Solving turnover (unusual dailywtf) - <AUTHOR> http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx?

<comment><USER3> "A company with a culture of quitting does not have ex-employees; they have alumni."

That point really hit home with me. You can beat around the bush and say "hit by a bus". You can put a positive spin on things and say "win the lottery". Or you can actually embrace a common social phenomenon and reap the benefits.

<comment><USER4> In our consulting company we have noticed that a lot of the ex-employees become our customers. Somehow, we have built good relationship with them and when they go and work for somebody else they call us. But I never saw it the way they put it in the article. It really is a good idea. Embrace turnover and get the benefits.

<comment><USER5> That's certainly an interesting way of getting customers. Employ people, have them quit, they get hired into a position that has the ability to give their old company money.

<comment><USER6> See Goldman Sachs.

<comment><USER6> Or McKinsey et al. I find connections into the private sector ethical OK, but connections to the government worry me. Just a gut feeling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How about the talented people who are exceptional at their jobs, content with their cushy lives, and stick around even though they aren't learning as much anymore? They enjoy being a trusted go-to person on many matters and stimulate themselves outside of the workplace (or with the challenges of being a middle manager).

That doesn't describe my personality, but it certainly fits the personality of some of my favorite ex-coworkers. Aren't these folks exactly the type a company wants to hire?

<comment><USER8> At that point, those people should be driving the direction of the company. The self-actualization motivation becomes implicitly linked to the success of the company. I think that's the only time it really breaks out of what this article is talking about. But that is effectively "becoming partner" when you look at it.

<comment><USER9> really? especially in technical jobs, often the best people don't have the skills /or the desire/ to obtain a management position, but they can still be extremely valuable. I know at some of the larger server farms I've worked in, there was often one guy who built a disproportionate amount of our infrastructure. The rest of us, in many cases, spent most of our time running scripts written by that guy.

Personally, I think having those sorts around as a script writer/mentor/troubleshooter is probably vastly more valuable than promoting another really excellent technical person to become a mediocre manager.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This really was an excellent article. I have a law school classmate who started at the New York City office of Cravath, Swaine, and Moore

<http://www.cravath.com/Cravath.html>

(the original "Cravath firm," of course) right after law school, having previously done his summer job between second and third year of law school there. He figured from the beginning that he would be very unlikely to make partner there. But I really envied the mentoring he received during his summer associate summer--mine was nothing at all like that. Cravath invests immense resources in developing talent, even though the firm knows it can't keep all the talent it develops. It still can keep relationships with many of the best lawyers who end up in other law firms by making that investment. My law school classmate has had a great career in another city since leaving Cravath.

</comment><comment><USER11> The problem from the opposite perspective: I found myself outgrowing jobs faster than would look good on my C.V. (I hear job hoppers aren't popular as employees).

I ended up going down the contractor/consultant route; for some reason, nobody seems to have a problem with job hopping as long as you call it consulting. I guess there are no false pretenses and it avoids the legal baggage that comes with being an employee (notice periods, arbitrary holiday limits, etc.). It also makes me more money, at least now, ~2 years later.

<comment><USER12> Hiring someone costs the company a lot of overhead, whether you work out or not. A contractor can be fired without incurring a lot of overhead. So if you job-hop quickly, companies might be a little wary of spending a lot of money to bring you in only to have you scadaddle off after three months.

<comment><USER11> Is it really so much more expensive to hire someone than to find a contractor, though? In theory, you don't have the risk - if they don't deliver, you don't pay - but in practice money isn't the only resource you're wasting with a bad hire, it's time too. Missed deadlines can be extremely costly. So you need to vet your contractors almost as much as your employees.

OK, depending on where you are, hiring an employee _can_ drag you into a ton of legal obligation (as I mentioned in my original post) but typically that burden is reduced if the employee doesn't stay for too long. So as long as the company knows what they're getting into, I'm not sure why hiring a mediocre performer for all eternity is preferable to an overachiever who gets bored after a couple of months but hits the ground running. Sure, _someone_ has to stay longer term, but that could be a pretty lean team.

I guess it's assumed that people job-hop because they're _not good enough_ to hold down a job, and it's assumed that contractors know what they're doing. Why is that? You choose your contractors based on their reputation. You should be doing the same for your employees anyway.

FWIW, it may sound like it, but I'm not arguing out of some kind of bitterness here, I quite enjoy contracting because it means I _always_ work on something that is important to the customer - I'm just genuinely curious why such different standards are applied, and if that's rational and sensible.

<comment><USER13> You can sue and possibly recoup some of your sunk cost from a shitty contractor. You can't really do much more than fire a shitty employee.

<comment><USER9> This is about as realistic as choosing Microsoft over Linux because there is 'someone to sue if something goes wrong' - The chances of successfully suing your contractor and recovering anything after lawyer fees are almost zero.

The advantage of the contractor is that most companies have policies that make it more difficult to fire full time people than to fire contractors. Sure, in an at-will state, if you hire an employee, you can technically fire them the next day, but most companies don't work that way. Most companies do, however, have the ability to fire contractors the next day.

The advantage of hiring a contractor is that it's easier to cut your losses if you are stuck with policies that make it hard to fire your regular employees at the drop of a hat. We're expecting to get let go when the job is done, or if you don't like us, so generally we aren't as offended either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I might be the minority here but I didn't really find this article worthwhile.

On one hand it was a nicely documented theory that 'makes sense' but I have my doubts about how connected to reality it is. On the other it was written by someone who has had a series of bad managers and is pointing out the flaws with them.

From the studies I read, the biggest correlation between leaving a company and variables is the relationship with your direct manager.

Good managers will take the time to understand an employees ambitions and goals, and work with them to meet those exceptions in their current role or provide a path to a new role which will meet the employees goal. Neglecting to do this due diligence with your employees will leave them feeling isolated and itching to switch jobs.

That's where I think this guy's theory falls apart. There is no value apex, software is software everywhere you go, the only variable is how it is managed. Instead of a value apex I would replace it with a fulfillment meter, consider is each of your employees fulfilled at their current position and if not why not? That's the question you should be asking and those are the problems you should be solving.

<comment><USER15> There's a good aphorism: "People quit their managers, not their jobs."

OTOH, I don't agree that "software is software everywhere you go". I've worked in specialties like games / computer graphics, and that kind of work is inherently more interesting to me than for loops and sql statements style dev.

This isn't to say that less sexy areas can't have really good tech. They just often don't, and the exceptions are usually the leaders.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ordinarily The Daily WTF is good for a chuckle, but this was actually insightful. I find that it applies to the HN user base, since we're (or we think we are) the employees most likely to "evaporate" and leave the job security types behind.

<comment><USER16> I lost a job in the manner he described - told them I was looking elsewhere, but I'd be more than happy to train my replacement. I did it without first finding work and I thought I was doing them a favor by letting them know as soon as I was sure of leaving so their projects wouldn't be affected. I was laid off due to 'lack of budget' within the week. That taught me.

This is the first time I've read something which makes complete sense to me and helps get rid of the "ifs and buts" from my head (I still am looking for work). My ideas would never have been implemented, the organization was too resistant to change. The curve makes sense- it was fun for a while, but after "getting it all", the daily monotony would have killed me. At the same time other employees came in, did their work, and went home. They felt the whole system was very rigid, but they were ok with tolerating it. After quitting I've often found myself wondering if its something in my head that prevented me from "sticking it out". This post makes some good sense and I hope more employers read it.

<comment><USER6> We are looking to expand our team at the moment. I'll send you an email with more details. I hope you like it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well, our company has a good solution for this.

People leave because they get bored, so they would switch teams from time to time, give new responsibilities and try to keep everyone motivated. Didn't always work, but they managed to keep some top guys for very long...

<comment><USER18> I personally believe that "you will be given more challenging work" should be the reason to be given for documenting stuff, rather than "I know you will quit one day".

Not wanting to be interrupted, to know how things work, when you are working on your next interesting stuff, is reason enough to make things better maintainable.

I personally held that belief and worked through such challenges for over 8 years, until I got bored switching teams and creating new stuff for my employer. I now do the "creating new stuff" for myself at my startup.

 _If the talent is trying to make itself irreplaceable - like say, only one person knows how something works and they do not like documenting it or training others. It shows insecurity of the person who does not want to lose the job, which is bad for the organization as well as for the person.

Bad for the organization because, if the person either wants to quit or cannot turn up for work, a crucial piece of work cannot be completed.

Bad for the person because, though the person might think he/she is crucial for something work and cannot be fired, they are making themselves tied up to the work and hence cannot be promoted to better opportunities.

A talent should learn and grow. And then to teach others and make them grow. And keep repeating the process. If there is not much you can learn to grow, then quit and join some place where you can._

This is from my first link to HN (545 days ago).. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=309262>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This was one of the most insightful posts on Daily WTF. Unable to find much online about the Cravath system - although having seen it pop up in other references to why the starting salaries of lawyers was so messed up - <USER2> started the wikipedia article on it.

For a privately published 3-volume history of one law firm, I was surprised that so many libraries had a copy of the history of the Cravath law firm. Not a lot of them are available on interlibrary loan.

</comment><comment><USER20> A less offensive way to think of it:

It's a college - you spend 2-3-4 years, learn all you can and then graduate to better things in life. The only way you can stay here is by becoming a TA or a prof, but that'd be an entirely different job, and most people don't want that.

</comment><comment><USER21> For some reason this made me think of Google and how they encourage movement between teams and projects.

It seems to me that's probably a good way to keep highly skilled employees riding the wave of that 'value apex', rather than just cresting over it and then leaving.

Does anyone know what Google's turnover rates are compared to other technology companies? A quick search didn't turn up anything interesting, but I figure there might be some Googlers here with an idea...

<comment><USER22> I recently had a telephone interview with Google for a systems engineering position. I'm not incredibly impressed by their process of finding talent.

Background: I provided the hiring guy with architecture diagrams of some pretty large scale systems that I had designed: database clusters with 1TB of RAM and 72TB of disk, 10GbE network, etc. I not only designed, I also implemented these systems, so I'm a pretty senior architecture engineer with 18 years of solid UNIX/Linux, SAN storage, and networking experience.

Long story short, I missed a very basic question "what does setting the sticky bit on a directory do?" I blanked because I wasn't expecting to answer basic sysadmin questions, and hadn't honestly set the sticky bit on a directory for several years.

So, they sent me a nicely worded email that after careful consideration, we don't have a position that matches you, etc.

The hiring process at Google is really messed up. I gather that the only qualifications they are really looking for are:

1\. Fresh college graduates that memorized man pages. 2\. Willing to work 80 hour weeks. 3\. Don't care about salary because we're not going to pay much.

I mean seriously, you don't turn down a senior architecture engineer with 18+ years of experience because he blanked on a stupid memorization question that can be googled in 10 seconds.

<comment><USER23> Within Google we've noticed that the people who complain about the process are most often the ones who don't get in.

How do you know that the basic question is what sank you? Is it possible that the interviewer didn't like the architectures that you came up with? Or perhaps you left the impression that you would not like to find yourself in a hands on position where you have to do things like set the sticky bit? (Based on this post I'd get that impression myself. But everyone here is hands on. "Architecture Astronaut" is not a job type we want to encourage.)

But whatever the cause, I absolutely guarantee that all three of the qualifications that you think we have are wrong. Because I am none of the three and managed to get hired.

<comment><USER24> I'll disagree on the notion that Google's hiring practices don't allow a small error to derail the entire process. Basically, within Google we haven't noticed any of the problems around our hiring practices enough to solve them.

The problems are clear; unfocused interview loops leading to poor feedback, much too long process between phone screen and receiving approval from MTV, a focus on hiring those good at interviewing and not those good at engineering (hiring scores do not correlate with performance scores), and ignoring experience by offering salaries or positions significantly below candidate's current levels in the industry.

We end up being a place which is great for college hires and those getting their first chance, e.g. moving from test to dev, but not for experienced hires. And the effect is larger in some groups than others, but the senior engineers on my floor are mainly those without motivation to advance their careers and move on, even to internal projects.

<comment><USER23> Let's walk through the criticisms you make.

 _unfocused interview loops leading to poor feedback_

Yes, and it sounds like that is an issue they are trying to address that.

 _much too long process between phone screen and receiving approval from MTV_

Absolutely. I am an outlier there. I took over a year from initial interview to hire thanks to the hiring freeze. I'd like to see us A/B test different interview formats to figure out how much of the process we can remove without hurting the performance of the people we hire.

 _a focus on hiring those good at interviewing and not those good at engineering (hiring scores do not correlate with performance scores)_

This is not so simple. There is a skill to impressing people, and everyone has trouble limiting its impact on interviews. My impression is that Google does much better than most. For instance how many times have you heard someone say that their impression was really good, but when they went through the notes the person wasn't as good as they seemed. That is a case where someone's interview skills didn't have its usual impact.

The best anyone has managed do with any hiring process is to filter out the vast majority of bad people. Successfully ranking the best is pretty much impossible. The toy model I offer at [http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2010/02/what-is- intelligence.ht...](http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2010/02/what-is- intelligence.html) is a pretty good explanation of why. Just replace TST with "interview skills", INT with "actual performance" and IQ with "hiring scores". Since both actual performance and ability to interview affect your interview results, being really selective winds up with people who are good at both, and not those whose performance is truly exceptional.

 _ignoring experience by offering salaries or positions significantly below candidate's current levels in the industry._

This I'll actively disagree with. Google is in a strong negotiating position. They would be amiss to their shareholders to not negotiate well. _Particularly_ since the ability difference between "got in solidly" and "just missed the cut" is rather small. But even so, if you're good at negotiating, the salary drop is much less. And there are various kinds of incentives that make your overall compensation significantly more than just your salary.

Besides, whenever you put people into a different kind of job than they have had before, you run a real risk that they will prove not to be a good fit. A drop in compensation is only appropriate in that situation. And Google's environment is different enough that lots of people wind up in that situation. (For instance I'm an SRE. That's a Google role that you don't find elsewhere.)

<comment><USER24> _This I'll actively disagree with. Google is in a strong negotiating position. They would be amiss to their shareholders to not negotiate well._

For someone with a short tenure at Google, I'm worried that you haven't seen the larger picture yet.

The corporate policy is to hire the best and treat them well. But we are not hiring the best with consistency, instead often weighing cost and patience higher than talent and experience.

Ask around about your colleague's referrals. For the very few that get through HC, many of those engineers pass up the opportunity to work at Google precisely because our offers were to drop them a level or two and 10-15% salary. Make no mistake, that this hurts Google. We would be much stronger to have the talent from Cisco, Amazon, and Microsoft that I've seen turn away Google.

<comment><USER23> If you only look at the people who would have been better than average here and get lost for that reason, sure.

What happens if you include the people who would have been worse here and get lost for that reason?

Unless you can make the case that the ones who are unwilling to come really are better than the ones who do come, then there is no net difference. Given the difficulties with measuring relative talent at that level, this is a really hard case to make. (You could try to do it by A/B testing two different hiring processes...)

In fact my inclination is to believe the opposite. People who are more excited by the culture, co-workers, and problems that Google has are generally willing to take that drop. Which is a sign that they will fit in better here in the long run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Maybe the good people are leaving because you are letting too many bad ones in, aren't getting rid of the bad ones fast enough, or at least getting them out of programming jobs, and generally aren't giving the good ones any differentiated treatment?

<comment><USER26> I think the point of the article is this thinking. Really it's not them, its not the crap people being treated with respect (altho that does in fact chafe), its that I get bored. Seriously after a while it stops being a puzzle, its just work. Once I've "solved" it, I lose interest and start getting resentful of being forced to deal with it even more. This is what "its just that time to move again" is about.

If a place could provide me with a new challenge, puzzle whatever, I'd stick around, but a lot of places that have good environments are small, and therefore one product shops.

<comment><USER27> >If a place could provide me with a new challenge, puzzle whatever, I'd stick around

It's this kind of thinking that I fear is far more prevalent among new hires, and in my opinion is far more damaging. The company shouldn't need to "provide" you with a new challenge -- you should be seeking them out and creating your own challenges.

<comment><USER28> Exactly. In my experience there is plenty of challenge in virtually every facet of building a product. I've held a job(at single product shop) for more than 5 years. It wasn't like I went to work one day and went 'welp.. everythings done. Lets pack it in!'

There was ALWAYS things to do. I guess I get my rocks off by actually accomplishing things. That means doing a really good job no matter what challenge I'm dealing with. There are a lot of challenges in software development. I think too often folks are looking for glamorous problems to solve. It's more about ego than anything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I see too many of the 'entrenched' at my work.. We have a secretary that refuses to be called anything but 'office administrator' and has been here 10 years (Down to 3-4 hour days now) ~ of course the owner thinks 'she runs this company' .... it's really sad.

<comment><USER30> Quit, you don't want to be part of the salt that gets left behind in the dead sea effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This system is a very bad idea, because it fails to address (or even mention!) the Peter principle: "In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence."

You could have someone who is just great in job description X, but you promote them to Y and they suck at it. I see this all the time.

Not everyone's goals are the same as your goals. It's crucial that a manager try to understand his employee's goals and motivations, without imposing his own.

There's also an implicit assumption that we _should_ derive most of our satisfaction from our jobs. It's okay to have a job that's "just a job", while doing interesting hobbies or side projects.

</comment><comment><USER31> The problem with the Cravath system is that the rewards have to be significant for making it. Partners in law firms earn a LOT more than mere associates. Most established businesses aren't going to offer enough to make it worth putting up with this.

The result of such a system would be constant job shopping to get a better wage, and low satisfaction for many workers. I think this would have destructive effects on most organizations, although if you managed to survive that initial change, it might be self-sustaining.

<comment><USER19> I would rephrase that as _the problem with the Cravath system is that companies that claim to follow it, don't_. The system, as developed at Cravath, involved extensive training and mentoring. The advantage of the system for other companies was that they got very experienced and well trained employees by hiring "alumni" of Cravath.

The _Up or Out_ promotion system used by most companies (and for officers in the US military), the advantages of the cravath system were removed and only the _up or out_ was retained. The most prominent example of how this perverted version of the cravath system came to permeate US industry was Jack Welch's GE. Welch is seen as a hero by business majors and every stupid thing he said or did is worshipped as gospel.

The quintessential example of Welch's stupidity came during a discussion with employees, where an employee asked about loyalty and Welch responded: "it's Friday, you got paid, we're even."

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> "most talented software developers tend to not stick around at one place for too long. The least talented folks, on the other hand, entrench themselves deep within the organization"

Is this true for all organizations, or just bad ones? It feels like the best devs are not on the market long, and tend to "nest" too once they find a good situation.

<comment><USER33> I think the best organizations are the ones that can extend the curve as long as possible without "rolling out the red carpet on the way out". So when a talented developer gets to one of those places, they'll stay much longer than they would elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I can easily motivate myself to write documentation without thinking about getting run over by the bus or quitting: I know that my successor will most probably be myself in half a year, and by that time, I have forgotten why I did what I did.

</comment><comment><USER35> OTOH, some very good engineers are more interested in the domain than the technology. I work with some really smart people, one of which has been at the company for about 15 years. When you have the opportunity to work in a field that fascinates you, the actual technology you use to implement products becomes a lot less interesting, the business retains the "corporate knowledge" that only exists in people's heads, and the less committed quit.

I wonder if the attitude here is a product of short product lifecycles and rapid gratification. In my industry, a short project is 2-3 years. An average one is 5-7 years from concept to first release.

</comment><comment><USER36> _But perhaps the most important benefit to a culture of quitting is that it effectively flushes out the residue of unskilled employees._

Of course, that only works if there are other companies who are content to accumulate them. If _everyone_ is constantly swapping jobs and never reaching partner, it's hard to distinguish the good employees from the bad ones.

</comment><comment><USER37> This exactly describes my graduate school experience in a certain mathematics department.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is this a repost? I have a feeling that a very similar article was on reddit back in the days when it was still bearable--i.e. even before HN existed.

<comment><USER38> I wouldn't call it a repost if it was on Reddit, but I had seen it before. I'd even bookmarked it in delicious, June 19, 2008--so it's a good bet it was on reddit that week. :)

<comment><USER6> The layout of the original post was different, and it was probably not an the daily wtf. (As far as I can remember.)

But 2008 does sound about right.

<comment><USER39> The date on the article is 2008-04-29, so it's likely you came across it soon after it was first posted.

<comment><USER6> Yes, probably.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "This growth continues exponentially… [a graph follows]"

That curve there doesn't look exponential, buck-o.

<comment><USER41> It was on a logarithmic scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Yeah, maybe the good ones are leaving.

Or maybe, you're attracted to flash and arrogance. Maybe you only think they were good because they told you they were and then left. Maybe you're like a pathetic person who fawns over a lover who treats them poorly.

Maybe, since you're still in business, the good ones stayed behind. Maybe you need redefine your definition of 'good'.

<comment><USER43> Continued existence is usually not the limit of a business owner's ambition. By that same token, the people who can keep it running are not necessarily the same people who can continually grow it.

"Flash and arrogance" are not the same as skill, but they're not inversely correlated either.

<comment><USER44> '"Flash and arrogance" are not the same as skill, but they're not inversely correlated either.'

No kidding. I don't think anyone could argue that Linus, for just one example, is unskilled... It's a pretty well established fact that he can also be arrogant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I agree that companies should be more aware of the fact that people leave jobs, and that it's an essential part of the economy. However, using biglaw (Cravath system) as a model for workplace culture is a really bad idea. Go here-- <http://www.xoxohth.com/> \-- if you want to see the personality traits that this work culture attracts and encourages.

<comment><USER46> That link appears to be a list of discussions of law school admissions, not personality traits.

<comment><USER45> Read it. These people are representative of the way professionals in Wall Street's "up-or-out" jungle think. Some of the things you'll read on that site will appall you.

This is what the biglaw partners produced by creating a professional environment in which only a few percent have a chance at making partner, and the rest have essentially wasted years of their life for nothing.

<comment><USER46> I'm willing to take you at your word that the site is filled with appalling things. It certainly looks appalling, and the few discussions I read appeared to be irritating people being irritated with the world.

But what evidence is there that the structure of the hiring practices is what attracted these people? My unsubstantiated hunch is that Wall Street professionals might be there because they're after money or prestige, not because they're inevitably attracted by the hiring methods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Good article but the date it was published: 2008-04-29</comment>


Getting Started With Toto, a Tiny WordPress Killer - <AUTHOR> http://fadeyev.net/2010/05/10/getting-started-with-toto/

<comment><USER2> Toto might be a "WordPress Killer" _for hackers_ , but that's just about it.

There are two reasons why WordPress is wildly successful...

(1) It's built in PHP so it can run on anything. Any webhost out there will run it, and 99% of them will have a "one-click-install" button for you.

(2) It has a pretty damn good admin interface and theme/plugin community. Anyone can install themes and plugins, either thru the interface or with some simple FTP knowledge.

All of this aside... I can't effing stand WordPress. I've been developing for it since it first branched off from the b2 blogging engine many moons ago. For a developer, building a complete site in WP generally consists of hacking plugins to work with one another, or writing your own modifications.

I built this site (<http://arbesko.com>) in WordPress because the client wanted it. Only about 10% of it is WP. I extended the URL rewriting system and wrote all of my own template code, most of the queries were written by hand. An experience WP dev might frown upon this because of "future incompatibility" but honestly, if you want to write good shit you're not gonna find it with WP's built in tools. The only thing left that isn't my own is pretty much the DB.

For a super simple blog, go with WP. For a "WP as a CMS site", don't fall for that bullshit. Write it in something else, anything else. Write it from scratch in Perl for all I care, just stay away from using WP for anything more than a blog and/or _very_ simple site.

And again, these kinds of things (toto, jekyll, etc...) are fun for hackers, but they will never kill WP. If you want to kill WP you're going to need to attack it from the perspective of an "SEO Marketing social media expert from Tampa FL who has 2 kids and runs the Tampa Tweetup every weekend", and not that of a hacker. The most you can expect from someone is installing an FTP client and uploading it. These people don't play with terminals or git.

<comment><USER3> I can feel your pain. I've recently begun doing projects with wordpress which require several custom queries and own code. I'm pretty sure there's a better platform for those "advanced cms needs", but, hell, wordpress is still just so convenient.

Also, the "future incompatibility" is not that bad with wordpress, just look out for "deprecated" in the source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tiny Wordpress Killer? That's the worst misleading title I've read in a while (and you'll se a lot of that here at HN). WordPress is a blogging software slowly becoming a full-blown CMS which is easy to host and --arguably-- easy to use.

Toto is a nice simple script that publishes static files to heroku via git. It's interesting, and hackish, and fun, but hardly a WP killer.

<comment><USER5> I don't see how your description of WordPress makes it different from Toto.

Toto is blogging software, has a full blown CMS, through git, is easy to host (Heroku), and is easy to use.

Hence, they serve the same purpose, which is of publishing and managing articles in the cloud.

<comment><USER6> How do I use it without installing a bunch of stuff on my Windows computer?

Wordpress is for the masses this is like jekyll alternative rather than wordpress killer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes but how do you use WordPress without installing a bunch of stuff on your computer? You need MySQL and you need a web server to run it, probably Apache. These don't come standard with Windows, so it's not that much easier to get WordPress running locally. It's true that many hosts now offer very easy WordPress installs, but there is no reason why something like this can't be set up for Toto. But as it is right now, Toto is a great WP replacement for hackers.

<comment><USER7> I think you missed both points. Point 1 was that he doesn't need to install anything on his Windows _client_ to publish to his blog. Point 2 was that Toto is not a WP killer. By naming Toto as a replacement for hackers (solutions for hackers are never killers of solutions for the masses), you are confirming his point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> FWIW - I just migrated my old WordPress site to Heroku, but I decided to keep the WP database structure intact.

So, I made a little Sinatra app with an ActiveRecord adapter that can understand the WP db schema.

It's just a hack to support my immediate needs at this point, but I think the concept is a good one.

<http://github.com/trevorturk/trevorturk>

Holler if it looks interesting to you.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been looking for a lightweight alternative to wordpress, so I'll give this a runaround. My only barrier to entry is having to dump all of wordpress posts into whichever new CMS I choose.

<comment><USER10> It would be pretty easy to dump each post into its own txt file to work with this. You might have a problem importing comments, I am not sure if disqus has a way to import older comments. I would guess not.

<comment><USER11> _"I am not sure if disqus has a way to import older comments. I would guess not."_

This was a long-standing request (<http://disqus.disqus.com/how_do_i_import_comments>) but it seems there is a solution for the past year ([http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/give-your-wordpress- comments-a-...](http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/give-your-wordpress-comments-a- makeover-with-disqus)) Tell us if you try it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If it doesn't run WP plugins and themes, or at least easily convert the themes, it's not a WP killer.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you're interested in an ultra-lightweight blogging platform, may I suggest that you check out Bloxsom (<http://www.bloxsom.com>, pronounced "Blossom")? It's written in Perl, all blog entries are text files, and categorization is done by sorting the entries into different folders.

Admittedly, it doesn't run on RoR, so you can't just pop it up on Heroku, but Bloxsom has been around for years and years, and has a stable group of maintainers on Sourceforge.

<comment><USER14> I think you meant Blosxom: <http://www.blosxom.com/>

Your link goes to someone's personal homepage. :)

<comment><USER13> Oops, you are so right.

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> On my blog (<http://neosmart.net/blog/>) I'm running our own "PerformancePress."

It's a WordPress install with a custom frontend. So you get a mind-blowing admin interface, and light-speed frontend. Updates to the frontend are a PITA when it comes to syncing new features with the backend, but for the basics (posts, comments, pingbacks, and.... that's it! It's a BLOG!!) it does the job.

<comment><USER16> I get this "PerformancePress" is proprietary software?

Good for you to have it.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, we wrote it in-house. I was speaking with the WordPress team about merging the changes back or something and sponsored a GSoC project for PerformancePress, but they ended up going somewhere else with the GSoC project that I mentored which ultimately failed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Boy, Toto's almost exactly like something I dreamed up a couple of months ago. Except my idea was more to show how one could use version-controlled text files _as_ your database in many simple situations. There are so many tools available already for doing stuff with text files. All you need is an index by "column" facility, and you're most of the way there (for simple websites like blogs).

</comment><comment><USER18> For the meta description tag all you need to write is:

<meta name="description" content="<%= @context[:description] || 'Default description' %>" />

Definitely a wordpress killer from an ease of use perspective, or not...

</comment><comment><USER19> Similar project for Python (that I believe predates Toto, could be wrong): <http://www.blogofile.com/>

</comment><comment><USER20> Yeah! Another [x] killer!</comment>


What happened to your MacGyver skills? He looks clueless as his car breaks down - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2073702/MacGyver-actor-Richard-Dean-Anderson-looks-clueless-car-breaks-down.html

<comment><USER2> Oh please. Obviously he's undercover. The ingenious part was getting his car to throw a rod exactly next to the drug kingpin's house.</comment>


The Next Generation Bends Over - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1927-the-next-generation-bends-over

<comment><USER2> Please.

$170 million is _"fuck you"_ money. Aaron and I'm guessing many of the top founders/executives made enough money to never ever have to work again. Fake revolutions are cute and all, but think of how awesome it would be to never ever have to work for the man again. They can do anything they want...for profit, not for profit, TBD (Y Combinator). This wasn't some BS talent acquisition; this was an absolute shitload of money to make in a very short period of time (3 years!).

Techcrunch and many others constantly harp on how people should be working on stuff that can help save the world. But the reality is, most of us have bills to pay and a table to put food on. With FU money you can do whatever you please without worrying about your family.

<comment><USER3> "Fuck You money" is such a myth. More on this soon in another post.

<comment><USER4> Most of your blog posts strike me as you rationalizing why you aren't a hugely profitable company.

<comment><USER5> I think it's fair to say that 37 Signals' aspirations are, at best, orthogonally related to profit maximisation. They're there to enjoy building things they like, their way.

No, I'm not some sort of Kool-aid drinking acolyte. But ultimately, I'm trying to do the same thing - to have fun and do what I find fulfilling, at the expense of considerably faster and more lucrative routes to making more money - so I can appreciate their general angle.

<comment><USER4> I get that. Really, I do. But they keep saying it over and over again in a public forum. Who are they trying to convince: the reader, or themselves?

<comment><USER6> It's a Cult of Personality. Benign, sure, and helpful even, but that's what you have to do to get your message across: repeat it, over and over, from a million slightly different angles.

Only nerds -- and people with no persuasive skills (or influence) -- think that saying something "the right way," once, is productive.

<comment><USER7> It's not benign or helpful when it drives, or excuses, attacks on successful companies.

<comment><USER5> That depends on whether you agree with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it me, or is 37 signals being disingenuous.

They rail against people who take VC money. At the same time they take money from an investment firm. They they say that their taking money was okay because they wanted the advice of the investor: [http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/bezos_expeditions_invests...](http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/bezos_expeditions_invests_in_37signals.php) Other people taking money to get access to investor advice is bad and a disease.

They rant against startups that pursue the eyeballs business. But then they publish blogs that are frequently contentious and create drama in the startup community. Really, RoR aside, if DHH didn't swear at conferences, or if 37 Sigs didn't throw rocks at other people's business models, would have heard abou them as a company? They like being the "bad boys" of the startup world. Bad boys get eyeballs and 37 Signals upsells those eyeballs.

The only problem that I have with 37 Signals is that they constantly say that they aren't doing the things that they are actually doing.

<comment><USER3> We say don't take money up front. Money up front is the sin: You're entering into a financial arrangement when you have no leverage. It's the worst possible time to do business.

Re: Eyeballs... Our problem with action for eyeballs is when you have nothing to sell the brains behind the eyeballs. Just building an audience with nothing to sell (beyond ads) is what we rail against. But building an audience that could also be your customers is something we encourage.

<comment><USER9> Often times, companies have no choice but to raise money up front. Tesla and Facebook had to, and both seem to be well on their way to changing the way we behave environmentally and socially.

Also, I really really really do not understand all the crap you guys give ad based websites/business models. Advert business has well and long been an established industry, dripping with cash. There are tons of websites out there generating millions of dollars for their owners. From POF to sleazy SEO blogs, these people generate enough money to live comfortably, and they're happy with that. And when I see DHH rail against ad based sites at conferences in his snarky ways, it's very disingenuous, as if he's completely blind to the world of those who are making bank from ads.

<comment><USER3> "Tesla and Facebook had to"

Tesla makes physical products. They manufacture. They have inventory. They have a factory. Money is required because they have significant initial capital expenses.

I take issue with "Facebook had to". Facebook chose to, they didn't have to. Software companies don't have to. They choose to.

<comment><USER10> I agree with your assertion that Facebook choose to. However, it seems like it was the right choice.

There are plenty of times where the companies (and consumers, and founders) best interests are served by taking early money and focusing on growth rather than profitability, especially if their VCs are open to helping those founders take money off the table as they hit milestones).

my .02

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A bit harsh, for something so speculative.

It's a rare founder who has no offer he'd take. In fact, if you have shareholders or employees with options, and someone makes you an offer that's significantly above the expected value of your company, fiduciary responsibility requires you to take it.

You can bend this requirement to some extent by overestimating your expected value, but there is always some number you'd have to take.

<comment><USER12> I think what Jason's getting at is to look beyond the offer/fiduciary responsibility mindset and to think bigger, to be motivated by passion and have grander ambitions than looking at one's business as "company + product + customer = offer/price".

There are many successful business that truly don't have a number they'd HAVE to take. It's a choice, and that choice doesn't appear to be actively made by this generation's poster-child business leaders.

I do disagree with Jason, I think that there are a lot of unspoken young businsses, not in the spotlight, that do have the passion to take the baton from the previous generation; it's just that they don't seek out the attention, nor does the attention seek them out.

<comment><USER13> I think what PG's getting at is that you can't "look beyond" the fiduciary responsibility "mindset" without being fiduciarily irresponsible. Which is basically illegal.

<comment><USER12> Only if you CHOOSE to ACCEPT outside investors, and CHOOSE a board that doesn't have the same vision for the company as you do. I'm no lawyer, but I'm guessing if you own your own business, your fiduciary responsibility is to yourself.

<comment><USER13> Yes, that would be the "if you have shareholders" part. Can you find an example of a $170 million sale of a startup with no outside investors?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ok, author of blog does not get it.

If I make a magic box, then patent it, and then sell the patent, whomever I sell the patent will dominate the box making industry, since they are the only ones with a magic box. This is what the author thinks is happening, but it is not analogous.

If I open a factory for making boxes, and I sit in the front office and monitor my factory, and hire great staff and motivate them to make boxes, and figure out methods and practices that help workers stay alert, motivated and uninjured, and I keep costs way below industry norms, I will have a very profitable box factory. Now, BigBoxMaker wants to buy my factory, since it is so much more efficient than theirs. They pay me $$$$$. I move to ${sunny_place}. They run the factory, but they aren't me, and they shit the place up. All they did was drive me out of the market, and in a few years another industrious soul will come in and they will have to buy their factory too, otherwise, eventually, they will be out of business.

Now, the key is eventually. They can afford to pay me what I would profit from running my awesome factory for 15 years, except it only took me 3 years. They require me to stay at BigBoxCompany for 2 years, but I just have to meet benchmarks, which is super easy since I already have the factory working at the level the benchmarks specify. So 2 years of dicking around at BigBoxCompany, doing whatever I feel like, plus a check for the amount I would make if I worked my heart out for the next 10 years, or 10 years sitting in a factory, looking at factory people, dealing with factory problems. Plus, my factory might not be successful in the long run, there is inherent risk of lawsuits, natural disaster, political shinanigans (BigBoxCompany gets your factory rezoned as an old folks home by bribing the governor, or you get EPA inspections every 10 minutes, or they bribe an employee to sabotage your equipment).

Finally, you don't have to sit around after you take the check. Perhaps you should open a bag factory (you probably agreed not to compete in Boxes), and you turn that around even faster, since you will of course take all your talented workers with you in 2 years once you are free of BigBoxCompany.

If the check is larger than (expected profit without selling out) * (risk factor) - (estimated value of your time doing other things) you _MUST_ take it unless you don't care about maximizing profits, in which case why are you running such a great factory?

Obviously the loser is the consumer, but this is always the case. On their way up, companies are models of efficiency (that is why they are moving up, so this is a tautology). At some point they are able to use market position and branding to get customers, and so they can let efficiency slip a little, so of course it does slip. If you were guessing what an executive would do when presented with 2 options, and one option requires 60 hours a week of hard work for 6 months, and one requires a phone call and dicking around and playing golf, and both have the same outcome, which would you expect the executive to make? So of course established companies just advertise and give out free schwag and sponsor events instead of buckling down and making a better product and more cheaply, the executive only cares about profit for the period which effects his compensation, and both methods are identical if that is your only metric.

</comment><comment><USER15> From a comment posted on the blog: "You may not realize how fragile Mint was. All the hard part was being done by Yodlee.com; Mint simply built a thin layer over Yodlee, and collected affiliate fees. Mint was not built for the long haul, it was built to flip. (Check out the free yodlee.com to see that this is true.)"

I think this point is important. Mint was adding value to an _existing set_ of services rather than creating from scratch. This made its offering _relatively_ easier to replicate. IMHO this point is not given adequate importance when considering why Mint chose to sell.

<comment><USER16> I have to disagree; if it was _that_ easy to replicate Mint's success, how come Mint can worth that much of money, and why people are using Mint's service instead of _Your-Mint-Clone_?

Your comment reminds me of the remark ( either here or on reddit, I can't remember) that StackOverflow is easy and can be cloned in a week, because the underlying technology is not hard to replicate. What you forget is market often pays a premium for the database, not the technology. Getting the technology to setup is easy, getting the subscribers, is not.

<comment><USER15> Unfair comparison. I never said it was easy to clone Mint or tried to trivialize Mint's achievements. On the contrary I emphasized the word "relatively". My argument was that Yodlee is the senior partner in the Mint- Yodlee collaboration. I am also guessing here that Intuit has far more access to financial data (banks as well existing quicken databases) than Mint-Yodlee.

EDIT: rephrased for clarity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Oh 37Signals. I can't figure you guys out sometimes. One day, you're telling people to be happy with small niche markets. The next, you're on a soapbox preaching about $170 million exits as merely "bending over." Make up your minds.

</comment><comment><USER13> I also found it strange that Mint sold so soon for so little, relative to what they would surely have grown into (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=821888>). But something bothers me about the current critique.

The most common argument (by far!) that I've heard against VC funding is that VCs only care about home runs, so their interests aren't aligned with the founders', they don't care if 9/10 of their portfolio companies die, and so on. But here the criticism is just the opposite: the "VC-induced cancer that's infecting our industry and killing off the next generation" is that VCs _don't_ want home runs, they want early exits. Both criticisms can't be right. So, are there two distinct and incompatible schools of thought about why VCs suck? Or are there just a lot of people who are against VCs no matter what, for whatever reason is handy? My spidey sense is that there's a little of the latter at work. (FWIW, I don't have an opinion for or against VC funding in general.)

</comment><comment><USER18> [sorry, late to the party -- traveling & running several DC events last 24hrs; just jumping in]

as a Mint investor, friend of Aaron's, and someone familiar with most of the other Mint investors, i can only summarize my feelings on this by saying that Jason Fried is 100% wrong and pretty much completely full of shit on this topic.

if he'd bothered to even lift a finger to check a few sources on this issue, he would quickly have realized how WILDLY INACCURATE his conspiracy theory was.

in my opinion, blogging at length about a subject which he fully admits he knows little about -- and had not attempted to research -- is incredibly ignorant & irresponsible.

please forgive my anger, but when someone attacks my friends with stupid lies, i tend to get a little pissed off.

</comment><comment><USER19> I find the Jefferson quote toward the end rather ironic. Jefferson and his compatriots were fond of explaining why anything was worth trading for freedom, yet the author is suggesting that the Mint founders should've passed on the guaranteed "freedom" the acquisition money provides for some trite devotion to slaying Goliath.

If you want change, make your own change. It's no one else's responsibility. Even if it were, the founders are now better positioned to execute on any idea they have in the future with few limitations. How shortsighted.

<comment><USER20> That's being a bit equivocal.

You're using the word freedom in very different way than Jefferson ever meant it. In Jefferson's world, the Mint founders are no more or less _free_ now than before selling to Intuit.

Otherwise, I agree that it isn't for us to judge. The founders were certainly _free_ to sell their company.

<comment><USER19> Hence the quotes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> From the point of view of mint.com employees and even moreso the investors in mint.com, this may be a wonderful deal.

But from the point of view of a consumer of financial software, this is terrible. Intuit's products have been terrible and getting worse. I do better with a spreadsheet than their money management software, and it isn't even money management software any more, it's just an advertising platform that also keeps track of your money. The only good thing I can say about them is that their chief competitor (Microsoft Money) is as bad or worse.

Mint.com was different. It was great. Maybe it will continue to be different and great. Maybe not. But if I were to guess, I would guess that it will change for the worse.

My only REAL hope now is that someone else decides to come along and build something great. And then maybe THEY will sell it for another $170 million. Intuit, Microsoft, the phone company oligopoly: they all seem to be a new form of monopoly where competitors cannot break in to the market because the incumbent is too rich.

</comment><comment><USER22> Jason you're projecting your ideology on others. That's a Fail smell.

There's nothing wrong with a decent exit. The old guard doesn't have to die, and right now we're relying on the old guard since they're almost the only way startups can get liquidity.

The Silicon Valley venture game isn't about making lifestyle businesses. It's about making good returns on investment. $170m was a respectable return for everyone involved.

<comment><USER23> Mint's definition of success isn't your definition of success.

Wait, didn't I read that somewhere?

Oh, right: [http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/define_your_own_success.p...](http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/define_your_own_success.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I can't speak for Mint, but not everyone is interested in creating a revolution.

<comment><USER25> Yeah but it is counter-intuitive to open a business with the intent on being bought or anything along those lines.

This just feeds big companies and will likely cause innovation to happen slowly through common user perspectives and reduce competitive businesses.

<comment><USER26> Why is it counter-intuitive? If your goal is to make a lot of money, sometimes your exit strategy will be acquisition.

<comment><USER25> I was assuming that when people open a business they like that business, I guess I assumed wrong for startup culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Jason's point is broader than the business deal, he's making a critique of the Silicon Valley culture. While I have the utmost respect for the capabilities of the Mint team, I agree that it's disingenuous for the community to wrap itself in the flag of _"We're in this for the revolution, not the money"_ and then be just so damn quick to take the money.

That said, Mint seems like the exception out here. Facebook and Twitter seem to be doing a great job keeping the champagne at bay.

<comment><USER28> What community?

Okay, I'm not in the Valley, but businesses are in business to do business - to make money for their shareholders. Arguing against that as a reasonable motivation is disingenuous. You can disagree with the business decision; that essentially amounts to "I think their expected value is >$170m and I'd take their risk profile". Fair enough. But if you're arguing it on any other basis than that, then you're substituting your morals for economics, and what's more, your morals for those of all the individual shareholders. Not cool.

Isn't it easiest to just assume that Facebook and Twitter haven't been bought because their equity holders think they make more money doing it their way? They've got a case too; as Twitter's paper valuation climbs past $1bn, the crew there get proved more and more correct.

<comment><USER27> Do you use Intuit software? Have you tried Mint? Everyone I've talked to that has a Mint account and has been forced to use Intuit software in the past is uniformly dismayed and confused by this acquisition.

Banker math surely proves Aaron would have to show real hubris to ignore Intuit's offer, but founders rightly run startups, not bankers. Intuit is a $9B twenty five year old company. Mint could have given them a run for their money. They took the payday instead.

<comment><USER28> So you're arguing that Mint can make more by displacing Intuit than by getting bought, and that this is likely enough to offset the risk.

Fair enough, judgement call. But what justifies it? 'Banker math'.

<comment><USER27> Motivation and conviction could have rightly trumped justification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Having gone through a few startups myself, and currently being at the tail end of one looking for an exit, I know at some point the desire for growth can be trumped by the desire to generate a return on your investment and move on. For us on the line who have only put sweat equity in, we're much more likely to hold on for more growth (and a bigger pay day) while those who have put millions of their own dollars on the line are looking to trade in their senior/junior debt and move onto the next investment.

Even for a company like Mint (of which I am a long time user), at some point their business model has a maximum angle of growth, and unless they went to a freemium-based model to generate recurring revenue, the short of it is they're running out of room to make money on their userbase.

That being said, as a user I'm very distrusting of Intuit taking Mint and running with it in any direction but into the ground.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's what this makes me think about: if Mint had an independent future, then there are employees at Mint for whom this acquisition was not the best move. That's true at $170MM and it's true at $50MM and it's true at $5MM. Founders can get rich on deals that make line employees nothing.

And there's nothing wrong with that --- I mean, I have kids to put through college, and my first loyalty is to them, etc --- but employees should know what they're getting in to.

</comment><comment> old-gregg _They were on their way to redefining an industry — one that was left for dead by the current custodians._

I have never seen Mint and haven't used Quicken in ages. But isn't Mint the same thing only hosted? Where exactly did they innovate, I haven't heard of any exciting features. Anything here besides just "onlineness"?

<comment><USER2> It's the same thing as Yodlee.com (literally - Yodlee powers its backend) with a prettier user interface and waaaay better marketing.

<comment><USER23>
      prettier user interface and waaaay better marketing

a prettier UI and waaaay better marketing are clearly not to be poo-poo'ed as "no innovation", apparently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm sure Mint's founders and investors analyzed the acquisition quite heavily, more than any of us for that matter, and concluded that the acquisition was a fair and reasonable deal, otherwise they would not have agreed to its terms. Only time will tell if this acquisition actually becomes a detriment to Mint and its end-users in the long-term. I believe if Mint continues to have a focused and creative team behind its product, one which continues to effectively evolve the service in order to accommodate their users needs, they should continue to grow steadily.

</comment><comment><USER31> Honestly IMO Mint wasn't all that revolutionary. It's an online personal finance tool that Intuit more or less cloned to make their own Quicken Online service which is actually pretty good. Mint was going to have a tough time competing with such a well known and established brand with a huge installed base. Who's to say the Mint founders won't turn around and make that $170M into something really revolutionary?

</comment><comment><USER32> Did anyone ever offer $170 million for 37 signals? I can guess that the answer is 'No' just by knowing that it wasn't sold.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't know anything about Intuit's history, management structure, internal bureaucracy, vision, or product direction, so it's hard for me to say anything critical about this post in any level of detail.

In general, though, I would point to something that ought to strike anyone with an outside angle on the culture and worldview pervading the tech startup community and much of small business: there is a rather Messianic complex of exceptionalism, particularly with innovation.

While it is certainly true that large companies necessarily homogenize business processes and impart well-known characteristics of "mediocrity," that's exactly what they do best: optimise for profitability. Large organisations are very good at extracting value from existing things. They are also the only ones with the capital to bring many innovations from an incipient level to mass-market; that's a large-scale, and very capital- intensive endeavour.

I think startups often like to imagine themselves leaders in innovation due to hypothetically negligible distribution and replication cost structure introduced by the Internet, but that's a silly thing to extrapolate to a universal. It really depends on what the product is, and certainly on the nature of the innovation. There are a lot of modern conveniences, well-known products, appliances, brands, etc. that would have never seen the light of day - in a household name sort of sense - if they had been left in the stewardship of the original creators. It takes a lot of money - and, indeed, a lot of thankless, cheerless, rather bland and unremarkable process development and management - to get the escape velocity.

My point is that without knowing more about Intuit, I am not convinced, _ipso facto_ , that Mint is going to die a mediocre, bromidic megacorporate death simply because it was acquired by a much, much larger company. That doesn't necessarily follow. That it will undergo considerable change and adaptation to the business imperatives of the acquirer is almost certain, but whether that will turn out to be utterly horrible or something quite pleasant depends on the quality of the acquirer, not the mere fact of the acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't understand why the sale of Mint is regarded as the end to Aaron & co.'s great adventure. They're now free (and funded) to tackle another interesting problem, and let Intuit handle the inevitably _boring_ business of running an established company.

I don't hear anyone criticize pg for selling Viaweb, and that sale was obviously what opened the door to the Y-Combinator experiment (which is _much_ more interesting than running an established company).

There's a reason founders leave when the company "makes it", and its not the money.

</comment><comment> brown9-2 Isn't Aaron Patzer taking a fairly high-ranking job inside Intuit (as head of "personal finance software" or something) once the acquisition closes?

If this was an acquisition fueled completely by a VC or investor, I doubt the founder would be interested or willing to then commit to the Big Evil Company that his revolution is being sold to.

Therefore I think the main premise of Jason's blog post is wrong.

<comment><USER34> You've hit the nail on the head here.

See Scott Cook's (Intuit's founder) blog post: [http://www.mint.com/blog/updates/intuit-not-out-to-change- mi...](http://www.mint.com/blog/updates/intuit-not-out-to-change-mint-says- founder/)

<comment><USER35> A side note, but the pitch of that blog post is so odd:

>>Scott Cook from Intuit here. OK, I'm about to date myself. Long ago (27 years ago in fact), I watched my wife complain about paying the bills. That gave me an idea. And that idea became Quicken. Check with your parents – they might use it. Maybe even your grandparents.

>>But probably not you. For many of you, Quicken is a 20th century product in a 21st century world. It's like the car your parents had growing up. So you turned to Mint.com. Because it wasn't Quicken.

He seems to deliberately and at every opportunity play up what an out-of-touch old fart he is. You can almost hear the fake twang as he sits on his rocking chair...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is there any way to tell from the outside and at this point in time if the deal is a takeover from the inside like Apple buying Nexxt?

Will the lead people at Mint have real power in Inituit? Will one of them be the next CTO? Are terms like those ever specified in a buyout?

<comment><USER37> "Will the lead people at Mint have real power in Inituit? Will one of them be the next CTO?"

Very unlikely. And even if someone from Mint were to become CTO, he would find it very difficult to change direction or focus. Intuit has multiple levels of management fiefdoms(within fiefdoms) and is infested with layers of clueless middle management and with a few honorable exceptions(mostly old timers from the old days, and some sharp kids just out of school, who don't stay very long) the tech people aren't very hot either (which is why, with all their resources and customer base and domain knowledge, they couldn't compete with a thin layer around Yodlee's backend).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> A wise man once said:

Get in, get out - that's a O.G.'s classic

</comment><comment><USER39> RE All the talk of loaning/giving money to family/friends should one suddenly find themselves rich:

I have a long history of being a bleeding heart. I also come from an environment where "throwing money at the problem" is kind of the default mental model. So I've spent lots of time fantasizing about how I would improve the world/help people around me should I suddenly have money. Over the years, I have concluded that financial problems grow out of real problems, so in most cases just throwing money at the problem actually hurts a person's ability to solve the underlying real problem. If someone is convinced that "The Problem" is how much money they owe and you pay off their debts, it lets them off the hook for wondering if there is something about their lives they should change. (And in many cases, those debts will quickly pile up again because the cause of the debts was not resolved. My recollection is that about 2/3s of people who win the lottery are bankrupt 5 years later.)

For intractable personal problems, the odds are very good that the person with this intractable problem is very resistant to change and/or the problem itself is inherently difficult to overcome. In both cases, an easy way out of a portion of the consequences tends to undermine any hope they will buckle down and do the hard task of making the necessary changes. Also, paying off someone's debts inherently contains a judgement about how the money should be used. I have concluded that it would be better to just give someone money, no strings attached, no questions ask, no expectations, as a gift. And then not roll one's eyes and such when it isn't used the way one thought it ought to be. I have also concluded that if I want to help people address some serious personal problem, throwing money at the problem is not the way to do it. Some day, I might figure out how making money available could grease the wheels of progress towards a solution without causing all kinds of unintended negative side effects. Should I ever work that out in my mind, I might well found a charity. In the mean, I will share info and try to mind my own business.

</comment><comment><USER40> Running Mint.com probably isn't fun. Money is. That's all.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yawn. So much philosophizing, people.

Everyone on this thread is just screaming their own point of view so they can feel validated.

Quit arguing on HN, and go DO something.

</comment><comment><USER41> No truer words have ever been spoken.</comment>


Grove Says Patent System May Have Same Flaws as Derivatives - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601204&sid=aw5EZ9BzrgtU

<comment><USER2> "Patents have evolved to a point where they often aren't developed into products, and instead are instruments traded by speculators looking for the highest possible profit"

My initial reaction to the headline, was that it was so much hyperbole, but Grove makes the case that patents no longer serve their original function, and patent challenges should be easier.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm very glad when this issue gets attention. The software patent system is severely broken.

There's something wrong when patents play a more important role as a defensive play (for most companies) than as an incentive for inventors to implement their ideas.

My own recommendation is that a company should lose its rights to a patent if there is not at least one product released by the company in x years.

<comment><USER4> _My own recommendation is that a company should lose its rights to a patent if there is not at least one product released by the company in x years._

Why bother? It would be trivial to game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The patent system is supposed to increase innovation, but there's a suprising number of adverse feedback effects _from_ an increased rate of innovation which distort the patent mechanism:

\- succeeding innovations are more likely to occur within the lifetime of a patent

\- the patent office can't keep up, so it reduces the time for review

\- the time to issue (3 years and counting) becomes a huge problem for small inventors, while being much less of one for trolls

\- the number of patents covering an integrated product increases. At this point it is impractical to actually check whether you are infringing one

\- The standard of unobviousness, the crucial criterion of whether a patent serves the public interest, is related to the state of the art. But as the state of the art changes more quickly, this becomes more difficult to define, and also more difficult for patent examiners to keep up with. (And the validity of a patent may be decided by a court which has even less chance to keep up).

</comment><comment><USER6> It's so important for highly respected, heavy hitters like Andy Grove to weigh in on this issue. When patents become weapons and products become targets, the creation of real wealth becomes a chump's game. In this sense, the analogy to derivatives is pretty brilliant. Opportunistic, sure, but pretty damn insightful as well.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't help get the idea to solve this problem...

The idea is : "Move your factories, engineering teams to China, where patents issued in USA are ignored". The drawback is the company can only sell products outside U.S.

Am I joking? If the ShangZai manufacturers in China take a longer term view, they can do this. They are capable to adopt U.S. patents for their own products, except they will not be able to sell the products/services to U.S. But they can flood all markets in Europe and East Asia with their new adopted inventions.

</comment><comment><USER8> The basic problem is one of power. A large corporate entity can muster greater legal resources than a small startup to defend patents, even those that will never be developed into products.

Perhaps a firmer "use it or lose it" deadline could shift the balance of power, and streamline the process of patent challenges.

<comment><USER9> Bigger companies can also "use it" easier than small companies. It would make patent sqatting more expensive, but probably not prohibitively so.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do engineers hate Jira? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Probably the majority of any hate has little to do with any specific software and more to do with the general concept of trying to have business people assert any kind of authority or set any kind of goals at all, and hatred of such attempts may get transferred to the software by accident.

Relatedly, specific attempts at enforcing certain business-centric processes like Scrum and Agile would be upsetting for the same reason, and for the additional reason of requiring bureaucratic overhead and social interaction, which engineers want to minimize at all cost.

Businesses wishing to enforce such things is completely understandable from their perspective, and the continual search for some kind of workable process is an iterative thing. But probably those places that lean very heavily on the side of process and surveillance have gone too far. Setting and meeting medium and long-term objectives would be the thing to optimize for, instead of obsessing about process or ultra-short term task items.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because of the ridiculous workflows that many companies use it to impose on teams for no good reason. Also, the API is atrocious, slow and poorly documented and you DO NOT want to know what some government orgs are using it for.

</comment><comment><USER4> A lot of the hate for JIRA from what I've seen is in terms of its performance, time taken to load a page, for example. I bet it's not just the speed though. I'm curious to know if anyone could share more details.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't hate it, but given a choice I wouldn't use it. It's not very intuitive. I felt like I was wasting time trying to deal with it, and never exactly sure why it wasn't working, rather than getting stuff done. My next project used Trello (only for Kanban-related activities) and I was much more productive.

</comment><comment><USER6> Jira is frankly just bad software. It's unintuitive, proprietary, vulnerable software.

They made it as a replacement for Bugzilla, but for everything it competes with Bugzilla on, Bugzilla wins.</comment>


5 ways Bitcoin needs to improve before it can enable emerging markets - <AUTHOR> http://www.wamda.com/2013/08/5-ways-bitcoin-could-become-the-currency-of-choice-in-emerging-markets

<comment><USER2> Urgh stating the obvious and rehashed-to-death issues with btc.

nothing to see here</comment>


Tell HN: Google deactivated Adsense on richtweets.com - <AUTHOR>

A few years a go I registered the domain richtweets.com and coded the the app during a weekend. On richtweets.com you create a page and post the link and some characters on Twitter, using the Twitter API.
I did no marketing, but the site got some traction and has now about 50K visits monthly. (https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/richtweets.com)
I used Adsense, to monetize the site, but Google deactivated Adsense on richtweets.com today and this is the reason http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66361 <comment><AUTHOR> It is actually like a blogging service like blogger.com or wordpress.com So if you want to post more than 140 chars on Twitter, you can login with your twitter account and publish your text, photos or videos.

Google is not right. The site has a lot of original content. Even Brazilian government authorities use richtweets.com to talk to their people. We have over 20k posts an these posts get a lot of comments, retweets and Facebook shares.

</comment><comment><USER2> well, Google is correct - your site has little to no original content. So what's your beef with that?

<comment><USER3> I believe RichTweets is the hosting area for the rich tweets that then get linked via Twitter.

At least that's how I understand it.

<comment><USER2> again, that's very little original content?

<comment><USER3> I don't follow. Would you say that tumblr has very little original content? That's basically similar to what this service is, only it also automatically tweets a link to your rich tweet for you.

<comment><USER2> Tweets are not exactly a ton of content.

<comment><USER4> you still don't seem to understand how the site works. the tweets aren't the content. they just link to the content.

example: <http://richtweets.com/2ri9c>

<comment><USER2> Ok, now I get how it works. I would presume the site contains a lot of rich tweets that are very thin on content then, even if there are some that are rich in content. That's what Google has a problem with. If I were site owner, I'd put noindex on pages with less than X words, and not put Ads on those tweets as well.

In general, Adsense on a very generic site like this isn't that effective anyway. Ads aren't very targeted and Google also doesn't like that. They don't want advertisers to have a poor experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. Adsense is also not effective on this site, but Adsense was the only way to monetize the site. Google deactivated Adsense without any warning, so I had no time to remove Adsense on pages with little content.

<comment><USER5> You probably shouldn't have had them on pages with little content in the first place. You did break one of their policies, but if it's not effective anyways, you haven't really lost anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really I haven't lost much, but it is lesson for everyone, not to reply on a single source of revenue.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Meet Studio Ghibli's PlayStation 3 game, Ni No Kuni - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/16/studio-ghibli-ps3/ <comment><USER2> Retro side note: Back in the 80s in the laserdisc era of arcade games one of my favorite games was Cliff Hanger which used footage from Hayao Miyazaki's Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro and Lupin III: Mystery of Mamo: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Hanger_(game)>

<comment><USER3> Castle of Cagliostro was one of the first anime I saw. I'm not generally an anime fan, but it is a great one.

<comment><USER4> The studio ghibli movies generally stand in a class of their own as far as anime goes. Kind of like pixar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If my son was a little older, this would be my excuse to buy a PS3 right away! But my wife also loves Miyazaki's movies and studi Ghibli so maybe I found me excuse anyway! ;-)

</comment><comment><USER6> holy *&%$ it looks JUST like a movie.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aAs-vZ4rZE>

</comment><comment><USER7> Pity playing it would require buying a Sony product, or I might get it. Studio Ghibli is well known for making great things.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wish it was turn based, but it's so beautiful - might try it out! (I'm big Dragon Warrior/Quest fan!)

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks like real-time Pokemon. I'll buy it.</comment>


Glaxo to cut prices to poor countries - <AUTHOR> http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/090214/glaxosmithkline_poor_countries.html

<comment><USER2> This is a great move by Glaxo. I interned a drug company a couple years ago, and you could tell there was real effort to make sure those could not afford the drugs, but needed them, could still avail their benefits. There were programs to provide drugs at free or reduced costs, and real patients were frequently brought to the company's headquarters to talk to scientists & executives about the diseases they faced, and how they faced them. Moves like this on Glaxo's part can do a lot to ease the burden of disease.

There are two problems here:

1) Affordability of drugs. The onus here is on the drug companies to be good citizens, follow Glaxo's lead, and go even further. It makes good sense for drug companies to give back in this way, like Google's support of many open- source initiatives.

2) Lack of treatment for third-world diseases. This is a much bigger problem that will require outside forces, like private foundations or government. Big drug companies are making drugs for lucrative diseases like cancer, but people in poor countries are dying of AIDS, diarrhea, or malaria, before they even have a chance of getting cancer. There's not any monetary incentive for research to go into solving these problems in poor countries.

<comment><USER3> aneesh here, had to create a second account, because my main one is locked out on noprocrast!

Didn't mean to screw up the layout above. And now I can't login to edit it. Someone with magical admin powers, help me out here -- fix my comment, or let me override noprocrast so I can fix it myself.

PS there should be a character limit on the code formatting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a really nice thing to do. But doesn't it create an incentive to export drugs to countries that will pay more?</comment>


Fred Brooks vs. Dijkstra? (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://hmijailblog.blogspot.com/2015/08/fred-brooks-vs-dijkstra.html <comment><USER2> I believe we are still in the alchemical age of software application design. There are glimmers of enlightenment here and there that will help the transition to chemistry, but the transition hasn't really begun. Software done well today requires genius, but this should not be, just as basic chemistry labs don't require it.

Djikstra was complaining about these alchemical methods, and rightly so. The sad and dangerous thing is how much we have built on the shaky edifice of alchemy, and how much we blame ourselves for failure, and how we pride ourselves when we master some local improvement. (Even worse, the pride of finding some new local improvement).

<comment><AUTHOR> (Author here)

I agree. There's much too much "art", religion and cargo cultism in software development, and much too little science/engineering.

And it's hard to even say whether we're improving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> " _He talks about using OOP to remove "accidental difficulty" from the process, "allowing the designer to express the essence of the design without having to express large amounts of syntactic material that add no information content"…_

" _…but he stops at OOP? Makes me think that he was not very informed about functional programming, given that OOP is (1) trivial to add to functional programming languages, (2) dissed by all the greats as uninteresting – or worse._ "

Here's my take: OO _may_ be a decent way of managing complexity, but it introduces a (noticably high) complexity floor that negates many of the benefits. It works very well for some things, specifically windowed guis, and less well for almost everything else. Rule of thumb: if you are modeling the "problem domain" and not the "solution domain," you are doing it wrong.

However, for better or worse, every programmer in the last 30 years has been trained on OOP; most simply cannot conceive of not using a "class" keyword. On the other hand, almost no one does OOP itself anymore. Objects, classes, are treated as a module system, which is noticably missing, or at least very limited, in most programing environments.

All problems have some level of essential complexity, although often it is lower than both the floor demanded of both the programing environment and _the programmer 's self esteem._ (It's difficult for many to admit that what they are being asked to do is trivial, so they look for ways to make it more difficult, including introducing bizarre monstrosities into their environment.)

On the other hand, exactly no one wants to grapple in hand to hand combat with any moderately complex problem (and many problems do have sudden, steep, complexities) as Dijkstra would have preferred. Or, some problems cannot be solved in the necessary resource constraints, including the brain power of the programmer. As a result, more complexity is pushed down stream---and modern systems have very long tributaries.

So, what can ya' do?

<comment><USER4> > [OO] introduces a (noticably high) complexity

Hmm...I'd say Smalltalk is about as simple as things get.

For anything more than a few functions/methods, you want some sort of scoping/module concept, and I think you're right that that's one way classes are used. Might as well be classes as they are lightweight, provide a convenient metaphor and other benefits.

I would say that true OO programming is rare. Most I've seen in industry is scoped procedural with little to no polymorphism. Or paraphrasing Alan Kay: "Before you dismiss OO, you should at least try it _once_ ".

<comment><USER5> Smalltalk is simple. But Smalltalk doesn't help making your programs simpler - at least not as much as a powerful FP language.

OOP is a convenient tool for cutting your state into smaller, independent pieces. But that can only go as far as the pieces can be independent, what for most practical domains is not very much. It also does not bring any other big benefit bundled with it, what looks to me like the EDJ complaint is all about.

<comment><USER4> > But Smalltalk doesn't help making your programs simpler

Hmm..."OO may be a decent way of managing complexity..." was what the parent said, I responded to the "complex baseline" assertion. And your assertion that it doesn't help is empirically invalidated on many counts.

First, the folks at Xerox PARC managed to implement "Personal Computing (networked)" in around 20KLOC of Smalltalk, including the OS, windowing system, IDE, networking, e-mail, messaging etc. Second, look at the sheer amount of functionality in something like Squeak.

> at least not as much as a powerful FP language.

Citation needed? Caper Jones Function Point Metric puts Smalltalk's language level at 20, Haskell at 8.5 (larger=better)

[http://www.cs.bsu.edu/homepages/dmz/cs697/langtbl.htm](http://www.cs.bsu.edu/homepages/dmz/cs697/langtbl.htm)

<comment><USER3> IIRC, both Plan 9 and QNX are not _that_ much larger, and they're written in C.

<comment><USER4> The ~20KLOC of Xerox PARC was the entire system, not just the kernel, and included, among other things:

\- the kernel/OS

\- the windowing GUI

\- the programming language, compiler, libraries

\- the visual IDE

\- Networking

\- E-Mail/Chat

\- ...

I am not sure DTP/Word Processing was also included, it might have been a separate system.

Now I am a huge fan of QNX, used it and developed for it a bit in the 90s, but the version that fit on a floppy didn't cover anywhere near as much. Also, QNX is built on a _message passing_ kernel...hmm...

You also left out Amiga Exec + Intuition, which is also amazingly compact and was built in C...but using OO concepts, which are implementable in C. For example, everything in the kernel is a List, and so specific concepts like ports effectively subclass List (with function tables etc.) See also: Objective-C.

Plan 9 is also very, very cool, and its "everything is a file" (no really, _everything_ ) is not that dissimilar to everything is an object. Part of my own work[1] is trying to find the common ground between these two approaches, with a good amount of success.

Anyway, the Plan 9 distribution is 1.5 _million_ lines of code. The Acme text editor and cc compiler alone sum to 20KLOC. libdraw is another 5KLOC etc.

So Plan 9 is good, Smalltalk is arguably better, but I think we can (and have to) do better still, see VPRI[2].

Coming back to Brooks for a second: in NSB, he saw OO as one of the few hopes for tackling the problem, and in an OOPSLA panel 20 years later he opined that it had largely succeeded[3].

That said, I agree with your take that software tends to be much, much more complicated than it has any need or rights to be. I attribute much of this to architectural mismatch[4], particularly in the domain of UI-intensive systems[5]

For example, much of the complexity of UI programs can be removed by modeling them using high-level dataflow constraints[6], combined with compositional storage.

Dataflow also seems to be a very powerful reduction factor, Unix pipes/filters still rule (see Doug McIllroy's response to Bentley's challenge), and Dan Amelang's Nile/Gezira does a modern 2 1/2D compositing graphics subsystem in ~500 lines of dataflow code[7]

[1] [http://objective.st](http://objective.st)

[2] [http://www.vpri.org](http://www.vpri.org)

[3] [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221321794_No_silver...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221321794_No_silver_bullet_reloaded_retrospective_on_essence_and_accidents_of_software_engineering)

[4] [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/able/www/paper_...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/able/www/paper_abstracts/archmismatch- icse17.html)

[5] [http://dl.ifip.org/db/conf/ehci/ehci2007/Chatty07.pdf](http://dl.ifip.org/db/conf/ehci/ehci2007/Chatty07.pdf)

[6] [https://www.hpi.uni- potsdam.de/hirschfeld/publications/media...](https://www.hpi.uni- potsdam.de/hirschfeld/publications/media/WeiherHirschfeld_2016_ConstraintsAsPolymorphicConnectors_AuthorsVersion.pdf)

[7] [https://github.com/damelang/nile](https://github.com/damelang/nile)

<comment><AUTHOR> Regarding [3], I find the paper interestingly underwhelming. Brooks' part of it says that 2 decades have passed (since NSB in 1986) without an order-of- magnitude improvement, and then says "Of the candidates enumerated in "NSB", object-oriented programming has made the biggest change, and it is a real attack on the inherent complexity itself."

I think this is rather ironic / off-mark, given that the 90s and 00s were so full of OOP - for example, growth of C++ impulsed by Windows, and if anything OOP lately seems to be (thankfully) going back to being just another tool in the toolbox. To me it feels like OOP had its moment/decades in the spotlight, it didn't fulfill hopes/expectations/SB and therefore things keep moving on, in search of that SB. Isn't it? Or is the implication that things were even worse in the 80's?

Note, I'm referring to OOP in the "industry standard" way it's commonly understood, not Alan Kay's message-passing original meaning - about which I'm still trying to learn more.

But, WOW - I just read David Lorge Parnas' part in [3]. I was already reeling from the paper's distilled self-serving, but this guy is crapping in every one, rather directly, and making sense while at it. I have a new hero to research.

[4 - 7] are really interesting, thank you (as is Betley's and McIlroy's mention). And also very interesting to see someone working in those things while developing another iteration of Smalltalk. This is really making me prioritize learning Smalltalk in my to-do queue...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Clickbait. The post does not contrast Fred Brooks with Dijkstra.

(Instead it presents some complaints from Dijkstra - on overblown marketing material mostly. And presents some of Fred Brooks well-known points - apparently the author doesn't quite agree, or perhaps hadn't grasped the depth of Brooks' thinking.)

<comment><AUTHOR> (Author here)

The post quotes both Brooks and Dijkstra; the first managed development of a system and got famous, the second saw the system's actual failures and reported his criticism on it.

So, care to explain what exactly is it that you find lacking? My experience with people who cite "failure to grasp the thinking" has been rather with "architecty" types that can't get past handwaving to make a point, so anything concrete would be appreciated.

For example: you say Dijkstra complains "on overblown marketing material mostly". Citation, please? Sounds like you mean that the marketing overpromised and underdelivered, but to me it looks like Dijkstra was pretty clear about _the whole set of ideas_ being poppycock even if fully delivered; he says that it's fundamentally the wrong way to do things, and does so in a rather smug "told you so" mode.

... unless we want to argue that maybe Dijkstra didn't "grasp the depth of Brooks' thinking" either, nor the functionality of that thinking's actual, first hand implementation?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would you solve the spam problem at Gmail? - <AUTHOR> Imagine for a moment that you are on the GMail team and you need to solve the problem of deciding whether an email intended for one of your customers (@gmail.com user) is going to go to the Inbox or Spam folder.
The world is full of actors - both good and bad - who are hungry to get their message into Inbox.
So how would you ensure only the good actors land in the Inbox? <comment><USER2> You start with SPF, DKIM, DMARC and IP reputation.

But then I'd use the moat GMail enjoys as a primary mail destination by statistically looking at the frequency an incoming email's metadata and content similarity has recently arrived at GMail as a whole, then moving suspicious arrivals into a progressive exposure pathway that tentatively delivers a small percent to known currently-active users (eg mobile GMail app open on screen and unlocked) and see what percentage are flagged as spam, archived or deleted. Then use that real time feedback to vary the delivery flow of remaining messages to inbox vs spam.

</comment><comment><USER3> First and foremost you want to make sure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are valid from the sender's mail server

[https://www.smartertools.com/blog/2019/04/09-understanding-s...](https://www.smartertools.com/blog/2019/04/09-understanding- spf-dkim-dmarc)

Then, email filtering companies use things like IP Address of the sender, keywords, and NLP, and other tools to determine if the email has spam and assign it some kind of score to it.

</comment><comment><USER4> You can use the + feature to generate different email addresses and then chuck anything coming to the root address. That way when you get spam on a particular address you just block that one address.

</comment><comment><USER5> Apart from a preapproved list of contacts, I would ask for a fee to deliver each message and only high bidders get to pass. Which is more or less what they re doing

</comment><comment><USER6> Perfect task for AI. Especially considering that Google has more resources for it than bad actor.

</comment><comment><USER7> This sounds like a product-manager-interview question.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interview question? ;)</comment>


Pony: open-source, actor-model, capabilities-secure, high performance language - <AUTHOR> https://www.ponylang.org/ <comment><USER2> A recent discussion of Pony, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14676505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14676505)</comment>


Prototyping at Slack - <AUTHOR> https://slack.engineering/prototyping-at-slack-b1ec3a298226 <comment><USER2> Personally the Slack UI is very not "natural" for me, both before the redesign and after with new desktop UI. The iOS app feels better in the new version, but also something is very not consistent with my experience with other apps.

In the desktop case, for some actions (like leave a channel), I have to click on every element which looks like it clicking it would open a menu, until I find the right menu with that option.

On mobile, I find it very difficult to navigate quickly between channels/DMs, and always have a hard time when trying to open a "DM with several people session". Both a new one, and finding one I know exists in my history.

</comment><comment><USER3> Their UI is not my cup of tea either. I find browsing channels and the way personal chats are listed not to work well. I've also seen a bug numerous times where the UI shows a notification for a message when there isn't one but that's not a UI problem per se

</comment><comment> http-teapot I am curious, it says it loads under one second but doesn't on my computer, does it load that fast for you?</comment>