sethbannon

Makes me think airlines will soon start strategically placing "purchasers" throughout the plane in order to maximize the effect of this social pressure.

If your point is that I'm sensitive to journalists looking for takedowns given that I feel I was the target of one, you're absolutely right. But how is your comment relevant to the article originally posted? And why the throwaway account?

For those curious, the article above was published after I wrote a blog post on my mistakes here: http://sethbannon.com/mistakes-you-should-never-make

From the image at the front of Josh Tetrick with mayo on his face, this seems like a hit piece designed more to take down Josh and Hampton Creek than to inform the public. There are legitimate conversations to be had about how Hampton Creek runs its business, but this piece doesn't sit well with me.

One of the saddest things to me is seeing some of the most brilliant and creative minds work on trivial or frivolous things. How much positive impact could those people be having if they were just pointed in another direction? Yes, it's sometimes hard to know what frivolous looking things may turn out to be important, but some things (e.g. smartphone-controlled candles) are clear as day.

There are many great mentors in the startup world, but I've yet to meet one with a better time in to help out ratio than Michael Seibel. Excellent choice to lead YC.

It's also very inspiring to see YC Group tackling some of the world's most important problems. Excited to see what comes of this.

"Give me your tired, your overworked, your entrepreneurs yearning to innovate."

My goodness driving directions used to be such a nightmare!

Uber finally threw up the white flag in its fight against Didi in China. I wonder how big of a dent this puts in Uber's sheen of invincibility in other markets. Will investors be braver backing other regional competitors like Ola in India and Lyft in the US?

I really hope this means we'll get to see this beautiful new campus vision come to life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3v4rIG8kQA

It was put on hold after Google lost development rights to needed property to LinkedIn.

Great video. You you enjoyed the above, you'll likely also appreciate this video of a Rubik's Cube being solved in 0.9 seconds by a robot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixTddQQ2Hs4

It seems to me some economists simply can't fathom en economic system not fueled primarily by human labor. "Employment" is treated like a good in itself instead of what it should be treated as: a means to the desired end of high quality of life.

For convenience, direct link to the paper being reported on: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20...

I read the headline and shuddered, but seeing the examples she gives of the sort of behavior she'd like to curtail, it seems fairly reasonable:

"Apple uses control over the iPhone platform to advantage Apple Music over other subscription music services.

Amazon uses control over the world’s largest store for e-books to advantage books published by Amazon over books from rival publishers.

Google uses control over the world’s most widely used search engine to promote its own Google-generated content even when a straight implementation of Google’s algorithm would surface content by someone else."

Anyone interested in the effort to catalogue all the world's languages should check out the nonprofit Wikitongues: http://www.wikitongues.org

They have a fascinating collection of videos of people speaking in their native languages.

This just in: homes connected to roads are not private, court rules.

This is a noble effort. Animal agriculture is pretty terrible. It's massively wasteful in terms of land use and water use. It's incredibly inefficient when it comes to energy use (beef cattle production requires an energy input to protein output ratio of 54:1 [1]). And, of course, there are the animal welfare concerns.

Even given all the problems, I'm convinced that people won't stop eating meat unless there is a market alternative that's at least equivalent in terms of price, taste, smell, texture, and nutrition. While the plant-based alternatives are getting better and better and I'm a big fan, I'm much more excited about the cultured meat alternatives.

Basically, you can think of a cow as a biological machine inside which certain processes occur which lead to things humans like to eat (milk, meat). If you can replicate those process in the lab instead of in the cow, you can get real meat without the negative side effects mentioned above.

Until very recently, this field had been relegated to academia, but there are now several companies working on commercializing it, like Memphis Meats, Mosa Meats, and Modern Meadow. In my mind, this is the only solution: give people real meat, made without the animals.

[1] http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-80... [2] disclaimer: I'm an investor in Memphis Meats (http://www.memphismeats.com/)

I'm not aware of any other show that so seamlessly combines rip-roaringly funny comedy with essential insight into the way our society and system of government is deeply flawed. And on top of that, he even manages to direct action to fix the issues he draws attention to -- taking down the FCC website being one example[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/03/john-oliv...

Is there somewhere to check if one's account / pass was in the database?

He writes: "It was because of these articles that Vitalik Buterin, one of the founders of The DAO, started exploring the concepts in a three part series."

Vitalik is in no way a founder of The DAO. He's a "curator" which only means he can whitelist wallet addresses that can receive funds. He had no hand in it's creation or in the white paper that inspired it.

Getting such a basic fact wrong makes me doubt his understanding in general.

Hey Debra,

Thanks for everything you're doing to increase participation in our democracy!

I know it's a bit far-sighted, but would love to hear your thoughts on electronic voting. Is it feasible? Desirable? What do we need to get there?

Hey Jared, there are now startups that offer to detect customers that might churn before they do based on things like product usage data. I'd be curious to hear if YC has thought about an early detection system like this for startups it's funded that might be in need of some extra attention, based on the data it gets from founders. Could also be interesting to see if YC could predict a startup that's about to breakout in a systematic way.

I wouldn't be surprised if, in a month, Lee Sedol was able to beat AlphaGo in another match. This is what happened in chess. The best computers were able to beat the best humans, until the best humans learned how to play anti-computer chess. This bought them a year or so more, until computers finally dominated for good.

I was at the 2003 match of Garry Kasparov vs Deep Junior -- the strongest chess player of all time vs what was at that point the strongest chess playing computer in history. Kasparov drew that match, but it was clear it was the last stand of homo sapiens in the man vs machine chess battle. Back then, people took solace in the game of Go. Many boldly and confidently predicted we wouldn't see a computer beat the Go world champion in our lifetimes.

Tonight, that happened. Google's DeepMind AlphaGo defeated the world Go champion Lee Sedol. An amazing testament to humanity's ability to continuously innovate at a continuously surprising pace. It's important to remember, this isn't really man vs machine, as we humans programmed the algorithms and built the computers they run on. It's really all just circuitous man vs man.

Excited for the next "impossible" things we'll see in our lifetimes.

This is great news for education tech. Also very interesting that YC is focusing so heavily on the "education vertical". Can't help but wonder if this is only the first such consolidation. Could easily imagine YC joining forces with other vertical accelerators that have deep expertise and networks in things like synthetic biology, hardware, food, etc.

Could be an interesting tactic to increase the costs of patent trolling. No longer is merely dropping a lawsuit when a company pushes back a way out -- now the patent trolls also have to deal with a separate litigation in a far away jurisdiction. I hope we see more of this.

Interesting choice on the equity side. If I'm reading this correctly, and YC gets 1.5% when the company IPOs or has a $100M or more funding event then, functionally, it's as if YC is taking much more than 1.5% now, because they're not taking on the dilution they would otherwise be as the company went through successive rounds of financing.

I encourage everyone to take time today to reflect on Aaron's legacy, and on how we can use technology to make the world more just, more open, and more fair.

This would make a great psychology experiment. Use an algorithm to detect someone's age, then randomly assign them an attractiveness score and see how their behavior differs based on the result. How does the random attractiveness result effect how likely they are to share their score? To retake the test? Does this vary based on the users age?

Imagine a factory that's dumping large amounts of arsenic into the public drinking water supply -- a factory that can't operate without doing so. Imagine also that studies show small amounts of arsenic are safe, but large amounts in drinking water can cause serious negative health effects.

Seeing these studies, someone comes along and proposes a regulation that limits the amount of arsenic this factory is allowed to dump into the public water supply, to keep it within safe levels.

A critic then comes along and says: "The amount of arsenic in the water is not the root problem -- the root problem is that arsenic makes people sick. We should focus on helping people not get sick when exposed to arsenic! That way, we wouldn't have to hurt this job-creating factory."

This feels like what PG is arguing for here. In an ideal world, where governmental systems were purely representative and incorruptible, and where markets were efficient and impossible to manipulate, sure, focusing on huge economic inequality wouldn't make sense. But we don't live in this world, just like we don't live in a world where we can easily make people immune to large amounts of arsenic.

What sort of work have you done?

Would love to hear more and see if we can't collaborate on this. My email is seth AT amicushq DOT com.