
What I Didn't Say - twampss
http://paulgraham.com/wids.html
======
grellas
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
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?

~~~
jsmthrowaway
You mean like the cult-like reverence for the pseudo-intellectual issues
commentary on Twitter and Medium? The people who have less than a decade in
the industry but are experts on compensation, ocracies, power dynamics, and
psychology? The ones who work at Silicon Valley startups and lecture the
_entire industry_ about how things work, then surround themselves with like-
minded people to have strength in numbers?

You are seeing respect for Paul Graham because, as flawed as some of his
opinions might be, he also has the experience backing them. Louis CK said this
best:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXcWeFn-
YYM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXcWeFn-YYM) (NSFW in the latter half)

If you're under 40, I'm largely uninterested in your take on the world. That
includes my own; I know I still have things to learn and I make a proactive
effort to listen more than I talk. I don't always succeed.

~~~
ryguytilidie
I don't mean to get in the way of your hyperbole, but the person above you
seemed to have no objection to "respecting" pg, he was taking issue with 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."

Which you don't mention at all in your response...

"If you're under 40, I'm largely uninterested in your take on the world. That
includes my own; I know I still have things to learn and I make a proactive
effort to listen more than I talk. I don't always succeed."

Are you actually being serious? Your brain works in such a way that any person
who has lived less than 14,610 days couldn't possibly add any value to your
life? I don't mean to be harsh but this could be the dumbest thing I've ever
heard in my life. Certainly worse than anything I've seen on Medium.

If I was pg and this was these were the type of people and defenses that were
coming to my aid, I would be mortified.

~~~
Gigablah
> I don't mean to be harsh but this could be the dumbest thing I've ever heard
> in my life.

If that's the case, then you're a very sheltered person.

Lay off the hyperbole next time.

~~~
ryguytilidie
A day later I see no hyperbole here. If the logic one uses is:

-Should I listen to anything this person has to say or take value from their life experiences?

-Well I dunno, have they turned 40 yet.

Is very certainly in the top 5 dumbest things I've ever heard if not the
dumbest. A human being going well out of their way to avoid learning things
and gaining more experience. But thanks for contributing with the random
insult. Hope it helped rebuild your self esteem?

~~~
jacobtracey
The quote was "If you're under 40, I'm largely uninterested in your take on
the world."

See the words 'largely', and 'uninterested'?

Do you understand what those words mean? Fucking hell.

------
ericabiz
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.

~~~
crazygringo
Blind applications would be great if they were possible, but I suspect they
would be as helpful as a blind audition for concert conductors -- i.e., not at
all.

When you evaluate a team, you need to be able to judge their confidence, see
how they interact with each other, get a feel for the trustworthiness, the way
they look at you when they answer a question, and so on. If you can't see
them, and their voice is distorted, then you might as well just ask for a
slide deck and forgo an in-person interview altogether. Which doesn't seem
like a good idea.

~~~
_delirium
That's a plausible hypothesis, but it'd be interesting if someone were willing
to test it experimentally. Some evidence for the hypothesis could be found if
a "blind" YC batch did much worse than a typical YC batch, measured say 3 or 5
years in the future. Of course, with relatively small sample sizes nothing is
likely to be proved beyond doubt, but it'd be interesting to know, and the
amount of money needed to test it wouldn't be huge, since YC isn't making VC-
level investments. Of course, it's not free or risk-free either, so I could
see if they weren't willing to test it.

I've long wanted to see in general some more experimental testing of selection
variations. What if YC (or some other funder's) candidates were just selected
completely randomly from the applications? What if they were selected solely
according to some dumb criterion, like take everyone with the most degrees, or
the longest CV, or the most GitHub LoC? What if they were selected purely
based on the applications (without the dumb-criterion requirement) but without
interviews? For a few tens of thousands of $$, someone willing to try those
kinds of things out could get some pretty interesting information on how
reliable different selection methods are.

My own hypothesis is a negative one: that beyond screening out a few
obviously-bad candidates and taking a few obviously-good candidates, the bulk
of the YC selection process is randomly related to outcomes, and the YC
mentoring/contacts/press/etc., rather than predictive value of the selection
process, is the main driver of their generally strong outcomes. But I can't
prove that. :)

~~~
RRiccio
While that might be worth experimenting, there's a high cost to it. Having
high selection standards makes the network (YC's or any other) exponentially
more valuable to those already in it. If you add a few not-so-good apples by
mistake, there's no going back.

Also, you have to consider how much quantitative and qualitative experience YC
has accumulated, the partners are pretty good at telling in a couple minutes
conversation if you're a strong founder. This advantage would be lost with
blind interviews.

~~~
_delirium
> the partners are pretty good at telling in a couple minutes conversation if
> you're a strong founder

This is the part I doubt, though, if by "strong founder" you mean
"statistically more likely to exit successfully than people selected according
to much simpler 'dumb' criteria". These kinds of claims to predictive ability
based on un-quantified holistic properties like "experience" rarely hold up
under scientific scrutiny.

------
tptacek
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
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
_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
It's not reputation that makes the media successful at programming people.
It's the repetition and omnipresence of the repetition.

------
throwaway135
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)

~~~
crassus
I wonder if part of it is that hackers look down on female-dominated lines of
work. We imagine that being like us is the best thing in the world. It is a
decent line of work, mind you, but it has its downsides and not everybody is
cut out for it.

~~~
MartinCron
Hackers tend to look down on some male-dominated lines of work, too. It's not
like you see a surplus of respect for construction workers or prison guards,
for example.

I think it's more of a class thing than a sex thing.

------
apsec112
"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-
spe...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/15/things-i-learned-by-spending-
five-thousand-years-in-an-alternate-universe/)

~~~
pjscott
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
I was congratulated by a newspaper once. Scaring is a huge understatement, I
avoid any interaction with formalized media since then.

------
kyro
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
> 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
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.

------
yawn
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.

~~~
calibraxis
So far seems he hasn't; he's explained why, and all the more power to him.

BTW, I'm disappointed that only "witch hunt" (terrorism against women) is used
in this particular thread so far. Where's "lynch mob" and "McCarthyism", to
round out the irony trifecta? (Hilariously sick when men liken themselves to
women, whites to blacks, and capitalists to communists.)

~~~
iamjustin
Both men and women were killed during the Salem Witch Trials. A "witch hunt"
isn't terrorism against women.

~~~
aaronem
I seem to remember hearing that the final score in Salem being nineteen women
and one man. Given this data, trivial statistical analysis tells us that the
use of "witch hunt" in this context is 95% sexist, a value well within the
margin of error.

~~~
klipt
Only if you ignore all witch hunts outside Salem. That would be incredibly US-
centric.

Bertrand Guilladot and Louis Debaraz come to mind.

Anyhow, that completely misses the point - that witch trials were based on a
presumption of guilt against which no defense could be made. Much like the way
certain media sites attack people.

~~~
aaronem
Literature review and meta-analysis seemed out of scope, considering the
comment to which I replied. (And I seem to've fallen into the HN trap of being
too straight-faced about a smart-assed comment.)

------
kremlin
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
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
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.

~~~
Perihelion
You're exactly the sort of person I'm talking about. People like you are
afraid to be comfortable in a work environment for fear that they'll be fired
for saying or doing the wrong thing. Provided you aren't a sexist/rapist, I
see no reason why you need to be walking on eggshells all the time at a place
where you spend a large percentage of your day. It makes me sad that my
presence would make you uncomfortable when I haven't said or done anything to
you. While you and you alone have the power to change your behavior (and it
would be awesome if you gave women the benefit of the doubt because we're not
all this way...promise), I really can't place 100% of the blame on you either.
Events like this are conditioning people to be afraid of these issues, not
solve them.

I just want to come to work, maybe draw stupid things on a white board, make
cool shit, and go home. I'd really love it if my vagina wasn't the deciding
factor in whether or not I was capable of STEM or whether or not I was capable
of working around other human beings.

~~~
smtddr
_> >Provided you aren't a sexist/rapist, I see no reason why you need to be
walking on eggshells all the time at a place where you spend a large
percentage of your day._

It's been my experience that when men feel like they're walking on eggshells
around women in the workplace it's because they're normally comfortable making
sexists/rape jokes and/or have sexist beliefs. The feeling of eggshell walking
is them trying to cover that up. I say this as a guy who has seen other male
coworkers' behavior when there are no women around and how difficult it is for
them to clean up their act when there is a lady in the room.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
Or, we're concerned about being misinterpreted and that misinterpretation
being escalated instead of discussed with us so we can clear it up. But yeah,
it's easier to just label us as sexists that like to joke about rape, right?

~~~
smtddr
That's just an excuse. Why are you more worried that a female coworker will
misunderstand you than a male one?

~~~
Perihelion
I see a LOT more drama surrounding the things that men have said/done. If I
were a man I would absolutely be more concerned about my interactions with
female coworkers over male ones.

Don't take this to mean that I think I can say/do whatever I want in this
industry on account of being female -- no one is bulletproof. It just seems
men are vilified more than women when it comes to these sorts of things. Maybe
that's just my world view.

~~~
smtddr
Hmm, so let's see. If this kind of stuff is going on with gender relations,
does it exist with race too? Orientation?

For the tech-world, I guess a black lesbian would be a triple-concern? I would
say that is a problem. Not sure how to fix it, but that's a problem. I
personally don't have to change my behavior or speech when a lady is in the
room. But then again, I'm probably unique in that... I never, ever use
profanity and never make jokes that wouldn't be safe on the Disney channel. I
don't know anyone who can claim that besides me. But, I will say compared to
my time at at&t... the men there seemed to be less frat-housey than the SV-
startup-culture. The men at at&t seemed to be more "gentlemanly", more
socially acceptable. SV-startup-culture I think allows the frat-house/bro-
grammer attitude to grow thus making it more difficult to the men who are use
to that to clean up when a lady is around. At least, that's what I've seen.

~~~
Perihelion
I'll agree with you partially. This sort of thing is definitely going down
based on race/orientation as well, but I see less of that and more men vs
women sorts of discussions.

It's not just a tech problem either. This stuff is going on all around the
world. I don't claim to have solutions to these problems, but I would
appreciate it if the public shaming and witch hunts would stop. I'm tired, SV.
So very tired.

I've never worked at AT&T but I'd wager the same stuff went on. Perhaps you
experienced the same sort of thing I did where people assumed you wouldn't
appreciate their words/actions and elected to avoid you?

~~~
smtddr
_> >Perhaps you experienced the same sort of thing I did where people assumed
you wouldn't appreciate their words/actions and elected to avoid you?_

Being a black male myself, it saddens me to think that you're probably right
in more ways than one....

------
rubiquity
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
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.

~~~
MartinCron
You should feel bad for anyone who gets pushed into any career they don't
really love. I strongly doubt it's at epidemic levels for the daughters of HN.

I'm not applying any pressure at all to my daughter, I'm telling her she can
practice any kind of medicine she wants.

~~~
josephagoss
> I'm telling her she can practice any kind of medicine she wants.

This gave me a much needed laugh.

------
minimaxir
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=0AjPFdCURhZvddHJ...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjPFdCURhZvddHJ5LXFJaE5UbnFZVy1TVVktZ0o2V1E&usp=sharing)

~~~
robg
Is this a stated intention? [ref?] It seems more to be a nice consequence of
their approach - to attract great talent.

~~~
minimaxir
pg mentioned in the article that he wants to increase the number of female
founders.

------
freyrs3
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.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
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)

~~~
freyrs3
I find the twitter comment you linked to very insightful, it's just a thinly
veiled statement of "even if the facts don't support the claims I made about
your actions, you're still to blame for your _inaction_ ". This kind of
"You're either with us, or against us" mentality is rather alarming...

~~~
crassus
The concept of a _struggle session_ might help understand what's going on:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session)

Also, Moldbug: [http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2013/09/technol...](http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2013/09/technology-communism-and-brown-scare.html)

~~~
philwelch
The struggle session notion is a little too on the nose, given the Marxist
influence in SJW circles.

------
ChuckMcM
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)

------
oskarth
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
> This piece should have to be written.

I'm guessing you meant "shouldn't" there?

~~~
oskarth
Sorry, yes. Typo and then noprocrast caught me.

------
yo-mf
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
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
"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
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.

------
ajju
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?

------
gkoberger
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
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
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...](https://www.theinformation.com/When-Founders-Fight-They-Call-Jessica-
Livingston)

------
bedhead
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
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
Historically sure, but (at least in the US) that ship sailed long ago.

------
dschiptsov
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
_Why, ..._ Because absolute egalitarianism is dogma. Evidence of anything is
just evidence of the capitalist patriarchs running everything.

------
davidw
> [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.

------
robg
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
_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.

------
YuriNiyazov
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."

------
tomasien
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
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
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.

~~~
yogo
If you think like this, even a little, I think you can find a way to see
everything in life as having a gate. Can't get on TV, radio, on some blog,
etc. ... gatekeeper present. That's the wrong mindset to have IMO.

~~~
tomasien
Um, yeah - gatekeepers are WAY more present in TV, radio, and blogs than even
at YC. At least at YC there are lots of partners, in those examples it's
usually one person who decides to have you on. Patriarchy is a way bigger
problem in those places.

It's not about an attitude about life - I don't worry about gatekeepers at
because practically you can't. You've got to give gatekeepers no choice - give
YC no choice but to accept you, Techcrunch no choice but to write about you,
etc. etc. But as a matter or discussing how our SOCIETY should work,
gatekeepers need to examine their biases, strongly and often.

------
lauradhamilton
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
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.

------
snake_plissken
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.

------
kategleason
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 :)

------
Nimi
"""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?

------
cookiecaper
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
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.

------
abalone
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.

~~~
nycticorax
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".

~~~
abalone
Yup, you nailed it.

The bigger problem with pg's statement is not the 13 year old girl claim. It's
that he fully blames them and middle school curriculum while giving YC, PyCon
and the startup industry a pass. His stance is we already have an open door
and are self-selected, so the problem must be up the line.

You're right, he dodged the question of whether we need to be more _proactive_
, not just open.

~~~
nycticorax
All this having been said, I think that the level of vitriol PG has been
subjected to is completely unfounded. I think it's unclear whether YC is
morally obligated to lower its standards for female applicants, or to make
special efforts to encourage them to apply. The first is fraught, since it
implicitly means you're selecting less-qualified people over more-qualified
ones (the Ivy League universities do this for disadvantaged minorities,
Caltech notably does not), the second would be nice (and I think basically all
top-tier universities in the US do this for disadvantaged minorities), but
it's not clear to me that it rises to the level of a moral responsibility.

~~~
abalone
There are other ways of being proactive. I bet if you asked teachers and
parents, they'd say 13 year old girls lack female hacker role models to look
up to. They'd note how bro-y the hacker culture appears to be.

So perhaps our industry could make a greater effort to spotlight and support
our very best examples of female hackers, and put them in closer touch with 13
year old girls. And to dial down the bro-iness of events and startup office
cultures.

Those are examples of being proactive that have nothing to do with lowering
standards. Pointing fingers elsewhere in the system is not that different from
defending the status quo, because it's an interdependent system.

~~~
jlees
There are initiatives doing both of those things, luckily. Little Miss Geek,
Technovation, et al for the first; and various changes including anti-
harassment policies for the second (though some companies/events remain quite
"bro"-y). Not to say there shouldn't be more of them, or that more hacker role
models aimed at all genders and demographics in the early teens aren't needed.
There are also more visible female tech role models than there used to be,
from Marissa Mayer to Sheryl Sandberg -- but that doesn't stop 15 year old
girls drawing a spotty, overweight, badly-groomed man as their idea of a
"technologist" when asked. (source; Little Miss Geek TEDx talk)

I also want to point out on the lowering standards front, I'm a female hacker
who's been coding since age 6, and I was rejected from YC. I'm actually proud
of that fact in the light of this discussion. I'd hate the whole foundation of
my startup to be the source of such rabid debate, and for folks to think I
just got in because I'm a unicorn and we need more unicorns in tech.

------
McKittrick
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
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
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.

------
ElissaShevinsky
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.

------
akkartik
My favorite quote: "I err on the side of late binding for everything.."

~~~
danso
Me too. Ageism is also a huge problem in tech, independent of gender and
racial issues.

~~~
ChristianMarks
Me three. I was beginning to think that I hadn't programmed the systems I
actually had.

------
jcromartie
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?

------
gmays
I wonder how much time and energy is wasted defending or clarifying comments,
particularly by people who would otherwise be creating value.

------
rexreed
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.

------
informatimago
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!

------
edw519
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.

------
oskarth
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.

------
dataminded
I find that doubting anything that Gawker says about anyone or anything is
generally a good idea.

------
robomartin
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).

------
izendejas
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.

------
dkural
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
> 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.

------
beachstartup
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.

------
venantius
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.

------
drcode
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)

------
dinkumthinkum
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.

------
natural219
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...](https://www.theinformation.com/YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete-
Interview), but there's no way I'm subscribing to this junk website.

------
jayferd
Here's a collection of other writings by pg about women:
[http://sambiddle.kinja.com/paul-graham-writing-about-
women-o...](http://sambiddle.kinja.com/paul-graham-writing-about-women-on-his-
website-1491875959)

This would be different if there were no context, but there is a lot of
context.

------
atmosx
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
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.

------
forgottenpaswrd
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.

------
vorg
> 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.

------
nox_
I expected an article about monads.

------
devin
_reads post_

 _realizes there isn 't a lot of substance to most of the comments_

 _goes back to programming_

------
edouard1234567
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."

------
jpeg_hero
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.

------
emiliobumachar
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?

------
Osiris
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
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/transcr...](http://www.onthemedia.org/story/129436-just-email-
me/transcript/)

------
skylan_q
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.

------
fit2rule
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.

------
ondiekijunior
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

------
foobarian
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).

------
jenandre
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).

------
ChristianMarks
_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.

------
ericd
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.

------
dchichkov
> 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.

------
arcticfox
Is there an editor's rebuttal to this? If unintentional, at the very least a
limited apology seems fitting.

------
bambax
> _whether we could, in effect, accept women we would have accepted if they
> had been hackers_

"wouldn't"?

~~~
gingerlime
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
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
_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.

------
yarou
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.

------
leoc
"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."

------
jug6ernaut
"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.

~~~
kstenerud
"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
What I quoted was not from the "interview"

~~~
kstenerud
Technically, you are correct. But you're missing the underlying comment that
anyone can find fault with what you say if they use sufficient semantic boxing
rather than granting a bit of slack.

What's amazing is how many people continue to do this, even though they have
many times felt the aggravation of others doing it to their public posts.

------
anuraj
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.

------
lazyant
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.

------
zw123456
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).

------
jebblue
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.

------
ooohooo
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.

------
thatusertwo
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.

------
znowi
How come this high volume post isn't penalized off the front page yet? :)

------
spajus
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.

------
11thEarlOfMar
Well, that's a relief.

------
crassus
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
> 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.

~~~
bluekeybox
To blame the listeners is one step short of accepting things as they are. In
this case, it is most certainly the talkers, since it is they who immediately
profit from their deeds. Don't forget that every listener is also a talker (I
bet there is a Nietzsche quote about it somewhere).

~~~
davidp
> To blame the listeners is one step short of accepting things as they are.

I disagree:

\- If the talkers are the problem, then the solution is... less speech?
Muzzling/censorship? I'll pass, thanks. Better to have the frenzied finger-
pointers grow hoarse blathering to a crowd that's ignoring them, than to give
them the very attention that they crave and that drives their fortunes.

\- I didn't mention solutions to the problem because my post was already long
enough.

Solutions would involve (at least):

\- Persuading people to take their media viewership and loyalty away from the
worst offenders (MSNBC, Fox News, etc.). Hit them where it hurts, in the
pocketbook. Do this by pointing out the emperor's nakedness. \- Persuading
people to give their media viewership to sources and outlets that don't pander
to them (not quite the opposite of the first point). This gives influence
(money) to media voices who, eventually, can credibly call our leaders to task
for their race-to-the-bottom mentality. \- Improved critical thinking
curricula in formal education at all levels.

The above improvements would have gradual second-order effects on civic life,
e.g. you might eventually end up with real town hall meetings instead of
staged, scripted tripe. It really wouldn't take much overt change to see
results -- you don't have to boil the ocean.

~~~
bluekeybox
No one is talking about Soviet-style suppression of free speech. To see my
direction, compare media-enabled witch-hunts and mob politics to an immune
reaction of an organism. A small, appropriate dose of it is good for the body.
A disproportionate immune reaction (like what we're seeing here), is an
inflammation, and should probably call for administration of cortisone (while
a Soviet-style reaction would be cutting out the whole inflamed tissue and
harming everything in the process). It gets worse. If left unchecked, we can
have an auto-immune disease. Someone has to be watching the watchers.

------
squirejons
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!

------
thenerdfiles
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_.

~~~
yetanotherphd
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
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.

------
fuckpig
I used to respect pg. Then I saw moderation here and how bigoted it is, and
now, I respect none of you.

------
nashashmi
Can I use the skewed article and PG's response to now make a case that women
can't be newspaper writers?

~~~
nashashmi
I guess I should have initialed it as j/k. I hate down votes.

------
frozenport
Thats what happens when you get your news from a p0rn outlet!

------
grinich
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
YC has 3 female partners.

[http://ycombinator.com/people.html](http://ycombinator.com/people.html)

~~~
grinich
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
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._

------
__pThrow
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
Does it really surprise or disturb you that PG takes a special interest in
things said about himself? It should not.

~~~
__pThrow
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.

~~~
freyrs3
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.

~~~
__pThrow
1\. Paul is not influential in African Politics. Paul is influential in tech.

2\. Paul runs a press that specializes in topics in tech

3\. Paul and his mods goes out of their way to kill threads that discuss this
topic when it deals with other people, people who are almost entirely
powerless to defend themselves and so rely on the crowdsourced power of others
to defend them and discuss the topic

4\. Paul then uses the same press to complain how he was treated.

Draw your own conclusions regarding Paul's relative complicity in what
happened to others and himself.

And there are of course far more incidents than the three I mention.

