BrandonM

Indeed, we’ve come full (half?) circle. IIRC, it was renamed to Hacker News in part to discourage meta-discussion on intellectually stimulating posts, questioning why the front page had so many posts that weren’t about startups. Now we are instead discussing startup post fatigue.

Your third and even fourth paragraphs are pretty interesting. It's a shame that they come after the speculation and jabs in the first two paragraphs.

I don't think anyone is claiming that these companies are acting out of the goodness of their hearts. These companies all have missions, though. Companies are made up of people. Some of those people believe in those missions and choose to work for those companies for those reasons. A larger group of people are happy to exchange time for money, provided that their company does not stray too far from its mission.

It's not a black-and-white choice between "goodness of their hearts" or ruthlessly exploitative capitalism. There's a huge gray area in between, and that's where social and legal guardrails (for better or for worse) have to help ensure that companies act in a socially responsible way.

I don't have experience with Facebook specifically, but I have worked with Google's security team. From what I've seen, Google truly cares about securing their users' data in a way that exceeds the standards of other large enterprises that I've worked with. I get a ton of spam emails and phone calls every day, and never once have I suspected that it was because Google or Facebook violated my privacy.

I'd rather focus my ire on companies like Equifax or popular browser plugin acquirers or the debt collection system or even mall sweepstakes. All of these entities egregiously violate privacy by blatantly sharing user information, auctioning it off to the highest bidder, or recklessly failing to secure it.

I think that's taking things a bit too far. Of course, the ultimate goal of every for-profit corporation is to make a profit. But along the way, most of them are providing value to society.

So much of the Internet as we know it is built atop AWS. Many people are able to shelter in place with minimal impact largely because of the groundwork laid by Amazon, during more than a decade of not being profitable. That includes ordering equipment to work from home, ordering home goods to avoid going out, running the compute infrastructure that powers teleconferencing tools like Zoom, providing entertainment options through Prime Video, etc. etc.

How many families are staying in touch through Facebook Messenger, video chats, and just plain old photos? How many grandparents feel less alone because they can see their family members and a wealth of photos every day? How many old friends reconnect because Facebook exists?

Google makes the world better in so many ways that I can't even pretend to address it exhaustively. I personally have been able to experience remote places thanks to Flights, Translate, and Maps. I use Search hundreds of times a week... the world's knowledge is more accessible than ever before thanks in part to Google's efforts to organize it.

I think it's totally right to call out companies where their behavior is poor. I think we need to demand—both through social pressure and through laws—that companies respect privacy, treat workers well, and minimally impact the environment. But I think it's taking it a step too far to claim that the world is worse off for the effort of FAANG employees. Even those working on ads... if there's no ad revenue, none of those other benefits exist.

The article addresses that point.

Overcast does roughly that for podcasts and it works great.

You don’t have to be out of money to raise funds, so I question that you have to spend the money. You can raise with years of runway, provided that you have a compelling story about how you’re going to put the additional funds to use creating value.

If there’s anyone in finance who’s less focused on quarterly numbers than VCs, I’d love to hear about them. One of the bigger criticisms of VCs is that they encourage a high risk, high burn, swing-for-the-fences strategy, even in businesses where it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

So while I agree with your sentiments overall, I wouldn’t say that Andreesen is especially reflective of the attitudes that you’re rightly calling out.

Disclaimer: my company received funding from a16z. It’s worth mentioning that, if anything, they have been part of a board encouraging our CEO/founder to think about producing more grand, long-term value, and our CEO already has a strong bias toward long-term thinking.

Bringing back mammoths based only on DNA seems to me to be akin to bringing back a New Yorker based only on DNA, thousands of years after NYC no longer exists. Even with perfect DNA, I think we underestimate the role that social structure and ecological momentum play in even the simplest of creatures. I think humans are the rule and not the exception when it comes to learning after birth.

And that's not even getting into the complex interaction between a mother and her unborn child, including cytoplasm, mitochondrial RNA, etc. It's not like an organism springs whole cloth from DNA alone.

I found the video to be worthwhile overall. For anyone looking for the Kayfabe-specific part, though, it starts at about 23:40: https://youtu.be/bsgWSPWX-6A?t=1420

To me, the main point of marriage in the present day is to have all your friends and family sign off on your mutual declaration, “This person is now the most important person in my life.” Your parents, best friends, siblings no longer have any standing to complain when you favor your spouse over themselves. More even than the legal differences, I think that’s really the purpose of marriage, and the ceremony itself is a reflection of that reality.

In a given time period, let's say a year, you may personally work harder or smarter than in some other year. Do you believe that you should be compensated the same regardless of how hard or smart you work in a given year?

If you're a self-employed craftworker who produces hammers, should your income be the same each year, without regard for the quality or quantity of hammers you produced that year, and without considering the world's need for the sorts of hammers you produced? How would you go about achieving that outcome?

...if everyone is bringing their whole self to work. Not saying I agree or disagree, but I think that's important context that shouldn't be left out.

Many comments mention the merits of Lisp. That's all well and good, but I think they miss the largely historical reasons that Lisp is so popular here:

Paul Graham wrote Ansi Common Lisp and On Lisp. Both are great books and were used in university courses in the 90s and 00s.

Paul Graham cofounded a startup called Viaweb, implemented in Lisp, that sold to Yahoo.

Paul Graham wrote a bunch of essays about tech startups at paulgraham.com. These essays frequently extolled the virtues of Lisp and other high level languages, citing it as a major factor in Viaweb's success.

Paul Graham, in his essays, strongly encouraged skilled, motivated programmers to build startups instead of working at large companies.

Paul Graham created Y Combinator, betting his time and money on the growth of startups that he predicted and promoted, popularizing startup incubators in the process.

Paul Graham created Startup News when Reddit started going mainstream, predating the existence of subreddits. Startup News provided a real-world application to inform the design and development of Arc, a Lisp language.

Paul Graham renamed Startup News to Hacker News. And here we are.

===

As someone who has been here for 12½ years, I view the Lisp sentiment as echoes of HN's past, inextricably linked to the Lisp enthusiasm of HN's founder: Paul Graham.

While I agree with many comments here that Lisp is a language worth learning, I think they miss the mark as to why Lisp continues to come up on Hacker News. The majority of the original Startup News members were Lisp enthusiasts.

Are you implying that SF is a lot less racist than America is on average, or that there are places in America that are a lot more racist than SF?

To your point, I thought Columbus, OH, would be a good candidate for a large city limits population. According to Wikipedia, "Columbus adopted a policy of linking sewer and water hookups to annexation to the city." This means that Columbus proper includes low density areas which would typically be suburbs outside the city limits of most cities.

Even still, the city population was about 880K in 2018, with a metro area of 2.4MM. So even in a US city with a somewhat aggressive annexation policy, still only about ⅓ of the population lives within the city limits. And Columbus has no passenger trains, anyway, neither intracity nor intercity.

There are 5 different Greyhound buses next Monday from Chicago to Dayton (called "Dayton Trotwood"), ranging from $36 to $90, all taking about 7 hours. There are some passenger trains in the US—I've actually gone overnight from Rochester, NY, to Milwaukee, WI, via train when a flight was canceled—but bus travel is just how you get to medium-sized US cities, for better or for worse. 188 US cities are larger than Dayton, and it's only the 6th largest city in Ohio.

Of course, it's not as nice as having regular, smooth, fast trains. But the situation is not as dire as people make it out to be.

That would be hugely ironic considering https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1. Then again, Shuttleworth spoke pretty positively about Microsoft when he closed the bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1/comments/1834

@track_me_now: you seem to be shadowbanned even though your comments seem reasonable to me. You might want to message the mods.

I wonder whether a human calculating a math problems is not unlike a computer simulating another computer. Observing the hand-eye coordination of top athletes, it's pretty clear that our brains do some amazing computations, and fast. In fractions of a second, we can turn a pattern of photons into concepts, discover relationships between those concepts, track changes over time, and project all of that out some distance into the future. In other words, aren't most of our computational capabilities buried in the unconscious mind?

Is the human species every really comfortable?

That basically is what they have (see bottom):

https://www.uber.com/en-AU/blog/how-ratings-work/

I think it's absurd that they try to dictate user behavior based on broad averages, as opposed to normalizing each individual's ratings to fit a standard distribution, then averaging those normalized ratings.

I live a couple blocks away from Van Ness. Here's the project: https://www.sfcta.org/projects/van-ness-improvement-project. They're moving to dedicated bus lanes, allowing the buses to load and unload safely without blocking other traffic. As with all significant projects, they've lumped in a bunch of other maintenance that has been put off for too long, like upgrading utility lines.

Construction generally blocks a lane of traffic on one side of the street, rerouting the other lanes and pedestrians, for several weeks at a time. Then they move on to the next block or to the other side of the street.

Just from a layman's perspective, it seems incredibly tricky to try to construct a housing development with that going on around it. The "bus line" construction has already put additional pressure on traffic up and down Van Ness, and it's got to be very tricky to get permits for parking spots, dumpsters, and other necessities with everything else that's going on. And anyway the city could probably just come through and close everything down for weeks or months so that they can perform another stage of "bus line" construction.

(I'm putting "bus line" in quotes because they haven't even really started on that part. This whole project is a pretty incredibly yak shave that's taking 5 years and hundreds of millions of dollars for a bus line.)

There really are cities that pay for bus tickets to ship homeless out, generally under the banner of a name like "homeward bound." The reality, though, is that SF is a net exporter under those programs: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

Not what I was saying at all. The Starbucks comment is questioning the value proposition of a service that a lot of companies clearly value, providing an alternative that isn't realistic for more than a single person. It's a typical HN middlebrow dismissal.

My classic "FTP" comment was some feedback on a Show HN post, that I was concerned that the technology may be easy to reproduce and thus had a low barrier to being reimplemented by OS vendors or competitors. Drew addressed all my points and I acknowledged the value of the service. Completely different from this thread.

An HN submission 4 months ago¹ reported that WeWork forms a separate subsidiary for each lease agreement. So at least when they're not the owner, they've conveniently arranged to not be on the hook if a particular location or region doesn't work out.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18714962

Yeah, that's not what that post actually said, nor is it true to the context of the discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

The Overcast podcasting app seems to be built by a single person: https://overcast.fm/skeptics_faq

It’s funny that you assume the narrator is a male while I assumed female. I’m not sure whether that would change anything about how to address difficult situations with a male roommate.

I stuck with Firefox through Chrome's peak due to Tree-Style Tab. It makes all the difference in terms of tab anxiety, IMO.