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> Black, Hispanic, Women, Veterans, and International founders. I think it's great that YC is concerned about helping non-elite people. What about just focusing on helping poor people compete in Silicon Valley in general? Does anyone think wealthy founders of any kind need more help than poor founders of any kind?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you spent any time in or near a predominantly black church? There's one on my corner. There's white people there all the time. And did you really just suggest that "women's shelters" somehow advantage women over men? Suggested Google search: [lucky ducky comic]. You might also enjoy the editorial cartoon stylings of Stan Kelly.
You're putting words in my mouth. But if you want to talk about that, then yes, there is more support for homeless women than there is for men. But that is beside the point here. My point was to list a handful of the many counterexamples to "it is white male time all the time", which is a silly claim, at least as stated. Strike that example off the list, then. It doesn't change the original comment's point.
I like to think we're all adults here. As a nerdy straight white male even I understand that it's shorthand.
Imagine we both have a bucket. Every time life gives you a "freebie", you drop a stone in the bucket. Every time you get passed over or catch crap just for being yourself you take a stone out.
I have had plenty of experiences in my life where I was targeted for being nerdy; bullied, harassed, etc. My parents were not rich and earlier in my life actually quite poor. The difference is my bucket is still mostly full. The average black man can't say that. The average white woman's bucket is fuller than the average black man's, but not as full as mine.
And yes you are pedantically technically correct: there do exist some white people who's buckets are relatively empty by this analogy. They are proportionally a much smaller percentage of all white people than the corresponding cohort of black people in the US.
That is what gripes me a bit about the responses my own tech/nerd community tends to vomit out whenever issues like this come up. Congrats, you pulled a few counter-examples out of your ass. Who cares? We're talking the overall big picture here.
This probably won't be very popular: but isn't the notion of special treatment from YC partners on the basis of race inherently racist? I think anyone who is black or Hispanic would much rather associate with YC on the basis of their own individual merit only now everyone who has anything to do with YC will have to wonder if they are there because YC felt the need to help out the poor, underprivileged, black dude or…
Another way to look at it is that even if individual experiences are varied enough that they will drown out racial contribution when considered one at a time, racism can still hold back a group of people by 5-10% or whatever, and so that needs to be addressed.
It helps explain why a policy like this is not generally considered racist, but if YC were to single out one individual for YC on the basis of his race, it probably would be.
[1] cf "Poor people should skill up and improve themselves" as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not defensive about criticisms of this YC program, although I find all of them preposterous. My hackles are, however, raised by the virulent strain of HN comments written by anonymous users confidently asserting that they understand the motives of people they've never met. The word "probably" in the comment upthread is where the switch flipped in my brain that made me respond. Oh really? Probably, you say? Please…
Since when can anon's can post on HN? Where's the word "probably" in my response that set you off? How can or why should I respond to you about assertions made by others? Please stop projecting your need for social justice on me, for or against - my only assertion is 'follow the money', and that's more of a fact of life of living in the USA than anything else.
> Please stop projecting your need for social justice on me
Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. Please don't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It is an example of a white male privilege" No it is not. You cannot point to poor treatment of one group as evidence of the "privilege" of another group. There are more than two colors of people.
I don't think you grok the concept of privilege as I'm using it. My guess is that like many people who reject the term (or its common usage), you think "privilege" is an indictment of the people who hold the privilege, or a demand for them to relinquish it. That may be some people's notion of privilege, but it's not a very useful one. Better is just to see it as a positive attribute, rather than a normative one. It i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It is an example of a white male privilege" No it is not. You cannot point to poor treatment of one group as evidence of the "privilege" of another group. There are more than two colors of people.
Then whats the cause of the poor treatment?
This probably won't be very popular: but isn't the notion of special treatment from YC partners on the basis of race inherently racist? I think anyone who is black or Hispanic would much rather associate with YC on the basis of their own individual merit only now everyone who has anything to do with YC will have to wonder if they are there because YC felt the need to help out the poor, underprivileged, black dude or…
I'm not sure it serves HN very well to have exactly the same entirely generic debate come up every time there's a thread about anything like this. Rehashing the same political divide over and over merely produces the identical hash over and over. That doesn't count as interesting in HN's sense—nothing predictable does. Meanwhile, interesting discussion about the specifics of the story at hand largely gets drowned out…
I think a mod kicking off a meta-topic about the quality of discussion on HN every time he sees a post that falls into one of a few buckets, lowers the signal-to-noise more than posts like Uptrenda's.
I'm not trying to be a troll, I'm just trying to find a justification. Having something that says you can only can come in if you are "Black, Hispanic, Women, Veterans, and International founders" kinda racist as fuck? It sounds exactly like segregation to me. Again, not trying to be a troll. Not American, just trying to understand.
It is discrimination. Discrimination is having applicants use 23andMe to prove that they are more black than white, so you can give them a different preferential treatment.
Next to making the world a better place through more black startup founders, this is a PR move. Paul Graham stopped posting on YC around the time of those terrible threads on females in tech. Hackernews became renowned for their toxic response to these issues. You can still see some of that in the rest of this thread and in my comment.
What followed was Female Founders and this initiative. This discriminatory trend will only continue. YC thinks it can make their startup portfolio more diverse, by adding more black startup founders. In this lies the hidden assumption that black founders act or think differently than white founders. The terrible alternative being that YC judges the diversity of their portfolio on the skin color of their founders.
"Notes [...] [2] One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you're not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon. Believe it or not, under current US law, you're not even allowed to discriminate on the basis of intelligence. Whereas when you're starting a company, you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with."
I guess they are looking for the talented blacks, Meso-Americans and females who weren't happy with being handed the jobs they were under-qualified for, and wanted to risk throwing away being at the top of their in-group mating market for self-actualization or helping the world or something?
The whole Faustian world-saving, or hyper-competitive, tech hobbyist, leadership inclinations aren't really found in the populations they seek to reach out to. They don't want to invent anything new of valuable, they merely seek to re-distribute funding and opportunities in tech to themselves.
The same inclinations to start tech companies are more similar to ones in people who play strategic games, or who contribute to open source software, or who engage in hacking for fun or bragging rights. I think they would have far more success reaching out to those groups. It's not really imaginable that the kinds of blacks and Hispanics they are seeking to fund were the kinds of kids who would lend their friends books on programming growing up that had nothing to do with school or a career. If they believe that starting a world-class company is simply a good business decision for anyone with the talent, then, they should do more recruitment of people who actually have the skills for that.
They fail to realize that marginalized minorities are not raised to "be leaders", and "take risks". In a state where the "oppressed" talented can coast on their racial credentials, why bother taking the risk?