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Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

The only thing truly embarrassing is that nobody at YC advised them that this ad is 1) terribly amateur and 2) has the chance to look extremely bad. Did not advise and in fact published to their feed. Weird optics, I am not familiar with what I presume to be Indian factories, other than the wild lack of safety (thanks youtube) but I cannot see how this video does anything positive.

As for the product itself I don't think it is unusual, these types of measurement systems are not new and can be helpful for a factory, like all things, it boils down to the owner/managers of said factory not the tool.

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> like all things, it boils down to the owner/managers of said factory not the tool.

Tools are created and optimised for a purpose. If you gouge someone’s eye out with chopsticks or a spoon, their inventors are hardly at fault. If you kill a bunch of people with an AK-47, its inventor doesn’t get a free pass.¹

These guys clearly built this tool to crack down on factory workers. They aren’t excused when managers use their tool for the thing it was made for.

¹ https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/13/262096410...

A more apt example would have been Nobel with TNT, as it has more legitimate purposes. This software could be used legitimately.

And yet Nobel was so upset about his legacy of being the explosives guy for WW1, we still reward scientists with money and an award from him.

Yes, that's my point

Your point is mooted. I’m both cases, an invention has far more potential negative applications than positive ones.

How is it moot? TNT was a massive safety boost for the mining industry. The negative uses were developed/adopted after it was invented.

"an invention has far more potential negative applications than positive ones."

Emphasis mine. Do you mean to say all inventions have more potential negative uses? Even say a toothbrush? I suppose that could be true, but then you have to look at magnitude of impact and rate of occurrence to see that the potential negative uses like stabbing someone is low.

No, I was referring to dynamite and to the startup at the center of this controversy.

> This software could be used legitimately.

But it wasn’t designed to, which is the point. The creators had a specific goal in mind, and that goal is exploiting factory workers to the benefit of the owners. This is clear from their written words and video. Like with any tool, the goal influences the design and the design influences how people use it.

Seems like management could use the tool to reward high performers. It's all about how it's used.

I think people are thrown off by the Indian work culture shown in the video, which is very hierarchical and frequently involves parent-like scolding. That said, I think that culture is horrible and should be eliminated.

I worked at an Indian consulting firm as the only American and experienced this firsthand.

It’s pretty wild when you witness that stuff after working in “traditional American tech companies” your entire career. That and the absolute abuse of metrics like story points for all kinds of things ranging from financial reporting to employee performance evaluation.

It’s fucking wild. Makes you really appreciate how good some places can be.

Why do you consider the use of story points for those 2 cases "abuse of metrics"?

Many parts of India have a much more chilled out approach to work. The work experience that you describe is much common in North Indian companies or where North Indians are managers. Looking at the names of these kids it seems to be the case as well.

saw someone point out how they could have framed it as a way to reward good workers, but instead they showed how they can go after people underperforming. Just bad framing and shows how out of touch they are

If we're being real here: it's excellent framing for their customers who very likely does this but slower (and with an equal amount of empathy). The framing is excellent in terms of the basics of pitching: know your audience identify bottlenecks, present a solution to remove bottlenecks, and clearly demonstrate how.

The optics of presenting this in a public domain full of people who relate more to the factory worker than the middle manager is indeed tonedeaf, though.

Are factory managers that dumb that they can't figure out what its actually for?

Out of touch? The people offended by this are not their target customers. I imagine there are far fewer managers sitting around thinking, "I need a way to identify my good workers so I can reward them" than managers thinking, "I need a way to tell when my workers are not working."

If anyone is reading from YC, I'm happy to review their submissions, I was perhaps the first who raised concerns and was on top of the thread with my comment.

(See this post I made on LinkedIn about this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/crufter_today-y-combinator-de...)

I haven't read the details or watched the video, but it does sound like you noticed something that should not have been there.

I noticed that your page says this:

> New: the thread "Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers" on Hacker News got removed from the front page despite having 242 points.

The thread fell in rank because it set off a software penalty called the flamewar detector. We haven't taken any moderator action or touched it in any way. Our usual practice is to downweight shallow outrage posts (because they're not what the site is for), but we haven't done so in this case, because we have a core rule of moderating less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is in a story. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...)

If you want to be fair, you could add that information. Otherwise, readers will assume you mean that we nefariously censor negative posts about YC, when the truth is the opposite.

Edit: after I posted this, I noticed that the thread said [flagged] at the top. That's because users flagged it—as they usually do with shallow outrage threads. However, I've turned the flags off in keeping with the rule I just mentioned.

> If you want to be fair, you could add that information. Otherwise, readers will assume you mean that we nefariously censor negative posts about YC, when the truth is the opposite.

I'll do that, sure! Dang, I have deep respect for both you and HN for many-many reasons (HN literally changed my life and made it 1000x). So don't take this as me having a grudge. I just like accountability.

> but it does sound like you noticed something that should not have been there.

I don't follow this, sorry.

Thanks! I appreciate the kind reply—a nice change from how these things usually go. And I'm grateful to hear that you feel that way about HN. (What you say about how it changed your life is true in my case too, which is one reason why I'm doing this job.)

> I don't follow this, sorry.

Oh, I just meant that it sounds like you spotted something (the video in this case, I assume) that should not have been on an official YC launch page. I was being careful with my wording because I haven't looked at any of the details and haven't myself seen the video—I'm only going by the reactions that people are having to it.

Believe it or not, founders don't run every single thing they do by the YC partners!

> Believe it or not, nobody suggested you need to run everything by a partner!

Believe it or not, nobody suggested you need to run everything by a partner! I would expect someone to at least watch a video once before posting it in a congratulatory post on YC's feed. It is not a criticism of startup culture but watching that video I genuinely question how far quality has fallen?

I don’t think it’s fallen, I think they just repost press releases and 99.9% of the time it’s uneventful.

Still, did no one watch the press release video upstream of this post? Either they are posting garbage press releases without really reviewing the content, or (worse) one or multiple people genuinely saw no problem with it.

I’d bet on the first. I don’t think it’s really that problematic, that’s just HNs reactive group political leaning that we all saw in regards to PGs last essay, but it is extremely poorly-shot.

You’d have to be pretty extreme to watch that video and come to the conclusion in the title of this thread. You would only need to have ever seen video before to be like “man these guys didn’t even just google ‘videography tips’”.

Sure, but it seems like this was posted to (and now deleted from) the @ycombinator X account with a "Congrats on the launch!" message.

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