This post was either written entirely by chatGPT, or mostly. Multiple instances of "...this isn't just X - it's Y."
"The contrast isn't just economic — it's philosophical."
"family wealth isn't just an advantage in entrepreneurship — it's often a prerequisite"
"entrepreneurial success isn't just about fairness — it's about creating more pathways for the next generation of innovators"
This fact doesn't undermine the value of the article - but it is frustrating for the level of LLM authorship to get to the point where I can spot this in a number of HN posts.
People can have writing tics, i know i do — that said, this article does read very much like a scrape-n-translate + some "summarized insights" of Chinese forum threads. While that's fully within the scope of a human blogger, it is very much in the wheelhouse of a modern LLM.
More telling rather than any specific lines or phrases, to me, is that the tone gives off a strong "i don't have a single strong feeling about this topic, i'm just transcribing others' opinions and vaguely coming up with a C2A" vibe — no human who'd bother to write a personal-opinions blog would realistically channel that energy into an 850-word essay without LLMs doing all the drudgery.
What is the value of this article? Having family wealth is advantageous in basically every career - so I don't get why Entrepreneurship would be any different.
Yeah the writing is terrible. It also doesn't specify who "we" is until the last paragraph. There's many entrepreneurs in this country that don't have as much wealth, they just aren't in tech.
That isn't just a pattern LLM's use—it's one people use too.
But there's a whole lotta metaphor and flowery synonyms in that article too, and it all certainly feels robotic and repetitive in today's day and age.
> The thread, titled "How do parents cultivate young, famous entrepreneurial kids?" revealed insights that might make you rethink everything you thought you knew about teenage success stories.
Though I'm very curious about this sentence: that `?` at the end of the title is taking the place of a comma ending the aside about the title... but feels funky. I can't say it's wrong, but I feel like there's gotta be a better way to style it. Any English experts here?
(Also em-dashes with surrounding spaces bug me, personally.)
Cybersecurity "expert" here. This seems to be under-hyped, if possible. If there were login attempts that even appeared to be coming from Russia using valid credentials that were created less than an hour before, it can really only be explained by collusion or an attacker having visibility into the process that created the credentials in the first place.
The fact that the traffic appeared to be coming from Russia isn't particularly compelling, as it's very easy to make your web traffic appear to be coming from another country. But I struggle to understand why a legitimate user of those credentials would willfully make their legitimate use of government systems appear to be coming from an adversary.
[I'm attempting to ask this question in an apolitical way].
The consensus amongst economists appears to be that tariffs will have net negative impacts on our economy. Can someone explain the support amongst financially sophisticated people (e.g. Marc Andreessen) for a candidate whose economic policies rely heavily on tariffs? Is it just that they believe the benefits of Trump's other policies (e.g. deregulation of crypto) will outweigh the negative impacts of tariffs?
I think the only people who can explain their rationale would be those people you’re talking about. We can wildly speculate (low regulation, pro business, etc), but domain experts broadly agree the tariffs in question would be detrimental to the US economy. I suppose we’ll have data from a natural experiment shortly. Will the data matter? Probably not.
We reversed on Smoot-Hawley in a few years. I expect the same this time. If you have capital, there will be a lot of agricultural and manufacturing assets in distress. If you don’t, I guess get some? (I’m putting aside cash to buy farmland.)
One of the common meme answers is that a destroyed economy is easier and cheaper for an international megacapitalist to pick apart and buy up. The long-term profits and power from those acquisitions outweigh a decade or two of inconvenience and bad charts.
It can make more sense to buy pieces of a company during a bankruptcy firesale, instead of buying out that company as a bailout. In this case, the company is the USA.
EDIT:
Realistically, there's more blood to squeeze from the consumer stone - you can raise prices with the increased costs, and compensate by 'allowing' people to go far further into debt for longer.
Feels a bit like the rise of the kleptocrats after the fall of the USSR. This is more a plutocracy, where the already very wealthy get to be the last man standing.
It stresses the bounds of my ability to take the question at good faith or seriously, if Marc Andreessen is the example of "financially sophisticated." His technolibertarian California-ideology unchecked-rule-by-the-rich fervor doesn't feel well considered, it feels emotional. (If there is an ideology, it's "America's greatness is purely a function of my personal greatness", from what I can see.)
As another poster pointed out, Harley Davidson had a painful time, and ended up having to make more motorcylces outside the US.
Similarly, Soy Bean farmers needed a large bailout.
Both of those sound pretty bad to me, and they were somewhat targetted - he has suggested blanket tariffs, which you only need to look back to Smoot-Hawley, which is generally accepted to have worsened the great depression.
The tariffs let Trump push tax cuts. People want the tax cuts. The tariffs are just a way to say they’ll be paid for. (Dems do that same with deficit financing and ‘tax the rich’ schemes.)
There are also communities who don’t think tariffs will be reciprocated. If we truly engage in a trade war, American farming and car manufacturing will be in crisis—they’re overbuilt for a domestic-only market.
In 2017 Harley-Davidson was devastated by a European counter-tariff. I'm confident that in 2025 Twitter and Tesla amongst other signature American brands will be hit by some massive counter-tariffs.
Did Brazil not blackhole Twitter until Musk paid up? Which he did? And Brazil went after Starlink?
What do you think China could do, comparatively speaking? If we look at what they did to Jack Ma [1], I could see China doing far more harm to Musk's China interests than the US can do to China.
> that in 2025 Twitter and Tesla amongst other signature American brands will be hit by some massive counter-tariffs
Maybe. Agricultural products is easy because there isn’t a billionaire at the top to be spiteful. Detroit auto a middle ground between pissing off Elon and not retaliating.
Tariff targets are generally chosen on industries that have an oversized impact on politicians. Harley-Davidson was chosen because while those tariffs would have little impact on the European or US economy, they figured it would have an oversized impact on Trump.
Farmers are typically chosen for counter-tariffs for the same reason -- politicians listen to farmers a lot more closely than their voting or economic impact would imply. Upset farmers get a lot of media time.
Musk has Trump's ear. That's why he'll be targetted.
> Tariff targets are generally chosen on industries that have an oversized impact on politicians
In 2016, when countries were trying to influence policy. There are other motivations for tariffs, from seeking autonomy from an unreliable trading partner to straight-up spite. There is also the domestic component: you target industries you have domestic competitors for because that now makes them happy.
Andreessen holds major investments in many of the companies that will benefit. The paper says that tariffs make the US economy less efficient. Inefficiency == profit. An efficient market is one where prices are close to costs. Inefficient markets provide more profit to capitalists.
Because of Trump's planned tax cut renewal the profits of US companies should not only keep at current levels (whereas they were going to drop when tax cuts expired under Kamala) and even rise a little bit.
Making stocks rise is pretty much the purpose of the whole sector. Hence ...
As impressive as the number of Starlink satellites is, the service has become unusable for me in Southern California, particularly for video calls. I’ve been told that the bottleneck is land stations, not satellites. Either way, I’ve had to cancel my Starlink service both at home and work.
Based on what? What user count do you think Starlink needs to be economically viable?
Napkin math time because the economics for satellites are not intuitive compared to stuff where density is better.
10% of the surface of the earth is inhabited by people. 510 million square kilometers * .1 is 51 million square kilometers. At a service density of only one user per square kilometer, that’s 51 million users for regular service.
Setting that aside, do you care to guess how much an oil rig in the North Sea will pay for Internet? And that user will put roughly the same load as Ted in SoCal will on the network.
Satellite Internet is not for people in cities, period. Starlink, viasat, whatever.
I agree with you, and your 2nd point about the b2b areas being important.
However I think the general math you do needs a bit more nuance. You'd want to exclude all people living in cities so you'd need to exclude the land mass taken up by cities to get a more accurate estimate.
it's probably economically viable without selling to consumers at all. if they get planes boats and military, that on it's own would be plenty to sustain it
I doubt it. The ongoing operational costs of a mega constellation like this is huge and I doubt they will be able to sell their services to maritime, aviation and military sectors at a much higher price than existing operators.
They will also meet hefty competition the next few years from Amazon Kuiper, Oneweb and I assume existing operators are scrambling to meet the competition. Interesting times.
They already sell it to maritime and aviation sectors at significantly less than existing operators, though significantly more than the regular service.
But at this point in their plan it doesn't matter if they undercut existing providers. If the marginal cost of the extra client is small enough then it is just extra revenue. And you get the clients operations dependant on that extra bandwidth that they won't want to give up.
But it doesn't necessarily need high subscriber rates in any one place to make lots of money. If you just focus on those high population areas, 1.7 billion people live in cities. If you can sell to a few in a thousand then you will have several million subscribers across the world and they will likely be wealthier people. And then there are cruise ships, airliners, oil rigs, ski chalets, military compounds, backhauling WiFi for musical festivals, and millions of people living in the woods with rubbish DSL.
Furthermore, a lot of people seem to think the world is divided into Manhattans and log cabins in the woods someplace. In fact, a huge number in the US and presumably elsewhere live nearby small cities etc., have electricity and maybe other utilities, but don't have what most people would consider decent Internet access.
Yea, there are hundreds of thousands of tiny tiny towns all across the US with terrible internet service. You could run a perfectly good ISP for a village of a few hundred people off of one Starlink dish.
I have used it regularly in a rural area, it works amazingly better than what was available prior, and keeps improving as more satellites are launched.
If nothing other than 1 Gbit fiber will satisfy you I guess Starlink isn't that great. But, honestly, my wired broadband 50 miles outside of one of the largest cities in the Northeast isn't 100% reliable and near-infinitely fast either.
As in your case, my brother's house basically didn't really have Internet before though was finally get able to get a Verizon hotspot which "worked" but you couldn't really stream video, for example, because of data costs. Now, it's completely practical to work from there as well as have access to Internet entertainment etc. options which simply wasn't the case before.
SpaceX have sought approval for 12,000 satellites, with a possible extension to 42,000. Right now they have less than 4,000. I think they have substantially fewer satellites than they believe they require, and the service is probably doomed in the long run if they can't get Starship flying.
I have minimal contact with YC these days, and have no particular motivation to artificially inflate the value of the program.
YC was transformational for my company (MedCrypt). I have almost zero negative things to say about it, and would do it again immediately with my next company (despite probably not needing help raising the first $500k for a company).
I can't think of a situation where I would recommend a company not accept a spot in YC.
"The contrast isn't just economic — it's philosophical."
"family wealth isn't just an advantage in entrepreneurship — it's often a prerequisite"
"entrepreneurial success isn't just about fairness — it's about creating more pathways for the next generation of innovators"
This fact doesn't undermine the value of the article - but it is frustrating for the level of LLM authorship to get to the point where I can spot this in a number of HN posts.