16 ms·

What I Didn't Say

• tptacek 13y ago
  I apologize. I took it on faith that when The Information said they were running a "complete interview" with you, that it was in fact both complete and an actual interview. It seems very clear how this piece misrepresented you; the entire elided question you cite is particularly damning. I retain some of my misgivings (which have much more to do with the industry than with YC), but the "interview" clearly wasn't a good lens through which to consider them. I was nevertheless ready to do that too quickly, so the fault is as much mine as the magazine's.
  • sillysaurus2 13y ago
    It's a little scary how powerful newspapers are at shaping public opinion. At least their reputation will be irreversibly damaged by breaking people's trust.
    • pdonis 13y ago
      At least their reputation will be irreversibly damaged by breaking people's trust. I would love it if this were true, but I think it's way too optimistic.
      • skylan_q 13y ago
        It's not reputation that makes the media successful at programming people. It's the repetition and omnipresence of the repetition.
    • kordless 13y ago
      I don't think it's so much about shaping public opinion as it is playing up people's fears. The threat of discrimination is still present in our society and is a very important topic across multiple demographics. You can't blame someone for feeling strongly about something they fear. However, journalists who write in a blaming tone to play to these fears should be blamed for mislaying trust instead of being lauded for raising awareness. Nitasha Tiku made several negative blaming statements in her story. The one that stuck out to me as an obvious tell of a blaming statement was "That archetype, of course, is usually attached to a penis." In all fairness, I don't think that anyone wants to be addressed via 'being attached' to their private parts. Here's a link on NVC if anyone is interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication. It's powerful stuff.
    • Confusion 13y ago
      What everyone should, once again, learn from this is that you cannot take anything you read or hear at face value. Not even from people you trust, because things may be misrepresented by accident. Often it doesn't really matter, but if you get emotional about a subject and wish to comment on it, you should better be sure you have the facts straight and always temper your responses based on the possibility you don't know everything.
  • toomuchtodo 13y ago
    I'm impressed with both your response as well as pg's. Definitely refreshing to not see the pitchforks come out for everyone.
    • tptacek 13y ago
      Thank you, but it's sad that the bar is so low on "impressive".
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  • po 13y ago
    I had high hopes for The Information that their business model would lead to better quality reporting… Their page states: The Information recently sat down with Mr. Graham. We covered a wide range of topics including “mass producing” startups, Mr. Graham’s controversial statements on founder accents, his wife and YC's secret weapon Jessica Livingston (link) and some little-known stories about YC alum Airbnb. https://www.theinformation.com/YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete-Interview https://www.theinformation.com/YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete... …which implies that it was a formal interview. I don't have a subscription but something still doesn't quite mesh there. If I were PG I would be writing to them to demand that they change that lead-in to the story. edit: Another part of this saga that stands out to me is how very few people commenting on it actually have a subscription to the supposedly first hand source at The Information. It was a bit strange that we had a scandal caused by a news report about a news report that most people don't have access to.
    • aaronem 13y ago
      > I had high hopes for The Information that their business model would lead to better quality reporting The only differences between The Information and The Register [1] are that the latter acknowledges its tabloid nature, and lacks the breathtaking presumption to peddle its tripe for four hundred dollars a year. [1] http://theregister.co.uk http://theregister.co.uk
  • Tycho 13y ago
    I'm really pleased to see someone make an apology. No idea what you personally said, I'm sure it was very far from the worst, but I clicked on this thread with my comment already formulated, questioning whether anyone would actually apologise and, well, was pleasantly surprised given how these things usually go.
  • jordo37 13y ago
    I want to echo what tptacek is saying here, though I didn't write much here on HN about the issue. I have been talking with colleagues and friends and the comments in the article seemed well intentioned but a little tone deaf. I am relieved to hear not only that they were false, but also that PG and YC are actively working at some of the misgivings I share concerning our industry.
• gkoberger 13y ago
  I wonder why pg did an interview for a site that was going to go behind an (expensive) paywall and was going to be edited. I know that "fixing journalism" is something pg would like to see[1], and (pg, sorry to put words in your mouth here) maybe he felt a for-pay site aiming for quality journalism was the answer? But it still seems weird he did this interview. EDIT: I did read the article and know he was allegedly tricked, but my questions still stand. It was a long interview to just be a background about Jessica, and it was for a profile using the YC name to get $400 subscriptions. If they lied about the reasoning and then edited his words to say something completely different, I would have thought he'd be more outraged. [1] http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html (see #3)
  • jl 13y ago
    Paul talked to the reporter about me (for the profile being written) before The Information had launched. Neither of us knew it would be behind a paywall.
    • gkoberger 13y ago
      Thanks for the clarification. The paywall was my main curiosity. Was/will the profile ever be published? EDIT: Found it: https://www.theinformation.com/When-Founders-Fight-They-Call-Jessica-Livingston https://www.theinformation.com/When-Founders-Fight-They-Call...
  • macleanjr 13y ago
    If you read his essay, he states that this wasn't an "interview", the reporter was doing background for another story on Jessica. It was never intended to be an interview.
    • pdonis 13y ago
      Which makes the fact that the material was published as if it had been an interview, without any explanation of the actual circumstances, particularly bothersome IMO.
• tomasien 13y ago
  Are you still going to write about women founders? I 100% take you on your word about all of this, but that I still think a lot of the things you said were off the mark in understandable but important ways[1]. You're obviously well meaning and thoughtful and I think it would be great to read more about your thoughts, although I know you'd prefer to avoid the shitstorm that would follow (no matter how well reasoned your arguments would be) 1 - Most notably, as a gatekeeper in startup culture (<- this seems to be causing confusion: not a gatekeeper to doing a startup, but a gatekeeper to YC which can often be important in succeeding as a startup in my and many other people's opinions), it seems pretty willfully ignorant to assume that you'd know if you were biased against female founders because if you missed some you'd know. If women are a group that starts on the outside to, as a gatekeeper you'd need more than that to know if you're keeping the gates properly, since we it'd be pretty hard to argue the system as a whole isn't a boys club.
  • spindritf 13y ago
    There are no gatekeepers in the startup culture. How would that even work? Would pg deny you a business license? Stop you from getting a VPS? Remotely invalidate your copy of The Art of Computer Programming?
    • tomasien 13y ago
      Not PG specifically, but unless you operate on the premise that getting into YC does nothing to help your startup OR that YC's acceptance processes are flawless (two assertions I'm 100% certain PG would not make) then there is a layer of gatekeeperdome inherit in what YC does. I would personally argue it's a large one, but it certainly IS one.
      • spindritf 13y ago
        For that to be true, YC would need to be the only early investor around. Even then, not getting a boost from pg is hardly gatekeeping.
      • tomasien 13y ago
• bambax 13y ago
  > whether we could, in effect, accept women we would have accepted if they had been hackers "wouldn't"?
  • gingerlime 13y ago
    It is a confusing sentence, but I think it's correct. I think it would be clearer if it said "whether we could, in effect, accept women (who are not hackers) we would have accepted if they had been hackers" The stuff I added in brackets is implied. The main question is accepting women who are not hackers, as if they were, given the (challenged) assumption that you can turn them into hackers in YC.
    • bambax 13y ago
      You may be right but if you are, it means being a hacker is a (necessary) criterium of the YC's approval process: is it?
      • pdonis 13y ago
        is it? It is if you are seeking funding for a startup based on hacking. The context in the article makes it clear that this condition was implied.
• crassus 13y ago
  At the heart of the matter is that witch-burnings are popular (turn into clicks) and that Gawker has a witch quota to keep up. I'm glad to see such a thorough, intelligent reply from PG. He is extremely careful and precise in his language, without coming across as robotic or inhuman. It's impressive. But this kind of thing is going to continue to happen. There is no market for taking an honest man at his word without reading subtext into it. The opinion ecosystem is a cesspool of the worst pieces of humanity. "Reporting" on Silicon Valley from the east coast would be hubristic and a folly if the organs involved had any intention of doing so honestly. PG is fortunate that he is self-employed which provides some barrier against the power of the easily-offended. Somehow the talkers have gained power over the doers, and it is wrong. We live in a time when a person lower in an organization could easily find himself out of a job for an off-handed remark. Teddy Roosevelt most eloquently described what is wrong with Gawker: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
  • davidp 13y ago
    > The talkers have gained power over the doers, and it is wrong. Somehow critics have grown in power to be able to extract punishment and concessions from people actually on the ground. Agreed, although I don't think it's the talkers vs. the doers; it's the talkers' audiences vs. the doers. Here's your "somehow": The lack of critical thinking skills in the general population (not new), combined with the power of instant global communication (new). The lack of critical thinking skills leads people to seek absolutes, simplicity, and swift action in areas where shades of gray, nuance, and care should be called for. Again, nothing new here: mob justice is a well-understood, if regrettable, characteristic of human society. Instant global communication much more swiftly connects 1) the easily-manipulated with 2) those who lack experience and maturity but who nevertheless possess the gift of persuasion. In short, I blame the listeners, not the talkers. It would be a Good Thing(tm) if people were generally more skeptical of everything they heard and read, and even better if they knew how to ask the right questions to resolve that skepticism. It would make it harder for unworthy critics to hold power, and easier for worthy ones to be heard. Here's another quote, from Joseph de Maistre: "Every nation gets the government it deserves." A similar thing could be said for culture and civil society.
• yo-mf 13y ago
  Truly unfortunate all around. PG getting slammed from every direction. Jessica Lessin's new venture gets a black eye for shoddy journalistic standards. Lots of invective going around for what appears to be liberties of interpretation. And of all of this, I am not sure this really does anything to address the very serious topic on the imbalance of men to women in technology jobs.
  • actsasbuffoon 13y ago
    That's my biggest problem with this whole thing. I care deeply about trying to fix the gender imbalance, but these sorts of dishonest shenanigans make the whole movement look bad. At the risk of committing the No True Scotsman fallacy, I don't think the people responsible really care about gender equality. If they did then they would have checked their facts, rather than making people doubt them and the views they claim to hold.
    • crassus 13y ago
      "Equality" movements are doomed to fail. I don't believe that in a perfectly fair world, men and women would equally participate in every profession. If you focus too much on outcome you are taking on an impossible task. What's important is fairness and equality of opportunity.
      • yo-mf 13y ago
        Well, not really. There are plenty of equality movements that have been quite successful. But the real point is that if we believe that jobs will be more technical in nature and that deeper knowledge of technology and coding will be required, maybe we should be concerned with the current ratio. Thus we not only create a skills divide, but one that grows into an economic divide as the better paying jobs are technology jobs. Maybe this is an "equality" movement worth putting some energy into.
    • jacalata 13y ago
      I don't think the people responsible really care about gender equality. If they did then they would have checked their facts, I think that kind of is No True Scotsman, because it's an unreasonable conflation of two attributes ('really caring about x' and 'being careful with sourcing in debate/arguments'). I know lots of people who care deeply about various causes but are terrible about research, sourcing and verification in general. And some people might care deeply about a cause but do damage to it by being involved (deeply unpleasant so that nobody wants to work with them and the volunteer group falls apart, that kind of thing). Level of caring is not, in my opinion, strongly correlated with a person's value as an advocate :)
• beachstartup 13y ago
  every time i've ever dealt with "journalists" i've always come away with the unmistakable conclusion that most of them are complete and utter scumbags. but that's just my opinion on the matter.
• minimaxir 13y ago
  For those curious, here's a chart of the proportion of female founders funded by Y Combinator in the last 4 years, which correlates with YC's intention to add more female founders: http://i.imgur.com/MCLqUm3.jpg http://i.imgur.com/MCLqUm3.jpg Data source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjPFdCURhZvddHJ5LXFJaE5UbnFZVy1TVVktZ0o2V1E&usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjPFdCURhZvddHJ...
  • robg 13y ago
    Is this a stated intention? [ref?] It seems more to be a nice consequence of their approach - to attract great talent.
    • minimaxir 13y ago
      pg mentioned in the article that he wants to increase the number of female founders.
  • yawaramin 13y ago
    Thank you for this. Is there data on applicants? It would be useful to compare the ratios of male founders applied-to-accepted vs female founders applied-to-accepted.
    • trickyager 13y ago
      Exactly. The data are useless without a proper control pool to compare against.
  • rexreed 13y ago
    How does this correlate to the general, non-YC population of female founders? More, less, or same as average? That's an important data calibrator. Without that, it's hard to judge if YC is better than, worse than, or average, good intentions or not. Without having any real data, I'm guessing maybe marginally better than average given that it's probably in the single digits on average?
• nox_ 13y ago
  I expected an article about monads.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• kremlin 13y ago
  I didn't find any of the quotes that I read, even if they were out of context, remotely offensive. But I can see how someone who makes it a point to be offended by things might deliberately interpret it in a bad way, and convince other people that that is in fact what was meant by it. For example, you say that you don't know how you'd convince 13 year old girls to be interested in programming. The normal interpretation is, 'Clearly 13 year old girls are very rarely interested in programming, and Paul Graham doesn't know how to change that.' The nasty interpretation is 'Paul Graham thinks that girls are intrinsically incapable of being interested in programming'. It's easy to be offended by things. It's also obnoxious and often irresponsible.
  • Perihelion 13y ago
    As a woman in this industry that has been programming since I was ~8, I wasn't offended in the slightest. In my opinion he said there was a problem that he'd have to think about before offering a solution. "It's easy to be offended by things. It's also obnoxious and often irresponsible." Personally, this sort of behavior affects my career. When I first started at my current job people were afraid to speak to me because they expected me to get offended at the slightest thing. I want people to treat me equally, but I don't want people to be afraid to come to work because I might sue them for looking at me. That's not what I'm about at all but unfortunately I'm pre-judged to lash out at people when I see something I don't like. I want everyone to come to work and get fair treatment/compensation/etc. but I feel that incidents like this set all of us back. The discrimination is different now. People don't see me as incapable of STEM, they see me as incapable of working with other people. It sucks. A lot.
    • kremlin 13y ago
      It is undeniably the case that men are more...cautious about what they say and how they behave around women, particularly in the workplace. As a man, I'd have to say that such caution has precedent - you may be an exception, but (this incident being a great example) in my experience women are much more easily offended. And I could see how that could make things less enjoyable for women who aren't so up tight; women who are easy going and just want to get along with their co-workers and share a laugh and get good work done. It is unfortunate.
• cookiecaper 13y ago
  Any interaction with the press is terrifying in almost any circumstance because you never know and really have no control over whether the outlet is going to pull something like this. I always have the impulse to refuse media interaction unless I can get final approval on the published piece, which, of course, no one will ever give you. It's important for all of us to remember that the incentives of the media and their subjects are not necessarily aligned, and that bombastic distortions such as this are common.
  • quantumhobbit 13y ago
    These sort of outrage inducing misquotes by the press seem to be becoming more and more common. There is no way to know if it was on purpose, but phony outrage certainly generates more clicks (or subscriptions in the case of The Information). At what point does misquotation become libel? As much as I hate the idea of suing the press, lawsuits seem like the only defense. Real and lasting damage was done to pg's reputation here. Even with yc as his personal loudspeaker, I doubt pg will be able to set the record strait.
• yawn 13y ago
  Jakob Kaplan Moss owes PG a public apology for his behavior. The witch hunt tweets that were coming out of him without getting the facts straight are downright disheartening.
  • crassus 13y ago
    I'm of mixed opinions about him. On the one hand, he's been influential in making Pycon more friendly to women, which I support[1]. On the other hand, he appears to have swallowed the feminist kool-aid without reflection. He has a knee-jerk reaction whenever an alleged case of "sexism" comes up - he is inclined to take the side of the "oppressed" group and facts be damned. He takes a guilty until proven innocent standard for people with a Y chromosome. [1] The anti-harassment policies of Pycon are a gold-standard for the industry
    • jsmthrowaway 13y ago
      You've described a number of the Django old guard. That is definitely not limited to him. Remember the gendered pronoun brouhaha against libuv? And no, Jacob is already bitching about pg's essay on his Twitter.
      • crassus 13y ago
        He was part of pronoun-gate? That was one of the stupidest, most counter-productive brouhahas of all time. Something tells me that purging your best devs for being insufficiently progressive is not going to attract more females.
        • jsmthrowaway 13y ago
          Alex Gaynor was the catalyst for pronoun-gate, and reflects a prevailing attitude among a large number of the founding and old-school Django developers. I had the privilege to meet them and spend some social time with them at a past PyCon and I saw some of the attitudes firsthand, but they were remarkably more muted and respectable in person. Online, well...
    • 13y ago
• gmays 13y ago
  I wonder how much time and energy is wasted defending or clarifying comments, particularly by people who would otherwise be creating value.
• izendejas 13y ago
  FWIW, The Information's piece definitely crossed the "too indignation-inducing to be true" threshold for me. And I for one, would enjoy an essay about such topic as it would be very relevant to the HN community that is often just as eager as journalists to see certain individuals or startups fail for whatever reason.
• ericabiz 13y ago
  As a female founder, I think this is a well-thought-out, articulate response, and I appreciate pg stepping up to say something about women in tech. In a similar vein, I'd love to see YC take on one or both of the following: 1) Do at least one application cycle completely blind. How could you accomplish this? Much like in the concert auditions where this was first tried, put people behind a curtain--and then use technology to change their voices so every voice sounds the same. I think it would be a really cool experiment to see if different types of companies or a more diverse founder set would get funded. 2) Publish more stats on the success of YC companies, and publish stats on % of female(, black, ...) founder applications submitted, % accepted, % funded after acceptance, etc. Of course, I'd fully expect that this would be "opt-in" from the founders as well--i.e. each set of founders would need to agree as part of the application to have their data anonymously shared. You could also share data on % who opted to not have their data shared. (Techstars is doing some great stuff with their stats here: http://www.techstars.com/companies/stats/ http://www.techstars.com/companies/stats/ ) I've talked to many female founders and YC does have a reputation as a "frat house" (I told one of the YC partners that personally when he asked me to apply.) I decided to not apply to YC and instead was in the first Techstars Austin cohort, which was a fantastic program overall. Techstars definitely seemed more welcoming to women from my perspective as a geek-turned-tech-entrepreneur. I'm hoping this is the start of breaking down the "frat house" reputation around YC and getting more women actively involved with it.
  • marquis 13y ago
    As another female founder I concur: blind applications would make me more comfortable to consider applying to funds in general, not just YC. As an audio processing geek, getting male and female voices to sound the same is actually pretty hard without losing diction, but at least having the application have a separate cover-sheet for the founder's names and any information that might give away identifiers about gender, race and nationality would be a good start, so applications could be read 'blind'.
    • sp332 13y ago
      blind applications would make me more comfortable to consider applying What kind of pressure are you feeling about applying to funds now?
• akkartik 13y ago
  My favorite quote: "I err on the side of late binding for everything.."
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • danso 13y ago
    Me too. Ageism is also a huge problem in tech, independent of gender and racial issues.
    • ChristianMarks 13y ago
      Me three. I was beginning to think that I hadn't programmed the systems I actually had.
• freyrs3 13y ago
  I'm not sure I want to work in an industry where some offhanded quip can lead to the kind witchhunt and character assassination like we saw over the last few days. Paul Graham may have some views that seem controversial to some people, but don't we all? I really blame the tabloidization of the tech press and the "twitter controversy of the day" bandwagon effect for these kind of incidents.
  • crassus 13y ago
    I wish him luck on his follow-up essay about female founders. What's valuable about a PG essay is 1) his careful analysis and 2) generalization from his wealth of experience. But if he does (2) at all, he's going to piss off Social Justice Warriors. Writing nowadays is like playing football in a minefield.
  • klaut 13y ago
    This. A million times this.
    • fat0wl 13y ago
      plus -999,999 times this
  • vezzy-fnord 13y ago
    It's not really a problem with the tech industry, so much as it is in general with the mainstream media and consumer society. People have loved sensational stories for centuries. The only difference is the persistent toxicity of extreme social justice and how they've invaded tech, for some reason. Perhaps because it's a big and booming field, but I've always found it odd how a lot of feminists decry geek culture as outcasts, losers and misogynists, yet simultaneously want desperately to be a part of it. Ultimately, I think you'll do yourself good with a social media detox.
  • jsmthrowaway 13y ago
    There are people who wake up in the morning, just like you or me, and instead of doing something productive with their time begin the day's hunt for a topic to be offended about. These are people that spend every day searching for something that offends them so that they can bitch to their followers about it and feel like they are producing some real change in the world. Think on par with "Fox News commentary," except militant feminism instead of hyperconservative. Facts just get in the way of the rage train. Can't have those. You are getting a glimpse of those people. Spend your days looking to be offended and, my God, it occasionally happens and you get your chance to rabble! Welcome to social justice warriors. I used to think I wanted out of the industry too. Now I just keep a list and act accordingly when I am asked to hire. I've also learned to spot the signs, including certain phrases, retweeting of certain people consistently, linking to the Geek Feminism wiki because it's a wiki and it has facts, and so forth. A good example of a red flag tweet: https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/417775128831741952 https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/417775128831741952
• frozenport 13y ago
  Thats what happens when you get your news from a p0rn outlet!
• lauradhamilton 13y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. It is unfortunate that your statements were taken out of context and spun. I typically look for the original source, and am relatively skeptical of poorly edited viral stories such as this one. With that said, I do think that the moderation / upvoting / flagging of Hacker News is overwhelmingly male. I sometimes see sexist comments here, and there doesn't seem to be a good system for women to flag and remove those. This is a problem in my opinion.
  • kordless 13y ago
    There's a comment system. A sane, non-blaming comment calling out sexist comments can do wonders for swaying the opinion of others. The last thing we need to solve this is to start segmenting ourselves on here.
  • MartinCron 13y ago
    I sometimes see sexist comments here Me too. And I will downvote, comment, or both. The system isn't perfect, but there are people who are trying.
  • ionforce 13y ago
    Why are you linking someone's gender to the ability to flag and remove sexist comments? Are you saying that women are allowed to make sexist comments about men? Sexism is everyone's problem, regardless of gender expression.
  • yetanotherphd 13y ago
    Could you give some examples of the kinds of post you would like to censor?
  • yawaramin 13y ago
    Admittedly, there's no 'flag' or 'remove' option. There is however a downvote option--but only for users with enough 'karma'. You and I, being (relatively) new users, don't have enough karma to downvote posts. _That_ is unrelated to gender.
• arcticfox 13y ago
  Is there an editor's rebuttal to this? If unintentional, at the very least a limited apology seems fitting.
• nashashmi 13y ago
  Can I use the skewed article and PG's response to now make a case that women can't be newspaper writers?
  • nashashmi 13y ago
    I guess I should have initialed it as j/k. I hate down votes.
• natural219 13y ago
  Can anyone link to an objective "what PG actually said" so we can, you know, actually evaluate these claims in context? I see a link to https://www.theinformation.com/YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete-Interview https://www.theinformation.com/YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete..., but there's no way I'm subscribing to this junk website.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• dataminded 13y ago
  I find that doubting anything that Gawker says about anyone or anything is generally a good idea.
• apsec112 13y ago
  "I think everyone should have the media perform a hatchet job on them at least once. It’s this really scary feeling when you know you’re trying to be honest and do the right thing, and yet you see how easy it is for a hostile writer to cast every single thing you do as corrupt and destructive. And how quick everyone is to believe them. And how attempts to set the record straight get met with outraged “how dare you give one of those typical sputtering non-apologies!”. It reminds me of those computer games where “ACCUSE” is just a button you press, and it doesn’t even matter what the accusation is or whether it makes sense." http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/15/things-i-learned-by-spending-five-thousand-years-in-an-alternate-universe/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/15/things-i-learned-by-spe...
  • sedev 13y ago
    That piece was new to me, and very interesting! Thank you.
  • pjscott 13y ago
    Even regular, non-hatchet-job journalism is usually pretty bad. Being reported on is a profoundly weird experience: open the paper, and see your day-to-day life distorted beyond recognition! It's pretty eye-opening. I think the best solution is to avoid most journalism altogether, and get news from blog posts by people who know what they're talking about, care about it, and have no reason to lie.
    • marcosdumay 13y ago
      I was congratulated by a newspaper once. Scaring is a huge understatement, I avoid any interaction with formalized media since then.
• rubiquity 13y ago
  The passion for women/girls (referred to as females from this point on) representation in programming is so strong that they try and make villains out of the wrong people as if it will help their cause. From all of the reading I've done of PG's writings I think he has always taken a rather binary approach at whether you're the startup kind of person. I don't think he cares about sex at all. He wants people that are hackers/founders by personal interest rather than being pushed to it by others. I really like when the move for more female participation in programming is more of removing barriers that would otherwise discourage females from participating (sexism, snickering, etc.) and less pushing females into programming. As we all know, PG runs a company where his bottom dollar comes from the success rate of startups. It's not hard to draw the conclusion that people who naturally enjoy doing something are more successful at it on the whole than people who are pushed into doing something. PG just happens to operate in a space dominated by males, because of this I imagine some people feel he has a responsibility to push the female programmer movement forward. I certainly don't imagine him holding female programmers back, with the female founders conf he's announced it sounds like he's trying to help. That said, I think PG is a "pull no punches" kind of guy, so while he is aware of the lack of female founders I don't think he's going to lose sleep over it as long YC continues to succeed.
  • crassus 13y ago
    I feel bad for the female children of HN. I imagine them thinking, "Why do all the adults in my life want me to be a computer programmer? I want to be a veterinarian or teacher, but daddy says that's a patriarchal stereotype." There's nothing wrong with offering people an easier onramp to hackerdom, of course. But there is a subtext of devaluing all female-dominated lines of work.
    • theorique 13y ago
      An earlier comment mentioned that all the different professional programs (law, medicine, business, etc) that lead to top, well-paid jobs, are competing over the same top-5% elite group of girls/women. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6981040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6981040 Adding CS/CE to this mix won't necessarily solve things. Improving the pipeline is a reasonable step, but it takes time for the effects of those efforts to be realized.
• jug6ernaut 13y ago
  "I was explaining the distinction between a CS major and a hacker..." "What I was talking about here is the idea that to do something well you have to be interested in it for its own sake, not just because you had to pick something as a major.So this is the message to take away: If you want to be really good at programming, you have to love it for itself. " Labeling "CS major"'s as non hackers, good to know as someone with a CS degree. While I 100% agree with your final above statement, I find it concerning that you would label everyone with a "CS major" as having motivations outside of a "hacker". I fail to see how they are mutually exclusive. I hope this was just a unfortunate choice of words.
  • nicolethenerd 13y ago
    I didn't read it as him saying the two were mutually exclusive... I thought the distinction was between 'just a [CS major]' as opposed to 'hacker' (who may or may not have a CS degree) - perhaps I just interpreted it the way I wanted to - but giving him the benefit of the doubt, I think he was just saying he wants founders that are intrinsically motivated (by having a desire to build stuff) rather than extrinsically (by a degree program)
    • jug6ernaut 13y ago
      Agreed, thats why I said I agreed with his statement "If you want to be really good at programming, you have to love it for itself." I understand what hes trying to say, I just find it really odd that he would go about it by labeling a group of people as if they were intrinsically different.
  • kstenerud 13y ago
    "the audience for an interview will include people who for various reasons want to misinterpret what you say, so you have to be careful not to leave them any room to."
    • jug6ernaut 13y ago
      What I quoted was not from the "interview"
• __pThrow 13y ago
  What Paul didn't say. Anything about DongleGate Anything about PronounGate Anything about CPlusEqualityGate But when They Came for Paul, then he wanted us to know what he said. Sadly, I was already gone. In fact what he did apparently was to take these sorts of threads down and encourage moderators to kill them. Now of course, he abuses his power as publisher to host this thread where we can deify him, thank him, and and apologize to him.
  • Crito 13y ago
    Does it really surprise or disturb you that PG takes a special interest in things said about himself? It should not.
    • __pThrow 13y ago
      I think pg is very influential in tech and he has missed several opportunities to speak out for the powerless being abused. I think this is made worse when he runs Hacker News, and lets that platform be used in a very similar case to defend himself. My original post references "First They Came" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...) That's not to suggest feminist bullying is anything close to Nazi Germany, but to suggest we all have moral duties to speak out for the powerless and abused.
      • Crito 13y ago
        If PG spent his time addressing each injustice in the world individually, he would not have enough time for anything else in his life. He has however kindly provided the world with essays on honest discourse, and provided us with a platform that we can use to discuss various injustices in our industry. PG 'throwing in' during "Donglegate" would not have done anything to improve the situation.
      • freyrs3 13y ago
        Is pg also to blame for not immediately hopping on a plane to feed starving children in Africa? Just because someone is silent about an issue you personally care about doesn't give you cause to criticize them for their morals.
• ajju 13y ago
  When a similar brouhaha happened over PG's comments about accent taken out of context, not one publication cared to actually interview the scores of foreign founders with accents that have gone through YC (I am one). The same thing happened again with this controversy. Here's at least one rebuttal from a leading female founder: https://t.co/1NbszBqlB1 https://t.co/1NbszBqlB1 Is it too much to ask of the press to at least look into a person's actions before piling on with criticism of a purported quote rehashed by a known instigator such as valleywag?
• rexreed 13y ago
  Does the shrill, hyper-Silicon Valley startup focused, gossipy, and banal tech 'press' really matter? I wish they would focus on news, get outside of the Valley for their inspiration, and focus on a wider range of technologies and markets. But then again, who would read that? What we've got here is not "press" but rather entertainment. Basically, it's the TMZ-ification of tech "journalism". Yup, those are scare quotes.
• venantius 13y ago
  I'm really happy PG responded to this, because when it came out it already seemed like a completely overblown and taken-out-of-context quote and I had to literally refuse to discuss it with people because the firestorm seemed too absurd to validate with conversation.
• informatimago 13y ago
  I think it is time to eliminate journalism entirely. Already with the web we've reduced greatly the number of intermediaries in transmitting information. But it is clear that they should be removed from the loop entirely Don't feed the trolls^w journalists ie. don't give them interviews or "conversations", don't pass on urls to their "articles". Instead give the url to the original data!
• informatimago 13y ago
  I think it is time to eliminate journalism entirely. Already with the web we've reduced greatly the number of intermediaries in transmitting information. But it is clear that they should be removed from the loop entirely Don't feed the trolls^w journalists ie. don't give them interviews or "conversations", don't pass on urls to their "articles". Instead give the url to the original data!
• throwaway135 13y ago
  Why is adding more women to the tech industry automatically assumed a laudable goal to throw resources behind? I'm Middle-Eastern (probably a smaller minority in the North-American tech scene compared to women), and while I (like most people) would certainly like to be surrounded by more of my brethren, it's not something I'd be comfortable spending resources on because the return on investment is so nebulous; diversity of views isn't automatically beneficial as is commonly assumed (an extreme example: you wouldn't expect a conservative big-corporation suit-wearing type to benefit a two-founder startup team). It also seems a bit arrogant to tell people 'you should stop pursuing X and learn coding instead'. I wonder what would have happened had someone convinced Marie Curie, Jane Austen, or Hillary Clinton to go into programming instead of their respective fields (yes, I realise computers weren't invented in the case of the former two, but I hope you understand my point). Finally, why is all this restricted to women only? Should I start advocating for Arabs? Africans? Inuit? It very quickly turns into a lot of duplicated effort. What's wrong with treating everyone equally? Not to mention that special-casing also reinforces the idea of 'us' and 'them', which I don't feel is productive either. (throwaway because I don't want to be burned at the stake for publicly asking such questions)
  • hyperpape 13y ago
    My response elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6985366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6985366 From an economic perspective, having any group not participate in a valuable activity is a waste.
    • throwaway135 13y ago
      You seem to be saying: since coding is a valuable activity, any group not coding is a waste. Is that correct?
      • hyperpape 13y ago
        Any group underrepresented in [valuable activity x]relative to its distribution of talent. You can theoretically have a distribution in which natural aptitude is equal, the distribution is skewed (more men than women) and it's not horribly inefficient, but I think if you spell out the assumptions of such a distribution, it's not especially realistic.
• deleted 13y ago
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• atmosx 13y ago
  It is true though, women are not hackers where I live. That doesn't mean that womens are out of skills, and PG explains really nice it's just how it is and it might change in the future. Given the way my mother cooks, I can state that when it comes to food she totally can be a called a hacker :-)
  • alan_cx 13y ago
    There are women hackers everywhere, just like men, just as many. Thing is, men don't notice, and women don't refer to it as hacking. They call it coping, or getting by.
• kyro 13y ago
  Something needs to change about this industry's obsession with sensationalist journalism. If this industry is truly as forward-thinking and progressive as it is, and hopes to make strides in issues like gender/minority equality, then we need to build defenses against severely twisted, unfounded, and intentionally heinous hit-pieces by nobody bloggers who are trying to break into the industry by being edgy and aggressively opinionated. The discussion about women in startups has completely come to a halt now and has shifted to discussing whether Paul Graham is a sexist. The most sickening part of this whole ordeal? That these shit-stirring "journalists" are praised and said to have some sort of talent by their respective circles for knowing how to "shake things up," and their higher-ups want nothing more but for them to continue.
  • MBCook 13y ago
    > Something needs to change about this industry's obsession with sensationalist journalism. I don't think there is anything wrong with this industry. This seems to be how most 'news' is made these days. I'm guessing that people who closely follow a non-technical industry have seen similar sensationalism on other issues.
    • kyro 13y ago
      Agreed, this isn't specific to this industry. In fact, most humans flock to this sort of journalism. It's how gossip rags make their money. But this industry is more forward-thinking and adept to rapidly changing than most, and is most capable of making progress in workplace equality, among other issues. To let trashy journalism get in the way to the point that it has is to severely hinder the potential for change.
  • jeffdavis 13y ago
    I think a lot of it has to do with the amount of experience the readership has to this kind of "journalism". Sensationalist and highly opinionated journalism loses its impact on individuals over a few years of exposure. After a while, people start to realize that such things are almost never the full story, and you need to wait for more information and analysis to come forward before forming an opinion of your own. The reason this kind of journalism works is simple: because there is a steady supply of new people who aren't resistant to it yet.
• robg 13y ago
  How horrifying must it be to have every word dissected by a linkbait culture? Then when the mob hears something in their pre-determined wheelhouse, the pitchforks come out with a vengeance. Moreover, anyone who has read pg knows this kerfuffle was likely spam. I'm just sad our culture has degenerated to convict first, ask questions later. Shameless has supplanted shameful.
  • robg 13y ago
    This is particularly true in the age of Twitter, where a single sentence taken out of context can go viral. Now anything you say about a controversial topic has to be unambiguous at the level of individual sentences. Ugh, how depressing.
• McKittrick 13y ago
  Getting misquoted in an interview happens to almost everyone who has given an interview ever. It is a product of the interviewer trying to put an editorial spin on a story (i.e make it interesting) and human error (based on reporter time constraints). Being misquoted is the tax for using the interviewer's platform for marketing. For most people, the benefit of the publicity outweighs the tax. So you give the interview, knowing full well that the end product is going to come out somewhere on the spectrum of slight misquote --> just made up stuff. And this isn't going to change. But it is something to keep in mind when you're pitching PR for your startup. You will get misquoted, its a matter of degree. Share your words as wisely as possible. Unfortunately, unlike PG, the rest of us don't have a platform for setting the record straight on a misquote.
  • runevault 13y ago
    The difference here is he was not supposed to be interviewed, he was offering background for an entirely different piece, and they turned the discussion into an "interview" after the fact when they presented pieces of said material claiming it to be an interview.
    • McKittrick 13y ago
      if you talk to a reporter for a story, you're being interviewed. Let me rephrase, if I was talking to a reporter and the conversation was being recorded, I would presume I was being interviewed. If the reporter told me it was off the record, I would not consider it an interview.
    • deleted 13y ago
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• 11thEarlOfMar 13y ago
  Well, that's a relief.
• ChristianMarks 13y ago
  Now anything you say about a controversial topic has to be unambiguous at the level of individual sentences. This has been true in academia for years.
• Osiris 13y ago
  To avoid these kinds of problems, why don't journalists just post the entire interview transcript instead of, or in addition to, editing it for brevity and thus injecting their own biases?
  • MartinCron 13y ago
    There's a movement to get journalists to do this for some time. I remembered this interview with public radio's On The Media from 2007 on this very subject. http://www.onthemedia.org/story/129436-just-email-me/transcript/ http://www.onthemedia.org/story/129436-just-email-me/transcr...
• snake_plissken 13y ago
  Whoa whoa whoa, it's considered ok to mess with a quote like this and completely ax things out? And editors are ok with it? In the journalism industry and with with reputable print/electronic news outlets, when something is on the record (as I assumed this is since there is a transcript), are quotes actively edited to the point where key words are removed? I know things are taken out of context, and quotes/sound bites can be selected and presented out of sequence, but actively editing the quote seems absurd and beyond anyone who honestly thinks they are reporting something accurately.
• bedhead 13y ago
  I've said it before and I will say it again: Gawker is simply professional trolls. They exist only to shit on everything, the farther away from their rigid liberal ideals the better. I wish people would ignore them completely.
  • crassus 13y ago
    Liberal != left/progressive. Liberals were people that supported free exchange of ideas, believing that truth would be discovered through open argument (think John Stuart Mill). Progressives are pretty much the opposite of that.
    • acheron 13y ago
      Historically sure, but (at least in the US) that ship sailed long ago.
• forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
  It is very interesting see someone like PG take the bait with anti ethical journalism. I have some friends in top positions and the first thing they learn is about this techniques. There are predators out there wanting to eat your hardly earned reputation for their own benefit or agendas.
• dkural 13y ago
  Dear Paul, In your arc article: http://www.paulgraham.com/arc0.html http://www.paulgraham.com/arc0.html you have the following few sentences: I realize that supporting only Ascii is uninternational to a point that's almost offensive, like calling Beijing Peking, or Roma Rome (hmm, wait a minute). But the kind of people who would be offended by that wouldn't like Arc anyway. Here's the issue: "the kind of people who would be offended by that" - I realize that "that" refers to ASCII only support, and I agree with your statement. But it took me two minutes to figure that out. Indeed "that" might as well refer to Chinese people being offended by the colonial label of Peking instead of using Beijing. I thought you might want to fix this infelicity of expression.
  • enko 13y ago
    > Chinese people being offended by the colonial label of Peking instead of using Beijing I think the only Chinese people who would be "outraged" by calling their capital Peking (the old southern way of pronouncing it) vs Beijing (the new northern way of pronouncing it) are the same types getting "outraged" over this ridiculous event - they were looking for something to get angry about anyway. For most I believe it is simply a historical name. Do New Yorkers get outraged if you sidle up to them and whisper "New Amsterdam"? Anyway, it's still generally called Peking in plenty of languages, including Spanish, French, German and Japanese, and I don't see any great international incidents over that.
  • Uchikoma 13y ago
    I at least do not get angry about München being called Munich or Köln being called Cologne by occupation forces.
• ericd 13y ago
  I'm not surprised that things were taken completely out of context. The first time you have something written about something you've said is really eye opening - unless the whole thing is printed verbatim, it's almost invariably edited to say something different than what you meant, and to be more in line with the rest of the story.
• deleted 13y ago
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• davidw 13y ago
  > [3] The controversy itself is an example of something interesting I'd been meaning to write about, incidentally. I was one of the first users of Reddit, and I couldn't believe the number of times I indignantly upvoted a story about some apparent misdeed or injustice, only to discover later it wasn't as it seemed. As one of the first to be exposed to this phenomenon, I was one of the first to develop an immunity to it. Now when I see something that seems too indignation-inducing to be true, my initial reaction is usually skepticism. But even now I'm still fooled occasionally. I think we could do with fewer of those stories on HN, truth be told. They seem to generate a lot of heat and little light, and are generally about "off-topic" subjects without being intellectually gratifying.
• ChuckMcM 13y ago
  Nicely responded. Over Thanksgiving a friend of mine who is studying for his Masters in Philosophy introduced me to the formal concept of the 'Principle of Charity' [1] which is on the hearer's part a requirement of applying the most reasonable interpretation of the argument presented. When pg wrote this: "Also (as we've seen), if you talk about controversial topics, the audience for an interview will include people who for various reasons want to misinterpret what you say, so you have to be careful not to leave them any room to, whereas in a conversation you can assume good faith and speak as loosely as you would in everyday life." It connected with me that both in the interwebs and here on HN too often people do not apply this principle, either in prejudice or in ignorance, to the topics being discussed. That is really too bad, because it helps the quality of the discussion tremendously. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
• drcode 13y ago
  This is a good essay, but I was disappointed it wasn't a followup to his classic essay "What You Can't Say" http://paulgraham.com/say.html http://paulgraham.com/say.html
• dchichkov 13y ago
  > If you want to be really good at programming, you have to love it for itself. It is difficult not to love things that you've discovered for yourself and learned to do as a kid. So the following: > If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. while not required, could be just an 'often encountered' case.
• YuriNiyazov 13y ago
  In John Gruber's words: "I’m sure this will get just as much attention as Valleywag’s misguided hatchet job that started the whole thing, and that everyone on Twitter who excoriated Graham will apologize."
• grellas 13y ago
  A word about credibility. It comes from the Latin word credo, meaning "I trust." Its value exceeds that of money because it marks you as a person - as someone who is respected, who is trustworthy, and whom you would want to count as a friend. It marks you not as perfect but as special. It makes others ponder not so much that they did the last deal with you but that they would want to do the next deal too. Just as we build credit through many transactions, so we build credibility by the very pattern of our lives. Credit and credibility derive from the same root and signify the same thing: when in doubt, we can trust the one who has either trait. Not blind trust, just a benefit-of-the-doubt level of trust. Well, pg has earned our trust and deserved the benefit of the doubt when something so off kilter as this is attributed to him. He did not get it here, and that is a sad testament to how crowd-inspired frenzies can bend our perceptions in such faulty ways. Let us only hope that we can learn some good lessons from this. pg's response is actually priceless: it is like a soft-spoken witness upending a bullying lawyer who had just viciously attacked him, leaving the attacker reeling for all to see. Indeed, the mob looks pretty much like an ass at this point and kudos to pg for his more-than-able defense. Very lawyer-like, in a way, but far more classy.
  • mjburgess 13y ago
    Fine, he was mischaracterized and he replied. But jesus, > pg's response is actually priceless: it is like a soft-spoken witness upending a bullying lawyer who had just viciously attacked him, leaving the attacker reeling for all to see. What's with the almost cult-like reverence for this largely pseudo-intellectual entrepreneur?
    • jraines 13y ago
      pg's writing has made a big impact among a lot of people, the majority of whom don't view him as a cult-like leader or personality at all. It sounds like you disagree with his ideas; what qualifies someone as an intellectual in your book and not a pseudo-intellectual?
      • mjburgess 13y ago
        "pseudo" was a little strong. But if you have any serious familiarity with his "off-topic" rants, youll see he writes about issues glibly and with a severe lack of information. I dont mind "academic journalism", I do it a lot myself: write on difficult topics for a lay audience and maybe sacrifice a little accurasy a long the way. I think pg likes be seen making points more than he wants further understanding/truth/etc.
• jayferd 13y ago
  Here's a collection of other writings by pg about women: http://sambiddle.kinja.com/paul-graham-writing-about-women-on-his-website-1491875959 http://sambiddle.kinja.com/paul-graham-writing-about-women-o... This would be different if there were no context, but there is a lot of context.
• vorg 13y ago
  > in a conversation you can assume good faith and speak as loosely as you would in everyday life In some countries it's legal to record any conversation you're a part of without informing the other participants so many people are on their guard. Even in everyday life with people you know well, they or you might be carrying a mobile phone manufactured by certain company or running a certain OS that listens, even when turned off with the battery still in, on behalf of some party who'll never be prosecuted and often never even exposed, and there's a lot of those sorts of people out there. Perhaps even a higher than average percentage of Hacker News visitors are these sorts.
• jpeg_hero 13y ago
  don't try to talk honestly about the issue of women in tech. why do it? just will bite you in the ass. just say whatever "they" want you to say (whatever is pc these days) and keep your head down and keep hacking.
• oskarth 13y ago
  This piece should have to be written. I think the same goes for the essay Foreign Accents. I'm not a women, but I am a "foreigner", and it's completely obvious in both cases what pg actually said. That is, unless you have a thing for being Offended or you are looking for excuses. It's sad that pg feels he has to waste time doing these type of clarifications. Especially since he's not even holding any controversial opinions in either case, but is merely observing what he has seen at YC. I wish more people would be harder on the trolls with nothing but superficial criticism. Ignore them, and if they gain traction, despise them, the same way you despise spammers. There's an asymmetry here. The trolls lose nothing on their vitrolic rants. For them it's a win either way, since at worst case they get some page views, whereas pg has to spend time dealing with bullshit. It would be more just if these trolls were punished, and pg weren't made to feel like he has to respond like this.
• oskarth 13y ago
  This piece should have to be written. I think the same goes for the essay Foreign Accents. I'm not a woman, but I am a "foreigner", and it's completely obvious in both cases what pg actually said. That is, unless you have a thing for being Offended or you are looking for excuses. It's sad that pg feels he has to waste time doing these type of clarifications. Especially since he's not even holding any controversial opinions in either case, but is merely observing what he has seen at YC. I wish more people would be harder on the trolls with nothing but superficial criticism. Ignore them, and if they gain traction, despise them, the same way you despise spammers. There's an asymmetry here. The trolls lose nothing on their vitrolic rants. For them it's a win either way, since at worst case they get some page views, whereas pg has to spend time dealing with bullshit. It would be more just if these trolls were punished, and pg weren't made to feel like he has to respond like this.
  • nbouscal 13y ago
    > This piece should have to be written. I'm guessing you meant "shouldn't" there?
    • oskarth 13y ago
      Sorry, yes. Typo and then noprocrast caught me.
  • deleted 13y ago
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• Nimi 13y ago
  """Mark Zuckerberg starts programming, starts messing about with computers when he's like 10 or whatever. By the time he's starting Facebook he's a hacker, and so he looks at the world through hacker eyes. That's what causes him to start Facebook. We can't make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years. """ I wonder why pg thinks being a programmer is a prerequisite for looking at the world through hacker eyes. The notion that Zuckerberg could have started Facebook as a non-technical co-founder doesn't seem unreasonable to me (and you could even argue Steve Jobs, while having some technical chops, wasn't the typical uber-hacker-has-been-doing-this-since-age-12 programmer). Or not?
• squirejons 13y ago
  CorpGovMedia hath given unto thee Laws to Live By. And so it is written that thou shalt not denigrate females, but that thou shalt elevate them above all others, for the females are The Most Sacred Consumer and Surplus Labor Supply, thus lowering wages and increasing The Most Sacred Corporate Profits. And All Those Who Violate This Law Shall Be Marked "B" for Bigot. And Know Ye Well That Those Who Wear This Mark of B Shall Be Cast Out of Society and They Shall Be Demonized Forever.... Know Ye These Laws!
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• kategleason 13y ago
  from a female founder: PG picks the best. it's time we step up to plate ladies. if we want to compete toe to toe with the gents then we have to be better than the ones we are up against. period. if you're better, trust me, he will pick you regardless of your gender. it might even be in your favor if you just happen to be a woman on top of being better :)
• leoc 13y ago
  "Milo carefully said nothing when Major —— de Coverley stepped into the mess hall with his fierce and austere dignity the day he returned and found his way blocked by a wall of officers waiting in line to sign loyalty oaths. At the far end of the food counter, a group of men who had arrived earlier were pledging allegiance to the flag, with trays of food balanced in one hand, in order to be allowed to take seats at the table. Already at the tables, a group that had arrived still earlier was singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in order that they might use the salt and pepper and ketchup there. The hubub began to subside slowly as Major —— de Coverley paused in the doorway with a frown of puzzled disapproval, as though viewing something bizarre."
• dinkumthinkum 13y ago
  I hate that pg even has to make this explanation. It is easy to understand what he meant even in the hit job "interview." I didn't realize how it was constructed. Now it makes a lot of sense. I mean what goal would it serve for pg to misogynistic claims? It defies common sense. I think the "interviewer" represents the worst of journalism, simply trying to peddle controversy where there is none. It is sort of infuriating to me because there actually is misogyny in our hacker culture but this is NOT it.
• edw519 13y ago
  This incident immediately reminded me of Hall of Fame baseball player Steve Carlton, one of the greatest professional athletes of all time. He had a simple method of dealing with media "issues": he didn't talk to them. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Carlton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Carlton ... Carlton slumped in 1973, losing 20 games. The media's open questioning of his unusual training techniques led to an acrimonious relationship between them and Carlton, and he severed all ties with the media, refusing to answer press questions for the rest of his career with the Phillies.[13] This reached a point where, in 1981, while the Mexican rookie Fernando Valenzuela was achieving stardom with the Los Angeles Dodgers, a reporter remarked, "The two best pitchers in the National League don't speak English: Fernando Valenzuela and Steve Carlton."[14] Sometimes I wonder if more people responded this way, "professional journalism" might actually have a chance.
• zw123456 13y ago
  There is obviously a huge amount of energy around this. I think it would be great if YC sponsored a conference around this topic (perhaps Women & Minorities in tech startups).
• thenerdfiles 13y ago
  Don't women pick up concepts faster than men? I mean, it's pretty clear that women excel at language acquisition over men, and these are just computer languages. Let's say, ceteris paribus, 10,000 hours for adolescent boys, 8,000 hours for adolescent girls. Supposing this is the case, given the history of computer science, I doubt really any one of us is in a position to define credibility on solely that metric of time spent. Clearly environment plays a very significant role here, and it goes without saying, given the larger cultural context of the West, that women have been excluded. I mean, Women's Suffrage was, like, a century ago. I'm just going to assert that I'm quite postive more than half of you are talking jive, and that's not good.
  • thenerdfiles 13y ago
    And because 4th gen. programming languages, surely girls, who command on average a wider variety of language concepts due to social capability and variation, will more readily digest the grammars of these languages. Boys are very often emotionally stunted, as is clear, by the excessive machoism of the West, such that their mentalities are restricted and limited, less prone to exploratory thought compared to linearized, route execution.
  • yetanotherphd 13y ago
    Yes the evidence is clear: Girls score better at boys in language, therefore they are biologically advantaged. Girls score worse than boys at math, therefore they are being discriminated against and discouraged by society. You can't argue with evidence.
    • thenerdfiles 13y ago
      I thought I was arguing from environment, and not biology. I thought that was clear when I said "environment plays a significant role here." Does "environment" mean "nature" to you between "nature/nurture"? Granted, I'm making big assumptions, but they don't have anything to do with biology.
    • deleted 13y ago
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• foobarian 13y ago
  Reading the full quotes of what pg said to the reporter, they come off both as quite subtle and arrogant. I can imagine the reporter not quite understanding the point but instead hearing "blah blah blah we're better than you and you can never be a hacker." I'm kind of surprised pg was that open in the "interview," I think I would probably be really careful what I say in a similar situation (been bit more than once).
• edouard1234567 13y ago
  One can only appreciate the irony of note [3] :) " The controversy itself is an example of something interesting I'd been meaning to write about, incidentally. I was one of the first users of Reddit, and I couldn't believe the number of times I indignantly upvoted a story about some apparent misdeed or injustice, only to discover later it wasn't as it seemed. As one of the first to be exposed to this phenomenon, I was one of the first to develop an immunity to it. Now when I see something that seems too indignation-inducing to be true, my initial reaction is usually skepticism. But even now I'm still fooled occasionally."
• ElissaShevinsky 13y ago
  I wrote this in response: https://medium.com/glimpse-labs/5c6d2ff4ef0d https://medium.com/glimpse-labs/5c6d2ff4ef0d PG has done a lot for the community and I think he deserves a conversation rather than a lynching. I'm calling for a more civil discourse on sexism. We could say that I'm baised bc my cofounder was similarly attacked by Valleywag, but it's very reasonable to say that these conversations could be handled more thoughtfully.
• abalone 13y ago
  pg is being disingenuous. He did only refer to programmers. That's true. But what he left out is that, he defined programmers as the "pool of potential startup founders". (You have to read the full transcript to notice that.) So he is not actually referring to a subset of women. He very clearly says women as a whole are underrepresented as founders because they haven't been hacking since age 13 like the attendees of PyCon and open source committers, because it's really hard to get 13 year old girls interested in hacking. It's completely clear when you read the transcript.
  • 21echoes 13y ago
    it's amazing you have to scroll down this far to find someone actually thinking critically about the issue at hand rather than saying "they edited out the word 'these'! that's not how journalism works!". yes, they edited the quote. no, the original was not really much less sexist.
    • reallyseriously 13y ago
      Agree w/ the first part but it's not sexist at all for him to note the demographics of the pool of talent he's choosing from.
  • nycticorax 13y ago
    I agree with this completely. PG basically said that the reason there are not many females in YC is that not that many qualified females apply. The interviewer then asked "what would be lost" if YC either lowered their standards for female applicants, or did more to encourage qualified females to apply. And PG basically (and perhaps unintentionally) dodged the question, and reiterated that there aren't as many qualified female applicants as male ones, because in some sense YC's 'ideal' candidate is a twenty-something who's been hacking for 10+ years, and more of those are male than female. I'm not saying that PG is necessarily sexist or a bad person for saying all of this. But he did basically say that there aren't a lot of twenty-something females who have been hacking for 10+ years. And then he seems to sort of back away from that statement in "What I Didn't Say". In the original interview, he said "We can't make [these] women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years." In "What I Didn't Say" he says "When I saw [the above quote] myself I wasn't sure what I was even supposed to be saying. That women aren't hackers? That they can't be taught to be hackers? Either one seems ridiculous." Basically, he was saying a less-crazy version of the first statement. Namely, that there aren't that many 20-something female hackers. In summary, it seems like PG stated an inconvenient and perhaps unfortunate truth (and implicitly declined to get into what he could perhaps do to make this truth untrue), The Information reported it in a responsible way, and then ValleyWag re-reported it in a misleading and sensationalistic way. And then PG somewhat disingenuously claimed that he didn't say what he actually said. Also, the irony is rich that all of this involves the guy that wrote "What You Can't Say".
• fuckpig 13y ago
  I used to respect pg. Then I saw moderation here and how bigoted it is, and now, I respect none of you.
• devin 13y ago
  reads post realizes there isn't a lot of substance to most of the comments goes back to programming
• ondiekijunior 13y ago
  No offense intended but what am seeing are ad hominem attacks at worst and pointless agreements at best over suitability of a fellow hacker, pg in this case, to put things clear on a generally clear topic. We are introducing abstract reasons why he is correct or otherwise. Why don't we take him at face value, cause in general it's isn't good practice to discuss someones intellectual ccompetence unless they are a potential hire in our university start-up
• deleted 13y ago
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• dschiptsov 13y ago
  Oh, this American sexism nonsense again. Why, btw, no one is complaining that women have no predispositions for "autistic traits" ("being a male is to have some slight form of autism", like they said) and that girls with Asperger's, like, supposedly, Ayn Rand, is one for a billion. Why no one is protesting against the facts that men are much worse in caring for babies, because they have not enough "non-verbal communication abilities" to stay in a "continuous non-verbal rapport" with a toddler 24 hours a day? Why just not accept the fact that women are evolved to be better at some tasks at the expense of the other (and so are men)? So-called gender equality is a nonsensical "mental" concept (like any other "equality" nonsense which goes against the nature - genes is the very vehicle of inequality), given that the whole "evolutionary reasoning" behind a gender is necessary diversification of functions and abilities.
  • skylan_q 13y ago
    Why, ... Because absolute egalitarianism is dogma. Evidence of anything is just evidence of the capitalist patriarchs running everything.
• robomartin 13y ago
  The media has amazing power to manipulate stories and fabricate what will be taken as facts by the masses. This power is almost impossible to counter. They have molded public opinion, destroyed people and manipulated elections at nearly every level. When I was a kid I was told a story as a means to communicate the gravity of telling lies. A lie, as the story goes, is like ripping open a feather pillow atop a mountain. Feathers fly everywhere. To undo a lie you have to collect every single feather, a task monumentally more difficult than telling the lie. The Internet multiplies the power of the lie at every level. From a simple comments to blog posts to more established media outlets. Since the feathers can't be collected the damage can be extensive, permanent and even outlive the victim. Given this it would almost seem that the law needs to develop beyond liebel and slander (which I think might not be up to the task).
• ooohooo 13y ago
  In the end, there will be no winners in the feminist or forced approach to trying to increase the number of women programmers. It's a lose-lose situation.
• fit2rule 13y ago
  Welcome to the ways of media. My only question is: Why is it such a surprise to you that this occurred, when in fact .. This editing/re-positioning is normal and accepted behaviour in media organizations, and has been for decades. You should have known that the reporter already had their story goal filed - embarrass the PG/VC crowd somehow - and then they went to you for your interview, farming whatever they could to build controversy. Controversy is the product, not informed readers.
• anuraj 13y ago
  PG has put what he said in perspective - and everything boils down to quoting out of context. You want to be an A class founder - try hard - there is no shortcut even if you are a woman.
• nice1 13y ago
  But what if PG had actually said what was attributed to him? It goes against some current prejudice, but it is a view that someone would be entitled to hold, given how few women hackers actually exist. It is simply not known why this is (or why there are relatively few women in some other fields such as physics or math). The simplest hypothesis - that it is of biological origin - has simply not been refuted by any evidence. Why should anyone hound people who approach this issue in a rational way (rather than ideologically)?
• grinich 13y ago
  I don't really care about what was said and what wasn't. PG was probably misquoted. Whatever. What bothers me more is that damaging PG's public image is seemingly what it takes for him to prioritize writing an article about female founders. I don't think YC needs to have affirmative action for gender; it would neither be fair or that effective. However, I think they're in the perfect position to inspire younger generations to start hacking. And this must specifically include girls. My cofounder is a woman, who was contributing to Debian at age 15. Our first employee is a woman, with a MS from the operating systems group at MIT CSAIL. There are lots of women hackers out there, but none of them are partners at YC. This press is disappointing, but not unexpected.
  • jcc80 13y ago
    YC has 3 female partners. http://ycombinator.com/people.html http://ycombinator.com/people.html
    • grinich 13y ago
      Sure, but none of them are "hackers" in the current context. Carolynn is a lawyer, with a bachelors is in political science. Jessica previously worked at an investment bank, and has a BA in English. Kirsty is an accountant, and although she holds an MEng in electrical and information sciences, it's not clear that she ever worked as an engineer. This discussion is about young girls hacking with computers, which (I'm assuming, given their bios) none of these women did at that age. I'm just disappointed that YC doesn't have a woman partner with a CS degree of any sort.
      • reledi 13y ago
        I think it's unfair to describe those women as non-hackers without knowing them well. FWIW, pg can be described in a similar (limited) manner to argue that he's not a hacker: a venture capitalist with a degree in philosophy. And I don't think pg meant that you have to be hacking since age 13 to be a "hacker" (it was an extreme example), but that you have to be passionate about it. From his essay: > What I was talking about here is the idea that to do something well you have to be interested in it for its own sake, not just because you had to pick something as a major.
• deleted 13y ago
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• emiliobumachar 13y ago
  This post is not listed in pg's essays list on his website, for understandable reasons. Makes me wonder what I've been missing. Is there an exaustive list of pg's public writings?
• skylan_q 13y ago
  I stopped reading this partway through because PG doesn't really need to explain himself here. Don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to your own misunderstanding.
• spajus 13y ago
  1. Why is this so heavily upvoted? 2. How do you, startup people, find the time to write a novel in the comments of this "I didn't mean it" post? 3. Would you lick dirt off Paul's shoes if he allowed you? Go write some code instead.
• thatusertwo 13y ago
  Older people start thinking what they see is true, my dad always says stuff that is true to him, but not so true for me as I have less life experience.
• yarou 13y ago
  It's a shame how easily people get offended these days. Calling PG sexist is totally unwarranted, especially when what he said was taken out of context. I suppose these days certain kinds of people get off on controversy, especially when there's none to begin with.
• jebblue 13y ago
  It seemed like a thoughtful and appropriate response to what almost looks like an intentional misrepresentation of his comments; or at least of the purpose of the discussion.
• jenandre 13y ago
  I would be interested in the stats of 'successful' startup investments (for YC and otherwise), how many of those technical founders actually started programming at age ~13 (vs 17 or 18). Would also be interested in seeing what the relative success/failures of investments with startup founders at 23 w/ 10 years experience (started programming in teams), vs 28 (who started programming at 18).
• jcromartie 13y ago
  Why is anybody even offended at what he didn't say? What is wrong with the statement that women aren't making Facebook because they haven't been hacking for ten years? In a statistical sense this is true. The proportion of girls spending their formative years hacking away at technology is miniscule compared to the proportion of boys. The odds of a female Mark Zuckerberg are skewed for this simple reason. And despite PG and YC giving every indication of wanting to change the situation, a simple statement of the situation (if it's out-of-context or not) makes people pick up their pitchforks?
• znowi 13y ago
  How come this high volume post isn't penalized off the front page yet? :)
• lazyant 13y ago
  My concern is that one of these days there will be a silly misunderstanding of greater proportions and PG will say "fuck it" and stop writing publicly and giving interviews.