I've Had a Cyberstalker Since I Was 12 (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2016/02/ive-had-a-cyberstalker-since-i-was-12/?mbid=social_tw_backchannel <comment><USER3> This article hit close to home, albeit my contact with a cyberstalker was (thank god) very brief it was a nerve-wrecking experience, to which end I panicked and deleted a lot of accounts and profiles in an attempt to make it harder to track my online activity. I was scared the stalking and harassment would become more personal, "leaking" in to the real world -- but it thankfully did not.

A lot of the (non-technical) internet users probably don't know how easy it can be to link an online identity to your person, be it through handle (nickname) re-use or simply having a pattern of likes and dislikes or hanging out with the wrong crowd. Once the connection is made you have nothing left to shield yourself with and will have to, like the person in this article, deal with it on a daily basis.

I've since grown up a little, grown a thicker hide and conquered my paranoia to a degree thanks to therapy, and have started to comment and share online again but the fear of coming across the wrong person with too much time on their hands still feels chilling to me.

Garry Newman (the guy behind "Garrys Mod" and "Rust" (game)) published[1] a rather interesting chain of emails, a peek in to the mind of his stalker.

[1] [https://garry.tv/2015/11/10/stalkers-and-abuse- part-1/](https://garry.tv/2015/11/10/stalkers-and-abuse-part-1/)

</comment><comment><USER4> If anyone from Facebook is reading this and wants to help, ALLOW USERS TO HIDE PRESENCE.

As-is, any time you log into Facebook, anyone who is friends with you can see that you are active in the Messenger bar on the right-hand side ( _even if you have chat disabled_ ). This gives stalkers (who, as the article explains, are sometimes best not blocked) an excuse to message you, to which a victim will feel pressured to respond. This makes Facebook a very unpleasant place to be.

I personally have written a Chrome extension to hide my presence. Facebook, please ALLOW USERS TO HIDE PRESENCE if you want to make a positive impact against stalking.

<comment><USER5> Facebook is not the problem, users are. Back in the day most users would not even share their name on the internet and now most people are doing the complete opposite: They share way to much without thinking about what can happen.

If you don't want a person to see that you are online, just remove the person..or even better, don't add the person in the first place. If you join a service made for sharing personal data you should at least think about the consequences.

<comment> King-Aaron > Facebook is not the problem, users are. Back in the day most users would not > even share their name on the internet and now most people are doing the > complete opposite: They share way to much without thinking about what can > happen.

Facebook is indeed a major part of the problem which you just described. They hold a 'real name' policy, and have well-crafted call to actions which pressure people into feeling obliged to share information. The entire service is designed to mine data from you, which is a bonus for a stalker.

Though I don't feel your suggestions - 'just removing or never adding them in the first place' \- is a bit moot when the author has described exactly why the person is on their list..

<comment><USER6> Well facebook is the biggest stalker of them all. It is only natural they will have features enabling stalking

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The top ranked comment in the previous discussion* talks about women putting up with too much because they don't want to seem rude. I will suggest this is a societal problem. Women get a lot of social pressure to "be nice."

Just leaving this here as a kind of PSA: [http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/not- really-r...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/not-really- rude.html)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11207891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11207891)

<comment><USER8> It's a genetic problem. Women are hardwired to smile more in front of people, even if they're unhappy ( _1). They 're more polite, right from the moment they begin to speak (_2). They try much harder than men to avoid conflict ( _3).

_ 1 Cole - Children's spontaneous control of facial expressions - <USER2> Development (1986), Saarni - An observational study of children's attempts to monitor their expressive behavior - Child Development (1984)

 _2 Politeness: Some universals in language usage (1987), Leaper and Ayres: A meta-analytic review of gender variations in adults ' language use, Personality and Psychology Review (2007)

_3 Campbell - Staying Alive: Evolution, culture, and women's intrasexual aggression. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1999)

<comment><USER9> What? How on Earth do you know that "women are hardwired to smile more" instead of "women are culturally conditioned to smile more." Considering women are told to smile by _complete strangers on the street_ you can't just go ahead and disregard cultural conditioning.

[https://news.yale.edu/2003/03/18/women-smile-more-men- differ...](https://news.yale.edu/2003/03/18/women-smile-more-men-differences- disappear-when-they-are-same-role-yale-researcher-finds)

<comment><USER10> > Considering women are told to smile by complete strangers on the street you > can't just go ahead and disregard cultural conditioning.

As a dude, I get told to smile pretty frequently. I don't think this has anything to do with sex most of the time (though there are sexists, obvs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > The lawyer had apologized for his client's behavior and asked that we notify > him if Danny ever attempted to contact me or anyone connected to me in the > future.

So what happened?

Did the author's father verify this was indeed a real lawyer?

Did the author contact her own lawyer to help figure out what circumstances could result in a cyberstalker's lawyer saying this to her father?

I don't understand how an article on a first-person account of cyberstalking could possibly end with, "something extraordinary happened that I won't explain further and perhaps that will wrap things up."

<comment><USER12> > I don't understand how an article on a first-person account of cyberstalking > could possibly end with, "something extraordinary happened

Because this is what happened so far.

> that I won't explain further

You can't explain things you don't understand. The article says:

 _I emailed the lawyer back, but due to attorney-client privilege he wouldn't reveal the nature of his representation of Danny. I assumed, however, that he was being sued by another victim._

> and perhaps that will wrap things up."

Yes.

<comment><USER11> > You can't explain things you don't understand.

But you _can_ follow up on them, especially in an article where the first- person account is part of a larger story about cyberstalking.

E.g., "We then contacted a lawyer who specializes in stalking, who told us that..."

E.g., "I emailed the professor mentioned earlier in the article to find out if criminal/civil settlements ever result in such an arrangement in cyberstalking cases."

Or, "While the lawyer couldn't reveal the nature of his relationship with Danny, I _certainly_ was under no such obligation. We hired a private investigator to go through the records I had kept of the cyberstalking and harassment, to try to piece together who other potential victims may have been."

If this were a blog I wouldn't have commented at all. I can understand if the author took the call from the lawyer as a potential signal that the harassment was over and wishes to devote 0 more time going forward to dealing with this person. But it's not a blog-- it's a journalistic story about a person using every legal avenue available to stop the harmful behavior of an abuser that spanned decades, and how every single avenue fell short of stopping the abuse. That story is frustratingly incomplete because we don't know what it is that actually put a stop to the abuse, and it appears nobody took further steps to explain it.

Edit: added word "journalistic" for clarification

<comment><USER13> The story's focus is about how frustrating and bewildering it can be to deal with cyberharassment, not to detail the complete drama of this incident.

<comment><USER11> I'm not interested at all in the drama of the incident.

I'm interested in what steps were necessary to force a lifetime harasser to find a lawyer and a) agree to provide that lawyer with at least a partial list of victims of his online attacks, and b) also agree to allow the lawyer to contact the family of those victims and request a response if the lifetime harasser ever tries to contact the victim again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel a lot of sympathy for the author. Would it be correct to infer from this article that the appropriate response after ("make no contact with them" and "keep records" should be: 1) Talk to lawyer 2) Get restraining order (useful info here[1]),

possibly preceded by 0) hire private investigator to find stalker's actual identity

[1] [http://www.womenslaw.org/simple.php?sitemap_id=90#2](http://www.womenslaw.org/simple.php?sitemap_id=90#2)

anyone with experience of how effective (or not) this might be?

<comment><USER7> That is extremely unlikely to be effective. People like Danny tend to be good at doing things that are hard to prosecute. Lawyers, restraining orders and reports to the authorities wind up sucking away more of the victims life while, in most cases, getting them no remedy and simply making it clear to them that there is no remedy within the rule of law. It often just deepens their frustration, sense of helplessness and sense of being victimized.

Victims usually are not good at figuring out how to effectively manage the situation via other means. If they are, well, they don't write articles like this.

<comment><USER15> Why limit responses to seeking help from "authorities"? She knows the stalker's identity. Why not shame him, in his network? Could she be too polite for that? That would be sad.

<comment><USER7> As I said:

 _Victims usually are not good at figuring out how to effectively manage the situation via other means. If they are, well, they don 't write articles like this._

I will posit that most stalkers fit the profile of a sociopath. Most of their victims probably do not. Trying to figure out how to think enough like a sociopath to outwit them if you, yourself, are not innately wired that way can be distasteful. But, if you don't, your efforts to manage the situation wind up either ineffectual or backfiring or both.

In this article, it says she did things like told him to stop sending so many messages or she would block him. When he didn't do as she asked, she blocked him. The result: It just made things worse.

This seems to be the usual pattern. The victim often tries tactics that just deepen the problem.

It gets to a point where politeness has nothing to do with it. If everything you try just makes the problem worse, trying to just not antagonize the creep can seem like the least worst option possible.

<comment><USER15> I don't see that self-defense is at all sociopathic. Shaming an attacker in their social network seems equivalent to screaming "HELP!" when attacked in meatspace.

But yes, I get that some people are socialized in counterproductive ways. Maybe there's a market for enforcement services to help such victims. Reputable providers would, of course, verify claims of potential clients. On the other hand, IANAL. And there might well be liability for defamation.

<comment><USER7> You sound like you are tossing out hypotheses without firsthand experience. Let me suggest you don't really understand the problem space. Tossing out solutions without understanding the problem tends to be counterproductive.

<comment><USER15> I have been stalked. On Usenet. For about a year. By one of the old-school notorious trolls. So I obtained the entire newsgroup, parsed it into a SQL database, and found his IP address. Years ago, it turned out, he didn't use proxies. Also, using semantic analysis, I identified other personas. So I let him know, and he left Usenet.

<comment><USER7> This might have been a more productive discussion if you had started with that anecdote and then tried to assert or ask whatever it is you are trying to assert or ask. It looks to me like you are saying "Well, I was able to handle it myself, so she is just a loser that she couldn't."

I frequently try to talk about what women and other oppressed groups can do differently. I am routinely accused of _victim blaming_ because of it, so I am aware that this is a hard thing to talk about effectively. But some of the problems here are:

1) If you are male and she is female, she may do the exact same things you did and not the get the results you got.

2) It sounds like you were probably an adult when you ran into this issue. She was just 12 when she met Danny.

3) She had known him a lot of years before it became apparent that he was a problem.

There are no doubt other problems with it. If you want to talk about better approaches and what targets of stalkers can do differently, I am up for that. But I am not really interested in "agreeing" that because you solved it yourself, she just must not have tried hard enough or something.

The reality is that while some responses to such people or situations tend to be more effective than others, if someone decides to target you, you may be unable to dissuade them from continuing to do so. In many cases, stalkers do not stop until they are dead. To take that to its logical conclusion, if you are being harassed by a serious nutcase, it may be a situation where killing them is the only real way to put a stop to their behavior. And if you do so, the odds are really high you will go to jail. Most people would rather just keep trying to avoid the lunatic than go to jail.

Furthermore, abusive husbands who finally beat their wife to death do less prison time on average than abused wives who finally defended themselves with lethal force. Part of the reason for this is that men tend to have both a size and strength advantage over women, and it is also not uncommon for them to have an advantage of skill from having taken martial arts or served in the military. So, women very often need to pick up an equalizer and preplan it to have any hope of successively winning the battle. Thus, abusive men are very often charged with manslaughter and their victims are very often charged with premeditated murder in cold blood.

Thus, if you are a woman and some man decides to victimize you, you may find yourself in a situation that is simply shitty as hell no matter how you choose to handle it.

That fact needs to be acknowledged up front before talking about "well, what can the victim do to try to de-escalate such things before they become so entrenched?" And you seem to be in a head space where you think the victim can just do a thing and magically make it go away. This is often not the case at all, even if they are really savvy about handling shitty social situations.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the thoughtful and persuasive reply. You're right, I'm male. And I was an adult (at least chronologically). However, although we were both just anonymous cowards on Usenet, I had "known" him for years, when this started. Basically, I stood up for others that he was attacking, and that pissed him off.

> It looks to me like you are saying "Well, I was able to handle it myself, so > she is just a loser that she couldn't."

Sorry if it comes off that way. I did manage to handle it. But it took months of tedious work. Yet I didn't mind, because I was extremely angry about it. And I knew that I was learning stuff that would be useful later.

I'm not saying that she's a loser. I'm saying that she was socialized to be nice. To find aggression distasteful, as you said. I do strive to be peaceful, and I seek peaceful friends. But unfortunately, entirely nonviolent and peaceful people can end up as victims.

So what can victims do? Going to authorities doesn't seem to work very well. Filing a lawsuit, as Hatena did against Hill, is expensive. That's why I floated the idea of private enforcement. Rather like PIs that take direct action against attackers. Instead of doxxing attackers personally, as puellavulnerata and I did, victims could hire consultants to manage it.

To avoid liability, there could be "Assassination Politics" type services. Attackers typically have multiple victims, so there would be multiple contributors. Who would, of course, be kept anonymous. The front end could be an easy-to-use app. And the service would be compartmentalized, with staff who verify allegations being fully anonymous, and firewalled fully from anonymous staff who handle action against attackers.

> To take that to its logical conclusion, if you are being harassed by a > serious nutcase, it may be a situation where killing them is the only real > way to put a stop to their behavior.

Well, the first draft of my first post in this thread did include a sentence about having a group of friends with baseball bats pay this jerk a visit ;) But arguably, measures well short of death will stop most stalkers. Shaming to family and friends often does it. Or trashing their career, as puellavulnerata did. My stalker was a well-respected academic, and he was utterly freaked when I confronted him at his university email address.

<comment><USER7> _So what can victims do?_

I posted a link elsewhere in this thread suggesting that women need to learn to give pushback sooner rather than later. That is in the category of trying to not let yourself become a victim to begin with.

If you do become the target of something like this, well, it gets a lot more complicated. Your idea about shaming to family and friends is not necessarily effective. In the past, I have been moderately harassed online by a man who alternated between verbally feeling me up and verbally assaulting me. Any time he verbally felt me up, his girlfriend would attack me in some other discussion on the same forum. I complained to the mods. They saw no reason to intercede on my behalf.

Horrible people often have friends who are either horrible themselves or basically a good pawn. It is not unusual for a romantic interest to treat the object of desire as if they are intentionally being temptresses. There are complex reasons behind that.

But, yes, contacting them at work or implying/threatening that you will make it public in a way that materially harms them can be useful. If it is ugly enough, making it clear that you understand you can't win, but you can make them lose harder can be a useful way to get some breathing room.

But all of that requires you to understand what they want from you in specific and from life in general. Victims are often emotionally warm people with a lot of empathy. Coming to terms with how cold hearted, callous, manipulative, uncaring horribly assholes stalkers really are is an uncomfortable process for such people. Some of them will fail to get it through their thick skull because they would literally rather believe the world is a nice place and people are really good at heart than to let their delusions of that sort be destroyed by coming to terms with the truth of their situation.

And that is probably a rather muddled, hand-wavy comment. My heart isn't really in this discussion today.

Best.

<comment><USER15> > Victims are often emotionally warm people with a lot of empathy. Coming to > terms with how cold hearted, callous, manipulative, uncaring horribly > assholes stalkers really are is an uncomfortable process for such people.

I can only vaguely imagine that. I mean, I'm friendly and empathic enough. But I also have a short temper, and tend toward keeping grudges.

And about stalkers. They aren't necessarily cold hearted, callous, manipulative, and uncaring. Sometimes they're just unconsciously selfish and childish. I know because I've been there. I lusted for a close friend, for years. But she just wasn't interested. And yet, we apparently remained friends through it all. Later, I learned that her thesis adviser was harassing her sexually. And I got that I'd been a jerk, to not see it, and to be another problem for her.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Those great data gatherers have quite a stalker-tone to there messages and notifications themselves, harassing users for data. If i read those notifications, wanting data from me, the voice i imagine is usually the "rapist-in-the-dark-alley"-voice of movie trophe fame. "I ve noticed you today visited the bakery. I like cake too- just tell me more. Shall i tell your friends, you like cakes? You better reply, i can repeat this a thousand times.."

Regarding human stalkers.

What to do.. mmh.. how about building a trojan-persona? You hook NN-Chatbots behind all your profiles on your online persona- ready to speak even with the stalk and sneak out in the middle of the night? You tell your friends in person about your new low_profile and that stalker is off chasing maschinery.

</comment><comment><USER17> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11207626](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11207626)

</comment><comment><USER18> I had a similar issue due to a bad encounter on a forum when I was younger - had to keep a low profile on the Internet for several years since then and had to frequently delete my online profiles out of fear. This wasn't just one stalker though, he has "friends" and from what I heard recently while the original stalker has lost interest his friends still hate me just as much.

</comment><comment><USER19> I feel for the person, but I'm not sure what the police can do if somebody stalks without committing a clear offence, just like the case where somebody might be a terrorist but hasn't committed any act of terrorism yet. You can't throw somebody in jail for being annoying. Though perhaps the person could be forced into therapy if there are multiple reports from multiple people about aberrant and problematic behaviour... That could be something the law should look into.

No victim blaming here, but be clear and confront the guy. I guess making beyond shadow of a doubt clear that you don't ever want to hear from him again under any terms is about the only thing you can legally do. Wishy-washy communication is in my opinion really the wrong way to deal with pushy men. The slightest wavering means "yes" to some guys.

<comment><USER20> > No victim blaming here, but be clear and confront the guy

Stalking is very common. Rarely stalkers will murder their victims. It's not easy to tell the difference between the annoying but not murdering stalkers and the murdering stalkers.

So confronting them carries a small but real risk of severe harm.

There's also not much evidence that confrontation works to stop stalking.

> The slightest wavering means "yes" to some guys.

This is incorrect. To these people anything will be twisted into "yes".

"I don't want you to contact me again. If you make any further contact I will contact the police, and you will be in violation of the court order I have against you" will be interpreted to fit the delusion, perhaps "in truth she still loves me, and wants to be with me, but her husband has manipulated her into saying this stuff."

Tldr ratioanilty doesn't work with irrational people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This stuff sucks, but based on own experience the best thing to do is to never give the person any attention at all.

Most people these days are completley blind to the possible consequences of sharing personal data with others.

It seems like most people used to be very careful with sharing personal information online, but in the last 15 years many people have clearly forgotten about common sense.

2000: It's the internet, it's dangerous to put your name there. 2017: I have to share a bunch of photos of myself(so people have something to edit), lists of all my connections(so people knows who to contact), my current location(so people knows where to find me) and I need to have 25 open communication channels. Oh, and it should be available to more or less everyone.

Last week I actually heard a person complaining about a stalker messaging her on facebook, blocking didn't help as he just created a knew account. I guess most of the users here sees a simple solution, but most people have no idea what they are doing online.

<comment><USER21> Back in 1990 we not only put our real name, but sometimes our address, phone, etc online, either in usenet sigs which are still available, or at the very least in finger

<comment><USER22> Back in 1980, they used to publish books full of this stuff and put it next to public telephones!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The ads on this page are almost intolerable. The page keeps jumping up and down. Normally I leave sites that do that, but the story here is interesting enough that I'm suffering through it.

<comment><USER24> Reader view in Firefox wants to be your friend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> But what happens next? Was there an update to this sequence of events?

</comment><comment><USER26> The Psychopath Code — "Practical tools and techniques to survive the most difficult people" — [http://hintjens.com/blog:_psychopaths](http://hintjens.com/blog:_psychopaths)

</comment><comment><USER27> I have personal experience defending against a stalker. Questions were asked down-thread about the effectiveness of restraining orders, so I'm posting in response. I got away, and I find the slight chance that this helps someone else compelling. Also, I can't really talk about this in real life, so I wish other people could know that it can happen, and how it works.

TLDR answer is: To defend against a stalker you will likely need legal advice and representation.

This is distasteful and expensive, and judgment is required to decide when to take that step. I am not a litigious person, and generally prefer to avoid conflict, or negotiate reasonable solutions. A stalker will take advantage of this. Stalkers (at least mine) operate by asserting control gradually, and retaliating against your attempts at self defense in a tit-for-tat fashion.

I think it likely that if you have even considered seeking legal redress, it's probably already time to hire an attorney. The cost and risk of civil cases or lawsuits is generally much smaller then the cost/risk of potentially getting involved in a criminal case later, so if you can solve the problem in civil court, it is highly desirable to do so.

The police may arrest and charge one (or both) of you if they respond to an in progress assault. However, they will not want to evaluate contradictory factual claims made by you and the stalker about things that happened while they weren't there. When you ask for help, they will probably encourage you to obtain a restraining order, which makes the problem someone else's job for now, and sets at least a low bar for complainants, before the police have to get involved.

Your legal position in the future will be constrained by early decisions and statements that you make. The article describes this question from a police officer: "'Were you ever afraid for your life?' he asked, still apparently on my side."

In my state, fear of one's life or safety was a legal requirement for obtaining an ex parte domestic violence civil restraining order. Think very carefully in advance about how to answer questions like this and don't ever lie to anyone or change your story. Lawyers are required to tell a judge if you do, and you will also need to protect your reputation with people you know against claims made by the stalker. Your only advantage over the stalker is truthfulness and consistency.

A civil restraining (or "protective") order is issued by a civil court which orders one party to stay away from another, possibly along with other provisions . Ex parte means "without the other party's presence." Some states (including mine at the time) allow such an order to be issued without an adversarial hearing. You obtain this by: going to court clerks office and submitting the paperwork they give you. Soon, (because this is presumed to be an emergency) you are given a short hearing in which you must explain why you are afraid for your life, and what's happed so far. If the judge grants the order, the respondent will be served a paper copy of the order by an officer, who will explain to the respondent that it's a crime to approach or bother you while the order is in force. These orders are short (mine was 21 days) because the respondent is not allowed an advance adversarial hearing.

After being served, my stalker retaliated by obtained an ex parte restraining order against me. I have come to understand that this is not uncommon in states where reciprocal orders are allowed. Eventually, after some stalling, I was granted a hearing and that order was dismissed at my request. Ultimately, after many further hearings over the course of about a year, I was granted a long term civil restraining order. During the litigation I dropped my college courses, resigned from my internship, and finally transfered to a university in another town. I did this partly because it was advised by my attorney, but mainly because I wanted to move on with my life.

It was also my experience that other people tended to trivialize the problem. It was hard for some people to understand that simply ignoring the stalker would not make it possible for me to attend work, or class, or use public spaces. My stalker would wait for me outside of my school and workplace, hold the doors shut, and threaten to report an assault if I tried to get in. They would also follow me in public or into businesses and create disruptions by yelling, making false reports to police or security, or other authority figures. The goal seemed to be to deny access to a space and/or provoke a physical altercation so I could be charged with assault.

I got out of this for a few thousand in attorney fees (plus a year of my life), and was never injured or charged with a crime. If I had not hired an attorney, I think there is a chance I would have been injured, killed or imprisoned. There were some peculiar features of my case that probably make it exceptional, so I'm not sure how well my advice generalizes, but this is it: Don't engage with the legal system without a lawyer, and don't wait to start defending yourself.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've gone ahead and deleted this comment for privacy reasons.

Thanks for reading it.

<comment><USER29> Although stalking can be done by any gender, it does seem that obsessive behaviour and social maladjustment are more masculine traits in general.

That's not to detract from your suffering - I am sorry to hear of your terrible experience at the hands of this creepy, awful woman. I hope you get this resolved somehow.

<comment><USER7> Or maybe it is just more socially acceptable for men, so they make less effort to hide it and are more willing to turn it outward rather than inward.

At this time, we cannot possibly separate out what is the result of biological wiring and what is the result of how people are socialized. There seems to be some evidence that as women gain power and social status and so forth, they start exhibiting some of the same negative traits that are deemed to be stereotypically male.

It may not be that women are more virtuous. It may just be that women get enormously more social pressure to curb certain tendencies, or at least hide them.

<comment><USER30> There is a clear correlation between aggression and testosterone levels[1]. People who take steroids are more likely to be violent[2]. Men have more testosterone, and thus act different overall. I'm not saying culture doesn't play a role, but try not to underplay biological differences between men and women overall, because they are definite.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggression#Testosterone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggression#Testosterone)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabolic_steroid#roid_rage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabolic_steroid#roid_rage)

<comment><USER7> Saying that we can't currently separate it out is not the same as saying biology has no effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think that males have sort of an instinctual way of thinking which is often reinforced in the media that persistence and commitment are "romantic" which women secretly desire, and that they often "play hard to get," etc. There are certainly many cases where this is true but probably much more commonly not. I can see how this combined with wishful thinking, general emotional confusion, lack of information, self esteem issues, etc can lead to these sort of situations.

I definitely don't think the woman owes him an answer or anything else of course, but I do think that women have a different perspective than men in general where they often have many more suitors and don't really understand the male experience that well. From the perspective of a man who has few prospects who takes every interaction as being meaningful, being abruptly blocked by someone with no explanation seems very rude and personal, but to the woman doing the blocking it might simply be the most convenient and reasonable way to deal with being approached quite often. It wasn't until I became platonic friends with women that I realized just how much more popular they are on dating sites, etc.

<comment><USER32> That reading may possibly, maybe have made sense in the early stages. Like when they were 12. But at some point she literally told him "stop messaging me so much or I'll block you". And even before that, he's _well_ outside of societal norms.

The guy then switches to insults and threats. Going from there and explaining it away with "oh, poor guy, might have felt rude and personal to him" is quite the stretch.

The guy is an active stalker. Let's stop making excuses for _horrible_ behavior. He's not "confused". He's malicious. He's threatening. He's trying to destroy her livelihood.

It's not women "having a different perspective than men", it's men like you continuing to make excuse after excuse for men who behave like sociopaths.

<comment><USER33> This.

"Danny" is obviously mentally disturbed and should not represent the rest of the male population.

Normal men do not act like Danny.

<comment><USER34> I'm really beginning to doubt the idea that people who act like this are mentally disturbed. I think they're just shitheads.

<comment><USER35> Mentally disturbed could mean sociopathic, which is likely the case here.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Board Moves the Doomsday Clock Ahead - <AUTHOR> http://thebulletin.org/press-release/board-moves-clock-ahead10433 <comment><USER2> Dupe (though original source): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13493396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13493396)</comment>


Live Picture: Software that was way ahead of its time - <AUTHOR> http://www.pixiq.com/article/live-picture <comment><USER2> 1) Your site's burning, pitty most people won't see your article/images.

2) The claim to "unlimited everything" repeated numerously in the article as well as "instant" anything is just hyperbole. There's no such thing in software. It might've been cleverer than photoshop about things, but unlimited and instant? No.

3) The claim to complete resolution independence is false. You might store editing operations/layers as parameters, but the source material is still resolution bound.

4) 48-bits is not that great honestly. At RGB (no word about alpha) that's 16-bit per channel. If it's normalized that's 64k graduations vs. 256 graduations. If interpreted as half float you'll only get 2 bits more per channel (half-floats use a 10-bit significand). That's cool, but not all that cool, either you get a non HDR format with a cool channel resolution, or you'll get a HDR format with 4x more graduations than 8-bpc. No you know what's cool? 32-bit single precision floats. 4 bytes, 32-bits per channel, 128-bit per pixel. You'll get 23 bits in graduations and HDR. Desktop graphics cards use this format internally anyway.

<comment><USER3> As someone that used it, it did indeed have all of those features. Sorry to burst your bubble.

As for resolution independence, what they mean is that all of the operations and manipulations you performed were resolution independent. If you upscaled the image, any manipulations weren't simply upscaled, but reperformed at the new scale which provided significantly better results.

It was indeed instant. You could load a 500 meg image on a machine with a quarter of the ram and zoom, pan and mess with it in realtime. It was amazing at the time.

<comment><USER2> Sorry to burst your bubble, if you think there's such a thing as unlimited and instant you're sorely mistaken.

It might've been fast in simple cases compared to the alternatives, but there's no two ways about it that all computation takes time, and you can make tradeoffs where you cache more and compute less, but that's it.

It's not instant and unlimited. It's Limited and fast, or more limited and faster, or more ram and faster, or more data and slower.

<comment><USER3> Stop bending semantics to fit your binary view point.

Instant in this case means you move the brush and it distorts as you move the brush. No parallax, no beach ball waiting for it to do the computation. It happened as you moved it. It was instant. Even with brush sizes the size of the image you were using.

It had unlimited undo. It had unlimited layers. That's not an arguable point.

<comment><USER2> Right, unlimited everything, got it.

/me wonders why he even tries to point out the folly to people with no clue about how computers work...

<comment><USER4> You are amazingly pedantic!

<comment><USER2> I write image processing software, I'm precise, there's a difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I used to use live picture back in the day. It was pretty amazing, but we never really fit it into our workflow because we were a very heavy digital shop and photoshop still had a leg up in a few areas (this was a digital pre- press and multimedia dev shop back in the early 90's).

Interestingly, we were also one of the first shops to have a digital camera for use in pro photo shoots. It was a Leif back that fit onto a Hasselblad. It would take one photo for each color plane, R, G, B, and each shot took about 30 seconds. You couldn't photograph people because of how long it took. But it was good for catalog and still life and high resolution enough for print. I think it cost about $10K if my memory serves.

</comment><comment> chestnut-tree The history of desktop applications is full of examples of clever or unique applications that never took off or failed to gain widespread adoption. Sometimes these applications had a superior interface to the dominant app (and sometimes not).

It would be really useful to see a few side-by-side comparisons of how a task is accomplished in LivePicture compared with Photoshop.

Although Photoshop is powerful and feature rich, I find the interface clumsy and awkward (Illustrator, in my opinion, has an even clunkier interface). Does the lack of serious competition against Photoshop keep Adobe from re-thinking the interface?

Apple's Final Cut Pro clearly had some influence on subsequent releases of Premiere Pro, but there's no serious competitor to Photoshop that I can think of (yes, there are alternatives, but none that are likely to take users away from Photoshop).

What's more, many people simply don't go looking for alternatives. Mastering Photoshop or Illustrator will stand you in good stead in the employment market if you're looking for a visual design job. And if you get stuck with an application task, there's a good chance you'll find a solution by searching for it online. There is an absolutely enormous number of supporting resources around Adobe's Creative Suite of products: tutorials, training, books, discussion sites etc.

All that helps to maintain the status quo and makes it much harder for competing apps to gain attention.

<comment><USER5> >Does the lack of serious competition against Photoshop keep Adobe from re- thinking the interface?

It's probably more a case of pros who have invested a great deal of time in adapting themselves to Photoshop's workflow and quirks would be really upset if they rethought the interface--however excellent a job they did.

FWIW, Adobe did a really excellent job when they had a clean sheet of paper with Lightroom, although it took a couple iterations to get there. (Mostly-- it's more modal than I'd prefer in some respects.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The photoshop competition was all on IRIX, and was a LOT better. Matador and Amazon were great applications, and better performers on 64bit MIPS hardware. Some got ported to Linux, but were then not maintained, or integrated into other codebases.

Old / dead image editors (with deep colour) better than Photoshop at the time:

* IFX Amazon

* Alias Eclipse

* Da Vinci or something? Not the Colour/DI suite.

* Deep Paint

* Avid Matador

* I actually used Combustion for years. You can keep your photo-pap!

Alive alternatives:

* Cinepaint (Yes it works fine)

* GIMP 2.9 or GIMP 2.10 when it is released

* Node based compositing apps i.e. Nuke.

</comment><comment><USER7> Site appears to be down. Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Fe4HrH3...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Fe4HrH3mYJsJ:http://www.pixiq.com/article/live- picture%2Bhttp://www.pixiq.com/article/live- picture&hl=en&client=safari&nomo=1&biw=320&bih=416&prmd=ivns&strip=1)

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's a brief comparison of Live Picture vs. PhotoShop.

It says Live Picture is sluggish and only better than PhotoShop on really large images.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j7viI0y...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j7viI0yXQkoJ:philip.greenspun.com/wtr/live- picture-v-photoshop.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER9> It also seems to be from the 90s.

Edit: Maybe I'm mistaken and the linked site is talking about _software_ from the 90s? It's down, so I really don't know. All I know is that they need to stop calling that an "app", then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> We are currently working on a application with similar features called Leonardo although Leonardo is streamlined for digital painting, not photo editing.

Leonardo is still at least 6 months away from being released but all the features like "unlimited canvas", "instant painting" and handling of "huge files" are already in place.

Main website: <http://www.getleonardo.com> (not much there yet)

We also just started a Vimeo channel were we "blog" about the progress of Leonardo: <https://vimeo.com/channels/sol/>

Unfortunately there is no video right now showing the "unlimited canvas" and "instant painting", but I can make one within the next couple of hours... :)

</comment><comment><USER11> A monopoly can also be seen as, a pioneer making something useful, others being unable to replicate or challenge with their own.

take gimp for example, it is nowhere near the dominance of adobe. its like windows-macintosh of the computer graphics world.

<comment><USER12> Even apps like Pixelmator don't quite get enough in there to adequately replace Adobe's offerings.

In fact, I can only think of Dreamweaver as the prime example of something that has _plenty_ of superior competition, attacking from a variety of angles.

<comment><USER11> indeed, thats a very good example, but still, what we are forgetting is the insane amount of money it costs to buy adobe software, even if they have lesser market share, they sure make up for it. Supposedly, their customers are all the artist, for whom 1000-2000$ is like buying new clothes. This allows adobe to further seal its position, through spending on R&D to pull further ahead of the competition.

so we can say, adobe would not stand challenged until someone can beat them on this part, with a proper strategy. Which is true for its current competitors, all of which only try to make the best from their current possibilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The probable reasons this app failed, and any app that competes with PS will (regardless of how well it tackles the resolution independence/feedback speed issue): are two things:

1\. Workflow must match PS 1:1 for the majority of everyday image editing operations. People that use PS are mostly creative folks who do no understand image editing from a technical perspective. Solving a problem (a use case) to them means to internalize a workflow. Mastering a 'deep' app like PS this way takes years. If you write a competitor to PS and dont honor this experience that took your target users years, often over a decade to aquire, you're shooting yourself in the foot too hard to ever gain enough momentum on a market that is dominated by PS (resp. its users).

This is imho also the reason why Adobe hasn't touched basic workflow in PS, _ever_. Because if they did this, they risked alienating users and driving them to test a competitor's product. Recall when Apple 'improved' the UI/workflow of FinalCut Pro? The screams of outrage echoing through the web? :)

2\. Feature set must be more or less identical to PS. You can 'plus' in some areas but you can't 'minus'. If you have a use case that is not covered by your app but by PS and it is even used by the average target user only once a week in PS, this will be enough reason for them to not consider your app a worthwhile alternative, even if you do get 1. right.

1\. is not too hard to do, engineering wise. But 2. is a huge task. PS simply has _a lot_ of features.

</comment><comment><USER14> The article praises Live Picture, but offer no hints as to why it failed to "kill" or even simply concurrence Photoshop.

<comment><USER15> I heard that it was due to the lack of plugins, and that was in turn due to a tricky and complicated API. Live Picture used some interesting and complicated data structures to work its magic, but all of that complication was exposed to and required of plugin authors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I recall trying Live Picture a few times, back in the early 90s. It was promoted in the same kind of breathless tone as this article. My recollection is that it in no way lived up to the hype. It was slow and crashed a lot.

</comment><comment><USER17> Why does Photoshop need to be killed? Seems like a good, powerful piece of software loved by many.

<comment><USER18> Adobe must die.

I set up a workflow for InDesign CS5.0 and everything worked. InDesign CS5.5 came out and they refused to sell me CS5.0. They introduced no new features, but the export as HTML option started producing random crashes. I spoke with their engineers and they said they would fix it in the next version.

We still experience a random crash in 1/30 automated jobs - which requires us to redo a large portion by hand. I don't know if they had fixed it, but I know they want thousands of dollars to upgrade to CS6.0.

Why did this problem happen? Because they released a new version called CS5.5 that introduced only bugs. Using Adobe software feels like you are being robbed.

Adobe must die.

<comment><USER19> Still you're using it, because there is no alternative.

Since it's the best software for what it does, your idea that "Adobe must die" is based solely on a fantasy notion that whatever replaces it wont have bugs, and will be all unicorns and love.

Not to mention that the bugs you mention are mostly specific to your workflow (specific automated jobs et al), and don't mean that the most used software in the industry is problematic in general. I've never been biten by any bugs in other parts of 5.5 I use, like PS and Premiere, for example.

I also don't see why you were quick to jump to 5.5 since you "set up a workflow for InDesign CS5.0 and everything worked.".

<comment><USER18> I didn't want to use 5.5

I setup the work-flow and was ready to deploy. When I went to purchase the licenses, the adobe sales rep said it was their policy to only sell the CS5.5 version.

I feel betrayed because each new version of Adobe's product brings more bugs and no useful features. This is is a direct consequence of adobe's monopoly, which disregards the needs of its users in favor of push new versions down our throats. Reminds of Windows ME.

<comment><USER19> > _I setup the work-flow and was ready to deploy. When I went to purchase the > licenses, the adobe sales rep said it was their policy to only sell the > CS5.5 version._

That's bad. Adobe does tend to screw their customers in similar business ways.

> _I feel betrayed because each new version of Adobe's product brings more > bugs and no useful features._

Well, I don't know about InDesign much, but this is not true for: Photoshop, Lightroom and Premiere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd like to see the 'impossible image' that was created with LivePicture and impossible for Photoshop...

</comment><comment><USER21> Could have..would have.

There is one thing than can still kill Photoshop, something on par for linux.

ps. do not say gimp, really.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Or is it 'should have killed Photoshop'...

<comment><USER22> no need to kill photoshop. Then we'd just have another monopoly.

<comment><USER23> The problem is no open source (or even closed) come even close to the Photoshop workflow, and also integration with other monopolized software like Illustrator and Fireworks. It's also one of the reasons why a lot of people can't switch to Linux, winin' it is just not good enough

<comment><USER24> I've worked professionally with Photoshop and After Effects and access to Adobe software is the only reason I still have a Windows computer. I don't even want to try getting it to work in Wine, and dual-booting just to be able to use them seems like a waste of time.

And until professionals use it in large numbers and are comfortable around it and potential employers want to see it on a resume, other solutions aren't going to matter.

<comment><USER25> > potential employers want to see it on a resume

this is a problem imho - why should a vendor specific product be a defacto qualification for a job? I know it is, and plenty of office clerk jobs "require proficiency" in office/word/excel. I say, instead of requiring a product name on your resume, you instead have to show you can achieve a particular effect (say, describe a procedure to achieve a rock texture in the abstract).

<comment><USER24> I suppose it can matter if that vendor's product is what they use in house and if whatever the other thing is that you know, isn't. They may be worried about the amount of effort they'd need to put into training you to do things their way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just another case of superior tech losing out. Sad but true. All too often.</comment>


I Just Hacked a State Election. I'm 17. And I'm Not Even a Very Good Hacker - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/21/i-just-hacked-a-state-election-17-not-a-good-hacker-219374 <comment><USER2> This was a CTF competition using a software stack that was designed to be hacked. It was not a copy of a real elections site. [https://twitter.com/Lee_Holmes/status/1031926153777299457](https://twitter.com/Lee_Holmes/status/1031926153777299457)

As far as I can tell it was at the r00tzasylum village and not even at the Voting Machine Village.</comment>


Tim Ferriss's Speed Reading Method, in a Chrome Extension - <AUTHOR> http://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/speedreader/jigjffjnfiikefbmfcnffbinngepkaik <comment><USER2> Tim Ferriss's method focuses a lot on eye movement. I question the decision of lines/keeping lines over making the words move instead of your eyes. On the web - we can move text to where our eyes are, instead of focusing on imaginary lines to aid in speed reading.

I use something similar to Squirt [0], unfortunately I forgot the name as I failed to properly name the bookmarklet. Unfortunately Squirt is a little buggy and doesn't strip out connecting/useless words (just, basically, a, etc.) but it gives a good idea of what I'm talking about.

I typically have it set to 850wpm~ which is good enough for comprehension so long as the material is within my vocabulary. If it doesn't parse well (punctuation like parenthesis often breaks the parsing) or the vocab isn't in my reach - I drop it down to 450-550wpm.

[0] [https://www.squirt.io/install.html](https://www.squirt.io/install.html)

Edit:

Spritz is another speed-reading bookmarklet that I recommend over Squirt, as the parsing is better:

[http://www.spritzinc.com/](http://www.spritzinc.com/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Tim Ferriss, in his "How to Triple Your Reading Speed in 20 Minutes", shows us a pretty neat trick to increase our reading speed. The only issue is, it only works for reading we do on paper. As you all know, most of our reading happens online nowadays. This chrome extension takes his method and allows you to apply it to any webpage/online articles.

<comment><USER3> Here is a link to the article.

[http://fourhourworkweek.com/2009/07/30/speed-reading-and- acc...](http://fourhourworkweek.com/2009/07/30/speed-reading-and-accelerated- learning/)

Thomas Frank breaks down the math in a video. Basically our eyes take so long to move and refocus, then read. The lines added by the chrome extension give you a target for your eyes to help practice using your periferal vision, requiring fewer eye movements to read a line.

[https://youtu.be/jv2BdHXRD3Q](https://youtu.be/jv2BdHXRD3Q)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a quick and dirty speed reading hack: just read the first sentence of every paragraph in a long form article. You can usually infer the rest!</comment>


Why GitHub Finally Abandoned Its Bossless Workplace - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-06/why-github-finally-abandoned-its-bossless-workplace <comment><USER4> My personal experience has been that many of the engineers most in favor of flatland management are in fact most in need of good managers themselves.

One of the biggest challenges for flatland-style organizations is getting technical people to focus on business objectives which tend to be non-fun. For software that includes fixing a lot of hard bugs and really delivering on features like complete documentation, monitoring, and good upgrades.

(Disclaimer: I have been a manager about 2/3 of the time in my last few jobs. I'm an engineer currently.)

<comment><USER5> > For software that includes fixing a lot of hard bugs and really delivering > on features like complete documentation, monitoring, and good upgrades.

That's exactly the kinds of things I wish that I could do. In my experience it's mostly managers that want you to push features without any documentation and filled with bugs.

<comment><USER6> I am a junior developer, but my experience so far has been exactly this; arbitrary deadlines, poorly defined or no technical specification and worst of all, no room for testing or documentation, yet still somehow expecting it to happen in the end.

<comment><USER7> Well look at it this way....if all of those things were to be provided to you, they could probably find someone to do your job for 30% less. There are _some_ upsides to software being a total shitshow.

<comment><USER8> I would, as an engineer, be okay with that. As you imply, that makes me considerably more valuable. The problem is that I'm never given _time_ for any of it. As soon as "MVP" status is reached, the feature is launched, declared a victory, and then we move on to the next thing, while the users note the half- assedness of the delivered product, and never looked on again. Meaningful work (aside from the occiasional bugfix) never occurs, as it can't ever get prioritized higher than the current MVP of the day.

<comment><USER7> You shouldn't worry about software being late. Work at a good clip with the time you have. This is just the norm for this industry and the only managers who presume otherwise are themselves novices.

<comment><USER9> Or are cynically using it to crack the whip and aggrandize power with zero regard for whether the deadlines are meaningful.

<comment><USER10> " _Noted Good Developer_ A thinks it will take at least 3 weeks for _you_ to complete this feature request, but we're being pushed to get it out in 2. I think you could manage that, but what about you? Can you do it or not?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't know if I misread it, but I found this article almost entirely devoid of information about this transition. This is the only trace I could find:

> Wanstrath told staff of the switch to bosses the month after his co- > founder's departure, and the software engineering department began assigning > managers in the spring.

It doesn't explain how their new management structure works, or how they picked the managers, or what. Half the article is about the Github gender bias controversy, and the other half is about other companies with flat organizations.

Does anyone have any real insight about how Github's new management structure works?

<comment><USER12> My guess?

The company's at an inflection point and management has to choose between a) raising capital or b) exiting. Either way, investors had expressed concern about GitHub's (lack of) hierarchy, and the constraints it imposed on opportunities.

<comment><USER13> This.

Don't read this as a management howto but a "hey look, we're legitimate now!" PR-focused post. They're trying to acknowledge the previous risks and describe how they are now addressed.

We're not the audience for this one, folks. Institutional investors are.

<comment><USER14> So, translation is actually:

      blorp blorp!

      money money!

      blorp blorp!

      feed me, seymour!

Yay! I feel reassured that everything is going smoothly, just as planned, and 10% growth as usual.

One could quickly argue that PR articles that skip the details, and make designs to produce the sensation of graphs that "go up and to the right," are a clear indicator that pleasing investors produces a bland gruel of profiteering corporations as ineffective at doing anything useful besides "making money," as is flatlander management, at providing direction to employees (read: millennials) who can't adjust to the sensation of not being subordinate to micro-managing overlords.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The key is that every task must have EXACTLY ONE BOSS whose say is _final_ when a decision is necessary.

A hierarchy works fine if it really _is_ a hierarchy. It won't work if the hierarchy has been poisoned with "dotted lines" or lots of unnecessarily- senior-sounding job titles that let senior people share control over project direction. I've worked in groups in the past where there were like 5 senior people trying to pull things in completely _different_ directions, no one would tell us whose opinion really mattered, and we kept having to decide for ourselves.

<comment><USER16> Eh. At every large company I've worked in or with, even if there's officially one boss, the reality is it's a committee. Worse, when in the middle of a big organization, you're never really sure who has authority. Someone lower on the org chart might call their friend who is an SVP from some other branch of the company, they fly in to have their say... it's all politics, no matter what the org chart says.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I struggle to understand how flat org structures work... In my experience, a hierarchy of power is essential. I've seen problems at organizations which lacked clear title differences between engineers with different experience. This meant junior engineers felt just as authoritative as senior engineers, despite those junior engineers often being very wrong.

The end result was unhappiness, and contention between coworkers. The senior engineers felt unappreciated and unrecognized, and the junior engineers felt the brunt of that resentment.

Based on that experience, I tend to believe that organizations should have clear power lines (titles), and respect those titles. Doesn't mean you need to have a dictatorship, but someone needs to be able to make a strong decision that sticks, when the time calls for it.

<comment><USER18> The case of the crash of United Flight 173[1] is quite an extreme but still a relevant one on why seniority (in terms of title or work experience) shouldn't be the sole driving factor of decision making. Yes, junior engineers can be wrong but shutting them out by defining a hierarchy leads to multiple issues - a) they don't learn and b) senior engineers don't benefit from useful and creative ideas. A hierarchical top-down org usually forces the people at the bottom to just follow the instructions. The better option is not hierarchy but leadership. There should be somebody in charge of the project and they should be able to take the final call when there is a contention. Yes, some wrong decisions would be made but that's what learning is all about.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_173](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_173)

<comment><USER17> Totally agree.

While I believe clear power lines, and titles, are important for business function, they should not come at the cost of respect, or a democratic environment which promotes conversation and compromise. You can definitely have both; Not all rigid org structures are authoritarian.

"Yes, some wrong decisions would be made but that's what learning is all about."

The problem I've seen is that unless an engineer sees his peer as having more experience (visa vi the title), then they often won't even give them the time of day. Even if their peer is 100% right, the junior engineer often believes themself right and is unwilling to budge. While the reverse can definitely happen, its generally less common.

<comment><USER16> > unwilling to budge

I respect explanations, not assertions, nor titles. Maybe that's why I have trouble with large companies.

<comment><USER19> Explicit hierarchy is useful to break ties. Not all questions have a universally compelling answer. There are often two or more competing "explanations" that are all sensible. Having nobody with the authority to make the final call often leads to uncertainty and endless bikeshedding.

<comment><USER16> In which case I expect the other person to agree that both options are equally valid and it's appropriate to choose randomly.

I think randomness is often underappreciated in business decisions. It helps create a baseline for performance measurement.

<comment><USER19> And I expect to have an experienced person in authority make the decision based on their "intuition", which just means the part of their accumulated experience that is difficult to formulate into an externally compelling argument.

This is actually a pretty good example of the phenomenon - if you and I were on a team and trying to figure out how to make decisions for our team, we would have this strong disagreement about whether it's better to break ties through intuition of randomness. My intuition is that intuition is better, and your intuition is that randomness is better. It's unlikely I can convince you that I'm right, or vice versa, so how should we break that tie?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "flatland" corporate structures don't really seem to scale. You eventually get to a point where the cost of coordination everyone needs to do is greater than the cost of having a bureaucracy. Also, I'm guessing that these structures are only effective in firms like Valve: a small number of experienced employees, no hard deadlines, and lots of specialists who know how to best allocate their time.

<comment><USER21> > Also, I'm guessing that these structures are only effective in firms like > Valve: a small number of experienced employees, no hard deadlines, and lots > of specialists who know how to best allocate their time

Are they that effective at Valve though? Seems it's not bad enough to cause the company serious damage but are they doing much nowadays? Yes there's the Vive but that's in partnership with HTC who may be providing a lot of the top- level direction.

I get the feeling Valve is coasting along on the Steam cash cow and could be doing a lot more with the people and resources they have available.

<comment><USER22> An example of a flat structure failure is the complete lack of a new episode of Half Life.

<comment><USER23> I think not doing HL3 was the right move from the business standpoint. The expectations of the HL fans got so high that anything short of another milestone of PC gaming history would damage them. It is hard to beat yourself, when the last success was so big. Much smarter to put the effort into several other directions.

<comment><USER24> Doing half life 2, then switching to episodic content so you can get things moving faster, then taking forever to release 2 episodes, then sitting around for a decade with an unresolved cliffhanger is ridiculous.

I don't buy your reasoning either. Right business move because DotA 2 and their Hats! are a cash cow business, sure.

<comment><USER25> They're waiting for VR. Half-Life 2 already spans everything cool you could conceivably do with a 'post-quake 2' shooter. Team Fotress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Dota 2 cover all the neat online matchmaking, micro- transaction, user-created content stuff.

They don't want to make Half-Life 3, the expansion to Half-Life 2. They want to make something new. They created something new with Portal, which required them to hone their ability to introduce players to an entirely new game mechanic, but now they have to wait for VR to put it all together.

<comment><USER22> As a fan of the HL series, I don't need a revolution, I just want to finish the darn story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness)

<comment><USER27> I find the idea of a democratic structure oddly appealing. Don't like your boss? _Vote them out_! Love someone and wish they'd be in charge, because they're basically in charge anyway? _Vote them in_! If anonymous voting happened at every level, it's possible that the incompetent people hiding away in the company will quickly get revealed and demoted (which might make them leave altogether).

That said, the democratic approach has a lot of other issues in the form of cohorts and cliques. A manager might secure just enough votes to stay in power by having quiet conversations with some employees, using power to give them breaks, etc. I'd love to see a frank discussion or proposal about how to dissuade that.

<comment><USER28> I think you missed the point of the Wikipedia article. Structurelessness (and that is still what you're describing) leads to a tyranny where there are unspoken leaders who basically bully the rest of the organization. You described exactly that and then asked how to avoid it. Short answer: You probably can't. It's a human problem, not an organizational or process one.

Clear lines of ownership and responsibility do wonders for just letting coders code, and let everyone else decide what they code.

<comment><USER29> Exactly, it's "leaderless" in the same sense that a class of high schoolers is "leaderless."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Interesting. I just talked to a friend of mine who is actually a lawyer. He told that in his firm of 300 everybody is a partner and nobody has a boss.

Instead they periodically elect a body of 20 (or so) partner to deal with compensation, bad partners, sets policies, etc, etc.

My buddy says that all the partner are fairly self-driven grown ups, and usually do the right thing. Rarely is there any action needs to be taken by that elected body.

They do have a "CEO" in name to represent the firm to the outside, but with no other powers otherwise. And obviously you need some HR department.

Immediately I wondered whether one could run a software company like that.

Seems that GitHub drove it a little too far on the no-structure route. I wonder if they could have done what this firm does.

<comment><USER31> Law firms are very different in how they generate revenue and operate than every other company. There is no basis for comparison.

<comment><USER9> The more I talk to lawyers the more I like the way they operate. Is there really no way to steal a lot of that structure for our field?

<comment><USER31> Sure if you are an application developer (like an integrator, BI, ERP, etc). Make cooperatives. But they won't be flat. You still have a boss - <USER2> partner. Every partner is like a mini company and they share resources and partners vote on future direction. It's not that rare actually. The ad agency conglomerates operate similarly. So do management consulting firms which are increasingly getting into tech consulting. Don't know how Accenture operates, but I would think it would be very similar. Ditto for Capgemini, Infosys, Cognizant, the list goes on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've experienced first hand why businesses need bureaucracy, because I resisted building one. Turns out it's the same reason cars have 4 wheels. It just works.

Some workers require oversight to be productive, and for some it just helps. This means you get the most out of your work force, and can also hire workers who can't manage themselves. But managers also abstract trust and responsibility from multiple staff to one staff, help organize workflow, and ensure proper communication across teams. It's a simple matter of fact that some work is more fun, some people communicate better, and people don't organize themselves. Add to this the coaching and mentoring factor of a good manager, and it's a no-brainer.

Granted, what most employees fail to understand is if you have a manager, the company has already deemed you need one, and you're practically paying for your own overhead. Good managers are hard to come by, and are expensive. But businesses desperately need good managers because they solve most staffing issues. In other words, if you stop being complacent and just behave like a manager, chances are you will become one.

Here is how it's done: You start by managing yourself and removing your own overhead. Then you start taking care of other responsibilities because you can't help it. Know what needs to get done, understand the big picture, and just help accomplish it from the side. And when you provide relevant insight about how to improve something, put out a fire, or organize a project, you're already manager material. Your goal is to replace your manager without actually replacing him, without being the boss, without pissing anyone off, and without higher pay. You just made your bosses job easier, increased the value of everyone else, and ensured work got done. If your company doesn't give you a raise, you're at the wrong company.

Here is how it isn't done: You keep relying on your manager to keep you in check. You only accomplish your minimum requirements. You blame training for not being able to do anything else. You feel entitled for a raise just by being there for a long time.

Both of the above are exaggerated to emphasize two opposites, but most people are somewhere in between. Of course, if you're not manager material and you suck at your job, the likelihood is you will get fired, so it's perfectly okay to be complacent and just do good work. But the point is, you have your manager to thank for your straight forward and fairly comfortable job, and at the end of the day, his/her salary is practically coming out of yours.

<comment><USER33> What if you're looking for autonomy without becoming a manager?

<comment><USER32> You're a great worker. If you're autonomous, you're already good at managing yourself and your own work, so you're half way there. You're the person that would be high on the list of potential recruits for managerial positions if there was a shortage in your company. And you'd have to turn them down to maintain your non-managerial status and lower payroll.

If you have a group of people that can manage themselves, you have a group of potential managers. In other words, they're worth more than people who can't manage themselves, and the likelihood of them doing simpler tasks that can be done with someone more cost effective is greater. Meaning, unless you're allergic to non-autonomous people, it becomes a good business decision to just start managing some helpers instead of forcing everyone to help themselves. The quintessential helper is "the intern" (and they may be grooming you for a managerial role if they put you in charge of one).

Also, if you're an entrepreneur you're a manager. If you can't manage people, you have no business trying to build a business.

It's also worth noting public education systems do not produce managers. The teacher-student dynamic is similar to the manager-worker dynamic. They don't teach you in school that you could learn whatever you want on your own and that the teacher is mostly there just to make sure you get your work done. It's pretty much the same with managers.

<comment><USER33> Thanks for the response -- interesting stuff.

But any thoughts on what to do in the "allergic to non-autonomous people" situation?

<comment><USER34> If you're just describing people who can't or won't think for themselves (or have very poor judgement when they do), your options are (a) work alone or with a small group of people you respect, (b) work for a company with high standards for hiring (no place is perfect, but some are better than others), (c) learn how to constructively work with people you consider lesser mortals while hiding your contempt, or (d) don't put people into made-up buckets and learn how to make the best of whatever situation you find yourself in. (d) is by far the most challenging, and by far the most rewarding, because what you're capable of won't forever be circumscribed by preconceived notions about people, who can be quite surprising in unexpectedly positive and negative ways.

<comment><USER32> Just to add, regarding (d), buckets will make themselves based on work, and people will make buckets for themselves based on who they are. So you want these buckets to match. Except, as a manager or an employer, you really have little control over either. If marketing needs to get done, that's a predetermined bucket. If someone loves marketing, that's their predestined bucket. But 1 to 1 matches are rare. If your business is growing, work buckets constantly change. And if you're a person, you constantly change. And then there are offices that are still trying to figure out the proper buckets, as well as the people who are still trying to figure out their passion. So it's a clusterfuck and there is always collateral damage. But you want to be working for someone who's at least trying to get it right, and usually if you can talk to that person, they'll appreciate your feedback. The key is for both sides to be flexible enough to get all the work done without making anyone too unhappy. Of course, businesses can't sacrifice work, so people end up sacrificing happiness, but for the most part, a business that fails to keep their employees happy is either a failing business or a bad business (and as an employee you should look elsewhere).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if this is in response to out-of-control GitHub employees enforcing arbitrary "Codes of Conduct" on their users, including flagging repositories for using language that's not inclusive enough, or might offend someone?

Seems like without management, an employee with an agenda--especially on that's not related to technology--could go off unchecked for a long time.

<comment> nommm-nommm Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER36> I think this might be a reference to the "WebM for Retards" repo which was banned. After that event, someone ran a search and found myriad other repos containing "problematic" language which were ignored.

<comment><USER37> Not just that repo -- see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12232250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12232250)

<comment><USER36> I'm honestly so jaded by the injection of language policing into everything that all I can do is sigh nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I once worked for a company with a very flat organizational structure. It was just the CEO and thirty people underneath him.

Every day I had 10 people coming to me with issues they all thought were critically important. I was being pulled in every direction and I couldn't focus on anything. It was a complete mess.

Now I work at a company where I have one boss, and he acts as a funnel for all the work that comes into our department.

I'm never going back to a flat company again, if I can help it.

<comment><USER39> Not to say it's an unimportant difference, but the only difference is that your boss knows how to say "no" to immediate requests for you time and you don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Most of the people I've talked to who "reject management", they really reject "bad management".

<comment><USER41> to be fair, that is _most_ management. good management is quite rare, unfortunately.

<comment><USER42> And much of the "good" management I've encountered is actually about protecting your people from the bad management around and above you in the organization.

Many orgs tend to conflate technical leadership with people management and with project management, and they are different things.

<comment><USER43> > Many orgs tend to conflate technical leadership with people management and > with project management, and they are different things.

The problem is that if you get a professional PM, they typically have seniority on the org chart and call the shots, even when they don't have the technical capacity to do so.

I'd like to experience an in team flat structure, one where management/PM is working for the team, not in charge of them.

<comment><USER42> All the really excellent PMs at Microsoft that I worked with seemed "flat" to me -- they did coordination, technical documentation and basically "glued together" disparate groups. They were technically deep and would have made fine engineers, except they were better at communication and negotiation than your average engineer. They didn't seem to give a damn what the management structure was like, except to steer around it.

The poorer PMs were the ones stuck in hierarchy, who managed schedules, tracked bug counts and (aside from bug triage _maybe_ ) did work that could have been largely automated. These folks tended to circulate through and were generally fungible, even at the nosebleed levels of their management tree.

I would happily have traded 20 or 30 of the "bug counter" PMs for a couple of technical PMs who could write specs that meant something. (I saw many "bug counter" PMs quit, or get fired).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Can GitHub--a company with 600 people-- _really_ be called a "startup" anymore (as termed by the article)?

<comment><USER45> There's some cred that's given to any company that's a "startup". Which is why successful startups do their best to extend the use of that term-- claiming that their culture stays the same. The same way that job titles are being inflated, I think there's "startup inflation".

In one of my college business classes we tried to define a startup, and we ended up with something like: _> A startup is a company that is new company, less than 5 years old, that is also looking for a big payout by trying a risky and novel product or business strategy. A startup is also looking for extremely high growth, which is usually funded by outside investment._

So, github? No longer a startup. A year after you've become successful and paid off the VCs? No longer a startup. If you're a design/development agency? Not ever a startup, because the product/services you're providing are not novel or new territory. If someone made a competitor to Jira, I might also hesitate to call it a startup. At some point these kind of services get commoditized.

Of course, colloquially this definition fails and I don't ever try to push this definition on people. But it helps to conceptually divide the "high- growth new product startups" from the "lifestyle startup" and "traditional business startups".

<comment><USER46> I think the brief description is a company in search of a new scalable business model.

If the business model is not new then the business can be categorized as X (grocery chain, real estate dealer, machine shop, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> It'd be cool to see an internal study, at least within the engineering group, of how commit activity/issue resolution changed before and after the new structure. On an aggregate basis, at least.

<comment><USER48> Could you elaborate on why you think that would be useful?

<comment><USER47> Ostensibly the decision to change structure is to improve productivity. Does it? And if so, how does it affect/improve it? Commit activity is as granular/quantifiable a data source as we have to analyze it.

Obviously, the analysis shouldn't be limited to the mere quantity of commits. I'm more interested in if the activity becomes more "regular" than sporadic. Or if long-neglected (i.e. boring) issues get more attention than they did before.

<comment><USER49> It would be interesting, but not immediately scientific when it comes to measuring productivity. A larger structure is going to be less efficient than a small one (under most topologies) but can take on larger tasks. The individuals will have more specialization and decisions will take longer to arrive at.

What _I_ would find interesting is a what is the slope of the line in terms of worker productivity as it varies with org size as the number of workers are added.

Having a bossless architecture is fine when there is lots of interesting engineering work to do. Coordination and direction is just overhead when the organism should just spread in every direction. But after some point it needs to move and find food.

<comment><USER46> " A larger structure is going to be less efficient than a small one (under most topologies) but can take on larger tasks. The individuals will have more specialization and decisions will take longer to arrive at."

This is the best brief simplification of organizational dynamics on scaling I've had the pleasure to read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> > GitHub is taking on increasingly ambitious tasks, such as organizing a two- > day developer conference on Sept. 14 in San Francisco that's expected to > attract 1,500 attendees.

This can't be serious...

<comment><USER51> What do you mean?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> It works for Valve, but that's because there are so many good people who really, really want to make computer games. (This is also why game developers tend to be exploited. See the EA litigation.)

It's surprising that it works for Zappos, which is just an online shoe store. Yes, there are people who are fanatical about shoes, but the business of selling and shipping them is not that exciting.

<comment><USER53> Does it really? Valve is extremely profitable because of their particular role in the video games industry. But outside of Steam, is the company really a role model for success?

Is Valve's latest "new" IP DOTA2 successful when compared to the other set of MOBAs that have come out over the past few years?

Have Valve's forays into VR and hardware been successful compared to other companies in the space? e.g. the Vive, Oculus?

Looking at Steam itself, has the service dramatically improved since launch? Certainly there have been a lot of good incremental updates, e.g. two-factor auth. But the Apple App Store has seen a lot more updates in terms of search, discoverability, etc.

I am not an expert, and may have my details wrong about Valve. But I don't think the company has been especially successful outside of being the only game in town for buying AAA video games online.

<comment><USER37> Would Steam have happened if they had a different management structure?

<comment><USER34> Perhaps not, but if it didn't it would be because the rest of the org that didn't want to do Steam would have been more empowered to stand up to Gabe, whereas with Valve's flat org, Gabe is God and everyone has to do what he says.

It's probably best for Valve that Steam did happen, but if it's due to Valve's flatness, I would attribute that to the org's inability to resist Gabe rather than any sort of bonus wisdom that arose from that flatness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> One of the ways I see manager's having a very positive impact on a product is by managing the (sometimes) competing interest of users versus engineers.

As engineers, we can sometimes become obsessed with updates/refactors/optimizations that have zero meaningful impact on the user experience. A user doesn't care about your cobwebs and dirty laundry, but as an engineer it's so hard not to obsess over these optimizations. It's so easy to forget that users don't care about the same things as you.

At the same time it's maddening when you feel like you're working with a house of cards and your manager asks for a third story.

I see a lot of conflict here, and this imho is what separates good technical managers from bad ones. They understand the competing interests and are able to prioritize work in a way that works best for everyone.

<comment><USER55> > that have zero meaningful impact on the user experience.

The reason I want to refactor is to make the code easier to read and maintain and more likely to be bug free. It doesn't have any meaningful impact on the user experience, but it is making the software a lot better and keeps running costs lower and allows new features to be added more easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> We desperately need to find new organisational forms - it's crazy in modern western democracies most of us spend our lives in command and control dictatorships

However the transition is hard. Democracy is nice but companies are too close to the daily life of people to allow a vote every four years and let others decide policy

GitHub could have experimented with new ways of deciding policy (voting) - <USER3> I would argue that it's likely they would have got things like "write good docs" voted in anyway.

And it would be interesting to see how one handles voting on issues like "gender bias"

But we will all have to have companies like this one day - otherwise where do the big value wins come from. We can't keep inventing technology of the 21 C and hope they overcome the management hierarchies of the Stone Age

<comment><USER57> There are other forms of structural organisation than strict hierarchies.

One interesting one proposed by cyberneticist Stafford Beer was dubbed Syntegrity [1].

It involved relationships between workers structured like a bucky ball, where each person had direct influence over a number of topics, and oversight of a number of others.

The result was (in theory) an arrangement where everyone had some responsiblity, but there was no overall "leadership". _In theory_

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntegrity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntegrity)

<comment><USER56> Thank you - but I think that the perhaps less complicated goal of achieving corporate democracy will be hard enough :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Its just agile/scrum for management. How is that working out for you guys? Do you get things finished?

</comment><comment><USER59> Flat management structure is not the problem, is it? Someone always has more of a say in what gets done for whatever reason- seniority, skill, charisma, anything.

What should really be flat is the pay scheme: pay every worker 1/n of the company's assets at the end of each financial period.

That means anyone who wants more money must work to make the company prosper as a whole. Employees should also have the chance to decide who gets hired (because they have a motivation to hire only the people they think can increase their own pay).

Btw, I'm totally willing to try this in my own company one day. And if it doesn't work- who the hell cares. Most companies fail for much more common reasons than their management or pay structure anyway.

</comment><comment><USER60> Are they still using the Code of Conduct that explicitly allows "reverse- racism, reverse-sexism" etc. for members of marginalized groups?

</comment><comment><USER61> Depending on the business, there is usually a requirement for a coordination role. Whoever that coordinator is needs to have the authority to make a final decision in order to be effective.

If companies want to avoid tyranny in the workplace then perhaps it would be better to have bosses but allow a majority vote of direct reports to fire them. Give 360 reviews some actual teeth.

</comment><comment><USER62> Gitlab is cool but with things like webrtc, ethereum/swarm/ndn, gittorrent etc. out there eventually we will be able to get away from servers and definitely having one company in charge of storing all of the code is not the most ideal final solution.

</comment><comment><USER63> The link to Medium's experiment is interesting too.

[https://blog.medium.com/management-and-organization-at- mediu...](https://blog.medium.com/management-and-organization-at- medium-2228cc9d93e9#.3xupsu3mh)

</comment><comment><USER64> The genius of github is git. Did a manager help Mr Torvalds construct that?

<comment><USER65> If GitHub was only git, we'd be talking about Gitorious (or Gitweb, or...) having hundreds of employees, not GitHub.

I've heard people describe GitHub as the "Facebook of Open Source" and that's not as absurd a statement as it may seem at face value.

GitHub is basically the SourceForge of Web 2.0. It's where you go for open source projects and it makes it easy to participate.

I would hope to see GitLab succeed GitHub by virtue of being open source at heart (rather than just at the surface level) but as much as I love GitLab I'm not holding my breath.

Either way, git is ultimately an implementation detail to GitHub's success. Git's success may have given GitHub the edge over BitBucket (back when BitBucket was hg-only and GitHub was git-only) but it feels like the inverse is also true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Seems kinda childish to me to not want management.

<comment><USER55> Try working a couple of months in my previous workplace and i am sure you will change your tune.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Next step: TPS reports.

</comment><comment><USER68> And yet during the flat org structure time period Github was an innovation BEAST. It was one of the most creative technology companies I've ever seen and changed the way we do development. Since more structure has been put in place, innovation seems to have come to a screeching halt. The product feels old, new features are hard to come by, bloat and cruft are everywhere. Maybe they hired too many people for the job at hand?

<comment><USER69> I think you'll find the slowed pace happened a good deal before the managers came in if you look at the history more closely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Between the lines, hierarchy was necessary in order to impose HR-compliant politically-vetted governance.

"the Preston-Warner episode helped demonstrate that some problems couldn't be solved by the masses. While the old times created a strong sense of camaraderie, employees didn't know who to direct questions to, either about uncomfortable confrontations with colleagues or about their own performance"</comment>


How Apple Can Make Money From Higher-Quality Songs - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/how-apple-makes-money-from-higher-quality-songs/

<comment><AUTHOR> would say we already figured this out a few days ago...... that it's all about hardware sales</comment>