Hey all! This’ll be the last YC Newsletter to go out in 2023, as the last few days of the year will (ideally) be a bit quiet around here.

I hope all of you have a relaxing/safe/warm holiday. Shout out to all the sys admins, DevOps/security teams, and on-call folks who secretly keep the Internet alive over the next few days.

I was asked to take over this newsletter around the middle of this year, and I’m loving it. I’ve heard from a lot of you about what you like in here, and we’ve focused on making that stuff even better — the HN section looks a lot more like HN, YC Launches are now easier to read, and we've put more emphasis on the latest YC videos while also pulling more evergreen stuff out of the archives. It all fits together quite well now.

Got other ideas? Send me a note at greg@ycombinator.com. I’m here for it! (Got plans to make something cool in 2024? I want to hear about that, too.)

Be excellent to each other, be well, and have a very happy New Year.

- Greg

📺 The Latest

The asymmetric upside of being positive

It can be tempting to default to pessimism. Social media tends to favor pessimistic takes.

But as Dalton Caldwell writes, "this type of worldview doesn’t help founders building startups. The problems with any new startup are usually obvious and numerous, but you have to balance that with seeing the upside of making it work."

In this latest episode of Dalton & Michael, the two YC Group Partners share why they're optimistic about the future of tech.

🌎 YC Community

🚀 The Launchpad

🔥 Hacker News

1. Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger (www.figma.com)
   2190 points by supafastcoder | 962 comments


2. ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format (blog.arxiv.org)
   1069 points by programd | 282 comments


3. Simulating fluids, fire, and smoke in real-time (andrewkchan.dev)
   768 points by ibobev | 165 comments


4. Apple allows some iOS apps to track user locations via lists of nearby SSIDs (wingu.se)
   764 points by lloyds_barclays | 291 comments


5. James Webb Space Telescope captures high-resolution image of Uranus (webbtelescope.org)
   686 points by gmays | 275 comments


6. How to learn chess as an adult (2021) (www.alexcrompton.com)
   595 points by pseudolus | 299 comments


7. Ventoy (www.ventoy.net)
   583 points by matthberg | 107 comments


8. Wasm3 entering a minimal maintenance phase (github.com)
   556 points by padolsey | 143 comments


9. The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940) (www.charliechaplin.com)
   520 points by hypertexthero | 370 comments


10. 0% of the phrases of the original Wikipedia "Ship of Theseus" article remain (twitter.com)
    505 points by fortran77 | 123 comments