The Disappearing Universe - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@startswithabang/the-disappearing-universe-d7447467c63a <comment><USER2> If there's any possible way to corrupt spacetime, resulting in a sphere of destruction that expands outward at the speed of light, then maybe an accelerating universe could act as a firewall. What if we're here because the non-accelerating universes with intelligent life tend to get wiped out?

<comment><USER3> There is a novel about that. "Schild's Ladder", by Greg Egan.

But in that novel, the sphere of destruction expands only at c/2.

<comment><USER4> If it expanded at C, it would be a shorter book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Leonard Susskind talked about this idea and expanded on it in his talk 'Why is time a one way street'

Highly recommend the talk.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhnKBKZvb_U](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhnKBKZvb_U)

<comment><USER6> That was very interesting, thanks for sharing.

I can see the elegance of using fractal math to explain the big bang, cosmological expansion and the apparent structure our universe exhibits (as opposed to being an inert soup).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I first read about this many years ago, in Olav Stapledon's brilliant _Star Maker_ , about a man who takes a magical mystery tour through the whole of time and space:

       "Then the Star Maker said, "Let there be light." And there was light. From all
        the coincident and punctual centers of power, light leapt and blazed. The
        cosmos exploded, actualizing its potentiality of space and time. The centers
        of power, like fragments of a bursting bomb, were hurled apart. But each one
        retained in itself, as a memory and a longing, the single spirit of the whole;
        and each mirrored in itself aspects of all others throughout all the cosmical
        space and time.

        "No longer punctual, the cosmos was now a volume of inconceivably dense matter
        and inconceivably violent radiation, constantly expanding. And it was a
        sleeping and infi-nitely dissociated spirit.But to say that the cosmos was
        expanding is equally to say that its members were contracting. The ultimate
        centers of power, each at first coincident with the punctual cosmos,
        themselves generated the cosmical space by their disengagement from each other.
        The expansion of the whole cosmos was but the shrinkage of all its physical
        units and of the wave-lengths of its light. Though the cosmos was ever of
        finite bulk, in relation to its minutiae of light-waves, it was boundless and
        center-less. As the surface of a swelling sphere lacks boundary and center, so
        the swelling volume of the cosmos was boundless and center-less. But as the
        spherical surface is centered on a point foreign to it, in a "third dimension,"
        so the volume of the cosmos was centered in a point foreign to it, in a
        "fourth dimension."

        "The congested and exploding cloud of fire swelled till it was of a planet's
        size, a star's size, the size of a whole galaxy, and of ten million galaxies.
        And in swelling it became more tenuous, less brilliant, less turbulent.
        Presently the cosmical cloud was disrupted by the stress of its expansion in
        conflict with the mutual clinging of its parts, disrupted into many million
        cloudlets, the swarm of the great nebulae.

        "For a while these were as close to one another in relation to their bulk as
        the flocculations of a mottled sky. But the channels between them widened,
        till they were separated as flowers on a bush, as bees in a flying swarm, as
        birds migrating, as ships on the sea. More and more rapidly they retreated
        from one another; and at the same time each cloud contracted, becoming first
        a ball of down and then a spinning lens and then a featured whirl of star-
        streams.

        "Still the cosmos expanded, till the galaxies that were most remote from one
        another were flying apart so swiftly that the creeping light of the cosmos
        could no longer bridge the gulf between them."

Written, impossibly, in 1936.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I remember that as well, great book by the way. As much as I'd like to attribute clairvoyance to Olaf Stapledon also with regard to his fictional(?) mystical out of body experience, I'm skeptic. There already was a big bang theory and the red- and blueshift of starlight was already discovered. So I'd think speculation that some galaxies are speeding away from us faster then the speed of light was not impossible in 1936, am I right?

<comment><USER7> Georges Lemaître had proposed an early version of the Big Bang theory in 1931. In 1936 it was nowhere near the scientific consensus -- that didn't happen until the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, 29 years later.

But knowledge of the Big Bang and the Hubble redshift aren't, by themselves, sufficient to explain what Stapledon wrote. Those things just show that the universe _has_ expanded. For most of the 20th century, people assumed that the acceleration of the universe would diminish -- either asymptotically approaching zero, or reversing into a "Big Crunch". For the galaxies to accelerate beyond the point where photons can bridge the gaps between them, they need to not only have been accelerated, but to _keep accelerating_ , which is a very unintuitive notion (what would be driving the acceleration?)

My guess is that Stapledon was influenced by Einstein's Cosmological Constant, which predicted exactly this kind of acceleration, but which Einstein himself had repudiated several years earlier, calling it "his biggest blunder". When I first read Star Maker in 1997, I figured that even if Stapledon had been up- to-the-minute about the Big Bang, he somehow hadn't gotten the memo about the Cosmological Constant. So I chalked this passage up as one of several things that Stapledon had definitely gotten wrong.

A year later, Dark Energy was discovered, and suddenly it appeared that Stapledon was right all along. This did my head in a bit. Somehow, Stapledon had been spectacularly smart/lucky in crafting his story from a mix of freshly-proposed and freshly-discarded theories. So no, clairvoyance isn't strictly necessary to explain this. But just to be safe, I'll retain that parenthetical question mark after "fictional(?)" when describing Star Maker.

<comment><USER9> If I understand correctly, Einstein's cosmological constant was intended to produce a steady-state universe, not an accelerating one.

20th century cosmology could be seen as a long argument over the sign of Einstein's constant.

<comment><USER7> I think you're correct about the motivation for the cosmological constant. By adjusting the sign of the sign of the constant, you could produce a universe which was expanding, contracting, or steady-state. When Hubble's constant got nailed down, that definitively meant that the universe was expanding, and Einstein was happy to accept that. The problem was that if you tweak the constant to produce that result, then it also says that the universe is not only expanding, but _accelerating_. Which didn't seem to make the slightest bit of sense, so Einstein dropped it, and Stapledon didn't.

(Standard disclaimer: I'm not a cosmologist, and probably have no idea what I'm talking about.)

<comment><USER8> Fascinating! I think it's better to look at Hubble's law then the cosmological constant in this particular regard. Hubble's law was published at the end 20's decade. If you contemplate the law it follows naturally (although counter- intuitively) that very far away galaxy's might speed away from each other faster then the speed of light. How this can be understood with regard to relativistic effects or the uncross-able universal light speeding law is another intriguing topic. So perhaps Stapledon thought of this or someone else thought about this (Lemaitre?) and Stapledon read or heard it. With regard to the cosmological constant, Einstein dropped it but Lemaitre didn't. Lemaitre argued in the early 1930's that the rate of expansion of the universe was accelerating. [http://www.amazon.com/The-Day-Without-Yesterday- Cosmology/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Day-Without-Yesterday- Cosmology/dp/1560259027)

"Lemaître was then invited to London in order to take part in a meeting of the British Association on the relation between the physical Universe and spirituality. There he proposed that the Universe expanded from an initial point, which he called the "Primeval Atom" and developed in a report published in Nature.[15] Lemaître himself also described his theory as "the Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of the creation"; it became better known as the "Big Bang theory," a pejorative term coined during a BBC radio broadcast by Fred Hoyle who was an obstinate proponent of the steady state universe, even until his death in 2001." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre)

So some have (mistakenly) attributed intuition of dark energy to Einstein and his cosmological constant or some like you would argue that Stapledon was spectacularly smart or lucky but I think I'd attribute it to Lemaitre and I think indirectly (or directly) Stapledon heard or read about this. Perhaps as an academic he was even present at the "British Association" meetup on science and spirituality.

But if so, why did Lemaitre keep Einstein's cosmological constant in his own work and why did he think the expansion rate of the universe was increasing?

Even so I'd like to believe Stapledon really was traveling among the stars 'in some way', also his description of the out of body experience is oddly similar to credible accounts later in the 20th century and might be autobiographical but if not could be explained by him reading earlier accounts of this psychological effect.

edit: apparently Lemaitre discovered Hubble's law before Hubble did! [http://www.universetoday.com/90862/the-expanding-universe- cr...](http://www.universetoday.com/90862/the-expanding-universe-credit-to- hubble-or-lemaitre/)

<comment><USER7> This kind of comment is what keeps me coming back to Hacker News. I didn't know that Lemaître had proposed that the expansion was accelerating -- actually, I didn't know much about Lemaître at all, truth be told. ( _The Day Without Yesterday_ just went on my reading list -- thanks!). In any case, I guess Stapledon must have been working off of Lemaître's model, rather than cooking up something unique.

Still, like you, I do like to imagine that Stapledon tapped into _something_ that was somehow beyond the ordinary. I don't feel like speculating beyond that, but however he did it, Star Maker is an extraordinary book.

<comment><USER8> As a humble scientist Lemaître didn't take the credit of the discovery of the expanding universe. Appearently there was a nice presentation by experimental particle astrophysicist Ariel Goobar at "Symposium - Georges Lemaître's Big Bang In Modern Cosmology: A Celebration" last month: [https://fys.kuleuven.be/ster/meetings/lemaitre/programme](https://fys.kuleuven.be/ster/meetings/lemaitre/programme)

At the end it states: "SNIa cosmology provides stunning confirmation of cosmic expansion – as predicted by Lemaitre in 1927! • Expansion currently accelerating – as proposed early on by Lemaitre to explain the age of the Universe • Is it Einstein's CC or some exotic new phenomena? Observers busy trying to find out. Theory badly needed!"

Perhaps the dark energy is the combined weight of all those unproven undiscovered astral dimensions :-) Or perhaps it's something more mundane as unproven strings or quintessence: [http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/critical- opalescence/201...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/critical- opalescence/2012/06/11/is-dark-matter-a-glimpse-of-a-deeper-level-of-reality/) [http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12261-is-dark- energy-l...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12261-is-dark-energy- lurking-in-hidden-spatial-dimensions.html) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintessence_(physics)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintessence_\(physics\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is very interesting that essentially there are causally disconnected subsets of the universe - each a sub universe onto their own. Although globally not possible, is the gravitational collapse scenario plausible for some of these causally disconnected subsets? Tying it with the fact that galaxies seem to be slowly eaten by their black hole centers, would this be an example of a local gravitational collapse?

And when this process is over, what happens to all the black holes, isolated from everything else.. do they just dissipate out, creating a uniform, cold, low entropy universe?

<comment><USER11> Correct. As we understand it now, the black holes will slowly evaporate through Hawking radiation.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe#Black_Hole_Era)

And, after that, oblivion.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe#Curr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe#Current_status)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If we could achieve near-light speed, how would time work for those traveling at that speed relative to the universe ? Wouldn't time "feel" normal but "stopped" relative to the other slower bodies of the universe ? As such, couldn't that near-light speed "slow down" the rate at wich we see the expansion of the universe, making possible star traveling ?

<comment><USER13> Being aboard a spaceship that's accelerated to such speeds would feel pretty normal internally, but the outside universe would pass by very quickly and processes in that universe would appear to be impossibly fast. Accelerated to a very significant fraction of c would allow you to visit practically everywhere in the galaxy within a few years of ship time. But on the outside, millennia will have passed.

You can see why that's not practical, because everything you left behind would be gone. Still, there are scenarios where this might be a valid solution.

However, you could never reach a destination that's speeding away from you faster than the speed of light. Because you can't accelerate your spacecraft beyond that speed, parts of the universe will always be unreachable - which is the point of the article.

You might wonder why galaxies moving away from each other faster than the speed of light works at all given the cosmic speed limit. The answer is that their "movement" is not normal, inertial movement as we know it. Instead you might imagine that new space is being created in between them, driving them away from each other by simply scaling up the distances involved.

Given the practical and theoretical limits on spacecraft acceleration, people have been thinking about a different way to travel, a way that doesn't involve momentum but instead manipulates spacetime to simply shift an object to another position without acceleration. The article hints at this as well. It makes sense because technically the acceleration and deceleration part of a journey is wasteful and limiting. At this time, it's the only way we know how to get from A to B, but we're all hopeful that one or more alternatives can be researched which allow us to simply go somewhere else without using traditional movement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if this has any impact on the Fermi Paradox? Could it be that any sufficiently advanced civilization finds itself beyond the "red out" horizon before having a chance to say hello to anyone else? (Pure speculation of course, but so is the question in the first place.)

<comment><USER15> Almost certainly not. You don't need to leave our galaxy to make the case for Fermi's paradox. Something more like a Great Filter ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter)) is more likely in play.

</comment></comment><comment> 2Pacalypse- Lawrence Krauss talked about this in his entertaining and famous talk, A Universe From Nothing[1].

[1] - [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo)

</comment><comment><USER16> I seem to remember from physics class that mass cannot travel faster than the speed of light, so how is it possible for galaxies to be unreachable if you managed to travel at the speed of light?

<comment><USER17> Imagine that you go running with a friend. You run at 0.9 * speed of light and your friend runs at 0.8 * speed of light in the exact opposite direction. How fast are you getting away from each other?

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure I understand. It seems like you're implying that the two people would be moving away from each other faster than the speed of light, but I was under the impression that that's not the case. I thought that each person would observe the other travelling at C?

<comment><USER19> I think they would observe each other traveling at C but would experience visible time dilation (in the other person's frame of reference).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm looking at the bright side, it means that we don't even need to achieve speed of light to travel to other galaxies, because the universe is ever- expanding it means that some planets will occupy the space our planet is in now, so theoretically if we can figure how to live in a static point in the universe (e.g, absolute position, not relative to our solar system) some day in the future (millions of years from now) we could visit other galaxies.

<comment><USER21> what? No. there is absolutely no such thing as an absolute position in the universe.

<comment><USER22> What if we find the point where the Big Bang happened?

<comment><USER23> There is no such point (or it is everywhere if you like, as someone else had said).

The best analogy I've seen is that of ants on a balloon. They live in what appears to them to be a two dimensional universe. As you inflate the balloon, they observe their own universe getting bigger. But the "point where the Big Bang happened" to them is not a point that even exists in their universe any more. They cannot get back there, since the higher third dimension does not exist in their universe.

<comment><USER22> That's a nice analogy. Now I understand!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Now I'm sad

<comment><USER25> On the bright side, we'll probably never explore much of our galaxy, let alone the universe at large.

<comment><USER26> I'm pretty convinced we will either die out or fill the galaxy with people. If we can start the reaction by going one other place and inhabiting it I think it will ultimately set off a chain reaction. Lots of work to do between now and then but it seems like its mostly engineering now vs new discoveries.

<comment><USER27> > Lots of work to do between now and then but it seems like its mostly > engineering now vs new discoveries.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. There are still lots of issues with just surviving the journey, let alone making a foreign planet habitable and establishing a society. We need lots more discoveries in energy and understanding human physiology before it becomes just an engineering problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Simplifying http requests using ES decorators - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jblaak/fitted <comment><USER2> Not sure if I see how this is any different from simply using `<a library of your choice>.get(...)`. Just a different, imho more confusing, syntax.

<comment><AUTHOR> For single requests this would, indeed, be the best solution. However, when exposing an interface to multiple endpoints, requiring the same base url, pre/post-processing of requests this helped me quite a bit.

<comment><USER3> I'm having trouble figuring out how this would look in code and how it would be more graceful than async/await. Can you share an example?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure! Here is a gist: [https://gist.github.com/JBlaak/8d9fdebb2a28a0b9026a71bced7cc...](https://gist.github.com/JBlaak/8d9fdebb2a28a0b9026a71bced7cceaf)

Every request will have the `accept` and `X-Requested-With` headers and prefixed with some route prefix using the request and the base decorators. As you can see in consumer.js you use async/await to consume results generated by the methods.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Textual configuration has comments, GUIs don't. - <AUTHOR> http://machinesplusminds.blogspot.com/2011/06/textual-configuration-has-comments-guis.html

<comment><USER2> "There is no good way to put comments into GUI."

Maybe he hasn't seen any, but this seems a harsh conclusion. Whoever wrote the GUI could track history of changes, make comments required, and show it in the GUI.

There is a vast difference between "there is no way", and "I haven't seen it done right"

<comment><USER3> We've solved this type of problem before with a set of meta-config entries. Each field gets an entry in the meta-config table. There is a small mouse-over widget next to each config field that allows you to view/edit comments for that specific config item.

It's no where near as simple as comments in a text file, but it's more "user" friendly, where the user is someone other than a programmer.

The primary reason one builds a GUI around a configuration is for guidance. Text based configuration is great if you're accustomed to reading error messages that contain line numbers, but GUI interfaces are able to provide a lot clearer direction for visually oriented people. With a GUI, you can highlight the issues using color, weight, and even motion. You can also provide guidance for correcting the error directly next to the item with the issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A bigger feature missing in most GUIs is that I can't tell what has changed from the defaults. On the other hand, most text configuration files contain _only_ what has changed from default, which is exactly what I want to know.

<comment><USER5> I would say the biggest problem with text configuration files is that you can't ever be sure what the default is.

The problem is that:

1\. Config files need _visible_ defaults

2\. Config files need to show current values

3\. _Config files need comments_

4\. Config files need to be small or they get unreadable

Doing all four is tricky. Postfix gets close:

postconf will show you all config entries. Add -d to get defaults instead. Or try -n to show settings which have been changed.

Even with Postfix you have the big file/comments problem, so what you do is refer to a copy of the original main.cf file, or one stored in the docs under /usr/share/doc/postfix for a thorough explanation of all settings and keep a bare minimum config file with comments in /etc/postfix.

<comment><USER4> > I would say the biggest problem with text configuration files is that you > can't ever be sure what the default is.

Arguably defaults are always there, whether configurable or not. Thus you cannot claim to be familiar with an application unless you know how it behaves in its default configuration (whether that is in a GUI or a text file).

I think this is fundamental and not an issue that configuration (text, GUI or otherwise) needs to deal with.

> 1\. Config files need _visible_ defaults

I agree, but I don't see that this should be in the config file. I do think that there should be a way to see what these are. Your postconf example is perfect for this.

Like you, I'm in favour of keeping the bare minimum config file only. Comments should only describe something local about the site (just like "i += 1 # add one to i" is wrong). Documentation of configuration variables should be somewhere else.

<comment><USER5> > Arguably defaults are always there, whether configurable or not. Thus you > cannot claim to be familiar with an application unless you know how it > behaves in its default configuration (whether that is in a GUI or a text > file).

I don't agree with this part. The best way of learning about a program is to play with it. Knowing how a program is expected to behave is key, and without defaults you don't.

Even if someone knows the defaults, they will change.

(I agree with the rest of what you wrote)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unless the config file uses JSON as a format. Then no comments for you!

<comment><USER7> I've done something like this:

{"height": 100, "width": 150", "__comment__": "This is a comment"}

Of course depending on the implementation details this may keep the comment string in memory. I agree JSON should have native comments, as well as optional trailing commas.

<comment><USER8> I don't think JSON as a _data interchange format_ should have comments. Key factors contributing to JSON's popularity and great practical value is simplicity and the fact that JSON is a final specification (i.e. no versioning, no extensions, no backward compatibility requirements).

Although JSON is human-readable, it wasn't specifically designed for human interaction. There are other projects and languages that address this specific topic. For example, Yaml and Piq. (Piq is the one that I'm working on as a part of the Piqi project -- <http://piqi.org>).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While I do prefer text configuration over guis, I had two thoughts that kind of run counter to his point:

1) There's nothing inherent about guis that prevents them from having a space for comments. Perhaps gui designers should consider leaving spots for comments in complex config situations.

2) A lot of the comments I see in config files are little notes about what this or that setting actually does... comments that are generally not needed in a well designed gui. But then again, I am not a sysadmin. YYMV.

<comment><USER10> Comments in configuration files are approximately equivalent to those "tooltip" things GUIs sometimes have. I think comments are a much better method though since GUIs often seem to be missing their equivalent and even when present, it's a pain in the ass to use.

<comment><USER11> I disagree. Comments in configuration files can serve (at least) two purposes:

\- to explain what a setting does.

\- to document why you chose a value for the setting.

Tooltips can do the former, but not the latter.

<comment><USER10> Yes, I am revering to point 2 of the GP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Use whatever is appropriate and suited for your needs. GUI. Text. Front-panel register toggle switches. Wire wrap. Jumper boards. Whatever. Each of these has its adherents, of course.

A single problematic XML configuration editor is not a sufficient justification to cling to the morass that a manually-edited configuration file can provide; to paint a whole class of tools. It's probably a better justification for making improvement in the tools you're using; annoyance is a powerful motivator.

If the current configuration editor is insufficient for your needs, consider fixing it.

There are good configuration editors, and there are bad ones, and configuration file errors can run from subtle to blatant, and have definitely introduced legions of errors.

And as with most everything UI in this industry, there are trade-offs between what an experienced user needs or wants here (or the pain such a user is willing to endure, depending on your perspective) and a UI that will utterly drown a new user.

(And these days, and beyond a classic GUI configuration file editor, tossing the underlying configuration file settings into a DVCS certainly has its appeal. Consider the ability to do a git bisect on a buggy startup file, for instance. Possibly through the GUI, or at the command line. )

</comment><comment><USER13> Loosely related: a lot of the directories on my hard drive contain comments about the directory in a file named .header, and I redefined ls to cat .header if it exists. A graphical file browser could do the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER14> We at OpenLieroX actually tried to solve this for game settings. OLX is a 2D shooter-like game.

In the game settings dialog, for each setting which was changed by the user, it shows a 'reset' button next to it. Also there is a way to just show the changed settings.

You can also filter the settings by how advanced you want to go (a bit similar like in VLC but with more levels).

And when you hover one setting, there is a comment section below the dialog which describes the setting.

</comment><comment><USER15> I myself have definitely learned more about something from reading it's configuration files than clicking through a "Wizard".</comment>


Getting another interview at a place you recently turned down?  - <AUTHOR>

Im an undergraduate about to graduate with a double major in math/cs. I had two interviews with a company whose software executes trades in the financial sector with extreme speed. I passed both. I was however worried about my possible position within the company, as it seemed like I would mainly be doing web development for them (this is what was described in the interview). Seeing as how the cs market is hot, I was thinking I could do better elsewhere.
Generally most of their employees went to ivy league schools. I never responded to their request for a third interview, as I was suspicious about how good of a position I would get in the company. Was this a stupid decision? Many of their developers are very accomplished individuals, writing really fast low latency c++ code.
Is it possible to get a low level job at one of these shops and expect to move into these domains of the company in the future? If so, how does one go about contacting them successfully so as to secure another interview?
Whats more, if one wants to get into the domain of high frequency trading, but perhaps doesn't have the pedigree to get a job outright, where is best to start? Would any old c++ developer role do? Should I target a database job? As a young intelligent individual where is best to start if one wants to maximize their income within the financial industry?( This is assuming I cannot work at Microsoft, google amazon)…messed up my amazon interview.
Furthermore, I am looking eventually to make into a hedge fund as a developer (and lateral within the company once there). I have been considering, and was advised by an executive at a hedge fund, that having math + cs and a masters in accounting would be a stand out pedigree as opposed to MFEs and the like. Has anyone here heard of such a combination, and can you give me insight into the advantages such a skill set could present? <comment><AUTHOR> Bump</comment>


Journalism Heaven - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8504972.stm

<comment><USER2> That's "haven": "a place of safety; a refuge or sanctuary"</comment>


Ask HN: Did something major change in the Apple App Store algorithm today? - <AUTHOR>

Our app jumped a lot in ranking today, and the entire lineup of apps around us seems to have changed.<p>Did anyone else notice a change in their app store rankings (on mobile)? <comment><USER2> Yes, we had a sudden drop in rankings like it went off a cliff and we saw the same thing for many of our competitors replaced by much less known apps that had keyword in title.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, seems like they went back to giving paid apps a bit more weight again.</comment>


Racism and Meritocracy - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/19/racism-and-meritocracy/ <comment><USER3> So, how about stepping back from the issue of race because that makes people stupid: if Silicon Valley (or a large chunk of the institutions which make it up) has a persistent bias against X, regardless of whether that is invidious or just a result of suboptimal processes, and that bias is unconnected to merit, then you should be able to profitably exploit it.

Silicon Valley has many biases, of varying levels of connection to actual merit. One is that it is a very chummy place: who you know is, historically, the first filter applied to you (there is an entire culture around intros) and some folks consider it to be the best available method of approximating merit. This suggests the existence of a strategy which repeatably beats the tar out of the Valley: invest in people before they are known by the powers-that-be, introduce them to the powers-that-be, make out like a bandit. You will probably end up rich enough to take up amusing hobbies like running message boards in your spare time.

It is entirely possible that Silicon Valley has a blind spot with respect to X, where X is a entrepreneurial demographic or a market or a business model or a geographic location or a personality type or a whatever. If X is unconnected to merit, then that suggests the existence of a strategy which will predictably produce crushing. I might even go so far as to say that absence of crushing is fairly persuasive circumstantial evidence about either the existence of the blind spot or about the connection to merit.

<comment><USER4> I think the article was a solidly not-stupid approach to the issue of race; I would like to see more discussion like it.

I don't think capitalism can solve all ills; even if there is an opportunity for, say, seed-stage investment for startups run by tech "minorities", there is a whole litany of necessities and problems which give it long odds of being successful. You have to find individuals who are both interested in the problem, and have the resources required to address it; they have to have the right recipe of skills; they, themselves, have to know certain people (that chumminess again); and, moreover, they have to be willing to throw significant capital at addressing a problem which might not exist in 5 years.

Or, to put it another way: I think there can be common agreement at this point that YC is not funding and accepting as many startups as they would like to, which implies that there is a strong market demand for another YC which could be as successful, or nearly as successful, as YC itself.

So why doesn't one exist?

<comment><USER3> There are a _lot_ of investment groups which have been, ahem, inspired by the YC model. I'm totally agnostic on what degree of success any particular one or the field in general will have, but in 2022, we'll have trivially checkable empirical evidence on whether there needed to be more seed stage funding than YC was doing for itself.

 _long odds of being successful_

Do you realize that, if you believe the odds are long against this strategy succeeding, you _have_ to be taking the position that this isn't a serious problem in the status quo? And vice versa? I mean, you're not going to give long odds against gravity or penicillin winning, right? They're going to ROFLstomp the alternatives. If diversity is not ROFLstomping the alternatives, then _we did not have a diversity problem_.

<comment><USER4> I realize that that is the conclusion _if you believe that it is inevitable that a free market will capitalize on every opportunity_.

I do not believe that this is so. I mentioned a few of the things which might prolong or even prevent such a thing from being successful even if there is sufficient opportunity for it.

I might be willing to change my position if there were a much greater number of people with the resources necessary to launch YC-like companies.

<comment><USER3> So I think we're coming at this in two different ways. It is possible that we're just philosophically irreconcilable on that.

I am skeptical, but willing to be convinced by evidence, that access to capital contributes more to success of software companies than talent. If, hypothetically, companies fail because of lacking access to capital but do not fail because of lacking access to talent, and the market selected for people who were fundable instead of people who were talented, I would not come to the conclusion that the free market has failed. I would come to the conclusion that the free market had allocated resources correctly to capital and away from talent (in the dystopian world where talent, apparently, doesn't really matter).

If you're betting that access to capital and social networks and execution risk trump diversity in investment outcomes, you're betting that access to capital and social networks and execution risk matter more than diversity.

<comment><USER4> I think we are, too. Still, you're forcing me to think more carefully about my position on this, which I appreciate. I had to go outside and rake the leaves and think about what you said before replying.

So, I think you carried my argument a little bit further than I would have. For example, I don't think that access to capital contributes _more_ to success than talent, nor do I think that talent doesn't really matter.

It's a bit more nuanced than that.

I understand that you're more attracted to data than supposition; unfortunately, I'm neither a researcher of sociology, nor prepared to locate data on "unsuccessful but extremely talented people" (which is where this is going) -- largely because I'm gobsmacked by the very thought of trying to dig up such data, especially historically.

The only thing that I have to fall back on is a particular series of reasoning:

\- We assume that there are varying degrees of talent, i.e., "extremely talented" and, let's say, "normally" (or "moderately") talented.

\- We assume that YC does not restrict itself only to teams of the most extremely talented. I think I can at least support this with pg's own past statements; he's far more likely to cite Sam Altman as an example of extreme talent than any other given YC graduate. I doubt pg would want to say that anyone in YC _wasn't_ extremely talented, especially publicly, nor am I going to put those words in his mouth. However, it's clear from his own statements that YC has funded a range of differing talents, with Sam Altman on one end and many other people at another end.

\- We assume that some of these YC graduates have been successful by nearly any measure. If these successful individuals are not Sam Altman, then we have an example of people who have been successful despite having less talent than someone else. (Again, I am very very carefully here not implying that they are not talented, or even that they are not extremely talented. This is not in any way to be taken as a criticism of anyone involved with YC in any way.)

\- Given those, we have now shown a non-1:1 correspondence between talent and success.

\- So: talent _alone_ is not a predictor of success.

My position was not that talent doesn't matter, nor that access to capital matters _more_. My position was that access to capital _matters_. You can have people with identical levels of talent, and some will be successful, and some will not, based upon the resources that are available to them and any number of other semi-random influences.

I will readily agree that a person with an extreme amount of talent has better odds of succeeding than someone with less talent. They are more likely to possess the skills necessary to overcome a greater number of more serious challenges. But, those individuals are terribly rare in society; we would be trying to draw conclusions about sociology from a 1% of a 1% of a 1% of a 1%.

When discussing the greater general population, I think that environmental factors -- like access to funding and resources -- can greatly affect someone's success in life.

> _If you're betting that access to capital and social networks and execution > risk trump diversity in investment outcomes, you're betting that access to > capital and social networks and execution risk matter more than diversity._

I think that the original article covered this:

"So, again, racial or gender diversity is not an end in itself. But we have to ask ourselves: if teams are consistently being put together with homogeneous demographics, what are the odds that they also will contain a diversity of perspectives? Shouldn't we be worried that the same selection process that produces homogenous results in one area might be accidentally doing the same in the area that we care about (but that is harder to measure)?"

i.e., this is not about betting so much on a winning strategy, as wondering if perhaps we're collectively missing out on some opportunities.

<comment><USER5> This civilized, well-considered, thought-provoking back-and-forth is one of the reasons I fucking love this site.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I scanned some of this conversation solely because I caught that it was an extremely civilized debate (rather than an emotionally heated argument). So amen to that. One of HN's finer moments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of the problems with racism in particular is that it has effects on people from birth. Past racism may have hurt their parents' socioeconomic prospects, forcing them to be born in an economically depressed ghetto with poor schools and gang violence. Even if there's no racism past that point, if their parents were prevented from ascending to the middle class, they won't pass on middle- class virtues emphasizing the importance of education. No matter how good the schools are, they don't really work the same without positive parental involvement.

And there's obstacles to how good the schools are, too--good teachers will be scared away by the violence and gang activity that's common in those environments, and district-based taxing, funding, and student allocation procedures mean that kids in those areas are trapped in bad schools. If the school system is racist on top of that, that's even another barrier.

If you don't fix something that's that bad when the kid is five years old, by the time they're eighteen and getting out of high school, let's suppose they go to college. Okay, the colleges do everything they can not to be racist, but it's genuinely harder to meet academic standards for admission if you went to shitty schools your whole life. And even if you get in, you have to compete with the students who went to better schools and got a better start. That's a barrier against even getting into difficult academic tracks like STEM. And if the university system is racist, that's even another barrier.

Okay, the job market for developers is pretty good right now even in startups. It probably isn't even racist. But even at this point, all the forces I've already described have thinned out the numbers to the point where a disproportionately small minority of the genuinely qualified population of entry-level developers are, well, minorities. But let's say the job market is racist, too.

Once you're ready to found a startup, it's absolutely true that the pool of candidates coming to YC and others for funding is genuinely unbalanced. Even if investors do everything they can to be perfectly non-racist, racism in any or all of the levels previous to this in the person's life is going to take them out of the population of qualified startup founders. And no matter what you do to fix investment, it's not going to restore the proportion of minority startup founders to the proportion of minorities in the population. You have to fix these problems at the root, not all the way out here when it's too late to make any difference.

<comment><USER8> Exactly! Maybe this is a small minority being extra loud. Thank you for saving me a lot of typing.

Diversity for the sake of diversity hurts us all. You really do need to fix the underlying problems. I believe that there really are few qualified minority candidates for these jobs out there and there would be a lot more if we could fix some of the poverty and segregation that exists out there.

Black people in this country live in a separate America. They have their own culture as a result of past racism. So many black youth are living in these poor neighborhoods where they're learning that the only way to get ahead is to hussle in the bad sense of the word. Take a look at hip hop and the ideals being broadcast with that music. Make that money (however you can), trust no one, the world is against you. And it really is against them. Violence, crime, gangs, drugs, poverty. This is what a lot of minorities have to deal with growing up. If they manage to avoid the pitfalls of growing up that way they then have to adjust to a whole different world in college and beyond. If we can fix this issue then we'll have a lot more qualified minority candidates.

Look at pro sports. Why are so many star athletes black? Because they had no other way out. Meanwhile the suburban white kids have the luxury of living in a safe cul de sac where they can sit quietly and study or save up an allowance to pay the smart kid I'm the block to take his SAT.

Women are brought up to be these frail creatures and have heavy emphasis on things that won't help them become the career women we see in movies. There's a lot of talk about women's rights and equality but it isn't practiced as much as rhetoric is thrown around about it.

We as white males benefit greatly from White Privilege. It isn't our fault and we shouldn't feel guilty about it but we should recognize it and try to change it. The fact of the matter is that our culture and society is heaviily biased toward helping white men succeed with the ideals we're taught, the opportunities we're given, and just the way we're generally raised.

If we can extend White Privilege to everyone then we will have more diversity. There really is just less qualified minorities than whites in this industry and going out of our way to find a minority isn't helping anything. It just covers up a problem and leaves behind the greater issue. This needs to be addressed at the root.

<comment><USER9> > _Diversity for the sake of diversity hurts us all_

I agree with this, but at the same time, a _lack_ of diversity might (I stress _might_ ) indicate a problem with racism or (more likely these days) disparate impact and it's worth investigating and rectifying if need be. Just chalking it up to "well, I guess blacks/women/etc just aren't into tech" (not that you said that, but other posts here reflect that) may be ignoring a problem. If proper research shows that is the case, then fine, but let's not leap to assumptions.

> _Black people in this country live in a separate America. They have their > own culture as a result of past racism._

I see what you're trying to say here, and there are cultural/regional differences, but saying "[blacks] have their own culture" makes it sound a bit like an alien society. American black culture is just a subset of _American_ culture - a random black guy from Chicago is going to have a lot more in common culturally with a white guy from Seattle compared to a black guy in sub-Saharan Africa.

> _If we can extend White Privilege to everyone then we will have more > diversity._

I'd rather just get rid of privilege totally, but that's a tall order. I do a lot of consulting for government agencies and in that world you really do get work based primarily on who you know. As a result a lot of my colleagues tend to be white males, not because of any sort of overt racism, but because the white males who head up government agencies tend to look within their circles of other white males for recommendations. Making the procurement process fairer and more reliant on merit will probably increase diversity in my market, and that's a good thing in terms of increasing opportunities for all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [http://www.google.com/search?q=railsconf+audience&hl=en&...](http://www.google.com/search?q=railsconf+audience&hl=en&safe=off&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=svvHTs3XHfTJiQKv5KX- Dw&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1164&bih=927)

<comment><USER11> Eric is not suggesting that the applicant pool is diverse and the selection process biased. Instead, I think he's suggesting that different selection processes can result in different applicant pools:

"Imagine that you were a professional musician thinking about which orchestra to audition for. You have a choice between an all-male orchestra that conducts interviews out in the open, and a mixed-gender orchestra that conducts auditions behind a screen. Which would you choose to apply to? Wouldn't your answer be different if you were a man or a woman?

I think thought experiments like this are helpful for suggesting an alternate hypothesis to the pipeline problem: that there are qualified minority applicants who are choosing – rationally – to invest their time and energy elsewhere. I am not aware of any scientific study that proves this hypothesis is correct. But I have seen enough existence proofs to believe it is likely."

<comment><USER10> The Railsconf audience images refute that explanation too. Since there is no screening process at all, potential attendees can't be deterred by biases in it.

<comment><USER4> Of course they can, and in fact the article touched on this:

> _Remember, part of the defense against the racism theory is that the > applicants are already skewed before any selection is done._

> _I once spent time with a promising entrepreneur who was not a white man. > Because their startup sold a product that a lot of tech entrepreneurs buy, > many of their customers were graduates of Y Combinator. So I asked if they > were planning to apply. Their response: "oh, no, it's a waste of time. Y > Combinator doesn't accept people like me." Where did they get that idea? > Surely not from YC's partners, who as far as I can tell are scrupulously > fair in their dealings with entrepreneurs. Rather, they got that impression > by inferring that there is probably implicit bias in YC's admissions > process, and that they'd be better off spending their time doing something > else other than applying to YC._

I realize you're talking about Railsconf and not YC, but is it really a leap of logic to suppose that there might be a similar mechanism at work at Railsconf, or other social conferences? Is it possible that individuals of certain minorities in tech -- women or various ethnicities -- are more sensitive to discriminatory undertones that other people aren't conscious of? e.g., they feel like they just won't "fit in" there, and are more inclined to spend their time elsewhere.

I think the article was well-written, thoughtful, and presented solid evidence as it gradually built its case point-by-point. I think it merits more consideration than a link to Google Images.

<comment><USER10> I used images of a conference audience because it's the best way I could think of to get a sample of what the hacker community looks like. If you can think of a better one, let me know.

(The point of that link, for anyone who didn't get it, is that the lack of diversity Eric Ries perceives in the output of our filter is also present in the input, which implies it's not caused by bias in the filter.)

<comment><USER4> I think there is an error in logic here (and I think Ries touched on it): a bias in the input of a filter does not preclude a bias in the filter itself.

A bias in the input may exist because of a bias -- _perceived or actual_ \-- in the filter.

<comment><USER12> Sure, that's possible, but first we have to look at the skewed input before we look at any problems with higher selection processes. Hell, I even see this working shlubbo programming jobs here in Minneapolis - there simply are not many female programmers, or African-American programmers. Until we look at problems in K-12 and college, I don't see that it's meaningful to talk about racism and sexism in the valley.

<comment><USER4> Hmm. I'm not sure I agree, but I'm still thinking about it. It smells like this approach presupposes that the problem of diversity in tech -- assuming that such a problem exists, which isn't universally agreed-upon -- is rooted in problems in education.

Again, I think one of the points of the article is that post-input selection problems can _cause_ selection problems in the input.

As a thought experiment, if we imagine a situation in which a particular minority were to believe that, even if they followed the rules of their majority peers, they would still be selected against, then we might also imagine that as a consequence they would actually select against themselves.

(For example: I'm _terrible_ at casual party-like get-togethers, so I tend not to go to them, which in turn prevents me from getting any better at them; I'm selecting against myself in this situation because of an expected problem. Likewise, if I were a woman and an entrepreneur, I might not attend certain events because I believed in advance that I wouldn't do well there.)

I'm not at all arguing that this is actually the case. But, I don't think that limiting ourselves to looking at problems in education is taking a complete enough approach to the overall problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article read to me like a concern troll (I'm just so concerned about diversity) overlying a passive-aggressive smear of the "I'm not saying" sort. As in: I'm not saying they're racist. Not necessarily. At least they _say_ they aren't, and I take them at their word. At least until there's evidence that they're lying. Of course I _have_ heard racist jokes.

Such language is unimpeachable on the surface and conveys something different underneath.

</comment><comment><USER11> One thing that bothered me about this article was the way it called out YC's selection process implying it is part of the problem. Actually the Valley has never been more accessible to 'outsiders' because of the rise of YC, AngelList, and many more angel investors.

<comment><USER14> I couldn't agree more. My intention wasn't to call out YC as part of the problem, but simply to suggest a specific place where I think YC (and the Valley ecosystem in general) could be improved.

In fact, the only reason I think this argument has any chance of having an impact is that I think SV is one of the most meritocratic places in the world.

I'm pointing out a bug that we could easily fix if we want to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Isn't it possible that it has nothing to do with race, but with culture.

From my experience most people who end up working in technology are or were at one point part of the geek subculture.

You can't just look at Tech fields and say look it's all white and asian. It's not, it's predominantly a particular subset of white and asian men. That subset has it's own culture.

Maybe there is some cultural reason that white and and asian men are more drawn to this subculture than other demographics.

<comment><USER8> This has everything to do with culture. This becomes a big deal because of white guilt which is a result of White Privilege.

Fact: there are far fewer minority hires working in our industry

Fiction: the previous fact is a result of racism

If that were the case maybe there's reverse racism in pro sports?

<comment><USER16> Evidence, please?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This post has many empirical problems, but let's start by looking at the male/female deck by Terri Oda. The only data in the entire deck is on slide 21, and the caption reads:

      Two normal distributions that are 0.15 standard deviations
      apart (i.e d=0.15. This is the approximate magnitude of
      the gender difference in mathematics performance,
      averaging across all samples.)

In other words, what is plotted there is actually NOT data but simply the textbook Gaussian curves for two distributions.

So let's take a look at actual data. Here is a significantly more rigorous analysis:

<http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm>

This actually uses data from three different tail populations: Female mathematicians in the NAS, Fields Medalists, and Putnam Competition winners. Lo and behold, a simple Gaussian model predicts that small differences in _average_ mathematical ability produce significant sex differences in the tail[1]. And these predictions tally with reality (e.g. the empirical proportion of females in the NAS).

Ms. Oda also does not consider two other crucial aspects, which are:

1\. The large difference in spatial ability between men and women:

      http://goo.gl/SGhDw

      On the whole, variation between men and women tends to be
      smaller than deviations within each sex, but very large
      differences between the groups do exist–in men's high
      level of visual-spatial targeting ability, for one.

2\. The large difference in preferences between men and women:

      http://goo.gl/ccKyj

      A study by Lubinski and Benbow followed the careers of
      mathematically precocious youth from age 13 to 23. All
      were in the top 1% of mathematical ability. At age 23 less
      than 1% of the girls were pursuing doctorates in
      mathematics, engineering, or physical science, while
      almost 8% of the boys were. Equal aptitude not
      withstanding, girls pursued doctorates in biology at more
      than twice the rate of boys, and in the humanities at
      almost three times the rate of boys.

The asymmetric part of this whole debate is that someone who voices the above counterarguments in public runs the risk of being browbeaten like Larry Summers or Michael Arrington.

[1] This is of course assuming that distributions remain Gaussian, though it is well known that correspondence to Gaussianity drops off considerably as you move into the tails.

<comment><USER18> Mathematical achievement doesn't fit a gaussian, and neither do the gendered groups of your conception. And if mathematical ability were distributed as a Gaussian, and genetic, women couldn't be ascending so rapidly.

See for example Lisa Sauermann, the all time best performer in the international math olympiad:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Sauermann>

As I wrote four years ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65494>

The thing is that intelligence isn't some kind of nice, statistically normed quantity. There's more to most variables than a mean and a standard deviation -- so I don't know why people seem to always think that you can restrict a discussion of intelligence to such concepts.

...

But intelligence isn't a gene. Researchers have, since the time of Galton, tried to find a simple, biological basis for genius. You know, memory capacity, reaction times, brain size, brain structure convolution, etc. They haven't found anything -- literally everything has turned out to be a false start, even brain size, which, has been shown, within families does not even predict g. In the mid ranges, there are greater standard deviations, yes. But every single normed test is normed on a sample on the order of 1000. They're designed for regular people. The designer of the Weschler has adamantly opposed the use of IQ tests for anything other than clinical settings, for this reason. It's just no good at drawing conclusions on the extremes of ability. A better guide might be actual performance. The IOI this year had more girls than ever before -- 11. That's nearly 300% more than last year, where they had 4, and one medal. They are: Emina Bukva (Bosnia and Herzegovina) Constanza Contreras (Chile) Anna Currel (Spain) Romina Huenchunao (Chile) Vaiva Imbrasaite (Lithuania) Taksapaun Kittiakrastien (Thailand) [Silver] Sepideh Mahabadi (Iran) [Gold!] Radwa Metwali (Egypt) Katie O'Mahony (Ireland) Phitchaya Phothilimthana (Thailand) [Silver] Ye Wang (USA) [Silver] Sepideh Mahabadi had one of the best performances of anyone. If you're familiar with IOI scoring, only the top 1/12 are to get golds, and 2/12 to get silvers, thus 1 gold and 3 silvers out of 11 implies that they did at least as good as the boys, and in fact somewhat better. Were the 'standard deviation' explanation correct they should have, instead, had 0.4 girls earning maybe 0.01 medals. It just doesn't work.

And three years ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244449>

 _Why is it sexist to say we show up more frequently in science departments because we have also been designed by evolution to be better at math?_

Because compared with bench-pressing, claims of mathematically ability being better in men (and partially ordered, to boot) is seriously jumping the gun. We know what's involved in a bench press. We understand how testosterone stimulates the production of muscle. We are nowhere close with mathematical ability. We have no theory of mathematically ability -- we really don't know what it means, or if the simplest metrics are even useful for higher level math. We have no experimental results, because we have no controlled variables. We have few pieces of data, none of which are conclusively disentangled from cultural and historical influence. In the past two decades, the number of women scoring highly on the IMO, the IOI, the Putnam, and SMPY has gone up by roughly a factor of six. Doubtful that the number of girls with 'math talent genes' have sextupled that quickly. Isn't this evidence that we should hold off on our conclusions?

And four years ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65524>

"Brain size does not predict general cognitive ability within families" <http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/97/9/4932> You can't discount that IOI statistic becuase it's an outlier. Every single participant at the IOI is an outlier in cognitive ability. Do you know about the theory of outliers? There's this thing called the central limit theorem. It says that if you have a lot of small independent variables, randomly assigned some value, then the mean of all these variables (or, by the same token, the sum of the variables) is distributed approximately normally. But suppose the variables are not small, or they're not independent. Then the central limit theorem doesn't hold, and what you have, almost all of the time, is an outlier -- that's why there are often many more outliers than you'd predict in a given population, using a small sample. Now, I'm not saying that g is zero. I said that psychometrics is a non-science, in the same sense that a lot of the social sciences are non-sciences (you can find papers which try to show a causal effect of insurance regulation on premium prices, ignoring profits entirely, for example). The fact that g is non-zero can be readily explained by the following simple observation -- most academic subtests, including IQ's, rely on skills that are either practiced as a group, or on skills that are shared between subtests. One example is focus, in general. Another is visualisation. Another is working memory. And so on and so on. Many of these skills are also practiced in situations, like school, where if one does well in one area, they do well in another. If you're the teacher's pet, you get more attention. If you're known as the bad kid, you're immediately discounted (and I've been on both sides). If you're poisoned against a learning environment, you just won't put any effort in. So it's no mystery to me that g is non-zero. The point is that the field of psychometrics is totally absent of content. There's no objective test for the validity of a test, for example -- the best they have is g-loading. Over the years, this means that tests have become higher and higher g-loaded. Now this could mean that the tests are getting better, or it could be that the subtests only look different, they are becoming more similar in content. I've been studying these tests, the actual tests, since I was twelve. It didn't take long before I figured out how poor they were at answering research questions, or questions of individual ability. If you get the chance, try to look up the history of the Stanford-Binet, or Terman's kids, or actually take a look at the scoring method behind most of these things. They're totally full of crap...

<comment><USER19> "And if mathematical ability were distributed as a Gaussian, _and genetic_ , women couldn't be ascending so rapidly."

This is false. It could be that mathematical ability is genetic and normally distributed, but some component of women's underrepresentation is caused by factors other than this (e.g., discrimination, personal preferences).

"It's just no good at drawing conclusions on the extremes of ability. A better guide might be actual performance. The IOI this year had more girls than ever before -- 11... Were the 'standard deviation' explanation correct they should have, instead, had 0.4 girls earning maybe 0.01 medals."

Come on. I know you know better than to draw statistical conclusions from a single event with a sample size of 11. So why do it?

"The fact that g is non-zero can be readily explained by the following simple observation -- most academic subtests, including IQ's, rely on skills that are either practiced as a group, or on skills that are shared between subtests. One example is focus, in general. Another is visualisation. Another is working memory. And so on and so on."

You've come up with a plausible theory of what g is. It might be f(focus, visualization, working memory). This does not make the theory of psychometrics "totally absent of content", it just means they don't understand everything yet.

The fact that pressure is non-zero can be readily explained by the following simple observation -- air is made of particles obeying Newtonian mechanics which impart a force upon a vessel when they collide with it. Does this make thermodynamics "totally absent of content"?

The fact of the matter is that a variety of seemingly unrelated tests are correlated with each other. They are also strongly correlated with various life outcomes in a manner which more or less corresponds to our intuitive intuition about the idea of "intelligence". Stuff like this rarely happens by chance, and it is highly likely there is something behind it.

<comment><USER18> _It could be that mathematical ability is genetic and normally distributed, but some component of women's underrepresentation is caused by factors other than this (e.g., discrimination, personal preferences)._

I mean this to be evidence against a genetic explanation of under representation.

 _Come on. I know you know better than to draw statistical conclusions from a single event with a sample size of 11. So why do it?_

Performances like this are more the norm now than ever, but the main reason is that the counterexample is such an extreme outlier that it blows a hole in the gaussian theory of distribution explanation for female under-representation.

 _They are also strongly correlated with various life outcomes in a manner which more or less corresponds to our intuitive intuition about the idea of "intelligence"._

The Terman study of the gifted missed _both_ future Nobel Prize winners in their sample.

The methods used to 'validate' IQ tests are not at all sufficient for equating their results with intelligence, or for arguing that it represents an immutable, genetic, predisposition of groups.

As Cosma Shalazi writes:

<http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/494.html>

 _Q: Would you put on your right-thinking left-liberal educated-in-Berkeley- and-Madison hat for a moment?

A: I'd find nothing easier. (You left out the dirty hippyprogressive Montessori school where they taught me Pirandello and Diderot.)

Q: Very good. (It didn't fit the rhythm, and anyway they get the picture.) How would you react to the idea that a psychological trait, one intimately linked to the higher mental functions, is highly heritable?

A: With suspicion and unease, naturally.

Q: It's strongly correlated with educational achievement, class and race.

A: Worse and worse.

Q: Basically nothing that happens after early adolescence makes an impact on it; before that it's also correlated with diet.

A: Do you work at the Heritage Foundation? Such things cannot be.

Q: What if I told you the trait was accent?

A: I'm sorry?_

<comment><USER19> _I mean this to be evidence against a genetic explanation of under representation._

It is evidence against such an explanation, but it's very weak evidence. It shows other factors are involved, which no one disputes, but it does not rule out genetics as a factor.

Incidentally, your Q&A argument is incomplete. We have data which shows accent is not genetic - correlation between the accent of genetic parent and child is gone if you look at adopted children. If there is a twin study on the topic, I'd give 1/p value of the study odds that identical twins raised apart have minimal correlation of accent.

In contrast, identical twins raised apart have a 75% correlation in intelligence and adoptees have a 25% correlation with genetic parents. (I'm working from memory here since I don't have the book with me. The numbers are far from zero, but might be 70% and 20% or 80% and 30%. [http://www.amazon.com/Genome-Autobiography- Species-23-Chapte...](http://www.amazon.com/Genome-Autobiography- Species-23-Chapters/dp/0060932902) )

The source you cite is simply being dishonest by leaving this part of the dialogue out of his conversation with a straw man.

Also, your source has a very different philosophical basis for knowledge than most people. He believes that aggregate quantities (e.g., pressure, temperature, possibly g) are statistical myths. See here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2210600> , which is a response to <http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html> (which he cites in the article you link to).

<comment><USER18> _It is evidence against such an explanation, but it's very weak evidence. It shows other factors are involved, which no one disputes, but it does not rule out genetics as a factor._

The core of my argument is that other factors have been shown to dominate underrepresentation for some time. While other factors persist and dominate, it is scientifically incorrect, and ethically irresponsible, to continually make reference to innate differences and outmoded, procrustean interpretations of how talent fits a curve.

It is genuinely too early, if not simply too brutal, to claim a group's intellectual inferiority. The evidence is flimsy, the mathematical framework naive, the conceptual underpinnings insufficiently examined, the data is simply not in.

Worse, people use _tiny_ differences in group performance as justification for wildly unfair stereotypes, as applied to _individuals._ Even if those supposed group differences withstood criticism at the level of rigor exceeding that accorded to physics or mathematics, it still would be ethically irresponsible to make it publicly and commonly known, or the focus of so much discussion.

<comment><USER19> This statement: _The core of my argument is that other factors have been shown to dominate underrepresentation for some time..._

Directly contradicts this one: _The evidence is flimsy, the mathematical framework naive, the conceptual underpinnings insufficiently examined, the data is simply not in._

You can't have it both ways. Either intellectual inferiority of some groups is a possibility (i.e., "the data is simply not in"), or else it has been accurately measured and shown not to be the case. Pick one.

 _Even if those supposed group differences withstood criticism at the level of rigor exceeding that accorded to physics or mathematics, it still would be ethically irresponsible to make it publicly and commonly known, or the focus of so much discussion._

It would be ethically irresponsible to make true facts public? Um, ok.

Have you considered the possibility that you don't actually object to the data/methodology, but rather you are seeking justification to reject conclusions that contradict your moral values?

<comment><USER18> I am totally confused by your misunderstanding. It is possible there are intrinsic differences, and anyone insisting that this has been shown through appeals to science is being insufficiently rigorous, and scientifically irresponsible.

Where did you get the idea that I was saying it was impossible?

"What is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth. - <USER2> Feynman."

Appeals to a supposed scientific justification of the inferiority of women in mathematics are extremely weak, and certainly damaging if untrue. The supposed scientific proof is thus pseudo-science - thinly veiled politics. I'm not going to spell it out again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> He claims that the difference between men's and women's interest in tech startups is not skewed enough to explain the skewed male/female ratio in the tech startup world. ("...all of the research I am aware of suggests that these differences are extremely small – not nearly big enough to explain what we're observing in places like Y Combinator.")

It would have been nice if he'd cited the reseach which supports this claim.

</comment><comment><USER21> Fascinating discussion. In fact, the reasons people do or don't rock certain fields are (like people themselves) incredibly complex. The blind orchestra auditions to which Eric refers are just one drop in a sea of quantitative data about the effects of unconscious bias.

There's Robert Rosenthal's study that showed that others' belief that you are "gifted" actually results in an IQ increase. There's the famous "McKay" study, in which test subjects evaluated identical academic papers by "John" and "Joan" McKay. And on and on.

What's really interesting is the experience of post-op transsexuals, like biologist Ben Barres (who was Barbara Barres until he was in his 40s). These folks are the true secret shoppers of gender-- and the ultimate control group in terms of understanding how gender affects one's experience of the world. It would be really interesting to find a comparable race test case (an updated "Black Like Me").

A few years ago I wrote about this phenomenon in Slate-- I looked at women and ambition in general. Check out the piece if you're interested in a more generalized analysis: [http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_gist/200...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_gist/2006/11/positions_of_power.single.html)

<comment><USER22> Self-Made Man is a tale similar to Black Like Me, where it was a writer's experiment, rather than a transgender exercise.

[http://www.amazon.com/Self-Made-Man-Womans-Journey- Manhood/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Self-Made-Man-Womans-Journey- Manhood/dp/0670034665)

There are also a lot of interesting works by transgender people, but the perspective there is different, since they usually report that they never felt comfortable in their birth gender.

<comment><USER21> I liked Self-Made Man-- really interesting exploration of masculinity and the culture of "manhood" in general. It would have been especially interesting if somehow Vincent could have stayed in her old sort of rarefied world and experienced life there, rather than having to leave that world and join bowling leagues so she wouldn't be recognized.

Ben Barres (formerly Barbara Barres) wrote a great piece in Nature ("Does Gender Matter?") after the Larry Summers debacle. There's an interview with him here: [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/science/18conv.html?pagewa...](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/science/18conv.html?pagewanted=all)

Pretty convincing stuff on the role gender plays in our interactions with each other. To me, what's so fascinating about the experience of transsexuals is that they literally have controlled experiments going on-- they're the only people who can experience life in two different bodies. What a useful perspective to have-- I'll never know what life is like as someone of another gender/race/ethnicity, but I imagine it would be incredibly mind-expanding if I could.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> there might be an inherent gender imbalance simply because men can afford to settle down and start a family much later in life than women. founding and managing a startup takes an incredible amount of time and dedication solely to work, which can easily turn into a multi-year workaholic wormhole that leads nowhere. perhaps the majority of women would rather put 5-10 years into a guaranteed, fulfilling family than uncertain stress and a large paycheck. if i was a woman and wanted to have children before i was 30, it would definitely change my outlook for embarking on the entrepreneurial path.

</comment><comment><USER24> In the article: "When we see extremely skewed demographics, we have very good reason to suspect that something is wrong with our selection process"

In my chess club have the same kind of female/male ratio: 12 females on 220 members. Leaving out the youth members it is 8 out of 180 or about 4% ;-) Something must be wrong with our non-existent selection process.

<comment><USER25> The problem is not in the admission process, but (amongst other things) in each individual's perception about it. A mostly male club with only 4% women will naturally attract more male population, making the group even more unbalanced over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> 1\. Minorities, in general, are less economically privileged. It's not causation, it's correlation. Nevertheless, this translates to worse schools, worse education, worse qualifications, worse job prospects. So before minorities are even able to apply, they're being selected against economically. For no fault of their own, they have worse chances than a non- minority.

2\. When giving money, Eric Ries is right, you don't just go off empirical data. I want to give money to someone I relate to and feel comfortable evaluating. Someone I can understand. When doing that, I'm probably going to choose someone who's like me. If I'm a VC or angel, that probably means a white male. That goes, without saying, for founders. I want someone who has my back, not someone who feels like more of a wild card--I'm taking enough chances as it is starting the company.

So is it Racisim? Hell yes. Are these people Racist? No. It's not as if these words are sticky bombs that implicate anyone who gets near them with an indelible smear. The world is not a fair place--rain falls and the just and unjust alike. Let's call it like we see it.

Silicon Valley, just like anywhere in the world, is not a 100% meritocracy (that I think we can all agree on). What percent meritocracy is it? That's completely subjective. However, trying to convince yourself otherwise is an attempt to wash your hands of the problem while doing nothing to correct it.

What has to happen to solve this is, thankfully, what SV does best--take risks. That means hiring someone who isn't your ideal and seeing how they pan out. That means giving a second look at people that you normally would pass over--if only to keep your lifeblood fresh.

It doesn't mean ruining your company in a futile attempt to change the entire world--but it does mean doing things different, ie, hard.

Enough with the outrage. There is racisim/sexism in the world guys (yes, guys). It doesn't mean you're a racist. Let's man up to it.

</comment><comment><USER27> At my company, we're hiring mobile developers. We have received over 100 resumes. 2 of them were from women. I wish we could hire a more diverse group, but it's pretty obvious that changing our selection process isn't enough.

<comment><USER28> I have the same problem, and I'm female running a tech company. But I have a solution: I teach a group of kids to program, equal gender. Maybe in 10 years I'll be hiring some of them. You know what interests the girls most? I tell them about my lifestyle, my freedom to travel and to live how and where I want, the long lunch breaks I can take if I want (after working hard enough to get employees). By teaching these kids lifestyle options they stay engaged. It's early days yet, I've only just started the classes but I'm enjoying the process.

We're looking forward to the new Stanford CS101 online class, hopefully I can base my teaching on this which should spin off into the kids taking other online classes of their own volition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am racist.

And sexist.

I subconsciously attribute certain qualities to men and women, and to various ethnicities. Underneath all of the various common jokes -- "Asians are good at math", etc. -- there is an undercurrent of discussion where other people are admitting their biases, too.

When I get on the phone with technical support and hear a thick East Asian accent, the first thing that happens is I grit my teeth. I feel frustrated that I am having to try to resolve a technical issue with someone that I have to actively concentrate on in order to understand clearly; I feel annoyed in expectation of their overstated politeness; I am immediately resigned to not getting the problem resolved at all, as they are probably going to ask me to troubleshoot a networking problem by rebooting a computer.

These are biases that have been built up over a period of many years of similar experiences, one little bias at a time. And, when the call actually resolves the issue quickly and without any frustration at all, I find myself thinking, "That went better than expected."

I recognize this about myself. So, when I notice these things happening, I consciously moderate my tone, and try to consciously manage my opinions and feelings and statements. But, that doesn't change the fact that the bias is there, affecting my subconscious.

Likewise, for women in tech. I _know_ there are amazing women in technology, and in other male-dominated fields. I'm occasionally fortunate enough to work with some of them, covering a wide range of other demographics. Still, when it comes time to hire again (someday soon, I hope), applications from women will first be met with biases built up one-by-one from a lifetime of experiences: all the various women friends that need help "fixing their computers", or of a past applicant who we hired, presented with an easy starting project and clear instructions -- "no coding necessary, just do some nice-looking Photoshop mockups" -- and who called, the next day, saying that she had cried all night and talked to her mom because she didn't think she could do the work because we used iframes in an ajax-y way.

Or, when I hear about a black entrepreneur. The first thing that bubbles up from my subconscious is, "Wow, they're succeeding in spite of modern black culture." I have to beat that thought down and consciously regard them as an individual.

These are uncomfortable admissions to make. I would be loathe to admit them in more polite company. Terms like "racism" and "sexism" themselves carry strong biases -- that the only forms of "racism" are "white superiority" and the only forms of "sexism" are blatant misogyny and creepy sexual undertones.

But, racism and sexism and other -isms are a part of who we are, a part of our psychology that dates back to our tribal and "us versus them" cultural influences. I think that trying to pretend that they don't exist is only going to prolong their effects.

Knowing that they exist can help us make better decisions.

<comment><USER19> _Underneath all of the various common jokes -- "Asians are good at math", etc. -- there is an undercurrent of discussion where other people are admitting their biases, too._

That's not a bias, it's simple fact. Asians have SAT math scores 72 points higher than average, TIMSS scores 74 points higher than average, and are disproportionately represented in professions requiring significant mathematical background.

<http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0883611.html>

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathematics_and_Science_Study#United_States_2007)

Further, the top 5 nations on the math component of TIMSS have been the 5 first world countries in Asia (Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) in all years since 1995 (in 1995, Taiwan was not included, and Belgium was #5).

<comment><USER29> And worldwide Asians are underrepresented as Field's medalists. And Turning Award winners. And Nobel prizes in math intesive fields like Econ and Physics.

<comment><USER30> Give them a few more years.

There is a group with even higher SAT and IQ scores - the Jews. And they are way overrepresented in Field's, Turing, Nobel awards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I really fail to see how anyone can see racism in this. The current people trying to make it big in silicon valley now did not start the process now, they started 10 or 15 years ago when they started fiddling around with computers or learning to code or reading business books. And it's at that stage that the current audience was created, and not right now. The people applying and the selection is just a result of that process.

And clearly, many african-americans and many women were not doing the steps needed to be talented enough to be able to make it big now. The most likely reason they did not do that, is probably because it just did not occur to them.

And in any case, there is this theory: if you pick any group of people at all, there are going to be a few people who are simply more able to do many things. Let's say these people are more talented and more intelligent. These people tend to work on what is currently 'intellectually trendy'. For example, a while back they would have been painters, another while back, they would have been writers, another while they would have been physicists, now they are technologists. These people search out a trendy intellectual effort and then spend their time developing their abilities there. This 'trend' is different for different groups, depending on the media that they are exposed to, and what the people around them are talking about.

Groups in America are pretty segregated, and there is a form of intellectual segregation betwen men and women. It leads to gender specific roles. It also leads to the effect observed above: Smart black guys did not start fiddling with computers 15 years ago, so they are not currently active in the tech industry.

<comment><USER32> _And clearly, many african-americans and many women were not doing the steps needed to be talented enough to be able to make it big now. The most likely reason they did not do that, is probably because it just did not occur to them._

You use words like "clearly" and "probably" but provide neither explanation nor evidence to back up your suppositions. Clearly, you expect your audience thinks exactly the way you do and will probably confirm your bias.

<comment><USER31> The "clearly" comes out of logic. If you assume that my "result" statement is correct, then the reason would also have to be correct.

Do you think African American students, 15 years ago, were spending time studying how to use computers? I think it's rather likely because:

\- I've never heard of this

\- Such playing-with-computers is something that was confined to the somewhat richer and educated people in American society, which the african-americans were not, 15 years ago.

I doubt that my audience thinks the exact way I do, and I doubt I have any bias that needs to be confirmed.

<comment><USER33> _Do you think African American students, 15 years ago, were spending time studying how to use computers? I've never heard of this_

I was, as were all of the other black computer science students who graduated with me at MIT. Do we get to question your bias now?

<comment><USER31> I'm not talking of an individual, I'm speaking of a general trend. And by the way, "graduating from MIT" means nothing to me. I went to a university, you did too, the university you went to does not mean much (to me).

<comment><USER33> _And by the way, "graduating from MIT" means nothing to me. I went to a university, you did too, the university you went to does not mean much (to me)._

Good for you.

When you say you've "never heard of" black people learning how to use computers, it behooves me to refute you with the fact that not only are there are plenty of black people who know how to use computers, but there are plenty of black people graduating from the best computer science programs in the world.

<comment><USER34> So do you disagree that African Americans are underrepresented in tech?

<comment><USER33> African Americans are underrepresented in tech, but far more underrepresented in accelerators and VC portfolios.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Good piece, this discussion is needed. It's about disability too. May I briefly weigh in with an anecdote - please take it only for what it's worth:

I am a quadriplegic due to a diving accident when I was 13. I know my limitations better than any recruiter or HR department ever could, & while I have some personal concerns with meritocracies in general (especially as social policy), I only ever apply for positions in which I can be sure I meet the inherent requirements of the job. Again, I am a good worker with good skills, but I will not apply for positions in which I can't bring proper, uninhibited value.

So no problem, right? I should be awarded consideration in line with my meritocratic value. That's how the world works... Rubbish.

Regardless of council regulations mandating otherwise, I cannot access most (yes, most) workplaces due to physical barriers (poor parking, doorways, stairs etc). I'm sure some places in the world are better, but here I am. In fact I've been knocked back for not being able to access an interview room upstairs (in a semi-govt. owned office, mind you) - the actual workplace for the job was on ground level. That's not even to mention the stereotype I'm perceived as by a frightening majority of interviewees.

No, I don't have a chip on my shoulder, far from it. I'm just saying it's hard to ignore the greetings of (half-speed) "HELLO BUDDY! ARE YOU GOOD TODAY?" from people who have administered & approved your intellectual aptitude tests. Unfortunately I'm not exaggerating.

Meritocracies are not dependent on a passive HR stance. Get active about it. Educate your staff, ensure equality of access, or at least have the guts to be honest about what attributes you're looking for.

</comment><comment><USER36> One second-order effect not mentioned in the article is as follows. Investors know that to be successful, their investees are going to need to succeed at social skills like marketing, business development, hiring, management of larger teams, etc. I suspect an inner dialogue that works against diversity may occur, such as "I am egalitarian enough to ignore this person's otherness, but will his vendors/customers/employees/future potential investors be this way too?"

I am reminded of something I heard about a distant relative of mine who was involved in breaking the color barrier in Opera back in the 50's. People told her it was silly to "waste" an opportunity on a talented singer of color, because they (of course) would never be accepted by the public.

These kinds of biases can be deeply ingrained in a culture, even when individuals in said culture are honestly free of first-order bias themselves.

</comment><comment><USER30> Here is my view on the subject (in the unlikely case anyone cares):

1\. Men and women are different, hundreds of millions of years of evolution made them so. Men are more aggressive. Women are better at communication (talk a lot more, learn foreign languages faster, etc.). Men are better at geometry. Women are better at working with sets and groups.

IQ scores of men are more widely distributed than women's. Women's average IQ is a little bit higher. Most of the stupidest people (IQ under 70) and smartest people (over 140) are man.

2\. Different races and ethnic groups have different physical and mental abilities, including IQ. As an example look at the different Olympic sports. I'm quite sure different races dominating different disciplines is in big part due to genetics.

All the inter-racial IQ scores I've seen published in peer reviewed journals show the following picture: Black < White < Asian < Jewish.

</comment><comment><USER37> Great article! Racism Disrupted by Eric! Coming from Europe, more specifically France, I find the law in the US to be very protective against discrimination. For example, compare the typical resume in France to the one in the US. In the french version you often find the following information : color picture, age (not the date of birth, the actual age...), nationality, marital status, number of kids and gender. I never saw any of this in resumes here. An example I got by googling "exemple de cv en Francais" (ironically CV stands for resume in french :) ) <http://tinyurl.com/6t7p3o2> In my opinion the United States is one the of the most innovative countries when it comes to fighting discrimination. Having people like Eric Ries getting involved can only augment this tradition.

</comment><comment><USER38> When thinking about this, imagine what would have to happen for a child born to a black, single, crackhead mother to have a fighting chance in life.

And then take a look at what the Harlem Children's Zone has been doing lately: [http://www.hcz.org/books/HCZ%202011%20Biennial/files/assets/...](http://www.hcz.org/books/HCZ%202011%20Biennial/files/assets/downloads/publication.pdf)

And send them a few bucks, so they can do some more of it.

</comment><comment><USER39> Diverse demographic =/= Diverse skills and expertise

I am disappointed by underlying presumption of the article that you must have diverse demographic correlates with diverse skill sets because it doesn't.

If we continue to think that superficial physical qualities such as skin color or having a certain genitalia defines who we are as _individuals_ , then we do indeed live in a racist and sexist society where people are judged based on race and sex.

</comment><comment><USER40> YC application asks for age. Ageism?

</comment><comment><USER41> The main problem with this article that meritocracies are a mythological construct and not something that empirically exist. This probably shouldn't be much of a surprise, considering that merit is literally a religious concept.

Try replacing every instance of the word merit with the word Jesus, and you'll see there is essentially no loss of meaning.

Figuring out how to reduce bias in startup funding is important, but really it's only a small part of the larger problem of identifying talent in general.

<comment><USER19> "I attempt to hire based on merit in order to increase the probability that my startup will succeed and make me rich."

"I attempt to hire based on Jesus in order to increase the probability that my startup will succeed and make me rich." <\- Huh?

"The guy I hired based on merit has certainly brought my startup closer to success - he's built several useful apps, caught plenty of bugs, and has kept our India operation running smoothly in my absence."

"The guy I hired based on Jesus has certainly brought my startup closer to success - he's built several useful apps, caught plenty of bugs, and has kept our India operation running smoothly in my absence." <\- Doesn't make so much sense. What does Jesus have to do with building useful apps, fixing bugs and keeping our worker's pipelines full?

<comment><USER41> "Doesn't make so much sense."

That's the point.</comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: GitHub should suggest that popular projects switch to an organization - <AUTHOR> Popular unmaintained projects on Github are a real problem. There's really no solution other than disgruntled users creating a series of unrelated forks.
I believe Github could easily track the number of open issues, closed issues, and number of stars to determine if a popular project is no longer being actively maintained or attended to.
In the event a project is no longer being maintained, Github should recommend that the admin switch the repo to a free organization account and add some of the top contributors to the team.
I believe it could lead to higher quality (and better maintained) repos. The net benefit being the entire programming community wins.
Anyone have thoughts on how a flow like this could be implemented? <comment><USER2> >if a popular project is no longer being actively maintained or attended to

>the admin switch the repo to a free organization account and add some of the top contributors to the team

if the admin of a project doesn't care enough to maintain their project, what makes you think that they would bother adding users to an organisation?</comment>