It’s to pull eyeballs for jobs at YC portfolio companies and to attempt to convince founders to apply to batches. It is their marketing and talent sourcing. It is, arguably, the most valuable contributor of forward looking potential returns (considering most VC investment decisions are statistics and gambling).
I'm always skeptical about "eyeballs" type arguments. If we were talking about millions of people for an advert sure, but most folks here aren't YC participants / won't be and heck most talk about joining a startup as an IC on here is NOT POSITIVE ;)
It's the car commercial dilemma. No one is going to spend 30,60,100k on a whim because a commercial told them too. But the long term idea is to implant that idea of wanting X brand once you are in the market for a car. You can't know what you don't know.
But such effects need to be measured over years, not weeks. So a company won't know until it's too late.
At least Slashdot's participation in modern late stage capitalism was restricted to like, selling banner ads to RedHat, and selling mugs and t-shirts. YC is a whole other ball game.
> modern late stage capitalism ... selling banner ads to RedHat, and selling mugs and t-shirts
If these are the supposed sins of modern late stage capitalism I say let's have more of it and less of the various types of socialism which the entitled always seem to be pushing as a replacement. I'd rather ignore annoying banner ads and refrain from buying merchandising than stand in a line in a street to a shop selling something, anything, no idea what but there's a shop which has something to sell so people stand in line like they used to do in the worker's and farmer's paradise which was to lead the world revolution to the glorious victory of socialism.
I'll even take the entitled brats kvetching about the sins of the economical order which allows them both the means as well as the free time and freedom to do so. They'd be standing in some line to a shop somewhere, no fruitPhone in their pockets and no way to use it even if they had without having the state come down on them for their sins against the glorious revolution if their purported ideal order were to come to pass because the revolution always eats its own.
BTW, I don't consider slavery to be a form of modern late stage capitalism, it is more related to the primitive origins from which the different *-isms arose. Slavery used to be the norm rather than the exception and in some places in the world it still thrives. It is in the much-maligned West where the strongest movements to abolish it were and are to be found.
Wondering is just a visceral reaction to the possible harms that come with all technologies. As with most gut feelings, it’ll soon be forgotten once that cool new shiny doohickey is announced, with a price point of $599.
Ha! The sweatshop for startups has finally produced a startup that wants to help sweatshops grind their workers into dust. The circle is finally complete!
The circle will complete when the co-op spaces install this new system so startup founders can watch their employees. And then the circle will make another loop and VCs can watch the startup founders.
Even "Taylorism" wasn't this bad...it at least tried to analyze conditions that were constraining worker productivity. This just measures output and manages by pressure and belittlement.
Not even that. Measuring output makes a certain amount of sense. This just measures "looking busy". It's practically an admission that they don't care about actual production, they just enjoy hassling people.
When market conditions give you a glut of "qualified" labor you can afford these practices.
Then again these are precisely the types of "poverty studies" that have been done in India for years. "Should we fine nurses who are late to work? If so, how much?" "Should web publicly shame and harass office workers who leave early? If so, how much?" Lookin' at you, "Poverty Action Lab."
This looks like the logical extension to what we've been putting this country through for years.
Actual manufacturing engineers are expensive and tell you things that you don't want to hear/require work and long term thinking on management's part. Yelling at/blaming employees is instant gratification.
This is like when I worked at UPS loading trucks over the summer and they recorded how many packages I scanned in 15 minute intervals and I was slower than they wanted. It sucked.
These guys spent a lot of effort making a really great implementation of sweatshop software. These two privileged kids really thought it was a great idea and honestly didn't think there was anything wrong about this at all. Objectively they did a great job from a technological perspective.
The fact it didn't cross their minds that maybe this is a bad idea to release in the US really shows the cultural difference between the West and other countries like India. There are plenty of things wrong with the US but blatant treating of lesser-privileged people like animals is something that isn't well tolerated here.
I would hazard a guess that plenty of US companies (start with Amazon warehouses, move on to truck drivers) do very similar things, if not exactly the same.
I've noticed this in interactions between high caste and low cast Indians at my job. Many High caste Indians have a level of arrogance towards low cast Indians that would make a Goa'uld system lord embarrassed. They truly feel entitled to their subservience and cheap labor. It is remarkable. I'm not sure if anyone born and raised in the US has the same degree of entitlement. You would have to go back to slave plantation owners in the US South.
International diplomacy is a very different thing to Indian cast relationships and not relevant to the discussion. When it comes to social elites acting like arrogant jerks the US is morally superior.
Is it? How? In both situations you have a group of people in power who use their power to violate rights of another group of people. Unless you say that this is okay as long as the people whose rights are violated have a different passport.
> Objectively they did a great job from a technological perspective.
It’s not clear to me that their software, actually does what it says… I feel like that wasn’t entirely clear from the demo. It’s not like a short demo proves much.
> The fact it didn't cross their minds that maybe this is a bad idea to release in the US really shows the cultural difference between the West and other countries like India. There are plenty of things wrong with the US but blatant treating of lesser-privileged people like animals is something that isn't well tolerated here.
McDonalds and Amazon are American companies that micromanage workers - the only difference is that their software is inhouse. The next time you're at any fast-food drive through, have a look at the monitors they have up, you'll likely see a timer and stats about rate they are serving customers.
More broadly, Hell, mouse-jigglers became a thing, and most American retail outlets won't let their cashiers sit (no chairs!) - talk about treating workers like animals.
> These guys spent a lot of effort making a really great implementation of sweatshop software.
This is such a fallacy of "If it is evil, it must be competent". Did you actually look at the software? In no universe can you confidently infer that it's a "really great implementation", it's childish at best. You're just assuming it so you can make the rest of your argument.
> There are plenty of things wrong with the US but blatant treating of lesser-privileged people like animals is something that isn't well tolerated here.
Eh, that's flattering, but there are many ways of treating lesser privileged people like animals that are socially acceptable in the US, e.g. homelessness, prison slave labor, healthcare, immigrants, the whole "tough on crime" schtick, just off the top of my head.
There are all for the most part special cases. Most people aren’t homeless, in prison, illegal immigrants, etc.
This is just what-about-ism.
Clearly what the person was talking about was how PEOPLE tend to treat others, in vast numbers, so that it’s common to be an offender and even more common to be on the receiving end.
There are not 100 million people in the US actively poorly treating 250 million others like cattle.
dismissing what is often the lowest income part of a country as a minority is a pretty useless tautology. Of course the poorest people are the poorest.
>There are not 100 million people in the US actively poorly treating 250 million others like cattle.
So it's okay when it's maybe 10,000 people treating 320 million others like cattle?
I don't know why you're trying to act like domestic abuse (in the purest sense of the word "domestic", not the legal sense) is on another level from systematic abuse. They often go hand-in-hand anyway.
AI enforced slavery. I remember reading a short story where workers get instructions from an AI constantly after starting out as work assistance. Don't remember the details.
RIP Marshall Brain. He was a great man. And quite befitting the peculiar name.
It really makes me think. Honestly the Manna system has only just since the LLM discovery been possible, whereas it seemed a bit farfetched to me 15 years ago when I first read it. It would be pretty easy to roll today’s “AI” into a product to replace fast food managers like in that story.
There is nothing AI about that demo though? It is just humans talking on the phone looking at an mvp dashboard of basic productivity metrics. In serious logistics/ manufacturing better stuff than this is already in place.
Which is different from chattel slavery, of course. But it's still an extant theory that gets discussed widely. It would seem an AI company to be a labor panopticon would align with the critiques raised by the concept of wage slavery.
Its important to raise awareness of the forms of modern slavery [1] and while comparing employee-surveillance software to slavery may seem hyperbolic, we who build these tools are culpable to their impact on the world and what they might lead to next.
Another example of terms being appropriated like that would be how "piracy" now refers to copying information your aren't legally permitted to copy, as well as the older meaning of using violence to steal things at sea.
Another one is nemesis, which now refers to a long standing enemy, as well as the older meaning of a Greek goddess of vengeance.
Don't imply or wink and nudge. Say what you mean to say. Your example is either a non sequiter like mine, or it's implying something while avoiding saying the actual thing you are trying to convey.
Slaves didn't have freedom to move jobs or to have agency in their lives. At the base level, let alone all the abuses they faced which varied in places and times throughout history.
But a lot of these workers don't have some things that even slaves had. Like room and board.
Aside from the mildly disturbing tone of the video, I thought it was amusing/interesting that both of them were born into families that owned factories and got into Duke. What a world of people that get into YC.
I really hope that this was just a crappy mockup that the founders didn't spend any actual time on.
Because if it is a fully fledged product, I'm not sure what that says about the many people at YC and elsewhere that gave it a pass. Seriously wtf material.
It’s not a cultural thing. It happens here too. Someone created something like this to track strawberry pickers and their ‘productivity’.
Remember they are not even paid minimum wage by the hour. They are paid by how many punnets they pick. And this founder thought it was a great idea.
American Ag is more exploitative than any third world/developing country because the really desperate work here. It is sorely in need of automation.
Nobody wants to actually invest in Ag automation..not really…there is a lot of BS floating but everything grown locally and on our shelves relies on low paid manual labour.
I wish.. so very much..that Americans see how their food is grown.
I grew up in Santa Cruz county. I went to school with field workers' kids. I don't know about the ones that were migrants as we didn't keep in touch, but the ones I went to school with year after year almost all went military then college. None went on to be field workers. American ag might suck, but like you said it at least comes with something more, some future hope, if only for your kids.
Anyone who would fund or build this is, in my mind, taxonomically evil. Maybe not irretrievably so, but YC would need to do a lot of work in my mind to not be "that form that believes the panopticon and dehumanization is good."
This isn't just run of the mill capitalism bad, this is truly exceptionally vile and staining.
Probably depends what the pitch was. "Monitor assembly lines using AI so you can tell when a machine breaks" is radically different from "constantly snitch on all your factory workers".
It is interesting to me that people seem to believe that were it not for this software, no one would ever complain at workers who are, or who are though to be, slacking. As though that concept was invented by the software.
In reality this sounds to me like a play to eliminate the manager jobs, not to materially change working conditions for the rank and file, who are monitored for output one way or another, even in Western countries. Nobody employs workers unconditionally and for life.
”Optifye says it’s building software to help factory owners know who’s working — and who isn’t — in “real-time” thanks to AI-powered security cameras it places on assembly lines, according to its YC profile.”
A startup looking to act as the equivalent of overseers on a plantation in 19th century is very representative of the American neoliberal shithole we live in.
It sounds like you want universities to instill a sense of respect for other people with a different socioeconomic background. The current administration would consider that to be "woke" or "DEI", and fine Duke the equivalent of it's endowment based on a tenuous link to the anti-affirmative-action SCOTUS ruling.
I wouldn't be surprised if the startup asked YC to pull the Launch after the backlash, and I would be surprised if HN was resistant to doing that. Unlike most of what runs on HN, Launch HNs (and YC company job posts) are purely a benefit for YC companies.
I wouldn't bring this particular product to market. But I think people have weird ideas about the level of intentionality that exists inside of YC with respect to its portfolio companies.
Relative to an ordinary VC fund, YC admits absurd numbers of companies every year (always has!). It deliberately admits companies that are nothing but pairs of impressive founders and an idea. Those teams get some office hours advice from some subset of YC partners, but are left alone to build their companies --- YC takes a small amount of equity, nothing resembling control. By the time Demo Day or "Launch HN" happens, many of those companies are working on totally different things from their applications.
I don't really understand why anyone would expect YC to keep a durable record of a Launch post that was working against the startup that put it together. They're not a journalism outlet, and it looks like journalism did just fine keeping a record of what happened here.
> I don't really understand why anyone would expect YC to keep a durable record of a Launch post that was working against the startup that put it together. They're not a journalism outlet
Is it really surprising that people might expect "Hacker News" to follow the basic standards of respectable news outlets?
In the UK and most of the west this is unethical but there is no explicit law that makes it illegal, curious what country you are from that deems this illegal?
That was "just" CCTV, not an AI panopticon. I think the law (and nearly-guaranteed consequences) are so clear in Germany that few larger companies would be stupid enough to seriously consider something like this, and if they did, any serious Betriebsrat (works council) would put a quick end to it even before the privacy authority could bring the hammer down.
Switzerland has laws against behavioral surveillance too, although I'm not sure how the enforcement mechanisms look in practice. But I expect something like this to be too blatant for employers to get away with it. (https://www.edoeb.admin.ch/en/video-surveillance-in-the-work..., "The use of video surveillance systems for the targeted monitoring of employee behaviour is prohibited".) These rules are explicitly considered health & safety rules due to the psychological harm (stress etc.) that this kind of surveillance causes.
"The European Court of Human Rights has consistently held that video surveillance of an employee in the workplace, whether hidden or not, as well as interception of the content of employee conversations on a work phone, constitutes interference within the meaning of Article 8 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms."
'Hey Number 17 ' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43175023 - Feb 2025 (122 comments)
Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170850 - Feb 2025 (160 comments)