., Manifest Destiny, free land, slave ownership). But once Blacks had these new privileges, there was a conspiracy to dilute their rights by including more groups as minorities. Until 1970 Hispanics were classified as Whites, for example.
He argues that people would rather hire a woman, or rent their home to a Hispanic or gay person over a Black person which is why the category was broadened.
He has a great analogy that gives perspective-- "being a minority is a headache, but being Black is like having brain cancer". Yet we treat all these different groups practically the same and wonder why things are getting worse for African Americans.
"Altman, who will personally oversee this initiative, believes [Startup School] is the fastest, easiest way to bring ten thousand new founders a year into the network."
In the YC scenario, once its network hits a certain size it ceases to become a useful network and is just the world.
"Launching a startup in 2016 is akin to assembling an alt-rock band in 1996 or protesting the Vietnam War in 1971—an act of youthful rebellion gone conformist."
Agreed. This a very long and well written article. It does have some very heartbreaking, personal stories too:
One of Altman’s co-founders at Loopt, Nick Sivo, was also his boyfriend; the two dated for nine years, but after the company sold they broke up. “I thought I was going to marry him—very in love with him,” Altman said
It was interesting to read of his ambivalence toward AI. I've seen this sentiment echoed by other tech-scene heavyweights. Why are so many in SV aggressively working to bring about a "super-awesome" world which they don't even seem to want?
My impression: It is 46 pages printed. I opened the link, read three paragraphs, and still not a word about the Manifest Destiny mentioned in the title. Closed it. Way too long. Way too much story telling.
"At a hundred and thirty pounds, Altman is poised as a clothespin, fierce as a horned owl."
to me, sounds like a romance novel, not objective reporting. From a group that espouses the virtues of a 30 second elevator pitch, I find the down voting odd. There's an incredible amount of verbosity here that essentially adds nothing to the article. At 46 pages, that's roughly half the size of the entire GoLang specification.
Long articles are fine so long as the length is required to convey the information presented. Based on the first few paragraphs, this one appears to actively waste time with pretentiousness. Not my cup of tea.
This article isn't written for you then. It's written for the audience of the New Yorker which consistently reads quality long form which paint whole pictures. As a hacker news commentator you probably have far more insight into the start up scene than the vast majority of them.
I'm also curious about the 46 pages, I'd put it at about 15 in the print form of the magazine. Enjoyed the read and comment thread quite a bit.
"I continue to be impressed by the quality of The New Yorker's reporting."
It really is quite good and I have gone out of my way over these past 8 years or so to show them whatever patronage I can. To that end, I subscribe to the digital version on my kindle as well as buy the print version (which I prefer, aesthetically).
Since we're talking about it, I think any discussion of how good the New Yorker is has to touch on how good the London Review of Books is. It's a truly remarkable publication. Very, very left leaning but I appreciate it nonetheless. I highly recommend an LRB subscription to anyone that appreciates good, original, thoughtful reporting and commentary. As a bonus, you get a very different perspective on many world events than you get from US media.
It's great that every week that release some five or so long form articles many of which must take months to complete. I'm duly impressed by every issue which shows at my door.
I was half kidding. But sometimes all you care about is media validation, not what people actually think. You have your face in the press and get broadcast and that's it.
I don't care what other people think of me either, but I can't afford to be seen as such. I'm just not rich and powerful enough to have people lick my boots no matter what. I would certainly find that convenient.
I've been trying to put my finger on what bothers me about Sam Altman ever since he was named President of YC in 2014. Now I know. It's less to do with him; more to do with this narrative of Sam Altman as some visionary, world-saving, future-builder. The story just doesn't fit the character. There's no comparison between him and true visionaries like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, etc.
Unlike Sam, these guys can dive deep into whatever industry they choose with a very obvious clarity of thought. Watch any of their interviews for examples. Even though Steve Jobs wasn't "technical" he was able to speak about the technical aspects in detail. On the other hand, Sam seems to stand at a very high, superficial level. I have yet to see him dive deep into any of the frontiers he's focused upon: AI, energy, biotech, etc.
But it's not just that, these visionaries let their track record speak for itself. I don't seem to understand Sam's track record. A Stanford dropout whose claim to fame is selling Loopt for $43M (at a loss to investors) after raising $30M in total at a $175M valuation, and pocketing $5M for himself? Then goes on to tout YC's runaway success as due, in part, to his leadership when >60% of YC's portfolio value is due to ~15 companies from pre-2014 YC batches.
To top it off, as proof of his ambition, a silly comparison between YC's portfolio value being 14% of Alphabet's market cap is made. That's apples-to-oranges.
Bottom line, the results we see today are largely due to PG & friends. I wish people would stop forcing this narrative of Sam Altman as a visionary. Right now, he's more Tim Cook, less Steve Jobs. There's nothing wrong with being an operational genius. YC, the company, has a manifest destiny.
I don't get it... This is just a bunch of your feelings about famous people you haven't met? Where's the content? I just lost a minute reading this, and another replying.
It's the American narrative and boy, is it clear in all its features if you read this article with a European mind.
If you're American and some foreigners tell you that you all look like you're up your own assess all the time, just think of this New Yorker piece as an explanation why.
Excellent prose that crafts the same old boring story about how this very special individual has become richer and more successful than others. All around him an orbit of friendly millionaires and billionaires whose contradictive role is left out of the picture and an army of wannabes whose anxiety-laden lives are always romantically portrayed with a recurring reference to ramen-based meals -- because it's fine to have nutrition deficiencies and work 22 hours a day if you're building the next (much probably) useless tech startup that will hopefully turn you into the next Sam Altman.
This is what it is, people: a narrative. Why always trying to live by someone else's narrative? What really strikes me as incredibly counterintuitive is that every single startup story is different in its own ways, and what set successful startups apart is their willingness to follow individual paths. Yet, the way we tell these stories always gets down to pattern-matching the same old tropes everybody knows and loves.
I fondly appreciate most of the American culture, I'm enamoured with the startup scene naïveté, I think Y-combinator is a wonderful and extremely innovative player in the VC scenario. I mean, I love even this echo chamber that's called hacker news. That's how much I dig this stuff.
But again, I'm European. Doubt and skepticism are built in as standard features. So please, listen to me when I say that's better to limit agiography to the boooks about catholic saints from the Middle Age.
As a fellow European, I disagree that we have built in common features - unless you think "European" means your country and its closest relatives. If we all had the same culture, the EU wouldn't probably be in its slow bureaucratic slump.
On topic, don't underestimate the power of faith. Humans are not rational beings by default, so powerful narratives about the hot shots of SV really do have an effect in inspiring the next generation of SV hot shots. Yeah, it might be a bubble waiting to pop, but it also might be the fastest economic and technological growth the world has ever seen.
I'm originally from the UK, but feel that 'healthy skepticism' there can all too often be the label that people give "why bother, it'll probably fail anyway". The boundless optimism of the US may be more beneficial in the long run.
> I've been trying to put my finger on what bothers me about Sam Altman ...Bottom line, the results we see today are largely due to PG & friends ....
The NYT and other papers have to deliver stories to the readership, I guess. But this has a premise that is borderline ridiculous.
YC has proven itself and justified its business model many times over. But one gets the sense that it is still cruising on the momentum of P.G. and the early team.
Not knocking Sam Altman in any way. He is ambitious and has a plan which he has publicized - but he has not yet delivered on it. It is far too early to laud his greatness by speaking of his 'manifest destiny'. He has high standards for YC applicants; we should apply those standards to him as well.
Sam Altman is an excellent politician/influencer, which is probably what YC needed. PG gave the impression of not enjoying that role.
I think the best way to understand it is to compare their two respective "request for startups". Paul Graham had 6 concrete tradeable opinions about the world. Sam Altman has 21 non-specific opinions which cover more or less everything ("healthcare", "robots", "hollywood" with no specific opinions within the field), and several of them (11, 19, 14, 21) are not even startup sectors so much as talking points to show the Cathedral that he's one of them.
I find it odd that you'd criticize Sam Altman in this way then go on to call Steve Jobs a "true visionary". I see Jobs as being more a managerial type that managed to get a few things very right. He wasn't able to dive deep into technical things and grok them as you said. I have read comments on hacker news from people that worked directly under him, talking about how he forbid using object orientation in programming. So programmers had to hide it from them that they were actually using it, which was easy because he could not read the code.
Additionally, Sam Altman is now in a position to achieve greatness and he probably will do so whether or not he has already. Someone in that position would not even have to be particularly exceptional (once again, whether he is or not) to do so. So whether he has or not so far is a moot point. I'm just pleased he has ambition and apparently isn't focused on the lime light. Compare that to how most billionaires use their funds (ie, big yachts etc) and you should just be pleased that anything is happening.
Anyway, my main point is that I guess that an appreciation of "genius" is a highly subjective thing. And the instant someone would mention Jobs as such is the same moment I'd intensely disagree with them. It can probably just be left at that.
> I have read comments on hacker news from people that worked directly under him, talking about how he forbid using object orientation in programming.
Steve Jobs talked incessantly about object-oriented programming after he left Apple, and built an entire company (NeXT) and operating system (NeXTStep) using a new object-oriented programming language (Objective-C). He didn't write the code himself but he funded and led these efforts.
> I have yet to see him dive deep into any of the frontiers he's focused upon: AI, energy, biotech, etc.
I do admit I am still very skeptical about his views on AI. I am not an expert on that particular subject, but as a student of biology my understanding is that we are still a very long way away from truly understanding how "intelligence" works...
I think of it as happening in a sort of Moore's law sense. Double what you can do today in 18 months, then do that 5-7 times in the next decade, and the results should be pretty staggering.
What's even neater about AI is that the requirements to get involved are much lower than that of hardware and much easier to propagate. Combine that with the inherent power of machines teaching themselves and networking with each other and we may be looking at more of a power law or exponential rate of increase in capacity for accomplishments.
> What's even neater about AI is that the requirements to get involved are much lower than that of hardware and much easier to propagate.
That's thinking very much from a CS point of view. Sure, if we're only talking about software you're quite right. But I would strongly argue that if we want to build an artificial intelligence, we first need to know what a "natural" intelligence looks like - and that includes a lot of neurobiological research that still needs doing. Now you can say what you like about software, but neuroscience doesn't come that cheap...
I'm not sure why A.I. would need to be based on human intelligence. At the end of the day the black box of the process doesn't matter if the results are sound, and we already frequently don't understand how our current A.I. works (which features the system is picking up on, etc). I'd expect that trend to continue.
You nailed it. I'm surprised you didn't get downvoted to the gazoo. You absolutely were able to express the way I feel.
I don't consider myself a troll, nor do I hate Sam Altman. My goal is not to come here and slander. But I agree with you.
Sam's accomplishments and track record have been very much exagerated. And he has played a roll in that exageration.
For me Sam's biggest qualities are: 1) being able to navigate sillicon valley skillfully 2) having a fantastic network 3) Portraying a self image that is super founder friendly (which he actually probably his, for at least the companies that are doing well).
That said he is not:
1) A successful founder.
2) A serial entrepreneur
3) A tech genius
4) A visionary
Not to mention it allows them to control negative comments/articles through implicit threats/incentives and direct (and hidden) moderation/manipulation.
There's an annoying fakeness about YC/HN that gets old after a while. Lots of founders willing to tell YC folks whatever they want to hear and YC folks happily slurping it up like it's authentic. Genuinely gamed. And worse they treat anyone who isn't a sycophant (people like @pinboard/idlewords) as crazy assholes who they actively seek to filter out of YC/HN as possible.
It would be really good for the world if HN was replaced by a neutral platform.
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.
If you won't take Dan's word for it, maybe you'll take mine?
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.
Now, please ignore it, and go about your business. The worst thing to happen to a person's acceleration would be belief in having success. The only person you race in life is yourself, and you always need to catch up.
Reid Hoffman makes clear like I suspected that SV power players are skeptical about Sam Altman. YC is becoming Jack of all trades master of none. Jury is still out on YC under Sam's leadership. By 2020 I think we'll start to see the wheels fall off.
It does seem there's a lot of flailing around. As someone mentioned, this http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ went from 6 under Graham to 21 under Altman. Altman mentions laser like focus at time when referring to how startups should function. The same doesn't go for YC?
It's really easy to get fame and plaudits by associating yourself with a cornucopia of big ideas, it's a lot harder to actually follow through.
While I respect that they claim not to be about accumulating wealth (and it does feel as if this is genuinely true compared to more traditional VCs), this looks a bit like the Google X of VC. I suspect that they have generated enough returns from their seed investments that they no longer have outside LPs for a lot of the stuff they do, allowing them to freely pursue off the wall ideas (the exception here is probably their continuity fund). I'm not sure how sustainable this is in the long term. They would have to keep churning out Airbnbs, which is not guaranteed.
> Altman mentions laser like focus at time when referring to how startups should function. The same doesn't go for YC?
It does.
Sam mentioned in an interview (can't remember which one) he sees YC as a meta company, like Alphabet. So it makes sense to broaden the type of companies YC is interested in.
Note that YC itself is not directly working to solve the problems mentioned in the RFS. They are funding companies that solve them. So the laser like focus exists at the individual startup.
TL;DR It makes sense to expand focus, being a meta company.
the facts on the ground don't support your theory, Reid is one of the people helping fund OpenAI (Sam is one of the founders)
more that he is pissed that the YC Continuity fund is starting to compete with him on deals at Greylock which the article alluded to that it's a threat to other VC's
This is a strange profile of the sort of hero and status/wealth worship that only seems to have currency in the USA. The more I read the article the less I came away thinking of Altman as a genius and more of a babysitter and teacher.
I'm not really looking to attack Altman's character or competence, he seems to have both in spades, but the whole thing was just...creepy. And cultish.
This is a thought provoking question. I didn't miss it, but I didn't read it as irony, I read it as a sort of awe-struck breathlessness on the part of the author... or at least, the slightly emotionally distant (aloof, not really ironic) version of that that the New Yorker is very good at.
The idea of writing this sort of piece about someone whose grand ambitions have not yet been realized is both to make the reader aware of the grandeur of the ambitions, and also to draw a line in the sand so that his accomplishments can be judged later, aided by the glimpse into his unfettered idealism.
This is not a criticism of the New Yorker (I love it). Just a phenomenon of the unique genre of personal profiles that the magazine produces. The same tone would also work if writing about an artisanal butcher in Maine, for example.
I think you describe the tone quite precisely -- it is the same tone the author may have used to describe someone who built an Eiffel tower out of matchsticks -- the premise being that we get an objective description of a subculture (SV technologists) somewhat alien to the main readership of the magazine. But I do think that this objective tone is somewhat fake, because by the choice of examples and their juxtaposition the author does seem to occasionally take sides and actively (and subtly) parody certain attitudes. It is telling how many in this forum seem to have missed this and saw the article as unilaterally flattering.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadLecture on said book http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bfriedman/files/moral_conse...
Foreign Affairs review http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bfriedman/files/the_ethical...
IMHO An economically strong middle class is needed to maintain social order. This mitigates the public from hunting and and killing the rich and keeps the public from displacing their social frustrations on to each other and creating riots. Generally its a better existence for everyone.
Obviously those are both failure modes. We want the quality of stretchiness, to use a technical term :) because the requirements of what the elastic band has to put up with are changing over time.
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 conflict of interest where the trade can be reversed.
So I win A, but only if I allow you to win B. 'the next time'
This logic only can work if we allow each other to be winners.
Suppose our economic incentive was to 'defect' in game theory parlance, and defect always. Why would this be so?
Perhaps because we're in a zero sum game instead of a positive sum game. Perhaps I must win or I will die, in which case my non-cooperation with you is non-negotiable.
"I want Z, but you also want Z, and this is a rival good, only one of us can have it at one time."
sama, and Thiel, believe technology solves this by turning a potential rival good into non-rival goods. Or put more simply; if everybody can have stuff they are happy.
There can be exceptions to this logic, like a mother choosing her child's survival over her own in a pregnancy gone wrong. But in a world without growth, without those potential negotiations 'violence' becomes selected for.
The important realization is not the trivial 'more stuff makes people happy'. It does, but the real reason why growth is a big deal is that in the long run it selects for outcomes which don't lead to deadlock leading to violence.
Where I part company with Sam, is the belief that democracy is worth saving. It is worth saving representation, each entity's self interest in a system must be recognized yes, but not democracy. Ironically equal voting must lead to unequal outcomes. Right from the initial premise it does not hold up against physical reality. Like genetics, circumstance, and all of history. There are other systems in G-space that have the potential to be much better at governing. That includes systems in which people would feel much more represented than they do in our current system. Equality of votes is like a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. I mean even the NSDAP had policies on the environment and health most people agree with in the present. What does that say about our ability to select?
tldr; The relationship is close to axiomatic in game theory and democracy when looked at in the cold light of day is a pretty dim worldview to start with.
This is obviously an enormous topic area. It is also a dangerous and highly contentious subject matter filled with many taboos, due to its nature and importance.
That said political scholars, like economists, have come to many consensus realizations. This is kind of amazing since Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are clones from a political science perspective, there exists a great diversity of thought.
This means that there is not as much of a gap between somebody like Francis Fukuyama and Moldbug as is popularly imagined. If you have a sincere interest in outcomes you find unexpected allies.
Here is a good start:
Volume 1: The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama Volume 2: Political Order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama
Seeing Like a State by James Scott
Exit, Voice and Loyalty by Albert Hirschman
The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer
The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joesph Tainter
The majority of the time these authors are interested in outcomes, not in winning for whatever their home team is.
Outside of academia Silicon Valley itself is having a serious discussion on this topic from our perspective:
Balaji Srinivasan : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A
Peter Thiel : http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3EBfS9IcB4
Patri Friedman : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading
Larry Page : https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/15/larry-page-wants-earth-to-...
Last but not least, the notorious Moldbug: Best explained by Scott Alexander : http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-...
If somebody is aware of an interesting line of thought around these issues I'll be happy to hear it.
One thing is perfectly clear and that is with the advent of the Internet we see the world differently and that this will lead to different forms of governance for the first time in several hundred years.
I also half seriously recommend you listen to audiobooks by Lovecraft to get into the appropriate mood for studying or reading about government.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
I don't agree with his statement but it feels familiar after reading the books I recommended to you. This stuff has scale and is scary, the last person to seriously tinker with the subject on this level was Karl Marx.
That is why Patri's ideas may eventually win the day, but I leave you to it.
It would appear to make a lot of sense given current capital availability in China, world-leading mobile payment penetration, and US/SF issues with visas, overheads, component sourcing. Get over here!
What's stopping these things penetrating the west? For payments, mostly incumbents. For e-vehicles, mostly protectionist levels of government regulation that make small vehicles too expensive to approve as roadworthy or illegal to drive, and foreign SNS platforms have outright announced they are planning on emulating WeChat.
However, I usually see better writing in the New Yorker. Take "as a result, the once nerdy Y Combinator is now aggressively geeky." What the hell does that mean? (Nothing.)
OTOH, a few memorable quotes:
> Growth masks all problems. (Steve Huffman)
> Despite having raised a robust $1.6 million after Demo Day, the founders were ridden with angst. Fredrik Thomassen said that they wanted to make their war chest last forever, and Sondre Rasch mentioned that he’d frugally chosen to live in a twelve-entrepreneur collective in a nearby forest.
"what intrigues him is their potential effect on the world. To determine that, he’ll upload all he needs to know about, say, urban planning or nuclear fusion."
P.S. The mandatory xkcd link: https://xkcd.com/747/
I heard about YC, PG, and sama all through this outlet.
Also a lot of the times the solutions given or explanations are amazingly good and entertaining. Thanks to YC I've become a better person I'd say.
I couldn't agree more, on both counts. It's such a thrill seeing a link to a research paper or exceptionally well written essay, and have the author answering questions in the comments. I can't even estimate how much general science, history, and literary education I've received this way, almost by accident. No doubt I am a much more well rounded person as a result.
I rarely read TFA. I'm here for the discussion, and if the discussion is extraordinarily interesting, I'll read the article for clarification. To me, HN is the "guild" that teaches fundamentals, and keeps me abreast of the state of the industry (and many, many unrelated topics that are equally interesting!). Normally this level of access to illuminating dialog would be restricted to universities, but I can get it here for free, in my underwear. I've spent a good part of my life geographically isolated from centers of learning and industry, and being able to remain in the loop is priceless. I doubt my personal and professional growth over the last 10 years would be a fraction of what it is if I hadn't had this resource. Yes, I am a fanboy.
Specifically I have become a better writer. The HN crowd is a tough but fair audience when it comes to upvotes on comments.
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
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 investments through tough times instead of writing them off. This seems relatively rare amongst early stage investors, especially outside the US. In my relatively few years of experience in business, I've learnt to value people in the "cooperate cooperate" quadrant of the Prisoner's Dilemma very highly, and it's not a reputation you can "buy" quickly.
HN is a place to have civilised discussions thanks to both a seed of core tech personalities for historical reasons drawing a network of quality, and thorough and active moderation. I think "self-perpetuating machine" is harsh and not quite representative of most of the value derived by those of us who are not part of the YC ecosystem and unlikely ever to be (and yes, I haven't read the original article).
PS: nice site! Light, fast and with just one tracker (but "old geeks" would crunch web logs, surely?)
And, thanks for the feedback OldGeekJobs. It's been making rounds on HN over the last two weeks.
https://oldgeekjobs.com/press
This is a great way to put it. People who act in good faith are the only people I'd want to do business with, and YC has (rightfully IMO) earned a reputation for being a partner you can trust.
Edit: Getting downvoted, but these resources are really great, so I'm not sure what's going on. I just added links in case people are unfamiliar.
[0]: http://playbook.samaltman.com
[1]: http://startupclass.samaltman.com
But: it's about the least interesting thing that can be said about this article. And whoever is responsible at the New Yorker will never see these comments.
I think dang has said these kind of comments are off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9236332#9238739
I personally don't think "The choices you've made exclude part of your audience, and may not be compatible with laws around accessibility" is bike-shedding, but I have stopped commenting on design choices.
How should the extension work? Maybe a simple blacklist of fonts so the fallback font kicks in?
I'm very curious who these two billionaires are and what exactly are they planning to do regarding this likely hopeless project.
His argument that our world is most likely a simulation does seem logical given our current knowledge. However, breaking out of the simulation is completely another matter, more in line with Hollywood thinking than with anything that scientists can be engaged to do, at least currently.
EDIT: aside -- "Microcosmic God" [1] was a great short story along these lines
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmic_God
For example, if light did not have a speed limit, and interacted with the entire universe instantly, this would be very hard to simulate. You would save resources by giving light a speed limit.
We also expect that they might abstract out the nitty gritty details of how things work at the atomic level. If you don't really care that much about how very small particles interact with each other, you might have these numerous calculations evaluated lazily, when they are "observed" by the higher level entities.
Things get really interesting when you start thinking about what kind of bugs a god programmer might be likely to make when designing their simulation.
Are there any weird natural processes, that would be much more elegant if our equations modeling them were changed very slightly, almost as if the equation was a mistake in the first place? Another attack avenue is to combine two natural processes in unexpected ways, to try and find "edge cases".
On a different note, does simulation hypothesis strike anyone else as the idea God just explained in pseudo scientific/computing terms?
The simulation argument is one that can be supported or argued against using evidence.
For example, if scientists find some new nature process that would be very difficult to simulate, (infinite speed of light is one such example) then that is strong evidence that we aren't in a simultion.
Of course, even if we keep observing things about the universe that would make it easier to simulate, that doesn't mean we actually are. It could just all be a coincidence. Or maybe it doesn't make any sense for a universe to be difficult to simulate.
The basic idea is to ask the question "Assume someone lives in a simulation. What would that person be likely/unlikely to observe?". and "Assume someone does NOT live in a simulation. What would they be likely/unlikely to observe?" And see how much this stuff matches up with reality.
That's actually a pretty cool idea for a movie. Scientists hacking the universe to achieve alchemy and time travel. Maybe it could be a sequel to the Matrix. It's strange how they only ever made that one Matrix movie.
Interesting to consider: if we ever discovered ourselves to be living in a simulation and attempted to do something about it, would the simulator simply reset the simulation (a la The Matrix trilogy)? Or would the simulator be intrigued by our self-awareness and allow the simulation to continue?
But anyhow, that's enough of a digression for one day.
And then there's the weirdness beyond M31: According to the more conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower – maybe a collective of Kardashev Type Three galaxy-spanning civilizations – is running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of space-time itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath.
You can find smart, rational, deep thinkers who adhere to any and all of the world's major and minor religions, as well as atheism.
You don't even need to take a position on religion to conclude that no-one really knows what's going on.
> “The merge has begun—and a merge is our best scenario. Any version without a merge will have conflict: we enslave the A.I. or it enslaves us. The full-on-crazy version of the merge is we get our brains uploaded into my butt. I’d love that,” he said.
I had to disable the extension to verify that it was its work and not the actual quote.
> It’s all about founders. Facebook had Mark Zuckerberg, and MySpace had a bunch of monkeys.
The kind of ubermensch/Ayn Rand rhetoric that makes me cringe.
> Graham wrote an essay, “Mean People Fail,” in which [...] he declared that “being mean makes you stupid” and discourages good people from working for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
I see a mix with no consensus.
And your assessment of Airbnb of just "diverting dollars from the legacy provider" is wrong in my opinion, it turns an unused space into cash (creating a new market/enabling an underserved market), just like early-eBay turned unwanted stuff in your house into cash. I'm not fully sure where I stand on Uber, but they're certainly offering a much better customer experience than traditional taxis.
Reading the rest of your comment, I don't really think we disagree except that you seem to think AirBNB is driving additional revenue into the economy ("Also, I've stayed at AirBnb locations where there was no other accommodations options") - before AirBNB was there, what would you have done? You would have either stayed at a hotel that was further away than you'd like, or stayed home.
The consumer is definitely winning though.
The Freakonomics podcast had a really good economic justification for Uber specifically that goes beyond what I've described here. It's worth listening to (and I can't seem to link to it directly: http://www.npr.org/podcasts/452538045/freakonomics-radio -- September 7th).
I believe Sam is better at making such connections than most people I know.
> If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend Peter Thiel
Is this true? How does it work?
Thiel is a very vocal supporter of Trump and yet he's Altman's friend, a friend so close they would want to spend the rest of their life alone together, in the event of a catastrophe.
Altman can certainly have all the friends he wants; but he shouldn't get to pretend he opposes Trump at the same time.
I actually read a bit of an insinuation to the fact they're both gay, but maybe I'm overreading into the article.
And it's not just one's opinions or even party affiliation; Thiel is working very hard and very publicly to get Trump elected.
A Trump presidency would be an extinction-level event (for example -- and this is just one small example -- he doesn't "believe" in global warming, and would dismantle the EPA).
How far can friendship go?
The only way to explain this is, Altman doesn't think Trump is that big of a threat. Which makes me question his judgement very much.
You are amusing. How similar to a meteor strike would you say Trump is, or is there another analogy that you want to make [0]?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#Most_widely_s...
Very similar. The main difference is that a meteor strike is bad luck (an "act of God"), whereas electing Trump would be an act of Thiel and friends.
[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/manifest%20destiny
> In the 19th century, manifest destiny was a widely held belief in the United States that its settlers were destined to expand across North America. There are three basic themes to manifest destiny:
The special virtues of the American people and their institutions
The mission of the United States to redeem and remake the west in the image of agrarian America
An irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty
Sometimes it is blatant. See Congo Free State. The nominal justification was to bring civilisation and thus improve lives. Instead the people were enslaved in a state owned and controlled by private enterprise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_follows_the_plow
This led to people settling in unwise places. And you know what, even though the Wikipedia page says that climatologists now regard this as mere superstition, these areas of the US are now well-populated: A critical mass did settle, so in a way it's all worked out.
Sounds like a classic case of survivor bias though? Where would Chicago be today if it wasn't for the trains? What would be the state of Phoenix Arizona if not for things like CAP? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Arizona_Project
You mentioned this but I wanted to spell it out.
Or in another sense; because it exists, then it exists only for them. It ties into their earlier religion where they warped the belief that an entity called God created the world for mankind and humans, where they only reason and believe that only they themselves to be human and man.
Please don't create accounts to break the site guidelines with.
Edit: In case anyone is confused, the parent comment has been edited several times. This has crossed into outright abuse, so we're going to ban the account.
I don't have any insider knowledge, but I think YC is structured as a partnership, and I assume the other partners could throw Altman out if he were obviously screwing up.
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...
The only sympathetic argument against minority rights that I know of comes from Dr. Claude Anderson, an African American economist and philosopher.
His theory is that Black people fought for affirmative action in the late 60's in response to the affirmative action that benefited White Europeans(e.g., Manifest Destiny, free land, slave ownership). But once Blacks had these new privileges, there was a conspiracy to dilute their rights by including more groups as minorities. Until 1970 Hispanics were classified as Whites, for example.
He argues that people would rather hire a woman, or rent their home to a Hispanic or gay person over a Black person which is why the category was broadened.
He has a great analogy that gives perspective-- "being a minority is a headache, but being Black is like having brain cancer". Yet we treat all these different groups practically the same and wonder why things are getting worse for African Americans.
That seems incredibly unlikely. I suspect the opposite is true. Do you have data?
Is it? Or is it just more vocal since the progress of the LGBTQ rights movement globally makes homophobia no longer the silent norm of society?
Its often easy to mistake a movement as being stronger when its really just got its hackles up because its wounded and backed into a corner.
In the YC scenario, once its network hits a certain size it ceases to become a useful network and is just the world.
"Launching a startup in 2016 is akin to assembling an alt-rock band in 1996 or protesting the Vietnam War in 1971—an act of youthful rebellion gone conformist."
Only to one's immediate family might the work-life balance and low chance of success raise eybrows.
One of Altman’s co-founders at Loopt, Nick Sivo, was also his boyfriend; the two dated for nine years, but after the company sold they broke up. “I thought I was going to marry him—very in love with him,” Altman said
to me, sounds like a romance novel, not objective reporting. From a group that espouses the virtues of a 30 second elevator pitch, I find the down voting odd. There's an incredible amount of verbosity here that essentially adds nothing to the article. At 46 pages, that's roughly half the size of the entire GoLang specification.
Long articles are fine so long as the length is required to convey the information presented. Based on the first few paragraphs, this one appears to actively waste time with pretentiousness. Not my cup of tea.
I'm also curious about the 46 pages, I'd put it at about 15 in the print form of the magazine. Enjoyed the read and comment thread quite a bit.
It really is quite good and I have gone out of my way over these past 8 years or so to show them whatever patronage I can. To that end, I subscribe to the digital version on my kindle as well as buy the print version (which I prefer, aesthetically).
Since we're talking about it, I think any discussion of how good the New Yorker is has to touch on how good the London Review of Books is. It's a truly remarkable publication. Very, very left leaning but I appreciate it nonetheless. I highly recommend an LRB subscription to anyone that appreciates good, original, thoughtful reporting and commentary. As a bonus, you get a very different perspective on many world events than you get from US media.
I think that circuit exists and is functioning quite well. It seems to me there's a lot of glory embedded in YC's plans.
... opined Altman in his New Yorker PR piece.
Perhaps he should have said "most people" instead of what he did say.
Unlike Sam, these guys can dive deep into whatever industry they choose with a very obvious clarity of thought. Watch any of their interviews for examples. Even though Steve Jobs wasn't "technical" he was able to speak about the technical aspects in detail. On the other hand, Sam seems to stand at a very high, superficial level. I have yet to see him dive deep into any of the frontiers he's focused upon: AI, energy, biotech, etc.
But it's not just that, these visionaries let their track record speak for itself. I don't seem to understand Sam's track record. A Stanford dropout whose claim to fame is selling Loopt for $43M (at a loss to investors) after raising $30M in total at a $175M valuation, and pocketing $5M for himself? Then goes on to tout YC's runaway success as due, in part, to his leadership when >60% of YC's portfolio value is due to ~15 companies from pre-2014 YC batches.
To top it off, as proof of his ambition, a silly comparison between YC's portfolio value being 14% of Alphabet's market cap is made. That's apples-to-oranges.
Bottom line, the results we see today are largely due to PG & friends. I wish people would stop forcing this narrative of Sam Altman as a visionary. Right now, he's more Tim Cook, less Steve Jobs. There's nothing wrong with being an operational genius. YC, the company, has a manifest destiny.
I know that negativity might look rude, but the hero worship (while more socially acceptable) isn't any better.
If you're American and some foreigners tell you that you all look like you're up your own assess all the time, just think of this New Yorker piece as an explanation why.
Excellent prose that crafts the same old boring story about how this very special individual has become richer and more successful than others. All around him an orbit of friendly millionaires and billionaires whose contradictive role is left out of the picture and an army of wannabes whose anxiety-laden lives are always romantically portrayed with a recurring reference to ramen-based meals -- because it's fine to have nutrition deficiencies and work 22 hours a day if you're building the next (much probably) useless tech startup that will hopefully turn you into the next Sam Altman.
This is what it is, people: a narrative. Why always trying to live by someone else's narrative? What really strikes me as incredibly counterintuitive is that every single startup story is different in its own ways, and what set successful startups apart is their willingness to follow individual paths. Yet, the way we tell these stories always gets down to pattern-matching the same old tropes everybody knows and loves.
I fondly appreciate most of the American culture, I'm enamoured with the startup scene naïveté, I think Y-combinator is a wonderful and extremely innovative player in the VC scenario. I mean, I love even this echo chamber that's called hacker news. That's how much I dig this stuff.
But again, I'm European. Doubt and skepticism are built in as standard features. So please, listen to me when I say that's better to limit agiography to the boooks about catholic saints from the Middle Age.
On topic, don't underestimate the power of faith. Humans are not rational beings by default, so powerful narratives about the hot shots of SV really do have an effect in inspiring the next generation of SV hot shots. Yeah, it might be a bubble waiting to pop, but it also might be the fastest economic and technological growth the world has ever seen.
The NYT and other papers have to deliver stories to the readership, I guess. But this has a premise that is borderline ridiculous.
YC has proven itself and justified its business model many times over. But one gets the sense that it is still cruising on the momentum of P.G. and the early team.
Not knocking Sam Altman in any way. He is ambitious and has a plan which he has publicized - but he has not yet delivered on it. It is far too early to laud his greatness by speaking of his 'manifest destiny'. He has high standards for YC applicants; we should apply those standards to him as well.
I think the best way to understand it is to compare their two respective "request for startups". Paul Graham had 6 concrete tradeable opinions about the world. Sam Altman has 21 non-specific opinions which cover more or less everything ("healthcare", "robots", "hollywood" with no specific opinions within the field), and several of them (11, 19, 14, 21) are not even startup sectors so much as talking points to show the Cathedral that he's one of them.
Additionally, Sam Altman is now in a position to achieve greatness and he probably will do so whether or not he has already. Someone in that position would not even have to be particularly exceptional (once again, whether he is or not) to do so. So whether he has or not so far is a moot point. I'm just pleased he has ambition and apparently isn't focused on the lime light. Compare that to how most billionaires use their funds (ie, big yachts etc) and you should just be pleased that anything is happening.
Anyway, my main point is that I guess that an appreciation of "genius" is a highly subjective thing. And the instant someone would mention Jobs as such is the same moment I'd intensely disagree with them. It can probably just be left at that.
Steve Jobs talked incessantly about object-oriented programming after he left Apple, and built an entire company (NeXT) and operating system (NeXTStep) using a new object-oriented programming language (Objective-C). He didn't write the code himself but he funded and led these efforts.
I do admit I am still very skeptical about his views on AI. I am not an expert on that particular subject, but as a student of biology my understanding is that we are still a very long way away from truly understanding how "intelligence" works...
What's even neater about AI is that the requirements to get involved are much lower than that of hardware and much easier to propagate. Combine that with the inherent power of machines teaching themselves and networking with each other and we may be looking at more of a power law or exponential rate of increase in capacity for accomplishments.
Very exciting times.
That's thinking very much from a CS point of view. Sure, if we're only talking about software you're quite right. But I would strongly argue that if we want to build an artificial intelligence, we first need to know what a "natural" intelligence looks like - and that includes a lot of neurobiological research that still needs doing. Now you can say what you like about software, but neuroscience doesn't come that cheap...
I don't consider myself a troll, nor do I hate Sam Altman. My goal is not to come here and slander. But I agree with you. Sam's accomplishments and track record have been very much exagerated. And he has played a roll in that exageration.
For me Sam's biggest qualities are: 1) being able to navigate sillicon valley skillfully 2) having a fantastic network 3) Portraying a self image that is super founder friendly (which he actually probably his, for at least the companies that are doing well).
That said he is not: 1) A successful founder. 2) A serial entrepreneur 3) A tech genius 4) A visionary
There's an annoying fakeness about YC/HN that gets old after a while. Lots of founders willing to tell YC folks whatever they want to hear and YC folks happily slurping it up like it's authentic. Genuinely gamed. And worse they treat anyone who isn't a sycophant (people like @pinboard/idlewords) as crazy assholes who they actively seek to filter out of YC/HN as possible.
It would be really good for the world if HN was replaced by a neutral platform.
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.com/item?id=12625852 and marked it off-topic.
Given your position, do you think that you can look at HN objectively?
Lobste.rs is also a good HN-alt. A bit more groupthink on common topics, and less groupthink on VC stuff.
edit: and thanks for lobste.rs! I've been looking for something similar to HN without all the SV gossip.
Whatever faults dang may have, he's not a capricious moderator, and he works hard to be fair.
Since I got called out my name, let me say that no one has tried to "filter me out" of HN since Paul Graham stopped moderating the site.
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.
Now, please ignore it, and go about your business. The worst thing to happen to a person's acceleration would be belief in having success. The only person you race in life is yourself, and you always need to catch up.
It's really easy to get fame and plaudits by associating yourself with a cornucopia of big ideas, it's a lot harder to actually follow through.
It does.
Sam mentioned in an interview (can't remember which one) he sees YC as a meta company, like Alphabet. So it makes sense to broaden the type of companies YC is interested in.
Note that YC itself is not directly working to solve the problems mentioned in the RFS. They are funding companies that solve them. So the laser like focus exists at the individual startup.
TL;DR It makes sense to expand focus, being a meta company.
more that he is pissed that the YC Continuity fund is starting to compete with him on deals at Greylock which the article alluded to that it's a threat to other VC's
I'm not really looking to attack Altman's character or competence, he seems to have both in spades, but the whole thing was just...creepy. And cultish.
The idea of writing this sort of piece about someone whose grand ambitions have not yet been realized is both to make the reader aware of the grandeur of the ambitions, and also to draw a line in the sand so that his accomplishments can be judged later, aided by the glimpse into his unfettered idealism.
This is not a criticism of the New Yorker (I love it). Just a phenomenon of the unique genre of personal profiles that the magazine produces. The same tone would also work if writing about an artisanal butcher in Maine, for example.