If we disqualified all developers with personal issues from investment, there would be no-one left. Emotional intensity and productivity seem to be positively correlated.
> "The only thing you can conclude is that it's a crap shoot," Kawasaki said in a recent interview at his home office in Atherton. "You have no idea what is going to succeed."
(Guy passed up on Yahoo and Google.) I think to someone without the requisite skill necessary to evaluate the technology and people it's like a crapshoot, sure.
However, I think a more accurate analogy would be that it's poker. Luck is a factor but it's dominated by skill (execution). If you're not an expert player then it seems like it's all luck; but expert players finish at or near the top over and over again.
Start-ups are like players that don't have a track record, so you have to watch their play carefully to decide if they're good or not. But in order to do that accurately you have to be an expert yourself.
Sounds like you worked with some pretty uptight people! I would suggest buying them copies of Spice World. And no, "Hacker News" is not a professional setting, it's certainly informal. "Women" is itself a loaded term to many feminists, who may prefer "womyn", "womun", or some other spelling.
In order for "girl" to be insulting, you must subscribe to the notion that there is something wrong with being young and female. Accepting that premise is to unwittingly agree with perpetuating a worldview in which the very notion of female-ness is disempowering. "Girl Power" actually challenges the establishment; suppression of any reference to femininity reinforces the older male status quo.
That so many people are programmed to think "girl" is insulting just shows how far society still needs to go to free itself from counterproductive paradigms.
> never call a woman a girl in a situation where it would be inappropriate to call her a bitch
Your implication of equivalence is loony, and of course more evidence for the informality of Hacker News. Your post also suggests to me a useful reason to use the terms "girls" and "boys" -- to smoke out people who get offended so easily or are stuck with such old paradigms that they clearly lack the flexibility needed to work in a start-up. Valuable co-founders aren't stuck with old thinking, are hard to offend and easy to joke around with.
"Girl" isn't a pejorative unless you're determined to take it that way. It has nothing to do with age; it's part of an informal nomenclature, as in "girls and guys". I know many women who refer to themselves as "girls" -- including those in their fifties and sixties -- and/or use "grrl" in their online names, and there are even groups like LinuxChix which use "chicks" in a hip sense rather than a belittling one. "Girls' night out" is another example. I would even observe there's an inflection point where women above a certain age prefer the term and consider it a compliment to be referred to as such, as youth and vitality are desirable connotations.
And groups of women do refer to wanting to find more "boys" -- the terms "men" and "women" both seem to connote some kind of stodginess, probably because most people's models for what men and women are, growing up, is parents, teachers, and other authority figures, all of whom are tragically unhip.
Not necessarily -- some organizations would patch it themselves in a private branch just to maintain an edge, assuming they have the expertise in-house. I've done this before with GPLed libraries. That's assuming you can even track down the problem -- Vendetta Online couldn't pin it down well enough to submit a coherent bug report (in fairness, SBCL is a monstrosity; just as a comparison, how many Rails developers could track down CRuby bugs?).
This seems to be a recurring theme with Lisp implementations. Reddit switched from CMUCL to Python (threading); Vendetta Online switched from SBCL to Erlang (GC/memory leaks). Other people have hit major snags e.g. with Haskell/GHC runtime bugs (Wager Labs; switched to Erlang). Use a massively complex runtime, hit bugs that can't be fixed (in a start-up timeframe, anyhow)?
This is my objection to many "high-tech" companies: in many cases it boils down to grunt work, mindless labor. I don't want to get rich off the backs of poor people doing menial jobs. I think moving humanity forward is going to involve obviating exploitation, and if you're not doing something progressive then you're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.