brchsiao

Social creatures like being valued. What they don't like about being objectified is having everything else about them disregarded. I hope it's not callously dismissive to ask: what new, surprising thing does this article tell us about the universe?

If you're interested in Python and Lisp, Hy (https://github.com/hylang/hy) is great. They're welcoming and funny.

What do you find tone deaf about it? I'm unable to extract this message from the essay: "No, really, my girlfriend was around to be the work mom and handle the social stuff!" It reads more to me like "despite all she's accomplished, the press is never going to do her justice, and if no one's going to, I will."

Please reread the essay. She was not "a girlfriend with an English degree" he "brought on to handle marketing."

> Y Combinator is fundamentally a nexus of people, like a university. It doesn't make a product. What defines it is the people. Jessica more than anyone curated and nurtured that collection of people. In that sense she literally made YC.

You seem to be assuming that pg wrote this essay to boost YC's reputation. Actually it feels like he wrote it to correct an injustice. A large one, I'd add, considering it's gone on for most of a decade.

While "a few winners and a whole fuckin' lot of losers" applies anywhere, the difference, the article says, is that in this case the losers have a lot more potentially malicious power over consumers, and you never want to be standing next to a desperate dying animal.

The main protest here seems to be that fixing what unions break inevitably benefits capitalists while cheating the worker. I'd genuinely like to know: what's the best example of an industry disrupted in this way that left workers net behind?

Everyone knows it's annoying to see the rich philosophize in armchairs while the rest of the world does the lifting. Is that all that's left to say? pg seems to be claiming that (a) unions indicate breakage for startups to fix, and that (b) fixing this breakage is in fact more profitable for startups if they do it good-naturedly instead of simply taking workers' pie. Is this false?

Of course they're all IRC users inadvertently. That doesn't add to IRC's popularity. If Twitch disabled IRC and switched its chatrooms to some ghetto socket.io app, most of its users wouldn't know.

> Of course they wouldn't, you're already speaking with them. Slack is fine for trusted networks of peers (businesses), but not much else. I won't start chatting with any my friends using it, nor would I bother to sign up somewhere to get access to a random Slack channel/community instead of using IRC, where I also coincidentally wouldn't need any of Slack's features.

No, what I meant was, people no longer think of IRC as the tool to use to talk about projects and communities. They used to. That was its primary use case. That use case is shrinking, so IRC is becoming less popular.

> How do you determine the popularity of something? How many people use it. Android is extremely popular. Do most of the folks realize they're using an Android phone? Nope.

This isn't quite true, is it? Most Android users seem to know they're using Android. I could be wrong.

The discussion is about users who use IRC directly and consciously. Many of Twitch's users have no clue what IRC is. Imagine a new social app that used SMTP in its implementation. You wouldn't bring it up in a discussion about the popularity of email.

No one denies IRC's continued popularity as a protocol for broadcasting text over a network. Slack itself uses it. But it's dying out as measured by the number of people who say to their colleagues e.g. "get on IRC, I have something to tell you."

Being powered by IRC is not the same as using it, in the sense meant here.

If I may allow myself a guess, possibly the line of thought at livecoding.tv, given the other examples of banned users on your site, and given the lie about the cron job, is that these are merely moronic, worthless customers you're alienating that you wouldn't want on your site anyway. Perhaps you think (thought?) that this is another such instance. This is not the case. You've created a huge leak in your potential enthusiastic user base, which now consists of "programmers willing to stream their content who also happen not to be HN readers."

Mistakes happen. Many startups have survived bad publicity on HN. Your actions have not ensured you a spot in this roster. Even generously overlooking the juvenile behavior of your cofounder and ban messages, the narrative of livecoding.tv stored in the collective brain of HN is now "fails to respond to user and petulantly refuses to apologize for seven hours."

The best thing you can do right now is to identify the responsible individual in your company, apologize specifically, and abjectly, as a company, on behalf of this individual, remove all the ban messages, delete OP's account, explain how a cron job came to enter the story, and both explain and apologize for why this took two hours to resolve after you heard about it.

(Disclaimer: I was about to sign up for livecoding.tv for similar reasons as OP just yesterday. I'm disappointed to know this might've happened to me.)

The unfairness of this makes me rather sad. A handful of YC companies make mistakes out of >800. Why the need for a snide remark toward Jessica?

So the cron job turned out to be an invented lie told to a user they essentially assumed would be too stupid to think about it. Which is it then, that they e.g. have a tired support team using a canned response that includes a lie? Or is it the founders themselves thinking their audience are fools?

Sure, separate business policy from code, but it seems unwise to assume your users are technically ignorant when your site is about inviting programmers to stream their work.