Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

As someone who owns a weathered copy of Hackers and Painters and routinely says things like “a rare miss from pg”, I think this is a big miss from pg.

And the real shame is that he gets so close: he talks about discovery, about the intersection of science and technology and the broader world, he identifies the importance of doing things to learn enough to write about them, and most importantly: having an outrageous question with a real and alarming insight lurking around the corner as an answer and thereby avoids vaporous rhapsodizing.

So I’ll ask an outrageous question about which pg has both deep insight and over a decade of lived experience to ground an answer on: is YC still a good thing? I’ll ask a few corollary questions to illustrate.

He talks about the kinds of tests you hack to get ahead in some vague elsewhere: is getting ahead in YC, or the Valley, or the technology business still about merit and capability and being relentlessly resourceful rather than optics, connections, and flexibility? Is it about garages with Ethernet cables snaking everywhere more or less than knowing one’s way around the Rosewood Sand Hill?

His first citation as a reviewer is Sam Altman: is @sama still his pick for most capable founder and best person to guide the sprawling empire that YC sits at the heart of?

I don’t find any of those things obvious, and I think a candid essay about a set of very timely questions would be the most important essay he’d ever written.

Sam went through the garage startup stage in 2005-2007, and again in 2015-2017 with OpenAI. He was good at it -- I saw both firsthand. At OpenAI he was scrounging GPUs when that's what we needed most, and wangled a prototype DGX-1 long before you could buy one. More importantly, he convinced people to leave multi-million dollar salaries at Google & DeepMind for a tiny startup no one had heard of. Now OpenAI needs to build a trillion dollars of infrastructure and lobby governments for favorable regulation, so he's doing whatever that involves. It wouldn't make sense for him to be running Ethernet cables today.

YC's public content focuses on early-stage startups. Should it have more on late-stage startups? Maybe, but it doesn't seem as impactful. The reason to produce public content is that it can scale to reach more people than the partners can talk to one-on-one. There are fewer late-stage startups, so the scaling problem hasn't hit yet. YC follows its own advice of doing things in ways that don't scale until scaling becomes necessary.

One set of outrageous if solicited questions to a living legend seems enough for one day, and I'm very aware of the amount of non-public, first-hand knowledge I'm addressing here, so please take this in the highly respectful spirit in which it is intended from someone who recognizes that their entire career and adult life have been shaped by your and pg's achievements.

I do not find it at all obvious that either a trillion dollars in private investment or aggressive lobbying around regulation favorable to a particular for-profit entity are necessary or even possible paths to outcomes that are globally good for humanity or locally good for the community of people who spend time in threads like these.

I don't think that I'm part of a small minority in finding those means very dubious ways to accomplish things, the ends to which those means are being put of questionable public-mindedness, or the secrecy and apparent subterfuge with which this to all external appearances is being done acceptable ways to wield vast power.

I don't know if you'd make this argument, but others have when arguing for the same outcomes, so if I'm addressing them and not you please excuse me: we have institutions with a mandate from the public to deploy wartime budgets on Manhattan Project-scale undertakings attended by extreme risk. This cannot be ethically, morally, or legally delegated to unelected and unappointed individuals or private for-profit institutions via what was once called corruption.

Clearly I speak only for myself, but many others with far better credentials are saying similar things, in many cases much more stridently.

FWIW I was about to post this on a now (probably appropriately) flagged remark about retribution for dissent regarding critical remarks here and it went under while I was typing. I felt it was worth posting here to make it plain to anyone who is thinking but not saying what the other poster green-named (as my comment is probably one of the most "critical"-sounding on the thread):

" I've been probingly questioning of pg's essay on this very thread, and as he requested I asked a few questions that can be fairly described as "outrageous". I think they're in the spirit of his call for outrageous questions, but they aren't "softballs".

Trevor challenged me on this, and I respectfully disagreed with his assertions in the same breath as acknowledging the almost limitless power of the YC network in my profession.

I did this not because I have any desire to be ground under the boot of the YC network, but because I trust @pg and Jessica and @tlb and (especially these days) @dang. My questions are about whether or not their good intentions might have gone awry, why they might or might not be worried about that: not whether or not they have always had and still have good intentions.

I've been hanging around here for like 16 years, and I don't fear retribution for respectful dissent at all. This is in sharp contrast to some other parts of the industry that I've wandered through. "

PG would probably never admit it, but any reference to a person such as @sama is not only talking about him as a person but also to him.

Of course one can only guess what the message for him might be.

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