#humblebrag
Interviewing with YC? Don't overstep the limits like us (but be close)
21–30 of 51 posts
Re: Interviewing with YC? Don't overstep the limits like us (but be close)
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be brutally honest, if you're not a bit weird[1] you're probably not cut out to make it in the social space. We're talking about people who would have created a hot or not site 10 years ago without a thought about the pain it could cause people who always ended up 'not'. These aren't normally adjusted people. They have a lot of good points, and some very bad ones. If you want to look at it in a good way they're no…
I don't mind sociopaths; they are what they are. What I mind is the sugar-coating of sociopathic behavior that's actually flat-out unethical as 'naughtiness' so these people can be treated as innovative rule-benders rather than creeps. Doing many of these 'sociopathic' things is a lot like going to a small country town where people leave their doors unlocked and burgling the houses there; you're violating a lot of un…
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Re: Interviewing with YC? Don't overstep the limits like us (but be close)
#23"The problem is, while pg outwardly disapproved of our actions, we know he secretly loves founders that push the limits!" You know what, though: the response function around the limit is not a smooth bell curve; it drops sharply below the x axis as you go past the peak.
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Who gets Italy?
Re: Interviewing with YC? Don't overstep the limits like us (but be close)
#24"The problem is, while pg outwardly disapproved of our actions, we know he secretly loves founders that push the limits!" You know what, though: the response function around the limit is not a smooth bell curve; it drops sharply below the x axis as you go past the peak.
It took me a while to get this, so I made a helpful graph for everyone else as slow as I am. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22926250/pgResponse.png
kind of like a Kelly criterion bet
http://www.math.washington.edu/~morrow/336_10/papers/jane.pd...
if you bet like a mouse, you get cheese
Re: Interviewing with YC? Don't overstep the limits like us (but be close)
#25From pg's own remarks on the topic http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html : They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. I get the feeling these folks can't tell the difference between the two. And I am thinking "naughty" is not necessarily the best word for this quality and is bound to be misinterpreted by some folks.
The assumption that these 'naughty' people automatically have a good intuition for the rules that matter is interesting. It's a bit like all those people who think that they drive perfectly well when yakking on a cell phone, drunk driving, or going 20 over the limit, or perhaps both. Everyone's an expert on highway safety, apparently ("my intuition tells me I'm not distracted here, I don't care what those statisticians say").
Interestingly, I have known a surprisingly large number of dangerous drivers (alcohol, speeding or both) in the tech scene and many have fit whole YC 'naughtiness ethos' pretty well.
Playing by the rules without necessarily understanding all of them might have helped these guys at the moment when they outed a bunch of people as applying to YC using Twitter.
Re: Interviewing with YC? Don't overstep the limits like us (but be close)
#26"It's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission" Thats a mantra that I found hard to take on, but it really has helped me
In uni myself and a friend used this philosophy to get lab space and desks in the postgrad labs (we were undergrads and normally didn't get our own "private" lab space). We had keycards because we needed access for project work[1], found ourselves some unused space, unused desks etc figuring that if anybody minded we would just apologize and find someplace else. Nobody complained and by the time I graduated we had th…
I did as an undergrad in the US states doing both undergrad and grad course work in Molecular Biology both lab space and computer lab space..keycards, key licenses to apps using apple's keyserver, etc. Even got an unofficial desk in one of the Faculty member's offices.
It was not just knowing those Professors but we did enough 'free' work that we could easily ask for bribes..either pay us or give us space..in my case I wrote some computer macros/programs to use MS Excel to do stats for certain science areas as they had particular methods and standards they wanted to follow in lab data analysis, etc.
Re: Interviewing with YC? Don't overstep the limits like us (but be close)
#27From pg's own remarks on the topic http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html : They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. I get the feeling these folks can't tell the difference between the two. And I am thinking "naughty" is not necessarily the best word for this quality and is bound to be misinterpreted by some folks.
The assumption that these 'naughty' people automatically have a good intuition for the rules that matter is interesting. It's a bit like all those people who think that they drive perfectly well when yakking on a cell phone, drunk driving, or going 20 over the limit, or perhaps both. Everyone's an expert on highway safety, apparently ("my intuition tells me I'm not distracted here, I don't care what those statisticia…
The assumption that these 'naughty' people automatically have a good intuition for the rules that matter is interesting.
Language has its limits in attempting to convey what the author really means. I assume pg was trying to convey that, in his experience, those folks who make good entrepreneurs do, in fact, have good intuition for when it is appropriate to break the rules. But I'm not really comfortable speaking for him. He's perfectly capable of speaking for himself. I just don't feel that I heard it the same way you did. (Though perhaps neither of us heard what he really meant. )
Re: Interviewing with YC? Don't overstep the limits like us (but be close)
#28Writing twitterbots to spam people? Man, I wouldn't have just yelled at you in an interview. I would have engaged in physical violence. Twitter spammers are right down there with Nigerian 419 scammers in my book. I'm disappointed to hear that YC is funding one of them.
Re: Interviewing with YC? Don't overstep the limits like us (but be close)
#29Writing twitterbots to spam people? Man, I wouldn't have just yelled at you in an interview. I would have engaged in physical violence. Twitter spammers are right down there with Nigerian 419 scammers in my book. I'm disappointed to hear that YC is funding one of them.
Is it any worse than forcing/requiring people to manually tweet in order to get/win something?
I find both approaches distasteful.
Re: Interviewing with YC? Don't overstep the limits like us (but be close)
#30"The problem is, while pg outwardly disapproved of our actions, we know he secretly loves founders that push the limits!" You know what, though: the response function around the limit is not a smooth bell curve; it drops sharply below the x axis as you go past the peak.
Would you have funded them had they not pulled their stunts?