Happy Monday! I’m Stephanie Simon, an Admissions Manager at Y Combinator. I’m guest editing the YC newsletter with some of the topics on my mind this week. Hope you enjoy.

P.S. We’re accepting applications for YC Winter 2018. You can apply here. If you’d like to learn more and meet us in person, we might be in your city soon! The YC Fall Tour begins later this month.

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Firstly, I’m hoping Irma is not as devastating as the predictions say (this is a helpful article for deciding where to donate).

Thinking about the recent natural disasters, here are some climate change-related reads:

An interesting look at some of the flaws in online movie ratings, especially as they relate to the current political divide, through the lens of the An Inconvenient Truth sequel.

A brief summary of the dangers of the palm oil industry. This industry is due for a shake-up. $60B and growing market, but it causes irreparable harm to ecosystems and communities. I’d love to see applications from people working on solutions.

I’m interested in how we adapt to the increasingly common extreme weather conditions. Here’s how some lizards are.

Thought Starters

Luke Wroblewski asks “What value would exceed the pain of charging and wearing augmented reality headsets each day?”

Building products “monkey-first”

An ethical dilemma around automating one’s job

Mini organs!

And to end, this is from a few weeks ago, but still on my mind. Cadran Cowansage’s honest and thoughtful post about the Google memo.

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On the YC Blog

The Challenges a Repeat Founder Faces
Tikhon Bernstam cofounded Scribd (YC S06) and Parse (YC S11). He stopped by to share his experience starting a second startup, deciding to do YC a second time, and investing in several YC startups after Parse.

Hosain Rahman on the “Defibrillator Experiences” of Jawbone
Hosain Rahman is the CEO and Founder of Jawbone. Jessica Livingston interviewed him during our 2014 Startup School and Hosain shared the “defibrillator experiences” from Jawbone’s early days.

Top Posts on Hacker News

• Writing a SQLite clone from scratch in C (cstack.github.io)
• Wind Energy Is One of the Cheapest, and It’s Getting Cheaper (scientificamerican.com)
• Tell me what your company does (medium.com)
• Demon-Haunted World (locusmag.com)
• Ask HN: How to start afresh in a new domain after years of expertise in another?
• Optimizing web servers for high throughput and low latency (dropbox.com)
• Delta Goes Big, Then Goes Home (flightradar24.com)
• Cybersecurity Incident Involving Consumer Information (equifax.com)
• Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack (bloomberg.com)
• How Many Years of Life Does That House Cost? (arcgis.com)
• Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You (kalzumeus.com)
• Give away your code, but never your time (wgross.net)