| ▲ | ryandvm 17 hours ago |
| Curious about the official YCombinator stance on this extremely unpopular YCombinator-backed startup (unpopular here at HN anyway). |
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| ▲ | chuckadams 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I believe "money good" is YC's only guiding principle. HN is a nice resource, but let's not have any illusions about the morals of the owners. |
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| ▲ | avree 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The official YCombinator stance is that Flock was a huge success as an investment - which it seemingly was, given that they managed to sign deals with what seems like every tiny municipality/sheriff/government organization. https://www.ycombinator.com/library/N0-unpopular-ideas-that-... |
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| ▲ | SoftTalker 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | Because for police departments, they are a huge benefit and well worth the cost. A lot of crimes have been solved with Flock cameras. Stolen cars, or cars linked to criminal activity have been tracked and located. Missing persons have been found. None of that justifies the massive invasion of privacy that these cameras represent. You don't have a right to not be individually surveiled in public, but that doesn't mean it's OK for the government to warrantlessly track everyone everywhere they go 24x7, or to do it by proxy with a private company such as Flock. The potential for abuse is just too high, and we've seen many cases of that too. |
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| ▲ | overfeed 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you've read anything Garry Tan has said, you wouldn't be curious. |
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| ▲ | doctorpangloss 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| if you want to tackle the POV of the true believers at Y Combinator*: look, flock can't be that effective if all it takes is a guy with a ladder to defeat it, right? same thing with pervasive facial detection, you can wear a mask. you don't have to go into all this philosophical stuff to see how the promises will not be fulfilled. *Garry Tan has been characterized as a True Believer, in that he sincerely believes Flock's vision will reduce crime and not be misused. on the flip side they don't invest in Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, etc. or other defense stuff. so it's very exceptional for them. |
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| ▲ | nerdsniper 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | YC is definitely pivoting into Defense. Besides 9mothers, there’s a list of 22 defense startups accepted into YC just this year so far: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/defense And beyond this there are a number of defense-dependent companies like ProvenMetal (whose value proposition largely depends on a customer’s deep need to do onshore manufacturing) It makes sense. From 2000-2015 it was pretty difficult for anyone to break into defense and really own a brand. Breakout companies like EOTech were really rare. Generally founders would be at the mercy/grace of the major defense incumbents ('primes'), getting scraps from their tables. That’s changed lately. For a wide variety of reasons (political, technical, and on active battlefields) there’s a lot more room for startups to really own their own slice of the industry and build some moats of their own. | | |
| ▲ | doctorpangloss 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | they invest in defense stuff now, that's new! but. paul graham doesn't like defense stuff. there were plenty of great defense seed investments (palantir), and he runs the best seed venture firm in the world, always has, so his opinion matters. but it was out of a righteous place, it wasn't because he thought it couldn't make money. y combinator is a much bigger fund now with lots of people in charge. the "2000-2015" era you are talking about: valuations of everything were 1/10th of what they are now. it's hard to make any definitive comparisons about venture trends. |
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| ▲ | giancarlostoro 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > or other defense stuff. so it's very exceptional for them. 9 Mothers. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/9-mothers-corporation | |
| ▲ | etc-hosts 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | the Thiel Anti Christ Chats at Garry Tan's house is run by Anduril founders. https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/08/michelle-stephens-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trae_Stephens It's hard for me to understand how any of this is very Christian. | |
| ▲ | iepathos 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | For additional context, for first I've ever seen their rfs specifically asked for startups focused on military applications and warfare "The Future of American Defense" https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs Disappointing to see this is the future they are trying to invest in. | |
| ▲ | SlightlyLeftPad 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Palantir and Terminator enter the chat. |
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| ▲ | snootypoot 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | stickfigure 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Flock threads attract a narrow slice of hotheads on HN, just like anti-social media threads. It's not really possible to say anything definitive about the popularity of Flock in the broad HN community. |
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| ▲ | rconti 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | Flock seems to be pretty unpopular, internet-wide, in bipartisan tech/very online worlds; feels like 90% to me. Where things start coming into balance a bit more is among the Nextdoor paranoia crowd. | | |
| ▲ | fckgw 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | Flock is popular with 1) local police departments and 2) local city councils who don't want to upset the police It's pretty unpopular with mainly everyone else. | | |
| ▲ | stickfigure 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you spend time in neighborhood groups like nextdoor and local facebook groups, you find plenty of support for Flock. I'd even go so far as to say a majority. This doesn't have the scientific rigor of a random sample, but it's enough to convince me that the anti-Flock voices on HN are not representative of the public at large. And might not even be representative of HN. | | |
| ▲ | frm88 an hour ago | parent [-] | | John Oliver made his last episode of Last Week Tonight about surverillance with particular focus on Flock and its many abuses. Last I checked it had 1.5m views on Youtube. Breaking Points had an episode on Flock yesterday featuring a member of the management calling anti-Flock people domestic terrorists. When I watched it on YT it had 80K views. EDIT: here's a list of 30+ cities that cancelled their contracts with Flock because of above reasons: https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/flock-safety-cancel-wav... | | |
| ▲ | mlrtime an hour ago | parent [-] | | John Oliver is also one of the most biased sources of news you could possibly absorb. He's a comedian playing the part of an opinion news reporter. No different than Fox news hosts, which are equally biased towards their viewers preferences for ad money. I respect John Stewart for moving more towards real politics than playing the "I'm just a comedian" role. |
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