throwawayknecht

By discussing things with them like a regular human being and giving them opportunities to try things they are more comfortable with.

Good management is not, ironically, rocket science.

That's not the same at all, though. The prison is doing the same thing they would be doing, only on a different schedule.

Tesla has demanded that firings be carried out at the same rate as average attrition for poor performance, even though those two things have different causes and remedies. People who perform the least-well on their team but are still a (potentially large!) net benefit are generally not fired, but systems like this demand they be.

What's thoroughly disgusting is an employer summarily firing the bottom X% of their workforce, largely because the top management fucked up scheduling and needs to restore investor confidence.

How would it be different if a hospital murdered X% of their worst-prognosis patients every January 1st, rather than letting X% die over the course of the year regardless of interventions?

The counter to a move like this is trivial, but they are banking on surprise and that you won't have any Popper to actually pull it off in your evidence on-hand.

(I haven't paid attention to policy debate in 15 years and now I wonder what kind of impact smartphones have had, or could have assuming they're not currently allowed.)

On the other hand, focusing intensely on "critical thinking and argument" is detrimental to the purported goal of debate as a civic institution - rather than a high school sport - which to educate, seek truth, and ideally come to common ground either via persuasion or compromise.

K-heavy policy is kind of the extreme opposite of that, increasingly meta arguments where no one ever has to concede even a basic model of reality to the other side. I didn't like it as a debater, and I had a dim view of it as a judge, especially from aff side.

(These frustrations had me drift towards group disco and student congress after 2.5 years in policy.)

This is the exact opposite of my (now two decade old) experience. We had a team (honestly, one guy) who did the most ridiculous meta Ks and the LDers were almost scornful of it. Their debates were ideological and drew from a much wider range of sources, but there was virtually no meta involved.

> So essentially what they're saying is a woman would be chosen over a more highly qualified man simply because she has a vagina.

I don't have any personal experience, but I've heard many women without vaginas talk about how good Sephora has been to/for them. So don't worry, that's not happening.

> Both of these practices are extremely unfair and should be eliminated.

I realize this is Hacker News where everything must be rederived from first principles every single thread, but really, these practices exist especially to eliminate situations where extremely unfair hiring practices have existed, de facto or de jure, in the past.

If you don't like what the solution looks like, tough shit. Figure out how to avoid causing similar problems in the future rather than bemoaning the necessary recompense now.

> Most nurses are women, maybe we should favor men in the hiring process there?

Ah yes, the inevitable "I didn't do any researching at all but WHAT ABOUT THE NURSES" post.

Most areas in North America and Europe want more male nurses. How to attract and keep them is a major area of discussion. Many nursing scholarships are exclusively for men. Men in nursing get paid more than women in nursing.

And all this ignoring why the nursing gender imbalance exists. Here's a hint: It's not because women wanted to do the work of a doctor for a fraction of the pay.

> Why Isn't the Construction of CRUD Web UI's 90% Automated?

It is, several times over.

Using SQL or some other domain-specific query language against structured records? That's the first 90%. HTTP and hypertext? That's the next 90%. CSS and modern HTML authoring? Another 90%. Web app framework with an ORM and MVC / data binding / reactive / flavor of the month? Another 90%.

Your mistake is assuming that automating 90% of it reduces the work by 90%, rather than letting you spend 10x as much time on making the bespoke parts fancier.

"What kinds of questions do you propose these bigoted people are asking?"

If the US is any example, it is the worst-trained scaredy-pants who walk up to every traffic stop with their hand on the holster, and the cops most "up to the job" who are willing to engage suspects with words, time, and humanity.

It's not a matter of when class war will break out in the US, but rather when enough of the working class will realize they've been losing it for decades.

> Why immediately turn this into a racial issue?

Gun control in America has always been a racial issue. Black people have never been able to own guns as freely as white people, from the Black Codes to the Mulford Act to Marissa Alexander and Philando Castile today.

> You dont think there will be minorities clinging to their guns?

That there will be is entirely the point of my comment!

> Dont you think your comment is a bit racist?

No. I think America is a lot racist. And I think that will have implications on enforcement if gun control policies are enacted, and so we need to keep that in mind when considering what to enact.

Unfortunately, it's not just the politicians. Key to the making the buyback work was that people were willing to sell. If you tried it in America you'd get white militias in standoffs - think a new Cliven Bundy every week - and cops slaughtering any black person hesitant to turn over their weapon.

I support the EU, but it's not clear to me that they are the primary entity responsible for peace in Europe between 1945 and 1991. And I think they have acted especially parochial and conservative during 2007-2012, the period prior to getting the Nobel.

Somewhat bizarrely, though, he is Basque and it's suggested he's wildly divergent genetically (though it's not clear if it's really suggesting that, or just Hel using it to rile him up - Hel is enough of a Marty Stu it's reasonable to read some authorial belief into it), neither of which is true of the Cagot.

"Moral revulsion" seems reasonable to feel at Kissinger's win.

Obama's is meaningless, even if you believe he did contribute materially to international peace (he didn't) he hadn't done so yet, with less than a year in office.

Giving it to the EU is just farce, in the same sense as "corporations are people." The EU is the result of the process the prize is supposed to encourage. It should be going to the people responsible for that institution's functioning - but good luck convincing anyone that its leaders have done a particularly good job navigating post-sovereign-debt-crisis, the period the prize would usually be awarding.

(I agree the award is necessarily political. I think it's better to say many recent awards have been tactical - moves in an attempt to bring about better relations, mostly unsuccessfully, rather than recognizing those who do really encourage them.)

It's already done in other countries.

http://www.royalmail.com/personal/identity-verification https://www.deutschepost.de/en/p/postident.html

(Deutsche Post also runs a consumer bank, and does quite a bit of electric / electric-assisted vehicle R&D.)

I can't speak for adnam but I would consider YC's cannabis-related investments questionable for reasons beyond just "it has to do with pot." If you are going to make your fortune selling pot, IMO you have a moral obligation to assist those (predominantly young men of color) whose lives have been ruined cracking that market for you. Meadow is just another gross Uber-esque intermediary (not to mention the YC partner working as part of the most tough-on-drugs executive branch in decades).

More generally, if you want to establish yourself as a "good person" I think you need to make the argument when you fund the thing as to why your loans aren't predatory, or your pot isn't white people getting rich on the back of black lives, or your laundry service won't leave a community unable to wash their clothes. Part of "doing good" is working with people affected to establish your bona fides. YC doesn't attempt this; they are concerned with "being good" which, as the article covers, is a semantic game that lets you justify any behavior you want.

I felt like the GP's citation was probably enough - "pg and Jessica have written about YC's philosophy multiple times in greater detail over the years."

(Graham is regularly quoted on HN without citation, especially in threads about his writing, which is how I classify this one.)

But that seems to be entirely driven by the current small size of the company, which is fundamentally anathema to YC's conception of a startup, which is a company that is growing as fast as it can.

If you want to work at a small company because you feel like you'll have a greater impact, picking a startup is a great way to ensure you'll be dissatisfied with your job every couple years. Pick a genuine SMB instead.

Also payday loans.

Also, repeatedly, laundry services that fail to scale but shut down all local laundromats while they have the money to price below-cost.

I would again recommend this Atlantic article about how Silicon Valley interprets "goodness" in a "tautological and narcissistic" way - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/what-...

My bullseye metaphor was maybe a little off; the "target" I was talking about was not economic success, in which case YC hitting it is indisputable. It's the idea that this essay contains the principles necessary to achieve those financial results.

My claim is that YC has many principles that led to its financial success, and not all of them are, or are really compatible with, other principles mentioned in this essay.

("Good" as used in this essay also shares a kind of empty essentialism with Google's "evil" - a focus on BEING good or not BEING evil, rather than the trickier question of how to DO good / avoid DOING evil - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/what-...)

It absolutely is. The culmination of the "why" section is basically "because you will run a business better":

"In any competitive field, you can win big by seeing things that others daren't. And in every field there are probably heresies few dare utter. Within the US car industry there is a lot of hand-wringing now about declining market share. Yet the cause is so obvious that any observant outsider could explain it in a second: they make bad cars. And they have for so long that by now the US car brands are antibrands—something you'd buy a car despite, not because of. Cadillac stopped being the Cadillac of cars in about 1970. And yet I suspect no one dares say this. [11] Otherwise these companies would have tried to fix the problem."

> union for startup founders.

"Any industry that still has unions has potential energy that could be released by startups... industries afflicted by unions are sclerotic so have left lots undone."

What's in this article has been said before, but not everything said before is in this article. Paul threw a lot of darts, and while they do have clusters, this is just as much him drawing the bullseye.

His comments about naughtiness / "what you can't say" / etc., for example, don't play particularly well right now between back-to-back Facebook advertising scandals, and Kalanick, and aren't in here. But he's talked about that as much as many of the things that are in here.

Even in the US the current conception of "free speech" - both culturally and legally - only goes back to 1964.

> His point has been for quite a while that if you're a young man, and you're unhappy with your life, the way to fix that is to work on fixing your life, not joining some far-right movement.

Weird, then, how as soon as something went wrong with his life, he joined a far-right movement. (And seems to be very well-compensated financially for doing so.)

> This is not like England and Scotland, is more like Manchester wanting to leave England.

In what way?

(Let's ignore for now the fact Manchester did have a semi-serious independence movement during the Scotland referendum, and no police were necessary.)