I take issue with the quick denial of having a Grindr account and it is this very type of discrimination that is ruining the valley.
Nah, kidding. Best part was PG, though, clearly unaware of the appropriate way to make it rain. In fact, I suggest someone make a gif of just that part and it be made the background of HN every time a YC company is acquired.
I'm always surprised that the LGBT community doesn't intersect more with the engineering community, given that both San Francisco and New York are major hubs for both.
I know several gay men (and a few lesbian women or transgendered people) who work in the startup world, but even then they tend to be non-engineering positions. A former co-worker of mine and I started an NYC meetup for this exact purpose - we're actually having a game night tonight if any engineers are interested: http://www.meetup.com/Identity-Hackers/ [0]
Speaking only for myself, I've never felt any kind of discrimination, though I imagine if I were female or transgender, that experience may be different. I was also pretty lucky, though - my first experience working as a startup was at an incredibly gay-friendly dating website, so when your job is to work on posts like these[1], it's pretty easy to feel comfortable.
That doesn't really solve the problem of getting people in the door, though, and I've often wondered why more LGBT people go into engineering in the first place. I went to a very gay-friendly school, and even there the LGBT crowd seemed underrepresented in the engineering classes. I imagine this is related to the question of why we don't have more female engineers (whether straight/cis or not), but that's a much larger discussion.
I know a lot of gay people in the tech community in both SF and NYC (and at MIT). Not many lesbians, but that's due to lack of women overall (and they are probably well represented in the overall small number of female engineers).
A surprisingly large number of transgendered people. My first contact with a transgendered person was finding out the ~40 year old female IRCop on EFnet who was married to a woman was originally a man. Really confusing for a 13yo, but it was great to first encounter someone that different from me in a safe setting where I already respected that person's technical competence and general reasonableness.
It's kind of funny that in the military, where the whole LGBT rights thing was a big issue, one of the biggest predictors of "would you be ok with LGBT openly serving" was "did you know someone who was LGBT and a good soldier otherwise" -- if the first gay person you met was some horrible example of humanity independent of being gay, it was pretty easy to assume all gay people would be like that. If the first one was a great soldier (like 1LT Dan Choi), you'd be more likely to support gay soldiers as a class.
I think part of the problem with it is that most LGBT people are basically invisible about sexuality in their work settings -- which is awesome. I don't want to know about coworkers who have weird fetishes for objects, or blondes, or whatever. If it comes up in the context of "oh, I can work late, my husband will take the kids..", that's a great way to learn a coworker is gay. It isn't something you need to hide, but in a work setting, there's no reason to flaunt any traits unrelated to work.
There are quite a number of interesting LGBT projects happening in the valley. My favourite is my cab service when I'm in town (I prefer this to a usual cab late at night as a solo female traveller): http://www.yelp.com/biz/homobiles-san-francisco. If you'd like to hear some genuine discrimination stories order a cab here sometime, they are unbelievably friendly and happy to discuss why this service exists. There's an unpublished NPR interview out there also, not sure if it's made it to the airwaves.
This hasn't been my experience so far working as a software engineer in the valley. I've worked with/know several gay engineers and startup folks. To be fair, I don't know whether the proportion is representative of the wider population or not.
Anecdotally, I feel like it isn't, though I don't live in the Bay Area. San Francisco has the highest GLBT population (by percentage) in the nation. Even if we even it out and use 10%, a number that GLBT organizations sometimes use when referring to the general population, that would imply that most startups with a 10-person engineering team would have a gay engineer.
In my experience, that's certainly not been the case, at least in NYC (though it seems to be true about SF as well). It's even more bizarre because Silicon Alley overlaps with most of the gayborhoods in NYC. At a startup I used to work at, our local dive bar happened to be a gay bar, even though only one member of the team was openly gay[0]!
[0] Backstory: the old dive bar got bought and turned into a gay bar, so people just kept going to the same place anyway.
The US flag in the background of the treadmill is kind of offensive -- it touches the ground, etc. (and the waving them around parts outdoors, too, later in the video). The flag-pants are not something I'd ever wear, but that's more ambiguous.
Hardcore nationalist = you must display flag. Anyone who follows US flag code (military, older people, etc.) just believes "no obligation to use the flag, and in fact it's way overused, but if you're going to display it, do it in a respectful way".
I hate people with flags/ribbons/etc. on their cars, generally.
I have no choice but to respond to the down-votes. I promised myself I wouldn't at -1 but at -3 I have no choice. This is not a complaint of any sort but I would like to say the following:
We have been active HN readers/contributors for over 3 years. The "richkidsoftwtr" HN handle is one we created simply for this service and not for our personal use.
Having said that, one thing this community appreciates is a good story about a hard working group of guys using innovative ways to solve not only the problems that their customers face but also their internal problems (i.e. how are we going to survive until the next payment is received, etc...).
If you were to honestly take time to read the "about" link (https://www.richkidsoftwtr.com/about) you would see that we're an honest group of guys trying to do something unique to solve our own cash shortage. We're not just being opportunistic douches but rather capitalizing on this opportunity given the Exec team referred to "Making It Rain" in their post.
After all, having been in this rat-race for a few years, we appreciate just as much as the next person the amount of daily grunt work required to make it. This is just part of our effort. Kudos to all the other rats who appreciate our effort.
As someone who doesn't know what you do or who this is for the home and about pages both need a lot of work. From what I can see your service lets me give money to someone in a 'fun' way but you guys get a %?
I don't know why everyone is worked up about this. Having read their about page and seeing their service it Seems like a pretty legitimate startup story to me. Kind of a cool way to raise money if you ask me.
Having said that, congrats to exec. Definitely not our intention to take away any spotlight from them by posting that here. We just found it fitting. We'll gladly take down this link if the OP asks.
I get that the name is from a meme, or something, but it's all just a bit too ridiculous. It sounds like a tumblr of spoiled suburban kids' tweets, not what I gather is gittip for twitter - which seems like a shaky premise.
The downvotes are probably because you aren't adding anything to the discussion, just blindly pimping your site. If it comes up in a discussion, or it's relevant to the topic at hand, throw in a plug. But making an account expressly for spamming is a poor choice.
We're well aware of the fact that this is rather ridiculous. That is part of what captivates people about the service when we tell them about it. As for the premise of the service, it's somewhat different from what you have in mind. Clicking the "i" at the top right explains what the service really is.
In any case, I didn't want to get into the details before but we were actually unable to post the link to HN using this account as a "new" submission so we had given up on posting to HN. Trust me, I, like you hate when people plug their service on someone else's post. Having said that, when we were reading HN today and saw this headline, we couldn't resist.
It could definitely use a better description; basically I'm throwing my money into a well, and you guys get a cut? If there's some charitable component, or the destination of the cash was more transparent, then I get it. Otherwise it just seems like paying a lot of money for a tweet, which I guess somw people might be into.
So, I guess, good luck. It seems really weird and unlikely.
Fair enough. In all honesty, there are an infinite number of purchases displayed on the richkidsofinstagram website that I cannot understand or ever justify but it caters to a crowd that thinks and operates far differently than you or I - and those are the ones we are targeting. Hence the somewhat "arrogant" language in the info page.
Nah, kidding. Best part was PG, though, clearly unaware of the appropriate way to make it rain. In fact, I suggest someone make a gif of just that part and it be made the background of HN every time a YC company is acquired.