However, Salmon's incentives aren't aligned the same and regardless of his desire to show a lack of bias to be a "good journalist", there is a point that he stands a lot to gain if his critique of Andreessen becomes popular.
Sure, he makes good points, but I'd take this type of critique a lot more seriously if a successful VC said it. Journalists are good at writing and doing a job of disseminating information. Given their role, they will never be completely accurate when it comes to making predictions of an industry in which they are often on the periphery of "the trenches".
Have these types of things happened on Kickstarter before (or has anyone attempted to just completely game the system?) What types of recourse do investors have? Any?
There are a lot of lucid dreaming devices, and people report varying degrees of success with them, but I've never heard that any of them are completely worthless. Is there any particular reason why Remee wouldn't work?
The point is-there are lucid dreaming devices that work, at least partially. Remee seems to be based on similar principles. In theory Remee is an improvement on those devices, addressing a lot of the common complains about existing lucid dreaming technology. But unless I'm missing something (which is why I asked) it seems really odd to claim that an invention that's supposedly an improvement on existing, (partially) functional devices is "snake oil."
So let me rephrase my question. Given that there are existing, functional devices, based on a similar mechanism, and Remee seems to be an improvement on those devices, why exactly does it qualify as snake oil? Which of my assumptions is wrong?
Lucid dreaming is possible, but not everyone can do it. Of the times I have personally done it, it has been awesome! I achieved it with the reality check method, but I think a device would make it a lot easier..
There is an interesting new iOs app called Dream:on (it's free too) that uses the accelerometer to determine when you are in likely in a REM state, and then it plays audio cues to help get you into a lucid state, instead of flashing lights like the remee.
I haven't had the bed to myself to try it out yet - my wife is a very light sleeper - but in theory both of these devices could work, but don't expect it to happen immediately or every night.. and you may need to incorporate a reality check method too, the device cue would just make it easier to do.
Ok so you're a realist, fine. But I'm curious, do you not think lucid dreaming is real? Or do you just not think it can be triggered with flashing lights?
I've had many lucid dreams, non of them involved flashing lights in my face. More importantly of all the methods to induce lucid dreams, flashing lights in your eyes isn't among the practices normally used in scientific studies. If it were actually reliably effective, it is highly likely it would be used in studies as a reliable method of initiating lucid dreams.
But as far as I know, lucid dreaming in general is not something that is being studied by a very large number of scientists, so we're not likely to find a whole ton of studies like this regardless of how effective it is.
I've heard of non-delivered projects. So far, I don't know of any big money high profile ones, but I'm sure there will be one sooner or later.
Like the other guy said, you're not investing, you're buying. Or maybe donating.
I don't think there's any recourse for a failed project, and I don't think there should be one. If you're thinking about contributing to a Kickstarter project, understand that there are no guarantees and moderate your contribution accordingly.
There is a kickstarter for a game (Echos of Eternia) where the creators are making the game using RPG Maker (a free tool anyone can use). They raised over $26k.
A lot of great games have been made on RPG Maker. To The Moon is the most recent example I can think of. You wouldn't say that a program is worth less because it's written in c, a free language anyone can use.
Where do you draw the line about where you believe people shouldn't raise funds? Are they allowed to use a toolkit like RPG Maker or GameMaker? Are they allowed to use game engines?
The point of making successful games isn't about doing everything from scratch, it's about making something that people want to play.
Even with the OP if (perhaps because of head trauma) people feel they want to play the Ron Paul platformer, they should be free to throw money at it. If the project delivers what it promised and it's not actually infringing on others work, then where's the problem?
So, no more gcc, clang, Eclipse, Blender, nasm, or GIMP. Anything built with free tools is not worth supporting. Do you want to let the entire Fortune 500 know they need to close up shop now, or should I?
I don't mind them using RPG Maker... but I don't understand how they have any investors considering how cliche the project sounds and how terrible their presentation skills are. Possibly the worst pitch I've seen.
That sounds tied to environment or personal insecurity. Being wrong and failing can be okay so long as 1) you're okay with it yourself, and 2) the people who are relevant to you being successful are okay with it.
And I think to answer the parent's question one can expand on your second point. I think most people don't admit to being wrong or not knowing because they 1). wrongly think of certain people as relevant or 2). they have chosen their relevant people wrongly.
Not really. In that situation you're telling people you know how to do something you don't. In this situation you're telling people you have no idea but can probably figure it out.
Not quite sure this applies too much in startupland. There does appear to be a shift away from traditional IA practices with most startup designers, but largely because it takes too damn long and really isn't that necessary.
Proper IA/wireframing/signing-off-on-steps is good for companies where a clueless management is going to make myriad changes to information hierarchy or UI bits along the way, because you have a "we talked about this already and you agreed" defense when some clueless marketing guy comes over and says things need to be bigger, this link needs to be here because it's his friend's company, etc.
A lot of what this article is proposing is missing (organizational hierarchy, an understanding of the order of information) is something that I don't really think is missing in a good tech-company designer's head. He or she is often one of few in control of that domain, and the product roadmap is often known quite a bit in advance. A lot of the polar bear book's 1000+ pages ends up getting turned into heuristics, when quick decisions and fast iteration under multivariate testing is often better off for a young company than sitting back and doing some type of holistic, IDEO-class set of mental exercises.
I think proper Information Architecture is extremely important especially in the startup land. Proper not necessarily meaning formal, structured, long winded process, but more along the lines of though of how this virtual place called the startup product should be structured, as much as one can in the crazy land of every changing, fast paced stuff.
I would agree that a lot of the stuff that is missing can be in a good tech-company designer's head! Totally with that.
Sure. On the flip side of my argument there is also something to say: quite a few startup designers could learn a lot from following such a process at some point. There's a lot of "copy this guy's design, it converted well for his product!" that ends up leading people down roads that aren't exceptional for that product.
But can we say there's really a "devolution"? Is there not progress in not following Morville and Garrett to the letter? I find a lot of dogma in "UX" practices that make designers feel comfortable, and I just as often find many UX designers to overstate their impact on things because it is not as easily quantifiable as an engineer's impact.
Is there such thing as a "do not mail" list? If it is possible to opt-out of private (tele)marketing and block spam, then logically it should be possible to opt out of this service too.
There is: https://www.dmachoice.org/. It took quite a while (several months) until I noticed any changes, but my (very subjective) impression is that the (spam) mail volume decreased over time.
Another thing I'd suggest is https://donotcall.gov/. Registering there seems to have had a positive impact on the number of spam calls I receive.
Why are we are focusing consistently on a short-term solution to what seems like a larger issue? I personally don't see a quick fix to all of this, and it seems to me that the real solution is more holistic than we seem to be pushing for.
In every one of these that gets to a couple hundred comments, we end up with two big groups that appear: "bros" that are "just having fun" and y'all need to "lighten up", or some stereotype of a misogynistic engineer that hates women because women consistently slighted the character throughout his life. In the first case, you have to fight a subculture that commoditizes women; in the second, you have to fight years of maladaptive behavior, and negative feedback from a cycle of sexual and social ostracization, where their defense became vilification.
Both of those cases are going to be really tough to change in the short-term. In the best case scenario we'll get a few to see the light, but when there are emotional ties to this type of behavior there is a lot of cognitive dissonance that has to be cut through before any change is truly realized. In the tougher cases all we will actually do for the present generation is bury sexist sentiment into a back channel somewhere, which doesn't help the end cause.
Yes, let's lead by example, but let's also try to start at the origin and get things sorted out before such discriminatory practices can get deeply rooted. Go talk to some college engineering teams. Let's get more women involved in the things that these guys are doing, and give them equal opportunity to show their abilities; the culture is often more meritocratic than not. Take it one step further if you have kids, and teach them that gender roles are just as bad as racism. The bros will realize that their actions are slowly being obsolesced, and the shunned will be proportionally less so. It takes work from both ends and we are really only ever pushing one angle hard.
EDIT: Drastically rewritten in hopes of being clearer.
It's because there's a lot of talk about something that in the end I highly doubt will be fixed anytime soon.
Well that (it not being fixed anytime soon) is a big problem.
a lot of this discrimination appears generational and likely won't be solved shortly by this method of self-correction.
Actually, the evidence is otherwise. For example, in the linked post:
Traditionally, high tech has been dominated by young Caucasian and Asian males (go back another 20 years, and it was just Caucasian males). Like many other parts of society, entrepreneurship has become more inclusive.
Additionally, the "typical" YCombinator startup is full of young people (who often are male). The "it's the old generation" argument doesn't stack up, and the "wait for them to die" solution is unacceptable.
It's hard to see how either of these groups are easily changed by blog posts, "awareness" of the issue, or even pure coercion.
Actually, it does seem to work. Find me an example of a startup that acted in a sexist way and continued that behaviour after it was highlighted.
The truth is that awareness is one of the things that has been shown to work, and even if there are additional things that can help additional awareness is not a bad thing.
People are misunderstanding; it's time for an edit.
What I'm trying to get at is that awareness alone is not going to solve this issue, and we are very narrowly focused on this "Be aware!" thing. You're not going to self-correct big things like this; in a lot of cases you might truly correct it but you will just as much bury the sentiment in others who truly believe these types of things.
EDIT: Also, I don't understand how the quote you referenced is evidence otherwise, but perhaps we're miscommunicating. Rewrote my post in hopes of being a little clearer.
Awareness will work against casual, environmental sexism. That's the fucking point: It's background radiation so you don't even pay attention to it. Get it? That sort of atmosphere of boys club is actively hostile to non-conformant people.
Be aware of the environmental issues, don't tolerate flare ups even if a person is technically competent, think about how you could be a little more welcoming. Doing that would be a huge first step and will do a lot towards making the generational changes you're talking about reality.
We all, collectively, have the power to make technology an environment welcome to all races, creeds, and biological persuasions. Do as much as you can personally and try to make sure other people are aware of the issue.
I don't think many people "truly believe" that women are objects. I think most people who are contributing to the problem are just ignorant of the effects their actions have.
If this is true, then increasing awareness can have a significant impact on culture.
I think this argument hits it on the nose. Almost all of the offenses stem from ignorance, not malice. Almost all of the offenders would change their behavior if they were aware of the impact it had.
Maybe he loves women, and that's the reason for having picture of one?
> such discriminatory practices can get deeply rooted.
Just to clarify—by "discriminatory practices" you mean that it is bad there was only picture of woman, not the man, and hence males are discriminated against?
Really, guys did you even stop to think about what is sexsim, what is discriminatory?
What is the vision of your ideal society: genderless, bland, wrapped in burkas?
I'm imagining a hypothetical News.YC frequented by primary school teachers, getting worked up every few days about that field's lack of men. Or nurses. Or librarians. Or maybe gender imbalances in certain professions are actually a complete non-issue?
It may be that at teaching/nursing/library science conferences, there are presentations that feature images of Chippendales dancers and fireman calendars and are met with hoots of approval. If I were a man sitting in the audience at these hypothetical conferences, I'd feel pretty uncomfortable.
The fact that a field lacks gender balance isn't the point. The point is that whatever the field, people shouldn't be made to feel uncomfortable.
Perhaps the more women go into IT, the more jobs there will be for guys in nursing or teaching or whatever? :)
But on a more serious note, you cannot equate anti-male sexism with anti-female sexism, not yet, because one has a history of being both the oppressed gender and the exploited class, and the other just the exploited class.
I'm fine with some problems being generational but there's no indication that the next generation is necessarily more enlightened than the previous. I really don't want to have to wait two generations.
Younger generations are often more malleable than older ones. There is a reason why many cultures have a proverb similar to the "old dog, new tricks".
I'm not saying that there's nothing we can do now, but the kind of change you're looking for isn't likely to just happen overnight because you don't feel like waiting for it. These things have lots of momentum and emotion behind them.
This seems to boil down to "Oh, it's so hard for the men to change. They've had a hard life too! Cut them some slack."
I couldn't disagree more. Sexism will end when we (1) educate people about what constitutes sexism, (2) stop tolerating it.
Everyone can help with (1) to some degree. Not every one is in a position to do (2), but those that can, such as the many startup founders that read HN, should.
It seems to me that in your post you are doing the opposite of both. You are arguing that we should stop talking about it, and that we should tolerate it.
That's not what I'm getting at at all. This might be the most misunderstood thing I've written. If this keeps up I'll likely rewrite again.
Read my last paragraph in my post again, please. What I'm trying to get at is that if you want to really squash an issue let's do more than the easy thing of "awareness". Why don't we actually get involved somewhere else? Help out in the places where this type of crap actually originated and keep it from happening in the end. Try to prevent the problem, don't just suppress it when it arises in certain cases. It seems the better long-term solution; IMO it's easier to correct less-formed opinions and put people on the right track then. "How to correct sexism in Silicon Valley" isn't just "hey, get mad at people when they say something out of line", it's also "hey, let's try to get people to understand why this hurts us in the first place".
Do you really think this article didn't help? Do you really think that anyone who read it is going to behave like the Geek List guys did?
You'd have to be really clueless to read it and then make the same mistake that they did. For better or worse, public ridicule is an incredibly effective tool for changing behavior. It changes the behavior not just of the person who was ridiculed, but of everyone who saw it happen.
So yes, I think it is totally realistic to change people's behavior today, "by getting mad at them when they say something out of line." It's unpleasant for everyone concerned, but it works.
Your "better long-term solution" sure is "easier" for us men, but it's not easier for the women...
Also, fundamentally what you are doing is excusing sexist behavior. You're saying "these people, in some sense, aren't fully in control of their actions; it's not their fault that they didn't get the appropriate training as children; it's too hard for them to change." I think that that is a harmful idea to advance. First of all, it gives people cover when they behave inappropriately. Second, it's disempowering -- nobody wants to be thought of as a helpless case that can't change.
I'm not saying that this article doesn't help, but I'm saying it's the equivalent of pouring water on a fire, and we're ignoring the systemic cultural stuff that started the fire in the first place. What I'm arguing is we need to stop thinking "Pour water on this until it goes out" and also make sure that we take away the fuel for such behavior by trying to solve many of these problems earlier.
As LinXitoW put it, I think we need to do both. But it's a lot easier to call out what's offensive when it's right in front of you, than it is to change the demographics and training of an entire industry.
Hypocritical comments like this often seem to stem from one of two things: a desire to drum up needless press conflict or a complete lack of self-awareness. Perhaps Google has gotten the best of itself and in their all-consuming "must be, er, kill Facebook" dogma not realized that they are likely more a threat to privacy and openness as those they criticize.
The problem may essentially be that Brin is now too close to the whole situation to see the problem as it really is, that in his head what's right for Google and what's right for the internet are too closely linked.
Obviously there are two things here regardless of who you are - what you think is "good for" the internet and what you think is helping and hindering it. Brin's view is predicated on a particular view of the first point - what's good for the internet which is (for obvious reasons) very similar to Google's own view.
But any view on what's helping and what's hindering has to be viewed in terms of what you actually see as good for the internet.
Heh, that's not how most people think. It's more like:
Security! It's a total non-issue! Why would anyone want to break my app?
Most people seem to feel this way until their apps are dumped, rooted, hacked, or they just end up thinking security is cool and say "Man, I didn't realize how much of a mess I had before."
Basic scans need to be part of the CI workflow of startups these days. The same QA tier you use for Selenium and what not you should just throw Nessus/SQLMap at and have injections/vulnerabilities of the web stack fail builds as well.
Completely agreed. And actually, this is a large part of what Tinfoil is currently working on building. If you have suggestions, we're all ears.
It's all too common to hear people not caring until its too late. At least with all the skiddies running around nowadays it's harder for anybody rational to ignore.
Sure, he makes good points, but I'd take this type of critique a lot more seriously if a successful VC said it. Journalists are good at writing and doing a job of disseminating information. Given their role, they will never be completely accurate when it comes to making predictions of an industry in which they are often on the periphery of "the trenches".