495 karma · joined August 18, 2015
Asking anyone to "reconsider" their way into a hostile environment is pretty brutal. For that to be realistic, YC has to make the first move, and it'd likely have to be an extremely costly signal. What would you suggest?
I am intending to use my economic leverage, and advocating others do the same, by refusing to work with Thiel and his enablers, which include Y Combinator and companies funded by them. (It's not just the Trump thing, by any means, that's the end of a very very very long list.)
Altman has also shown himself to be – at best – unaware of the moral dimensions of his actions, and that's not someone I want to have to deal with. So I won't and I suggest that you don't.
Same reason I won't work for an oil supermajor. I don't want to be party to pollution.
Everyone else is free to act as they choose, but I hope enough people agree with me that it weights the needle. If companies can't hire talent, they die; so what talent can do is refuse.
HN has – through inaction – smirkingly enabled alt-right/NRx/GamerGaters to parody-thru-libel liberal positions on equality for a long time; supporting Peter Thiel is in the same vein. That's made Hacker News racist, sexist, and (worst of all for this crowd's self-image), stupid.
For a bunch of "disruptors", they're blind to the systemic effects of that set of decisions to the point of parody. Well, the only conclusion to be drawn: the Y Combinator partners (and the companies they fund) don't care sufficiently about society to be people I want to work with. Makes my decisions easier!
What exactly else do you propose? Endorsing people based on their actions (all actions are political; no actions are apolitical; that's just how it works, you can't quit the game) is the only ethical position which makes any sense at all.
This has gone far enough. The only effective response is to judge by actions and refuse to work with any Y Combinator company until Thiel is fired (and Altman resigns).
He said them $1.25m times. Cut ties or lose deal-flow. It's on you.
Led Zep are absolutely in the English folk tradition – distinct but related to the American scene – as well as the blues one.
Your most likely starting point is density functional theory; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density_functional_theory, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohn–Sham_equations. Classical molecular mechanics is even older than that.
Been there. Self-destructive. Bad idea.
How not to product manage 101.
If Scott Kupor's position is a company's position, and the total package value (including salary, benefits, etc), isn't acceptable to you when valuing options at zero – and given you don't control the company, and they can fire you at any time, you have to – then they're on the list. Refuse to work with them and tell your friends.
If you disapprove of his or A16Z's attitude, just don't accept investment from him. Let the market tell them they're wrong.
(Much as I will never knowingly work for a Kleiner company.)
Western Europe's governments are largely run by social democrats, Christian democrats or liberal conservatives. Very few are left enough to be properly called democratic socialism.
The one really good idea in the whole Semantic Web train-wreck (and at this distance, I think it's fair to call it that) was that everything should have a negotiable, dereferencable URL. REST includes that core principle.
A lot of single-page web apps make me sad because they've been designed without reference to that. If what you're building is genuinely an application, then I get it; but most of the time what you're building is a catalogue, and everything in that can have an address, so it should.
Everyone in the physical sciences uses arXiv.