Hacker News Reader

Comment by pi-squared | Hacker News Reader

Why are posts by Sam Altman and Paul Graham upvoted unconditionally? I know, it's yc domain but is everything they write so good that it always require an upvote or is it because they are the bosses? Maybe I don't understand something about news.ycombinator.com, a.k.a. hacker news or I joined too late - was it originally posts only for yc funded startups and it eventually became general techie/science news and thus acquired a lot of people who are yc startups?

View on HN

Sam’s posts aren’t upvoted unconditionally. See here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=samaltman.com

Granted I don't pay much attention to the y-combinator side of all this, but I didn't know who this dude was when I read the article. I immediately disliked a lot of the advice because of how out-of-touch it is (don't do something you don't like, buy a $4000 mattress, etc.) and came to the comments expecting some level of critique of that. Nope, everyone is fawning over this guy:

"What do you think he'll think when he starts meditating" "How do you feel about him using canabis?"

What kind of cult is this?

ed: spelling

you are clearly new here. stick around... welcome.

I've been reading HN for at least 4 years and I always knew there was some level of bootlicking around the ycombinator stuff but it was easy enough to ignore and move on. I couldn't do that this time.

It's just people trying to bottle the lightning.

Person X becomes successful. Other people ask X how they did it. Person X explains some personal philosophy, and the other people nod sagely. Then persons Y, Z, and Q follow the recipe by X, and do not become successful.

It's probably better to ask failures what they did wrong. You end up with rules like "don't ever try heroin", "always insure the things that make you money", "let your lawyer review it first", "get a pre-nup", and "keep offsite backups". Most spend a lot of time figuring out exactly where it all went wrong, and can tell you exactly what they should have done differently to not fail (from that particular cause).

It's almost like there is more to success whether or not someone sleeps on a tempurpedic mattress with a cooling pad, earplugs and eye mask... or whether they write lists on paper... or whether they have that unfortunate characteristic where they only work on stuff they don't like (you know, a job)

To me, the talk of such things suggests that they don't actually know where their success comes from. Or they do know, and need to sell a distracting narrative for some reason. Perhaps the more people that know about it, the less it would work for them.

I had no idea who Sam Altman was before hand.

The post describes a few principles the author follows. It isn't a recipe for anything.

I thought it was really good, though I don't agree with all of it.

Take what works and leave what doesn't. Know your self.

Because most of Paul Graham's posts are excellent.

> was it originally posts only for yc funded startups and it eventually became general techie/science news and thus acquired a lot of people who are yc startups?

Yup, that just about sums it up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com