Startup Legal Setup Guide - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@howietl/the-startup-legal-setup-guide-439b63bf68e8#.wlo6x4wpp <comment><USER2> This seems like it's more intended to promote Airtable than actually provide information. I've never heard of Airtable but it doesn't seem to be a good format for long blocks of text.

<comment><USER3> Speaking of which, a spreadsheet widget is the worst possible delivery format for the long-form text in this article.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can expand the long text cells by clicking the expansion arrows that appear in the top right corner of the cell. I would also highly recommend using the full-screen version rather than embed (by clicking "View Larger Version"): [https://airtable.com/shrOQ3Gf4Hs3Gvvvc](https://airtable.com/shrOQ3Gf4Hs3Gvvvc)

I would also add that, while I'm certainly biased, there is benefit to making this a "cloneable" database that you can then use as a personal checklist, add notes, further attachments, etc which you wouldn't be able to do with a simple blog post, for instance.

<comment><USER2> Now I'm kinda curious, especially since you emphasize the cloneable part: what makes this better than a Google Sheet?

<comment><AUTHOR> For starters, 1) File attachments 2) Better mobile UI (Airtable's database records can be displayed as cards on touch devices, whereas a traditional spreadsheet is always a 2d grid). 3) Interactive fields like checkboxes, dropdowns, etc. 4) Ability to expand records into a form detail view for better readability of long text, etc.

<comment><USER2> Sheets does have #3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> (IAAL.) While the author is very likely coming from the right place, I find this kind of "legal" advice totally useless——hence the fact that half of this "article" is a disclaimer that you shouldn't bother relying on it. If I were one of the lawyers whose name is attached to this advertorial, I would hasten to get my name removed from it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here, for the sake of constructive criticism, would love to hear why you don't find it useful?

The disclaimer is there because, while I tried my best to make sure all info in the guide is accurate, I don't think it's fair or necessary for me to take on legal liability if someone makes (or claims to make) a mistake by using this (free) guide. I certainly hope readers do not interpret this guide as a definitive and comprehensive substitute for proper legal counsel and research of their own--rather, it contains information which is designed to act as a supplement to those things.

In other words, it will hopefully help folks avoid false negatives in legal steps (i.e. forgot to file an 83b within 30 days or register with their city's business department), expose them to lesser-known alternatives that their own lawyers may not have told them about (using FF preferred stock to provide a small measure of founder liquidity down the road without skewing 409A valuations), and understand _why_ it's necessary to do certain things (like adopt bylaws, file a Form D, etc).

The scope of the guide is strongly biased towards U.S. startups incorporating as a Delaware corp (a common approach, even for companies not based in Delaware itself).

<comment><USER3> Why don't I find it useful? "Find legal counsel" and "Comply with State- Specific Regulations" are actual line items on your checklist. Your checklist can be reduced to one line item: hire someone who knows what they're doing.

It wouldn't bother me if you were simply sharing your experience in setting up a company, but this article is presented as advice wrapped in a thinly-veiled promotion of your product (and some lawyers/law firms).

<comment><USER4> Agreed with rpgmaker. My experience with the law (IANAL) is that it's sometimes just easier to pull up the books, read the relevant portions yourself, then confirm it with your lawyer for some quick answers. This is what I was doing before having a lawyer and it worked just fine, but having a validation source saved me many, many hours. Simply a hiring a lawyer and somewhat blindly trusting them sounds like poor advice in itself. That said, in an attempt at CYA, please please please just use a damn lawyer.

<comment><USER3> I said: "hire someone who knows what they're doing". I didn't say "blindly trust someone who holds themselves out as an expert and don't do any homework yourself". In fact, you said you hired an expert to validate your findings, which is exactly consistent with my advice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ok, this thing is just Marketing to push Airtable. Once you liked the provided info you click on "Copy Base" and voila, Airtable gets a new user.

But I do think that Airtable looks nice. And I appreciate any new approaches to spreadsheets. This space lacks a bit of innovation and the advice seems to be not that bad.

Upvoted.

</comment><comment><USER6> Some day I'm going to write about the boring backoffice mechanics for folks who are doing business on the Internet but do not expect to ride the startup trajectory.

In the meanwhile: LLC incorporation. You'll almost certainly pick an LLC as a solo founder because the costs are lower, the protections are roughly equivalent, and the pass-through nature of the business makes your tax planning easier. You'll make your LLC in your choice of Wyoming or Nevada. Wyoming is institutionally more privacy conscious than Nevada is, which may matter to some of you. ("Do you want your home address trivially available on the Internet?" is a question which gives some entrepreneurs pause. Not wanting that is a totally legitimate reason to incorporate in Wyoming.) Nevada is fairly cheap, has no state income tax and no prospect of attempting to retroactively impose one later on your income, and has a fairly nice portal where you can do the one thing a year they'll require you to do. (Robosign your "annual list" and then pay a few hundred bucks for the privilege of limited liability for another year.)

You do not need to have any connection to the state you incorporate in whatsoever. Full faith and credit clause of the US constitution for the win: all states can create legal entities for anyone which all other states must treat like their own legal entities and, accordingly, states compete with each other to get corporate formations (as a source of revenue and for knock-on economic purposes). Delaware has planted the flag in "We are a very predictable jurisdiction for litigating complex court matters if it comes to that; we're going to charge you for this." Wyoming picked privacy/"low fees low services." Nevada picked "We're cheap and reliably funded by sin taxes."

You will pay taxes anywhere your business has an economic nexus. For almost all of you, this will be "where you do the work that earns the money." Importantly, this is _not not not not not_ where your customers are, where the people paying you money are, where the money actually changes hands, where your corporation is registered, or where your bank account is. If you sell $10,000 of software on the US App Store from a Nevada LLC with a bank account in London but you physically coded the app in Croatia, your sole economic nexus is Croatia. (Run this by an accountant or lawyer if you doubt me, but if they doubt me, I'll offer them 100:1 odds that I'm right.)

Not too much changes about your life after incorporating. You'll want to get a business checking account in the name of the LLC, primarily to start segregating funds for bookkeeping purposes and secondarily for maintaining the corporate veil. You'll register for accounts/leases/etc in the name of the LLC rather than in your personal capacity. You will almost invariably be asked for a personal guarantee for any debt/lease/etc until your business has millions in revenue -- this sucks, but you'll do it. You should get a credit card (doesn't have to be a "business" card) which you use exclusively for business purposes, because this assists in you doing your most important bit of tax planning, which is keeping very, very accurate books regarding business expenses.

You will almost certainly be amazed at the variety of expenses which are legitimate business expenses. There are fairly few bright lines, and navigating the gray area is one of the reasons you will hire an accountant. They will, almost certainly, categorize thousands of dollars of things you thought were personal as business expenses; this is one of their primary functions when working for small businesses. (Examples: 100% of your WSJ subscription; 40~60% of your Internet fees; 100% of your coworking space rent; some percentage of depreciation on your laptop; etc etc.)

In the US, you'll typically file a Schedule C attached to your 1040, showing the revenue of the business, expenses, and net profits. You'll pay taxes on the net profits, and also pay self-employment taxes on them (Schedule SE). Your accountant will identify a variety of tax-saving strategies for you; the most important (after "keep good books!") for most small businesses on HN will be "establish and generously fund a retirement account."

<comment><USER7> > You will pay taxes anywhere your business has an economic nexus. For almost > all of you, this will be "where you do the work that earns the money." > Importantly, this is not not not not not where your customers are [...]

This seems to be a common belief among entrepreneurs, but all the evidence I have found (and my accountant) point to it not being true, at least not in all states. For example, here is a page from California's FTB web site:

[https://www.ftb.ca.gov/businesses/Sales_Factor.shtml](https://www.ftb.ca.gov/businesses/Sales_Factor.shtml)

> Jill, a nonresident of California, owns a web design business that she holds > as a sole proprietorship. She works from her home out of state but has > customers in various states including California. For the 2013 taxable year, > Jill's sales receipts from California customers are $300,000 out of the > total sales receipts everywhere of $1,000,000. Does Jill have a filing > requirement in California?

> Yes, nonresident individuals are taxed on all California source income. > Jill's sole proprietorship is carrying on a business in and out of > California and will be required to apportion its income to California using > UDITPA rules. Under market assignment, sales of services are assigned to > California if the purchaser of the service received the benefit of the > service in California. Accordingly, $300,000 will be assigned to the > California sales factor numerator for Jill's sole proprietorship and Jill > would apportion 30% ($300,000 CA sales/$1,000,000 total sales) of its > business income from her sole proprietorship to California.

I would love it if you had some evidence you could share that the popular view (you only pay taxes where you do the work) is correct so that I could stop paying taxes in California :)

<comment><USER8> If you're registered in Nevada or Wyoming, does UDITPA apply? Those states haven't enacted the rule.

[http://www.uniformlaws.org/Act.aspx?title=Division%20of%20In...](http://www.uniformlaws.org/Act.aspx?title=Division%20of%20Income%20for%20Tax%20Purposes)

<comment><USER7> I am not any kind of lawyer, but my understanding is that each state follows its own rules and does not defer to the rules of any other state just because you live, work, or registered your business there. So for the states that follow UDITPA, they will apportion income to themselves, and assess the resulting taxes, according to UDIPTA rules regardless of what other rules your business might be subject to in other states.

But, again, I am far from an authority on this topic, so don't take my word for it, and if you find out a way to find out for sure please let me know :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great post!</comment>


Doomed: There's No Way Out of the Debt Crisis for Italy - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonconstable/2019/06/20/doomed-how-theres-no-way-out-of-the-debt-crisis-for-italy/ <comment><USER2> Politicians sure must have (had) other objectives for the country they have been elected to be responsible for. Same for the EU politicians who have not intervened yet.</comment>


Extending Visual Studio - <AUTHOR>

Visual Studio provides very powerful capabilities for us to extend its functional using various technologies and approaches. You can both automate routine actions using simplest macros and carry out a deep integration of any third-party or your own user components. In fact, while extending Visual Studio, you are limited only by your own imagination, so you can realize such eccentric solutions as integration of your favorite Instant Messenger client into the project window, or even an "achievements for developers" http://bit.ly/xwaQxN  system like in videogames! After all, any serious developer must know and be able to adjust the development environment to his/her own needs, as well as be able to handle its possible "glitches".
At the same time, creating extensions is nowadays simple and transparent as never before, regardless of your previous experience of working with Visual Studio! You can both integrate a native library module that will be able to directly handle the low-level COM interfaces of the API environment, and a managed build that will have an access to almost all of these APIs through convenient managed wraps. While the native unit will surely provide the developer with the absolute control over the situation, using managed builds for extensions will help you get rid of a very complicated process of calculating the number of COM-objects instances and direct memory handling, allowing you to focus on implementing the functionality you need with all the power .NET Framework and Common Language Runtime can provide.
If you've got interested in the subject of extending Visual Studio, you can try it right now - http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0165/ . This guide will allow you to create a completely functional managed extension module for all the Visual Studio versions literally within NN minutes and start using your functional at once. <comment><USER2> I can't downvote yet so SAGE.

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this spam?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is useful information, which is not known by programmers.</comment></comment>


URL Zombies – a zombie survival game in the URL bar - <AUTHOR> https://url-zombies.glitch.me/ <comment><USER2> Nice, what a neat idea. The Back button history is pretty fun to look at too :)</comment>


The Noncompete Ruling Won't Change Anything, Anywhere - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/10/the-noncompete-ruling-wont-change-anything-anywhere/ <comment><USER2> It's a stupid idea in the first place to even try to enforce this. If your company can't even compete with its competitors, or you're losing your employees to them, you probably don't deserve to be in business (or will be out of business very soon). Keeps the co-founders on their toes and creates an incentive to not slack off and settle.</comment>


Nicholas Felton Recorded His Personal Data for 10 Years - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/10/nicholas-felton-obsessively-recorded-his-private-data-for-10-years/ <comment><USER2> Upvoted. I always used to love checking out his Feltron Annual Reports.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can never get enough of my Felton reports. Keep em up!</comment>


Little Known Hacker News Is My First Read Every Morning - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-is-my-first-read-every-morning/

<comment><USER2> New to Hacker News? <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

<comment><USER3> Fantastic and concise. Out of curiosity, is there a link to that anywhere on the News.YC website? Perhaps I'm blind, but I don't see one anywhere. I looked for a page like that when I joined and, after not finding one, just jumped into the fray.

It's a great resource for newbies like myself. Perhaps it deserves more prominent billing?

<comment><USER4> It's in the footer on the list pages under "guidelines". footers don't appear for comment pages, for some reason. It's even more important that they're there in comment pages, I imagine.

<comment><USER3> Ah, so it is. Thanks! (I'm fairly option-blind. If what I'm looking for isn't pretty obvious on a webpage, I usually never find it.)

And adding the Guidelines link to the comments page in some way might well be a helpful addition. At least there IS a link to it, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We're screwed now... techcrunch isn't exactly known for its overly insightful comments.

Welcome digg-like users!

<comment><USER6> The arrival of less insightful people is inevitable. The goal should be presenting the site such that they matter less or don't bother coming.

<comment><USER5> Well put. It'll be interesting to see how pg and team handle something that every other site has failed miserably with.

I've got high hopes.

<comment><USER7> Not every site. The Ars Technica forums have maintained a surprisingly high level of quality discussion over the years. Ars uses human moderators who read every post and enforce the rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I concur. I'm a top-10 reddit poster and Hacker News is my first site of the day now. Keep up the good work and don't be afraid to ban the idiots. Now if only somebody would set up a "Political News" site using the same code base...

<comment><USER9> Anyone can. pg included the sourcecode to news.ycombinator in his latest release of Arc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> With as much as we complain about how much noobs will change the site, why did he go off and do a stupid thing like put this on the front page of TC?

<comment><USER11> Who is "he?" Arrington runs TC. PG doesn't put anything on the frontpage of TC.

<comment><USER10> "He" would be Michael Arrington, the person who put it on the front page of TC. If he's an actual community member here, then he should have realized that was a stupid thing to do, for the sake of the news and comment quality on Hacker News, and not to have done it.

<comment><USER12> Do you think Arrington values the community here more than the community reading TC, his own community? Adding value for his readers should be his first priority.

<comment><USER10> What value is he adding for his users?

First off, he's referring them to a site that competes with his own, which very well may cause some users to switch over. That isn't too far of a stretch for my imagination, seeing as N.YC has much higher comment quality and community cohesion.

Second, if the TC users came here and destroyed the signal to noise ratio we currently enjoy, he would have done them a disservice by recommending a web site that was so quickly destroyed after they all discovered it. Of course, few of them would likely realize that they, themselves, were the cause of the downturn.

Clearly neither of those seem like they're going to happen, based on the referral numbers that Paul posted so far, but it was a more feasible option when I made my earlier post.

<comment><USER12> Even if the community here is "diluted" with TC members, it is a net positive effect for techcrunchers to get smarter people to talk with.

<comment><USER10> Of course, that's only up to the point that the "smarter people" stop tolerating the dilution and leave, thus leaving the TC members in the exact same position as before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> you guys, relax. pg has been thinking long and hard about the newbie influx problem for many months now. he saw what happened to reddit, and he's applying his usual sensible approach to preventing that from happening here.

if anybody can do this, pg can.

<comment><USER14> why do you figure pg is amazingly good at this? he already banned me and rms from voting. that doesn't seem to suggest great leadership skills.

<comment><USER15> That doesn't seem to suggest anything at all, period.

<comment><USER14> Why do you say that? I think failing to get along peacefully with leaderboard users is a bad sign.

<comment><USER16> All users are held to the same standards, whether they're on the leaderboard or not.

Eventually the other users will get tired of you filling up the comment threads with your private beefs, and you'll stop.

<comment><USER14> It's not a matter of different standards, it's a matter of: if you can't lead active yc users, why would you be able to lead an influx of new reddit (or techcrunch or whatever) users?

rms for example is apologetic and offered to do what you wanted. a new user from reddit probably wouldn't do that. but despite this, you still lead in a way that alienates rms.

in my case, i haven't apologized or offered to change my behavior because you never notified me of doing something wrong or asked me to change any behavior. that's bad leadership too. if you want me to follow some rules you have to tell me.

<comment><USER17> Dude. The place for this discussion is not here. If you have a beef with PG, use email. Nothing personal, but it doesn't make for great reading.

<comment><USER14> I don't think he'd enjoy that email, so I haven't sent it. He chose not to contact me about this, presumably for a reason.

This, on the other hand, is a public thread where it's relevant to the topic in the parent comments. I haven't asked pg to read this thread, so it's not my problem if he chooses to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not ready to pull a chicken little. I came over here from reddit after seeing pg's post on trolls on the reddit front page. Some of the earliest comments and/or posts I saw were of the "oh man, we're screwed now" type. Obviously I can't speak from experience, but I have a hard time believing the reddit crowd did HN a disservice. HN is just too darn... smart for the majority of people. On the rare occasion when some stupid POS makes it to the front page, the comment section more than makes up for it.

The community is too good to suffer fools gladly. And fools get bored easily.

</comment><comment><USER19> So the obvious question is... how many sock puppet accounts does Arrington already have here? He admitted to 5 at digg, I think. Sometimes I come here first thing in the morning and it's 75% techcrunch.

</comment><comment><USER20> > Why? Because it's focused mostly on startup and hacking news, which is what > we cover. It's one of the best places to find information on startups we > haven't heard about yet. And, better, the community is jerk-free. Comments > are mostly helpful, thoughtful and interesting.

Hopefully the TC coverage doesn't change this ...

<comment><USER21> Hacker News is the Schrodinger blog. Techcrunch can't observe it without changing its state.

<comment><USER22> _ahem_ i think you mean Heisenberg's blog - Shcrodinger's blog would be all blogs at the same time until you actually tried to read it - then the blog wave function (a blavtion if you will) would collapse thus revealing the true observed blog. which will almost certainly be a LOL cat. it may be alive or dead - it's mileage has varied.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Oh crap, here comes eternal sept.

</comment><comment><USER24> HN is one of the very best sites on the web. In fact, it's probably one of the best sites the web has ever had, at least for the tech/startup group. I have confidence that the right people will find it and the others will be bored and go away. It's actually kind of boring for flame wars. But great for news and ideas.

</comment><comment><USER25> Hacker News is one of my favorite sites - i love it for the quality of the content. Hope it doesn't go down because of the attention that it's getting now.

</comment><comment><USER26> On one hand, I'm glad that arrington validated something I've believed for a long time: news.yc is the best social news/network/app for people who are into startups.

On the other hand, I do not want to see this place get overrun by ron paul supporters and facebook fanboys. Where will all the cool people post news to then? Maybe swen.yc?

</comment><comment><USER27> Does HN have an issue with scalability? The site is tremendously slow from the new influx.

How would you go about scaling an Arc app?

</comment><comment><USER28> "Little known?" Or is he getting confused and _really_ mean, "Different target audience?"

</comment><comment><USER29> Hopefully we'll get to see the traffic spike chart from all this Techcrunch traffic (PG? :D)

</comment><comment><USER30> hey man TC isn't that bad. You have to muddle through a lot of comments from what seem to be the same trolls, but once in a while you find a gem of a comment.

too bad there isn't a browser that can filter out comments from select people ... TC would then be much more insightful

</comment><comment><USER31> Gee, I registered only yesterday. I'm glad I made it before it became mainstream!

</comment><comment><USER32> ok, the word is out.

SHHHHHHH...

</comment><comment><USER33> oh well at least scoble didn't get a whiteboard out to explain how it works :p

<comment><USER33> lol, no sense of humour I guess

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Get ready for some LOL cats.

<comment><USER35> Let's ban everyone with < 10k karma!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> and news.yc jumps the shark....

</comment><comment><USER37> So does this mean that Hacker News will soon be acquired by Google?

</comment><comment><USER38> Hacker News gets Techcrunch'd and Arc falls to it's knees. Start your "Arc can't scale as well as X" rants here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133489>

</comment><comment><USER39> I find it amusing people are 'upset' that HN got techcrunch'd with the story being posted on TechCrunch. You should be ecstatic the TechCrunch editor frequents this site so often as you would most likely sell your first born to get featured on TechCrunch.</comment>


Hacking into the Federal Reserve - <AUTHOR> https://asciinema.org/a/2fulxh2to46q8rn4blpzr33j6 <comment><USER2> Why do you link to this third-party site that provides nothing more than a single link? Why not linking to the project directly?

[https://github.com/bartobri/no-more-secrets](https://github.com/bartobri/no- more-secrets)

Apart from that, the old entry has already been submitted some time ago, this is the previous discussion on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11643270](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11643270)</comment>


RICON2012 Talks Announced; Brewer, Hellerstein, Flake To Keynote - <AUTHOR> http://basho.com/blog/technical/2012/08/23/ricon-talks-announced/

<comment><USER2> I really hope I can go to this! Yay for Basho, very exciting company.</comment>


Buoy hopes to fight fake online health news with an artificially intelligent app - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/08/buoy-aims-to-fight-fake-online-health-news-with-an-artificially-intelligent-app/ <comment><USER2> Congrats, Buoy, on a great app. This is a wonderful life saving tool that will bring happiness to a lot of people.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great app! So much better than being told you have cancer in the middle of the night. Buoy for me!</comment>


Zuckerberg's Second Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/11/zuckerbergs_sec.php

<comment><USER2> Though I must admit I HAVE NOT being inside zuckerburgs anus day in and day out so I can't judge the guy; I must say that from outside looking in, we have to respect what he's done.

Sure its easy to criticize but its a very simple fact that he had the vision/balls to make pretty bold moves and have them pay off.

How many of you guys can honestly say you could run that big of a company as CEO mind you. Not just some tech guy, some programmer but as C.E.O. AND programmer I have to respect him for that. He has made pretty swift and successful business moves which can't be said for a lot of startups.

Who would turn down 1 billion dollars, only to be valued at 10 times that later? Did we all forget about the success of the facebook api?

It is ironic that I am defending the guy, because I never went to college, so when fb was happening and all my peers were using it - I couldn't .And I do remember the douch-ness of his "a mark zuckerburg production" copyright details coupled with a logo that had HIM IN IT - but that is besides the point.

<comment><USER3> Value != REAL money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For the 'law' to be stated equivalently to Moore's law it should state: 1) the rate at which consumers will be able to organize their information, for a given cost, will double every year, or 2) the rate at which facebook will be able to evaluate a quantity of information, at a given cost, will double every year.

The percentage of information consumers choose to share is more of a question of market adoption.

</comment><comment><USER5> Personally, I think the "Zuckerberg Curve" was Zuckerberg's First Law. That guy makes a lot of laws.

<http://www.killnine.com/comics/25.php>

</comment><comment><USER6> At least in P2P networks, sharing is going down.

<http://www.evidenzia.de/eng_stats_all_releases_line.html>

</comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like a 24 year old to me.

<comment><USER8> As a 25-year-old, I'm insulted by this comment.

<comment><USER7> I am 23

<comment><USER9> Be like Mike.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Shall no fart pass without a tweet?_

If you have Zuckerberg luck (henceforth known as "Zuckluck")-- the kind of +5 sigma noise that can only befall mediocre talent-- you can sell a rightly- placed fart for billions of dollars.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure why I understand the hate on this guy. He put one foot in front of the other and made something for himself. Who doesn't want that...?

<comment><USER8> This is the best explanation I can come up with: Due to the nature of the market, there had to be one winner in that particular social networking space, and it turned out to be a completely mediocre choice. Facebook had superior competitors who lost because they didn't start at Harvard, and for literally no other reason.

Zuckerberg, to our generation, is emblematic of the successful mediocrity (not a contradiction)-- often the annoying, arrogant suckup who gets into good schools by doing a hundred extracurriculars not very well, the one who gets ahead by exploiting the system. This ties in well to the fact that the absolute only reason any of us have heard of Facebook (originally thefacebook... :vomit:) is that it started at Harvard and was able to use prestige at each level of market growth (first Harvard, then the Ivy League, then the top ~150 colleges...) to progress to the next. It makes him a symbol of the Elite College Mediocrity (ECM), an archetype that all of us hate. Those of us who went to top colleges will never forgive the ECMs for the damage they did to our college experience. Those who didn't go to top colleges despise ECMs because the ECMs have more competitive resumes and stronger rolodexes for no good reason.

Zuckerberg's not an ECM at all, actually, since he's quite bright compared to the average person and even the average student at Harvard. He is, however, an utter incompetent compared to level of success and prominence to which he has been lifted by the sheer dumb force of +5 sigma luck.

He also gave a talk at Startup School 2007 that was absolutely terrible. In fact, it was so awful as to raise suspicions of sabotage.

<comment><USER11> Zuckerberg may be less capable than his success indicates, but I am sure we are all capable of better things than sitting behind a screen and hurling mud at the successful. Envy is an ugly thing.

By the way, did you hear Steve Jobs is arrogant? The nerve of the guy, after building the second most successful consumer computer company of all time.

<comment><USER8> You should not compare Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg. Steve Jobs has vision, at least, and it's that vision that has brought AAPL back from limbo. Mark Zuckerberg just took someone else's vision and ran with it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Finding a Horseshoe on the Beaches of Rio – On Chaos Theory (1998) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www6.cityu.edu.hk/ma/doc/people/smales/pap107.pdf <comment><USER2> Error in the second sentence: The name is James Gleick, not "James Gleich".

</comment><comment><USER3> Are figure 4 vertex labels wrong?</comment>


I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count - <AUTHOR> I know 1500 people have said this before, but today I guess I'm the one who hit the boiling point.
The value of HN, from the perspective of simply learning, has been destroyed for me since upvotes were hidden.
When I first started reading HN I learned a TON very quickly and everyday about completely new stuff, and was able to do so because I could easily sort through the legitimacy of opinions based on their upvotes.  Yes, the upvote system wasn't perfect, but it's a piece of information I can take with a grain of salt.  Especially as an engineer who knows little about business, it was extremely helpful to get a community perspective on the startup stuff.
Now, unless I know a lot about the subject (in which case I get limited value from the community), this is just a forum with no easy way for readers to differentiate the noise except for: a) the location on the page, which is useless when comparing a parent to a child reply, and b) the overall confidence and aggressiveness of the poster, which is the exact thing we are trying to avoid judging legitimacy on.
I feel like I just come back here everyday because of inertia and habit.  That wont last much longer because I don't feel like I learn anything here: it's just watching people argue now.
I expect massive downvoting but hopefully I'm not the only one... <comment><USER3> You need to ween yourself off your social proof addiction. The problem with vote counts is that two downvotes can start a cascade of reflex downvotes. Or at best, it won't get upvoted. When vote counts where active, this effect caused many instances where an excellent comment was found greyed out at the bottom of the page until a few smart HN folks with high karma voted it back up.

<comment><USER4> Idea: a [view count] link. Once clicked, votes are ignored for that comment. You can vote, or get the social proof, but not both.

<comment><USER3> That's quite brilliant. How about up, down and abstain buttons and if you click any you get to see the vote count and you're done voting. It will encourage voting, remove the social proof influence and give the option to abstain.

<comment><USER5> How does that option help the main poster? Forcing him to vote on comments (even as abstention) is just meaningless mechanism that gets in the way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've noticed the same thing. I'll see a debate which is basically a thread of two people replying to each other with no other contributors. In this circumstance, it's impossible to distinguish between a situation where one person gets 10 upvotes and holds a well-agreed opinion and the other person gets 1 or 2 upvotes and is arguing his opinion just well enough to avoid being downvoted.

I understand that we're supposed to form our own opinions as to who we agree with, but sometimes its just not reasonable to take the time to do enough research. Sometimes, you want to learn from someone that actually knows what they're talking about.

Without some sort of vote indicator, it's hard to tell who has the most accurate opinion, except often in subjects like law, security, and seo where there are known experts that often chime in (e.g. grellas, tptacek, patio11).

I'd suggest that a form of "fuzzy vote counts" be implemented. Something to indicate either a relative score ("this comment is substantially higher voted than its parent") or just an approximate value ("unvoted", "few votes", "many votes") without a specific score.

<comment><USER7> _Without some sort of vote indicator, it's hard to tell who has the most accurate opinion, except often in subjects like law, security, and seo where there are known experts that often chime in (e.g. grellas, tptacek, patio11)._

You assume that votes are a good indicator of who holds the most accurate opinion. My experience says that they are merely an indicator of who holds the most _popular_ opinion, or who argues their point in the most convincing fashion. The latter is a particularly insidious case, since accurate information does not always go hand in hand with good debating skills.

<comment><USER8> I would agree with you. Most topics don't even really have a clear measurement of objective accuracy. And, even when they do, it's rare that votes reflect expert's analysis of accuracy. Rather, votes on HN typically reflect one of the following:

O How well known is the individual - I'm even guilty of mindlessly clicking on a grellas comment when it has to do with Law, Security with tptacek, or patio11 on all sorts of things (Japan, Startups, SEO).

O How popular is their opinion - once again, I sometimes do this myself - <USER2> I want an endorphine rush, or my day is slow, I'll go create a comment that I know adheres to HN Philiosophy, just to enjoy racking up 40 or 50 points. Juvenile, I know, but it _feels_ good.

O How effective are they presenting - this is a bit of a mixed bag, and I'm happy to see that frequently very well argued positions are downvoted into oblivion because they are nonsense. :-)

But, with that said - the first approach actually isn't too bad - grellas/tptacek/patio11 actually _are_ worth reading, and their opinions really do count for more than a random individual - so maybe the "this personis well known and has a good track record" vote does have merit.

<comment><USER9> Regarding your second bullet - do you have an alter ego to test anti-HN sentiments as well? Not really in good taste, I know, but it would be interesting as a social experiment.

I notice that a lot of posters prefix their comments with a "damn-the- downvotes" remark, which shows that a lot of disussion is skewed toward karma- preservation. Both up and downvoting are fraught and maybe you really need both or neither one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel the opposite - I'm learning more, because if I'm spending the time to read something, I have to think critically about it and do research sometimes in order to have a good interpretation. It takes more time, but it's real learning, instead of echo-chamber reading.

<comment><USER11> It's like it's gone from a cherry-picking exercise to an actual reading exercise. It requires more of a commitment, and it seems to keep the dialog on a more contemplative level.

We're all speaking about "seems" and "feels" here, so it's coming down to impressions (not to mention taste differences), but some ideas for measuring the effect:

\- change in the "story point count"-to-"comment count" ratio

\- change in average current (and future?) karma of the people who do comment

\- change in average comment length

None of these is an objective measure of quality, but they do indicate "change" which might help Paul or whoever make a decision about whether that change was desirable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I know I'm not really supposed to have an opinion on these things, being a recently-created account and all, but I must respectfully disagree. If you really want to learn, using upvotes as proxy for correctness is a suboptimal way to do so, especially regarding topics without any clear cut answers. Being new to this site, I've actually spent roughly equal amounts of time with and without vote counts an I've noticed a pretty big difference in my own habits. In particular, rather than acting like HN is an omniscient font of knowledge, I treat it much more like wikipedia: a springboard for further exploration of topics.

</comment><comment><USER13> I absolutely agree - and since it's impossible to know whether a top comment in a thread is there because it was just posted or because it has a lot of upvotes the sorting of the comments doesn't really give me any information. This begs the question: _If I can't see the votes and have no easy way of knowing which comments are highly rated why have a voting system at all?_ What is the purpose if not to serve as a guideline for the users?

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't use upvotes to decide what I agree with, I use them to decide what to read in the first place. Hiding the votes means I can no longer skim through a thread to pick out the comments that are gems; I'd have to read all the bad comments too. And this means that reading comments here is no longer worth my time, so I don't do it. This is definitely not the desired effect.

<comment><USER15> This is exactly how I feel. It's no longer an efficient use of my time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I completely agree. I don't have time to read every comment. I miss being able to skim to crowd-sourced, high up-voted comments.

<comment><USER17> These high up-voted comments are still exactly where they were before - at the top of the thread.

<comment><USER18> Not always, that is only used to sort comments at the same level. Often a root comment may have had 2 or 3 points and a counter argument contained some useful insight and would be upvoted to 30+ Skim reading would allow me to spot this comment contains something worth reading...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The highly voted comments still float to the top of the page don't they? When I was only reading the highly voted commetns I started to feel like I was only getting the popular opinion, especially so when it came to touchy topics. If HN does decide to turn the count back on I'd love an option to turn it back off in my own profile.

<comment><USER20> Highly voted comments don't always stand up when the discussion gets into deep threads. I remember seeing a few threads with 20+ comments and one really insightful response in the middle changing the flow of the discussion.

I feel it is now difficult to have an idea of this kind of "flow" at a glance.

I'd love an option too show or hide the count. Or perhaps show the count when hovering or touching a link for a few seconds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've said this in some of the other threads on this topic, but I'll say it again:

The huge (and incorrect) assumption that people are making about upvotes is that everybody reading the comments is stupid. We're not using the upvote count as a 100% perfect indicator of if somebody is correct or not, we're using it as an indicator of how many upvotes the comment has gotten. It's just one of several things that we can use to judge a comment's merit.

This information is useful, and I cannot fathom a benefit to withholding it.

<comment><USER22> On stackoverflow the criteria for voting are considerably more concrete, yet it's clear that voting there is strongly biased by vote counts. HN might have more rational voters (though look who's saying so), but they're still human, and the fuzzier criteria, shorter active lives of posts, and volume of comments to scan through probably more than make up for this.

(I could've made this same reply to other comments here.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There are so much more possibilities than just "show vote counts" and "hide vote counts": different sort orders based on more than just votes, collapsing threads, marking people as friends, or adding them to a kill-file. Giving votes different weights based on karma, or average comment score. Tagging of articles, and filtering or sorting based on that. And so on, and so on.

I understand that pg hasn't got the time to do all kinds of experiments, but this is HN, where more than half of us are great programmers.

Give us a simple API and let us do our own experiments. That's all I want.

</comment><comment><USER24> I guess only pg can answer this, but I'm wondering how the change has impacted voting behavior. Have there been more or less votes per comment? Has the proportion of upvotes to downvotes changed?

I get the sense that my comments have received more rather than less votes since the change. Previously, when a decent comment of mine had say 10 upvotes, I felt like people concluded "good enough" and didn't bother upvoting. Now without the score feedback, I actually feel like some of my mediocre comments have gotten more upvotes than they deserved.

Some behavior data would go a long way toward confirming or denying hypotheses like these.

<comment><USER25> why can't we just have a setting -- those who don't want it can turn it off...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've been trying to give it a chance, but so far it doesn't seem like hiding the vote counts has done anything to improve the quality of comments on HN. Honestly, I think it's had the opposite effect. The number of in-depth comments seems to have plummeted.

<comment><USER27> It's pretty hard to quantify quality of comments, and I've seen at least one other comment in this thread saying the quality of comments has gone up (personally, I'm undecided).

I wonder how much one's perception of the change in comment quality is colored by their initial opinion about hidden comment scores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Since HNers are so divided on this issue (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039>), why not do one month on, one month off for a time to do a sort of A/B testing over a sustained period while keeping everyone at least semi-happy half the time? This would have the added benefit of letting cumulative totals get updated on searchyc from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER29> _When I first started reading HN I learned a TON very quickly and everyday about completely new stuff, and was able to do so because I could easily sort through the legitimacy of opinions based on their upvotes._

And yet the founder of HN said 25 days ago that there is a problem with HN, "the decreasing quality of comment threads on HN."

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696>

He summed up the problem by saying "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted." If pg observed a situation like that, isn't it a bad idea to "sort through the legitimacy of opinions based on their upvotes"?

A link and comment in another recent metadiscussion thread largely sums up the back-and-forth about visible comment scores as a signal on comments in active threads:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465357>

>> Please bring back the comment scores. It helps a lot in parsing the comments and assigning a proportional weight to each when reading them.

> I had to think about this a bit, and I disagree so far. I'm finding that I'm > not pre-judging comments as much. It's nice to be able to read someone's > comment without knowing first that 70 or 80 or 3 other people thought it was > worthwhile.

Once I had thought about that a bit, I reached the second conclusion. Readers on HN are gaining more quality comments as readers look at comments according to their inherent value and not upvoting or downvoting based on the crowd appeal of what someone else has already voted. Cognitive scientists have done a lot of research on what is called anchoring bias,

<http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/a/anchoring.htm>

and I get the impression, after 892 days as a registered user of HN, that comment upvotes and downvotes for the last year or so have not been based on the same careful consideration of comment quality as they were in the early days of HN, but rather have been based too much on what net karma score is already displayed as people vote. I like the new comment score system of not displaying net comment scores on OTHER people's posts (of course I can still see my own comment scores) better than the previous system. In the spirit of pg's statement, I try to help the quality of HN by actively upvoting thoughtful, helpful comments, and being on the lookout for mean comments (which pg hopes will not be upvoted by anyone) and dumb comments (which surely don't help any users relying on comment scores to learn new facts) for downvoting those. A comment that is both mean and dumb ought to be downvoted, not upvoted. We can all do our part to help the quality of the community.

In his thread, pg mentioned comments that are mean or dumb "that (c) get massively upvoted." With that condition of HN less than a month ago in mind, how do the highest-voted comments visible in the bestcomments list

<http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments>

look to all of you recently? Are there fewer mean comments than before? Are there fewer dumb comments than before? Are the comments that are "massively upvoted" since the experiment began mostly comments that are reasonably kind and well-informed, helpful comments on the whole? In most of the treads you visit, do helpful, thoughtful comments seem to rise to a position of prominence, while mean or dumb comments gray out?

Remember, pg's claim is that recently HN has not been a place where there is an "easy way for readers to differentiate the noise," but rather a place where the noise has had an attached badge of being signal rather than noise. That isn't good for anyone reading HN. As you correctly point out, we STILL have "the location on the page," which is useful at least for comparing multiple comments at the same reply level as a comment thread develops, and the actual sources and reasoning used by one or another user in supporting points made in comments. People who LOOK UP what the facts are can find out a lot about who is taking care to do good research and who is just making stuff up. And that's always the safest path to learning, to check the sources to verify other people's factual claims.

<comment><USER30> How about this solution to improve the readability of HN threads, without degrading the quality of comments/discussion?

1\. Show comment-ranges. (1-, 0, 1, 2-10, 10-50 etc.), instead of absolute values. This indicates the quality of a comment, without _promoting/prompting_ voting, based on existing votes (that much.)

2\. Do not show username (use a placeholder for profile link). This will solve the problem of "instinctive" up(/down?)voting from commenter's fan base.

3\. Any related changes required in the UX, to bubble the better comments more visibility.

<comment><USER31> Usernames can be very valuable though. If it's a story about Delicious, I'd like to see joshu's comments. If it's about Google search, I'll be looking for Matt Cuts.

I do like the first idea though. It would be a loose indicator of quality without giving too much away.

<comment><USER30> Well, It is true, but they are exceptions, not the rule.

Potential solutions

1\. If the author feels like he is the authority and/or is the important part of the comment, he can always declare it in the comment itself. (The profile- link can always be verified by the users, to ensure that any such claim is correct.)

2\. or you can click the links of the comments.

3\. or even there might a functionality implemented to show all the usernames on the thread (by default, the author names would not be shown). Later PG can see, if default off makes sense, based on the data captured and user trends (eg. if 99% people are always want to see the commenter name) .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think the best solution would be for everyone to just start posting "better" commentary (and submissions), and revert back to the old ways of downvoting things that add no value to the discussion.

The "old" HN was a lot drier (for lack of a better word), but the discussions were generally much more informative and/or insightful. I remember people complaining about getting downvoted for a comment that would have probably gotten many upvotes on other sites, and I was always pleased to that these in turn were downvoted as well. This doesn't seem to happen any more though, which is a shame IMO.

</comment><comment><USER33> The point you make is totally valid; and now that I think about it, when I was able to see the upvotes I could at a glance identify the answers with one or more of the following:

1\. Correct Answer (real, like a founder answering about his app). 2\. Popular Answer (comedy, something people "lol" to).

Identifying the difference between those two is done with only common sense; but supposing you still lack of that, you can still feel what the community liked by looking at the numbers.

"50 upvoted this" that must mean something vs "3 upvoted this"...

</comment><comment><USER34> I don't need to know a comment's score, just the score's _magnitude_ provides a lot of utility. In the same way that a grayed-out comment signifies a poor reply, find a way to show me whether a comment is neutral, slightly positive, very positive, or stupendously positive.

</comment><comment><USER35> I like not seeing vote count, but agree with you that it's a handy metric to sift through the cruft. How about a color scheme to show popularity instead of the specific vote count?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure - to be clear I'm not tied to upvotes as a number specifically, and I doubt anyone else is. But give us SOMETHING.

<comment><USER36> How about sorting comments in any subtree by the number of votes? That way hierarchy indicates the comments with the highest number of votes, while hiding the actual number itself.

<comment><USER37> That's the easiest and most effective solution, I think. But we could also do with an optional visual cue, since a lot of people want it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> What I found weird is that the points went away but the greying effect stayed. The truth is that that goes a lot further in making sure I don't ready unpopular views (with my eyes I often have to copy paste it to a text editor before I can read it comfortably). I would much prefer all comments be the same font color and being able to see the score so I can make my own decision as to whether to read it or not.

<comment><USER39> The fact that a comment is grayed out makes me want to read it.

<comment><USER38> But seeing it say -10 wouldn't accomplish the same thing? Or are you implying that this is literally a swimming upstream situation for you and the shear physical difficulty of the task makes it appealing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I miss them also. Was a weighted voting discussed as an alternative? One where the up/down vote is weighted against the karma of the voter? Seems like that would help elevate big-karma users to sort of meta-moderators and might help soften the concerns about reflexive voting?

And yeah, maybe for display the numbers aren't the best option.. just some sort of watered down "+" "++" "+++" type scheme...

</comment><comment><USER41> "because I could easily sort through the legitimacy of opinions based on their upvotes. "

This is a mistake. People frequently vote down things that are right because they don't understand the material as well as they think they do.

<comment><USER42> Except the mechanic for voting down (dimming out the comment) remains.

Also, my experience is that the down votes are usually countered. Good comments get a good number of points.

By removing points from comments, you've made points worthless for determining comment value. In that way, having them is pointless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I, literally, stopped reading comments and even started to stop reading hacker news because I didn't feel like spending extra time to read through and filter out the informational comments.

</comment><comment><USER44> Thanks for posting this. This is exactly how I feel about it.

The one upside to this change I guess is I'm spending much less time on H-N now.

</comment><comment><USER45> I miss the voting. I don't even bother reading comments anymore.

</comment><comment><USER46> I could see this change working for other sites, but HN actually does have a sort of collective wisdom.

I've also stopped looking at comments entirely. Before, I would sometimes click through to _just_ read the comments. There was value there. It's not necessarily gone now, but it is much harder to find.

</comment><comment><USER47> Yes please.

Also, the poll at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039> showed that most people agree.

<comment><USER48> And yet, an astonishing number prefer without. I'd argue that as the particular problem being worked on is increasing group think, this would be a perfect example of herd mentality or popularity contest leading us in the wrong direction.

Throughout threads such as these, the general reason for votes is to avoid reading or to be told without thinking what to think, while the general reason given for preferring them gone is an elevation in discussion.

The second was the stated goal for hiding them in the first place, and the first is the problem to combat -- glib votes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> i agree. i miss being able to skim faster and determine what the community judges as a good reply, I know many others who feel the same way.

</comment><comment><USER50> Nowdays I just don't read beyond the first few comments. Request to please bring back the upvote count.

</comment><comment><USER51> Can we at least maybe have a star rating or color rating or something that lets us differentiate high voted comments from mediocre comments? It really does simply take too long to scan and read all the comments. Most of the time I'm just looking for interesting snippets of information, I simply don't have the time to read everything.

Please bring something back, I find myself never reading the comments now.

</comment><comment><USER52> Lately, I've been reading the "new" headlines as opposed to the "top" headlines to find those hidden gems that _I_ think are interesting.

</comment><comment><USER53> Why not have a (high) karma threshold, above which you can choose whether or not you want to see vote counts?

I think respected, established members of the community would know themselves well enough to decide for themselves whether it's good or bad to personally have vote counts.

FWIW: Below the threshold I think it's better to not have counts.

</comment><comment><USER54> I prefer not seeing the number of votes, and think lukifer's idea of a "view count or vote" model is great. A visible score attached to each comment seems to me somehow demeaning. But I've never been much for grades...

And has been stated multiple times, the highly upvoted comments filter to the top already.

</comment><comment><USER55> I am very sorry, but that is just wrong.

Votes are not a reliable indication of whether or not a post is correct.

They _are_ a reliable indication of whether or not a post is popular.

It does sometimes happen that a post is both correct and popular, but that is not something it is ever safe to rely on.

'Social Proof' is a fantasy that does not exist.

</comment><comment><USER56> I feel like all the articles that get posted on HN are ones that I come across through a variety of other sources (SAI, TechCrunch, etc.) on Twitter. I find HN to be much more useful for discussions that are started based off the aforementioned articles from other sites.

</comment><comment><USER57> Hm, this post is only 2 hours old and is already 14th on the front page despite having 600+ points. Do all local posts disappear so fast from the front page, or is this one treated specially? Or maybe its upvote/downvote ratio is low?

</comment><comment><USER58> One issue I'd like to see explored more deeply is the path-dependence of a comment's final score.

There's this often unstated assumption that "good" comments will rise to the top.

What about this:

1) Display all comment scores, all the time 2) A new comment is posted 3) Segment the readership somehow, so that the comment has a (possibly different) score for each segment. E.g. Allow a comment to have 4 different scores. 4) Start the comment off with a random score in the range [-2, +2], but one that's different for each viewer segment 5) track (but hide) the number of upvotes and downvotes for each score 6) display just init + upvotes - downvotes to each segment

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm not a heavy user of social networks so I don't know if this exists somewhere but why can't I have a customized view where posters I like are weighted more than others. Then I can do this:

\- The poster's weighting would show up as a color (good,better,best)

\- The product of the poster's weight and the popularity of the comment determines the order on the page

Now I can look at the top of the page where very popular comments show up and then scroll toward the bottom and quickly identify any posters I really like

I realize this wouldn't be too hard to do by scraping the comment page and maintaining my own database of favorite commenters.

</comment><comment><USER39> Maybe there should be 2 modes.

One for those just wanting to read and learn where they can see the votes but where the user is not allowed to vote.

And one for those wishing to vote where they can't see and be influenced by the votes of others.

</comment><comment><USER59> Here's a thought: maybe it's time to close HN. That's right, close it down. PG said all along HN was a production experiment for Arc, so maybe it's time to evaluate the hypothesis and conclude the experiment.

All this hand-wringing about 'the community' and signal/noise indicates the membership has outmanoeuvred any means of wrangling it into some pre-conceived notion of 'quality'. For better or for worse, the thundering hoards of the internet have arrived and are drowning out the elitist clique. If that is bad for everybody, then it's time to shut up shop.

</comment><comment><USER60> every time someone posts this I add my 2 cents and say the same, please bring back the karma most useful.

</comment><comment><USER58> Wow. I never realized that people paid attention to upvotes. This explains a lot...

> Especially as an engineer who knows little about business, it was extremely > helpful to get a community perspective on the startup stuff.

It's not a community perspective. It's a positive feedback loop.

> The value of HN, from the perspective of simply learning, has been destroyed > for me since upvotes were hidden.

Now, you're learning.

</comment><comment><USER61> Perhaps pg should set a point where the points are revealed, but additional voting is locked out (but not comments)? Perhaps 24-48 hours after an article is submitted? Then provide a link to those articles as they decay into that group for people who really need point confirmation to catch up on what the rest of the community thought?

</comment><comment><USER62> Or at least shove it in a div or span and hide it by default, so those of us who want it back can style it unhidden.

<comment><USER63> That would completely defeat the purpose.

<comment><USER62> because...?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I hate to be "that guy," but I don't see why the count display isn't an option in our account panel.

In the previous polls, people seemed to be split 50/50-ish. Unless pg, as HN Overlord, feels that either removing counts has a performance or pedagogical purpose, this option seems like a perfect candidate for an account setting.

<comment><USER65> You've hit upon the answer yourself: it can't be a preference because hiding the vote count is intended to have a corrective effect on the voting and commenting behavior of the community at large.

If anyone could switch their vote count on, the majority would -- including myself -- to the detriment of us all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Take any site like this, they all suffer from this problem when the number of users reach a certain point.

I like the slashdot way of organizing stuff. Mods who actively moderate and categorize comments. It's more work, but the end result will be of higher quality.

</comment><comment><USER67> Learn to read critically and think critically. You don't need prior knowledge on a subject to evaluate a comment. Look for sound logic. Identify and evaluate the assertions and any hidden assumptions.

Vote counts are won't ever reliably reveal truth.

</comment><comment><USER21> To the people who think that comment points should not be visible:

How do you go about choosing which books to read? Do you read all of them, are you exclusive to specific authors, or do you depend on your peers to make suggestions?

</comment><comment><USER68> To new HN readers, the comments appear to be sorted randomly. There's no explanation for why some posts are at the top or bottom. That's a definite flaw of hiding the votecounts and could dissuade newcomers.

<comment><USER69> It is also annoying when you post a reply and the comments have shifted order. I guess PG expects you to start reading the thread from the top again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Hacker News needs a Meta HN.

<comment><USER29> Hacker News has long had a rather rarely used Meta HN, the Feature Requests thread linked to from the bottom of most of the main pages on HN, such as the home page.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363>

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I don't understand this. I have no problem discerning good quality content and comments from bad quality. I just read stuff. It sounds intellectually lazy and quite possibly self-defeating to rely on the trivialities of other people's votes to determine what is important to YOU.

After all, what is important to ME or not important to ME has nothing to do with what's important to YOU. The fact that you have stopped learning anything on HN, as you put it, has to do with YOU and not ME. So, don't blame the lack of votes. I wonder how you can get along in this world where you have to evaluate things at face value. In the "real world", there aren't point values and upvote/downvote nonsense on things.

I hope HN gets rid of the point system altogether. I'm sure I'm in the minority.

</comment><comment><USER72> Although I learn a lot from the comments on submissions, I tend to learn _a lot more_ from the submissions themselves.

Maybe the Hacker News team is trying to place more emphasis on submissions instead of comments?

</comment><comment><USER73> How come this post is not in the first page after 8 hours while the following post for example still is?

Joel Spolsky: Lunch (joelonsoftware.com) 275 points by alexlmiller 12 hours ago | flag | 175 comments

<comment><USER47> "Ask HN"-types posts (i.e. without a link) are heavily disadvantaged. They take more upvotes to get to the front page, and fall down faster.

<comment><USER73> is there an explanation for that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Will setting downvote display limit to 0 instead of -4 help?

</comment><comment><USER75> Comment age is also a factor: an older comment has more points than a similarly ordered newer comment.

So, when scanning downwards, score is inversely proportional to age.

</comment><comment><USER76> Karma is a form of currency. It's influence should be exploited not suffocated! There are ways to use it that would benefit the community.

</comment><comment><USER77> So have two types of browsers -- those who choose to see vote counts, and those that don't. And discount the votes of those that do.

</comment><comment><USER78> I kind of like hiding the points for active threads, maybe after 24 hours it could show the points. This would be helpful when

</comment><comment><USER79> I did not even notice they removed the vote count. It doesn't bother me. I don't know how to downvote either though

</comment><comment><USER80> Having it as an option for everyone to choose if he/she wants it enabled or disabled could as well be a "solution"?

</comment><comment><USER81> I think you either need an upvote count or the ability to collapse comment threads.

</comment><comment><USER82> Maybe make the up / down votes on a comment a reward for participating on that thread.

That is, if you up vote / down vote a comment and make a comment on that comment you can view that comments vote count. Does that make sense or did it come out sounding bad?

Just a thought. I think I like it without knowing the vote count.

Edit: Clarification.

</comment><comment><USER83> Agreed, votes are a good way to filter out the most of noise from the signal.

</comment><comment><USER84> What are the incentives for up/down voting?

</comment><comment><USER85> I disagree. It is forcing you to think for yourself.

What do you want to learn here? What most HNers believe to be true, or do you want to learn to be independent?

<comment><USER21> By "Be independent", do you mean "go and learn what people who have written books believe to be true"?

Or do you mean "go and learn what people who have written forum posts believe to be true"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Can we get a user preference, as the case with show_dead and topcolor? I don't see that could be bad for anyone.

"Show score on posts: (yes/no)"

</comment><comment><USER87> How about the Slashdot system? +1/5 Insightful/Funny/etc?

</comment><comment><USER88> The only thing you're no longer learning is groupthink. Be glad you aren't learning it.

It's easy to learn in person, just parrot what everyone else is saying. You don't need HN to learn it.

You realize that people game the upvote system right? Writing karma whore comments is so easy when you know the votes. If you really want to know the votes, just reverse engineer the algorithm, it will show you the relative votes.

</comment><comment><USER89> Could we have a hybrid? We don't need to see the exact number... what if massively upvoted (100+ points) got a green highlight on the "link" URL, and massively downvoted (-10 or more) get shaded, like they already do?

This keeps the content from being so quickly judged, but eventually shows strong content that has been upvoted by hundreds without bias.

</comment><comment><USER90> Good comments are still put at the top. Mentally filter out the recent comments, and you should be able to see quite easily how "good" a comment is. I honestly don't see the big difference.

</comment><comment><USER91> here here!

</comment><comment><USER92> Suggestion: Try getting dopamine from reading the comments instead of from game mechanics layered imperfectly on top of the forum.

</comment><comment><USER93> I did see that as '..bring back the upvote c*unt'. Thought it was a little harsh.</comment>


Eye Tracking hardware + Kinect games for fighting against dyslexia - <AUTHOR> http://www.livemint.com/2012/05/08204959/Defeating-dyslexia.html

<comment><AUTHOR> See the Video here of the project: The D Labs <http://www.imaginecup.com/IC12/Champions/PeoplesChoice>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Winner of Microsoft Imagine Cup - 2012 People Choice Award and 3rd Coca Cola Health Awareness Award. <http://imaginecup.com>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.financialexpress.com/news/techies-with-a- mission/...](http://www.financialexpress.com/news/techies-with-a- mission/951437/0)</comment>


Distraction Free Writing with Vim - <AUTHOR> http://laktek.com/2012/09/05/distraction-free-writing-with-vim/

<comment><USER2> I suppose MacVim automatically centers the editable area on the screen when going fullscreen? I can't seem to replicate that using vim under Linux.</comment>


Ask HN: Are bonuses common for software engineers? - <AUTHOR> I'm curious how common bonuses are for software engineers at other companies (in the US).  My company has a bonus structure but it effectively never pays out anything (by the time it gets to my level [staff software engineer], the bonus pool is exhausted). I have never considered the bonus (or potential bonus) to be part of my total compensation, which is just a simple salary. Do some or most engineers making well over six figures also receive any kind of bonus? For example, I've read on several occasions that Google engineers have a slightly lower-than-market base salary, but bonuses (and stock, but let's forget about stock for the purpose of the question if possible) usually result in a net earnings above market. I don't know how true that is, but I'm curious if it's standard or not. <comment><USER2> Bonuses are an absolutely standard part of comp at the tech giants and unicorns (Uber, AirBnB, etc.) There's a minimum yearly bonus you can expect to get (10-20% depending on where you're at) which increases with performance.

Elsewhere it's not common at all - you might get a small bonus if you're outstanding, but it's not to be expected.

<comment><USER3> I can say it is common in the finance sector in the UK and US. IT workers get 10+% bonuses as standard. Hedge funds, Market Makers, Asset Managers & Investment Banks will all payout bonuses as standard. The % will depend on the company. I know that hedge funds seem to be more bonus driven and have heard of quarterly bonuses being paid out.

<comment><USER4> I would add to this that it is also based on firm performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't speak across the board, but I'm a software engineer for a small-medium tech company (~100 employees/~15 devs). We don't have any kind of bonuses for engineers here, typically just 3-5% raises every 6-12 months. I do know of people working for some of the big name tech companies who receive annual bonuses that are quite large. But it doesn't feel like something all that standard for the majority of tech companies.

</comment><comment><USER6> Bonuses are pretty common around companies in my area (Metro Detroit). Every company I've worked for had some kind of bonus structure, ranging from "Here's some money and don't tell anyone about it" to "10% every year as long as we're not broke, plus more for performance".</comment>


Do you know of any resources for people who want to change careers? - <AUTHOR> Is there some type of "advisor" services which could potentially be paid to help you transition in another career ?<p>If not that, then do you know of any website or place where you can post about your career problems and people will help you out in regard to that. <comment><USER2> Community colleges are usually a place anyone can goto and talk to advisers. May want to try that route. Give the local community college and call and tell them where you're at, and where you want to go. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm already a software engineer. Ideally, I would like to remain in the "TECH" field. But I would like to be involved maybe in technical sales or consulting or something like this. Maybe management or product/techproduct management.

I'm looking for something like this, not necessarily getting completely out of tech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The only resource I know of is 80000 hours: [https://80000hours.org/](https://80000hours.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> interesting. i will have a look. thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You could try talking to people in the industry you want to enter.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have, but that never seems to go anywhere. There are just so many unknowns when doing things like this.</comment></comment>


Starbucks Wi-Fi Hijacked People's Laptops to Mine Cryptocurrency - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gyd5xq/starbucks-wi-fi-hijacked-peoples-laptops-to-mine-cryptocurrency-coinhive <comment><USER2> Not actually Starbucks, but the provider. I'm guessing they're doing this all over the place with a bunch of coffee shops and hotels etc!</comment>


On Modern Web Applications Stability - <AUTHOR> https://www.emadelsaid.com/on-modern-web-applications-stability/ <comment><USER2> Occasionally while waiting for npm install to finish downloading, I think about how there are websites like [http://www.urbandead.com/](http://www.urbandead.com/) which is probably a single 20k line perl script and mysql server running on a single box with 12 years of uptime that somehow manage to get along just fine with no javascript and apparently no input from their owners.

When I started doing webdev 8 years ago you shipped a recentish copy of jQuery, maybe jQuery UI if you were feeling fancy and that contained pretty much every library function you needed. Now we NPM install thousands upon thousands of modules to get by.

These days, browsers have tons of library features baked into them - but with APIs so obtuse and difficult to use you have to install another library to make them usable.

Last week at work I had a 2 hour meeting where we tried to work out how to ship the 2MB of JS our website apparently needs to clients without Google Lighthouse penalising us.

I don't know what to do with any of these thoughts but they often make me want to quit and take up a profession that doesn't involve computers like blacksmithing :/

<comment><USER3> It's pretty crazy. I have just about the exact same experience I'd say. On personal projects I'm moving back towards straight CSS, Vanilla JS (maybe I'll use jQuery if they get more complicated, they're very bare bones at the moment), and server generated HTML with Django templates.

Web Development seems to move at this incredible pace. I also started just about 8 years ago and I've gone through jQuery, Angular 1, Backbone, React, React with Classes, React with Hooks.

And even the tiniest project I do with NPM ends up being hundreds of megs on disk locally. I was cleaning my harddrive recently, MomentJS is _over 100mbs_ cloned from GitHub, I don't even know if I actually did an NPM install in there.

Material UI was _nearly a gig_. I'm assuming there are assets in there somewhere.

Meanwhile we have really neat improvements in CSS and HTML that I want to go and use but I'm to busy learning how to do CSS in my JavaScript, and validation in my JavaScript. Reinventing accessibility by deploying ever more bloated projects filled with bugs and inconsistencies.

I wonder if we'll see a gradual return to less complicated stacks as people realize a lot of work can be accomplished pretty reasonably with a lot less and a greater reliance on the browsers to do a fair amount of water carrying.

I'm not sure... but I have to get back to learning how to create APIs in GraphQL ;-).

<comment><USER4> Just to give this some perspective, the entire Wordperfect 5.2 download is less than 4MB!

[https://winworldpc.com/product/wordperfect/5x-dos](https://winworldpc.com/product/wordperfect/5x-dos)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24413394](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24413394)

Web development has become so cludgy especially with the SPAs which do not even support bookmarking.

<comment><USER5> Well SPA can do route rewrites if it's taken care of properly (Vue Router makes this easy). I'm always pushing for it on my projects for usability and link sharing. There's no reason to not have it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't buy it. I mean the entire society is set up this way. If we tried to reduce reliance on others and others systems, are we saying we should all build our own operating systems that are hardened from solar radiation?

About one week ago I woke up to my great uncle knocking on my RV (we live in his driveway temporarily) and he said, the fastest moving fire in CA history is moving toward Paradise again and we need to get ready to evacuate. We had no electricity and so updates were bad. Later he updated us after driving to the top of the hill that the fire was 40 miles away. Later that day I found out he was wrong, it was 10 miles away :P. The sky was red, the world had stopped, everything was hopeless.

I went to gas up the RV, hundreds of people doing the same, all scrambling trying to avoid a repeat of mistakes from 2 years ago. Everything is nuts, no one is calm.

Except the world didn't stop. Mail was delivered in Magalia and Paradise that very day. UPS and Fedex dropped off packages in both cities that very day. The world is actually a lot more robust that we give it credit. Sure, maybe we are constantly 2 minutes to midnight. But maybe, just maybe this modern society can handle pandemics. I know the literature is saying the exact opposite. And maybe in a year we're all going to be starving to death. But if that's the case, then the least of my worries is how many dependencies I have. If anything, if I have more, perhaps we're strengthening our society just a little by paying 5 SAAS companies to keep mine running.

Just tying it back to my fire experience, I depend on daily, so many freaking companies and people, ACTUALLY doing stuff that day, that I don't care that my code is resting on the backs of 4000 developers I haven't met, that haven't touched 90% of that code in 3-4 years anyway.

Not saying I wouldn't enjoy a completely different society, but that's a different essay.

<comment><USER7> I think the point is resiliency. The real world is resilient. In the face of massive threats to the infrastructure people will find new ways and keep living. But the average webapp is not resilient. If one out of 3700 libraries breaks then the whole thing can go down. A webapp is a very complex and rigid machine, it does not have the organic nature needed to be resilient. Making it simpler makes it sturdier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The author is absolutely right. And to add one more point: Debugging such a system has become so difficult that many do not even attempt it anymore. I have seen experienced operators treating their stack like voodoo ("I have no idea why it acts up, but restarting _this_ part seems to help sometimes. Oh and I increased memory on _that_ VM, because, why not.").

For any reasonably successful web application there comes the day when a developer has to investigate the cause of a bug who wasn't there when the application was "young and agile". They will scratch their head above old libraries, out-of-fashion frameworks, tools, and languages, and finally, more often than not, argue that the whole system needs to be reimplemented in X.

</comment><comment><USER9> Definitely some issues raised in the article and particularly the idea that even if you need a little bit of something, you inherit the entire library with dependencies you don't need!

However it is a little short on solutions. The truth is that I don't want to write my own PayPal API when there is one that PayPal produce and are likely to keep more up-to-date than me. Writing my own means that I only rely on my team but it is a big overhead for any reasonable size company that use dependencies from possibly 20+ major libraries and the hundreds of lower-level dependencies.

What would be cool would be a webpack style dependency manager that can remove things you don't use and then only show you updates for the bits you do.

<comment><USER10> It seems like "the hundreds of lower-level dependencies" is a problem that is unique to JavaScript due to its lack of a standard library.

JavaScript has a huge ecosystem, and as a result produces many new, interesting ideas, but its also the source of a lot of churn.

I remember working on large-ish (+300k LoC) .Net applications that were essentially dependent on just the .Net Framework itself.

For those looking to prioritize stability, the "solution" would probably be to avoid Node.js based applications altogether.

Use something like JavaScript/Node.js where it makes sense, in the front-end, and for developing thin API layers to support your front-ends. For heavy lifting (data and complex business logic) look towards languages/tools that prioritize stability.

<comment><USER11> _avoid Node.js based applications altogether._

I ran into this recently. Firefox has a "packager" for putting together add- ons. It uses "node.js". All it really does is apply "zip" to some files. I tried to install the "packager" on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It had several hundred dependencies, and wouldn't run because of some version dependency in node.js for something totally irrelevant to the task at hand. Mozilla support suggested upgrading the operating system on the development machine.

I wrote a one-line shell script which zipped up the proper file types into one file to package the add-on.

<comment><USER12> The overreliance on NodeJS in "modern" Enterprise(TM) JS development is pretty weird in general, even for folks who have an affinity for having all their tools written in JS. A bunch of the NodeJS tooling could just target the browser's native JS runtime instead, which is already installed. E.g. to build the project, you clone it, double click the project's Build.app.htm file, and then drag and drop the project source tree there. I've actually already prototyped this sort of thing. This is how I plan on doing anything when working in JS going forward, whenever possible. That it's incompatible with the vast majority of the NodeJS/NPM ecosystem is a bonus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of this movie illustration the complexity and human collaboration required to produce a pencil: [https://youtu.be/IYO3tOqDISE](https://youtu.be/IYO3tOqDISE) (6:33 in total; it's a bit "dreamy" sometimes but still worth a watch, you can skip the first minute).

Basically entire human civilization is based on collaboration, learning from and relying on each other (among other things). The process kickstarted with developments in agriculture, freeing up Human Resources to work on other things. We've been perfecting this for a few thousand years, of which we've been automating things using software for only 50 years (being generous here). Give it some time - with the current rate of development we may not need another thousand years to improve software development to near perfection as well ;-)

(Or more pessimistically: there's still a lot of hunger in this world so even after a few thousand years we've not even perfected the most basic of human needs - doesn't bode well for something as fancy as the typical glorified beans counter that is most enterprise software...)

Disclaimer: This video is typically used as a pro free markets argument to illustrate the level of cooperation required to produce even the simplest things, arguing that such collaboration is only possible by free actors in a free market - that's not the point here but still interesting tangent to think about in this context.

<comment><USER14> Sure, supply chains exist everywhere (and managing them is a field of its own..), but usually they are more explicit at least on each "link" of the chain. Can you imagine producing pencil in full anarchy where people just do random stuff and somehow you have to fish out the things you need and hope they keep the flows going without any explicit agreements or contracts? Where you get wood from logger because he happens to like logging that much, or he had some leftovers after doing a gig for someone else? That imaginary world resembles more the current state of software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Of course, the other side to this coin is assuming that you can do better than the folks who have specialized in solving particular problems, and open- sourcing their solutions.

I'm not arguing that package bloat is a good thing, but I do think it's an acceptable trade-off for the speed and functionality improvements.

If long-term stability is a very high priority for your project, you should look at using the right tools for that job. A language like Clojure that actively seeks to avoid "churn" while operating on top of common runtimes is a good choice for things like that. There's no need to compromise on speed of development, either :)

</comment><comment><USER16> This article mentions node dependencies and ignores the innumerable number of libraries down the stack to the bare metal. Even if you wanted to spend the time writing your application without using any libraries you still must have some level of trust on the platform you are running on.

</comment><comment><USER17> I completely disagree. Stability isn't better when you do everything yourself, actually in my experience, it's worse.

For example, if I want my users to be able to scan a generated qr code, I am not going to write a qr code generator myself since that is quite a lot of work. I will use a trusted library to do that for me.

In this way, the library will have had a lot of eyes, patches all the time fixing bugs and so on. If I would try and make a QR code generator, I would most likely make a lot of mistakes and bugs that more seasoned people that have experience in making such functionality already have experienced and fixed.

If I stopped writing code for the company I work for today, the application would work just the same in one year, in two years etc. I don't get why a desktop app would be more stable than a web app in that sense. I would argue a web app is more stable since we don't really break backward-compatibility in a browser in the same way people do in desktop operating systems.

Sure there is something to be said to not use a big ass framework for some small app. I think frameworks usually brings more pain than it's worth in the long run. But having dependencies in modern applications is a must, even in desktop applications because people expect and demands it. If you would not use dependencies, your customers would choose your competitors most likely.

<comment><USER18> A web app cannot be more stable than a native app but there are trade-offs, it's simpler to target an app that would open on most browsers even if it does't work too efficiently. If there was only one browser in the world web apps would be a whole lot more stable but that's not the world we live in. I think the only reason people stopped writing native apps in favor of web apps is manly for the cost benefit and we as users are getting a good enough experience but not perfect. The landscape is changing quickly, not sure how the whole webassembly thing is going to run but there's some hope.

<comment> what-the-grump Semantics. Because the web changes more than native. Like com 32 been around for 30 years, doom still runs in windows 10. We still cry when microsoft patches... Well you can't have your cake and eat it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe"

</comment><comment><USER20> To me the main thing to remember is [what Joel Spolski said about rewrites]([https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you- should-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never- do-part-i)):

"As if source code rusted. The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they've been fixed. There's nothing wrong with it. It doesn't acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive."

By that token, blindly updating your dependencies sounds more like the problem and so does writing your new code in place of their old. Security patches may force your hand but apart from that, if you want stability just be deliberate about upgrading and it will be rare for old dependencies to suddenly generate new bugs.

As far I see it, the right way to think about good, reliable code is not as a compact, resilient thing like a baseball but like a matchstick sculpture glued together with maple syrup. It is both inherently very fragile and very unlikely to spontaneously break if good decisions went into the design of its supporting structures and because it's mounted to the sturdy, climate controlled plinth of the silicon chip.

In the article, these supporting structures such as compilers, OS and firmware are mentioned but if we don't trust these then we simply should all stop trusting computers. Most of us believe that this broad _societal_ dependency has been a good tradeoff bringing us an amount of good which is so hard to outweigh even by an imagined disaster.

The same goes for most of the dependencies in the average ruby project (don't know what to say about JS). They are battle-hardened and bring value that companies would pay massive sums for were they not free.

There are of course the odd suspect, unnecessary dependencies in most projects. Usually they're for trivial uses and easy to remove. When you discover these few they do not indicate that the rest of your package list was a mistake. The fact that 90% of the problems you have come from 5% of the dependencies (made up statistic) should tell you that your project will be dead before the other 95% let you down.

<comment><USER20> But one thing I can't help but agree with: Upgrading to a newer version of your language implicitly creates a jolt to the maple syrup glue in every one of your dependencies. There's only so many years of that your project will stand before the unmaintained ones bring it down and an overhaul is needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't know what author is trying to say here. Should I develop everything from scratch and myself? I would actually recommend opposite.. look what you can buy before deciding to build it yourself(considering a lot of factors).

</comment><comment><USER22> There is a reason distributions like Debian exist. They solve a lot of those problems through collaboration if one stays within it.

</comment><comment><USER23> I love this recent xkcd about Depedency: [https://xkcd.com/2347/](https://xkcd.com/2347/)

<comment><USER11> There was a period during which OpenSSL was maintained by a World of Warcraft guild.

<comment><USER24> Nice idea, but I don't buy it. Do you have a source?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> At the very least, I like the rocketbook usage</comment>


Breasts lead to arrest of Anonymous hacker - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57414153-71/breasts-lead-to-arrest-of-anonymous-hacker/

<comment><USER2> Link is broken; story at [http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57414153-71/breasts- lead-t...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57414153-71/breasts-lead-to- arrest-of-anonymous-hacker/)</comment>


I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ <comment><USER2> That's a very long article for making the core point that the author believes their kind of tolerance is better than your kind of tolerance.

Fact is, most people are uncomfortable to some degree with people of different race, gender, sexuality, nationality, dress sense, social class. Myself included. That's human nature - well done if you are a rare exception, but most people aren't. Tolerance is about getting over it, even though it never quite goes away.

So most people declaring tolerance of all those other kinds of people should earn some Virtue Points in the author's framework. They deserve a bit of sympathy for not feeling free to admit they aren't quite as comfortable as they're supposed to be with other folks.

He's being an asshole when he criticises basically anyone claiming to be tolerant of the different people around them. Forget the self-obsessed "look at how tolerant I am" activists. Give most people the credit they deserve.

Otherwise you end in the the perverse situation the author does: dismissing most people just trying to be good people; looking to find ways to give a bit of credit to people tending to the Nazi end of the scale; making like tolerance is a huge, blood bursting struggle where if you're not angry enough, you're not trying hard enough.

That piece is a variation on what it claims to be a bad thing: acting like your basic day-to-day tolerance of other kinds of people is this amazing, incredible, praise-worthy act that deserves an admiring audience.</comment>


School of the Future Festival 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.tokyo-midtown.com/jp/event/school_future/english/english.html <comment><USER2> This site is very hard to read with all those seemingly randomly broken words.

"word-break: break-all;" may work well for Japanese but it's a nightmare for most latin scripts.</comment>