Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jessica Livingston (2015)

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 202 posts

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#171

Post by telltruth »

seizethecheese wrote: post #158
telltruth wrote: post #138

I wish pg the best but I think everyone should know how much legal liability these kind of public writings creates. A person I know closely had 25 year marriage in CA and he always believed in love and lifelong relationship. But as their kids went to college, wife's priorities changed. She started affair, started helping out her partner financially etc. Husband discovered all these accidently from her phone. After ma…

This is an extremely weird thing to say, since Jessica is legitimately a cofounder of YC…

From everything I can read, I think Jessica contributed as much as pg but I have no direct knowledge in their world and it's not my business to speculate there.

On the other hand, it would be hard to argue that Lucas, Bezos or Gates wives had same contributions in Lucas Films, Amazon and Microsoft. When I look at their cases, I feel they cashed out with massive windfall taking advantage of broken laws.

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#172

Post by telltruth »

telltruth wrote: post #171
seizethecheese wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an extremely weird thing to say, since Jessica is legitimately a cofounder of YC…

From everything I can read, I think Jessica contributed as much as pg but I have no direct knowledge in their world and it's not my business to speculate there. On the other hand, it would be hard to argue that Lucas, Bezos or Gates wives had same contributions in Lucas Films, Amazon and Microsoft. When I look at their cases, I feel they cashed out with massive windfall taking advantage of broken laws.

Another case in point: Musk's wife went to court for Tesla's ownership during their divorce but Tesla board had made some provision to avoid this. If Musk had written public letters like above during good days of their relationship, he will toast in the court. I am not saying Musk must deny legitimate ownership of other co-founder but someone just claiming ownership because of marriage laws without putting in blood and sweat of actual founder is just wrong.

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#173

Post by telltruth »

smt88 wrote: post #139
telltruth wrote: post #138

I wish pg the best but I think everyone should know how much legal liability these kind of public writings creates. A person I know closely had 25 year marriage in CA and he always believed in love and lifelong relationship. But as their kids went to college, wife's priorities changed. She started affair, started helping out her partner financially etc. Husband discovered all these accidently from her phone. After ma…

Anyone this cynical about marriage just shouldn't get married.

Everyone not cynical about marriage only realize their mistake after they get put in 50% bucket of divorces couples. No one who is getting married think they will the one who end up in divorce. It's always that other couple :).

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#174

Post by sovietswag »

There was a comment here earlier explaining how many modest/humble/non-confrontational/etc qualities portrayed as reflections of good character in this article by PG come from a place of privilege. I think it’s gone now, does anybody have a copy of it / is the author around? It was probably unnecessarily mean but it was insightful for me and made me reflect. Would appreciate any help finding it, thanks

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#175

Post by btilly »

scg wrote: post #168
fragmede wrote: post #103

I wonder what her Social Radar picks up off cryptocurrency-adjacent individuals. Because she's seen their pitches to YC. And that Social Radar of hers should get a good read on crypto bros. And so the question is how many of them are grifters and con artists trying to cash in on the next Bitcoin, and how many of them are true believers of the ideals being spouted. And how many of them are, actually, honestly, good pe…

Can you point to a single YC crypto / "cryptocurrency-adjacent" company that is a "grift"?

Who determines whether it is a grift?

I would cite Coinbase. But if you don't agree that it is a grift, what have we shown?

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#176

Post by hayleox »

echelon wrote: post #25
bluepod4 wrote: post #15

I understand the optics involved with the Wikipedia situation. But an automated script (AnomieBot) tagged that article because it met or rather didn’t meet certain guidelines. It’s a stub article and lacked certain citations. Why not just flesh the article out? The “Notability” tag on Wikipedia has a different meaning than “notability” in the dictionary. Either way, it seems like someone already removed the tag manua…

The photo situation on Wikipedia is so weird. Editors often upload bad photos, even if better alternatives exist in the public domain or are fair use. But the thing that grates me more than anything is Wikipedia uses elderly photos of famous figures that were at the peak of their careers in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. The appearance of these public figures changes, and sometimes the changes are so dramatic that I have t…

They're still alive (most of them anyway)! Imagine looking up your own Wikipedia page and they've got a photo of you from 40 years ago. That'd be rude! It's like pretending they're already dead just because they're not in the spotlight anymore.

In addition, for all the child actors except Lloyd, we don't have any free photos of them as children (and that childhood photo of Lloyd isn't very good – the one in the article is the only one we have).

As for Carrie Fisher, our only 1970s photo of her sucks (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carrie_Fisher_with_W...), and anyway she did do a lot of noteworthy acting well after Star Wars (look at her awards section).

For Harold Ramis, we have pretty slim pickings: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Harold_Ramis

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#177

Post by tbrownaw »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #117
no_wizard wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like anyone who fits the categorization (so called INFP/F types[0]) are unlikely to the ones to tell you. That's why people who claim to have this ability almost never do. Its not in the nature of someone who can to really talk about it this way. I'd also argue that courts are definitely not the place to have this. There's good reasons why this is likely to fail in a stressful setting (convicting someone of a…

Why is Myers Briggs being referenced when it has zero substance to back it up? I thought it was common knowledge that pop psychology stuff was garbage, at least amongst this website’s readers.

Not quite zero substance, the four dimensions are reasonable close to some of the five leading components of personality.

The problem is that each letter comes from splitting a normal distribution in half right at the middle where maximum likelihood is. So most people won't be very strongly attached to most of their letters.

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#178

Post by chris_wot »

Jun8 wrote: post #107
fairity wrote: post #27

> No one understands female founders better than Jessica. But it's unlikely anyone will ever hear her speak candidly about the topic. She ventured a toe in that water a while ago, and the reaction was so violent that she decided "never again." I wonder how much wisdom has been lost bc of this effect. I feel like society needs to create a much larger incentive for thoughtful people to share their wisdom. Today, you st…

For the curious, I think this is what pg is referring to: https://valleywag.gawker.com/paul-graham-says-women-havent-b... (so glad that “news site” is dead BTW). He made some Summers-like foray on female founder’s abilities, I remember it was a big deal at the time, now I don’t know if many people remember it (note to self about any moral battle du jour that seem so important). I have no data to back this up but alwa…

I seem to recall it was “The Information” that was the chief instigator.

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#179

Post by afarrell »

mandmandam wrote: post #93
burnished wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't the phrase 'pearls before swine' refer basically to this situation? Basically I don't think it's something you can do in the presence of a thing like twitter because of the participants whose goal isn't communication. Which is fine. The wisdom isn't lost, its just not as widely available.

> Which is fine. The wisdom isn't lost, its just not as widely available. It's not fine though. Our political and economic spheres have been run by the swine for too long, and the planet's back is breaking. The second order effects of only giving the brash and thick-hided a voice in society are everywhere, causing permanent harms. Let's start making space for the wise and sensitive types, and make pearls abundant.

Libraries are a solution to this problem.

Print the wisdom on thinly-sliced trees and place it in a location which requires someone to get out of the house and engage with their community.

Re: Jessica Livingston (2015)

#180

Post by qingcharles »

jedberg wrote: post #147
qingcharles wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for delicious. Funny note: I went to jail for 10 years. One of only about three sites (out of thousands I had accounts on) that I could log into when I was released was delicious. Sadly 99% of my bookmarks now pointed to dead wood.

Do you remember the other ones?

Weirdly, one was Facebook. The reason for all the other failures was that almost every site had either changed their password requirements and reset everyone's passwords when I was locked up (and so far in the past for me that I had missed the boat and now was terminally locked out), or they had introduced some sort of multi-factor authentication, and again I had missed the boat on the change-over and re-authentication and could no longer get in.

Frustratingly the worst ones were the biggest accounts, e.g. Google, because most of these companies were now boasting that they had rid themselves completely of human support and that if you could no longer access your account then you should simply create a new one. Years or decades of stored data be damned.

Post reply on HN