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Comment by chandrab | Hacker News Reader

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chandrab·

Great, another test I have to study for! :-)

Seriously, what impact does this have on getting funded by YC? (I'm sure everyone wants to know the answer to that)

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To be honest, not much. We may use Pairwise seriously in the next round, but this is just a prototype.

In particular, we don't care much about the specific metrics this test tries to measure. The Pairwise guys chose those; we had nothing do to with it. When we use this for real, all we'll care about is one measure: how close one comes to the best founders. We don't care what atoms are in that molecule.

Even if we take it as a given that a test like this can work well, I suspect that test takers will become more sophisticated at choosing images to get desired outcomes.

And so the test will need to get more sophisticated in turn by finding even more non-obvious yet discriminating pairs of images.

This is sort of like the constant battle between those creating spam filters and spammers.

The difference between this and spam is that the cycle time is too long for people to learn efficiently how to beat the system. A spammer can write an email and send it to his gmail acct and know in 30 sec if it beats the filter. We only accept applicants every 6 months.

Won't such a test limit the diversity of Y Combinator founders? And so you might get stuck in a local maximum as a result.

We would never use only the test. At most we'd use it to prompt us to take a second look at someone we were about to reject.

I guess you might try applications like these as well:

online dating

airport security

immigration

finding cofounders

What scientific proof do Pairwise folks have that this works? They should test it and verify it before you use it for something important.

You might as well hire a psychic to test potential cofounders... I think you'll have the same success rate.

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