Say what you will about the guy, and there's an argument to be made that Tesla at least is incremental and not a crazy new idea, but Musk co-founded Paypal and is now pushing limits in spaceflight.
I don't think that's correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#X.com_and_PayPal
There are just way more people that I know and trust personally that I think could give positive, but constructive advice. I would believe absolutely nothing coming out of Paul's mouth because he hasn't shown that he's an honest person. He's not disinterested about any of this, but feigns like he is above it.
I think some of us are very sick of the absolutely fake and fraudulent way he and others like him and Musk operate. They do not care about the truth or other people, they care about their own egos and people for whatever reason buy that.
You crossed badly into bannable territory in this thread. I've responded in more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066921.
You posted surprisingly vicious smears in this thread, even blaming one person for the death of another. Some of that you edited in an extremely misleading way, so that the community's original response seemed unreasonable, when in fact it had been appropriate. Even in the above comment, which is still up, you've accused someone of being fake, fraudulent, and dishonest, with zero basis. When asked not to do any of this, you haven't even acknowledged what you did—instead you're changing the subject dramatically. Isn't that a little distasteful?
> I'm sure you've seen where people have accused you
Since you saw the thread where people were bringing it up, I'm surprised you didn't see the explanations:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26959559
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26959675
> is HN not the place to discuss that
People discuss companies, including YC-funded companies, at great length on HN all the time. That's not the issue here. The issue is that you've been breaking the site guidelines very badly, and we need you to stop.
> Do you not have a conflict of interest
I've written extensively about that over the years. If you or anyone is interested, some of those past explanations can be found at the following links:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
The short version is that we don't moderate HN to suppress criticism of YC or YC startups, because that would be (a) wrong, (b) futile, and (c) dumb. We moderate HN to try to keep it interesting and in line with the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) — that's all. I'd never claim to be immune from bias (who could?) but I can tell you what principles we try to apply and can at least claim to have years' worth of practice at them.
There's nothing secret here, by the way, in the sense that anyone can get an answer to any question about how HN works (other than technical details about anti-abuse software, and that only because they would stop working if they weren't secret). Trying to run an online community any other way would be inefficient and self-defeating. We try to never do anything that isn't defensible to the community, because the community's good will is the only asset HN has.
I completely understand how easy it is for unexplained details to compound into weird and sinister pictures. That's a fact of human life that we all have to deal with, especially online. But really the cleanest and freshest way to deal with it is to check what's actually happening, when that option is available. HN, even though it has millions of users, is still small enough that that option is actually available. Why not take advantage of that?
I don't want to keep doing this, though, so would you please use your main account? I removed the restriction from it, so it should work.
A few responses: if you say you didn't intend to mislead by editing your comment, I believe you; nothing factual that you've said about pg remotely justifies the abusive language you used; Elon Musk has nothing to do with any of this; if someone was bullying toward you on HN, or you felt they were, that sucks, and I'm sorry we didn't stand up for you. I try to stand up for someone who's being unfairly criticized when I know about it—don't forget that we don't see the overwhelming majority of what gets posted; I consider it a smear when people say awful things about others without justification; it doesn't depend on payment.
In my short startup life, I have had the opportunity of meet many founders, VCs and also get solicited and unsolicited opinions from friends and family. Most of the VCs, friends and family members were critical of my ideas or simply didn't spend the effort to really listen. I see the same thing happening to other founders and startups. Specially fun is meeting VCs who have never built a startup themselves or coming from a non technical background be overly critical and share their strongly held opinions on how my startup could fail. I ran out of fingers counting how many ways.
Ofcourse a startup can fail. Thats why it's not a company yet. There is a saying that it takes many miracles to make a startup a success. Most founders know that already. We are already scared.
Paul is suggesting a different approach. A more positive one. And given the statistics around Paul's and YC's success versus other VCs, you would think that the HN crowd of all people would at-least pay attention.
P.S: My startup was rejected multiple times by YC. So not a fan exactly.