What I Didn't Say

by twampss • 13 years ago

1289 567 13 years ago

tptacek2• 13 years ago

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 good lens through which to consider them. I was nevertheless ready to do that too quickly, so the fault is as much mine as the magazine's.

toomuchtodo• 13 years ago

I'm impressed with both your response as well as pg's. Definitely refreshing to not see the pitchforks come out for everyone.

tptacek2• 13 years ago

Thank you, but it's sad that the bar is so low on "impressive".

sillysaurus22• 13 years ago

It's a little scary how powerful newspapers are at shaping public opinion. At least their reputation will be irreversibly damaged by breaking people's trust.

pdonis7• 13 years ago

At least their reputation will be irreversibly damaged by breaking people's trust.

I would love it if this were true, but I think it's way too optimistic.

kordless2• 13 years ago

I don't think it's so much about shaping public opinion as it is playing up people's fears. The threat of discrimination is still present in our society and is a very important topic across multiple demographics. You can't blame someone for feeling strongly about something they fear. However, journalists who write in a blaming tone to play to these fears should be blamed for mislaying trust instead of being lauded for raising awareness.

Nitasha Tiku made several negative blaming statements in her story. The one that stuck out to me as an obvious tell of a blaming statement was "That archetype, of course, is usually attached to a penis." In all fairness, I don't think that anyone wants to be addressed via 'being attached' to their private parts.

Here's a link on NVC if anyone is interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication. It's powerful stuff.

Confusion4• 13 years ago

What everyone should, once again, learn from this is that you cannot take anything you read or hear at face value. Not even from people you trust, because things may be misrepresented by accident. Often it doesn't really matter, but if you get emotional about a subject and wish to comment on it, you should better be sure you have the facts straight and always temper your responses based on the possibility you don't know everything.

po• 13 years ago

I had high hopes for The Information that their business model would lead to better quality reporting… Their page states:

The Information recently sat down with Mr. Graham. We covered a wide range of topics including “mass producing” startups, Mr. Graham’s controversial statements on founder accents, his wife and YC's secret weapon Jessica Livingston (link) and some little-known stories about YC alum Airbnb.

https://www.theinformation.com/YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete...

…which implies that it was a formal interview. I don't have a subscription but something still doesn't quite mesh there. If I were PG I would be writing to them to demand that they change that lead-in to the story.

edit: Another part of this saga that stands out to me is how very few people commenting on it actually have a subscription to the supposedly first hand source at The Information. It was a bit strange that we had a scandal caused by a news report about a news report that most people don't have access to.

aaronem14• 13 years ago

I had high hopes for The Information that their business model would lead to better quality reporting

The only differences between The Information and The Register [1] are that the latter acknowledges its tabloid nature, and lacks the breathtaking presumption to peddle its tripe for four hundred dollars a year.

[1] http://theregister.co.uk

Tycho• 13 years ago

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.

jordo374• 13 years ago

I want to echo what tptacek is saying here, though I didn't write much here on HN about the issue. I have been talking with colleagues and friends and the comments in the article seemed well intentioned but a little tone deaf. I am relieved to hear not only that they were false, but also that PG and YC are actively working at some of the misgivings I share concerning our industry.

gkoberger2• 13 years ago

I wonder why pg did an interview for a site that was going to go behind an (expensive) paywall and was going to be edited. I know that "fixing journalism" is something pg would like to see[1], and (pg, sorry to put words in your mouth here) maybe he felt a for-pay site aiming for quality journalism was the answer? But it still seems weird he did this interview.

EDIT: I did read the article and know he was allegedly tricked, but my questions still stand. It was a long interview to just be a background about Jessica, and it was for a profile using the YC name to get $400 subscriptions. If they lied about the reasoning and then edited his words to say something completely different, I would have thought he'd be more outraged.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html (see #3)

macleanjr• 13 years ago

If you read his essay, he states that this wasn't an "interview", the reporter was doing background for another story on Jessica. It was never intended to be an interview.

pdonis7• 13 years ago

Which makes the fact that the material was published as if it had been an interview, without any explanation of the actual circumstances, particularly bothersome IMO.

cookiecaper3• 13 years ago

I'm sure he's unhappy about it, and feels betrayed. What good would it do for him to make an expression of that a major component of his response? Wouldn't that just result in another witch hunt like the one PG is trying to quell with this piece? He can handle his personal resentment in a more quiet context and save everyone else the chaos.

jl• 13 years ago

Paul talked to the reporter about me (for the profile being written) before The Information had launched. Neither of us knew it would be behind a paywall.

gkoberger2• 13 years ago

Thanks for the clarification. The paywall was my main curiosity. Was/will the profile ever be published?

EDIT: Found it: https://www.theinformation.com/When-Founders-Fight-They-Call...

pervycreeper• 13 years ago

I think this certainly sheds more light on the value proposition that this site is offering to prospective subscribers.

tomasien4• 13 years ago

Are you still going to write about women founders? I 100% take you on your word about all of this, but that I still think a lot of the things you said were off the mark in understandable but important ways[1]. You're obviously well meaning and thoughtful and I think it would be great to read more about your thoughts, although I know you'd prefer to avoid the shitstorm that would follow (no matter how well reasoned your arguments would be)

1 - Most notably, as a gatekeeper in startup culture (<- this seems to be causing confusion: not a gatekeeper to doing a startup, but a gatekeeper to YC which can often be important in succeeding as a startup in my and many other people's opinions), it seems pretty willfully ignorant to assume that you'd know if you were biased against female founders because if you missed some you'd know. If women are a group that starts on the outside to, as a gatekeeper you'd need more than that to know if you're keeping the gates properly, since we it'd be pretty hard to argue the system as a whole isn't a boys club.

spindritf2• 13 years ago

There are no gatekeepers in the startup culture. How would that even work? Would pg deny you a business license? Stop you from getting a VPS? Remotely invalidate your copy of The Art of Computer Programming?

tomasien4• 13 years ago

Not PG specifically, but unless you operate on the premise that getting into YC does nothing to help your startup OR that YC's acceptance processes are flawless (two assertions I'm 100% certain PG would not make) then there is a layer of gatekeeperdome inherit in what YC does.

I would personally argue it's a large one, but it certainly IS one.

jordo374• 13 years ago

This seems naive. There are those with power, who not only make decisions based on their own work but also by setting precedent. If you look at other accelerators and how many of them follow the practicies and forms put down first by YC then its obvious that the impact from YC is large, both in the large number of startups they directly touch (especially in the last several years) and the number of industry wide practicies they influence from the use of convertible notes and now SAFES, to the preference for coder-founders.

theorique7• 13 years ago

No one can tell you "your startup sucks and you can't do it", but there are ways to exponentially improve your chances of growth and success.

YC is one of those ways, arguably a very significant one.

smtddr6• 13 years ago

No official gatekeepers, but there are certainly some things that can help/hurt you exponentially.

  If Google drops you from search-results, game over!
  If YC accepts you, game on!

Neither one of those are official gatekeepers, but they're something to be concerned about. I signed up with coinbase.com because I tend to trust companies that are YC-backed. The fact that they're in SF and I can walk right into their office on my lunch-break if my money disappears also helps.

bambax4• 13 years ago

whether we could, in effect, accept women we would have accepted if they had been hackers

"wouldn't"?

gingerlime• 13 years ago

It is a confusing sentence, but I think it's correct. I think it would be clearer if it said "whether we could, in effect, accept women (who are not hackers) we would have accepted if they had been hackers"

The stuff I added in brackets is implied. The main question is accepting women who are not hackers, as if they were, given the (challenged) assumption that you can turn them into hackers in YC.

bambax4• 13 years ago

You may be right but if you are, it means being a hacker is a (necessary) criterium of the YC's approval process: is it?

crassus14• 13 years ago

At the heart of the matter is that witch-burnings are popular (turn into clicks) and that Gawker has a witch quota to keep up.

I'm glad to see such a thorough, intelligent reply from PG. He is extremely careful and precise in his language, without coming across as robotic or inhuman. It's impressive.

But this kind of thing is going to continue to happen. There is no market for taking an honest man at his word without reading subtext into it. The opinion ecosystem is a cesspool of the worst pieces of humanity. "Reporting" on Silicon Valley from the east coast would be hubristic and a folly if the organs involved had any intention of doing so honestly.

PG is fortunate that he is self-employed which provides some barrier against the power of the easily-offended. Somehow the talkers have gained power over the doers, and it is wrong. We live in a time when a person lower in an organization could easily find himself out of a job for an off-handed remark.

Teddy Roosevelt most eloquently described what is wrong with Gawker:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

davidp2• 13 years ago

The talkers have gained power over the doers, and it is wrong. Somehow critics have grown in power to be able to extract punishment and concessions from people actually on the ground.

Agreed, although I don't think it's the talkers vs. the doers; it's the talkers' audiences vs. the doers.

Here's your "somehow": The lack of critical thinking skills in the general population (not new), combined with the power of instant global communication (new).

The lack of critical thinking skills leads people to seek absolutes, simplicity, and swift action in areas where shades of gray, nuance, and care should be called for. Again, nothing new here: mob justice is a well-understood, if regrettable, characteristic of human society.

Instant global communication much more swiftly connects 1) the easily-manipulated with 2) those who lack experience and maturity but who nevertheless possess the gift of persuasion.

In short, I blame the listeners, not the talkers. It would be a Good Thing(tm) if people were generally more skeptical of everything they heard and read, and even better if they knew how to ask the right questions to resolve that skepticism. It would make it harder for unworthy critics to hold power, and easier for worthy ones to be heard.

Here's another quote, from Joseph de Maistre: "Every nation gets the government it deserves." A similar thing could be said for culture and civil society.

pdonis7• 13 years ago

I blame the listeners, not the talkers.

I blame both. The listeners for not exercising critical thinking, as you say, and the talkers for spending their time and effort (not to mention sucking in the time and effort of many other people) on these useless witch hunts instead of adding actual value.

bluekeybox2• 13 years ago

To blame the listeners is one step short of accepting things as they are. In this case, it is most certainly the talkers, since it is they who immediately profit from their deeds. Don't forget that every listener is also a talker (I bet there is a Nietzsche quote about it somewhere).

yo-mf2• 13 years ago

Truly unfortunate all around. PG getting slammed from every direction. Jessica Lessin's new venture gets a black eye for shoddy journalistic standards. Lots of invective going around for what appears to be liberties of interpretation. And of all of this, I am not sure this really does anything to address the very serious topic on the imbalance of men to women in technology jobs.

actsasbuffoon• 13 years ago

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 claim to hold.

crassus14• 13 years ago

"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.

jacalata7• 13 years ago

I don't think the people responsible really care about gender equality. If they did then they would have checked their facts,

I think that kind of is No True Scotsman, because it's an unreasonable conflation of two attributes ('really caring about x' and 'being careful with sourcing in debate/arguments'). I know lots of people who care deeply about various causes but are terrible about research, sourcing and verification in general. And some people might care deeply about a cause but do damage to it by being involved (deeply unpleasant so that nobody wants to work with them and the volunteer group falls apart, that kind of thing). Level of caring is not, in my opinion, strongly correlated with a person's value as an advocate :)

nycticorax4• 13 years ago

I don't think The Information comes out of this looking bad at all. I think that PG was being somewhat disingenuous in "What I Didn't Say".

Read http://jessicalessin.com/2013/12/31/on-the-information-and-h...

and the things I wrote elsewhere on this thread.

ValleyWag comes out looking terrible, of course.

beachstartup• 13 years ago

every time i've ever dealt with "journalists" i've always come away with the unmistakable conclusion that most of them are complete and utter scumbags.

but that's just my opinion on the matter.

minimaxir2• 13 years ago

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...

robg4• 13 years ago

Is this a stated intention? [ref?] It seems more to be a nice consequence of their approach - to attract great talent.

minimaxir2• 13 years ago

pg mentioned in the article that he wants to increase the number of female founders.

yawaramin2• 13 years ago

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.

trickyager• 13 years ago

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

rexreed2• 13 years ago

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?

nox_• 13 years ago

I expected an article about monads.

kremlin3• 13 years ago

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 interpretation is, 'Clearly 13 year old girls are very rarely interested in programming, and Paul Graham doesn't know how to change that.' The nasty interpretation is 'Paul Graham thinks that girls are intrinsically incapable of being interested in programming'.

It's easy to be offended by things. It's also obnoxious and often irresponsible.

Perihelion11• 13 years ago

As a woman in this industry that has been programming since I was ~8, I wasn't offended in the slightest. In my opinion he said there was a problem that he'd have to think about before offering a solution.

"It's easy to be offended by things. It's also obnoxious and often irresponsible."

Personally, this sort of behavior affects my career. When I first started at my current job people were afraid to speak to me because they expected me to get offended at the slightest thing. I want people to treat me equally, but I don't want people to be afraid to come to work because I might sue them for looking at me. That's not what I'm about at all but unfortunately I'm pre-judged to lash out at people when I see something I don't like.

I want everyone to come to work and get fair treatment/compensation/etc. but I feel that incidents like this set all of us back. The discrimination is different now. People don't see me as incapable of STEM, they see me as incapable of working with other people. It sucks. A lot.

kremlin3• 13 years ago

It is undeniably the case that men are more...cautious about what they say and how they behave around women, particularly in the workplace. As a man, I'd have to say that such caution has precedent - you may be an exception, but (this incident being a great example) in my experience women are much more easily offended.

And I could see how that could make things less enjoyable for women who aren't so up tight; women who are easy going and just want to get along with their co-workers and share a laugh and get good work done.

It is unfortunate.

sinca• 13 years ago

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.

jordo374• 13 years ago

There are things in the edited version of the interview that are problematic - not offensive, and PG also points this out. The very first incorrect quote - "We can't make women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years." is problematic because it says women are NOT hackers. Given the number of women who are founders of YC companies, or are engineers, this is patently false and therefore problematic.

I for one care about when problematic or false things are said not because I am offended, but because falsehoods make it harder to accurately deal with problems like the low number of women in STEM careers, including tech startups.

kremlin3• 13 years ago

I can see how that quote would be problematic.

That's a quote that, when I read it the first time, I tried to interpret charitably. It's one that I read as, 'Women generally (but with exceptions) don't start hacking at the age of 13, and there's nothing we can do to make these women see the world through hacker eyes.'

Rather than, 'There's no such thing as a woman who's hacked since she was 13, and thus no woman can see the world through hacker eyes.'

Saying the quote is 'problematic' and that it needs clarifying -- I have no problem with that, and in fact I totally agree. What I don't like is how large swaths of the blog-o-sphere didn't even consider the first interpretation; they talk as if the second interpretation is just clearly without qualifiers what he must have meant.

cookiecaper3• 13 years ago

Any interaction with the press is terrifying in almost any circumstance because you never know and really have no control over whether the outlet is going to pull something like this. I always have the impulse to refuse media interaction unless I can get final approval on the published piece, which, of course, no one will ever give you.

It's important for all of us to remember that the incentives of the media and their subjects are not necessarily aligned, and that bombastic distortions such as this are common.

quantumhobbit• 13 years ago

These sort of outrage inducing misquotes by the press seem to be becoming more and more common. There is no way to know if it was on purpose, but phony outrage certainly generates more clicks (or subscriptions in the case of The Information).

At what point does misquotation become libel? As much as I hate the idea of suing the press, lawsuits seem like the only defense. Real and lasting damage was done to pg's reputation here. Even with yc as his personal loudspeaker, I doubt pg will be able to set the record strait.

yawn2• 13 years ago

Jakob Kaplan Moss owes PG a public apology for his behavior. The witch hunt tweets that were coming out of him without getting the facts straight are downright disheartening.

crassus14• 13 years ago

I'm of mixed opinions about him. On the one hand, he's been influential in making Pycon more friendly to women, which I support[1]. On the other hand, he appears to have swallowed the feminist kool-aid without reflection. He has a knee-jerk reaction whenever an alleged case of "sexism" comes up - he is inclined to take the side of the "oppressed" group and facts be damned. He takes a guilty until proven innocent standard for people with a Y chromosome.

[1] The anti-harassment policies of Pycon are a gold-standard for the industry

jsmthrowaway11• 13 years ago

You've described a number of the Django old guard. That is definitely not limited to him. Remember the gendered pronoun brouhaha against libuv?

And no, Jacob is already bitching about pg's essay on his Twitter.

yawn2• 13 years ago

That's why the "disheartening". He's obviously very smart and compassionate. I add a Code of Conduct to all my sites now, largely because of his example. The way he flew off the handle so quickly without taking the time to understand first really bothered me.

freyrs36• 13 years ago

So he's a flawed human being who makes mistakes just pg and the rest of us. What really is scary to me is the group dynamic that has come out of this "social justice" movement in that it seems to fueled by very loud public commentary about very small events. The pronoun incident with libuv really just took this to level of absurdism.

crassus14• 13 years ago

After reading his tweets, my opinion of Jacob Kaplan Moss is more unmixed. I would never want to work with him on anything, even something as small as a lemonade stand. Keep that SJW BS out of tech and in English departments on the East Coast, where it belongs.

gruseom• 13 years ago

He was far from the only one.

DasIch• 13 years ago

His behavior was perfectly fine unless you assume that the "interview" as published was wrong. We now know it isn't and the facts have changed.

I doubt he would have tweeted any of it, if he had known this.

freyrs36• 13 years ago

Is it really deserving of the level of vitriol heaped on the issue? Even as printed it would only be mildly controversial, and even then not nearly noteworthy. It strikes me as me as offhanded comment from the first time I heard it.

roopeshv• 13 years ago

you should see his current tweets

calibraxis3• 13 years ago

So far seems he hasn't; he's explained why, and all the more power to him.

BTW, I'm disappointed that only "witch hunt" (terrorism against women) is used in this particular thread so far. Where's "lynch mob" and "McCarthyism", to round out the irony trifecta? (Hilariously sick when men liken themselves to women, whites to blacks, and capitalists to communists.)

iamjustin2• 13 years ago

Both men and women were killed during the Salem Witch Trials. A "witch hunt" isn't terrorism against women.

aaronem14• 13 years ago

I've found @jacobian's statement on the matter [1] eminently reasonable and even-handed.

As for the trifecta, I can't help you out on "lynch mob", I'm afraid, but how about this for McCarthyism?

"The [tech industry] is infested with [sexists]. I have here in my hand [2] a list of [102] -- a list of [user]names that were made known to the [Github administrators] as being members of the [sexist majority] and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the [tech industry]." [3]

[1] https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/417776560603549696

[2] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:a3j7b1R...

(This link points to Google's cache of @ashedryden's tweet, because the tweet as originally hosted on Twitter has been deleted since I saw it last. I hope you'll agree that Google's cache is an acceptably authoritative source for what used to be hosted at that Twitter URL. The replies are more interesting than the original tweet, anyway.)

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy#Wheeling_speech

klipt2• 13 years ago

Hilariously sick when men liken themselves to women

Believing men and women are equal is "sick" now? What a strange notion.

xs_kid3• 13 years ago

You don't have idea about what is a "witch hunt" and using that metaphor to describe some tweets is very insensitive and softens the absolute horror of people killed in real witch hunting.

Do you know that witch hunt still being a thing in some countries of the world?: http://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/medellin/ARTICULO-WEB-NEW_N... (title translated: Woman accused of being a witch in a town in Antioquia was burned)

This is a witch hunt: a woman was accused of being witch and _burned alive_, do you think that is even comparable with the tweets of Jacob Kaplan Moss?

RivieraKid• 13 years ago

using that metaphor to describe some tweets is very insensitive and softens the absolute horror of people killed in real witch hunting

I'll start using this metaphor from now on, just to annoy PC-nazis like you.

Dewie6• 13 years ago

I'm offended when people say that enduring something was "hell". It is disrespectful towards people who are burning in Hell.

freyrs36• 13 years ago

you don't have idea about what is a "witch hunt"

witch hunt (n): the act of unfairly looking for and punishing people who are accused of having opinions that are believed to be dangerous or evil

Sounds like proper usage of the word to me.

Crito9• 13 years ago

I cannot tell if you are being serious or sarcastic, but in either case, and with all due respect^, fuck off with this bullshit.

Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, a play about a literal witch hunt, as an allegory for McCarthyism. Do you think that he thought that blacklisting actors was literally as bad as crushing somebody to death with stones over several days?

Of course he didn't. It was fucking allegorical. Do you really not understand the basic premise of a metaphor? I think you do. I think you are trolling.

^ little is due.

sontek3• 13 years ago

At least the most notable woman and YC founder in the django community, Leah Culver, hasn't backed Jacob in any of his witch hunts. I think this says a lot about how the women in his community feel about his actions.

WalterSear• 13 years ago

Just how one woman feels.

sontek3• 13 years ago

I think Jacob's and Alex's criticisms and attacks on other communities/companies would be more relevant and credible if their own Django community would start being more inclusive, I only see one woman committer: https://github.com/django?tab=members

xs_kid3• 13 years ago

you can not expect to have women as core committers immediately, first step is get more women involved in community and OSS.

I don't think the work that Python/Django people are doing to get more women involved in the community can be easily ignored.

gmays• 13 years ago

I wonder how much time and energy is wasted defending or clarifying comments, particularly by people who would otherwise be creating value.

izendejas• 13 years ago

FWIW, The Information's piece definitely crossed the "too indignation-inducing to be true" threshold for me. And I for one, would enjoy an essay about such topic as it would be very relevant to the HN community that is often just as eager as journalists to see certain individuals or startups fail for whatever reason.

ericabiz6• 13 years ago

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 technology to change their voices so every voice sounds the same. I think it would be a really cool experiment to see if different types of companies or a more diverse founder set would get funded.

2) Publish more stats on the success of YC companies, and publish stats on % of female(, black, ...) founder applications submitted, % accepted, % funded after acceptance, etc. Of course, I'd fully expect that this would be "opt-in" from the founders as well--i.e. each set of founders would need to agree as part of the application to have their data anonymously shared. You could also share data on % who opted to not have their data shared. (Techstars is doing some great stuff with their stats here: http://www.techstars.com/companies/stats/ )

I've talked to many female founders and YC does have a reputation as a "frat house" (I told one of the YC partners that personally when he asked me to apply.) I decided to not apply to YC and instead was in the first Techstars Austin cohort, which was a fantastic program overall. Techstars definitely seemed more welcoming to women from my perspective as a geek-turned-tech-entrepreneur.

I'm hoping this is the start of breaking down the "frat house" reputation around YC and getting more women actively involved with it.

lauradhamilton2• 13 years ago

I agree. Blind applications would be great.

650REDHAIR• 13 years ago

Part of the interview is to see how the founders interact with each other and the investors. Taking that away by masking their appearance/voice would have a pretty big impact on the interview process I think.

crazygringo2• 13 years ago

Blind applications would be great if they were possible, but I suspect they would be as helpful as a blind audition for concert conductors -- i.e., not at all.

When you evaluate a team, you need to be able to judge their confidence, see how they interact with each other, get a feel for the trustworthiness, the way they look at you when they answer a question, and so on. If you can't see them, and their voice is distorted, then you might as well just ask for a slide deck and forgo an in-person interview altogether. Which doesn't seem like a good idea.

_delirium2• 13 years ago

That's a plausible hypothesis, but it'd be interesting if someone were willing to test it experimentally. Some evidence for the hypothesis could be found if a "blind" YC batch did much worse than a typical YC batch, measured say 3 or 5 years in the future. Of course, with relatively small sample sizes nothing is likely to be proved beyond doubt, but it'd be interesting to know, and the amount of money needed to test it wouldn't be huge, since YC isn't making VC-level investments. Of course, it's not free or risk-free either, so I could see if they weren't willing to test it.

I've long wanted to see in general some more experimental testing of selection variations. What if YC (or some other funder's) candidates were just selected completely randomly from the applications? What if they were selected solely according to some dumb criterion, like take everyone with the most degrees, or the longest CV, or the most GitHub LoC? What if they were selected purely based on the applications (without the dumb-criterion requirement) but without interviews? For a few tens of thousands of $$, someone willing to try those kinds of things out could get some pretty interesting information on how reliable different selection methods are.

My own hypothesis is a negative one: that beyond screening out a few obviously-bad candidates and taking a few obviously-good candidates, the bulk of the YC selection process is randomly related to outcomes, and the YC mentoring/contacts/press/etc., rather than predictive value of the selection process, is the main driver of their generally strong outcomes. But I can't prove that. :)

nashequilibrium4• 13 years ago

1.)The fact the female founders are asking for this, tells you that they don't feel on par with the way things are being done today.

2.) Paul has admitted to being susceptible to the Mark Zuckeberg effect, at least he was honest about that and should be respected for the fact that he realizes that. Most VC's i believe also fall into this trap but don't admit it.

3.) Now what are we going to do about this? Shrug our shoulders and just say this or that won't work or get to trying solutions and iterating on that?

ceejayoz2• 13 years ago

Blind applications would be great if they were possible, but I suspect they would be as helpful as a blind audition for concert conductors -- i.e., not at all.

While I agree that blind applications would be somewhat tough for startup founders, conducting seems like a bad example. You could fairly easily judge the resulting music without being able to see the conductor.

VLM2• 13 years ago

"forgo an in-person interview altogether. Which doesn't seem like a good idea"

I would disagree strongly in that YC has a measurable financial risk of excluding potentially profitable founders solely for meaningless cultural woo woo reasons. For example if some Finnish dudes conduct perfectly normal business transactions nude in the sauna, a prudish American who refuses to participate has an obvious measurable economic loss solely because of irrational cultural woo woo. Now extend that far out example into female communication style.

Now what would work, or at least would be interesting, is having a female partner interview female founders separately from the male partners then study the female partner's impression vs male partner impression. I don't suspect there would be a huge difference; but at least this would be a somewhat more effective way to test the proposed effect. For my ridiculous made up example, you'd need a Finnish partner; probably easier to run this test on the somewhat easier to acquire and categorize male vs female test subjects.

kazagistar3• 13 years ago

Time and time again, studies have shown that people attribute more positive attributes like kindness and honesty to people who are more physically attractive, irrelevant of sex. This holds even when people are explicitly warned beforehand and told to keep their bias in check.

crassus14• 13 years ago

One thing that nobody is mentioning is that many "fratty" companies have been wildly successful. That's why VCs aren't cracking down on startups to make them more professional. (Although it is a good idea to become more professional as your startup grows, for cultural appeal to the median tech worker)

This fratty culture certainly drives away slightly older founders (by that, I mean 25+!) and others who don't appreciate the atmosphere. Ultimately, I expect differentiation in the ecosystem, with different incubators forming to attract talent from different pools of talent.

Creating an atmosphere where your founders feel like they belong is a competitive advantage for an incubator. But no one incubator can make an atmosphere that appeals to everybody. If you make an atmosphere to appeal to 40-year-old females, someone else will lure the 19-year-old males away with beer pong, dorm living, and video game breaks.

dm8• 13 years ago

I'm curious, what do you mean by professional culture?

nashequilibrium4• 13 years ago

lol.....25+ is considered old? This is why most of the big startups of this year are social like snapchat, tumblr, etc. The opportunities where customers are willing to spend shitloads of money like enterprise, hardware are not funded anywhere near as well as social. This is beacuse 19yr olds dont know much about HR or disrupting the Investment Banking software industry. This requires some exposure to the problems firsthand, which require being around the block. We are totally overextended on social, techcrunch is like replaying the same movie over and over.

The truly break-out companies founded in markets where customers are willing to pay, are started by entrepreneurs over 28. Age is not a hard rule but we talking about averages here. Steve blanks spoke well about how he started up his companies while still managing family life. Check quora for famous tech founders over 30 and their take on it.

An example about how a person over 30 starts a business from Quora:

Marc Bodnick, Co-Founder, Elevation Partners

We did it by starting with a profitable service line.

I was 34 when I founded Arcstone. We had three young kids (we now have four). I was coming off a VC salary of ~$250K, and yet didn't have much savings to speak of. I started Arcstone with $18K borrowed from my brother-in-law, and a couple credit cards to service revolving debt.

We started a service business targeting a specific, relevant pain point, which has a quick sales cycle. We became profitable immediately; with our profits we both fed ourselves and invested in technology and infrastructure. We were careful not to overbuild on our way up, though some expenditures (like our 5-year lease) were taken with a leap of faith.

Three+ years on, we are a nationally respected financial services firm (primarily in the valuation niche) with a healthy top (and bottom) line, and a very happy and dedicated team of seven.

Getting out of the Silicon Valley mindset -- Seed/A/B/C/Exit -- has been incredibly liberating.

marquis6• 13 years ago

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'.

sp3322• 13 years ago

blind applications would make me more comfortable to consider applying

What kind of pressure are you feeling about applying to funds now?

tel• 13 years ago

At least in real time...

dinkumthinkum7• 13 years ago

Well, honestly if they're going to do this why bother with distortion and just interview via chat, what is the difference at that point?

ggreer• 13 years ago

Why not apply to YC? Worst case, you'll spend a couple of hours answering questions on the application, then get a rejection email. On the bright side, simply answering the questions can help hone your idea and execution. If you do get an interview, great! Then you have an opportunity to meet some YC partners, applicants, and alumni. If you're turned down at that point, feedback from the partners will be personalized, and you'll have gained experience interacting with investors. If things go well and you get an offer, then you can accept or refuse based on the information gleaned from the whole process.

If you're unsure about applying, I recommend doing so. No matter what happens, you stand to benefit.

ChrisNorstrom4• 13 years ago

"I appreciate pg stepping up to say something about women in tech."

"Do at least one application cycle completely blind."

Sorry but this comes off as insulting (I know that wasn't your intention), you applaud and agree with him then turn around and pull a "but I still don't trust you". As if PG can't be trusted, or you think that he's secretly sexist and want him to change his successful interview process just to prove himself to you.

I'm positive that women get discriminated in many fields, I've heard my mother's own stories. There's something about seeing a strong woman succeed that makes men feel weak. But this assumption that women are absent or less represented at Y-combinator simply because they are subconsciously discriminated against by Paul and Jessica Livingston just seems absurd. Especially seeing has how politically correct everyone's trying to be now a days. Many people (especially those running Tech Crunch events) are purposely looking for that unicorn female developer to rid themselves of male guilt. The one that's worked on algorithms, programmed since a kid, and coded up numerous apps.

Rather than focus on discrimination ask yourself this: How many times have we seen a female coder's blog? How many frameworks/api/apps have we seen created by females? Is it discrimination or lack of ambition? Take a look at the 10 industries that women rule http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2009/01/26/10-industries-where-.... Are men being discriminated against (one can argue the day care industry) or do they lack the desire and ambition to get into these industries?

rcfox• 13 years ago

as if PG can't be trusted

Just because we're in pg's house, it doesn't mean we have to treat him like a god. He's a fallible human being, just like the rest of us.

The whole point of a blind interview is to prevent implicit bias that the bearer might not even be aware of.

aaronem14• 13 years ago

There's something about seeing a strong woman succeed that makes weak men feel weak.

Fixed.

pedrosorio• 13 years ago

Applying the scientific method to investigate whether there is an unconscious bias in the selection of founders (perhaps resulting in the selection of less than optimal candidates) should not be insulting to anyone.

ajju3• 13 years ago

Erica, genuine question: Did you reach out to any female founders who went through YC to ask about their experience?

ericabiz6• 13 years ago

The straight answer is no. Here's a slightly longer version of the story, in case you're curious:

I first met pg at SXSW several years ago, when he was swamped by hungry startup founders. The whole scene was intimidating to me--I hate crowds! I finally got to ask him a question, which I can't recall the exact content of now, but was something about women and YC. He suggested I email Jessica about it. I didn't do that--probably because I had been intimidated, and partly because I felt like he had punted on the question instead of giving me an actual answer (I now know that this was just part of his characteristic bluntness, and I definitely don't hold it against him especially given the environment in which the conversation happened, but at the time I didn't know pg and I found it offputting.)

Since then, I've had two good friends go through YC, both young white males. One of the companies is now "Internet famous" and shows up here on HN on a regular basis. The other one is still completely underground. Both of them enjoyed and recommended YC.

Another fellow entrepreneur here in Austin went through YC recently and we sat down and compared notes after he went through YC and I went through Techstars. Our conclusion: Techstars wins in terms of mentoring and support, but YC wins in terms of visibility and fundraising.

So, tl;dr I've met pg (briefly), I know one of the partners and a handful of YC founders, but they're not female. I didn't specifically seek out female founders who'd gone through YC, though now that you ask, I'm really curious to hear some of their viewpoints!

bambax4• 13 years ago

Yes. The whole problem of every controversy involving YC rests on the fact that there's no control population.

The great majority of YC alumni are young white males. Every time the issue is raised of some minority or another being under represented, the answer is invariably that the process is completely fair and that the problem lies somewhere upstream.

That may be so. But wouldn't it be interesting to have some proportion of YC selected purely randomly and see what happens?

VLM2• 13 years ago

Well that just does it. Someone needs to found a YC funded startup to use standardized A/B testing to implement outsourced founder evaluation as a service. Keep your finances and negotiators and mentors in house, but think of this similar to an outsourced credit check, call it a ... credibility check or something.

To say it would be high risk / low volume / high cost service would be an understatement. And just defining success would be hard. But a hard problem is a good startup problem. And you could probably pivot into (or out of?) employee interviewing.

I guess you could bootstrap as some kind of outsourced HR lady to ask those annoying anxiety producing interview questions (you know the typical HR lady questions, like explain your worst attibute, or tell me about your greatest failure, or the classic when did you stop beating your wife? (kidding about the last one)). This is a legit business opportunity to help small biz do the "HR" questions at an interview and formalize the reporting of multiple candidates, and could pivot into this A/B testing of startup founders once some cash starts flowing.

I'm not kidding about this. Someone else with more spare time that me, take it and run.

hooande• 13 years ago

A reputation can be a blessing or a curse. YCombinator has a great reputation as the best startup incubator and it's founders have sterling reputations as being the people you absolutely need to talk to if you're considering a tech startup. It takes a lifetime to become known as superlative, the proverbial gold standard. It's as true on the mean streets as it is in the halls of power: You are what people think you are.

I'm not sure where this "frat house" thing comes from (scare quotes, not direct quotation). Have you ever been to a frat house? Believe me, they have nothing in common with a summer at YCombinator. I've described yc dinners as being "like a high school lunchroom where everyone is happy to see you and every table is the cool kid's table". Women are utterly and completely welcome. Minorities are welcome. Bring them your nerds, your socially inept, your ambitious hackers yearning to be free. Frat houses are all about pecking orders and childish humor. YC is genuinely about mutual support and an open exchange of ideas.

If "frat house" means that there aren't many women present, I can only guess as to why. There are a variety of social and cultural factors that push the majority of women away from hacking at a young age. I can't point the finger of blame at anyone in particular, but I can report on what I have observed. Women are generally underrepresented in computer science departments, engineering programs, computer clubs and yes, startup incubators. It has nothing to do with Paul Graham or the YC partners. We're all responsible as members of society at large.

I understand your reasons for not appliyng to YCombinator. TechStars is a great program, and I'm glad that you've thrived there. But there's something to be said for seeing things with your own eyes. I would be very unhappy if someone dismissed me out of hand because of something that they'd heard. I can only believe that YCombinator’s positive reputation will outweigh whatever negative reputation that they have fairly or unfairly received.

calibraxis3• 13 years ago

Does your company respond to customers like this: start by pointing out your "sterling reputations" and end by claiming "I understand"?

The person you responded to offered two doable action points. A litmus test is if YC moves on at least one of them. YC does not have the excuse that it doesn't have the technical know-how. And it would be a laughingstock if they didn't have the hacker spirit to figure out how to implement them.

jusben13694• 13 years ago

Hey I think your intentions are in a good place but I think you're placing the onus on the wrong party. @ericabiz is very open, transparent and direct about what she has seen and heard. It sounds like she's quite talented and had a choice available to her in the marketplace. Based on her market research she went with what she believed to be the better option for her situation. It's possible that she may have decided to go against her instincts and research and go with YCombinator anyway but it's odd to argue that she should have taken the risk and done it over her preferred solution. These are very big decisions involving where you live in the short term and how your life turns out in the long run. The onus really is on YC to address the perceived or real notion in the marketplace (that it's not female founder friendly) to continue to attract the best startups. That is, if there is an onus on any party here it's not on the buyer but rather the seller to address these issues. If these notions are false and unfounded it won't be too hard to clear them up. If they're based on something that does have a grain of truth then go tackle that. (Female founders focus FTW!) I just think it's unfair that you have a somewhat lecturing tone in your comments. It's a little bit of shooting the messenger.

dinkumthinkum7• 13 years ago

I think you're discounting her experience, maybe you don't mean to but it comes off that way.

mistermann2• 13 years ago

There are a variety of social and cultural factors that push the majority of women away from hacking at a young age. I can't point the finger of blame at anyone in particular, but I can report on what I have observed. Women are generally underrepresented in computer science departments, engineering programs, computer clubs and yes, startup incubators.

I don't think women have to even be pushed away. I would assert (and am more than happy to be proven wrong) that in many if not most undertakings where the ratio of hours of fun to non-fun (I wish I had a better way to describe what I'm thinking) are low, you will find a lack of females. One example is "hardcore" personal investing, I'm talking investing forums, twitter, etc - if you are familiar with them, once again you will notice it is a sausage-fest. Women aren't pushed out of these communities or discriminated against, they simply are just extremely disproportionately not present.

For whatever reason, I think woman who choose to excel in a field tend to focus on endeavors with clearer and more structured formal paths. For example, you will find plenty of female representation in finance in universities and as career professionals. But after quitting time, the people putting in the extra hours in forums and on twitter are disproportionately male, as are the people who have been coding multiple hours per day since under 10 years old, or multiple hours after quitting time once in their professional lives. These are simple facts. Only when race or gender is involved would anyone ever suggest this not relevant to success.

nostromo2• 13 years ago

Self-selection, as you have done, is a hard problem to solve.

Not just in tech, but in our entire culture. As noted elsewhere, Americans are sorting themselves by demographics.

It feels awkward to be a woman in a predominantly male organization. It feels awkward to be a republican in San Francisco. It feels awkward to be gay in Mississippi. It feels awkward to be black in Portland. And so we place ourselves in locations (and organizations) where it's less awkward to be ourselves, and the problem gets worse.

What's difficult about this problem is that it's nobody's fault. There's no conspiracy behind this trend. (In fact there is a conspiracy to try and reverse it! But to little avail.) Counterintuitively, perhaps it's the fault of the people who choose the comfort of sameness over diversity, but that feels too close to victim blaming.

smirksirlot• 13 years ago

As you said, victim blaming. It isn't just feeling awkward about things - there are consequences both psychologically, financially, and physically being an outcast. Being uncomfortable with a place isn't something the person can fix themselves - they neither have the power nor the ability to do so.

Diversity begets diversity. The only way to do that is to set up systems and infrastructure that supports and enables that and it requires support from community leaders.

chanux• 13 years ago

..that it's nobody's fault

THIS. And this is the problem. People don't understand this. It HAS to be somebody's fault. It has to be black OR white. Gray is beyond the understanding of many.

rmc2• 13 years ago

What's difficult about this problem is that it's nobody's fault. There's no conspiracy behind this trend.

Well, it's not really any one person's fault who set everything up. But we can change it. There are tools to undo the "death by a million cuts" that make it this way.

I would say that the people who don't do these things are partially at fault for not attempting to fix a broken system.

forgottenpaswrd2• 13 years ago

As a founder, with due respect, why you don't do anything about it?

I think they are good ideas. So how is that you expect someone else to do the work for you?

As a founder I know how hard is to make an idea a reality, and my ideas had relative success(I managed to get things done and most people look to me now like "all I have was given" to me, or that what I created was obvious and easy, as it is obvious now, but the same person was arguing to me how it "was never going to work" in the past). Most people are not that lucky, but they try anyway.

So if you care about this, why you don't take action?

You expect someone else, who is a man (and does not care, there are more urgent problems to them), to do something you should be doing in my opinion.

The "frat house" is working very well and there is no reason to change what works. Different systems could work, but with different people, and different focus.

You could start working on this. It is impossible to do it alone, but organizing with others there is nothing imposible.

ericabiz6• 13 years ago

As a founder, with due respect, why you don't do anything about it?

There's a difference between "good idea" and "marketable business." As founders, we have to make that distinction. I'd like to see YC do blind interviews because I think it's a good idea for them to do so. I am not working on that myself because I can't see that good idea, in and of itself, turning into a business--a product a company could replicate and sell to others.

Perhaps other founders have the necessary domain expertise to turn something like what I suggested into a replicable, marketable business. If so, I support them in doing so.

So if you care about this, why you don't take action?

I did. I took time away from my business to write this comment and make a suggestion. I hope YC takes it into account. I think it would make an awesome experiment for them.

The "frat house" is working very well and there is no reason to change what works.

I suspect this might have been your real point. Sure, YC has worked well...but could it work better? Those are the questions we as hackers ask all the time. I think it's worth a shot to try something different and unique that could work even better than the status quo. Given the popularity of my comment here, I'm not the only one who thinks so. We'll see if YC (or any other accelerator) runs with this suggestion!

tesseractive2• 13 years ago

The "frat house" is working very well and there is no reason to change what works. Different systems could work, but with different people, and different focus.

Yes. Y Combinator could very well decide that their current process is offputting to women, but that it is so successful that they don't care, and that they're perfectly happy to keep doing what they're doing even if it effectively excludes women.

But if this is the case, then their only two options are to lie about it or to stand up in public and say that they don't care about including women. The former has significant risk as a long-term strategy, and the latter is a PR debacle that could negatively impact their ability to attract a significant percentage of male founders -- which is to say, anyone who cares about gender equality.

larrys• 13 years ago

"then use technology to change their voices so every voice sounds the same"

Right off the top I would say I don't like that for the simple reason that you can't tell confidence (and I will assume that is a factor) or even how full of shit someone is if you disguise their voice.

I do negotiating over the phone, in person, and by email. I dissect each and every nuance to try and determine what is under the hood. I've had good results with that. I make money that way. To me how someone sounds is important on many levels. If you are going to do this, why have them speak at all? (Not suggesting this.)

Along the sames lines I've had a theory for a long time that it is much harder to tell if someone is truthful if they have an accent (even american from a different regioin) that you are not used to because you can't tell nuance like you can with an accent that you know.

Bottom line is hiding the voice, for the purposes of getting diversity, is not the way to go. Especially for decision making that takes into account "the team" and/or "the individual" and not just the idea.

baddox• 13 years ago

Out of curiosity, I wonder what people would conclude if YC was able to perform blind applications, and ten years later that class performed significantly worse than classes from the traditional application process.

squozzer• 13 years ago

the whole notion of blind studies I would love to see implemented not just for tech startup funding, but jury selection, and a few others I'm having trouble imagining at the moment.

brc• 13 years ago

This whole episode is the first time I have ever picked up on a gender discussion in relation to yc applications. The general feeling here seems to be that some type of affirmative action of quots needs to be applied. But there already is a quota - those with the most promising teams and ideas get to go.

The last thing a successful female founder wants or needs is a quota or lower bar of entry for things like yc. Because once that happens, you're going to have to work twice as hard to get respect, because now you have to prove your place wasn't just because the quota needed to be filled. if you get picked fair and square, then being there is a strong signal that you are worthy.

There are times and places for intentionally creating diversity, but a start up incubator is a bad fit for that type of intervention.

ilkan2• 13 years ago

If I were a capitalist VC, and discovered I was potentially missing out on a raft of profitable ideas only because otherwise capable founders were intimidated by the selection process... I would change the process asap to increase my win ratio.

reledi2• 13 years ago

The last thing a successful female founder wants or needs is a quota or lower bar of entry for things like yc.

I don't think anyone is arguing to lower the bar of entry for women in YC, instead (as far as I can tell) they are arguing for ways to increase the number of female applicants to YC.

mike_esspe• 13 years ago

Blind application can be accomplished with IRC interview.

skylan_q4• 13 years ago

Publish more stats on the success of YC companies, and publish stats on % of female(, black, ...) founder applications submitted, % accepted, % funded after acceptance, etc.

Sorry, but this is a terrible route to go for YC as there's a huge risk of backlash to achieve nothing good. Say, for instance, that black co-founders had received more funding but achieved poorer returns on investment. A very simple interpretation of that data (not necessarily correct, but easy to formulate interpretation) would be that blacks are less successful than whites at getting a return on investment even with odds stacked in their favor. The conclusions and the data would then be deemed "racist" and YC would have shit all over its face. It doesn't even have to be right. There just has to be published data available for there to be a debate about race/sex, etc... leading to a toxic atmosphere around YC.

The reason data like this isn't collected is because VCs are interested in being politically neutral. Data on race and gender are a political powderkeg. PG said that women who haven't been hackers can't see the world as a hacker, and we see the shitstorm it's caused. Imagine if they were tracking stats based on race or gender? They'd be called nazis.

akkartik• 13 years ago

My favorite quote: "I err on the side of late binding for everything.."

danso• 13 years ago

Me too. Ageism is also a huge problem in tech, independent of gender and racial issues.

ChristianMarks2• 13 years ago

Me three. I was beginning to think that I hadn't programmed the systems I actually had.

freyrs36• 13 years ago

I'm not sure I want to work in an industry where some offhanded quip can lead to the kind witchhunt and character assassination like we saw over the last few days. Paul Graham may have some views that seem controversial to some people, but don't we all? I really blame the tabloidization of the tech press and the "twitter controversy of the day" bandwagon effect for these kind of incidents.

crassus14• 13 years ago

I wish him luck on his follow-up essay about female founders. What's valuable about a PG essay is 1) his careful analysis and 2) generalization from his wealth of experience. But if he does (2) at all, he's going to piss off Social Justice Warriors.

Writing nowadays is like playing football in a minefield.

klaut• 13 years ago

This. A million times this.

fat0wl• 13 years ago

plus -999,999 times this

vezzy-fnord• 13 years ago

It's not really a problem with the tech industry, so much as it is in general with the mainstream media and consumer society. People have loved sensational stories for centuries.

The only difference is the persistent toxicity of extreme social justice and how they've invaded tech, for some reason. Perhaps because it's a big and booming field, but I've always found it odd how a lot of feminists decry geek culture as outcasts, losers and misogynists, yet simultaneously want desperately to be a part of it.

Ultimately, I think you'll do yourself good with a social media detox.

jsmthrowaway11• 13 years ago

There are people who wake up in the morning, just like you or me, and instead of doing something productive with their time begin the day's hunt for a topic to be offended about. These are people that spend every day searching for something that offends them so that they can bitch to their followers about it and feel like they are producing some real change in the world. Think on par with "Fox News commentary," except militant feminism instead of hyperconservative. Facts just get in the way of the rage train. Can't have those.

You are getting a glimpse of those people. Spend your days looking to be offended and, my God, it occasionally happens and you get your chance to rabble! Welcome to social justice warriors.

I used to think I wanted out of the industry too. Now I just keep a list and act accordingly when I am asked to hire. I've also learned to spot the signs, including certain phrases, retweeting of certain people consistently, linking to the Geek Feminism wiki because it's a wiki and it has facts, and so forth. A good example of a red flag tweet: https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/417775128831741952

diydsp• 13 years ago

You are so correct, except that some of them don't even hunt for something to be offended about, they simply log onto their favorite websites and take other people's word at what to be offended about!

"Anyone can become angry -- that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way -- this is not easy."- Aristotle

gfodor2• 13 years ago

the SJW thing is in the most classic sense a meme. it's spread into tech and it's really disappointing. i don't really get it. the only explanation I have is that it offers people the feeling that they are somehow smarter than the rest of the sheep for realizing the effects of "the patriarchy" and "privilege". They have a more enlightened perspective and one which has easy to use go-to rhetorical defenses when called into question. These views also have the attribute of making the person feel like they are by definition always on the morally right side of any argument, since they are de facto always supportive of the victim. (Since they define the victim.)

The problem is that these things are set up to be unfalsifiable, and claiming that perhaps situation A or B was not in fact influenced by some hidden, systemic, nefarious thing like the patriarchy sets you up to be labeled at best ignorant and at worst sexist/racist/intolerant/etc. Simple explanations for cause and effect events in society are by definition suspect, if they cannot be tied to some larger scale societal struggle and narrative. It's basically a intellectual framework that has built up immunity from criticism via built-in argumentative tricks, similar to various forms of pseudo-science.

This is not to say there aren't plenty of places where discrimination happens and needs to be confronted. But it is not always the answer, and it is certainly not always the dominant factor in our day to day lives. Folks like the one you posted above seem to see everything in life through this lens, and it colors their opinions on everything, from the important to the mundane.

freyrs36• 13 years ago

I find the twitter comment you linked to very insightful, it's just a thinly veiled statement of "even if the facts don't support the claims I made about your actions, you're still to blame for your inaction". This kind of "You're either with us, or against us" mentality is rather alarming...

tizoc• 13 years ago

https://alastairadversaria.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/of-trigg...

Search for "Offence trolling" and read that section please (the whole article in general is good, but that section talks specifically about what you are talking about).

Perihelion11• 13 years ago

Amen. I stated earlier that because of this behavior people now treat me (a female) as if I'm just looking to fight. It's disgusting and actively pushing me out of the industry. Sexist men are not my enemy anymore :/

dinkumthinkum7• 13 years ago

Keep in mind, the industry is really bigger than this. There are many tech people for which this story is not even on the radar.

frozenport• 13 years ago

Thats what happens when you get your news from a p0rn outlet!

lauradhamilton2• 13 years ago

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 women to flag and remove those. This is a problem in my opinion.

kordless2• 13 years ago

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.

MartinCron9• 13 years ago

I sometimes see sexist comments here

Me too. And I will downvote, comment, or both. The system isn't perfect, but there are people who are trying.

ionforce• 13 years ago

Why are you linking someone's gender to the ability to flag and remove sexist comments? Are you saying that women are allowed to make sexist comments about men?

Sexism is everyone's problem, regardless of gender expression.

yetanotherphd4• 13 years ago

Could you give some examples of the kinds of post you would like to censor?

yawaramin2• 13 years ago

Admittedly, there's no 'flag' or 'remove' option. There is however a downvote option--but only for users with enough 'karma'. You and I, being (relatively) new users, don't have enough karma to downvote posts. _That_ is unrelated to gender.

arcticfox• 13 years ago

Is there an editor's rebuttal to this? If unintentional, at the very least a limited apology seems fitting.

nashashmi2• 13 years ago

Can I use the skewed article and PG's response to now make a case that women can't be newspaper writers?

nashashmi2• 13 years ago

I guess I should have initialed it as j/k. I hate down votes.

natural219• 13 years ago

Can anyone link to an objective "what PG actually said" so we can, you know, actually evaluate these claims in context?

I see a link to https://www.theinformation.com/YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete..., but there's no way I'm subscribing to this junk website.

dataminded• 13 years ago

I find that doubting anything that Gawker says about anyone or anything is generally a good idea.

apsec112• 13 years ago

"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 give one of those typical sputtering non-apologies!”. It reminds me of those computer games where “ACCUSE” is just a button you press, and it doesn’t even matter what the accusation is or whether it makes sense."

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/15/things-i-learned-by-spe...

sedev• 13 years ago

That piece was new to me, and very interesting! Thank you.

pjscott• 13 years ago

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.

marcosdumay• 13 years ago

I was congratulated by a newspaper once. Scaring is a huge understatement, I avoid any interaction with formalized media since then.

rubiquity2• 13 years ago

The passion for women/girls (referred to as females from this point on) representation in programming is so strong that they try and make villains out of the wrong people as if it will help their cause. From all of the reading I've done of PG's writings I think he has always taken a rather binary approach at whether you're the startup kind of person. I don't think he cares about sex at all. He wants people that are hackers/founders by personal interest rather than being pushed to it by others.

I really like when the move for more female participation in programming is more of removing barriers that would otherwise discourage females from participating (sexism, snickering, etc.) and less pushing females into programming.

As we all know, PG runs a company where his bottom dollar comes from the success rate of startups. It's not hard to draw the conclusion that people who naturally enjoy doing something are more successful at it on the whole than people who are pushed into doing something.

PG just happens to operate in a space dominated by males, because of this I imagine some people feel he has a responsibility to push the female programmer movement forward. I certainly don't imagine him holding female programmers back, with the female founders conf he's announced it sounds like he's trying to help. That said, I think PG is a "pull no punches" kind of guy, so while he is aware of the lack of female founders I don't think he's going to lose sleep over it as long YC continues to succeed.

crassus14• 13 years ago

I feel bad for the female children of HN. I imagine them thinking, "Why do all the adults in my life want me to be a computer programmer? I want to be a veterinarian or teacher, but daddy says that's a patriarchal stereotype."

There's nothing wrong with offering people an easier onramp to hackerdom, of course. But there is a subtext of devaluing all female-dominated lines of work.

theorique7• 13 years ago

An earlier comment mentioned that all the different professional programs (law, medicine, business, etc) that lead to top, well-paid jobs, are competing over the same top-5% elite group of girls/women.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6981040

Adding CS/CE to this mix won't necessarily solve things. Improving the pipeline is a reasonable step, but it takes time for the effects of those efforts to be realized.

MartinCron9• 13 years ago

You should feel bad for anyone who gets pushed into any career they don't really love. I strongly doubt it's at epidemic levels for the daughters of HN.

I'm not applying any pressure at all to my daughter, I'm telling her she can practice any kind of medicine she wants.

jug6ernaut3• 13 years ago

"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 someone with a CS degree.

While I 100% agree with your final above statement, I find it concerning that you would label everyone with a "CS major" as having motivations outside of a "hacker". I fail to see how they are mutually exclusive. I hope this was just a unfortunate choice of words.

kstenerud2• 13 years ago

"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."

jug6ernaut3• 13 years ago

What I quoted was not from the "interview"

nicolethenerd• 13 years ago

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)

jug6ernaut3• 13 years ago

Agreed, thats why I said I agreed with his statement "If you want to be really good at programming, you have to love it for itself."

I understand what hes trying to say, I just find it really odd that he would go about it by labeling a group of people as if they were intrinsically different.

jbaudanza• 13 years ago

He doesn't say they are mutually exclusive, and it is a stretch to interpret it that way.

hyperpape4• 13 years ago

I think it's meant to be "I was explaining the distinction between a _mere_ CS major and a hacker".

Wasn't Mark Zuckerberg a CS major, and Graham praises him.

gfodor2• 13 years ago

I know tons of CS majors who are terrible hackers. It's a non-necessary, insufficient condition. However, the best hackers often have a CS background. This is reality, and it is in line with what pg said. There is a distinction, ie, when I hear "CS major" I do not think "hacker", and when I hear "hacker" I do not think "CS major".

To think that pg of all people fails to see the value in a CS degree is pretty hilarious though.

theorique7• 13 years ago

You can major in CS without being a hacker, and you can be a hacker without majoring in CS.

Many, many hackers enter CS programs precisely because they are hackers and want to learn more about computers. Others take a different path.

Some people in CS aren't into it because they love it, but because their parents want them to get a "useful" degree, or because they heard that they can get a good job. All reasonable motivations, but different from doing something due to intrinsic motivation.

null_ptr• 13 years ago

Most CS graduates I know did the bare minimum to earn their major credits and that's it, avoiding any challenging courses like the plague. They'd rather study some unrelated intro-level elective than computation theory. No actual interest in the field, no passion, no imagination. You're damn right they're not hackers. They're here for the gold rush and nothing more, they won't be the ones advancing this industry. They're the copy-paste from Stack Overflow types, they're the ones that get hired because their uncle works at the company, and they're the ones leaving knots behind them for others to sort out.

__pThrow3• 13 years ago

What Paul didn't say.

Anything about DongleGate

Anything about PronounGate

Anything about CPlusEqualityGate

But when They Came for Paul, then he wanted us to know what he said.

Sadly, I was already gone.

In fact what he did apparently was to take these sorts of threads down and encourage moderators to kill them.

Now of course, he abuses his power as publisher to host this thread where we can deify him, thank him, and and apologize to him.

Crito9• 13 years ago

Does it really surprise or disturb you that PG takes a special interest in things said about himself? It should not.

__pThrow3• 13 years ago

I think pg is very influential in tech and he has missed several opportunities to speak out for the powerless being abused.

I think this is made worse when he runs Hacker News, and lets that platform be used in a very similar case to defend himself.

My original post references "First They Came" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...) That's not to suggest feminist bullying is anything close to Nazi Germany, but to suggest we all have moral duties to speak out for the powerless and abused.

yetanotherphd4• 13 years ago

In fact what he did apparently was to take these sorts of threads down and encourage moderators to kill them.

Do you have evidence for this claim?

My understanding is that HN attempts to automatically detect all controversial topics and remove them from the front page. From what I saw, PronounGate got fair attention on HN, and so did CPlusEqaulityGate (relative to how much traction it got anywhere else).

ajju3• 13 years ago

When a similar brouhaha happened over PG's comments about accent taken out of context, not one publication cared to actually interview the scores of foreign founders with accents that have gone through YC (I am one).

The same thing happened again with this controversy. Here's at least one rebuttal from a leading female founder: https://t.co/1NbszBqlB1

Is it too much to ask of the press to at least look into a person's actions before piling on with criticism of a purported quote rehashed by a known instigator such as valleywag?

rexreed2• 13 years ago

Does the shrill, hyper-Silicon Valley startup focused, gossipy, and banal tech 'press' really matter? I wish they would focus on news, get outside of the Valley for their inspiration, and focus on a wider range of technologies and markets. But then again, who would read that? What we've got here is not "press" but rather entertainment. Basically, it's the TMZ-ification of tech "journalism". Yup, those are scare quotes.

venantius• 13 years ago

I'm really happy PG responded to this, because when it came out it already seemed like a completely overblown and taken-out-of-context quote and I had to literally refuse to discuss it with people because the firestorm seemed too absurd to validate with conversation.

informatimago• 13 years ago

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!

throwaway1354• 13 years ago

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)

hyperpape4• 13 years ago

My response elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6985366

From an economic perspective, having any group not participate in a valuable activity is a waste.

throwaway1354• 13 years ago

You seem to be saying: since coding is a valuable activity, any group not coding is a waste.

Is that correct?

crassus14• 13 years ago

I wonder if part of it is that hackers look down on female-dominated lines of work. We imagine that being like us is the best thing in the world. It is a decent line of work, mind you, but it has its downsides and not everybody is cut out for it.

throwaway1354• 13 years ago

I think many in the tech community do look down on other professions. All the support for 'women in code' programs indicates that.

Dewie6• 13 years ago

All of the disdain that some people show for activities and occupations that are more associated with participation from women does have some very ironic implications, given the stated intentions of those people.

MartinCron9• 13 years ago

Hackers tend to look down on some male-dominated lines of work, too. It's not like you see a surplus of respect for construction workers or prison guards, for example.

I think it's more of a class thing than a sex thing.

smtddr6• 13 years ago

Here's my take: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6530237

jacalata7• 13 years ago

What's wrong with treating everyone equally?

Does that mean 'do the same thing to everyone'? 'Equal' treatment can easily result in very unequal effects. For instance, if you put a staircase at the door to the classroom, everyone is being treated equally if they are all expected to go up the same staircase, even though that means some people can go in and others (people with crutches/wheelchairs/etc) can't. For another example, lets say public schools started charging every student the exact same fee of $10,000 per year: that would be equal treatment with a clearly unequal outcome, because some students started out in families that can afford the fee, and some didn't.

Also, advocacy is not 'restricted to women' - but there are a lot of people who feel it is valuable to spend their time and effort on programs for women. There are also programs for black teenage boys, for inner city kids, probably for Africans (and African-Americans), that get less attention. If you feel that you can see some disadvantaged group you'd like to advocate for, go ahead. If you feel that you don't want to advocate for anyone, also go ahead. But it doesn't make sense to say that because you don't want to advocate for a group/any group, or think the effort is not worth it for you, then everyone else has to agree not to do it either. (And besides, in many cases obstacles for one group affect other groups, so it doesn't have to be duplication of effort but shared effort that can be applied more widely - eg: increasing awareness that not everybody is likely to have a USA traditional-geek-boy-in-highschool background helps interviewers learn to avoid questions that rely on an assumption of that shared background, which helps everyone with non-mainstream backgrounds like women, homeschooled kids, and foreigners).

newnewnew2• 13 years ago

To understand the call for equal representation in tech, you have to understand cultural marxism. My previous thoughts on the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6509118

atmosx• 13 years ago

It is true though, women are not hackers where I live. That doesn't mean that womens are out of skills, and PG explains really nice it's just how it is and it might change in the future.

Given the way my mother cooks, I can state that when it comes to food she totally can be a called a hacker :-)

alan_cx• 13 years ago

There are women hackers everywhere, just like men, just as many. Thing is, men don't notice, and women don't refer to it as hacking. They call it coping, or getting by.

kyro2• 13 years ago

Something needs to change about this industry's obsession with sensationalist journalism. If this industry is truly as forward-thinking and progressive as it is, and hopes to make strides in issues like gender/minority equality, then we need to build defenses against severely twisted, unfounded, and intentionally heinous hit-pieces by nobody bloggers who are trying to break into the industry by being edgy and aggressively opinionated.

The discussion about women in startups has completely come to a halt now and has shifted to discussing whether Paul Graham is a sexist.

The most sickening part of this whole ordeal? That these shit-stirring "journalists" are praised and said to have some sort of talent by their respective circles for knowing how to "shake things up," and their higher-ups want nothing more but for them to continue.

MBCook• 13 years ago

Something needs to change about this industry's obsession with sensationalist journalism.

I don't think there is anything wrong with this industry. This seems to be how most 'news' is made these days. I'm guessing that people who closely follow a non-technical industry have seen similar sensationalism on other issues.

kyro2• 13 years ago

Agreed, this isn't specific to this industry. In fact, most humans flock to this sort of journalism. It's how gossip rags make their money.

But this industry is more forward-thinking and adept to rapidly changing than most, and is most capable of making progress in workplace equality, among other issues. To let trashy journalism get in the way to the point that it has is to severely hinder the potential for change.

jeffdavis• 13 years ago

I think a lot of it has to do with the amount of experience the readership has to this kind of "journalism". Sensationalist and highly opinionated journalism loses its impact on individuals over a few years of exposure. After a while, people start to realize that such things are almost never the full story, and you need to wait for more information and analysis to come forward before forming an opinion of your own.

The reason this kind of journalism works is simple: because there is a steady supply of new people who aren't resistant to it yet.

robg4• 13 years ago

How horrifying must it be to have every word dissected by a linkbait culture? Then when the mob hears something in their pre-determined wheelhouse, the pitchforks come out with a vengeance.

Moreover, anyone who has read pg knows this kerfuffle was likely spam. I'm just sad our culture has degenerated to convict first, ask questions later.

Shameless has supplanted shameful.

robg4• 13 years ago

This is particularly true in the age of Twitter, where a single sentence taken out of context can go viral. Now anything you say about a controversial topic has to be unambiguous at the level of individual sentences.

Ugh, how depressing.

McKittrick2• 13 years ago

Getting misquoted in an interview happens to almost everyone who has given an interview ever. It is a product of the interviewer trying to put an editorial spin on a story (i.e make it interesting) and human error (based on reporter time constraints). Being misquoted is the tax for using the interviewer's platform for marketing. For most people, the benefit of the publicity outweighs the tax. So you give the interview, knowing full well that the end product is going to come out somewhere on the spectrum of slight misquote --> just made up stuff. And this isn't going to change. But it is something to keep in mind when you're pitching PR for your startup. You will get misquoted, its a matter of degree. Share your words as wisely as possible. Unfortunately, unlike PG, the rest of us don't have a platform for setting the record straight on a misquote.

runevault• 13 years ago

The difference here is he was not supposed to be interviewed, he was offering background for an entirely different piece, and they turned the discussion into an "interview" after the fact when they presented pieces of said material claiming it to be an interview.

McKittrick2• 13 years ago

if you talk to a reporter for a story, you're being interviewed. Let me rephrase, if I was talking to a reporter and the conversation was being recorded, I would presume I was being interviewed. If the reporter told me it was off the record, I would not consider it an interview.

11thEarlOfMar• 13 years ago

Well, that's a relief.

ChristianMarks2• 13 years ago

Now anything you say about a controversial topic has to be unambiguous at the level of individual sentences.

This has been true in academia for years.

Osiris• 13 years ago

To avoid these kinds of problems, why don't journalists just post the entire interview transcript instead of, or in addition to, editing it for brevity and thus injecting their own biases?

MartinCron9• 13 years ago

There's a movement to get journalists to do this for some time. I remembered this interview with public radio's On The Media from 2007 on this very subject.

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/129436-just-email-me/transcr...

snake_plissken• 13 years ago

Whoa whoa whoa, it's considered ok to mess with a quote like this and completely ax things out? And editors are ok with it? In the journalism industry and with with reputable print/electronic news outlets, when something is on the record (as I assumed this is since there is a transcript), are quotes actively edited to the point where key words are removed?

I know things are taken out of context, and quotes/sound bites can be selected and presented out of sequence, but actively editing the quote seems absurd and beyond anyone who honestly thinks they are reporting something accurately.

bedhead• 13 years ago

I've said it before and I will say it again: Gawker is simply professional trolls. They exist only to shit on everything, the farther away from their rigid liberal ideals the better. I wish people would ignore them completely.

crassus14• 13 years ago

Liberal != left/progressive. Liberals were people that supported free exchange of ideas, believing that truth would be discovered through open argument (think John Stuart Mill). Progressives are pretty much the opposite of that.

acheron• 13 years ago

Historically sure, but (at least in the US) that ship sailed long ago.

forgottenpaswrd2• 13 years ago

It is very interesting see someone like PG take the bait with anti ethical journalism.

I have some friends in top positions and the first thing they learn is about this techniques. There are predators out there wanting to eat your hardly earned reputation for their own benefit or agendas.

dkural• 13 years ago

Dear Paul,

In your arc article: http://www.paulgraham.com/arc0.html

you have the following few sentences: I realize that supporting only Ascii is uninternational to a point that's almost offensive, like calling Beijing Peking, or Roma Rome (hmm, wait a minute). But the kind of people who would be offended by that wouldn't like Arc anyway.

Here's the issue: "the kind of people who would be offended by that" - I realize that "that" refers to ASCII only support, and I agree with your statement. But it took me two minutes to figure that out. Indeed "that" might as well refer to Chinese people being offended by the colonial label of Peking instead of using Beijing. I thought you might want to fix this infelicity of expression.

enko• 13 years ago

Chinese people being offended by the colonial label of Peking instead of using Beijing

I think the only Chinese people who would be "outraged" by calling their capital Peking (the old southern way of pronouncing it) vs Beijing (the new northern way of pronouncing it) are the same types getting "outraged" over this ridiculous event - they were looking for something to get angry about anyway. For most I believe it is simply a historical name. Do New Yorkers get outraged if you sidle up to them and whisper "New Amsterdam"?

Anyway, it's still generally called Peking in plenty of languages, including Spanish, French, German and Japanese, and I don't see any great international incidents over that.

Uchikoma• 13 years ago

I at least do not get angry about München being called Munich or Köln being called Cologne by occupation forces.

ericd3• 13 years ago

I'm not surprised that things were taken completely out of context. The first time you have something written about something you've said is really eye opening - unless the whole thing is printed verbatim, it's almost invariably edited to say something different than what you meant, and to be more in line with the rest of the story.

davidw• 13 years ago

[3] The controversy itself is an example of something interesting I'd been meaning to write about, incidentally. I was one of the first users of Reddit, and I couldn't believe the number of times I indignantly upvoted a story about some apparent misdeed or injustice, only to discover later it wasn't as it seemed. As one of the first to be exposed to this phenomenon, I was one of the first to develop an immunity to it. Now when I see something that seems too indignation-inducing to be true, my initial reaction is usually skepticism. But even now I'm still fooled occasionally.

I think we could do with fewer of those stories on HN, truth be told. They seem to generate a lot of heat and little light, and are generally about "off-topic" subjects without being intellectually gratifying.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Nicely responded.

Over Thanksgiving a friend of mine who is studying for his Masters in Philosophy introduced me to the formal concept of the 'Principle of Charity' [1] which is on the hearer's part a requirement of applying the most reasonable interpretation of the argument presented. When pg wrote this:

"Also (as we've seen), if you talk about controversial topics, 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, whereas in a conversation you can assume good faith and speak as loosely as you would in everyday life."

It connected with me that both in the interwebs and here on HN too often people do not apply this principle, either in prejudice or in ignorance, to the topics being discussed. That is really too bad, because it helps the quality of the discussion tremendously.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

drcode• 13 years ago

This is a good essay, but I was disappointed it wasn't a followup to his classic essay "What You Can't Say" http://paulgraham.com/say.html

dchichkov• 13 years ago

If you want to be really good at programming, you have to love it for itself.

It is difficult not to love things that you've discovered for yourself and learned to do as a kid. So the following:

If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own.

while not required, could be just an 'often encountered' case.

YuriNiyazov• 13 years ago

In John Gruber's words: "I’m sure this will get just as much attention as Valleywag’s misguided hatchet job that started the whole thing, and that everyone on Twitter who excoriated Graham will apologize."

grellas• 13 years ago

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 build credit through many transactions, so we build credibility by the very pattern of our lives. Credit and credibility derive from the same root and signify the same thing: when in doubt, we can trust the one who has either trait. Not blind trust, just a benefit-of-the-doubt level of trust.

Well, pg has earned our trust and deserved the benefit of the doubt when something so off kilter as this is attributed to him. He did not get it here, and that is a sad testament to how crowd-inspired frenzies can bend our perceptions in such faulty ways. Let us only hope that we can learn some good lessons from this.

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. Indeed, the mob looks pretty much like an ass at this point and kudos to pg for his more-than-able defense. Very lawyer-like, in a way, but far more classy.

mjburgess20• 13 years ago

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?

wmeredith• 13 years ago

It's his website ;)

wr1472• 13 years ago

I haven't read the submission yet, neither am I fully up to speed on the topic, but I'm going to go all meta on you and ask what a pseudo-intellectual is?

GnarfGnarf• 13 years ago

reverence

minimax• 13 years ago

The guy you're responding to is George Grellas, who is a lawyer. That's probably why he couches it in terms of lawyer and witness.

jraines• 13 years ago

pg's writing has made a big impact among a lot of people, the majority of whom don't view him as a cult-like leader or personality at all.

It sounds like you disagree with his ideas; what qualifies someone as an intellectual in your book and not a pseudo-intellectual?

Estragon• 13 years ago

It was reverence for his reply, which is indeed quite skillful and restrained.

jsmthrowaway11• 13 years ago

You mean like the cult-like reverence for the pseudo-intellectual issues commentary on Twitter and Medium? The people who have less than a decade in the industry but are experts on compensation, ocracies, power dynamics, and psychology? The ones who work at Silicon Valley startups and lecture the entire industry about how things work, then surround themselves with like-minded people to have strength in numbers?

You are seeing respect for Paul Graham because, as flawed as some of his opinions might be, he also has the experience backing them. Louis CK said this best:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXcWeFn-YYM (NSFW in the latter half)

If you're under 40, I'm largely uninterested in your take on the world. That includes my own; I know I still have things to learn and I make a proactive effort to listen more than I talk. I don't always succeed.

aaronem14• 13 years ago

You confuse respect with reverence, and pseudo-intellectualism with lively intellect; I can't imagine why. Incidentally, your malaprop is showing.

mojowo11• 13 years ago

Most of the reverence for this guy (regardless of whether you find it pseudo-intellectual or not) can probably be explained by the fact that Paul Graham is a co-founder of Y Combinator, and you're on ycombinator.com.

mattmanser4• 13 years ago

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 dialect of LISP? That he started and sold his own startup in the early days of the web? And that, now this is some serious respect, it was actually written in LISP?

That's not cultish, it's earned respect and pg's got it in buckets around here.

Crikey.

Little drunk, but crikey, talk about having absolutely no fucking clue. The guy's a machine of intellectualism, most things he turns his mind to he de-constructs, encapsulates and then explains brilliantly. Yeah, occasionally he's wrong, especially when he tries to justify certain aspects of exploitative capitalism, but damn he's good. Very good.

And that response was classic pg as grellas said.

Jd• 13 years ago

pg is a nerd who got rich without being any less of a nerd. He also helps other nerds get rich. Any clue why that would be popular?

theorique7• 13 years ago

What's with the almost cult-like relevance for this largely pseudo-intellectual entrepreneur?

- Founded a successful web apps company back in the 1990s when that wasn't common, and sold it to Yahoo

- Founded Y Combinator to advise and invest in startups

- Smart investor with substantial success and track record (Dropbox, AirBnB, etc)

In other words, he's earned a reputation for doing some very smart things, and documenting them in clear, easily understood language, over the past 20 years.

I'm not being a mirer or a nuthugger here. I participate in HN because it benefits me and I learn useful things amidst the noise. (And of course pg started this site too.)

Ygg2• 13 years ago

What's with the almost cult-like relevance for this largely pseudo-intellectual entrepreneur?

People worship and idolize their heroes all the time.

dinkumthinkum7• 13 years ago

Honestly, this is a troll comment.

By making the comment you will assuredly elicit the response you expect, imply, but it is not necessarily for the reason you state.

pg was misrepresented and held out as a misogynist. We think highly of pg, why should we not defend what is merely slanderous nonsense?

I'm the first one to disagree with many ideas in our echo chamber ... That's healthy. But the idea that pg said anything wrong is ridiculous.

ajslater• 13 years ago

What's with the almost cult-like reverence for this largely pseudo-intellectual entrepreneur?

Who, pray tell, are the real intellectuals?

visakanv2• 13 years ago

I have a problem with the term "pseudo-intellectual". What's an intellectual, and what's a psuedo-intellectual? Please define your terms.

benched• 13 years ago

largely pseudo-intellectual entrepreneur

Seriously, wtf. What does this even mean when talking about a person, and not a particular essay? Do you honestly not think that Paul Graham embodies a life of the intellect?

Confusion4• 13 years ago

It's interesting how people are attacking you for using 'pseudo-intellectual', while completely disregarding the 'cult-like reverence' bit. Your question is just as damning without the 'pseudo-intellectual' adjective, yet they are trying to change that to 'intellectual'.

This is a nice demonstration of 'framing': you frame pg as not deserving cult-like reverence because of his 'pseudo-intellectuality' and people respond by explaining how he is a true intellectual. Except that the arguments they give for that assertion are wrong, because that is not the assertion for which they have arguments. Their arguments actually explain why pg is revered and they are now contorted to be arguments that seem to be meant to explain why is he is cult-like revered for his intellectuality.

The result is that it seem like people are tacitly acknowledging the 'cult-like reverence' and are giving completely ridiculous arguments in support. The ridiculousness of those arguments is pointed out and we get into pointless discussions about what things mean, completely losing sight of the original point.

The bottom line is: pg is revered and reasons for that reverence are given. There is nothing cult-like about the reverence and the pseudo-intellectual part of his writings (I would use another word to describe that quality of the writings, but that is beyond my current argument), are not the reason for the reverence.

sytelus• 13 years ago

Go change how an entire industry works, help found more successful startups than you can count on your fingers, pile up few billions while you are also coding a prime destination on web for hackers - and then you too would get a cult-like reverence for your pseudo-intellect.

richardw• 13 years ago

He writes for hackers, not for Nature, his articles take a week, not a year. People like to read his perspective and he's got some street cred. Why does it bother you so much if he has a following? So do sportspeople, businesspeople, graffiti artists. That's ok. It takes very little from your life. Personally I'm glad he takes the time.

If you can do better, go for it.

dylandrop• 13 years ago

Can we lay off the cheesy deification of PG? He was called a sexist, and he responded well. He is not a paragon of society, he is simply someone who is very good at tech and making money. And he is probably a good person too, but come on, this is just silly.

On a second note I'm also curious as to what exactly you're referring to when you say he has the credibility that should make us know that he isn't sexist. I'm not saying he is sexist, I'm just saying that all of his credibility lies in making good business decisions, not gender relations.

reeses• 13 years ago

"On a second note I'm also curious as to what exactly you're referring to when you say he has the credibility that should make us know that he isn't sexist. I'm not saying he is sexist, I'm just saying that all of his credibility lies in making good business decisions, not gender relations."

I agree. This willful blindness to bias and prejudice because smart people are not biased or prejudiced prevents us from examining our thoughts and behavior.

orionblastar2• 13 years ago

Look you are getting credibility and trust confused with respect and other things.

Personally I don't trust anyone, I've been burned too many times. Yeah that makes me paranoid, but it comes from too many bad professional relationships were I was backstabbed by the other person to further their career goals. I must state that this does not happen in every organization, and that there are a few people I would trust if they showed some good faith and helped me out with things. But since nobody I know wants to help me out, and once I reached the age of 40 I get old I am too old for this industry.

But PG is worthy of my respect, he has paid his dues in this industry, he knows what he is talking about and has experience, he hasn't backstabbed anyone that I know of so he has credibility, yes he is one of the few that I would trust had he helped me out in some way.

Look there is a lot of jealousy in the industry for experienced people. We get called nerds, geeks, dorks, etc by all of the people in other industries. They claim they know how to use a computer, and sure maybe use a Wordprocessor and write on a blog using Wordpress, but every once in a while one of them gets a bad case of jealousy that 'hackers' or 'IT workers' know more than they do, so they lash out and do a hatchet job on someone who got some attention in the media. This is basically politics, and how one person can backstab another.

I've had my words taken out of context a lot as well. It is but just one way to backstab someone. It is not just the Internet trolls who do it but the news media and these people writing blogs that hate the startup community.

In street terms, these people are 'haters' if I used that term correctly.

My sister who got into discoranism calls such people as 'greyfaces' and here is the Urban Dictionary definition. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=greyface

You can use either the first or second definition, and it would define the person who did this to PG quite accurately.

Crito9• 13 years ago

Do you give people who you respect the benefit of the doubt? By that, I mean that if they say something that could be interpreted charitably or uncharitably, do you tend to tentatively assume that they meant it the charitable way?

I think that is what grellas means by "trust".

calibraxis3• 13 years ago

Let's not praise Paul Graham just yet, based solely on his response. The Information's founder Jessica Lessin offered comments like: "We reviewed the transcript again and shared it with Paul. We stand behind our excerpting and editing for clarity. We continue to believe that the quote is in its proper context. Thanks for checking in." (http://valleywag.gawker.com/paul-graham-says-women-havent-be...)

More importantly, it's not about some beloved leader besmirched by a drive-by interview. The focus is best on YC's track record — and what it'll do to fix it — not a quote/misquote.

bambax4• 13 years ago

As you observe yourself, PG's credibility didn't work in this case; I'm not sure it ever does.

For example, how does the non-credibility of the press work? We all know from experience that the actual business of the press in general is to produce catchy headlines based on a forced interpretation of the "facts" (or based on no facts at all).

And yet, we're always ready to trust an article and get all upset as if the press was doing its theoretical job of uncovering some hidden truth (last sentence of PG's post: "even now I'm still fooled occasionally.")

Why is that? Why does the press still have any credibility left?

vorg• 13 years ago

in a conversation you can assume good faith and speak as loosely as you would in everyday life

In some countries it's legal to record any conversation you're a part of without informing the other participants so many people are on their guard. Even in everyday life with people you know well, they or you might be carrying a mobile phone manufactured by certain company or running a certain OS that listens, even when turned off with the battery still in, on behalf of some party who'll never be prosecuted and often never even exposed, and there's a lot of those sorts of people out there. Perhaps even a higher than average percentage of Hacker News visitors are these sorts.

jneen3• 13 years ago

Here's a collection of other writings by pg about women: http://sambiddle.kinja.com/paul-graham-writing-about-women-o...

This would be different if there were no context, but there is a lot of context.

jpeg_hero• 13 years ago

don't try to talk honestly about the issue of women in tech. why do it? just will bite you in the ass.

just say whatever "they" want you to say (whatever is pc these days) and keep your head down and keep hacking.

oskarth3• 13 years ago

This piece should have to be written. I think the same goes for the essay Foreign Accents. I'm not a women, but I am a "foreigner", and it's completely obvious in both cases what pg actually said. That is, unless you have a thing for being Offended or you are looking for excuses.

I wish more people would be harder on the trolls with nothing but superficial criticism. Ignore them, and if they gain traction, despise them, the same way you despise spammers.

There's an asymmetry here. The trolls lose nothing on their vitrolic rants. For them it's a win either way, since at worst case they get some page views, whereas pg has to spend time dealing with bullshit. It would be more just if these trolls were punished, and pg weren't made to feel like he has to respond like this.

oskarth3• 13 years ago

This piece should have to be written. I think the same goes for the essay Foreign Accents. I'm not a woman, but I am a "foreigner", and it's completely obvious in both cases what pg actually said. That is, unless you have a thing for being Offended or you are looking for excuses.

It's sad that pg feels he has to waste time doing these type of clarifications. Especially since he's not even holding any controversial opinions in either case, but is merely observing what he has seen at YC. I wish more people would be harder on the trolls with nothing but superficial criticism. Ignore them, and if they gain traction, despise them, the same way you despise spammers.

nbouscal• 13 years ago

This piece should have to be written.

I'm guessing you meant "shouldn't" there?

oskarth3• 13 years ago

Sorry, yes. Typo and then noprocrast caught me.

Nimi• 13 years ago

"""Mark Zuckerberg starts programming, starts messing about with computers when he's like 10 or whatever. By the time he's starting Facebook he's a hacker, and so he looks at the world through hacker eyes. That's what causes him to start Facebook. We can't make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years. """

I wonder why pg thinks being a programmer is a prerequisite for looking at the world through hacker eyes. The notion that Zuckerberg could have started Facebook as a non-technical co-founder doesn't seem unreasonable to me (and you could even argue Steve Jobs, while having some technical chops, wasn't the typical uber-hacker-has-been-doing-this-since-age-12 programmer). Or not?

squirejons• 13 years ago

CorpGovMedia hath given unto thee Laws to Live By. And so it is written that thou shalt not denigrate females, but that thou shalt elevate them above all others, for the females are The Most Sacred Consumer and Surplus Labor Supply, thus lowering wages and increasing The Most Sacred Corporate Profits.

And All Those Who Violate This Law Shall Be Marked "B" for Bigot. And Know Ye Well That Those Who Wear This Mark of B Shall Be Cast Out of Society and They Shall Be Demonized Forever....

Know Ye These Laws!

kategleason• 13 years ago

from a female founder:

PG picks the best.

it's time we step up to plate ladies. if we want to compete toe to toe with the gents then we have to be better than the ones we are up against. period. if you're better, trust me, he will pick you regardless of your gender.

it might even be in your favor if you just happen to be a woman on top of being better :)

leoc• 13 years ago

"Milo carefully said nothing when Major —— de Coverley stepped into the mess hall with his fierce and austere dignity the day he returned and found his way blocked by a wall of officers waiting in line to sign loyalty oaths. At the far end of the food counter, a group of men who had arrived earlier were pledging allegiance to the flag, with trays of food balanced in one hand, in order to be allowed to take seats at the table. Already at the tables, a group that had arrived still earlier was singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in order that they might use the salt and pepper and ketchup there. The hubub began to subside slowly as Major —— de Coverley paused in the doorway with a frown of puzzled disapproval, as though viewing something bizarre."

dinkumthinkum7• 13 years ago

I hate that pg even has to make this explanation. It is easy to understand what he meant even in the hit job "interview." I didn't realize how it was constructed. Now it makes a lot of sense. I mean what goal would it serve for pg to misogynistic claims? It defies common sense. I think the "interviewer" represents the worst of journalism, simply trying to peddle controversy where there is none. It is sort of infuriating to me because there actually is misogyny in our hacker culture but this is NOT it.

edw519• 13 years ago

This incident immediately reminded me of Hall of Fame baseball player Steve Carlton, one of the greatest professional athletes of all time. He had a simple method of dealing with media "issues": he didn't talk to them.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Carlton ...

Carlton slumped in 1973, losing 20 games. The media's open questioning of his unusual training techniques led to an acrimonious relationship between them and Carlton, and he severed all ties with the media, refusing to answer press questions for the rest of his career with the Phillies.[13] This reached a point where, in 1981, while the Mexican rookie Fernando Valenzuela was achieving stardom with the Los Angeles Dodgers, a reporter remarked, "The two best pitchers in the National League don't speak English: Fernando Valenzuela and Steve Carlton."[14]

Sometimes I wonder if more people responded this way, "professional journalism" might actually have a chance.

zw123456• 13 years ago

There is obviously a huge amount of energy around this. I think it would be great if YC sponsored a conference around this topic (perhaps Women & Minorities in tech startups).

thenerdfiles3• 13 years ago

Don't women pick up concepts faster than men?

I mean, it's pretty clear that women excel at language acquisition over men, and these are just computer languages.

Let's say, ceteris paribus, 10,000 hours for adolescent boys, 8,000 hours for adolescent girls. Supposing this is the case, given the history of computer science, I doubt really any one of us is in a position to define credibility on solely that metric of time spent.

Clearly environment plays a very significant role here, and it goes without saying, given the larger cultural context of the West, that women have been excluded. I mean, Women's Suffrage was, like, a century ago.

I'm just going to assert that I'm quite postive more than half of you are talking jive, and that's not good.

thenerdfiles3• 13 years ago

And because 4th gen. programming languages, surely girls, who command on average a wider variety of language concepts due to social capability and variation, will more readily digest the grammars of these languages. Boys are very often emotionally stunted, as is clear, by the excessive machoism of the West, such that their mentalities are restricted and limited, less prone to exploratory thought compared to linearized, route execution.

yetanotherphd4• 13 years ago

Yes the evidence is clear:

Girls score better at boys in language, therefore they are biologically advantaged.

Girls score worse than boys at math, therefore they are being discriminated against and discouraged by society.

You can't argue with evidence.

thenerdfiles3• 13 years ago

I thought I was arguing from environment, and not biology. I thought that was clear when I said "environment plays a significant role here."

Does "environment" mean "nature" to you between "nature/nurture"?

Granted, I'm making big assumptions, but they don't have anything to do with biology.

foobarian• 13 years ago

Reading the full quotes of what pg said to the reporter, they come off both as quite subtle and arrogant. I can imagine the reporter not quite understanding the point but instead hearing "blah blah blah we're better than you and you can never be a hacker." I'm kind of surprised pg was that open in the "interview," I think I would probably be really careful what I say in a similar situation (been bit more than once).

edouard1234567• 13 years ago

One can only appreciate the irony of note [3] :)

" The controversy itself is an example of something interesting I'd been meaning to write about, incidentally. I was one of the first users of Reddit, and I couldn't believe the number of times I indignantly upvoted a story about some apparent misdeed or injustice, only to discover later it wasn't as it seemed. As one of the first to be exposed to this phenomenon, I was one of the first to develop an immunity to it. Now when I see something that seems too indignation-inducing to be true, my initial reaction is usually skepticism. But even now I'm still fooled occasionally."

ElissaShevinsky• 13 years ago

I wrote this in response: https://medium.com/glimpse-labs/5c6d2ff4ef0d

PG has done a lot for the community and I think he deserves a conversation rather than a lynching. I'm calling for a more civil discourse on sexism. We could say that I'm baised bc my cofounder was similarly attacked by Valleywag, but it's very reasonable to say that these conversations could be handled more thoughtfully.

abalone3• 13 years ago

pg is being disingenuous.

He did only refer to programmers. That's true.

But what he left out is that, he defined programmers as the "pool of potential startup founders". (You have to read the full transcript to notice that.)

So he is not actually referring to a subset of women. He very clearly says women as a whole are underrepresented as founders because they haven't been hacking since age 13 like the attendees of PyCon and open source committers, because it's really hard to get 13 year old girls interested in hacking.

It's completely clear when you read the transcript.

21echoes• 13 years ago

it's amazing you have to scroll down this far to find someone actually thinking critically about the issue at hand rather than saying "they edited out the word 'these'! that's not how journalism works!". yes, they edited the quote. no, the original was not really much less sexist.

reallyseriously3• 13 years ago

Agree w/ the first part but it's not sexist at all for him to note the demographics of the pool of talent he's choosing from.

nycticorax4• 13 years ago

I agree with this completely. PG basically said that the reason there are not many females in YC is that not that many qualified females apply. The interviewer then asked "what would be lost" if YC either lowered their standards for female applicants, or did more to encourage qualified females to apply. And PG basically (and perhaps unintentionally) dodged the question, and reiterated that there aren't as many qualified female applicants as male ones, because in some sense YC's 'ideal' candidate is a twenty-something who's been hacking for 10+ years, and more of those are male than female.

I'm not saying that PG is necessarily sexist or a bad person for saying all of this. But he did basically say that there aren't a lot of twenty-something females who have been hacking for 10+ years. And then he seems to sort of back away from that statement in "What I Didn't Say". In the original interview, he said "We can't make [these] women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years." In "What I Didn't Say" he says "When I saw [the above quote] myself I wasn't sure what I was even supposed to be saying. That women aren't hackers? That they can't be taught to be hackers? Either one seems ridiculous." Basically, he was saying a less-crazy version of the first statement. Namely, that there aren't that many 20-something female hackers.

In summary, it seems like PG stated an inconvenient and perhaps unfortunate truth (and implicitly declined to get into what he could perhaps do to make this truth untrue), The Information reported it in a responsible way, and then ValleyWag re-reported it in a misleading and sensationalistic way. And then PG somewhat disingenuously claimed that he didn't say what he actually said.

Also, the irony is rich that all of this involves the guy that wrote "What You Can't Say".

abalone3• 13 years ago

Yup, you nailed it.

The bigger problem with pg's statement is not the 13 year old girl claim. It's that he fully blames them and middle school curriculum while giving YC, PyCon and the startup industry a pass. His stance is we already have an open door and are self-selected, so the problem must be up the line.

You're right, he dodged the question of whether we need to be more proactive, not just open.

fuckpig• 13 years ago

I used to respect pg. Then I saw moderation here and how bigoted it is, and now, I respect none of you.

devin• 13 years ago

reads post

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

goes back to programming

ondiekijunior• 13 years ago

No offense intended but what am seeing are ad hominem attacks at worst and pointless agreements at best over suitability of a fellow hacker, pg in this case, to put things clear on a generally clear topic. We are introducing abstract reasons why he is correct or otherwise. Why don't we take him at face value, cause in general it's isn't good practice to discuss someones intellectual ccompetence unless they are a potential hire in our university start-up

dschiptsov• 13 years ago

Oh, this American sexism nonsense again. Why, btw, no one is complaining that women have no predispositions for "autistic traits" ("being a male is to have some slight form of autism", like they said) and that girls with Asperger's, like, supposedly, Ayn Rand, is one for a billion. Why no one is protesting against the facts that men are much worse in caring for babies, because they have not enough "non-verbal communication abilities" to stay in a "continuous non-verbal rapport" with a toddler 24 hours a day? Why just not accept the fact that women are evolved to be better at some tasks at the expense of the other (and so are men)? So-called gender equality is a nonsensical "mental" concept (like any other "equality" nonsense which goes against the nature - genes is the very vehicle of inequality), given that the whole "evolutionary reasoning" behind a gender is necessary diversification of functions and abilities.

skylan_q4• 13 years ago

Why, ... Because absolute egalitarianism is dogma. Evidence of anything is just evidence of the capitalist patriarchs running everything.

robomartin• 13 years ago

The media has amazing power to manipulate stories and fabricate what will be taken as facts by the masses. This power is almost impossible to counter. They have molded public opinion, destroyed people and manipulated elections at nearly every level.

When I was a kid I was told a story as a means to communicate the gravity of telling lies. A lie, as the story goes, is like ripping open a feather pillow atop a mountain. Feathers fly everywhere. To undo a lie you have to collect every single feather, a task monumentally more difficult than telling the lie.

The Internet multiplies the power of the lie at every level. From a simple comments to blog posts to more established media outlets. Since the feathers can't be collected the damage can be extensive, permanent and even outlive the victim. Given this it would almost seem that the law needs to develop beyond liebel and slander (which I think might not be up to the task).

ooohooo• 13 years ago

In the end, there will be no winners in the feminist or forced approach to trying to increase the number of women programmers. It's a lose-lose situation.

fit2rule• 13 years ago

Welcome to the ways of media. My only question is: Why is it such a surprise to you that this occurred, when in fact .. This editing/re-positioning is normal and accepted behaviour in media organizations, and has been for decades. You should have known that the reporter already had their story goal filed - embarrass the PG/VC crowd somehow - and then they went to you for your interview, farming whatever they could to build controversy.

Controversy is the product, not informed readers.

anuraj• 13 years ago

PG has put what he said in perspective - and everything boils down to quoting out of context. You want to be an A class founder - try hard - there is no shortcut even if you are a woman.

grinich2• 13 years ago

I don't really care about what was said and what wasn't. PG was probably misquoted. Whatever.

What bothers me more is that damaging PG's public image is seemingly what it takes for him to prioritize writing an article about female founders.

I don't think YC needs to have affirmative action for gender; it would neither be fair or that effective. However, I think they're in the perfect position to inspire younger generations to start hacking. And this must specifically include girls.

My cofounder is a woman, who was contributing to Debian at age 15. Our first employee is a woman, with a MS from the operating systems group at MIT CSAIL.

There are lots of women hackers out there, but none of them are partners at YC. This press is disappointing, but not unexpected.

jcc80• 13 years ago

YC has 3 female partners.

http://ycombinator.com/people.html

grinich2• 13 years ago

Sure, but none of them are "hackers" in the current context.

Carolynn is a lawyer, with a bachelors is in political science.

Jessica previously worked at an investment bank, and has a BA in English.

Kirsty is an accountant, and although she holds an MEng in electrical and information sciences, it's not clear that she ever worked as an engineer.

This discussion is about young girls hacking with computers, which (I'm assuming, given their bios) none of these women did at that age.

I'm just disappointed that YC doesn't have a woman partner with a CS degree of any sort.

emiliobumachar• 13 years ago

This post is not listed in pg's essays list on his website, for understandable reasons. Makes me wonder what I've been missing. Is there an exaustive list of pg's public writings?

skylan_q4• 13 years ago

I stopped reading this partway through because PG doesn't really need to explain himself here. Don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to your own misunderstanding.

spajus• 13 years ago

1. Why is this so heavily upvoted? 2. How do you, startup people, find the time to write a novel in the comments of this "I didn't mean it" post? 3. Would you lick dirt off Paul's shoes if he allowed you?

Go write some code instead.

thatusertwo• 13 years ago

Older people start thinking what they see is true, my dad always says stuff that is true to him, but not so true for me as I have less life experience.

yarou• 13 years ago

It's a shame how easily people get offended these days. Calling PG sexist is totally unwarranted, especially when what he said was taken out of context. I suppose these days certain kinds of people get off on controversy, especially when there's none to begin with.

jebblue• 13 years ago

It seemed like a thoughtful and appropriate response to what almost looks like an intentional misrepresentation of his comments; or at least of the purpose of the discussion.

jenandre• 13 years ago

I would be interested in the stats of 'successful' startup investments (for YC and otherwise), how many of those technical founders actually started programming at age ~13 (vs 17 or 18).

Would also be interested in seeing what the relative success/failures of investments with startup founders at 23 w/ 10 years experience (started programming in teams), vs 28 (who started programming at 18).

jcromartie• 13 years ago

Why is anybody even offended at what he didn't say? What is wrong with the statement that women aren't making Facebook because they haven't been hacking for ten years? In a statistical sense this is true. The proportion of girls spending their formative years hacking away at technology is miniscule compared to the proportion of boys. The odds of a female Mark Zuckerberg are skewed for this simple reason.

And despite PG and YC giving every indication of wanting to change the situation, a simple statement of the situation (if it's out-of-context or not) makes people pick up their pitchforks?

znowi• 13 years ago

How come this high volume post isn't penalized off the front page yet? :)

lazyant• 13 years ago

My concern is that one of these days there will be a silly misunderstanding of greater proportions and PG will say "fuck it" and stop writing publicly and giving interviews.

What I Didn't Say

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