Launch HN: Mirror (YC W17) – turn a selfie into emoji that look like you - <AUTHOR> Hey HN!
We are launching an app (Mirror) that uses a single selfie to create ~250 emoji/stickers that look like you and your friends.
We previously started a large online travel company in Russia (Ostrovok, >$500m in sales this year) and while there got very interested in AI as a tool to solve business objectives like predicting cancelations or conversion rates to inform marketing spend. And when we started something new, we wanted a product that had extremely high-frequency usage to build feedback loops into + something that a lot of humans really want to do, but that AI can do better.
Emoji keyboards sound like trivial toys, but this is actually a path to teaching AI one of the most complex human social behaviors. Offline, our faces communicate the majority of information that passes between us; far more than words do. In fact there is a whole piece of our brain (fusiform gyrus) dedicated to facial analysis and if lesioned humans lose ability to read faces while losing nothing else. Basically humans pay closer attention to faces than to any other object in the universe – from the day we are born.
AI needs data that informs it whether its decisions are right. And emoji are by far the largest structured source of facial data + usage in the world – >15 billion sent a day. Getting that ocean of data will help train AI that can solve all kinds of future problems – from VR characters that look like you in the gameworld, to personalized advertising that has your face in it the way you like, and a lot of other things. Everyone asks us why after starting a big "serious" company, we decided to work with emoji, and this is the reason.
On to the actual product. We think custom emoji apps like Bitmoji are a good step towards bringing our real, unique faces into messaging. We take this further and let you:
- Get your emoji in 3 seconds with one tap.
- Not spend mental energy wondering what your head shape/nose shape etc. are
- Add your friends/family (soon your pets and more) to your own emoji in seconds. Manually constructing 10+ friends is just too hard.
- Use all text-containing emoji in 8 languages (will expand to >25 shortly). We really have no idea why Bitmoji and other such apps tend to be English-only.
- Get emoji that become more and more recognizable/liked with time by learning from data (explicit choices + implicit metrics). For example we see that people want larger-than proportional eyes and darker skin. Except in Japan where it seems users want lighter skin. Really excited to find more like this with usage data.
Google Allo (and some others) tried doing this but got very little done. The reason is that while the idea is extremely obvious, the tech is quite hard. Here's why:
- You have to get a lot of facial features right. Some of these (e.g. hair, facial hair) are very diverse across age/sex/ethnicity. Some (e.g. head shape) are 3d but need to be inferred from shadows in a 2d image. Some (e.g. lower eyelids or wrinkles) can be detected but have a tradeoff of authenticity vs beauty. Some (colors of skin, hair, lips, eyes, eyebrows) are highly dependent on lighting conditions. All are must-haves. And this is still not enough – you have to detect and place wrinkles, birthmarks, sunspots etc. too
- You have to compensate for a lot of variability in selfie-taking – lighting/shadows, turn/pitch/tilt, camera distance, device camera type, background, whether the user is smiling or not etc.
- You have to use one photo to infer and reconstruct how that person looks with different emotions.
- There's a whole dedicated part of the brain for this task, with a lot of neural machinery (fusiform gyrus). Humans can't formally explain how they recognize other humans, but are very demanding to result quality. Humans take our exceptional skill at face recognition for granted, although for us a face is THE most well-perceived object in the universe. Think about it: can you instantly recognize a piece of a random wall that looks similar to every other wall, and that you stared at for an hour 10 years ago? You can do this with a face.
All the above makes training neural nets that solve recreating (rather than simply recognizing) faces much harder.
It took us close to a year and a large engineering team + multiple people with many years of experience with faces to get this to beta.
We know there is still a long way to go to make the product great. Right now we are working on several things to make it better:
- improving the tech from just "personalized" to "recognizable by friends" – both by utilizing feedback loops and by looking at new developments in AI. Particularly excited about GANs although we don't see a pure-GAN approach as viable (longer discussion).
- adding new features – e.g. auto-detection of groups of people, pets, clothes, backgrounds. doing a lot of this automatically based on your Photo Stream content and on-device ML technologies.
- expanding our content library to ~10,000 emoji in 25 languages.
You can get the app here: https://www.mirror-ai.com/
Let us know what you think – we really appreciate all your advice! <comment><USER2> I installed this and pointed it at my six year old son. It came back with a big image of an angry girl shouting "SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

Not really what I was expecting. Glad I wasn't showing him the screen at the time, at least. But you might want to fix that.

<comment><AUTHOR> ugh. thanks for telling about this. we don't detect the gender of kids too well, but we do detect age and should just turn off the more explicit stickers.

thank you, very useful. and sorry you had that experience.

<comment><USER3> Can you please remove the profanity ones from the first page?

<comment><AUTHOR> yep, doing this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well that was a bit of a waste of time - the stickers (they're not emoji, they're stickers) look nothing like me - got the color of my hair totally wrong, the shape of the face is nothing like mine, and the facial hair is completely wrong.

To top all of that off, I was immediately presented with profanity thats completely out of line with the store rating.

Nice try, but bitmoji was more fun and way more accurate.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for your feedback – we know it doesn't work for some people and are working to make it better. we'll get there :)

regarding profanity – thinking how to both let people who want to use it use it (as many do) while not annoying anyone with it.

thanks for trying the product, sorry it didn't work for you

<comment><USER5> Um, yeah the profanity was completely unexpected. I happen to be one of those weird people that basically doesn't swear and presenting "me" with a big ole (non abbreviated) STFU word bubble feels bad. Uninstalled.

If you're going to have them, put them in a "you gotta look for them corner" of the app, not front and center.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I tried it, and I know there is a lot of work behind this, but you asked for an opinion and here it is: I look nothing like the emojis, I could not identify myself with them.

<comment><USER7> Seconded. It got my hair color wrong (I have light mousey brown hair, with a sprinkle of gray, the app creates an avatar with dark brown hair), and it got my eye color wrong (it chose brown over my blue)

While the idea is admirable, there is very little scope for error in a space as personal as thjs

<comment><AUTHOR> agreed re scope of error – this is the key challenge given the complexity of face perception.

this is a beta, we will improve quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't get it. The technology looks super interesting but the end result maybe is more targeted at teenagers?

 _> AI needs data that informs it whether its decisions are right_

Well, aren't the emojis all out there for you to analyze? Isn't there a lot of videos with real faces for you to analyze?

 _> VR characters that look like you in the gameworld_

XBox does this today, doesn't it?

 _> personalized advertising that has your face in it the way you like_

I couldn't care less about advertising. Maybe you're pitching to investors?

 _> Everyone asks us why after starting a big "serious" company, we decided to work with emoji, and this is the reason._

What's the reason? It's not clear.

As an user of this, it looks like a gimmick (like Tom The Talking Cat).

<comment><AUTHOR> hey! let me illustrate with an (oversimplified) example:

– we tweak eyes to be larger-than-real and observe the reaction by letting users pick from several options or just observing usage frequency. that way we find the optimal point and then slice it down by age, sex, ethnic etc. groups; as well as to personal preference. \- do that with a large amount of data + genetic algos that do much less-obvious things than eye size. \- when a user wants a World of Warcraft orc avatar, we can use the data to make the orc look both like an orc and like he wants to see himself.

you can't do this with generic emoji – you actually have to keep tweaking and seeing user reactions to understand how people truly want to see themselves and others. and then you can use this to other contexts.

thanks for the feedback, i agree this is not explained clearly enough in the post.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for explaining it in more detail. This is very interesting (and if it doesn't pan out, you got the hottest skills in the market right now). All the best.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you! really appreciated :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Meh.

Your payoff says I could turn a selfie into an emoji that looks like me, but I got stickers instead of emoji, and they looked nothing like me.

<comment><AUTHOR> we'll make it better. matter of time + data. right now it works for some people, but not for others – just tough to get really good results because of how complex human facial perception is.

thanks for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just tried it out, only one attempt and got good results!

Couple of ideas, you may already have considered:

1) Use a color-correction algo to help with tinted hair. Then use something like MASK-RCNN to get pixels of hair and get dominate cluster of color. 2) If lighting/shadows/environment causes so much trouble maybe have user rotate/tilt their head in circle-motion (like Apple has users do to train FaceID) then these run ~30 images through your algos and average the results? Maybe have torch on during capture to make the data more homogenous. (Or do once with torch, once without and train two different networks for both types of captures.) 3) If user manually overrides hair color show them your algos next 5 best predictions as other color choices so you can more easily retrain if user selects one of these other predictions. Maybe have them manually adjust bounding polygon of hair detection and even adjust image color correction sliders to show "what my hair actually looks like" (so you can train color correction).

Just some ideas. Cool product! Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you! passing to the ML team!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This app sounds really cool!

I installed it but wasn't too impressed with the quality of the emoji. (This could be because I look kind of weird; eg I have pink hair.) It's really easy to take photos and see how the emoji look; I encourage other people to try that out.

I'm excited to see whether this technology ends up working well in future.

<comment><AUTHOR> hey!

yea we don't have pink hair – basically it was really hard to get the color palettes working right in all kinds of different lighting conditions, so we didn't include rare/custom hair.

we'll get better at it :) thanks for using the product!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have a nice lumberjack-kind-of-beard and my avatar showed up with a designer chinstrap and glossy lips...

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah – it's definitely not perfect. we are quickly making it better. in particular beards are very limited because there are no good existing datasets/trained networks for them, so we have to do everything ourselves.

thanks for mentioning, we'll improve!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This appears to be a keyboard? What other data does your app have access to in that regard? Do you get to read the contents of SMS or email or anything else with that? Also, what data or images of mine are stored on your servers?

<comment><AUTHOR> we don't log your messages – in theory keyboard developers could do this, but Apple would wipe the floor with us if we did. we do plan to have a bag-of- words RNN that runs locally on the device to suggest emoji to you depending on context of your SMS etc without sending anything to a server.

we do send your images to our servers at this point, and we do store them + standard usage data about how you interact with app flows (conversions, retention etc).

in the future we'll try to have ML on the device and not even send your images to the cloud. both better for privacy and saves us money.

thanks for bringing this up. i have zero sense of privacy for myself so it helps when others point out how they feel about this.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the detailed response. In the interest of total transparency, I have to say I'd be a little concerned with installing a keyboard app that sends photos of my face to servers in Russia, particularly with everything going on right now.

I'm not sure what could be done to alleviate that concern, and perhaps I'm being paranoid, but for now, that has stopped me from using the app. Obviously a 10 year old wouldn't have that concern, and perhaps that is a different problem.

I hope you understand--nothing personal.

<comment><AUTHOR> they aren't in Russia, they are in AWS :)

if we kept it in Russia latency would suck + we'd have to comply with local regulations we don't want to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cool app! read my facial shape, eyes, hair color, and style from an indoor selfie. Wish I could have just uploaded a photo to start. People might have a better photo of themselves in their photo stream.

<comment><AUTHOR> we initially let people do that, but they started uploading much worse photos, group photos etc. – the selfies help consistency. glad you liked it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just wanted to say, this is a fantastic app in my opinion. I took one photo and it was already more accurate & personally identifiable to some friends as a 'better' Bitmoji.

I'm impressed

<comment><AUTHOR> really glad to hear!!! hoping we can get everyone to have this experience :)

thanks for giving us a try! if at some point you have other feedback pls let us know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is the app only available in the States? I'm in the UK and when I click the download link on my iPhone I get this: [https://imgur.com/zHytq4u](https://imgur.com/zHytq4u) (url: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mirror-emoji- keyboard/id1199...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mirror-emoji- keyboard/id1199126741?ls=1&mt=8))

Maybe clarify that, or open it up to the rest of us :)

<comment><USER17> Could you please try to open this link in Safari? I guess Chrome failed to redirect to App Store.

<comment><USER16> Safari on iOS works correctly and opens the App Store.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for finding this, we'll fix it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Excuse my (potential) ignornace, but isn't this just Bitmoji (which has huge market share), just with slightly reduced setup from face scanning?

<comment><AUTHOR> not quite. let me point several things out:

\- bitmoji takes a long time and a lot of mental effort to set up. i have no idea what my face shape is and had to ask my ex-gf whether my eyes are green or brown.

\- with bitmoji you cannot add other people to your emoji because even if you DO go through mental effort and time to create yourself, you won't do a bunch of other people. and often you really want this – e.g. i want to send an image of YOU as Captain Obvious if the situation calls for it, not of ME.

\- over time this will get better and better in terms of quality, while Bitmoji will not.

\- bitmoji has no market share in any other language than English, and little market share in non-snapchat messengers.

<comment><USER19> My experience trying it just now with my girlfriend: I think we both like bitmoji better. With Mirror my girlfriend took her selfie probably 5 or 6 times to get one she was happy with, and had to try her hair in different styles to see what she liked. She also asked if there was more customization options like bitmoji. I don't think people really mind the setup time of bitmoji and possibly actually like playing with it.

Anyway, it's a cool app. I'm not trying to be a downer, just wanted to give you honest feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for sharing! i wonder if there are just different demographics here where some people want to customize while others don't.

i remember that at our hotel booking company, only 10-15% of people used any filters/sorts for hotels, and >80% just picked from the top list of what we gave them. to me this is shocking given a hotel is a big and rare purchase. but it makes me feel the majority of the world want the fewest taps and the fewest mental barriers.

plus we kind of feel like we want to force ourselves to do a good job out of automatic creation, and a lot of manual customization is defocusing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool idea! I'd allow more options to customize - I didn't feel that the emoji accurately looked like me and wouldn't feel comfortable sending this to people. However some slight tweaks (manually changing the hair color, beard style, etc) would go a long way to giving me a sense of ownership over the emoji.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the feedback! yep, we are planning to add exactly the tweaks you mentioned. plus eye color.

will do this soon :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> As a male with long hair past my shoulders, there seem to be no such hair option when creating the profile

<comment><AUTHOR> hmm, obvious mistake. will fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Tried the app on my Nexus. It didn't work, at all. When I open the app and try to take a selfie, the image is completely blurred out and it can't detect my face. (The built-in Camera app works just fine, though.)

<comment><AUTHOR> huh. this definitely shouldn't be happening. does it replicate every time? any chance you can try a couple times and post the exact time you are doing this? will try to hunt down where it went wrong.

thanks for testing

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is great. I had an idea similar to this, with the added concept of being able to generate animated emojis using video and either keeping the audio of the user or generating synthetic audio from text.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah we decided against that because it would interfere with sharing frequency – people are much more willing to share images than voice/video. plus animation makes content volumes much harder to scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if there's any potential for this to be used for 3D avatars in VR. I imagine it would be fairly easy to do. Not much of a market yet, but perhaps in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> definitely. we think doing this with emoji first is much better than going after VR first. this is where the market (and the data) is today. and that will help build the applications of tomorrow like VR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> My vanity made me click on this. My curiosity about using AI with human interaction made me install the app.

Very interesting problem set. I look forward to seeing what you do with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> vanity... definitely my favorite sin :)

it does tap into a lot of human emotions. one of the reasons we decided to pursue this area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I just installed and tried it:

\- very easy to install and use \- took a pic (I am not that good looking) and my emoji looks great! \- I sent it to a couple of friends who liked it

<comment><AUTHOR> awesome :) really happy you liked it!! thanks a lot for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I went through the trouble of actually logging into my Hacker News account just to say that the generated version of me looks exactly like me. O_o

<comment><AUTHOR> awesome :) really happy to hear this!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> huh what does 'emoji' mean in this context -- are you using some combination of Unicode characters?

<comment><AUTHOR> no. a more accurate description is definitely "stickers." but everyone knows and searches "emoji" much more. this is more of a marketing naming decision, i agree that it isn't accurate.

<comment><USER28> Ah gotcha. So is the idea to signal to future partner companies that the product is like a 3rd party version of "Animoji", using cool pictures to collect a big corpus of face feature data for future products?

<comment><AUTHOR> if you mean about the word "emoji" it is more to pick up traffic from people searching for emoji keyboards and the like.

if you mean in general, right now we are focused on building a great, highly engaging product that people enjoy. and once that is there and at large scale, we'll start thinking about other applications.

impossible to do anything in life well without obsessive focus...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Quite intriguing on a number of levels!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks :) we obviously think so too

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> My emoji turned out fine, but full access to keyboard data is a non-starter for me. Sorry.

<comment><AUTHOR> well you can use it without the keyboard, or with an iMessage app if you are on iOS.

unfortunately full access is the only way to make image pasting work. Bitmoji and all other apps that utilize this mechanic do the same thing.

For what it's worth, Apple would brutalize us if we were offloading customer keystrokes to our servers or something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> What's the business model?

<comment><USER32> Be bought by another company ;)

<comment><USER33> Looks like something facebook would buy. Do you consider them as competition ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Facebook are clearly a very smart and capable team that is very interested in this exact area. So yes, they are competition.

But it is a classic case of that for a large company it is hard to execute on many priorities at once and dedicate a lot of organizational resources and attention. Plus they seem to have bet on going directly to VR.

We are laser-focused on doing this particular usecase extremely well, have a large/growing/strong engineering team, and have business leaders that don't have any other priorities beyond making this product excellent.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Fuzzy Search Documentation from the CLI - <AUTHOR> https://gitlab.com/memogarcia/doc-fzf <comment><USER2> it always makes me so happy to see people using the WTFPL</comment>


Tim O'Reilly: Gift Economy or Honeymoon? - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/gift_economy_or.html <comment><USER2> Stupid idea: Someone should do a mashup of Google and Revver, and show related Revver videos instead of text ads next to search results. The site would actually be monetized by getting people to watch the videos.

<comment><USER3> I actually suggested this to YouTube when they were young. Basically, instead of displaying "director videos" on the right hand corner, they could show video ads similar to Google video ads. Now that YouTube is owned by Google, such a system is even more plausible. An advertising system on YouTube based on Google's adwords architecture would work to the benefit of both, advertisers and the content hungry users.</comment></comment>


Wanted: a WhatsApp alternative for clinicians - <AUTHOR> http://www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k622 <comment><USER2> I implemented a messaging system for doctors with end-to-end encryption a long ago. Tried to have some of them but didn't work out.

It failed for a couple reasons: doctors don't know how to evaluate security features, want some official authority to endorse it, want something that already has wide adoption.

The technology for something like this is not overly complex, it already exists and is well documented. What makes it difficult is to get adoption.</comment>


Why I Now Believe the Glass Ceiling Is Real - <AUTHOR> http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2-352397/ <comment><USER2> At the risk of sounding insensitive, am I the only one who didn't find any real sexism in this article?

I was expecting this "rock star" to exhibit sexism by promptly joining after he was told he'd be reporting under a make. But...no. He joined after significant alterations to the deal, including a bump in position and salary.

It might be gratifying for the author, but it's kind of irresponsible for her coach (whatever that is...) to claim something without any evidence at all.

We can't just publicize articles claiming we're victims of emotionally loaded, cultural taboos without _any_ hard evidence whatsoever. Consider that if she hadn't explicitly put it in the title or the story itself, this story would not have signalled sexism to readers.

<comment><USER3> This isn't about that kind of sexism. It's about a softer sexism that's really about familiarity.

It's real, and it's a problem. Look at how Hilary Clinton was dealt with by critics and her handlers during her run for the presidential nomination. They were worried if she was feminine enough. I thought it was totally absurd, pointless, and even stupid, but I suspect it made sense to people in their late 50s and 60s.

In the same way, I'm kinda comfortable with the way Michelle Obama is treated by her supporters in the media - but if I stand back and really analyze it, it's patently sexist and offensive. Who cares about her domesticity? She was a CEO. What she brings to the table is being able to potentially work on policy or be a political operative. To people in their 40s (and maybe even 30s), though, this sexist treatment in the media makes us comfortable.

Even Laura Bush could have been an operative - but her party is old, and that just wouldn't fly. We're in the age of the power couple, and that's reality, but our biases and sexism will prevent this from being accepted for a decade or more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> \-- snip -- I responded and she continued: "Right, well, it's because you're young and female." \-- snip --

I feel like I missed some steps here. It sounds like it went like this: Person agrees to job. Person signs agreement. Person declines job.[1] The male cofounder contacts this person and offers more money, a better position, and reporting to him.

Then we also learn the author had been considering leaving for a while.

So three things in play:

a) candidate was offered a much better deal to come on board[2] and

b) maybe the candidate picked up on her potential lack of commitment, even the fact that in her mind she was not sur about staying with the company. Perhaps he did this on a subconscious level - making this something that would be hard to put his finger on. Comments about her "energy level" seem to hint that this may be true as well; and

c) maybe the candidate had an issue with gender.

A couple of other revealing snips:

"As a co-founder, your role is to attract the best talent to compete in the market" and "The answer is not hiring quotas or prettier bathrooms. It's strong leadership."

It seems to me that - regardless of gender - it is _possible_ that the author does not or did not at the time possess these qualities. And that _is_ a deal breaker to certain types of potential hires.

There are simply too many variables in this equation to conclusively state - as the author has done - that her gender was the obvious catalyst to his vacillation.[3]

[1] Do you really want to hire someone who breaks his given word so easily?

[2] Actually this means one of two things: he went back on his word to _another_ company, or he never had another job lined up and was just playing them for a better deal. Either way: not someone I'd want at the top of my org .

[3] Alternatively there is information omitted from this account that would make the rationale more clear.

 _edit_ I can English.

</comment><comment><USER5> Gee, she is pretty hard on herself in the post.

"Right, well, it's because you're young and female."

But I don't think that was the reason...

"After lengthy negotiations including a bump to VP, an increase in salary and signing bonus, the rock star senior director re-joined"

There we go. Money talks and bullshit walks.

<comment><USER3> Why didn't he hint that during negotiations then?

My guess is that he just didn't feel comfortable reporting to a younger woman. Maybe he couldn't really figure it out, but he wasn't put into his comfort zone and backed off.

Dealing with a male, even a younger one, was probably easier. A bump in the title probably helped, too.

<comment><USER6> I think I could come up with at least a dozen equally plausible reasons why he wouldn't 'hint it during the negotiations' that have nothing to do with sexism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sorry, low-value comment incoming. Web designers, please, never capture keypresses of the up and down arrows and make them do anything but vertical scrolling.

<comment><USER8> If you think that is a low-value comment, you have obviously not read the other discussions about sexism in tech.

<comment><USER9> You made my day. Or night being precise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "He outlined a few specifics — I'd taken two to three days to give feedback to his presentation. My energy level in our last meeting had given him pause. But even when I pressed for more detail, he reiterated that it wasn't just one particular thing but rather a general sentiment that had accumulated with time. Despite our signed offer, he had already accepted another position. This was goodbye."

If that's the only evidence I'm allowed to read from the writer, then I'm missing how that could construed as sexism.

<comment><USER11> In my opinion articles like this further entrench any sexism that is out there.

I, for example, am admittedly sexist. This doesn't mean I would never hire a woman, or even have a bias towards a man over a woman. What it does mean is, I believe with great certainty that men and women on average have tendencies. Males are not guaranteed to, but are statistically more likely to commit violent crime and other such things, so I can't understand how so many believe it is impossible that females are likewise statistically more likely to exhibit certain traits. And one tendency that in my experience women tend to exhibit more frequently than men is towards victimhood. Too often, if something doesn't turn out their way, they chalk it up to sexism, or some other conspiracy, when usually it's just simple bad luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can empathize here but at the same time she is calling this person publically (in the Journal!) a sexist without a whole lot of hard evidence (or if she has more, she didn't present it here.) I'm sure it won't take long for the internet detectives to figure out who this person is. That's pretty harsh.

<comment><USER13> err. sure, but that's how it goes whenever you're questioning the rational behind someone's decision. What evidence could exist? There's no go back to state save and play it with the male character test. You can't find out what he was thinking, and he'd never tell you. He'd give you a perfectly rational line of thought. Humans are fantastic at rationalizing their decisions. This is why sexism is such an ugly subject. The only practical way we have to view it is from an objective distance with aggregate data. You can not personalize it. What frustrates me is how personal most sexism stories are.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure where you're disagreeing with me here.

<comment><USER13> Only on the threshold of evidence. No evidence could exist, no standard could possibly be met short of full fledged confession.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have no idea what truly happened but it seems:

        1. younger person finds *rock star* older person
        2. older person says yes, then says no, and says
           well I am not impressed enough with you
        3. company says report to a higher up, and we will
           vp'gold you
        4. younger person says sexism!

It's an interesting claim but Occam also suggests it could be ageism + way better offer. Do we really know this older person would have accepted the same offer from the equivalent male younger person?

I think it's great she has a coach, honestly, I am not sure that's a privilege many of us have.

I don't know who this rock star was or where they ended up, but meebo, didn't that finish as an acqui-hire?

<comment><USER15> The "higher up" in this case was Seth Sternberg, born 1979 according to CrunchBase. I'm guessing Elaine and Seth are about the same age.

<comment><USER14> Yes, however he is still a higher up (President) and the new employee's title is vice-president with one connection from the president not manager or sr. connecting to VP connecting to president.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a hard time seeing why she thinks the problem is her gender.

What about her skills? Her personality? Her past achievements?

And while the other one says "Older men don't want to report to young females!", why is it the gender that pops out? What about _young_?

<comment><USER17> Because he was happy to join the company reporting to her co-founder, who seems to be about the same age as she is (early 30s). And as I've pointed out above, he had already accepted the position, started attending company meetings, and then pulled out a few days before he was due to take up his full-time duties.

<comment><USER18> With a bump in pay and position.

<comment><USER17> He could have obtained that by simply saying 'you're great, I love working with you, but I'm being offered more elsewhere.' He'd still have been reporting to a co-founder, not a junior employee. I find it weird that people insist on discounting this factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is, by far, the most level-headed article on sexism in business and technology that I've ever read. The fight for equality didn't fail, we just haven't finished it yet. But the fight from here doesn't require anger or protests like it did in past decades. Now it requires leadership, and we need to switch gears.

As for anger, I'll be directing mine at the Wall Street Journal for making it so I couldn't scroll with arrow keys: I almost gave up reading (and I'm glad I didn't)

<comment><USER8> This is very similar to the central idea of Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In". Having more and better women in leadership positions will help both men and women. I was skeptical, but I enjoyed the book more than I expected.

<comment><USER19> Progress in equality benefits everybody, no matter how much people try to claim otherwise. Diversity is an amazingly good thing.

<comment><USER8> Some people take the primitive view that anything that helps women must hurt men. It makes me sad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I see that many people here think that not her being young and female, but him gunning for a better position was the real cause of this.

When he told her on the phone that he would not join because of HER, he cut off any possibility of her making him a better offer. So no, it was not him gunning for a better position, he was uncomfortable with her. Was that because she was young, or because she was female, or because of other facets of her personality, we will not know. But common sense pretty much points to a combination of young and female.

</comment><comment><USER21> Two things,

First. I was set off by the complete lack of evidence for the sexism case. The setting that assert _sexism_ is in play is limited to:

      [...] and she continued: "Right, well, it's because you're
      young and female."

And that's it, from there on, the author says _It was because of sexism_ , because her coach said so.

Second. Although the storyline is not a convincing anecdote, it still has value. It is interesting to see that:

      * It's not necessarily people higher in your company that will prevent a women from
      getting promoted.
      * It's not necessarily that women won't get hired for a higher position.
      * If it seems the problem of sexism is solved for many, older individuals still form a
      majority in the senior/execs layers, and their older generation may have sexist ways.

Although the story was not strong enough to make an convincing example, the idea is still plausible and motivates a new way to look at it.

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if he would have reported to her if they offered him the same stuff they gave him after the negotiation ("a bump to VP, an increase in salary and signing bonus") but required him to report to her.

</comment><comment><USER23> It might surprise the author to know guys get rejected (professionally) by other guys _all the time_ , with no credible reason given. Your "coach" told you it was sexism? Get a new coach.

<comment><USER17> But this wasn't a straight rejection. He had accepted an offer, signed on with the company, and started attending strategy meetings, then announced he was quitting only days before he was due to begin full-time. And if we beliece his version of events (about going to another firm), he did the same thing to them. that's very far from professional behavior.

<comment><USER23> Certainly that's true. But that has nothing to do with sexism or glass ceilings (a term she's misusing here).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think this is the first article I've read on sexism in tech where the "glass ceiling" has been explained in terms of how it would/does/might actually manifest itself in real life, instead of in generalities like "society is sexist." Whether or not this story actually reflects sexism, at least the author is giving us a real story with actual information that causes us to evaluate our experiences from a new perspective. It's much appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER25> The women in this article assume they can read minds and divine intentions from a very sparse base of facts. To jump to the conclusion that those who chose not to do business with you are seeking to enforce the 'Old Boys Club' (when in fact they were strangers, who were forming a new 'club', or business) and keep women out, is outrageously disrespectful and malicious.

</comment><comment><USER26> "This was a political land grab spurred by a perception of female weakness. I'd acquiesced too soon and it was still my fault, but for a very different reason."

So there's a "perception" of female weakness which spurred the exploitation of said weakness and the female in question acquiesced? It may just be me, but this isn't about the glass ceiling, it's about the author perpetuating the stereotype that women are weak by doing exactly what the bias suggests.

Personally, I'd have send an email to the "company" who hired the "rockstar" and congratulated them with a little passive aggressive message of "I was quite surprised to hear he decided to join you after signing papers with us."

</comment><comment><USER27> Since it took me an absurdly long time to figure out how to read this in a non-awful format, here's a link for others:

[http://blogs.wsj.com/accelerators/2013/10/11/elaine- wherry-w...](http://blogs.wsj.com/accelerators/2013/10/11/elaine-wherry-why-i- now-believe-the-glass-ceiling-is-real/tab/print/)

</comment><comment><USER28> The article doesn't load for me, I just see a bunch of pictures.

The glass ceiling has _always_ been real. It will continue to exist until the human race is extinct. Humans prejudice each other based on whatever traits they decide they don't like.

</comment><comment><USER29> So, a potential employee decides not to work with your startup and you immediately jump to the conclusion that it's because you're female?

It sounds to me like he found a better job and just needed to give you an excuse.

On top of this, this was not your boss, this is someone you were trying to hire. You can turn down a job for any reason and it has nothing to do with the "glass ceiling".

Aren't we allowed to have opinions these days? If I don't like you and you just happen to be black, a woman, gay, etc..does it always have to be because of these traits..and not because you're an asshole?

<comment><USER17> _So, a potential employee decides not to work with your startup and you immediately jump to the conclusion that it 's because you're female?_

No, she immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was _her fault_ and she then sacrificed her own future with the company in order to get this person onto the team. _Some time later_ her coach pointed out that she overlooked the possibility of an age/gender issue.

Why, I wonder, did you choose to completely mischaracterize the content of the article?

 _On top of this, this was not your boss, this is someone you were trying to hire. You can turn down a job for any reason and it has nothing to do with the "glass ceiling"._

Backing out of an accepted job offer is a bit different from 'turning down a job'.

 _Aren 't we allowed to have opinions these days? If I don't like you and you just happen to be black, a woman, gay, etc..does it always have to be because of these traits..and not because you're an asshole?_

Nobody forced the candidate to accept the job offer before backing out of it on a rather flimsy pretext. He hadn't even started work yet, so I wonder what basis you think he had for deciding that his then-future boss was 'an asshole.'

<comment><USER2> _Why, I wonder, did you choose to completely mischaracterize the content of the article?_

That's a little unfair. The article's title frames the story in reference to the glass ceiling. That the grandparent comment used the word "immediately" does not change the fact that this entire article is about sexism; even if it was only explicitly mentioned at the end, it is the author's point that sexism caused these events. It's not as though she wrote an article detailing these events and then threw in what her coach said because it's thought-provoking -- she actually believes it, factual or not.

 _Backing out of an accepted job offer is a bit different from 'turning down a job'._

While this sentence is true, it doesn't answer what the grandparent said. You can turn down a job, back out of a job, quit a job - whatever, for whatever reasons you want, and they don't have to remotely involve the glass ceiling.

 _Nobody forced the candidate to accept the job offer before backing out of it on a rather flimsy pretext. He hadn 't even started work yet, so I wonder what basis you think he had for deciding that his then-future boss was 'an asshole.'_

Similar to how rejection letters from a company are almost always form letters and not personal details about your interview performance, I don't see why you'd expect anything other than a flimsy excuse from a candidate turning down the job.

And the grandparent wasn't saying the author _is_ an asshole, just that it is an equally plausible explanation to her being a woman, young, gay, a dominatrix, diseased, whatever.

I get what you're saying, anigbrowl, but I have to disagree. I fully believe sexism exists in tech, and most of the stories on HN about it are probably the real deal. But this doesn't have enough evidence to give me that impression. If anything, I'd say it's more that he didn't want to be the subordinate of an unassertive young person (ageism), not a female.

<comment><USER17> I have my doubts about how much sexism was in play, but I also accept that the writer of the article necessarily has more first hand experience of the situation than can be adequately laid out in a short column (which may in turn have been edited for length by a copy editor). Note as well that she is going out of her way to be circumspect about the identity of the person in question; I am perfectly willing to believe that there's more to the story but that she is choosing to exercise some discretion to avoid impinging on the person as an individual and also to avoid the possibility of a libel accusation. I don't think ageism is a big issue here since the star hire was apparently happy to end up reporting to the author's (then) 32 year old cofounder, and the author appears to be of a similar age.

The point I'm making above is that the grandparent poster seems to have some need to make up facts that are not present in the original story in order to justify his angry tone. In short, I think he has a giant chip on his shoulder.

What I think you and a lot of other posters are missing is the import of her paragraph about how diversity costs; when they were a freewheeling write-the- r-own-rules startup they could afford to blow off or ignore anyone who tried to leverage personal biases such as sexism, ageism, or anything really. Once they were funded and had investors whose expectations they had to satisfy, they were also obliged to deal with suppliers (of skills in this case) whose economic apparent economic benefit outweighed the ancillary costs in terms of team cohesion and founder status. She's pointing this out as an example of systematic discrimination - not in the casual but incorrect sense that most people use the term, involving some villainous type whose primary goal is to disenfranchise others, but as an unfortunate consequence of the laws of supply and demand.

If you need to hire a hotshot in some specialized field and the expected value of that person's economic contribution is greater than the cost of buying out a cofounder, then said cofounder is at the mercy of any personal biases that the hotshot might have. And being a hotshot is absolutely not correlated with any kind of superior moral development. I have met plenty of highly skilled people who were leaders in their field but who were markedly undeveloped in other respects, and indeed I could say the same of myself in some respects.

<comment><USER2> _What I think you and a lot of other posters are missing is the import of her paragraph about how diversity costs; when they were a freewheeling write-the- r-own-rules startup they could afford to blow off or ignore anyone who tried to leverage personal biases such as sexism, ageism, or anything really._

I had missed this, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

 _She 's pointing this out as an example of systematic discrimination - not in the casual but incorrect sense that most people use the term, involving some villainous type whose primary goal is to disenfranchise others, but as an unfortunate consequence of the laws of supply and demand._

I can see how this makes sense, okay, fair point. In other words, a far more subtle type of discrimination based on the circumstances. I probably missed this because the title seemed a bit more straightforward.

As for everything you said about "hotshots", yeah, I agree.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Docker Hub Official Repos: Announcing Language Stacks - <AUTHOR> https://blog.docker.com/2014/09/docker-hub-official-repos-announcing-language-stacks/

<comment><USER2> Maybe I'm missing something here but I don't see this as being particularly useful?

It's a nice quick way to get an application running in Docker but realistically would you want to be depending upon these images in production?

The power I see in Docker is the ability to create portable images that contain everything my application needs. I don't want to depend upon Docker (the company) to figure out what these images should look like.

Am I looking at this the wrong way?

<comment><USER3> If the Dockerfiles were available, I would feel better about it. Just glancing around I couldn't find the stacks Dockerfiles, so not sure those are available.

<comment><USER2> I think they're here: [https://github.com/docker- library](https://github.com/docker-library)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know why debian was chosen as the source for these repos? I thought they were defaulting to ubuntu.

ie. [https://github.com/docker- library/golang/blob/master/1.3/Doc...](https://github.com/docker- library/golang/blob/master/1.3/Dockerfile)

<comment><USER5> This question was asked on [https://github.com/docker- library/golang/issues/11#issuecomm...](https://github.com/docker- library/golang/issues/11#issuecomment-56748915) too, but the main reason is that the "debian" base images are tightly controlled and kept really minimal, so it's easy to make the new images as minimal as they can be too. The Ubuntu images are also great, but they include more stuff as part of keeping a consistent experience, so they don't have the same focus on minimalism that the Debian images can.

<comment><USER6> Note that the image maintainers (starting with tianon above) reserve the right to change the base distro they use for the images. So they can truly use the best tool for the job, now and in the future.

<comment><USER7> Changing the distro underneath would break all other Dockerfiles that assume they are running on a certain distro. How do we have to deal with cases when the distro is switched from debian to centos for example?.

<comment><USER8> If you don't want things to get broken further down the line, you should use tags. It's the same with any dependency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm very happy to see Hy language among the official repos! I think more people should know about it.

<comment><USER10> For people not aware, "Hy transforms its Lisp code into the Python Abstract Syntax Tree"[0].

[0]: [http://hy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html](http://hy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can someone explain to me what the fuss is about? I mean, e.g. the Java 7 dockerfile is 3 lines. Why is it better for me to FROM these images instead of copying those three lines into my own dockerfile?

<comment><USER12> Well from a practical sense it's just making it more modular for you to mix and match without duplicating configuration. But the fuss is about PR. If this were Gentoo or something there'd just be a big directory of ebuilds and you'd just use them as you needed. But an announcement like this always makes it to the front page of HN, and then other sites, and they get more eyeballs on their site. So it's half useful, half business-as-usual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pity they choose "Golang" instead of "Go" for their default Go image. It's called "Go". And they built Docker with Go.

<comment><USER14> Pity Google choose "Go" instead of "Golang" for their programming language. There were already another "Go!". And they built it from scratch so they could choose whatever name instead of a common English word.</comment></comment>


Carlos Ghosn Flees to Lebanon to Escape Japan Legal System - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-30/carlos-ghosn-left-japan-arrived-in-beirut-reports-say <comment><USER2> The press is certainly painting him as a fairly classic example of a celebrity CEO whose real expertise is looting the companies he runs, rather than turning them around.

On the flip side of that... I quake with terror at the thought of ever being charged with a crime in Japan. Repeated interrogations without the right to have a lawyer present? Delaying charges in order to secure multiple detentions? Harsh conditions of bail?

All of these things seem to be engineered to produce guilty pleas or convictions without a lot of pesky pushback from the accused.

<comment><USER3> In another article about Ghosn, it stated that in Japan there's a 99% conviction rate. That is scary.

<comment><USER2> If we read the same article, it suggested that Britain's conviction rate was around 87%^H^H^H 80%.

(Hat tip to peteretep for the updated figure).

<comment><USER4> 80% in the UK vs 99% in Japan

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate)

<comment><USER5> Most criminal defence attorneys will admit that the _most_ of the people they work with are guilty. It's just how the police and justice system works when you get caught and what cases go forward. But 99% will always be insane and a giant red flashing light indicator of something is wrong.

 _At least_ 5-10% of people get off on technical details the police or prosecutors messed up or just good lawyering of guilty people. The rest the cases fall apart before trial because of witnesses or other evidence and turns of events. (I'm pulling these numbers out of my ass just to make a point).

The problems in Japan are with the due process and a serious lack of rights of the accused. Even if we completely ignore the conviction rates.

<comment><USER4> I've read a competing theory of Japan which says prosecutors are so over- worked they only go through with cases they know they'll win. I wonder how one would decide?

In the UK, the CPS only prosecute cases with "a reasonable chance of conviction", which I guess means they essentially choose the conviction rate they're aiming for?

<comment><USER5> That sounds like the same bullshit line that the FISA courts give their 99%+ approval rating for domestic surveillance warrants.

We saw how that works in practice recently with that FBI report where the judges were basically yes men trusting everything the FBI told them without even basic scrutiny...

The Japanese system is more on the input end regarding due process and rights to counsel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm no fan of fatcat CEOs but by most accounts the charges against Ghosn are weak at best. See: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-01-31/inside- th...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-01-31/inside-the-takedown- of-renault-nissan-chairman-carlos-ghosn)

Specifically he's accused of:

1) Concealing the true scale of his retirement package, none of which had been paid

2) During the '08 crisis he had Nissan temporarily take on hedging contracts (used to blunt the impact of currency fluctuations of the yen) since his bank was demanding collateral he didn't have; then later securing a line of credit from a Saudi businessman who was paid $14 million by Nissan (ostensibly for regional distribution)

I'm no forensic accountant but that's not a lot of smoke, much less fire. The retirement package was still theoretical and it's hard to believe a man being paid $20 million a year was really engaging in financial skullduggery for what amounted to peanuts of his net worth.

As others in this thread have pointed out, this seems to be a case of the Japanese looking down on greed, whereas it's the norm in America and some parts of Europe.

Also the Japanese were possibly reluctant to see a big Japanese company (Nissan) subsumed into a large international behemoth (Ghosn was trying to formally merge Renault and Nissan at the time of his arrest).

Ghosn is probably right that he can't get a fair trial in Japan's notoriously prosecutor-friendly justice system. Even the Businessweek article notes the conviction rate is at or near 100%.

Ghosn may have been arrogant and greedy but unless new details are presented the publicly available evidence suggests these charges are extremely flimsy.

<comment><USER7> Whether or not he is guilty of any wrongdoings, I think what many people have picked up is what seems to be 'special treatment' he received from the Japanese authorities.

It seems very rare, if not unheard of, in Japan for a CEO to be arrested and thrown to prison the way he was.

For example the 3 former execs of Tepco who have been charged with criminal negligence in relation with the Fukushima disaster have never been arrested. I don't think that execs at Kobe Steel who knew about falsified data regarding defective airbags were arrested. Etc.

On the other hand, Olympus CEO, first foreign CEO, was fired for blowing the whistle on accounting fraud within the company...

<comment><USER6> I agree, it was odd the way they immediately threw the book at him.

Look at the Takata airbag executives. Their decisions resulted in the actual deaths of human beings and they were not treated as harshly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The way this has all unfolded is very interesting.

From the beginning, Ghosn has employed a team of publicists to manage his image during the arrest and trial. Their primary focuses have been on highlighting the injustices of the legal system in Japan and on portraying an apparent conspiracy against Ghosn perpetuated by Nissan and the Japanese government. It's not hard to see how successful they've been in getting support for Ghosn.

Meanwhile, this strategy has successfully shifted focus away from the charges themselves - charges that include Ghosn secretly shifting $5 million from Nissan to companies his wife and son own in Lebanon.

One point that is interesting in hindsight is that Ghosn decried the injustice of not receiving bail in January, when prosecutors successfully argued that he was a flight risk. He received it in March with heavy restrictions.

In hindsight, the strategy of managing his image, promoting a conspiracy, and denouncing injustice, all while diverting attention away from the charges, seems built with the intended outcome of him fleeing the country. Of course, it probably wasn't planned that way, but it's certainly better to flee and rebuild your life when international public opinion is in support of you rather than against.

In any event, the likely outcome now is that we will never find out the truth behind the four charges against Ghosn.

<comment><USER9> Considering that he fled, I think we can at least say that the Japanese system was correct and accurate in assessing that Ghosn was a flight risk.

<comment><USER10> That said, I always wonder why people don't abscond more often when facing charges that will see them jailed for the rest of their lives. I suppose it's more likely than not that he did at least some of the dirt he's accused of. But from his personal perspective, the choices are the life of a fugitive and the life of a prisoner (in Japan, no less, which is famous for its harsh treatment of prisoners). For me, the choice would be obvious.

<comment><USER11> You give our word not to flee. For some of us the dishonor for breaking our word is worse than being jailed unjustly.

Besides, liberal freeing society collapses if we cannot or will not hold people to their word, replaced by totalitarianism.

<comment><USER12> And what happens when the government doesn't stick to their word?

Nothing. Asymmetrical power relationships are complicated.

<comment><USER11> So? My honor, like my privacy, is valuable to me without having to attach to it a material worth. My honor is refusing to live a lie and therefore denying myself.

I would much rather die knowing I lived like Havel, then his infamous grocer.

(In case you don't know Havel, he's one of the thousands of bright lights who refused to live a comfortable lie in the Eastern bloc and took down an empire. The government is more scared of honorable men, then men who would flee)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To be honest, given the state of the Japanese system[1], if I were in his position, I would escape and skip bail... I have lived in Japan and love the country but I would be really scared if for whatever reason I were to be suspected by the police there.

[1] Japan has very few protection for suspects and more than 99% conviction rate. There's a great movie about the justice system there that is worth seeing: I Just Didn't Do It, それでもボクはやってない

</comment><comment><USER14> How does someone with multiple organizations shadowing him skip bail?

"The terms of Mr Ghosn's detention meant he could leave his flat while on bail, but he was followed by three agencies — the police, prosecutors and a private detective."[1]

[1][https://www.ft.com/content/e0330dbe-2b45-11ea-a126-99756bd8f...](https://www.ft.com/content/e0330dbe-2b45-11ea-a126-99756bd8f45e)

<comment><USER2> The escape reads like a Bond movie. An orchestra gave a performance at his house, and when it left, he was hidden in one of the boxes used to carry instruments.

That same box was then flown to Turkey in a private plane, with him in it.

It's reported that his wife arranged the entire affair.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _An orchestra gave a performance at his house, and when it left, he was > hidden in one of the boxes used to carry instruments_

Source?

<comment><USER15> Most of the stories I can find are sourcing a tweet from an MTV (edit: Murr TV) producer in Lebanon, which is a little odd. This one: [https://twitter.com/jossie_jaalouk/status/121177472470926540...](https://twitter.com/jossie_jaalouk/status/1211774724709265408)

Mentions the musical instrument box, but I don't see the other details.

Edit: This site has the story including the band. No idea how credible it might be: [https://gulfnews.com/world/did-nissans-carlos-ghosn-flee- jap...](https://gulfnews.com/world/did-nissans-carlos-ghosn-flee-japan-in-a- musical-instrument-box-1.1577791981610)

<comment><AUTHOR> > _stories I can find are sourcing a tweet from an MTV producer in Lebanon_

On one hand, Ghosn is in Lebanon. That's where people with the full story are.

On the other hand, Ghosn is popular there. An MI6-style escape sounds better than the likelier reality of massive bribes having been paid.

<comment><USER16> I really doubt you could pull this off in Japan with bribes: there are way too many parties involved and way too much public scrunity. Sneaking out of the country seems much more plausible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sneaking out of an island country while under state surveillance generally requires greasing a few palms. Not necessarily to knowingly co-operate. But to look the other way.

<comment><USER10> Do you have personal experience or knowledge of island country escapes on which you're basing this claim? Would you mind sharing your sources?

<comment><AUTHOR> > _Would you mind sharing your sources?_

Simply getting through immigration and customs requires (a) gambling you get a distracted agent or (b) paying a bribe. Given the consequences with (a), it's not surprising that pretty much every fugitive-by-air account features bribes.

There are many more steps that are tightly watched in getting on an international flight, even one privately chartered, particularly out of Japan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> g-888 I am Japanese and know a little about this incident. Mr. Ghosn was arrested by an organization that specializes in investigating corruption and financial crime. They are under strong political pressure and will be shut down if Mr. Ghosn is acquitted. This means that Japanese corruption and financial crime will increase. So they will use whatever means they can to convict Mr. Ghosn.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _They are under strong political pressure and will be shut down if Mr. Ghosn > is acquitted_

Yes, prosecutors are incentivized to close their cases, and yes, Japanese prosecutors are very conservative about choosing which cases to bring. But nobody was threatening to shut anything down (nor would such an action be politically or bureaucratically feasible) based on the outcome of the trial.

<comment> g-888 Mr. Ghosn was arrested by an organization called the Special Investigation Department (Tokusoubu). Tokusoubu is hated by politicians and corporate executives to investigate corruption and financial crime. The authorities were always trying to shut down Tokusoubu, and in fact were weakening. It is unlikely that those in power will be able to intervene in the judiciary, but if Mr. Ghosn is acquitted, Tokusoubu is likely to be closed down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Japanese prosecutors and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission both > claim Ghosn and Nissan violated pay-disclosure rules

> within days of his arrest, a billboard with his portrait loomed over the > streets leading to downtown Beirut. "We are all Carlos Ghosn," it read. The > executive's incarceration united the country's usually fractious politicians > around him.

Interesting how different he is viewed by different countries.

</comment><comment><USER18> I can't wait for the Netflix series on this. Having lived with many of them over the years, I've always admired the sheer entrepreneurial energy of the Lebanese diaspora. Remember, Carthage was founded by ancient Phoenicians (modern-day Lebanon) and its strength came from its business and financial prowess [0]... and was Rome's greatest threat at the time. This [1] more recent article from the Economist discusses this as well. [0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Carthage#Economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Carthage#Economy) [1][https://www.economist.com/business/2013/03/16/a-tale-of- two-...](https://www.economist.com/business/2013/03/16/a-tale-of-two-traders)

</comment><comment><USER19> I am going to go out on a stretch and say that reason he fled is that he is guilty of what he is being suspected of and not because Japan has a "rigged" legal system. And his corrupt buddies back in Lebanon are helping him because he has got millions in ill gotten gains stashed away there.

<comment><USER20> > I am going to go out on a stretch and say that reason he fled is that he is > guilty of what he is being suspected of and not because Japan has a "rigged" > legal system.

Him fleeing doesn't give you any new information on wether he is guilty or not.

If I was innocent but accused of his crimes in Japan, I would also flee, because once you are accused in Japan their is basically no way to defend yourself, you are going to get convicted no matter what, so why would anyone, guilty or not, stay?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm pretty sure Ghosn isn't a saint, but he has a strong point regarding the Japanese Legal System which in practical terms is no system at all since if you get accused of something there's an almost 100% chance you'll get convicted no matter what.

Also, AFAIK the Japanese side of the board has been withholding information, straight up lying and everything in between to the other part of the board regarding strategic and everyday operations stuff.

I don't know if it's due to the usual egomania and personal agendas, but if their strategy is to burn the 3rd biggest automaker to the ground and then be kings of their little kingdoms they are doing a great job.

</comment><comment><USER22> It is amazing how much impunity billionaires the wealthy and powerful seem to world.

<comment><USER23> to be fair anyone can technically skip bail. But the resources to properly fly are obviously dictated by wealth and power.

<comment><USER24> The article also claims he entered Lebanon on a fake (or at the very least not his own) French passport.

Moving internationally with fraudulent credentials would land most people in jail, but it seems the local government "loves" the man (no doubt his money helps with political favours), so he's safe from that too.

<comment><USER3> He entered Turkey with a fake passport, maybe the Turkish government issued him a new valid Turkish passport? And I would have to think he already had the OK from the Lebanese government to travel there and stay there without being extradited.

<comment><USER15> Lebanese TV says he entered Lebanon on a French passport. It sounds like Japan didn't confiscate all of his passports. It's likely he has three...France, Brazil, and Lebanon.

<comment><USER25> If Japan confiscated his passports he can probably just go to a consulate and get a new one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm no fan of CEOs, but can anyone here honestly say they would stay and stand trial in a place with a 99.9% conviction rate? That's stalinist level "justice".

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't know if he's guilty or not, but he has just, single handedly, made bale for high profile indictees very difficult indeed.

He's under indictment for corruption, and fled the country using what can only be described as corrupt means, hardly an endorsement.

Compare and contrast with the treatment of Julian Assange.</comment>


Stack Exchange for English Language and Usage - <AUTHOR> http://english.stackexchange.com/

<comment><USER2> Judging from the top questions that I read, this is not a site for linguists, at least not ones interested in descriptive rules of language. Nearly all questions asked about standards of written English, which are arbitrary and uninteresting to a linguist, except in that the bickering over what is "proper" might bring to our attention divergent forms among varieties of English.

For people interested in the debate over whether a "correct" English (or any language for that matter) exists, here is an interesting article by Geoffrey Pullum:

<http://people.ucsc.edu/~pullum/MLA2004.pdf>

Re: written English vs. spoken English Spoken English is a primary linguistic form while written English is secondary or parasitic on spoken forms, so actually from a linguistic perspective, calling written English a language is wrong. English exists in speakers' minds and written English is a filtered encoding of that language with certain non-linguistic constraints put upon it (e.g. in my dialect of English, dropping an auxiliary at the beginning of a yes/no question is completely okay, but in writing, I hardly ever do this, unless in a very informal context. This is because written standards tell me not to.)

<comment><USER3> A lot of the signal in spoken English is carried by tone of voice and emphasis. Which confuses people from cultures where emphasis is not part of the signal, much as English speakers are often confused by tonal languages.

Written English is more formal presumably because it has to get by without that part of the signal.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My favorite word source: <http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> Why couldn't people use this more often?

<comment><USER6> Because english isn't as standardized as we would like to think. The written and spoken forms are not a one to one translation. Written english could almost be classify as a seperate language that happens to share words and similar syntax. At least the written version has a modest level of standardization. The spoken language is very fragmented.

<comment><USER5> I wasn't referring to spoken language. I meant when people try to literally "write like they speak" and end up sounding ridiculous because, as you said, written English could almost be another language.

<comment><USER7> Several, don't forget dialects.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Subject: Airbnb - <AUTHOR> http://paulgraham.com/airbnb.html <comment><USER2> Fascinating conversation. Thanks for giving insight into how these deals work...

>ABNB reminds me of Etsy in that it facilitates real commerce in a marketplace model directly between two people.

Interestingly enough, I still tend to side with Fred's assessment of AirBnB's future. All my experiences with it as a user have been too unreliable to expect that it can scale to truly massive usability. Selling your old guitar online is a lot different than renting a room to someone. Renting a room has so much more of a personal aspect to it.

There are so many more subtleties to actually having a stranger come and stay in your house than there are to sending a stranger a book, guitar, etc via USPS.

Regardless, I still think there's a massive market out there for this type of thing, I just don't see it swallowing up the whole Hotel industry.

<comment><USER3> I just did my first AirBNB experience (actually am still in the middle of it) and I can say that it's actually been surprisingly smooth. It's almost like a paid way to make friends. The hosts who I'm staying with are so cool, and since I'm pretty public online, it was easy for them to feel comfortable with me staying at their pad. They've set it up as much like a hotel as I could ask for. It's really great, and it's paying half their rent (they have about 100% occupancy, believe it or not).

<comment><USER4> I like Airbnb. I've hosted 8ish times and stayed with people once.

Why I think the people on Airbnb are 'cool' is that its a small population that has a lot in common (young or young-at-heart, singles and couples without kids, internet natives, own a macbook, would love to hitchhike Europe while submitting correspond reports for the NYTimes). As it grows, I'm worried that everyone's not going to find everyone else 'cool' on Airbnb.

I wasn't around for the early days of Craigslist, but I imagine it was easy to like people you found on Craigslist because they were probably very similar people to be on Craigslist so early. But now, after scale and popularity, that's gone.

I wonder if Airbnb might lose the 'cool' people edge after scaling.

<comment><USER5> What Airbnb would need to do is allow renters to rate rentees. Two-way system like eBay used to be.

<comment><USER6> We do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting that completely missing from this conversation is:

\-- Their website design \-- Their code (Rails? Jquery?) \-- Their hosting / scalability / "cloud" strategy \-- Source control methods, dev environment, tools \-- APIs, "ecosystem", social media, "viral rate" etc. \-- And more...

Basically, all the things that most of us here spend most of our time discussing.

Instead: 1) Idea / Team 2) Execute 3) Talk to people with money 4) Go to #2

<comment><USER8> MARKET.

[http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to- star...](http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-startups- part-4-the-only)

That's all Fred is looking at in that phase-- because even an awesome team won't build a venture-sized business in a tiny or low-growth market.

At our Demo Day, there was two teams that had a veritable investor feeding frenzy around them-- and they were both attacking markets that were either huge/rich or markets that were growing like gangbusters (and they had the good sense to talk as much about the market opportunity as they did about their product).

<comment><USER9> To be fair, anyone who makes it through YC and gets pg's recommendation should be pretty competent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think _this_ is the post that best gives an idea of "Why should you do YC".

<comment><USER11> And this is the post that tells you why you should read HN too.

<comment><USER12> Absolutely there is a lot of meat there. And hope for all of us!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've told this story before on HN, but it's worth telling again.

I rented a room in L.A. using Airbnb. The owner of the room said he made $4000 in 3 months on two rooms that would have otherwise been vacant. If you're making this much money for people you've tapped into one helluva market.

<comment><USER14> I can cover the rent of a 2-bedroom apartment in Manhattan by renting out one of the bedrooms on Airbnb. I don't expect the situation to last forever, but for now it's great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice, pg.

Have you ever given a similar vote of confidence to founders who didn't live up to your expectations?

<comment><USER16> Maybe not quite that persistent, but I've definitely tried to sell investors on startups that didn't end up doing very well. Even by the end of the 3 months we are far from perfect at predicting who the big winners will be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fred Wilson tweeted: _Reading the email discussion between paul graham and me with 20/20 hindsght is both useful and painful_

<http://twitter.com/fredwilson/status/48456993614200832>

</comment><comment><USER18> So this post has done two things in my estimation.

1) Improved the perceived standing of PG among the entrepreneur-class. It proves that he really adds value the way he says he does - hawking, what can easily be seen as a very weird idea at a time when not many people see it.

2) Improved my perception of Fred. Even though he passed on the deal, he is stand-up enough to not only admit it - but allow PG to post this email exchange that shows that he was "one of the old guys" that were skeptical. It also shows that he wasn't just pulling PG's chain, but was really debating it internally.

</comment><comment><USER19> Great examples of VCs never saying no directly and of a strange insider be- terse-and-get-out-of-my-way writing style.

<comment><USER20> Is it terse or is it just concise?

So many 'business' people think that long waffling sentences seem clever and impressive. Nothing is further from the truth.

<comment><USER21> This is neither terse nor concise. Terse and concise means you write what you mean. When the VC writes, "we are still in the data-gathering phase", he really means "I see what you are saying, but my gut says no right now. I may contact you in the future when I know more."

This is longer, but it actually means something. Instead of saying that he needs more data in order to make a decision, he's said that he needs more time to make a decision. The data comes natrually.

A "data-gathering-phase" is the phase that everyone is always in about everything. I am currently in a "data-gathering-phase" with respect to whether or not I should make another cup of coffee. My current cup is cold, but still contains liquid. So it's not a sure thing that I should make myself another cup of coffee. On the other hand, hot coffee is nice. I can't decide, so I will continue to gather temperature and flavor data until I make a decision or I spill my coffee.

See how meaningless that is?

<comment><USER22> I was in data-gathering about coffee until I read that you wanted coffee too. I have asked an associate to bring in some coffee for discussion.

<comment><USER23> I've completed my data-gathering-phase and need coffee too!

This has gone viral!

<comment><USER22> Inveeeeeeeeest

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In my experience, Airbnb's biggest competitor is HostelHero and I found this much more convenient than Airbnb while traveling (if only because hostels nearly always have space, unlike the many rooms we encountered on Airbnb advertised as free but suddenly not when you book them).

Arriving in a new city without internet it was great to have HH and be able to find 10 hostels and know they are going to be open. I guess McDonalds wifi etc. means Airbnb could have been a competitor, but the ease of finding accommodation reliably, of a reliable standard, and at more affordable prices meant we used HH far more than Airbnb.

Having said that, the times we could manage to find a room that was genuinely free, and appeared to be genuine people with a spare room, were some of the highlights of our travels. The people and the rooms were both fantastic, and it's this "home away from home" and social aspect I think Airbnb should be pushing. I think at the same time they should be working hard to remove the listings that I could best describe as dodgy guys trying to run a hotel out of an apartment building without adhering to local hotelier laws as we found these far too prevalent in some cities.

</comment><comment><USER25> What an incredible post. Thanks for sharing, pg.

YC absolutely does hustle for you like this, and it's the best kind -- genuine.

</comment><comment><USER26> >(Fred Wilson): I am also talking to my friend Mark Pincus who had an idea like this a few years ago.

Mark Pincus is better known as the founder of Zynga, unless this is another Mark Pincus.

<comment><USER27> same mark. he has hundreds of ideas for businesses to start and has pitched me on many of them over the years

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wow, thanks PG (and Fred and AirBnB team). This is an _awesome_ insight into angel/VC investment decisions. It's hugely valuable.

</comment><comment><USER29>
      It just seemed a very good sign to me that these guys were actually
      on the ground in NYC hunting down (and understanding) their users.

That's a funny comment from paul because he was the one to tell them to go to NYC. That they went is to their credit, but still. I think of this sometimes with the pitch coaching for demo day. How many investors think "that's a great way to phrase that" when watching a presentation and what they are actually hearing is PG? When you've seen a few of them, it is quite stunning.

I don't mean this in a negative way. It actually is just evidence that paul graham is a badass.

<comment><USER6> We were already meeting our users over the previous year, including at the DNC and Inauguration. We had ambivalence to continue to do so city-by-city because, as we were warned by others, it didn't scale. PG gave us permission to continue these efforts, and to "do things that don't scale." It was one of the greatest pieces of advice we ever received.

<comment><USER30> I talked with one of the founders of Hackruiter (YC S10) last weekend and he told me Paul gave them the same advice! The two founders (or "the Hackruiters" as PG would say) are scheduling days completely full of half-hour 1-on-1 in- person meetings in different cities with people who might be interested in joining a startup. This is one of the most un-scalable processes I can imagine.

By the by, I was very impressed with the founder I talked to (Nick), and I would suggest that if you are a superb developer who is itching to join an existing startup, get in touch with Hackruiter. If they think you are a good fit, they may very well be able to either make the right connections on your behalf or at least point you in the right direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's interesting that in the end Airbnb raised from Sequoia, I wonder if lots of other VCs passed.

It possibly shows why Sequoia are the best.

<comment><USER32> True that is. +1 for the suburban golf loving VC's - at the end of the day, they are successful for a reason.

<comment><USER22> Have you met the Sequoia guys?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> You won me over PG. I'm applying to YC tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER34> the most amazing thing is that it took them only 2 years to come to a stage that a VC had to write a blog regretting missing them out.

</comment><comment><USER35> This exchange cements my concerns about AirBNB only being huge if they can end-run the hotel regulatory system.

pg: _Did they explain the long-term goal of being the market in accommodation the way eBay is in stuff? That seems like it would be huge. Hotels now are like airlines in the 1970s before they figured out how to increase their load factors._

fw: _So I think it can scale all the way to the bed and breakfast market. But I am not sure they can take on the hotel market._

The problem is, the regulatory system (not to mention the neighbors) do not want unlicensed, widespread "crowd-sourced" illegal hotel rooms, and are working hard to block them:

<http://www.frommers.com/articles/6912.html>

Paul Graham talks about the 'eBay' of accommodation -- but a huge percentage of eBay's revenue comes from professional sellers, which is exactly what will run afoul of regulation in the rental/hotel market.

<comment><USER36> not only regulation.

hotel chains won't be sitting idly while few geeks eat their market.

oh and btw, isn't eBay kinda dead thanks to Craigslist?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> If someone still has any doubts about the value of YC, they should read this email exchange. PG is pushing for the startup as if it was his own. He _genuinely_ wanted them (and also the VC firm) to succeed.

Great stuff.

<comment><USER38> What? He was invested in them. Do you think he wants to see them crash and burn?

<comment><USER37> You still really think he did _all of_ that only because of YC's ~6% stake in them?

<comment><USER39> I'm not trying to take anything away from pg here, but " _all of_ that" refers in this case to 7 emails with one VC.

AirBnB has raised $7.8M (at, what, around a ~$40M valuation at the time? 6% of which would be over $2m). Is it really that incredible that someone would send a few emails for a shot at that kind of money?

<comment><USER40> He's risking his reputation if he's pushing a company that he's not confident in. The reputation is worth a lot too, probably mostly in reciprocal connections.

<comment><USER39> That's true, but he's also risking his reputation (and his paycheck) if he _doesn't_ shop around for later stage investors for his companies. This kind of thing is his job, it's what Y Combinator exists to do. When one of his companies looks like it's going to be successful, he _has to_ do this kind of stuff to actually get a return out of it.

Which, again, isn't to denigrate him at all. He's obviously very good at what he does and deserves a lot of respect for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is great stuff. You can't blame any VC for being cautious at that early a stage though, and although the idea of hotels using airbnb to list their vacancies hasn't happened yet, as far as I can tell, it may not even matter. I have just started trying them to rent my apt in NYC, lets see how it goes. Personally as a "landlord" I feel like I do a great job accomodating my tenant, but on a site like craigslist, which is where I'd been posting my listings, this never gets reflected as there are no opinions/ratings, etc. As a result, I can't "stand out" from other landlords. It's not hard to get tenants in NYC, but I can imagine in some other parts of the country or world this may be a bigger issue. This is where I hope airbnb comes in handy.

</comment><comment><USER41> Lesson: _even_ pg can be rejected.

It's not the end of the world.

</comment><comment><USER42> Unrelated to start-up investment, just a random thought about ABNB:

I was thinking about the impact of hotel chains' business traveler kick-back schemes (euphemistically known as "rewards" programs) on the independent room providers (a phrase I just coined to run the gamut between someone renting out his spare room and a boutique hotel) ability to attract business travelers. How, as a business renting out 40 rooms in a single city, do you compete with Marriott who can offer some guy and his wife a free weekend stay anywhere in exchange for funneling his company's (or even his company's client's) dollars toward their brands? What if ABNB offered up to these independent operators a rewards program similar to those offered by the big chains? They would move beyond be a transaction facilitator toward being closer to a consumer brand. I believe that lower-end hotel chains basically follow this model -- independent owners become franchisees of the brand as a way to get bookings, have a recognizable brand, etc. While I doubt that too many of today's ABNB bookings are business-related, that number will surely increase. I love playing armchair QB :)

<comment><USER43> You can also hook into the kickback schemes by partnering with major reward programs like Amex Membership Rewards. Or work with state governments to have a voucher program like what Ireland has for BnBs.

It's a great business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Was I the only one that kind of smiled when reading the emails from PG to Fred pitching these guys? I loved that!

</comment><comment><USER45> Very encouraging to see that AirBnB struggled to prove market size. I know the pain.

</comment><comment><USER46> I have to say, it's pretty inspiring to see that PG went to bat that hard for the Airbnb guys.

</comment><comment><USER47> Is it just me or just Brian Chesky reply 2 minutes before PG sends the intro? Time differences won't account for it since NYC is ahead of SF

</comment><comment><USER48> VCs often say they invest in team first and idea second but USV decided not to invest in AirBnb despite having no (obvious) reservations about the team or their ability to execute.

Does this mean that ideas are more important than investors really let on?

<comment><USER49> Markets are the most important. Great team in a small market: no hope. Bad team anywhere: no hope. Great team in a great market, bad idea: there is hope (changing the idea is easy, just pour more money - changing the team is close to impossible)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Airbnb is a good startup but the founders struggled so much at first without gaining any significant traction. And even with PG's endorsement they still had trouble getting funding from a progressive-minded VC. I wonder if they (Airbnb's founders) could make it to this point without YC.

</comment><comment><USER51> Thanks for sharing PG, this is fascinating! We as entrepreneurs are generally busy trying to sell you and we rarely get to see your approach when "pitching" one of your companies. Your point by point break down of a market and how a company can grow into it is very insightful. I am taking note of your use of character validation (cereal story), peer validation (YC poll), market/community focus validation (out talking to users) and master vision for my own future investment communications. So short, subtle, and to the point, love it!

</comment><comment><USER52> Airbnb has definitely tapped into a latent market, but I wonder how such "rentals" may square with terms in lease agreements or condo association provisions. States and / or municipalities may quickly try to capture taxes, as Zipcar has discovered, or they may try to prevent or regulate such "rentals" on the basis of licensing, public health and safety, or other laws or ordinances. I wonder if the typical renter is properly reporting the income to the appropriate tax authorities.

</comment><comment><USER53> Note that there is zero mention of VRBO or Homeaway in this entire email thread. That's the real opportunity (not hotels or bed and breakfasts) and neither Fred nor Paul saw it.

</comment><comment><USER54> It seems PG has utmost belief in AirBnB guys from the beginning by the way he repeatedly tries to convince Fred to invest it.

Thanks for sharing the inside story. :)

</comment><comment><USER55> This seems right up USV's alley too. Marketplaces and platforms.

If I remember correctly, USV didn't exactly pass, but made a play around the time Sequoia did.

<comment><USER27> yup. right up our alley. in our wheelhouse. which is why i'm kicking myself for missing this one. this is our kind of deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Not that I doubted it, but this shows that YC are really prepared to fight and defend your corner to help you advance. Great to read.

</comment><comment><USER57> We tried to use airbnb here in Bali to search for a house but we had to give up as there were too many kinds of accommodations. Houses dubbed as villas, rooms dubbed as houses, one floor dubbed as a full house and even a gazebo where we were supposed to stay 2 months. All this is fine but I wonder how usable it will become once you throw the hotels in.

</comment><comment><USER58> Fascinating -

I could be wrong but I don't imagine too many people push back so hard on @paulg like that.

I have great respect for @fredwilson for pushing back and then admitting in a very public way that he felt he made a big mistake.

The best line of the email is @paulg describing @fredwilson: "He is the least suburban-golf-playing VC I know."

Glad this story was shared and glad there is continued mutual respect there -

<comment><USER19> How long have you had twitter disease? We're working towards a cure as fast as we can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> pg seemed a bit direct in terms of what he wanted in his email, which I found refreshing. On the other hand, Fred seemed to 'beat around the bush' as when he said 'we are in data gathering phase'.

Just curious what the norm is around the vc/angel circles. Are most people pretty direct/candid? or do they mostly hide behind business speak?

<comment><USER27> maybe i knew this email was going to get published someday and was careful about what i said. it's kind of amazing that pg only was asked to redact one small thing in the entire thread

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Here's what I appreciated:

Both Fred and PG are willing to a) admit mistakes and b) be totally transparent about it and c) publish that transaction for others to learn from put them BOTH in a class above and beyond traditional VCs.

Are you "other" guys listening out there? This is why YC is eating your lunch with new startups...

</comment><comment><USER61> Fred: "I'm just not sure how big it's going to be"

\- had he seen couchsurfing at the time?

<http://www.couchsurfing.org> (launched as beta in 2003)

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

Are Airbnb copycats?

<comment><USER62> One huge difference is that couchsurfing is free... do some chores around the place maybe to be nice, but the whole point is sharing and using each other's space for free. I think Airbnb is aiming for a different market, actually - for example, my parents would feel "weird" about crashing on a stranger's couch but booking a quaint and unique little bed and breakfast over the internet makes them feel cool. Conversely, I would feel bad about charging somebody to stay in my disgusting apartment but I'll happily host somebody just passing through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I love the term "cereal entrepreneurs" from one of the commenters on Fred Wilson's post:

[http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/airbnb.html#comment-16689887...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/airbnb.html#comment-166898872)

(The Disqus link doesn't quite work all the time tho...)

</comment><comment><USER64> Could there possibly be a better pitch for YC than this? Awesome read!

</comment><comment><USER65> Wow. I did not get the pun in AirBnB until I saw it spellers out widhelm he lowercase b in airbed.

The capital B is either a branding miss or an intentional branding effort to look more upscale than Airbed.

<comment><USER66> Based on previous discussions, I think it's done intentionally to reflect a pivot (away from airbeds).

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I wonder if missed investments like this have the senior guys listening to the junior members a bit more, or whether the young guys are wrong enough to keep it biz as usual.

</comment><comment><USER68> Hey PG,

Thanks for publishing this exchange. I've never known you to be anything but exceedingly polite and thoughtful; now I learn you're doing good work behind the scenes too. Inspiring!

</comment><comment><USER47> The content is wonderful to read through but the time frame that this conversation takes place over (a month) has a lot to say in itself.

</comment><comment><USER69> I love the succinctness of the email exchange.

</comment><comment><USER70> All other important factors aside, everything comes back to scalability. This helps further drill that point.

</comment><comment><USER71> I am surprised couchsurfing.org is nowhere mentioned - it was a working example already 5 years ago.

<comment><USER53> Yes but couchsurfing wasn't a business... it was more of a "movement". that was the concern: could couchsurfing be commercialized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> What could YC/Airbnb have done to prevent this? Anything you guys would do differently in hindsight?

<comment><USER73> Prevent what exactly?

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> interesting stuff

I was under the impression that YC introductions were pretty much the equivalent of "hey, here are some guys...invest in them"...but here you can see that there is a lot more pressure....bordering on begging

<comment><USER75> We earned PG's recommendation by working really, really hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> awesome

</comment><comment><USER77> I wish PG could back up my idea like that. What if.. I simply signed Paul Graham? : )

<comment><USER78> I realize that you're joking, but I think it's really important to point out that Paul was backing the team more than the idea. At least that's how I read it.

Team > Idea.

<comment><USER77> Of course.</comment></comment></comment>


'Digitize Your Inventory' – Would You Buy This Product? - <AUTHOR> https://www.sanna-tech.com/ <comment><USER2> Cool product! I would totally use this for organizing my wardrobe.</comment>


Ask HN: Have You Heard Conversations in a Constructed Language? - <AUTHOR>

A year ago there was an interesting HN submission of newspaper article about conlangs (link to appear in comment to this thread), and I'm wondering how many HN participants have heard live conversations in a constructed languages. Some constructed languages, e.g. Volapük, are constructed to solve practical problems of worldwide communication, and others, e.g. Klingon, are constructed initially for entertainment but also as frameworks for investigating the nature of language in general. Some fans of conlangs investigate quite a few different conlangs and discuss the differing characteristics of each one. Have you ever heard a live conversation in a spoken conlang? Have you ever engaged in correspondence in a written conlang?<p>To the best of my knowledge and belief, the most I have heard of any conlang is one sound recording of a poem in Esperanto (one part of a much longer recording with samples of many world languages) and one Internet sound file of Klingon from an online reference webpage. I have participated in live conversations in English (goes without saying), German, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Hakka, and (barely) Spanish, have overheard conversations in several other languages I was able to identify by ear and others I was able to exactly or approximately by the setting of the conversation. I think some of you here on HN have greater experience with conlangs and I would be delighted to hear about it. <comment><AUTHOR> Link to previous HN submission of news article about conlangs:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=54474>

Some good websites with lots of information about conlangs:

<http://www.zompist.com/kit.html>

[http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/9219/conlangfaq.ht...](http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/9219/conlangfaq.html)

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

with links to more from those.</comment>