Didn’t YC already try this with Yuri Milner ten or so years ago? From what I remember they canceled it because it was creating zombie companies, where the founders felt like they couldn’t give up on a bad idea because they still had so much runway.
I have no inside information on this but I think it may have had more to do with concerns about whether they wanted to be encouraging every YC company to take Yuri Milner's money. See e.g.:
I'm confident that the Ron Conway / Yuri Milner "Start Fund" idea worked out great financially, although I think one difference is that it was optional while this new deal is mandatory, so there might have been a significant selection effect (positive or negative), e.g. I'm not sure if Coinbase (YC S12) took the deal and that would matter a lot to the returns.
It seems like a lot of people are defending credit card pricing, but the idea that they’ve been charging the same % since before the internet and are still absorbing the same “cost” of fraud protection is absurd.
I would love Stripe to start advocating for lowering credit card fees, either through regulation or providing more avenues for competition.
That working as intended. Now vendors can lower prices for all users instead of being held hostage by credit card banks/processors/users taking money from cash/debit users to divide among themselves.
It’s too late. Much of that extra savings on fraud protection has already been funneled back to the card owner in the form of cash back or reward points. Not a whole lot can be done to break that unless the government comes in and legislates something as they do in Europe.
There are many costs that remain stubbornly fixed as a portion of GDP (Ads has been 2% of GDP for > 100 years). Fraud as an industry, and corresponding fraud protection services likely fall under this umbrella barring substantial technological innovation.
I just read the whole thing, how is it a takedown? Plomin's paper is a meta-study which discusses results that are robustly replicated because there is a crisis of reproducibility in this domain and replication is the arbiter of the scientific method. This article you linked is essentially an opinion piece about Plomin...
edit: Did I get shadowbanned for this?! Post not showing up on different device..
It's a review of Plomin's book, Blueprint, including putting it into context with the history of similar works.
"Like much of that literature, Blueprint plays fast and loose with the concept of heritability. Sometimes Plomin treats it (correctly) as a variable property of a population in a given environment. As population geneticist Richard Lewontin pointed out in a scathing critique of Jensen’s approach in 1970, in times of plenty, height is highly heritable; in a famine, much less so (R. C. Lewontin Bull. Atom. Sci. 26, 2–8; 1970). But elsewhere, Plomin, like Jensen, treats heritability wrongly as a property inherent in a trait."
...
"The most troubling thing about Blueprint is its Panglossian DNA determinism. Plomin foresees private, direct-to-consumer companies selling sets of polygenic scores to academic programmes or workplaces. Yet, as this “incorrigible optimist” assures us, “success and failure — and credit and blame — in overcoming problems should be calibrated relative to genetic strengths and weaknesses”, not environmental ones. All is for the best in this best of brave new worlds.
"Plomin likes to say that various components of nurture “matter, but they don’t make a difference”. But the benefits of good teaching, of school lunches and breakfasts, of having textbooks and air-conditioning and heating and plumbing have been established irrefutably. And they actually are causal: we know why stable blood sugar improves mental concentration. Yet Plomin dismisses such effects as “unsystematic and unstable, so there’s not much we can do about them”."
I wouldn't jump straight to foul play. New throwaways are probably pretty sensitive to downvote/flagging/etc, it's unlikely you were moderated out of existence.
I wish that writer had spent fewer words describing Plomin as undemocratic, insidious, discredited, simplistic, and regressive, and more words actually explaining why he thinks Plomin is wrong.
Someone sent me this screenshot and asked to post to see if this was some kind of spam filter or if HN mods are actively hiding it (trying to invoke the Streisand effect I guess). She said the first post was also hidden until it re-appeared with your response. I am now also very interested because as far as I can tell this doesn't violate rules, just makes some people uncomfortable or something.
They mention that these pages were created for every combination of “connect service X to service Y”, which matches twhat people are actually looking for, so I would argue this is a great use of 25K landing pages that are adding value and being rewarded by google for doing so.
It is fantastic. I pay for Zapier and sometimes I end up on these pages when searching simply because I was unaware of a new integration. The pages do a fantastic job of showing people a solution they are searching for.
It's funny. This happened to me yesterday. Not a new integration but I wanted to know if I could get data from a forum into a Google sheet once a month.
Zapier landing page: Sure, just use a webhook trigger to Google sheets.
