
Ask PG: What Changed? - switz
Two years ago, you referred to the question, "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage" as "one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications."[1]<p>But, as recently as a few months ago you said, "How you hacked some real-world system to your advantage is not a super important question. Probably not even in the top 10."[2]<p>So, why is the question not as evocative as you once thought?<p>[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693870
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pg
There are 35 questions on the application. A question can be one we
consistently pay attention to without being in the top 10.

Also, we added at least 2 new questions we care about more since we added that
one. (The field names of one or both of those may be those of previously
existing questions, but we changed the question itself in a way that made the
answer more important.)

~~~
noibl
> A question can be one we consistently pay attention to without being in the
> top 10.

Sure, but the query was about "pay _most_ attention to".

I wonder if hacking the YC app process via PR stunt became too obvious an
answer to the question over time.

~~~
rxs
> Sure, but the query was about "pay most attention to".

If you interpret that as "pay most attention to (when questions are ranked by
the amount of attention we've paid them over all rounds)", nobody gets killed
and we can all go home.

~~~
noibl
Right, right. Or! We could stop redefining common words and agree that 'pay'
is a verb in the present tense.

(Please don't kill me.)

~~~
rxs
I have suggested no redefinition. Technical accuracy is one of the aspects of
my communication I pay most attention to.

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codex
Stop turning over PG's every word like some soon-to-be unemployed English
major. It is pathetic. You need experience with the real world through use,
and not by the cool reflected glow of the Internet on your monitor.

~~~
siglesias
1) The hit against English majors was entirely unnecessary.

2) I don't see how experiencing the real world would have gotten him any
closer to the answer. HN seems to be a perfectly reasonable forum to ask.
There might have been something interesting there.

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redler
It's not a terrible question, but it's really not that different from more
common corporate-speak interview questions like, "We like 'out of the box'
thinkers here. Does that describe you, and if so, how?"

If anything, it's an easier version of that question, since it primes the
applicant with the hint of considering responses outside the standard domain.
It makes sense to me that pg doesn't consider this a top ten question.

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JohnsonB
Nothing changed, it was never a good question. There are many ways to be
productive, entrepreneurial, and creative while working "within the system",
so the question was intrinsically discriminatory to those who did so.

~~~
paul
It's generally not possible to do anything "revolutionary" without
encountering some very severe obstacles. The status-quo guards itself.

~~~
biot
If someone loses 30 pounds of body fat and you ask them how they did it, would
it be considered hacking the system if they told you that they worked out and
ate healthy meals while restricting their caloric intake? To me, that's the
expected normal way to go about losing weight and for the majority of people
is guaranteed to work.

So it is possible to get extraordinary results through the application of
discipline to boring, traditional approaches.

~~~
shrig94
I lost 40 pounds of body fat in 3 months by not eating carbohydrates, and
eating an over 2000 calorie high fat diet. I think that losing 30 lbs of body
fat the normal way isn't that extraordinary. I think what I did by hacking the
system was more so extraordinary.

~~~
mcs
did the same thing, this works. I've learned to enjoy avoiding bread.
<http://reddit.com/r/keto>

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rdl
It must be weird having everything you say picked apart -- it's like being the
Pope or Alan Greenspan.

Interesting with Greenspan we ended up with sort of a reaction to the previous
tea-leaves reading by Bernanke -- he's vastly more transparent and
communicates really boring things.

~~~
pyalot2
Being famous, successful and surrounded by padawans does that to you.

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ceejayoz
I'd guess it's the same reason no one asks "what's your greatest weakness" to
job applicants any more. Everyone's been trained to come up with an answer
like "oh, I guess it's that I just work so damned hard all the time!"

~~~
sherm8n
This reminds me of the way people answer how you know people need what you're
making. Everyone says they've validated the idea with users or talked to
users. When you start getting deeper in the conversation you can tell they've
only scratched the surface level. They don't know users all that much. I guess
people are starting to be trained how to answer the question. The only person
they're fooling is themselves though.

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robryan
I think one issue might be that everyone knows about this question and primed
by the earlier comments on the importance might end up over optimising this.
There might end up being lots of really impressive answers to this question
that didn't correlate well with results.

In earlier rounds when less people that were applying knew the question it
might have been a better indicator.

------
JimWillTri
How about the possibility that every batch of new admissions is a learning
experience. No one has all the answers to what makes a great startup. You live
and learn every day.

