brhsiao

I was worried whether it'd randomly shut down, so I emailed the creator, http://pastebin.com/raw/eWG8RQqk, and it looks like it'll be safe for a while.

I have no idea whether using services like these is a good idea.

I did read once that humans basically evolved to handle childcare as a society. Apparently villages used to raise all the kids together. So I am probably arguing against biology here.

I'm still not sure assuming that people with kids have less time left over is discrimination, but I am probably projecting my own lack of desire to have kids onto the separate issue of how society should be run.

But why does it fall on companies to create an "environment" that treats people with kids the same way when in fact their circumstances are different?

During the YC/Thiel thing, I saw someone cite "I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon", as an example of a morally outrageous statement. But surely people with small kids are more preoccupied?

Why do companies/society need to accommodate people who have kids? Why are maternity/paternity leave a thing? How come we don't expect people to price the fact that having a kid is a lot of work that will inherently set their life back into their decision of whether to have one?

Is it really so "evil" when one makes the assumption that someone with kids is on balance less dedicated, more tired, more preoccupied, etc. than someone without? Can't we rephrase that as, someone who has a matter in their life they need to spend hours a day on will have less time for other things? Is that discrimination?

Am I the only one who just hasn't experienced this feeling? There used to be Rails/Django and jQuery. Now there's Node and React. Both revolve around extremely simple ideas. Spend an afternoon reading the React docs, and you'll know everything you need. Take another afternoon after that and learn Redux. If you have another few afternoons, learn Clojure, and see what the Lisp folks have gotten going with reagent/re-frame. There isn't that much to keep up with.

It's the same with complaints about JS having too many transpiled dialects. These dialects make life easier. There are good ideas in them. For example, Livescript is wonderfully concise and elegant, at no cost of readability once you grok Livescript. It makes your code more readable and faster to write. How is this a bad deal?

I sometimes wonder if people are just annoyed that they need to learn new paradigms at all. It's not like ours shift at an especially fast rate.

    * Thiel is passionately against all forms of political correctness, just like Trump.
    * Thiel: "A startup is basically structured as a monarchy. We don’t call it that, of course."
    * Thiel wants to restrict immigration to highly educated people. Just like Trump.

I've yet to see this claim substantiated. Why can't one coherently believe Trump is an existential threat to society while allowing one of his biggest supporters to give advice to startups? What on earth does one have to do with the other?

People keep talking about moral "incoherence" and "spinelessness," in response to which I have two concrete questions:

(1) How does it "support" Thiel to allow him to advise startups who are allowed to choose whether they want to work with him? How would it improve the situation to rob YC startups of his advice?

(2) Sam already wrote that he thinks Thiel is "completely wrong" in his support of Trump. What else must he do?

I can't wrap my head around the idea that it's evil to do business with someone committing an unrelated evil to the business being done. It'd be one thing if Thiel were using YC as a megaphone for his political efforts, but YC already said he wasn't.

Edit: Sam just posted https://twitter.com/sama/status/787794988855812096.

> For that matter, it's disingenuous of you to point to an individual's tweets denouncing Trump, then to the fact that his organization hasn't done the same, and call it a lack of moral courage.

YC has multiple partners, and for them to disavow Thiel as a whole would require them to conspire, behind Thiel's back, to reach an agreement on this. That seems iffy. Is it really not enough that Sam has individually come out against Trump? Is it really moral incoherence that he hasn't rallied his entire organization behind him on this?

I do wonder whether female and Muslim YC founders ever receive advice from Thiel, and how they feel about it. But I suspect most accept that he's a smart guy, and that at the end of the day, they can part ways in disagreement but a few pieces of good advice richer. Or maybe not. I'd be interested in hearing about someone's experience here.

If you're saying Sam should come out and say he disagrees with Thiel, he's already said he finds Trump repugnant. Are you saying that in addition to this, he also has to say, "I now draw attention to the fact that by opposing Trump, I am hereby disagreeing with my partner who supports him"? Why? And could it possibly also be because YC has other people in it, and disavowing a partner of YC by himself would be acting irresponsibly toward his partners?

If you're saying YC as an institution should disavow Thiel's actions, is every company expected to choose a political stance, then disavow any partners who act against it? For that matter, it's disingenuous of you to point to an individual's tweets denouncing Trump, then to the fact that his organization hasn't done the same, and call it a lack of moral courage.

It's also disingenuous to suggest, as you do in your tweets where you warn women and Muslims against joining YC, that because one of their partners donated to Trump and spoke at his convention, YC as an institution is now somehow poisoned with the views typical of a Trump supporter. Presumably Thiel was added as a partner for the simple reason that he is a valuable source of advice for startups. He can still be one as a keynote speaker for Trump. Besides, most people who endorse candidates, even people who act as keynote speakers, don't agree completely with their candidate, which further weakens your argument.

Finally, I sometimes read your tweets, and I noticed you tweeted https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/787756601281085440 to Paul Graham's wife. Your usual sense of humor becomes weirdly aggressive when you write about YC, like you really want to pick a fight. What's your problem with them?

I'd like a serious answer to this, actually: why does this matter?

http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/

http://cs231n.stanford.edu/

I don't have any affiliation with them. I just always thought trading stocks was schleppily difficult, and was delighted to discover it was not so. I believe some company will do well; I'm not interested in understanding spreadsheets or hiring anyone; here's my money; how do I buy shares? What is the Uber-like, magic-button product here? Robinhood, it turns out.

https://www.robinhood.com/

> At first, saying “no” to fund-raisers and coffees brought with it a keen, almost illicit pleasure. What freedom! I started slipping out of meetings and school assemblies at the first possible moment instead of staying to chat. On one delicious occasion, I sat in my car and read a book while my children attended a family-oriented athletic function.

seem like perfectly reasonable behavior? I couldn't care less if someone I knew did this. I had no idea saying no to coffee was rude.

Presumably, if you break one of these rules, e.g. by saying no to some big gathering, you'll be offending someone. This would seem to suggest that there are people out there industriously keeping track of who fails to show up to gatherings and holding it against them. Really? Here, at the end of a century that saw the perfection of human flight, two world wars, and ongoing efforts to make us a multiplanetary species?

If not dragging myself out to spend several hours making small talk is rude, can I just be rude?

I don't know if this is true of the history of philosophy (or if it's a meaningful indictment of these philosophers), but I can't help but be reminded of it when I see strenuous efforts being made to bucket various phenomena, and human ones at that. What are we going to do with these categories? Not to put too fine a point on it, these things are complex. Any differentiating scheme simple enough will be insufficient to be the basis of any important decision, and any sophisticated enough won't be neat enough for us to be talking about it like this.

I say this as someone who spent more years than I'd care to admit obsessed with MBTI. Wow, look, there are all these different people with their strengths and weaknesses. I even get a cool framework—a stack—to aid me in psychoanalysis. And then of course you have Socionics, which shamelessly tries, using just sixteen categories, to produce a catalog of human interaction. I am not saying it isn't fun.

Actually, MBTI did help me in one way: by showing me how diverse humans are. In my most advanced, intelligent state, I'm still not going to get along with or be compelling to all of them. That was an important idea for me growing up, and still is.

But beyond that, and running the risk of sounding unsophisticated: who cares?

Being called ugly sucks, but in the long run it seems better than having an arbitrary, ill-defined adjective like "creepy" thrown around. Ugly is at least constructive feedback. You know where the problem is.

Suppose I were writing a rant about obesity being unhealthy and visually jarring. I then decide, for comedic dramatic flair, to write "fat people should be eradicated from the gene pool," knowing full well it will anger the reader—who in turn cluelessly gets angry. I'd argue that that doesn't make me deplorable, it makes the joke on the reader. In the grand scheme of things, my gene pool comment obviously isn't serious, even if the rest of my rant is.

Being provoked by people trying to provoke you is the conversational version of slipping on a banana peel, and is itself funny, albeit only ever so slightly.