Hacker News Reader

Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News is smaller than most major subreddits in terms of usage. 400 upvotes is considered a lot here. The site is extremely simple and something that could be replicated in a couple of days at most by most engineers. It doesn't process money or really require a lot of content moderation either.

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That is all true but the real answer is that it is run as a charity project by billionaires. So it doesn't need to be monetized.

Ehh there's a really pro ycombinator slant and ever notice how any yc announcement, hiring notice, or article quickly hits the top? They're getting a lot of value out of that stuff that helps with the VC side of things.

> Ehh there's a really pro ycombinator slant and ever notice how any yc announcement

The site is literally news.ycombinator.com... and you're surprised it's slated towards ycombinator?

I don't think the parent is surprised, no.

Who would hate on YCombinator?

There are some legitimate arguments about how VC backed startups have behaved as of late, and YC is part of that overall system.

I’m not sure where I personally sit, but I think it’s a bit silly to pretend that YC is universally beloved or beyond reproach.

HN makes no secret out of that. Reddir has Tencent's influence crippling them.

The fact that YC doesn't need to monetize HN , and others mentioned how so much talented is sourced here is what makes it a good and comfortable place for technologists and tech enthusiasts.

Although, I am still a wee bit dissappointed at the lack of discussion about actual hacking.

Sure, but the criticisms mostly don't apply to companies in the seed stage. YC is somewhat removed from the mainstream critiques of startups mostly by sitting at the part of the process where startups are most startup-like, ironically enough.

You’re not wrong, but we’re talking about different things. Culturally YC is more associated with startup culture, even if their direct involvement ends after the seed stage.

I did not think it was universally beloved, but just never read any negative viewpoint about them so was curious.

Keep in mind that YC is very visible. As a result, complaints about VC behavior in general will accumulate to YC, since they’re often the public face of startups and startup culture. That might not be fair or ever correct, but it’s how people work.

Personally, YC’s involvement in AirBnB is my biggest complaint with the company. I’m not sure how it looked from the inside before hand, but in retrospect AirBnB is one of the poster children of VC backed companies extracting profits at the cost of society, and I suspect that they probably should’ve known better.

Extracting profits at the cost of society may be a bad thing for you and me, but it might be a good thing for YC.

I'm reminded of Paul Graham's words on unions:

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104?lang=en

From his perspective, it could be that society is something standing in the way of profits.

Are you saying something like everything is relative? I can't tell if you're being sarcastic.

I'm sorry for the lack of clarity. I should have been explicit in saying, I agree that treating society as a thing you can vacuum wealth out of is a bad thing; the people who run a VC firm (and who view unions as an indicator for industries to "disrupt") may view that as a good thing, or as the goal.

That should tell you something important about them.

Also, society stands in the way of progress. You can’t have both. Progress and no-profits.

> AirBnB is one of the poster children of VC backed companies extracting profits at the cost of society

Do you have any evidence to back up that claim? Because hard data shows exactly the opposite: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2018/beyond-bls/how-airbnb-has-...

That’s focusing on AirBnB’s effect on the hotel industry, but I’m more concerned about AirBnB’s effect on the rent market. This is a subject that’s been pretty well covered here before.

I don’t think you read the link before downvoting it. It’s about the effect on the hotel industry as well as consumers and hosts.

You also haven’t provided any evidence to back up your claim. I’d be curious to read it, if it exists.

I absolutely read your link, it was talking about hotel consumers. But I was never concerned about hotel consumers; I was concerned about the effects on everyone else.

Studies into various markets have shown that AirBnB increases rent for residents by converting long term rentals to short term rentals, reducing housing supply. The question is whether or not the increased tourism offsets the damage caused to the housing market. Studies point towards the answer being “no”.

Source: https://www.epi.org/files/pdf/157766.pdf

This is not an out there theory on my part; the name for this is the “AirBnB effect”, and searching for that shows articles in Forbes, EPI (linked), the Guardian, The Harvard Business Review, among others.

You absolutely did not, because it very clearly states it's not just about hotel consumers: It's about the welfare effects on hotels, travelers (including those who otherwise wouldn't have been hotel consumers), and hosts [1]. Why do you keep mischaracterizing it?

The EPI thinktank report you linked to simply states the costs outweigh the benefits without any numbers to support that conclusion. This paper, on the other hand, does look at the numbers. I appreciate the reference, however.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w24361.pdf

Any of the non-founder employees who work at one of their hundreds of portfolio companies that have refused to go public. Literally only one company backed by YC, Dropbox, has gone public to date.

Does Y Combinator have a lot of companies that could go public? Most do not seem IPO ready.

And what does any of that have to do with YC?

My comment was in response to "Who would hate on YCombinator." To expand on my answer: All of the employees who were duped into taking a low salary in exchange for the promise of valuable equity are the ones who would hate on YC.

Probably a return of investment priced without the Ponzi-smell.

Jason Calacanis, repeatedly, and vociferously.

Intriguing. Lots of interesting reading there.

Haven’t you noticed the years long media campaign to try and get the public to hate tech? It hasn’t been very successful but it’s not like there aren’t a lot of people who hate every single person who work in the technology industry.

I get that angle, but have never read any criticism specific to YC.

They probably source enough engineers on here to make it more bait rather than charity.

There are very few billionaire charity projects that don't have some kind of bait stench associated with them...

This site is a lot less brazen that, say the Gates Foundation or Jack Dorseys "all the strings attached" charity "donations", but there's no doubt it's run in the interests of YC and they're doing it for the benefits they get.

Not that I begrudge them that. It just needs to be something you bear in mind when wondering about odd looking article rankings or apparent voting/submission patterns that evade the fraud detection... It's their space, they can do that if they want. I (and everyone else) needs to weight up the benefit to themselves against the benefit to the people in control, and determine whether to hang around here, or walk away. For me? They do an OK job of not taking too m much advantage of their ultimate power here. I'm mostly cool with them.

I think it lands in a place between 'charity project' and 'neglible expense of time and effort'.

> The site is extremely simple and something that could be replicated in a couple of days at most by most engineers.

I'm a little skeptical of this. Don't get me wrong, I understand that it's not going to win any ACM awards for innovation in web development - it's a simple web app. I know this. But I think it's well beyond the 2-day prototype mark.

Because I know what a cheapo off-the-shelf, 2-day-product or PHP forum feels like, and Hacker News doesn't feel like that. It's a little more fine-grained and thoughtful than that.

The design, and probably countless little feature improvements that take time to make: I think these have accreted over time, a tiny bit at a time. And for what it's worth, getting comments to nest (stored in DB, parent, child, child of child etc.) and then to show that correctly in the UI isn't quite as easy as people who haven't attempted it might think.

And then things like downvoted comments being faded, next page loading at screen bottom, setting up the API... it all adds up.

Sure, but a mvp that does 75% of it is definitely possible in a weekend for a pair of really good in-the-zone coders. I'd argue that if you actually list out all these minor features fully, it's even possible to flesh it out completely in 4-5 very long days. Even otherwise, this could easily be a site that starts with a full weekend of work for mvp, followed by gradual refininig over the next few months with feedback needing no more than a Saturday afternoon. I wouldn't even consider myself the best coder out there and I have definitely coded something in a similar timeline in the past - a Netflix style book lending website with queues, inventories, user auth, the whole shebang. Im sure it wouldn't work in the same scale as HN, but I doubt it would have been that hard to keep up.

As I typed this I realized how unsubstantiated this claim looks, and to be frank the cost of just doing this isn't even that high, so I'm probably just going to do this next weekend for giggles. Let's see!

I hope you did better than Netflix. It's horrible to navigate. For example it's really really not obvious how you find previous seasons of a show.

I've been following Netflix for really long, and whatever downgrade in their UX is absolutely deliberate on their part to hide their library's flaws.

If you really wish to go back to the original view, you should consider giving Netflix dvd a try. You get DVDs and on top of it the original site with five star ratings, predicted rating and most importantly the ability to sort by predicted rating in any genre!

Given ycombinator's market cap, it might be the most cost-effective loss leader in history.

> or really require a lot of content moderation

I'm not sure about that. HN is moderated very effectively. I couldn't comment on the workload there, not being a moderator.

I think YC doesn't publish the numbers to prevent a bandwagon effect from happening. Or do you know more about the numbers?

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