staunch

> Of course, I knew that cargo-culting...

You're cargo-culting the phrase "cargo-culting" here, i.e. using the term blindly without understanding it.

Using a programming language and related frameworks repeatedly, based on prior first-hand success, is not anywhere near the definition of cargo-culting.

> ...every time I start a new project, I question what language I should use for it...

Sounds like a waste of time unless the projects are significantly different from each other in terms of environment or requirements. The most productive and efficient choice is very frequently the language/frameworks your team know best. If that's not weighing extremely heavily in your decision-making process, you're doing it wrong.

> It's easy to project your hopes and dreams onto a person when you discount the meaning of their literal words and replace them with your own biases. I have no illusions that Musk's own conception of "free speech" is not just as qualified and diminished as what Twitter offers.

Right there you're doing what you accuse me of doing, just in the opposite direction.

I will admit that I am doing that to some extent, but I feel I have some reason to believe I'm more likely to be right.

One major reason is that everything he has said seems to align with what was a very common viewpoint just a few years ago, which is best summarized by the Voltaire quote:

"I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

That's the sentiment behind the First Amendment and what I believe Elon Musk most likely believes in.

> ...which makes him either delusional or a manipulative liar

There are many more explanations for his past behavior other than him being delusional or a liar. He could have nuanced views, have simply failed to live up to his own ideals in specific instances, have justifications you can't imagine, etc. In any case, it's almost certainly a false dichotomy.

Okay, you're right, at least in 2022. I believe it was relaxed in this regard (well placed political "donations" at work) because I'm fairly certain there used to be requirements to recruit U.S. workers first.

Today, it seems that only "willful violators" are legally required to recruit U.S. workers. So FAANG are merely violating the intent of the law, which is stated extremely clearly by the BOL:

"The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce"

There's nothing debatable or ambiguous about this direct statement of intent.

So these corporations have successfully bribed the right people to make it legal to violate the intent of the law. Which shouldn't surprise anyone but changes nothing about the ethics of the situation. It's still a massive abuse and entirely used for the purpose of increasing corporate profits.

YC asks primarily questions about the company applying (but also has founder profiles attached). This A16Z program only asks questions about an individual applying, and seems most interested in their corporate pedigree.

The "Meet our STARTers" carousel shows: Cofounder of Rappi, Former Global Head of Ecommerce at Rappi, Former Business Unit Head at Rappi, Former VP Product at Ethos, Former Chief Strategy Officer.

It appears to be something like an open invitation for a "Entrepreneurs in Residence" type program than a YC-style startup program.

A lot of VCs think hiring the executive team at a successful startup is a good recipe for success. As far as I know this hasn't proven to be true, although of course there are surely some examples.

Musk seems to have used the term "free speech absolutist" as a means of contrasting his First Amendment-style view of free speech with the severely qualified and diminished version currently available on platforms like Twitter.

So I agree that you're technically correct about what "absolutist" means, but I don't think it makes a difference in this case.

Anyone who is willing to run social media services as if they were bound by the First Amendment has my support. They may fail but at least they'd be trying to do the right thing, which is better than what we have today.

Which could be their first mistake. YC gets a lot of signal by requiring people to clearly answer so many questions. YC's questions are really good and it wouldn't have been a bad idea to wholesale copy them like some other's have. Not least of all because then founders could apply quickly using copy-paste.

I suspect someone could out-compete YC just by obtaining the YC application data and funding on that basis alone, eschewing the interview process entirely as it very possibly introduces more noise than signal. It'd take some guts though, kinda like starting YC in the first place took guts.

> What makes you think he is willing to sacrifice short term revenue?

Because we already know from his past behavior that he's willing to make long-term bets. And his statement that he doesn't view his interest in Twitter as a money-making venture.

> He sued Top Gear because of a somewhat negative car review of the original Tesla Roadster

That's a very biased way to frame it. IIRC Top Gear admits that they faked part of the review to make Tesla look bad, after Tesla proved that they had.

Believing in free speech doesn't mean you can't sue people that you believe have violated laws.

Or perhaps he simply made a mistake of judgement going after them legally and was wrong to do so. That's also not inconsistent with a belief in free speech.

Accepting applications from absolutely anyone "over the transom" is the biggest innovation behind YC's success. It's not a small thing, and something major VCs have historically refused to take seriously.

Out of dozens of fairly lame attempts by others, this may very well end up becoming the most serious competitor to YC so far.

It'll all come down to who they get to run it, how well they run it, and if they can consistently get the attention of founders. A16Z certainly has the brand and money to make a real go of it.

I wonder if they know what makes YC special and if they can offer the first head-to-head alternative.

Edit: After another quick look, seems like they may just be targeting executives at existing successful companies, in which case they're not likely to create a legit alternative to YC at all. Oh well.

This doesn't even seem like a legitimate security vulnerability at all, just a generic behavior bug. I'm guessing there are countless bugs like this in a common Linux userland.

I'd argue that the security vulnerability only exist in any program which passes untrusted user input to zgrep, which would be an obviously insecure thing to do.

Unless zgrep claims its safe against untrusted user input? But that would be weird and surprising.

No one claimed such a ridiculous thing?

The fact is that no one in history that has great things for humanity did so without having some degree of mixed motivations.

There's no inherent contradiction in wanting to make lots of money, become popular, become powerful, and do good things for other people all at the same time. In fact, it's a very common set of motivations among smart people.

You seem to have it backwards. He became a billionaire as a consequence of creating immensely valuable companies, not the other way around. And he risked the entirety of his previously earned fortune in order to so. These are facts that you can verify for yourself.

That he's not highly motivated by money or luxury, at least at this stage in his life, is obvious for anyone to see.

I agree sites had different policies and I'm (intentionally) simplifying the history.

> Neither one of them had any common carrier protections to protect or to lose by these policies.

That is precisely the reason sites had a light moderation touch for years. I'm not sure where you're getting that from? The consensus (from lawyers I was advised by personally) was that too much moderation would open you up to liability, and so most social sites just enforced their ToS without wading into full scale moderation.

> I can't name any prominent American politicians who really want social media to publish everything that's allowed under the First Amendment. Do you know of any?

I'm sure there's probably at least one, but I have no interest in what politicians say they want. They're so often the people the Supreme Court is protecting us from. To me the question is what principles should guide us, and my answer is the First Amendment.

> I don't think that he understands how broad the First Amendment actually is...

I think he does understand how broad the First Amendment is. I also think he's probably much more willing to sacrifice short-term (or even long-term) revenue than most people would expect. I don't claim to know for sure though. And he might change his mind in the future.

> how can you be both honest / sincere and a "mixed bag"?

Because people can be both honest and dishonest about different things or at different times. No one is perfectly honest and even the worst person is probably honest some of the time.

> ...considering his status as the world's richest man makes me think he should be held to a much higher standard

This makes sense in some ways and absolutely none at all in other ways. The richest man should be judged harshly for displaying greed, for example, but not for making mistakes that money doesn't help prevent.

1. He needs Tesla to be highly profitable to achieve his ambitious goals of renewable energy. It's expensive to build factories, etc.

2. He needs SpaceX to be highly profitable to achieve his ambitious goals of multi-planetary life. It's expensive to build rockets, etc.

3. He doesn't need Twitter to highly profitable to achieve his ambitious goals of making it a global free speech platform. It's relatively cheap to run an internet service.

This is an entirely consistent point of view.

I think 99% of people would agree it's reasonable to have a very few, very clear exceptions. And it's possible to do so without falling down a slippery slope. We know this for a fact because sites like Reddit did it for over a decade, as did many other sites. It used to be that they didn't moderate content themselves for fear of losing their "common carrier" liability protection.

And many of these exceptions might not even necessarily even be exceptions to US law or the First Amendment. Abuse of computer systems (spam), Federal obscenity laws, etc.

And there are many potential approaches to hiding (with transparency) from view legal content that no one (or almost no one) actually wants to see, without necessarily even deleting it.

One obvious approach would be to allow users to dictate what kinds of content they want to see. An example is subreddits, where users who want to see gore could be free to do so. Twitter could implement similar kinds of self-moderation features.

There are probably even more creative approaches that could solve some of the echo chamber effects, misinformation, etc without heavy-handed global moderation. It's a hard problem but it'd be really great to see someone try at least.

I say day-mon because it's less alarming for non-technical people and less ambiguous for technical people.

But, in accord with the robustness principle, I'm happy to accept any pronunciation.

I simply believe he's being honest and sincere in this case. That doesn't mean I condone anything and everything he's done or will do.

He admits himself that he's a "mixed bag". Which is of course true of all of us.

A limited edit window with a changelog seems reasonable to me but yeah I think immutability is elegant, if somewhat inconvenient.

1. Improve the product (make Tweets editable for a period of time and things like that).

2. Run the service as if it was bound by the First Amendment (i.e. only illegal content should be removed, basically how every social network ran prior to a few years ago.)

3. Open source the ranking/spam code on GitHub and accept PRs.

He explicitly stated that he does not view it as a money-making opportunity. His goals are altruistic.

It may be hard for some (cynical people) to believe that someone would do such a thing but I believe he's completely sincere. He's got the $40 billion to spare and thinks it's important to humanity's ability to progress. I agree.

The only reason Zuckerberg gave up on free speech for Facebook was that he was scared of losing revenue. Musk isn't worried about losing the money, which means he can act out of principles rather than fear.

Most embedded/embedded-like devices running Linux are running a modified version of the kernel with a heavily customized userspace. These are still Linux by any reasonable definition. I'll leave it at this.

> They don't have to try and fail to hire US workers in order to use the H-1B program.

The US Department of Labor disagrees with your assertion:

"The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States."

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b

There are requirements for companies to attempt to hire US workers first. None of them actually make a good faith effort to do this, they just pretend to. And that's why it's fraud.

Nice! Looks like a good start. As some have noted in this thread there are some issues but nothing you can't fix.

I'd recommend running `go vet -a` and `golangci-lint` on it to see some of the current issues:

  $ go vet -a

  $ docker run --rm "--volume=$(pwd):/app" --workdir=/app golangci/golangci-lint:latest golangci-lint run

That's how it works at most tech companies that run this scam, which is most tech companies. The point is that FAANG companies should have a tiny number of H-1Bs if they were following the law. Instead, they have the most H-1Bs.

And instead of getting in legal trouble for fraud like this company, they're protected by their size, legal teams, lobbyists, and money. It's only H-1B fraud if you're doing it at a relatively small scale.

Sure the specific titles might be slightly unique to any given company. "Software Engineer for iCloud" or whatever. But these really are generalist software engineering roles.

There are hundreds of thousands of US workers that can fill these generalist roles. It's not as if Apple is trying to hire US workers, failing, and then resorting to the H-1B program as they're supposed to. They use the H-1B to increase their labor pool and lower costs. That's the scam.

I still think Triplebyte gave me the best interview I've experienced, and I've done ~100 over the years at all kinds of companies. I've also interviewed people ~1000 times myself.

It was even more impressive because the person doing the interview wasn't super competent and yet they still managed to do a fairly comprehensive technical evaluation in ~2 hours.

One section was a debugging session where you had to get tests to pass. The code and tests were quite decent, which made it quite easy to show off. Every company should do this.

Too bad the Triplebyte promise (not having to do phone screens) was a joke and their business model wasn't good, but that part of Triplebyte had major promise.

The whole program was sold under false pretenses and has been abused hundreds of thousands of times by virtually every large company in the US. It was sold as a program to import foreign labor in specialized roles that couldn't be filled by US workers. In reality, it's a cost-cutting measure designed to suppress US wages in order to increase corporate profits.

The program was bought and paid for by US corporations for their direct benefit.

Why would Apple, with all their money, need to hire H-1B generalist Software Engineers and Project Managers when they can out-compete literally any other company on earth? https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/apple-inc-6g06vq412q/lca/...

The cover story these tech executives and investors use is that they like the H-1B out of a pure love for immigrants and the melting pot it creates. The reality is that they love the competitive advantage it gives them in hiring. They don't sincerely care if it's in America's best interest or in the interest of the countries being brain-drained. Some of them will admit this in private.

(Disclaimer: I have nothing but respect, understanding, and zero judgement for employees working in the US on H-1B visas. I have a dozen good friends on H-1Bs. They're in no way to blame for these abuses. They're just doing what's in the best interest of themselves and their families.)

> The kernel is deployed in hundreds of millions of devices...

There are billions of Android phones alone. Not to mention the huge numbers of servers, IoT devices, embedded computers, and all the SBCs in my closet.

Early adopters have early adopter problems. Are you genuinely surprised Starlink doesn't support something they didn't claim to support and that most users don't even need? Complaining about "beta" labels, which everyone knows are meaningless?

FYI: I unsubscribed because of this video (previous to it showing up on HN). It's obviously disingenuous clickbait. Look at the title alone. And it even goes into a pointless discussion about Elon Musk that has nothing to do with Starlink itself. Lots of good technical YouTubers avoid this crap. I was surprised you felt the need to engage in it. I'm not mad, just disappointed :-)