Y Combinator Blog

For an extreme example, there are finite patterns behind the lava lamps at Cloudfare or the chaos of Jupiter's storms. These are sufficiently random for any current need I can currently imagine though.

But then I also see that "classical computers can never be built big enough to explore more than 400, actually more than, probably 100 qubits, 100 qubits doesn’t seem like very much. No classical computer can do the calculation of following what 100 qubits do" https://blog.ycombinator.com/leonard-susskind-on-richard-feynman-the-holographic-principle-and-unanswered-questions-in-physics/

Are we really in no danger of quantum computers being able decipher patterns behind these traditional sources of noise? There is no pattern to quantum randomness. Aren't we going to have switch to truly random sources of noise eventually, instead of pseudorandom ones (anything non quantum)?

Read, my first favorite comment was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613281 and I find it pretty accurate. Sometimes great comments turn grey just after posting only to bounce back up later, thanks to people taking time to read them. I’ve also had showdead enabled in my profile settings virtually the whole time I’ve been here, and been able to vouch for some wrongly killed posts, as the mods say:

> Currently, when an account is banned, a software filter trips, or enough users flag a post, the post goes [dead], meaning only users with ‘showdead’ turned on in their profile can see it. The trouble is that some posts end up [dead] when they shouldn’t be. Banned accounts sometimes post good comments, software filters sometimes have false positives, and users sometimes flag things unfairly.
[https://blog.ycombinator.com/two-hn-announcements/]

Here's another fun one:

The _average_ Y Combinator company is worth ~100M [1]

The _median_ Y Combinator company, however, is worth closer to $0 (the majority of YC companies don't get to a Series A).

This just highlights how counter-intuitive power-law distributions are.

[1] Calculation:

Discard pre YC'17 companies for the purposes of this calculation, as these are still too early stage for meaningful analysis. Brex, Faire and Atrium are the only YC '17 or later on this list.

Numerator: The top 100 companies have a combined valuation of ~$110B, according to this list.

Denominator: There were 1,400 YC companies as of Summer '17 according to https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-summer-2017-stats/. Removing S17 and W17 gives about 1,100 companies prior to '17

The feeling of being on-call is what sucks the soul from a worker's body. I've experienced it off and on over the last 20 years and IMHO it's one of the great problems of our time. I'd like to see labor move towards a direction more like Uber, where you decide when you're on the clock, and when you're off, you're off.

One of the difficulties though is that the Uber model only works for saturated and playbook industries like driving, delivering food, walking dogs, etc. It doesn't work so well for the decision-making tasks of more complex jobs where there are ramifications for every step:

https://blog.ycombinator.com/read-this-before-you-build-uber-for-x/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15150083

Thank you! I'd agree with the other commenters that Peter's talk is the best place to go for hearing the in-depth story: https://blog.ycombinator.com/peter-reinhardt-on-finding-product-market-fit-at-segment/

I'd say more generally that finding product-market-fit felt much more like a 'pull' than a 'push' motion. We had been trying for 8 months to convince even a single user to rely on the product we were building earlier, and it just wasn't sticking.

When we launched today's product, we started seeing a lot more pull from customers. We solved one problem that other products did not, which prompted a bunch more requests from customers.

It's not an answer for what I asked for. Demo day is at the end of 3 month program...

But there's a hint in other blog post:

> We want to make sure founders know that the YC Summer 2020 batch will take place. Our online application is open now and we will run our application review process as we always do, with some modifications to how we run interviews. Additionally, depending on the circumstances this summer, some or all of the batch may take place remotely over video.

https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-s20-batch-updates/

Yet, would love to get some official info after traveling ban.