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Comment by salimmadjd | Hacker News Reader

Why are you asking for age? As the leader in the space of incubator you're setting the stage for age discrimination and you're making it acceptable. I'm very disappointed!

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Because we have higher standards for achievement for a 30 year old than a 20 year old.

>>Because we have higher standards for achievement for a 30 year old than a 20 year old.

Then your form doesn't really allow for that. You're only asking to list the coolest thing someone has built. Why not change the form to: List the coolest thing you have built (maximum of three).

This enables the 30+ year crows to show their broader list of accomplishments and not artificially tilt it toward the younger audience.

You say you have higher standards but then you don't allow the higher standard to show. What if someone has consistently hit singles (to use a baseball metaphor) and a rookie has one home run. You're rewarding the onetime home run over consistent delivery. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but you need diversity and your system discriminates against that.

Hey, this is your show and you're going to run it the way it fits your need. However, with risk of blacklisting my name, I feel it's important for someone to speak out and help you see it from another perspective.

But I feel both pg and yc have been quite consistent about this: They're not trying to optimize for proven consistently good performance, they're looking for potential to be great. They're trying to discover the next Einstein, not merely put together a decent physics faculty.

The form only asks for education and where you've worked. That's a limited definition of higher standard (especially for hackers and designers).

You also wrote this [1] back in 2007. Have your views changed since then?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html

When I open the form in Safari and the window is shorter than the length of the form, the portion of the form below the bottom of the window isn't always rendering when I scroll or expand the window. This may be hiding the rest of the questions for you. To fix, just expand the window and hit refresh.

It asks what's the coolest thing you've built.

Indeed it does. When I posted my comment, the additional questions about tools and coolest thing you've built, were not appearing.

Edit: As mentioned in a sibling comment, This appears to be an issue with Safari where items 'below the fold' don't render. Strange.

Would you not have filtered out the novice Larry Ellison through this standard? He started Oracle when he was 33 and I can't find anything substantial he did prior to that.

Yea, the age box is insulting. Even when I was younger, I never saw the need to ask about a person's age. I had a few young friends in the 90's go into game design. They were excited to be doing something they loved, but all eventually felt their youth, and naivety were exploited by older white men. I still remember how impressed they were by free sodas, and snacks. Anyway, I used to think Thoreau was right. He said, 'I've never learned anything remotely useful from anyone my senior!', or something like that, but age does bring some useful knowledge; especially about human nature, and how unforgiving the legal system can be.

A 50 year old who is "just learning python" is less attractive than a 16 year old doing the same.

There's more value in educating and pumping enthusiasm into a 16 year old than a 65 year old.

>> There's more value in educating and pumping enthusiasm into a 16 year Why is there more value? What if the 50 year old is an accomplished artist, or a 50 year old doctor or other types of experience. BTW, thanks for validating the age discrimination.

What happens to these 16 year olds when they get to be 30, 40, 50. Do they think they are no longer able to start new things or they are less valuable? Because this is the message we are sending.

No, it is not- read the parent comments. The message we are sending is that 50 year olds have had ample opportunity to do something impressive whereas we expect far less of 16 year olds.

If they haven't "made it" by middle age, hopefully they have found a stable life situation and aren't playing startup roulette anymore.

Nobody is saying you can't start new things. I'm saying the game is creating new experiences on hardware that didn't exist a year ago for, usually, a demographic of people under 30. Trying to break into that world as a nobody outside of that demographic and life experience is a long shot. Not impossible, but energies are better spent fueling people who have an actual chance at changing the world (and an entire lifetime ahead of them to do it).

It's disappointing that you think the game is only about software for people under 30. There's so much more to entrepreneurship, but you're blinded by media attention and low hanging fruit.

I don't mind the age box. The box you've got around where and when people should be, that's a problem.

Was this a new addition? IIRC, I stated age when I applied three years back and I got in as a 40-something.

As a YC alum (and thus someone who's experienced the folks involved, though I'm not an expert on this), I think it's much more likely it's mostly used to gauge demographics or potentially to increase diversity rather than reduce it as seiji suggests below.

Edit: to clarify, I think you incorrectly assume they're asking for age to filter for candidates that are younger. I don't think they use to filter at all, but even if they do, I would consider it highly improbable that it is to target a specific range.

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