_pius

Yet another strawman. We haven't even gotten to the details yet; remarkably, you've argued against increasing the pool of qualified applicants, on principle.

Referral networks are great for Silicon Valley startups

And another strawman! I never claimed referral networks are bad for startups. But those networks also tend to miss large swaths of qualified potential hires. You yourself admitted that eventually those networks get tapped out.

Meanwhile ... is the applicant pool a function of the current employees or not? If not, why are referrals an advantage? In one breath, the claim makes "no sense" to you, but in the next, that fact is a "huge advantage."

You don't seem to be familiar with how hiring works.

Referrals are a thing, for instance. Job openings tend to get shared within the networks of employees.

I'm honestly amazed that this is a point of debate.

Utter strawman. The pool of applicants for any given job is largely a function of the people who've already been hired. This startup is providing a tool for counteracting that selection bias. It isn't "discrimination" to strive for the broadest possible pool of qualified candidates.

Rather than running an API server 24/7, you can write your API as a set of functions that cost you money only when they're actually invoked.

None needed. I refuted you with the very first thing I said; the Rooney Rule isn't a hiring preference. Yet you've blithely continued to assert this and other falsehoods all across the thread.

In fact, you said: "To quickly sum up my thoughts on why it is essentially a quota in practice: If you do not hire more marginalized groups, you'll be accused of not honoring the Rooney Rule."

Well, that's just something you made up ... and it turns out to be completely false. There's actual data about how organizations have fared in implementing the policy. No need to rely on opinions from random White Pride concern trolls sea-lioning discussions on Hacker News.

Moreover, it's absurd to imply that an organization can't improve its process without exposing itself to liability. The Rooney Rule is a simple, effective way to ameliorate the selection bias that exists in many hiring processes: no more, no less. That's a far cry from your claim that implementing the Rooney Rule is some admission of liability. You literally don't know what you're talking about ... or are pretending not to.

There's no point in engaging with someone who's being willfully obtuse and that goes double for anonymous, pseudo-intellectual, race-baiting trolls.

Why? Soylent's just another proprietary product.

Hey, you said it, not me.

No. The NFL has been using the Rooney Rule for quite some time.

Otherwise they weren't being systematically ignored for consideration.

You keep using EEO in your argument. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Running the "real" process without any minority candidates and then throwing a patsy in at the end isn't good faith.

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

Of course the invention of representations like written language, equations, and graphs changed the way people think. It's just hard to see at first because you've grown up immersed in them.

This part's a definite yes ... even a squatter can get tenant rights by staying somewhere long enough.

The OP, however, is quite good. In a nutshell, it argues that (1) disruption theory assumes rational actors and (2) consumers are much less rational than businesses.

Just as a heads up, you can edit your comments within a certain window of time.

You're making a fallacious, reductionist argument. Looks like a misreading of Peter Singer.

I imagine you'd also criticize someone for showing a homeless family to the nearest shelter because in that time the person could have signed up for Watsi!*

* ... and this is coming from someone who donates to Watsi every month.

I'm sorry, but this is really bad advice for engineers graduating from MIT in 2015 and predisposed to starting a new company.

You have your whole career to settle into a big corporate job for a long stretch; why do that right out of college? An entrepreneurial software engineer graduating from anywhere, let alone MIT, should almost certainly move to San Francisco after college and start or join a startup. If it doesn't work out, they'll find themselves looking for a job in an extremely favorable market.

Letting assumptions about what's "easier" cow you into taking some job for five years is no way to live, certainly not for a recent MIT grad with the most highly sought after skill set in the world.

That's completely false. AI winter wasn't about AI research being "essentially paused" but about AI startups becoming essentially non-fundable. It was backlash to the intense hype that surrounded the category.

An intuitive explanation is that if the contestant picks a goat (2 of 3 doors) the contestant will win the car by switching as the other goat can no longer be picked, while if the contestant picks the car (1 of 3 doors) the contestant will not win the car by switching. The fact that the host subsequently reveals a goat in one of the unchosen doors changes nothing about the initial probability.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

http://philip.greenspun.com/tcl/

http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/