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Comment by camillomiller | Hacker News Reader

Upvoted. I am honestly disappointed at how this board seems completely of out touch with what's going on in the US. And not a single official line from ycombinator as well, so far. I would also point out that, despite a quest for diversity that spans a few years, now, a quick glance at the people page of ycombinator shows an appalling truth: there is not one single black person listed.

https://www.ycombinator.com/people/

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There's a significant amount of people of color on that page including (at least) one black person.

It's a bit beyond me how you can think comments like yours are helping anyone.

Can you indicate the African-americans from that page? I’m not questioning diversity or pointing out that YC enforces any kind of anti-diversity policy. Quite the contrary: despite being a diverse organization, the amount of people of African-american descent in that page are basically statistically irrelevant, if there’s any. Either this tells you something about the state of things in tech and Silicon Valley, or you’re just as unaware of the problem as many other Americans seem to be.

Michael Seibel - joined Y Combinator as its first African-American partner in October 2014.

You’re right. One of eighteen partners. 1/18. Since six years.

I’m mostly happy not to have too much politics on hn. Discussions on politics are usually uninteresting and many times too heated; a net negative most of the time.

It is difficult to solve people-problems with a clever hack.

This is exactly the problem. YOU are politics. Tech is effing politics.

I come to HN to get away from political discussions, I’d rather it stayed like it is now.

I like a space free of politics too. However, being able to ignore politics is a privilege. There are folks out there who can't ignore politics because their lives are made worse by those very politics.

It sucks a bit for us but it sucks a lot more for them.

> It sucks a bit for us but it sucks a lot more for them.

This, I think, is the crux of any minority disenfranchisement. Their bubbles of reality are just different, and it's almost impossible to see from within someone else's bubble.

Also, ignoring politics is tacit approval of the status quo, which is a choice as much as any other.

I don’t. Its never been that way and I don’t see why it should start now.

I’m more annoyed by the meta mods

Maybe y’all should find a different place to hang out instead of flagging thinks folks actually wanna read, seeing as how it made it to the front page

Yeah, if we could get rid of all those all stories about pages being deleted, tweets being annotated or apps being taken down that would be nice.

I don't know if this is sarcastic, but yeah I'd like that too.

We’re very sorry that the world outside is burning due to injustice and systemic inequality, and this might disrupt your nice little privileged bubble.

I would separate the board issue with the disconnection from reality. But yes, as some tech leaders are expressing themselves on twitter, each time I log into HN I have the feeling I can hear "Whitey on the moon".

Good to know I’m not alone.

What are you arguing for? Equality of outcome or equality of opportunity? The first can be dismissed as another form of racism outright, so let's talk about the second. Do you think that black people have not had equal opportunity?

Equality of outcome might not be a good target if you assume that there are underlying factors that we don't want to control for that would cause unequal outcomes - which I think we can probably agree on, since (the relevant) minorities are under-represented in the pool of potential candidates and let's just say that's probably beyond the scope of what YCombinator can reasonably be aiming to achieve.

However, let's say I build a function that selects a random item from a list of length 100. I run it 50 times and it only ever returns an item from the first 5 elements of that list. That's a pretty good reason for me to take another look at the function. It's probably broken.

In the same way, whilst you're not aiming for a specific outcome, if the outcome is a long away from your priors - if you seem to be excluding a specific group of people from your company, you probably need to take another look at why that's happening and I don't think "Let's just assume we're doing a great job and that there are just no under-represented people to hire" is a reasonable explanation.

Yes, I might have rushed my comment, but that’s what I meant. If even a diverse organization like YC can’t have enough African-Americans in their ranks, it has to mean something about the access these people get compared to white folks and people of other heritage.

To further elaborate: Reddit hiring a black person to fill a board seat vacated By a white man on the premise of giving it to an African-american is a patch that’s worse than the hole.

With risk to sound controversial but since when is not having a single black person in a team considered a indicator of a negative view towards black people? Would you rather they have a token black person to avoid this?

This kind of claim is ridiculous and hurts your cause. If you are going to hire people based on the color of their skin you are actively being racist, even if it is in order to promote diversity.

EDIT: I would add, if you think that I'm wrong I encourage you to reply to me to let me understand why. If you just angrily push the downvote button I'll not understand your point of view.

Because once racism is systemic, actively avoiding racism will continue to perpetuate the current situation. Great if you're part of the privileged group, not so much much if you're hoping for a change.

I feel like this is an issue that must be fixed at the root (education), not at the leaves (actual job).

I agree that there is a systemic discrepancy that needs to be addressed, but in my opinion this is a completely wrong way to approach the problem.

I'm not trying to tell anyone what the correct solution is (I've experienced societies with wildly different approaches to this), but doing it at the leaf (as you express it) is a solution. It's not the only solution, but it is one. Furthermore, this solution does work to some degree, and it has quite quick results, compared to education which takes generations to impose any real change.

> I am honestly disappointed at how this board seems completely of out touch with what's going on in the US.

We're not out of touch! We're incredibly supportive. There's a huge outpouring right now. Even Mitt Romney is out on the streets.

This has the nation's attention.

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