paul

I love reading these old articles. Here's another fun one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719975

A good summary of why I dislike brutalism so much:

We were experiencing one of the defining characteristics of Brutalism. The atmosphere of totalitarianism. The brutalists were masters of putting you in your place, which was in submission to the state (and the architect). The huge, blocky forms immediately create a dichotomy of scale. You are minuscule next to these things. The walls are flat. No decoration. Even the texture is on a small scale (no feature larger than a brick) and uniform. This lack of features reinforces the dichotomy. There is nothing human size in this place. The very structure of the building screams out "You are small. We who built this, we are large. You are small! We are in control!"

How is quoting the Palm CEO dishonest? The fact that he was so wrong about Apple is kind of the point.

I love the quote from Ed Colligan:

Messrs. Zetsche and Lutz might want to meditate on Palm CEO Ed Colligan’s infelicitous words mocking the newborn iPhone in 2006 [emphasis mine]: “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

This also is good advice for anyone applying to YC. I'm not going to read your 10,000 word manifesto -- just tell me what it is you are building! :)

We've actually found that the ability to provide clear and concise answers strongly correlates with success, so this is a major factor when evaluating founders.

I'm also reminded of my favorite C. A. R. Hoare quote: "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult."

The same thing applies to business. Long, complex pitches are a sign of muddy thinking and hidden icebergs.

Many of our most successful companies entered YC with little more than an idea. Slope is more important than Y intercept - https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-profound-life-lesson...

The point being that if we lack the political ability to simply not kill an innocent person, then more complex things such as updated gun regulations are likely impossible.

A bit of background on the Glossip case (from PG): http://pg.posthaven.com/the-case-of-richard-glossip

If we can't stop the state from killing a person known to most likely be innocent, it makes me wonder what hope we have with genuinely complex issues such as gun violence.

This is ridiculous. Google should delist Amazon.com to "avoid customer confusion" when searchers land there and can't buy a chromecast ;)

Their explanation is just insulting.

http://fellowship.ycombinator.com/ :)

But how could a company that fired the great Michael O. Church possibly be anything other than pure evil?

More seriously, I would never want to work at a place that is structurally unable to fire toxic people, which is one of the big downsides of unionization from the "worker" perspective.

Indeed. In fact, I think burnout is often one of the causes of failure, either directly, or indirectly through the bad decision making it causes. Building a successful company takes many years. It's a marathon, not a sprint.

If you know great scientists solving important problems, please encourage them to apply :)

That said, great research projects do not necessarily translate into great startups. People doing fundamental research with no clear path to market likely aren't a great fit for the program at this time.

What is your evidence for the claim that, "YC has not shown a good understanding of the life sciences"? (and what evidence will change your mind?)

Our biotech investments are currently all too young for something huge like an IPO, but many are continuing to grow and prosper. For example, Ginkgo just raised a $45M Series B: http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/23/ginkgo-bioworks-takes-on-zy...

"Almost all women—and therefore men—use a form of birth control at some point in their lives, yet contraception is so politically and legally radioactive that legislators and pharmaceutical companies avoid funding it. So it’s no coincidence that the money behind the Colorado initiative, the St. Louis study, and Liletta all came from an unnamed philanthropic source—they all were from the same discreet foundation. Very few people will discuss The Anonymous Donor on the record, but tax filings, medical journal disclosures, and an archived interview with a foundation official show the funds come from Warren Buffett, the chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway, and his family."

I'm glad we don't have to rely on democracy for progress :)

If you don't understand the difference between the original Microsoft tablet and the iPad, then it's not surprising that success appears to be all luck.

Details matter.

I doubt it's possible. Keep in mind that nobody invested in AirBnb until YC, and as I understand it, they were mainly accepted based on the strength of the team.

They said "no" because they didn't want to waste time meeting with such an obviously unpromising startup :)

I was one of the angels who simply didn't respond, in part because I was busy with my own startup, but also because the idea of a marketplace for renting out air mattresses just didn't sound very appealing...

It's mainly an easy/polite way of saying no. If they knew it was going to be huge, all would have invested.

When choosing between immediate profitability or faster growth, the smart decision is typically faster growth, as that leads to much greater profits down the road.

Remember when the HN crowd thought that Facebook could never be profitable because they were making the same tradeoff?

I remember that an engineer we tried to hire at Google in 2000 turned down the offer for the same reason -- he thought that all of the interesting problems were probably already solved :)

The reality is typically the opposite. Most startups are technically straightforward to start with and only get really advanced with scale.

What is the correct way to value art?

Toxic cynicism.

Change happens one step at a time. Tell us about the amazing things you are doing.

Early employees of Google and Facebook made pretty good money.

They have no concept of how complex ranking is. There are millions of factors being fed into massive machine learning systems that try to predict which results users want (which is different from which they are most likely to click). It's like asking to see the algorithm for a cat.

They should go back to working on their own "Google killer" search engine :) http://www.infoworld.com/article/2672709/operating-systems/e...

"Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so."

Apparently people in tech have always been clueless about the real world :)

Yeah, I'm not convinced that's a good idea, but I think they are at least putting some extra limits in place so that they won't gamble their whole 401k away.

On the other hand, the .com bubble was driven in large part by the ability of VCs to flip junk onto naive retail investors.

The fact that venture investors now need to wait many years for an exit (and the startups can really only access institutional capital during that time) helps keep things a lot more grounded in my opinion (though I'm sure many will disagree).

That rec.photos thread is great. I love reading old predictions. For some reason many of them got hung up on the idea that there would be crazy compression schemes that eliminate all the creative parts of photos.

> O.K. Chemical films can presently store more information than any reasonable digital image-getter can. However, digital may be possible if one has a wristwatch-sized supercomputer doing various shades of image/abberation recognition capable of replacing the actual information with some sort of 'tokenized' equivalent of the original image. Fine. Such data compression/ reduction techniques may alow you to have your little computer-camera.

> But wat if you want those abberations, or if you want that blur for that action shot, or if you want that sun/iris flare for a neato scenic shot, or if you want to use some weird lighting effects? Then you are s.o.l. By having the camera identify/correct (tokenize) and remove all of the possible artifacts of using a real-world camera (which is the only way that such a camera is possible), you will also eliminate almost all of your creative power.