@sidd_sehgal This tweet was the result of a conversation some YC partners have been having about a good startup YC rejected some years ago and why it happened, but I can't name names.

This is related to a problem that a lot of "literary" mid-20th century novels suffer from: the writer wants to show that he's cleverer than any of his characters. One reason Sherlock Holmes stories are so good is that Doyle doesn't do this.

The solution is to show how clever you are in the opposite way: by thinking of cool things the startup could do instead of ways it could fail. Though of course to use this strategy you have be able to think of them.

One of the most dangerous temptations investors face is the temptation to find problems with startups in order to show how clever they are. This can make them reject companies that end up doing well.

@MeirL 16% annual growth rate is good for a company that size.

@santygegen 20% would be more than sufficient.

@nearyd Obviously everyone is. The Great Man theory doesn't assume a Neolithic hunter could sit down and come up with relativity. Why are you wasting our time with responses like this?

@haugejostein Is his essay so problematic that it's mistaken? In that case, you can just say it's mistaken. And if it isn't mistaken, it can't be very problematic.

I bet mathematicians and scientists are more partial to the Great Man theory of history than the general population. However things work in the rest of the world, it's certainly true in theirs.

@octal In a way, we did. We gave persistent fraudsters special cookies and used to take an extra long time to respond to each http request. Several minutes sometimes, IIRC.


@levie I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but you can tell how old the people running Apple are from the fact that they're making heart monitors and hearing aids.

If you want the "Make something people want." poster designed by Rudy Adler and Jay Lorenzini, here's where to get it:

https://t.co/HUJhHvIB7S

@mattob @Polymarket What's 52 - 46 Matt?

@bennyjohnson Does @CommunityNotes do arithmetic errors?

Whoah, this is not one of those things happening in a couple decades. This is happening in 4 years.

@bubbleboi I don't. It's true I was a philosophy major for most of college, but I dropped it at the last moment because I was worried CS grad programs would hold it against me.

@LBFlyawayhome We have one of these in our kitchen.

"It was alarming how fast things devolved. It was like Twitter."

— Jessica on the Lord of the Flies movie

@Scholars_Stage "If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking."

— Leslie Lamport

@DanMulroyjr Depends at what. The best athletes have coaches, but the best mathematicians don't.


@Damien_Steele_ @timruss2 It's only misleading to the uneducated, which is why it works as a filter for detecting them.

@migueldeicaza I think the hasbara accounts are spread thinner because so many more people are talking about this now.

@heysamir_ I wish the US were merely uninvolved.

@cremieuxrecueil I was just talking to a very knowledgeable friend about this, and his answer was: yes at the beginning, and no toward the end.

@aknox92 I am constantly being lied to. Hasbara bots fill the replies of any post about Gaza that gets over a certain number of likes.

Jessica: Do think one day people will look back and ask how America could let this this happen?

Me: A lot of people are already asking that today. https://t.co/ibUvZ4Jyex

@Austen I often add "answer in one sentence."

@typesfast Yes, but 1300 mph, not 500.

@hdemott3 It is a bit puzzling. But "he knows what he did" doesn't mean he knows what's in the files. My guess is there's stuff in there that he thought was safely buried.

@vonderleyen So why not take action?


@AnechoicMedia_ Bezos's example is not merely a "plausible story." Before he started Amazon, he was the youngest person to have been made a VP at D. E. Shaw to that date. It would be implausible to claim he *didn't* already have access to all the funding he needed via his own connections.

@DavideRoznowicz @Austen Do you understand what it means to be a VP at D. E. Shaw? He already had something he could fall back on.

@JillFilipovic Case in point: GLAAD's blacklist, or as they call it, list of "Accountability Profiles".

https://t.co/4rG52XylKF

@Mayhem4Markets The emerald mine thing everyone knows is an urban legend. So basically all you have here is that Warren Buffet's father was a congressman.

@Mayhem4Markets Microsoft was 6 years old and established as of the main suppliers of software to microcomputer manufacturers by the time IBM chose DOS for the PC. IBM didn't first learn about them from Bill Gates's mom.

@Mayhem4Markets Bezos could easily have raised seed funding elsewhere. He was a VP at D. E. Shaw before he started Amazon. He took money from his parents as a favor to them rather than the other way around.

@Austen Plus Bezos could easily have raised that money elsewhere. He was a VP at D. E. Shaw before he started Amazon. He took the money from his parents as a favor to them rather than the other way around.

@vaibhavThevedi I'd guess roughly 6 to 8 hours.

Here's the other half of the room, and over on the right some of my patient subjects. https://t.co/bpkofrRBMv

I spent much of 2014 painting. To get my hand and eye back into shape, I began by painting a lot of monochrome oil sketches on cardboard. I'd paint 6 to 8 of these a day. https://t.co/BF3kum4WeX


Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
December 2014
American technology companies want the government to make immigration
easier because they say they can't find enough programmers in the
US.  Anti-immigration people say that instead of letting foreigners
take these jobs, we should train more Americans to be programmers.
Who's right?
The technology companies are right. What the anti-immigration people
don't understand is that there is a huge variation in ability between
competent programmers and exceptional ones, and while you can train
people to be competent, you can't train them to be exceptional.
Exceptional programmers have an aptitude for and
interest in
programming that is not merely the product of training.
[
1
]
The US has less than 5% of the world's population.  Which means if
the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly
distributed, 95% of great programmers are born outside the US.
The anti-immigration people have to invent some explanation to
account for all the effort technology companies have expended trying
to make immigration easier.  So they claim it's because they want
to drive down salaries.  But if you talk to startups, you find
practically every one over a certain size has gone through legal
contortions to get programmers into the US, where they then
paid them the same as they'd have paid an American.  Why would they
go to extra trouble to get programmers for the same price?  The
only explanation is that they're telling the truth: there are just
not enough great programmers to go around.
[
2
]
I asked the CEO of a startup with about 70 programmers how many
more he'd hire if he could get all the great programmers he wanted.
He said "We'd hire 30 tomorrow morning."  And this is one of the
hot startups that always win recruiting battles. It's the same all
over Silicon Valley.  Startups are that constrained for talent.
It would be great if more Americans were trained as programmers,
but no amount of training can flip a ratio as overwhelming as 95
to 5. Especially since programmers are being trained in other
countries too.  Barring some cataclysm, it will always be true that
most great programmers are born outside the US.  It will always be
true that most people who are great at anything are born outside
the US.
[
3
]
Exceptional performance implies immigration.  A country with only
a few percent of the world's population will be exceptional in some
field only if there are a lot of immigrants working in it.
But this whole discussion has taken something for granted: that if
we let more great programmers into the US, they'll want to come.
That's true now, and we don't realize how lucky we are that it is.
If we want to keep this option open, the best way to do it is to
take advantage of it: the more of the world's great programmers are
here, the more the rest will want to come here.
And if we don't, the US could be seriously fucked. I realize that's
strong language, but the people dithering about this don't seem to
realize the power of the forces at work here.  Technology gives the
best programmers huge leverage.  The world market in programmers
seems to be becoming dramatically more liquid.  And since good
people like good colleagues, that means the best programmers could
collect in just a few hubs.  Maybe mostly in one hub.
What if most of the great programmers collected in one hub, and it
wasn't here?  That scenario may seem unlikely now, but it won't be
if things change as much in the next 50 years as they did in the
last 50.
We have the potential to ensure that the US remains a technology
superpower just by letting in a few thousand great programmers a
year.  What a colossal mistake it would be to let that opportunity
slip.  It could easily be the defining mistake this generation of
American politicians later become famous for.  And unlike other
potential mistakes on that scale, it costs nothing to fix.
So please, get on with it.
Notes
[
1
]
How much better is a great programmer than an ordinary one?
So much better that you can't even measure the difference directly.
A great programmer doesn't merely do the same work faster.  A great
programmer will invent things an ordinary programmer would never
even think of.  This doesn't mean a great programmer is infinitely
more valuable, because any invention has a finite market value.
But it's easy to imagine cases where a great programmer might invent
things worth 100x or even 1000x an average programmer's salary.
[
2
]
There are a handful of consulting firms that rent out big
pools of foreign programmers they bring in on H1-B visas.  By all
means crack down on these.  It should be easy to write legislation
that distinguishes them, because they are so different from technology
companies.  But it is dishonest of the anti-immigration people to
claim that companies like Google and Facebook are driven by the
same motives.  An influx of inexpensive but mediocre programmers
is the last thing they'd want; it would destroy them.
[
3
]
Though this essay talks about programmers, the group of people
we need to import is broader, ranging from designers to programmers
to electrical engineers.  The best one could do as a general term
might be "digital talent." It seemed better to make the argument a
little too narrow than to confuse everyone with a neologism.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Jessica
Livingston, Geoff Ralston, Fred Wilson, and Qasar Younis for reading
drafts of this.
Spanish Translation


Live TV events now replace booing with cheering in real time? That seems a step too far.

@ilyasu As opposed to what? An expression that returns a value?

@CookinJobGates I would cut someone a break for the occasional blooper of course, but this was a very thoroughly explained example of not understanding middle school math.

@daltonc Bit decay!

How many other professors would out themselves the way Huberman did if they made as many videos?

@RuudPriem That's Killens, not Killers...

@pitdesi Are there any videos of him playing?

@NateSilver538 Part of the reason they do this is that they hope it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy: that if they act as if everyone believes x, then more people will believe x. It probably even works to some extent — on credulous undergrads for example.

@rickasaurus I can confirm that this remains true for n > 3.

@Chris_arnade What's his thesis?


A Way to Detect Bias
October 2015
This will come as a surprise to a lot of people, but in some cases
it's possible to detect bias in a selection process without knowing
anything about the applicant pool.  Which is exciting because among
other things it means third parties can use this technique to detect
bias whether those doing the selecting want them to or not.
You can use this technique whenever (a) you have at least
a random sample of the applicants that were selected, (b) their
subsequent performance is measured, and (c) the groups of
applicants you're comparing have roughly equal distribution of ability.
How does it work?  Think about what it means to be biased.  What
it means for a selection process to be biased against applicants
of type x is that it's harder for them to make it through.  Which
means applicants of type x have to be better to get selected than
applicants not of type x.
[
1
]
Which means applicants of type x
who do make it through the selection process will outperform other
successful applicants.  And if the performance of all the successful
applicants is measured, you'll know if they do.
Of course, the test you use to measure performance must be a valid
one.  And in particular it must not be invalidated by the bias you're
trying to measure.
But there are some domains where performance can be measured, and
in those detecting bias is straightforward. Want to know if the
selection process was biased against some type of applicant?  Check
whether they outperform the others.  This is not just a heuristic
for detecting bias.  It's what bias means.
For example, many suspect that venture capital firms are biased
against female founders. This would be easy to detect: among their
portfolio companies, do startups with female founders outperform
those without?  A couple months ago, one VC firm (almost certainly
unintentionally) published a study showing bias of this type. First
Round Capital found that among its portfolio companies, startups
with female founders
outperformed
those without by 63%.
[
2
]
The reason I began by saying that this technique would come as a
surprise to many people is that we so rarely see analyses of this
type.  I'm sure it will come as a surprise to First Round that they
performed one. I doubt anyone there realized that by limiting their
sample to their own portfolio, they were producing a study not of
startup trends but of their own biases when selecting companies.
I predict we'll see this technique used more in the future.  The
information needed to conduct such studies is increasingly available.
Data about who applies for things is usually closely guarded by the
organizations selecting them, but nowadays data about who gets
selected is often publicly available to anyone who takes the trouble
to aggregate it.
Notes
[
1
]
This technique wouldn't work if the selection process looked
for different things from different types of applicants—for
example, if an employer hired men based on their ability but women
based on their appearance.
[
2
]
As Paul Buchheit points out, First Round excluded their most
successful investment, Uber, from the study.  And while it
makes sense to exclude outliers from some types of studies,
studies of returns from startup investing, which is all about
hitting outliers, are not one of them.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading
drafts of this.
Arabic Translation
Swedish Translation


@rksharmanyc I am too.

@providenceluvr No, it's that the sun sets before 4:00 in the winter.

@market_news0 @GarettJones Investment firms usually distribute shares in successful companies to their partners and LPs. It's up to them what they do with them.

@market_news0 @GarettJones Not YC directly, but people who were partners during that batch do, if they haven't sold it. It is a large fraction of my net worth.

@GarettJones Not Coinbase's. https://t.co/q87CevXWQV

@FIav0r @RobertIger You only get Brian Armstrong moments when you have Brian Armstrongs.

@winterrose They're pretty rare at this age. I worry about my older son though.

@mert No, he's average-sized. The other player was just huge.

@joshuamcclure Ok, I'll delete this.

@samdaceo A long time I hope.


The Fatal Pinch
December 2014
Many startups go through a point a few months before they die where
although they have a significant amount of money in the bank, they're
also losing a lot each month, and revenue growth is either nonexistent
or mediocre.  The company has, say, 6 months of runway.  Or to put
it more brutally, 6 months before they're out of business.  They
expect to avoid that by raising more from investors.
[
1
]
That last sentence is the fatal one.
There may be nothing founders are so prone to delude themselves
about as how interested investors will be in giving them additional
funding.  It's hard to convince investors the first time too, but
founders expect that.  What bites them the second time is a confluence
of three forces:
The company is spending more now than it did the first time
  it raised money.
Investors have much higher standards for companies that have
  already raised money.
The company is now starting to read as a failure. The first
  time it raised money, it was neither a success nor a failure; it
  was too early to ask. Now it's possible to ask that question, and
  the default answer is failure, because at this point that is the
  default outcome.
I'm going to call the situation I described in the first paragraph "the fatal pinch." I try to resist
coining phrases, but making up a name for this situation may snap
founders into realizing when they're in it.
One of the things that makes the fatal pinch so dangerous is
that it's self-reinforcing.  Founders overestimate their chances
of raising more money, and so are slack about reaching
profitability, which further decreases their chances of raising
money.
Now that you know about the fatal pinch, how do you avoid it?  Y Combinator tells
founders who raise money to act as if it's the last they'll ever
get.  Because the self-reinforcing nature of this situation works
the other way too: the less you need further investment, the easier
it is to get.
What do you do if you're already in the fatal pinch?  The
first step is to re-evaluate the probability of raising more money.
I will now, by an amazing feat of clairvoyance, do this for you:
the probability is zero.
[
2
]
Three options remain: you can shut down the company, you can increase
how much you make, and you can decrease how much you spend.
You should shut down the company if you're certain it will
fail no matter what you do.  Then at least you can give back the
money you have left, and save yourself however many months you would
have spent riding it down.
Companies rarely
have
to fail though.  What I'm really doing
here is giving you the option of admitting you've already given up.
If you don't want to shut down the company, that leaves increasing
revenues and decreasing expenses.  In most startups, expenses =
people, and decreasing expenses = firing people.
[
3
]
Deciding to
fire people is usually hard, but there's one case in which it
shouldn't be: when there are people you already know you should
fire but you're in denial about it.  If so, now's the time.
If that makes you profitable, or will enable you to make it to
profitability on the money you have left, you've avoided the immediate
danger.
Otherwise you have three options: you either have to fire good
people, get some or all of the employees to take less salary for a
while, or increase revenues.
Getting people to take less salary is a weak solution that will
only work when the problem isn't too bad.  If your current trajectory
won't quite get you to profitability but you can get over the threshold
by cutting salaries a little,
you might be able to make the case to everyone for doing it.
Otherwise you're probably just postponing the problem, and that
will be obvious to the people whose salaries you're proposing to
cut.
[
4
]
Which leaves two options, firing good people and making more money.
While trying to balance them, keep in mind the eventual goal: to be
a successful product company in the sense of having a single thing
lots of people use.
You should lean more toward firing people if the source of your
trouble is overhiring. If you went out and hired 15 people before
you even knew what you were building, you've created a broken
company.  You need to figure out what you're building, and it will
probably be easier to do that with a handful of people than 15.
Plus those 15 people might not even be the ones you need for whatever
you end up building.  So the solution may be to shrink and then
figure out what direction to grow in.  After all, you're not doing
those 15 people any favors if you fly the company into ground with
them aboard.  They'll all lose their jobs eventually, along with
all the time they expended on this doomed company.
Whereas if you only have a handful of people, it may be better to
focus on trying to make more money.  It may seem facile to suggest
a startup make more money, as if that could be done for the asking.
Usually a startup is already trying as hard as it can to sell
whatever it sells.  What I'm suggesting here is not so much to try
harder to make money but to try to make money in a different way.
For example, if you have only one person selling while the rest are
writing code, consider having everyone work on selling.  What good
will more code do you when you're out of business?
If you have to write code to close a certain deal, go ahead;
that follows from everyone working on selling.  But only work on
whatever will get you the most revenue the soonest.
Another way to make money differently is to sell different things,
and in particular to do more consultingish work.  I say consultingish
because there is a long slippery slope from making products to pure
consulting, and you don't have to go far down it before you start
to offer something really attractive to customers. Although your
product may not be very appealing yet, if you're a startup your
programmers will often be way better than the ones your customers
have.  Or you may have expertise in some new field they
don't understand.  So if you change your sales conversations
just a little from "do you want to buy our product?" to "what do
you need that you'd pay a lot for?" you may find it's suddenly a
lot easier to extract money from customers.
Be ruthlessly mercenary when you start doing this, though. You're
trying to save your company from death here, so make customers pay
a lot, quickly. And to the extent you can, try to avoid the
worst pitfalls of consulting.  The ideal thing might be if you built
a precisely defined derivative version of your product for the
customer, and it was otherwise a straight product sale.  You keep
the IP and no billing by the hour.
In the best case, this consultingish work may not be just something
you do to survive, but may turn out to be the
thing-that-doesn't-scale
that defines your
company.  Don't expect it to be, but as you dive into individual
users' needs, keep your eyes open for narrow openings that have
wide vistas beyond.
There is usually so much demand for custom work that unless you're
really incompetent there has to be some point down the slope of
consulting at which you can survive.  But I didn't use the term
slippery slope by accident; customers' insatiable demand for custom
work will always be pushing you toward the bottom.  So while you'll
probably survive, the problem now becomes to survive with the least
damage and distraction.
The good news is, plenty of successful startups have passed through
near-death experiences and gone on to flourish.  You just have to
realize in time that you're near death.  And if you're in the fatal pinch,
you are.
Notes
[
1
]
There are a handful of companies that can't reasonably expect
to make money for the first year or two, because what they're
building takes so long.  For these companies substitute "progress"
for "revenue growth."  You're not one of these companies unless
your initial investors agreed in advance that you were.  And frankly
even these companies wish they weren't, because the illiquidity of
"progress" puts them at the mercy of investors.
[
2
]
There's a variant of the fatal pinch where your existing
investors help you along by promising to invest more.  Or rather,
where you read them as promising to invest more, while they think
they're just mentioning the possibility.  The way to solve this
problem, if you have 8 months of runway or less, is to try to get
the money right now.  Then you'll either get the money, in which
case (immediate) problem solved, or at least prevent your investors
from helping you to remain in denial about your fundraising prospects.
[
3
]
Obviously, if you have significant expenses other than salaries
that you can eliminate, do it now.
[
4
]
Unless of course the source of the problem is that you're paying
yourselves high salaries.  If by cutting the founders' salaries to
the minimum you need, you can make it to profitability, you should.
But it's a bad sign if you needed to read this to realize that.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and
Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this.
Arabic Translation


Writes and Write-Nots
October 2024
I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I
feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there
won't be many people who can write.
One of the strangest things you learn if you're a writer is how
many people have trouble writing. Doctors know how many people have
a mole they're worried about; people who are good at setting up
computers know how many people aren't; writers know how many people
need help writing.
The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it's
fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly,
and thinking clearly is hard.
And yet writing pervades many jobs, and the more prestigious the
job, the more writing it tends to require.
These two powerful opposing forces, the pervasive expectation of
writing and the irreducible difficulty of doing it, create enormous
pressure. This is why eminent professors often turn out to have
resorted to plagiarism. The most striking thing to me about these
cases is the pettiness of the thefts. The stuff they steal is usually
the most mundane boilerplate — the sort of thing that anyone who
was even halfway decent at writing could turn out with no effort
at all. Which means they're not even halfway decent at writing.
Till recently there was no convenient escape valve for the pressure
created by these opposing forces. You could pay someone to write
for you, like JFK, or plagiarize, like MLK, but if you couldn't buy
or steal words, you had to write them yourself. And as a result
nearly everyone who was expected to write had to learn how.
Not anymore. AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to
write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school
and at work.
The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots.
There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it.
But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and
those who can't write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers,
ok writers, and people who can't write, there will just be good
writers and people who can't write.
Is that so bad? Isn't it common for skills to disappear when
technology makes them obsolete? There aren't many blacksmiths left,
and it doesn't seem to be a problem.
Yes, it's bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing
is thinking. In fact there's a kind of thinking that can only be
done by writing. You can't make this point better than Leslie Lamport
did:
If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.
So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous
than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know
which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.
This situation is not unprecedented. In preindustrial times most
people's jobs made them strong. Now if you want to be strong, you
work out. So there are still strong people, but only those who
choose to be.
It will be the same with writing. There will still be smart people,
but only those who choose to be.
Thanks
to Jessica Livingston, Ben Miller,
and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.


@5vforest @PalantirTech Did Palantir have a role in this?

@brianrobtsmith It's a good sign when replies in threads about Israel mention other countries, because that means you've said something irrefutably true.

@ProfDBernstein So do you personally approve of the policy of waiting till these people go home and then dropping a dumb bomb on the entire family?

@yudapearl Are you claiming the quotes from intelligence officers are fabricated? If so, you should tell @yuval_abraham. And if they're not, I think they speak for themselves, don't you?

"It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations."

@acambridgediary It looks AI generated, and in fact it was generated by something similar to AI: a Victorian architect.

@mammothfactory This is a lower bound on the evil.

@balajis This might not translate to other industries. Journalists don't always hate their subjects.

@aryehazan @Wlo_oWl Deliberately killing children is never a reasonable policy. It's the definition of barbarism.

11 yo hit 15 year old hard enough to give him a bloody nose. 15 yo is a prop at a serious rugby school. So the fact that 11 yo is still alive means 15 yo knew he was in the wrong.

@lahcim2000 Thanks. I'm in the middle of writing a new one. It will probably be done in another week or two.


According to Le Monde I am now a Trump supporter. You'd think they'd have at least taken 10 seconds to try a Twitter search. https://t.co/r5L9Gp95WU

@ATabarrok When existing journals ignore some class of discoveries, isn't the solution to create new journals?

Related but not identical idea: would it be a good idea to start a journal specifically focused on negative results?

In theory the right way to respond to information leaking around the edges of their channels would have been to acknowledge it and become less biased. But who knows if it would have been possible to make money this way.

The rise of internet made it harder for journalists to hide their biases, but also made it profitable to double down on them by appealing to specific audiences. This combination of forces has lost them a lot of trust.

@nw3 Among other things.

@minhasv I don't think either of us realized till I pointed it out. We were thinking of them as "those other guys."

I was recently giving a founder advice about how to extract concessions from his investors, and it occurred to me afterward that we're one of them. It will be good for the company though.

@chr1sa @petewarden My shorthand for it is fridges with blue screens of death.

I wouldn't be surprised if the idea returns in a working form in a few decades though, like happened with electric cars.

Me: You know, one day you'll be reading something and it will be useful to know that.

12 yo: And I'll think "Yeah! I know what a metic is!" and turn the page.

Me: When you have kids you'll have interesting conversations with them.

12 yo: You mean like we have.

Me: Yeah!

12 yo: You mean I'll tell them what a metic is so they can use it in everyday life.


I offered to measure 17 yo's height, but he says people shrink in the course of the day, so he wants to wait till the morning.

He's right you know.

How bad do things have to get before you say something?

Congratulations, Equipmentshares!

It's exhausting to be lied to. I think some of the most accomplished liars even take advantage of this fact. Their lies then serve a double purpose: (a) whatever purpose each specific lie serves and (b) to exhaust their audience and thereby batter them into submission.

The reliability of the US government was the foundation of post-war international trade and diplomacy. What a strange thing it would be if this stopped being so because of the character of one man. Usually changes on that scale are due to deep historical forces.

The international role of the US has already been eroding, simply because other countries are richer and more powerful than they were in 1945. But it's going to erode faster now that the US is becoming unreliable as well as inessential.

Presumably ChatGPT is trained on corpora of things written by humans, and yet it doesn't sound like any human I know. Is there a population somewhere of people who write in chirpy bulleted lists that I've somehow managed to avoid?

I don't mean this entirely as a joke. If there is a population of people who write like ChatGPT, I would have avoided them pretty strenuously.

If you're going to spend a lot, buy things that won't decrease in value. Not because you expect to sell them later, but because if you don't you're a mark.

Walking is really good for you compared to other forms of exercise. And you don't have to do all that much to get most of the benefit. (via @EricTopol) https://t.co/XGZyvkSiu7


@Das_Filter You wouldn't want a picture of it in its current form.

@olivkoch Only a few percent of people who attack my essays have actually read them.

@prasannakotyal I started writing it just under 2 months ago, on Nov 15. But if you want to include the time I spent thinking about it first, it would be more like 10 years.

@parkergins Originally "woke" was used by black people to mean awareness of racism.

@cperciva I think so too. But if you're trying to date origins the leaders are the ones you care about.

@lavvocato That was the original sense of the word, but the pejorative sense has been the dominant one for several years now.

@Colmeo Very, very little. I already despised political correctness, so when the second wave appeared I saw it for what it was.

@JeanClaudeFox2 People are more politically extreme in both directions in the US.

@du_leclerc People often tell me this. I reply that the back button does this.

@ar7work Mmm, yeah, just before as in years before.

https://t.co/Dl9NdW7y7I


I have to wait till I've forgotten the Sherlock Holmes stories well enough to reread them, but I don't have the patience to wait till I've really forgotten them, so when I read them it feels more as if I was drunk the last time I read them.

@justinvincent Interesting question. Take care of my family, write good essays, help YC and founders generally, donate effectively. Maybe some future projects too; we'll see.

@larspetrus @samdaceo It was happening long before that. Metals took away all the flint-knappers' jobs.

@JerseyanUSA Oops. Ok, I'm going to delete this.

@arithmoquine @shaggysurvives A metaphor is often the simplest way to say something.

I believe it was Pythagoras who said:
"I'mma bust a cap in yo head."

— from a rap by 12 yo

@BowTiedWellness @subverzo Not really. I'm talking about powerful Democratic politicians, not random anonymous Twitter accounts.

@JimDBanting I never dropped him once.

Even though I supported the Democrats in the last election, I really hope they don't decide to try to teach Elon and Vivek a lesson in political brinksmanship right now. Maybe teach them a lesson in compromise instead?

If the essay I wrote on having kids were a book, I think I'd have to use this as the cover. https://t.co/FhyixExygn


Putting Ideas into Words
February 2022
Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows
you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas
into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually
wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over
to
get them exactly right. And your ideas won't just be imprecise, but
incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones
you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that's why I write
them.
Once you publish something, the convention is that whatever you
wrote was what you thought before you wrote it. These were your
ideas, and now you've expressed them. But you know this isn't true.
You know that putting your ideas into words changed them. And not
just the ideas you published. Presumably there were others that
turned out to be too broken to fix, and those you discarded instead.
It's not just having to commit your ideas to specific words that
makes writing so exacting. The real test is reading what you've
written. You have to pretend to be a neutral reader who knows nothing
of what's in your head, only what you wrote. When he reads what you
wrote, does it seem correct? Does it seem complete? If you make an
effort, you can read your writing as if you were a complete stranger,
and when you do the news is usually bad. It takes me many cycles
before I can get an essay past the stranger. But the stranger is
rational, so you always can, if you ask him what he needs. If he's
not satisfied because you failed to mention x or didn't qualify
some sentence sufficiently, then you mention x or add more
qualifications. Happy now? It may cost you some nice sentences, but
you have to resign yourself to that. You just have to make them as
good as you can and still satisfy the stranger.
This much, I assume, won't be that controversial. I think it will
accord with the experience of anyone who has tried to write about
anything nontrivial. There may exist people whose thoughts are so
perfectly formed that they just flow straight into words. But I've
never known anyone who could do this, and if I met someone who said
they could, it would seem evidence of their limitations rather than
their ability. Indeed, this is a trope in movies: the guy who claims
to have a plan for doing some difficult thing, and who when questioned
further, taps his head and says "It's all up here." Everyone watching
the movie knows what that means. At best the plan is vague and
incomplete. Very likely there's some undiscovered flaw that invalidates
it completely. At best it's a plan for a plan.
In precisely defined domains it's possible to form complete ideas
in your head. People can play chess in their heads, for example.
And mathematicians can do some amount of math in their heads, though
they don't seem to feel sure of a proof over a certain length till
they write it down. But this only seems possible with ideas you can
express in a formal language.
[
1
]
Arguably what such people are
doing is putting ideas into words in their heads. I can to some
extent write essays in my head. I'll sometimes think of a paragraph
while walking or lying in bed that survives nearly unchanged in the
final version. But really I'm writing when I do this. I'm doing the
mental part of writing; my fingers just aren't moving as I do it.
[
2
]
You can know a great deal about something without writing about it.
Can you ever know so much that you wouldn't learn more from trying
to explain what you know? I don't think so. I've written about at
least two subjects I know well — Lisp hacking and startups
— and in both cases I learned a lot from writing about them.
In both cases there were things I didn't consciously realize till
I had to explain them. And I don't think my experience was anomalous.
A great deal of knowledge is unconscious, and experts have if
anything a higher proportion of unconscious knowledge than beginners.
I'm not saying that writing is the best way to explore all ideas.
If you have ideas about architecture, presumably the best way to
explore them is to build actual buildings. What I'm saying is that
however much you learn from exploring ideas in other ways, you'll
still learn new things from writing about them.
Putting ideas into words doesn't have to mean writing, of course.
You can also do it the old way, by talking. But in my experience,
writing is the stricter test. You have to commit to a single, optimal
sequence of words. Less can go unsaid when you don't have tone of
voice to carry meaning. And you can focus in a way that would seem
excessive in conversation. I'll often spend 2 weeks on an essay and
reread drafts 50 times. If you did that in conversation
it would seem evidence of some kind of
mental disorder.
If you're lazy,
of course, writing and talking are equally useless. But if you want
to push yourself to get things right, writing is the steeper hill.
[
3
]
The reason I've spent so long establishing this rather obvious point
is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking.
If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more
complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully
formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully
formed ideas about anything nontrivial.
It feels to them as if they do, especially if they're not in the
habit of critically examining their own thinking. Ideas can feel
complete. It's only when you try to put them into words that you
discover they're not. So if you never subject your ideas to that
test, you'll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never
realize it.
Putting ideas into words is certainly no guarantee that they'll be
right. Far from it. But though it's not a sufficient condition, it
is a necessary one.
Notes
[
1
] Machinery and
circuits are formal languages.
[
2
] I thought of this
sentence as I was walking down the street in Palo Alto.
[
3
] There are two
senses of talking to someone: a strict sense in which the conversation
is verbal, and a more general sense in which it can take any form,
including writing. In the limit case (e.g. Seneca's letters),
conversation in the latter sense becomes essay writing.
It can be very useful to talk (in either sense) with other people
as you're writing something. But a verbal conversation will never
be more exacting than when you're talking about something you're
writing.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick
Collison, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
French Translation


@michael_nielsen More that the expectation in that situation is that one wouldn't be completely candid.

@Austen "Works in UK" is a good filter for the salary half.

@bensroom @SpencerHakimian Excusable mistake...

@ViktorBunin @AndrewBrandt Maybe half. It's so weird, because this is easy to check.

@mckaywrigley I tell them roughly the same thing, except I don't claim it takes less than 20 hours to learn.

@AndrewBrandt I did say this!

@kawaiiSane How I wish I was.

@pofunder Israel.

Every child in this picture is now dead. https://t.co/zfUJF70uUR

@ahistoryinart He might have thought his relationship with Preece was deeper. I don't think she thought so.


@veronica_humble Damn, is that the consensus? I learned about this research from a story in Smithsonian Magazine, which I assumed I could trust to be a reliable source...

@JohnConstableRA For several seconds I thought that was a ruined bridge reflected in a river.

@anukiranghosh It does mean something. At a minimum, these men will never be able to travel outside a small cluster of outlaw countries.

@EdwardNorthman Elon certainly gave it a big push on the way out the door, but by October 2022 it was already in retreat.

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Shoigu and Gerasimov for Russian attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine. (The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023.) https://t.co/wtjcAt5wN7

@_cam__mac_ Did it vow to "do better?"

@OHenry313775 It's a talent for storytelling rather than writing. An important distinction, because it began long before he could write. The way I noticed it was that he kept telling stories.

@hot_town I don't remember teaching him that one. He must have learned it in school.

@proxypol An angrier, more intolerant second wave of political correctness that began in the early 2010s.

@KarazazuN They're always a couple years behind.


While I generally support social network bans for teenagers, what if someone created a social network that actually helped them? They'd be forbidden to use this too.

I put a great deal of effort into ensuring that summaries of my essays omit important points. I don't do this directly. I do it by trying to make the essays so concise that you can't cut much without serious loss.

Something I told 13 yo: Neuroticism and imagination are closely related, if not identical. So if you're going to be imaginative you also have to be disciplined, in order to prevent bad kinds of imagination from bringing you down.

"The wealth taxi is moving to Miami."

— typo in an email from Ron Conway about all the founders who are leaving California because of the proposed wealth tax

Rewrote the end of the new essay again. Is this the fifth time? The sixth?

Jessica and I watch a lot of Murder She Wrote, and it's always jarring to see our heroine in the opening credits grinning delightedly as she types her latest novel. Boy does it not look like that, for me at least. I look like I'm trying to fix some complicated, broken machine.

1. When you write something intended to be read by an important person, go through it and cut every unnecessary word.

2. The reader of anything you publish is an important person.

Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.

https://t.co/3GQUlfH58t

Asking the right questions has always been a critical ingredient in great work, but AI is making it even more critical.

Hay on Wye. Stone walls, scrambled eggs, wonderful old books. What could be better? Well, raining less. But aside from that, not much. https://t.co/gwpyxkY6Ez


This is not two planes flying in formation. (It's a Fairey Battle trainer.) https://t.co/2I5L7g43ZE

One of the things I love about these founders is how genuinely committed they are to discovering pesticides that are safer for farmers. Startups often talk about making the world better, but I can tell you this was their concern from the very start.

The artist who occupies the most space in my brain is Stanley Badmin. Almost every day I look at the world and think "Badmin." https://t.co/ZWhk5oR187

This is big news. Delaware was the standard because the state had a reasonable, stable legal system. Once there starts to be even the smallest doubt about that, it could be like a bubble bursting.

If you invested at the peak of the Nasdaq in March 2000, it would have been roughly 18 years before you were whole again: 15 years before the index reached the same point, plus another 3 for inflation.

Most vicious circles can be made to run in reverse.

Till I saw this graph (by ChatGPT) I assumed quartz watches had eaten the Swiss mechanical watch industry. In fact it had already declined by about 75% before quartz really got going. Quartz was just the final blow. https://t.co/G3ULhkH5Tk

My older soon at 4 and 16. https://t.co/yJvv1rMJ0P

The epilogue is hilariously apt:

"And where are those who wished to end her career? She says the three women are still posting, but on Bluesky. She does not read them."

The eyebrow equivalent of uptalking. This is the face people use when they don't want to take responsibility for what they're saying. https://t.co/i3USPOb8nj


Can You Buy a Silicon Valley?  Maybe.
February 2009
A lot of cities look at Silicon Valley and ask "How could we make
something like that happen here?"  The
organic
way to do it is to
establish a first-rate university in a place where rich people want
to live. That's how Silicon Valley happened.  But could you shortcut
the process by funding startups?
Possibly. Let's consider what it would take.
The first thing to understand is that encouraging startups is a
different problem from encouraging startups in a particular city.
The latter is much more expensive.
People sometimes think they could improve the startup scene in their
town by starting something like
Y
Combinator
there, but in fact it
will have near zero effect.  I know because Y Combinator itself had
near zero effect on Boston when we were based there half the year.
The people we funded came from all over the country (indeed, the
world) and afterward they went wherever they could get more
funding—which generally meant Silicon Valley.
The seed funding business is not a regional business, because at
that stage startups are mobile. They're just a couple founders with
laptops.
[
1
]
If you want to encourage startups in a particular city, you have
to fund startups that won't leave.  There are two ways to do that:
have rules preventing them from leaving, or fund them at the point
in their life when they naturally take root.  The first approach
is a mistake, because it becomes a filter for selecting bad startups.
If your terms force startups to do things they don't want to, only
the desperate ones will take your money.
Good startups will move to another city as a condition of funding.
What they won't do is agree not to move the next time they need
funding.  So the only way to get them to stay is to give them enough
that they never need to leave.
___
How much would that take?  If you want to keep startups from leaving
your town, you have to give them enough that they're not tempted
by an offer from Silicon Valley VCs that requires them to move.  A
startup would be able to refuse such an offer if they had grown to
the point where they were (a) rooted in your town and/or (b) so
successful that VCs would fund them even if they didn't move.
How much would it cost to grow a startup to that point? A minimum
of several hundred thousand dollars.
Wufoo
seem to have rooted
themselves in Tampa on $118k, but they're an extreme case.  On
average it would take at least half a million.
So if it seems too good to be true to think you could grow a local
silicon valley by giving startups $15-20k each like Y Combinator,
that's because it is.  To make them stick around you'd have to give
them at least 20 times that much.
However, even that is an interesting prospect.  Suppose to be on
the safe side it would cost a million dollars per startup. If you
could get startups to stick to your town for a million apiece, then
for a billion dollars you could bring in a thousand startups. That probably wouldn't push you past Silicon Valley itself,
but it might get you second place.
For the price of a football stadium, any town that was decent to
live in could make itself one of the biggest startup hubs in the
world.
What's more, it wouldn't take very long.   You could probably do
it in five years.  During the term of one mayor. And it would get
easier over time, because the more startups you had in town, the
less it would take to get new ones to move there. By the time you
had a thousand startups in town, the VCs wouldn't be trying so hard
to get them to move to Silicon Valley; instead they'd be opening
local offices.  Then you'd really be in good shape.  You'd have
started a self-sustaining chain reaction like the one that drives
the Valley.
___
But now comes the hard part.  You have to pick the startups.  How
do you do that?  Picking startups is a rare and valuable skill, and
the handful of people who have it are not readily hireable.  And
this skill is so hard to measure that if a government did try to
hire people with it, they'd almost certainly get the wrong ones.
For example, a city could give money to a VC fund to establish a
local branch, and let them make the choices.  But only a bad VC
fund would take that deal.  They wouldn't
seem
bad to the city
officials.  They'd seem very impressive.  But they'd be bad at
picking startups.  That's the characteristic failure mode of VCs.
All VCs look impressive to limited partners.  The difference between
the good ones and the bad ones only becomes visible in the other
half of their jobs: choosing and advising startups.
[
2
]
What you really want is a pool of local angel investors—people
investing money they made from their own startups.  But unfortunately
you run into a chicken and egg problem here.  If your city isn't
already a startup hub, there won't be people there who got rich
from startups. And there is no way I can think of that a city could
attract angels from outside. By definition they're rich.  There's
no incentive that would make them move.
[
3
]
However, a city could select startups by piggybacking on the expertise
of investors who weren't local.  It would be pretty straightforward
to make a list of the most eminent Silicon Valley angels and from
that to generate a list of all the startups they'd invested in.  If
a city offered these companies a million dollars each to move, a
lot of the earlier stage ones would probably take it.
Preposterous as this plan sounds, it's probably the most efficient
way a city could select good startups.
It would hurt the startups somewhat to be separated from their
original investors. On the other hand, the extra million dollars
would give them a lot more runway.
___
Would the transplanted startups survive?  Quite possibly. The only
way to find out would be to try it.  It would be a pretty cheap
experiment, as civil expenditures go.  Pick 30 startups that eminent
angels have recently invested in, give them each a million dollars
if they'll relocate to your city, and see what happens after a year.
If they seem to be thriving, you can try importing startups on a
larger scale.
Don't be too legalistic about the conditions under which they're
allowed to leave.  Just have a gentlemen's agreement.
Don't try to do it on the cheap and pick only 10 for the initial
experiment.  If you do this on too small a scale you'll just guarantee
failure. Startups need to be around other startups.  30 would be
enough to feel like a community.
Don't try to make them all work in some renovated warehouse you've
made into an "incubator."  Real startups prefer to work in their
own spaces.
In fact, don't impose any restrictions on the startups at all.
Startup founders are mostly
hackers
,
and hackers are much more
constrained by gentlemen's agreements than regulations.  If they
shake your hand on a promise, they'll keep it.  But show them a
lock and their first thought is how to pick it.
Interestingly, the 30-startup experiment could be done by any
sufficiently rich private citizen.  And what pressure it would
put on the city if it worked.
[
4
]
___
Should the city take stock in return for the money?
In principle they're entitled to, but how would they choose valuations
for the startups?  You couldn't just give them all the same valuation:
that would be too low for some (who'd turn you down) and too high
for others (because it might make their next round a "down round").
And since we're assuming we're doing this without being able to
pick startups, we also have to assume we can't value them, since
that's practically the same thing.
Another reason not to take stock in the startups is that startups
are often involved in disreputable things.  So are established
companies, but they don't get blamed for it.  If someone gets
murdered by someone they met on Facebook, the press will treat the
story as if it were about Facebook.  If someone gets murdered by
someone they met at a supermarket, the press will just treat it as
a story about a murder.  So understand that if you invest in startups,
they might build things that get used for pornography, or file-sharing,
or the expression of unfashionable opinions.  You should probably
sponsor this project jointly with your political opponents, so they
can't use whatever the startups do as a club to beat you with.
It would be too much of a political liability just to give
the startups the money, though.  So the best plan would be to
make it convertible debt, but which didn't convert except in
a really big round, like $20 million.
___
How well this scheme worked would depend on the
city
.  There are
some towns, like Portland, that would be easy to turn into startup
hubs, and others, like Detroit, where it would really be an uphill
battle.  So be honest with yourself about the sort of town you have
before you try this.
It will be easier in proportion to how much your town resembles San
Francisco.  Do you have good weather?  Do people live downtown, or
have they abandoned the center for the suburbs?  Would the city be
described as "hip" and "tolerant," or as reflecting "traditional
values?"  Are there good universities nearby?  Are there walkable
neighborhoods?  Would nerds feel at home?  If you answered yes to
all these questions, you might be able not only to pull off this
scheme, but to do it for less than a million per startup.
I realize the chance of any city having
the political will to carry out this plan is microscopically
small.  I just wanted to explore what it would take if one did.
How hard would it be to jumpstart a silicon valley?  It's
fascinating to think this prize might be within
the reach of so many cities.  So even though they'll all still
spend the money on the stadium, at least now someone can ask them:
why did you choose to do that instead of becoming a serious
rival to Silicon Valley?
Notes
[
1
]
What people who start these supposedly local seed firms always
find is that (a) their applicants come from all over, not just the
local area, and (b) the local startups also apply to the other seed
firms.  So what ends up happening is that the applicant pool gets
partitioned by quality rather than geography.
[
2
]
Interestingly, the bad VCs fail by choosing startups run by
people like them—people who are good presenters, but have no
real substance.   It's a case of the fake leading the fake.  And
since everyone involved is so plausible, the LPs who invest in these
funds have no idea what's happening till they measure their returns.
[
3
]
Not even being a tax haven, I suspect.  That makes some rich
people move, but not the type who would make good angel investors
in startups.
[
4
]
Thanks to Michael Keenan for pointing this out.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert
Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.


@VlVEK It's a problem but it's not a hole in the *idea*.

Practically all successful startup ideas seem to be full of holes early on — either actual holes that later get patched, or holes that are merely apparent because the ideas are so new. So if you go looking for holes early on, you'll find them.

One of the worst qualities an early stage investor can have is a need to show how clever he is by poking holes in founders' ideas. In later stage investing this may be harmless or even useful, but in early stage investing it's a disaster.

@MrGoldBro Not long before? It's already happening.

@swombat She needs to go read the Constitution.

@grok @Stocktrader You missed the point that the hardware does whatever the software tells it to — that the politicians are in effect being programmed by ChatGPT.

Sam, if all these politicians are going to start using ChatGPT to generate their policies, you'd better focus on making it generate better policies. Or we could focus on electing better politicians. But I doubt we can improve the hardware as fast as you can improve the software.

@OliverBeedham This often happens in the course of YC. At least half the time I'd guess. In this case it was in the category of: instead of making software for other people doing some thing, do the thing yourselves using the software.

@cja_blocked1 I'll typically meet with 5 startups in sequential 30-minute slots.

@AdanBecerraPhD Of course. There is no other.


It is therefore a big mistake for early stage startups to conceal the risks they face by being vague or evasive. You're hiding something that won't bother experts using something that will. Just admit the risks upfront, and explain why the EV is high nonetheless.

The worst thing a pitch to professional investors can be is confusing. Professional investors are willing to give early stage startups the benefit of the doubt. They're ok with risk. But they can't invest in a startup whose pitch they can't even follow.

Since Robert Reich is tweeting again, here is how people actually get rich in America (and why they get so much richer now than they used to):

https://t.co/ggPKu1gN8u

@latentgravity @SteveStuWill The Origins of Wokeness: https://t.co/jvOj5Ayr3x

The phrase "next team" is an interesting slip. They expect their behavior to get them voted out of office.

@typesfast I think many admissions officers would like it if there were less signal in the applications, because it would mean they had more discretion in choosing applicants. That's why they got rid of SATs.

This is brilliant.

Bertrand Russell on the fundamental difference between liberal and illiberal thinking (via @SteveStuWill): https://t.co/qeJfl5nkHq

@amasad Son did it, and Larry Ellison and Sam, who had no idea how to stand in such a situation, figured they might as well copy him.

@AlecStapp @Sam__Enright Depends on the field. Most books about starting a startup are terrible. Most books about Lisp are pretty good. I'm not sure about books about writing; I haven't looked at many.


@Jeff53454524 @MabreyTed Nope.

@JTLonsdale (I deleted the reply I posted here because I decided to talk directly to Joe instead. I really do want to understand where Palantir draws the line on what they'll build for the government, and it's easier to have a real conversation when it's not in public.)

@davidu Where exactly is the sophistry in asking Palantir to commit not to help the government violate the constitution? It seems like a commitment any patriotic American would find easy to make. It's frankly worrying that the idea seems to cause them so much difficulty.

@PalmerLuckey @cosmicfibretion @MabreyTed That's why I'm asking Palantir to commit not to violate the constitution. Obviously such a commitment has no legal force. But I'm hoping that if they do, and some Palantir employee is one day asked to do something illegal, he'll say "I didn't sign up for this" and refuse.

@PalmerLuckey @cosmicfibretion @MabreyTed Which, since you are smart and have experience with governments, you know the Palantir's field engineers would probably have to have to do for them. I.e. if the government wanted to do something illegal, a Palantir engineer might well have to type the actual commands.

@PalmerLuckey @cosmicfibretion @MabreyTed Obviously I'm not talking about the case where a pencil manufacturer's product is used by a bad cop to stab someone. I'm talking about situations where a company *knows* the government is asking for something illegal.

@MabreyTed When you say "we have made this promise," what does the phrase "this promise" refer to? Because despite the huge number of words in your answers, I can't help noticing that the word "constitution" does not occur once.

@cosmicfibretion @MabreyTed Yeah, I know. It would be so easy. One sentence that any genuinely patriotic US citizen would have no trouble saying.

@Jacob_Hornstein @kevinmark The tech world is not identical with San Francisco. YC has funded startups all over the world. Are only the ones in SF in the "tech world"?

@kevinmark What? I didn't flee it. In fact I spent last week meeting with startups in the current YC batch.


I know it will be amazing for most people. I just have strange tastes.

At which point I felt like I was in a James Bond film made to torment Lisp programmers. A bald man with a beard, dressed in black, telling me "You're programming in English now, Mr. Bond." Could it get any more sinister?

Amjad just showed me Replit's latest AI code-generation stuff. When I was aghast at all the boilerplate it generated (probably no more than a normal Python app to be fair), Amjad said "Don't look at it. That's object code. You're programming in English now."

@denismars It would be hard to do more than about 9 or 10 normal office hours. I used to do more if it was vertebrae office hours, which all have the same format.

@5harath This isn't continued growth. This is a launch spike heading back downward. Ideally not all the way back down.

@connor_beem It's fun up to about 5 or 6 startups. 8 is possible. 12 you'd be a zombie.

This is why I write in the mornings and do office hours in the afternoon. Writing essays is harder. I can't do it with a scrambled brain.

One surprising thing about office hours with startups is that they scramble your brain. It's the context switching. You dive deep into one problem, then deep into another completely different one, then another. At the end you can't remember what the first startup was even doing.

Chris Parry saved the lives of more than 400 Ukrainian civilians before the Russians killed him.

https://t.co/ako05Mfl5N

@rajatsuri @dflieb The beer test distracts from the main question, sure, but I don't think David's does. His test is a test of basic character, not just how much you'd like them.


@sonicaghi Close. Firenze. She loved Rome though.

@lamirkhalid Me too!

@peptalksblog Happens constantly if you're doing it right.

@josephjojoe I type vi followed by the filename.

@robinlavallee Code's no problem because it's not inherently sequential.

@Austen I thought you'd already solved that problem.

@josephjojoe This essay talks about things I've learned from having kids: https://t.co/mqo7WlWJrv

@SanketSshreemal No music on the walks I do to have ideas. It's nice to have music on walks. You feel like you're in a movie. But I don't have as many ideas with music.

@ThatChrisRyan She was always happy in pictures I took of her because she was happy that I was visiting her or (in this case) taking her on a trip.

@StefanFSchubert I talked to her a fair amount about it, because it was such an interestingly short list, and she clearly thought of it as a general rule.


If an essay is good, cutting isn't just removing words that aren't necessary. It exposes the beautiful underlying thing.

@rickasaurus It's true.

@baileyberro Probably Jessica.

@GunnelsWarren I genuinely can't tell whether you're dishonest or just stupid. But this question will help us answer that: are you aware of what has happened to the value of Microsoft stock since 2010?

@Atlanticus10 Somewhere in England, probably London.

One thing I wouldn't have predicted about Y Combinator is the degree to which we're still involved with companies 10 or even 20 years later. We end up being like the friends famous people had before they got famous. Founders know they can trust us.

@collision @ipkehoe Much as I'd like to read it, I'm not signing up for a subscription to this publication I've never heard of in order to do so. You should implement some kind of solution so they don't have to resort to this.

@BabakHosseini It would be a bad answer, because these protests aren't successful. They net harm the fight against climate change by alienating the general public.

@Jack_Raines I suppose prop in theory based on his place in the scrum, but those distinctions are pretty meaningless at this age.

@mattyglesias Yes, it would be even better to go after those trustafarians living comfortably in Malibu while the credulous teenagers they encourage to break the law are going to jail for it.


@nejatian The origins of this problem are quite interesting. The short version is that English Literature as a subject was created by false analogy to the Classics.

https://t.co/c6JW4s8xID

Chris Arnade is not a political extremist. If he reports that the US asylum system is broken, then there's a real problem. https://t.co/gen9oYhOaK

@DavidSacks The SF political elite has always included some Republicans. In an informal poll I took in 2012, about a third of people I asked voted Republican. Trump has decreased that proportion a lot, but there's still a significant fringe who support him.

@iamgingertrash @DamonBurrow @lindsaystamp3 This isn't true. The canonical examples of this kind of work were always cutting wood and carrying water, and in industrialized societies no one does either of these.

@ChrisStringer65 Could you measure reburied bones using remote sensing?

@DamonBurrow @lindsaystamp3 It's difficult. You have to like doing something other people will pay for, and you usually have to be very good at it. So if you like programming, you're in luck, but not if all you like is eating and sleeping.

@whyvert Apparently it's a cliff in reported company size, not actual company size.

@lindsaystamp3 Work on something you enjoy.

@LevyAntoine Do people quietly add on to their houses later?

@mikemaletic @markessien The reason is that the standards aren't actually the same. Colleges say they just use legacy status to break ties, but you can give it as much weight as you want by decreasing the number of buckets you classify applicants into.


He doesn't have any employees, and doesn't plan to hire any in the near future. Not because AI has made employees obsolete, but simply because he's so massively productive right now that he doesn't want to stop programming to spend time interviewing candidates.

I met a founder today who said he writes 10,000 lines of code a day now thanks to AI. This is probably the limit case. He's a hotshot programmer, he knows AI tools very well, and he's talking about a 12 hour day. But he's not naive. This is not 10,000 lines of bug-filled crap.

@SpencerHakimian Some do. But you can make more from a product company than a service company.

@joeytitanium @davidschles I like your full stack approach. It's a sign of confidence. It also tends to be faster.

@KevinHenrikson No. There's no time for such subtleties.

At first sight I thought this was a proposed congressional district in Texas.

@mmr_leo The most common things I told them were probably how to expand their idea, and how to rephrase their pitch to make it shorter and clearer.

Showing up at YC is the exact opposite of having a teenager. I walk in and I'm mobbed by people eager to hear my advice about what they should do.

@piersmorgan Most of these accounts are fake anyway.

@NathanpmYoung I do in many different ways. I just don't talk about it much.


Filters that Fight Back
August 2003
We may be able to improve the accuracy of Bayesian spam filters
by having them follow links to see what's
waiting at the other end.  Richard Jowsey of
death2spam
now does
this in borderline cases, and reports that it works well.
Why only do it in borderline cases?  And why only do it once?
As I mentioned in
Will Filters Kill Spam?
,
following all the urls in
a spam would have an amusing side-effect.  If popular email clients
did this in order to filter spam, the spammer's servers
would take a serious pounding.  The more I think about this,
the better an idea it seems.  This isn't just amusing; it
would be hard to imagine a more perfectly targeted counterattack
on spammers.
So I'd like to suggest an additional feature to those
working on spam filters: a "punish" mode which,
if turned on, would spider every url
in a suspected spam n times, where n could be set by the user. [1]
As many people have noted, one of the problems with the
current email system is that it's too passive.  It does
whatever you tell it.  So far all the suggestions for fixing
the problem seem to involve new protocols.  This one
wouldn't.
If widely used, auto-retrieving spam filters would make
the email system
rebound.
The huge volume of the
spam, which has so far worked in the spammer's favor,
would now work against him, like a branch snapping back in
his face.   Auto-retrieving spam filters would drive the
spammer's
costs
up,
and his sales down:  his bandwidth usage
would go through the roof, and his servers would grind to a
halt under the load, which would make them unavailable
to the people who would have responded to the spam.
Pump out a million emails an hour, get a
million hits an hour on your servers.
We would want to ensure that this is only done to
suspected spams.  As a rule, any url sent to millions of
people is likely to be a spam url, so submitting every http
request in every email would work fine nearly all the time.
But there are a few cases where this isn't true: the urls
at the bottom of mails sent from free email services like
Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, for example.
To protect such sites, and to prevent abuse, auto-retrieval
should be combined with blacklists of spamvertised sites.
Only sites on a blacklist would get crawled, and
sites would be blacklisted
only after being inspected by humans. The lifetime of a spam
must be several hours at least, so
it should be easy to update such a list in time to
interfere with a spam promoting a new site. [2]
High-volume auto-retrieval would only be practical for users
on high-bandwidth
connections, but there are enough of those to cause spammers
serious trouble.   Indeed, this solution neatly
mirrors the problem.  The problem with spam is that in
order to reach a few gullible people the spammer sends
mail to everyone.  The non-gullible recipients
are merely collateral damage.  But the non-gullible majority
won't stop getting spam until they can stop (or threaten to
stop) the gullible
from responding to it.  Auto-retrieving spam filters offer
them a way to do this.
Would that kill spam?  Not quite.  The biggest spammers
could probably protect their servers against auto-retrieving
filters.  However, the easiest and cheapest way for them
to do it would be to include working unsubscribe links in
their mails.  And this would be a necessity for smaller fry,
and for "legitimate" sites that hired spammers to promote
them.  So if auto-retrieving filters became widespread,
they'd become auto-unsubscribing filters.
In this scenario, spam would, like OS crashes, viruses, and
popups, become one of those plagues that only afflict people
who don't bother to use the right software.
Notes
[1] Auto-retrieving filters will have to follow redirects,
and should in some cases (e.g. a page that just says
"click here") follow more than one level of links.
Make sure too that
the http requests are indistinguishable from those of
popular Web browsers, including the order and referrer.
If the response
doesn't come back within x amount of time, default to
some fairly high spam probability.
Instead of making n constant, it might be a good idea to
make it a function of the number of spams that have been
seen mentioning the site.  This would add a further level of
protection against abuse and accidents.
[2] The original version of this article used the term
"whitelist" instead of "blacklist".  Though they were
to work like blacklists, I preferred to call them whitelists
because it might make them less vulnerable to legal attack.
This just seems to have confused readers, though.
There should probably be multiple blacklists.  A single point
of failure would be vulnerable both to attack and abuse.
Thanks
to Brian Burton, Bill Yerazunis, Dan Giffin,
Eric Raymond, and Richard Jowsey for reading drafts of this.
FFB FAQ
Japanese Translation
A Perl FFB
Lycos DDoS@Home


If you're a startup trying to decide whether to sell to startups or do "enterprise deals," you should usually choose startups. They're the early adopters. They don't have as much money, but they decide quickly, and they'll have a better influence on your product.

@MatthewLloydR Ugh, off by 17 years...

@mattyglesias I can top this. The one my haters mostly use is one I didn't write, and I even said so in the second tweet in the thread.

@mattyglesias One interesting thing about him is that his impulse to lie is so direct and so immediate that you can tell exactly what he's being told at any given moment.

@robleclerc That's not a high valuation in SV today.

And in any case, if it isn't true today, it could well be in 6 months.

@Austen For me it still is.

@eyeslasho Primness switched from the right to the left with the rise of political correctness in the mid 1980s. That's why the censorious left of today is so different from the permissive left of the 60s and 70s.

The other reason founders make this mistake is that it's an ego boost to have a high valuation. They're rich (on paper), and they feel like they're doing better than their peers (in the first 100 yards of a marathon).

Why do founders raise too much at too high a valuation? Because most VCs want to own a large percentage of the company. They're less price sensitive though. They're willing to spend a lot to get it. So the result of these constraints is: large investment at a high valuation.


@michael_nielsen Four I can remember: the grave of the the Cid, the site of Shockley Semiconductor, Stonehenge, and the HMS Victory.

@stevesi @SahilRoyVerma @Scholars_Stage Thank you BTW for telling me about the source!

@TarasBob @PaiMeiBTC @Scholars_Stage He's extremely honest, but I probably won't be passing on any more messages from him.

@TheStoicEmperor Related:

https://t.co/HvlJGoHaBS

@SahilRoyVerma @Scholars_Stage Here's the source. I'd guess that accounted for a lot of them.

https://t.co/OzsxxLvGqC

@PaiMeiBTC @Scholars_Stage That one I didn't even write. I just agreed, as a favor, to pass on a message from someone else who wanted to remain anonymous.

It pleases me, actually, that the "mistake" I'm most famous for wasn't something I claimed to be true.

@michael_nielsen A literal pilgrimage to a recognized holy site, or a metaphorical one?

@snowmaker @garrytan @kimmaicutler Clearly from a time before headlines were optimized for clicks.

@Coscorrodrift @KTmBoyle A handful. People I wanted to prove wrong. But I'm very disorganized about it.

@Stella33448324 @Scholars_Stage It was tweeted by a very trustworthy account. It must have just somehow slipped by.


@Albionk98 It does look novel I admit.

@dadiomov Plus if you're a good, young programmer, the risk is minimal. If it doesn't work out, you can always get hired somewhere else.

@geniecenser Depends on the reader. But one should certainly avoid that if one can.

I just spent two days in my favorite town in Wales (Hay) doing my favorite thing (buying used books). If you're in the UK and you like books, you'll be happy here. Beautiful place too. https://t.co/ItwXiwPPNB

Notice how much more interesting the world gets when it goes through a good artist's head.

@ashley6meyer It used to be (centuries ago) left unguarded in a fairly public place, and people carved their names on it.

@Jasielinvests You don't seem to grasp the distinction between having a limited vocabulary and choosing to write simply. From the midwit peak, all you see is lowlands surrounding you.

@generativist I thought it was hilarious that it contained so many mistakes. I even tried to vote for it myself, but by the time I got back to my computer it had disappeared.

@Mochievous @daramatoye @Antholeee @elnathan_john I didn't include that link as proof of what I said (obviously) but to explain further what I meant.

@ahistoryinart That's a great picture, but it's hard to imagine Badmin sitting so far away from anything he was painting. I imagine him using a loupe.


@StuartDAA I don't know enough about the subject to write anything interesting about it.

@OliverBeedham Definitely. In fact I wish I could find more topics worth spending so long on.

@MattACrawford I banned myself from writing till I finished Bel in 2019.

@lulumeservey There was a similar cascade after Brian Armstrong dewoked Coinbase, but it wasn't quite so courageous, because all the other CEOs did it quietly.

A graph of essays I've written per year by Awais Iqbal. I wrote less as I got busier with YC (and kids), bounced back after I retired in 2014, then banned myself from writing till I finished Bel in 2019. 2023 is low because "How to Do Great Work" took about 6 months. https://t.co/G2DtmjceCf

@michael_nielsen I used Emacs in college but when I showed up at grad school they had Sun computers on which Control-s froze the screen. It took a week before I found someone who could tell me what they used to save a file in Emacs, and during that time I switched to vi and it stuck.

@ahistoryinart Done from life and yet it has that Hodler tell, the gratuitous symmetry. https://t.co/V8feQPqffg

@Richard_Florida @nytopinion That picture looks like a representation of a jackass leading Elon Musk astray.

Since 13 yo (he turned 13) is studying Latin, I told him he should make up a Latin motto for himself. He chose "Lorem Ipsum."

@bscholl I heard that Boeing deliberately head-faked Airbus into making the 380 by seeming to be focused on bigger planes. Have you heard anything like that?


@robinhanson This might be true in the median setting but it's not going to get you tenure at CalTech.

@andthedropout @JohnathanBi I had many.

@JohnathanBi I don't know about the others, but in my case it was because as an ambitious but gullible high school student I was tricked by philosophy's false claim to be about a kind of knowledge more abstract than you could learn in other fields.

An expert's view of a very interesting subject. Chris Arnade on why and how to walk 200 miles.

https://t.co/V8DcrrXDVp

It's sad that this tweet will get extra-ignored because it's not merely a link but a substack link, but that's how it is.

@siraustin Whoah, that's surprisingly insightful.

"Why can't I have a symbol?"

— 12 yo

(After having to answer questions about symbolism in novels in English class, 12 yo is planning to introduce it in his stories. I am dubious.)

@mundanemun A Pickwickian sense.

Since "executives" implies there are others, someone should ask her for a complete list of the people she wants to be killed.

Since she is a writer, we have to assume that she understands that saying "People wonder why we want these executives dead" means she is also saying "We want these executives dead" and thus also "I want these executives dead." https://t.co/4iADBealI8

@saisocial @dvassallo I don't mind him saying these things. They only convince people who wouldn't have made first-rate founders, and if people who wouldn't have made first-rate founders don't apply to YC, that saves YC a lot of time and money.


@BraddrofliT WTF. Billionaires want governments to work better, diseases to be eliminated, etc, just as earnestly as anyone else. And when those things happen, everyone benefits.

What used to happen when we had pancake mix on the bottom shelf. https://t.co/e8ezq5vFG0

@LovinRiftss @Kuroya_Kiyo Because there are some signs that it's happening fast and carelessly, instead of slow and thoughtfully. But I don't know how much to trust such signs yet, or what the (so far mostly unreported) upside of the process will be, so I'm reserving judgment.

@nooriefyi For him, yes. But for the country it's a disaster.

In a frenzy of cleaning Jessica reorganized the food cupboard. Judging by the big gaps, a lot of it must have been expired. The jars on the bottom shelf are a clever countermove against the dog, Biscuit, who eats anything he can get hold of, but has very short legs. https://t.co/vDJs8O5jVI

@Kuroya_Kiyo So far I'm ambivalent about it. It's one of those things that could go either way. But it's happening; that much is clear; and as long as it's happening, I want it to be done by smart and thoughtful people.

@0xrandomrandom No it did not. The sentence I added at the end would be obvious to anyone reasonable. Goodbye.

A young programmer asked if he should go work for DOGE, or whether it would end in disaster. I told him that it would at least be interesting, and that if he was worried it would end in disaster, that was all the more reason to take the job. Maybe he could help prevent that.

@jfleming2870 I'm guessing that means your answer is no, you don't know anything about the case.

Some simple repeats I made experimenting with Replit back in 2020. https://t.co/7KWyCZwLMN


If this were true it would probably be the most exciting thing that has happened in the history of humanity. https://t.co/QKkw3Z6ydI

@ShaanVP It's why I like asking people who attack something I've written to give me an example of a specific sentence or passage they believe is false. I've spent days going through the essay sentence by sentence, and I know they're probably not going to find one.

@ShaanVP That's my deliberate m.o. when writing many essays, but I don't think anyone noticed before.

@PLBompard Some other name .com.

@ylecun @elonmusk @jeremymstamper @bneiluj @how_many_roads_ So in a society of one person (e.g. if you were shipwrecked) it would be impossible to do scientific research?

@StefanFSchubert Saying things that are true doesn't mean you can only talk about things that are certain. It just means you have to do a good job of qualifying what you say. E.g. instead of flatly stating x, say that there's evidence suggesting x, and then explain what it is.

@connor_beem This exercise will either generate such ideas or make them stop writing.

@JamesTyler___ Merely writing them down is usually enough. And what you don't catch yourself, you don't usually have to ship further than a few close friends.

@LauraPowellEsq Because he's smart and thorough, and has access to experts in everything.

@IsaacKing314 Here it is with no color. I don't see a number. Do you? https://t.co/C8yDwSkw8Q