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Comment by saltedonion | Hacker News Reader

I’m confused. So YC kicked out the guy who complained about it on Twitter and not the people who advocated for lying to skip lines? Wtf?

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Why is that confusing? If you condemn the in-group publicly, it's a sign of betrayal, and they kick you out. Monkeys strong together, that's all there is to it.

It's cool and reassuring that YC has no principles or morals other than "monkeys strong together"

(as an outsider looking in) I think, for YC, who pride themselves on their tight-knit alumni network and reach of their partners, in-group bias was always going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There are no rules about these kinds of things in private organizations, so it defaults to the instinctive human behavior.

Whenever you hear about the "greats" of the industry, you can be aware that they rose to prominence through navigating power structures built on such principles.

It’s not a bad moral though.

We can do much better.

I'm guessing it goes like this:

1. Skipping vaccine line and talking about it is not actually against BookFace/YC ToS, or it would be a stretch to apply ToS.

2. Publicly talking about matters inside the private group is against ToS since it breaches privacy. In a way that paints the group negatively, nonetheless.

Pretty straightforward. It doesn't really matter *to YC* whether anyone skipped a line or not, what matters are private forum matters getting blasted to hundreds (thousands?) of Twitter users.

Edit: before you get angry, I'm presenting this from the most plausible perspective of YC, not my own feelings on the matter (which are irrelevant).

Edit2: what are people seeing that I'm not seeing here? Clearly I'm missing something, because wow I've never gotten piled on like this on HN.

Your post is a bit inaccurate.

Biggar tweeted about his unhappiness about the behavior of a person in the private group.

He received a public response fromt he person in question with a dismissive meme.

He in turn responded to that.

So, one could argue that the line-jumping-advocate relinquished his privacy in the first place.

I'm under the impression that any public commentary about what goes on inside that forum is generally discouraged, but that's just what I've seen. Although this is an interesting point, for sure.

You are correct. YC emphasizes regularly that the forums are private and otherwise the people wouldn’t share as much or give blunter truth.

Having seen screenshots of the post in question, it was bad, but it also would have been strange to kick someone out for that. The poster is an asshole and proud of it, but the community seems to have responded directly.

> I'm under the impression that any public commentary about what goes on inside that forum is generally discouraged

When private organizations in their internal culture and functioning deviate too far away from common social norms, you kinda hope that a whistleblower or the press calls them out for it.

That wouldn't surprise me. Don't worry about the downvotes, it's not unusual for votes on a post to oscillate wildly in any sort of hot topic because people often revert to tribalism as they first scan the thread.

And it’s why YC doesn’t have the reputation it once did. Letting Sam bro up the institution wasn’t the best decision in hindsight as this incident demonstrates.

pg believes the Civil War wasn't actually about slavery (http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html), so I'm not sure that Sam actually made the place worse.

That's a really disingenuous take from a single line in an essay that is not about the subject.

If we could say "The Civil War was about slavery" and be done with the subject, I'm pretty sure so many books, studies, and histories about the subject would not have been made.

I mean, we can say that and be done with the subject. For instance, just look at the seceding states' articles of secession: they quite plainly spell out that they are seceding because of slavery and to join the other slaveholding states.

But there are a whole lot of Americans who wish to believe that the South had a noble cause (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy), and they are more than happy to buy books and watch TV shows explaining what that cause is, so such books and TV shows get written.

The Civil War was just a couple of generations ago, and involved a huge chunk of the country. The various organizations attempting to rehabilitate their legacy (e.g., the Daughters of the Confederacy) are younger still, and active today. It's not actually surprising that there are a large number of Americans who for whatever reason wish to believe that there was a better reason for the Confederacy to do what it did than slavery - the Daughters, for instance, are quite literally descended from Confederate soldiers, so there is a natural desire to believe that they fought for a worthy cause. But the number of people who believe it is hardly evidence that it's true.

What is noteworthy that Paul Graham (who wasn't even born in the US!) is one of those people, and moreover doesn't simply believe (as you're claiming) that there's a legitimate debate about what the Civil War was about - he believes that the possibility that the Civil War was about slavery is a "cartoon version" which can't possibly be true.

And yes, it's a throwaway line in an unrelated talk. But he still said it as if he believed it, and the alternative interpretation - that he doesn't really believe it and said it anyway because he thought it would please his audience - is that he is a man of poor judgment and a loud mouth in things he should judge less and speak less on, which goes to my point that Sam did not "bro up" YC, it was already rotten.

I think you are attributing a lot of things to Graham that he didn't say.

He did not say that it was not about slavery. Again, if it was an issue that could be expressed in a single sentence, it would not have inspired the many studies that it has. That is not to deny that the Civil War was about slavery, which I am certainly not. As to what Graham believes, a single sentence means only that. And does not mean he thinks its opposite is true. Not everything is an either/or proposition. Quite often things are more a both/and situation.

> I think you are attributing a lot of things to Graham that he didn't say. He did not say that it was not about slavery.

What you are saying is just simply quite literally not true. He said exactly that:

> "Better stick to the standard cartoon version that the Civil War was about slavery"

-- http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html

> If we could say "The Civil War was about slavery" and be done with the subject, I'm pretty sure so many books, studies, and histories about the subject would not have been made.

"We" can. Apparently some people can't. There's a difference.

ugh.

> 2. Publicly talking about matters inside the private group is against ToS

So never mind their high-falutin' ideas of Founders being A Better Class Of People; in the end it's just frickin' Fight Club after all.

I'm guessing he broke an internal rule about talking of what's said in the founders forum, while the founder is breaking unrelated outside rules and being a dick, which isn't as fireable.

Why is it not though? Intentionally misleading people is how you get Theranos. Being a dick is how you get a TK@Uber as a leader. Neither of those are examples one should follow of "how to be a leader"

Why would YC care about that? Their ethos is “how to make a boatloat of money”.

Theranos would be fine if they weren’t caught out before their IPO.

That's a very sad commentary on the human condition if you think anything about Theranos would have been "fine". If anyone involved knew what was going on and still pushed for the IPO to get their money, then they need to be hit for fraud.

As a collective, we've lost our humanity. I used to think we were losing it, but over the past few years I feel like we've moved past losing and now just lost it completely.

Humanity as in valuing service to mankind over the abstract point value of accumulating money?

Is it really that out of character for a tech VC company to have no objections to "disrupting" government processes?

Per the tweet replies, Paul Biggar's company that YC funded has been defunct, so that likely makes YC's calculus to remove him easier (optics aside).

FWIW I don't think that would much affect the decision. In past similar cases, where the startup wasn't defunct, YC has divested.

I've never been part of any such decision, but I do know YC and the people who have to make such decisions, and from what I've seen they'd be reasoning from first principles or at least trying to.

This is the part that I don't understand. CircleCI is alive and well last time I checked.

Apparently it was a startup wayyyyy back in 2010, before CircleCI: https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/12/ycs-newstilt-aims-to-help-...

I'm also confused. But it seems like the tweet in question is a false story that could be libel/defamation or something?

He later issues a 'correction' (why not delete the original wrong tweet?) that says that the story about "advocating for lying to skip lines" is false. [1]

I don't have any part of this and I'm confused and don't know what's going on here. But it does not seem like the tweet everyone is focusing on was even true. So the story becomes possibly, that YC kicked someone out for spreading lies about people in their internal community? I don't know.

[1] "I was incorrect in saying the 2nd founder lied, and would like to apologize." https://twitter.com/paulbiggar/status/1370144350861135881

>But it does not seem like the tweet everyone is focusing on was even true. So the story becomes possibly, that YC kicked someone out for spreading lies about people in their internal community? I don't know.

It's still partially true - the allegation of lying was wrong, but the allegation of instructing others how to lie is still being made. This is clarified by the tweet that you linked.

I didn't quite read it that way. The accusation is that both told other people how to skip the line. My assumption is that the both founders told other people how they could get the vaccine. A more charitable observation would be that the second founder told people how they could get it without waiting in line or lying.

The accusation still sounds gross. Though vaccine rollout wasn't great in the bay area. I got an email from my doctor about appointments being available. The ones in the bay area were taken really quickly. Availability was much better in other counties. There were also a couple other replies. One mentioned you could get vaccinated for volunteering for 4 hours. Another mentioned some sites were doing first come first serve.

>The accusation is that both told other people how to skip the line. My assumption is that the both founders told other people how they could get the vaccine. A more charitable observation would be that the second founder told people how they could get it without waiting in line or lying.

You're being charitable in the wrong direction, because you're not interpreting the allegations in good faith. What would be the point of taking to Twitter if all the second founder did was instruct people how to get a vaccine, without the component of lying to bypass the queue?

Since there would be no point to such an outrage, it's uncharitable to pre-emptively dismiss the contents of the allegations. Whether or not they are eventually shown to be true, they should still be interpreted in the most serious and direct way.

Lying to skip lines is probably considered "growth hacking"

But he didn't lie. Many clinics are opening up to first-come, first-served because vax rates are dropping and they still have inventory. Feels like drama?

Were they doing that in March, when the incident in question happened?

Sites that were not getting enough people coming in to use all the doses they had available were doing that in my area. It was not all sites all the time but at a certain point, lots of places switched priority to getting doses to people regardless of demographic so that they didn't spoil. And lots of that info was word of mouth or social media posts, because there was little way to centrally coordinate it.

It’d likely count as a non-computer system you hacked.

The guy who advocated getting the vaccine has chimed in with his side of the story elsewhere in these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27400221

It makes sense because in some states its been basically any adult can walk in and get a shot for months already. I'm surprised there is anywhere in the country left where that is not the case.

This was not the case back in March.

That's exactly what I would expect. Can you explain why you would expect something else to happen?

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

Sounds like Biggar was being a massive drama queen and no one wanted to have that kind of toxicity around.

What’s so bad about skipping the line?

Priority groups don’t even make sense. It’s some egalitarian crap for the sake of it and more so for buying votes from older ppl.

Then we are left with: it’s simply against the rules. And as if people in SF care about that.

Why r so many people in SF on these moral crusades anyway. Getting high off enforcing rules and looking down on others.

Everyone should be equal…as long as I get my ridiculous salary and elite network. It’s like imposter syndrome for the privileged…so they need to pretend they are for the common man.

Good riddance to such crusaders. PG is a boss.

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