TL;DR guy gets asked to leave exclusive party.

Kind of dumb to be raising a stink over the issue anyhow. Just get shots in arms. After front-line medical workers it doesn't matter whose. Prioritizing the elderly was baloney. Hell, smokers were a priority group. How much more obvious does an intentional backdoor have to be? This guy probably shames people who bluff in Poker.

People have been kicked out of other important things for less. I wish they put a warning label on social media... don't post unless you want your words used against you in a future you haven't envisioned.

It may be too late but I would advise anyone to delete anything you wrote under your real name now. In 10 years you are going to get buried for what is normal today. They are coming for you.

What he did was wrong but in the 80s the info would have passed on to a small group at a pool party.

I waited until I was eligible, which was about a month ago. Anyone could have lied about their eligibility and gotten shots early, and although I wasn't comfortable doing so, I also don't begrudge people who did. Frankly, the vaccine should have been distributed more widely from the beginning. It was disheartening to watch the politics play out where only the "most deserving" people were granted vaccine, which quickly turned into "hospital executives, their families, & high ranking admin" before they got around to the most deserving.

I certainly wouldn't have encouraged a group of wealthy or soon-to-be wealthy tech founders to lie for vaccine. "Hacking the system" has always implied a sort of robinhood ethos, at least to me, not just greed purely for its own sake. I guess it's easy to be confused when you were raised inside the bubble and everything is monopoly money.

His defense was:

> 1. I went to a neighborhood clinic in Oakland, CA that's literally next door to my house, I can see the church from my window. Paul lives in NYC which is on the opposite end of the country.

> 2. I asked them about eligibility and told them I don't clear CA guidelines. They told me it's first come, first served with an ID showing I am 18+.

I am not buying this. Why would they even go and ask for eligibility when they know very well they are not eligible?

The only reason would be to hope to find a loophole.

The whole vaccine situation in CA was an excellent test of character. They failed it.

Not surprised that a YC founder thinks that rules apply only to others and not themselves. The antisocial gene is strong in this one.

I view most of the outrage over skipping the vaccine line as misplaced. The (American) system was very clearly made easy to game in the first place. The government criteria was unnecessarily complicated and had many vague carveouts that were easily gamed. For example, smokers were eligible early on as having a pre-existing condition - this is trivial to game without technically lying!

Indeed, many people early on advocated doing the criteria strictly by age (after healthcare workers), but the government decided to create carveouts largely for social equity reasons (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...).

It got to the point where, in February/March, the only people I knew were vaccinated were a bunch of young people who got vaccinated because they were in med school (or other medical affiliated school), even though they were studying remotely. And in many cases you didn't even need to "lie" to skip the line because nobody even checked for proof you were eligible.

I hope Paul Graham takes a principled stand and tweets his support for Biggar.

https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apaulg%20%22cancel%20cult...

“This is how we know we’re a real family here.”

“Oh no no, not the Y Combinator Founderinos.”

These things happen when you don’t practice what you preach, inconsistencies create drama.

This is one of those cases where it seems like everyone made bad choices.

Good. LOL.

et tu ycombinator?

ycombinator is useless - always has been, avoid it at all costs.

Title is not substantiate by any content.

Steve Jobs used his means to game the system to make a liver transplant available for himself; his wait time for an organ was much shorter than less wealthy and connected people. I recall no moral outrage over that[1].

A CEO who's smart enough to get their vaccine early should be acknowledged for their cleverness -- wouldn't you want that kind of smarts running a company??

I guess he would have been safer by refusing the vaccine -- oh, wait -- there's a different scarlet letter for that, right?

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/06/24/liver.transplant.priori...

well, lol

it's not skipping the line, it's hacking the line

Aaaaaaaaaand it's gone! (from the front page)

So Paul Graham is now the new DHH for the next couple of weeks

No doubt YC will be furious about this out-of-control cancel culture!

Bookface posts are confidential by design.

If there is ever a place that I will listen to unsubstantiated rumors without evidence from, it won't be Twitter.

I didn’t skip the line, but I don’t fault anyone who did (in the US) after the vaccination criteria was expanded beyond the elderly and a the immunocompromised.

The vaccine hesitancy rates in some communities were absurdly high. The justifications given for not vaccinating were equally ridiculous and uninformed. In that environment it’s completely morally justified to jump ahead.

Not sure what the deal is in the US, but in Melbourne, Australia (a week prior to our current lockdown) I managed to get my Pfizer jab as a walk in, even though I do not meet the eligibility criteria. At that point, some vaccination centres were allowing all walk ins due to the lack of (eligible) people wanting the vaccine here. Obviously lockdown 4.0 has changed that, and now everyone wants a jab.v

Does speak to a sense of entitlement some people have.

Guess what? It can happen to you, too, if you dare criticize a celebrity CEO. I got flagged & chastised for “breaking the guidelines” over a comment that stated facts about a certain CEO whose initials are TK.

Remember when y’all kept saying there’s no free speech on Facebook or Twitter? Well, it’s worse here, because if you don’t toe that line and bend the knee, you might get your user privileges limited.

Edit: here it is. +3 points and flagged. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26914977

Edit 2: and here's the dressing down I got:

> Regardless of how wrong or badly-behaved other people (be they HN users, celebrity CEOs, or imperialist bullies) are or you feel they are, you owe this community better if you're participating in it. Other people doing bad things is a poor non-excuse for setting this place on fire.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26938019

See? Don't criticize "celebrity CEOs," folks. You're breaking the code, and the insiders will circle the wagons if you do.

BTW, "Boober" is a direct quote said directly to a GQ reporter: https://www.gq.com/story/uber-cab-confessions

All of the energy going into this should instead be directed toward "how do we vaccinate most efficiently in future?"

I think it makes a lot of sense to vary eligibility criteria by vaccination site, and allow for anyone to be vaccinated at some of the sites. That way, anyone who meets special criteria can go to a site where the wait will be shorter, and anyone who doesn't meet any particular criteria still have a place where they can go to get it provided they are willing to endure the potentially long wait. As the rollout progresses, if some of the "special criteria" sites are not too busy, they can change to become "anyone" sites.

Overall, the problem of "too many people want the vaccine ASAP" is a great problem to have.

Can we not read so much into a literal tweet? It's what, 240 characters max? We've written more words speculating on what happened than was originally said. It's a tweet.

Also would like to point out: I'm not defending anyone - my initial reactions largely agree with the sentiment here, but it's 240 or 180 characters at most. It's not a news story or a comprehensive view. Let's take a moment to step back and acknowledge that before we devolve into the wars we seem to be criticizing so strongly.

Sounds like he violated a confidentiality agreement.

If you read something on a private discussion forum and then blast it out publicly on twitter, don't be shocked when you get kicked out of that forum.

It sorta doesn't matter how righteous your cause was, it is just going to be automatic.

I know people that have been fired from the company they work for over a similar kind of offense. If you've signed a confidentiality agreement then you do not have the right of freedom to tweet without repercussions.

As a NYC resident, I'm surprised to hear that it's not easy for healthy people to get a COVID vaccine in the Bay Area. I thought that the entire US was at the stage where they've got more than enough vaccines, at least that's the impression I got from the news.

EDIT: Nevermind, I guess this was all something that happened back in March. Interesting that this controversy arose now.

Hmmm.... personally I never saw any ambiguity in who qualified when and where for that vaccine so it's pretty hard for me to buy into anyone using that for an excuse to jump in a line they didn't belong in.

This is a moral character issue. I try to avoid those who don't have it and doing that is more than proof enough for me they don't.

None of the rules around vaccination make sense to me -- nor do I have faith in the politicians who came up with them -- so I find it difficult to judge the person accused of skipping the line. But I do find it easy to judge the person who shamed him. And that judgment is that he's annoying and should mind his own business.

lol. i don't get why people think y combinator is some high moral/honest company. they are just like any VC.

Sounds like it is in Australia, there are some sites that are vaccinating only those based on an eligbility criteria, and there are mass vaccination sites for anyone who wants the vaccination.

Some people are getting upset about people skipping the elegibility criteria.

Its a story about poor Governement communication to the masses.

Another person tweeting on being kicked out for criticizing a founder, though for a different topic. https://twitter.com/ekadamer/status/1400956227501318146

It could be worse: https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2012/04/startup_weekend_...

Personalities and personas and misdeeds of participants (real or imagined) and feuds and every other human-interest story have always been a part of the technology world.

But those things do seem to be growing rapidly as a fraction of overall mind share.

What are the rules for YC's private forum? Is it more restrictive than Chatham House rules? Is it permitted to leak internal conversations and denounce other YC members on Twitter?

Though it makes YC look very weak and thin-skinned, I bet the same thing would have happened at a lot of companies if an employee tweeted critical comments about the CEO, owner, etc.

The “cover your ass” culture in the US is getting out of hand. Since when did we expect church lady behavior from everyone? I object.

I don't get it.. the vaccine is available to everyone 12 and up now. You can make an appointment or find a walk in clinic.

https://myturn.ca.gov

The governor opened up vaccines for everyone on April 15.

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2021/04/15/all-californians-16-now-el...

So you got accepted. Then tell everybody in YC that they're shitty. Then you get kicked and wonder why.

I wonder how many jobs have been lost and reputations sullied by posting thoughtless comments on Twitter. 20 years ago, you really needed to make an effort to get a thought out to the world: create a website, write an op-ed in the NY Times, get interviewed on CNN. Now, it takes 5 seconds to ruin your life. There's a lesson in here somewhere.

They should have asked him to take it down, or re-phrase it to be more polite about it. Booting someone over that seems kafkaesque, like there's a lot to hide.

Especially if he was being factual, there's an element of legit whistle-blowing there, it's a bad look, YC.

I think it's telling that Atherton and Piedmont were above 80% vaccinated well before vaccinations were open to the general public. "Wait your turn" is not how they became members of their respective clubs.

"First do no harm" is what the doctor would say.

It's also not new at all:

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/dixie-chicks-were-cancelled-...

I suppose the term is used in lots of way.

For the most part though, it means getting fired/etc. over something that is unrelated to your work, rather than breaking a (literal or assumed) work rule.

I think it'd be more cancel culture to fire the other guy. He did something bad that isn't related to YC's rules, but maybe shows poor morals.

If a firing or whatever is described as an example of ‘cancel culture’, that usually means it was driven by some kind of orchestrated pressure from third parties.

Typically it means those third parties (usually online activists, the ‘cancellers’) have gone out of their way to get the person fired/disinvited/whatever, with the specific motivation of diminishing their public standing. This may involve techniques such as deliberately fomenting online outrage with the aim of creating a negative PR situation for their employer that will go away when they fire the the targeted person.

(Just explaining what I think the term usually means; not saying anything about any specific claimed instances of it.)

Where can I see this? Did the OP make a screenshot?

Fair point.

I still think the conclusion applies though. Not everything is a judgment on overall worth or character. Most rules exist for banal reasons. Arrive on time, so we can open on time. Maintain confidentiality, so that we can have a non public forum. If heated arguments are settled by going to twitter, that's a cultural norm that negates private forums. It's not a moral norm, necessarily, but an operational one.

Very few things are absolute though. If someone brags about murder, and that confidentiality is maintained then it certainly does say something about norms and culture of a group. That said, naughtiness is an explicit part of YC culture, for better or worse.

In any case, sometimes there are choices. Civil disobedience can lead to consequences, to make another analogy. People participating in it accept that.

IDK what actually happened on the private forum, but I imagine this is an argument that spilled out from private to public. If Paul considered this a "the world must know" situation, then maybe he considers the price worth paying.

I have yet to see an actual source for this "bad behaviour, behaviour that is harmful to others, and advocate for others to do it" part.

Though based on dasickis comment, it seems there may not have been bad behaviour in the first place.

Totally! If your Twitter timeline is not awesome, it's your fault.

That exaggerated oppression claim only reinforces the heuristic. In reality, approximately 99% of the time people use the correct pronouns based on name and appearance. The remaining rare cases consist of honest mistakes (that can be politely corrected) or bullies (who the rest of us already denounce).

Apparently lots of vaccination sites were indeed different.

Your food bank analogy would work if they were serving fresh food and could not give it all away, so invited any and all to come and eat. Which was the situation at many vaccination sites. Doses were going to waste if people did not use them. And when not enough people in the designated groups were showing up or making appointments at some sites, everyone was encouraged to come so the shots did not go to waste. That so many showed up after the general call for people is a marker of success. Not the one intended for initially, but better than shots going to waste.

Interesting. I can still see these "deleted" tweets when I retrieve JSON from the command line. I do not like using Twitter's user interface, especially the way it uses Javascript, so I wrote a quick shell script called 1.sh to read Twitter without using a graphical web browser.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27056734

To read the JSON, I have been experimenting with json_reformat from https://github.com/lloyd/yajl

   1.sh > 1.json

   sed -n /{\"data\"/p 1.json|json_reformat|sed  -n -e 's/ *//' \ 
   -e '/created_at/p;/sation_id_str/p;/full_text/p'|grep -B2 full_text|less

That tweet from the official account of the City of New York says otherwise: “With State authorization, we can get vaccines to tourists and make sure they have a built in souvenir to bring home with them.”

It's only ethical that anyone who writes LOL should also actually Laugh Out Loud, otherwise it would be deceptive. Same thing for ROFL.

As a past moderator for an unrelated forum, there’s a careful balance between “reducing confusion” and “fanning the flamewar using a moderator’s outsized leverage.” I really don’t see how the reply here strikes that balance. Moreover, my post here was +3 but is suddenly now -3 after Dang’s reply.

Dang, I’m sure you have a lot of work to do, but I recommend you take a critical look at how much of that “work” you’re actually creating for yourself. The behavior I’ve observed here really underscores the untrustworthiness of other things I’ve seen from YC founders and employees.

Apparently it was a startup wayyyyy back in 2010, before CircleCI: https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/12/ycs-newstilt-aims-to-help-...

No, we're getting offended at well-heeled serial start-up founders getting vaccinated at the expense of others and then playing the victim card when it's pointed out that this isn't super nice.

Did you really not get that, or are you just pretending?

There is a huge difference between something being legal and something being moral.

What they did might have been legal, sure, but it sure as hell was not moral.

On the second half, I saw a quote from C.S. Lewis (here on HN[1]) which I thought captured the same sentiment well:

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?

If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

-- C.S. Lewis

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26614034

Got downvoted for this comment by a mob. How very on brand.

> Why are adults in the US using Twitter/GIF memes instead of finding thoughtful and mature ways

This way they evoke more emotion, so, more of the unthinking (feeling-based) approval: retweets, reposts, just being remembered. When it's funny, it makes people happier along the way, when it's angry, it may make people also feel anger, but a righteous, just anger.

It's a potent drug which is very hard to stop taking recreationally, and also for a just cause. Not as a poster, but most importantly as a reader.

I kind of miss the old days when I could go through life without ever knowing that some guy in North Carolina got in a fight with his brother-in-law over a borrowed lawnmower. My solution is to stay off social media altogether.

It's hard to pack thoughtful and mature communication into 280 characters.

I am not surprised this comment was buried to avoid scrutiny. Technocracy censorship is common these days

Yep, Germany screwed up the whole supply management. Just saw a projection that Germany will reach 80% first vaccinations in July. Which was kind of expected, initial orders as of January were enough to get that in June/July. I guess we will one month behind everyone else in the EU, so I think July won't be that far off. In August we will see headlines complaining about all the over ordering of vaccines and what to do with it.

I'd love to write a case study about that one day. Or maybe not.

You know what they say about the road to hell and it’s paving material.

I agree with you, but this is where it's worth pointing out that really ugly conversations occur on Facebook between people who are clearly identifiable and in many cases acquaintances.

(as an outsider looking in) I think, for YC, who pride themselves on their tight-knit alumni network and reach of their partners, in-group bias was always going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There are no rules about these kinds of things in private organizations, so it defaults to the instinctive human behavior.

Whenever you hear about the "greats" of the industry, you can be aware that they rose to prominence through navigating power structures built on such principles.

It’s not a bad moral though.

I read more about the location he got his shot from. He is most likely right that he did nothing wrong. Idk anything about the other person who supposedly bragged about skipping in line, but seeing as 1 of his 2 examples was incorrect, I'm going to assume the 2nd one is untrue too until I see something more than hearsay.

Link to that tweet?

Are people culpable for flu deaths, too? That’s a shaky chain of responsibility.

> Vaccine line cutting is just such a bizarre thing to take a hard moral stance on.

Even if we stipulate that a hard moral stance may be "bizarre", it's still at least rather dubious, isn't it?

So, it's certainly more bizarre to excommunicate someone for merely pointing it out.

This is historical, there are no limitations in CA now. I believe that’s true for the whole country since April 15th. Bay Area removed requirements a few days before that due to higher than anticipated supply.

Were they doing that in March, when the incident in question happened?

Almost. Tamarians were using references to shared cultural stories. Many, but not all, memes work like that. This meme is of a different kind - it packs emotional payload mostly directly, with only a reference to a simple activity and related concept (popcorn + Internet drama).

Put another way, if you consider a story to be a collection of handles (in programming sense, like a pointer) to concepts and emotions, then Tamarians communicate by speaking handles to stories. That's one level of indirection extra over this meme, which itself is a (simple) story - a collection of handles to concepts and emotions.

I'm under the impression that any public commentary about what goes on inside that forum is generally discouraged, but that's just what I've seen. Although this is an interesting point, for sure.

Because people are interested and want to find out the truth? At the moment it's a he-said-she-said situation, with each side posting their own (probably biased) version of events.

The technical work that a lot of us are involved in is deeply intertwined with the venture capital business. This is a glimpse of how things operate inside of that business.

Posting the exact text would be sort of the opposite of gossiping. And it is somewhat important because of the possibility of ycombinator unjustly punishing someone(the other possibility being that ycombinator did nothing wrong and this tweeter just burned his reputation). The beauty of the internet and message boards is that if you don't want to take part in the conversation, you can just leave the page.

From the HN guidelines: “Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.”

I don't know anything about the situation, but what is evident is this is some of the worst of Twitter on display, and why I shy away from the platform more often than not.

I didn't quite read it that way. The accusation is that both told other people how to skip the line. My assumption is that the both founders told other people how they could get the vaccine. A more charitable observation would be that the second founder told people how they could get it without waiting in line or lying.

The accusation still sounds gross. Though vaccine rollout wasn't great in the bay area. I got an email from my doctor about appointments being available. The ones in the bay area were taken really quickly. Availability was much better in other counties. There were also a couple other replies. One mentioned you could get vaccinated for volunteering for 4 hours. Another mentioned some sites were doing first come first serve.

I believe what are being thought of and judged by some (not you necessarily) as hard rules are actually just guidelines as you mentioned.

And individual sites are encouraged to use their discretion in giving out available doses, when extra doses are available, to people who would otherwise not fit the guidelines. Because having doses go to waste is not desirable. So, people passing judgement may be being overly harsh.

It’s hard to speak generally about it though because rules and guidelines vary from place to place.

"If the adults over there don't care, why should you care?"

What makes you think that the people running the sites, once fully informed, would not have cared? If you cheat on your partner, but your partner is not upset (of course, they don't know about it) your logic states that no one should call you an asshole for it.

Incorrect. J&J vaccine are designed to be stored at regular refrigerator temperatures. They are different from the mRNA vaccines which expire shortly after thawing. So J&J shelf life is much much longer than Pfizer and Moderna and are good for areas where recipients returning for a 2nd vaccine shot are less likely.

> I just happened to disagree.

Did you continue to disagree after the issue had been aired and a decision had been made? That could definitely end up in the territory you describe.

This is the umpteenth time I've seen this "But we don't know anything about it!" argument, and besides surprising me it's beginning to piss me off. We know quite a bit. Why do people keep claiming we don't -- just too lazy to read the thread where this stuff is repeatedly linked, or trying to promote some agenda?

https://twitter.com/SarahBelleLin/status/1370071520953835520

https://archive.is/Z55Oe

not that big of an assumption given that, as we have seen, the person in question had no reason to make that up and a lot to lose.

I live in Seattle. What I remember is that they advertised that they were following the same eligibility requirements as everywhere else in the state, but they were having such trouble getting enough people to show up that they put out requests for anyone over 18 to show up. I know a few people who drove out there to get their shots a couple weeks ahead of when they would be eligible to make an appointment elsewhere in the state. None of them lied about their eligibility factors.

Information you think is wrong isn’t “fake news”. Please don’t be so hyperbolic. It’s akin to calling someone a liar.

That may have been the policy which was published but the factual reality is that they were vaccinating very nearly any adult who showed up.

Why would YC care about that? Their ethos is “how to make a boatloat of money”.

Theranos would be fine if they weren’t caught out before their IPO.

Let's make three things very clear:

- Lying to jump the queue, ahead of people who need it more is trashy, selfish, should be not just discouraged but heavily reprimanded.

- A lot of the vaccine distribution is awful and disorganized. This often leads to vaccines being thrown away.

- SHOTS IN ARMS. A vaccine in someone is better than a vaccine thrown away, even if it's not optimally distributed.

"Just showing up" is a thing here in Belgium as well, and I expect many countries. Here in Brussels for example for a while the major vaccination center had time and stock for 1000 shots a day, and so would plan for 1000 shots distributed per day and invite … 1000 people for that day, not one more. Over snail mail or SMS depending on where you lived. And 75% were going unused, and they were wondering why.

So yeah, we can spend time talking about how they should know better, overbook, etc but in the mean time vaccines were being thrown away and the distribution was slowing down. So people just showing up speeds that up, and is a net gain.

And yet, people complain and are outraged, claim the people showing up are skipping the queue, and I frankly wish they'd shut the fuck up about it.

If indeed Paul was denouncing someone who was bragging about jumping the queue or encouraging people to do so by revealing how they're Hacking Society™, that's just absolute trash and it's completely disgusting.

If he's complaining about an instance of someone saying "There's unused vaccines in centers, show up at the end of the day and you can get one", then have at it.

I'm not in YC / the forum in question, I've no idea, can't form an opinion. But yeah, needinfo.

Might be a letter of the law vs. spirit of the law sort of a situation.

AFAIK, the FEMA mobile clinics were meant to boost vaccinations in underserved communities. So they go to one of those communities, set up shop and then jam the needle in as many arms as they can find.

I don't know but it's completely possible that as long as you are there and you are 18+, you will be eligible for it. However, since it's meant to vaccinate underserved communities, you were probably not supposed to be there if you live somewhere else.

read the papers I linked and you'll realize that these sites have challenges with getting people vaccinated due to lack of trust in government and healthcare in general

it's been 3 months since that clinic and many people here are still hesitant to get vaccinated

these issues remain because few people understand how deep distrust runs especially in Oakland where people have seen the massive destruction caused by government agencies

People lie. All the time. The Karen’s of the world. If you deceived in order to get vaxed and someone who desperately needs the vax couldn’t get one, I understand the anger. I’ve lost friends to covid. What I will say is life isn’t fair, crying about it after the fact doesn’t do anyone any justice. Focus on you and just go get vaxed. If you need to make an appointment, do it. If you need to walk up to a clinic, do it. The sooner we can get everyone vaxed the sooner we can return to normal. I’m not downplaying the issue, I’m simply redirecting energy into more positive outcomes. I have no say on the drama of whether they lied to get bumped to the front of the line or not. People lie to jump lines all the time. Hell, some people just cut them. Does it anger me personally, yes. Will it change the overall outcome, no. Get vaxed. Call your congressperson if you must, but get vaxed.

pg believes the Civil War wasn't actually about slavery (http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html), so I'm not sure that Sam actually made the place worse.

Why would alleged poor behavior among a handful of YC founders damage its reputation, unless it’s either endorsed by YC leadership or widespread enough that it’s unfortunately representative?

If anything, criticism of poor behavior within the cohort would reflect well on a culture that values sharp contrarian takes and productive disruption.

Or at least, it could...

>At this point in the US, anyone who wanted to get a vaccine can get one.

Pretty sure when this actually happened, vaccines were not actually open to anyone that just wanted one.

> At this point in the US, anyone who wants to get a vaccine can get one. That makes getting it a personal choice.

But since this all happened in March, when not anyone who wanted to get the vaccine could get any, your comment is irrelevant.

"Try to damage Ycombinator"... How?

What would you say the purpose or goal is of unconstructive critique?

It's a divisive political topic, and he associated an individual post made on an internal Ycombinator forum with Ycombinator itself. Comments of individuals don't represent the company, and by framing it like he did, he publicly dragged Ycombinator right into the middle of a contentious political debate.

>not everything on Twitter is true

>I'm sure you have a good point. I'm just not sure how to do it better.

Probably without the allusion that the tweeter isn't telling the truth, to be blunt.

You can't satisfy the people who don't want to be satisfied.

I think you are unwittingly coloring your words, likely because you are frustrated by this post (it's petty drama you want to downvote but policy says you can't, and you have inside information you can't share). This is like subtle apophasis, where you're implying that the tweeter (wow that sounds so weird) is on the wrong side.

I'm not taking sides here, despite being a YC alum (alternate account) I stopped looking at the forum forever ago and had not even heard about this nor do I care, honestly I just thought it'd be fun to read some drama on HN since it's so rare here.

I think enough other people are commenting on this to suggest it's not just me. I think you mean well, but none of us are unbiased. It seems like a no-win situation though. So it goes.

> I am also super interested in the answer to this particular question. I know a lot of people who waited for surplus/standby shots at the end of the day outside clinics in SF. Anecdotally, a lot of my coworkers got early vaccines that way.

How did that work with the two-dose vaccines? If you were not eligible under the then current phase but got the first shot from surplus (which is entirely legitimate), were you exempted from phase requirements for the second shot?

I would feel guilt if me waiting in line before becoming eligible resulted in another person being turned away at a busy vaccine site - even if I didn’t have to technically lie about my eligibility.

Even if I’m iffy on the morality now, I don’t want to look back 20 years later as a different person, thinking about how, as a healthy young person, I cut in front of the eligible.

Would that person who was turned away because of me get a shot the next day, or the next? Probably. It’s just principles for me, like a personal code. The morality is debatable, everyone is different.

There’s something nice too about working cooperatively with an entire country at a unique time in history, and helping the less fortunate by simply following the rules as best you can as a non-essential individual.

My 2 cents

This is a really disappointing answer. I know, I know discussing moderation here is frowned upon... but come on. You’re basically saying there’s a secondary set of rules that are decided and disclosed arbitrarily.

It’s your choice how to moderate, I don’t have any expectation or illusion of a right to use this platform. But can you understand how this creates ambiguity for people who don’t know what the rules ultimately are, and how it creates huge openings for people to cry foul when there’s nothing unusual?

Wouldn’t it be better to refine the rules and disclosure when gaps arise, so everyone is participating in the same system?

I appreciate that this is probably a no win situation. Thanks as always for doing your best and keeping this community healthy.

You could just say “As there is a conflict of interest, I will not comment on the substance of this tweet.”

If you want people on your side, you're really going to need to get some more tact over here.

Unnecessary snark isn't going to get you fans.

As a moderator of YC’s forum, you have a conflict of interest. That’s an objective fact.

Saying there is a conflict of interest is not saying that you actually feel conflicting motives. I’m not casting any doubt on that. The mere appearance of a conflict is sufficient, in typical circumstances where legal definitions are required.

Recognizing that the (appearance of) a conflict of interest exists and respecting it would go a heck of a lot further in garnering trust, IMHO.

Are you claiming you do not have a conflict of interest here?

But then he couldn't subtly minimize or delegitimize it.

Sorry! I meant it in a nice way, though of course that may not have come across.

I agree with what you're saying, and made the same decision myself. I was advised by someone who'd looked into it that I could have qualified as a healthcare worker and gotten into phase 1B or 1C, because my startup Cyph has customers in the healthcare industry. However, I work remotely and don't have all that much human contact even outside of a pandemic, so it didn't make sense to me to skip the line and take a more deserving person's spot on a technicality. (I am fully vaccinated now, though.)

That being said, based on the limited information in this thread, it seems to me that Paul unfortunately started a whole lot of drama over nothing.

My choice was a personal decision that made sense for me, not an absolute moral value that I feel entitled to impose on the world. I don't know these people's situations, or why they felt they needed the shot more urgently than I did, but even if our situations were identical it's not obvious that my decision was more correct. Arguably, they were more correct based on the position from the NY Times article someone else linked ("If you're offered a vaccine, take it"). At worst there's an argument that they were inconsiderate, but it's silly to raise a stink about such a morally grey issue.

If anyone is truly upset about this, why not instead write/call whichever level of government is responsible for having structured the system such that these things happen and are neither illegal nor discouraged?

Here’s the thing: public officials created procedures with estimates based upon who qualifies. If you qualified and didn’t take it, you actually created inefficiencies in the system, and slowed down rollout.

Source: friend in high up gov in CA

Shot in the arm as soon as it is offered saves lives by being one less person that will spread the virus to someone vulnerable.

I live in Oakland. This incident seems to be back in early March. Back then the large vaccination sites were all listed on myturn.ca.gov (ie the Oakland Coliseum). They'd post new batches of appointments and they would be all booked really fast (within minutes or hours). But Curative was also running vaccinations sites in Oakland and Berkeley. They weren't listed on the myturn website, so people didn't know about them. They would post new appointments and they would be available for days, sometimes even available right up until the appointment time. This was during the time when you had to be 65+ or have a health condition. In my social circle there were many ineligible people sending links around for the Curative appointments. There was definitely a mentality of "there are so many open appointments, they're just going to go unused." Whether that was true or not I don't know, but there was definitely a reality that certain vaccine sites that were not integrated into the central database had tons of openings, while people who didn't know how to find the secret links were left to reload myturn.ca.gov constantly hoping to find appointments. It was also public knowledge that nobody ever checked that you qualified with a valid medical condition. So getting a vaccine appointment at that time for a totally healthy 25 year old was as simple as someone texting you a link and clicking a single checkbox to say you had a medical condition. In my small social circle, I know of that happening at least a few times.

Oh, I really didn't think it was clear from your comment or follow up.

Honestly I have friends who lied to get the vaccine early and I don't really want to blame them. We were all in different circumstances in this pandemic and like I tried to say I don't want to pass judgement.

If you didn't lie I cannot see in any way how you did anything wrong. I read that you did from your follow-up post calling other people Karen's.

Not that it matters, but I did get vaccinated the very first day it was open for me where I live.

I think you are attributing a lot of things to Graham that he didn't say.

He did not say that it was not about slavery. Again, if it was an issue that could be expressed in a single sentence, it would not have inspired the many studies that it has. That is not to deny that the Civil War was about slavery, which I am certainly not. As to what Graham believes, a single sentence means only that. And does not mean he thinks its opposite is true. Not everything is an either/or proposition. Quite often things are more a both/and situation.

I think we may have crossed signals somehow because I'm certainly not denying any of that—it's obvious and the community is well aware of it. Respect for the delicate conditions under which the HN community, the HN moderators, and YC interface with each other informs everything about how we moderate HN, as anyone who reads my comment history will find. You can look at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... for examples if you (or anyone) cares.

What I don't respect so much is Twitter drama and misleading rhetoric. To the extent that readers care about this at all, they should get to hear both sides of the story so they could make up their minds for themselves. But it's not my call, so I don't get to go there this time.

More interestingly perhaps, I think it would be a big mistake, for community relations, to hide behind bureaucratic language about this stuff (e.g. "as there is a conflict of interest, I will not comment"). HN readers aren't used to that. They're used to getting the inside story and to feeling personally connected to the people who run HN and to some extent YC. To flip a switch and suddenly turn that off when something like this happens would send all the wrong signals. My commitment to people here is to tell them as much as I can about whatever they're curious to know, and to interact with them as a human, not as a corporate role. That's what I meant by "bloodless ghoul" - I apologize if that wasn't clear - my language maybe gets more colorful late at night.

We should make those moral decisions as a society, not as individual apes who have incredible vested interest in tricking themselves into thinking that they are doing the world a solid by advancing their interest.

I don't know how you missed the many comments saying the opposite.

Because we'd have to change bookmarked websites apparently.

Well he basically admitted it. But if y’all want to suck him off, fine. This place is overrated anyway.

That argument only applies if they are demand limited. If they are, sure, great, get a vaccine. If they aren't, then you are quite literally keeping someone else from getting a vaccine.

I read the news regularly and the bulletins from the San Mateo County health advisor. During the time I qualified they were still running out of doses every week for front line workers. I am not a front line worker. It was not my place.

That’s right. I pass by several farms on the way to work and there’s a lot of people working in close groups and using shared housing. Thats who those shots are for. I show up to work at 4:30pm and work at a computer till 10 or 11pm. If all the tech workers were on some vaccine list for some reason I’d have done it, but I’m not the kind of “farm worker” those doses were intended for.

No not at all. I'm saying that it's not the reason why I couldn't comment further.

The conflict of interest (I'm not sure that's the most precise term here, but I'll go with it) is obvious, everyone's aware of it, and it doesn't normally (nor should it) stop me from sharing information with the community. HN readers are curious, generally like more information rather than less, and are smart enough to make up their own minds. And although you can call it a conflict, actually just sharing what's happening is a way to build trust with readers.

The difference in this case was not any of that—it's just that it's not my call what YC does or doesn't publish about its internal affairs, so I don't get to share information like I normally would. I don't like that; my comfort zone is, like I said, to tell HN readers whatever relevant information I can and let them decide for themselves. That has worked well over the years and continues to. But other people have different jobs and need to make decisions from different perspectives.

In that case I don't think we're so far apart. I wasn't "just deciding" to arbitrarily change things. Someone asked me how we'd handle a particular kind of rare situation and I answered based on established practice.

In fact, if you read my comment closely, it's not hard to discern what the principles are: (1) being transparent with the community, (2) protecting people's safety and privacy, (3) if there's a conflict between (1) and (2), then (2) wins.

But example 2 wouldn't be skipping the queue, which is what the tweet is discussing.

Plenty of people were doing the showing up at end of day thing, it wasn't frowned on at all back in March.

> The government should not be the arbiter of one’s morality.

If people vote and decide that this is the way that it is being done, then people should respect that. Circumventing rationing because you feel like you are more deserving in that context is unethical.

> utilitarian perspective and not a political-agenda perspective it would have made sense to give the vaccine to healthcare workers first and then grocery workers next, as society in general will collapse if people are not able to get groceries

Not at all clear that this is the conclusion to reach. Grocery store workers are much more likely to spread, but are also very unlikely to be killed by it. Elderly people are likely to be killed by it. Most epidemiological modeling showed that vaccinating the elderly first and as quickly as possible was the fastest way to mitigate deaths, not vaccinating coronavirus.

This is exactly why it is better to come to these decisions as a society, not let individuals who may very well come to incorrect judgements about what the socially optimal thing to do is.

> IMO both if these perspectives were misguided and the optimal way to handle it would have been to had over vaccine logistics to Amazon who could actually make a web app that doesn’t crash to register for vaccines and just go first-come first-served.

This is classic HN backseat driver-ism. First-come first-served would have been ineffective, because again, there were ample reasons why vaccinating the elderly first made sense.

The latter group "young, affluent" in the Bay Area, typically do not work jobs with extensive human contact. Most jobs with extensive human contact were prioritized in the Bay by March, so skipping ahead implies people whose jobs did not require human contact.

The only point I'm trying to make is that it was morally wrong to lie to skip ahead in the eligibility lines in March.

> They gave him one without checking anything. His response? “America has the best vaccine program on the planet. They have so many rules in Zurich that the confusion is holding things back. They’d rather throw away vaccines than break minor rules”.

I live in Zurich, the vaccination program is crystal clear. If there are free slots, you can book an appointment. Up to recently, if you were not in a priority group (which are well-defined), you couldn't book. Now it's open to everyone. I haven't heard of vaccines thrown away.

I don't know what your friend found confusing in Zurich, or how he somehow concluded that flying long-distance during the pandemic to get a shot in CA is worth it.

I don't think anyone's disputing that extra vaccines should go in arms as opposed to getting thrown out. However, given wait times in the 4-8 hour range all over this page, that clearly wasn't the case.

And how is this not like standing in line at the DMV. We have a number of people to process and limited resources to process them. It seems like an excellent analogy. If we had to reissue all licenses, I would like to think we would prioritize truck/bus/ambulance/fire engine drivers over other people. Than probably people who need to go to work. The people who need to go to essential jobs. Then unessential jobs. Then people who were working from home.

I think there is a large difference between having guidelines and asking people to voluntarily follow them for the sake of expediency, and having a policy of first-come-first-served.

This incident was in March, and what is really sad is that back in March there were places in the US where it really was first-come-first-served. I know many people here in Illinois that got vaccines in Indiana because their official policy was that any open slot was fair game if it was less than 24 hours to go. That policy started in late February or early March.

There is absolutely no reason to be jumping in line, especially if you have the means to travel.

> friend of mine flew out from Zurich to CA to get a shot.

I call BS.

Unless said friend is a US citizen, people who have physically been to the Schengen area have been forbidden to enter the US for quite a while now. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/from-oth...

They don't ask for proof of poverty at a food bank either. And "Am I eligible here" could be seen about specifically asking about age/preconditions eligibility.

In fact, that whole conversation could have been changed trivially to picking up free food at a food bank and would not have looked out of place.

As for "if you're offered a vaccine take it", I don't think that applies to "I can go somewhere to get offered the vaccine." If there was a 4 hour wait, then it's not like they had spares lying around. If you had driven to a rural site where they have to thaw 6 doses for 3 people that would have been a different story.

I'm not making a judgment on this situation, but as someone who lives in Alameda County (where Oakland is) and tried hard to get a vaccine as early as I ethically could, I can definitely confirm that this rollout was very confusing. The county and my city (Berkeley) kept on saying it wouldn't be available to the general public until the 15th. Then they changed the eligibility on the 10th, but with zero fanfare and without all of the websites being updated. I believe MyTurn wasn't even updated for a while. I was checking periodically and only happened to notice on the 11th. I also heard about these "certain ZIP code" vaccination centers and assumed that they probably weren't "for" me (not my ZIP code), but there wasn't much clarity.

I understand why the county probably did some of these things: they want to make the vaccine available to underserved communities without asking for documents that are typically a barrier for members of those same communities. They want to make it easy to get a vaccine, but not talk about it too much so people don't flood in from other areas. But it does leave you in a weird quandry when you want to do your part and line up when the time comes to get vaccinated, and the question of "is it time yet" isn't exactly clear.

In my case I didn't get the shot until the 16th, but I'm so glad I got it at all.

Gotta love the rationalization. In March there was a lot of issues with supply of vaccines and the program was intended to specifically target underprivileged people because COVID is drastically affecting them more than people.

But you said to yourself, fuck their rules, I found a news article that justifies me jumping the line. So you hacked the system and jumped the line and got yourself vaccinated ahead of someone who could have gotten their shot that day.

The site is intended to vaccinate the population as quickly as possible. Ignore the rules, get jabs in every willing arm until there is none left. Vaccines in the fridge or thrown in the bin don't lower R0.

The goal of any competent vaccination program should be to get the most socially active population vaccinated as quickly as possible to lower R0. This means 15-35 and retail workers first. That's not what happened anywhere in the west because of gerontocratic politics.

EDIT: I was mistaken here, corrected by a response below.

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I don't think there was a way for the public health authorities to create an explicit rule about neighborhood residency without inviting lawsuits. The best they could do is place vaccination centers in more convenient locations for underserved communities, and hope that it could raise the rate of vaccination in the vicinity.

I think there were people assuming that if it wasn't against the explicit rules to commute there to be vaccinated, it must be OK, even though it might (in the event of limited supply) undermine the effort to raise vaccination rates in that specific area.

Means Testing is stupid

I see, thanks for sharing your perspective.

They didn't set up a clinic and stick a "Colored folks only" sign out front.

At the county or state level, they looked at the data and identified that Black and Latino populations were not being vaccinated at the same rate as white populations, and also recognized that the pandemic has disproportionately affected those same populations.

So they committed resources to establish more clinics in areas with high concentrations of the given populations and may have waived certain documentation requirements that are historically more challenging for them to acquire.

The result being that people of means, predominantly white people, took time off of work and travelled long distances to take advantage of the situation. Taking the place of a non-zero number of residents that were the intended recipients.

Mt. Zion wasn't "set aside for a high-risk community." It should have been, and indeed it was set aside earlier that week, but by Thursday morning they opened the gates and let everyone in. https://archive.is/Z55Oe

As a result, it was my turn, after I waited in line for four hours at a "first come, first serve" vaccination site.

Elsewhere you allege that @dasickis and I were "skirting eligibility rules." You know that's not true. Perhaps there should have been eligibility rules, but there simply weren't. There weren't even eligibility guidelines, not even a written sign saying "for West Oakland residents only."

The lack of rules actually means something. Due to the lack of rules, I didn't have the option to give the vaccine I took to an underprivileged person of color in the West Oakland community.

The SF Chronicle article describes the last person in line on Friday, "Roz M., a 37-year-old from Hayward with vivid purple hair."

Do you think I owed it to Roz to offer her the vaccine I took? You may say that neither of us deserved a vaccine, but, due to the lack of rules, in fact, it was me, or Roz.

(And let's not forget that I have a special obligation to my kid, who's not yet old enough to be vaccinated, to vaccinate myself and the adults in our family. I have no such special obligation to Roz.)

I’m saying that claim is not accurate, there were no eligibility rules at this site later on. They tried restricting to get shots to people in west Oakland reached through the networks of the church and other community organizers, then deliberately opened it up to everyone because they had excess supply. I didn’t get my shot there but live a few blocks away.

You could argue that they shouldn’t have opened it up, or that every healthy person under 65 should have waited until supply was plentiful before trying to get one to not edge out any seniors or other at risk people, but there was no rule breaking or duplicity here.

I’ll also add that after this there were further targeted efforts towards getting shots to these zip codes. Someone in 94607 was eligible at most East bay sites weeks before CA fully opened up eligibility. I think this is what mberring is referring to, but it was a separate program from the vaccination site at the church.

Yes, it was legally open to everyone 18+. And food bank food is open to everyone too. What's the difference?