Y Combinator to set up China arm with former Baidu executive Qi Lu as chief
American start-up incubator Y Combinator is setting up shop in China, with a new unit to be led by former Baidu chief operating officer Qi Lu.
Sam Altman, Y Combinator's president, said in a company announcement Wednesday that China had been "an important missing piece of our puzzle" when it came to sourcing new start-ups to take under its wing.
"We think that a significant percentage of the largest technology companies that are founded in the next decade — companies at the scale of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook — will be based in the U.S. and China," Altman said. "YC's greatest strength is our founder community and with the launch of YC China we believe we have a special opportunity to include many more Chinese founders in our global community."
Google's back in China. Now it's time to do a search for entrepreneurs.
Also at CNN.
See also: Y Combinator invests in a build-your-own mac and cheese restaurant
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A Startup is Pitching a Mind-Uploading Service That is "100 Percent Fatal"
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The highly-anticipated experiment with basic income from Silicon Valley finance firm Y Combinator appears to be making good progress. The company has chosen Elizabeth Rhodes as the project's Research Director, opting for the little-known PHD graduate over applications from tenured professors working at Oxford and Harvard universities. Oakland, California is where the basic income research will happen: the community has been chosen for its close proximity to Y Combinator's head office, and the much-reported wealth divide in the locality.
Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
The startup accelerator Y Combinator is known for supporting audacious companies in its popular three-month boot camp.
There's never been anything quite like Nectome, though.
Next week, at YC's "demo days," Nectome's cofounder, Robert McIntyre, is going to describe his technology for exquisitely preserving brains in microscopic detail using a high-tech embalming process. Then the MIT graduate will make his business pitch. As it says on his website: "What if we told you we could back up your mind?"
So yeah. Nectome is a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company. Its chemical solution can keep a body intact for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, as a statue of frozen glass. The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere.
This story has a grisly twist, though. For Nectome's procedure to work, it's essential that the brain be fresh. The company says its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive (though under general anesthesia).
The company has consulted with lawyers familiar with California's two-year-old End of Life Option Act, which permits doctor-assisted suicide for terminal patients, and believes its service will be legal. The product is "100 percent fatal," says McIntyre. "That is why we are uniquely situated among the Y Combinator companies."
Only a few of the search behemoth's 88,000 workers were briefed on the project before The Intercept reported on 1 August that Google had plans to launch a censored mobile search app for the Chinese market, with no access to sites about human rights, democracy, religion or peaceful protest.
The customised Android search app, with different versions known as Maotai and Longfei, was said to have been demonstrated to Chinese Government authorities.
In a related development, six US senators from both parties were reported to have sent a letter to Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, demanding an explanation over the company's move.
One source inside Google, who witnessed the backlash from employees after news of the plan was reported, told The Intercept: "Everyone's access to documents got turned off, and is being turned on [on a] document-by-document basis.
"There's been total radio silence from leadership, which is making a lot of people upset and scared. ... Our internal meme site and Google Plus are full of talk, and people are a.n.g.r.y."
Earlier this week, Y Combinator, which has backed companies like Airbnb and Reddit, put out a request for startups working on technology that can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
"It's time to invest and avidly pursue a new wave of technological solutions to this problem — including those that are risky, unproven, even unlikely to work," Y Combinator's website says.
Y Combinator is looking for startups working on four approaches that they acknowledge "straddle the border between very difficult to science fiction" — genetically engineering phytoplankton to turn CO2 into a storage-ready form of carbon, speeding up a natural process in which rocks react with CO2, creating cell-free enzymes that can process carbon, and flooding Earth's deserts to create oases.
Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, acknowledged that these ideas are "moonshots," but said that he wants to take an expansive approach to the issue.
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Y Combinator Spreads to China
Lab-Made Magnesite could be Used for CO2 Capture
NASA Announces CO2 Conversion Challenge, With Up to $750k Awards
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @07:53PM (19 children)
Their leftist, censorial forum will be quite at home under the thumb of the PRC.
Maybe now when participants fail to toe the social agenda, they can quietly disappear them in meatspace, too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @08:12PM (8 children)
lawl, I've seen plenty of right wing opinions on HN, perhaps your problem is how you present yourself. They are definitely not tolerant of trolling, ranting, or bullshit. This disqualifies a lot of users that post here on SN.
The anarchy enabled by anonymous internet posting is actually a rather new phenomenon. All previous public forums would generally enforce rules for civility.
I think the solution is transparency, sites should make censored comments available if you click through to read and thus everyone can judge whether the censorship is good or bad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @08:33PM (5 children)
Indeed, what happens when facts become offensive?
You are begging the question; you are engaging in circular logic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @08:46PM (4 children)
Lol YOU are begging the question and I had no circular logic. I pointed out that most of the censoring I've seen has been for shitty posting behavior, and then I recommended that sites make the censored comment available if a user wants to see it.
You are a projecting simpleton, go dig up some examples and we can have an actual discussion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @09:01PM (3 children)
Well, I like the irony, anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @09:54PM (2 children)
Hey this isn't HN, I don't have to coddle your feelings or promote civil behavior. You started with false accusations, ignoring my points, and bringing up a hypothetical that requires proof. Go suck an egg Douchey McDouchebaggins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @10:00PM (1 child)
OK.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @10:31PM
Must be violently imposed monopoly guy at it again. Did capitalism not factor into your HN angst?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @10:27PM (1 child)
WTF is "HN"?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 18 2018, @09:45AM
Hacker News [ycombinator.com] - the civilized-people counterpart of S/N.
More technically informative, they never let eth ruin their party.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday August 17 2018, @09:35PM (9 children)
I've never understood that forum. Someone posts a statement. Someone else disagrees with it or asks a question. Then the original poster never seems to respond, but there seem to be so many posters on there that someone new jumps in instead to answer. Then yet another person replies. It's kind of jarring because you never know what the original poster would have said on the issue. Are they all just too incredibly busy to follow up on their comments? Or do they all have short attention spans?
error count exceeds 100; stopping compilation
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @09:51PM (2 children)
Maybe one person has more than one account, so these aren't new people?
Actually, I think HN probably became the current top tech news aggregation site after the collapse of that other site that spawned soylent. Am I missing out on another site?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday August 17 2018, @10:15PM (1 child)
That sort of fakery would suggest someone's trying to make up the numbers to make the site look more popular or to influence opinion. I suppose it's possible. The commenters often sound sort of stressed or overworked though so maybe they really don't have enough time on their hands -- compared to somewhere like soylent.
I remember a few people praising it as the place to go when Fuck Beta hit. I don't spend a lot of time there, partly for the reason I gave and they seem to take themselves (and others) a bit too seriously for me.
Pipedot? It's a shame that hasn't really taken off. You'd think there'd be enough hardcore nerds online to fill lots of these places. So, yeah, where are they?
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @10:59PM
You should post in HN and link to anything in jwz.org (Netscape guy).
In the past it you always got a redirect to http://i.imgur.com/32R3qLv.png [imgur.com]
Oh, it still does:
His opinion hasn't changed.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Friday August 17 2018, @10:04PM (5 children)
It's interesting because this is both common behavior for trolls / site shills, and people who are sure that what they posted was accurate and/or factual (and may well be correct in that assessment.)
For myself, I know that many times that what I post will trigger various categories of the fact-deprived, and I'm usually not really interested in answering posts from such as those... typically, they can't learn for whatever reason, or they'd already know better. People who have non-fact-based beliefs and broader belief systems have to fix themselves. It isn't even worth the time to try, IMHO.
It's not that they're (necessarily) stupid; it's that they are invested with various forms of confirmation bias, endowment effect, divestiture aversion, politician's fallacy... or just ashamed of a huge dose of buyer's remorse.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday August 17 2018, @10:28PM (3 children)
Good point. Most of these posts don't seem trollish, at least superficially (the modding's much too harsh for that on HN and they tend not to get replies) but shilling is certainly possible. I do wonder whether it's just a psychological artifact of the site having a larger base of commenters (if indeed it does?) than sites like Soylent or The Other Site -- I mean, if two or more people jump in and answer a question for you, would you bother to reply yourself? I think I probably still would but then I'm quite stubborn in that regard (A stubborn Soylentil -- surely not! Fuck Beta!), so maybe it's just a different sort of attitude on that site.
error count exceeds 100; stopping compilation
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday August 17 2018, @10:30PM (1 child)
I actually did LOL. :)
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday August 17 2018, @11:42PM
Well if I get one laugh a year by the time I'm 80 I might have enough for a brief standup act. If I live that long. Think of it as an insurance policy.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 17 2018, @10:35PM
Shilling? On HN [wikipedia.org]?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Friday August 17 2018, @11:29PM
Agreed. The sight is summed up in a meme about it consisting primarily of finance obsessed man children and brogrammers. Everyone wants to play big salary super engineer so their rebuttal to anything ain't gonna change because they'll be god damned if proven wrong. Though not all of the sight is like that. You just have you heavily opinionated know it all dick weeds who either get called out and won't stop defending themselves or they just disappear. A few will sometimes humbly admit defeat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @11:13PM
No investments in companies with African American CEOs and majority African American employee numbers.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 18 2018, @03:28AM (1 child)
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz........
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday August 18 2018, @09:48AM
This will be here for eternity.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 19 2018, @01:53AM
Like all your silly valley compatriots who have ventured to the Middle Kingdom.
Btw Soylentnews is blocked in China, not by China but by Soylentnews itself who firewalls most traffic from Asian countries.