Normally we downweight articles like this but when YC or a YC startup is the story, we err on the side of moderating less - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
You want more diverse content because it attracts a more interesting audience. There’s several mechanisms to promote this. “Health risks of travel in early-modern Britain” only has 35 upvotes in the last 6 hours but still ranks #17 because diversity is encouraged.
Another story is talking about remnants of a structure dating back “476,000 years and predating the evolution of our own species, Homo sapiens” https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2023/09/20/archaeologists-disco...
There both interesting but so is “Fine-grained caching strategies of dynamic queries” etc etc.
So, your duty was done.
I trust that they had the judgment to decide that they needed to defend their reputation.
I know you're mostly correct but let's not distort reality here.
And there's a lot of evidence these business are excelling DESPITE him. Eg people buying Tesla even though they resent the man.
The obvious example is Musk who regularly makes himself look like an idiot, though I think the kind of whiny defensive posts mentioned in this article look way worse.
Somewhat surprisingly, I think Yan LeCunn does a decent job of posting fairly aggressive tweets but not looking like a whiner, crazy or someone shouting pointlessly into the void.
Social media: The business utility of it is primarily in broadcasting press release-type information and real-time notices. For personal use, the power law distribution of popularity suggests it's a time suck with little or no net positive value.
YCs contention is that the number of mentors on the website is not the right way to compare. For example, the YC mentors are working full time at YC helping startups while Neo’s mentors have full time jobs elsewhere and only spend a % of their time mentoring startups.
So the contention is that Neo is directly calling out YC and making dishonest comparisons.
There are other things as well about the ethics and behavior of the Neo founder, Ali Partovi, but it is only hinted at. Not explicitly stated with examples backing up any claims.
I don't know whether those numbers are accurate or not because i don't know (or care) about either of these companies, but he definitely did not say what he's being accused of saying.
