klik99

It’s true startups go against deeper pockets, but I stand by my analysis since Uber / Amazon / Tesla (to a degree) were early tech companies going against old companies and not competing with others doing the exact same thing. They operated at a loss to defeat the old guard. Today that model doesn’t work well, and Anthropic are against deeper pockets that are doing nearly the exact same thing as them. If they were the only innovative company with huge outside investment against entrenched and unwilling to innovate older companies like Uber and Amazon then I’d agree there was a bigger chance.

And I like Anthropic, I want them to be successful, but they just can’t operate at a loss like this for long, they have to make some tough calls, and trying to cut corners behind the scenes is not good for long term trust

Those aren’t good comparisons.

Uber operated at a loss to destroy competition and raised prices after they did that.

Amazon (the retailer) did the same and leveraged their position to enter new more lucrative markets.

Dunno about Spotify, but Tesla and palantir both secured lucrative contracts and subsidies.

Anthropic is against companies with deeper pockets and can’t spend to destroy competition, their current business model can only survive if they reduce costs or raise prices. Something’s got to give

Yes, this is mostly true - class is thought of as upbringing in UK and it's malleable in US. But you can still be rich and low class in the US, there are a ton of class signifiers in US but it's more like a club that you get inducted into, money just gets you the chance to try to enter that world. Increasingly though it's something you're born into.

As a cultural mutt between US and UK, I think UK is "class-aware" and US is more obsessed with the idea that if we all wear jeans then class isn't a thing. I see the same class contempt in US as the UK, and not recognizing it for what it is keeps people divided.

Someone brought this up in a previous HN comment section as an example of trust in software ruining peoples lives. But your explanation is far more human and recontextualizes it a bit for me - it just happened to be that this was done with software, but the real motivation was contempt for the lower classes and could have easily have happened 100 years ago with an internal investigation task force.

Growing up half in England and US I feel British culture is more attuned to the class aspects to this kind of event. Traditionally America likes to pretend this kind of class contempt doesn't exist (think of, people on welfare angry at welfare queens, unaware they will be affected by legislation they support).

I suspect by "anybody" they meant anyone outside of the "relatively small but healthy sector", and therefore competitors such as Epic or GOG wouldn't count. Outside analysts think of games as a subset of tech and that big tech companies would merely need to turn the eye of sauren towards games and they could conquer the market.

But outside analysts are wrong and completely misunderstand the games industry, see https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethanevansvp_as-vp-of-prime-g...

"The company is the product." -> When I'm feeling more optimistic I see this is how VC sees their portfolio and how you sell it to them, but not what the company is in reality. Like playwrights who write under authoritarian regimes selling it to the censor as promoting the regime while it actually satirizes and undermines them. But even if it's possible to walk that line, the data just doesn't back it up as common.

Side note, on "exit plan" - the most ridiculous thing about raising money is you need an exit strategy but you cannot explicitly say you have an exit strategy, you have to imply it while the whole time pretending it's not a focus for you. It's a very weird dynamic.

For the last 5-10 years I've noticed a lot of people here are more willing to question VC as the sole or even ideal way to start a company, and since a major chunk of YC is to train how to raise money and connect people via demo day or mentors to VC, I think that marks how the HN community has departed from the YC community. Obviously there's a lot of overlap, and HN clearly has it's roots in YC by it's literal founder, but I think it's wrong to say HN community is the same as YC community, which I say "historically"

I wish it were that simple, I think capitalism works best when personal self-interested incentives are aligned with what creates common good - IE policy is like game design where you design the rules in a way that provides an overall good outcome. In this lens, there is a huge problem with PE right now (the rules incentivize buying out industries and gutting them), and something wrong with VC (the rules incentivize enshittification) so the rules need to be adjusted to align with the broader outcomes we want.

Genuine question because I think I might be wrong on this one, or maybe misunderstanding what you're saying - aren't there cases of shareholders suing CEOs for not acting in shareholders interest and winning? If there was no legal obligation to act on behalf of shareholders how could they win those cases?

My understanding is those kind of cases aren't common because a) they are hard to prove, b) the people being sued if they actually have the money to make it worth suing them also have the money to fight it, and c) it's a really bad look for an investor to be suing a previous member of their portfolio and would a strong adverse affect on their deal flow

Unless you're saying there is no explicit legal obligation / fiduciary duty in law, but it does emerge from civil court cases, which is how I understand it, but short paragraphs are not a good place for the amount of nuance so I just said "legal obligation" as a shorthand for something real but very complex.

Maybe in theory, but in practice there is a strong power mismatch that causes investors to have a strong influence. Sand Hill learned it's lesson from Facebook/Zuckerberg and now always have a seat on the board. Only outliers like zuck/bezos/similar have the weight to push back against investors. Heck, even Dorsey couldn't for whatever reason.

And even if what you said is true, you can look at the results of years of this system, the difference between companies with outside investment vs without makes a strong case against what you're saying.

It's like saying educating people about their rights wrt police helps, but in practice police don't derive their power from actual laws and it comes at considerable personal expense to push it to courts, in the same way Delaware is very strongly biased towards shareholder rights.

> Then it raised venture capital, hit scale, and needed to hit growth numbers and meet quarterly metric goals. The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.”

Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these companies feel they’re beholden to shareholders and can’t act on their own agency of course they will turn to addiction research not as a warning but as a guidebook. It’s Stanford Prison Experiment stuff.

I hate being reductionist, and I am posting this on a historically YC forum so of course there’s nuance, but there’s a pretty huge throughline of outside investment and addiction engineering. It sucks we’re seeing less grants and less security net to encourage risks under current administration, because it leaves investment as the quickest path to starting or scaling a company. Donate to open source, IMO

I doubt you'll agree with any article sources I could provide, and for a lot of diseases it doesn't happen immediately. Measles is one - 285 cases in 2024, so far in 2025 there have been 1214. I'm sure you'll have a reason that is unrelated, so not sure what evidence I can provide.

Anecdotally, I know people who track flu to create the vaccine for next year, basically tracking trends in other countries that have leading indicators. People have been fired/rehired/fired from these positions across multiple rounds. Imagine not knowing if you'll be somewhere next week. The instability has caused a lot of people to look at other jobs. The smart people have options will leave when they think there's a better chance, the dumb ones will stay. Public health, which are like the roads - it's easy to forget how much work is involved to keep up - is going through a brain drain. These are people who are doing real work, for everyone, not just people who can't afford healthcare.

Since anecdotal stories probably don't sway you, check out reddit for public health and see how the actual workers: https://www.reddit.com/r/publichealth/

I'm sure none of this will affect your opinion, so can you provide hard data that what he is doing is good?

Google AI says: "While the term "insane" is subjective, dumping a bear carcass in Central Park is both illegal and highly inadvisable."

RFK believes "For decades, the CDC has kept a tight grip on the Vaccine Safety Datalink, concealing vital vaccine safety information from the public," - IE that CDC has conspired to conceal harmful effects of vaccines. If he finds that database, I'll gladly sit up and listen. But until he finds it I'll consider this a conspiracy theory and, according to Psychology Today, belief in conspiracy theories is not necessarily associated with mental disorders.

I disagree with a lot of people in the Trump administration, but I only use the word insane (in the subjective sense, not in the literally diagnosed sense) to describe RFKJr.

I don't give him credit because he comes to his view from a lot of dangerous mistrust of science and medicine. I know a lot of people at CDC who work on flu vaccines and AIDs research, and my step-father was on the team that eradicated smallpox. RFKJr has done unimaginable harm to public health and is pushing us backwards. The people at CDC genuinely want to help people. You can say they've done things wrong, overstepped in some way, or have too much research money from private industry, and that could be a good discussion. No group is perfect, but the answer isn't to destroy it all, or think the CDC is part of a conspiracy.

I think food dyes need more research and better understanding before deploying to millions of people, that is not the same as his anti-science stance. While breaking a lot of things, he also happened to do something good, I don't think that counts as "solving the actual problem".

And, as far as your last point about previous administrations I meant both democrat and republican, but it's been obvious a long time that Democrats pandering would cause a backlash.

At any rate, I don't discount peoples ideas as brainwashing or preconceived ideas, even people I disagree with. I want America to succeed. Trump even did a few things in his first term I agreed with. You seem to have a filter to think people who don't buy into this "new golden age" are brainwashed or tribal. This isn't true. Spend some time considering other view points.

> Are artificial dyes actually bad for you?

The fact that this is a legitimate question is very concerning. Some of these dyes are/were ubiquitous and there is very little research about them. IIRC a few have evidence of harm. Nothing should be this widely deployed without understanding them more.

If you were more questioning "Is natural actually better for people or just a nice sounding word" which could also be implied by your question, I agree with that, with the caveat that artificial stuff has more potential for surprises since it doesn't have the history of being used safely "natural" stuff does, and should have a higher bar of research.

Why did it take an insane person to actually get sensible regulation for food dyes in? Rhetorical question because I think people like RFKJr got into power because previous administrations didn't take care of the obvious things that need regulation, and if you ignore the basics for too long people flip over to someone who packages a couple of reasonable stances with a lot of damaging ideas.

I agree with RFK for pushing for change in this industry but I give him no credit, instead I blame previous administrations on both sides for not taking a better stance on regulating food like every other developed country in the world.

Exactly this, it's hard to explain to a non-emacs user why TRAMP is so magical, but the number of times I tried to run something that was meant to run locally on my machine through TRAMP and it just worked is very impressive. It runs so smoothly that you forget you're executing things on a remote machine, and when that leaks through it's typically very easy to diagnose and fix - for instance I have ag (silver searcher) installed on my local machine, tried running a search with ag via tramp and the bin obviously wasn't on the remote machine, a simple apt-get later and I could run my search with all my custom settings remotely.

If anyones ever used the Plan 9 OS across network, TRAMP is like that for emacs

Nice, I unfortunately need to work on Windows while also doing a lot of remote editing, so switched to emacs on wsl just to use tramp - I wasn't aware of watchexec which seems like a much better solution. However part of what makes tramp great is being able to use emacs just like it's local, so things like ag/magit/etc wouldn't work as smoothly.

This article assumes people are primarily accessing these things at home. Maybe for most apps / websites that’s appropriate but people access these things internet on phones in places where connections can be spotty, and it’s very frustrating to be driving through a dead zone and have apps freak out.

I hope people making apps to unlock cars or other critical things that you might need at 1am on a road trip in the middle of nowhere don’t have this attitude of “everyone has reliable internet these days!”

Concrete example: I made an app for Prospect Park in Brooklyn that had various features that were meant to be accessed while in the park which had (has?) very spotty cell service, so it was designed to sync and store locally using an eventually consistent DB, even with things that needed to be uploaded.

Yes, that's a really good point. I had this nagging feeling of there was a commercialization aspect driving when I was writing that, since that's obviously what happened to punk, and you hit the nail on the head. I do think students are taught the 3-act structure / heros journey as if it was the ideal structure, but the true reason for it's ubiquity is an attempt to commoditize art.

Kubrick frequently uses a two act - Barry Lyndon where he rises from nothing to peak at the exact midpoint and then falls to nothing at the end, or Clockwork Orange where he does a bunch of horrible things in the first half and the consequences are mirrored around the midpoint of the movie.

One thing I've noticed in music composition (where I have more training/experience, but I suspect the same is true for narratives) is the rules get codified / standardized a generation after a style of music is popular. Bach, for example, "breaks the rules" of counterpoint at least once in every piece in Well-Tempered Clavier, which was supposed to be an educational piece so if he actually felt like there were rules to follow he'd be more likely to be "by the book" for educational purposes.

But the rules of counterpoint were codified after his death (IIRC there were two people who worked together to do it), and act like an averaging across all baroque composers. Making the rules is kind of like putting it in a glass box, sealing it off and preserving it - IE removing all life from it. A contemporary example is how punk became standardized, just wear leather jacket with safety pins and mohawk and play barre chords. The spirit of punk moved to post-punk and elsewhere but also this bizzaro copy of all the superficial aspects of punk moved elsewhere.

While I love Joseph Campbell and the heros journey, I do feel like sticking too strongly to it does the same thing for narratives. I especially hate insistence that everything needs a three act structure, not because it's inherently bad, but because stories that don't need it are shoehorned into it and given an unneeded third act with more set pieces than genuine character motivation and development. It's like people see a good movie with a three act structure, and think it's due to that specific structure.

I just learned about kishōtenketsu thanks to this great video on How To with John Wilson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-SwyF-Vvbs). I'm surprised that it's not as well known in the west, considering how many great directors use it.

Ozu is my favorite director, and learning about the 4-act structure helped me understand why - I always hated the third act of most movies, when character motivations go out the window in the interest of a big explosive ending. There is a lot of potential in kishōtenketsu structure to tell stories that are more realistic and introspective and don't require the kind of antagonistic conflict of 3-act structure.

Parrot parents parrot their parents

I thought AI was supposed to make people more productive with less time? Shouldn’t AI companies be dog fooding?

In seriousness, I get startups require 7-day weeks - from the founders, who have enough equity that makes it worth it. I did that, for years, with a family. It was rough and we never exited, but I don’t regret it since I believed in what I was building. But if you’re VC funded and saying you need 7 day work weeks from employees you’re giving fraction of percent of equity, you’re exploiting people. Hire more people, make a bigger ask.

As I said I regret nothing about my experience in the startup world, but I’m so happy to be at a company that truly respects work life balance.

I was gonna disagree with you, until I saw this line:

"Mr. Friede’s first snake encounter, a harmless bite by a garter snake at age 5, started a lifelong fascination. “If I only knew back then what was going to happen,” he recalled, laughing uproariously.

But he didn’t begin dabbling with snakes in earnest until he was married with children and working in construction."

"Dabbling with snakes" is just poetry

I mean, I think people can be that altruistic, but the people who really make a difference are those whose interests align with an altruistic outcome.

The irony of asking on HN how to not use HN

Pushing back on extremely biased reads on China doesn’t mean denying things that look legit. China does engage in more transnational surveillance than most countries. Most of what I read on China is distorted, exaggerated or simply the same as every major world power does, but this one sounds pretty accurate and shitty. I don’t trust any government though, and think pointing fingers is not as useful as fixing our own house.

Yeah, it's a good thing to be talking about pie in the sky ideas, most of which won't really work. The few good ideas that survive internet critics picking apart the smallest details could be interesting

This particular way of seeing MCP that the article describes came up a lot during the early voice assistant ways - and I guess amazon did kind of attempt an app store approach to giving alexa more capabilities. In theory I like it! But in practice most people won't be using any one integration enough to buy it - like why go through the hoops to buy a "plane ticket purchasing app" when you do it maybe 4 times a year. I just don't see it playing out the way the author describes