[flagged]
If you want to blog or whatever about how you're being persecuted, fine, but I don't see what obligation HN has to serve as a platform for it.
I thought HackerNews readers who read "Keeping Secrets" would be a good group to discuss the secret keeping of HackerNews with.
I don't think that is off-topic at all, but I think it's fine if you disagree and respect your opinion.
> It's time you stopped taking threads off-topic into whatever your personal thing is with YC/HN
I think maybe you have filters setup or something that might show you a biased subset of my comments here. I just checked, and I had to go back 57 comments to find my last comment about my gripes with YC/HN. So ~2% of my comments might fit that bill. If only 2% of my comments are critical of YC, and if a high % of those are flagged (like this one), then that is a bit worrisome.
Keep in mind I'm not harping on YC/HN to switch to Python or something. I am drilling in on one specific thing I think YC is getting wrong. And I am doing it because I think YC going more open would be better for YC, and be better for the world.
When I started at Microsoft in 2014, people made fun of me for immediately installing Ubuntu on my Windows machine. I also constantly blasted "source depot (sd)", and pushed for github over and over again.
A few years later, Windows shipped with Ubuntu and bought GitHub. And the stock price has done quite well.
I would not push hard for something if I thought it was unimportant, or if I did not care for the organization.
> As far as I know the only secrets anybody is keeping
Does HackerNews not have a lot of secret features that regular HN users are not informed of? Does Bookface not have a lot of secret features people are told not to share/talk about? Does YC still do "off the record" dinners, where speakers sometimes tell tales of questionable behavior? Doesn't Jessica Livingston have a whole essay on her blog at this very moment (https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-sound-of-silence) admitting to having a lot of secrets [to her credit she seems to lament that!]?
So can you explain to me how you don't know of any secrets?
> with your own behavior
I have done many dumb things in my life. When I do something wrong, it's generally out of acting too fast emotionally, and not taking the time to contemplate the best moves, and later I apologize and try to learn from it.
I am sorry to anyone at YC who I hurt with my behavior in 2022. I exceeded the speed limit. However, my intentions were always good, and I think my actions, as ridiculous as they were, have helped reveal for many people what the speed limits are--something not talked about much. I am happy to be a guinea pig if it helps other people.
And the positives to the world from what we've built and the impact of what we are doing will be far greater than the harm to people's feelings from those relatively small hours when I was behaving far worse than my potential.
> If you want to blog or whatever about how you're being persecuted, fine, but I don't see what obligation HN has to serve as a platform for it.
Again, a small % of my posts are critical of HN/YC. I do see why HN has an obligation: gratitude. I've been here since nearly the beginning, and have done my best to help likely thousands of startups and founders. I've given advice, time, hundreds of thousands in donations to HN users struggling with various things, have probably gotten thousands of people to sign up myself over the past ~16 years, etc. I obviously thoroughly enjoy this community, and get a lot of out of it myself, but I have pored a ton of myself into it as well, both online and in the offline relationships with other HN users.
I think it's disrespectful to someone like me to block my emails, and flag my posts. I feel like I deserve better treatment than that.
Also, if I asked you for the password to your HN account you probably wouldn't tell me, because it's a secret - and that doesn't make you evil.
Not so many people know that YC has a secret [insert whatever it is that they have that is secret but that we don't know about here].
I also have plenty of personal secrets that you don't know exist, but I don't see why that would change anything.
I would tell you, but I would ask you why you wanted it first.
There's no inherent need for us to have passwords. If people were always good then I would have no need for a password on this account. The login could just be "username" and one could assume that no one would pose as someone else.
> Secrecy is necessary for privacy, and you can find plenty of essays defending privacy rights.
I think "privacy rights" are completely redundant if one has property rights. If I have property rights on my home, there's no need for additional "privacy rights".
That's a rather fringe belief, incompatible with widely held conventions such as the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (among many others).
I hold the equally fringe belief that property is theft.
I am open to the possibility that it is. I am not sure. For cryptography, my gut says 80% odds not evil, 20% odds evil, but that's after putting very little thought into it.
I certainly know cryptography is used for quite a lot of evil.
Is it used for good things? Perhaps it is always a suboptimal solution.
These are good questions. Thank you.
Can you explain why you think they're evil now? That seems like an awfully strong position.
I have been working on a long form essay on this for months. It has not fully annealed in my mind yet.
But right now, heuristics leads me to think they are evil.
I can think of so many times where I and people I care about have been harmed by secrets (some fatal). I can't think of a single case where I was helped by someone keeping a secret.
You really couldn’t think of things like that?
At a less extreme position, are you willing to post your name and SSN in your public profile so others can benefit from your openness while you are harmed?
Yeah, some things shouldn’t be secret. Some people hurt themselves and those around them with secrets. Asserting that all secrets are evil is just absurd though. Focus on helping them open up about what should be shared and help them understand why or that they are safe sharing with you. Don’t tell them they are committing an evil act by keeping secrets like some fire and brimstone preacher. Who wants to talk to that guy?
There is your evil problem, right there. There is a saying "lesser of 2 evils". Secrecy may be the lesser of two evils, but it's still evil.
I have tremendous respect for people who tell the truth in societies where doing so comes with repercussions. They are the ones who change the world. They are the good ones. The violent repressors are most evil of course, but the ones who practice secrecy in fear I also don't have much respect for.
> are you willing to post your name and SSN in your public profile so others can benefit from your openness while you are harmed?
I've done this many times. And no one has harmed me (well, a few dishonest people have tried, and it was very painful...for them).
> Asserting that all secrets are evil is just absurd though
Why? I am not sure if it is correct, but it seems like it might be. It might be that secrets are generally the lesser of 2 evils, but always above zero on the evil measure.
Disclosure of these secrets foreseeably results in irreparable harm.
Just because some bad people do bad things doesn't necessarily mean the morally right course of action is to start using secrecy.
I am not 100% sure on this yet though. Thanks for the perspective.