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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

That's deeply untrue and unfair, and the fact that you've reached back 12 years to find an example, when YC has funded thousands of startups since then, is evidence against what you're saying.

YC has turned down many startups because they didn't think what the product was doing was right, and it has defunded and banned startups for ethical reasons over the years. It's not your fault that you didn't know this, since no one makes a big deal of it, but I think it's proper to bring it up when you say that the people at YC will "back anything that makes money".

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I deeply respect your work here on HN (and I semi-frequently email you so you know I do), but I disagree here. I don’t have to go back 12 years, I think YC funded its fair share of crypto scams like other VCs (of course what’s considered a crypto scam is different for everyone so no point in arguing), but I picked a very well known example that most old users probably know. I should probably mention I commented on a Launch HN thread this month that’s clearly illegal by design: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42886294.

I don’t have much against VCs investing in whatever makes money, to be honest, given how immoral the top dogs of this industry are to begin with, and I can’t claim I haven’t worked in an at least somewhat immoral company.

Edit: I only saw the second paragraph after a refresh. Sure, what I wrote about “back anything that makes money” was inaccurate so I should retract that, but I stand by the “no moral high ground” point.

Ok, I appreciate the reply and am sorry about editing while you were replying. (Sometimes I leave a tag in my comments while I'm still editing them, but I didn't do that this time.)

No problem!

YC is funding weapon manufacturers lol. Where are the ethics there?

People have different views about what is ethical. The HN community itself is divided on the ethics of things like weapons manufacturing (a.k.a. "defense companies") or crytpocurrency (mentioned elsewhere in this thread). Having different views about ethics is not the same thing as having no ethics.

This is a strange view.

Weapons development is at best helpful as it hopefully provides a deterrent to nefarious actors and at worst protects our interest as Americans if someone caused us to move beyond weapons as a "deterrent."

Pretending like national defense and development of weapons is a bad thing is hiding your head in sand and pretending that there's nobody that wants to hurt you.

> protects our interest as Americans

Whose? Not mine.

To me, yours is the strange viewpoint. We have nukes and a massive air force. That is the bulk of the deterrence. Use good statesmanship and diplomacy and that covers the rest. Anything else being developed is for political suppression or fueling regional wars and imperial bullshit.

And that's fine, but they're solely yours. 57% of US citizens support expanding the military.

Further you have no evidence to back up your claim that anything outside of the Air Force and nukes are all that are required to properly deter threats.

I would imagine that you also have no credible evidence that "Anything else being developed is for political suppression or fueling regional wars and imperial bullshit."

If you don't want to be involved in developing weapons then that's fine, nobody is forcing you to do so. To claim someone as anti-ethical because they chose to do so in a legal way may be your opinion but surely not a fact.

> We have nukes and a massive air force.

> YC is funding weapon manufacturers lol. Where are the ethics there?

Circular reasoning? The reason we have a massive and more importantly effective air force is because weapons development occurred. It would not take very long at all for China to surpass the US in terms of air effectiveness if the US stopped working on defense projects.

We have far more carriers though

There is no circular reasoning here. I said funding weapons development is unethical, guy responded saying we need weapon development for deterrence, I point out that we have had plenty of effective weapons and the new ones will not be used for peer wars but for gladio/terrorism or regional wars.

Further weapon development just fuels arms races and puts the world in a worse place. That is why I find it unethical to fund it.

Also, btw, China already surpassed us despite all our spending. They are defining what a 6th gen fighter is, after all.

dude, YC funded stablecoin scams, including one that lost everyone's money in Terra-Luna.

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