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Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

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Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#101

Post by Kye »

lm28469 wrote: post #98
philipjoubert wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched my mother spend 30 years building her company...it's hard enough to build a manufacturing company in 3rd world country. Applying Western labour standards would make it impossible. The way out of poverty is to through. You need to create enough value to be able to afford the airconed offices where everyone sits on an Aeron with a macbook pro.

I'm sitting on a $70 ikea chair, in a flat reconverted to an office, right under the roof, with no AC and I have 1st gen base model m1 FAANG is an exception, even in the west

Yeah, I was going to say "through to what?"

Enough people have to have enough money to be able to buy the things made in a factory someone's mom spent 30 years on for that factory to exist. These tools are being used to dismantle the "what" people strive for. It's precarity as a service.

Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#102

Post by tuukkah »

latexr wrote: post #79
tuukkah wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did YC fund (or otherwise back) InstallMonetizer? The way I understood it, they applied to YC with a different idea and worked on IM earlier/on the side/later. (In which case, the controversy was more whether YC works with people who make things like InstallMonetizer.)

> Did YC fund (or otherwise back) InstallMonetizer? Yes. Quoting Paul Graham: > Last week there was some controversy online about a company we funded called InstallMonetizer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711

Here's his clarification that followed, saying they didn't fund the product InstallMonetizer:

> They're working on something new, and all the office hours I had with them were about that. They're not even in our database of companies as InstallMonetizer but as the new thing. (I'm not sure if I can say the name because it may not be launched yet.) I knew they had some previous product that was called a Windows installer, but I don't think we ever talked about what it did. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5093047

Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#103

Post by gagik_co »

leonheld wrote: post #74

The response here would be significantly different if this was about measuring the performance of software engineers in wealthy countries.

I mean… yes, obviously? There’s a lot less room for exploitation of white collar workers in wealthy countries than sweatshops. Though performance quantifying software still deserves a lot of scrutiny for removing humanity from work in any context.

Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#104

Post by latexr »

LinuxBender wrote: post #34
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then if everyone is out of their job and unemployed ? who will buy the stuff if noone has the money. I think there is a balance. Otherwise its going to be 1984 in more than one way (the spying part is already there) (it would also do of that the countries are ready to produce things as much but they won't and limit it to create that constant mood of war to make people not question them / make them weak.) I think…

CGP Grey did a video on this topic about 10 years ago. Curious if the video aged well. [1] [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU [video][15 mins][Humans Need Not Apply]

> Curious if the video aged well.

Just watched it, and I would say that it did age very well.

Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#105

Post by danpalmer »

sarchertech wrote: post #85
danpalmer wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colleagues, the business. The important things are that performance management is a) used to identify those performing far below what is possible, and b) that there is a good faith effort to support those people to perform better. Both of these things are mis-handled by many companies, who will use it to encourage more performance out of those who are already as productive as practically possible, and that the tools…

You don’t need constant monitoring to find the bottom 10% though. People performing that badly are easy to pick out with spot checks. It’s the same with software. Your direct manager should know if their employee is in the bottom 10%. If they don’t, they aren’t doing their job or they have too many reports. What constant automated monitoring allows is cutting back on the number of managers and like you said, pushing…

That depends what you consider monitoring to be. Managers don't just know these things, they aren't walking the floor watching people, they're busy doing things. Their source of knowing these things is often looking at data for the number of things processed, or in some cases failure rates.

You're right that this doesn't need to be constant or even that automated though.

Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#106

Post by dang »

friendly_chap wrote: post #61
infecto wrote: post #56

The only thing truly embarrassing is that nobody at YC advised them that this ad is 1) terribly amateur and 2) has the chance to look extremely bad. Did not advise and in fact published to their feed. Weird optics, I am not familiar with what I presume to be Indian factories, other than the wild lack of safety (thanks youtube) but I cannot see how this video does anything positive. As for the product itself I don't t…

If anyone is reading from YC, I'm happy to review their submissions, I was perhaps the first who raised concerns and was on top of the thread with my comment. (See this post I made on LinkedIn about this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/crufter_today-y-combinator-de... )

I haven't read the details or watched the video, but it does sound like you noticed something that should not have been there.

I noticed that your page says this:

> New: the thread "Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers" on Hacker News got removed from the front page despite having 242 points.

The thread fell in rank because it set off a software penalty called the flamewar detector. We haven't taken any moderator action or touched it in any way. Our usual practice is to downweight shallow outrage posts (because they're not what the site is for), but we haven't done so in this case, because we have a core rule of moderating less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is in a story. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...)

If you want to be fair, you could add that information. Otherwise, readers will assume you mean that we nefariously censor negative posts about YC, when the truth is the opposite.

Edit: after I posted this, I noticed that the thread said [flagged] at the top. That's because users flagged it—as they usually do with shallow outrage threads. However, I've turned the flags off in keeping with the rule I just mentioned.

Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#108

Post by dang »

oefrha wrote: post #19

Brought to you by the VC famous for InstallMonetizer? Make no mistake, it’ll basically back anything that makes money, there’s no moral high ground. And like it or not, this kind of AI (or should I say A-eye) is here to stay.

That's deeply untrue and unfair, and the fact that you've reached back 12 years to find an example, when YC has funded thousands of startups since then, is evidence against what you're saying.

YC has turned down many startups because they didn't think what the product was doing was right, and it has defunded and banned startups for ethical reasons over the years. It's not your fault that you didn't know this, since no one makes a big deal of it, but I think it's proper to bring it up when you say that the people at YC will "back anything that makes money".

Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#109

Post by mattmaroon »

infecto wrote: post #75
mattmaroon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe it or not, founders don't run every single thing they do by the YC partners!

> Believe it or not, nobody suggested you need to run everything by a partner! Believe it or not, nobody suggested you need to run everything by a partner! I would expect someone to at least watch a video once before posting it in a congratulatory post on YC's feed. It is not a criticism of startup culture but watching that video I genuinely question how far quality has fallen?

I don’t think it’s fallen, I think they just repost press releases and 99.9% of the time it’s uneventful.

Re: Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

#110

Post by pluto_modadic »

infecto wrote: post #59
trunch wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this will definitely be used only to innocently tell off people doing 1/10 the work of everyone else, and not micromanage and hound people to increasingly unrealistic standards in already desperate conditions. Safe to say you aren't in any position where every move you make will be watched by AI and analysed for faults so that your boss can scream at you more efficiently whenever you don't meet standards for…

Do you really think this tool is making folks micromanage and abuse employees or perhaps they already would be doing that and this tool helps it? There can be real value in these types of tools, its ultimately up to the implementation and I don't believe this tool will somehow make a happy work environment into an abusive one, the abuse will have most likely already existed.

picture this: corporate buys something (like O365), and is reluctant to end licensing for the bundle. So... if they're locked into a contract that includes management-abuse-as-a-service, enabling bad behaviors, do you think they'll back out of enabling that one abusive manager out of five? how will that impact the workforce?
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