The Moral Order of Panera - <AUTHOR> https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-moral-order-of-panera-kaiser-schatzlein <comment><USER2> So, I can totally believe that this particular idea didn't work well. I can totally agree that we should learn from it, perhaps that people want to give $ to feed the poor only when they don't have to sit next to them, or that people on lunch break don't want to have to tackle a moral quandary just then.

But, the article seemed needlessly negative. So, the CEO of Panera tried something, put his business experience to work seeing if this idea would succeed, and when it didn't, after giving it a fair shot, he shut it down. I don't think that's a reason to hate on him for trying it, or that anyone who thought it was worth a try should have known better. Just a reason for solving hunger in a different way (perhaps the simpler one of just giving food- insecure people some lunch money).

<comment><USER3> The reason it's so negative is because it already notes that prior research showed consumer responsibilization doesn't work. Shaich might see himself as good-minded, even volunteering as cashier, but he comes off more as misguided (what with his Ted Talk enthusiasm) and out of touch (note the vast gap between the customers and this man who made $2 million that year). I'm not sure why you expected some bland analytical article. The author clearly doesn't agree with Libertarian ideals or conscious capitalism.

<comment><USER4> The only research this article cites is a 2017 study that looked at Panera Cares itself. You can hardly fault the Panera CEO for trying when his efforts are what allowed the research to be done in the first place.

<comment><USER3> Okay I was incorrect on that front, [0] but the field of economics isn't exactly new, nor is the general idea itself (things like pay-what-you-want, voluntary contributions, etc).

[0]: Here's the paper: [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/205157071454056...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2051570714540560)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found the employee who said the discount was only available the first time to be a symptom of a self-defeating policy: once you make such a statement, the transaction would become uncomfortably personal as illustrated by the account of the mother in the article. Having a sign outside the store and another one near the checkout would be less personal. The most that I would ask an employee to say in that sort of situation is "Please pay it forward when you can".

The part about the customer dress code was declared to be unevenly enforced between the Panera Cares store and the normal Panera bread store, so that seems like another issue of policy.

The Yelp comment that mentioned smell is a tough one. I was thinking about not having any place to sit period to avoid that, but then one could make the argument that isn't the Panera Bread experiment.

I applaud Ron Shaich for at least trying. I personally would not have gone towards opening four stores without proving out and refining the first experience of the first one. By just having this one store, it could have stayed open longer before closing, and the employees working at that store could have been given better job security e.g. if this store doesn't work out, then I'll guarantee you a position of employment at your nearest Panera Bread.

</comment><comment><USER6> There's a secondary cause mixed in here I'd like to propose.

If you were to pay forward at this Panera, you don't know where your money is going to. That alone would make you hesitate as a consumer: You're not sure whether you'll be paying forward for someone who is in extensive need of the meal, or just a well-off customer who's looking for their discount-of-the-week for a decent sandwich.

It's the same kind of unease that pushes people away from giving money to panhandlers: they want to know that they are actually helping a person survive, not enabling them to seek out the means that may have contributed. (No, that's not what all of them will do. The point is you don't have the information and you will tend to err on the safe side in that context.)

</comment><comment><USER7> We all collectively benefit when children get a good education, when everyone has fast and safe transportation, when everyone has enough nutritious food, and when healthcare is available to all.

These collective goods must be paid for collectively, or the free-rider problem guarantees failure.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free- rider_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem)

I will gladly pay my share to secure these social goods, but I won't shoulder the entire burden by myself.

When I see most people free riding, I'm much less likely to step up and be the chump who contributes.

<comment><USER8> > These collective goods must be paid for collectively, or the free-rider > problem guarantees failure.

That's close to the truth, but it ignores the efficacy of charities and churches — where many people can (and do) give generously to help others. When run well, those do far more good than even government programs.

I challenge anyone who cares about the poor and wants to make a big difference to give to, volunteer at, or even start one of these nonprofit community programs.

In my city there's a charity that provides clothes to poor people at massive discounts. They don't feel like they're getting a handout, since they're still paying (less than $1 per item) - hence they don't lose any sense of dignity or "providing for their family". It also reduces free-loading since you _do_ have to pay. And store employees take time to help people with all sorts of things - job applications, government forms. If I'm bit mistaken, they also offer counseling, showers, and a cold weather shelter.

<comment><USER9> The thing is, charities and churches are rarely "run well". Many charities have become a cash cow for their executives and office staff ("Hey, look, we can direct a lot of these donations to paying us extremely generous salaries"), with actual generosity to those in need almost seeming an afterthought. I saw this firsthand when I volunteered in the central office of a charity, and it rather shattered my idealism.

Churches have been notorious for either stipulating that recipients act in a certain church-approved way to get aid, or giving charity in the hope that recipients will convert. Either way, it hardly strikes most people outside that religion as "generous".

It is worth pointing to the Nordic countries, where private charitable endeavours have largely faded away with the rise of the welfare state, and even the local churches are happy to let the state take care of the feeding, clothing and housing business because the state enjoys economy of scale far beyond any church's ability. In spite of the dwindling of private charity, those countries have less wealth disparity than countries fond of charitable activity. Consequently, some feel that charity is a just an awkward substitute for a functional state, not a good thing in itself.

<comment><USER8> > The thing is, charities and churches are rarely "run well".

Do you have any data or personal experience (not just one example) to back that up?

The truth is, the vast majority of churches and local faith-based charities just quietly do their thing and usually aren't big enough to garner any recognition or attention at scale.

Actually, it's the big operations with money flowing to a central hub that are usually the most suspect - when those at the top have less accountability and more temptation to not put all that money where it ought to go. The American Red Cross comes to mind. The only exception is large charities with a "100% of donations go to help people" policy (i.e. employees and leaders have to raise their own support to work there).

<comment><USER10> > The truth is, the vast majority of churches and local faith-based charities > just quietly do their thing and usually aren't big enough to garner any > recognition or attention at scale.

Your original comment said:

> When run well, those do far more good than even government programs.

Can you prove this? Because Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps do more good for 100+ million Americans than your local charities and churches, nor do faith based organizations have anywhere near the resources available to them government does.

<comment><USER11> _Because Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps do more good for 100+ million_

Do more good because their have much bigger budgets? - Maybe. More good per every dollar spent? I doubt it.

<comment><USER12> It depends what it is. The government is efficient at sending people checks and retail stores like Walmart are efficient places to buy things. It's hard to see how to do much better for supplying people with new stuff.

On the other hand, thrift stores also have an important role for getting used stuff like clothing to people who need it, and charities do some of that.

Then there are various services that charities do, which is a whole different thing and not easily replaced. But some of their funding comes from the government.

<comment><USER11> I agree that gov't is relatively good at sending checks (except in some economic circumstances, e.g. when the currency it prints is no more in demand - like in Venezuela, or late USSR). However it doesn't necessary make a particular welfare program efficient in general. Maybe recipients are poorly determined (which happens more often with larger programs), or sending checks is not the best idea at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> FWIW, Raleigh has had an independent non-profit pay-what-you-can restaurant for about 16 months now:

[https://tableraleigh.org/about](https://tableraleigh.org/about)

 _Customers have multiple options to pay and to pay-it-forward.

\- Pay the suggested price

\- At least half of the suggested price

\- By volunteering with us

Pay it Forward

\- Tip to fulfill our mission

\- Buy a $10 token to hand out yourself in the community_

I suspect these may work better as independent establishments as opposed to being part of a chain or large corporation.

<comment><USER14> "I suspect these may work better as independent establishments as opposed to being part of a chain or large corporation"

Agreed. I am always skeptical of large corporations doing charity work. It's never clear clear where the money is going and whether they just do it for PR. I find it easier to trust smaller organize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems to me that the author misunderstands the nature of the libertarian moral-economic approach. The whole point of it is that whatever decisions people make wrt charity and welfare _with their own money_ are the only ones that reflect their true morality, and thus, a free market will simply express the moral consensus of the society in which it operates. Thus, if the experiment supports the theory that "consumers don't prefer conscious capitalist businesses", from that perspective, it is not a failure - it just means that the current consensus is that the various social causes aren't important enough to pay for them.

That is also why people who subscribe to this value system wouldn't talk about SNAP - from their perspective, it's some people deciding what to do with other people's money, which cannot be moral by definition.

You may disagree with that value system and its definitions - I do - but you have to at least acknowledge that it is different enough that what you see as problems is not necessarily what its adherents see as problems. In this case, the article writer is complaining at the end that it's a failed attempt at "solution to a problem we already know how to solve" \- but is it really meant to solve _that_ problem? I don't think so.

<comment><USER16> > the current consensus is that the various social causes aren't important > enough to pay for them

No, the only consensus I see from this article is that _this particular approach_ to solving a very important social problem doesn't work.

<comment><USER15> Like I said, I do not agree with libertarian ethics. I'm explaining how it looks from that perspective. And in it, by definition, whatever the market does is the consensus.

The larger point is that they're not trying to solve the problem you (and the author) think about. It's not about solving hunger per se. It's about alleviating it to the extent permissible by the bounds of what their value system deems moral - and those bounds do not accommodate wealth redistribution via taxation. So it's kinda like complaining that communists can't solve the problem of protecting private property - well, yes, but they aren't trying to, so you should complain about that very fundamental premise.

In a way, it is rather like religion. Islamic banking, for example, is hardly efficient at solving most problems that modern banking does. If all you cared about was solving them, you wouldn't need it. But if you are under a religious prohibition on charging interest, then you have to come up with all those alternative convoluted schemes, that don't cover many scenarios outright, and are inefficient in others - but it's the best that can be had. Conversely, if a problem requires a sinful action to solve, then it's not really a problem. "Whatever God does is good" is a common religious trope - replace it with "whatever the market does is good", and you'll see that it works just the same here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > If he did, he may have had to admit that Panera Cares was nothing but an > elaborate branding exercise, a solution to a problem we already know how to > solve.

I would expect there to be a lot less food insecurity if we actually knew how to solve it.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I would consider "get everyone to agree with me on topic X" to be a _very_ unsolved problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Agree with many other commenters here that holding this up as a supposed failure of free-market libertarianism borders on absurdity. Cut against the grain of human nature and you're going to fail, irrespective of your philosophy.

Also, counterpoint: [https://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/television/Rosas...](https://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/television/Rosas- Pizza-gets-surprise-from-Ellen-DeGeneres.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> It sounds like the problems are mostly shame and self-selection, which could perhaps be iterated on, for instance with some sort of automatic dynamic pricing. For instance, it's a lousy first idea, but I wonder if credit card terminals can tell how close you are to your credit limit, and if you're close it'll automatically adjust your price downward.</comment>


Details Unveiled for Twitter's Native Video Player to Rival YouTube - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/02/details-unveiled-for-twitters-native-video-player-to-rival-youtube/

<comment><USER2> It's interesting how Facebook closes it's eyes on copyright infringements because they want to take over video consumption market. For example super highlights[1] Facebook page share copyrighted football games all the time. This is on top of giving video posts a higher rank and auto-playing the videos.

Twitter will push a lot of videos using all sort of technics just like Facebook.

To be fair, a playing video in my Facebook feed is very mesmerizing.

[1] [https://www.facebook.com/pages/Super- Highlights/358037564248...](https://www.facebook.com/pages/Super- Highlights/358037564248067?ref=br_tf)

<comment><USER3> The process is always the same

1\. Launch platform that supports user generated content 2\. Close eyes, let any content go 3\. Manually take down selective content (porn, racist material, etc) 4\. Support official DMCA channels 5\. Increase speed and volume of take downs for select material 6\. Provide automatic detection and takedown of MPAA/RIAA material

You only have to fulfill the requirement of each sequential bullet point after you get substantially large. If you stay small and unprofitable you don't have to worry about it. The more profitable become the more you have to worry about it.

Honestly that seems pretty reasonable to me. Some cases, such as sports highlights, are annoying. But for the most part it's fine. No, you can't make millions of dollars off of someone else's content. I'm ok with that. YouTube feels like it's in a pretty good spot imo. If someone wants to compete with YouTube then they're gonna have to play by the same rules. That's not too bad.

<comment><USER4> Makes sense for a startup, but if you are part of an existing large company, I don't see why rights holders wouldn't jump ahead to taking action even in stage 1 and 2.

<comment><USER5> They try, but the DMCA safe harbor provisions make it hard.

There is a doctrine of secondary infringement which arose out of the Grokster case[1] that may help rights holders. However, it is pretty limited in scope.

[1] [http://www.law.columbia.edu/law_school/communications/report...](http://www.law.columbia.edu/law_school/communications/reports/winter06/facforum1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For a second I thought it said Twitch.tv. Twitch has found a profitable niche from which to attack youtube. Don't stop at video games, go for the jugular twitch... Become youtube before youtube can become you.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Everything that happens in the world happens on Twitter..."

Really?

<comment><USER8> "happens on Twitter" is obviously marketing but "gets mentioned on Twitter" isn't far from the truth

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well this will be a much better platform for response videos. We'll see if the advertisers like it and the smart ones will expect it and take advantage of it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wasn't part of youtube's original concept to be limited to 10 minutes as well? It's already been so long I've forgotten.

<comment><USER11> I thought that was just a technical limitation to prevent abuse of resources, rather than a deliberate part of the concept of YouTube.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of how CDROMs for PCs were hyped. The PC was then called a "multimedia" PC. It made me sit down and have a think on what a PC is good for. Playing video is one of those things.

So what we have at this point is former startups are playing slow follow trying to dislodge best breed products. I won't name names, but I'm sure you can think of other examples.

<comment><USER13> An alternative to YouTube would be a healthy thing for the Internet. It has a complete monopoly on online video, and its policies are awful for content creators.

<comment><USER14> A lot of slacktivists complain about their policies, but honestly, are they that bad? I've heard a few content creators moan, but they've always stopped well short of e.g. hosting their own videos.

If you're sailing close to the wind - making video collages with copyrighted content (legal fair use, but that's an affirmative defence you have to assert, not a right as such), or advocating for controversial political causes, or doing things many people don't want to see in public (breastfeeding, nonnude fetish modelling) - then sure, you're in trouble. But what proportion of content creators is that? The mainstream of content creators are, I think, doing fine under YouTube.

There are plenty of occasions where YouTube takes down things that are perfectly legal, perhaps even things that don't violate their own written policy. And sure, that's bad. But nothing they've done so far has felt like the hill I would want to die on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The good news: Youtube will have another main competitor, which can only be a good thing.

The bad news: Twitter will start building its own "advanced censorship infrastructure" to appease MPAA (just like Google did), which will later be used for other kinds of censorship, too (shared images, tweets, etc).

<comment><USER16> Not sure why this is being down voted, but it seems pretty fair to me. DRM is the reason why YouTube still uses Flash as the main player, the same for Netflix with Silverlight.

Given Twitter will mainly be doing this from a commercial angle, I can't see them being any different - if anything their technical might will lead to stronger DRM technologies.

<comment><USER17> DRM is not the reason youtube uses flash, browser support and feature usage. HTML5 video APIs are still frustrating to use compared to flash's pretty well built-out mechanisms.

<comment><USER18> Advertisers also love to serve video ads on a flash platform because it lets them perform custom analytics, logic, etc.

<comment><USER19> And don't forget the part where flash is a backdoor to users computers. It can bypass proxies and give them your real IP, and I'm not sure even google will want that to go away.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


It's Not Capitalism That Causes Poverty, It's the Lack of It - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/12/19/its-not-capitalism-that-causes-poverty-its-the-lack-of-it/ <comment><USER2> "We must go and exploit them as the ruthless, red in tooth and claw, capitalists and free marketeers that we are. Simply because it is the absence of capitalism and markets that allows poverty, their presence that defeats it."

I believe the same argument was made for black slavery.

That black slaves were better off than their African counterparts, therefore slavery is good.

Same logic, different time.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a load of justifiabullshit.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is this article missing a page? It ends without saying anything. It appears to be built around a single fact and extending that fact outward without examining its implications or methods of implementation: that is, just because capitalism doesn't currently exploit the third world in a negative sense says nothing about the potentiality for it to. Instead, the article seems to use this one data point as a smug shield against criticism. A more robust and therefore interesting article would have taken the criticisms (the ways in which capitalism is said to exploit the poor) point by point and explain how it would ultimately be avoided in even a baseline, pragmatic capitalist influence on struggling third world economies.

This article convinces no one and only makes already in-the-tank capitalist apologists feel validated. Is there a word for that?

</comment><comment><USER5> "In 2013, The Economist described its countries as "stout free-traders who resist the temptation to intervene even to protect iconic companies" while also looking for ways to temper capitalism's harsher effects, and declared that the Nordic countries "are probably the best-governed in the world":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model)

</comment><comment><USER6> ... by providing capital to the poor? Right? That's what this article is about, right? Right?

Oh.

<comment><USER7> We can do better. My favorite Forbes article is this: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/harrybinswanger/2013/09/17/give-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/harrybinswanger/2013/09/17/give- back-yes-its-time-for-the-99-to-give-back-to-the-1/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Forbes is now blocking people with AdBlock?

<comment><USER9> Yep. This works though: [https://github.com/Mechazawa/FuckFuckAdblock](https://github.com/Mechazawa/FuckFuckAdblock)

<comment><USER8> Not working for me.

 _Update_ : My bad. Working fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Right, because if you have more capitalism, the poor just die off like they're supposed to. The system works!

<comment><USER11> every economy is capitalistic, in that the goal is to produce capital, who owns that capital is where the differentiation lies, in a purely socialist society the government would own it, in a free market society those that produced it would own it and trade it with whomever they saw fit. free being defined as the absence of coercion. a poor person is by definition someone without capital. so if when looking at reasons why that person isn't getting capital through trade or by creating it, one needs to look at the coercive forces preventing them from obtaining it and seeing how in poor countries and even in western countries the most coercive force is the government one could draw the conclusion that the government is causing poverty by preventing people from creating and trading capital in ways that they themselves see fit. to gain any kinda of capital through trade in a free market society one has to convince people that what they have is worth trading, thus any profits are earned through both parties own volition. it's this voluntary relationship that is at the heart of the free market and progress, when you have entities such as the government or institutions that use the coercive nature of the government that's when this system breaks down.

<comment><USER12> In a purely "socialist" society the people who produce the capital (the workers) would own it, in a purely "free market" the capital is owned by a "capitalist class" who own the products of their laborers efforts.

I'm generally a free market guy, but words mean stuff. No purely free market or purely socialist system has ever or will ever exist.

<comment><USER13> And rightly so. Either taken to the extreme leads to terrible situations. But balance the best parts of both socialism and capitalism, and you get something really nice. That's pretty much what the Nordic countries are doing, and it seems to be working very well.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Less-saturated platforms for premium plugin development? - <AUTHOR> What kind of less-known platforms do you know of for developing interesting little paid plugins?
I'm thinking of things like Wix apps (http://www.wix.com/app-market/main) or Slack bots maybe a plugin for another existing SaaS and things of that sort.
I'm interested in making a tiny useful plugin or something and maybe earning the cost of my internet and coffee per month.
The bar is too high for things like Wordpress/Android/iOS and so on and the market is saturated. So I was hoping to find a little under-served niche/slice of the market where the bar is lower. <comment><AUTHOR> Also meant to mention Shopify ([https://apps.shopify.com/](https://apps.shopify.com/)). Not sure how good the marketplace is.</comment>


Newbie - <AUTHOR>

I am highly considering joining the codeacademy , however, i know nothing about coding nor have I ever used Ruby/Rails before. Is this something I'll be able to pick up on in 12weeks ? Any advice out there? <comment><USER2> Obligatory reading: <http://norvig.com/21-days.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> First of all, at this moment Codecademy only teaches Javascript, so you don't need any Ruby knowledge. Also, I think it has several "Start Programming" lessons for starters... It should be a good starting point.

<comment><USER4> The OP is talking about codeacademy.org, it is not the same as codeacademy.com the YC company.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Penroads – A platform to connect with other travelers - <AUTHOR> http://www.penroads.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Any comments/suggestions/critiques are welcome! Thanks guys!

</comment><comment><USER2> The page keeps refreshing asking me to login. Closed tab, sorry.</comment>


Show HN: Angular Attack – new 48 hour online coding competition for Angular - <AUTHOR> https://www.angularattack.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Angular Attack organizer here. Let me know if you have any questions!</comment>


Ask HN: Email website announcements - expected or spam? - <AUTHOR>

When a user signs up for a web-based service, is it legitimate to send them occasional emails letting them know what's new, or announcing major milestones? Should they explicitly opt-in for this, or are occasional announcements just assumed? I'm not talking about email marketing, an email newsletter, or (of course) any sort of third-party product placement - just an occasional "Hi" from the founder, with a clear "unsubscribe" link.<p>I want to respect user privacy and definitely don't want to spam or annoy users. But I also want to be able to communicate with people who are using my service. <comment><USER2> opt-in.

i'd delete emails like that without reading them, if they got by my filters.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, both Pownce and Twitter send these, and I pretty much ignore them. To the extent that they are expected, they are expected because we are used to being treated badly, not because they are a good thing.

I'd try communicating via a blog and also via one-off messages sent to users the first time they log in after a change. Both of those provide information without being too pushy about it.</comment>


Leftpad C++ - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/zelcon5/7dc42bf91ea958132a0d <comment><USER2> The code is awful. Just use std::string::insert if you want to pad a string or std::inserter with begin/end if you want to be more generic

Edit : I actually did a PR on the code. Wait & see

</comment><comment><USER3> This is really not how you should write C++ in 2016:

\- Manual memory management

\- NULL-terminated strings instead of std::string and/or a string_view class

<comment><AUTHOR> How is it not clear by my using ONLY standard C library headers that I am NOT trying to write "modern C++"?

The STL has its uses…when you're writing a high level program, for example, that queries a database or when you need to pivot matrices for rendering some graphics. But if you're writing a string manipulating function that's presumably going to be called tons of times, it makes no sense to draw in big monsters like the STL. It's like bringing a jackhammer to nail a picture on drywall.

As for manual memory management, this is C++, not Python. If you're willing to use smart pointers, then you shouldn't even be using C++ because that sacrifices determinism and performance just as much or more than GC. If I wanted that kind of software, I would just use a much quicker-to-write language like Java/Go/CL.

<comment><USER3> When you're writing a string manipulation function that is called a lot of times you also don't allocate memory. And GC isn't necessarily slower than manual memory management. And std::unique_ptr is _never_ slower than manual memory management, since it does exactly the same thing.</comment></comment></comment>


How a Chinese Startup Made $50 Million in 3 Months by Stealing US and UK IP - <AUTHOR> https://chinatechconfidential.blogspot.com/2019/12/how-chinese-startup-made-50-million-in.html <comment><USER2> The concept of strong IP doesn't really exist in their society. They look at is and scratch their head and think why are they making it so hard?

<comment><USER3> This is specifically why SpaceX rarely patents anything. From a 2012 Wired article [0], Musk is on record as saying "We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China—if we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book."

[0] [https://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk- qa/](https://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/)

<comment><USER4> Which is sad in part because trade secrets can hold back healthy competition for generations. At least with reasonably limited patents society as a whole can learn without resorting to spying, leaks, or expensive reverse engineering.

<comment><USER5> Parents can also be used to stifle competition.

I am not convinced the no patent world advances any slower than the patented and heavily litigated world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article mentions that the app has thousands of books 'scanned from physical copies'...while reading books to our kid I've been struck by how many are printed in China so I wonder if getting access to the digital assets used in the printing process would be easier than scanning the produced books?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello! Author here. The company in question does not have connections with the publishing industry. It is basically a 1-1 tutoring platform gone rogue.

<comment><USER6> ah ok - quite a lot of effort must have gone into copying these books then I guess!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is nothing "new", the real money is from printed books, not only China, Turkey too: ESL publishers buy books from eg. Greece then scan > photoshop to translate Greek to Turkish > publish, original publishers have no idea as its an off-the-net business, definitely the language barrier helps those kind of business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! How do you know about this happening in Turkey? The novelty here is probably in the online component and with Apple app store approval.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yet Scribd remains.....

<comment><USER9> Yes, very similar to Scribd user uploaded content. I like Scribd, but I mainly use it for audio books,

On the other hand, publishers will not chase unless they see money. It is a new app, maybe it can grow into something valuable they publishers will be interested in getting some money. These books will be too expensive to sell anyway.

<comment><USER8> In reality, technology has moved beyond globally enforceable copyright protection for the written word.

That ship has sailed. New revenue streams, like audiobooks and companion videos/software/etc will become essential, if they are not already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> surprising that apple app store doesn't do much DD on content apps, esp. from a chinese app developer</comment>


Food Hacking - An awesome summer drink on my blog - <AUTHOR> http://manmakesfood.com/post/15859436381/summer-mixed-berry-juice-ideal-at-breakfast-time

<comment> Tim-Boss Has HN really deteriorated to the point where people are submitting smoothie recipe articles?!?

Oh no, my mistake, just another thinly veiled advert for a personal blog.....

<comment><AUTHOR> No veils or adverts - I am also aiming for something quite different to a recipe site, as there are far too many of those and in all honesty they're too precise and don't actually capture the experimental and less formal attributes that surround giving food / drink creation a go. We all lead busy lives - including myself, and I am only trying to help others find ways to slip some quick and easy homemade health into their lives.

I guess with that in mind - do you have any pointers? Also, sorry if the post disagreed with you mate.</comment></comment>


Torus – A secure, shared workspace for secrets - <AUTHOR> https://www.torus.sh/ <comment><USER2> As soon as developers have access to the production credentials it's game over. Auditability is gone. Passwords end-up being stored in various password stores and plain files because it's convenient. Developers connect to the production system and start doing live changes.

Hashicorp Vault is more difficult to put in place but it does the right thing. With it's custom backend it can generate temporary tokens, for example to access the database. Those token are short-lived and part of the audit log.

<comment><USER3> Hashi Vault isn't that difficult to setup, especially for smaller setups, it's basically just a binary you run, with the file backend. You still get the auditing goodness, etc. Otherwise I agree with what else you said.

<comment><USER2> Yes Vault isn't that difficult to setup. It's mainly harder because Torus hosts the backend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks interesting. I'll definitely take a look at how this compares to Hashicorp Vault. Definitely getting closer and closer to the point where I can start to properly utilize a tool like this.

Reading the docs, though, it does seem like it's one legendary AWS outage away from being a huge problem:

>Torus's infrastructure has been designed from the ground up for resilience without any single point of failure. All of our services are autoscaled and run in multiple availability zones in the us-east-1 region.

<comment><USER5> :| Yikes.

Maybe it's not a good idea to launch in the default region.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This does not seem any less complicated than Vault or Keywhiz.

</comment><comment><USER7> How is using an online service as a starting point for security a good thing?

<comment><USER8> As long as everything's encrypted on the client-side (and the client's source code is available for public audit), I don't see any immediate concerns besides the obvious one of "what happens if Torus goes under?".

It looks like there are plans to open-source the server, though, so that problem can be solved if you want to host your own Torus deployment (which I'd likely do for any serious non-personal usage).

<comment><USER5> Goes under or AWS goes down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We've used Torus a fair bit in my team at work, however we're now using Docker's native secrets solution for our container runtimes as it avoids the knowledge and build-time overhead of an extra dependency.

I personally found the experience of using Torus to be great. Getting a quick working setup is easy and it doesn't take much effort to transition from there to locked down access control. Will likely continue using it outside of the Docker context.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been using Blackbox and it has been great. It encrypts files directly in your VCS. We've setup the deploy pipeline to decrypt secret config files and then deploy to servers.

[https://github.com/StackExchange/blackbox](https://github.com/StackExchange/blackbox)

</comment><comment><USER11> Looks interesting. I probably need to get my hands dirty to understand how it's different from Hashicorp's Vault. A quick glance says it's a cloud-based solution with simpler UX. I see only client binaries and sign-up instructions. There are no server setup instructions.

<comment><USER12> At Manifold(1), we built Torus from the ground-up to solve a consistent pain when building cloud apps: securely storing, sharing, and rotating secrets used to build, run, and deploy code. Our goal is to make it simple for anyone, not just the security savvy, to keep their secrets out of git and off disk.

To do this, we designed our security model (host and cryptography architecture) for hosting in the cloud to ensure we never have access to any of the keys used to encrypt or sign secrets — they're derived from a user's password and never forwarded along. We've posted more information in our documentation(2).

The server is currently closed source, with plans to open source it. The client (where all cryptographic operations happen) is open source.

1) [https://www.manifold.co/](https://www.manifold.co/) 2) [https://www.torus.sh/docs/latest/internals/crypto](https://www.torus.sh/docs/latest/internals/crypto)

<comment><USER13> Could you highlight differences compared to Vault?

<comment><USER12> At it's heart, Torus is public-key infrastructure, users/machines derive and encrypt asymmetric key pairs from their password. These key pairs are then uploaded and signed by the Torus server using a key endorsed by our root signing keys (always kept offline in a sealed and secured environment).

This enables Torus to establish a web of trust (much like gpg), allowing clients to retrieve and validate (by navigating down the web of trust) public signing and encryption keys for other users or machines. Using these validated keys, clients can encrypt secrets for each other without ever sending the secret (or any material used to encrypt it) to the server.

Vault, on the other hand, operates under a centralized encryption model with all secrets encrypted using keys encrypted by the root master key. For a vault cluster to boot up, the vault must be unsealed which complicates it's high availability story — for a cluster to cold start it must have access to the master key.

The onus is on operators to properly store, transmit, and leverage the master key to unseal the vault which requires a certain level of sophistication to do properly. If the root key were to be lost or compromised, then all of the secrets would be as well.

Torus uses a decentralized model and builds on-top of the privilege of least privilege — users and machines only have access to the secrets they require. Making it far easier to operate as a cloud service (no cold start problem) and ensure that we never have access to your secrets.

We don't see Torus as only a security tool, instead, we see it as a productivity tool by focusing on making it super easy to set, audit, and rotate secrets when a machine is compromised, developer leaves, or key is committed to git.

<comment><USER14> > For a vault cluster to boot up, the vault must be unsealed which complicates > it's high availability story

It doesn't complicate anything. It just makes it secure.

> If the root key were to be lost or compromised, then all of the secrets > would be as well.

In Vault, you do not have just a root key. You have it divided, initially in 5 parts 3 of which are needed for unsealing. You can change the numbers. It is unlikely that all of them goes AWOL.

Plus, Vault is trivial to set up for a small team. Not a bigger effort is needed to set up a cluster.

I can understand that Torus is your tool of choice, but please do not spread FUD about Vault at the same time. I have no experience with Torus, yet, but Vault is a solid piece.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very strange navigation behaviour: enabled JS, and then clicking e.g. 'Docs' modifies the URL in address bar, but requires a manual refresh to actually load the docs page...

</comment><comment><USER16> A shared workspace for secrets as long as none of your friends using Windows, Android or iOS have secrete to share, apparently.

<comment><USER8> There's a Windows version on their download page: [https://get.torus.sh/](https://get.torus.sh/)

Doesn't solve the lack of mobile support, but hopefully the fact that the client-side code is already free software (and under a liberal license, to boot) means that the community can fix that problem if all else fails.</comment></comment>


Author wants to "Abolish Silicon Valley" to save it from capitalism - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/12/qa-this-san-francisco-based-author-wants-to-abolish-silicon-valley-to-save-it-from-capitalism/ <comment><USER3> Reading between the lines I see two complaints:

\- the VC system is pretty messed up. Paul Graham made himself and others rich by recognizing some deficiencies. That there are still massive problems would not be a controversial statement here.

\- Private companies controlling, exploiting and monopolizing platforms. Tech companies effectively self-organize to disrupt monopolies that harm them (Linux, Postgres, Kubernetes, etc) while these same companies are trying to gain their own monopolies.

I think most people here would agree that these are problems. Most here would probably be happy if the US enforced its existing anti-trust laws better, but it sounds like Liu's proposed solutions are much more radical. I'll be interested to hear them.

</comment><comment><USER4> I guess I'll have to read that book.

I'm a similar age to the author and have also experienced a good deal of disillusionment about the tech industry. Like her, I absolutely did idolize tech companies as a kid, despite only ever reading about them from afar. I even bought into the concept of these places being pure meritocracies and forces for good.

I still love tech and most people who work in the field, but it's apparent that it's not a pure meritocracy by any means. Not that any industry is, to be fair. I still have no regrets about choosing this career and think that technology jobs in general offer an outsized opportunity compared to most other jobs, especially for ambitious working class kids. I do think though that the highly regional nature of top-tier jobs and capital heavily favors the SF area excludes a good portion of talent from the tech startup scene, especially black people and rural people. You would think the absurd housing costs in that area would provide incentives to branch out, but network effects are powerful and the wealthy investor class don't feel the pain from that issue. The end result is a physical and cultural bubble around tech in SV that will decrease the ability of tech startups to contribute genuine innovation moving forward.

Like many things related to capitalism, it's not terribly hard to identify problematic patterns and unequal outcomes - but proposing solutions is much harder. Will be curious to read what the Author believes can help, and why.

</comment><comment><USER5> > This is manifest in the way tech companies are funded through venture > capital firms, going public or taking money from stock and the public. The > problem is the fact that tech is ultimately interrelated to capital and > right now capital is in a very concentrated and not representative group of > people

Software and web service startups don't require a lot of capital to get off the ground.

In many cases I would agree that venture capital is unnecessary and can do more harm than good as the company shifts focus toward investor happiness rather than customer and employee happiness. The same bad focus can happen in a public company when the stakeholder balance sometimes shifts overwhelmingly toward investors at the expense of everyone else.

In a non winner-take-all market, funding a company the old-fashioned way - paying out of pocket until you have enough paying customers to sustain the business - may be a good way to go.

</comment><comment><USER6> >Reclaim the wealth from capital, push back capital and fund public innovation.

Being born in Eastern Europe, having experienced communism when I was a kid - which meant lack of food, living in improper conditions (cold, frequently shutdowns of utilities), scarcity of common goods, relative poverty, low development, poor healthcare, censorship, violation of most rights - <USER2> thinking of tens of millions of deaths caused worldwide by communism, I don't really understand why some westerners are pushing to it instead of being happy they didn't experience it.

<comment><USER7> Socialism != communism

Democratic socialism !== socialism

<comment><USER8> Socialism ⊇ communism

Democratic Socialism ⊆ Socialism

<comment><USER7> Also, Government ⊇ communism.

Communism being a bad form of government says very little about the set of all forms of government. Likewise with socialism.

However equating communism with democratic socialism as the GP and many others do is a false equivalency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why is "silicon valley" only websites n smartphone apps?

</comment><comment><USER10> Nonpaywall link?

I checked Google Cache and it's still paywalled.

Impossible to have an informed opinion without reading the article. As "saving from capitalism" can mean so many different things.

<comment><USER3> It's a teaser for a book which comes out next week. There will be much more informative reviews and articles then, I'm sure.</comment></comment>


Why we applied to YC despite having gone through another accelerator - <AUTHOR> http://www.karthikmanimaran.com/2016/01/21/why-we-applied-to-yc-despite-having-gone-through-another-accelerator/ <comment><USER2> As a YC B2B alum, not totally impartial, but also not totally uninformed. I think you may have the wrong take-away from your experience.

I'm sorry you had a bad experience in LA. I agree a lot of the stuff you wrote about that accelerator sounds like unconscionable bullshit. The amazing thing is it is far from the worst I've read about. I'm glad you realize it was crappy.

Yes, there are ways to bootstrap a B2B business: early sales/revenue. The risk is becoming a consultancy, or losing your market to someone who is better funded. I wouldn't say you _have to_ raise (even for consumer), but I also wouldn't say you shouldn't, and in the current market, raising is probably the best choice for someone who fits the scale/size/winner-take-all model, even in B2B.

2.9%? Why does a specific percentage matter? If someone takes 10% and tanks your business, that's bad. If I could get YC level value-add (network, advice, reputation) as a developer tool company focused on startups for 25% of common from a huge value-add investor, I'd seriously consider it. But of course I'd rather take YC for 7% and all the other YC benefits.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a good example of how bad many accelerators are, but extrapolating based on that experience to thinking that he knows anything about YC is a major error. This is a bit like saying, "I had a bad time drinking bleach, therefore you should avoid all liquids."

<comment><USER4> Most accelerators are profit generating initiatives that while started to be beneficial are unable to scale and fulfill their purpose.

<comment><USER3> Accelerators are actually a terrible business because you only make money if you get a big hit (which most won't), and even then it can take 10 years or more to realize the gains. I predict most will disappear in the next 5 years.

<comment><USER5> What's your advice for a new accelerator (or any investor for that matter) in measuring if they are doing well? The problem is one of retarded measurement of success. It feels like you are doing well because you are deploying money, you are being highly selective, etc. But you can still be slowly dying without noticing. What are some good predictors? You guys at YC have some heuristics for identifying good founders, but I believe it would be hard for new accelerators/investors to use those, because they are highly subjective and I would argue most new accelerators/investors will not know how to assess those founders characteristics when they are getting started. Would you advice people to experiment for a few years (literally being willing to loose all the money invested) just to develop that ability to measure, and be ready to be a good accelerator/investor a few years down the line?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think YC cares about growth, or if you're early/late stage (yeah I know this goes against what the president said..but hear me out). We also got refused being a B2B startup with extreme growth and only less than 6 months old solving a real world problem. The difference is that our startup was boring web SaaS, without any crazy tech or AI. If you look at their latest batch most companies are hardware, biotech, energy, or some batshit crazy algorithm AI buzzwordy startup. They're going deep and risking a lot, and this is probably what I would do too if I had a big fund 8 years later.

Quora got in YC after already raising many rounds and through other accelator..but that was 2 years ago when YC wasn't 100% crazy tech only yet: [http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/11/quora-y- combinator/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/11/quora-y-combinator/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Aside from your confusing logic, it drives me nuts that half my screen is your body shot while I'm supposed to be reading your blog post. Very distracting. Sorry if this is nonconstructive.

<comment><USER8> your body shot shouldn't occupy more than 3% of the screen ;)

<comment><USER9> 2.9%

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I assume you plan on raising money? In your case, you would likely get even more than a 6% valuation bump, making YC worth it on that alone.

I think there are some key details missing in this post which make it hard to tell why you were in fact rejected. In addition to the accelerator, you've also been going at it for 3+ years, and are only now hitting 1M For B2B, that is unfortunately on the really slow end of things for growth (read Jason Lemkins quora posts for whay to expect for typical bootstrapped busineeses). The fact that you're a leader already in this market, and growth is that slow, is maybe an indicator the market doesn't have much potential. On the other hand it might also just be that you're in a market that is new, so the potential is there and others just don't see it.

<comment><USER2> I'm fairly down on Quora, but ~everything [https://www.quora.com/profile/Jason-M.-Lemkin](https://www.quora.com/profile/Jason-M.-Lemkin) has written looks pretty amazing -- I wish he'd write a book or something.

<comment><USER11> I suspect he's too busy investing and slinging tickets to his annual conference. Conference Money > Book Money.

<comment><USER2> Nice thing about that conference: they're letting people volunteer and get free entrance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I do not understand how YC is anything at all like Paypal.

<comment><USER13> This also struck me. It seems as though YC gives you $120K, advice, contacts and exposure. Obviously it's worth $120K plus whatever the other happens to be worth. They take equity from the company in return.

Paypal offers a necessary service to a company (payment). They charge a service fee.

I'm not going to say YC isn't useful or worth the equity for some people. However, you've got think that a $120K loan is pretty damn cheap these days. Also, I pay my accountant a few thousand a year and he gives me incredible business advice. Possibly I'm just lucky, but I suspect that young founders do not really understand the options they have open to them for growing a business.

I view my accountant as a necessary business expense. I even get to write off the money I pay him from my income. That's more like Paypal. Similarly, on a loan, I have to pay interest. That's a cost (and possibly necessary expense). If I need to pay a consultant to help me improve my image or make contacts, that's a cost.

Giving away part of your company for a service? Not at all like Paypal :-) Personally, I'd rather pay an expense than give up part of my company. Obviously depends on the situation, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Now it's not so convincing piece of advice when you say "Never do an accelerator", when you just applied for one and got rejected, is it?

<comment><USER15> I thought about that as well. I think it may be defensiveness and anger - rather than a logical statement. Those feelings are natural, so I don't fault him - but at the same time, rejection is a part of startups at every turn and I think we have to get over it, and figure out how to use criticism constructively.

YC has always valued persistence - so I'm sad that he applied and wrote that, since he might have been able to get in the next time, and I think YC likely would have helped his ability to recruit and valuation, especially given the changing markets. But regardless, I always have respect for startup founders (esp after 3 years of hard work) - so we should all wish his team luck.

<comment><USER14> This guy not only tells people not to YC _after_ he applied and got rejected, but also publicly bashes someone (the LA accelerator) who did their best to help him (Doesn't matter if it didn't work out. They did their best to help their portfolio companies and this guy says it was a "gimmick") I wouldn't like to work with this guy

<comment><USER15> Hard to use that to say he's not a great person to work with. The LA accelerator might have been egregious, and he may be doing a service to other entrepreneurs by publicizing it (there are a lot of incubators today, and entrepreneurs should beware). I do hope in the LA incubator's case that he gave actionable feedback privately long ago.

I totally agree on the cognitive dissonance with bashing YC and saying to never to do it, after getting rejected recently. But I can realize how it might not be a fully rational perspective (he'd probably argue that he's more educated now, and that's why he's changed his mind since applying - my gut is there's some emotions involved, since I can't see a ton of benefit to him to write this so publicly).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Since he didn't link to it himself, for those curious, Karthik's company is [https://welink.com/](https://welink.com/) \- location-based social media monitoring. e.g., sentiment within a sports stadium or shopping mall.

</comment><comment><USER17> You missed an opportunity to explain what your startup does, no link in the blog entry, blog only contains that one entry. Also +3 years at it is not a good indicator for getting at YC which as per Sam's post prefers very early startups but good luck anyways.

<comment><USER18> To play devil's advocate, Airbnb was in business for at least two years already before they got into YC.

Yes, one can argue, times have changed a lot since then as the applicants pool have significantly increased. One other the thing, founders were extremely impressive; so, Airbnb may be an outlier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Posted this on his comment form:

Karthik, disclosure, I was a YC founder.

It doesn't seem very thoughtful to say never pay more than 3%, full stop. If you get more than 3% value out of the incubator, it's often a good idea to pay more than 3%. You should make the decision after talking to many people who've chosen the incubator, and there are many companies that will say they got much more than 7% benefit out of YC – and also companies that didn't.

It'd be great if every incubator charges much less than they do today, but I'm doubtful it's a perfectly competitive market, with stickiness in things like alumni networks and reputation (it does seem like it has some similarities to the education market). Entrepreneurs would obviously benefit from more competition amongst incubators – and maybe you're right that change is at hand.

I'm sorry that you didn't get in to YC specifically (and maybe it wasn't the right idea to apply, if you felt so strongly about how incubators provided so little value) – but I hope you won't let your disappointment and anger get in the way of thoughtful business decisions, including in cases like future customer rejections.

Anyway, back to building our businesses – good luck with your own!</comment>


Ask HN: Your job satisfaction? - <AUTHOR> With all the recent threads about salaries, I would like to poll the HN Community about their current job:
1) What are some of the best things you value at your job?
2) What are some of the things you wish you could change about your organization?
3) Besides money what is the one thing you wish your organization would offer you?
4) What is one thing the Founder or CEO could do to improve the leadership in your organization? <comment><USER2> I just left my job a few months ago because I wasn't happy. These responses apply to that job.

1\. The money was good ($175k as director of engineering in Los Angeles) and the hours were 9-5.

2\. I wish I had more autonomy to manage my team. Although I was director, engineering was basically under the control of product and upper management. Unfortunately they knew nothing about how engineering works.

3\. A chance to define a new role, possibly R&D or skunk works, so I could contribute but not be bound by the traditional management hierarchy.

4\. Ultimately nothing, since he was the problem. He is CEO of a tech company but he can't even plug in a thumb drive. He has said in the past he views engineering as "black magic" because he doesn't understand it.

<comment><USER3> This sounds really familiar.

In my experience the CEO/Founder can be classified as either of two types:

1) Great sales guy but has no deep concept of the technology his product is based on and other related aspects such as technical debt. Can be really hard to explain why something is more complicated than it looks to him, etc.

2) Great technical guy who can't sell. If you're not doing something conceptually new it can be difficult to acquire customers if your selling is weak.

I wonder if any one has encountered the unicorn CEO/Founder who's great at both of these things?

<comment><USER2> Either of those would be preferable to what our company had, which was 3) Poor sales guy with no concept of technology. Even the engineers were were begging for basic marketing concepts like focus groups, A/B testing, user personas, etc. We actually got in trouble for wasting time thinking about marketing instead of doing our jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1\. Work Flexibility and challenging problems to solve. I love the work/life balance in my workplace as it stands. Work doesn't interfere with my life on weekends and in evenings.

2\. There should be a clearer channel to communicate with the different stakeholders. I might have good product ideas, regardless of what my designation is (engineer, in my case). There should be an easier way to get feedback on ideas - good or bad.

3\. Lopsided workloads should be regulated. It will be nice if all teams were equally loaded. In my case, I have a very reasonable schedule, but in some of my friends' case they work really hard!

4\. Give people more responsibilities! Nothing teaches leadership like taking up ownership.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm just gonna answer the questions I feel comfortable with.

1) What are some of the best things you value at your job?

The clients I work for are huge, well known companies. The work is interesting, and I'm learning a lot from the other developers. They like to encourage professional growth.

3) Besides money what is the one thing you wish your organization would offer you?

Getting to work remotely as often as I'd like, which would be like 3-4 days a week. Higher matching for the retirement plan comes in second.

</comment><comment><USER6> 1) Rapport with Boss,Challenges, new technologies, value of participation, projects in pipeline, company's financial health

2) Putting less skilled people in middle mgmt on top of engineers (thats a big putoff bcoz we do check their profiles), measuring work more, valuing people that actually work more

3) Sports area, occasional hangouts, spare time for personal projects

4) News updates, taking reviews, giving feedback, more involved, valuing tech stuff, following future market trends

</comment><comment><USER7> 1)Flexibility 2)My organization is perfectly right.I don't like to change any thing. 3)i would like to have entertaining programs monthly in my organization.</comment>


Robot submarine finds "holy grail of shipwrecks" - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robot-submarine-finds-shipwreck-san-jose-carrying-17-billion-treasure/ <comment><USER2> "the Spanish galleon San Jose", "one of the most valuable shipwrecks in history", "lost more than 300 years ago", "might be worth up to $17 billion", "Colombia and Spain both say it belongs to them."</comment>


Why Most IT Departments Are Modeled After a DMV - <AUTHOR> http://redmondmag.com/blogs/it-decision-maker/2011/06/itil-it-dept-modeled-after-dmv.aspx

<comment><USER2> I've seen another cause change of aversion in big organizations: admin bonus pay was tied to application uptime. This created a hilariously dysfunctional situation where the admins locked the developers out of production and refused to deploy any code changes to production, including bug fixes, for several months. Senior leadership in the organization insisted this was the best model to ensure service stability. In the meantime agile competitors ran circles around them until the service became irrelevant, but just look at those uptime numbers!

</comment><comment><USER3> The problem is that IT gets inundated with tons of requests and everyone thinks their problem is more important than someone else's. The moment you start queuing up requests and trying to apply some order to the chaos is the moment IT's bad reputation develops. It's a thankless position for sure.

The article doesn't offer a solution, but points out what we already know. Even though the "cloud" is to supposed to eliminate the need for a big internal IT department, you still need someone to support your cloud environment, which takes you back to square one.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a well known problem - Joel has a great post on how procedures can kill creativity in his "Big Macs and the Naked Chef" post: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000024.html>

Slides 40 to 56 of the following NetFlix presentation could be a solution. Instead of adding more processes and procedures, hire good people who are effective at managing complexity:

[http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/05/other-companies-should- have...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/05/other-companies-should-have-to-read- this-internal-netflix-presentation/)

</comment><comment><USER5> "Simple, obviously non-destructive changes should have a way of being expedited in your organization."

One man's 'simple non-destructive change' is another's 'horrifying perversion of everything.'

Management is so slow to implement change because even the smallest changes can have lasting and far-reaching effects.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think that adherence to codified change control is really not the cause as this article suggests. These issues are management issues - claiming a framework for managing the chaos which results from bad management is poor root cause analysis.

Poor management results in both poor testing and underdeveloped project understanding.

If you have solid, well funded (with both money AND time) testing - the impact of change is minimal.

Further, the propensity for IT to say no stems from their understAnding of how poorly upper management allocates resources to IT as it is historicLly been seen as a liability/cost center rather than integral to business. (obviously this is far less true in silicon valley).

Clearly though, having good IT managers and staff are important and you find a lot less 'no' with good staff.

IT organizatiOns typically report to the CIO/CTO and are overshadowed by the CEO. If the CEO is of the typical Sales/Marketing DNA (or the "I used to be a developer - we don't need that much redundancy!" DNA, which can be worse) then they typically underfund all infrastructure projects.

Finally, IT gets the blame for all downtime, so it's their asses if the shitty managers decisions impact service.

So, ITIL is not the issue. People are. IT needs competent leadership to succeed.

<comment><USER7> _IT needs competent leadership to succeed._

And fewer TPS Reports.</comment></comment>