zach

Seems like it should be “DoorDash (YC S13) to Acquire Instacart (YC S12)”, if only to emphasize that this is by far the largest merger of YC companies.

Choplifters of the world unite and take over

I agree, robotaxis do not belong in LA, at least culturally.

The collective suffering of working-class commuters ascending and descending the income gradient on packed freeways is the thing that powers LA, like children’s screams powered the city in Monsters, Inc. Robotaxis can never replace that.

I noticed that Evan O’Dorney’s generals was chaired by Bhargava and this question was asked:

  What is Brauer's theorem?
    [I had no idea and they moved on]

He clearly should have read Bhargava’s generals, where Andrew Wiles asks Bhargava the same question!

Hey, Matthew. I have some bad news: I can’t read this article without a Medium account. This is probably going to be fatal to its hopes of being widely read via HN.

One of the most memorable moments of my career was when I joined a project and, the very first day, had the equivalent of a “showrunner” sit me and another engineer down and pitch the project to us.

It was mostly the same pitch that the showrunner gave to get the green light for the project, and it was crackling with energy, excitement and potential. It was magical.

So many other times, I was kind of tossed into a team and had to piece together what we were making and even why and how. This time, though, I went from knowing almost nothing about this project to having a clear view of where we wanted to go and being thrilled to be on this journey.

Speaking of which, I can’t resist sharing a fantastic metaphor of a creative project as a journey from Pixar director Andrew Stanton (the following are all his words):

The hardest thing about directing an animated movie is keeping yourself excited about it. It's hard enough to make the crew excited about it, but keeping yourself excited about it -- trying to remind yourself why you wanted to do it. Because it's all about the details once you really start making the movie.

It's no different than building a house, or, building a really extravagant mansion. There's a million details that you have to spend more time with after the bigger ideas of where the rooms are going to go and how it's going to be structured, and it can get you kind of bogged down.

Joe Ranft used to have this great expression that there's always a point during the making of a movie where there's sort of the Columbus where-is-the-land moment, where everybody on the boat is going "You promised us the land. Where's the land? We're not seeing it!" And people get bogged down in all the minor problems or the major problems that won't go away, and it's all justified -- it's all legitimate to have that response.

So, for me, to prevent that is to get really, really picky about what story you're going to tell up front. And this is my opinion, and it's not a rule. But if I have an idea that I kinda like, then I don't want to do it. If I have an idea that affects every fiber of my being, like "I want to see that movie made whether I make it or not" -- it's like that idea has to get on the screen -- that's a real good quality to start with. Because it's going to get attacked for the next four years. And there's going to be, sometimes, weeks or months where nothing seems to be going right.

[...] It's like looking for oil or something -- it's like "where can I find something that has enough fuel that's going to keep me going for years?" Because there's going to large stretches of time where nothing is working, nobody's happy, everybody thinks that the sky is going to fall, and what's going to get me out of bed is just because that idea still has to be on the screen.

So I want that when I'm going to go into battle. Because it's going to be battle. So if I don't have that going in, then I won't go into it -- I won't make that movie.

When I started a real estate startup, it was because I had gotten the wall version of the Thomas Bros. map — of course! — and plotted LA’s median home prices, crime and school stats.

My idea was, wow, wouldn’t it be great to give other people this kind of expansive knowledge about Los Angeles? If they could only understand what I see on this map!

But of course, it’s not necessary to understand the entirety of a map if you have a tool that zeroes in on what you really want. Google doesn’t exist for you to understand the whole web, but to mine it precisely. Finding a home is hard to do the same way, but giving people a zeitgeist is always inferior to giving them a tool that lets them understand the least about something. It’s a hard lesson for an infovore to learn, I’ll say that.

So, of course, now LA drivers know too much, while they themselves know very little. In the 2000s there were “hidden shortcuts” and alternate routes that were risky. Now, the risk is hedged and nothing is hidden. It is a marketplace of nearly perfect information, where saving a minute of someone’s life in traffic is treated with the respect it actually deserves.

Yet now the big problem is that people have locked in their commute route years ago, and it gets slower and slower with no escape. They drive from their far-away apartment, guided by synthesized voices, past the landed aristocracy of Los Angeles with the favor of Prop. 13 whose lawn signs chide land-use refugees to drive like their non-existent kids lived there.

Ultimately, the era of broad knowledge was also an era of choice. Both are leaving us at the same velocity. There is little need for a giant book of colleges when you can’t get into or afford the ones you’re interested in. Who cares about a directory of reviewed doctors when your crummy insurance will not let you see any of the ones you would choose? The time of the Thomas Bros. map was before the closing of the urban frontier. Now, you just take the only thing on the shelf.