So, no, guelo, there isn't. :)
-24 karma · joined January 14, 2015
For instance, discussion of the motivations of Sam Altman in creating this suggestion-guideline: is he lashing out after the negative reaction to his bubble essay?
That's insulting! It's also fair game!
You can argue that as a statement it's inaccurate, given what you know or believe, but I hope you understand that that kind of statement is exactly the sort of negativity this thing seems designed to prohibit.
We can't even begin if people demolish all introspective criticism.
>We disagree that insults are ever necessary.
There's insults like "fuckface" and "idiot," and there's "You're nothing more than a rich white guy whose money makes him feel like his opinions shouldn't be criticized."
Personally I find the second more insulting. Basic namecalling isn't really my concern here as something worth defending. Describing the factual nature of someone's motivations and political manipulation is another matter.
(No shit it'd be insulting and inflammatory. Sometimes that's what the community deserves, and to believe otherwise is to believe in human perfection!)
This is exactly the kind of thinking that becomes prevalent in the atmosphere towards negativity engendered by HN.
Meanwhile the cloaked negativity where you're thinking cutting criticism but maintain a polite facade runs rampant. That's the toxicity I worry about.
When negativity becomes forbidden, it is only those with power whose negativity gets heard. They (read: you, Sam) only have to sit through negativity that's phrased appropriate to their 'position.'
This is a non-rule anyway. Suggestions aren't going to make the next gender hellhole thread any less toxic.
> Gentle reminders by peers are the best way we know to make the culture better.
Consider this a gentle reminder that you're trying to control the tone of conversations that can't be both polite and honest; it won't work, but that doesn't make you less of a meddling, controlling asshole for trying.
This is a setback for Dart and Dart's mission statement, and everyone knows it, and everyone also knows it's been a long time coming.
Think of it as advocating for all work to be paid more. Those people doing "real work for a living" should be being paid enough to live comfortably.
Workers don't actually owe financial sacrifice to the machine because they feel bad about other workers that get paid less. The politics of your loyalty is somewhat misplaced: out of loyalty to other workers, you want the corporate structure to benefit?
Money paid as salary to employees goes towards useful things like housing and childhood education and food. All across the board.
Or, to put it more delicately: suck as much money from the greedy bastards as you can. They're trying to do the same to you anyway.
I suppose that's exactly the 'us vs them' mentality you're worried about, but for the most part programmers aren't real money. Yeah, you might find it easy to buy a house or two, but real money has a million as the lowest denomination bill.
Being unable to joke about it, however, is stifling. The reaction to clamp down on the joke suggests that suicide is something normal people don't do.
I don't think you have any understanding of what the situation on the ground was like.
1. What, do you think putting "Don't give up" on a poster in Swartz's office would have helped?
2. In a chess game, you can sacrifice the queen without blinking, but in real life the decision might not be cold and you don't get to make it into a cold decision if you're in the situation.
3. Spoken like someone who will never, ever take a risk or a stand on principle. What you saw was the actions of someone thinking it through! This I think is where your arrogance is most evident, in that you're evaluating someone's strategy in a calm environment without any display of understanding of the pressure the situation creates.
4. You seriously think Aaron didn't fight? You just think he should have fought more? What a nice little opinion you have.
But I'll play along. I'll be taking Starfighter in a new direction. Most notably, we'll be reorganizing how we react to online discussion. Anonymous critics will be summarily executed unless we cannot identify them, in which case they shall merely be barred from Starfighter for life, which, if you believe our marketing department (AND AS CEO I DO IN FACT I'M SORRY I IMPLIED IT WAS POSSIBLE TO DOUBT THEIR CLAIMS), will make it very difficult for them to find work in the hiring utopia that is the post-Starfighter process.
>most of the people who participate aren't going to be looking for a job when they do.
This is weird, and I'm sensing some miscommunication between you and patio.
I'm only hearing about this as a tool for proving my worth. Your major marketing (as far as I'll likely ever be aware) has CAREER CAREER CAREER stamped all over it.
People won't follow the honor system if the stakes are at the 'career' level. You're losing the 'fun and free' culture of Microcorruption that makes people spend their free time building fun tools.
Your understanding of the incentives differ from the incentives that have been communicated to me about Starfighter.
Perhaps what you're saying is true in that universities have a financing division, but my point is that this isn't a case of university. The focus is on how they're going to make money as middlemen (and dwarves will sing about their riches), not how their business is subservient to their idealistic educational aims.
If you feel that it is an accusation or a criticism, I would suggest that indicates something unrealistic in how you view business negotiations.
As patio said, this is a trade between interested parties. Generosity is therefore expected to be limited.
---
Fair enough. I just wanted it on record that this is a business transaction for you, not a generous educational endeavor.
Some people want to pretend that they're in it to make the world a better place when that's not truly their absolute top priority. They're probably asking "Why can't it be both?" when I say that this is business, not generosity.
One simply can't have multiple top priorities, particularly with profit and generosity; generosity is practically defined as something that doesn't profit. Something like one of your (patio's) blog posts are given generously in that there is no formal expectation/obligation on a reader to 'give back' some asset, for instance.
Thank you for your clarification.
By this I mean, the article uses some creepy language as only a company enthusiastic about its power to broker reputation can.
>>We can tell you exactly what happened when your candidates tried to implement a REST API.
What, are you going to keep a record of the time I fiddled with it for an afternoon and then use that to disqualify me from a job?
You say elsewhere about MicroCorruption:
>Microcorruption player identities were totally private. There's no way for a recruiter to look someone up, unless they used a very-identifiable username.
Sounds like a good starting point, but what if I don't want my report card stored and used to compare with other people? What if I don't want to feel like my performance is owned by you?
>>We assess for skill first, passively as players play our games and then actively. Our founders — talented technologists — personally reconstruct candidates’ solutions and evaluate them.
If I don't have any control over how and when my information is going to be monitored, I'm forced into an ugly position where I have to treat the whole thing as part of my career and perform competitively. The sense of relaxed exploration is killed, the idea of treating it like a college course or project isn't viable, and honestly I begin to resent the project.
Alternatively, I play on an anonymous account, and then if I decide to use my information about me in a professional setting, I'm best served by creating a new account and just redoing everything.
Edit: I should say that the idea really excites me and I'd love to learn in this format.
>Considering this guy was recently fired, I wouldn't want to speak directly to him if I were her.
Did you know that she responded directly to his comment on HN? (See here)[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399047].
Adria portrays herself as a fearless crusader against injustice. She has failed in this portrayal in several ways and appeared opportunistic and hypocritical.
Would you be willing to admit there's 'no foul play' in that failure? I don't know if I'd go that far, because my point is more about the nature of the court of public opinion than it is trying to assign blame.
>Facing down this king of online scrutiny and doubt of your motives is exactly why women tend to keep quite about this kind of stuff
It's a problem, sure, but the court of public opinion is extremely volatile and doesn't like being misled, which is part of why it's considered a 'nuclear option'. Adria deliberately used that option and it backfired. This is not doubt of her motives, it's a plain reading of her account of events.
How can you protect someone that chooses to engage in a game of social russian roulette? How can you protect someone that then pulls the trigger six times? You can't, and now Adria is jobless while Hank has a new job. And it's sad and really unfortunate that things have worked out that way for her.
I haven't been trying to make a point like "Adria deserved it" though you probably heard that, and there's an "unfair" amount of that going around (though it's not foul by the rules of the story-telling game you're describing, right?).
There simply isn't anything to be done about mob justice except be aware that it will betray you for the slightest infraction.
...I've been tracing back through the beginning of this conversation, because I was focusing on where exactly I think Adria made a significant mistake "in the eyes of the court" and I wanted to make sure we were still topical.
>>But if you believe that her actions were about "PR and a personal agenda" then I think you'd also have to agree that "Hank"'s apology was just as much about "PR and a personal agenda".
I don't disagree actually with that statement in isolation, but I think you're missing the point here. When they say things are about "PR and a personal agenda," what they mean is there's a sense of dishonesty detected. You can shape the narrative, but get caught distorting it and the mob pounces.
Asking someone to bear false witness is not comparable to posting as a throwaway.
And in any case, your logic of narrative control is contradictory: Adria was trying to override Hank's control over how his story was told. She didn't ask him publicly, she went through back channels to his previous employer for social leverage.
Hank is allowed to try to control how his story was told. Adria tried to interfere with that right.
I hope you explain yourself, because from what I can tell, you're attempting something ugly.
I think it is quite likely that Gundotra is a sleazy slimeball and Google has covered its ass by trying its best to ignore the complaint. He should probably be fired and Google should never be allowed to pretend it doesn't have a sexist culture.
However: I do not think that things are as simple as declaring the rules of a "work environment" and enforcing them.
After-hours events or company vacations can be considered work environments, but they're also deliberate attempts to escape the work environment. If you extend the logic of standardizing all work environments, what you might find is that it's simply inappropriate to be around coworkers in sexualized situations. (And if you don't think bathing suits are designed to sexualize bodies, I'm not sure where you're drawing the line.)
Edit: Perhaps I should make it clear that I find nothing inconsistent in demanding that work events be completely professional, that all corporate interaction be sterile, and that's basically what I expect from my employer. No booze cruises. No getaways to beach locations. No employee dating whatsoever, not even a hint of acceptability for that kind of relationship.
I just don't know that this is a realistic expectation, and I don't trust anyone that is certain of a solution. Sometimes problems cannot be solved and we can only punish who we can punish and move on.
I just don't think this place can handle the divisive nature of the passion inherent to the subject.
And it's not like any forum really can, as Aloisius says.
What's so wrong with dispassionately noting that this topic is going to be a toxic flame war?
It's odd that you think Paul Graham's writing is only worshipped here. There's criticism, too.
The halo effect around YC is a form of delusion. Person making important gut-based decisions about people's lives gets criticized for publicly announcing her own competence. Why is that appalling?
It's either hubristic or it's empty in content, in that we know the promise the future might hold. Technology has been promising us the world for a while now, but what we've gotten has actually been a shift towards dystopia. Yeah, the future might be a paradise where you can virtually travel to see relatives in Guam while also learning to cross-stitch, but Silicon Valley thinking currently presents us with ad-infested crapware.
We don't actually need more cheerleading.
The kind of people that write this kind of article aren't the kind of people that are actually working against the threats these writers want to ignore.
He was just a kid, for one, and in the Valley, "socialized" doesn't mean respectable, it means "willing to appear to toe the party line."