What I Didn't Say • Hacker News Board

Re: What I Didn't Say

#421

Post by rexreed » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 4:40 AM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #18

For those curious, here's a chart of the proportion of female founders funded by Y Combinator in the last 4 years, which correlates with YC's intention to add more female founders: http://i.imgur.com/MCLqUm3.jpg Data source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjPFdCURhZvddHJ...

How does this correlate to the general, non-YC population of female founders? More, less, or same as average? That's an important data calibrator. Without that, it's hard to judge if YC is better than, worse than, or average, good intentions or not. Without having any real data, I'm guessing maybe marginally better than average given that it's probably in the single digits on average?

Re: What I Didn't Say

#422

Post by trickyager » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 4:41 AM UTC

yawaramin wrote: post #369

minimaxir wrote: post #18

For those curious, here's a chart of the proportion of female founders funded by Y Combinator in the last 4 years, which correlates with YC's intention to add more female founders: http://i.imgur.com/MCLqUm3.jpg Data source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjPFdCURhZvddHJ...

Thank you for this. Is there data on applicants? It would be useful to compare the ratios of male founders applied-to-accepted vs female founders applied-to-accepted.

Exactly. The data are useless without a proper control pool to compare against.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#423

Post by pdonis » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 4:43 AM UTC

mjburgess wrote: post #324

mattmanser wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg, a pseudo-intellectual? I'm frankly surprised you've been here for 2 years and never realised. You see the ycombinator in news.ycombinator.com? In this website? That's pg's company. Do you know what ycombinator is? That he started the seed funding movement? That he was blogging about hacking startups before people even really realised you could hack startups? Before lean startup existed? That he's written his own…

None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on. I granted him "entrepreneur" status. He can have "compu-sci" intellectual too. You can see my comment here on his pseud-osity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6988150 to save repeating myself.

Most of this is just bluster and argument from authority. The only substantive critique I see you making here is that pg's suggestion about decoupling wealth and power won't work because wealth is power. But your definition of "power" is "increased ability to do something", whereas pg's implicit definition of "power" was "the ability to corrupt important social processes that are supposed to treat everyone fairly".

So I don't see the force of your critique: pg and you can both be right. Wealthy people can have more ability to do things even if there are systems in place to prevent them from corrupting particular processes that are considered worthy of such protection.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#424

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 4:44 AM UTC

grellas wrote: post #229

A word about credibility. It comes from the Latin word credo , meaning "I trust." Its value exceeds that of money because it marks you as a person - as someone who is respected, who is trustworthy, and whom you would want to count as a friend. It marks you not as perfect but as special. It makes others ponder not so much that they did the last deal with you but that they would want to do the next deal too. Just as we…

[deleted]

Re: What I Didn't Say

#425

Post by pwang » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 4:50 AM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #301

mjburgess wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine, he was mischaracterized and he replied. But jesus, > pg's response is actually priceless: it is like a soft-spoken witness upending a bullying lawyer who had just viciously attacked him, leaving the attacker reeling for all to see. What's with the almost cult-like reverence for this largely pseudo-intellectual entrepreneur?

pg, a pseudo-intellectual? I'm frankly surprised you've been here for 2 years and never realised. You see the ycombinator in news.ycombinator.com? In this website? That's pg's company. Do you know what ycombinator is? That he started the seed funding movement? That he was blogging about hacking startups before people even really realised you could hack startups? Before lean startup existed? That he's written his own…

I don't know you, Matt, and I certainly don't have a beef with Paul Graham - I have much respect for him. But, the specific components of your encomium do not recommend you. More specifically:

> That he started the seed funding movement?

Um, people were doing seed rounds before YC. For like, decades. They weren't blogging about it, because there was no HTTP and HTML and always-on broadband, but crikey, how the hell do you think half of silicon valley started?

> That he was blogging about hacking startups before people even really realised you could hack startups?

I don't even know what this means. Every true startup is fundamentally a hack; it's probing at the boundary of the risk frontier. (I'm not talking about those VC dice rolls on the flavor du jour, manifest as a bunch of brogrammers with zero understanding of the time value of their own risk profile.)

For "hack startups " to make sense, one would have to infer a new usage of the word "startups", namely, to refer to the pattern-matching herd mentality of tech VC dealmaking and The Great Game of Deal Flow. Partially driven by real opportunity and partially driven by the wealthy exodus from equity markets in a post-HFT world, the modern funding bubble has led to a difficult climate for seed-stage companies, and Paul & YC are merely taking advantage of that impedance mismatch between them and traditional VCs. But to imply that there is some fundamental new structure that Paul discovered with YC is absurd. Incubators & incubation is a decades-old concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_incubator

> Before lean startup existed?

The term "lean startup" started being popularized in 2011 by Eric Ries. This is less than three years ago. There are innumerable things older than this. Actually, there are few truly noteworthy things in the technology space that cannot be described as existing "before lean startup".

> That he's written his own dialect of LISP?

I think many LISPers have done this. Isn't the whole point of LISP to write your own dialect of it for each problem?

Anyways, I just wanted to point out that your list is not very impressive at all, and the fact that they impress you doesn't really reflect well on you.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#426

Post by mistermann » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 4:59 AM UTC

kazagistar wrote: post #320

ars_technician wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would be a laughingstock if they did implement a voice adjuster. It makes it appear that rampant sexism is such a problem that they have to implement protection against it.

I don't get this at all. Even with just names discrimination has been shown to occur at places like universities, so it wouldn't be revealing a problem, it would be being proactive in case there is one. Trust but verify. Second, a perfect excuse was provided: for science! Its not that they think they are sexist, but an untested hypothesis is less strong then a tested one.

Am I missing something here? Is there a single case of a female founder with very compelling business/tech that was rejected by ycombinator, whose rejection was at least somewhat widely controversial?

Or, are we talking solely about the lack of females accepted, and explicitly disallowing discussion of what they brought to the table?

I honestly don't know, but if there's a controversy with no specific examples, at least for me, it's pretty hard to take seriously.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#427

Post by yo-mf » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 5:07 AM UTC

crassus wrote: post #131

actsasbuffoon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my biggest problem with this whole thing. I care deeply about trying to fix the gender imbalance, but these sorts of dishonest shenanigans make the whole movement look bad. At the risk of committing the No True Scotsman fallacy, I don't think the people responsible really care about gender equality. If they did then they would have checked their facts, rather than making people doubt them and the views they cl…

"Equality" movements are doomed to fail. I don't believe that in a perfectly fair world, men and women would equally participate in every profession. If you focus too much on outcome you are taking on an impossible task. What's important is fairness and equality of opportunity.

Well, not really. There are plenty of equality movements that have been quite successful.

But the real point is that if we believe that jobs will be more technical in nature and that deeper knowledge of technology and coding will be required, maybe we should be concerned with the current ratio. Thus we not only create a skills divide, but one that grows into an economic divide as the better paying jobs are technology jobs. Maybe this is an "equality" movement worth putting some energy into.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#428

Post by devin » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 5:08 AM UTC

reads post

realizes there isn't a lot of substance to most of the comments

goes back to programming

Re: What I Didn't Say

#429

Post by pjscott » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 5:16 AM UTC

apsec112 wrote: post #62

"I think everyone should have the media perform a hatchet job on them at least once. It’s this really scary feeling when you know you’re trying to be honest and do the right thing, and yet you see how easy it is for a hostile writer to cast every single thing you do as corrupt and destructive. And how quick everyone is to believe them. And how attempts to set the record straight get met with outraged “how dare you gi…

Even regular, non-hatchet-job journalism is usually pretty bad. Being reported on is a profoundly weird experience: open the paper, and see your day-to-day life distorted beyond recognition! It's pretty eye-opening.

I think the best solution is to avoid most journalism altogether, and get news from blog posts by people who know what they're talking about, care about it, and have no reason to lie.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#430

Post by wrongc0ntinent » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 5:16 AM UTC

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #408

MartinCron wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time I was hiring, I wished I could easily review resumes without seeing the names, email addresses, physical addresses, school names, or even telephone numbers as I felt that I was bringing in my arbitrary bias. Telephone numbers? I found that I identified a lot more with area code 206 than 425 or 253, just as I identify a lot more with an @gmail.com address than @hotmail.com or @aol.com.

Don't you think, though, if you have such arbitrary biases, it would be better to work on them than hide the problem?

It wouldn't be hiding biases, it would be making them inconsequential. That's pretty much the best you can hope for, once you admit the possibility that there's no such state as bias-free.