What I Didn't Say • Hacker News Board

Re: What I Didn't Say

#71

Post by sinca » Mon, Dec 30, 2013, 9:33 PM UTC

kremlin wrote: post #22

I didn't find any of the quotes that I read, even if they were out of context, remotely offensive. But I can see how someone who makes it a point to be offended by things might deliberately interpret it in a bad way, and convince other people that that is in fact what was meant by it. For example, you say that you don't know how you'd convince 13 year old girls to be interested in programming. The normal interpretati…

Exactly my thoughts. Reading all the quotes on Gawker, I fail to see how they arrived at the conclusion that PG's implying that one needs to be male in order to be a good programer.

I see a few points being made ("out of context"): - You want to start programming at 13 to be a hacker. - 13 year old girls are not interested in programming. - PG doesn't know how to make programming more attractive to this group.

As far as I can tell these are neutral observations and opinions. Even if his statement is plainly incorrect, simply being wrong doesn't make it offensive.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#72

Post by kordless » Mon, Dec 30, 2013, 9:33 PM UTC

lauradhamilton wrote: post #39

Thanks for the clarification. It is unfortunate that your statements were taken out of context and spun. I typically look for the original source, and am relatively skeptical of poorly edited viral stories such as this one. With that said, I do think that the moderation / upvoting / flagging of Hacker News is overwhelmingly male. I sometimes see sexist comments here, and there doesn't seem to be a good system for wom…

There's a comment system. A sane, non-blaming comment calling out sexist comments can do wonders for swaying the opinion of others. The last thing we need to solve this is to start segmenting ourselves on here.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#73

Post by kstenerud » Mon, Dec 30, 2013, 9:33 PM UTC

jug6ernaut wrote: post #66

"I was explaining the distinction between a CS major and a hacker..." "What I was talking about here is the idea that to do something well you have to be interested in it for its own sake, not just because you had to pick something as a major.So this is the message to take away: If you want to be really good at programming, you have to love it for itself. " Labeling "CS major"'s as non hackers, good to know as someon…

"the audience for an interview will include people who for various reasons want to misinterpret what you say, so you have to be careful not to leave them any room to."

Re: What I Didn't Say

#74

Post by Tycho » Mon, Dec 30, 2013, 9:33 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #2

I apologize. I took it on faith that when The Information said they were running a "complete interview" with you, that it was in fact both complete and an actual interview. It seems very clear how this piece misrepresented you; the entire elided question you cite is particularly damning. I retain some of my misgivings (which have much more to do with the industry than with YC), but the "interview" clearly wasn't a go…

I'm really pleased to see someone make an apology. No idea what you personally said, I'm sure it was very far from the worst, but I clicked on this thread with my comment already formulated, questioning whether anyone would actually apologise and, well, was pleasantly surprised given how these things usually go.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#75

Post by jug6ernaut » Mon, Dec 30, 2013, 9:34 PM UTC

kstenerud wrote: post #73

jug6ernaut wrote: post #66

"I was explaining the distinction between a CS major and a hacker..." "What I was talking about here is the idea that to do something well you have to be interested in it for its own sake, not just because you had to pick something as a major.So this is the message to take away: If you want to be really good at programming, you have to love it for itself. " Labeling "CS major"'s as non hackers, good to know as someon…

"the audience for an interview will include people who for various reasons want to misinterpret what you say, so you have to be careful not to leave them any room to."

What I quoted was not from the "interview"

Re: What I Didn't Say

#76

Post by informatimago » Mon, Dec 30, 2013, 9:34 PM UTC

I think it is time to eliminate journalism entirely. Already with the web we've reduced greatly the number of intermediaries in transmitting information. But it is clear that they should be removed from the loop entirely Don't feed the trolls^w journalists ie. don't give them interviews or "conversations", don't pass on urls to their "articles". Instead give the url to the original data!

Re: What I Didn't Say

#77

Post by informatimago » Mon, Dec 30, 2013, 9:34 PM UTC

I think it is time to eliminate journalism entirely. Already with the web we've reduced greatly the number of intermediaries in transmitting information. But it is clear that they should be removed from the loop entirely Don't feed the trolls^w journalists ie. don't give them interviews or "conversations", don't pass on urls to their "articles". Instead give the url to the original data!

Re: What I Didn't Say

#78

Post by marquis » Mon, Dec 30, 2013, 9:34 PM UTC

ericabiz wrote: post #32

As a female founder, I think this is a well-thought-out, articulate response, and I appreciate pg stepping up to say something about women in tech. In a similar vein, I'd love to see YC take on one or both of the following: 1) Do at least one application cycle completely blind. How could you accomplish this? Much like in the concert auditions where this was first tried, put people behind a curtain--and then use techn…

As another female founder I concur: blind applications would make me more comfortable to consider applying to funds in general, not just YC. As an audio processing geek, getting male and female voices to sound the same is actually pretty hard without losing diction, but at least having the application have a separate cover-sheet for the founder's names and any information that might give away identifiers about gender, race and nationality would be a good start, so applications could be read 'blind'.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#79

Post by nicolethenerd » Mon, Dec 30, 2013, 9:35 PM UTC

jug6ernaut wrote: post #66

"I was explaining the distinction between a CS major and a hacker..." "What I was talking about here is the idea that to do something well you have to be interested in it for its own sake, not just because you had to pick something as a major.So this is the message to take away: If you want to be really good at programming, you have to love it for itself. " Labeling "CS major"'s as non hackers, good to know as someon…

I didn't read it as him saying the two were mutually exclusive... I thought the distinction was between 'just a [CS major]' as opposed to 'hacker' (who may or may not have a CS degree) - perhaps I just interpreted it the way I wanted to - but giving him the benefit of the doubt, I think he was just saying he wants founders that are intrinsically motivated (by having a desire to build stuff) rather than extrinsically (by a degree program)

Re: What I Didn't Say

#80

Post by throwaway135 » Mon, Dec 30, 2013, 9:35 PM UTC

Why is adding more women to the tech industry automatically assumed a laudable goal to throw resources behind?

I'm Middle-Eastern (probably a smaller minority in the North-American tech scene compared to women), and while I (like most people) would certainly like to be surrounded by more of my brethren, it's not something I'd be comfortable spending resources on because the return on investment is so nebulous; diversity of views isn't automatically beneficial as is commonly assumed (an extreme example: you wouldn't expect a conservative big-corporation suit-wearing type to benefit a two-founder startup team).

It also seems a bit arrogant to tell people 'you should stop pursuing X and learn coding instead'. I wonder what would have happened had someone convinced Marie Curie, Jane Austen, or Hillary Clinton to go into programming instead of their respective fields (yes, I realise computers weren't invented in the case of the former two, but I hope you understand my point).

Finally, why is all this restricted to women only? Should I start advocating for Arabs? Africans? Inuit? It very quickly turns into a lot of duplicated effort. What's wrong with treating everyone equally? Not to mention that special-casing also reinforces the idea of 'us' and 'them', which I don't feel is productive either.

(throwaway because I don't want to be burned at the stake for publicly asking such questions)