anticonformist

More rich women and rich black people joining the VC network would not solve the problem. And yet that's the conclusion this thinking leads to. It's the author's solution as well and doesn't address the real problem at all.

What portion of non-rich people make up the VC network? It's definitely lower than the percentage of women or black people. No one is more "underrepresented" than non-rich people.

VCs are the 1%. Their target of exclusion is the 99%. Most don't care about race or gender. They will overlook almost any attribute if they see dollar signs, race, gender, and even someone's poor background. Because their primary concern is money.

And since VCs hate poor people. And they know this about each other. Even those VCs that don't hate poor people will be more reluctant to fund poor people because they know other VCs are assholes. If other VCs will discriminate then the company may have trouble raising money and is more likely to fail. This is one of the major the systemic problem.

Her experience is the same. Zero funding is zero funding. Your experience cannot be worse than "received no money" when it comes to raising money. It is a binary outcome.

She's receiving equal treatment.

But she's expecting and explicitly asking for preferential treatment based on the her belief that VCs have promised it.

It could be that these VCs were never intending to offer preferential treatment. Or that they meant that they would offer preferential treatment to black members of the Ivy League. Neither of these answers would be surprising.

Many white male founders have had the exact same story with VCs.

If they were black or women they might have assumed it was a matter of VCs being racist or sexist. But this is probably wrong.

Because of these three attributes, one is not like the others.

"I’m a Black woman, mom of three, and I don’t have an Ivy League degree."

Because, regardless of their own race or gender, VCs are highly connected members of the Ivy League.

VCs don't like poor people for the same reason most rich people don't for thousands of years. They believe that poor people are losers. And why would an investor want to bet on a loser?

That number is wildly inaccurate but even so, it's no doubt very different from the bad old days:

Certain private universities, most notably Harvard, introduced policies which effectively placed a quota on the number of Jews admitted to the university. According to historian David Oshinsky, on writing about Jonas Salk, "Most of the surrounding medical schools (Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Yale) had rigid quotas in place. In 1935 Yale accepted 76 applicants from a pool of 501. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and only five got in." He notes that Dean Milton Winternitz's instructions were remarkably precise: "Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota

Remember that it is not "your" team but that you are just a member of the team, in good standing, with the relevant experience, that is volunteering to take on some additional responsibility.

Focus on the job at hand. Don't get into unnecessary political disputes. You're a tech lead, so keep it technical and focused on solving business problems.

Be kind and understanding of people's personal issues. It's a marathon, not a sprint, so it's fine if people's productivity goes up and down over time. As long as they contribute well over time, there should be no problem.

Make sure people take time off. Burn out sneaks up on people. Taking weeks off regularly is essential.

Do plenty of grunt work yourself, don't pawn it all off.

Write the most documentation and help your teammates write theirs.

Share the credit. Credit the team and individual team members frequently. Point out when people do well.

Downplay failures. Unless a mistake is malicious, you should blame the technology and the processes in place rather than the people involved. Humans make mistakes and it's through technology and process that we avoid them causing damage. Fixing the weakness in your technology or process is what really matters.

Most of all: lead by example. You should be an exemplar team member. Not perfect; no one is. Not an expert in every dimension; no one is. You should simply perform your duties in a way that your teammates could emulate with success.

There are a hundred other things, of course. That's just a few ideas.

Reforming the H-1B to do what it was intended to do would mean eliminating 99% of the visas that are granted.

It turns out that the entire H-1B program has been a massive scam. It was created and promoted by American Big Tech companies to make them money at the expense of American citizens. It's been a trillion dollar theft from lower and middle class Americans into the hands of the 1%.

Without the H-1B in place, these companies would be working to fix America's education system, paying more in salary to workers, and lifting more Americans into the middle class.

The program has been beneficial in many ways but the overall effect has been to use foreigners as a weapon against citizens.

One of the most reprehensible aspects has been the propaganda by the Big Tech companies. They're pretending to care about America's melting pot and helping immigrants, but they're importing primarily the wealthiest immigrants. They're damaging America and other countries at the same time, all in the name of money.

The author seems to have missed the true root cause here here. Which was exposing VNC and NoMachine to the internet in the first place. These services should have been accessed through ssh port forwarding (or using a VPN). Password auth should always be disabled on ssh and keys should be used.

Very few daemons are secure enough to expose to the open internet. OpenSSH is one of the few.

(And, if possible, even network access to ssh should be blocked by the cloud provider's firewall. Access should only be permitted from the user's public IP)

Police are doing a very different job than any other service worker likely to interact with a dog (as I explained in the other comment).

The general public has very little interaction with police officers at all. A random member of the general public should have approximately zero fear of their dog being shot.

The people having their dogs shot are usually doing something to attract the attention of police and/or not being responsible with the care of their dogs.

In other cases police officers are wrongfully shooting dogs. These are almost certainly the minority of cases but clearly this number should be as close to zero as possible. Police officers should be fired and sued in cases of negligence.

There is no equivalence between a meter reader and a police officer's situation. Some subset of police interactions may be similar but many will be very different. A police officer's interaction is much more likely to be heated, urgent, close quarters, and unavoidable. A meter reader can just leave if necessary, which is what they do.

For example, police officers frequently have to enter a home during a domestic dispute with a dog that is riled up due to its owners having a physical altercation.

I think police should have better procedures in place to try to prevent shooting dogs. It definitely happens more than it should.

That said, bites are incredibly dangerous and not something to downplay. This is pure ignorance. No infectious disease doctor is likely to agree that dog bites are always a "minor wound." People are hospitalized, lose limbs, and die from infections caused by bites. Puncture wounds should always be treated by a doctor.

Even a small dog can inflict a dangerous wound. Kicking a dog is a good way to get a bitten on the foot. Restraining a dog without injury is extremely difficult.

Police should employ pepper spray against dogs, or maybe there's a better technology available that they should start using.

But, when there is a legitimate case where a police officer reasonably fears that a dog is about to bite them, they should be be free to shoot. This is basic self-defense against great bodily injury. Every American has this right, not just police.

It's on owners to do their best to prevent police from interacting with their unrestrained dogs. That doesn't mean it's always the owners fault if a police officer is forced to shoot a dog. Sometimes it's just a bad situation and no one is really at fault.

That is cool but now you're relying on some random third-party app developer for your security/privacy. Even if they're good people, there's nothing to stop them from selling it to some jerk that will enable their own apps to bypass it and/or enable other shady developers to bypass it for money.

This kind of software can also be difficult to get right. There may be ways to easily bypass it.

If Google did this, I'd seriously consider going back to Android.

I'd recommend you abandon this idea. What attracts most people to YC is money, connections, and advice. It doesn't sound like you're in a position to offer these things.

If you need help figuring out to work on, Startup School is a good option. Reading Paul Graham's essays on ideas should help. His advice is not all applicable to people outside his bubble but his advice on ideas is excellent.

Choosing the idea is the most critical thing you will do. The difference between an idea that seems good and one that is actually good can be very difficult to determine. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to launch multiple projects and see which gets traction. In any case, the ability to iterate on multiple projects and then multiple versions is a hugely powerful ability.

I'd recommend you focus on solving some problems you have experienced personally. Want a GIF meme generator for your Discord channel? Do that. Or anything regardless of how trivial it is but just focus on making it grow. Worry about the financial aspects after you have learned how to make something succeed. Maybe you will find that your project can't be easily monetized but at least you will learn what market success feels like for the next project. Or you can decide to do only things that might have a good financial outcome, that could work too, but it still would be very good to solve a problem you have experienced.

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html

https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/

"You can write Rust shockingly similar to Go."

This applies in any case where one language is more complex than another. You can write almost any style of any language in C++, for example.

The problem is that every team ends up writing in their own subset of these languages, which means it's impossible to ever really achieve expertise. Each team's definition of the language is different, and no one has worked on every team. Ergo no one in the world is actually a C++ expert at any given company's "version" of C++, even if you know every C++ feature independently. You have to follow the style guide which tells you what subset of the language to use and how to use it. This isn't an insurmountable problem but it is a problem. Rust has the same issue.

With Go, everyone can feel free to use the entire language and every team's code ends up looking and feeling incredibly familiar, making it straightforward to contribute to most parts of any code base.

It's not any particular feature that makes a language a mess. It's the interaction between the features. It's a bit like mixing paint, it's very easy to end up with greyish poop.

Go was designed by very experienced programmers that understood the cost of abstraction and complexity well.

They didn't do an absolutely perfect job. It's probably true that Go would be a better language with a simplified generics implementation, enums, and maybe a bit more. That they erred on the side of simplicity shows how they were thinking. It's an excellent example of less is more.

Most programmers never gain the wisdom and/or confidence to keep things boringly simple. Everyone likes to use cool flashy things because it makes what can be a boring job more interesting.

But if your goal is productivity, and the fun comes from what you accomplish, then the code can be relatively mundane and still be very fun to write.

This is the main issue I have with app security. It would be great if one could deny network access to apps. I would be much more willing to install many apps if I knew they would keep the data local and not be able to send my data to some insecure cloud service for sale to the highest bidder behind my back.

It would be cool if app stores showed which apps require network access and which don't.

They started a fire through mild negligence, denied the fire existed, and only put out the fire when the entire neighborhood started yelling.

It was a forgivable-but-negligent decision to write/approve that code in the first place. It was a sign of a bad process that a reported security vulnerability was not escalated to people security-conscious enough to immediately identify this as a major problem.

I don't agree with the outrage. Anyone who has followed DDG knows they're legit. They just need to do a bit better. They probably will.

Their main feature is privacy. They should be at least as sensitive to privacy vulnerabilities as their most aware users.

DDG should announce that they now pay out privacy-related vulnerabilities like this and send the reporter $5k. It would be good honest PR and well worth the expense.

The only problem I have with this extremist campaign is that it's about controlling other people. Disagreeing with their narrative publicly means risking their attempt at cancelling your livelihood. You couldn't even disagree within an organization safely.

They're not asking nicely. They're not actually asking at all. You either agree with the change or you are branded an Enemy of Progress.

Imagine an employee at a Big Tech Company publicly disagreeing with the change solely for the fact that they don't wish to succumb to bullying. Many nerds have a visceral reaction to bullies.

Paradoxically, these people are forcing others to take actions against their will. They're making themselves masters and making slaves of others.

Exactly.

Just because someone claims something is anti-racist doesn't make it so. Almost all organized evil is done in the name of something good. Look at how laws like the The Patriot Act are named.

The people behind these bans are leftist extremists going after their rightist extremist enemies. Their "good intentions" are paving our path towards hell.

The public square is owned by private companies and they're enforcing anti-first amendment principles. One can't even argue that these banned people can move to another platform if they're all coordinating.

Leftist extremists are effecting public banishment of their rightist extremist opponents.

It wouldn't be as bad if leftist extremists were getting banned at the same time. The problem is that leftist extremists have bullied the mainstream left into extreme action.

American universities sell out their limit capacities to foreign students for huge amounts of money. This forces out huge numbers of American students from attaining the educations they need to get the jobs many H1B workers take.

Space at top American universities is currently a zero sum game by design. Many top universities could easily afford to expand. They choose not to for purely unethical reasons.

And then American tech companies hire these (and more) foreign citizens to avoid the expense of investing in the American education system as well as directly drive salaries and increase employee retention.

And that's not even the worst part. The fact is that big tech companies are almost never using the H1B as intended. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and all of them are hiring (using the H1B) for roles that could in 99% of cases be filled by Americans. It would just drive up costs significantly if foreign workers were not added to the labor pool. The data is all public and plain for anyone to see.

The price of real estate in the Bay Area is also currently a zero sum game.

American tech companies and universities, in conspiracy with corrupt politicians, have betrayed the country that made their existence possible.

Just as all American organizations have an ethical duty to pay taxes, they also have an ethical duty to benefit American citizens above foreign citizens when there is a conflict in their interests.

There is nothing wrong with an ethically oriented "America first" policy. Putting your family first above strangers is perfectly reasonable and good.

And yes, I agree Trump is an unethical incompetent. But his nose for unethical scams is what makes the H1B scam so transparent to him. He has also exploited the H1B scam himself and probably laughed about it with his fellow assholes.

Since I'm disagreeing with the majority here: I have nothing but love and respect for people of all countries. I also happen to disagree with the groupthink on the H1B for reasons that have nothing to do with being bigoted.

1. The H1B is unethical because it intentionally brain-drains countries.

Why is it good for the U.S. to take the most educated (and wealthy) foreigners from their countries? Doesn't this hurt these countries?

2. The H1B is unethical because it advantages large corporations and rich immigrants over small businesses and locals.

Small companies can't generally hire using H1B, so they lose out on the scam. The immigrants are disproportionately the wealthiest people from their countries. By buying expensive educations, their parents are buying them access to the U.S. Rich corporations helping rich people by exploiting others.

3. The H1B is unethical because companies commit fraud using it without consequence.

It's an open secret in the tech world that the H1B (and other visas) are being used to lower costs (through lower salaries, increasing supply, and coerced retention) and not to hire for roles that could not otherwise be filled by locals. This is fraud and yet there is little to no enforcement.

99% of the H1B jobs could all be filled locally. It would just drive up costs for large corporations like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Tesla.

It's actually very insidious the way HN (and Reddit) control what we see though. There is almost no transparency, accountability, or oversight. Moderators make mistakes and we never even know it. We don't know what we don't know. The culture of silicon valley and hacker culture are being manipulated by a small number of employees at a proprietary investment firm. This is very far from ideal even if you do trust the intentions of the current employees.

I'd be in favor of a law that required uncensored free speech on all forums but that also allowed users to opt-in to moderation. Even if 99% of users opted in to moderation it would still leave an escape valve for totally uncensored free thought.

So what if they're the only two black people he knows? And so what if he only gets confused by black people? There is nothing racist about it in any case.

Person A has illiberal views on race but is very good at recognizing black people's faces.

Person B has liberal views on race but is very bad at recognizing black people's faces.

From your point of view: Person A is not apparently racist and person B is a confirmed racist!

This is a good example of how mistaken the illiberal left has become on these issues.

What is currently causing huge divides and limiting progress is the incredibly flagrant accusations of racism where none exists.

There is nothing racist about confusing two people for each other based on them having the same skin tone. A two year old child might do it. This should be enough proof for anyone that the cause is not racism but the brain's pattern recognition system failing.

Accusing someone of racism used to be a serious charge. Now its used by many against anyone who makes any misstep where race is involved. This is diluting the charge the point of meaninglessness which provides cover for actual racism. It also repels people who see through it.

If someone mistakes two blonde people for each other, no reasonable person accuses that person of being bigoted against blondes on that basis. Their brain simply lumped those two people together using an inaccurate heuristic.

A black person without much exposure to asians might have trouble telling asians apart. A white person without much exposure to black people might make the same mistake.

In neither case is there even a hint of racism. Ignorance is not racism. It's perfectly okay not to have exposure to people of any race. Not living in a "melting pot" does not make someone a bad person.

It's also perfectly okay to have a brain that isn't great at distinguishing between people. This is just how human brains are and is nothing to be ashamed of. It is not grounds for guilt. And it's not grounds to accuse anyone of something as serious as racism.

These protests are going to result in the deaths of thousands of people. They are clearly irresponsible during a pandemic. Gathering in large groups with no physical distancing is tantamount to conspiring to commit mass murder.

The problem of racial inequality has existed for "hundreds of years" so why not push the protests back 1 year so it won't unnecessarily cost many people their lives?

There is no reasonable suggestion that police will kill thousands of innocent black people in the next 12 months. There is no actual emergency here that can justify killing thousands of people.

It is incredibly obvious that the urgency here is false. The false urgency is driven by pandemic-related issues like stress and unemployment. Anyone can see how clearly thse protests have become an outlet for a number of issues, only one of which is racial inequality.

It is possible to fully support racial equality, elimination of poverty, and modernization of policing and also believe these protests have been carried out in an incredibly unethical and irresponsible way.

Claiming to support a good cause does not make it okay to inflict death on innocent people.

The ethics are the issue. If protesters were unable to stop the extremists, that would be one thing. They're unwilling and uninterested in stopping them, and that is the ethical issue.

This is exactly the same reason police officers are ethically in the wrong. They could decide that "enough is enough" and push out the "bad apples" among them. Instead, they do nothing. That is their ethical failing.

The protesters (and their supporters) are doing the exact same thing, ethically. They refuse to even attempt to push out the extremists, as evidenced by the widespread rationalization and minimization of their actions.

These are very basic ethical dilemmas. Do you or don't you call out and punish bad actors among your group?

Ancient tribes were generally okay with anyone of their tribe committing any atrocity as long as it was against a member of a foreign tribe.

Civilized people condemn and punish even members of their own tribe and do it even when the victim is a member of a foreign tribe.

Just because you claim it to be false does not make it false. You could be wrong.

So what exactly does someone "deserve" for expressing a contrary opinion?

"This is the kind of thoughts I had when I was 15, I don't even know what to reply to that anymore."

And this is the kind of insult I used until I was 12. Either address the argument or don't. Bless us lesser beings with your wisdom.

"Don't you have the balls to attach your speech to your semi public internet presence"

Pretty easy if all of your opinions are borrowed from others.

If you actually consider every issue for yourself then you're going to need to have discussions/disagreements.

And in modern "leftist" culture it's absolutely not permitted to disagree on certain issues. There is a correct way of thinking and any deviation makes you an enemy. You're either onboard wholesale for everything (making you a second class "ally" if you're out of the relevant racial/gender group) or an enemy.

I want to live in a good world as much as anyone. I have no belief in the superiority of any race or sex. I absolutely would have supported MLK Jr. and I'm fairly certain of this because my parents did and I have a lot in common with them.

And yet I find myself dismayed by the whacky thinking that has infected part of American culture. There is a new world in which racism isn't racism if it's aimed at certain racial groups and violence isn't violence if it's against police or certain racial groups. Permanently destroying people's lives is okay now too, as long as they made some kind of mistake related to a hot issue.

This stuff is insane and totally counter productive. The majority of people are too smart and good to buy into this perverted worldview. Most people are never going to come around to the worldview where it's not-so-bad to kill a police officer that is responding to a break in.

What we should hope to see is a separation process, where the extremist crazy people and ideas are abandoned.

There seems to be a hostage/hijacking situation, where the majority are being cowed/controlled by the extremists, dooming the movements to failure.

An enemy of racial equality couldn't organize better sabotage than what the people involved are seemingly doing on their own.

It's not a false dichotomy. It's an ethical double standard. If you don't live by your own ethics, how can you judge someone else for not living up to them as well?

Police are just people. Protesters are just people. Every one of them has to decide what they will and will not abide.

It's not a matter of protesters not being able to stop the extremists among them. They're not even trying. They don't even want to.

The problem is that most people (including here in these comments) are rationalizing the actions of these extremists, hence the misapplied MLK Jr. quote. This is an implicit endorsement.

A black police officer was killed by extremists. There is serious violence and burning by extremists. These acts are being implicitly endorsed. In the same way Trump implicitly endorses the behavior of his movement's extremists, by not vehemently denouncing it and distancing himself from it.

It doesn't require training or an oath to condemn extremists and seek to exclude them from your movement. It just requires principle.

This principle incriminates the protesters just as much.

There is widespread rationalization and support for the "few bad apples" perpetrating violence/looting/burning/rioting. There is very little condemnation. Lots of quoting MLK Jr. "rioting is the voice of the unheard" and yet MLK Jr. certainly did not practice or advocate violence.

If the protesters can't regulate their own bad apples then how can they judge police for not being able to?

Currently, this is two groups of unethical idiots fighting with each other. With each group's extremists serving to justify the other's extremists.

The outcome is easily predicted. Either the protesters take the ethical high ground or they lose.