alexanderss

Trying to circumvent a company's hiring process by cold e-mailing ALL 730 employees at a single organisation; as well as calling out busy people who couldn't respond to your cold e-mails or couldn't take time out to meet with you personally by full name, position, and company in a self-promoted Medium post seems a highly negative signal and poor form, especially in Silicon Valley. This is likely the reason most of these companies passed.

You may want to read more carefully next time. "A Harvard Business Review study from 2008 found that as many as 50% of women working in science, engineering and technology will, over time, leave because of hostile work environments." The article then expands on that definition, including as journalistic and not scientific essays tend toward, real interviews from credible first-hand sources.

Seems fairly analogous to the Barbie story that this woman's website broke and now other people are jumping in to help.

Oh, no actual recruiters or talent leaders? No way would I pay essentially a peer for something like this. That's what friends advise us for. You need inside info, and engineers and PMs just don't have it.

Who are your "Advisors" ? Just other engineers?

Wait, what? By showing companies "you're listening" to their astroturfing, you are even more actively condoning it. And you ignored this part, but aside from all the tweets and favorites condoning astroturfing, you've said and written that having companies beg users and social networks for upvotes is a growth tactic for Product Hunt. Just come clean when you're called out, man.

The failure of abstinence-only advice and education is extremely well documented and transcends class and race.

So every time you "put it in," you are trying to make a baby? Poor people also know about the different kinds of sex acts available to humans, I'm not sure if you're a virgin, trolling, or just don't understand how human biology works.

That's simply not true. minimaxir just linked to hundreds of Twitter results (as recent as yesterday) of you favoriting and positively commenting on tweets from companies that are explicitly asking for upvotes on their products. I also learned that Product Hunt does this because I've heard/read you specifically mention it in interviews, saying "it grows the site."

https://twitter.com/search?q=product%20hunt%20upvote&src=typ...

Agreed, I only recently found out how much Product Hunt relies on astroturfing tactics to grow their userbase and promote the site, but whenever I'd check it I was always baffled by what was getting to the top of the "best new products" lists. Their growth hacking and employee "hustling" seem to mess with the quality, so it's just not reliable. I'd actually figured it was organic because top entries still only have about 200 upvotes despite Product Hunt having 50,000 users.

Can't say I agree that "mediocre or even slightly below average talent" should be compensated in the "mid-$150k range" (is that a way of saying $155k?), so close to excellent engineers. This seems to misunderstand how market rate is determined (especially relative to equity compensation), conflate "market rate" and "the value engineers provide their companies," or defend high compensation for mediocre performance. The logic is flawed regardless, as "mediocre or even slightly below average talent" will actually provide the company with negative value, costing the software team and the company much more than they offer.

Yes, you're right. Depression is more common than AIDS, cancer, and diabetes combined; and nearly 400,000 people attempt suicide in the US every single year. Those are only the cases medically documented. Depression and suicide are more prevalent in high socioeconomic environments and nations with higher quality of life. Depression is actually more likely to make you an insider than an outsider.

This author fixates on his local software developer and entrepreneur peers (depression can make it difficult to perceive interpersonal interactions objectively) but what he doesn't realize about them is that if you're lucky enough to be born in a country where you can pursue software and entrepreneurship as a teenager (especially in a world-class city full of opportunities like Boston where he lives now) you're MORE likely to be depressed or suicidal than the majority of the world's population who could only dream of having the life and access he has. They experience the same thing, and he is far from alone.

"The 2014 Ig Nobel Prizes were physically handed to the winners at a ceremony at Harvard University, by five genuine Nobel Laureates"

I'm enjoying the thought of watching them being laughed at in-person at Harvard.

No, users have no idea how many or what kind of ads are going to be on a website before they get there, and some content has ads, others don't. Just a few examples are pre-roll ads on YouTube videos (some have them, some don't, it's not a choice), news articles with ads mid-paragraph, or sliced up into slideshows with ads to continue consuming or receive any content. You may not personally understand how insidious ads can be, but 450 Hacker News readers do. I didn't even cover the issues with tracking, privacy and potential malware.

One thing not covered in the blog post (except Twitter) was social media or regular media where you interact with people you don't already know (e.g. Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News). Is this less common because friend-based social media is mostly photos and teenagers prefer using images to communicate? Does having a pseudonym on any of these sites count as anonymity, or is that preferred to communicate with friends anonymously? Thanks!

"This is huge for Facebook — it has become an ubiquitous utility. And my sister didn’t even know Messenger, Facebook’s well-regarded, standalone messaging app, existed. Couple this anecdote with the WhatsApp acquisition and Facebook seems poised to own (utilitarian and functional) communication."

Given how hard Facebook pushes, and has subsequently forced Messenger onto all mobile users, his sister not knowing it exists is not good for Facebook. I'm sure the author is trying to spin it into a positive since he works there, but that's quite a stretch.

Just curious, you're a PHP developer?

Yes, because I'm pro users rights. I don't believe people should be forced to look at (or sit through 30+second) ads for things they don't want or need, that are bad for them, or that perpetuate unhealthy stereotypes or behavior. People can choose those messages on their own through whatever media they seek out, but it shouldn't be compulsory. Aside from that, there are too many other ways to monetize in 2014, and this is only growing. I use Ghostery, Disconnect and original AdBlock (getadblock.com) not AdBlock Plus, which has a semi-extortionist ad program that actually showed me ads without realizing it.

If you answered "No" but use Chrome (and probably other modern browsers), you may not realize that it already automatically blocks pop-up ads for you, so to some extent you are already using an AdBlocker. Ads haven't gotten much less annoying than they were in 2008, the browsers just hate them as much as you do.

This ad is the poster (pardon the pun) for YC sexism, it still appears in women in tech blog posts all the time. Hard to imagine being a Stanford student in 2006 who has never heard of "Y Combinator" and sees this ad. May get a laugh from a guy like Evan Spiegel, but is just plain creepy to a woman.

He needs ghost web designers.

Seriously, this is what gives Hacker News a bad name.

#1 is my ex, #2 and #3 are guys I barely know. After that, the top 10-20 are just the Facebook friends that are most active on Facebook.

I would not necessarily take the blog post author's advice. He appears to be a big self-promoter that's more impressed with the perceived prestige of a management consulting job than the success of his actual startup.

Apart from Alfred being the only CrunchFund company among the six finalists (and Mike Arrington tweeting it as the winner on Twitter before it was publicly announced), three of the finals judges have already invested in Alfred through SV Angel (David Lee as Managing Partner, Marissa Mayer and Kevin Rose as LPs). Alfred was also the only SV Angel company in the finals.

I'm curious about the actual statistics of ADD/ADHD drug abuse in the tech community. I do have friends that have started taking Adderall but stopped quickly, or only take it rarely, because of negative effects. By negative effects I mean it made work and relationships harder, not just adverse side effects of the drugs.

Nice to hear from Jessica on this. I'll be keeping an eye out to see if they follow through on this (female founders aren't afraid name names, just not to the media or on Secret, for obvious reasons).

Like most tech-savvy AdBlock users that this post references, I whitelist all sites I want to support (if those sites have chosen display ads as their preferred source of revenue). I can't imagine a web without AdBlock because I believe no one should be forced to view ads... and Google, Mozilla and Apple seem to agree with me.

Does anyone on HN work in a windowless office? Curious what this is like.

First of many.

What percentage of applicants are his age or older? Probably very, very small for obvious reasons. Most founders PG's age and older have more financial resources (and network, etc) making YC's terms less appealing than for younger founders without any experience. In terms of diversity, age doesn't quite fit in here.