Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies. So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.
Its also the currently last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big.
You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer comes out of the woodwork to fix it, something that I've seen happen in the last week on nh for the first time.
> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies
I should probably clarify this a bit.
It's true that HN sponsors Launch HNs (and Show HNs) by YC startups. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. However, YC would not be funding HN if that were the only reason for it. It's a secondary factor.
Far more important than promoting existing startups is attracting founders who might start new startups. This requires an entirely different strategy than promotion: it requires being interesting enough to attract the right kind of users. That's why the site is organized around curiosity, as I explained elsewhere in the current thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46309399).
I interpreted their comment more along the lines of
“Don’t critique ycombinator companies or go against their interests, otherwise you’re fine”
YC companies and their founders have special privileges on here and there is an opaque moderation system. There is no data you could provide beyond full transparency into your entire organization(obviously not happening) that would convince anyone that there isn’t influence that they have over communication here
Apart from job postings and Launch HNs, YC-funded startups don't have access to any information or influence that isn't available to anyone else.
We literally give exactly the same information and help to YC-funded startups as we do to non-YC-funded startups who ask for assistance with their Show HNs. That's because giving “extra help” to YC-funded startups is far less valuable (to everyone including the startup themselves [1]) than just making HN interesting to readers and showcasing cool projects, no matter who has built them.
[1] More than almost anything else, what I've learned from moderating HN is that “extra help” to get onto the front page of HN is of barely any help at all. That is, if the post isn't interesting enough to earn significant numbers of upvotes and good comments very quickly, it will disappear off the front page very quickly. Also, any time a story is on the front page that the community doesn’t think belongs there, it feels off and attracts flags and complaints.
> There is no data you could provide beyond full transparency into your entire organization(obviously not happening) that would convince anyone that there isn’t influence that they have over communication here
Since you're in a subthread of my comment: I've been here for many years and have not seen any evidence that would convince me that you are right.
And I trust both Dan and Tom to speak truthfully on this matter, they are truthful in their interaction with the community and I see no reason why this would be any different. And if it were different and if you did find proof that it is different then I don't know of HN would be for me anymore.
It is always important to realize that when you write words like 'anyone' that you are speaking for yourself.
You are correct. I will walk back the term “anyone” and amend it to “anyone who doesn’t personally trust the employees/mods of the organization and doesn’t assume that an organization involved in investments and VC firms will act with the same level of self interest as everyone else in that industry”
I am obviously very skeptical of any group like this, but not to the point where I would claim a stance like yours is definitionally incorrect. I’m just personally never going to have trust without the transparency given past history
I have some evidence that might sway you: there have been many threads on here that are critical of YC backed companies, sometimes pretty pointy ones.
For those threads flagging is turned off not on. So YC companies actually have it harder on HN than non-YC companies very specifically to avoid the accusation of bias.
I've also seen people associated with YC backed companies here downvoted into the toilet for spouting unpopular opinions. The only thing that possibly could happen (and that would be fairly hard to detect) is brigading on a company level, but I would accuse the likes of Google and Apple of that long before I would do so with the YC mods. Think about the opportunity cost of moderating this site. If you take that into account and then combine what you know of Dan and Tom with them selling out their integrity for a pittance if it would come to light that they did so it would wreck their reputation, which is pretty much the only compensation they really get here.
So I'm not buying it and I'm more skeptical of YC than most on here.
There is zero evidence that would sway me other than full transparency into all company records, which I recognize as an implausible ask.
I do not trust companies, or any organization involved in their creation and investment like this forum, to speak honestly and openly.
They have an incentive not to and their peers have proven time and time again that this incentive is too enticing to avoid.
I have seen and taken part in threads on here that were negative for ycombinator and/or their business partners be removed at almost machine level speed.
Maybe it’s the company, maybe it’s the community opinion, maybe it’s another option that I didn’t anticipate.
Regardless I assume it’s the company because they have not proven otherwise and companies in the American business setting are guilty until proven innocent to me.
Don't underestimate the power of brigading. If a couple of YC founders on YC's internal forum (much like HN) decide to get together there isn't much the moderators of HN can do about it other than to act retro-actively.
You'll see the same happen whenever someone is critical of some deity or brand (say, Steve Jobs or Apple). This is a generic problem, and it is a hard one to solve.
I've always been a fan of analyzing all of the flags retro-actively to see if they were just or not and to have a per-subject matrix that would weigh flags from particular users. So anybody that is on the gravy train at apple would find their apple flagging permissions removed, and all YC combinator founders would have their ability to flag YC related threads removed. But that is a lot of work to implement and keep accurate.
I don’t care about all those signs/flags? Is probably the best I can express my feelings.
I assume anything corporate or corporate aligned, which I believe this forum is, is being manipulated by the owners because they are structurally unreliable.
Corporations are counter parties who will betray you the second it’s in their benefit, and then crow about it in their quarterly earnings reports to their shareholders.
They’ll have their pocket MBAs and lawyers tell you how they have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns and quote some fucking 1920s era lawsuit with Henry Ford despite not actually having to maximize return but just having to do what’s in the shareholders best interests.
The sociopaths in our society have determined that means getting more money even if other people are harmed.
I am going to continue assuming that any corporate aligned org is following the incentives of our societal structure until we change that, and if you try to convince me I should ignore the structural incentives then I am going to assume you are trying to pull the wool over my eyes.
> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies. So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.
Everything has a cost. For the web, that's typically monetary or your data and attention to advertisers. I think you're right that the cost of Hacker News is that my participation is lending some (tiny incremental) legitimacy to Y Combinator. It's also costing some tiny amount of my attention, in the sense that I may not have heard of Y Combinator if it weren't for Hacker News. For me personally, that is absolutely fine – but I'm glad you made it explicit so that it's a conscious choice.
[Edit: Of course it costs an absolutely vast amount of my attention :-) but I mean only a teeny tiny fraction of that is "payment" in the sense of noticing that Y Combinator exists.]
> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies.
That's up to you, really, you can just ignore them. I know I do.
> So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.
Probably, or maybe that is just an overly cynical take. If it were as bad as that I can think of a couple of very easy things they could do to improve on that and they aren't so for now I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Note that I'm not particularly impressed by anybody associated with YC except the mods here.
> Its also the last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big.
So you're saying there is hope for Haskell?
> You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer comes out of the woodwork to fix it, something that I've seen happen in the last week on nh for the first time.
There are some pretty funny instances of such interaction here, the best of which still has me in stitches after more than a decade.
Not everything has to have an explicit purpose beyond “this is a good and valuable thing”.
Why do I take in parcels for my neighbour if a courier knocks on my door? She doesn’t pay me. It wouldn’t cause me any harm if I didn’t. But it makes the place nicer to live, and I’ve become friends with her as a result.
She invited me to dinner recently and fed me delicious food, and we drank very good champagne. That was an unexpected bonus.
“To promote ycombinator” only works if there’s an audience worth promoting to. Building something great that brings people back day after day maybe has the result that it can also serve as a promotional tool - but that’s a bonus, not necessarily a purpose.
I’m not the person you asked the question of - but I think the purpose of ycombinator is to give relevant people a place to discuss things aligned with the ecosystem in which ycombinator operates, to help strengthen and champion that ecosystem. Does it have a payoff for ycombinator? Almost certainly. Was it created with that explicit purpose in mind? I doubt it. There are easier ways to make money.
They started it for particular reasons, which can be examined. It's not bad that they did so, but your purpose and what the GP said are basically the same thing.
They're not promoting startups to investors via HN, it's a different kind of promotion. But 'pool of eligible hires' is quite worth a few salaries to maintain, even if others get value from it.
_ Hacker News was two years old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news._
_ Hacker News is an experiment, and an experiment in a very young field. Sites of this type are only a few years old. Internet conversation generally is only a few decades old. So we've probably only discovered a fraction of what we eventually will._
_ Hacker News is definitely useful. I've learned a lot from things I've read on HN. I've written several essays that began as comments there. So I wouldn't want the site to go away. But I would like to be sure it's not a net drag on productivity. What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site that caused them to waste lots of time._
HN isn't selling anything, but without HN the founder feed would likely dry up (or maybe not, now they have critical mass) and eventually of course they're selling stock.
Space hardware needs to be fundamentally different from surface hardware. I don't mean it in the usual radiation hardenrining etc, but in using computing substrates that run over 1000c and never shut down. T^4 cooling means that you have a hell of a time keeping things cool, but keeping hot things from melting completely is much easier.
The transistors are experimental, and no one is building high-performance chips out of them.
You can't just scale current silicon nodes to some other substrate.
Even if you could, there's a huge difference between managing the temperature of a single transistor, managing temps on a wafer, and managing temps in a block of servers running close to the melting point of copper.
At this point with having to read the manual to open the damned door I'm seriously thinking about attaching a belt drive, motor, driver circuit and esp32 running an http with spin/stop commands.
Mickey Mouse's character design as of 1930 is in the public domain. But if you ask an AI image model for "Mickey Mouse", you'll probably get something based on more recent versions of the character which are still copyrighted.
Scroll down on this page[0] and you'll see the different Mickeys and most of them are not under copyright. You got Steamboat Whillie + gloves but no Fantasia Mickey or later. Definitely no red-pants version.
Unsurprisingly Disney knows what they're doing and they have 95 years to modify a character's looks (and how the public imagines that character) before it enters public domain.
Yes, Boom is a YC startup, and the GP comment was unacceptable and the sort of thing we ban accounts for. Both are the case, and that doesn't change depending on who a comment is talking about.
Vibe coding produces great one shot proofs of concept that fit inside its context window.
It produces hot garbage when it needs to bring together two tokens from the far ends of a large code base together.
This comes as no surprise to anyone who understands what the attention mechanism actually is, and as a great surprise to everyone who thinks transformers are AI magic.
Its also the currently last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big.
You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer comes out of the woodwork to fix it, something that I've seen happen in the last week on nh for the first time.
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