masterzora

That said, to a large extent you are correct but you are framing it poorly. One of the major steps of breaking the gender gap is to spend more resources on, not just finding women, but also encouraging women. The net result may be in paying disproportionate amount of attention to the group of women compared to the group of men but it should not imply either of the more obvious ways to interpret "pay less attention to males". That is, it shouldn't involve ignoring men or spending less time with any individual nor should it mean reducing any focus on finding good people regardless of gender. It should involve adding focus on the women, which is substantively different despite the ability to describe it with the same words. It's also not necessarily feasible for everyone but it certainly is for Microsoft, especially with the sort of focus they put on trying to bridge the gender gap.

in a sense, trading any of your company for other companies might be a negative expected value play

In general, insurance is a negative expected value. After all, that's how insurance companies make money: by charging more than they pay out. The key with insurance, however, is that it is purchased to cover a catastrophic event. That is, all the money you pay into it will hopefully be more than the money you get out of it but if you end up needing really expensive medical treatments or your house burns down you need to be able to afford to move forward.

With founders and the "founder failure insurance" there is significantly less of this, though. If you fail you don't get an immediate payout, or even a guaranteed payout, failure is not a catastrophic event (in the sense of needing a lot of money fast) for most, and it's actually possible to do well and make money from this.

Really, a more honest way of describing this is as a bet that you will lose, though that's not a complete picture, either.

Intriguing idea nevertheless and something I'd consider if I were a founder.

This is true, but one of the biggest steps you can take toward fixing the various forms of explicit and implicit sexism in the industry is to hire more women. It's not sufficient, but it is necessary. Moreover, the existence of such programs can be beneficial in the short term, as well. They really only skew significantly problematic if they are willing to compromise on standards in order to meet the goal of hiring more from underrepresented groups but we have no reason to think they are.

That is, think of it another way: the programs exist to provide more opportunities than would otherwise exist but getting in doesn't imply you only got in because you were of a given demographic. You're still being selected for your skill above all else.

In a negative sense, mostly. If it's absolutely a good idea that you know you have the solution for and it doesn't require a ridiculous amount of capital to execute and said execution is fairly straightforward and a sizeable market exists and etc, etc then the only possible conclusion is that you are legitimately close enough to the first one to solve the problem that you can go ahead. But odds are against this being the case so you should assume that it's not and then figure it out from there rather than assume that it is the case and you have an easy business ahead of you. Anything else would just be a bad investment of your time and resources.

That said, you are touching on something I left implicit in my original post. Yes, there is a really small chance that you are the smartest person with the most relevant experience relative to a given problem to approach it. And, if this is the case, that is your valid answer to why you haven't seen someone else do it before. But for most people this is simply not the case and even for the people you are thinking of now as the smartest should assume it isn't the case, at least at first.

If analyzing the situation and doing research legitimately leads you to "I am better/luckier than everyone else who's approached this", good for you because you're off to a great start.

As far as Larry Page goes, a sibling post said that pg, to name one person, had something very similar to PageRank futher driving in the point that you usually can't count on being the first to figure out a solution. But, regardless, it absolutely would have been fair to ask Larry those same questions at the time he was founding Google. No matter how smart you are, due diligence is a key concept.

There are a number of reasons those topics are taboo and, to some degree, maybe should be until further notice. For example, you say "reality is what it is and all the words in the world won't change it" but when the reality in question is the words, actions, and beliefs of people we all know that that statement is categorically false. The wrong words, the wrong discussions, the legitimisation of wrong arguments can all have a disproportionate effect and impede or even reverse some of the progress we've made. For example, it may or may not be the case that the average XY male has an inherently slightly higher propensity for physical strength as compared to the average XX female but any time a study suggests "yes" or "no" the discussions surrounding it greatly exaggerate the potential difference discussed. Especially with the way science is reported today, proof positive of a real difference that is still dwarfed by training would enter the public consciousness as an insurmountable gap that some would take to justify various forms of oppressing women.

Of course, we are talking about science and some people hold the ridiculous belief that the human element doesn't matter and we should just discuss the truth and thus everything above is irrelevant. Except, even if we legitimize that point of view, the truth is: we don't know. The state of the research on real, meaningful, inherent differences is largely inconclusive except for some highly specialized and specific results. For example, it's common knowledge that the best distance runners are disproportionately often Kenyan but this doesn't take into account the relative effect from genetics, environment, and training and it also doesn't imply that being Kenyan makes you better at running. When we look at it we can't say there's a difference between races or nationalities because we don't know that; we just know that some combination of factors has balanced the scales in an interesting fashion. With the exception of certain disease/condition frequencies, this is some of the best data we have for real differences between races or sexes. Generally speaking, even if we could do a study to compare everybody alive now from group A with everybody alive now from group B (say all XY-males with all XX-females) and properly accounted for other variables and measured a real difference we still have no way of knowing where the differences come from as far as "nature" or "nurture" goes.

Furthermore, there are adequate studies suggesting that, regardless of natural tendencies, the environmental/training effect can be greatly affected just by the simple act of telling someone they can or cannot do something or fit some role. That is, it might be the case that American XY-males today are better (by whatever quantitative measure) at math and science than American XX-females today strictly by environmental factors and that by repeating "men are better at math than women" we are exacerbating and continuing this problem.

Now, all this said, it shouldn't be the case that all differences are strictly off-limits since, for example, there is a high incidence of lactose intolerance among south Asians and an incredibly low incidence among northern Europeans so menus for both groups absent other information would likely have necessary differences. And, given an equal society with a different mind towards things data on other differences might be interesting. But, widely speaking, discussions on potential differences is necessarily an area of little to no information and has high potential to be actively harmful to society.

Citizen Kane gets a lot of rightful attention for being historic and groundbreaking in a number of ways, especially by people who have never seen it. Unfortunately, despite often being conflated, "groundbreaking" and "good" are not really the same thing. Now, don't get me wrong, Citizen Kane is a fine film and still worth watching today. But divorce it from its historic role and consider modern audiences. Think about what it would be like if released today. At best it would be critically-acclaimed and lauded by a small audience without ever seeing mainstream appeal, much as Firefly has.

Now, granted, I haven't gone a single shred toward showing that Firefly is actually any better than Citizen Kane though I have gone some way to putting them on roughly the same level. And Firefly has more explosions and space zombies making it more watchable for many people today.

Is Firefly really better than Citizen Kane? It will never be widely thought so by critics but I can definitely see an argument where it is better for modern audiences and I really think that's what matters at the end of the day.

But, seriously, whether they should be or not the fact is Pandora is hosting sensitive information and they need to act like it. They shouldn't need to lock it down like Fort Knox, sure, but password hashing is considered a bare minimum these days.

Except, oh wait, even people on HN don't always follow best practices because they can be fucking hard sometimes. And that's before we get into the support email I got from a 90-year old user that consisted entirely of the subject line "WHAT IS PASSWORD".

I will guarantee you that somebody with access to every Pandora user's username and password will be able to access multiple bank accounts (or worse) within a short time period even though Pandora itself is a key example of a minimum-damages service.

Also, be very careful about sentences like "The middle class has a culture of spending most money as soon as you earn it." There are certainly parts of the middle class that are like this. We all know the concept of keeping up with the Joneses and overextending credit in an attempt to do so. However, there are also large parts of the middle class (and, again, the lower class you so ignore) where it's not "culture" it's "necessity". Sure, maybe some could survive on 20% less but at the cost of things you might take for granted--living in a safe neighborhood, eating healthy food, or having health insurance. But, no, surely it's just a culture of unnecessary spending.

It may not have been your intended message, but it's certainly the one that comes across.

With regards to #1, hilariously that's one of the problems that this sort of single-sign-on is supposed to solve.

Despite believing downvotes exist as a means of labeling content as not belonging here I hate when people delete their comments in response to any number of downvotes. Generally speaking, once you've added your comment it's become a part of the history of the discussion and I don't like said history being removed. Further, while I could see a certain nobility in people removing a comment because they see the community says it doesn't belong, most people doing so just don't want to harm their Imaginary Internet Point total and I have a strong distaste for people who put too much stock into that number.

I know it's a small point to make but it seems the gp covered most everything else.

1. It discusses the odds that somebody on the plain has their phone on. As someone who frequently flies with his phone on, I can attest I have yet to die in a plane crash. However, it doesn't necessarily follow that a relatively small number of us rule breakers imply complete safety if the rule is removed. I'd be willing to bet that there hasn't been a flight where every single person had their phone on let alone with airplane mode off. I don't think even this would be an issue on modern planes but it's still silly to claim "a few phones is okay" to "a few hundred phones is okay" without further connecting evidence.

2. In today's terrorist-focused air world it seems implausible that the rule would be handled so casually, especially given criticism of the rule, when they would likely be insistent about this potential terrorist weapon. The prototypical terrorist specter that modern security theater seems so concerned with would love nothing better than a magic electronic box that could take down a plane as easily as some suggest.

3. The focus on safety as the cause seems to ignore other effects. In particular they've created a system that handily avoids people talking loudly on their cell phones for the entire flight. I would not be surprised if they'd keep the rule in the face of conclusive proof on the safety of cell phones just because of this effect.

But, seriously, I'm not one of those "HN is totally going downhill" people but I'm annoyed by most posts like this. I don't mean ones about fashion and not tech (the fact that this isn't strictly a "tech" site is a discussion for another day) but rather things that would have made perfectly servicable comments becoming their own submissions. I understand why people do it (more exposure for their message, more exposure for their blog) but I really think it dilutes the experience. It dilutes the discussion by forcing you to check multiple places for updates. It dilutes the front page by using multiple slots for the same discussion instead of having as many different discussions as possible. And it dilutes interest by repeatedly shoving the same topic in front of your face.

Before we have another one of these types of replies can we please just stop and think "does this need to be its own submission or is it really a comment in disguise?"

That said, at the end of the day scientists win when they can make statistically viable predictions and politicians win when people like what they've done so it's not as if they're exactly the same. But the engineer-type tendency to reduce this to your simple one-liner hurts far more than it helps.

Other intrinsic problems arise even sticking with the photon idea but hopefully this is enough of something to latch onto to help you start to understand.

More to the point, however, is that I was presenting a spectrum, with the-only-thing-worse-is-to-bomb-the-office bad on one end and about-as-well-as-leaving-early-can-end-without-bribing-everyone good on the other end and suggesting that bridges would really only expect to be burned near the worse end of the spectrum.

Or, even more of a key point, we only have a fragment of a second-hand telling of a single account of an interaction that really doesn't mean a whole lot and yet people still see the need to take sides and attack one party or the other from this position. This is so many levels of ridiculous that I couldn't help but try to inject some perspective.