Add authentication to your Angular app with Auth0 and ASP .Net OWIN backend - <AUTHOR> https://auth0.com/blog/2014/06/24/authenticating-your-angular-app-with-auth0-and-asp-net-owin/?utm_content=bufferb7b87&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

<comment><USER2> Looks great but (and it is a big but), Auth0 has an expensive attached cost: [https://auth0.com/pricing](https://auth0.com/pricing)

It also adds a third party dependency, namely Auth0, who hold your auth / user data.

I made this mistake once using RPXNow from Janrain. Andrew Arnold described quite correctly why 3rd party auth services are a bad idea: [http://blog.nerdbank.net/2009/01/why-using-rpxnow-is-bad- ide...](http://blog.nerdbank.net/2009/01/why-using-rpxnow-is-bad-idea.html)</comment>


Show HN: Beastnotes – A Notebook for Online Courses - <AUTHOR> https://www.beastnotes.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

I've built Beastnotes, a web-app and browser extension that work together seamlessly to help us take notes, stay organized, and keep focused on the videos we're learning from.

If any of you are taking classes online, it would be great if you could check it out.

Cheers!</comment>


Adobe's 9% Flash tax - <AUTHOR> http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/the-9-adobe-flash-tax <comment><USER2> If you want to call something a "regressive tax", please make sure that doesn't mean the exact opposite of what you're describing. A flat licensing fee would be regressive. A huge upfront cost would be prohibitive for small developers, but no problem for large companies.

On top of that, it only comes into effect after $50k revenue. If Flash reduces your development costs (not making that argument one way or another), then this is a great deal for small developers and will only be pushing away the large developers who can afford to invest in other technologies.

Is this a good idea? I don't know. I'm guessing this is the same type of licensing that a game engine would offer, but it does sound very expensive.

<comment><USER3> > A flat licensing fee would be regressive.

No. It would be flat. A regressive tax would charge the small companies more than the big companies.

<comment><USER4> Flat tax generally means a flat _percentage_ not a flat fee. Regressive tax is where the rate (percentage) goes down as you scale up. A tax that is a fixed total amount (not a fixed total percentage) is regressive because the same amount is a lower percentage of a higher income. You can still charge the rich total more than the poor and have it be regressive; eg a regressive tax where you charge 10k income at 10% and 1k income at 20% you still charging the rich a larger amount.

<comment><USER5> Or to give the US example, sales tax (and 'vice' taxes like cigarettes and liquor) - because of the different spending habits of different groups, they're effectively regressive taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I gave Adobe a significant chunk of my money, a while back, to be "legitimate" and to keep up with "the industry" at that time.

I'm seriously regretting that decision. Legally, it was "the right" thing to do.

But personally, I feel I paid the people that are screwing me -- as one person recently commented about the content industry, he was ceasing to pay those people so that they could use the money to force their evermore draconian policies (of self-interest) on him and society.

Furthermore, due to Adobe's clear mistakes, I needed support from Adobe Support. And despite all the money they had received from me, the experience was absolutely horrible. Eventually, _I_ was the one explaining (repeatedly) to their support technicians what they needed to do. It finally came down to luck of the draw and reaching an associate who was actually willing to demonstrate a little initiative.

All this boils down to personal anecdote, but for me that is: Adobe goes to extremes to seem/be _undeserving_ of the license fees they demand.

<comment><USER7> Agreed: Personal Anecdote

I made a $15,000 software purchase a few years ago (A bunch of copies of CS5 Master) and the same day I called for support because it was not running well on our brand new machines. I was told "Sorry sir you have to pay $79 to talk to a technician because you use a server (Level two Escalation)" Me: I just purchased $15,000 of software and I have to pay to talk to someone who may or may not be able to solve my issue? Them: "That's correct" Me: "Please let me speak to a manager" Them: "I can't do that sir"

Sorry Adobe, but at a minimum buy me dinner before you... I'm sure you can finish the rest.

<comment><USER8> $79 is half of a percent of what you just spent on that software. While I agree that charging you is disappointing in principle, it's odd to fume over a penny when you just spent $150.

<comment><USER9> This reminds me of people who aren't willing to drive across town to save $250 on a $15000 car purchase, but who make sure to buy their groceries when they are on sale to save money ...

Just because you recently spent $15,000 doesn't mean the next $80 are worth less.

<comment><USER10> False comparison - You buy a new car once every 5-7 years. You buy groceries 2-3 times a week.

<comment><USER11> It's not a false comparison, and luckily I don't have to explain it, because this is covered in my personal favorite TED talk, "Dan Gilbert on our mistaken expectations".[1] It's a bit long for a TED talk, running for about half an hour, but I'd recommend at least reading the transcript if you can't watch the video.

The relevant portion comes after Gilbert sets up a situation not unlike the one being discussed here. People won't shlep across town to save $100 on a $31k car, but they will to save $100 on a $200 stereo. He explains the cognitive mistake as follows:

> _This kind of thinking drives economists crazy, and it should. Because this > 100 dollars that you save -- hello! -- doesn't know where it came from. It > doesn't know what you saved it on. When you go to buy groceries with it, it > doesn't go, I'm the money saved on the car stereo, or, I'm the dumb money > saved on the car. It's money. And if a drive across town is worth 100 bucks, > it's worth 100 bucks no matter what you're saving it on._

[1] [https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_researches_happiness.h...](https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_researches_happiness.html)

<comment><USER10> The reason people go to so much effort to save money on smaller purchases, is they make them so much more frequently. You make a $31k purchase once a decade, so saving $100 on that purchase is way down on the list of priorities - location is much more important if you are visiting the dealership for the next 10 years. Time and gas alone to go an extra 5 miles will add up to hundreds of dollars.

If i can save $100 every two-three months, with no downstream liability as a result (like the cost of taking my car the extra distance to the dealership) then I've profited $4000 over 10 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm trying to imagine the discussion that happened at Adobe that resolved this decision, and it's got to have been either:

a) We are self-aware enough to acknowledge that the end of flash being relevant is nigh, so let's monetize this thing while we can

b) We think flash is a growing platform, and we're in a position of strength (like Apple's App Store), so the percent of revenue is something people will hate but tolerate

(Due to MBAs' infrequent use of the word 'nigh', b) is more likely)

<comment><USER13> I'm guessing it's like "Zynga's making $1.4B a year on the back of our technology, dammit, and we're giving it to them for free! We must do something about this problem of uncaptured revenue."

<comment><USER14> It's a little more like "Alchemy+Stage3D" can be used to create another Apple App Store on the desktop, but they're giving away the tools to use it for free. Without some means of get some revenue from it, the cost of maintaining this for everyone else is a pure loss for Adobe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Still, the $50K limit and 3D/memory-specific technology seems like there is only a handful of companies that will ever fulfill these conditions... and Adobe surely has a list of exactly who they are. So this is a very targeted policy that will never apply to 99.99% of us.

Is this an accurate assessment?

<comment><USER16> > Still, the $50K limit and 3D/memory-specific technology seems like there is > only a handful of companies that will ever fulfill these conditions... and > Adobe surely has a list of exactly who they are. So this is a very targeted > policy that will never apply to 99.99% of us.

> Is this an accurate assessment?

No.

If you want to create a 3D game using Unity and deploy to Flash, for example, you will need to pay the 9%. That's a lot of people, Flash support for Unity was a much-requested feature. So that's a lot of people right there.

And this isn't just Unity users. Any fast 3D game will require the premium features.

<comment><USER17> Based on Adobe's announcements on this subject earlier in the week, the licensing requirement only applies to apps that use _both_ the 3d and memory- optimization technologies. Using one or the other by itself won't require licensing. The practical effect on Unity-Flash games are that small 3d games should not be subject to the licensing requirement.

Caveat: Adobe has actually not issued specific rules or statements on when licensing is required, so until they do, any analysis is really just conjecture.

Edit: The facts on which I based my analysis have changed. Adobe has issued a FAQ, and Unity has confirmed that the Unity-Flash conversion uses both features. Consequently, the practical effect is that any game that succeeds in reaching the $50,000 revenue threshold will incur licensing fees of 9% on the revenue in excess of $50,000 (i.e., $0.09 for $50,001 total revenue, $4500 licensing fee for $100,000 total revenue).

<comment><USER18> Adobe has released a FAQ: [http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/premium- fea...](http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/premium-features- licensing-faq.html)

Unity's export to Flash does currently require both 3D and memory-optimization technologies. Any Unity-Flash game that has a chance of netting $50k falls under the requirement, from what I currently understand. This basically covers any non-hobbyists. Unity could solve this problem by making their Flash exporter not use "domain memory", but that might be technically infeasible.

One interesting question is, if my company makes 5 games, each of which makes $49k, is that legit? Could I get away with taking down any game right before it nets the magic number and putting up a "new" game which is only slightly different? I'm guessing the answer is "no", but edge cases sound like a nightmare.

<comment><USER17> Thanks. I was going off of what was known yesterday; didn't know about the FAQ or that Unity had confirmed its conversion process used both of the targeted techniques.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > In this case, even if you created the SWF yourself (using tools like haxe), > you'd still have to pay the tax.

Can that actually be legally enforced? I assume this tax would be part of the TOS for using an authoring tool. A consumer has to agree to the TOS for using/downloading the Flash client. But if I want to put up an SWF file I built without Adobe tools... who can legally stop me?

Unless there's some kind of encryption key for generating signed Flash files necessary for the functionality, and circumventing them would run afoul of the DMCA...

<comment><USER19> Welcome to the new world of proprietary software. If you're running on someone else's APIs, and there is an incentive to charge you for it, they probably will.

When you buy your computer/phone/tablet you are not purchasing hardware and software to use as you please, you are purchasing access to a "platform" that can reach into your computer and make decisions based on not-your self interest.

<comment><USER20> NEW world of proprietary software?

Proprietary software has been around for a long time, young Padawan. And for all that time, using it has meant knowing that the platform owner could step in at any time and ream^H^H^H^H"monetize" you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > this violates the fundmental openness of the SWF format

Since when has the SWF format had "fundamental openness"? It's the exact opposite.

<comment><USER22> Considering the spec is open and anybody can make a SWF from any program, or use any program to parse and execute a SWF...isn't that the definition of "openness"?

It's Adobe's tools that aren't free or open.

<comment><USER23> The spec itself, though, is wholly controlled by Adobe. If someone else wanted to go in and make changes to the spec they could not do so. Compare this with HTML, which is definitely an open spec, and you can see the difference. It's like saying .NET is open: it's not, even though Mono exists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The business model of monetizing a product that is on the way out is well established. At least that was my reaction to the announcement.

CA (Computer Associates) made this their primary product revenue stream by buying up old software (eg. Clipper, Ingres, etc.) that still had an installed base. They invested minimal amounts into product maintenance (make sure it works on the newest version of Windows) and rake in the licensing revenue from the remaining user base.

The only thing different is that Adobe is essentially doing it to themselves-- monetizing their own long tail instead of selling to a long-tail specialist and moving on.

</comment><comment><USER25> _"I think it's pretty peculiar that Adobe would announce such a regressive tax,... even if you created the SWF yourself (using tools like haxe), you'd still have to pay the tax."_

I disagree it is 'pretty peculiar', I think it is 'pretty obvious' why Adobe has done this. After years of growth and dividends and success, they have gone through a decade of sideways motions where they are resorting various and sundry cost cutting moves to keep their stock afloat. They have 'good enough' disease.

That is the disease where computers and their products which run on those computers have become 'good enough' and their customer base isn't rolling over every 12months to pony up an upgrade fee. One of the interesting ways to see this effect is to look for sales of technical books about older versions of a particular software. When they are still selling well it is because those folks are using the 'old' version rather than upgrade.

Given the pricing model Adobe doesn't have a good way to capture that market. They have aggressively been trying to shut down re-sale of older versions on Ebay and elsewhere but the courts have handed them a couple of set backs too because their licenses do actually allow it.

So they have a product, Flash, which they have already said is 'dead' [2] in that its future is maintenance only, and so they perhaps figure, what the heck, lets get some money out of it before it goes.

[1] [http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...](http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1332878400000&chddm=1154686&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NASDAQ:ADBE&ntsp=0)

[2] [http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/10/technology/adobe_flash/index...](http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/10/technology/adobe_flash/index.htm)

<comment><USER26> While what you say is true, I disagree with you in tone.

Adobe makes money from Flash by selling licenses to the tools. During the long period of platform growth, developer community growth and turnover helped maintain profits through new license sales. Now that the Flash community is shrinking, that revenue is not sufficient to maintain the profits that will motivate Adobe to fund continuing development of the platform. This is a business, after all, not a nonprofit like the Apache Foundation.

Meanwhile, you have companies like Zynga making profits from software built on the Flash platform disproportionate to the number of Flash licenses they purchase. Zynga owes much of its success to the high market penetration of the Flash player, which makes its social games extremely accessible to its non- technical core users.

It's reasonable to place much of the blame for Flash's decline on Adobe for failing to maintain the quality of the Flash Player and for underestimating the shift to mobile/tablets. In light of those failures and what must be rapidly falling Flash tool sales, Adobe has made a decision to change the revenue model for Flash so that they can continue to profit from the platform.

<comment><USER25> "It's reasonable to place much of the blame for Flash's decline on Adobe for failing to maintain the quality of the Flash Player and for underestimating the shift to mobile/tablets. In light of those failures and what must be rapidly falling Flash tool sales, Adobe has made a decision to change the revenue model for Flash so that they can continue to profit from the platform."

100% agreement. Going from a infrastructure support model to a rent seeking model. This will hasten the abandonment of their platform as historically rent seeking has been antithetical to supportable business models in users of the technology at hand, especially if there is no FRAND agreement in place for the technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Adobe is killing Flash even quicker than I had hoped.

Please, Adobe, keep this shit up.

<comment><USER28> They're giving the stick, here are some carrots!

<http://www.chromeexperiments.com/>

<http://aleksandarrodic.com/p/jellyfish/>

[http://www.script-tutorials.com/fresh-10-html5-canvas- webgl-...](http://www.script-tutorials.com/fresh-10-html5-canvas-webgl- examples/)

<http://www.html5code.com/gallery/javascript-3d-model-viewer/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> How likely is it that they will be able to collect the money, legally? After all, using programs like haXe, people can bypass all adobe software used in the creation of the software. Can Adobe monetize the _use_ of said software by taxing the original creators? It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, unless they implement some DRM wrapped around the "premium" apis.

<comment><USER19> How the binary is created is irrelevant, it's going to run on the Flash VM. Adobe can easily block unsigned code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Perfect, another nail in flash's coffin.

</comment><comment><USER31> > Are Flash game companies going to have to reveal all their internal revenue > details, and is Adobe going to regulate this somehow?

This. Seems near impossible to keep track of all those different devs, monetizing in so many different ways.

<comment><USER32> I wonder if devs who offer their games for free, but have in-app purchases could get around all this? =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So a walled garden is good if its one company, and bad if its another? Be fair.

<comment><USER34> Exactly. Apple takes a 30% tax and one says anything?

<comment><USER35> Google charges the same 30%: [http://support.google.com/googleplay/android- developer/bin/a...](http://support.google.com/googleplay/android- developer/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=112622)

However, this isn't an apt comparison to what Adobe's doing. Apple, Google, Amazon, etc provide the infrastructure, hosting, payment processing, and the integration into the device. Adobe is providing none of this, yet is still claiming a piece of the action.

<comment><USER33> None of that justifies a 'cover charge' - lots of folks make hardware, everybody has their store. They only 'provide' the store because they won't let anyone else.

The guys that do it, do it because they can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> So i would have to pay more if I become more successful? Even if the new revenue had nothing to do with the api im licensing? I see no fairness in this whatsoever.

If my game makes 60k one year, then 300k the next year because I poured money into marketing, development, new content, better experience, etc.... why should adobe get more money? Especially if none of the new growth had anything to do with the licensing. This is so insane... Why would anyone agree to this?

<comment><USER36> It's not too far from the 30% that Apple charges for App Store distribution... You are paying for the use of Adobe's Flash Player.

<comment><USER32> Two totally different things.

Apple has a giant marketplace thats allows people to find your app by search or discovery, they distribute it, they host it, they manage the servers for the store, they keep it secure, they host the feedback, they have a massive customer base that they offer your app to in an easy to use marketplace, etc. etc.

adobe is just unlocking a portion of an language/api essentially. Ive never heard of a premium upgrade taking a portion of your revenue. ive only ever seen a fixed rate to have access to better features. That's just insane. I would never pay this & I pay 25% of my revenue for a marketplace for my scripts & themes

9% for unlocking an api? that's insane/offensive/hilarious & i would never participate in such a thing. it feels like a bully taking part of my lunch money no matter how much my mom gave me.

<comment><USER36> I'm a bit late to this comment but there's just one thing I want to say. I agree with everything you for the most part but Adobe is in effect charging for the distribution of their platform. For example if you built a game with Unity you could either publish on Unity's browser plugin or pay 9% to publish using Flash Player. What you're paying for in that instance is the fact that any user will most likely already have flash player installed and ready to go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think there's also a secondary explanation.

There is a huge potential for security exploits in 3d code. Drivers are optimized for performance and glitches will likely allow malicious code.

Forcing developers who use these features to sign their code gives Adobe a way to police exploits.

In fact, look at how soon the cut off date is. A researcher has probably sent them a proof of concept exploit. Adobe's solution is to disable the feature for most developers.

</comment><comment><USER38> _I think it's pretty peculiar that Adobe would announce such a regressive tax_

1) I've been in a company with a large established user base on a development environment. This is a very tempting option for such companies. (Look at the comment elsewhere referencing CA.)

2) Such a tax is not regressive. The $50k minimum is actually very friendly to the little guys.

</comment><comment><USER39> Is this a flash tax for all of flash? Or 1 or 2 features that will only be used to an extreme by large companies?

Is the title of this post fud filled interpretation, or are there some facts?</comment>


Motorola Pushes Android Updates the Fastest and Russia Has Crazy Fragmentation - <AUTHOR> https://www.apteligent.com/2016/08/apteligent-data-report-android-manufacturer-edition/ <comment><USER2> I would buy a Motorola device to get faster updates, but do they even have phones worth getting?</comment>


I Quit Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://mattmaroon.com/2010/11/23/i-quit-hacker-news/ <comment><USER2> It certainly does seem that HN has become increasingly more political in recent days. Yes, I can understand a post on body-scanner technology and it's applications to travel security, but do we really need to see blog posts about how person n opted out, or how person x experienced an unusual pat-down? Yes, for Americans (and non-Americans alike), these are important issues, but HN does not need to become an aggregate site for stories such as these.

There is a strong commitment by the community to prevent the site becoming like digg, reddit, or slashdot. Losing focus on the topics that brought us here in the first place (technology, startup culture, and programming) is the first step on that path in my opinion.

All I can ask is please, try not to submit/vote up stories which are not particularly related to tech. It's not what I'm interested in discussing in this particular venue.

Or maybe I'm just in the minority. I guess time will tell.

P.S. Just because you put the word "Hacker" in your article/title, doesn't mean it belongs here.

<comment><USER3> It would be completely ridiculous to try to remove political discussion from HN.

Politics is involved with _everything_ the world has to offer; and more specifically, politics is fundamentally bound to technology.

The fact that people like making 'cool stuff', will always have a flip-side. We need to be able to talk about the way that technology is utilised and that (necessarily) involves political discussion.

Without this kind of discussion, people involved in the tech industry are destined to become unthinking drones .. consideration of ethics and politics is essential if technology stands any chance of making the world a better place.

<comment><USER4> Any way you slice it, discussion on ways to bypass scanners is not that relevant to technology. More importantly, there are a large number of sites where 'politics' can be discussed, don't infest a hacker site with it.

<comment><USER3> It's entirely relevant to technology.

Whether you like it or not, technology doesn't happen in a vacuum. Technology relates to people and society in a big way.

When usage of a device (like the millimetre wave scanner) is misguided and unappreciated by a large number of people, why on earth _shouldn't_ it be discussed on a tech forum?

It's not enough to take the view that 'I just make the stuff .. other people can choose whether it's a good idea'.

We all have a responsibility to consider whether what we create is going to result in anything 'good' and what 'good' actually means.

<comment><USER4> What you're talking about are your opinions and your personal philosophical beliefs of only tangential relevance to technology. Discussing them is not what I signed up here for. You wanna talk about it? I have a reddit account, you know?

<comment><USER3> What you're talking about are _your_ opinions and _your_ personal philosophical beliefs [..] discussing them is _exactly_ what I signed up here for.

.. or are you claiming you only express facts ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wrote this as a reply to 'icey and it got unwieldy:

The standards for what's germane to Hacker News have gotten looser. TSA is only the most recent example. What's especially toxic about this fact is that you don't notice it until it gets really bad. That's because most of these stories have nerd-structured narratives, involving tradeoffs and logic and subtext and affordances for contrarianism, which bait commenters. Having participated in a TSA discussion (for instance), you become socially committed to the idea that they're relevant to Hacker News.

Hacker News has become much more self-referential. All due respect to 'lionhearted and 'DanielBMarkham and 'jacquesm, but there have been many stories voted to the top of the site on content that wouldn't stand had they been written by an "outsider". There's a clear name-recognition bias. That's not the author's fault (it's their blog, they should write what they want), but it does make the site feel insular.

I'll go out on a limb though and assert that insularity is something 'pg cultivates. My most recent cue on that was his encouraging response to "Offer HN".

Like it did for Matt, Hacker News has killed any desire I have to write standalone content. I haven't blogged in over a year. A book idea I was tossing around has been dead for longer. Hacker News fills the same psychological place for me that Usenet did in the 1990s, when I also didn't write a lot of standalone content. Now, for me, this is actually a good thing; I dove into HN while fleeing the "blogosphere". But I can see it being a problem for someone else.

Having said all that: I get tremendous value out of HN. I've met tons of people running startups, I've done business with some of them, I get to carry on long-running conversations with people like Patrick McKenzie and Colin Percival, I've hired several awesome people off the site, and I'm still impressed by the newcomers (for instance, go read 'carbocation's backlog of comments on biology and medicine).

Perhaps I'd like to see people a little quicker with the "flag" button; perhaps I'd like to see the site tuned so that flaggers can more easily win the race against thoughtless up-voters. And it might be nice if we could take a break from blog posts by long-time contributors; maybe we can switch to a "best-of" 'lionhearted mentality, instead of a "today's" 'lionhearted mentality.

But, while it sucks to lose Matt (he seemed like one of the more no-bullshit members of the site), I'm not as alarmed as he seems to be about the decline of HN.

<comment><USER6> 'Perhaps I'd like to see people a little quicker with the "flag" button; perhaps I'd like to see the site tuned so that flaggers can more easily win the race against thoughtless up-voters.'

What happens when the 'thoughtless upvoters' find the flag button as well though? I don't think flagging posts is the solution to this problem.

People are never going to see eye to eye about what content belongs on the site and what content doesn't. There's no amount of convincing or flagging you can do to change this.

This is a tech-centric community, there's enough talent here to come up with a good tech-centric solution to the problem.

Something as simple as being able to apply a subtractive filter to the main page could go a long way. I.E. '-TSA -scanner' or something along those lines.

<comment><USER5> The TSA posts are manifestly off topic:

 _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic._

The _first_ TSA post was (marginally) germane. The TSA is now on the front page of CNN. Unfortunately, HN "blessed" the topic by spinning off gigantic discussion threads on early TSA stories. So, even though this is a current events topic currently being covered on network TV news, it still finds a place here.

I bring this up not to further the argument about the TSA on Hacker News, but rather to demonstrate a pathology that occurs when we accept borderline stories that end up breeding months-long narratives in dribs-and-drabs. I also say this as someone who has written many hundreds of words here in comments on TSA stories.

As for filtering the front page: you might as well suggest "sub-HN's", like Reddit. Part of the point of the site is that it focuses a lot of interesting brains on a single spool of stories and discussions.

PS: _For what it's worth, this is actually not a tech-centric community full of tech-centric ideas for community building problems. HN is a deliberately simple site curated by a single guy who started it as a demo for his programming language and liked where it went. Very few of the technical ideas anyone has proposed for this site have been tried, much less adopted; that's just not how HN works. This is a community governed by norms more than by code._

<comment><USER6> I'm not arguing that the posts are on topic. What I'm saying is that you have no control over the so called 'thoughtless upvoters'. If you start flagging. They will start flagging, even if it's just out of spite.

I'm not taking sides here, and throwing the rulebook at me isn't helping to solve the problem.

The filtering suggestions was the first example technological approach to solving the problem that popped into my head. I agree that there's a danger of fragmenting the community with that sort of change, but filtering out '-TSA' is hardly the equivalent of having a 'TSA sub-HN'.

Regardless of whether the filtering idea is good or not, I'd like to see more suggestions on how to fix the problem.

<comment><USER5> There's a karma threshold to flag stories.

If we're going to "- TSA" filter the site, I'd be happy if 'pg just fired up a REPL and did that to news.arc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The TSA stories are certainly fluff in the sense of being easy to upvote, even if the underlying principles are important. Ironically, so are posts saying that one is tired of TSA stories.

I do believe the TSA stories represent a danger. If there's a road from hacking to politics, it's probably civil liberties. So already for the past week TSA stories have had an automatic penalty applied. Or more precisly, they've been autotagged as being political, which entails a penalty.

There are no TSA stories on the frontpage at this moment. In fact, the frontpage is a pretty normal HN frontpage now.

<comment><USER8> Just curious: Was this submission penalized, too? I noticed it dropped on the front page from #1 to about #25 almost instantly at around 1:50 EST.

<comment><USER7> Yes; posts complaining about excessive posts about topic x are effectively posts about topic x, in their effect on the content of the site.

<comment><USER9> Wow, just curious about the implementation. Do you use some sort of heuristics in determining political posts or excessively complaining posts?

<comment><USER7> The main one is number of flags. When anything gets over a certain number of flags, it shows up on a list that admins see. They decide either to kill it, mark it as political or whatever, or do nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've had high hopes for <http://techstartu.ps>, but it doesn't really seem to be getting much community traction.

HN has become more and more general news and less technical or startup related over the past couple of years, but the last few months have been especially bad.

It's got significantly less value for me today than it has previously... it just sucks that it's still the only game in town. Now it feels like there's a cult of personality here; that vapid, content-free submissions gather a surprisingly large number of votes. Comments have mostly stayed good, but the reddit lulziness is starting to creep in there as well.

I do think that pg has done an excellent job in making adjustments to the site as it has grown; the rating mechanism on the front page seems especially well tuned, and trolls get [dead]ed very quickly. I think this might just be a symptom of community growth & dilution.

<comment><USER11> I wonder how much of that is because of the asymmetry in time needed to produce quality content, vs. the time needed to consume that content.

I remember when I made "Diary of a Failed Startup" public. It shot to the top of HN, and the top comment was tptackek's "More posts like this, plz." But that one link was _a year_ of accumulated startup lessons learned, experiences, and emotional reactions to things along my startup journey. And it fell off the HN front page in a day and a half. Just by the numbers, posts like that can only make a small portion of total links submitted.

The same thing when I submitted "Write yourself a Scheme in 48 hours". Shot to the top of Reddit and HN, stayed there for maybe a day. Took 3 months to write. Compare that with the volume of material that can be produced by a blogger who spends a couple hours on each post.

When a new social news site becomes popular, people immediately start submitting all the favorite links they remember from years past. But that's selecting the cream of the crop from the last 15 years of posts. Once the community reaches a steady-state, all of those posts have already been read before, and it takes a long time to produce new ones. Instead of becoming a selection of the best articles published over the last 15 years, it becomes a selection of the best articles published in the last day. The latter will naturally have far less quality than the former.

My personal solution has been to care less about consuming content and more about producing it as I've gotten older. This sorta sucks. Producing interesting content is a long, hard slog where you investigate lots of ideas that nobody wants to hear about before finding one that people do. Consuming it gives you the immediate satisfaction of thinking "Hey, I'm smarter than I was fifteen minutes ago." But ultimately, I'd rather be part of the solution than part of the problem.

(And the irony isn't lost among me that this comment is probably part of the problem, being dashed off in ten minutes or so.)

<comment><USER12> Why does your solution suck? Producing quality content, even if the attention is short, is far more admirable than consuming social news. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to be learned from reading articles on HN and participating in the discussion, but if you don't apply it then it's nothing more than masturbation.

I'm reminded of some of the recent articles about how the corporate environment needs to adapt to millenials so they can profit from their amazing technology skills of the new generation. It's great that the kids know how to use Twitter and Facebook, and yes there are some nice marketing opportunities there, but let's not kid ourselves: most people are not changing the world with their mobile phones, they're distracting themselves and killing their productivity. In Silicon Valley there is this social pressure to stay on top of technology fads so as not to appear clueless, but a hermit who holes himself up in a cave for a year to work on an invention is much more likely to do something truly interesting than people who are so concerned with staying up to the minute that they're all rehashing the same ideas in rapid cycles with no downtime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How social sites devolve.

Many social sites start with a small community of thoughtful, intelligent people because they were created _by_ those people. Certainly this is how reddit started, and HackerNews after it. Then as the site becomes more popular, the masses (and particularly the immature masses) join up. As the masses join up they start outnumbering the founders, and the center of gravity of the site moves towards the lowest common denominator. This makes the site even _more_ interesting to the masses, who join in greater numbers, and so on.

Current sites are on different positions on this timeline right now. At the far end is HackerNews. Reddit is more devolved -- because it's older and because of the digg debacle. Then probably comes digg. At the far end of the sewer of the masses is 4chan. But make no mistake: all these sites are gravitating towards 4chan-ness. It is unavoidable. Our only hope is that as sites slip towards oblivion, new ones take their place at the top of the hierarchy.

I suspect the #1 reason why these sites devolve is because their handles are anonymous. This gives you leave to be a jackass where you'd never do that in reality.

I have decided to test this. On reddit or digg or whatnot I have my own name as a handle for official announcements, and of course I have various anonymous accounts, including novelty accounts. I'm sure that's the case for everyone here. But on HN I solely post under my own name, and have no anonymous accounts at all. Numerous times I'd write some snarky thing on HN only to delete it at the last minute as I realized that this was going out under my real name. As a result I think my comment quality has been radically better and more thoughtful than it has been on, say, reddit.

I still think the flow is unavoidable. But I wonder if HN could at least slow the inevitable flow towards oblivion by requiring real names.

<comment><USER14> Another idea for preventing decay / devolution:

Membership is by invite only. Whenever someone gets banned (for any reason), the person who invited them gets banned (recursively).

<comment><USER15> > _Whenever someone gets banned (for any reason), the person who invited them > gets banned (recursively)._

If I understand your "(recursively)" part correctly, this could make for a really _interesting_ mass-shedding of users the first time anyone was banned. Like watching Filezilla delete a directory structure ...

<comment><USER14> Well it would only go up the tree of invitation, not sideways. The most members that could be banned at one time would be the depth of the tree. If A invites B, who invites C, who invites D, and that's as deep as any chain of invitation goes, then at most 4 people could be banned at one time.

I'm not certain how to deal with the problem of initial members / founders. Surely the founder would not set up the system so they would be banned the first time someone was banned. It seems there would need to be a set of unbannables, including the founder.

I suppose you would need to handle the detached leaves of the tree too. This brings the unbannables back into play. So if A was an unbannable and had invited B, B had invited C1 and C2 and C3, C1 had invited D and D got banned, C1 and B would also be banned, and C2 and C3 would be considered invited by A.

I think this is getting far too complicated to be practical.

<comment><USER16> Maybe instead you have to be sponsored by somebody in order to view posts, but instead of banning people outright, let the sponsor's karma/reputation be affected by the people he sponsors. That way someone who creates a lot of value to the community can mentor someone who is not currently providing a lot of value, and help them understand the community or decide it isn't for them. Then if the relationship isn't working out the sponsor can stop sponsoring them and the person will have to look for a new sponsor if they want to do anything but view the stories and discussion, but the community will be kept fairly intact, except for the people the system is still trying to figure out or vice versa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think they're all good points, though I disagree with #6. It doesn't steal comments from the source because I would never comment at the source and there's a lot of value in having conversations with people with whom you share a history and context. When patio11 comments on something, I know where he's coming from for the most part already so he can get right to the point without having to give background information I already have.

<comment><USER18> I agree with this. Follow up question: I've seen sites where HN comments appear in the source's comments (like trackbacks). Can someone point me how to do this with Posterous?

<comment><USER19> Disqus allows this... I don't know how to do it on Posterous, but that's how I got it working on danieltenner.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > 4\. The community is often snobbish and out of touch with how the other half > lives.

I suspect this is endemic to many (most?) community sites, especially as they grow. HN is no exception.

> 5\. It's a time suck. That one's self-explanatory to anyone who has used the > site.

So does the rest of the Internet.

> 6\. It removes comments from where they should be, on the destination site.

Many sites linked to from Hacker News, like Daring Fireball, do not support commenting. Others require user registration. Either way, I read the HN comments on an article _first_ , every time, and I use that discussion to help me evaluate if I even want to read the source article.

> 7\. It reduces blogging time.

So does the rest of the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER21> I agree with Matt on about 75% of these points. That's why I have severely started limiting my time here.

Probably the worst part is the time-sink and the predictable nature of the comments. Most of the time I can tell from the title what all the comments are going to be like. Anybody that tries to swim against the stream, if only a little bit, can be mercilessly punished. In fact, it's somewhat of a game to see how even-handed I can make a thread -- human hacking. Which makes it even more of a time sink.

HN has changed for me from being a site where I can hang out with fellow hackers to being a site where people I like hang out and spend too much of their time. I'm trying very hard not to make the same mistake. Hopefully I won't be joining Matt. (Lunch is over. Back to work)

<comment><USER22> I think that to some extent the karma average score has encouraged too much homogeneity in the comments. I don't feel like I can disagree for fear of getting downvoted or not upvoted, which would lower my karma average and make my votes in turn worthless.

The time sink factor is also obvious. However, I tend to swing back and forth between very productive and not very productive. When I am in a coding mood I rarely browse HN or comment and instead I hack like crazy for hours every day. When I am burned out or feeling like I need a break from chasing some bug I'll stop by here and read.

So the time sink aspect is doable for me at least. No one can work constantly, without any breaks, and maintain their sanity.

<comment><USER23> > I don't feel like I can disagree for fear of getting downvoted or not > upvoted, which would lower my karma average and make my votes in turn > worthless.

That's too bad, because you can.

Stop worrying about your karma.

<comment><USER22> Its easy to say that I don't or won't worry about karma, but the truth is that karma systems are tied to body's endorphin system. You get a good feeling when you see that your karma or karma average has risen.

Naturally the reverse is also true and you can't help but not want either number to fall. In my case at least these feelings are involuntary, despite the fact that I know these are pretty much worthless numbers. (Except for the fact that karma average does effect the weight of your votes.)

<comment><USER24> some people are a lot more susceptible to this than others. if it's at the point where it's a significant issue for you, then you should treat it as you would any other kind of chemical dependency: learn ways to control it, or stay away from environments that trigger it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "The community is often snobbish and out of touch with how the other half lives. "

I have noticed this and unfortunately have to agree with this observation. I wonder what principle (teaching) lets hackernews people behave like that.

<comment><USER26> Most people are like this. People generally don't have a lot of understanding or empathy to the challenges of people outside their social class.

<comment><USER27> What's the average age of an HN poster? I remember being pretty judgmental and self-righteous when I was 20…

<comment><USER28> This poll says 32% are in the 19-24 range, and 35% in the 25-30 range:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126923>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > 6\. It removes comments from where they should be, on the destination site.

I think this is the reason Hacker News exists. The comment threads on destination sites are scattered across the Internet and do not bring any one community together. They are also often filled with some of the least desirable commentary possible. Read any of the comments on a Washington Post article, say, for an example of the rubbish that is exceeded only by Youtube commentary.

</comment><comment><USER26> Evaporative cooling...sigh. I can sympathize with some of his points here, and I've starting really limiting my time here as well, but it's disappointing to see the high-value members start to move on. It's only going to make it harder to keep quality high.

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

</comment><comment><USER30> He complains about lack of downvotes on stories, but then points out how downvotes on comments are abused. Personally, I'd rather have an unworthy story be voted up and having to ignore it than miss a good story because it was unfairly downvoted. Yes, I know that theoretically, poor-quality upvoted stories can mean good-quality ones are ignored, but I think that's less of a problem than good ones being prematurely killed by downvotes.

As for the "downvotes to show disagreement" problem, it's no where near as bad here as it is every single other place I've seen with downvotes. I do see one sided upvoting fairly frequently, but it usually is because the downvoted side is not arguing their position well, not _because_ of their position. I'd say that the reverse is more of a problem, actually (poorly worded arguments that most HNers agree with being upvoted). Overall though, most downvotes I've seen have been due to poorly thought out or worded comments and comments that don't add value rather than disagreements. If you're downvoted here, you should generally put some thought into _why_. Every single time I've been downvoted, I've learned something from it.

<comment><USER31> There's a substantial difference between downvotes on comments and downvotes on stories. Upvoting or downvoting a story is a vote for whether you agree or disagree that the linked story contributes to "hacker news". Upvoting or downvoting a comment _should_ be a vote for whether or not the comment constributes substance to the conversation.

I'd be in favor of reversing what can be down-voted: allow submissions to be downvoted, but only allow comments to be upvoted. Then the comment 'vote' more easily becomes "is this good?" (or at least removes the "is this something you disagree with?") and we can maintain a 'flag' on comments for the trolls/spam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> RE point 6:

> It removes comments from where they should be, on the destination site.

Each place-of-commenting is its own community. You comment on HN because you want to talk to other HN folk. Generally, each community online has a particular focus. On HN you get a startups-and-tech focus, which is very different from what you get on reddit, or the Guardian, or NYT, etc.

Finally, the quality of each community is different. Contrast HN to reddit to reddit-when-it-started to techcrunch. Part of that quality comes from the software, some from the community, part from the moderatorship.

A blog is it's own community. HN is it's own community. There should be comments on both.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not quit quietly?

<comment><USER33> Perhaps PG will change his mind about allowing political articles (TSA)?

<comment><USER34> How is the TSA political?

<comment><USER33> Smells like politics to me. It's all over the place here:

<http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/>

If you feel a need to discuss it, perhaps that would be a more appropriate forum?

Not to mention featuring on sites like cnn.com. It's a pretty big issue that is certainly not "startups" or "tech". Yeah, there's tech involved, but the issue is how does society believe it should be used: politics.

<comment><USER3> So how do you decide if an article is 'political'?

<comment><USER33> Whether you like them or not, you really can't tell? To me it's pretty obvious what goes where, with a few things that are on the edge, like politics that are really important for tech and startups, like net neutrality. The TSA articles aren't tech or startups at all. I think the "pro-politics" people would still vote them up if there were no scanners and it was only about being groped by the goons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> _This is a community of white collar workers who quite frequently look down on blue collar workers. I'm sorry but it's true. A TSA worker..._

Who here actually looks down on truck drivers or plumbers? It's a disingenuous way of framing the issue.

<comment><USER36> Yes, it's the logical equivalent of saying someone is anti-military for opposing the occupation of Denmark by the Nazi troops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I still don't understand why guys like this will complain about quality and then say that they don't flag anything!

Upvotes move posts up. Flags move posts down, and if you get a ton of them, it even makes the post disappear. That's all there is to it! What does it matter whether it's called a flag or a downvote?

<comment><USER38> You're missing his point about flagging. Flagging is for trolls, spam, etc. It isn't a 'downvote'. He wants downvoting to be the opposite of upvoting, meaning 'I don't like this' or 'I disagree with this'.

As Matt himself says, it is a nuance that is lost on most.

<comment><USER39> Flagging is also for things that are off-topic. If he's sick of 20 TSA stories every day, I don't think the flag is the wrong option. I personally flag things I see that are merely political.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm surprised people are so reluctant to use the flag as a downvote, since it has approximately the same effect. I make it a point to visit the 'new' page and use it liberally on TSA articles, political articles, Gruber articles, etc., as well as upvote the sorts of articles I'd like to see on HN.

</comment><comment><USER41> In the course of participating in a community or in an activity, it can be hard to avoid defining yourself in terms of that participation. "I am a Hacker News member," or "I am a poker player," become not only descriptions of what you do, but who you are. You become attached to that participation because it is part of your identity as a person. It's really easy to fall into this trap, especially if you don't have a strong sense of personal identity. I think that a lot of people, myself included, lack a real sense of self, of who we are, and we begin to define ourselves by what we do.

When you find something negative about what you're doing, or it simply disappoints you, or whatever else it might be, you end up projecting those feelings onto yourself. When the activity or community begins to frustrate you, you can either be frustrated with yourself or realize that you've grown beyond it.

Like Matt, I spent some time making a living at poker, and like Matt I have been a Hacker News member for over 3-1/2 years (I just realized that there is only one day separating our join dates). I feel like I have a pretty good idea where he is coming from. When you find that the quality of your life is being diminished by something you're doing, and you have the power to remove yourself from that activity, then it is time to do just that. I commend him for having the courage to do that.

I know people will complain about him leaving loudly. Personally, I have also tried to quit poker and Hacker News, and in times when I have a lack of direction, I find myself wandering back into old habits. Quitting loudly is a small measure to take to give people the chance to help you stick to your decision, to hold you accountable.

Good luck, Matt.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think one of the major problems isn't that bad stuff gets voted up, but that good stuff doesn't.

The new page is sorted by time, which was fine when there were a hundred posts a day, but now during busy periods a new link is only on the new page for maybe 30 minutes.

Most of the votes a link on the new page gets seem to occur when the link is one of the top 5-10 links. So in practice a link has ten minutes to get votes or it dies. So it comes down to the handful of people who read the new page in those ten minutes (I posted a link the other day, it had ten click throughs while it was on the new page and 3 upvotes; 1 more upvote would have pushed it to the front page).

I think HN needs to switch the new page to a "rising new" page (like Reddit uses), where links that have upvotes get to stick around longer on the new page than links without upvotes.

</comment><comment><USER43> I like the community. I like the TSA stories. I like the lack of a downvote button. Maybe the community does too and that's why they're rising to the top.

I honestly can't think of a post from mattmaroon.com linked from hacker news that's ever taught me anything or made me think. I learned quite a lot reading the TSA articles and I've been thinking about them and the enforcement of the policies they describe.

Internet people tend to be somewhat libertarian in my experience. Not left leaning or right leaning, just protective of their liberties. This unconstitutional violation of American's civil rights fits nicely into those views. So people like it.

If you really want to see a community on it's last legs take a look at digg. It's become a cesspool of political insanity combined with NSFW top ten lists.

</comment><comment><USER44> I agree with a lot of his points.

 _A TSA worker, to them, is not some guy without a college degree who is feeding his family, he's an amoral pawn of an evil bureaucracy that exists solely to ensure that peaceful Americans have to get their junk touched by the back of someone's hand before boarding a plane._

I got eviscerated for suggesting an alternative to berating the front-line TSA workers. To repeat, they are working hard, in a shitty job, to feed their families. They are following the rule they're given, and have no input to the process. Treating them like shit isn't the answer.

 _The ideology is often anti-corporate to the point of naiveté, and that's nothing compared to how anti-government it is._

This seems to be a problem in any tech community. Maybe the larger percentage of Asperger-like folks?

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure it's the specific issue of TSO decorum that Matt is trying to communicate, so much as it is the perceived lack of life experience and corresponding biases that HN commenters appear to bring to issues like this. We do, in the large, sound like a bunch of 17 year olds when we talk about the TSA.

I disagree with Matt about TSOs, but I think that's probably survivable. What might be less survivable is the fact that a group of people who are overwhelmingly privileged young male knowledge workers are spending time talking about politics at all. This is a crappy place to talk about politics. Discussions seem to invariably devolve to Rand-ian libertarian software developer vs. WTO protester software developers.

<comment><USER24> hmm, i haven't seen a lot of WTO protester types here ...

there certainly are a lot of privileged male knowledge workers here. that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad place to talk about politics, though. it depends a lot on your goals.

<comment><USER5> It bothers me that three people have (as I perceived it) now commented on this thread suggesting that there's nothing wrong with talking politics on HN. That's a shift in the norms of the site. We're talking about something that is _specifically called out in the guidelines as off-topic_.

No wonder there are so many TSA stories on the front page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I welcome posts like this one. I don't agree with everything stated, and frankly it may be easy to take exception to some of the points made.

Nonetheless, I find it incredibly helpful to take a critical look at the communities I am a part of and the thinking that pervades them.

</comment><comment><USER45> He'll be back, hn has its problems but there's nowhere else to go.

<comment><USER46> The Well actually has a discourse level that's comparable or even higher than HN on some subjects, but you need to pay $99 to join. The next discourse level up would be edge.org, but you're not allowed to contribute unless you're already a famous scholar.

<comment><USER37> You make it sound like it's $99 up front, but it's just $10 a month, or something reasonable like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> 1) Yes

2) Yes, but those appear to be the actual semantics of uv/dv buttons, not the intended meaning. It's sad but true. This has it's own impact, people tend to talk about the things that people will agree with in order to get upvotes.

3) Yes a million times. The actual Apple/Google/Microsoft discussions here are a very tiny signal in a fantastic epic pile of ideological noise. These are companies we can learn a lot from by looking at their successes and mistakes, but it's virtually impossible because people have invested far too much time making their purchase of products these companies make part of their personal identities.

4) Meh, maybe. That's just the way a community like this might skew.

5) Yeah well. But I find I'm fantastically up-to-date on the technology and business concepts for this area.

6) I actually find the comments on HN and interesting meta-discussion to most everything that shows up. I typically don't care to talk with the author of something. Most of the time, the link target isn't a blog with a comments section anyways.

7) Oh well. I'm not sure blogging is that great a benefit to humanity anyways.

I'm surprised it's not over the mysterious rules that PG tweaks constantly on the site, or the slow degradation along the HN->reddit->digg->4chan path.

And common, no alternate site that he's going to?!

</comment><comment><USER48> PG needs to take a more active role and nuke some of the world news / politics submissions. There's really no justification for having them here.

</comment><comment><USER49> I don't agree with Matt's conclusions about the 'damage to the internet', but his comments about the problems with HN resonate. I can understand why he's leaving. I think there are solutions, though, even if no other sites have quite managed to pull it off. I think the key points are:

1) It's OK for different users to see different views of the site. Reddit moved to predefined subcommunities, but this could also be done dynamically. A single 'top page' won't cut it unless users have the ability to block and filter.

2) It's OK to partition the site. While one wants consistency, it's OK to pretend that some posts were never made. You can't have things disappearing from the middle of reply-chains, but there's really no difference between a post that's never made and a post that's not shown to everyone.

3) Not everything functions best as a one-person one-vote democracy. I'm all for the benevolent dictatorship PG and those whom he delegates his power to. While transparency is often preferable, sites like this tend to fail due to lack of use of power rather than from unchecked use.

</comment><comment><USER50> > It removes comments from where they should be, on the destination site. When > you read a blog post, then click back, then comment, you've greatly reduced > your chance of speaking to the author.

Commenting on the blog is close to worthless, for several reasons.

1\. Most blogging software has atrocious handling of comments. Even such a basic feature as threading within the comment stream is often missing.

2\. There often is not any kind of way to vote on comments so as to make it easy for people to find the good comments.

3\. Bloggers are often one-hit wonders. They write one good blog post that makes it to sites like HN and Reddit, and then fade back into their normal obscurity. This makes it much less likely for a community of regular commentators to form around any particular blog. On sites like HN, one starts to recognize the frequent commentators, and see what they think on a variety of different comments.

There are often times where the comments here or on Reddit are sufficiently informative that I don't even get around to clicking through to the original article.

</comment><comment><USER51> What really happened to the downvotes?

Are they removed entirely, or the threshold is increased to beyond what I have now got (462 karma, at 3.5 average)

</comment><comment><USER52> The attendees at Hacker News Meetups are some of the smartest, most interesting, most courteous, and most entertaining people I've met. It's true that the software running this site may need to adapt a bit, but the community itself is still thriving.

(Plug for Hacker News DC meetup group: <http://www.meetup.com/JoinHNDC>)

</comment><comment><USER53>
        In an ideal community people would up-vote arguments for adding
        value to the conversation and down-vote only for detracting.

I agree in general with this point--I'd much rather have comment ranking based on comment value than how many people agree with it. However, I think a big part of the problem is that there's really no other way to 'agree' with a comment. Commenting "I agree" or something similar is (rightly) frowned upon, but the only real replacement right now is an upvote (or, if they disagree, a downvote), and people like being able to indicate their support of things.

The obvious (although maybe not best) solution would be to add another axis for comment voting that doesn't affect post ranking (or, at least, affects it much less than the current one) that tracks agreement/disagreement. I can see a couple of downsides to this, the biggest of which is that it adds a large new element to a very simple commenting system.

</comment><comment><USER54> It seems like Matt is generally not a fan of online communities. In reality hacker news has not changed a whole lot in the last couple years and as far as I know is still one of the few sites with a large community and a strong bias towards intellectualism and knowledge sharing.

Matt points out that HN and other voting related sites have flaws. Frankly, thats my assumption when I use any tool, or for that matter interact with any group of people through any medium. I'm a little surprised that the author is just now reaching his threshold for the flaws in the system - he points out no new problems.

The important question is not, "what's wrong", as much as "what's better?". This post would have been much more valuable as a discussion of feasible, implementable alternatives to the observed problems rather than a post about the author's choice on how to spend his own time.

</comment><comment><USER55> Might not want to know, but there is a password reset function.

</comment><comment><USER56> So what is the next big new thing? I'd certainly like a HN that is filtered _much_ more. Plan to experiment with machine learning, but prospects are uncertain.

How did those sites work out where news are just filtered by your friends, rather than everybody?

<comment><USER57> I've been throwing around some ideas, and I know that RiderOfGiraffes has, as well...

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Things come and go in HN, but that cannot be a primary reason to quit HN itself. Today it is TSA, yesterday it was offer hn etc. I have gained more in knowledge than what I have lost in time on HN, as long as it is that way, I am staying.

</comment><comment><USER59> I agree with just about all of Matt's points, but I've gotten (and continue to get) so much value out of the people here that I'm not ready to walk.

PG's recent inclusion of "average karma" seems to me a shot over the bow pushing us to recognize the importance of thinking before we speak.

It is shocking to me to see a leader board populated with low karma averages - only 1/3 of the "top" 100 members by total Kamra average over 5 (including Matt).

If there's one piece that we desperately need it's the ability to downvote, tied into average karma which is how I've measured and meter my contribution (and others) to the community.

</comment><comment><USER60> > 6\. It removes comments from where they should be, on the destination site.

This is very good in my opinion because it gives us more freedom, because the post's author can't discriminate against possible negative comments. In other words: this is neutral ground.

> someone who can't tell the difference between being a freedom fighter and > being a douche to a guy who makes $12 an hour trying to stop planes from > getting blown up.

I don't think the TSA's moves are as effective as they are annoying.

> 2\. Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather > than value

I don't think there is an easy solution for this one anywhere else.

</comment><comment><USER61> A little offtopic, but:

"The term "evil" (the silliest and most counterproductive word to enter tech discussions ever) is thrown about haphazardly."

Interesting observation. Haven't seen it here before. Was there some talk about this on HN?

<comment><USER62> I have not noticed this phenomenon, other than various paraphrases of "don't be evil".

<comment><USER63> Yes, the use of that term in this context is clearly bad -- bad in the same sort of way that Ernst Stavro Blofeld or Darth Vader is bad. </irony>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> As a newcomer, I don't see the problem. There are so many interesting submissions on HN that surely no one has time to read them all (I suppose if you reflexively read them all, _then_ you would have a problem). I appreciate the TSA-related posts as civil liberties are very important to me, but if you don't care, skip them! It's not like they're not clearly labelled.

I have spent a lot of time in the last few weeks reading the site, but I don't regret it at all -- it's been informative and inspiring.

</comment><comment><USER65> I once quit Hacker News: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43635>

Looking forward to seeing you back soon under a new account name, Matt.

<comment><USER66> Is it true that there's a secret spinoff site, called 'Flouncer News', to which you only receive an invite if your public "I'm quitting HN" post makes it to the top HN position?

<comment><USER65> Yes. It's spectacular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Is it just me or does his blog post only reason is to reassure himself that he's above hacker news as a community. If you want to leave because you see no value in it, then by all means leave. What does it matter if the author thinks HN sucks? I understand the need for valuation of one's actions, but really this sort of statements are just boring.

This article belongs in a tweet: "I'm fed up with Hacker News and ergo, I'm leaving it!". That's the only thing that the author really said, but really, does it even matter?

</comment><comment><USER68> After reading this I realize that I still vote up comments I agree with rather than comments that add value to the discussion. Why is it so hard to change your behavior in this regard?

<comment><USER69> The cases I see most often after reading a comment:

1) I was going to post the same comment. I'll just upvote him instead.

2) I had never thought of that. It makes sense and I agree. I'll upvote him.

Both cases are "I agree". But for 1) If I was going to post the same comment, then I clearly see it as something relevant to say in the discussion. Therefore his post is relevant and should be upvoted. 2) is also a case of something being relevant.

Should I also be spending my time finding things I disagree with but find insightful and upvoting them? Insightful generally falls under category 2.

Basically, agreement and value go hand in hand, and as long as you aren't treating comments like a poll, most if not all of your upvotes should be the result of you agreeing with the comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Tend to agree with alot of what Matt says. It's why I don't comment often, and simply use HN as a source of news and posting anything I find myself that I think is of interest.

</comment><comment><USER71> Genuine question: when should one refrain from posting a comment on HN? Mine aren't exceptional bits of wisdom, or unheard-of in the technology world. I haven't invented any programming language nor did I create an app which gathered 10M+ users in a matter of weeks. Should I just shut up or do we want to encourage discussion, let people make mistake so they can be taught — when there is one — the right answer?

</comment><comment><USER72> 189 comments (and counting) on a self-reflective post? The old chestnut about the media liking nothing more than talking about itself comes to mind.

</comment><comment><USER73> _The community is often snobbish and out of touch with how the other half lives. This is a community of white collar workers who quite frequently look down on blue collar workers. I'm sorry but it's true._

Who cares if it's true, is it _useful_? Is it a useful trait for HN to have, and is it a useful complaint for you (him) to raise?

</comment><comment><USER74> > _the community has grown more insular and self-referential which is a > problem in and of itself_

Nail on the head.

</comment><comment><USER75> The site is having trouble loading. Can read it here: [http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://mattmaroon.com/2010/1...](http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://mattmaroon.com/2010/11/23/i-quit- hacker-news/)

</comment><comment><USER76> Wow, most of his Categories are some variation of "other people are stupid".

</comment><comment><USER34> _I just changed the password to some long random string so I'd never be tempted to log in again. Lack of password recovery isn't a bug there, it's a feature._

Going to do the same thing. See ya, HN.

</comment><comment><USER77> To me, lack of upvotes is one of the better traits, as on other social sites, good stories are often downvoted into oblivion in order to make other stories look relatively better.

</comment><comment><USER78> A lot of this is true, but HN is a great source of interesting links, where else would you go to find interesting articles such as this blog about quitting HN?

</comment><comment><USER79> It's amazing how this post has received 233 upvotes in 4 hours, and it's not even on the front page. There's something weird with the ranking algorithm.

<comment><USER80> It's been penalized for being offtopic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> I think he's just upset about the TSA articles. That point keeps coming up over and over again in his post. It weakens what he has to say.

It's clear he supports the TSA to "stop planes from getting blown up." Since the majority of HN doesn't agree with that sentiment (at least that's how he paints it), he's sort of being a baby about it and quitting because he can't handle disagreement. He masks this fact very thinly in a what is definitely a stereotypical flameout post.

Communities disagree, and they're not all perfect. Nothing new there. If there was no disagreement on HN, it'd be boring.

<comment><USER33> Some of us are not fond of the TSA situation, but are vehemently opposed to this site being yet another place on the internet to chat about politics. You can get that elsewhere, but you can't get tech/startups/basically friendly attitude anywhere else I've found so far.

<comment><USER81> I'm with you on that. I flag articles that are political. That said, the posts about the science behind backscatter radiation, and subsequent discussion on HN, I've enjoyed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> Finally, I can align my HNews user name with my "street" nick. Sincerely, Chaz Wannamaker

</comment><comment><USER83> What if we could tag posts? Identify which ones were political, programming, etc.

</comment><comment><USER84> Too much drama.

</comment><comment><USER85> Can I have your stuff?

</comment><comment><USER86> Wow... I haven't even noticed TSA posts here. And I thought I checked a lot!

</comment><comment><USER87> I bet no-one will read this cause here are definitely to much comments but even so I will give it a try.

Part 1

I'm one of those new guys around here (to be honest I really don't know how I find out about Hacker News, maybe twitter) and maybe one of those assholes who are killing this community (if it is even possible) with it's valuable content. I just read in this blog post what I'm doing wrong here and how I'm helping those contents which don't belong at Hacker News come to the front page BUT I never knew and never wanted to do that. I love this community and I have to say it really opened my mind about functional programming, startups, making decisions, learning from lessons and so on. But in fact there was no- one who told me what this is all about, what news belong at Hacker News, how to comment and react right, that I should up-vote content which are valuable and not which are cool and exactly what I think about it.

In a place where are no rules people will act like there are no rules. And by rules I don't mean restrictions I mean telling people what is Hacker News and what is it about: startups, hackers, fancy geeky things, sharing thoughts ect. By not telling this to the newer AND older (who maybe forget about it) you are supporting that Hacker News becoming more and more invaluable. You are also supporting it if you are just opting out of this community. Come on, is it this everything you can do? To just leave and not help Hacker News become better (again)? It's not my style and hopefully it will never become my style.

If you want to give the Hacker News community something back maybe it would be a article about Hacker News and what it is and what it is for.

Part 2

I really don't understand why people are complaining about a lack of a feature when they could write it on their own. We are all hackers and pretty good ones. So grab for example GreaseMonkey and write a freakin' down-vote button own your own. When you are finish submit it to Hacker News and I bet my balls it will become a top topic for several days and everyone will use it. There you have it: the way a real hacker would go, right? Just do it. (No I'm not working for Nike)

Part 3

Hacker News is time consuming. Yeah thats exactly what it is BUT while it is time consuming it has a pretty good value cause you read about what people did wrong and who you can do it better on the next time and which services can turn to bad even if it was in theory really excellent.

Before I knew Hacker News I hang out on StackOverflow, some Blogs about Gadgets and so on. Now I'm just hanging out on Hacker News and reading all those valuable content (I try to focus on the ones which are interesting and not about TSA and other US-political stuff ect).

I learned so much about programming, software architectures, startups and wrong technology decisions that I'm glad I 'wasted' my time here and not on Facebook, Gizmodo, DaringFireball, you name it.

Part 4

Everyone has to do what they love and what they feel to do. If it is hacking and to exchange your experience: you are welcome. If Hacker News is turning to a waste of time for you? Drop it.

Last but not least

I hope I could write something which is valuable for all of you.

Note: Sorry for my bad english. I'm from Germany and so my english is sadly not my primary language. Feel free to correct me.

</comment><comment><USER88> no u didn't

</comment><comment><USER89> at least its not reddit (yet).

<comment><USER89> geez sorry :\

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> He seems to have issues with the TSA.

</comment><comment><USER91> Some valid points, but you're stilling getting this from me: <http://imgur.com/F2QBM.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER92> Extremists?

Let me know when the community is full of libertarian nutcases, rather than ideologue hating HNers.

</comment><comment><USER93> I guess he's not planning on applying to Y Combinator...

<comment><USER94> He's the founder and CEO of a YC Company.

<http://www.bluefroggaming.com/company>

<comment><USER93> Really?? Well that's the last time I make a playful quip on HN. Here's to being really serious all the time.</comment></comment></comment>


Hackers Say They've Broken Face ID a Week After iPhone X Release - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/hackers-say-broke-face-id-security/ <comment><USER2> Not much detail on how accurate the measurements on the 3d mask have to be. I'm not shocked that an accurate 3d mask can beat Face ID.

More detail on the cost of deriving the data would be helpful. Can they extrapolate the measurements solely from pictures?</comment>


Show HN: Swiss avalanche casualties visualisation - <AUTHOR> https://swiss-avalanches.github.io/explore/ <comment><USER2> Cool project! I assume this is based on the SLF's 20 year data: [https://www.slf.ch/de/lawinen/unfaelle-und- schadenlawinen/la...](https://www.slf.ch/de/lawinen/unfaelle-und- schadenlawinen/lawinenunfaelle-20-jahre.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. You are right data comes from SLF :)</comment></comment>


Do Programmers Practice Computer Science? - vezzy-fnord http://www.daedtech.com/do-programmers-practice-computer-science <comment><AUTHOR> Except, computer science is the study of algorithms, computation, and the design of computational systems.

Software development methodology is something else. Call it process engineering or workflow, and yes, it calls for measurable performance if one wants to improve performance. But it also should not apologize for having less concrete elements of sociology thrown in, because that's just the fact of it. Engineering is done in groups.

</comment><comment><USER2> Do cooks practice chemistry?</comment>


Show HN: Looking for a job? These resume templates increase your chances - <AUTHOR> http://almagreta.com/resume-templates/

<comment><USER2> Nice templates, but are those testimonials real? The names doesn't seem to match anyone, and those are stock images...</comment>


Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asmartbear.com/your-idea-sucks-now-go-do-it-anyway.html <comment><USER2> I would guess the number of start-ups who got it right the first time is infinitesimal. Failure is an essential but underrated part of the development process. Perhaps instead of saying "failure" we should re-brand it as "learning opportunity."</comment>


Ask patio11 anything - <AUTHOR> https://capiche.com/ama/patrick-mckenzie-stripe <comment><USER2> I love Patrick's insight here:

> Stepping back a bit, problems feel a bit less important to me as time goes > on. The world is awash in problems. Problems you care about are just so much > more rewarding to work on, and they pull better work out of you. Problems > experienced by people you care about quintuply so, because if you start a > SaaS business you'll spend much more time talking to customers and getting > in their head than you will be on e.g. modeling their workflow in Ruby or > optimizing your AWS spend.

> So I'd suggest most people asking this question instead ask "How do I find a > user population that buys software that I would enjoy having in my life five > days a week for 5~10 years?" My answer for that, after a lot of > soulsearching, is "I enjoy helping software people a lot more than I enjoy > helping undifferentiated professionals. Maybe I should just do that. Maybe > no maybe." Your answer may vary.

</comment><comment><USER3> If the developers of this website are reading this thread:

1\. I'd rather visit this site after a few days or weeks and read the answers since the UX of this site isn't conducive to reading right now. I hate those pop ups on newer answers and questions that hide a big portion of the screen on mobile. Why would I switch to viewing another answer or question while I'm busy reading one already (considering many answers are a bit long)?

2\. The other part of this page I didn't like is that answers are all expanded by default, which makes getting to the next question and answer cumbersome when the one that's in view isn't of interest.

I'll bookmark this and come back much later after (almost) everyone has asked enough questions and Patrick has had a chance to answer the ones he can or wants to.

<comment><USER4> Matt from the team here. Great feedback, thank you!

Great point on the notifications; they're fairly small on desktop but likely too large on mobile. We thought of them as a way to show there's new content if you're waiting for something new, but that does make sense.

We'll keep tweaking it. Let me know if anything else sticks out when you come back to read through the AMA later!

<comment><USER5> Hmm, I never get any notifications on news.ycombinator.com on desktop or safari on iOS. Am I reading HN wrong way? :-)

<comment><USER6> I think they mean notifications on the submitted articles site, not hacker news itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting, he still sees fixing engineering hiring as the biggest opportunity in SaaS: [https://capiche.com/q/whats-the-biggest-opportunity-for- a-sa...](https://capiche.com/q/whats-the-biggest-opportunity-for-a-saas- business-that-you-currently-see)

<comment><USER7> I'm not surprised. Just look at how many "eng hiring is broken" threads on here.

If software could help you hire candidates that are 10% more productive and stay 25% longer (numbers pulled out of my ass) than the candidates you hire now, how much do you think your company would pay for that?

<comment><USER8> Honestly it's the wrong problem. Having passionate, eager, focused, organized, willing workers is essentially the only job of management.

If that's not happening, switch out the managers.

<comment><USER7> You want me to be passionate about making rich people richer? How laughable. I show up for work and do my job to the best of my ability because if I didn't, I'd starve on the streets with no health insurance.

<comment><USER8> A company I worked at ran out of money. All my people stayed.

1 month, 2, 3 went by. I found guaranteed positions for them based solely on my recommendation for more pay then if we had money, the people still stayed.

They came in for work the same. Everything kept going. We eventually had a successful product, made money, and were able to backpay.

If I was a disorganized manager giving meaningless drudgery and absurd requirements divorced from product and purpose they would have all left.

There has to be a deeper mission, purpose, and vision that keeps people around and focused. That's the managements job.

People aren't generally in tech for the money, there's better money in real estate, sales and finance with less work. Drive the passion and you'll drive the work.

Programming is like movies, art, and music: great things rarely happen when people are just chasing dollars.

<comment><USER7> > ...real estate...

Sales.

> ...finance...

You make the real money here as an IB analyst (100+ hours a week in the office — definitely NOT less work than the average SWE job), or as a financial advisor, _i.e._ sales.

So, yeah, if you go into sales, sales, or sales, you can make more money that way than in tech as a SWE. But, honestly, do you think the average engineer would do well in sales?

<comment><USER8> Nah, that's not the point. I forget who it was, maybe Oxfam did a study on the "American dream" income requirements, I think it was:

Family of four, one breadwinner, property owner, annual vacation, eating out once a week, two cars, college education for children...

You know, baseline idyllic suburban living. For the bay it was I believe north of $200K.

That's what I'm talking about. Someone making 250K in Mountainview isn't in it "for the money", they are just trying to live a life that frankly, most other countries can tender for about $75,000 but because of decisions we've made in how we structure society, it takes a quarter million a year.

This is the real equivalent to the 1950s idea of "middle class", it's just gotten so out of reach for most people, we construe people looking for it as greedy.

They aren't. Once you understand that, you can align incentives ... A $5,000 reward doesn't mean much for these people since 250k doesn't mean they're chasing dollars, instead a challenging rewarding job where they can work from home whenever they want, that's what keeps them around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> No undue criticism intended, I have never understood patio11's lore and reverence. He built a site that addressed the needs of bingo players- kudos. He built other moderate internet businesses that scratched a B2C itch.

Do those credentials warrant the adulation he is granted?

<comment><USER10> Nope. It's because he writes clearly and insightfully, over a long period of time, about a relatively consistent set of topics.

<comment><USER11> I was pleased with his essay on discount brokerages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is this guy Ramit Sethi really someone to recommend? With a book title like "I will teach you to be rich" my bullshit meter automatically goes off :-)

</comment><comment><USER13> Is this live?

<comment><USER4> It was live; wrapped up around 6PM Pacific: [https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1237544476966445056](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1237544476966445056)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Patrick is obviously smart, but I'm struck by how he's also a pompous know it all. Just look at his answer to someone asking about buying a house with a credit card:

[https://capiche.com/q/whats-your-vision-of-e-commerce- in-203...](https://capiche.com/q/whats-your-vision-of-e-commerce-in-2030-will- people-buy-houses-and-cars-online-with-their-credit-card)

The main reason people don't use credit cards to buy houses now is due to the credit limit. Someone rich enough to have a $300,000 credit limit probably doesn't want to buy just a $300K house. However... it's easy to imagine the building or construction industry creating a credit card type product for home builders or renovators backed by a credit line sufficient to buy distressed properties.

> Will we see people buy houses online? I mean, clearly yes, we will see that. > Will it become dominant to do it without meeting one's counterparty and/or > broker? That feels unlikely.

Has Patrick ever even bought a house? Some people might think it's nice to meet the buyer/seller, but the only reason you really get together in the same room is to sign a bunch of paperwork at the same time. As patio might say, "there already exists a non-zero amount of lawyers executing real estate deals without the physical presence of the actual buyer and or seller". I see no reason for the trend to dissipate.

<comment><USER15> You are missing the point of credit cards vs long term loans.

> The main reason people don't use credit cards to buy houses now is due to > the credit limit.

suppose you want to buy a $500k home. You go to a bank and they offer you 30 years at, say 3.5%.

You go to your credit card provider and somehow get a $500k limit. Your payments looks something like 1 (one) month at 0% or as long as it takes (based on minimum payment) at 16.99%.

Which do you choose?

If you think you can change the economics of the credit card to be closer to the bank, you will end up with many of the same overheads that the bank has, and you will no longer be a credit card. I.e., you will not provide near instantaneous access to a line of credit.

<comment><USER14> The point is that credit cards are just lines of credit. Which typically have the high costs that you pointed out. But there's nothing special about the 16.99% interest rate and many people have cards with special intro rates at 0% lasting for 6-12 months.

I don't see a lot of reasons why we can't eventually have pre-approved 30-yr mortgage credit cards accepted by companies like OpenDoor focused on selling houses.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: When a developer leaves a project, how do the project survive? - <AUTHOR>

Dear $Community
What do software projects do when its key developer(s) leave a company or project, Is there any blogs or interesting write-ups about the problem and what solutions there to addressing the problem?
Also how important is it that the lead/key developer like the technology the software is written in, and can someone that does not no the platform or technology pick-up the project and maintain it?
---
I'm aware the above two question is easily influenced by the scenario of the project and company but I'm sure this is a general theme in big and small companies so any links or references would be appreciated, even keywords I must google for(Seeing I already tried and failed).
To help you to answer my question I will try to explain my scenario as follow:
I work for a small to medium sized company of about 150 people. A internal software project was started three years ago by two key people a Developer and Architect. After a year of development the business started to use it, and I joined the team six months later.
A Niche Software Development platform was chosen and in the beginning it gave the company a lot flexibility but after a year and a half we started to run into performance and maintenance problems large due to incorrect usage of the platform.
Recently the key developer left the company on good terms, but we are now left with only 50% of the mind share of the current system.
So we have a complex business system with more then 160 database tables, a really big hairy code base and the original person that developed the system is not available any more.
If I get carte blanche my first reaction is that we need to rewrite the system, but what will change when I leave the company in two years time? <comment><USER2> There are various answers:

a) There should be no key developers, no indispensable people in your projects. This is often hard to achieve on small companies.

b) Communication: In a group of developers there should be good communication about ideas and functionality. Documentation helps a lot, but sometimes just sharing the basic reasoning behind a component is enough to carry on.

c) Adaptation: Provided there is a lack of a) and b), your team should be good enough to adapt and survive to such drawbacks.

Now, for your particular case (I believe you are in c)), consider what will be better for the company overall? What will take you less time or be better in the long term? Trying to understand the current code or writing it from scratch?

I wouldn't worry about what will happen when you leave the company in two years time, because whatever path you choose, you should follow a) and b) to prevent from this happening ever again. Write documentation, share your ideas with fellow developers or even team up with some for this project, don't take on it on your own.

Hope this helps.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reading code is almost always (much) harder then writing it. Learning you way around the existing code base, and refactoring it if necessary is (almost) always a better option then rewriting it.

In a rewrite you'll find your self relearning about edge cases already solved, you'll lose features and business requirements you didn't even know about. You'll end up with a more maintainable (for you) but worse product in most cases.

Going forward you should have good documentation for key things regarding your system. If its not part of someone's job now, you should explain to your boss(es) why it needs to be someone's job in the future. Documentation is not time poorly spent.</comment>


Ask HN: Can we get an clear definition of bureaucracy and its implications? - wh-uws

I often hear this word tossed around and I know people seem to universally agree that it is bad but I can't decipher exactly what they mean by it from anywhere on HN.<p>Also in a theoretically perfect company how do you manage getting things done / ship without any kind of process while having a way for people to grow and advance in a company and still not bog it down with "political" "bureaucracy"? <comment><AUTHOR> Off the top of my head, it's when you can't act unilaterally.

</comment><comment><USER2> It's one of those instances where definitions, especially concise ones, always end up conveying less meaning the the original word. They are really a bunch of behaviors or characteristics we associate with the words. What is classy, sexy, tragic, trashy etc.

What we can find are behaviors and characteristics that can act as a test for bureaucratic or political because its hard to imagine a company embodying them without embodying some others.

Political is neither equitable nor meritocratic. If a decision is made for neither of those reasons, it will probably be described as political. Applying it to hiring, promotions, raises, partnerships and sales seems to hold up well. If the beauty queen isn't the prettiest and there aren't any equity issues involved, it's political. If a hire isn't the best or a raise isn't fair, it's probably political. I think there's a definition here. It's interesting that this defines political decisions as pretty much a particular class of wrong decisions.

Bureaucratic is when rules are obeyed for their own sake, not for whatever reason they were made. I think it also implies lots of rules.

With those two definitions it seems like political is always bad. Bureaucratic might have some uses.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just like a religion, it's when words and rules become more important than problems (and thus the truth that can be confirmed through those problems). If so, people are forced to do things that don't match the problems, and so the reason why they do things becomes to match a rule instead of an existent problem.

The implication is that the organization that runs like that will get bigger and bigger, worse and worse, and the activities of the group will make them exhaust themselves and lose their ability to understand their market and to adapt quickly, as the source of their ability is based on seeing things that exist now rather than a year ago. It's hard for a small organization to stay afloat like that, much less an entire country. Although countries are so big that they can appear to be doing just fine for a while but eventually the interest catches up with them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Doing things for the sake of doing it, even with the best intentions. See 'Best Practice', 'Competency Based Framework' or 'Standards Compliance Management'.

I'm not saying those things can't be good, but they're not panaceas. If you're aiming that high your sights are too low.</comment>