Why Online Communities Decay Over Time - <AUTHOR> http://rs.io/2014/02/26/why-online-communities-decay-over-time.html <comment><USER2> > _" When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to > interact in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty, > mean, aggressive..."_

This is one of the most off-putting things about HN in my opinion. It's better than bigger social sharing sites like Reddit in that tired jokes and posts with little thought are usually voted down to the bottom, but posts that poke holes in the original argument are often top comments.

A lot of technically-minded people take great pleasure in finding and fixing bugs. The problem is that finding errors in human interaction leads to pedantry, nitpicking, and cherry-picking. This is especially true as the community grows and interactions with all but the most visible people becomes rare. People have less incentive to give others the benefit of the doubt, and more incentive to find the problems and point them out.

I'm worried about our once-little community, but I don't know how to prevent the petty fault-finding from resurfacing in such a large and shifting community.

<comment><USER3> Free idea: Build a social site that, even when it has many many users, breaks people into smaller groups in such a way that it remains enjoyable to all. You could analyze user behaviors and interests to do this. I've considered doing this myself.

<comment><USER4> I've see this called the 'Warrens' model. Reddit does this with Sub-reddits. Keep the niche small group feel available, while aggregating useful stuff upwards.

<comment><USER5> Any more context? I just searched that term and it seems to have come up blank.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately I'm unable to find the reference. It's probably a different word, but the idea is the similar, and I specifically recall it referencing Reddit and other communities with a similar "small group" branching model. Warrens came to mind because of rabbit warrens, but that's probably not quite it.

<comment><USER6> This is most likely the reference you were looking for:

[http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software- sundays-2-the-...](http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software- sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The real problem with online communities is that the people who are upvoted the most are the ones who spend the most time commenting.

Generally, very successful people don't spend large amounts of their time commenting on online forums. In this manner, the biggest 'losers' in the real world, with the most time to waste on the internet, become the biggest 'winners' in the online community.

The end result is that the cultural norms of the online community end up being set by people who are the least qualified to create or enforce any kind of healthy norm.

edit: just wanted to say that I recall reading something similar on a blog a long time ago, although I cannot remember the name of the writer.

<comment><USER8> > The real problem with online communities is that the people who are upvoted > the most are the ones who spend the most time commenting.

I remember a claim of a similar but opposed problem: that low quality short content is much more rewarding that long, thoughtful responses. See a funny cat pic? I chuckled, upvote. See a long answer that doesn't quite fit your opinion? Downvote, or ignore at best. Short and funny trumps long and thoughtful.

This is not a problem in HN thanks to moderation, but it happens a lot in other communities.

<comment><USER9> Too black and white. Why not be funny, short AND thoughtful? Why does everyone here have such tunnel vision?

<comment><USER10> Because often points cannot be made in a short manner and still be understood. Just like in this very post some points need some explanation of their context and the thought chain leading to them, or people will not understand how the poster arrived there and simply voice their disagreement, instead of sitting down for a while and thinking about the post and trying to recreate that chain of thought on their own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While the blog article mentions interesting points, I don't think its insights have much to do with technical communities such as Hacker News or Stackoverflow.

HN is mostly very civilized. (Granted, some of that is due to moderators.) So the blog's bullet point about "trust" devalued because of one-time transactions does not seem relevant. It's relevant for reddit/atheism but not HN.

To me, the problem with HN, SO, etc is the voice of experts getting drowned out by amateurs. The growth rate of new amateurs joining will always outpace new experts and each year the signal-to-noise gets worse. I haven't seen a clever self-governing mechanism that addresses this social dynamic. The upvote/downvote/karma history is not enough to solve it.

<comment><USER12> Experts in one field are amateurs in all the rest of them. So even a community of just experts in some field would have a much larger number of amateurs than experts across all fields.

<comment><USER11> That's true but I'm not constricting "expert" to just domain expertise. An expert in <whatever_technology> who has worked hard and invested time into acquiring that expertise is often also an "expert" at not being a nuisance in the fields that he's an amateur. He's able to ask quality questions (instead of inviting snarky lmgtfy.com). He's an expert at being a non-expert.

Even if Paul Graham doesn't know Rust, I think it's safe to assume that any questions he'd write in an online community would not be ridiculous (is Rust slower than Bash?). Any amateurish observation he'd have, at minimum, would have some intelligent thought behind it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Whilst I agree with the general thesis of the article, this paragraph seemed very distasteful to me:

> _There is no reason to trust people you will not interact with again in the > future. There's no incentive not to defect. At the end of my last > relationship, our interactions became significantly less pleasant as it > became more obvious that it was over – I would not have to deal with this > person in the future, so why bother going through the motions of kindness?_

Without meaning to be rude or make an attack on the author's character, the author does sound like a bit of an asshole there.

How about being nice to people because you're a nice person, rather than because you want to get something out of it? If you could murder someone and get away with it, would you? I wouldn't, because in abhor the idea of killing people. Similarly, I would act decently towards another human being even when I have no incentive to do so, simply because I am a decent human being and I don't like the idea of causing unnecessary pain and suffering to others.

As they say, a gentleman remains a gentleman even in the gutter. If you need to be surrounded by other decent human beings to be decent, if being surrounded by jerks automatically reverts you to jerk behaviour, perhaps you're not a decent human being after all, only a chameleon sort of person who will do whatever they think they can get away with.

I hope a majority of people here would behave the same way as me - decently, irrespective of the surroundings and likelihood of "getting caught". And there's the rub I guess - a community composed mostly of decent human beings will be less vulnerable to this effect than one composed mostly of selfish people who only act decently when they can see a tangible payoff.

That may be another path to survival: find the assholes and keep them out, and then perhaps you can deal with growth more easily.

<comment><USER14> Game theory is just an explanation; people don't use it explicitly to make decisions, they just follow their gut, and evolution has caused our guts to produce rational decisions most of the time. It's the same as the theories of attractiveness based on symmetry and secondary sex characteristics: you don't look at a potential partner and think, "He/she looks so symmetric, I bet if I were to have kids with him/her they'd have a higher chance of survival." You just intuitively find the person attractive.

<comment><USER15> Lots of people use game theory to rationalize behaving in a selfish way.

This rhetoric of such-and-such an idea being natural, and therefore inevitable, is always used as a core justification for any ideology, whether feudalism, monarchy, communism or social darwinism. They are not all correct.

It's pretty obvious that humans are not exclusively rational machines designed for 'winning', we have all sorts of other mechanisms which act to make us function well as part of a unit, and these mechanisms have secondary consequences which mean that we are perfectly capable of acting against our own interests, or against the interests of our genes. We should be embracing that, not trying to cut it out. We shouldn't attempt to use the evolutionary process as a moral guide.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I forget the web page - I think from another HN reader - but they made the point that these challenges are the exact challenges that distributed computing wrestles with. For any problem set that a lot of resources are working with, how do you properly surface the most valuable results, how do you combine and summarize them, etc. There are a lot of discussion community sites that just try to pull in their own homegrown algorithms ("let's have a moderator!") but I suspect a lot of these experiences could be improved by reading up on distributed computing algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER17> This fits perfect with what PG said in a Tech Crunch Interview in 2013 [http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker- new...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-news/)

● "[Paul Graham] wanted to make Hacker News a place to recreate the way Reddit felt in the good old days"

● "He explains that [Hacker News] was community of insiders in the hacker world, and it has gradually been getting diluted."

● "That is what I spend all my time thinking about," he says.

● He worries that Hacker News will become what he calls "an old crumbling building."

● "The community has been in a perpetual but slow decline because the site is growing," he says.

</comment><comment><USER18> _> 'The probability that I will interact with any one user ever again on a site like YouTube tends toward zero. I have no real incentive to be polite or to put much effort into anything I say.'_

My sense of a terrible 'community' like YouTube is a bit different. I've always had the impression it's more about performing and the size of the audience - more about votes and reactions than expected interactions.

No matter how nasty or inane your opinions are, you can share them on a related YouTube video and receive anonymous validation from other people who agree with you. When you're feeling bad about yourself and want to lash out, you can post something vile and get a response.

I believe this was a source of a lot of complaints about changes to the comment system. It hurt ones ability to receive instant gratification by dropping a comment on the top of the stack.

In the bat analogy, upvotes/karma are a sort of secondary 'junk food' blood supply that costs the giver nothing and some bats don't care for it as they prefer real sustenance but others are addicted to it. The 'community' ends up as a circus of votefiends bludgeoning each other for another hit.

</comment><comment><USER19> Regarding to HN, problem is that social proof takes a huge part in determining what gets on the front page.

People check /new, see that some post already has 1 or 2 upvotes, checks it instead of some without any upvotes. The upvoted one gets even more upvotes (because more people are reading it), and it's on the homepage.

A bunch of my submissions made the homepage and from what I've noticed, the threshold is about 7-10 upvotes in the first hour. So can we fairly say that a dozen of people decide what's on the homepage? Maybe.

My suggestion: don't show upvotes in /new for 30mins after submission? As a trade off, a little time might get wasted on low quality submissions but maybe there would be more better quality submissions on the front page.

<comment><USER20> This is a good idea. There is a "Feature Request" link at the bottom of each page. Please resubmit this there so it is receives greater notice.

<comment><USER19> Done! Thanks for your comment :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Daydreaming here... so how about a community that funnels users into buckets automatically? Think of an HN where you only discuss an article with a pool of ~500 people instead of 80,000. When new users join, they're distributed to the smallest groups. Nobody is overwhelmed with an influx of noobs. And you might actually be able to start remembering the names of the active people in your group. Perhaps you could see top comments from other groups, but not interact with them directly.

<comment><USER22> That's a rather interesting concept. My big issue is that I'd be missing the best content from other buckets. Perhaps content can 'emerge' from a bucket after garnering a certain % of support from the bucket?

<comment><USER23> To avoid the Matthew effect, the best users should be re-distributed, too. -- still nice?

<comment><USER22> If that was the case, I'd worry about the buckets becoming like German universities - the best minds can't get together, so we all lose out.

<comment><USER24> I don't think most HN users know anything at all about German universities, much less any bucketing they might do, so that's probably not the most helpful analogy.

<comment><USER22> I learned about that particular situation from one of pg's essays (something I figured I could assume was common knowledge around here).

<comment><USER24> I've read most/all of pg's essays as well, but I have no recollection of anything like that, so...

<comment><USER25> Can someone explain the German university thing to me? It sounds interesting.

<comment><USER23> Well, I searched on HN and googled it, but nothing found easily. So this is why I don't like slang sometimes.. :-$

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> SomethingAwful is consistently high quality and has been for the 7.5 years since I discovered it. 190,000 users now, I think 90K in 2006.

The secrets seem to be

a) charging people $10 one time to join/post and view more than a few pages of a particular thread

b) segmenting into different subforums - over time they become different communities within SA that have their own quirks.

c) ruthless moderation that can and often does lead to posting probations and bans (requiring another $10 to reverse)

In particular, the politics/history, sports, video games, and arts discussions are very good.

</comment><comment><USER27> It is hard to appreciate the change in tenor the network experienced when AOL gave its users access to Usenet. I have never considered it in the context of the prisoner's dilemma as a one shot exercise but that certainly has an intuitive appeal.

We see it here on HN of course, someone creates a new user account, makes a single low value snarky comment and then off to oblivion.

An interesting counter example is twitter, which I've seen that as people become more invested in the reputation of their 'handle' the less ill considered their tweets seem to become. When that isn't the case that is also interesting.

<comment><USER28> Twitter is a terrible place for conversation to take place. There is no capacity for nuance or well-reasoned thought. It's a site for announcements, not nuanced musing, as expected from a place where every comment has to be a soundbite. Occasionally there might be a two-way conversation that works well, but that's not the norm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It took a while to find, this old kuro5hin article is a good read on the subject:

[http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000](http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000)

Titled "Attacked from within" it details the problems in scaling a community and community life-cycle very eloquently.

<comment><USER29> Oh, I remember that. This is the best thing ever written on the subject, but I think its conclusions are regularly ignored because people want to have their cake and eat it too, with regard to fostering vanity. Everyone wants the community but they still want to be the superstar in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Another thing that seems to be the case is that new members are unable to become assimilated into existing culture because the entrenched users quickly become the minority and are unable to enforce cultural norms. The culture is co-opted by the newcomers.

<comment><USER31> >>The culture is co-opted by the newcomers.

I must admit I've not seen this yet. In the forums I frequent the old elite rules...to the point where the admins trust the powerful members to manage it to some extent. If 3 powerful people decide that a new user is undesirable then said user is a dead man walking. Obviously not very democratic etc...but its super effective in maintaining the peace....the powerful members provide a base-line that absorbs most of the BS...the admins step in when something dramatic happens.

<comment><USER32> You're thinking of individuals. The point is that, even if the "old elite" have the power to just say "Ban that newcomer" and the newcomer gets banned, the "old elite" do not scale while the influx of newcomers certainly can. One, two, three, even 20 bad actors can be dealt with by a small group of community gardeners. But thousands of bad actors are just on a totally different scale and cannot be dealt with in the same way.

This is similar to the situation of event security guards. They individually hold more power than any member of the crowd, but if the crowd collectively decides to rush the stage, they can't really stop it from happening because it is physically impossible for 50 people to overpower 10000.

<comment><USER33> But when does this ever happen? Startups generally are not communities, and communities generally don't see exponential growth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A potential solution:

Implement a comment recommendation system. Based on comments you've liked and disliked, the system will push comments you would like to the top.

The quality of the community you see is then completely up to you. If you like poop jokes, you'll see poop jokes. If you like pedantic attacks, you'll see pedantic attacks. And if you like insightful comments, you'll see insightful comments. As you stabilize on a community you like, you can start responding to their comments, and then they too will have the chance to vote on your comments. If they like you they'll start seeing more of you, and a micro- community will evolve naturally for free.

<comment><USER35> If you think about it, it's pretty much the same thing as twitter, except the social graph is built more implicitly. In exchange for a larger selection of relevant content, you have to sift through more noise. But it probably feels better to vote if you know your vote counts differently for some users. You're no longer just one number in a statistic, but part of a much more complicated ranking system. Best of all, your votes significantly affect your own experience on the website.

A dynamic social graph like that would probably obviate the need for even categorizing content, let alone "jumping ship" when the community decays.

There are some drawbacks though. If you implemented it in reddit/hacker news, there would no longer be a "front page of x" to serve as a symbolic milestone for your submission. Without context, "2000 upvotes" has ambiguous importance. Also, a different ranking system exists for each cluster in your social graph, which sounds like a fun engineering problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I found this recent article about online harassment and moderation much more optimistic: [http://www.wired.com/2014/05/fighting-online- harassment/](http://www.wired.com/2014/05/fighting-online-harassment/) (Primary source: [http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind- Shaping-...](http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-Shaping- Player) ) Even with 67 million users, the developers of League of Legends have apparently reduced misbehavior substantially using fairly simple (although non-obvious) techniques.

</comment><comment><USER37> I wrote a post a while back about how the design of your social tools can help solve this problem:

[https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/c4c4074591ba](https://medium.com/i-m- h-o/c4c4074591ba)

If you look at sites that are based on following users or categories they are able to scale to much larger sizes without breaking down.

</comment><comment><USER38> I think part of the reason it that the communities finish talking about whatever it is they are talking about. When I started reading HN, a lot of the ideas that are common fare were new and interesting. Now, some are borderline cliche.

</comment><comment><USER39> Some other influential writing on this subject:

Clay Shirky: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" [http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...](http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html)

Xianhang Zhang: "The Evaporative Cooling Effect" [http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software- sundays-2-the-...](http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software- sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/)

</comment><comment><USER40> The solution (in so far as there is a solution) is to cultivate a culture. Large communities remain civil through culture.

Last week I wrote a post called "How to Cultivate Culture" that received a good amount of attention (outside of Hacker News) about this: [http://www.sitebuilderreport.com/blog/6-ways-to-cultivate- cu...](http://www.sitebuilderreport.com/blog/6-ways-to-cultivate-culture-on-a- website)

</comment><comment><USER41> I agree with the general premise. However, I also believe there's probably a way to shift the threshold depending on the culture and community.

When I was asked to be a moderator of brand-new (at the time) forums for a very popular Minecraft mod pack, it was being flooded with quite a large volume of people who would not adhere to some basic rules. The rules were quite simple and straightforward, but that didn't stop me and the owners of the site from straight banning large numbers of people.

The pure shock of forcing the "Yes we will see you again, you are not anonymous, and your reputation matters" into the system caused a lot less posting activity to take place on the forums, but the quality of each post was well worth it. A lot of people got banned trying (and failing) to wrap their brains around this concept.

The end result was I actually felt proud of helping shape an online community that was large, effective, and constructive. As it grew, so did the number of other moderators and that "critical point" kept shifting right, so we could have more users and still maintain a quality community. However, this requires a very proactive approach.

</comment><comment><USER42> Great article. That being said, seeing some proposed solutions to this problem would have been nice. One strategy that Reddit employs quite well is the Subreddit system. This creates smaller sub-communities that aren't victims of the 'large' community problem. Of course, overtime a subreddit becomes a default or gets too many subscribers... but it's still a decent solution.

I think it'll be interesting to see how growth affects Hacker News. I'm still very impressed with the quality of the articles and comments (yes, there are some bad ones here and there, but compared to most sites HN is excellent)... I think the downvote threshold for HN has actually been quite successful in encouraging people to post useful comments. It gives a goal for people with low-karma to strive for, thus encouraging them to post better content. I think a more extensive reward system like this has potential for creating a better community.

<comment><USER43> > Of course, overtime a subreddit becomes a default or gets too many > subscribers... but it's still a decent solution.

And then it spawns off one or more new subreddits, based on the desires of the users. I feel that's a pretty good way to handle the situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I agree with the author's thesis but I think other reasons apply to other communities.

Ideally, you would like to ensure the "greatest good for the greatest number" in a community. Consequently, good or happiness in a community is measured according to the preferences of the majority sometimes to the detriment of the minority. That is why, relative to the number of more intellectually engaging posts, you will see more LOLCats and animated gifs on the front page of Reddit. As somebody on here mentioned many people go on the internet for leisure, and intelligent/civilized discourse for them does not fall under that header.

As far as I know, HN was started to foster startups-tech community and I am optimistic because HN's subject matter is specific enough and the community concerned with this subject matter is small enough, for it not to devolve into another Reddit (meaning no offense to Reddit, I still visit there).

<comment><USER45> "* you will see more LOLCats and animated gifs on the front page of Reddit.*"

You'll see less of them these days. Reddit changed its default subreddit system last week and one of the big ones that got the boot was /r/AdviceAnimals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I am not sure if this has ever been done, but what if an online community grew to a certain size and then closed it's doors to new members?

Could that community avoid the pitfalls of what the article is describing?

I could see a place where enrollment closes at a certain point, then reopens once a person leaves or becomes inactive.

I would actually like to see if this would work.

</comment><comment><USER47> >>> These locusts were AOL users. In September of 1993, the company granted Usenet access to their entire user base, which triggered an unending deluge of noobs into the Usenet community.

Amusingly, I joined AOL in September of 1993. It was not long after I graduated and lost my university log-in, along with the e-mail address that came with it.

I chose AOL for a simple reason: I could dial up anywhere in the country and keep the same e-mail address no matter where I lived. AOL also greatly simplified the process of using the Internet. I ran a small business via my AOL address.

Each update to AOL software came via some promotion or other -- an insert in a magazine, or even a pile of AOL disks at the supermarket. At some point it became possible for an AOL user to access the Internet without the AOL software, e.g., by using mainstream e-mail and browser software.

</comment><comment><USER48> > "When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to > interact in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty, > mean, aggressive..."

Wow. I can't say whether this is true or not, but how depressing. Instead of counting on this behaviour, what if we tried to change it? Kindness, respect, and general "give the other person the benefit of the doubt" attitudes could make a huge difference. I just can't get around the idea that not interacting with the same person means you can not care how you treat them... that's crazy.

<comment><USER49> > I just can't get around the idea that not interacting with the same person > means you can not care how you treat them... that's crazy.

Its actually quite rational. It may be immoral -- or at least amoral -- but its not _crazy_.

One of the purposes of collective mutual benefit organizations -- labor unions, the state, etc. -- is to mitigate the effect of this by providing a manner in which a group of people can act and be perceived as an entity with which an actor _will_ have to interact with in the future even when they may not have to do so with the particular individual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> "The development of trust and kindness between two people depends on the probability that they will interact in the future."

Not true. Communities can - and should - use other incentive systems to encourage good behavior. 1) Point systems 2) Public shaming 3) bans / hell bans / abuse flagging / suspensions 4) various combinations

The threat of taking things from people that they've earned, even if it's as silly as 'fake internet points,' can be an extremely powerful enforcer of behavior, given the system is set up properly.

</comment><comment><USER51> "Decay" is a loaded word reflecting the author's bias. All communities change over time as they grow. Their culture then reflects the users. We may not like that community but clearly a lot of people do (after all these are the largest sub reddits we're talking about right?)

This is sort of the "This neighborhood was so great until all the yuppy/hipsters moved in and the art stores were replaced with coffee shops serving $6 lattes" argument.

<comment><USER37> Agreed. Saying that communities decay is the same as saying pop music sucks because it appeals to the masses. Millions of people love that content and who are you to say whether they should enjoy it or not?

We should be building better tools that can adapt and grow with the community.

I wrote about this a couple of years ago, with a possible set of solutions: [https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/c4c4074591ba](https://medium.com/i-m- h-o/c4c4074591ba)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Two online communities that I had to leave because they became really mean and decayed over time was IWETHEY and KURO5HIN.

Even Slashdot decayed and when Dice bought them out it was more about commercial stuff and less about technology and making cool stuff.

Reddit is over-run with trolls on various sub-reddits they started out in /r/atheism as fake atheists trolling people and then spread to other sub- reddits. Mostly 12 year old kids who think it is funny to grief people.

</comment><comment><USER53> Maybe it's just a lot simpler: size and success attracts douchebags and morons. It's not limited to online communities. Cities, sports teams, rock bands, movies, you name it, you see it happen again and again. Success attracts the kind of people who act like a-holes in any context.

And yes, I'm aware of the great irony of posting this rather superficial comment in this thread. But I'm not sure if I'm actually wrong...

</comment><comment><USER54> > I have no real incentive to be polite or to put much effort into anything I > say. Even my reputation will remain intact – who's going to witness it?

> When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to interact > in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty, mean, > aggressive, and to put little effort into their contributions.

If this is true, then HN should put users karma score next to their username when they post.

<comment><USER55> Karma on HN doesn't work. I've been here 500 days, but because I only post from time to time I only have 335 karma and I can't downvote. Since my karma per post is just over 2, that means I've only made ~150 comments in that span, one every three days.

So all the politics posts get upvotes from people who have enough karma to upvote, but not enough downvotes because people like me can't downvote.

In this way you can post a liberally biased article and all the Democrats will upvote it and the Republicans can't downvote it. So you get several hundred upvotes on your submission.

There are enough new members that can't downvote who have the ability to upvote to put any garbage article on the front page as long as it appeals to enough of them to overpower the people who consider the article not to belong on HN.

I could post some political garbage every day and get a huge karma/post score. At least 10 per each link submission which is more than 4x what I'm getting just commenting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I'd say online communities "diverse", not diverge. E.g. [http://i.imgur.com/4sftcoo.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/4sftcoo.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER57> There's a simpler explanation. The average person is not especially bright, funny, or articulate. The larger a community, the more it regresses to the mean.

</comment><comment><USER58> I really like this for not defaulting to the standard, lazy, fallacy-of-self- exclusion explanation of "most people are dumb."

The same effect seems to occur with large social movements. I've noted for many years that once anything becomes a "movement," it becomes shallow, trendy, and dishonest... even if the original seed of the movement had a good point in the beginning. Once it becomes big there is no longer any incentive for people not to abuse the movement as a marketing gimmick or a source of political power.

</comment><comment><USER59> The author hasn't been to reddit in years if he thinks that r/atheism and r/politics are still default subreddits.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is the most valuable article I've read on HN all week. The fact that it's not on the front page is dissapointing. EDIT: It IS on the front page. Hurray!

Personally I feel HN itself is having this very problem with its community right now. It's not only gotten too big but user "Probablyfiction" nailed it on the head. Too many newcomers destroy the existing culture instead of assimilating into it. The more I read about immigration problems in the USA, Europe (mass influx of Arab immigrants), Africa (mass influx of Chinese immigrants), Isreal (influx of African refugees) the more I notice this same assimilation problem exists in real offline communities as well. [New] Growth (too much too fast) can hurt communities by destroying the original characteristics, culture, and qualities that made them successful in the first place. Time and moderation needs to be given to ensure the new follows the rules of the old when applicable.

<comment><USER60> Well, to be fair, people have been concerned about HN getting too big and losing its community for at least two years now, iirc.

<comment><USER61> And ChrisNorstrom's account is about 3 years old, so that fits a stereotype of those with the highest concern over a perceived drop in quality being the newest old-timers.

<comment><USER17> That's because newer members have no memory of how things once were. They have no way of comparing the current quality of the community with the previous quality of the community. Of course its older members who complain about this problem.

<comment><USER61> Heh, the crux of my point was the concept of "the newest older members."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Nice post, Well thats the cycle of life. Everything has an expiry date!

<comment><USER63> It is the same with pop records or bands however the music industry appreciates and understands that nothing is forever. People should apply this thinking to community sites and expect a cycle of life. Instead we have myspaces worth billions to then be worthless and Facebook where they don't see it coming.

Much like pop records or bands there are some things that have a different life cycle. People still by records by that outfit that called themselves 'The Beatles' but there is no 'Beatlemania' any more.</comment></comment>


Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler - <AUTHOR> http://turbopascal.org/ <comment><USER2> This site doesn't describe the internals of Borland's Turbo Pascal compiler. It describes a compiler written in Turbo Pascal that can compile some subset of Turbo Pascal's language.

Borland's Turbo Pascal compiler was written in 16-bit x86 assembly, mostly by Anders Hejlsberg.

There is an explanation of this on the front page of the site, but it's not clear from the headline.

(I used to work at Borland on the Delphi compiler, and had access to the source of tpc.exe.)

<comment><USER3> I have very fond memories of just how blazingly fast Turbo Pascal was at compiling on my Mac. It stunned me every time. I remember spending most of one summer writing a text adventure game with it, based in the Australian Gold Rush. It even had NPCs which was quite advanced for text adventures of the day (I think the only NPCs in adventure games that I had encountered up to that point were those in the Hobbit, and of course the bloody thief in Zork (although he wasn't really an NPC, but was implemented as a bunch of semi- random encounters)...

Good times. In particular, I remember having to implement my own strings, because for a text adventure you often want to have access to strings longer than 255 characters...

Sadly, I never managed to make the jump from writing console applications with TP to writing proper Mac GUI apps. But "Inside Macintosh" cost an absolute fortune at the time (for a 10 year-old kid at any rate), so I ended up scraping enough money together to buy another text book whose name escapes me. I must have read the first few chapters about a million times - they talked about handles and graphics ports etc, but I could never get any code from them to run in TP (I think they were assuming that you would be using MPW?).

Which brings me to the point of this long rambling message - did TP really support graphics programming on the Mac? I know my version of TP was an official bought copy, so we had the manual, but I don't remember ever seeing anything that explained GUI programming in there.

<comment><USER4> Well you also had Apple's Object Pascal as the original OS system programming language, which was the inspiration for the OOP approach Turbo Pascal adopted.

With that one, you could surely do graphics programming on the Mac.

As for Turbo Pascal itself, I wasn't aware it was available on the Mac as well.

<comment><USER5> A more popular alternative to Apple's MPW on the mac was the 3rd party Lightspeed Pascal (later renamed THINK Pascal), which in many ways was quite similar to Turbo Pascal on the PC.

IIRC TP was just a quick port & had a very short life on the mac.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I loved Turbo Pascal.

When I got to learn C, already had Turbo Pascal 3, 4, 5.5 and 6.0 on my toolbox.

Compared with Turbo Pascal, the only thing C had going for it was being available in other systems. Everything else was meh.

No memory safe handling, no bounds checking, no units (modules), no namespacing, no proper strings, no OOP support, arrays decaying into pointers, no type safe enumerations, no sets, no generic array indexes...

At least C++ allowed me to get some of those Turbo Pascal features back.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pascal was off time. A lot of these traits are really worthy, but it wasn't attractive at the time .. was it as 'performant' as C too or was it a very nice environment to craft sound code productively whereas C code could allow you to tap into hardware more aggressively no matter how much headaches that would give you ?

<comment><USER4> Pascal and C compilers produced similar code quality back then.

Everyone praises C compiler quality nowadays. On those home computers, C, Pascal and Modula-2 were good enough for general purpose applications, if one wanted real speed, Assembly was the only way to go.

Turbo Pascal, as well as any other Pascal dialects, had the same capabilities to access hardware as C offered.

Also the MS-DOS game development scene and the demo scene tools were heavily based in Turbo Pascal, besides the usual Assembly stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh right, I remember inline asm in TP now. I smile at how easy this thing was, I didn't even know how many thing happened under the cover, I just typed so glyphs (I didn't know the language) and hit F5 IIRC. Only recently I heard how they designed the compiler to be so fast you didn't see the build step.

<comment><USER6> Thinking you press F5 for compile/run? That's the kind of shibboleth that outs the QuickBASIC heathen!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Turbo Pascal was my first contact with compiled languages in school, after starting off with Commodore Basic as a kid and graduating to Amos and some other Amiga stuff later. TP was my first contact with real PCs, too. After school I moved to Delphi, which was basically a thin wrapper around the Win32 API with Object Pascal syntax and the nicest IDE I had ever used (and probably will ever use).

Delphi really paid my bills as a newbie commercial programmer. That was around the time when the internet took off, and I wrote my first CGI servers in Pascal to make dynamic websites. The Pascal/Delphi language and environment were incredibly versatile and you could write some really fast code with it.

Fond memories. In many ways, TP leveled me up as a programmer.

<comment><USER8> I think a lot of people would have claimed that the Amiga was the more powerful Personal Computer. In many ways, it was more interesting than the Mac or Windows computers. It simply didn't have the software support from Microsoft, for example.

The Amiga did make its own dent in the universe: [http://www.geek.com/games/cgi-first-introduced-to-tv-in- baby...](http://www.geek.com/games/cgi-first-introduced-to-tv-in-babylon-5-by- mit-presentor-771051/)

<comment><USER9> In most alternate universes, the Amiga would never could have been a competitor to the PC or even the Mac.

The secret to the PC's success was not just the clone market, but the open architecture that permitted endless permutations on interexchangable components: motherboards, graphics cards, hard drives, etc. were all pluggable.

Amiga's custom chipset and architecture gave it a huge edge (mostly in multimedia), but the tight coupling made it an evolutionary dead end. Even if they licensed the OS and opened the architecture to clones, the hardware dependency wouldn't have been able to follow suit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was working at a software store during the mid-late 80's (Babbages if anyone knows it) and had a customer come in asking for a small, lightweight editor... You know like "turbo pascal but w/o the compiler part". First time I ever heard of it and, tbh, had no idea what he was talking about. I later used it to do some work for in my CS class (highschool was teaching programming via Pascal). It's a good language to learn after basic and before C/C++.

IIRC correctly, TP used a yellow font (well ascii) on a black background (default)? Didn't it also have some quick key combinations (I recall a ctrl+k for some reason but I'm sure it's just memory...)

<comment><USER11> > Didn't it also have some quick key combinations (I recall a ctrl+k for some > reason but I'm sure it's just memory...)

Exactly. So-called WordStar combinations, which lot of the editors of the time were using. AFAIK, it is still used on some quite popular text editors on Linux (joe?).

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

<comment><USER12> I'm compelled to plug the recently released JOE 4.1 here: [http://sourceforge.net/p/joe- editor/mercurial/ci/default/tre...](http://sourceforge.net/p/joe- editor/mercurial/ci/default/tree/NEWS.md)

"jstar" version of JOE has the WordStar keys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Turbo Pascal was the first language I was taught in school, although I had already taught myself BASIC on a BBC B Microcomputer as a child.

I loved Pascal and wrote a race management program for my local sailing club when I was 16. Fond memories. The whole experience was a voyage of discovery, as I had to write my own "windows" style UI using ASCII codes.

I used Delphi later on in university along with Modular2, and C++. I never felt the same passion for these languages as I had had for Turbo Pascal.

I later moved on to VB and VBscript, and didn't like them at all but they paid the bills.

The next time I felt that same type of passion was for C#. Somehow it just clicked. I think it is about what you can achieve productively with the language, as well as the language itself.

<comment><USER14> You will then be pleased to know that C# development team is led by Anders Hejlsberg, the same Anders mentioned in the article that created what went to become Borland Turbo Pascal. IIRC, he also led the development of Borland Delphi and its language, Object Pascal.

He is really a prolific language designer, one of the unsung heroes of that area.

<comment><USER2> Object Pascal was originally an Apple invention (with help from Wirth), and made some strides towards ISO standardisation. However it used a value-based OO model that made vtables optional until you added the first virtual method, permitted object slicing, had no common ancestor for all classes, had an odd syntax for calling constructors (using extra parameters to New), etc.

Delphi introduced a new object model while retaining the old object model for backward compatibility. The language was renamed to Delphi some time later to reflect this; while Object Pascal in practice meant the language that the Borland compilers compiled, its technical and historical meaning is both broader (more compilers) and more limited (a smaller language with different features).

<comment><USER13> Interestingly I just Googled Borland to see what they do these days: [http://www.borland.com/Products](http://www.borland.com/Products)

Seems like they made quite a major pivot?

<comment><USER15> Yes, quite some time back they split the languages and compilers part out and the rump of Borland became an application lifecycle management company, or something like that.

The bit you're probably looking for is at [http://www.embarcadero.com/](http://www.embarcadero.com/) now. Some of the old people like David Intersimone are still there.

I worked with Delphi for a long time, through versions 3, 5 and 7 (the odd numbers were always better). When .NET came, the whole situation went crazy and never recovered. I can't remember the twists and turns now, but I think they released a .NET only RAD Studio which was awful, then they added the Win32 bits back but Delphi.NET was still awful. Then they dropped .NET and incorporated Remobjects Chrome/Oxygene as Delphi Prism, which was an Object Pascal inspired .NET language. Now they've split again, and Radstudio is all about Firemonkey, a cross-platform UI library. Remobjects are doing their own thing.

<comment><USER16> I've been working with Delphi for the last 18 months; previously Java and .Net many years before that, but Delphi in the distant, distant past.

In my opinion, Delphi needs to just die, and the people/companies that have code bases built on it need to rewrite. There are lots of choices for software development these days, I don't think Delphi stands out for any particular use case in the modern world. But hey, maybe I'm just bitter after RAD Studio crashed on me one too many times...

<comment><USER17> Compared to VC++, it was easier to learn, read, write, make reliable apps, and extend. I could teach anyone a Wirth language. The Go community is learning the benefits of Pascal-style design. People wanting a new Delphi should probably use Go. Just because Delphi stagnated and died off.

Anyone wanting Pascal/Delphi today should use Lazaurus IDE w/ Free Pascal Compiler. Compatible with Delphi where it mattered, aiming for better in other areas, open-source, and cross-platform. Best use case is a C or C++ replacement that's safer, easy to read, and supports computers with little resources. Go's not there yet on runtime side.

<comment><USER18> > People wanting a new Delphi should probably use Go. Just because Delphi > stagnated and died off.

Or, for that matter, Nim, which also has a huge amount of Pascal heritage.

Go is a hybrid of Oberon and C (with semantics leaning more towards Oberon and syntax more towards C, but they're both mixed in), and Nim is Modula-3 semantics married to Python syntax (with the best parts of a bunch of other languages thrown in). Both Oberon and Modula-3 are descended from Modula-2, which in turn is descended from Pascal.

Personally, I'm more in the Nim camp, partially because I prefer Modula-3 to Oberon, partially because I prefer Nim's Pythonesque syntax to Go's C/Oberon mashup syntax, and partially because Nim's metaprogramming features are truly beautiful.

<comment><USER19> > which in turn is descended from Python.

I think you meant Pascal?

<comment><USER18> Yes, I did. I'll edit it.

(...and edited)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > _Anders Hejlsberg developed Blue Label Pascal... This compiler was later > licensed by a software company Borland which added user interface and > editor, changed the name to Turbo Pascal and offered it for a competitive > price._

Nooo... Another account of TP origins was that it was _written_ by Philippe Kahn (the founder of Borland), back when he was just a one-man operation running from a small office on top of a Jaguar car service shop. But apparently it wasn't. Damn.

<comment><USER21> [http://blogs.embarcadero.com/davidi/2008/11/02/38933](http://blogs.embarcadero.com/davidi/2008/11/02/38933)

<comment><USER22> The implementation size breakdown for the 12k compiler was: Compiler - 5.5k, On-Screen editor - 1.5k, Runtime library - 4.5k, and Control program 0.5k.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Fans of Turbo Pascal, or more so Delphi, will be interested in Lazarus. [http://www.lazarus-ide.org/](http://www.lazarus-ide.org/)

<comment><USER24> I took over maintenance of an in-house application written in Delphi/ObjectPascal about 18 months ago (as one of my many tasks - I have spent maybe one or two weeks working on it since), and I thought Lazarus was a neat way of getting me started, having no prior Pascal experience whatsoever. Alas, the IDE crashed on me so frequently both under GNU/Linux and OS X that I gave up within a couple of days. Either it is not very stable or I was mistreating it somehow, although I don't know how.

The documentation was very helpful, though, in getting to know Pascal. Taking over maintenance of an application written in a languange you can read but hardly write (whatever bad things people might be tempted to say about Pascal, cryptic syntax is not among them, I am certain) is a strange process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm triggered by the lack of diversity in that story. I am pretty sure Niklaus Wirth was actually black, but that fact was hidden by white male zealots.

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

<comment><USER27> You must be part of the cover up.</comment></comment></comment>


RSA conference site sends an ajax request per keystroke when entering password - <AUTHOR> https://zyan.scripts.mit.edu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Screenshot-from-2014-01-10-134955.png

<comment><USER2> Probably the strong/weak indicator. Maybe it should be done client side in javascript. It might be possible to narrow the range of likely passwords by analysing the timings of the requests.</comment>


Show HN: HTML to JSON to DOM - <AUTHOR> https://gliechtenstein.github.io/HTML2JSON2DOM/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys I know this post will be one of the most meta things to post here and probably a lot of people will say "what's the point?" but I thought it was cool so thought I would share.

For background, I am working on a JS library called cell.js ([https://www.celljs.org](https://www.celljs.org)), which turns a JSON object into a dynamic web app.

Anyway, this particular app (HTML to JSON to DOM) takes any HTML, parses it into JSON, and feeds it to cell.js, which then turns it back to DOM again. I built it because sometimes I just want to take an existing HTML and transform it to JSON, so I can turn any existing website into cell, and it works pretty well for that purpose.

You can try copy and pasting any website HTML into it to see the effect, as shown at [https://github.com/gliechtenstein/HTML2JSON2DOM](https://github.com/gliechtenstein/HTML2JSON2DOM). Hope you find it cool as well!

<comment><USER2> Pretty cool!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :)</comment></comment></comment>


How The New Mars Rover's Power Supply (Plutonium Dioxide) Works - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=116637781

<comment><USER2> I wonder if it was a good idea to use the blue light "to see what they are doing" as Cherenkov radiation they would see in case of a radioactive leak[1] would also be blue.

If it works at least as well as the one on Voyager it should be good for 40 years!

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident>

</comment><comment><USER3> 110 watts of continuous power.</comment>


Banjo CEO steps down after news of past KKK membership - <AUTHOR> https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/05/08/banjo-ceo-steps-down/ <comment><USER2> The title underplays it. It's more than just membership in a despicable organization. He has actively participated in violent hate crimes. Specifically, he was involved in a drive-by shooting at a synagogue.

This is not the kind of background I would want for an employee (or CEO) of a surveillance company with sensitive and private data about US citizens.

[https://onezero.medium.com/ceo-of-surveillance-firm-banjo- on...](https://onezero.medium.com/ceo-of-surveillance-firm-banjo-once-helped- kkk-leader-shoot-up-synagogue-fdba4ad32829)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here was his response:

> 32 years ago I was a lost, scared, and vulnerable child. I won't go into > detail, but the reasons I left home at such a young age are unfortunately > not unique; I suffered abuse in every form. I did terrible things and said > despicable and hateful things, including to my own Jewish mother, that today > I find indefensibly wrong, and feel extreme remorse for. I have spent most > of my adult lifetime working to make amends for this shameful period in my > life.

> In my teens, I dropped out of school, lived on the streets, ate out of > dumpsters and raised money panhandling. I was desperate and afraid. I was > taken in by skinhead gangs and white supremacist organizations. Over the > course of a few years, I did many things as part of those groups that I am > profoundly ashamed of and sorry about. Eventually, I was able to get myself > away from this world while serving in the United States Navy. This turned my > life around. While serving my country, I worked with law enforcement > agencies in hate group prosecutions and left this world behind.

> Since then, I have tried and failed to completely accept and come to terms > with how I, a child of Jewish heritage, became part of such a hateful, > racist group. One thing I have done, through therapy and outreach, I have > learned to forgive that 15 year old boy who, despite the absence of > ideological hate, was lured into a dark and evil world. For all of those I > have hurt, and that this revelation will hurt, I'm sorry. No apology will > undo what I have done.

> I have worked every day to be a responsible member of society. I've built > companies, employed hundreds and have worked to treat everyone around me > equally. In recent years, I've sought to create technologies that stop human > suffering and save lives without violating privacy. I know that I will never > be able to erase my past but I work hard every day to make up for mistakes. > This is something I will never stop doing.

<comment><USER4> It seems extreme but I think we should give everyone a chance to learn.

He changed his opinions on a range of subjects. If everybody has to step down from a CEO position because of opinions and affiliations they had 30 years ago we will severely limit leadership options to a more narrow group of people than we should.

I think zeitgeist and thereby society is moving quicker than we realize and thereby we shouldn't hold people accountable for every thought they had for an eternity. We should narrow it maybe down to a maximum of decade or so.

The boom of data recording on individual level is otherwise going to hunt people down into infinity.

Especially around the most controversial topics like sexism, racism and other bigotry people will make mistakes and what we are doing today is likely to be seen as immoral by a majority of the people living next century.

In 1901 a woman was sentenced 30 days to jail because she smoked in public in New York City.

In 1958 the government of Belgium decided to invite 500 people out of a colonial of Africa , to put these people on display next to the chimpanzees.

Today both examples from last century would at least end in a career suicide.

<comment><USER5> I don't know, it's more complicated that this. He was a terrorist. Would you give a second chance to a terrorist? It is a bit more complicated than how he wrote it.

Indeed, he was involved in a terrorist attack against a synagogue, as the getaway driver.

<comment><USER6> There are people in entertainment who were in gangs. Nelson Mandela was also a terrorist who got a second chance. This deeply gets into philosophy and I don't really have a good answer.

<comment><USER7> I love this trail of thinking though. Like, what if I told you that there are museums named after a violent domestic abuser? Should we judge Picasso for who he was, for his work, or for both?

<comment><USER6> I think so, the harm comes from judging someone from the past through the lens of the modern day. Maybe there will be a movement to add asterisks to everything? *the painter, not the domestic abuse performance artist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I tell my kids that being a teenager means you lose your brain for awhile, then it comes back. I know I had my share of brain-dead moments as a teenager. This guy appears to be the definition of a reformed person, and I am grateful to have read his story.

<comment><USER9> I'm glad he's reformed, but participating in a racially motivated drive by shooting is not your typical brain dead teenager moment, and this is something that he should have been honest and upfront about, not something that should have been found through investigative journalism. Especially when his job involves surveillance service contracting for the criminal justice system, where racial bias and privacy ethics issues are at the forefront.

<comment><USER10> > I'm glad he's reformed, but participating in a racially motivated drive by > shooting is not your typical brain dead teenager moment

Being made homeless at 15 isn't your typical teenager experience, either. Omitting the fact that he was recruited at a time where he was exceptionally vulnerable is a substantial change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I met and talked to Damien Patton in the last year: he gave a talk at my college. I remember feeling inspired by his perspective on how anomalies of real-time public data could be used to protect and help people at their most vulnerable moments.

</comment><comment><USER12> Anyone else feel sad that terrible choices made as a minor are having such a devastating impact on an otherwise upstanding human being?

<comment><USER9> His company does surveillance tech for the criminal justice system, meaning they handle sensitive data and are involved in areas with high risk of racial bias and important privacy and ethics questions. If I was contracting with him, I'd be concerned about why his criminal history wasnt communicated sooner given how relevant it is to the nature of his business (especially with concerns about racial discrimination in the criminal justice system), and I'd be curious why I only found out about it through a news report. He isn't owed societies trust with something so sensitive, delicate, and important. I'm glad he's reformed as a person from his getaway driver for a racially motivated drive by shooting days, but I don't feel sad at all that government is taking the background history of their contractors very seriously and that he is responding by stepping down to signal to people impacted by the criminal justice system the values of Banjo and to alleviate concerns people will have if their police force is contracting with an ex KKK member.

<comment><USER10> > If I was contracting with him, I'd be concerned about why his criminal > history wasnt communicated sooner given how relevant it is to the nature of > his business (especially with concerns about racial discrimination in the > criminal justice system) and I'd be curious why I only found out about it > through a news report.

Why is this concerning? Do you expect people to post their criminal histories on their LinkedIn? Even if said crimes occurred as a minor and the person has spent their whole adult lives as a law abiding person?

I don't find it curious at all as to why he didn't go around announcing his past criminal connections: because it would hamper his career prospects, and because he doesn't want people to portray the actions he took as a homeless teenager as reflecting his character as an adult. This whole thread demonstrates why not highlighting his past history was a wise decision.

<comment><USER9> Looking at the original article, it looks like he continued associating with skinhead groups in his time in the military[0], and that the reason it didn't come up in background searches is because his name was misspelled.

Yes, I absolutely expect someone entrusted with enormous responsibility in the criminal justice realm to be upfront and open about their past and be held to a far higher, far more stringent standard. And it doesn't help that his company hasn't been the most morally upright company in recent times either[1].

[0][https://onezero.medium.com/ceo-of-surveillance-firm-banjo- on...](https://onezero.medium.com/ceo-of-surveillance-firm-banjo-once-helped- kkk-leader-shoot-up-synagogue-fdba4ad32829)

[1][https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3bgky/banjo-ai-used- secr...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3bgky/banjo-ai-used-secret- company-and-fake-apps-to-scrape-facebook-twitter)

<comment><USER10> Also, he did state that he had been involved in gangs, as per your own source:

> "We all have a personal story," Patton told an audience at the Domopalooza > tech conference in Salt Lake City in March 2019. "It's probably what drives > you every day to do what you do. Drives your family life, your work life. > It's no different from me."

> "I came out of an abusive household," he told the crowd. "When I was a young > kid. And I left. And I was a homeless kid living on the streets, under the > underpass of the freeway in Los Angeles, eating out of the dumpster. Never > finished high school, belonged to street gangs," he said. "Was up to no > good."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> wow I almost took a job here! Never thought id hear about the company all these years later

</comment><comment><USER14> A repentant CEO is gone, but unrepentant gangsters are still celebrities.

Social justice!

<comment><USER15> false dichotomies are really weak arguments

<comment><USER14> It's not a false dichotomy — it's pointing out a differing standard in conduct based on race, which is racism.

It's also pointing out that the fundamental choice in what's acceptable or not is dumb: someone who made a mistake while young and genuinely has tried to build a better life should be welcomed into society, while criminals who continue to promote a criminal and violent lifestyle should not be.

It's also mocking that people who talk about "social justice" are often deeply racist and unforgiving people — which perhaps could be fairly criticized for tone, but is again not a false dichotomy.

<comment><USER16> I think you point out a dichotomy that's interesting, except that I can't find any evidence that people who talk about social justice "often" support violence-inducing criminals and condemn reformed criminals who are white. This sounds like a specter manufactured to make a point about a reality that doesn't match up with the world we (or at least I) live in.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


man bash | col -b | grep -C 3 BUGS # It's too big and too slow. - <AUTHOR> http://linux.die.net/man/1/bash manual page for bash[1] (a popular unix shell) contains 'It's too big and too slow.' listed as bug :)<p>[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_%28Unix_shell%29 <comment><AUTHOR> manual page for bash[1] (a popular unix shell) contains 'It's too big and too slow.' listed as bug :)

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_%28Unix_shell%29></comment>


Electric VTOL Aircraft News - <AUTHOR> https://evtol.news/ <comment><USER2> If you're interested in this, check out this playlist of presentations from the Sustainable Aviation Symposium in 2018:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWUnMAqjJ9CAue9jS0osS...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWUnMAqjJ9CAue9jS0osS5i-QQF8X6Q-l)

Some of them are very deep/technical dives. Hopefully they put their 2019 videos up soon.

Similarly, Uber has dumped an absurd amount of money into this. Regardless of your opinion on uber and its spending habits, they clearly paid for some very smart people to do some very detailed modeling:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmVTG4mAK7ny8vYb5Pc-7...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmVTG4mAK7ny8vYb5Pc-75PR9tGX1zt5u)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're interested in electric VTOL, definitely check out Zuri [https://zuri.com](https://zuri.com) (I'm not affiliated)</comment>


Apple: The App Store is not for discovery - <AUTHOR> http://robbieallen.com/2010/11/apple-the-app-store-is-not-for-discovery/

<comment><USER2> Well, yes. You still have to market your app. Apple won't do that for you. They do give you some keywords that you can use to help searches, though.

And I can't begin to describe how much I loathe seeing page upon page of apps that are largely made from the same boilerplate. Its a waste of space and largely gets in the way of finding something useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course we still have to market our apps, but you completely failed to see my point. But that's ok.

Waste of what space?? It's not like more apps take up a scarce resource. They need a better search interface (or you need better searching skills) if you see a bunch of results that aren't relevant.

Imagine if Google took this approach?

<comment><USER2> Only so many apps are shown per page. You want 345 apps in the App Store. Thats a good 300+ other companies/people right there that are affected by this[1][2]. You seem to have forgotten that people can (and do) view apps by release date.

Are you saying that your business is more important and has the right to demand as much space as it wants, to the detriment of others? Every time you want to submit an update or fix a bug?

1\. Assuming some people have multiple, unique apps in the category.

2\. Ignoring all the folks who are looking for something other than your app.</comment></comment></comment>


Will the United Kingdom Officially Exit the European Union by March 29? - <AUTHOR> https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/4672/Will-the-United-Kingdom-officially-exit-the-European-Union-by-March-29 <comment><USER2> So what's the eli5 on how this works? How does predictit make a profit?

<comment><USER3> There are sites that don't aim to make money. This site seems one of them:

 _"PredictIt is a research project of Victoria University of Wellington. In order to take full advantage of the research opportunities presented by prediction markets like PredictIt, we make our data available to members of the academic community at no cost. PredictIt's market data offers researchers a wealth of information that can be used to further our understanding of a wide array of subjects in fields of study as diverse as microeconomics, political behavior, computer science and game theory. PredictIt is excited to support the work of our researcher partners as they push the boundaries of human knowledge."_</comment></comment>


Sniff Your iPhone's Network Traffic - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2009/06/sniff-your-iphones-network-traffic/

<comment><USER2> Just turn on network sharing over wifi and run a packet sniffer (in osx). then connect to the new network from iphone over wifi.

SystemPreferences->Sharing->InternetSharing

Cocoa Packet Analyzer <http://www.tastycocoabytes.com/cpa/index.php>

<comment><AUTHOR> You could do that but an HTTP proxy like Paros gives you a much nicer view of what is going on because it operates at the application layer instead of the network layer.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you prefer to work for socially conscientious employers? - <AUTHOR> I've had an idea for a while that (for those at the top of their field, and have their pick of the litter so to speak as to who their employer will be) generally speaking salary only does so much for you when looking at the package a potential employer offers.  Would it be a safe assumption that, generally speaking, those at the top of their field not only want to get paid what they're worth (or more), but want the whole package, whether that is a guarantee to work on projects that interest them, or carte blanche in terms of your ability to choose how you spend your time.
Would such folks ever consider taking lower pay to work for what you'd consider to be a "socially conscientious" employer?
The reason for this question is I've wanted to begin compiling data that would make it easier for those at the top of their field to make the more "socially conscientious" decision about who writes their paycheck.  And even in the rare case persuade those at the top of their field to pursue employment with the more "socially conscientious" company.  The analysis (as to who is more worth) of course comes in many forms and would be interpreted in many different ways, so I envision more of a repository where a person would go to get the raw data in an organized / accessible fashion, instead of that data being hidden behind a "5-star rating" for example.
The hypothesis I'm considering here is that empowering people to make the right decisions about who employs them has the potential to (over time) help to ensure that those companies who have the best track records as being socially conscientious could end up being market leaders and not just an after thought within the markets that they serve. <comment><USER2> _Do you prefer to work for socially conscientious employers?_

Sure. But there's always the competing option of "work for a socially ambivalent megacorp which pays more, then donate the delta to your cause of choice." Or more commonly, "I have three kids and medical bills, and am not free to arbitrarily take substantial pay cuts."

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this question would be better phrased as, "How much of a pay or benefits cut would you be willing to take in order to work for a socially conscious employer?"

Studies have been done along these lines measuring consumer willingness to pay for eco-conscious products. Not surprisingly, it's a question of how much the premium is. See [http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/manufacturing/how_much_will...](http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/manufacturing/how_much_will_consumers_pay_to_go_green)

I imagine similar studies have been done on organic food.

Of course many of these studies go off what people say, and really we need to measure in all of these cases what people actually do when confronted with the actual choice.

</comment><comment><USER4> One data point you should look at and look at hard: Companies that pay better have higher employee retention and this leads to both lowered costs for the employer in terms of turnover and an accumulation of internal knowledge/wisdom/experience that is difficult to measure the value of.

I am pretty tired of this idea that do-gooders should get paid less. I did a lot of volunteer work. I had a health site for a time and people either pissed on me and told me it was a worthless piece of shit or they told me it was wonderful but I should give away what I know out of the goodness of my heart. So both people who felt I did not know anything of value and people who felt I did know something of value felt I should not get anything in return for the value offered.

I think that's a broken model. I am well aware that we pay a premium to hit men or for people to ruin their quality of life by working long overtime hours, but if you do it right, creating value should come back to you. Yes, you have to not bleed the market. "Strip-mining" type business models can extract value until it runs out. There are situations -- mining certain minerals -- where, no, no more is being made. But there are also situations where taking too much at one time reduces the long term value (deforestation comes to mind). So being good stewards of the earth's resources can actually improve long term profitability and that should be a big part of socially conscientious businesses.

The other thing is that a lot of things humans value are not directly measurable in the way you seem to be framing things. I had a job where I worked 37.5 hours/week. It was a full time job and it was an evening shift, so they gave a bit of a bonus to make it pay about the same as the day shift. I wanted the evening shift because of my health issues and the slightly less long work week made a big difference for me in my ability to cope.

People who have kids or health issues or are going to school while working or have some hobby that matters a lot to them -- their job needs to accommodate the fact that they have a life, they don't just live to work. The work to live. So how a job is packaged can ultimately matter more than whether or not someone thinks a particular job is morally "good."

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you. At least I think I do, where you are talking about the fact that higher pay equals better retention and thus lower long-term costs to employer.

Although I imagine since this is a sort of proposal or question as to "how do we change the status quo" where those companies with the best track record are in fact the leaders in their respective markets. In that other world I imagine pay would be better at these companies since they would be market leaders.

And I'm not even necessarily saying, though it may not be obvious in the original question, that people should need to chose between "GreenPeace" and "British Petroleum". I'm instead imagining, for example, that someone would be chosing perhaps between "Facebook" and "green Facebook" whatever that other company's name is.

We're still in a demand / supply economy so companies that do the same sort of thing would need to start differentiating themselves not just in how large and powerful they are, but also in how they impact the world in a larger way.

One idea here would be: Suppose a large pharmaceutical companies are trying to patent technologies to protect their businesses, but then a new kind of pharmaceutical company came into existence where they openly worked more for the greater good, not trying to patent things but trying to solve important health related problems and making those solutions open. Because people see the inherent good in what they're doing all of a sudden they are the ones who become the market leader in pharmaceutical companies because everyone wants to be their customers instead of those companies who try to stifle innovation through ridiculous patents and even more ridiculous marketing strategies.

<comment><USER4> Sigh.

I have a serious medical condition. I have spent 13 years getting myself well when doctors said that could not be done. I get a shitshow off of other people when I try to share information about what I did to get well.

I think real health companies include things like GNC and gyms and "green" construction companies. I am aware we will always need medicine (both the field of it and drugs) but the framing of what works is very different in my mind from how you are framing it. It isn't a case of "socially conscious drug testing" versus "blithely torturing animals to get product to market."

I am not trying to discourage you from creating a database to help people make job hunting decisions. I am just saying that this isn't and apples to apples comparison and isn't even necessarily an apples to oranges comparison. What kind of data/metrics you include matters. I am just trying to encourage you to think more broadly about the topic.

Best of luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. I think the problem is a very nuanced one, and probably very difficult to get right. The critical thing, in my mind, is to find the specific "types" of things that matter most to people. Another critical thing will be to find the combination of things that are non-intrusive enough that a company would feel comfortable sharing. There will, in the end, I think be a sweet spot where certain companies will be willing to share or openly oblige themselves to certain rules / restrictions while others won't. And that refusal to discuss those issues, that their competitors are willing to discuss, will of course be noted in that company's profile.

In the end it may not even be a huge gap between different companies in different industries, but the public perception behind a company who openly discusses their willingness to push certain initiatives vs the company who refuses to take a stand or create transparent policy on certain issues will APPEAR to be a huge difference.

Suddenly once you have companies thinking about these things and informing public opinion about their decisions / policies, the needle starts to move and all of a sudden you have a thing that matters and makes a difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You could put the need for social conscientiousness on a scale. Some people might be reluctant to work as a contract killer, but is perfectly happy to work in a cigarette company. Some people might not even consider a cigarette company, no matter the salary. I think if we see social conscientiousness as a continuum, everyone would consider lower pay for a more socially conscientious employer, to some degree.

</comment><comment><USER6> In order of priority, it definitely ranks below salary, benefits, how enjoyable the work is, and where the job is located. If my employer happens to be socially conscientious, that's a nice bonus, but I can't see choosing a job based on it.

</comment><comment><USER7> _" Would such folks ever consider taking lower pay to work for what you'd consider to be a "socially conscientious" employer?"_

c.f. the attraction of working at Wikimedia for far less than you might get at Google or Facebook.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> another important question here too then is how do you currently gauge this kind of thing, and what specific things matter, when choosing who to work for?</comment>


The story of 15 Second Copy for the C-64 (Mike Pall's followup to FCopy) - <AUTHOR> http://www.pagetable.com/?p=656

<comment><USER2> Mike Pall is the LuaJIT guy.</comment>


Ex-Googler had to shut down his London startup after struggling to raise funding - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/sup-shuts-down-rich-pleeth-interview-2016-10 <comment><USER2> > raised £409,000 in July 2015, seed round investors include JamJar > Investments (The Founders of Innocent), The Collective, The Founder of > Treatwell/Wahanda, Force Over Mass Capital, Jim Mellon and Pi Capital.

So they burned through $500k in a year and did not have any traction. Not too surprising they had trouble raising more.

<comment><USER3> It was 1 million USD even. The founder's linkedin page says £650,000 and I used the exchange rate from 2015 because after the Brexit vote the British Pound lost a lot in value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of the "bro" app from SV. How can it take 8 people to build such a thing?

Most of the failures in startups I seem to hear about are hiring too fast, and having no business model. This one seems to check both.</comment>


The Tetuan Valley Manifesto - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tetuanvalley.com/2009/07/tetuan-valley-manifesto.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting manifesto in a place where the entrepreneurial and financing spirit is low and not very developed. Believe this types of manifestos and spirit will bring a change in the long run.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Lets hope so!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: ARM Cavium ThunderX (96 Physical Cores) for Web Application Servers? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
While reading the BlackBlaze Compute Story I came across, Packet's ARM Offering. (https://www.packet.net/bare-metal/servers/compute/)
Their c1.large.arm offers ARM Cavium ThunderX with 96 Physical Cores running at 2.0 Ghz.
Has anybody used such a configuration for Web Application Servers? Possibly something running Go?
Since many web applications need high concurrency and wait on DB queries, I think having these large number of cores might be beneficial.
Any thoughts and inputs on this will be well appreciated. <comment><USER2> Per-thread performance is around 1/4 - 1/3 of a Xeon E5: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/10353/investigating-cavium- th...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/10353/investigating-cavium- thunderx-48-arm-cores/12)

With enough parallelism they outperform Xeons on some tasks, but not on others: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/10353/investigating-cavium- th...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/10353/investigating-cavium- thunderx-48-arm-cores/13)

You'd have to benchmark for your particular application, which is only worth doing if you'd be buying 10s of servers.</comment>


An analytic approach to the  Collatz 3n + 1 Problem - <AUTHOR> http://preprint.math.uni-hamburg.de/public/papers/hbam/hbam2011-09.pdf

<comment><USER2> Inevitable:

<http://xkcd.com/710/>

</comment><comment><USER3> It's interesting to see my own approaches to this problem mirrored in this analysis. I am not skilled enough to say how accurate this is, but it's very interesting nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER4> That is very impressive. [little tough to read though] Thank you.</comment>


Detailed Cross-section of the Kowloon Walled City - <AUTHOR> http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2014/10/28/detailed-cross-section-of-the-kowloon-walled-city-created-by-japanese-researchers/

<comment><USER2> Some great pictures of the place before its demolition can be found on this article:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2139914/A-rare- insig...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2139914/A-rare-insight- Kowloon-Walled-City.html)

What an interesting place it used to be. Basically a 1898 agreement between Britain and China created a legal limbo for a military base. Over time the military base became a refuge for squatters. After Japan's surrender in WWII the area grew into a dystopian-like lawless city that was ruled by criminal gangs until police raids from 1970's to 1980's cleaned it up. From 1987 to 1992 everyone was evicted and in 1993 it was demolished.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bunch of photos from the late 80s: [http://www.mascontext.com/issues/19-trace- fall-13/kowloon-wa...](http://www.mascontext.com/issues/19-trace- fall-13/kowloon-walled-city-heterotopia-in-a-space-of-disappearance/)

<comment><USER4> That article merits its own submission, it was a very interesting read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If anyone is interested in working on a "walled city" mod to the game "Banished" [http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/2014-08-26-mod-kit- beta/](http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/2014-08-26-mod-kit-beta/) please contact me.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you were ever looking for a coffee table book that may ensnare a guest's attention if they choose to pick it up and 'glance' through it, City of Darkness is one of the best. Unfortunately, it is now a collector's item now (hundreds of dollars)

[http://www.amazon.com/City-Darkness-Life-Kowloon- Walled/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/City-Darkness-Life-Kowloon- Walled/dp/1873200137)

Note: There is a 2nd edition coming out soon (via Kickstarter)

</comment><comment><USER7> Cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.spoon- tamago.com%2F2014%2F10%2F28%2Fdetailed-cross-section-of-the-kowloon-walled- city-created-by-japanese-researchers%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.spoon- tamago.com%2F2014%2F10%2F28%2Fdetailed-cross-section-of-the-kowloon-walled- city-created-by-japanese-researchers)

</comment><comment><USER8> The site is now a park, and there are some sculptures of the old city, and a version of the art linked at Spoon/Tamago.

See my pics! [http://imgur.com/a/NO9xB](http://imgur.com/a/NO9xB)

</comment><comment><USER9> Also see this thread about the KWC from several months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7647607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7647607)

</comment><comment><USER10> Awesome documentary on Kowloon. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lby9P3ms11w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lby9P3ms11w)

</comment><comment><USER11> regular posting of something KWC related. This one a blog post rehashing content from 2010. Everyone loves it/fascinated by it

</comment><comment><USER12> [http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2014/10/28/detailed-cross- sectio...](http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2014/10/28/detailed-cross-section-of- the-kowloon-walled-city-created-by-japanese-researchers/) seems to be the actual source, citylab seems just to be an aggregator.

<comment><USER13> Thanks. Url changed to this from [http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/11/rare- maps-show-life-in...](http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/11/rare-maps-show- life-in-hong-kongs-vice-filled-walled-city/382415/).</comment></comment>