Sam Altman is not on YC's board. So why claim to be its chair?

How is a new college grad supposed to reap "enormous returns" without significant savings?

IMO nobody highly typical reaped major returns from '2013 - 2019' unless they already had excess income.

Even restricting to CS (and I haven't tracked my graduating CS classes that closely from the '08 - '11 range) my memory is that many of the smartest ones didn't end up working in CS for reasons that were never clear to me and sort of muddled by for years. (To a certain extent I'm still not sure how college grads who didn't get internships or work in the field are supposed to land their first job in the field if they're great at c and algorithms but can't and won't market themselves or move.) The only ones who made out like bandits were the ones who landed internships at places like Google or MS or had preexisting connections or niche interests of some form. A solid chunk ended up at big old companies, like IBM, Lockheed Martin, etc. They mostly made out well because getting paid $60k - $90k out of college around then made it easy to buy a house, and because they worked somewhere that made a job switch or career progression work out well enough to start getting paid more circa mid '10s. That said, a solid chunk ended up in smaller companies, government, or non-tech companies that needed devs, and I think for many of them it didn't work out or lead to years of low pay before being able to get more on track. For many, it seems like things didn't really lead to big benefits until the pandemic, which I think unlocked opportunities for more folks to work remote.

Back to speaking more generally, I think many more people probably could have reaped the benefits of home ownership than did so in the '08 to '19 interval because houses seemed to stay cheap all over the country for much of that period. But many folks in the age bracket seem like they either (a) didn't realize they could afford to when houses were quite cheap, (b) actually couldn't (student loans?) or (c) were afraid to, because that whole generation never feels secure in a job or their ability to find a job if their current one cuts them, and got somewhat chilled by the foreclosures they saw in the '08 crash. Many of these folks I think only realized how this was screwing them when rents started to skyrocket, though I don't think I clearly have a sense of how student loans play out - I do think college enrollment as a percentage of high school graduates was pretty high, but I'm not sure how big a percentage of those enrolled in high cost vs low cost situations in both absolutes and loans.

But IMO it's important to realize that for most typical workers in those years, median income was not high enough for single income to invest significantly beyond their house if they did save towards home ownership. The number of folks who didn't know how to find anything gainful to do with their degrees and so went back to school for master's or higher in those '08 - '11 years seems significant to me. I personally know plenty of folks who got masters degrees or better in various fields and basically eke out a living doing stuff like writing website copy, teaching at charter schools, and various other things that don't pay well and seem likely to be sort of demoralizing for someone with an advanced degree.

So IMO it's only with two income households and above median incomes that you can realistically do both (invest and own housing) over those years, particularly if there are any student loans. And during those years marriage ages have gone up.

The thing I'm seeing now is that folks who did get housing are kind of stuck doubling or tripling their payment to get a large place if they want to have kids, etc. Which will likely further negate many folks' ability to participate in the market. Or lead to further birth rate decline.

Yes Lizzie was absolutely untouchable and invincible until the façade came crashing down.

Humans Want To Believe.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41x244sdEXL._AC_UF894,10...

Problem is, the "bad things" the rich want to stop from happening are usually what the rest of us are doing to stop bad things from happening...

In both cases, the agency of individuals was undermined by regulatory capture and the publishing of false studies (despite having real studies that the companies buried).

For decades, people didn't even know it was dangerous to smoke or have lead in gasoline or burn fossil fuels because the information was systematically suppressed by the producers of those products.

I would submit that if we care about outcomes then it matters if someone is the best suited for the role.

There will always be subjectivity, and “the best” is going to be at least partly defined in terms of who is available. Nevertheless we could insist upon certain standards. Not being a pathological liar, a sociopath, deeply conflicted or self-interested, and so on, seem like good starting positions.

I’m not arguing that we live in a reality that reflects this, of course. Just that it would be nice to.

And the document was not written by an oligarch, lol.

No, only about one, in order to pump up his career, and AIUI signed by him. "lol hahaha"

That mistake is that it's not true. Altman has earned a name for himself in the truth-telling/transparency department. He wasn't briefly sacked for his fashion sense.

In the article they quote Marc Fagel, who previously served as the regional director for the SEC's office in San Francisco:

"Misstating the qualifications of executives is something the SEC takes seriously,"

"in process to being true"

That's Altman-esque language.

Yes I do in fact read those things, every VP or above that I know does too. A meeting covers high points that doesn’t mean you don’t have to do your homework.

Trust but verify.

I appreciate your reading those past explanations (you're an existence proof that people sometimes do!) and I appreciate your thoughts. They aren't unreasonable, and it's not obvious what the optimum is, so I'm also just guessing.

I agree with you that the important thing is not to satisfy the litigious sort of internet user—the ones who take every explanation as fodder for fresh objections. It would be nice, of course, if they would take yes for an answer! and on rare occasions I've managed to pull it off, but it's hard, and ultimately too high a bar.

The important thing to satisfy the "rest of the community", as you put it. But the rest of the community seems to me already satisfied. Adding a new system like a moderation log wouldn't add to their satisfaction and might even diminish it.

I don't mean this in a complacent way! It has not always been the case that the "rest of the community" was more or less satisfied, and it took years to figure out how to get there. But we did figure it out (more or less), and the approach has been stable for a long time now. It boils down to this: we answer questions when people ask them, take their concerns seriously, and acknowledge and correct mistakes when we screw up. Because we do so much of this (I spend the bulk of my time doing it, many days), regular users eventually see repeated cases of it, and this lets them know that if they ever have a concern, a question, or just a curiosity, they can get an answer too.

This turned out to be by far the biggest factor in getting the HN system (community + mods + software) to be more self-regulating. What was lacking before that (mainly because pg didn't have time) was responsive, interactive moderation. It's important to understand that this is not a technical solution (like a moderation log). What makes things work better is human interaction, there's no substitute for that, and we're already doing quite a lot of it.

If the typical rational user will have seen many posts about YC critical news not related to celebrity gossip they will immediately know such claims are unfounded and have public references to it.

No, if it looks to them like many/most/all of those posts have been more or less subtly de-emphasized, the impression they'll get is the exact opposite of what you postulate.

Yes, I take your point and would have preferred the original downweight to be less for that reason. (Edit: I checked with the mod and originally it was - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40720026. It looks like user flags made the difference.)

Different mods inevitably make different calls sometimes, though. That doesn't change the fundamental practice, which has been stable for a long time (long before I took over HN long ago).

One thing I often point out in these situations is that "moderate less" (which is what the rule calls for) is not the same thing as "not moderating at all". Most probably the mod in this case was thinking along the lines of "I'm still moderating less in this case than we normally would, but I'll check with dang just in case".

To be fair, Lord Rasengan is a sovereign head of the Joseon Empire cybernation according to their own bio, so Sam was just conducting international relations for openAI's next country to exploit. Be careful you don't anger Lord Rasengan; they could throw you in internet jail.

i don't get the reference

But Apple's deal with OpenAI is superficial at best. It's not their entire approach to AI. You can use Apple Intelligence and not once submit something to ChatGPT. To me, that means that they are only using OpenAI as a crutch until they've improved to make it no longer necessary and/or gives them an option to swap out which ever 3rd party model is the new hotness. It's less embedded than having Google be the default search engine as ChatGPT isn't the default AI model and is absolutely opt-in with a warning message stronger than any data sharing message from anything they've offered.