Hacker News - It's not for hackers and it's hardly news.

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

What's BS about fake meat? It tastes fine.

Found the vegan

 

[i440BX]

What's BS about fake meat? It tastes fine.

The BS about cultured/fake meat is that it is that even if they manage to get a similar taste to minced meat, they will never match nutritional values of true meat. Or the complex structure/fat.

Another bullshit is that instead of accepting that people like meat more and accept their products as a niche for few vegans/hipsters, certain people are at war with animal farming and food, wishing to disrupt these markets. They will try to guilt trip or even gas-light people that any animal product is unhealthy or bad of society. No wonder the trust has become low.

Fortunately, this food sector is doomed to fail because some suckers believed it will replace meat. Stocks of those companies are falling and any their products are sitting on the shelves. Even chicken don't eat this. (Need to find the youtube video).

 

[AnOminous]

The BS about cultured/fake meat is that it is that even if they manage to get a similar taste to minced meat, they will never match nutritional values of true meat. Or the complex structure/fat.

The only remotely acceptable use of this crap is that fake ground beef you can put in chili or other things where ground beef is an ingredient. Even then it's inferior.

The only other "fake meat" worth anything is "mock duck," or seitan, invented centuries ago by Buddhist monks, which is basically flavored gluten.

If you're not going to eat a hamburger, a portobello mushroom fried with soy and olive oil, maybe salt and pepper, or some other flavor. Then you can treat it like a burger and it actually tastes great. Not like an actual patty but good in its own right.

And as for fake burgers, the ones that are just some kind of vegetable patty that isn't lying about what it is is the best.

 

[teriyakiburns]

What's BS about fake meat? It tastes fine.

So does lead acetate.

 

[anklyscr]

The BS about cultured/fake meat is that it is that even if they manage to get a similar taste to minced meat, they will never match nutritional values of true meat. Or the complex structure/fat.

Another bullshit is that instead of accepting that people like meat more and accept their products as a niche for few vegans/hipsters, certain people are at war with animal farming and food, wishing to disrupt these markets. They will try to guilt trip or even gas-light people that any animal product is unhealthy or bad of society. No wonder the trust has become low.

Fortunately, this food sector is doomed to fail because some suckers believed it will replace meat. Stocks of those companies are falling and any their products are sitting on the shelves. Even chicken don't eat this. (Need to find the youtube video).

Dunno if this is the video you’re on about but it’s an insight into the fake meat industry

Edit this one too.

 

[AnOminous]

Fortunately, this food sector is doomed to fail because some suckers believed it will replace meat. Stocks of those companies are falling and any their products are sitting on the shelves. Even chicken don't eat this. (Need to find the youtube video).

Here's a picture from the early days of the coof when grocery shelves were bare:

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

Well now, what in Lobste.rs do I spy, with my little eye, with ninety-five comments, while other threads die, but another meta-discussion:
https://lobste.rs/s/buez9b/bad_call_by_lobsters_moderation (archive)

That furry whose thread I need to start writing already, Soatok, complained about a moderation decision affecting his article:
https://soatok.blog/2024/02/27/the-tech-industry-doesnt-understand-consent/ (archive)
The gist is some WWW company named Automattic is fucking over its users. It's basic shit really, and not meaningfully worse than half of the other articles on the front page. Regardless, pushcx has a nebulous standard which must be maintained at all times, except for friends:


This user is correct; Lobste.rs really is just the very worst of Hacker News without any of its redeeming qualities, like a large amount of users:

Soatok moderates pawb.social, which is interesting, but I've yet to look into this at any detail.

This is presented without comment:

People here are talking about it (Hacker News) like they just have a difference of opinion, but it (Hacker News) is definitely not a place you frequent unless you’re already right-leaning at this point.

This discussion ended in yet another long-term user leaving. It says a lot about their inviting community that this continually happens:

If they can't even keep around homosexual furries obsessed with cryptography, their outlook is dim.

 

[Hồ Chí Minh]

soatok also complained on HN that their article isn't getting ranked highly enough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39540186

They also have an alt account with the express purpose of bypassing HN rate limits: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=soatok

If you look at the comment history then nothing really stands out as important.

He/She/They/It is one of those entitled people who throws a tantrum whenever the rules that apply to everyone else gets applied to them. I've seen them do this before a number of times.

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

Paul Graham has written another essay, and it's on the front page of Hacker News by its own merits and for no other reason:
https://paulgraham.com/best.html (archive)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39662615 (archive)

Despite its title this isn't meant to be the best essay. My goal here is to figure out what the best essay would be like.

I'm going to guess that it's not going to be like a Paul Graham essay.

It would be well-written, but you can write well about any topic. What made it special would be what it was about.

No shit.

A good essay has to be surprising. It has to tell people something they don't already know.

I'm not certain about this point. Null's essay about where the sidewalk ends wasn't littered with new-to-me information, but I still enjoyed it.

The best essay would be on the most important topic you could tell people something surprising about.

I guess. I've been complimented on essays I wrote in a matter of minutes, however.

Another unexpected consequence: I imagined when I started writing this that the best essay would be fairly timeless — that the best essay you could write in 1844 would be much the same as the best one you could write now. But in fact the opposite seems to be true. It might be true that the best painting would be timeless in this sense. But it wouldn't be impressive to write an essay introducing natural selection now. The best essay now would be one describing a great discovery we didn't yet know about.

If the question of how to write the best possible essay reduces to the question of how to make great discoveries, then I started with the wrong question. Perhaps what this exercise shows is that we shouldn't waste our time writing essays but instead focus on making discoveries in some specific domain. But I'm interested in essays and what can be done with them, so I want to see if there's some other question I could have asked.

This is already not a nice essay.

There is, and on the face of it, it seems almost identical to the one I started with. Instead of asking what would the best essay be? I should have asked how do you write essays well? Though these seem only phrasing apart, their answers diverge. The answer to the first question, as we've seen, isn't really about essay writing. The second question forces it to be.

My head is getting warm.

Writing essays, at its best, is a way of discovering ideas. How do you do that well? How do you discover by writing?

Add constraints. That's how I do my best writing.

How do you get this initial question? It probably won't work to choose some important-sounding topic at random and go at it. Professional traders won't even trade unless they have what they call an edge — a convincing story about why in some class of trades they'll win more than they lose.

People who play games with money are scum, and I wouldn't look to them as a model for anything, except scum.

Similarly, you shouldn't attack a topic unless you have a way in — some new insight about it or way of approaching it.

Still, this is correct, and why I avoided writing about any of the major political topics in 2020.

Once you've got a question, then what? You start thinking out loud about it. Not literally out loud, but you commit to a specific string of words in response, as you would if you were talking.

Paul Graham's readers should also be instructed to breathe through their noses.

I'm now tired of countering almost every paragraph.

Can we predict which questions will yield great essays? Considering how long I've been writing essays, it's alarming how novel that question feels.

Therefore, look at Paul Graham's questions, and pick very different questions.

One thing I like in an initial question is outrageousness. I love questions that seem naughty in some way — for example, by seeming counterintuitive or overambitious or heterodox.

Oh, but don't stray too far Paul. After all, investors hate when people ask certain questions.

You can also get ideas by talking to people, by doing and building things, and by going places and seeing things. I don't think it's important to talk to new people so much as the sort of people who make you have new ideas. I get more new ideas after talking for an afternoon with Robert Morris than from talking to 20 new smart people. I know because that's what a block of office hours at Y Combinator consists of.

Boy, I sure wish I could work at Y Combinator!

Holy shit this just keeps going.

When a subtree comes to an end, you can do one of two things. You can either stop, or pull the Cubist trick of laying separate subtrees end to end by returning to a question you skipped earlier. Usually it requires some sleight of hand to make the essay flow continuously at this point, but not this time. This time I actually need an example of the phenomenon. For example, we discovered earlier that the best possible essay wouldn't usually be timeless in the way the best painting would. This seems surprising enough to be worth investigating further.

Boy, those are some nice technical terms and artistic name drops, Paul. I'm impressed.

The answer to that turns out to be very strange: to be the evergreen kind of timeless, an essay has to be ineffective, in the sense that its discoveries aren't assimilated into our shared culture. Otherwise there will be nothing new in it for the second generation of readers. If you want to surprise readers not just now but in the future as well, you have to write essays that won't stick — essays that, no matter how good they are, won't become part of what people in the future learn before they read them.

He's succeeded in this respect. This essay isn't going to stick with me at all.

I skimmed until the end at this point.

But although I wish I could say that writing great essays depends mostly on effort, in the limit case it's inspiration that makes the difference. In the limit case, the questions are the harder thing to get. That pool has no bottom.

How to get more questions? That is the most important question of all.

Boy, this is his best use of the mathematical term limit case since he used it to justify why executives deserve so much more than the workers who actually do the work. Using a mathematical term like that makes him smart.

There are thirteen footnotes here.

I don't recommend reading this essay to you, except to laugh at it. None of the current comments on Hacker News are interesting.

 

[Raven Rainbow]

aside from just pg I don't trust anyone who calls their writing "essays"

 

[UNIXLover]

They also have an alt account with the express purpose of bypassing HN rate limits

For context Dan can add a flag to account to enable these "rate limits" for accounts he thinks are trolling / flaming / causing wars in the comment section. These are not rate limits to avoid overloading the single sever that runs hacker news, but rather to give the commenter time to cool down. The thought is that forcing a user to wait an hour before they can continue replying to replies to their comment can reduce how much damage can be done.
This flag is not on accounts by default.

 

[quaawaa]

For context Dan can add a flag to account to enable these "rate limits" for accounts he thinks are trolling / flaming / causing wars in the comment section. These are not rate limits to avoid overloading the single sever that runs hacker news, but rather to give the commenter time to cool down. The thought is that forcing a user to wait an hour before they can continue replying to replies to their comment can reduce how much damage can be done.
This flag is not on accounts by default.

Note that dang rarely adds that flag to people who are actually going off topic and picking fights. Most rate limited people just dared to disagree with someone who shares dang’s opinions.

 

[Panzerfrau]

I don't really give a shit about lobste.rs, but soatok is a whiny, annoying bitch and should kill himself already.

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

Y Combinator is nineteen years old today:
https://paulgraham.com/ycstart.html (archive)

Y Combinator's 7th birthday was March 11. As usual we were so busy we didn't notice till a few days after. I don't think we've ever managed to remember our birthday on our birthday.

At the time I had been thinking about doing some angel investing.

These people sicken me with how they use the words angel, unicorn, and others for their financial games.

Now YC is well enough known that people are no longer surprised when the companies we fund are legit, but it took a while for reputation to catch up with reality.

Oh yes, the legitimate companies such as the illegal hotel business, the illegal food delivery business, the illegal driverless taxi service, and Reddit. I only mention these because they're in the first image of my starting post for this thread. I'm sure there are other good, unprofitable examples of legitimate companies funded by Y Combinator.

If we'd had enough time to do what we wanted, Y Combinator would have been in Berkeley. That was our favorite part of the Bay Area. But we didn't have time to get a building in Berkeley. We didn't have time to get our own building anywhere. The only way to get enough space in time was to convince Trevor to let us take over part of his (as it then seemed) giant building in Mountain View. Yet again we lucked out, because Mountain View turned out to be the ideal place to put something like YC. But even then we barely made it. The first dinner in California, we had to warn all the founders not to touch the walls, because the paint was still wet.

How nice for them.

Anyway, I looked at the Hacker News comments for Paul's essay again:

As we can see, not everyone agrees with Paul here.

Yes, writing an essay is exactly like making a startup.

Uh oh, I can't find these critical messages anymore. I guess they shouldn't have insulted poor Paul, but I got them.

 

[9gfuwegw9j9]

Dang getting butthurt over a Boeing whistleblower getting suicided by 2 gunshots to the back of his head

 

[306h4Ge5eJUJ]

Paul Graham has written another essay, and it's on the front page of Hacker News by its own merits and for no other reason:

Man who has never written a good essay in his life writes an essay on how to write good essays. No punchline. Surprisingly, a quick search says that Dabblers and Blowhards (A) hasn't been posted in this thread yet, but it's oh so relevant.

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

View attachment 5808083
Dang getting butthurt over a Boeing whistleblower getting suicided by 2 gunshots to the back of his head

A link and archive would be appreciated.

 

[Markass the Worst]

A link and archive would be appreciated.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39673589
https://archive.ph/pXpAq

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

I'm surprised Hacker News doesn't have a black bar to mourn the death of Apple Computer's global monopoly:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39678532 (archive)

It's, of course, the largest conversation on the front page currently. I invite someone else to find some amusing dumbfuckery therein, as I'm satisfied with this I found near the top:

It pisses me off when people look at Bell Labs, where the transistor and laser were invented, and instead act like the shitty operating system that never worked worth a fuck and its implementation language directly responsible for billions of dollars of losses and wasted centuries of human effort were the big creations there. Here's a fun fact: We're familiar with various kinds of castration here; UNIX is literally a castrated Multics. The idiots at Bell Labs looked at all that yucky error handling code and ripped it out. Anyway, this fool also gets the history of the GNU project wrong, and improperly attributes TCP/IP to BSD.

I could swear there was something else amusing I noticed, but it eludes me in the moment, so I'll just make a brief post this time.

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

Paul Graham has written another essay:
https://paulgraham.com/google.html (archive)

(This is a talk I gave to 14 and 15 year olds about what to do now if they might want to start a startup later. Lots of schools think they should tell students something about startups. This is what I think they should tell them.)

Most of you probably think that when you're released into the so-called real world you'll eventually have to get some kind of job. That's not true, and today I'm going to talk about a trick you can use to avoid ever having to get a job.

The trick is to start your own company. So it's not a trick for avoiding work, because if you start your own company you'll work harder than you would if you had an ordinary job. But you will avoid many of the annoying things that come with a job, including a boss telling you what to do.

Ah yes, the American dream with a different name. Here he again repeats the lie that company owners and founders work harder than employees. As we know, starting a company is free, and the average American is lush with spare money to start companies.

It's more exciting to work on your own project than someone else's. And you can also get a lot richer. In fact, this is the standard way to get really rich. If you look at the lists of the richest people that occasionally get published in the press, nearly all of them did it by starting their own companies.

Boy, I'm going to start a company just like Bill Gates did, by having wealthy parents who were on the board of IBM.

Starting your own company can mean anything from starting a barber shop to starting Google. I'm here to talk about one extreme end of that continuum. I'm going to tell you how to start Google.

Google, like it or not, is profitable, whereas Paul Graham's startup Viaweb was purchased by Yahoo and no longer exists.

The companies at the Google end of the continuum are called startups when they're young. The reason I know about them is that my wife Jessica and I started something called Y Combinator that is basically a startup factory. Since 2005, Y Combinator has funded over 4000 startups. So we know exactly what you need to start a startup, because we've helped people do it for the last 19 years.

How many of those startups do anything except lose money, Paul?

I'm skipping paragraphs now.

All you can know when you start working on a startup is that it seems worth pursuing. You can't know whether it will turn into a company worth billions or one that goes out of business. So when I say I'm going to tell you how to start Google, I mean I'm going to tell you how to get to the point where you can start a company that has as much chance of being Google as Google had of being Google.

Next up, Paul Graham will write an essay on how to buy winning lottery tickets.

Those of you who are taking computer science classes in school may at this point be thinking, ok, we've got this sorted. We're already being taught all about programming. But sorry, this is not enough. You have to be working on your own projects, not just learning stuff in classes. You can do well in computer science classes without ever really learning to program. In fact you can graduate with a degree in computer science from a top university and still not be any good at programming. That's why tech companies all make you take a coding test before they'll hire you, regardless of where you went to university or how well you did there. They know grades and exam results prove nothing.

Rather than prove the special nature of programming, this proves that programming is not treated like a real engineering discipline, for which horseshit like this is not allowed.

If you really want to learn to program, you have to work on your own projects. You learn so much faster that way. Imagine you're writing a game and there's something you want to do in it, and you don't know how. You're going to figure out how a lot faster than you'd learn anything in a class.

Sure, Paul.

So that's the first of the three things you need, to get good at some kind or kinds of technology. You do it the same way you get good at the violin or football: practice. If you start a startup at 22, and you start writing your own programs now, then by the time you start the company you'll have spent at least 7 years practicing writing code, and you can get pretty good at anything after practicing it for 7 years.

Quite the contrary, many celebrity programmers have been programming for decades, and aren't good at it. Anyway, technical excellency has nothing to do with founding a successful American business.

Actually it's easy to get startup ideas once you're good at technology. Once you're good at some technology, when you look at the world you see dotted outlines around the things that are missing. You start to be able to see both the things that are missing from the technology itself, and all the broken things that could be fixed using it, and each one of these is a potential startup.

I suppose I agree, but this is more maddening than anything, considering how much can't be fixed without decades of effort.

In the town near our house there's a shop with a sign warning that the door is hard to close. The sign has been there for several years. To the people in the shop it must seem like this mysterious natural phenomenon that the door sticks, and all they can do is put up a sign warning customers about it. But any carpenter looking at this situation would think "why don't you just plane off the part that sticks?"

Will we see the word "deindustrialization" in this essay? No, we won't. Gee, it seems like Apple Computer and Google in particular have made an awful lot of money preventing people from fixing broken software as described here. In fact, they train people to give up.

Once you're good at programming, all the missing software in the world starts to become as obvious as a sticking door to a carpenter.

Notice he only talks about missing software, not broken software, and any programmer worth a fuck can tell anyone how many problems broken software causes.

He mentions Mark Zuckerberg, but doesn't mention his well-off family either.

It's obvious in retrospect that this was a great idea for a startup. It wasn't obvious at the time. It's never obvious. If it was obviously a good idea to start Apple or Google or Facebook, someone else would have already done it. That's why the best startups grow out of projects that aren't meant to be startups. You're not trying to start a company. You're just following your instincts about what's interesting. And if you're young and good at technology, then your unconscious instincts about what's interesting are better than your conscious ideas about what would be a good company.

This reminds me of the economist joke: An economist is walking, and notices a $20 bill on the sidewalk, but isn't certain, and doesn't look back or pick it up because someone else would've already done that if it were.

So it's critical, if you're a young founder, to build things for yourself and your friends to use. The biggest mistake young founders make is to build something for some mysterious group of other people. But if you can make something that you and your friends truly want to use — something your friends aren't just using out of loyalty to you, but would be really sad to lose if you shut it down — then you almost certainly have the germ of a good startup idea. It may not seem like a startup to you. It may not be obvious how to make money from it. But trust me, there's a way.

Did Paul Graham use Viaweb? He doesn't use Y Combinator, but he's not a young founder anymore, so I guess it doesn't count.

What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is something your friends actually want. And those ideas aren't hard to see once you're good at technology. There are sticking doors everywhere.

I don't recall the FBI ever arresting people who fix sticking doors, but I can remember plenty of examples of software that was modified by someone, and then the arrests happened.

Now for the third and final thing you need: a cofounder, or cofounders. The optimal startup has two or three founders, so you need one or two cofounders. How do you find them? Can you predict what I'm going to say next? It's the same thing: projects. You find cofounders by working on projects with them. What you need in a cofounder is someone who's good at what they do and that you work well with, and the only way to judge this is to work with them on things.

Why, Paul?

At this point I'm going to tell you something you might not want to hear. It really matters to do well in your classes, even the ones that are just memorization or blathering about literature, because you need to do well in your classes to get into a good university. And if you want to start a startup you should try to get into the best university you can, because that's where the best cofounders are. It's also where the best employees are. When Larry and Sergey started Google, they began by just hiring all the smartest people they knew out of Stanford, and this was a real advantage for them.

Is Stanford full of dumb niggers by now?

That's it, just two things, build stuff and do well in school.

This is so profound. I'm going to make a shrine to Paul Graham and masturbate over it to give him some of my psychic energy.

There's something else to which I want to draw attention:
https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/the-reddits (archive)

I'm not going to give this a comprehensive critique. It starts with an explanation of how Reddit came to be. To his credit, Paul Graham mentions Aaron Swartz.

They would have liked to call it Snoo, as in "What snoo?" But snoo.com was too expensive, so they settled for calling the mascot Snoo and picked a name for the site that wasn't registered. Early on Reddit was just a provisional name, or so they told me at least, but it's probably too late to change it now.

Haha, what a funny little joke, Paul.

Steve was not a big fan of authority, so he also liked the idea of a site without editors. In those days the top forum for programmers was a site called Slashdot. It was a lot like Reddit, except the stories on the frontpage were chosen by human moderators. And though they did a good job, that one small difference turned out to be a big difference. Being driven by user submissions meant Reddit was fresher than Slashdot. News there was newer, and users will always go where the newest news is.

Gee, how's Slashdot doing compared to Reddit nowadays? It's certainly ironic, considering that trannies now completely control Reddit editorially.

I pushed the Reddits to launch fast. A version one didn't need to be more than a couple hundred lines of code. How could that take more than a week or two to build? And they did launch comparatively fast, about three weeks into the first YC batch. The first users were Steve, Alexis, me, and some of their YC batchmates and college friends. It turns out you don't need that many users to collect a decent list of interesting links, especially if you have multiple accounts per user.

Haha, Reddit faked user activity for quite a while. I wonder if that will ever be illegal, if it isn't already.

Reddit the site (and now app) is such a fundamentally useful thing that it's almost unkillable.

Sure. Let's look back on it in a year, then a decade.

People thought they had Reddit's number: one of the players in Silicon Valley, but not one of the big ones. But those who knew what had been going on behind the scenes knew there was more to the story than this. If Reddit could grow to the size it had with management that was harmless at best, what could it do if Steve came back? We now know the answer to that question. Or at least a lower bound on the answer. Steve is not out of ideas yet.

Please buy Reddit stock. I think I'm going to buy some right now!