PG: Quite possibly the worst idea ever - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fuzzyshot.com/2008/08/pg-quite-possibly-worst-idea-ever.html

<comment><USER2> Ah you guys. FuzzyShot is not solving a problem, it's creating a problem. I never take photos with my mobile phone because I have to blog about it.

Your technology is good, your idea is good, but you _positioning_ is bad. You see, you think people want to blog, but you are forgetting the motivation. People don't want to blog, people want to be heard or want to be seen.

Now, let me give you an idea that is almost like yours, but with the correct positioning:

Imagine there is a big-ass concert happening in town. Now, this is where everyone has their camera with them, and they are taking photos with their cameras. Now, THAT is a position for your application. When I take my photos of Kenny Rogers or whoever, then I want everyone to know that I got a photo with Kenny. So NOW I want to share.

So you see, in your case I have never wanted to blog about stuff I see on the street. But in the second case, I actually want to post photos of the concert, but it's not just easy to do it.

If I were your marketing guy, I'd rebrand as this:

Where were you? Send your photos in!

People take photos of their concerts or whereever they were, and it all gets dumped into a visually very attractive group collage of that concert. Something that looks like a poster, but with everyones photos just mashed together.

And there is your first monetization idea right there - sell posters of people in their own concerts, but with themselves inside.

And it's easy to make money, because you focus on people going to concerts and events, so you can make money by affiliating with a ticket seller.

The problem you have is that you make a proposition to me that sounds like pain. You write on your site: Blog with mobile phone, and I'm thinking:

1\. I have to sign up 2\. I have to download and install their app 3\. I have to figure out how to send photos 4\. I have to frickin blog 5\. I have to invite everyone to join this damn blog I have which will be filled with a bunch of boring photos

It's pain. If I were already a photo blogger, maybe your tool would make sense, but for me, it has zero compel.

Position correct, and position in a simpler manner. Think of the twitter slogan.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Max,

Great suggestion. We have some ideas for how we can aggregate photos based on location and category. For example, if a bunch of photos from San Diego Comic- con came in we could somehow group those together into a public event. The iPhone camera quality is not super great so I'm not sure how many people would be interested in paying for a collage of photos with strangers in it. Maybe we can create personal prints of people's photos with the location of each photo on some sort of map...

<comment><USER2> Well, my point is that your entire positioning is wrong. Not that you lack certain features. The whole "blog" with X thing is tired and old news. Position in a fresh manner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Trust me, the worst idea ever, by a factor of ten, is sleep.fm. Compared to them you don't even rate.

<comment><USER4> The Kramer test for 'bad ideas': imagine Kramer explaining to Jerry why he just invested a bunch of money in the company ("but Jerry - it's an alarm clock... AND it's SOCIAL!"). If it sounds like something he might say, then it's probably a bad idea.

To sleep.fm guys: not trying to offend, I genuinely think it's a bad idea.

To those who were in elementary school when Seinfeld was on: damn kids:-)

<comment><USER5> Somewhere, someone is dreaming up a social coffee table book about coffee tables.

<comment><USER6> Will the site double as a coffee table in case you don't have a coffee table?

<comment><USER7> there's an optional accessory that bolts onto your laptop. i hear its waterproof too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember this one. The problem was that it depended on all your friends also having Android phones. I don't think the quote is accurate though. I wouldn't say either "quite possibly" or "worst x ever."

<comment><AUTHOR> PG, sorry if we misquoted you. Your advice was invaluable to us because it helped us understand why QuickMeet would not be something worth pursuing at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Could you explain somewhere (possibly on the front page of fuzzyshot) what is special about fuzzyshot? It seems to me being able to post pictures from a phone to a blog has been possible for a while, or am I mistaken? I know I can post photos to flickr from my phone.

As for the meet thing: what do you do if you know your friends are 30 minutes late. Start another round of Sudoku on your phone?

<comment><USER10> Take some photos and update your blog. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's wrong with a text message saying, "running late". That's usually even one of the templates included with cheap phones. No app necessary and it will almost surely be faster.

<comment><USER11> Except with the rate of text messages (20c to send, 20c to receive a reply saying "ok"), it's even better/cheaper to just _call_ the person to tell them you'll be late. I've never understood why texting is so popular when it's so expensive, slow, and inconvenient. Why not just dial the number and talk?

<comment><USER12> 20c texts are generally only for people who have NO text messaging plan. I have a BB (vzw) and iPhone (att obviously). Both have text messaging plans that for some trivial amount per month (like $5 or $10) I get more text message allotments than what I would ever reasonably use (a few hundred at least).

99% of the time, SMS messages arrive within 30 seconds of the sender hitting "Send". When you are going to be delayed by 5+ minutes, 30 seconds rounds down to "instant".

As for the inconvenient, I personally HATE getting a call when I am either in a very quiet business lobby, or very loud social event for someone to deliver an essentially 1-sided trivial message ("I am running 15 minutes late"). SMS's are PERFECT for this. They are, IMO, cheap quick and convenient.

Perhaps it is all in the eye of the beholder.

The "killer app" for this situation would be (IMO) to use a GPS-enabled phone with some rudimentary mapping capabilities that would auto-text SMS ETA messages once you are >5 minutes away from the meeting start time and your travel time is also >7 minutes (ie: when it predicts that you're going to be late by more than a couple of minutes). You would have an "app" on your phone that sent SMS messages to your co-attendees (they would NOT have to install, download or use any sort of application just to get this trivial text info). This would increase the viability and adoption rate, as suddenly your friends do not all need smartphones to get some benefit from the app.

<comment><USER11> Firstly, not everyone has smartphones, and not everyone text messages people enough to justify even $5/mo. Secondly, I said "slow" not because transmission is slow, but the typing of the message (or finding and selecting templates) is a rather slow process, _especially_ for those of us who don't use smartphones. Thirdly, you can always set your phone to vibrate and/or let the voicemail take the message if you're in either situation...

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure from your posts, but it seems that you're implying only smart phones have texting capabilities? If this is true, your definition of smartphone is very different than mine. If I'm wrong, I apologize for misinterpreting your statements.

In every group there are always outliers, and I see this in some cases with techies who for some reason or another simply REFUSE to acknowledge that their cellphone is anything more than a $20/mo voice communicator. You can't really solve for those situations.

Amongst all the people I've known/worked with, SMS-enabled cell phones and monthly service packages are the norm. Building an app or service on top of the premise that people can easily and cheaply send and receive SMS messages is not, to me, all that grand of an assumption.

My solution above also somewhat applies to your situation, as you would be the potential SMS recipient from someone with an app-enabled phone. Also assuming that the SMS messages is of the "I'm running late" variety, which would be most common for business meetings and social gatherings, the 20c surcharge would not seem to be something that adds up to a ridiculous monthly accrual. As a proportion of the cost (as in cost of a normal social gathering where timeliness is of some value), or value (as in the potential value of a business meeting), I think 20c is less than a rounding error.

<comment><USER11> I used smartphones as a point because most smartphone users have a data plan with unlimited text/instant messages, and because smartphones generally have full keyboards, or at least better data-input mechanisms. I have a Razr that I use for everyday communication, and the process of sending/receiving a text message is a royal pain in the ass. Sending a message is slow and laborious, because a number pad wasn't designed to send fulltext messages, and predictive typing still requires lots of manual corrections for common words (good vs home, in vs go, etc).

As for business meetings, SMS messages almost seem incredibly informal and curt, especially when money is on the line ("We're settling a business deal and you don't even have the courtesy to actually _talk_ to me?").

I'm most certainly not saying that no one should be texting, just that to some people, a phone is a phone, and would prefer to hear someone and chat with them, rather than having short, expensive, impersonal messages flying about. Granted, 20c by itself isn't that much, but when us poor Americans get slapped with charges on both outgoung _and incoming_ messages, it can add up pretty quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> PG said the same thing when I demoed my Jump to Conclusions Mat. =(

</comment><comment><USER14> Surely it's not a million miles away from loopt? I don't see why loopt would be a good idea and this a bad one...

</comment><comment><USER15> Actually, I think the idea isn't terrible.

However, the problem is that the implementation was flawed. Relying on people having solely the Android platform is a mistake. Basing it on the web as well as having a simple implementation over many platforms and having some sort of SMS or MMS integration for non-smart phone users might have got you somewhere. How to make money from it is a different question entirely though.

</comment><comment><USER16> Maybe the idea was just ahead of its time. I remember Philip Greenspun publicly humiliating a guy who invented "tagging" back in 1998. "Nobody will ever voluntarily submit metadata! This is the stupidest idea I have ever seen!" 18 months later he sued his own company for the remainder of their cash reserves. Be cautious around old lisp programmers.

<comment><USER17> _18 months later he sued his own company for the remainder of their cash reserves._

Philip Greenspun, _Founders at Work_ , pg. 343:

 _People focus a lot on the bust-up phase. It upsets me that they remember the wrong things like, "This Greenspun guy sued the venture capitalists." This is not true, first of all, since I was a defendant, not a plaintiff._

So, do you have evidence that Greenspun is lying or confused, which I'd be very curious to see? Or are you just spreading malicious rumors with no basis in fact?

<comment><USER16> No, you're right. He deserves most of the criticism aimed his way and he knows it. However, factual inaccuracy crosses a line and I apologize. There's more to the story than what Greenspun claims but I don't want to make any more public comments about it. I really just wanted to get the "be cautious of old lisp programmers" meme out there.

<comment><USER18> Your comments seem to indicate you have an axe to grind about lisp, but there is not much evidence that lisp programmers (or old programmers) are any better or worse than other kinds of programmers in building products people want or starting companies that survive.

Perhaps you should shorten your meme to "be cautious of programmers" or just "be cautious".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Quite possibly the best idea ever: If someone tells you you have the worst idea ever, _don't give up_.

You may need to stubbornly prove them wrong, or you may need to listen to them and make some changes. But don't pack it all in and get a job working for the man.

</comment><comment><USER20> There is probably a good thought in there somewhere. Get a thread up and running where people can post some of the worst ideas they can think of for the people applying for this (and later) rounds of funding.

Sort of like a process of elimination; people can cross-check their ideas against a list of pre-determined list of bad ones for similarities. Might help with an early filtering process or even good for a laugh.

For example:

It's like a toilet, but only more social! This is not only a bad idea, but I think George Michael has already done this.

</comment><comment><USER21> Maybe he's inadvertently trying to motivate you... personally, the more i hear the word "no", the more I'm inclined to go after something. Use it as motivation.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard this too. Just realize it only takes one "yes"... or whatever you're looking for to make it happen.

</comment><comment><USER22> You can be "problem seeks solution" or "solution seeks problem". Both work, but the former is easier.

 _Are we solving a customer pain with Fuzzyshot?_

But what customer pain are you solving? You describe your solution but not the problem...

</comment><comment><USER23> After spending 5 mins with the site: Fuzzyshot doesn't do anything that Flickr doesn't already do better.

Not to say it can't, but as-is it doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER24> How is that the worst idea ever?

I use Buddy Beacon with Where.app all the time on my iPhone. Probably one of the most useful apps I've used.

<comment><USER17> Read the proposal and critique carefully. Note the part about how the app is useless if you're the only person you know who owns a copy. Then note the part about _the Android platform_ , the one platform on Earth that (for the moment) is guaranteed _not_ to be owned by a single one of your friends. Finally, note that PG's critique is quite carefully phrased.

It's frustrating enough to develop an app that depends on the adoption rate of a vaporware platform, but it really is kind of crazy to develop an app that depends on the _square_ of the adoption rate of a vaporware platform.

<comment><USER25> Still doesn't make it the worst idea ever. Hell, you could have an app which depends on the cube of the adoption rate of a vaporware platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I remember Paul saying something like "rather build something inappropriate now" on some Rails Conference Talk video.</comment>


For Best Results, Forget the Bonus - <AUTHOR> http://www.alfiekohn.org/managing/fbrftb.htm Also, "The Folly of Merit Pay" http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/meritpay.htm
Home: http://www.alfiekohn.org/index.html
Basically, incentive pay has never worked, anywhere, at any time. Go figure. (And it has been hugely studied.) <comment><USER2> "I recommend that employers pay workers well and fairly and then do everything possible to help them forget about money. A preoccupation with money distracts everyone -- employers and employees -- from the issues that really matter."

I think this is the takeaway.

In my workplace, we have "peer bonuses". They're small-ish rewards (post-tax, it'll get you a dinner at a decent place) that some co-worker nominates you for when you go beyond duty to help them. These bonuses are unexpected and small, so there's no competition or motivation-ruining.

<comment><USER3> I have to wonder how many managers implement a policy like that but keep traditional bonuses for themselves.

The cynic in me says a company paying for a study like this will "save" orders of magnitude more if they follow its advice...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >"At a Midwestern manufacturing company, for example, an incentive system that had been in place for years was removed at the request of the welders' union. Now, if a financial incentive motivates people, its absence should drive down production. And that is exactly what happened -- at first. But after the initial slump, the welders' production rose and eventually reached a level as high as or higher than before. "

This example in particular cannot be used to support the author's hypothesis. Someone arguing the contrary point of view could opine that the removal of the incentive structure did cause a dip in productivity but the plant was in middle of a long-term rising productivity trend. There is simply not enough data to confirm or deny this.

Poor math skills and a lack of even-handed skepticism abound in opinion writing.

<comment><USER5> "There is simply not enough data to confirm or deny this."

Are you kidding? This is one of the most studied topics in all of science. There have been literally thousands of studies on this.

<comment><USER6> You should clarify what you mean, and I think what you mean is behavioral analysis of performance based on differing reward schedules.

As I understand it, and this is fairly amoral, mind you, the best reward schedule to encourage productivity is to inform subjects that they will be rewarded for certain activities and then just reward them after a random number of actions (not time).

Slot machines are the classic example, but I believe you could extend it to much more exhausting tasks such as rare loot drops in MMORPGs and, ostensibly, work tasks.

<comment><USER7> Nah, man, not when you want people to _want_ to do the work. That's the point of the article - people want loot, not killing the same monster over and over. Likewise, if you give people rewards, they'll want the reward, but they won't produce quality work because they're just focusing on getting to the goal.

<comment><USER8> Sounds like a very Buddhist perspective on motivation--mindfulness, awareness of the present, and all that. How do Buddhist companies generally compare to traditional capitalist companies? Which strategy prevails in, say, Japan or China?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know where something like profit sharing falls on the reward continuum? It's still a "bonus" in effect, but it's a shared bonus if done right with no per-person computation and thus no individual component to cause people to distort their behavior or worry about unfairness. On the other hand, it can still easily become an expected thing. On the other other hand, it seems like a reasonable way to reward people for helping create a successful company. I've read writeups of studies around bonuses, but they're always around much more targeted per-individual bonuses instead of something approximating a profit share approach.

<comment><USER10> You don't read about it much because profit share is the devil! Communism! Unthinkable.

Profit share is reserved to the better people, investors, execs. You don't exist to share profit, you exist to _create_ the damn profit.

Yes, I'm exaggerating a little. But in essence that mindset is pretty much the norm in "old economy".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Touching on the point about risk taking makes me think of a reward I would like to have: the privilege to take risks at work. I have some neat ideas about our product at Large Network Vendor Inc. I'm willing to work for _free_ exploring these ideas if only I could get a few smattering resources and OK from my boss. It might fail but it might also be a big boon to the business. They probably don't let me because of missing business commitments costs more than a bonus. :(

Or they could reward me with some kind of training. I dunno. Maybe this is the same thing focusing around "this" and "that".

</comment><comment><USER12> People also acclimate quickly to whatever rewards are given and come to expect them. Bonuses eventually become an expected and assumed part of one's salary especially when there is no transparency as to how the bonus figures are arrived at.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not news, but bears repeating. What the post doesn't mention is that not only are the returns on this investment zero at best, but the effects when it is expected and not delivered are devastating to morale. More than once around the turn of the millenium I had companies reduce or even zero the annual bonuses for economic reasons, and it just crushes morale.

</comment><comment><USER14> If you found this interesting, read his book - Punished by Rewards. It's amazing. I read it at a young age (13 maybe?) and it totally changed my life.

Here's the _real_ takeaway: in this life, almost everyone (at least in the US?) is conditioned, on every level possible, "do that, get this." It's not just about money, but approval, self-esteem, good grades, a place in society, a decent life, a good relationship, healthy children.

We learn this lesson at our parents' knees, it's confirmed in school, and cemented in employment/college education.

The only _real_ reason to do something is because you love it enough to bring it into being. (This is not the same as "loving what you do," because the production of outcomes you love enough to create will inevitably contain work you aren't going to love in and of itself. Like, for example, exercise and practice -- not always loveable. The key here is that the love is aimed at the way you want to change the world, in whatever fashion.)

Anything else is some combination of carrot/stick -- they are flip sides of the same coin, and neither work well, in the long run, and both lead to burnout.

Even if you think you "have" to have pressure to produce, you don't. Even if you think you "have" to have a business goal to create, you don't. Even if you think you have to taunt yourself with images of what will happen if you don't do what you "ought to," you don't.

If you can step outside this reactionary type of living model, it's amazing what you can do.</comment>


Insane "underwater" startup. - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/13/smallbusiness/subprime_sub.fsb/index.htm

<comment><USER2> Either this is nothing special or I just hang around a weird crowd. I know a some guys that made three submarines, and they go to 1500 feet. The biggest one is the largest amateur submarine in the world. See pictures here: <http://www.submarines.dk/>

They are currently working on commercial spaceflight: The goal is to make a rocket that will get one person suborbital but weightless and back down. They expect to do it within a couple of years. They just had their first public motor test, you can see a clip here: [http://ekstrabladet.dk/nationentv/klip/?clipid=17454&cli...](http://ekstrabladet.dk/nationentv/klip/?clipid=17454&clipfra=1) . (links are in Danish)

And they're just a couple of guys with no money to speak off, but they are crazy and they believe they can do it.

So do I.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure you just hang around a weird crowd...

 _pages through Facebook to see if anyone's status is building submarine or hobby rocket_

Yeah, just a weird crowd :-)

<comment><USER2> Looking forward to a trip on top of their rocket though :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there a particular reason underwater is in quotes here? It IS an (insane) underwater startup. The fact that it is underwater does not need to be quoted. I think people have completely lost touch with what quotation marks mean.

Sorry to be nitpicky, but I am getting tired of seeing completely wrong uses of quotation marks everywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> I used underwater in this case because it is often said that a startup is underwater when they are in debt.

The quotes for the double meaning.

Apologies if I got it "wrong". :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder just how much of the world would have been explored had Shackleton, Columbus etc worried too much about if their boats were insured.

Antarctica...ummm, that's all very interesting sir, but tell me again how much personal accident liability you have on The Discovery... :)

<comment><USER6> Interestingly, googling "Shackleton insurance" gives this New York Times article from January 16, 1914:

[http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A07E6DC1730E...](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A07E6DC1730E733A25755C1A9679C946596D6CF)

It's not clear to me from the article who actually took out the insurance policy, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I, like many of those who commented in the article, think the guy is pretty smart. I mean he did build his own submarine from scratch and furthermore made it profitable. However, I also agree that the bull headed and risky approach he has with the whole thing is a bit... unnecessary. I would like to see him approach it not thinking he's better than everyone and that he can simply get around the law. For as many dumb laws there are there are at least half as many good ones. Not allowing people to take other people to dangerous places without being certified and having insurance is one of those good ones.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point he made was that the certification would have cost him more than the sub. He is barely profitable as it is.

There are a whole set of laws in the first world that create an absurdly high barrier to entry for certain activities. Instead of making the activities safer, as intended, they simply make them impossible/unprofitable/implausible.

A soup kitchen that fed the homeless near me was forced to close because they could not afford to install a centralized halon fire extinguisher system to meet commercial kitchen code. Instead of making the volunteers and the homeless marginally safer, the volunteers went home to watch TV and the homeless were SOL. Law->Fail.

Different cultures experience risk/reward in different ways. Safety _above ALL else_ is a distinctly first-world/western notion.

<comment><USER7> I'm not saying they all work out I'm saying that some are good. In your example of the soup kitchen closed because it couldn't install some fancy- pancy fire extinguisher system, yeah, that's a bad law and a bit of an overkill. Telling someone that they can't legally take other people 700 feet below the water in a sub that isn't certified is a bit of a different story.

He may have barely have been making a profit but the fact of the matter is it would've cost him $100,000 to get papers/certified but he instead spent $200,000 on a new sub. It just seems like the kind of thing that would actually be considered an investment because it could make you more profitable and definitely adds more credibility.

<comment><AUTHOR> Eventually you end up with a choice. The older, smaller $100k sub with $100k of permission seeking added on (and somewhat known risk) or the newer larger $200k sub with somewhat unknown risk. In the first-world, that choice is made for me (and likely results in no sub ride at all). I'm glad that there are some places in the world where I can still choose for myself.

I'd take the sub ride.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Would you trust/encourage a guy who shoots a horse in the head just to see something on the bottom of the sea floor eat it?

<comment><USER9> Yes, while I don't see it as something I would do, I can't find any fault with it. I'd guess it's probably just the cheapest price point for meat available to him. If he bought a pallet of horse meat from a butcher, it would seem far more ordinary I think? That said I can't fault the logic of just going right to the source and saving money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its the same cultural problem that some people have with eating dog. Its just a different world. The meat in this case even walks to the place where its needed! If it was a cow or a pig, it would probably seem less objectionable. Horse seems to ring up as "pet" in my mind and so colors the issue for me.

If you think about it, he doesn't _need_ to shoot the horse first. Dropping it to the bottom of the ocean with cinder blocks attached would do the trick while possibly attracting more sharks. It be cheaper and cleaner boat-side as well. He would probably find it morally objectionable to do so though.

If more people had to kill their own meat, there'd be a ton more vegetarians.

<comment><USER10> > If more people had to kill their own meat, there'd be a ton more > vegetarians.

For about a week until we got over the social conditioning. Then we'd start wondering what else we've been missing all these years, and start killing and eating koala bears, kittens, and people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I saw ads for this when I was scuba diving and Honduras, kind of funny to see this story on CNN about a year later.

</comment><comment><USER12> This sounds like a lot of fun, till someone gets hurt. Even in Honduras that would spell trouble.

I would probably take the risk though.

</comment><comment><USER13> I am not an economist, but I think this is a lesson in the area of risk/reward. Sure, as a tourist I might have qualms about taking a ride in an unlicensed sub. However as a human being who loves knowledge, I would be intrigued by the chance to see a 14-foot shark close-up. The risk involved is offset by the chance for knowledge. Evolution hard-wires self-preservation into us. But perhaps it also hard-wires a certain risk-tolerance for the sake of a greater good. Put it another way: it is better for the gene to lose a few gene-carriers along the way to aquiring a big new advantage, than to not lose those handful of gene-carriers but also not aquire the big new advantage. So businesses like this that understand the hard-wired tolerance we have for risk when others don't understand that, have a competitive advantage - they can get to work while their competitors are still worrying about paper work. In a word, the selfish gene should be proud of this guy! :-)

<comment><USER14> You could get the same knowledge from watching a video.

<comment><USER15> Knowledge, perhaps, but by no means the same experience (which is what the commenter probably meant). There is no question that I appreciate how a shark moves through the water far more from my experiences as a diver than as a Shark Week viewer or aquarium visitor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Now that's a maverick.

</comment><comment><USER17> killing the horse just to get tourists see sharks and other sea predators is imo stupid and unelegant</comment>


Drug dealers are nice people - <AUTHOR> http://www.vice.com/read/harry-s-freedom-foxhole-drug-dealers-are-nice-people

<comment><USER2> From the polls I've seen, we've passed the point were the majority believe, at least marijuana, should be legalized. However, it's going to take a while to overcome the legislative inertia.

The war on drugs should be a lesson to everyone in limited government. This is a great example of what happens when we massage the constitution, so that "interstate commerce" includes me growing weed in my basement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, cocaine is a lot further from being decriminalized. However, it is still ridiculous someone could face up to 40 years in prison for non-violent crimes. The number one reason for incarceration in the US is drug-related offenses.

From wikipedia ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States)):

      - 1 in 100 adult Americans is in prison (the other 99% are effectively paying for that)

      - only 7.9% of inmates are for violent crimes

<comment><USER2> Yes, I'm for legalizing all drugs.

Our incarceration rates are insane. My local sheriffs office is building a brand new 115 million dollar jail to house 1500 inmates.

Our county only has about 130,000 people. Are there really 1,500 people out of 130,000 that are so dangerous they need to stay locked up to protect everyone else.

<comment><USER3> I fail to see why people bring this up as an argument to legalize drugs. This is really only an argument to change the penalty so you don't go to jail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even if drug offenses held a less-serious punishment, there would still be an immensely wasteful amount of money spent trying to find and apprehend drug criminals. This whole underground market is thriving; instead of collecting tax revenue, we are using taxpayer money to enact an impossible ban.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, this guy buys up cocaine from some (probably highly violent) drug producers from some poor country, but as he didn't kill anyone himself he is a nice guy?

Discussing drug legalization is one thing, but many people die every year by the hands of the same guys that deliver the drugs to those nice guys...

Come on... He earned good legal money as a player and had business with those ruthless drug producers, even if it through some mediators.

If you fuel violence with your money, you are not a nice guy, even if there is not any actual blood in your hands.

<comment><USER2> He's not the one fueling violence. Our government's policies are fueling the violence, so by that definition none of us are "nice guys."

<comment><USER4> Well, this kind of relative thinking brings us to another question that has not much to do with this topic.

Should laws be followed or not? Is it morally valid to do ilegal stuff because one believes that the law is wrong?

I'm adept of respecting law and trying to change it through our representatives.

Now if you fight the government, the government will fight back, and innocent people get killed in the process (by both sides).

So the question "are we all bad guys?" depends very much on what you believe that is morally correct.

I appologise for being so absolutist, when moral is the topic nothing is universal.

ps. and I know, I'm sorry, my english skills suck :)

<comment><USER2> > Is it morally valid to do ilegal stuff because one believes that the law is > wrong?

I say yes with absolute conviction. If the law is immoral, it is immoral to follow it.

This is an extreme example, but it supports my position--It was illegal to harbor Jews during the Nazi's reign. If, in Germany in 1939, you turned in your neighbor for harboring Jews, you were most definitely acting immorally, and your lawbreaking neighbor was acting morally.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Open racism and slurs are fine to post on Reddit, says CEO - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/12/racism-slurs-reddit-post-ceo-steve-huffman <comment><USER2> Good. I don't really use reddit anymore these days, largely because of their censorship policies, but this is a step in the right direction. Free speech is an important western value, and having it available on the internet is a positive thing. Let abhorrent views be aired publicly and die by being refuted, not be hidden and fester into extremist madness.

<comment><USER3> In that case HN isn't the right place for you either, because explicit racist slurs aren't tolerated here.

<comment><USER4> He said having it available is the right thing - and I am assuming here but it's because Reddit is a site that says they promote free speech.

Why do you assume that because he is for free speech on another site, that he doesn't belong here?

Reddit gives you the right to free speech, but it does not exempt you from the free speech or right of others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure they banned all the racist subreddits at one point. Was that not the case?

I'm not a fan of the more fascist aspects of the reddit userbase. There's immense value, I think, in allowing ignorant people free speech and over- labeling things as hate speech can be dangerous. For a while the site has been more about shouting and downvotes and less about dialog.

<comment><USER6> They banned all the racist subreddits where they could find an excuse to do so, like doxxing.

It's just like the real world. It's not illegal to annoy a cop, but that cop is going to be trying real hard to find something else to pin on you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thank god americans respect free speech.

</comment><comment><USER8> ...and? I understand the European media is shocked at free speech, but that's the way the world moves

<comment><USER9> Even if one does not subscribe to absolute free speech, I find the prospect of private companies censoring large parts of the internet as they please even scarier.</comment></comment>


REASONS WHY SAN FRANCISCO IS THE WORST PLACE EVER - <AUTHOR> http://www.vice.com/read/reasons-why-san-francisco-is-the-worst-place-ever?fb_action_ids=10202841914243267&fb_action_types=og.likes

<comment><USER2> The main problem is that there is nowhere else to go in the Bay Area if you're a young programmer. You cannot live in the Silicon Valley suburbs unless you have a wife, two children, a dog and a Prius, and it takes time and opportunity to amass all that.</comment>


Pocket Coder: coding JavaScript on your phone - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tomsoderlund/pocket-coder-coding-javascript-on-the-go-cacfe9d1282d?source=linkShare-3e1b2ee47bd3-1496913359 <comment><USER2> I couldn't find any concept of "saving", whether that be a local file or a paste-bucket or a "connect your github account". Just the idea that I could have more than one named script would make this great.

If that could be taken a step farther, such as allowing `require('axios')` and `require('./local_library')`, that would be next level.</comment>


The easiest way to run cron jobs on AWS - <AUTHOR> https://cronally.com/

<comment><USER2> Uhm... there's something called Amazon Data Pipeline. They offer scheduled events and you can output Alarms to SNS...

<comment><USER3> I think you need to run your own instance for Amazon Data Pipeline. If I need to run my own instance - I as well may use the standard cron.

<comment><USER4> You don't, but Datapipeline is no less, a royal pain in the ass to use..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are you looking for feedback? If so, here is mine:

\---

Forgive me, but this doesn't look easy.

Tons of JSON in bash.. not fun.

And no pricing link.

And no practical useful examples in the article.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the feedback!

We support JSON in the CLI so users can access the response data with tools like jq ([http://stedolan.github.io/jq/](http://stedolan.github.io/jq/)), but leaving off the json parameter will respond with human readable output.

The pricing is regrettably not up yet, but we'll definitely work on some other examples.

Cheers! Tim</comment></comment>


The Impermanence, Karma, and Bad Behavior of Why The Lucky Stiff - <AUTHOR> http://zedshaw.com/blog/2009-08-19.html <comment><USER2> Zed will never understand _why and his simplistic depiction (not understanding) of Buddhism is a testament to this. Moreover he doesn't recognize _why as an artist. He does this in numerous ways but the most obvious and most gauche is the refusal to call _why by his name, which is _why, not Jonathan. In doing so, Zed pulls why out of his world and into his own, which is not an artist's world, and then judges _why. This is unfair to _why in the extreme.

It reminds me of an essay by Henry Miller called "Creative Death" which may help explain _why to those of us who can't understand the state of mind and the motivation of an artist like _why. Here are some excerpts, which run to the end of this post:

For the artist in man is the undying symbol of the union between his warring selves. Live has to be given meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning. Something has to be created, as a healing and goading intervention, between life and death…

The process is a long and devious one. It is all a conquest of fear…

His war with reality is a reflection of the war within himself…

The ideas which germinate in the artist are unique and must be lived out. He is the sign of Fate itself, the very symbol of destiny. For when, by living out his dream logic, he fulfills himself through the destruction of his own ego, he is incarnating for humanity the drama of individual life which, to be tasted and experienced, must embrace dissolution…

It is what Nietzche described as the fusion in one being of two divergent streams–the Apollonian dreamer type and the ecstatic Dionysian…

<comment><USER3> > Zed will never understand _why and his simplistic depiction (not > understanding) of Buddhism is a testament to this. Moreover he doesn't > recognize _why as an artist. He does this in numerous ways but the most > obvious and most gauche is the refusal to call _why by his name, which is > _why, not Jonathan. In doing so, Zed pulls why out of his world and into his > own, which is not an artist's world, and then judges _why. This is unfair to > _why in the extreme.

On the other hand, _why is just an online persona created and portrayed by an actual person. When he says "I truly hope that Jonathan is ok," he's referring to the actual person, not to the online persona... The persona is fictional. A farce. A farce in the name of art, but a farce nonetheless.

It would be like Zed trying to talk about the guy behind 'Fake Steve Jobs' by constantly referring to him as 'Fake Steve Jobs' rather than by his real name, Daniel Lyons. If I said, "I hope that Fake Steve Jobs is in a good frame of mind," most people will not take that to mean, "I hope that Daniel Lyons is in a good state of mind." In the same way, saying, "Fake Steve Jobs is acting like a dick," is not the same as saying, "Daniel Lyons is acting like a dick."

I seriously think that people are taking this "Zed and _why are two polar opposites" idea way too far. Zed is basically saying that _why can do whatever he wants, but to create a bunch of projects that people rely on (even if these projects are your art) and then abruptly, without notice pull the rug out from under these people is an asshole move.

Let's bring all this into a small example. Say there's this artist whose art strikes such a chord with me that I invest every penny I own into putting on a spectacular art show to showcase this artist's art to the world. Let's say that the artist and I spend months and months planning the show and collaborating on it. Then comes the big day of the show, and I go to the location to find out that the artist has up and disappeared, taking all of his art with him. Leaving me with nothing.

If the artist and I have no formal argreement that he has to show his art there he has every right to walk out like this. But it is a very asshole move to leave me hanging after I've invested all of my time in money into it, no? Or do I just scratch my head, say "I just don't understand his art" and call it a day?

This is the same case here. There are things like his twitter account/tweets/blogs/blog entries/etc which pulling from the web isn't that big of a deal. On the other hand, all of his software projects/code are things that people have come to rely on and invest time into contributing to. He basically giving all of those people the finger when he just cuts out everything like this. Without taking the time to organize for these projects to be taken over by someone else (or at least leaving the hosting up for them), he's saying that all of those people, all the effort and time they've spent mean shit all to him.

Being 'artsy' and 'artistic' doesn't excuse you from being an asshole. I mean, Caravaggio (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravaggio>) was a 'ruffian' and a murderer. While his art still stands on its own, he was a dick of a person. Just because a dick of a person produces great art doesn't mean that we hand- wave away all their misdeeds with nebulous phrases like, "You just don't understand his art."

What if Caravaggio decided to pull a _why? Let's say that he broke into all of the places that his paintings resided (cathedrals,churches,mansions,etc) and destroyed every last piece of art that he had created. Should we excuse this behavior as "Well, it's his art and this action is just an extention of his art. You just don't understand his art?"

This has become a bit long-winded, so I'll just cut it here with this. Zed isn't tearing down _why's art. But some parts of _why's art have crossed over from just being 'just art' to being 'art plus' if you will. In this case, it's 'art + software project.' The fact that part of it is art doesn't mean one can ignore that the other part is a software project.

<comment><USER2> I completely disagree that _why was simply an on-line persona, "a farce". The Fake Steve Jobs was satirical, first of all. _why was often funny, but it wasn't satire. I think his work alone, often times personal, was a testament to his authenticity as an artist. You may have only known him as an on-line persona, but that doesn't mean that's all he was. There's at least one video on the interweb of _why giving a talk, in the flesh and blood, and he calls himself _why... Perhaps his friends all call him _why too.

I also think Zed saying he hopes Jonathan is ok is a bit of a platitude. I'm sure Zed DOES hope _why is fine, but it rings hollow in the context of the whole essay. Plus, who doesn't hope _why is ok. His biggest detractors aren't monsters wishing him ill.

I have to say that you confuse being an artist with being 'artsy', which is a mistake. I'm artsy, but I'm no artist. Not a single artist I know would describe themselves as simply artsy. Much of my opinion on what it is to be an artist, however, comes from the Henry Miller essay I referenced earlier. I suggest reading it. It's in a volume called "Matters of the Heart".

I believe an artist has the right to destroy his own work unless he's sold it or given it away. I'm not of the opinion that publishing work on-line is the same as giving it away, and I'm certainly not of the opinion that _why taking his stuff down is the same as breaking into a place to steal and destroy things. There's a very big difference between what _why did and your Caravaggio example. _why did nothing illegal, for instance.

In a way, _why reminds me of the French New Wave film-makers. They believed in the "film-maker as auteur" and wanted complete control over their work. From reading these forums, it sounds like most of _why's code was recovered, which is fortunate, and I'm not aware of anything missing that others collaborated on. I don't think he collaborated much with others if at all, but I don't really know. I do acknowledge that, even with works created solely by _why, there's a certain collaboration osmosis that occurs just by having it on the internet with so many users/readers/extenders/whathaveyous, but in my eyes that falls short of giving it away.

To me, _why considered his programs and their source code art equal to (more important than?) his drawings, music, poems, and stories. It was all his art. I'm extremely sad at the loss of so much of his amazing work.

<comment><USER4> > _I'm not of the opinion that publishing work on-line is the same as giving > it away, and I'm certainly not of the opinion that _why taking his stuff > down is the same as breaking into a place to steal and destroy things_

Publishing work on-line IS giving it away. If you don't want that, just don't publish it online. If not, it's like singing a song at a party and getting all upset on your friends for memorizing it. Sorry, but the cat is out of the bag, and you can't tell me that _why (being involved in an open-source community and all) wasn't aware of that.

_why's taking his stuff down is also comparable to stealing/destroying things ... his work still lives on because other people bothered to make copies, but he also took down the mailing lists / homepages of those projects, disrupting the communities behind those projects, leaving nice people that invested time and resources for those projects in the dark (I don't know how much time/resources were external, but that's irrelevant).

Being an artist doesn't excuse you being dick (although it also doesn't negate your achievements). But when you're being a dick, since you're living in a society that would brake if all of us where dicks, then you should pay the price for that.

<comment><USER2> We could go back and forth on this forever. I think it's a valid, if not tiresome, debate -- if you publish something on-line, is it yours anymore? Was _why's stuff art? Does it matter if we consider it art?

Maybe pulling things down is "comparable" to stealing, but it's not the same. And the extent to which external resources were part of his work is not irrelevant. There's tons of gray area here that's being glossed over.

Zed (and other posters) seem to have a view of the issue that lacks nuance. "He abandon us, he must be a dick." I'm not sure know why "dick" is the only name Zed et al have for _why. Besides the fact that the word is grating and low, it is bad form and, frankly, a little immature to use insults like that, especially when you don't know the whole story. The HN community both eulogized and demonized _why too quickly. Maybe it makes sense that hackers only think in binary terms and pass such stark judgment.

Look, I'm disappointed that _why is gone. There have been good points made on this forum about people who depended on the mailing lists, etc. And we can speculate ad-nauseam the causes for his disappearance. Personally, I thought his work was touching. As I discussed earlier, I also view him as an artist, with motivations that I think are very different from those of a typical hacker or engineer. But because we don't know the whole story, any judgment is based on speculation. And so I must give _why the benefit of the doubt here (and, clearly, defend him a little).

It's wrong to judge _why as Zed and others have, 'nuff said.

<comment><USER4> Yes, well, to tell you the truth I regret his disappearance. That's why I have a bad opinion about this.

I also believe in coding as an art form (although I'm surely not an artist), and _why was a person to which I could relate to. We need such positive models with the same aspirations as ours because we may start thinking that we are crazy ... ever got a blank stare while you where explaining to someone else that programming in itself is beautiful?

It would mean a lot to me if sooner or later he would reappear and provide an explanation ... I could also relate to him being burnt-out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The only thing that really bothers me about what _why did is that he killed all the mailinglists without warning. I happen to know that there were a lot of teachers on the Shoes mailing list trying to use shoes to teach kids to code. It was the center piece of the new hackety hack designed for kids. It seems completely irrational that _why would abandon these innocent people without so much as a "sorry, I'm out". this makes me really worried for his mental health. It is not rational behavior.

<comment><USER6> Not to nitpick semantics, but 'rational' is not actually a very high bar. It could be completely rational within a context that we don't know. It might be irrational, it's hard to say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Zed Shaw trying to leverage more attention on the back of _why's mysterious disappearance. It's as saccarine and transparent as Crystal Pepsi.

[Edit] I'm being downvoted into oblivion. Answer me this -- Shouldn't Zed Shaw be contacting _why directly and privately first, rather than posting this publicly shaming and incredibly presumptuous article? What possible benefit is there here?

Given that Zed offhandedly switches between _why and 'Jonathan', he must know _why, right?

<comment><USER8> I assume that it has gotten a little bit _impossible_ to contact _why.

<comment><USER7> Zed didn't seem to try very hard before assuming the mantle of Internet Behavior and Buddhist Philosophy Police.

[Edit] The downvotes truly boggle my mind. Since when did it become socially acceptable to public dress down a software community member without any facts, evidence, or corroborating information? Zed Shaw is _trolling._ He has _nothing_ in the game (he 'cut all ties' to Ruby, remember?), _no_ relation to _why, and _no reason_ to be publishing invective from his bully pulpit other than a desire to inject himself into the conversation.

He doesn't know what happened to _why, or what _why has planned, or whether the code is gone for good.

<comment><USER9> You're entirely right. As it happens, _why's email address was pretty well- known; furthermore, judging somebody so quickly after something's happened is brash and impertinent.

Even if you were wrong, you're making well-reasoned points, and it's irritating that people are downvoting you and upvoting snark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a new father I have to chime in and say I'm very disappointed to see hackety hack and shoes go away. It was exciting to see his talk from Art & Code, and I was looking forward to using both of those tools to teach my children.

In response to the article and comments, there are a lot of people here who immediately dismiss the article because its written by Zed, and still others who deem _why's actions acceptable because he's an 'artist'. Assuming _why is ok and he just decided to log off, Zed is right in this case. _why has transcended being an artist by creating art that does not only have aesthetic beauty, but also has substantial value to the people who have used it and who have invested time into it. The fact that he has created solid documentation in addition to releasing his projects in a public distributed system geared towards sharing and reuse is proof that he was at least interested in having other people use his projects. Which means he has a social obligation to not actively screw over his user base so he can be dramatic. Just wait, I can see Eric Raymond writing a new chapter about the responsibilities associated with releasing code to the open source community. Maybe this is a sign we need an equivalent of archive.org for code so that nothing like this can happen again.

<comment><USER11> It takes a HN thread and a free github account to restore everything he "took down"

And it took, [precisely that](<http://whymirror.github.com/>)

Zed, you and other are arguing as if he actively deleted your own copies of all that work and that he had an obligation to support it for ever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Shorter Zed Shaw: "It annoys me that you're all talking about _why instead of talking about me, what I believe, what I did for the Ruby community, and how I left it. I'm going to try and change that."

<comment><USER7> I'm going to keep tilting at the windmill, here. Why are you downvoting these comments? How is Zed Shaw not simply trying to insert himself in the debate with base presumptions about _why and his motivations or the cause of his disappearance?

<comment><USER13> I downvoted the parent for snarky ad hominem that adds nothing to the site. I downvoted this comment for complaining about comment voting and perpetuating the notion that voting should be about whether you agree or disagree with it. They are just bad comments.

<comment><USER7> No, my comment was intended to further elucidate the original comment as to garner an explanation for the _reasoning_ behind your disagreement with the comment.

Instead you dismissed it as "snarky". _Why_ do you disagree that Zed Shaw is attempting to hijack the situation to garner attention?

<comment><USER13> You're missing the point by a wide margin. I voted because I felt they were _lousy comments_. Whether I agree with them or not is hardly relevant, as I don't think they're even worth paying that much attention to.

The whole idea that comment moderation should be based on whether you agree or disagree with the message is a toxic one that has killed civil conversation on dozens of sites, replacing it with thoughtless and instinctual groupthink that frankly _makes everyone dumber_. (I won't even pretend to be above it at all times myself, but I try, and would hope to not be alone in that.) Ultimately, you can't stop everybody from voting that way, but you can discourage it, and that's what my post was about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have used both Zed's code and _why's code and have benefited a lot from both. That being said, I would much rather that Zed had left the Ruby community in the same way that _why did than vice versa.

</comment><comment><USER8> Zed, while offending, at least cares about other people. _why does not.

Edit: Woah, controversial comment.

Let me rephrase that: Zed cares more than _why about his projects' afterlife.

<comment><USER9> Which is an entirely different claim to make.

Zed likes pretending that he knows _why's name is Jonathan, when in fact every person here who _knows_ _why says it isn't, and when _why didn't like people speculating about his name to begin with. So Zed's a dick, too, and, typical of Zedshawism, he doesn't get his facts right, choosing instead to trust a specious Wordpress blog whose author is both unknown and a dick himself.

_why never said he was Buddhist. _why said nothing. The rest is speculation. So judging his philosophy is a little bit stupid as well.

I agree with your second statement, which is that _why didn't treat his projects well. But Zed isn't talking about other people. Zed's talking about himself, as always. He's no Jason Scott, who devotes his life to archiving other people's work. Instead, without anything to go on, he calls _why a nihilist (only for him it's a capital-N Nihilist), a "Nihilist who was just jerking people around and playing a long con on everyone," which is pretty offensive in my book. He also calls _why a dick (er, he calls "Jonathan" a dick), and he talks about how he's better than _why because he left up his code after insulting the entire community.

I don't know if we'll ever hear _why's story, but I'm going to give him the benefit of a little doubt. I won't lie, though: I think the guy had every right to remove himself from the Internet. I'd understand his motivation in removing everything, suddenly, without warning. Hell, the only reason I still have this HN account is that there's no option to delete on this site. And leaving gradually isn't leaving. Even when he completely vanished people made it a drama: If he'd announced this a week ago, we'd have had a week's extra drama.

So maybe Zed cared about his projects more than _why, but he doesn't care about people. He cares about pretending he knows shit about philosophy and psychology, and, stripped-down theme or no, about Zed's So Fucking Awesome, enough that his ego gets to influence every story he decides to force himself on. That's not caring about people, especially not caring in the way _why did.

<comment><USER15> Zed's material on Buddhism was a response to John Resig's "Eulogy to _why" in- which he excuses _why's behavior with an analogy to a Buddhist tradition.

<comment><USER9> I know, but he pins it on _why and uses it as an excuse to call him a filthy, awful Nihilist.

I agreed with Resig's eulogy, actually: It seems like _why would view his role in those terms. So what happens is, all of us see only _why disappearing and taking everything with him. In that context, he's being a nihilist. But from _why's perspective, he changed the community he was in for the better, and has chosen to go on. So he has left things behind - the salvaged programs, the Guide - and has himself moved on to something. We don't know what that something is. It's nihilist if you assume that his point was to disappear and destroy, but if he's moving on by using the things he's learned as _why, then it's a transformation and a celebration in just the way Resig described.

<comment><USER13> This is why Zed describes _why as a good person currently being a dick. He is explicitly very supportive of the notion of destroying parts of your life that are causing you suffering, but what he is calling out is the unnecessary harm he has caused to others, and Resig's mischaracterization of it.

Resig is well-meaning, but he's abusing the analogy by relating _why's work to a sand mandala. A sand mandala is not just symbolic--it's ceremonial, it's expected, and nobody gets hurt when it's destroyed. _why's disappearance was not ceremonial, was not expected, and did hurt people. It reflects the notion of impermanence, but that that is neither the totality of Buddhism nor an idea exclusive to Buddhism. Absent the notion of karma (or some other check), impermanence implies Nihilism, and it's a gross distortion of Buddhism to suggest that any suffering you cause for others in the name of impermanence is ok as long as you grow individually.

Zed is doing what so many are unwilling to, which is to point out that even though we all love _why and can all agree that he had the right to do what was good for him, it's _still_ a dick move to hurt people in the process, and he could have handled it better. _why could have accomplished the same thing without hurting anybody. _That_ might have rightly been called a Buddhist act, and fit for praise. But what is actually happening is that people forgive _why for the trouble that his exit has caused because they _like him_.

<comment><USER7> _Zed is doing what so many are unwilling to_

Rush to judgement? Yes, I'm unwilling to do that, especially publicly and without any reasonable justification for my own self-involvement with the issue.

<comment><USER13> Where is the "rush to judgement"? Zed's post is mostly in response to Resig's "eulogy", which itself assumes that _why pulled his stuff deliberately. He's only agreeing with that premise ( _with praise_ ) and disagreeing with the all-positive conclusion wrought from that premise. Again: the only unconfirmed assumption here is one that _most people_ including _the author being responded to_ have made.

Also, we're talking about something Zed posted to his own personal blog. Is Zed not allowed to post what he thinks to his own personal blog? What "reasonable justification" is required to publish your own opinion on the internet?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Johnathan, I truly hope you're doing alright, but that was a dickhead thing to do."

Extremely judgmental especially since open source offers no warranties or guarantees and implicit in this is the very real possibility of the code simply disappearing. It isn't like there is some contract (social or otherwise) that requires people to leave their code up online.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, that's fine, but if you think of open source as an intellectual gift of sorts, isn't what he did sort of like giving a kid a chocolate bar and yanking it away and throwing it in the trash mid bite?

<comment><USER9> That's why it's stupid to think of open source as a gift. It's great, but you're not entitled to it.

<comment><USER18> If you create Open Source Software you are putting a contribution in to the community. That contribution is often derived from or utilises other OSS.

I think of OSS as a movement. Publicly nuking your (popular) repositories is a step back for that movement.

Any developer has every right to do it. However, for those of us who are trying to get large enterprises to embrace and contribute to OSS, our task is a little harder this week than it was last week.

<comment><USER9> I agree. The _advantage_ here is that his contributions aren't gone. The only thing I know of that's seemingly gone for good is TryRuby.

As for getting enterprises to embrace OSS: Wouldn't you say that the ability for people to do what _why did _is_ a disadvantage? Commercial apps don't do things like that. I'm not knocking OSS, but that's certainly something to take into consideration.

<comment><USER19> _"Commercial apps don't do things like that."_

They do. Companies go out of business. They kill products. I went through it in a couple situations when I worked in IT.

In one instance, a vendor was sued by another company and had to immediately pull distribution of an app that we depended on, and the alternative was unusable. That particular example also provides an example of the value of OSS: the app was open source, so we were able to keep using it and tweaking it for years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't know why everyone thinks all of _why's code is gone, which is Zed's main complaint. He left his Rubyforge page up, with all of his code, and anything your project depended on can still be installed. He also had it all on github, so anyone with a checkout has full commit history.

<comment><USER21> That may be true, but tryruby.hobix.com is GONE, and that is a travesty of the highest proportions.

That was the page I learned my first bits of Ruby on. That was the page I introduced 8 friends to Ruby for the first time. It was the page I single- handedly got our contract renewed, by proving a piece of functionality was possible and easily done.

I think for many, it was an easy way in to Ruby. Someone must replace this immediately.

<comment><USER22> There was a tryruby repository at Github, but I don't know if it was all that was needed to run it.

One of the things that bother me more is the fact that he also pulled the plug on all the mailing list of his projects, which would have been the right place to discuss what to do with the code.

<comment><USER21> For what it's worth, this impacts me enough that I've looked, and I couldn't find it. If I had, I likely would have already been fast at work trying to put up a replacement, if only to have something to link to the people who are sure to ask me what happened to it.

My wife actually noticed yesterday that it was gone before I got around to reading all the comments on HN about Why's departure. I eventually told her that he was basically dead. Her response? "How am I going to learn Ruby now?"

I of course have installed a local interpreter, but she really liked the lessons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I liked the part where Zed suddenly thinks it's important to play nice.

<comment><USER24> My take is that Zed thinks there are some things that transcend personal issues, which doesn't seem to be a sudden development.

<comment><USER23> Didn't Zed just have a whole essay about how it's the author's right to do what they want to with their code [1]? _why had absolutely zero obligation to anybody with his contributions.

People should be allowed to take things offline if they choose to, it's laughable that Zed is suddenly high and mighty because someone took their ball and went home.

[1] <http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2009-07-13.html>

<comment><USER25> As he says, you have the right do do whatever you want, but that doesn't mean that people won't think that you're a dick for it.

<http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/3412630996>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> He keeps calling him Jonathan all the time, but it's not at all sure that's his real name (see: <http://ozmm.org/posts/his_name_is_robert_paulson.html>).

And even if it is, it's kind of a dick thing to do, given that we know that _why never wanted to be known as anything but _why.

<comment><USER27> Actually, it is: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774673> , particularly <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775578>

I agree though, dick move. Then again, this _is_ Zed we're talking about.

<comment><USER28> No, it's pretty obvious that they were close friends and coworkers, but not the same person.

<comment><USER27> I'm starting to sympathize with <http://xkcd.com/386/> more and more. I wish I could just stop doing this already.

Umm, ok, let's recap, shall we?:

1) His sister. This ( [http://www.advogato.org/person/whytheluckystiff/diary/14.htm...](http://www.advogato.org/person/whytheluckystiff/diary/14.html) ) says she was 14 in 2001. That makes her ~21 today. "Jonathan Gillette from Utah" has "Kristin Gillete" listed as a relative here: [http://www.intelius.com/search-summary- out.php?ReportType=1&...](http://www.intelius.com/search-summary- out.php?ReportType=1&qf=jonathan&qmi=&qn=gillette&qs=UT&trackit=74&focusfirst=1) . She's 21.

2) His wife. This page ( [http://ftp.df.lth.se/pub/scene.org/music/groups/starving_but...](http://ftp.df.lth.se/pub/scene.org/music/groups/starving_but_happy/sbh- lp003-moonboots-elfin_princess_%28starvingbuthappy%2c_2004%29/moonboots- elfin_princess.txt) ) says Jonathan is married to Kylie, or at least was in 2004. She makes jewelry, and has a site hosted by _why: [http://220.127.116.11/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=c...](http://220.127.116.11/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=cache:snapd.net&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8)

3) His band. See [http://ftp.df.lth.se/pub/scene.org/music/groups/starving_but...](http://ftp.df.lth.se/pub/scene.org/music/groups/starving_but_happy/sbh- lp003-moonboots-elfin_princess_%28starvingbuthappy%2c_2004%29/moonboots- elfin_princess.txt) again. He plays in a band called (both) "Starving but Happy" and "The Child Who Was A Keyhole". See <http://www.myspace.com/thechildwhowasakeyhole> . Compare picture of _why (<http://www.flickr.com/photos/scottlaird/31366517/> ) to [http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewIma...](http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewImage&friendID=40210738&albumID=191117&imageID=957700) and [http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewIma...](http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewImage&friendID=40210738&albumID=191117&imageID=85996) \-- the guitar is pretty easy to identify as the same.

4) The firstname.lastname@example.com thing.

5) This site (<http://members.tripod.com/soccer_riot/> ) was made by _why (pre-why, as far as I can tell). If he is just close friends with Jonathan Gillette, it's apparently to the point that it didn't seem relevant to point out that he was producing the audio clips for the site. Open dolphins.ram in pretty much any media player and you'll see "Jonathan Gillette" as its author.

6) Why did jgillette make several very informed posts to ruby-talk, then completely quit developing ruby (apparently...)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's so easy to judge someone without walking in their shoes. You (and I) have no idea what this person is going through emotionally. He could have some serious problems.

</comment><comment><USER29> A true budhist would throw a hissy fit first and then let his software fucking rot, right?

The only difference between the disappearance of these two from the ruby scene is that _why will actually be missed.

Fuck Zed Shaw.

<comment><USER30> I feel the conflict within you. Let go of your hate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Zed, as much as I love you and your work, that also was a dickhead thing to say ;(

</comment><comment><USER32> I shudder to think how much chatter this is going to generate. Zed bashing on _why... worlds collide. The only thing that would be better is if he somehow brought up Erlang in the argument.

<comment><USER33> Except that Zed isn't "bashing", he's making an intelligent, _measured_ well thought-out argument - for once. Perhaps the only thing that will happen is the brains of those expecting insanity will explode...

<comment><USER9> He's bashing. Calls _why Jonathan instead of giving him the courtesy of an alias, presumes to know _why's motives, calls him names repeatedly.

<comment><USER34> Given that "Why the Lucky Stiff" is a persona - a mask, that this guy has worn for a while, and that seemingly, he no longer wishes to wear, what are we supposed to call him? Jonathon, if that's his "official" name, seems as good as anything else, since he seems to have resigned from the "Why" role.

<comment><USER9> It's not his name. Zed posted a link on Twitter to somebody named Jonathan and insisted it was _why. It wasn't.

We're talking about why the lucky stiff. We don't know anything about the man that wore the mask. He was very good at keeping his personal life a mystery. So calling him why the lucky stiff makes sense, at least until/if we learn more about what's going on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is bull. The idea of karma is an illusion too. The man who stabs you in the gut and laughs, is a buddha. mu.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm assuming _why kept the free stuff up, but took down the stuff he had to pay for? I'd probably do that as well. Monthly hosting fee's and domain name uptake can be a PITA, and a money sink.

<comment><USER25> He did delete his Twitter and his GitHub, so it wasn't just paid for things.

<comment><USER36> Gotcha. Well, no harm in deleting your own Twitter account. It may be that he was on a paid plan at Github (personally, I'm on the $7/mo plan), and just deleted it instead of downgrading? You "can" downgrade accounts though, for what it's worth.

<comment><USER25> Totally true. Just figured I'd mention it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft acquires data modeling startup ADRM Software - <AUTHOR> https://www.geekwire.com/2020/microsoft-acquires-data-modeling-startup-adrm-software/ <comment><AUTHOR> Looks like a fivetran compete to me, [https://fivetran.com/](https://fivetran.com/)</comment>


Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again - commons-tragedy http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/group-chats-are-making-the-internet-fun-again.html <comment><AUTHOR> 30 years later and we have reinvented IRC, but worse as you can't use your own client, the protocol may not be public and it's harder to discover channels.

<comment><USER2> At least your friends don't need a whole lot of instruction to join. Inserting pictures is pretty easy. And it's mobile.

<comment><USER3> I remember IRC in the late 90s, early 2000s having A LOT (like 9 out of 10) of people who otherwise had no idea about computers (remember droves of people disconnecting after 'Press Alt+F4 to get @'?). People who didn't knew the difference between a file and a directory (or folder) were on IRC with channels having hundreds of people.

If someone can figure out Facebook (and trust me, Facebook is far from intuitive for someone who doesn't know) or any other web-based service, they can figure out IRC.

The main reason people do not use IRC much nowadays is that other people moved off IRC to Facebook and other social places. It isn't a technical thing, it is mainly a social thing.

<comment><USER4> Lack of conversation persistence is a real problem. It's 2019 and people expect to have it. If messages disappear into the ether while I'm not actively connected to the room, it's not going to work for participating in a group conversation.

Yeah you can set up some always-connected relay on a server and bounce your client through it to still get the conversation backlog when you weren't online, but it's not reasonable to expect an average computer user even have an always-connected machine to run it on, let alone actually get a relay working.

If they can use Facebook they could use IRCCloud, but that's $5/month and Messenger/WhatsApp/Discord/Slack are free.

<comment><USER5> Well that's the whole idea behind Snapchat, but I get your point.

Sometimes I wish I didn't have so many messages saved forever tho, honestly.

<comment><USER4> Not just persistence in terms of "exists after I read it", but in terms of getting the messages at all. When someone sends you a snap while you don't have snapchat open, you get a push notification about it and the message is waiting on the server for you to read it.

In IRC, anything that happens while you don't have an active session just doesn't exist.

That might work for some communities, like programming language groups where I can hop in, talk about something with whoever's online, and hop back off.

But if I'm chatting with my friends and we're trying to make plans for the weekend, everyone really needs to see that conversation regardless of whether they have the client running right this second.

<comment><USER6> almost every single irc server since 94 or so have some sort of logger. if not, it's an intentional design choice for that one community.

<comment><USER7> You're suggesting people scour logs for missed messages as if that's seriously your pitch for "IRC has that, too."

This is exactly why people who are pro-IRC are watching the sun set on IRC and they don't have a flaming clue why beyond condescending suspicions like "it's the _users_ who are idiots."

<comment><USER8> Maybe september is starting to end?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This rings very true. I'm down using Facebook/Twitter for work, or checking every 2 or 3 days if I'm bored, desperate or looking for something in particular. Instagram is about a 50% mix of pretty things and friends, but the pretty things post way more often, so the split is heavily in that direction.

I'd say approximately a third of the friends I chat to regularly (late 30s ish) have left or don't use Facebook - but we're all in lots of WhatsApp groups. A couple with big groups of friends, but lots that are started before a night/day when the few in the group got together and just stay open to extend the fun from the day with relevant stuff.

It feels a lot more private to post to these. You can share things without some random friend commenting, or judging because you know exactly who you're sharing with. It feels more like having a pint with a couple of mates than pinning something to a noticeboard that friends, relatives and work colleagues may (or may not, depending on whether FB deems it worthy) seeing.

WhatsApp has definitely replaced Facebook for a few of us - and bearing in mind they have the same overlord, it seems like a pretty canny buy now.

<comment><USER10> Suddenly google circles don't seem so silly after all.

<comment><USER11> The basic idea of Google Circles - that we have small circles that we share content and engage with, was basically sound.

Google+'s misstep was to overlay a clumsy UI and load a lot of the work of setting up and maintaining those circles on the user. Neither do a lot of users have the clean line between "Close Friend", "Friend" and "Acquaintance" clear in their head.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Discord is eating the (chat) world, in the same way that Facebook has eaten social blogging, and Google has eaten email.

I'm running a small site where people can play pen&paper-style roleplaying games together in small groups, featuring persistent channels and a wiki for each channel, in addition to the core dice rolling and chat functions ([https://rolz.org](https://rolz.org) for anyone who's curious). The site has survived the stunningly well-funded and abundantly feature-rich Roll20.net, because it's non-commercial and doesn't require user accounts. However, since Discord appeared on the scene, traffic has been declining massively and steadily.

Where we once had hundreds of groups online at a given time, it's now usually in the low 20s. At first, people kept asking for a Discord-bot version, and at least one user made one using the public API, and now Discord is pretty much the only game in town.

Meanwhile IRC is also pretty much dead, as many people have noticed in this thread. I still hang out in the #ludumdare IRC channel, but over the last two years that community has dwindled from hundreds of users during the Compo to maybe ten, and from dozens of users during the rest of the time to maybe 2 or 3 being online per day. While the LD Discord has replaced the IRC channel, it is also a lot less vibrant and social. It's now more a loose collection of mildly disinterested people who sometimes hang out in the same chat room, mostly unconcerned with each other. I wonder how symptomatic that is.

<comment><USER13> Just dropping by to say thank you for running rolz! My role-playing group use the site for dice rolling every week. We have been doing so for more than a year now, and it has been great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> >For me, at least, group chats aren't the new AIM. They're the new Facebook. [...] Facebook was a place for this kind of purposeless sociality before it was a place for repeatedly blocking and reporting your step-cousin.

I'm glad to see this article articulate this. If you were thinking about something political, say Climate Change, and posted that, then you'd suddenly find yourself arguing basic facts with someone who dropped out of your highschool that you never got around to defriending.

Repeat post-argue-block until you can't muster the energy, and start posting trivial nothing like pictures of what food you are eating like everyone else - wanting social interaction but repeatedly slapped like a pavlovian dog until you don't know if it's even possible to have a real conversation online anymore.

</comment><comment><USER15> I had that thought for months. I'll give you my business Idea for free for the next big social network, since I'd rather work on my game development:

Chats based on hashtags. Are you watching the newest Game of Thrones ? Just search for #gameofthrones and enter the chat to talk with others. Chats go bad once too many people participate, so you split chats into channels of ~50. You can upvote messages and once they reach a threshold they will be broadcasted to all channels. Broadcasted messages can be saved in an archive and reread later by everyone.

Monitization can be done by allowing people to pay for broadcasts.

Everyone can start their own chatroom of course but names are unique.

Please, someone do it, I want this. Discord is to cumbersome because you need to find an interesting server first and you have to commit to much.

<comment><USER16> A large issue I see with this is that of moderation. Discord, Slack, Reddit, and so on, all have appointed moderators for every community that keep users in-check according to community standards. With this idea, there are no 'owners' of any of these chatrooms, so are you going to moderate it centrally? That is a lot of work and requires a lot of people, just think about how much work it is to moderate a single twitch chatroom for spam, let alone an unlimited amount of them.

Would love to hear if you have any ideas on solving that. Besides that, I like the idea.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, that is a big problem. The only thing I can think of is to allow vote- kicks/bans. Account creation can only happen with mobile numbers to discourage spam and other violations and people just creating another account with a new mail.

You could also use this as an opportunity for another monetization system which allows people to pay for a reserved channel and moderation rights. The owners would be incentivized to behave in a reasonable manner because people could just move to an umoderated channel if they don't like the administration.

I see the chats in a semi persistent state between reddit/discord and kik/jodel etc.

Not persistent over weeks or months but also not as short lived as a one day discussion that gets lost in new posts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It turns out being connected with good friends/family is a lot more enjoyable than being connected with every random person you had a university course with once.

Facebook is going to be your rolodex (A "facebook" even! good name for it) and then there's going to be a heavily segmented private social network for your friends / families to connect and share photos. Figuring out how to make that happen with limited / minor work for the user is the challenge.

<comment><USER18> I set up my personal rolodex as an alternative to Facebook. It's called Monica, and can be self-hosted: [https://www.monicahq.com/](https://www.monicahq.com/)

<comment><USER19> From your TOS: "You must only use the site to do things that are widely accepted as morally good." [0]

I'm sorry, but WTF does this even mean? That's so incredibly vague that I tend to read it as "essentially, nearly anything could be a TOS violation". For instance, if I log a call with "He was in a bitchy mood and was being an asshole", that is a TOS violation, since calling someone an asshole is widely considered unkind.

[0] [https://www.monicahq.com/terms](https://www.monicahq.com/terms)

<comment><USER20> I don't think surface kindness done or not done privately qualifies as a moral concern.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Group chats are great, but they still have a bunch of problems that their predecessors didn't: they're walled and often not private. In certain cases, using your own client is anathema and an opportunity to be kicked off the platform :/

<comment><USER22> For tech groups there are a lot of good ones on matrix which is a federated network.

<comment><USER23> I second this. Matrix is a great protocol, with lots of promising clients [0] like Fractal, Spectral, Riot(X), Pattle, etc. and bridges pretty well with Slack, Discord, Gitter, IRC...

It is self-hostable, and provides a modern baseline of features (though Riot is the only fully-featured client at the moment).

Burying myself in a walled garden is a no-go, so it has been working pretty well for me so far. I only regret the fact that the reference server implementation consumes a lot of resources, but it should be coming down [1][2] (the current state stems from the proof-of-concept python implementation having grown unchecked over the years), with alternative implementations hopefully becoming viable soon[3].

[0]: [https://matrix.org/docs/projects/clients- matrix](https://matrix.org/docs/projects/clients-matrix)

[1]: [https://github.com/orgs/matrix- org/projects/9](https://github.com/orgs/matrix-org/projects/9)

[2]: [https://matrix.org/blog/posts](https://matrix.org/blog/posts)

[3]: [https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix- now.html](https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html)

<comment><USER24> Meh. Personally, I could neither consider myself a Matrix fan…:

[https://https://web.archive.org/web/20180711050333/https://m...](https://https://web.archive.org/web/20180711050333/https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what- is-the-difference-between-matrix-and-psyc) (Why they removed this, and many of the other entries, from their FAQ? Who knows.)

[https://about.psyc.eu/Matrix](https://about.psyc.eu/Matrix)

[https://secushare.org/comparison](https://secushare.org/comparison)

…nor a fan of Federation in general:

[https://about.psyc.eu/Federation](https://about.psyc.eu/Federation)

[https://secushare.org/federation](https://secushare.org/federation)

Of course, the perceived need for federation only arises in the first place because the 'Inter'net doesn't actually deserve the name "Internet"—it's just three bead on a string telco networks in a Trenchcoat held together by thought-terminating clichés, of which you'll find plenty over here (and I don't exclude my comment there from that description):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19864808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19864808)

And a beads on a string model kinda forces one to enduldge otherwise mostly unnecessary middlemen.

Grrrrrrrr.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Discord is the best thing that happened to me since IRC and I could not be happier. We exchange art, we discuss movies, we play DND together. Obviously it could not replace IRL connections, but it complements them nicely.

<comment><USER26> I've very recently signed up to discord. Are you able to recommend any high quality tech discord servers/of the same calibre as HN? Im also interested in video games playing/development

<comment><USER27> Oooh, I too would like to see a curated list of tech Discord servers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> When I hit my early 30s a few years ago all my friends moved away and had kids. Getting them together even in a virtual form to do anything in a synchronous way has become basically impossible - it leaves me longing for the days of AIM and IRC when it was very easy to make friends online.

I haven't had a decent conversation with a stranger in years.

<comment><USER29> Ever been to a bar?

<comment><USER30> Serious question: how do you meet people at a bar? It has never been clear to me how that actually works.

<comment><USER31> People who go to bars alone are usually open to conversation. So you go to the bar and sit at the bar with open seats next to you. Whenever someone sits near you, you strike up conversation. It is wise here to have a keen sense of whether or not people are interested in continuing your conversation. Choose a bar with a relaxed, quiet atmosphere, probably serving tasty drinks so you have a shared activity over which to bond with people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> m-i-l The article doesn't cover this, but how do people discover these group chats? All the Discord servers I've joined I've essentially found by word-of-mouth, which doesn't seem very high tech. In the old days you'd find the interesting online forums by "surfing the web".

<comment><USER32> I feel there is an argument that this is one of the reasons people are gravitating to private chats. They're invitation only. You're not running the risk of your offhand snark about something with political ramifications getting besieged by bots and drones the way you are on Twitter.

You have to be someone who people _want_ to connect with. And if you stop being that kind of person you run the risk of getting kicked out.

<comment><USER33> Also not at risk of it becoming an online controversy with articles in the media and the potential of your employer firing you to save their own reputation.

Sites like Reddit, Facebook and especially Twitter have a bad reputation for taking people who said something slightly controversial and making them online pariahs.

These more private systems are safe from both drama fanatics and people looking for controversies, and from journalists looking for controversial communities to infiltrate and profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The most fun I have with my smartphone are two iMessage group chats with different friend circles. Hilarious. I just hope no one will ever analyze those...

</comment><comment><USER35> Wechat (from Tencent) has figured it out at least 5-6 years ago. Group chat inside wechat is everywhere in China now. People use it at works, for study groups, or SIGs.

<comment><USER36> Whatsapp is similar in my experience, at least for chat.

Push to talk/listen is popular in china as well and its insanely irritating being around people shouting at their phones to reply.

<comment><USER37> I was pretty happy when that died out with Nextel phones in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'll probably regret stirring the pot here, but I've never understood or been comfortable with group chats. I grew up in the era of Usenet groups and email (and later, forums & blogs), where conversations were slow and threaded. In the rare event I happen into a group chat today (whether IRC, Discord, SMS, FB, etc.), it feels incredibly stressful and overwhelming.

Sometimes I think of Vernor Vinge's book _True Names,_ where one of the characters is called the Mailman, and only deals with the world through email. That might be me by now...

</comment><comment><USER39> Two years ago, I've became disillusioned about the current status of web communities and culture. Basically I was thinking that, the web culture, once hailed as the center of out-of-box thinking, creativity, weird subcultures, e.g. Something Awful and early 4chan, was dying. Of course it has the good, the bad and the ugly, but now it seems increasingly boring.

For example, text boards and forums? Mostly dead. Imageboards? Even small sites dedicated to a particular obscure subculture are dying, the biggest ones are mostly ideological nonsense. Blogs? It no longer has a visible and influential blogosphere. Reddit? Primarily newsfeed and links. Also, lots of communities I was interested in was going downhill. Twitter? Lots of interesting things was happening in the beginning, but nowadays it's a mainstream walled garden, etc.

Even Hacker News had:

* I Don't Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

[http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to- waste-...](http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-waste-time- on-the-internet-anymore.html)

So I asked a friend online. He was once active in a technical community and specialized in writing tropes and jokes, but already stopped posting for a while.

I asked: _What are you doing nowadays?_

He answered: _Busy works._

Then I told him my all of my perceptions I mentioned, and asked him: what the heck is going on for web communities? what is the future? what are the places where interesting things are produced nowadays?

He answered: _I think it has returned back to the era of chatrooms._

I've realized his judgement cannot be too correct after seeing this article on HN.

Pretty much. I've heard a lot of activities is now happening on Discord servers, especially for gaming, it's almost the role IRC played in the early 2000s. Telegram also has many interesting groups and those dramas and incidents are coming on a weekly basis! I believe the chatroom would be a breeding group for the next wave of web communities.

In short, I guess we've just completed _a full circle_.

Unfortunately, what it means to me is:

(1) All the legacy of the previous web communities needs to be thrown away.

(2) It may take years for the new communities to recreate some interesting aspects of the old web communities had, and by the time you've rediscovered it, it would be too late.

(3) Most protocols and services and proprietary. Now a even bigger walled- garden is coming.

(4) I cannot be happy enough to see that Hacker News is still going strong. Registering an account was a correct decision. I think Hacker News is largely playing a role of the Usenet newsgroups, but in disguise as a news website. It may not be as effective as forums, but is working pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER40> After being connected through WhatsApp with a number of groups of family and friends, I recently decided to disconnect. I am on WhatsApp, but I no longer participate in group chats. I took this step after I felt that my time was no longer mine. I mostly played along for the FOMO. I still do 1:1 chats as and when needed.

After this change I feel liberated. I am able to think more independently, avoid group think and have more meaningful 1:1 conversations. For now I am planning to stick to this change.

</comment><comment><USER41> My problem with slack or discord is that once you join a group, there are just too many channels and sub channels to follow.

<comment><USER42> For Discord, I tend to mute all but the most relevant ones. This usually ends up being the general channel or the one or two channels that I actually cared about and why I joined in the first place.

I tend to treat channels as faster paced forums, more or less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> We had group chats in IRC, MSN, AIM, ICQ, etc. What's new?

<comment><USER44> My take: what is new? People want to own an $800 phone that can browse the web, do group chat, run apps etc. I get a kick out of modern ads, although they are probably effective (just not on me).

"Buy this $800 iphone 10x-r so you can send animated images to your grandma & grandpa. Or run an app that puts an smiley imoge over your face"

I understand for some people this is a great feature. Or how about being able to 'unlock your phone' with your face. Great that is totally cool (not), but sure go ahead and drop a grand on the new iphone if you want to.

I dont really agree with the article. Technically these group chats might be sending info over the wire. But normally i wouldnt really associate a group chat with "the internet".

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Im surprised no one has mentioned Kix here - Its probably one of the apps closer to the old days of IRC that I have played around with in quite some time.

</comment><comment><USER46> Any thoughts on why StackOverflow chat never really took off?

<comment><USER47> Id say its largely due to the culture found on SO.</comment></comment>


The New National ID Systems - <AUTHOR> https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/new-national-id-systems <comment><AUTHOR> src [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/10/id_systems_th...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/10/id_systems_thro.html#comments)</comment>


Ask HN: Does somebody needs a full-process desginer on your team? - <AUTHOR> Hey guys,
I'm 19 years old self-taught Full-process designer from Slovenia. As of right now I'm finishing school and I'm in process of searching a job. It can be any kind; freelance, contract, part-time or full-time. I'm willing to relocate.
I have more than 5 years experiences in web design, app design and branding. My passion is to create something beautiful every day and to improve something. I am consistently pixel-perfect with my designs and I'm up-to-date with latest trends in my field.
You can check my latest work at http://vidakovic.si and read more about me, my process and my latest clients at http://vidakovic.si/about
A few snapshots of latest work: http://imgur.com/gallery/f69FB
Contact me at http://vidakovic.si/contact or at email@example.com
Thanks! <comment><USER2> "Does somebody need <me>" isn't a good discussion topic. It's a job ad. On Hackernews job ads are submitted on the first day of the month in two discussion threads by [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring)

(I have nothing against one job ad. But companies tend to be aggressive submitting their ads and freelancers would start too if it becomes successful. There are many other websites and forums for job ads).

</comment><comment><USER3> You may want to define what Full process means? Also, your question emphasizes process than designer, which I think is the position you are really looking for

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, you can read more about the term I use here: [http://fullprocessdesigner.com/](http://fullprocessdesigner.com/) Travis made a nice podcast about that term and what it means in business world.

<comment><USER4> I don't know about anyone else but I have never heard of this term used before in business or otherwise.

The 10 points seem like a loose "definition" of a Business Analyst.</comment></comment></comment>


An Interactive Introduction to LaTeX course from WriteLaTeX - <AUTHOR> https://www.writelatex.com/blog/7-free-online-introduction-to-latex-course-part-1

<comment><USER2> This is pretty sweet - not sure use of $ signs is recommended anymore though?</comment>