Technically, in the phrase "YC startups are breaking the law", there is no clear implication that it is all YC startups.
The phrase simply does not speak on the point of quantity, and is pretty decent 'headline English', which traditionally does away with 'some', 'the', etc, trading specificity for celerity.
However, with the phrasing 'Some YC startups are breaking the law", there is actually additional information being added. Intentionally or not, dang is injecting into the discourse a self-protective disclaimer.
If you're really curious, one can probably work out a symbolic representation of the truth claim being made in any higher-order logic that can express Vagueness (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vagueness/) and demonstrate how the truth functions differ, but frankly I'm not a grad student anymore, and I'm less excited to do free symbolic logic problems ;D
Popping the devtools on my brain, I think the reason this issue jumped out at me in the first place is that YC's moral ground has shifted lately, mostly because of its exposure to blockchain bets, many of which turned out to be, how to put this politely, more valuable than worthy.
In this new climate, it's impossible for me not to pay close attention to how organizations shield themselves from reputational risk.
It might be advisable to HN to come up with some self-regulatory editorial policies and guidelines to prevent unintentional conflicts-of-interest.
For example, if it turned out that HN was being used to systematically privilege coverage of its friends, allies, and clients, that would have reputational impact on the publication going forward.
I don't think that's what's intentionally going on here, but I also feel we've seen just how fraught the act of edition actually is.
It's fraught, but from my perspective it's no more fraught than it used to be. The very first thing pg told me about moderating HN (before I even had time to grab a chair) was not to suppress anti-YC stories. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... has years worth of these cases, and there have been masses of others. I think the editorial policy is pretty clear (I've outlined it in this thread, and many other comments reachable through that HN Search link); it's also been stable for a long time.
Rephrasing: HN needs better self-regulation, because the weather has changed, and it's not a good look when you're standing halfway between several unhinged billionaires.
This is a friendly observation. Please be well and do the best you can.
