I believe Silicon Valley is meritocratic for the most part. I don't buy the minority argument since there are many asian minority presence in the valley. If you look at music industry or sports (such as basketball), you will see many black people. You rarely see any asian people doing sports or music. And we don't blame it on race. If black people are not discriminated in music or sports, I don't know why they would be discriminated in other industries. They succeed in music and sports because they are really good. If black people are really good in tech as they are in sports or music, I can't imagine how the tech industry would turn them away just because of their color.
Nope. I'm just as pasty and blond as he is, and that was my first thought as well. I would have put him at ~35, but he definitely doesn't look like he's fresh out of college.
Not really. For me, the design of the calendar is really ugly (in terms of usability not aesthetics).
I can switch to the old view. But if people don't let Google know that their design sucks, then sooner or later, Google will just shut down the old view.
I maybe downvoted to hell for speaking against a yc company. But I am going to say it anyway because it's downright wrong.
Now that their dirty practice is out in the open. What do they do?
Oh, It's actually a bug in our software, and we'll fix it.
This is just way too dishonest.
In 2008, when users signed up for loopt, they sms/spam everyone from the address book of users. When people complained about the spam, what do they do?
If companies like Loopt succeed, it might give people the wrong idea that in order to succeed, you need to adopt sketchy practices like what airbnb and loopt have used. It doesn't matter if it's unethical or even illegal as long as you benefit from it and get away with it.
This is just sad.
Now it might give people the wrong signal that in order to be accepted by pg/YC, you need to be as sketchy/evil as Loopt or Airbnb founders
I can't speak to anything about u-Deals since I didn't work on it, but the SMS issue was actually a bug. The guy who wrote the invitation flow forgot to clear a collection during initialization of the screen. If the user invited one contact at a time, each subsequent invitation would send another invitation to everyone the user had already invited. Within 30 minutes of hearing of the bug I had updated the Loopt server code to drop all SMS invitations from that build.
There were no instances of invitations being sent to people that weren't marked as selected or who the user hadn't already invited. Ever. It's too late for anyone to download that version and verify my claims, but it's true.
There was no rational reason for the behavior the app exhibited. Does pissing off the contacts of all of your users lead to success? No way. Was the SMS issue a fuck-up? Absolutely. Was it a bug? Yes. Was it malevolent? No.
If you move fast enough you will miss things. It happens.
> If you move fast enough you will miss things. It happens.
Surely at the point it's pissing off your users (which has a financial implication too), you're moving too fast?
Personally I don't like the idea of missing basic things, and from your description that really sounds like a bug that should have been caught - but that might just be a brief summary. Can you recall how frequently the bug manifested, or any reason it wasn't caught in testing?
The invitation UI showed a list of all your contacts, and let you select which ones to invite. It was pretty clear you could invite more than one person at a time, so our testing never caught going to the screen multiple times in one app run to invite multiple people.
Also, the person sending the invitations didn't see the bad behavior. On the receiving end, when I got multiple SMSs, how was I to know if QA invited me once or multiple times?
We did change our SMS testing process after that though, and haven't had any more similar incidents to date.
You can't catch everything or you never release. It wasn't an obvious bug until we heard about the behavior users were seeing. Sometimes the things you miss have a small impact. Other times they're a bigger deal.
Now it might give people the wrong signal that in order to be accepted by pg/YC, you need to be as sketchy/evil as Loopt or Airbnb founders
You just have no idea what you're talking about. The Loopt and Airbnb founders are all among the more upstanding people I've met. Anyone in the YC community can testify to that.
Your comment is a classic instance of people on a forum rushing to judgment based on incomplete information. It's isomorphic to the sort of thing one sees on reddit, except that it's about startups rather than the federal government or international bankers.
Your anger against Loopt is understandable (not agreeable but probably understandable). What have you got against the Airbnb founders? I have heard stories of their hustle but none of them were even close to being sketchy or evil.
In their defense, the problem with U-deals is no where near as obvious as the problem with spamming.
If they just offered a white label U-deal (get 20% off ice cream) without saying the brand, even if they had the particular brand in mind, that would be another possible fix.
Also, let's retain a sense of perspective. Napster was initially ethically shady, but because everyone did it ethics changed. Same with Youtube or Kazaa. Same with using Google or Bugmenot to bypass NYT or WSJ paywalls. Same with using Adblock or the Pirate Bay, or internet porn.
What was really bad and weird and out there became normalized and useful. Startups won't always get this right but it's better to have some mischief than total hidebound obedience to convention.
Your definition of ethics seems strange. If people don't like what they're doing, they'll stop interacting with them. If they're lying about the bugs, people will stop trusting their explanations (as you have), and evaluate them accordingly.
They may be taking a risk by engaging in behavior like this, but its up to the public to judge them. Within the context of this forum, I think seeing their experiment and seeing how people react to it is tremendously valuable.
I'm going to start a store that sells only stolen goods at ridiculously low prices. Rather than judge it right away, please wait and see how the public reacts. Let them decide. Then we will know if it is wrong.
College or University education is more than the "education". It's a way of life that people go through to gain some incredible social experiences that you can't get elsewhere. Now I agree that we always need to improve our education, but for the "college is worthless" because it doesn't help your career type, a great college(not a vocational school) is never for your career, it's for personal growth.
On a different note, do people notice that there are more and more teenagers using HN? I feel like HN is the new Myspace again.
There are plenty of experiences in the world that don't help your career, but rather help you grow personally. College may be one of them. On the other hand, doing things that help your career doesn't mean in any way that you don't grow personally. And so, the question becomes if you are a person who can deal with getting this personal growth without any other motivation or not. If growing personally is just not enough, then college may not be the best option and you may want to seek something else.
Personally, I prefer working on things that satisfy both conditions: 1) make me grow personally 2) help me achieve my business goals. I tried going with only one of those things (just 1 or just 2) and I could never managed to accomplish anything significant this way.
However, I've seen a lot of happy people who were able to do a lot with just one of those conditions.
On a different note, the second Techcrunch commenter says
"Reads like a high school essay. Too long. Didn't finish. Boring. Lift your game."
Now this may be true or not. But this is definitely mean and doesn't add any real value to the conversation.
I thought FB comments are supposed to keep out mean people under the assumption that mean attacks (true or not) come from people who hide behind an anonymous name. And they wouldn't do it with real identity.
So the question is what if people will still be mean even with their real identity attached? Does it hurt more if the attack comes from a real person?
At least to me, the attack doesn't hurt any more coming from a facebook account than from anonymous. Either way I feel like a real person wrote it. In my experience, true online trolls are also true real life trolls.
Well, you certainly don't sound very open to me. No one expects you to be experts. It's just that some Americans regard America as the central of the universe and never bother to learn about the most basic facts about "the rest of the world".
Many immigrants complain about the ignorance because some americans have ridiculous ,false or outdated stereotypical information about their countries. It's no doubt that America has the most intelligent people in the world but it is also not too hard to find a lot of arrogant and dumb people (maybe including you?).
So just because they are from a mostly poor and illiterate country, and let's say if some americans assume they are hardcore communists if they are from china or they are terrorists if they are from a muslim country or that all indians smell curry, they don't have a right to be disappointed? What does it have to do with their poverty and all?
I know you parents might fight and work very hard to escape their poor nation and come to america in order to give you a good life. Well,you are "American" now and seem to have totally forgotten your root. But at least have some respect. Don't be too arrogant.
I think a lot of this has to do with the cultural starting point in the U.S. The idea of American exceptionalism is quite common amongst the political punditry. Say something often enough and it begins to get believed.
There was a time when it was common amongst the Chinese intellectual class to think China was the best. In the 1400's Chinese emperors acquired a very anti-foreign attitude and Chinese exploration declined rapidly. Roman citizens thought Roman civilization was the best. My point is, imperial arrogance is common.
Still, creating a new language just for bindings (across all clients) still doesn't make sense to me. A good javascript library or framework should be good enough.
I do agree with you. But if you view it this way, are't most systems cyclic? companies, economic boom and burst. Even America might fall one day after its peak. The important question is how long the cycle is. Previous social networks have never gained such mainstream adoption and user participation as Facebook have. Facebook might fall one day, but my bet is that it's gonna take longer than you anticipated. Everything is a fashion thing, essentially (even religions).
The interval between shifts seems to be lengthening, I think this is due to the increased effectiveness of the predominant social network du jour to exploit network effects. Maybe that alone will be enough to counter the 'fashion' factor but I don't think we're there yet.
And sure, everything is eventually cyclic (well, almost everything) but I mean cyclic on a measurable (say 10 years) time-scale, not something geological.
