Have you read Christopher Alexander? (Pattern Language, et. al.)
Yes! I love A Pattern Language.
Awesome! :-) (I'm thinking of the new cities project.)
I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
431–440 of 458 posts
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seth Godin wrote a book on the subject https://www.amazon.com/Dip-Little-Book-Teaches-Stick/dp/1591...
Have you read this book? If so, how good is it?
I've read a couple of Seth's books couple years ago. I felt they are all like a great blog posts inflated to size a short book. But maybe going on about one idea for two hundred pages makes some sense, it made it really sink in for me.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#433Do you really think that financially incentivizing voting will create good downstream effects? Almost all ideas of civic duty are historically drawn from non-financial incentives and the idea of attaching some financial incentive to them potentially seems to further exacerbate a "pay to play" atmosphere that is one of the reasons people (like myself) don't find it particularly stimulating to participate in the presen…
Here in Australia we get a fine if we don’t turn up at the polling place and have our name crossed off the list on election day. Of course this creates a pool of voters (5-10%) who really don’t want to participate (these people typically spoil their ballot by doing things like drawing a penis on the ballot), but what this does do is keep a much larger section of the population engaged in the political process. What h…
There's a few factors at play here though.
Preferential voting means it's harder to shift the mean anyway, because parties have to appeal to other parties/interest groups to get preference deals etc (of course no one has to follow a preference voting card!).
Secondly, having 98% polling day turnout means you don't have to build outrage to get people to vote (as they do in the us/uk). I remember hearing that if polling day was rainy in the UK the conservatives could usually count on a 10% boost because their constituency have cars and the working class don't - not sure how true this is these days
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't read the book but that is entirely too simplistic and comes across as american exceptionalism to me. Not to mention the author has a well defined political agenda to sell I don't necessarily agree with. I've lived all over the country and all over the world and between countries I'd say it is 100% cultural. In "europe" employee protection laws make it difficult to quickly hire and fire employees, making it d…
>In "europe" employee protection laws make it difficult to quickly hire and fire employees, making it difficult to scale. And IMO US anti-discrimination laws are also flawed. I think a good compromise is to only include certain kinds of jobs like manual labor under employment anti-discrimination laws.
How do you believe they are flawed? I hear this most often from people who have heard rumor or trash news from America and they think American companies have Affirmative Action "quotas" where they have to hire a certain number of people of each ethnic background. This is false.
Though quotas have been outlawed in the United States, the European Union has had a recent push to punish companies whose boards aren't composed of at least 40% women. And India, Brazil and Malaysia, among other countries, have laws and policies that address affirmative action in schools and throughout society.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/business/global/18iht-boar...
There are lots of anti-discrimination laws in the US. While affirmative action is usually spoken of in general terms, there is no singular policy or implementation of the ways in which affirmative action take shape in government organizations, colleges and corporations. It varies.
Court cases continue to refine interpretations of how race is used at the university level. Some schools have experimented with a variety of ways of non-race-based models, like the Top 10 model that the University of Texas employs, to ensure the racial diversity of students.
A 2005 study by Princeton sociologists Thomas J. Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung compared the effects of affirmative action on racial and special groups at three highly selective private research universities. The data from the study represent admissions disadvantage and advantage in terms of SAT points (on the old 1600-point scale):
Whites (non-recruited athlete/non-legacy status): 0 (control group) Blacks: +230 Hispanics: +185 Asians: –50 Recruited athletes: +200 Legacies (children of alumni): +160
In 2009, Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford, in their book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African Americans who got 1100.
While the data and legal interpretation of Affirmative Action and anti-discrimination laws in the US are constantly changing today it has the largest real impact on Universities and Government.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in Australia we get a fine if we don’t turn up at the polling place and have our name crossed off the list on election day. Of course this creates a pool of voters (5-10%) who really don’t want to participate (these people typically spoil their ballot by doing things like drawing a penis on the ballot), but what this does do is keep a much larger section of the population engaged in the political process. What h…
There's a few factors at play here though. Preferential voting means it's harder to shift the mean anyway, because parties have to appeal to other parties/interest groups to get preference deals etc (of course no one has to follow a preference voting card!). Secondly, having 98% polling day turnout means you don't have to build outrage to get people to vote (as they do in the us/uk). I remember hearing that if pollin…
Yes the combination of compulsory and preferential voting has a great calming influence on the political system. Our two major parties (labor and liberal) are very similar in practice as they are competing for the middle ground, not the exciting the extreme wings to the polls. The only downside is it tends to make for boring politics, but overall boring is good if you have to live in the country.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
>In "europe" employee protection laws make it difficult to quickly hire and fire employees, making it difficult to scale. And IMO US anti-discrimination laws are also flawed. I think a good compromise is to only include certain kinds of jobs like manual labor under employment anti-discrimination laws.
How do you believe they are flawed? I hear this most often from people who have heard rumor or trash news from America and they think American companies have Affirmative Action "quotas" where they have to hire a certain number of people of each ethnic background. This is false. Though quotas have been outlawed in the United States, the European Union has had a recent push to punish companies whose boards aren't compo…
The problem is how these laws are enforced. For example, statistics and performance reviews are often used, which probably do work fine for manual labor jobs where employees are treated as a commodity (and for which these laws were probably originally designed for). Affirmative action BTW is not a good idea either, but not bad enough to outlaw IMO.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you believe they are flawed? I hear this most often from people who have heard rumor or trash news from America and they think American companies have Affirmative Action "quotas" where they have to hire a certain number of people of each ethnic background. This is false. Though quotas have been outlawed in the United States, the European Union has had a recent push to punish companies whose boards aren't compo…
The problem is how these laws are enforced. For example, statistics and performance reviews are often used, which probably do work fine for manual labor jobs where employees are treated as a commodity (and for which these laws were probably originally designed for). Affirmative action BTW is not a good idea either, but not bad enough to outlaw IMO.
You mean expensive lawsuits? That is true. Everyone in America is filing expensive lawsuits all the time especially if you own a business the first hire you must make is a good lawyer.
I don't see how this is related to discrimination specifically?
If your problem is too many lawsuits why don't you mention hot coffee at McDonalds? Or the problem with drivers causing accidents and suing in China?
http://www.ibtimes.com/china-arrests-7-faking-car-crashes-cl...
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
What we've thought about the most is creating a better way for potential cofounders to meet each other.
I think one simple way we're all staring at that's right in our face. Allow HN profiles to optionally have city,state, country attached to it. Add a map. Allow people to follow each other. add some kind of messaging or emails forwarding service. add interests, skills and projects to profiles.
I agree this is a great idea. I'm sure there are other folks in my city who frequent HN but no idea how I'd find them.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is how these laws are enforced. For example, statistics and performance reviews are often used, which probably do work fine for manual labor jobs where employees are treated as a commodity (and for which these laws were probably originally designed for). Affirmative action BTW is not a good idea either, but not bad enough to outlaw IMO.
You mean expensive lawsuits? That is true. Everyone in America is filing expensive lawsuits all the time especially if you own a business the first hire you must make is a good lawyer. I don't see how this is related to discrimination specifically? If your problem is too many lawsuits why don't you mention hot coffee at McDonalds? Or the problem with drivers causing accidents and suing in China? http://www.ibtimes.co…
Things like car crashes for example leave evidence by definition. There are many ways discrimination can occur, not all of which leave evidence.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a few factors at play here though. Preferential voting means it's harder to shift the mean anyway, because parties have to appeal to other parties/interest groups to get preference deals etc (of course no one has to follow a preference voting card!). Secondly, having 98% polling day turnout means you don't have to build outrage to get people to vote (as they do in the us/uk). I remember hearing that if pollin…
Yes the combination of compulsory and preferential voting has a great calming influence on the political system. Our two major parties (labor and liberal) are very similar in practice as they are competing for the middle ground, not the exciting the extreme wings to the polls. The only downside is it tends to make for boring politics, but overall boring is good if you have to live in the country.
pity it's such a shitstorm of conservative religious interest group pandering with a touch of racism, xenophobia and homophobia at present :(