←back to thread

YC: Requests for Startups

(www.ycombinator.com)
514 points sarimkx | 1 comments | 14 Feb 24 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
eltondegeneres ◴[14 Feb 24 18:21 UTC] No.39373199[source]▶
Jared Friedman and Gustaf Alströmer want to make it easier to kill other human beings, and turn a profit while doing it. Shame on them and anyone else who works on "defense technology."

> I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (p. 19)

replies(5): >>39373269 #>>39373383 #>>39374258 #>>39374400 #>>39375687 #
mtraven ◴[14 Feb 24 19:45 UTC] No.39374258[source]▶
I don't like working on killing machines either. But we shouldn't forget that the internet and basically all of computation originated out of defense research. That might be good or bad, but arguably the field was more innovative when that was the funding source than it is today.

> “All of modern high tech has the US Department of Defense to thank at its core, because this is where the money came from to be able to develop a lot of what is driving the technology that we’re using today,” said Leslie Berlin, historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. https://archive.ph/PY5sT

replies(1): >>39380492 #
1. tete ◴[15 Feb 24 08:54 UTC] No.39380492[source]▶
Sorry, but I don't think this comparison really makes sense. Yes, duh, there's military research and a lot of things come out of it, especially because they have huge budgets for funding all sorts of research.

But the topic here is both about private companies, not some research fund and it's explicitly about creating products (not doing research) for military use.

Things like DARPA are even more complex, because in a way, intentionally or not it is used by the US to have essentially government funded research and infrastructure development while bypassing the whole "but that's communism!" discussion and also simply not having to publicly discuss it other than "let's raise military spending!".

So in other words what you say makes sense and I agree, but it might not necessarily apply here. Like your quote states this is about money for research coming from the US DoD, not about private capital investors wanting to make money by telling you to do R&D for the military.