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Comment by sama | Hacker News Reader

I counted at least 5 factual errors in the photo caption and first 3 paragraphs.

We also heard that this reporter was 'encouraged' to write this by someone from a competing accelerator with an obvious agenda. Seems like manufactured controversy otherwise.

All that said, we like hardware and we like Luke, and we're excited he's in the new batch! And we're thankful for the work he did to get our hardware program set up.

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We also heard that this reporter was 'encouraged' to write this by someone from a competing accelerator with an obvious agenda

If you are making accusations against the writer you need to substantiate them. Or else it's just hearsay.

Heh, impressive that a lede photo caption as short and simple as, "Sam Altman, president and co-founder of Y Combinator", has an error.

two errors!

What's the second, is that a picture of some other person?

* Not a cofounder. YC was created by PG, Jessica Livingstone, and two other ppl who aren't Sam

* Recently changed roles. Michael Siebel runs YC now, while Sam runs the parent organization YC Group

At least you can use it as a source for his Wikipedia article.

In a few short years everybody will agree that sama co-founded YC. ;-)

I had to google your word "lede" in order to understand what you were saying.

I found this: http://howardowens.com/lede-vs-lead/

Ha! That's very interesting. I mean I never knew that people tried to claim that there was some long history about the word lede", but that's just how it was referred to in every journalism class I've taken and in the papers I worked at. I like using it because its distinct spelling makes it obviously different than all the other meanings of "lead", and journalism has all kinds of jargon anyway..."graf" (paragraph), "nutgraf" (summary paragraph of a story), "subhed" (sub heading inside a story), "refer" (pronounced "reefer", an item that references something somewhere else in the paper). And "TK", for "to come", which I still use when writing or coding because it's very easy to grep for.

Reading this made me want to look up `cq`, which is what you jotted into your story as meta-text, next to a weirdly-spelled name or just weird fact to indicate to whomever is going to edit your story, Yes, this thing has been double-checked even if it looks weird, so please don't change it to what you think it is -- an example might be "Katharine Weymouth `cq`", for the former publisher of the Washington Post, whose name is often spelled as "Katherine" mistakenly.

I've heard other journalists shrug and say they've heard that `cq` stands for "correct but queer". But apparently its likely origin is Latin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadit_quaestio

There might really have been a long history for lede... https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Lede&year_star...

I wonder whether 'cq' is a mangling of 'sic':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic

FWIW, I've never seen 'cq', but I've seen (and used myself) 'sic' lots of times; it might be a leftpondian/rightpondian thing.

Maybe it evolved from that, but `cq` is distinctly different than `sic`. cq is used as a meta-tag in story editing systems (I have no idea what news writers did before computers) to communicate between editors. `sic` is used to communicate to the reader that that weird quote is what was actually said. I guess you could put "sic" in as meta-text that wouldn't get printed, but it still might be ambiguous as to the writer's/editor's intent.

Just this week somebody told me about how a competing accelerator made them accept or turn down their offer before doing their YC interview. Ugh.

That would make me turn down their offer, I don't appreciate anti-competitive business practices. Leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I agree. I guess the other accelerator likes to imagine that they are the cast of The Shark Tank.

Unfortunately, you can look back in history and see "exploding offers" have been a pattern [1]. Sam even wrote a post "Exploding Offers Suck" a couple years ago [2].

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/the-nasty-exploding-term-s...

[2]: https://blog.ycombinator.com/exploding-offers-suck

And many more errors; Wakemate wasn't the first YC hardware company - or even the second. Picwing did hardware in S08 and Wattvision was W09 (still alive), both before Wakemate.

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