Corgi kills short-lived website that ranked its female employees | Hacker News Reader

Corgi kills short-lived website that ranked its female employees

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35 pointsrandycupertino35 comments

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This is the YC startup that allegedly stole a bunch of code from Papermark:

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/26/corgi-the-buzzy-y-combinat...

> how much does it matter if the source isn’t identical?

Ask a rock climber why a 7-11 D carabiner isn’t just as good as a pro one.

[EDIT] Originally, was “free” climber, who don’t use them (duh).

"You don't need either to tie on a chalk bag."

Good point. See correction. Point still stands, though; popular, or not.

No drama, gave me a chuckle, we all make mistaks ... :-)

as the Dalek said, climbing down off the dustbin

> as the Dalek said, climbing down off the dustbin

Love it!

Way off topic, but free climbers definitely do use carabiners. Free here means “free from aid” i.e. not using ladders or other tools common in aid climbing, but free climbing still includes safety devices to catch a fall (usually involving carabiners). You’re thinking of free soloing which also excludes safety devices. And yea, these terms are confusing, I guess naming things is hard!

You can't steal code.

To be clear, they were the victims in TFA, and the event is unrelated.

> For its three days of existence, CorgiGirls.com displayed photos of Corgi’s female employees in side-by-side comparisons, letting visitors vote on who they thought was more attractive. The website now shows a domain name error.

> The website appears to have been set up by Sebastian Mandal, a San Francisco-based startup startup founder who describes himself on LinkedIn as a college dropout and a professional Minecraft player. On Monday evening, Mandal said in a now-deleted tweet that he had purchased the CorgiGirls.com domain, asking his 279 followers, “what should i do with it? have an idea, but it may not be politically correct.”

> He then tagged Mark Zuckerberg to ask for his input, presumably as a nod to Facemash, a similar “hot-or-not”-style website that the Meta chief built in 2003 during his sophomore year at Harvard.

The guy who created it (Sebastian Mandal) has already taken down his site, his linkedin, and protected his Twitter/X. Guess he's getting slammed for his gross choice here.

I was really hoping for a fun story about someone using a corgi to disrupt a social media campaign though.

Let’s be the change we want to see. Maybe we can secure seed round funding for a corgi, a web server, and a precariously situated extension cord.

Good that it got taken down. I'm not surprised it was made. The sleaze kinda attracts sleaze. It really feels like this headline is, "Startup known for parading young attractive women takes down website that drew too much attention to the fact it was parading young attractive women."

It'll be interesting to see how things go for this company. I feel like there will be some interesting books written about it a decade from now.

Elephant in the Room time!

Wikipedia says they were an ordinary insurance tech company started by YC. Well, ordinary by SV standards, having a "frat house" atmosphere and "6-7 days workweek, sleep on mattress, tattoo of logo" sort of culture.

Now you say that they were "known for parading young attractive women". Why is that? Were their employees particularly known for fitting this profile? Is that why this third party sleaze-o targeted them?

Obviously, if the photos and exposure came from without, it was unwarranted harrassment and privacy breach; but did the original parading come from within? Does Corgi need to come clean about a toxic internal culture there?

It will be a part of some book about sleaziness - this one, mano scene, incels, Weinstein, Epstein, Catholic priests… who else?

The website was made by some dude unrelated to the startup

This title really implies Corgi (or someone associated with the company) made the site. It was a shitty third-party with no association who did it.

That's honestly just an expression of how the "base level" of corporate ethics and morality has sunk so low that it is fully believable that such a site could have been spun up by an employee of Corgi, so many of us are conditioned to take the worst possible interpretation of any such headline. I did the same, actually, until I clicked through and skimmed it.

However, the headline itself does not say anything like that. It simply says they "killed" the website. Which they did, via legal threat. I think the specific wording they used was more engagement bait than anything, and honestly a quite mild version of it compared to many. Might even have been completely unintentional.

i think (especially on HN) "X kills Y" usually means X owned/controlled Y and are ending support or whatever. e.g. "Google kills Glass" (for more, see killedbygoogle.com) or "Microsoft kills Skype" (for more, see killedbymicrosoft.info)

If we replace "short-lived" with "third-party", it would clear up the confusion without adding any more characters.

> Sebastian Mandal, a San Francisco-based startup startup founder who describes himself on LinkedIn as a college dropout and a professional Minecraft player.

I see a Sequoia Capital funding round in his future.

A startup so nice, they said it twice!

The whole startup ecosystem encourages go all in, crash and burn, go big or go home style actions from all actors involved.

It is fascinating to watch, now that I have a closer view of the table. You're encouraged to take pot shots at each other, get attention at all cost and win big.

it is so easy to lose all humanity in the doubling down on each other and thinking it is all one big frat party. all of us should be guilty to be part of the perversion, but since everybody is involved none of us are.

> it is so easy to lose all humanity in the doubling down on each other and thinking it is all one big frat party. all of us should be guilty to be part of the perversion, but since everybody is involved none of us are.

SV has poor alignment, so probably needs to be destroyed and rebuilt with better alignment.

Oh this guy again. This guy is a total douche. Not related, he previously tweeting being "inspired by" Martin Shkreli and writing letters to him in prison.

Something, something the company you keep.

This guy being Sebastian Mandal, the creator of the corgigirls website and who is unrelated to the company Corgi?

If corgi distances the company from this, is it a net positive from a PR perspective? I’d never heard of or thought a second about Corgi until now.

"Takes down" would be better than "kills". Kills sort of may imply they created it in the first place.

I agree with the latter but I don't think "take down" is any better.

I’m imagining a dystopian panopticon future of paid subs to “hot or not” Flock scrapes and the bozos who would defend it as a good exercise of free speech and the rights of capital

Please, if you are a bozo and this sounds like a good idea to you, consider getting your head checked instead of picking up the ball and running with it

is there a mirror somewhere?

A mirror world in which Zuckerberg's Hot or Not site was taken down this quickly?

Now there's a Star Trek:SNW proto plotline.

Actually, Zuckerberg's Facemash site was online for less than 3 days. It's worth mentioning that the events depicted in The Social Network regarding Facemash's traffic level supposedly crashing the Harvard FAS network were fictional. Administrative staff from FASCS (arts+sciences IT department) were alerted because the site content severely violated student privacy, not due to the network traffic.

If it helps, I regard early Facebook as Version 2.0 of the original Stalk That Girl and an example of asocial media that should have been culled at an early stage.

I can't speak to events depicted in films I haven't watched, so that's The Social Network and An Inconvenient Truth off the board :/

I hate this “do anything for clout” culture.

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