I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It - <AUTHOR> https://www.thrillist.com/eat/portland/stanichs-closed-will-it-reopen-burger-quest <comment><USER3> It's a "dead dove do not eat" feeling, but I kind of hoped I'd open the HN comments on this one and _not_ see a bunch of engineering solutions.

They all miss the point of the story, which is crushingly relevant to startups:

If you build a company with people you like and love, and circumstances outside of your control force it to scale in a hurry, those people you like and love are going to get hurt in the process.

That's not an engineering problem to fix. Stanich's didn't need an algorithmic order filling solution, it needed to lose the people that made it Stanich's. It was doomed no matter what. It was unscalable; it's unscalability is what imbued it with what Alexander liked about it.

The story begins and ends with Stanich's parents and the reason why they started the business in the first place for a _massive_ reason, one that seems to have gone over the heads of most HN commenters (and I'll bet also most people reading it via HN), and that's at least as depressing as the story itself.

<comment><USER4> Bang on. Right chord.

I think this article is a great advise to people running startups. The review is akin to raising outside money.

<comment><USER5> Couldn't agree more. It's a weird world where we want founders to be artisans and inventors, but the money can only think "scale now or die." There are other ways to build a sustainable large-scale business, methodically over time with profitability and a reputation of care for one's customers. But venture capital isn't aligned with this type of approach.

<comment><USER6> Yeah. No citation handy, but I came across an essay describing startups as essentially performing cheap R&D for VCs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Let's hear from a local about what really happened to Stanich's:

[https://www.metafilter.com/177718/Sometimes-its-better- not-t...](https://www.metafilter.com/177718/Sometimes-its-better-not-to-be- the-best#7564793)

"Anecdotally, I went to Stanich's a few weeks before the shutdown. They certainly weren't getting overrun with customers at that point. The place was maybe a quarter full on a Friday night, and it was filthy. Dust everywhere, dishes left on tables, stains on the floor, the crust on the ketchup bottles indicating it had been at least a week since anyone bothered wiping them. We watched our food sit at the pass for five minutes before a waitress could be bothered to serve us. The place had all of the hallmark signs of a restaurant going under."

"Did Kevin Alexander hurt Stanich's business by giving them the press? Maybe. But Kevin Alexander isn't responsible for running the restaurant. It isn't Kevin Alexander's job to clean the tables or the floor or the dishes or the ketchup bottles. Stanich killed Stanich's."

<comment><USER8> Do they really call the place where the orders are picked up "the pass"? :)

<comment><USER9> Yeah, it's short for "the pass thru". Older restaurants and diners used to cut a hole in the wall between the kitchen and dining area to pass food through. So yes it became known as "the pass". This is where your food sits and collects before it comes out to your table.

It's also where waitstaff pass tickets through to the kitchen. Lots of passing going on back and forth. Hence "the pass".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's hard to blame Kevin Alexander for this, because Steve Stanich played ball with the review, like most restaurants would. If he wanted to, he could have asked not to be featured in the list, and Alexander probably would have complied; otherwise, he could have done other things to make it clear to his customers that he wasn't interested in fulfilling the role the ranking carved out for him.

We see this effect in Chicago regularly, as I'm sure people in NY and LA do as well; there's a biennial ritual of naming the new "best burger" in the city (it's Kuma's! no, now it's Au Cheval! no, Au Cheval is franchising, time for something fancier --- Mott Street! no wait, the Loyalist†). It definitely "ruins" the restaurant, in the sense that it becomes basically impossible to eat there anymore. But it's hard to fault the businesses for going along! They're there to make a living for themselves.

To the commenters saying Stanich should simply raise its prices: there's a price ceiling for that burger. It's not a fancy chef burger; it's a standard burger shop burger executed well. It seems like the only real scaling option Steve Stanich has, if he's not willing to piss off part of his clientele (a reasonable option!) is to partner and franchise.

† _I 'm particularly irritated about Loyalist because their bar has one of the best amaro collections in Chicago_

<comment><USER11> > To the commenters saying Stanich should simply raise its prices: there's a > price ceiling for that burger. It's not a fancy chef burger;

If you have a five hour lineup for a burger, you need to raise your prices at least a little bit. You'll make more money overall, and your customers will be happy.

<comment><USER10> You can do that to a point, but if what you're serving is simply a well- executed diner burger, then, like I said, there's a ceiling. You can't charge $30 for that. Or, you can, but you'll create more problems than you'll solve.

This guy ate at 330 different burger restaurants. He has a finely-tuned metric for what a good burger is (his #3 is also a neighborhood place he grew up with). He's set up to appreciate what Stanich is actually accomplishing with his burger. The average foodie tourist is unlikely to arrive armed with that context; they'll pay $30 for the burger, expect a revelation, and leave unhappy.

<comment><USER12> I think this is the In-n-out effect - people who grew up on it see it as a vastly superior version of McDs, Wendy's etc for the same price, and are understandably effusive about this. But visitors expect something profound instead of a well executed fast food style burger.

<comment><USER13> Why would you ever expect more than a well executed fast food style burger from, well, a burger. That's literally what burger means as far as I'm concerned.

<comment><USER14> There are certainly non-fast-food restaurants that sell burgers.

To give a random example that comes to mind: the burger is one of the most iconic/famous things on the menu at the Spotted Pig, which has a Michelin star. You can't really compare it to McDonald's any more than you could compare any other dish to the fast food version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's an easy solution to having too much business : raise prices. I think this is one of A16Z's big insights into most businesses[1]: they don't charge enough.

If you look at the best restaurants in America like the French Laundry in Napa, they charge astronomical ridiculous prices and they still have reservations for months ahead of time. The oldest restaurant in Paris requires you put down a 400 euro deposit just to make a reservation! That these burger joint owners shut down instead of raising prices seems like a huge business mistake. They could have put 50% off coupons in the local newspaper or something if they wanted to make the place available to locals at reasonable prices.

[1] [https://a16z.com/2016/08/13/pricing/](https://a16z.com/2016/08/13/pricing/)

<comment><USER16> Raising prices would reduce the volume of customers, so the restaurant could maintain its quality standard, but Stanich felt his mission was to give back to the local community of regular diners. He didn't want to price out regular, repeat customers from the neighborhood and have only tourists eating there.

<comment><USER17> Others in this thread have suggested that the restaurant give locals a 'locals card', which would allow them to purchase food at a more reasonable price.

<comment><USER18> Burger pass. $30 for a burger pass. Gets you burgers for $4 for the rest of the year. or pay $20 for a burger now. You can secretly give out burger passes to locals when the tourists aren't looking.

<comment><USER19> I live in a touristy area with lots of great, but high demand and correspondingly high priced, restaurants.

Several of the local places do "frequent diner/visitor" loyalty cards, where the 5th or 9th meal (for restaurants), coffee (coffee shops), etc are free. This offsets the otherwise high prices charged on menu items.

Also, once a year (during the off season, of course), the local high school sells a booster card that gets a percent discount off for the entire year at numerous local places.

This is of course not unique to a touristy area, but I find myself using them far more often than in other places I've lived.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One of the sad things about this sort of list is that it's literally just one guy's opinion. Sure, he tried all the burgers. I'm sure all the burgers in the top 100 are good burgers, but there's probably very little separating them except some personal preference. For example, I probably wouldn't have rated this place as high because I don't care for grilled onions on burgers; I would much rather have raw onions.

The only reason anybody cares about that reviewer's opinions are because he has a platform and people are desperate to belong to something, anything.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, strangely enough, food and its accompanying culture is one of the most prevalent socially acceptable, encouraged biases. There's no objective, empirical stance you can take. Well, sure you can value food based on its nutritional content, but food and health science is continuously flipping back and forth on the facts and is overrun with pop-science, stirring confusing to no end. But most of all, your brain doesn't care about nutritional value once something is in your mouth.

"I don't like onions." "Oh, how can that be?" "Well, uh, they taste bad, I avoid them." "Well, I think they're great [because I like them]."

And yet these kinds of worthless opinions are given credence to no end in all levels of discourse from casual small talk to high-class cuisine.

<comment><USER22> "The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?"

― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

:)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Way back in the '80s, I worked in the kitchen at a little ice cream and lunch counter place called Great Midwestern. Ronald Reagan visited, and declared the blueberry ice cream "best ice cream in America" (to be fair, it was really excellent). This led to a big boom in business - and more importantly, mandatory visits by GOP presidential candidates in 1987 Iowa, with all the press circus that involved.

The owners took advantage of their good fortune and sold the business to someone else, who immediately started to "cut costs" by cheapening the ice cream. We went through two or three other owners, eventually landing on an out-of-state mega-dairy that just repackaged the cheap ice cream they sold in grocery stores - still sold as "best ice cream in America", the Ronald Reagan seal of approval.

Luckily, I could at least maintain standards in the kitchen, continuing to deliver all-vegetarian made from scratch soups daily and a nice selection of cold sandwiches made to order. But eventually, it died of neglect.

<comment><USER24> Which kid were you in the board cast?

<comment><USER23> You mean broadcast? Oh man, my manager wouldn't allow me out of the kitchen when the press was there, for fear of me shooting my mouth off at a candidate.

Luckily, the best takedown of a candidate was done by a customer - a PhD physics student who was a daily regular. At some point, GOP candidate Jack Kemp came in, with press in tow. He was touting his support for Reagan's "Star Wars" missile defense program. When he found an actual physics doctoral student, he asked what the student thought of it. Without blinking - and on national television - he said "The only physicists who think it will work are the ones getting paid to say it will work". It was beautiful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm a local. I've eaten a burger at Stanich's, way before any of this happened (apparently? I'm just now learning about it). It was fine, but calling it the best burger in America is extremely overselling it. Oregon has a law that you need to serve some kind of food if you sell hard liquor, and that's pretty much what their burgers felt like, an afterthought to fill OLCC regulations.

It was a place for old dudes to get a Budweiser and watch the basketball game, which perhaps made it one of the more authentic places in town (if that's all it takes, I know dozens of places in Minnesota you'll love), but definitely not the best place to get a burger.

If you want a much, much better burger in Portland, go to the Super Deluxe, or go to Yakuza and order theirs, or even Killer Burger, or really just about any other place. Portland is an extremely competitive food town that regularly has burger competitions ([http://www.portlandburgerweek.com/](http://www.portlandburgerweek.com/)), and there are dozens if not hundreds of places where you can get a burger that will be better.

I understand that the article isn't necessarily about this, but I'm having trouble walking away from what I know from direct experience is a ridiculous decision. To give a perspective on how ridiculous this is to me, if I was asked to name just Portland's 50 best burger places, I'm not sure Stanich's would be on it. It's not negligent because he unleashed the internet hordes on this place, it's negligent because the burgers there just weren't very good.

</comment><comment><USER26> "Too much love will kill you, just as sure as none."

It's an interesting reflection on the effect of the internet hordes that can be called up by a careless article or tweet. A similar thing happens to restaurants that receive the Michelin stars and to single individuals that end up being in more popular demand than can be sustained (this happens to some consultants). Not all of the typical defenses are available all the time, such as raising your prices or other ways of limiting the influx. Besides that not being fair to your original customers.

Hard problem, the internet mob is like a bunch of locusts, they devour that which they visit and leave it devastated.

<comment><USER27> > they devour that which they visit and leave it devastated.

Not disagreeing but the "they" is "us". You're not in a traffic jam, you are the traffic jam.

<comment><USER28> Agree. Whilst I think that people, or rather popularity, ruins everything, and whilst I'm frustrated that rather explore and discover things for themselves people would rather be told what's good and descend in a mob, I have to admit that I'm part of the problem: sometimes it's just easier.

<comment><USER29> You don't truly mean popularity literally ruins everything, correct? There are all kinds of things that are better because they're popular, or at least could not have been as great without their popularity. Smart phones, for instance: if they didn't get really popular, and there was not as much competition in the hardware and app space, the apps and hardware would not have gotten so much better so quickly.

Other ones off the top of my head: air travel (popularity has led to fairly low prices, even if the experience has suffered for those looking for bargain basement prices), computers, coffee, beer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Enjoyed the article. This reminds me a lot of what Groupon used to do to restaurants in the early days. They would just get slammed by hundreds of crabby people looking to one and done them for a half priced meal. Obviously as Groupon became more ubiquitous this lessened, but I do vividly remember going to a hot dog and burger place and finding the two owner-operators absolutely miserable as a line of 20 people formed out their door.

Back to the article: seems this is why Shake Shack succeeded and prospered with one store being inundated by customers. I'm sure this place has a lot of smart money wanting to use their name and recipe. Maybe not such a bad outcome?

<comment><USER31> Shake Shack began as a hot dog stand, but a hot dog stand created for a park being developed by a successful NYC restaurateur who owned a hospitality management company. If you're the sole developer of a new downtown park, and you own the only hotdog stand in that park, and you have lots of resources, it's going to be a success. When later there's the opportunity to develop the park further, you may pony up the cash to build a building to sell even more food. And later, when you see how successful it is, and you see the opportunity to branch out, you can do that, too.

Some restaurants become popular because people with money are in the right place at the right time, and not because it was an old-school authentic eatery discovered by a food writer and put on a top-foods-list.

<comment><USER32> Supply side economics dominates. There is no such thing as authentic demand.

<comment><USER33> Isn't the lesson here rather that monopolies, good management, and quality products are good for business?

<comment><USER34> Shake Shack is more about hyping just-ok products. There are better (and cheaper) burgers to be had without the megadosing of salt to compensate for a mediocre blend. They keep the seats filled because they worked the hype machine and the tourists flock there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This reminds me of Anthony Bourdain's visit to Venice and a local restaurant that only accepted being filmed if he didn't tell anyone the name or location of the place. It can definitely kill the business.

Off-topic question: how does a submission gets front page with just 3 points?

<comment><USER36> That can happen when the votes all occur in short succession.

<comment><USER37> Fascinating. Are you certain of this or is this conjecture? Feels like this could be exploited if true.

Maybe it's more sophisticated like votes must be from people with high karma points?

<comment><USER38> It can definitely be gamed. I always used to notice links to the nautilus science site would instantly get 6 or so upvotes. While pondering this was when I realised they were YC backed, and stopped wondering if they'd get called out on it....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> There is a local barbershop I have been going to for the past 4 years or so. Recently, they wanted to increase some business, so they were asking customers to leave a review. Loving the place and wanting to give back, I left a good review on Google. Fast forward a few weeks, and received emails from google saying my review has been viewed 100s of times. I used to be able to call and get an appointment the same day, or same afternoon even, but now it's difficult to be seen the same day. It's a bit of a bummer, and I'm not really sure how to solve it. It hurt me as a long time customer, but the shop is doing a ton more business now. Now I'm hesitant to do this for any other business I enjoy, even knowing this is a selfish feeling.

<comment><USER40> Ask to be put ahead of line for writing the review?

I'd have no shame about asking for some free haircuts as well. Your review is probably responsible for increasing their business 1.3-1.5x

<comment><USER41> Yep exactly or "this" as they say. The Market doesn't have to respond so slowly that prices stay the same even though demand went up. It doesn't have to charge a faithful customer more than an unfaithful one either.

It would be funny, although not culturally normal, to see companies start to review customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This reminds me of the first thing everyone asks when you tell them you just got back from Maui: "Did you go see the sunrise on Haleakalā?"

And, no I have not, because I don't want to wake up at 5:00am while on vacation and drive to a crowded parking lot to watch the sunrise in the cold with 80-100 strangers.

Why is it that we all have to have the same experiences?

<comment><USER43> This coupled with the articles I've seen on people on vacation all hoarding together to get the perfect picture of $insertMonumentOrSkylineHere. I remember one in particular that showed this gorgeous picture then showed what was behind the photographer and it was mob of people all taking the same picture. It honestly makes me sick. Those are the people that do thing to say they did them rather than for the experience IMHO.

If your life looks perfect on FB/Insta/Snap I just assume you are empty inside. Well "produce" our lives a little but some people go so far out of their way I just don't understand how people can follow that shit and not see how vapid/fake/BS it all is. Like serious this [0] fuck right off. I in no way endorse or support the backlash she got but it just all seems so stupid and wasteful to me.

[0] [https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news- life/blogge...](https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/blogger- bombarded-with-abuse-over-fake-pancakes-snap/news- story/3e3685be13cefbeeee33787bbb99d24c)

<comment><USER44> Yes. Similar to my child, who's interested in the process of the "art" she's scribbling rather than the result, and forgets about it soon after. But more self-conscious, as the process of taking common photos is a social act.

What if the mechanics of camera/social photo apps rewarded people for taking original photos?

[https://www.wired.com/2015/09/camera-wont-let-take-photo- eve...](https://www.wired.com/2015/09/camera-wont-let-take-photo-everyone- else/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Vox Media just published a video about the negative impact of Instagram and photo geo-tagging on nature sightseeing. The "Leave No Trace" organization now recommends that people not geo-tag their nature photos so as to limit the number of visitors to remote or sensitive nature areas.

"What happens when nature goes viral?" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itjc14Fm- gs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itjc14Fm-gs)

</comment><comment><USER46> Wow, I planned on only skimming the article because I figured it was clickbait... Loved every minute of this piece.

<comment><USER47> Same! I read the whole thing and I was genuinely sad by the end of it. Was not what I expected for a friday, but dam. It was a really good read!

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Who waits for 5 hours to get a hamburger? That's just silly. Either limit the hours in which burgers are served or hand out tickets allowing the holder to buy up to, say 4, burgers. The total amount served would be based on what the staff can reasonably prepare over a certain amount of time without going crazy. If you don't get a ticket, sorry, come back tomorrow. If you don't want burgers, you get to skip the burger line for a seat at the table where you may order anything else off the menu, just no burgers. After awhile, the hassle will cause people to stop trying and the crowds would be reduced to a sane number.

<comment><USER49> Same people who wait all night for a product launch.

Or all day to get into a convention panel.

Or all afternoon to get into a concert.

People get unreasonably obsessive about the things they love. It is known.

<comment><USER50> At the Comic Con in San Jose earlier this year, the lines for Stan Lee's autograph were insane. Hours backed up at the dedicated empty table starting at 9am 'cause he'll be there at 2pm [or whatever].

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Reminds me of a Nathan For You episode that lampoons the idea of ranking something as subjective as a burger.

Nathan convinces the owner of a burger joint in LA to go on a popular local radio station and promise that he has the best burger in LA, and offer $100 to anyone who eats there and disagrees. The comedy in this is apparent to pretty much anyone, but people will still refer to different restaurants as 'the best'.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A-wUs- fofs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A-wUs-fofs)

<comment><USER27> My mood has more effect on the pleasure I get from many things than their intrinsic nature. The first beer on holiday in a new country is the best beer you've ever tasted. A meal eaten in silence when you've been looking forward to it tastes divine.

Hell - my own narcissism even overrides most things. My own cooking is often my favourite thing in the world.

And on the other side of things - high expectations or rote habit often kill pleasures for me. If I try too hard to enjoy something it blows away like dust.

<comment><USER52> Context is king. Back when I was a consultant and flew all over the place a lot, there were more than a few times I landed at O'Hare sometime after midnight, got off the plane starving, and immediately beat it to the "open 24 hours" McDonalds in the food court and had a box of Chicken McNuggets that were, at that moment, the best meal I could dream of. I mean, who knew that damn mcnuggets could be absolutely heavenly under the right circumstances...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> They need to introduce a 'Local VIP' card. Basically if you are regular you get a card; if you aren't a regular they recognized and you are a semi-regular local, you show your drivers license and they can decide if you warrant a local VIP card.

If this doesn't solve it, then raise the price. Still too many people, and long waits - what a great problem - get a loan and open a second location or expand the first.

</comment><comment><USER54> People are lemmings.

Franklin's BBQ in Austin has hours long lines. It's very good brisket.

The hill country of Texas is FILLED with equally good brisket joints that don't have lines.

People who wait in line for 4 hours won't admit this. Cognitive dissonance kicks in, and Franklin's is unique and better than everyone else in their minds. Try telling a person that their Bose headphones are overpriced and overrated, and you will see this in action.

Lists are indeed stupid, but only because people aren't rational decision makers.

<comment><USER55> do you know of a pair of better/cheaper over the ear noise cancelling headphones?

<comment><USER56> Came to say the same thing. I'm not exactly an audiophile, but being able to listen to an audio book at less than 110% volume while walking next to a busy road is fantastic.

<comment><USER57> They're not exactly cheap, but the Bose QC headphones are superb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I eat at a few other particularly popular Portland restaurants where they don't take reservations and the wait can be several hours. Fortunately they will put your name on a list so you can go do something else in the meantime. It's easy to say this sitting behind my computer, but I think the only thing I would change if I were in the owners shoes, is to handle the crowds at the door better. Just because you have a long line doesn't mean you have to change anything about your business, go faster, be more stressed, etc. You would have to convey that to your employees as well.

<comment><USER59> When I visited Portland me and a friend tried to go to that ice cream spot everyone loves. Way too long so we went to the book store instead

<comment><AUTHOR> I went to that donut place that is a brand in itself. Kind of over hyped. Wish I spent the hour plus waiting in line at the technical branch of that Valhalla of book stores.

<comment><USER58> In case anyone tries to look this up, the standalone Powell's technical book store is now closed and has been merged into the main store on Burnside (mostly located on the top floor).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for letting us know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> There's a BBQ place here in the warehouse area south of the Phoenix airport similar to the described. Every day, at open, there's already 45-90 minutes of people in line. I've been by several restaurants that face similar issues.

In my mind, no restaurant is worth an hour wait before you can even get an order in. I'd just assume go to the #2/3 on the list over facing that.

On the one hand, it's nice when you find a place with really good food that makes it into your normal rotation. And you're really happy when they're always busy. But it's when you get a line out the door and around the block that you start to look elsewhere, and sometimes you miss it.

The Chino Bandito on 19th and Greenway was a bit like that at lunch for a long time... Of course I discovered the mediterranian place right next door to it (man, it takes nerve to open a restaurant right next to a hot spot). But the food there is really good (one of the better options in phx) and it's usually not too busy.

Of course I've seen the reverse too. A place with incredible food that you love that never seems to find it's regular footing. Often due to an awkward location more than any other reason I can think of. Just as often as I'd see a place I love blow up, I've gone back to a place I haven't been to in a year or two (usually in an area I'm just not near very often) only to find it's gone.

I don't know what the answer is, as commercial interests will usually corrupt what starts out really cool. I still use yelp, but the horror stories about their pushy sales really leaves me wondering.

</comment><comment><USER61> Everyone here is suggesting the "correct" business-y solutions, like "raise prices", "offer membership", etc -- but sometimes, you don't need sound economic theory, you just need a dirty hack that kind of works. Change the name and move a block over. Boom. Tourists gone. (You should be able, in this situation, to convince a lender that you can build a successful business, if liquidity is an issue.)

</comment><comment><USER62> The question of how businesses should treat long term customers is something I think about a lot. When I worked in a cable company call center I used to hear people complain about rate increases being unfair because they had been customers for such a long time. Which doesn't really matter in a duopoly. Compare that to a restaurants where there's so much competition that efforts to maintain loyalty seem almost futile.

</comment><comment><USER63> This is why I tell no one of my favorite spots. My second favorite bars, restaurants, and nature spots are where I meet coworkers, dates from apps, and acquaintances. Only close friends/partners/family get to know my true favorites - keeps them healthy as long as possible.

For example, I know of a cheap, quiet bar in the heart of a major west coast city. It's not perfect, but it's got wifi and cheap drafts and is relatively clean despite beinga dive.

I not only take no one there I don't really like, I will actively discourage people if someone notices it on Yelp when we're debating where to go.

(Luckily, it has a deceptively low Yelp rating due to the hordes of techies who think being told "buy something to get a key to the bathroom" is equivalent to being spit in the face so I can invoke the magical word "sketchy" and steer my party clear)

<comment><USER64> How will you feel if it goes out of business from not enough patronage or if the owner closes it because it's not meeting his financial requirements for retirement?

If the owner just wants a quiet cozy place that's certainly great but maybe the owner wants the place to be 3x as busy or maybe she want's to open a bigger place or 2nd place as soon as she gets enough people and funds.

<comment><USER63> >How will you feel if it goes out of business from not enough patronage or if the owner closes it because it's not meeting his financial requirements for retirement?

No place I've done this with has gone out of business yet. Keep in mind - <USER2> found it. Others will too.

<comment><USER64> Well, another POV is that some people like to help others. If the owner wants more business then helping them is spreading the word. Yea, it sucks you don't get to keep your special place but I'd rather help my friends achieve their goals than hold them back for my own selfish reasons.

If I had a friend running a restaurant or bar and they told me "don't spread the word I want this place to stay cozy" then of course I'd respect their wishes. If on the other hand they want to grow then I'd help them spread the word.

<comment><USER63> >Well, another POV is that some people like to help others.

Is causing my favorite bar to have an increase in customers, to the point that it's unable to deliver the good service I came to enjoy, a good thing? Said bar then starts to tweak things - they hire more staff, raise prices.

Next thing you know, the qualities that made people to flock to said bar are gone, customers die dow, and the owner is forced to lay people off and possibly is stuck with a bill for equipment or refurbishings they can't cover. This kills the bar.

I've seen it happen more than once.

Again, as I said: people before me found the bar, and people after me will too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Spoiler: he didn't actually kill the restaurant. He made it really popular, and it shut down for unrelated reasons.

Unless they're already too busy, 99% of small business owners would love to have this "problem" of huge lines out their door.

This reads as yet manifestation of the idea that because I'm in a place or I found something or I live somewhere, all the people who came after me are undeserving filth who are going to "ruin it". Same idea as anti-transplant, anti-foreigner, anti-gentrification, anti-tourist, anti-development, etc. I got here on this date, so that's a reasonable cut off for who "deserves" to be here.

As someone else in this thread put it: you're not _in_ the traffic jam, you _are_ the traffic jam.

</comment><comment><USER66> This kinda sums up how I feel about what the internet has done to ya. Life just feels sort of grey now. If someone recommends a restaurant or book that used to have value. If you sought out their recommendation and felt the same way it was kind of part of our shared experience. Now people are googling a book before I can even finish the title, they are checking the stars on yelp as I tell them about a great restaurant I discovered. By making all these experiences easy to discover all the magic was instantly removed. It's like turning on a cheat code that shows you where all the treasures in a video game are located, sure you can gather them all with ease, but you lost the whole point of playing.

<comment><USER67> I really like the way you phrased that - following someone's recommendation and it becoming part of your shared experience with that person.

I've felt this in the past, but hadn't heard it put into words like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Great article. A paragraph with the gist of what I enjoyed in it:

 _" Or is this just what we are now -- a horde with a checklist and a camera phone, intent on self-producing the destruction of anything left that feels real, one Instagram story at a time?"_

</comment><comment><USER69> Sorry, my engineering my mind craves a solution. Wouldn't forcing people into an asynchronous online/mobile queue be the best solution? You can favour verified locals if you want there, control exactly how many orders you take in, and nip any potential disappointments (leading to bad Yelp reviews) right in the bud.

I've trekked to enough "Best <X> in <Y>" places and been the "outsider" grumbling waiting outside in a giant lineup (or being at the front of the line at 9am), to know that it is a cherished experience while travelling, giving you a piece of local flare, and like many problems a focussed effort could help it scale properly.

<comment><USER70> I feel like the problem there is that it would require expending a lot of effort to solve what will probably be a temporary problem. That kind of system isn't going to be cheap, and the high traffic will only last as long as the list in question is popular. As soon as another 'best burger place' comes along, all that traffic is probably going to die down, and now you're a small diner left with this complex expensive system.

It reminds me a lot of the dilemma facing graphics card makers recently, wherein the cards keep getting bought up by cryptocurrency miners. If they raise prices, they're pricing out of the regular customers who will stick around after the cryptocurrency mining dies down, and if they raise their production capacity too much then they will be left with massive overcapacity with things die down.

<comment><USER69> I'm thinking this could be a solution that various businesses could adopt temporarily. And not a turnkey solution for each business.

These stories also keep coming out of various businesses in Europe with the influx of Chinese and Indian tourists, eager to pay them but the businesses have no infrastructure to "shape" the inflow of customers.

If this is indeed a big problem, this is also a big opportunity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> The saddest thing about this link is a huge fucking spammy email popup. Would downvote if I could.

<comment><USER72> That's absolutely not the journalist's fault.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> What a great, thoughtful, introspective piece. How rare. I do miss Stanich's and was actually unaware of what happened. Great place - I hope he can work it out.

</comment><comment><USER74> If it is true local restaurant or pub you should have locals coming regularly. It means they have reservations for whole year on same time at some day. This is true for Prague pub called U Zlateho Tygra. That pub is in city center and in every turist book. Locals have booked tables all the days for whole year. Tourists can sit if locals don't appear or between 3 and 6pm before locals come.

</comment><comment><USER75> See "The E-Myth Principle is Still Alive and Flourishing" at [https://www.forbes.com/sites/martinzwilling/2013/04/25/the-e...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/martinzwilling/2013/04/25/the- e-myth-principle-is-still-alive-and-flourishing/#667255625b30)

"The E-Myth ('Entrepreneurial Myth') is the mistaken belief that most businesses are started by people with tangible business skills, when in fact most are started by 'technicians' who know nothing about running a business. Hence most fail...Let me assure you that in my experience, ...I still see too many businesses started by technicians who haven't acquired the basic skills or knowledge, or still assume that business acumen is a minor part of the new business equation."

</comment><comment><USER76> Some restaurants just can't handle the hype. I just read about a family who returned their michelin star [1] for the sake of their own relationships and ultimately their business.

> "It got to the stage where it was difficult juggling family life with > working five nights a week later in the evening and also doing breakfast for > residents, doing all the prep work, keeping on top of the paperwork and > admin," said Kathryn.

I admire folks like this who have their priorities straight. If they were to scale up, they'd most likely loose the charm that earned them the star to begin with. Charm seems to be exclusive to smaller establishments, in this context.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/nov/16/checkers- restau...](https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/nov/16/checkers-restaurant- michelin-star)

</comment><comment><USER77> In my experience, rarely do these "best [food item] in [location]" lists (even the more reputable ones) deliver anything better than a marginally better dish. Sometimes even a lesser one because the author's personal preferences were different from yours or you craved a particular taste that was underrepresented in the food.

I don't think I've ever gone out to one of these places and had my expectations matched - you basically wait in line for so long that your mind convinces you it was better than everything else to justify the wait.

Living in NYC made me shake my head every weekend; seeing people lined up multiple hours for "the best" weekend brunch when there were countless top- notch options right down the street was just incomprehensible - it's a cultural and social/psychological gimmick to just be at the top spot.

</comment><comment><USER78> Really interesting article. This is the link to the yelp review: [https://www.yelp.com/biz/stanichs- portland-5?osq=stanich](https://www.yelp.com/biz/stanichs- portland-5?osq=stanich)

IMO, it's unfair to blame it on the guy who recommended the restaurant. There are thousands of restaurants that dream to have it happen. Think of it like this, I write an app and Mark Z shares it on his twitter. Sure, the traffic can kill the app, but I have to find a way to maintain it and do my due diligence to make sure the site will run smoothly when the user base increases.

It's too bad what happened. It does appear the real problem was family issues and not having great business practice. NOT the author/article.

 __I want to include the fact that burgers are probably my second favorite food after a Nigiri set.

</comment><comment><USER79> It makes a great point about mass tourism in general and what it does to the local population.

</comment><comment><USER80> When I went for training at Qantel Computers in Hayward California long ago for a few weeks, we desperately searched for decent food in the area and even bought a hot plate to make our own food in our hotel room (which we later were told to remove cause that wasn't legal at the time). On our very last night, our handlers told us about a family owned Mexican restaurant down the street. We ate there that night and it was the best Mexican food I have ever had.

"Why didn't you tell us about that place weeks ago!", we cried. "Cause every time we do, when we go there to eat, we have to stand in line behind guys like you and can't get in", they said.

</comment><comment><USER81> "The Tragedy of the Commons":[https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/tragedy_of...](https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/tragedy_of_the_commons.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER82> There is a simple way to solve this problem.

A special startup can he inacted to solve this frequent problem.

We'll not use any special card or ID. Showing ID for a burger seems invasive and special loyality card, we can forget to carry it.

Blue accounts are loyal customers.

Green ones are tourist/one timers.

1\. Use colored money concept.

2\. If a customer sends money from their mobile wallet more than X times, their account is colored for this particular merchant.

If merchant has set a rule, if payment is > X times / Y dollars, then apply 50% discount for A duration/B payments.

3\. Anyone not confirming with app, doesn't qualify for any discount.

Cash + app will also be supported.

Now simply adjust the prices to reach the demand you can keep up with.

</comment><comment><USER49> You know, I'll bet a lot of you are thinking: "Oh, this is just a scalability problem." :-)

The key is that Mr. Stanich wants to preferably serve his locals. This rules out simple approaches like raising prices to astronomical levels or requiring reservations a month in advance.

A ticketing system (or reserve in-person day-of), plus a set of reserved tables for locals, seems like the most workable of the approaches here. The franchising option also looks tempting, but I expect that little of what got this burger to #1 would survive the transition.

Hey, any chance we can get Mr. Stanich to open a second location down here in Santa Clara? Asking for a friend. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER83> This is another aspect of frictionless criticism. Being able to tell the whole wide world 'this is the one bestest burger in America', EVEN IF IT'S TRUE, is greatly different from just knowing it for yourself. Things don't scale the way internet attention can scale.

And nothing a 'market' or price-juggling can do, will change that. If you simply jack the price until it's so high that the sales unit volume is the same as it should be, you've completely changed everything in the dynamics of the business and its relationship to its context. You can't CURE this with markets.

</comment><comment><USER84> >"It was always delicious, but never really crowded," he said. "But then it started appearing on all these national lists, and now, no matter the day, you've got to get there before 11am if you don't want to wait two hours."

Like Knaus Berry Farm here in Miami, which opens only for the season. They sell these cinammon rolls which I shit you not people line up for since 4am to get them.

I went one day at 10am thinking everybody is at work; nope - still full with a line curving out in the sunny sidewalk.

Their food is good but not "wait in the hot Miami sun for four hours" good.

</comment><comment><USER85> This is similar to why I hate when TV shows feature my favorite local restaurants. They either create so much traffic the quality of the food takes a dip, or they get so busy it's just obscene and the only people who go there are tourists checking off some Guy Fieri bucket list. I'm sure some owners don't mind so long as money keeps coming in, but boy does it suck for the community who basically lose a quality eatery to novelty.

</comment><comment><USER86> Here what I would have done if I were Stanich (and didnt experience those personal family problems)

If you're a regular / local / I know you. you get service as normal.

If youre an out of towner coming here on the basis of the review then you must book in advance. and we only book as many of these per day as we can handle. If your an out of towner and just turn up, and we're not booked-out, or happen to be under capacity then you can dine as normal.

</comment><comment><USER87> I wonder if raising prices quite a bit would have helped.

<comment><USER88> Not likely. The issues were far deeper than cash flow.

The new business was primarily one and done visitors anyway. By the time you've made the trip to the foodie Mecca of Portland and traveled across town to try the "country's best burger" would you really be deterred by a $15 price tag vs $10? How much would you have to raise the price to make that work? How do you do this without forever alienating your loyal local customers once you have successfully chased the hordes away?

<comment><USER89> There is a fancy burger place near me that only serves a fixed number of customers per day. It is famous for the chef kicking people out for bringing children, dressing disrespectfully, and being offended for other random reasons. They gave out a membership card that allowed regulars to be seated immediately and avoid the daily limit.

<comment><USER90> That seems like a really smart way of handling it.

There are a bunch of restaurant types which just aren't that elastic to changing demand; basically anything which has a longer preparation time and is expensive enough that you can't afford to just massively overprovision. Thinking like slow-roasted meats, most soups/chilis, or fancy pastries like croissants, yeast-raised donuts, etc.

Basically any place that's serving that stuff (and legitimately making it in- house vs warming it up from frozen like a chain) is going to be done when they run out for the day. So handing out cards to locals to skip the line would be a great way of not alienating your loyal customer base.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> I'd establish two lines at my newly famous hamburger place.

The express line would be paying $50/burger. The normal line would be paying the regular price. I'd have signage saying why this was the case, telling people I thought the traffic was crazy but what are you gonna do, and inviting people to come back some other time once the hubbub died down.

</comment><comment><USER92> Are there similar stories of promising tech companies that achieved overnight fame but couldn't handle it and shut down?

</comment><comment><USER93> Reading between the lines, poor Stanich had a close family member go deep with heroin, if not succumb. That's a burden that's just awful, and completely separate from critic damage.

I've found that the rest of a top 10 list is exceptional as well, but usually doesn't have the crazy lines that poor #1 has.

</comment><comment><USER94> Folks probably just scroll to '#1 the country' and decide to go

I wonder if this outcome could have been avoided if the list wasn't numbered, or was categorized in some other way - would an 'x best burgers' without a ranking prevent one place getting mobbed?

</comment><comment><USER95> My thought for a solution to the food-tourist problem in cases like this is that if you've got ID that says you're local, great you're welcome. If not, well we've got 3-5 slots/day for those...

</comment><comment><USER96> Seems like an easy fix is to only sell prepaid burger cards. Set some number - 10x, 20x, etc. the cost of a burger.

Keeps the locals able to frequent regularly and highly discourages anyone coming just to cross it off a list.

</comment><comment><USER97> It's not just burger joints. I tremble every time I see my town mentioned positively knowing that too much publicity will drive out the people who made it a great place with ghastly land valuations.

</comment><comment><USER98> I found the best extended stay in Denver and I've been avoiding reviewing it. The last thing I'd want to do is bring it to the attention of the people who ruin the other motels of that variety in the area.

</comment><comment><USER99> Reminds me of this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17378673](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17378673)

Too much success too quick is always bad I guess.

</comment><comment><USER100> easy solution - serve only reservations and limit amount of reservations

this is doable without raising prices and hey you can have even quota of reservations for regulars

</comment><comment><USER101> Unpopular opinion: Good at cooking, bad at business.

</comment><comment><USER102> Unclosable popup.

<comment><USER103> [https://i.imgur.com/Fz8RwgQ.png](https://i.imgur.com/Fz8RwgQ.png)

Or you could just click the x

<comment><USER102> I didn't see it, but you got to admit that they purposefully made it hard to find by putting it there, in that color considering the background.

Even though I found the X now, I won't read the article, just on principle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> Uh temporary surge pricing??, anyone !?

</comment><comment><USER105> So restaurant reviews can be weaponized now, huh?

Hey everybody, tell all your friends and Yelp and foodie blogs that the BLT Prime by David Burke restaurant in the Washington, D.C. Trump® International Hotel has TOTALLY UNBELIEVABLE hamburgers!!!

[https://dc.eater.com/2017/9/19/16330572/trump-dover-sole- dav...](https://dc.eater.com/2017/9/19/16330572/trump-dover-sole-david-burke- dinner-blt-prime)

</comment><comment><USER106> The title is too clickbaity for me to read it. Tl;dr?

<comment><USER107> The article is worth your time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> :D

I would visit this place a couple times per year.

It was a place you took someone to for a special time. And when done that way, as it was done for me (Thanks Joe P), the need to respect that seems obvious, built right in.

With life being how it is sometimes, it has been a while.

Damn. This story makes me sad.

<comment><USER108> What's the deal? Don't you guys have little secrets around town that you kind of want to respect, have a little bit of culture around?

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> >> Apparently, after my story came out, crowds of people started coming in the restaurant, people in from out of town, or from the suburbs, basically just non-regulars. And as the lines started to build up, his employees -- who were mainly family members -- got stressed out, and the stress would cause them to not be as friendly as they should be, or to shout out crazy long wait times for burgers in an attempt to maybe convince people to leave, and as this started happening, things fell by the wayside. Dishes weren't cleared quickly, and these new people weren't having the proper Stanich's experience, and Steve would spend his entire day going around apologizing and trying to fix things. They might pay him lip service to his face, but they were never coming back so they had no problem going on Yelp or Facebook and denouncing the restaurant and saying that the burgers were bad.

Poor management is what caused the shutdown. Stanich knew about the problems and didn't fix them. Instead he went around apologizing about the problems that he shoulds have fixed in the first place.</comment>


Research reveals de-identified patient data can be re-identified - <AUTHOR> http://newsroom.melbourne.edu/news/research-reveals-de-identified-patient-data-can-be-re-identified <comment><USER2> I think that this article[1] (written by the researchers themselves) gives a better overview of the paper and context.

The important context is that there's legislation being discussed at the moment that would criminalise re-identification of published government data[2]. This link provides the important context that this legislation would only achieve a silencing of researchers, rather than actual protections.

[1] [https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/the-simple- process-o...](https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/the-simple-process-of- re-identifying-patients-in-public-health-records)

[2] [https://www.attorneygeneral.gov.au/Mediareleases/Pages/2016/...](https://www.attorneygeneral.gov.au/Mediareleases/Pages/2016/ThirdQuarter/Amendment- to-the-Privacy-Act-to-further-protect-de-identified-data.aspx)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Research for those interested: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.05627](https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.05627)</comment>


American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem - <AUTHOR> https://www.1843magazine.com/dispatches/the-daily/american-children-are-drowning-in-selfesteem <comment><USER2> What I've noticed common among a lot of Americans is a fear/inhibition of speaking the truth, mostly to not have a confrontation.

I witnessed an example of this in a music performance of a teen rock band.

In this performance, the band sucked overall. The guitarist didn't know what he was doing. But everybody (guardians, parents, teachers, friends) just keep saying, "Great performance brah, awesome shit, good going guys" etc.

While this feedback raises self-esteem with positive feedback, there is no criticism of where they failed...at all!! Who's going to tell them, "Hey, your timing on the G-C chord switch sucked"?

When these same kids go for a "real" performance/audition, they suck at it, fail miserably and thus causing anti-social behaviors, anger, and in extreme cases, suicides.

I personally believe in a system of constructive criticism where positive feedback is necessary for the kids, yet someone actually tells them that they can do better in this, this and this area.

Irrationally high/low self-esteem is a bane for competition.

<comment><USER3> There's a time and a place for critique, and immediately after a performance is neither. Only a jerk with truly low self-esteem would think that it was appropriate to offer unsolicited criticicism of the performance skills of a teenager in a rock band to their face at the performance.

If it's their music instructor, maybe. But again, that's not really the place. Next lesson would be the right time and place to get that feedback.

<comment><USER4> Are you an American? I'm European, and maybe this is just personal experience / a personal anecdote, but whenever I've had conversations with an American I found that they tend to always be really excited and then casually ignore any further communication. It's much harder to figure out for me what an American _actually_ means vs say a Belgian or a British person. No point in being an open person if you're only touting positive things.

I agree with your statement in principle, but at the same time, people need to be willing to give some meaningful comments. If I'm trying to break through in a rock band, I want criticism so I can figure out how to improve. Being told "Good performance brah", if you know you sucked, sucks.

<comment><USER5> What country are you from? In my experience Americas fall somewhere in the middle in terms of directness, compared to European countries.

I lived in the UK for a few years and found Brits very hard to read / resistant to confrontation. On the other hand, I'm married to a Spaniard, and when I'm over there, it's sometimes a bit uncomfortable how direct and open people are.

<comment><USER4> Belgium. It's not necessarily the directness that I mind, it's the fact that often people are (excuse my language) full of shit. They say A, but actually mean B. Which is a trait, for example, the British have as well, but one I seem to understand a lot better than when I'm dealing with Americans.

<comment><USER6> Americans have a reputation for saying things like "let's do lunch sometime" as a sort of vague statement of agreeableness and intention to stay in contact, whereas, let's say, Swedish people would consider that to be a straightforward intention to book a lunch date.

<comment><USER7> > Swedish people would consider that to be a straightforward intention to book > a lunch date

I don't know Swedish from Martian, but I'm surprised the language doesn't have "pleasantries". They seem near universal.

I know that I (as an American) have had uncomfortable experiences with translated Chinese for instance, assuming someone was asking impertinent questions when it was really just them being polite.

<comment><USER8> I'm Swiss and I think it's kind of the same thing. Don't look there for pleasantries. Hey Buddy! Hmm why iz zhat strange person calling me a 'Buddy', I don't even know him!

I think most germanic languages are just much more focused on information content. On the other hand I can get into deep discussions with strangers, even disagreeing with each other, but not get emotional in any way, actually even enjoying the exchange. With Americans I feel there's a mountain of smalltalk and pleasantries to conquer until you can start being sincere. However that might also just me not understanding the culture enough to do that correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The author seems to be attacking common core ("so many different ways to think about simple addition") but then links it to self-esteem, without actually showing the connection. How does he know the math curriculum was designed to boost self-esteem?

Also, the ability to do rote sums is not the same as understanding math. So the fact that his son "could add up already" doesn't mean much, at least out of context.

<comment><USER10> How math curriculum boost self-esteem? You mean like being able to calculate precise predictions of any model of any discipline? In what way do you think that can possibly influence the self-confidence of anyone?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If self-esteem is so high, why is suicide so common?

Giving someone self-esteem doesn't mean letting them whine all the time. Your swimming instructors saying "C'mon dude, stop complaining, let's get on with it!" IS giving the kid self-esteem!

Teaching many ways to add is important because not all kids are going to be able to learn the same way at that age. Different methods are going to "click" for different students. And those extra ways of adding aren't useless. In fact I spent a fair bit of time in college math and computer courses learning new ways to count, let alone add.

<comment><USER12> The argument I've heard is that children are not learning how to deal with failure or criticism early enough to develop a basic toolkit for it.

<comment><USER13> If you need this codified in the modern US media cycle, just take a look at the Corey Feldman / Today Show situation. He was terrible on appearance #1, the internet let him know (as it does, both in tempered and vicious ways) and he claimed he was being bullied, then came back and did appearance #2 which was even musically worse than the first one. Then he thanks everybody for the support, rather than pay attention to the valid criticism that he has not made a bit of improvement since his Howard Stern performance in 1992.

Calling a terrible work product terrible isn't bullying.

<comment><USER14> I think kid celebrities live in their own bubble and not representative of the larger population of children.

<comment><USER13> The man is 45 years old now. He's not a child anymore so it's reasonable to stop treating him with child gloves, or, to the point, coddling his self- esteem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _At the heart of the problem is an educational ethos that prizes building > self-esteem over academic attainment._

I'm not going to argue this assertion, because I think it's a valid one, but I would like to give it context that the author is seemingly lacking:

As a generalization spanning several decades, parents aren't interested in being parents and in turn the provenance of their responsibilities at home - discipline, ethics, morals, codes of conduct - have been transitioned to that of either the School System or LEOs in more extreme cases.

I submit it's nearly impossible to be both an academic task-master and an emotional development coach at the same time and expect both of them to excel in all scenarios where the provider is a Civic Organization of some sort (e.g. school system).

After all, it's a bunch of adults promoting the self-esteem bandwagon for these past few decades, not the kids. I wholly encourage Mr. Astill to join his local PTA and begin to address his long-term concerns with the root of the problem. I say this rather tongue in cheek, because actually doing something about the issue in one's one neighborhood is a _lot_ harder than sitting down and writing about it (as a writer, believe me I know).

<comment><USER15> This touches on something nobody wants to acutally acknowledge or talk about. There is some subconscious shifts taking place - marriage later or not at all, fewer kids per household, etc - but fundamentally raising children is a _ton_ of work. It is its own job, possibly in a class of its own in difficulty or at least rivaled by almost any other profession.

But society and culture just expects the job of you. Do it, don't be trained to do it, and probably worse of all do not organize society around promoting those who are best at it. In any other disciple if you are amazing at it you should expect gainful employment carrying it out. And there is a dramatic difference between _parenting_ and _caretaking_ or _teaching_. And even those have really bad real world metrics to gauge success, given by how often sitters or teachers can perform poorly.

But you don't solve this problem when you shove down every adults throat how not having children means they are a failure as a person, combined with the expectation that they should both be good parents _and_ have an independent second (or first) career.

Being a parent is its own job. Throughout history, humans have consistently dedicated tremendous amounts of absolute hours of its adult population to the raising of children. Societies often organized around the subjugation of an entire sex to do the job. It is crucial for the wellbeing and long term prosperity of current and future generations people accept that reality.

</comment></comment><comment> alex- > American children came top at thinking they were good at maths, but bottom > at maths. For Korean children, the inverse was true: they considered > themselves poorer at maths than the children of any other country, but were > the best.

This really stood out to me because I often found my own examination results puzzling. I would ace exams that I thought I failed and just pass ones I was sure I had done well in.

This has lead me to believe that the more I know about a subject, the more I know how little I actually know about it and the greater respect I have for subject as a whole.

This might explain why children who are not great at maths might think they are. Not due to an inflated self esteem but because "knowing what you don't know" is a part of the learning process.

<comment><USER16> I like to have short names for similar things which are described by different people, in this case the name is likely to be Dunning–Kruger effect [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

<comment> alex- Thank you!

<comment><USER17> Which is almost the opposite of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting anecdote. As a father I feel nearly the exact opposite so I'll share my opinion.

On academics, I want my kids to learn how to learn. And to love to learn. I want them to learn to be persistent, have mental fortitude, be formidable, take risks, be collaborative, and not be afraid to fail. They should learn to be productive in whatever aspect of society they end up in. I want them to be happy. Lives are short. Childhoods are shorter. Striving to be the best at math and science academically gets a "meh" sort of reaction from me.

Yes we need those skills, and raw academic achievement is an interesting measurement, but, I'd like to see some convincing stats that it holds a causal relationship to national productivity per capita and GDP. I'm guessing that would be the goal of an education, in terms of the economy.

</comment><comment><USER19> It is ironic the author uses a swimming metaphor:

 _" If their instructors had focused on making them feel good about swimming, instead of on making them swim, they could have drowned."_

Swimming is almost natural. Most mammals can swim with out training (even my cat knew how to swim). Fear on the other hand is what leads to drowning. You don't need formal training in swimming to stay a float. You need to not be afraid of the water.

On personal level for the downvoters as to why this is such a crappy metaphor is I know several adult family members that do not know how to swim and one of them my wife and just trained recently.... it required lots and lots of confidence boosting and reassuring.

So the instructor actually does need to make them "feel good" aka comfortable with the water.

The author could have picked so many other metaphors where state of mind plays less of a role.

<comment><USER20> That's nonsense. As a kid I was not afraid of water. I could dive 10 meters down without fear. But I still couldn't swim without instruction.

<comment><USER19> Maybe so. But the author says _" drown"_ not swim. I presume you knew how to float if you weren't afraid of the water?

I have seen adults that refuse to take lessons because... because... they are afraid.

So regardless I still say it is pretty crappy metaphor.

<comment><USER20> I didn't know how to float either.

<comment><USER21> You're an N of 1. When I was learning to swim I remember a lot of kids bawling their eyes out when first going into the pool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> We actually want more self-efficacy: [http://seliger.com/2008/05/01/self- efficacy%E2%80%94oops-the...](http://seliger.com/2008/05/01/self- efficacy%E2%80%94oops-there-goes-another-rubber-tree-plant/) rather than self- esteem. Which is a topic that's been bandied about in the media for a while yet hasn't really taken hold.

<comment><USER23> I really like the idea of this concept, as it helps guide people to understand what's important to them. Having a grounding sense of goals, principles, and boundaries enables people to cultivate a productive self-worth that can be very powerful.

I feel like a lot of Hacker News readers can probably relate to this, as I've sensed a lot of self-directed joy has come from their time spent learning and using computers.

Looking back, other people's people evaluating/encouraging/criticising my math skills, swimming abilities, or self-esteem has done much worse for me than individually realising what's important to myself and wanting to work towards that. I really hope that we culturally have a change in attitude towards these things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The grading scale at my daughter's elementary school keeps moving more and more towards not having any sort of discernable outcomes. The possible grade as of her most recent report card are:

Basic skill Progressing towards goal Meets goal Exceeds goal

And in several subjects (it grows every semester), Es are not awarded at all. I am not sure I understand the point of this system.

<comment><USER25> Because it's not meant to rank children against each other. It's meant to tell the parents and students how they are doing compared to the standard. If they have not met the goal, then something needs to change. If they have met the goal or exceeded it, there's not much to worry about.

It's not like kids really learn much in elementary school anyways. Which is itself a problem, but a different one.

</comment></comment><comment> a-no-n "Self-esteem" is a nice way of saying American children are becoming more arrogant with fewer skill, lower performance and less experience than ever. Adults, teachers and mentors need to do more to put them in their place, for their own good. Respect is earned, not entitled to "special snowflakes."

</comment><comment><USER26> While they didn't turn out to learn much in math, they did learn how to sit still at a desk, which is perfect preparation for a later office job. At least the parents got a break and someone else to take care of their kids for a few hours each day.

</comment><comment><USER10> "...the country's elementary schools seem strangely averse to teaching children much stuff" <\- If you really really want to understand why this happens, you should investigate the subject: "Cultural War"

</comment><comment><USER27> The article mentions that too much effort is going into teaching arithmetic by different means. Is that really necessary? Once kids get addition, subtraction, and multiplication as useful operations, and know what division is for, that kind of covers it. (Long division by hand is such a clunky operation, and done so much better by calculators, it may not be worth teaching any more.)

 _" I like having low self-esteem. It makes me feel special"_ \- Jane Lane, in _Daria_.

<comment><USER28> Long division was probably the first algorithm I've learned. If you don't think that learning how to manipulate abstractions by applying algorithms is a usefull thing… well why not just skip arithmetics too, calculators are good with this one.

<comment><USER27> I had a mechanical calculator of the hand-crank, moving carriage type to play with as a kid. This gives an insight into how multiplication and division really work.

There's a carriage with two rows of numbers, a full keyboard (10 keys per column), a hand crank, and a second crank which moves the carriage sideways one notch. Moving the carriage is a shift by a power of 10.

To multiply, you clear everything, then punch one number into the keyboard. The buttons lock down and stay down. When you turn the crank one turn, the number in the keyboard is added to the upper row on the carriage, and the lower row has 1 added. So to multiply 25 x 25, you punch 25 into the keyboard. Turn the crank once, and you have 25 in the upper row and 1 in the lower row. Turn the crank five times, and you have 125 in the upper row and 5 in the lower row. Then shift the carriage one notch right. Turn the crank once, and you add 250 to the upper row, and 10 to the lower row. One more crank turn, and you have 25 x 25 = 650 in the upper row, and 25 in the lower row. This makes it very clear that multiplication is repeated addition with shifting.

Division is repeated subtraction. You clear everything and enter the dividend. Turn the crank once to add the dividend to the top row on the carriage. Then clear the keyboard, clear the lower row, and shift to division mode. In division mode, turning the crank _subtracts_ from the top row while adding 1 to the bottom row. Now enter the divisor in the keyboard. Move the carriage so that the high digit of the divisor and the high digit of the dividend line up. Turn the crank. This subtracts the shifted divisor from the dividend and adds 1 to the quotient. If the dividend goes negative, a bell rings and 9999 appears at the left end of the top row, indicating you subtracted too much and went negative. That's OK; just turn the crank one turn backwards, the leading 999.. changes to 000 and the bell rings again. You now have one digit of quotient. Shift the carriage left one row and repeat. Each shift gives one more digit of quotient. When the carriage is back to the full left position, the lower row is the quotient and the upper row is the remainder. This makes it very clear that division is repeated subtraction with shifting.

This is clearer than manual long division, with all that trial divisor and guessing stuff. It reflects the basic fact that division really is just repeated subtraction with counting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It doesn't seem like this is a problem with self-esteem. The problem is that American schools don't have good educational standards or trained teachers. In the countries that rank ahead of us in the international assessments, even elementary school teachers need to have education degrees. That is not the case in most American school districts (just need a teaching certificate). Teaching is also a more highly respected profession in other countries.

It's pretty much expected in the US that kids don't really learn much of anything in school until they get to 8th grade. I certainly think we could introduce more advanced math concepts at earlier grades instead of taking five years to cover basic arithmetic.

That's not to say that I would like us to adopt a system like that of China or South Korea, in which students are drilled from morning to night on mostly rote tasks and then pitted against each other in a gladiatorial competition called the National College Entrance Examination. If there was a better way of squashing children's natural curiosity and love of learning, I can't really envision it.

<comment><USER29> 1\. I don't know what education degrees look like in other countries, but I highly doubt more education majors in the US would solve anything without first overhauling that curriculum and making it more demanding.

2\. Is there any factual evidence for this often-repeated stereotype about Asian children having less curiosity and love of learning than American ones?

<comment><USER25> 1\. I'm sure they are more rigorous than the education major in the US, which is pretty much a joke. I agree that the way we train teachers has to be revamped.

2\. I never said that Asian students are less curious. From interacting with Chinese and South Korean classmates, they are just as intellectually curious as their American peers. I just don't think the East Asian model of education is very good at fostering individual engagement and understanding. It's heavily focused on rote memorization and is definitely "teach to the test". I would welcome a study on it with a good analysis. Don't really known how you would measure it though. South Korea also has the highest suicide rates in the developed world, and much of it is concentrated in those under 18. So there are plenty of reasons why we would not want to adopt it here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The author states "Nor is [poor education performance in America] due to high levels of inequality: the proportion of American children coming from under- privileged backgrounds is about par for the OECD."

I'd be interested to see a citation for this claim; I think it's either misleading, or things have changed a lot over the last 5-8 years (which I doubt). What I recall from my time working in education research, looking at the international tests including PISA, is that average scores from the USA are brought down by the fact that the bottom-performing kids do so much worse than elsewhere, which if you look at the way public school funding works in America, makes a lot of sense (i.e. wealthy district = higher taxes = more funding for public education).

The problem isn't that America has _more_ low-SES students than other places, it's that we (speaking as someone currently living in America) do a worse job educating them. I'm not saying that the problem is _only_ inequality, but it is definitely part of the picture.

</comment><comment><USER31> There's a great book called "The Collapse of Parenting" [1] that talks about this. It obviously expands on these ideas, but here are a few notes: \- Many parents confuse self-esteem with courage \- To be courageous means to recognize the risks and your own limitations, but you find the resolve to move forward anyway. Bloated self-esteem means you aren't aware of your deficiencies \- The right kind of humility means you recognize your own shortcomings and you are better prepared to take risks

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Parenting-Hurt-Treat- Grown-U...](https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Parenting-Hurt-Treat-Grown- Ups/dp/0465048978)

</comment><comment><USER32> Of course, the idea of children with low self esteem has been rising in correlation of increased usage of social media. I would add that the rates of anxiety are also related the high usage rate of social media users.

</comment><comment><USER33> To grok self-esteem, one must grasp eudaemonia.

Self-esteem is reliance on your own power to think, judge, and act; regardless of what others may feel, say, or threaten. If some snowflakes cannot stand being judged by others, or cannot judge themselves, they do not have self- esteem.

As for post-modern "teachers" who believe that unfounded praise, unrelated to achievement, is the source of self-esteem -- they are nurturing lemmings, alienated from their true human potential.

</comment><comment><USER34> This isn't self-esteem. It's the foundation of narcissistic personality disorder.

Self-esteem is simply the belief that one can be loved and respected for who they are.

Needing to "achieve" (or believe that achievements are worthwhile) in order to feel good about ones self is the opposite to self-esteem.

<comment><USER35> I mainly agree but I believe the narcissism is in the parents more than the children. It is then passed on to the children.

No one wants to just admit their kid is pretty average or below average at certain things. They believe they have failed themselves and that there is no way that their offspring could just be a regular person.

Of course it has become harder to be a regular person and have a fine life in modern, Western society. We don't have the regular person jobs anymore that a regular person who is pretty average can take up like they could generations ago.

The stakes are high and a smaller and smaller group of high achievers, or what appear to be high achievers get all the spoils. A parent has an instinct to make every effort to guide their offspring to that to the point you get average kids who honestly believe they are well above average. It has been reenforced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I can attest to this fact ... I was a tutor to freshmans during my grad studies. The kids couldn't handle simple sum of fractions without a calculator. Forget about sum fractions containing a variable. I was astonished at how they managed to clear the SAT's.

</comment><comment><USER37> That self-esteem thing reminds me of this: [http://www.smbc- comics.com/index.php?id=3978](http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3978)

</comment><comment><USER38> Is it just me, or did seemingly every columnist switch from using "math" to "maths" in the past few years?

<comment><USER39> This particular commentator is from the UK. Here, in the UK we say "maths".

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> IMHO it's an issue.

</comment><comment><USER41> I blame L'Oreal for this. "Because you're worth it."</comment>


Ask HN: Vertical integration examples? - <AUTHOR>

Reading about NodeJs, Ryan Dahl, the creator, had in effect kept drilling down to the metal. First he contributed to existing Ruby web servers, then wrote Ebb in C, then wrote his own HTTP parser, etc.
A hundred years back in time, Henry Ford in his autobiography "My Life And Work" (http://www.amazon.com/My-Life-Work-Autobiography-Henry/dp/1442144327/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277742505&sr=8-1) discussed how he achieved tremendous gains from vertical integration, eventually running his own transport ships, railroads, coal mines, lumber mills, waste plants, school, steel plants, power plants (the examples and numbers are incredible).
A few quick ones: Apple with their tight integration of industrial design and expert knowledge of materials. Google with GFS and Chrome OS. SpaceX with in-house production of just about everything to achieve cost reductions across a broad spectrum of components. It's positive NIH.
Where else can examples of vertical integration be seen? <comment><USER2> TeX is an almost absurd case of it, though closer to the NodeJS example than to vertical integration in business. Knuth wanted a computer-typesetting system for a book he was writing, so he wrote one. That typesetting system needed a way of encoding scalable fonts, so he wrote one (Metafont). That font system needed fonts, so he designed one (Computer Modern). Then he needed an auto-hyphenation algorithm, so he invented one. Etc. Eventually he got around to writing a book using it.

There are of course a lot of bad cases as well. Google pulls off something like GFS, but there are dozens of companies with half-assed, bug-ridden internal reimplementations of custom components where they might have been better off using something more standard. Even where the in-house stuff is decent, it often adds maintenance/upgrade costs (want to upgrade your Linux server? oops, gotta port the in-house kernel modules first).</comment>


Ask HN: How many visitors/mo needed to be successful? - <AUTHOR>

Hello, I am currently founding a new website as startup/idea but of course I will go on by myself without funding..
The website is around social music.
I need to know how many visitors/month should I target within a year, to be really successful?
Because I know that a successful web app/site is associated with how many registered users + how many users.
I have the ability to reach a million visitor/monthly by the end of the year, but is it considered a success?
To be more specified, I am looking for making a startup to sell it later and get acquired. :) <comment><USER2> It seems like it all depends... but I'd like offer up a thought. Instead of looking at the registered users side, maybe consider the main metric to be revenues & profits.

If you have 100 million users, you obviously have something valuable that could be seen as worth acquiring to the right buyer but if you have $100 million in profits, there is a much stronger case for acquiring you and you'll have much higher power in negotiations.</comment>


I Was Wrong About Offline - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/outsystems-engineering/i-was-wrong-about-offline-fe5426894740#.fkjjlzqvp <comment><USER2> Between this article, the recent front page article on contrast[1], and something I've written recently (about missing loading indicators) [2], it seems the common feature is that developers are losing empathy for end users. Our devices and connections are too good to understand real world scenarios.

Facebook has (had?) a program to address this called '2G Tuesdays' [3]

[1] [https://backchannel.com/how-the-web-became- unreadable-a781dd...](https://backchannel.com/how-the-web-became- unreadable-a781ddc711b6)

[2] [https://uxdesign.cc/show-your-work-dont-forget-loading- indic...](https://uxdesign.cc/show-your-work-dont-forget-loading- indicators-9f511af1743d)

[3] [https://code.facebook.com/posts/1556407321275493/building- fo...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/1556407321275493/building-for-emerging- markets-the-story-behind-2g-tuesdays/)

<comment><USER3> I insist on using the minimum spec device for every product that I work on; it means that my job is often frustrating, but we build better products as a result.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely.

"Programmers with fast computers write slow code" has been my justification for always buying a cheap shitty laptop, and my excuse for still not having a SSD...

Similarly: "Programmers with reliable Internet connections write unreliable code."

<comment><USER5> I gave in to the SSD craze because _OSX_ became unusably laggy without one.

<comment><USER3> Using a Mac is the first thing to stop doing, if you're at all interested in targeting the median case.

Silicon Valley's obsession with high-powered boutique notebooks and the high- frequency replacement cycle of Apple products is in part why so much software that comes from the region is inaccessibly slow.

<comment><USER5> FWIW, I write software for servers, not clients. But yeah, I understand what you're getting at.

That said, I'm fine with folks using top of the line computers for developing, just not for testing. Nothing will frustrate you more than attempting to use an IDE on a memory and CPU starved system with a spinning rust drive. Nothing prompts you to silly shortcuts more than having a minute plus code/build/test cycle.

But once the coding is done, pull out that netbook from 2012 and make it run fast on that platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What the heck is with the implication that offline is for Middle East, Africa etc? I'm in the UK, have usually lived and worked in urban locations, but I am yet to live or work somewhere that hasn't had some degree of signal issue. Does the whole of SV and California have perfect signal?

Like phone works only in a certain part of one room, or works but sensitive to movement, or works fine, but you'll have multiple outages between home and work. Leads to missed calls, texts, and plays havoc with apps that mostly assume perfect connection. My attempt to adopt Google Play music was over in a week or two.

I wouldn't mind if I was in the wilds, I'd expect it, but that's in towns of 100k+ - 1m+. Crap signal and breaks isn't some rare edge case, it's common.

Facebook (and everyone else) need barely works and often doesn't Thursdays and Fridays to go with 2G Tuesdays!

<comment><USER7> The really bizarre thing is that during the time that the iPhone was AT&T-only, AT&T had _terrible_ cellular coverage in SF. Somehow this did not stop developers in SF from writing apps which did not work on an unreliable connection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's the other side, as everything in life.

Took part on a project that should be used nationwide (i.e., not costumers, but clients would have to use it). So much care was taken in consideration about some few users that didn't have reliable connection, could go offline for days, etc., that the project reached a dead end after some months.

Lesson learnt (for me, at least): sometimes you have to take care of 95% of your users first, developing as fast as possible so that they benefit, and then take care of those last 5% afterwards, even knowing that they will cost a lot, perhaps as much as the 95% users costed. Trying to solve slightly different problems with just one solution might escalate until becomes unpractical.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps a reasonable thing if your 95%/5% split is correct. It is possible that you are extrapolating from the group you hang out with to the population at large. It certainly doesn't apply to my group.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you look at anything in the technology stack it's all about redundancy, why would you not be leaping at the chance for your web page have a redundancy for its very connection?

Power (backup batteries, generators) Servers (multiple power supplies, storage, memory, NICs) Datacenters (multiple servers, internet connections, power suppliers)

All this to serve an app site, why stop at the first connection hiccup.

<comment><USER2> The thing is that batteries are usually stateless (is there power or not?) whereas if you're handling offline vs online mode you are going to have to sync changes and that's a mind#!%$. You know the line about the two hard problems in CS being cache invalidation and naming things, well now you're dealing with cache invalidation squared.

(I did make a demo of how using React & Redux can help sync UI state from offline to online but it's not a comprehensive solution [https://medium.com/@firasd/interface-from-data-using- react-t...](https://medium.com/@firasd/interface-from-data-using-react-to- sync-updates-and-offline-activity-across-devices-f672b213701c))

</comment></comment><comment><USER11>
      > Developer Experience Is More Important Than UX — Wrong

When would "developer experience" ever be more important than "customer experience"?

<comment><USER12> I assume the author is referring to the developer experience of their customers (it looks like they sell a developer tool of sorts) rather than their employees. i.e. developer experience _is_ customer experience in this case, and "UX" is referring to the customer's end-users.

<comment><USER11> But "I wanted to spare developers from suffering...if we don't allow developers to provide the experience _users need_ , we're not doing anyone any favors"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> And for you game devs (since we're on the subject), not providing an offline experience shuts down 5 mil+ NYC subway riders from your game every day. Not sure about other cities, but it's a significant use case.

</comment><comment><USER14> "It was a considerable R&D investment, one that no company had ever tried, "

Nope. That's just more ignorance of what is out there piled on (plus peddling your own stuff aka content marketing).

<comment><USER15> Yea it's a pretty poor excuse of an article. Sure the author was wrong, but it's really just a sales pitch wrapped in some false humility. This guy is still not a visionary, and still living in his own bubble of arrogance, demonstrated by that sentence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Vaguely related: curious what people here think of OutSystems as a developer platform. More generally, what do people think of ever using a system like this - I would be petrified of the company going out of business and being trapped. OutSystems looks very cool.

<comment><USER17> The company I work for provides services (development, hosting, training, etc) for a (mostly) open source alternative to OutSystems, called Odoo: [https://www.odoo.com/](https://www.odoo.com/)

I'm probably biased, but I'd say it's nice for these kinds of enterprise apps. You get a bunch of core modules for free, which you can then adjust to your needs - saving you the time of building yet another stock management app or whatever - and even for new modules, the framework provides most mechanisms for regular CRUD, so you can literally define a class with just the data fields you need and a menu, and all the UI will be generated on-the-fly to let users create/edit/delete records. Then you can extend and override at will.

It's not without its flaws, but for building the typical backoffice app, it's a pretty sweet spot between a regular framework that just provides the basic tools and a closed application which you're forced to "configure" with hacks and still only does half of what you need.

EDIT: By the way, I don't know about OutSystems, but Odoo is all made and extended in Python (and JS for frontend, but I rarely need to use it).

<comment><USER18> Outsystems is more a direct replacement for a traditional IDE and application server. It generates and deploys either .Net or Java code.</comment></comment></comment>