Yes, but first I want to be very clear on some things.
1. I could have hidden my identify behind a throwaway. I did not feel that would be appropriate when making this calim.
2. I am not looking for anything, literally at all. Any follow ups for blogs; anything that would benefit I will not answer.
3. This is NOT a new account, I am very easy to find; I am 6'1 140lbs
I was working for a company called NationBuilder and I had the opportunity to go on a work trip. Outside of a talk he had just given I was waiting for my ride and I looked over like...damn thats the speaker. I wanted to say Hi; he damn near flagged down the police. I apologized and just decided to move on.
Note: It was in Reno, and no I don't want to go into details; the others are not hard to find because I happened upon them via blog posts so i'm sure if someone with the accumen of RF wants to know, he will find.
I have heard similar stores from several people in the years since. I AM NOT CALLING THIS PERSON RACIST. I am saying; he is observably scared of black people and that is not someone I want making descions about how the world moves foward.
Maybe just Occam's Razor -- any time I've seen Sam talk in public he just seems to be a neurotic, anxious individual that would have a hard time interacting with people in any normal context. In a world of infinite variables it's hard to say that his aversion was due to your race -- there's really not much to go on here.
Thank you for sharing this. I 100% believe it, and it lines up with my experience with other people who came from similar backgrounds as Sam Altman - i.e. white, rich, privileged, and attending elite universities.
I will disagree with one part - I do believe it is racism. Most will never admit it publicly, but if they think you're one of them, it often comes out rather quickly, especially when alcohol is involved.
It's sad to me that "racism" is such a divisive word to many, and is met with defensiveness rather than introspection and communication. Trying to not be racist takes work, and communication, and is a process, not a state.
I appreciate OP's sharing as well. Also, racism isn't peddled only by rich white elite university attendees, it reaches into all the corners.
I don't think you're in a position to comment on what is and isn't racism, considering you just made a sweeping negative generalization based on race without recognizing it for what it is.
Also, I find it interesting how your list of "backgrounds that define bad people" conveniently omits a specific trait that many tech CEOs of questionable morals share, likely because it doesn't align with your agenda.
Interpersonal racism that produces systemic racism can be measured.
Defined as: Disparate outcomes where, holding all other things equal, the only determinative factor is race.
So, with altman, we maybe couldn't point out a single case where it was definitely interpersonal racism. He'd probably have several plausible explanations at hand, given who he is.
But, if we were to look at his hiring and firing history, we could probably measure an 'unexplainable' dearth of black people in his orgs and circles. At that point, we can say his interpersonal racism has produced a measurable systemic effect that has disenfranchised many talented black people unfairly from this digital gold rush.
I can't do this work, but I am certain someone at YC or OpenAI could, were they so inclined (they won't be).
An extranordinary claim needs a bit more evidence than one datapoint where in his defense maybe he is scared of anyone he doesn't know trying to talk on the street.
Agreed, his two posts read really weirdly. He made a deliberately vague(?) initial post to get a response and I'm not sure how I feel about his story as you've said, if I was Sam Altman I'd be wary of anyone coming up to me too.
Just to clarify, because I am not sure I am reading this correctly:
Your statement that he is terrified of black people is based on you (presumably a black person) running into him outside an event, an him reacting with fear/extreme caution when you approached him?
Not defending Sam, but if that is the case, then it's the kind of thing that Sam can hold up and say "Do you really think my critics are intellectually honest?"
Rock solid evidence is what brings people down. Stretched truths, assumptions, and careful half-truth wording, are all ammo the accused will use to strengthen their side.
Note: To all the downvotes; I did this publicly and not anon for a reason, if you will do the same I am more than willing to provide evidence for all of these claims as long as its done publicly and in the open.
PG said something along the lines of: "There should be no truth that is increasingly unpopular to speak."
If you don't believe what I shared is true, address that directly. But seeing my post sitting at 1 point and [flagged] after 2 hours is not OK. Just as DJT can't flag away his issues, you shouldn't be able to do so on HN.
One of the things I've loved most about HN is that it was real — grounded in observability, empirical evidence, not bias or feelings. I really hope that what happened to my post is not the beginning or a continuance of the end for that ethos.
> One of the things I've loved most about HN is that it was real — grounded in observability, empirical evidence, not bias or feelings.
That has never been the case, because HN is frequented by humans and humans are biased. Someone who claims to be unaffected by feelings is someone you cannot trust, as it means they are blind to their own shortcomings. Being robotic about the world is no way to live—that’s how you get people who are so concerned with nitpicks and “ackshually” that they completely lose sight of what’s important. They become easy to manipulate because they are more concerned with the letter of the law than its spirit or true justice.
Objectivity and empiricism are positive traits but should be employed selectively. Emotions aren’t a weakness, they are what drives us to change and improve. Understanding your own emotions equips you better to understand the world. But they too can be used to manipulate you. To truly grow, you have to employ your emotional and rational sides together. Focusing on just the rational will get you far but not all the way.
HN is primarily about curiosity—it’s in the guidelines four times—and you can’t have that without emotion.
>> One of the things I've loved most about HN is that it was real — grounded in observability, empirical evidence, not bias or feelings.
> That has never been the case, because HN is frequented by humans and humans are biased. Someone who claims to be unaffected by feelings is someone you cannot trust, as it means they are blind to their own shortcomings.
Yes, and HN is full of people like that: simultaneously arrogant and stupid software engineers whose arrogance is founded on their own ignorance and self-regard. "Grounded in observability, empirical evidence, not bias or feelings" actually sounds like a smokescreen to obscure one's bias and feelings from oneself.
> Being robotic about the world is no way to live—that’s how you get people who are so concerned with nitpicks and “ackshually” that they completely lose sight of what’s important. They become easy to manipulate because they are more concerned with the letter of the law than its spirit or true justice.
They're also easy to manipulate, because their emotions can be appealed to without them having enough awareness to be on guard. For instance: you can manipulate many software engineers by working your position into the form of a technical "system" (e.g. Econ 101) then praise them for being smart little boys for understanding and believing it.
I don't know if he is a racist or not, but forget HN. Last couple years it has gone on the deep end, not sure if delusion or $ interests, but it is impossible to have a decent conversation here. I think the only reason this article stayed up is because OAI is starting to be a bit 'toxic' now, but if this was published a year ago, it would have been flagged to oblivion.
So just ignore those points and flags. HN *used* to be a nice place for intelectual conversations, even if you disagreed with each other. Now is nothing more than bots, people with financial interests in this bubble or sycophants.
I tried to respond to your comment with some personal observations on racist currents in this community, but my comment immediately got flagged. So yeah! This site ain't what it used to be. Best for the good folks to seek community elsewhere, I reckon. I miss the old days as well, but I don't think they're coming back.
If this site ever was anti-racist, that must have been a long time ago. I threw away my old account many years ago only to come back with this one (because it's difficult to completely ignore HN if you work in tech) and the reason I threw that one away was in part the overwhelming reactionary bias in this community.
The "progressives" were at best silent "don't rock the boat" types more inclined to insist on civility than to challange reactionary sentiments while the reactionaries ranged from dog-whistling to outspoken, across the entire range of white supremacism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, zionism and so on. The only comments that would ever get flagged or downvoted were those that were explicit enough to be seen as "impolite" because they happened to spell out calls for genocide or violence rather than merely gesturing at it with the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability.
Well, I do remember it being more about the underdogs and a cheeky "fuck the system" attitude without much malice. Maybe I just wasn't tuned into this stuff back then. Now, though, both users and tech leaders can unironically parrot Stormfront rhetoric from 10 years ago (using vaguely cordial language) and no one even bats an eye. The kind of stuff that would have made you unemployable just a few years ago.
When I think of HN in the before times, I think of people like Aaron Swartz. Would he have enjoyed his technical discussions peppered with comments on how the West is being "invaded" and "outbred" by third-world hordes? Based on what I know about him -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- I'm guessing he would have noped out of that kind of community in a flash. Yet nowadays I see this kind of talk here all the time, percolating all the way up to industry leaders like Musk and DHH.
Just came to say, I appreciate your emotionally intelligent and balanced take on your experience, where it would have been very easy to react and let emotions take over (understandably).
It's disappointing to me that a completely factual personal experience can be relayed with zero spin – and yet some of the replies act as if it's 100% spin without any factual evidence. Some people seem to prefer to respond to an imaginary version of a conversation rather than the one that's actually happening in front of them.
The irony in your comment is that you accuse the OP of interpreting the world based on his own warped view of it rather than what’s actually in front of him, yet you’re doing precisely that. The OP did not call Altman racist and made a point to draw the distinction. He also claims his is not the only example of this and is effectively encouraging an investigative journalist and the rest of HN to look into it and verify for ourselves.
Some degree of skepticism is healthy here. An online comment is not definitive proof, and it’s all too easy to pile accusations as part of a comment thread that’s already critical of someone. But the way you readily armchair psychoanalyze and dismiss the OP tells me you’re not engaging in an honest way.
Thank you for sharing this experience with us. Don't worry about the downvotes. That's just how it is here sometimes. I don't think it reflects the views of most readers.
> The good news is that the Trump regime is unpopular, and doing crazy things is making them more unpopular.
Actually, that's bad news too. It's the cope that's convincing Democrats to stick their head in the sand and avoid dealing with their problems, which are what created the opening for Trump. They're more concerned with their own orthodoxies than actually becoming a popular party that could win a real majority and end this nonsense.
So our present course is: Democrats remain unpopular and eek out a win in the midterms in 2026, probably do some nutty things of their own, and then in 2028 we'll likely get new MAGA nutjobs.
The collapse is actually bipartisan, with different dysfunctions in each major party.
Political donation spam is a plague. I ran a donation website in 2018 and 2020 that split up money among many candidates, and by far the biggest complaint was the flood of email that came after using my site. In 2018 there wasn't even an opt-out button on ActBlue. In 2020 they added one, but the default was still to share your info. But it doesn't even really matter, because campaigns continue to buy and sell donor lists, so once you're in the system, you'll never get out.
It's a legal problem, in that spam laws simply don't apply to political campaigns.
But fundamentally it's a collective action problem. Excessive fundraising messages hurt the overall brand of the party and politicians in general, but for each individual politician, the advice from consultants is that each extra message has marginal value. This is actually true for out-of-district messages—they might get your money, but if they piss you off, they still don't lose your vote.
There is some movement to try to fix this.
Oath (oath.vote) is an ActBlue alternative that doesn't share your phone number or email address with campaigns. They can't erase you from the system, but at least they're trying to do the right thing.
Eventually, if groups like Oath, Crooked, Emily's List, etc. can all team up and say, hey, you won't get donations through us if you keep spamming people, we might see some change.
I assume things are also bad on the Republican side. It would be easy to say it's good if their brand suffers—but actually, I want them to start behaving more responsibly, including in this area.
Mountains Beyond Mountains was an incredible recruiting tool for health equity work, inspiring a huge number of people (including my partner) to try to follow in Paul Farmer's footsteps.
(Farmer himself died a few years ago, at only 62, of a sudden heart attack in his sleep, but he seems to have put in about 100 lifetimes worth of work. One wonders if his legendary overwork contributed to an early death.)
Virtually everybody I knew in the US Peace Corps had read and been inspired by Mountains Beyond Mountains. It's safe to say it'd been a strong nudge in that direction for many.
Switched to this from Apple a year and a half ago. Works for most things. Unexpectedly, replacement apps lack polish. Also, RCS works very inconsistently (been without it for months), seems to be Google's fault. There may be workarounds, but I haven't had the energy to try the more complicated suggestions.
I am probably going to switch back to a used old iPhone for "phone appliance" tasks, but keep around the Pixel for other things.
My main takeaway from the experience is that iMessage is an even bigger weapon than I thought.
Are you in the US? I get the impression that iMessage and RCS are only big there. Almost nobody uses them here in Europe. (It's mostly WhatsApp where I live and Signal is slowly getting more popular.)
As an aside, from the latest release notes: Sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer: add toggle for granting Play services access to ICC auth in order to support RCS with carriers requiring it for RCS in Google Messages including T-Mobile (see RCS usage guide)
The RCS issue is why I switched back to iPhone, reluctantly.
If anything, iOS seems buggier and less reliable, but I know (and am related to) a lot of people who insist on using iMessage/RCS, and I can't be missing messages.
It is possible for a devoted individual to do this, but it is not possible to solve deep societal problems one devoted individual at a time. We still need massive regulation of addiction-based business models.
It wouldn't particularly surprise me if Sam Altman were racist, but I'm curious what the specific incident you observed was.
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