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For more context here Flock Safety is a YC-backed company [1][2] [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/f
by kklisura 10mo ago
For more context here Flock Safety is a YC-backed company [1][2]
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
[2] https://x.com/garrytan/status/1856016868580151615 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1856016868580151615
- kklisura 10mo agoAnd let me share this reply by Garry Tan, CEO of YC, after someone made a comment that Flock might be _pretty dystopian_ [1][2]: > You're thinking Chinese surveillance > US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims [1] https://x.com/neurajordan/status/1963303084609966288 https://x.com/neurajordan/status/1963303084609966288 [2] https://x.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955
- devwastaken 10mo ago[flagged]
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10mo agoIf the police protected and served as they're asked they could get some funding. Not for tanks and spy cameras, but for trained officers.
- mikkupikku 10mo agoThe police are usually pretty good at their jobs, within reason. It's almost always going to take them several minutes at least to respond to your call, but when they do manage to arrive on the scene they are usually pretty good about eliminating the threat and rendering first aid/etc. There are some infamous cases where this severely broke down, instances of cops not entering an active crime scene and instead seeing fit to stop the public from taking matters into their own hands, but these instances are so notorious because of how unusual and counter to American values they were. It's usually prosecutors and judges who drop the ball.
- saubeidl 10mo agoThat is, unless you're black of course. https://naacp.org/resources/criminal-justice-fact-sheet https://naacp.org/resources/criminal-justice-fact-sheet
- therobots927 10mo agoWe’re pretending our upper middle class SV bubble is reality. Poor and historically disadvantaged people don’t exist for the purposes of this conversation. /s
- mikkupikku 10mo agoTravel through rural America sometime. The working class of America are fairly poor but still overwhelmingly support the police.
- therobots927 10mo agoYou know you don’t have to say it in so many words, “rural working class America” = poor white people. Of course they love the racist police (who used to catch slaves and enforce Jim Crow). And I say that as someone who grew up in rural America. I just happen to have read a few history books.
- mikkupikku 10mo agoHalf the people I work with in rural PA aren't white, you're just showing off your own racial bias with such an assumption. They still overwhelmingly support the police.
- therobots927 10mo agoThanks for the anecdote. Now let’s look at the numbers, where you will see a strong correlation between both income AND race and support for the police: https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/policing-america-understanding-public-attitudes-toward-police-results-national https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/policing-america-underst...
- peppersghost93 10mo agoWhy did my low-crime red town in a red state buy into flock?
- embedding-shape 10mo agoI've never heard about this Tan guy before, I don't keep up with politics/corporatism anymore, but is that possibly sarcasm? It sure feels like it to me. But again, I don't know this person, but if I came across that by itself I feel like it's pretty clearly sarcastic, as Twitter tends to be. Maybe I'm just tone deaf myself to how tone deaf others could be?
- esseph 10mo agoThis is the CEO of the startup incubator handwaving away concerns in the name of money.
- gruez 10mo agoHe probably being sincere. If you're logged in (or use something like xcancel), you can see the full thread, where he starts off with > Flock Safety currently solves 700,000 reported cases of crime per year, which is about 10% of reported crime nationwide > And they're just getting started His profile also says: >President & CEO @ycombinator —Founder @Initialized—designer/engineer who helps founders—SF Dem accelerating the boom loop—haters not allowed in my sauna
- embedding-shape 10mo agoIt's really interesting the different cultures "YCombinator the startup incubator" and "Ycombinator/HN the internet forum has". A comment being so oblivious about surveillance would probably be flagged here, at least heavily downvoted, while this guy is actively the president and CEO of Ycombinator today? pg, what happened? Ycombinator used to be a beacon of sense in a sea of uselessness, but now uselessness is running Ycombinator?
- overfeed 10mo ago> pg, what happened? Don't look to pg for anything that can be seen as "woke" - he wants that mind-virus eliminated forever[0]. Many billionaires revealed their true colors after November 2024, remember this when they adjust their public posture to follow the political winds. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42780223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42780223
- leeoniya 10mo ago> You're thinking Chinese surveillance the big irony, of course, is that i'm much more comfortable with China surveilling me than the US, since the latter can throw me in jail, seize my assets, and ruin my family's life, while the former cannot.
- devwastaken 10mo agoThe CCP can hijack your accounts and absolutely do all of those things, using your own government.
- riversflow 10mo agocould you provide an example of that happening?
- afavour 10mo agoThe US government is a democracy and can be replaced should it exceed people’s limits. The CCP… uh, not so much. I’m not trying to say the US government is faultless but it amazes me how often I see this kind of anti-democratic institition sentiment.
- mikkupikku 10mo ago> it amazes me how often I see this kind of anti-democratic institition sentiment. leeoniya didn't say anything about democracy. The practical reality is that regardless of what forms of government are involved, whichever government has the ability to arrest you is the government which is the greatest threat in your day-to-day life.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago> government has the ability to arrest you is the government which is the greatest threat in your day-to-day life Assuming every government is the same, which I'm not so sure about. I rather be arrested by the German government than the US government, mainly because I don't want to disappear to black site and be made to disappear for years while I'm t̶o̶r̶t̶u̶r̶e̶d̶ receiving enhanced discussion techniques. At least I know I'll be treated relatively OK by Germany, while my fear is pretty much the opposite from a lot of other governments out there.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- isoprophlex 10mo agojesus fuck the gloves really came off in the past few years. noone even cares to hide it anymore. i could almost admire the transparency of these people, the way they're apparently okay accepting collateral damage of their schemes, up to the complete destruction of the fabric of society... as long as there's money to be made.
- csomar 10mo agoThe gloves were always off, it's the masks that came down. Now they are ready to punch.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- saubeidl 10mo agoAmerican venture capitalism ironically creates all of the same authoritarian issues as Chinese state capitalism, but without any of the lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty part.
- ryandrake 10mo agoIndeed, American capitalism is designed to lift the already-rich out of mere "rich" into "obscenely rich."
- femiagbabiaka 10mo agoAnother sign of Chinese ideological dominance is that nobody can conceive of a future that does not mimic China's solutions to social problems. Trump says frequently that he's jealous of Xi's position as dictator, tech firms envy 996 culture, public safety advocates are pivoting to restricting internet speech and constant surveillance.. etc. etc.
- doctorpangloss 10mo agoWell a lot of people can conceive of a cultural hegemony that is more pleasant to live under. It’s more that Y Combinator wants to be exposed to the returns of the Palantirs, Andurils and Clearviews out there.
- femiagbabiaka 10mo agoPossibly. I think, at the very least, Garry Tan is a true believer. He's not proposing putting this in someone else's neighborhood or city, he wants it in SF, SJ, Berkeley, etc.
- doctorpangloss 10mo agoit's the opposite. expanding the Y Combinator startup index strategy to include the surveillance startups is less belief not more. it's less opinionated. Paul Graham is actually more opinionated about this than Garry Tan is.
- GaryBluto 10mo agoYou don't understand, when software has support for Chinese characters it is automatically 150% more dystopian.
- dzhiurgis 10mo ago[flagged]
- YY34798347329 10mo agoThis isn't a surprising sentiment when you consider America is a country that protects billionaire pedophiles who partied on Epstein Island while China puts corrupt billionaires in the slammer, or even executes them. America is a country that exists to keep him rich at the expense of the poor while China does the reverse - its the greatest threat to his continued class dominance over the proles.
- MSFT_Edging 10mo agoIn the book "Blockchain Chicken Farm", American Journalist Xiaowei Wang went to her parents' home country of China to interview various parts of the economy to get an understanding of how it works from an outsider's perspective. In one part of the book, she goes to speak to a police chief on the topic of surveillance. She discusses with the officer the challenges of tracking migrant workers, and how in China there isn't a single ID number similar to an SSN in the states. Towards the end of the interview, the officer, Xiaoli comments that much of the modernizing of the policing work is moving to be more "United States-Like".
- femiagbabiaka 10mo agoIncredible anecdote, I purchased the book. In this way, the relationship between America and China is exactly like the relationship between America and the USSR was -- each trying to become the other precisely as they try to consume each other.
- verisimi 10mo agoIs this dystopian enough yet?
- Hikikomori 10mo agoFlock does ai enabled mass surveillance. Palantir uses such information, feds and local governments are already customers. The CEO of ycombinator is part of the same weird church as Peter Thiel, acts 17. Then look up the other SV tech billionaires that are on board with network states and other Curtis Yarvin nonsense.
- ribosometronome 10mo agoI wonder if that's why this post, with more upvotes than a number of the other ones on the front page, has seemingly vanished from it.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoThe number of comments is way higher than the number of upvotes, which usually gets submissions heavily downranked.
- lossolo 10mo agoComments were moved from this higher upvoted thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46356182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46356182 to this lower upvoted one.
- dang 10mo agoNo, it's the other way around. This post is ranked higher on the frontpage than it would be if it weren't YC-related. (In fact, it probably wouldn't be on the frontpage at all in that case.) A core principle is that we moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of the story. Many past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- LexiMax 10mo agoI believe you when you say that nobody at YC put their thumb on the scale for this story in particular. However, YC very much has control over the algorithm used to rank stories on the Hacker News front page, and this algorithm very commonly downranks threads which are detected as being "controversial." If the algorithm "working as intended" consistently downranks stories that cast a bad light on YCombinator, the sorts of people y'all mingle with, or the tech industry in general...is that any better than putting your thumb on the scale? This is kind of why I feel obligated to use https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active - after all, it's a very good indication of what Hacker News' algorithm and certain cohorts of its readership wants to hide from the casual viewer. And given the sorts of stories it tends to hide, it doesn't reflect well on this site or its users.