Ask HN: Disheartening Corporate Life - <AUTHOR> Does anyone have any tips for coping with the demands of the corporate world?  The politics, the vague requirements, the changing deadlines, the isolation.
I am a part of a "team" that only works on solo projects. Only a few of which are my level technically, or in experience, and I am by no means a senior developer. I have to argue with managers that are clearly making bad decisions, some of which I suspect are being paid off by vendors.  I get vague requirements handed down from 4+ levels up the corporate ladder.  I don't get any recognition when I do something worthwhile. I don't even get punished when I don't deliver. I don't want to grab the brass ring, but even if I did I wouldn't know where it was.
I have responsibilities, and I don't think I could come anywhere near my current compensation anywhere else. So I stay, but every day I care less. <comment><USER2> I just left a corporate job in London at a Fortune 25 company that paid 78,800 GBP a year and moved to a different country with a smaller / lesser pay. I did it because I wasn't happy with the corporate life.

Don't measure your life by the size of your paycheck. Think about what you want to do and just take a leap of faith. If you choose to stay on, then invest some time and learn a few more programming languages and get some domain specific knowledge. If you don't have a specialization then that could be your start.

<comment><USER3> Curious what country you went to, I'm considering leaving London too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm on the exact same boat, except I couldn't care less and therefore I do not "argue with managers", or get worked up for any reason whatsoever. I say yes to whatever people want, even if it's stupid, because at the end of the day I'm just a cog in a corporate machine and still get paid and everyone's happy. Of course on the inside I laugh about them, but on the outside they think I'm their best buddy.

You may say I'm fake, well you're not wrong, but being forthright and get isolated don't help with paying the bills. It's a tough life I know. I'm not doing anything wrong, I just choose to ignore the bullshit for the sake of my own sanity.

>I don't even get punished when I don't deliver

Use the free time to do better yourself. You're given the gift of time from god. I become a better programmer not by doing whatever bullshit project they give me, but from self-learning with all the free time.

</comment><comment><USER5> To the sibling commenters saying OP can move -- OP seems to hint that he/she is located in a non tech hub with a family to support (perhaps his/her own, perhaps parents). In such a case where you are geographically constrained with few if any other high paying employers in the area, what would you do?

<comment><USER6> Move. That's what I did. I was stuck in a corporate fortune 500 world of meetings, unrealistic deadlines, frequent random layoffs, technical jobs being a cost center, etc. The metropolitan area was a bad job market too and I was interviewing for a couple years.

The further you move up in an organization like that, the less marketable skills and experience you will end up with. And higher pay locks those golden handcuffs.

I found a job in a different state that is growing economically, sold the house and moved. Sure it is tough on everyone in the family to leave behind friends, family and the kids go through periods of time where they are bummed.

The alternative is just waiting it out while your skills vanish and you become less marketable. My thought process was I wanted to be in control and not wait to be laid off which would be worst case scenario and would require moving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know it's not much to go on and I can't give specific examples, but I created a website to help people cope with their daily lives at work, to hear stories from others, to rant and complain about their jobs, their bosses, and do whatever they need... the website has evolved into full blown articles beyond the ranting... like success at work or dealing with stress at work and etc., but all types of articles are accepted.

Confessions of the Professions [http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/](http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I spent almost one year in a company where my situation was very much like yours right now. I was constantly frustrated and wanted to quit, but I couldn't because of several reasons. I noticed that such frustration was negatively impacting my work (although no one noticed/cared) * AND * my life outside of work. Once I had that realization, I decided to put an end to it and here's how I did it:

I started using a time tracker. I noticed that if I truly focused, I was able to get all my work done in 3-4 hours instead of 8 hours in a workday. This was amazing because every day, I was done with what was expected from me by the lunch hour. As you would expect, I kept this a secret. Once again, no one noticed anything abnormal as I was delivering with the same pace.

Every lunch hour, I'd quickly eat my lunch and practiced Spanish for 30 minutes. This bumped up my spirits me because I was having fun while learning something new. The next 3-4 hours, I whole-heartedly dedicated the time to sharpen my skills. I was basically reviewing fundamentals, practicing for interviews, and was keeping up with new research in my community. Once I realized I could move, interviewing and leaving the company was very easy.

In hindsight, I think the shift in my mindset occurred after I stopped caring about my then situation and started focusing on where I wanted to be.

I'm in a great place now, but just so you know - the politics, vague requirements, and deadlines still exist :)

<comment><USER2> The only way you can be rid of those vague requirements and ever changing deadlines is if you work for yourself :) ;)

<comment><USER9> Didn't work for me :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just quit and work for yourself. You're a slave right now. If you're okay with that, or you're into the whole politics thing, fine. But there's no need to put up with that bullshit if you are as capable as you say you are.

There's never been a better time to be a software engineer (well, except maybe the winter of 2000). There are thousands of smart, respected, non-technical people looking to start businesses in their field of domain expertise. Find them. Work with them, as a consultant or co-founder. Charge as much as you can.

If you're not happy at your job, leave. Life is too short. You have a very marketable skillset. Currently you're extracting value from that in the lowest friction way possible: working for a corporation. There are other options. It's your choice whether or not to pursue them. But if you hate your job, and do nothing about it, I have no sympathy for you.

Take some control of your life, say peace out to these idiots, and put your skills to use to make money for yourself.

<comment><USER11> Maybe you read it differently than I did, but the OP didn't cast themselves as some rockstar ninja with FU money who's tired of working with people they feel are beneath them, what I read was they discovered political skill > technical skill, which is certainly true for larger companies, and this fact is not obvious if you lack political skill.

> There are thousands of smart, respected, non-technical people looking to > start businesses in their field of domain expertise. Find them. Work with > them, as a consultant or co-founder. Charge as much as you can.

Do you have any actionable advice or resources on how to do this? This kind of personal networking is it's own skill that's non-trivial to acquire and train. Without such resources, this comment sounds as heartless as telling a laid-off factory worker to "Stop thinking poor! Pick yourself up by your bootstraps!". With such advice, it could be quite helpful indeed!

<comment><USER10> This person was asking for advice. There are many different was of providing encouragement. Not everyone needs you to hold their hand. Some people just need a push in the right direction. Tough love, etc.

Without knowing more details of the situation, we are all just speculating.

Also, nobody said anything about FU money. If you're single with no dependents, you just need enough money to survive and use your laptop.

People are way too quick to jump into corporate jobs out of college. If your career is not your priority in life, I understand it. But so many people are influenced by truisms, tribal knowledge, zeitgeist, etc. that it has essentially become propaganda for the status quo. Leave college, join the workforce, do your part in society.

Nobody questions it. Then a few years down the road they come to HN asking what to do about the overwhelming corporatism directing their life. The truth is, there is no fix. The only solution is to create and control your own environment.

There are so many other options for how to spend your life than a "safe" corporate job. It's sad how quickly people are to declare themselves ineligible to participate in the opportunities those options afford them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well... having been in a vaguely similar situation about 2 years ago, I recommend picking your golden handcuffs and getting the fuck out before you stop caring all together.

Find a smaller company, identify what you find full filling in a team and work, and search for that. Salary second.

This is a whole lot easier to reason through while you can control it.

I also second others' mention of the importance of learning.

Or, sell your sanity. How much is it worth?

</comment><comment><USER13> Are you working at the same company as me? I just jumped ship to somewhere else with high pay and promises of working with a complex low-level codebase - this is my skill set after all - as it turned out I'm writing unit tests in Python and being paid a bunch of money for it.

Inexperienced as far as the industry goes, but as far as the company goes I actually feel quite a bit more experienced (thanks to being mentored by a couple senior engineer with serious projects under their belt). Unfortunately people seem to care more about seniority in the company than actual code quality.

Even worse is that people seem to rarely show up to work except for meetings, or if they do they just leave really early. The ironic part is that the company is supposed to 'move fast', but all of their builds and infrastructure is insanely slow.

I guess the only thing we can do is learn skills outside of work and jump to a better job in a few months or a year. It is a good life lesson, and at least you are getting paid.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've been at the same corporation for 13 years now and have encountered this a couple times. I don't know how feasible it is where you work, but what I've done is look for a new position within the company. I really love this company, but there have been times I didn't enjoy the work/team I was on. It could be as simple as changing to a new project, or sometimes even more extreme. I went from being a lead architect on a project to heading over to the DevOps team for a year and giving that a try. I didn't enjoy it so I've since moved over to our Data Science team where I'm an Analytics Architect. Luckily I've been here long enough and gotten to know enough people that they've come and let me know when they have openings on their team and see if I'm interested.

TLDR; See if you can find another team/division within your company to work for.

</comment><comment><USER15> The amount of money sloshing around in our industry is insane right now. You might be surprised at how close you could come on current comp (unless you're in rest-and-vest at a very high-flier, in which case you need to look at how to replace what your comp will be in 2-3 years when the [typically] largest chunk has fully vested).

It doesn't hurt to look.

</comment><comment><USER16> Focus on learning, seminars, conferences, people, training learn everything you can. Learn as much as you can while you can. Once you feel that the job can not offer you any more learning opportunities, leave, for another job that will provide... rinse and repeat and you will become a top level.

</comment><comment><USER17> You may find yourself happier working for a smaller company.

</comment><comment><USER18> Pick up a problem in your current company which you can solve and automate. Automate that, get out and sell this to them later and hopefully more companies. Problem could be any "manual process" that's going on which you can fasten up or completely automate.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why is compensation (above and beyond what you need) so important?

</comment><comment><USER20> How senior are you?</comment>


See seven years of a Detroit neighborhood unfold - <AUTHOR> https://makeloveland.com/blog/see-seven-years-of-a-detroit-neighborhood-unfold <comment><USER2> The second-to-last plot (near the bottom right) goes from "occupied" to "no structure", even though it seems to have no structure in both photos. Another lot on Camden goes from red to blue even though it also remains unchanged in the photo (no structure before and after).

<comment><USER3> I think it is only one photo. They are just changing the overlay. Note the traffic in the streets and the parked cars--they are all the same before and after.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> one of the best parcel mapping tools out there!</comment>


NPR Website to Get Rid of Comments - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2016/08/17/489516952/npr-website-to-get-rid-of-comments <comment><USER2> This is an interesting move, and a topic I've been discussing with friends. I've stopped using sites like Reddit, because the comment sections are just toxic. I've gone as far as installing Chrome extensions that make comment sections disappear from popular sites like YouTube. It's too easy to get drawn into the negativity, and I'm completely over it. "Social Networking" has reached it's low point as far as I'm concerned. Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point.

<comment><USER3> >Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point.

the interesting thing about this is that HN comment system seems to discourage dialogue - i.e. you are not notified when someone replies to your comment. It seems to be more geared towards comment-it-and-forget-it.

<comment><USER4> Yes, and this has always bothered me. There's a chrome extension (Hacker News Enhancement Suite, broken at the moment due to recent HN changes) that made it easier to see your own comments. Since I no longer use the extension, I rarely check for replies. Bums me out.

<comment><USER2> Threads serves the purpose for recent stuff though right? I mean, do you really care about people commenting on stuff from days ago?

<comment><USER5> Sometimes I'll ask a question and forget I asked it, or someone will ask me a question. I'd like to know about those cases more reliably. But if it contributes to any degradation of HN's high quality comments then I'd prefer to keep things the way they are.

<comment><USER2> Fair, I think they could simply just sort by most recently commented posts you've created, and that would just solve that issue.

<comment><USER6> Click on your username in the upper right corner, then navigate to "comments" on the left.

<comment><USER2> That's the same function as "threads" in the main heading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I see comment moderation as one of the 'unsolved problems' left in this generation of the web. When I worked at Foreign Policy we worked hard to integrate new commenting tools and encourage power users, but we were just buried by the threats, spam, and low-value noise.

Web technology scales, journalism scales (poorly, but a relatively small publication can pull big traffic), but right now there's just no substitute for someone at manually checking out reported comments and banning problem users. When you have a site with as much traffic as NPR, that would probably take dozens or hundreds, and these orgs are loathe to outsource it to cheap countries like the big web players do, mostly due to the ethical challenges.

Maybe moving comments to people's own social groups on FB/Twitter will help to defray the costs, I don't think they're really seeing any discussion value for the most part.

<comment> guard-of-terra Disqus more or less figured out comment moderation around me. I'm yet to see a Disqus-powered comment system overran by undesirable content.

HN is failing at comments. During last years, the community deteriorated to the point where for many articles every single comment is grayed-out downvoted. That signifies quite a rift in community. HN used to be upvote- intensive excitement-driven but today it's downvote-intensive, annoyment driven.

<comment><USER8> Which articles are you reading? I have yet to see a single article where that has happened.

<comment> guard-of-terra Comments to most articles about Snowden, refugees or gender issues are like that.

<comment><USER9> Probably a signal that the user base does not find those issues interesting.

Snowden because it's nothing we don't already know, and refugees or gender politics because they _always_ degenerate into political (i.e. not interesting) mud slinging matches.

On a side note, if a community with the general high quality and good moderation of HN can't have a good discussion on those topics online, I'm inclined to believe that having same is just plain impossible.

Personally, my thought process upon seeing one of these articles is something like:

1) Ugh, _another one_. Let's check the comments..

2) As expected, a dumpster fire. Nobody even RTFA. Let's look at the article..

3) Nothing even remotely new or interesting. Who voted this up? _Flag._

<comment><USER10> Of the article isn't interesting, the article wouldn't have been voted up.

Marking down the comments indicates a desire by some to to enforce groupthink. Why? Because many people use votes to indicate agree-disagree instead of a quality metric.

<comment><USER9> You don't think agree/disagree votes apply to articles like they apply to comments?

And given what I've seen of the algorithm here, page positioning is a _lot_ more complicated than vote count weighted by time.

<comment><USER10> I think it's harder to agree/disagree with the typical headlines featured on HN. Most articles on HN appear to be straight.

But let's say that two articles were in the queue, one pro-X, the other anti-X and the pro-X forces were dominant. Sure the pro-X article would hit the FP, but the anti-X forces would still comment on it and be down voted.

Also the bias is only visible in the comment section because down voted comments remain visible, whereas a down voted article gets flushed down the memory hole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 95% of internet comments are pure trash and basically internet pollution. The other 5% can be a mixture of deep insight, thoughtful discussion, and relevant opinion. Sorting out the trash and insisting on quality comments is an unsolved problem, perhaps with an eventual tech solution.

The New York Times is probably the only site I know of that does comments well, and they are obviously heavily moderated. But, they're smart, sometimes funny, often insightful, and generally worthwhile to read.

Some general forums and social sites do comments reasonably well too, this one included. But Reddit is a toilet, and Facebook and Twitter are the dirtiest of cess pools.

<comment><USER12> The New York Times comments are free from trolls and spam, but it's a frustratingly obvious echo chamber when it comes to politics. I'm a liberal guy but I can't stand it. David Brooks wrote an interesting column ([http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great- affluenc...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluence- fallacy.html)) a week or so ago and most of the comments are just bashing him for being a Republican, as if that has anything to do with the subject matter.

<comment><USER13> i think your diagnosis is wrong. show me a conservative news outlet on the web with a high SNR of thoughtful and intelligent comments, free of frothing, conspiracy-laden bullshit. maybe the NYT is an echo chamber because modern conservative positions are so weak and contradictory, they can't stand the withering critique of a well-moderated forum. instead, they only survive in troll havens.

as for brooks' column, you might be missing some context. brooks has made a career of talking out of both sides of his mouth and (annoyingly) providing intellectual cover from the NYT for a plethora of bad conservative ideas. now that they're blowing up in his face, he's backing away from these stances.

this comment articulates it well:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great- affluenc...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluence- fallacy.html#permid=19427985)

"He should realize that we've been trying to bring the tribal ethos to the U.S. for a long time, with strong local communities providing the sort of help and social services that bind people together and take care of each other as we get older, or fall short in some way.

But He Who Talks with Forked Tongue likes to imagine an egalitarian utopia where 99 percent of us are quietly stitching blankets while a few get to hoard the vital resources. When the tribesmen and women protested and occupied Wall Street, Brooks nearly went on the warpath, and wrote a column in the Times entitled "The Milquetoast Radicals," (10/11/2011) in which he castigated the unwashed hippies who dared to protest the insane degree of income inequality in this country."

<comment><USER12> I was not comparing NYT to any other news outlet. It's an echo chamber regardless of the fact that conservative news sites also have echo chamber comment sections.

The David Brooks article was just an example. When Bernie Sanders was still campaigning every comment on Hillary/Bernie-related articles was about how the New York Times is wrong and that Bernie is the best, people will learn about the political revolution soon enough, etc. I was a huge fan of Bernie and I got bored of those comments instantly.

<comment><USER13> neither am i comparing them. you're observing that the NYT comment section is free of trolls/spam but is otherwise a liberal echo chamber. that's another way of saying that it's lacking a counter-balance of intelligent conservative comments. i'm accepting that critique for the purpose of argumentation, and replying by asking you to look around and find _anywhere_ on the web that has a majority critical mass of intelligent conservative commentary. once you realize that it pretty much doesn't exist, maybe that will lead to a different conclusion...

anyway, one of the few places i read that, for whatever reason, does carry an even mix of intelligent comments across the spectrum is interfluidity. for example:

[http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6400.html](http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6400.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cons: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity.

Pros: Requiring comments via Facebook means loss of anonymity.

I suppose it depends on what your priorities are. If you'd like the insightful input of someone who might be close to the source of the topic at hand, but maintains anonymity for safety or fear of repercussion, then the requirement to use Facebook could be quite damaging.

On the other hand, if your primary concern is the nameless faces spewing hateful, racist, or otherwise inflammatory garbage on your comments section, the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to curtailing that kind of dialogue.

I imagine your average article discussion consists of 5% of the former and 95% of the latter, and so I can understand why they might choose to go this way, even if I am disappointed by it.

<comment><USER15> > the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to > curtailing that kind of dialogue.

This was the theory was for a while, but empirical evidence has refuted it. People are just are bad or worse when posting under their real names, and it's not just an anecdotal feeling anymore: [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160729/23305535110/study...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160729/23305535110/study- trolls-are-even-worse-when-using-real-names.shtml)

<comment><USER16> It's interesting to see that real name policies can actually make trolls behave more aggressively. On the other side of the spectrum, I anecdotally find that they actually prevent me from posting _constructive_ things. I frequently refrain from leaving reviews for restaurants and stores on Google because I don't want them associated with my real name. It's not that I would otherwise be leaving low quality or bitter reviews, I'm just not particularly interested in anybody who knows my name having access to information about where I shop, what I eat, etc (even though I would be happy to share this information anonymously to help other people make informed decisions). I feel similarly about commenting on news articles, blogs, and apps that I use. It wouldn't surprise me if this was a significant factor in how real name policies affect overall comment quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I propose the following system for commenting on news sites:

-comment period open for 3 days after publication -comments are not published until the end of the comment period, then all published at once -you can submit 1 comment per article only

After the comments are published, then a voting/ranking system is enabled for automatic sorting, but nothing is deleted except for spam

This eliminates any back and forth arguments. It would function like an online letters to the editor.

<comment><USER18> I would imagine such a system would be mostly equivalent to no comment system at all. I'm not going to bother commenting if nobody can even see it, and 3 days later when they can I won't even remember that I commented.

<comment><USER19> Feature.

I'd hope that my comments mean something, even after three days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The key issue here is universal across the internet. That is, a bunch of people in the same room (i.e., commenting on the same article) is not a community. A community has standards, protocol, social norms, etc.

Yes, moderating comments is an issue, especially when you don't really have a community. On the other hand establishing and managing a community would go a long way to making comments manageable.

In short, allowing comments != community.

</comment><comment><USER21> > The conclusion: NPR's commenting system — which gets more expensive the more > comments that are posted, and in some months has cost NPR twice what was > budgeted — is serving a very, very small slice of its overall audience.

If this was the extent of their analysis (the article doesn't say), shame on them. People _reading_ the comments should count too.

<comment><USER22> Plus, in a meta argument, NPR itself only serves a small slice of the overall US audience -- should it be shut down too?

<comment><USER23> Wayyy different orders of magnitude. From NPR's self reported estimates, ~10% of the US population listens to NPR radio weekly. Only ~0.013% of web users commented on articles.

No telling how many regularly read the comments without contributing. Does anyone have lurker estimates?

<comment><USER24> > ~10% of the US population listens to NPR radio weekly

~30 million users per week would put NPR on par with some of the social networks. Amazing feat by NPR if that number is legit.

<comment><USER23> Numbers from the NPR Fact Sheet:

[http://www.npr.org/about/press/NPR_Fact_Sheet.pdf](http://www.npr.org/about/press/NPR_Fact_Sheet.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> >But the Facebook discussions that do take place, in particular, tend to be more civil, most likely because users are required to use their own names (not that fake accounts don't get through, but there seem to be far fewer than the predominantly fake names that NPR commenters currently rely on).

I have not found this to be the case. Before I installed content blockers in my browser to block comments sections altogether, I was often taken aback by how many people made comments that included racial slurs and direct personal attacks on other users using Facebook accounts with their apparently real name and photo.

</comment><comment><USER26> Rude reader comments can warp people's perception of what was being reported.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/this- story-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/this-story- stinks.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> I find the lack of comment section to correlate strongly with the author's self-importance and inability to take criticism. I even read such articles with a sneering, bloviating voice in my head. Makes reading all the pointless medium articles much more entertaining.

<comment><USER28> Do you scroll down on every site you come across to check for a comment section before you start reading?

<comment><USER29> All the time. For many websites, the very first comment is a succinct and correct refutation of the article or blogpost itself. And _that_ is why comment sections are disappearing. People really don't mind "trolls" or whatever all that much. They do mind being proven wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> In the earlier days of blogging (circa mid-2000s, I think?) bloggers and article writers were encouraged to have comment sections as a mechanism to "engage" with their audience. Social Media and blogging experts like Chris Brogan urged people to actively participate with commenters to build a community around their work (and he used to be very critical of Seth Godin for not having comments on his site).

But that was before Twitter, Facebook, and a bevy of other platforms with which you can actively converse with your audience. At this point, I really question the value of comments on articles. On sites that are really primarily unidirectional information sources (like old media news sites that are now online), what purpose do they serve? We used to have "Letters to the Editor," which were few, curated, and sufficient. Do we really need comments on every article?

<comment><USER31> I agree entirely. I've found comments below the story to generally seem outmoded and often jarringly tacked-on.

Outsourcing to other communities seems great, but I could imagine NPR doing well with a Boing Boing BBS / Discourse model and effectively offering their own community board (subreddit, if you will) auto-threaded with their content. Then as somebody potentially having a serious thought in a comment you don't feel ghettoized to the bottom of the page, speaking to who, the author?

Rarely does the threading in on-page comments give great visual direction to feel like you can engage other commenters or the author you are responding to in any manner other than "broadcasting" (or maybe a better word is screaming).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> We don't need to be able to comment on EVERYTHING. Unless you actively plan to use the comments for something, I think most sites should just remove them.

It's fine to give people a outlet, a place for them to let their voice be heard. It often just misused and not a core feature for most sites. Even Youtube barely need comments.

What I believe we need is a revival of the forum sites. Give people place beyond Reddit and Facebook to debate. More 4chan and less Disqus.

<comment><USER33> 4chan is a cesspool.

<comment><USER10> So are the comment sections on news outlets. If you really want to be depressed check your local paper's comment sections.

<comment><USER34> They're full of people who just _have_ to get things off their chest, but at least they don't have cheerleaders encouraging them to be even more asshole than they already are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> That's a shame, one of my favorite comments ever on a news site is from NPR: [http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2012/10/05/162383428/m...](http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2012/10/05/162383428/mandy- patinkin-25-years-after-the-princess-bride-hes-not-tired-of-that- line#comment-674582040)

That said, it's hard to imagine fixing the problems that news organizations have with comments when you're tied to Disqus, which doesn't seem to give publishers the efficiency and control they desire.

<comment><USER36> Amazing! I was at a play recently and Wallace Shawn (Vizzini) was outside during the interval... Inconceivable indeed!

P.S. I did manage to resist (just) saying the line!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Many tweets and FB posts are made solely on the contents of the article title, by people who've not actually read the article. (Although some Disqus commenters undoubtedly fall into this category as well, it's likely a much smaller percent.)

Ironically, NPR itself wrote an April Fools story to illustrate this precise point: [http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt- america-r...](http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt-america-read- anymore).

</comment><comment><USER38> With all the sites getting rid of comments. I wonder if a market is opening for something like hackernews in other niches ?

<comment><USER39> > _I wonder if a market is opening for something like hackernews in other > niches ?_

... or perhaps for a browser plugin that allows comments on any web page.

<comment><USER40> Who could forget hoodwink'd[0]! It was such a neat experiment, I miss it. Been thinking of doing something similar in scheme.

[0]: via mousehole [http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/hereIsMouseh...](http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/hereIsMousehole12.html) / [http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/theMousehole...](http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/inspect/theMouseholeProxy.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I always liked slashdot's comment system back in the day. It allowed you to adjust what you saw and how many points a "funny" post got vs how many an "informative" one got and then set a point threshold based on that.

Since then they seem to have eliminated that level of customization so either it wasn't working or they just didn't see it as worth reimplimenting when they moved away from their old code base.

<comment><USER42> And it wasn't just that - it was the complex system of meta-moderation. How you moderated posts was also scored.

One downside was that it could lead to a complete hive mind where your karma was dependent upon how much you thought like others.

<comment><USER43> Meta-moderation was indeed a big part of it, and something I never saw _anywhere_ else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Their argument is bogus. It's either cost or a laziness in moderation.

The ability to discuss specific articles and topics regarding specific source material is valuable. Having to search for the hashtag or article link on reddit or twitter to try to debate a topic is much, much less engaging, and is much more separated from the NPR writers and ombudsmen.

<comment><USER45> > Having to search for the hashtag or article link on reddit or twitter...

Isn't this laziness on your end then? Also, as mentioned in the article, _NPR 's obligation is "to provide information," not to "create and maintain a public square," Montgomery said._

<comment><USER44> I would disagree with their assessment of the mission statement, then. NPR talks constantly in their drives about their community service. Local stations have events calendars, and my local station is running a promo for a campaign called "I dare to listen" [1]. So to say it's not NPR's job to maintain a public square is lazy and lacks vision.

[1] [http://idaretolisten.org](http://idaretolisten.org)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think that maybe hosting comments alongside the original article isn't the best approach. Half the fun of internet comments is discussing with other commenters, but that works a lot better when you know the community that you're discussing with. You can't reasonably keep track of the dynamics of hundreds of different content provider's comment sections, nor can all content providers have interesting commenting communities.

We need a standard comment syndication format like RSS so that sites like HN and Reddit can continue to provide good communities for discussion, but content providers can still display comments below their content to show off reader engagement.

</comment><comment><USER47> I totally understand why they're doing this. Their comments section was terrible. I'm not at all surprised by the findings that a couple hundred to low few thousand commenters are posting the vast majority of comments.

I'm really surprised at the energy that the trolls on NPR spend. You'll see the same account posting rude comments on just about every article. Who has that kind of time?

</comment><comment><USER48> This is a shame.

Even though some consider comments section as toxic, I actually spend more time reading in the comments section than the article itself. Often, I find out more interesting view points from comments section than the one the article's author is advocating for.

There are idiotic commenters but also quite a few of the commenters are more knowledgeable than the author of the article. Very often.

</comment><comment><USER49> Outsource the commentary to other markets (read: news aggregators), insource the results onto the page. Everyone else takes care of the bullshit of moderation in their own communities, you get the benefit of readers seeing comments and becoming a part of the discussion on whatever platform they please.

</comment><comment><USER50> I have found comment sections on news websites to be reliably awful. It seems every discussion thread deteriorates into an attack on the other side's politics even when the link to get there is non existent. ("Thanks Obama")

That being said, I love reading all the comments. It has been a guilty pleasure of mine for years. I often spend more time reading NPR's comment section than I do reading the actual content. I don't think this change will cause me to consume less NPR content, but I'll definitely spend less time on their website.

</comment><comment><USER51> They cite cost as the issue, that only 2600 users represent half of all comments on their entire system.

I don't know how much they are paying for a third party to manage their comment system, but I will bid $500/month to handle those 2600 users comprising half of all comments, or $1000/month for all comments. All inclusive bid. I can get this tiny number of users running on a pretty modest system.

My proposed system will also save money on subpoenas and moderation overhead by not storing ip addresses and not having paid moderation.

<comment> qu4z-2 Have you factored in that you need to serve the comments to every user, not just ones that comment? I mean, to be fair, you could probably serve staticish chunks of HTML and update-on-new-comment, but it's a consideration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I remember larry king saying that less than 1 percent of his listeners call in.

What percentage of npr consumers add a comment? Or in general, any news site?

</comment><comment><USER53> Comments on blogs or news sites have always been terrible. The only sites that can have good comments are ones like HN which dedicate the purpose of the site toward that end. Even then it is a struggle (obviously.)

It makes no more sense for NPR to have comments sections than it does for NPR to have an image hosting service.

</comment><comment><USER54> maybe the problem isn't comment moderation, but rather the expectation that anyone should be able to "control" the dissemination of human thought through mediums like the internet?

the sooner news companies etc drop this notion of control the better chance they stand in the future.

</comment><comment><USER55> >There was the brimming idealism when in 2008 NPR announced it was moving from discussion boards to individual story commenting

Never visited the discussion boards on NPR. But it seems like a far better solution than "infinite comments" or the fragmented social media discussion.

</comment><comment><USER56> Of course not a lot of users comment - the comment section is more or less hidden on the articles...

</comment><comment><USER57> Quite ironically, comments, and especially voting on comments, do not seem perfectly aligned with encouraging thoughtful, civil discussion without completely quenching dissent. The inevitable result is either group-think or scorched earth flame wars.

</comment><comment><USER58> Can we also use this time to talk about Live chat for Youtube? It is literally filled with scrolling garbage and promotes so much of negativity. What purpose is it solving when there 10K users throwing garbage at each other?

</comment><comment><USER59> Being good at content doesn't mean you're good at running a public forum.

We should have disaggregated comments and content from the beginning.

Hat tip to all the bloggers who just include a "Comments on HN" link at the bottom of a post.

</comment><comment> Johan-bjareholt They had some interesting statistics about the authors in their comments, I would love to have seen similar statistics of the comments on the social networks to compare with though.

Still a incredibly stupid decision though.

</comment><comment><USER60> It's going to hit them on the SEO-front. Comments = click-through.

</comment><comment><USER61> Don't they use Disqus? Is that really a very big expense?

<comment><USER62> Pretty sure Disqus is often set up so comments are also stored in the site's database. That's how it worked when I used it for a WordPress site.

So all the comment text is likely being stored on the NPR website, even with Disqus.

<comment><USER63> That isn't how Disqus works. It is a centrally hosted widget.

<comment><USER62> Not quite:

[https://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/472125-data...](https://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/472125-data- synchronization-for-local-storage)

At least for the WordPress plugin, the default functionality is to sync the comments in the database with those on Disqus servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> It's nice irony: This article, about a site removing commenting, now has more comments than upvotes (although such a ratio almost always indicates a flame war).

<comment><USER65> I think they've relaxed the upvotes-comments threshold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> "If there is hope, it lies in the comments threads." \-- John Derbyshire

</comment><comment><USER19> My first thought reading this is, well, "conversation doesn't scale very well", as David Weinberger said (regards some recent Reddit contretemps).

Looking at NPR's own article, I'm findng the justifications given to be strongly suspect. NPR's focus on how many participants are engaging, and from what platforms, rather misses the boat. It's not that I feel the decision itself isn't without merits, but the merits given are exceedingly poor ones. I'm hoping they're not the ones actually used.

I've done my own measurement of public user activity on large sites.[1] In the case of Google+, my and Stone Temple Consulting's independent analysis[2] showed that 0.3% of all users actually engage in public posting on the site.

The real question isn't "how many users are commenting", but "what is the quality of the comments received?". Following critiques of my first study, I performed a second follow-up looking at where intelligent conversation was happening online, using the Foreign Policy Global 100 Thinkers list as a proxy for intelligent conversation, and the arbitrarily selected string "Kim Kardashina", as its obverse. This gave the world the infamous FP:KK index -- the ratio of mentions of _any_ of the FP Global 100 Thinkers per instance of a spin-off of the OJ Simpson trial fall-out.[2] A few results stood out -- Facebook's scale, Reddit's relatively high quality, Metafilter's phenomenally high S/N ratio, and the amount of high-quality material posted to blogs (though perhaps never seeing the light of day). I'd be interested in some further follow-up along these lines.

One of the problems is that at Internet scale, Sturgeon's Law is far worse than six-sigma compliant.[3] Not only is there an _awful_ lot of crud, but simple mechanics mean that no one person can see more than the tiniest fraction of what is transacted online daily. The simple acquisition cost and assessment of "is this worth reading or not" is absolutely prohibitive.

Or as Clay Shirky says, what we've got isn't content overload but filter failure.[4]

On the problem of idiots, my personal solution is simple and surprisingly effective: block fuckwits.[5] At scale, this evolves to the problem of figuring out who is and isn't a fuckwit. The ability for individual actions _against specific authors and publishers_ to be applied generally strikes me as a useful tool. Not a complete fix (there are controversial voices who do deserve to be heard). But if the cost of being an asshat is being an asshat screaming into the void, part of the problem is addressed.

(Yes, this means some form of 1) persistent reputation, 2) tools for applying reputation as filters, and 3) limitations on newly-created profiles. The idea of vouchers (again, with a reputation penalty applying) to bootstrap new identities may help. There's much in common to approaches against email spam in this.)

NPR in particular are counting the fact that many messages come from desktop users as a failing of their system. I see that as absolute insanity. _Desktop systems are hugely more useful than mobile devices for composing content._ Especially _thoughtful_ content. I know this because I've been trying, and losing, that battle myself, using a 9" Android tablet and Bluetooth keyboard -- one of the better mobile authoring configurations possible, and it _still_ stinks. The six lines by 45 characters I can see in HN's edit box certainly don't help. I've written a long rant at Reddit on this specific problem.[6] Whilst composing this comment I've had Firefox/Android crap out from under me, continuously popped out of the edit box, and unintentionally navigated from the page. Thankfully persistence of user state in edit dialogs has improved slightly, but the experience is frustrating to say the least.

I'd use a proper editing environment, say, vim, _except that under Android,_ VimTouch doens't interact with the clipboard _. I can neither copy content_ into* it, nor _out_. Termux's vim client is slightly better -- I can paste through the Termux clipboard, but copying _out_ is virtually impossible, and doesn't capture more than one screen at a time.

The fact that few people are entering thoughtful comments on mobile likely says far more about the state of mobile tech than it does about NPR's audience.

________________________________

Notes:

1\. [https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq)

2\. [https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/?ref=search_posts)

3\. [https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutat...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutation_of_metcalfes_law_revisited_network/?ref=search_posts)

4\. [http://www.cnet.com/news/shirky-problem-is-filter-failure- no...](http://www.cnet.com/news/shirky-problem-is-filter-failure-not-info- overload/)

5\. [https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm...](https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm7Tq)

6\. [https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/4y2k5r/l...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/4y2k5r/longform_selfposts_and_intelligent_discussion/)

</comment><comment><USER67> i think a good way to fix toxic comments is to have a "tag as troll" button. if enough people think a particular commenter is a troll then they lose their commenting privilege. it should be pretty easy to detect if a person is creating more accounts.

</comment><comment><USER68> I wonder how many comments said something about "Obama" or "left-wing"

</comment><comment><USER69> I think the fact this is a government service (or at least funded by gov) makes this choice far more interesting. It effectively sets a standard for services to avoid providing a open forum where the users can speak to one another, service providers and managing parties. Instead they are not bound to provide anything above and beyond their initial services. I dont think it is necessarilly wrong from them to do mass censorship nor think its right for them to suffer through caustic commentary. But the solution they are setting as a president is one of "Fuck you, gov still pays me". They do not need to adhear to the peoples wants so long as they can fet funding

Edit: I should clarify 'partially funded' but I will keep this comment as is because I believe it has stirred up the emotions which is why this move is controversail.

<comment><USER70> NPR's mission statement doesn't include "a open forum where the users can speak to one another" though, and removing the comment section doesn't constitute censorship.

The web and many social media services are available for people to publicly and freely speak their mind, unlike some other governments, where censorship does in fact exist. Ultimately, I think moves like this are good for promoting a more decentralized version of the web where people host and manage their own content, e.g.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs- creato...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creator- looks-to-reinvent-it.html)

<comment><USER69> "Above and beyond" are the key words here. If this was a 100% private sector I would be fine with it because its about the companies choice. But the fact it is associated to the gov opens up many questions.

\- how do gov programs want to accept feedback?

\- does the government want open forums and discusion places?

\- how much anonymity does the gov want to provide in such discussions?

\- what types of contracts forve a company by law to abide by government principles of discussion?

We have laws of what you cant do. We also have laws such as "you can not deny a person water" in arizona [0]. Is the internet to be placed under similar laws or can I run a non-profit with my own agenda in mind with no interest in handling feedback from the taxpayers funding it?

[0] [http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/asked- answered/201...](http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/asked- answered/2014/09/17/asked-answered-free-water/15740067/)

<comment><USER71> What other government resources should have comment sections? Should IRS.GOV?

<comment><USER69> Thats an interesting point actually. Their customer oriented subdomain doesnt accept comments in either. Also is pretty inactive. Perhaps this has been a long time coming and is only now happening to the bigger names

[http://taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/about/nta- blog](http://taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/about/nta-blog)

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qhVcm9Phi1c](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qhVcm9Phi1c)

Edit : Fbi alo doesnt accept comments

[https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/alaska-man-wanted- federal-a...](https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/alaska-man-wanted-federal- agents-killed-in-murder-for-hire-case)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An argument that companies should pay users for their data - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/business/economy/user-data-pay.html <comment><USER2> There's a whole genre of articles based on conflating two senses of "your," belonging to you, and about you. If I observe that you have blue eyes, that's a fact about you, but it doesn't belong to you, at least not without redefining what "belong" means.

It would be helpful if, instead of deliberately conflating these two senses of "your," articles on this subject went in the other direction and explicitly discussed the distinction.

We have from time to time redefined what "belong" means, but these redefinitions tend to be very complicated and have all sorts of unforeseen consequences. My guess is that a redefinition on the scale of facts about you = your property would be a disaster.

<comment><USER3> And here you're conflating "public facts about you" with "facts that only your cell phone / mattress / underpants / web browser know about you."

"Facts about you" falls into at least two categories: "Facts which you want and reasonably expect to remain private", and "facts which you display to the world and have no expectation of privacy about."

<comment><USER4> Which is fine as far as semantics go, but in the context of this thread the first category doesn't exist unless you're under 13 and in the US, or subject to the GDPR, or a few other nooks and crannies of international laws.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is absolute nonsense and dangerous to boot. Facebook's ARPU is still less than $20/year. If they literally paid all of their profits directly to their user it would still be a pittance. The real value of privacy has to do with freedom, manipulation and surveillance, and that is not represented by economic measures at all. Talking about the value of the data in purely economic terms is exactly the way you would want to frame the issue if you had more nefarious plans down the line.

<comment><USER6> Facebook is probably going to hit $100+ ARPU in the US + Canada for fiscal 2018. It was $85.41 for 2017.

It was $27.76 in Q4, and $21.20 in Q3 (for the US + Canada).

It's not implausible that it'll eventually hit $200 per year in the US + Canada.

For fun, here's their quarterly ARPU over the last few years in the US+CA, starting from 1Q15, excluding all Q4 results (Q4 skews because it spikes):

$8.32, $9.30, $10.49, $12.43, $14.34, $15.65, $17.07, $19.38, $21.20

Quite the increase machine. US+CA ARPU for 4Q17 ($27.76) was triple that of 4Q14 ($9).

<comment><USER7> Where are you finding these data?

<comment><USER8> Earnings Reports most likely.

[https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release- details/...](https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release- details/2018/Facebook-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full- Year-2017-Results/default.aspx)

<comment><USER7> I'm seeing $40.7B in 2017 revenue, 2.1B active monthly users (1.4B daily active users). I'd like to know how the calculation is done because I'm getting very different answers using these numbers.

<comment><USER9> > I'm seeing $40.7B in 2017 revenue, 2.1B active monthly users (1.4B daily > active users). I'd like to know how the calculation is done because I'm > getting very different answers using these numbers.

There aren't 1.4B active daily users in the US and Canada, because there aren't even that many people.

He's looking at the one of the richest slices of Facebook's user-base, but it looks like you're looking at the global/worldwide numbers, which include _a lot_ of _much_ poorer people.

<comment><USER7> Agree. Which is why I am trying to find out where he's getting his numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The media portrayal of the tech world would be more impactful if it weren't so hyperbolic, dramatized, and skewed. There are myriad valid complaints about the tech world, but Facebook paying you for you posting your photos is not one of them.

Facebook is free. Google search is free. 15gb of gmail/google drive is free. You get those free, truly amazing services for nothing because the companies found ways to generate value from the data being gathered. The cost to maintain that infrastructure and provide those great services is pretty high and has taken some brilliant engineers years of sweat. (I don't work for either so I'm not tooting my own horn, just giving credit where I believe credit is due)

I think as it currently stands (collect data on me and I get free 99.99% uptime, cloud available services for email, cloud drive, and social networking) is a pretty sweet deal.

<comment><USER11> They aren't free. You pay for them in high prices for good and services. Those companies pay advertising which increase prices plus their tech size profits. And because the stock market machine demands greater and greater profits they need larger stronger monopolies to generate those obscene profits.

<comment><USER12> > They aren't free. You pay for them in high prices for good and services.

Your reasoning is extremely fallacious because you're overlooking a lot of nuance.

Yes, it is true that _in aggregate_ part of the advertising costs get passed on to consumers. How much exactly depends on macroeconomic factors, industry dynamics, pricing power of distributors and retailers, and hundreds other variables. But you are right that _in aggregate_ a non-zero amount of the advertising costs get passed on to consumers.

However, advertising is valuable to advertisers because it works to some degree. And it works because people are influenced by it. Now, as _an individual_ I have no control over what other people are doing and so I have no control over how valuable advertising is and how much is being spent on it and how much is being passed on to consumers. Therefore as _an individual_ I look around me and prices are what they are and already have in them advertising costs which will not go up by me using service. Therefore as _an individual_ the _marginal_ cost of me using these services is effectively zero (imagine the ratio between the value of advertising to me and the aggregate value of advertising, that's effectively zero). As _an individual_ those services are free.

So it depends on what your definition of "free" is. A) Would prices be lower if advertising didn't exist? Yes [0]. B) Would prices be lower to me if I didn't use these services? No. The thing is that in definition A) I don't really have a choice, so it's irrelevant. I only have a choice as an individual.

[0] And even here some people will disagree with you. What I call "free market fundamentalists" will argue that No, they wouldn't, because the advertising leads to higher sales and greater operational efficiency, so that advertising costs are exactly offset by lower per-unit costs.

<comment><USER13> >part of the advertising costs get passed on to consumers //

Can you tell me who else will pay my advertising bill, because it can be a complete money pit and getting someone to pay for it without using revenue from customers would be great. Let me know bub.

<comment><USER11> I just said it wasn't free and we pay extra with a markup. if we just paid for it and had choices we would pay a lot less that's all I'm saying. or some kind of buying club.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is already mechanical Turk for the cases the author described. There are many paid initiatives to label data that these companies employ. These "AI" companies sample sizes are small compared to the services they provide against them. Once divided up its pointless to think about them "paying" you and is counter to the point. They already are paying in the form of the service they are providing. I.e free storage, service etc.

Democratizing the data so more companies can use it to build products beyond these major concentration of platform players is a much more practical. This is similar to the personal data requests legislation that Europe already has in place. This would be an extension to enable competing services to access this data as their customers opt into the the service. Enabling more companies to build more competitive products (employ people working towards market competitive products) not trying to set "sustainable" sheep that feed from the same troff of the concentrated power of these companies. Certainly universal basic income; but that should be wholly independent of being subordinates to these service providers.

</comment><comment><USER15> The thing is, I don't actually have my data.

Perhaps if I collected it and stored it, perhaps put it behind an accessible API and supplied Google et al with an API key to access it I might have a case for charging them for it.

<comment><USER16> It's worse than that. We currently don't even have the right to determine who has our data, or how its being exploited.

The remedy, of course, is to establish intrinsic properties rights over our own data. No different than copyrights.

Maybe we need a new catchphrase.

I propose _bodyrights_. It captures the notions of self, privacy, identity, and sovereignty all in one.

<comment><USER13> PII, Personal Identifiable Information, is the phrase I know for this.

I'd like to see a requirement for all companies receiving PII to issue an account of how they use it and who it's sold to, those receiving your PII would also have an obligation to notify you, and offer access to the same audit data (how they're using it, who they got it from, who they gave/sold it to).

Legit companies would then leak information, by design, showing companies using/selling your data without notifying you.

Real fines like those anticipated in the GDPR would be needed to encourage companies to adhere to the legislation.

/ifiwereemperoroftheworld

<comment><USER17> IMHO lots of the valuable data that the original article is about isn't _necessarily_ PII. That is, even if they're linked with PII right now, they need not be so and the article's argument would still make sense in that case.

E.g. sensor-mapping data gathered by Tesla from your driving is extremely valuable even if you absolutely dissociate it from anything personally identifiable. Facebook would have immensely valuable aggregate data about how people are likely to react when seeing a particular piece of content even if they would (or would be required to) not link the event to anything personally identifiable and just keep the aggregate. Etc, etc, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> But the value of my data alone probably is worth less than a dollar to Google and Facebook. Given the choice of getting paid a dollar, or using it for free (in exchange for them using my data), I would choose the latter.

Only in aggregate is it worth a lot.

<comment><USER19> In that case, I would pay Google and Facebook a dollar, and keep my data safe from their prying eyes.

<comment><USER18> I would do that too.

But the notion of getting paid for your data, when its worth so little by itself is not appealing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This wouldn't be such an issue if they couldn't see the data on which they are computing (and individual data wouldn't be exposed in data breaches either).

But I'm not sure if Google even cares too much about doing that (I know they've experimented with this, but nothing on a scale that matters), and Facebook certainly doesn't. Apple seems to be the only one that does somewhat with its differential privacy approach.

I think they can all do much more, but they're not trying too hard.

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure you understand what differential privacy is. Apple still has your data. If there's a breach, an attacker gets your data. It's probably encrypted, just as it is with pretty much any modern system where user data is collected, but differential privacy doesn't have anything to do with what data is collected or stored. Differential privacy is just a method for limiting how much information can be reliably inferred about an entire dataset from limited queries on statistical properties of the data.

It's basically this. Imagine I have two data sets that are identical, except one has your specific data and the other doesn't. It's possible in some circumstances to infer information about you by asking for things like averages on the datasets. Differential privacy is a method for defeating attacks that rely on that type of "leakage" of information. It assures that if two datasets are close enough, queries on those datasets will not yield significant information about their differences (i.e., the presence or absence of one particular data point won't be detectable).

It's all about how queries of the data perform, and not at all about the data itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'll never understand why I can't pay Google and Facebook $20 to $50 per year to simply respect my privacy and not give me advertisements. I can't imagine they make more than this off my viewing behaviour (especially as I use adblock)

<comment><USER23> Those people who are willing to pay $50 per year for such thing are worth more than 50$ per year as targets for advertising.

</comment></comment><comment> GCU-Empiricist Seems like an is ought question that is long settled: look at the credit reporting agencies. We may be doing impressive new things and figuring out how to learn a lot more about people, but who owns data on a person is a dead and buried question.

<comment><USER24> Not dead and buried in Europe with GDPR coming.

<comment><USER25> Which will add another checkbox that you have to tick once when entering a website. EU is not the ally of ordinary folk when it comes to the Internet.

<comment><USER17> Actually, GDPR seems to be explicitly designed so that no amount of checkboxes or legalese in terms&conditions can be sufficient to continue as-is, companies actually would have to change behavior to be compliant. Lots of previous threads have discussions about the particular details.

Of course, we'll have to see how it turns out in practice, but it's just a couple more months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've had this discussion with people before. It both sounds good and not depending on the viewpoint. The good is already spoken about in the article - I generate data that a company is in turn using to make money. The analogy I have used before is imagine if I owned land and ate apples on that land. If the apple seeds I spit out grew, I'd have apple trees. It would be bothersome to me if the state came in and sold all the apples the tree grew and I never saw a dime. Refraining from political discussion, I'm upset someone else is profiting off my work. No different than using my uploaded picture to train image processing systems.

Now the bad, how much am I REALLY worth? Online surveys pay out pennies at most for my "opinion". I'm a middle-class, white, male, computer scientist - the market is literally flooded with data from people like me. My data is only worth something if I was, say, a single Hispanic mother or some other niche demographic, and that's only because of their rarity.

Now, this is where the discussion typically leads to science fiction. I think this would be a great use of blockchain currency and let the market drive the value of your data. If there's a shortage of, say, beach pictures (because why not), then you're Instagram data might be of value. Likewise, the GPS locations of an underrepresented demographic is suddenly worth a more because its hard to get that kind of data.

But I think the major issue still falls back to how much its all worth. The article says $20,000, which nicely would support arguments for a living wage. I generate the data that runs the world, so pay me enough to live it in. However, what if the data isn't worth $20k?

<comment><USER27> I think your analogy would be more apt if you were spitting seeds onto public property, and the state took the trees. Or even further: you spit seeds (your data) onto Google's property while they gave you a free tram ride to the other side.

<comment><USER26> Another could be someone lets you use their land for free, so you use the land to grow a unique breed of flowers. Later you find out that person that owns the land is selling honey from bees that visit those flowers (solely or in some combination with other flower patches). This honey revenue depends on your proper upkeep of your flowers.

Okay, fine, its the cost for using their land.

But THEN, you find out that your flowers (or, again, the combination) are so unique, that person begins making millions of dollars in revenue off the honey.

As the primary producer of the income, I'd feel a bit shafted if I didn't get some of type of reciprocation.

Doubly so if that person accidentally let a malicious entity on the land who then stole my unique breed of flower and then started selling/reproducing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> _Your_ data is worthless. _Everyone 's_ data is priceless.

</comment><comment><USER29> Puppy pictures aside, I'd put it another way: I'm unique and what I do online is the product of an unique person thinking. If some corporation makes money by analyzing my behaviour, then I should be allowed to treat my data just like a song or a book: that is, intellectual property, with the clause that if and only if that data is gathered with consent and full transparency (using 100% free and open source software for example), then they're exempted from paying fees and/or lawsuits. Just my 0.2€. I don't condemn companies for using technology to make money, and am perfectly fine if they scan my surfing habits, but people rights should always come first, and if they scan my emails or private messages or use the information in a way I don't approve then I want to be able to hit them badly.

</comment><comment><USER30> Ive been saying it for years - I wont allow fb, twttr, ggl, or any of the tech giants access to my data _until_ they compensate me fairly for it. If theyre making billions off of us, then I want a few thousand in return. Until then, no accounts and no data from me! Privacy Badger, ABPlus, block @ DNS level, etc.

Also Ive been a succesful technologist, programmer, and social being for many decades, and not having any of those accounts has never been a downer in my life. I feel much healthier, sound, and happier than my peers that have FB accounts. Cant see the value in that jank. Cant see why it makes sense to empower those companies at our expense.

</comment><comment><USER31> Can I trademark my likeness (as famous actors or musicians do) and then sue Facebook if they use it?

I'm sure there's some reason it wouldn't work, but it's fun to think about.

<comment><USER32> In general they use ananymized data. No one is advertising to Burt who likes bee hives, they are advertising to a cookie pool that likes bee hives. Your likeness would probably not cover anonymized data. At least here in Canada, PII (personally identifiable info such as email) is not allowed to be used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The next generation of technological progress has to be an answer to these questions.

Google and Facebook (and similar companies) have killed innovation with their monopolies and in order to break their monopolies new technologies must be invented that disrupt their business models.

It is interesting to see the NY Times advancing such avant garde ideas but it is good to see rising social consciousness of the limitations of current technology.

</comment><comment><USER34> Can't you be paid by virtue of cheaper costs? Ad agencies filtering out value is of dubious value for society. Cheaper cars, more effective roads and transit, wiser food choices, data driven medicine, and plenty of other progress points continue to help most everyone that is at stake in this discussion. My hope is it continues to help even more.

</comment><comment><USER35> Off course, but the steady stream of money to the rich is unstoppable. The problem is that we are conditioned to accept the extreme wealthy and even look up to them. Most people think everything is OK as long as they have a decent income. So most people only find out first about the horror of this system once they lose their job and hit the streets. But then it's all too late when the reality sinks in. With the sticker POOR on your head your kinda lost till you die in this world.

We live in a world of modern slavery where one needs the skill and luck to find a good job to avoid the streets. A better distribution of wealth would be great of course. Imagine all those billionaires rendering at least half of their fortunes back to the poor. But that is not realistic and will never happen. Things will get worse to the point they lock us up in some sort of "District 9" (Elysium).

</comment><comment><USER36> An argument that having terrorcorporations get your data becoming normalized even further - the "but you do get some money in exchange!" edition.

Next step is getting some discount in the walled garden store or some crypto token payment.

Blah.

</comment><comment><USER37> It's kind of like reverse micropayments, in most cases the actual value of your "puppy pictures" etc is only valuable in the aggregate.

</comment><comment><USER38> They do pay users for their data in the form of whatever service or content they provide.

<comment><USER39> Facebook collects data on people who are not Facebook users too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This sort of data collection is inevitable with a highly commercialized Internet.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm astounded by the amount of blow-back in this thread. Do you all really love gathering user data that much that you can't even consider the possibility of parting with it, or at least with its _free_ availability?

</comment><comment><USER42> why is nobody here speaking about the basic attention token?

[https://basicattentiontoken.org/](https://basicattentiontoken.org/)

<comment><USER40> Basic attention token has nothing to do with the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> You are being compensated for it. You get to use Facebook, Gmail, Google Search, etc. without taking out your wallet.

Want more compensation? You're free to negotiate or take your data elsewhere to a higher bidder.

<comment><USER39> Reconcile that with the fact that Facebook collects data on people who don't use Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I can't wait to spend my $20!

</comment><comment><USER45> Similar to Betteridge's Law of Headlines:

Any time a question has a "shouldn't", the answer is usually no.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is analogous to asking why TV viewers aren't paid?

</comment><comment><USER47> I find the term "your data" bothersome. Just because there is a piece of data out there that pertains to you it doesn't make it "your data". Some will contend that the data is only gathered through a violation of your privacy, but I don't agree--in most cases, particularly the big tech companies who clearly spell out in their ToS, privacy policy, etc. what data they're gathering.

<comment><USER39> "Just because there is a piece of data out there that pertains to you it doesn't make it "your data"."

Yes it does.

"Some will contend that the data is only gathered through a violation of your privacy"

That it is.

" but I don't agree--in most cases, particularly the big tech companies who clearly spell out in their ToS, privacy policy, etc. what data they're gathering."

And when did I agree to Equifax's terms?

<comment><USER47> >Yes it does.

While you've presented a compelling counter-argument, I'm still not convinced.

>And when did I agree to Equifax's terms?

You didn't need to because they never stored "your data".

<comment><USER39> "While you've presented a compelling counter-argument, I'm still not convinced."

It was far more compelling that your argument.

"You didn't need to because they never stored "your data"."

Yes, they did. My social security number, my address history, my employment history, all my data.

<comment><USER47> >Yes, they did. My social security number, my address history, my employment history, all my data.

I can write down in my notepad right now:

      s73v3r_ - thumb sucker

and whether it's true or false, real or imaginary, relevant or irrelevant to you personally, it doesn't make it yours.

<comment><USER39> So I suppose in your mind that whatever a company wants to do is fine, and that's your prerogative. But in the real world, that's simply not true. And in the real world, this data is derived purely from me. It absolutely is MY data, and they have no right to collect it without my consent, and they have no right to sell it to others without my consent. To believe otherwise is to believe that a person does not have personal agency, and that a person is not in charge of themselves.

<comment><USER47> >So I suppose in your mind that whatever a company wants to do is fine, and that's your prerogative.

Non sequitur and a red herring.

>To believe otherwise is to believe that a person does not have personal agency, and that a person is not in charge of themselves.

Non sequitur. Someone owning data _about_ you has nothing to do with denying someone's "personal agency". Quite the opposite. I would suggest someone recording the actions you make is a testament to the principle of personal agency. You can own yourself and your choices all day long, but you don't control the consequences of those actions. Furthermore, if you're saying someone cannot record things that they observe, you are denying them their personal agency. (As an aside, I find your appeal to "personal agency" curious given your previous assertion that people are irrational, implying the foolishness of such a principle).

>But in the real world, that's simply not true. And in the real world

In the real world there are a myriad of legal jurisdictions, with a myriad of laws whose principles and motives often are contradictory. I am not arguing from the perspective of the status quo. Individuals can also demonstrate cognitive dissonance.

Please answer the following questions:

1) If I observe you walking down the street and I see you wearing a pair of Adidas athletic shoes, and I make a mental note to myself "s73v3r_ wears Adidas athletic shoes", do you own my thought?

1a) If yes to #1 how do you justify owning a stranger's thoughts?

2) If I write down the thought in my notepad, do you own the entry in my notepad?

2a) If yes to #2 how do you justify owning an entry in a stranger's notepad who expended their labor creating?

If you answered no to #1 and yes to #2 then you have a contradiction you need to account for (data is data whether it is in memory or persisted). If you answered no to #1 and no to #2 then you have established the principle that you do not own data about you. If you answered yes to #1 and yes to #2 then it would be good for you to at least be explicit so those who are following the argument understand your premise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I see the problem but this feels like a bad solution. The way I see it there are two real problems here.

(1) Google, Facebook and the like do have a cost, just that it's data instead of money. The fact that we're one step removed from money obscures the true cost associated with the services. And when you combine that with the fact that the services themselves obscure what data they're collecting/have, there's no way for an end consumer to know if they're getting a 'good deal' since they have no idea what they're paying. A fix to this would be radical forced transparency - every consumer should be able to find out what data any company has on them - both collected and bought (and bought from whom for how much.)

(2) Data is too large a competitive advantage in certain industries. It seems similar to me to utilities. Barring local law I _could_ try and start up a new water company and displace the incumbent but it would never work - the huge fixed costs make the industry prone to natural monopolization. Same here except with data. There are absolutely ginormous costs associated with collecting user data that could rival Google's or Facebook's (if it's even possible). You _could_ start a company to try to beat Google but you'll never get the data to make it good enough to compete and since you're not good enough to compete you'll never get the data. The free market here has done it's work - it's generated something new and useful and beneficial to society, now we should nationalize it so that it stays that way.</comment>


Can we craft a theory in which space and time aren't assumed to exist? - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/a-look-at-the-quest-to-unite-relativity-and-quantum-mechanics/ <comment><USER2> Cogito ergo sum</comment>


Up to 270 women may have died from breast cancer due to computer glitch - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-03/breast-cancer-up-to-270-women-uk-may-have-died-due-to-it-error/9721930 <comment><USER2> Is this now the most costly software error in history, measured in human lives lost?

Imagine if the UK Parliament or the EU decides that the best response is enact laws mandating a particular software testing approach, or mandates extensive regression testing on production systems after all changes?

<comment><USER3> > Is this now the most costly software error in history, measured in human > lives lost?

No, it's a drop in the bucket.

Here's a 1.2 billion screw up, it'd have to also be hundreds if not thousands of lives (A human life in the west is worth around 1 or 2 million $)

[https://www.smh.com.au/technology/queensland-health- payroll-...](https://www.smh.com.au/technology/queensland-health-payroll-fail- government-ordered-to-pay-ibm-costs-20160404-gnxpqj.html)

Even if you looked at humans per lines of code I suspect this wouldn't be it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > There may "be between 135 and 270 women who had their lives shortened as a > result"

> between 2009 and the start of 2018

> were not invited to their final breast screening

So over 9 years less than 270 people (30 people per year) over the age of 68 who weren't sent a checkup reminder, and chose not to take an active role in their own health care, and may have died of cancer.

Its a shame that people may have died, but in the grand scheme of this is this a huge issue? Is the algorithm to blame, or the people who chose to not take responsibility in their own health?</comment>


FogBugz rebranded to Manuscript - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/make-better-software/introducing-manuscript-aa4aabdc0f6c <comment><USER2> great idea (for them), this is one of those cases where i actually do think the brand name was likely creating the wrong brand perception.

Spolsky is always doing interesting things. Great guy.</comment>


Odometer – A JavaScript and CSS library for smoothly transitioning numbers - <AUTHOR> http://github.hubspot.com/odometer/

<comment><USER2> Cool effect! Combine it with D3 for some bad ass visualisations!

PS: Why do designers think that native scrolling is bad? Thanks, Apple...

<comment><USER3> I know. Trying to look at the demo page while using a mouse with a scroll wheel was infuriating. (Stop! Wait! No, come back! No, not that far! Wait! Stop! WTFFF)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a neat effect, but I don't like it because it's like seizure inducing to me, since the letters on the right move so fast.

Although not realistic, I would suggest a better effect would be simply roll the numbers the same amount, looking more like a roulette I guess.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. Thanks for the suggestion. [https://github.com/HubSpot/odometer/commit/927b5e35cbe9d4071...](https://github.com/HubSpot/odometer/commit/927b5e35cbe9d40712dc53ed33ac5c0f289c2b6c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pretty neat, but the kerning on the font is awful: [http://i.imgur.com/ssPu5J9.png](http://i.imgur.com/ssPu5J9.png)

</comment><comment><USER6> The neatest trick was tying the odometer to the github stars! Cheeky, but cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> For those curious, here's how that's done: [https://github.com/HubSpot/odometer/blob/ef4a0f9b56b715b7f00...](https://github.com/HubSpot/odometer/blob/ef4a0f9b56b715b7f0076cdf77da2024eaa64bd3/docs/intro.html#L69)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nifty effect! And it only maxes out one of my cores!

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice. I did see some framedrop or something when the animation was at 'max speed' though; Chrome's FPS meter is reporting a frame rate of 30 FPS when the animation runs, instead of a stable 60. Not sure if that can actually be fixed though.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's very interesting. When animating from 12 to 34, we'll animate the 2 through 22 digits to reach 4. However, when animating from 12 to 3004, we don't spin the 2 through 2992 digits. Instead, we skip digits artificially based on a target frame rate. (Since the animation is supposed to take 2 seconds, at 60fps we have 120 frames to show those digits, so you're not going to see all 2992 anyway.) We originally set this target frame rate to 60. We recently dropped it down to 30 in an attempt to improve the perceived FPS in Chrome. (See [https://github.com/HubSpot/odometer/commit/fc5ca1572d0ad218c...](https://github.com/HubSpot/odometer/commit/fc5ca1572d0ad218c9851bc6680d5f1cceb39899))

We'd certainly love to hear from the community if there are any other approaches worth trying. For those interested, we have an issue tracking rendering performance here: [https://github.com/HubSpot/odometer/issues/3](https://github.com/HubSpot/odometer/issues/3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems completely broken in Firefox (v 25.0 beta). The only thing that happens in the jsFiddle example is that it changes the number, and the github page looks like a web page from in 1994. Switched to Chrome and all is pretty.

<comment><USER9> BTW, I do like the effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hubspot is doing some very cool things to the web. Good job guys!

</comment><comment><USER11> I was expecting a slow rollover like an odometer typically displays. All the demos have very fast numbers flying by and I don't know when I would find that useful.

<comment><USER12> There are places where I would use the latter, but the name of the library is wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It doesn't work in FF24/win7, at least not for me.

The slow example looked nice in Chrome though. Might look good on a dashboard..

<comment><USER14> 24 / win8 here, works fine

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice!</comment>


Smallest RPN Calculators - <AUTHOR> https://www.swissmicros.com/# <comment><USER2> Rather than carry another device, I use RealCalc [0] on my Android phone. It supports RPN.

Besides, my HP-16C still works :-)

[0] [http://www.quartic-software.co.uk/](http://www.quartic-software.co.uk/)

<comment><USER3> Shamelessly plugging my iOS RPN calc : [http://protonome.com/apps/calx/](http://protonome.com/apps/calx/)

<comment><USER4> Slick app. Was looking for a RPN calc. Just purchased it.

<comment><USER3> Cheers mate! That's probably the first sale I've had in about four months...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've always find these fascinating, but I don't know if I would actually use one.

Basically when I would need it is when I'm programming and in those cases a Python REPL is easy to start (new terminal, run python), and for me it is unbeatable.

</comment><comment><USER6> I really admire that someone is doing this, but I just don't understand where these things would be useful. Other than as a novelty/nostalgia object, why?

What "use-case" does a calculator have these days?

<comment><USER7> One that I know: labs.

Having a calculator next to your precision balance or your micrometer is always useful. Many times, you always need to do the same operation with the quantity you are measuring, so it is worth to even program the calculator for it, if you have the possibility.

In this situation, the phone is usually hidden by a lab coat and you are wearing a pair of gloves . Moreover, the computer is out of reach or you do not want to touch. The calculator gets the job done much faster and you do not have to worry so much when it is soaked in acid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Smallest, hah! Check out the HP-01.[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-01](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-01)

<comment><USER9> It wasn't RPN:

"The HP-01 was Hewlett-Packard's first algebraic calculator."

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have the 15C clone and is awesome.

What I'm looking is a Windows RPN calculator

<comment><USER11> how does that keyboard feel? It looks not that great from the photos. Was thinking to get the 15L for my son because the keys look the same as the HP version

<comment><USER12> the last time i saw one, the keyboard sucked badly. Otherwise i would buy one. The latest might be better. hope so.

<comment><USER13> They recently changed the design of the keyboard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oooh, these look cool! I wish I had a child or relative in school right now, because one of these would be a gret little tool to help ensure success.

<comment><USER15> I used an HP calculator in college (they didn't exist when I was in high school). But now life is no longer so simple. Now you're forced to use a very overpriced POS TI graphing calculator. Besides, most high school math teachers probably don't even know what RPN is!

[http://mic.com/articles/125829/your-old-texas-instruments- gr...](http://mic.com/articles/125829/your-old-texas-instruments-graphing- calculator-still-costs-a-fortune-heres-why)

<comment><USER13> _students were allowed to use Desmos-installed iPads on the Texas state assessment_

Calculators too expensive so use iPads???

I still have the Casio FX82 I used and school and the HP48GX I used at college, both work perfectly and are still useful, the Casio is about 25 and the HP about 21 years old!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Tried to order a 16C blue but they are out of stock already it seems. Not that I /need/ one since I hoarded a pair of real 16C, but hey!

</comment><comment><USER17> Thats cool. I wonder if they are programmable... I have a HP12C which still feels great.

<comment><USER13> They are the exact same - original ROMs running under emulation. I have a DM-15L and it is superb.

<comment><USER18> I've a HP-41C, but the screen is a bit busted. I know it's a different format, but I wonder if they're similar? Do these feel like the old ones? The keys had a really nice feel to them.

<comment><USER13> The keys are flatter and have less travel.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pull Request Diff Comments - GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/785-pull-request-diff-comments <comment><USER2> Here's a few review threads in the wild to illustrate:

<https://github.com/legalbox/lb_js_scalableApp/pull/1> <https://github.com/jnicklas/capybara/pull/271> <https://github.com/gem/openquake/pull/25>

EDIT: formatting.

<comment><USER3> loved the chuck noris mod on the openquake hudson install

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm constantly impressed by the quality of the features released in github -- it truly is world class. Great job, as always.</comment>


RFC 2616 is dead - <AUTHOR> https://www.mnot.net/blog/2014/06/07/rfc2616_is_dead <comment><USER2> I had a faint hope that they'd fix "referer". Alas, no: [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-5.5.2](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-5.5.2)

<comment><USER3> So true. I'm occasionally confused on which spelling to use. My rule of thumb is using "referrer" for almost all place including variable names, except for the situation when I have to manipulate the headers directly.

<comment><USER4> i've finally got my brain wrapped around to believing that referer is the correct spelling within the context of HTTP. Any time i need to talk about a referer, it's spelled referer. if it's spelled referrer, it must mean something else.

<comment><USER5> Reminds me when I have to pronounce router the network thing vs router the woodworking tool. The former is pronounced the USA way, the latter the English way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would go a step further and say the IETF is dead ... so many of the new protocols are basically just after-the-fact corporate interests fronting up and publishing.</comment>


Our productivity during Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2009/04/our-productivity-during-ycombinator.html

<comment><USER2> This may just be cynicism, but since you assign point values to the work it seems like there would be a general downward trending as you get more into the project. I know at the start of any project I largely undervalue the difficulty of implementing a feature or fixing a bug.

Similarly, it seems that there is a large spike in point values right after showing the project to someone else. I know that, again, in my experience, after showing my projects off I tend to far over value the difficulty of new features. Typically that's because I end up spending 75% of the time leading directly to that showing off a project is to fix all the bugs and make it stable. After I've spent a long time fixing bugs, I start adding the difficulty of fixing the bugs that will come out of the feature to the difficulty of the implementing the feature. After a little while I stop doing that, and the difficulty would go down for the same feature.

Not saying anything about the post, or the quality of work done. I was just pointing out my observations on some of the statistical foibles.

<comment><USER3> Good observations.

General downward trending: That's been the case with us. If I went back and corrected the first few weeks of points, I would probably assign more points to the individual tasks, moving up the first few weeks of values. Yet I tend to correct the number of points assigned to each item before I mark it as "finished", thus somewhat normalizing the value of each point.

Large spike in point values: Nah, what actually happened is that we filed many more small (1-point) bugs, rather than overestimating values of new bugs and features. Thus, after showing off the new versions and handing out alphas, we'd have more work items at smaller valuations.

<comment><USER4> Did you assign points to bugs and chores, as well? Just curious, because Pivotal suggests not to count bugs towards the velocity of the project, because bugs are not directly bringing business value... Just curious about your approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> permalink: [http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2009/04/our-productivity- dur...](http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2009/04/our-productivity-during- ycombinator.html) (for posterity)

</comment><comment><USER6> I am confused as to what the graph represents. Just looking at it, it seems like it would be the total remaining story points. As the deadline gets closer, you finish more tasks. After the deadline, you add more stories.

The impression I get from the article is that the graph represents rate. So before the demos, they do less work, and after them, they do more? That just doesn't make sense to me.

<comment><USER3> It's rate, not remaining points.

Yes, after demos, we were typically _more_ productive, because we'd receive a lot of feedback about what needs to improve, and we started implementing that.

Around Demo Day, we didn't get a lot of product stuff done because (a) we were rehearsing and (b) we had some meetings afterwards. But once that was over, productivity shot up again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I made a graph kind of like that: [http://files.dangrover.com/howispentmyyear_draft_annotated.p...](http://files.dangrover.com/howispentmyyear_draft_annotated.png)

I need to normalize the data more to get a better picture. But right now, this is all of my time productively spent outside of any school or dayjob.

</comment><comment><USER8> pivotal looks interesting. thanks gabor!

<comment><USER9> I know their lead programmer, and I can vouch that their team is very much on the ball. :)</comment></comment>


A Lazy Sieve of Eratosthenes - <AUTHOR> http://www.funcmain.com/a_lazy_sieve_of_eratosthenes

<comment><AUTHOR> I got such a good reception from my post yesterday [0] on Go's range clause that I thought I'd hurry up and publish this article today.

This post is a lot more subjective - I personally think the algorithm is neat and elegant. If you agree I also recommend the paper as a good read.

I remember thinking about the Sieve when I first learnt programming, and being annoyed that I couldn't just let it generate all the primes without limit. Especially as running out of memory was an issue. I like the idea that I can come back and redo one of my earliest problems from a new angle.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5924082](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5924082)</comment>


Open letter to Tumblr - Let me use my name - <AUTHOR> http://shadyacres.tumblr.com/post/14287707851/open-letter-to-tumblr-let-me-use-my-name

<comment><USER2> Interesting point. I wonder if this is a way Tumblr wants to protect your creativity, allowing you to specify the title of your blog and have that come out from Google.</comment>