Running a Software Business on 5 Hours A Week - <AUTHOR> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-business-on-5-hours-a-week/ <comment><USER2> Using Slashdot terminology - Interesting, but not Insightful.

Patrick is trying to derive generic advice by formalizing his personal experiences. While it is useful to know what worked in his case, it is still just one project, an isolated experience.

I've been in a similar situation myself. I have sold a startup that settled me and my family for life, and things unfolded pretty much as I expected them to from the start to the acquisition. But the more I think about the whole experience now the more I am becoming convinced that there was a great deal of chance involved. And over the years I started describing my startup less in terms of how things _should be done_ and more how they worked _for me_.

In other words, once you are lucky, twice - you are good. Once you are "twice", then it will be Insightful. Until then it's just Interesting. Feel free to disagree ;)

<comment><USER3> We tend to have quite a problem with survivorship bias[1] on HN. We like to look at the cases where things went well and we assume that is because they did something right that the others did not, and since the founder believe this, he will list the things he intentionally did that he thinks helped. In reality, it may have been something he was taking for granted, or it may have been that he happened to miss some common pitfalls. From one data point it is impossible to know if those are the factors that pushed him over the edge or not.

Of course, one data point like this is useful if we look at all the other stories we get here on a daily basis.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias>

<comment><USER4> One thing that he did (dunno if he takes it for granted) is get a URL that matches with the top search phrase. If he'd named his company "GridFriend Creator", we'd be reading a VERY different article. Every time anyone links to him, it's like the George Bush "miserable failure" googlebomb [<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb> ]... Except that it's not frowned upon by Google.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that is of fairly minor consequence to the overall success of my business. I've been #1 for that phrase for almost four years now -- and as of four years ago, it was worth about 150 visits a month, or substantially less than five sales. "Whee."

It is worth more these days, but that is because people searching for [bingo card creator] are probably looking for Bingo Card Creator (for example, with five seconds of checking into my stats, I can guarantee at least 30% of folks searching for it last week and clicking on my site already have an account with me).

(Have I mentioned that "Google owns navigation on the Internet"?)

<comment><USER5> Doesn't that help it also rank for "Bingo _" and "Bingo Card_ ", though? I'm very hazy on how Google uses anchor text, but this is how I assumed it works.

On a related note, I'd be very happy to pay you for an SEO consultation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Works for me too. I often spend less than 5 hours a week working, and I have a 6 figure income. My web applications compete directly with Google and Microsoft, among others, so the "no competition" argument is out.

I generally buckle down for a few weeks of hard coding (meaning 4 hours a day for 3 or 4 days a week), once or twice a year, and the rest of the year I'm just doing customer service, system administration stuff, and limited marketing. Just maintaining the architecture for the sites is the biggest time sink -- one of the webapps has two different kinds of database servers (MongoDB in the front, MySQL in the back), web servers, worker servers doing incremental processing/rollups... and I keep things PCIDSS compliant which means self-audits, lots of security patching, etc.

Running affiliate programs for my products and encouraging customers to use them to refer others has been extremely important. Affiliates do all the PPC marketing, article marketing, social bookmarking FOR me, with their affiliate links.

Just goes to show there are a hundred ways to run a successful business. The venture backed 60-hour-week startup isn't the only option.

<comment><USER7> _Works for me too. I often spend less than 5 hours a week working, and I have a 6 figure income. My web applications compete directly with Google and Microsoft, among others, so the "no competition" argument is out._

I realize that HN doesn't encourage heavy self-promotion, but what is this business? Where is its website? Your story sounds wildly implausible, though it obviously isn't impossible.

Still, it reminds me of the comments I got on my post about "You're Not Going to be a Professional Blogger, Regardless of What the Wall Street Journal Tells You:" [http://blog.seliger.com/2009/06/17/youre-not-going-to-be- a-p...](http://blog.seliger.com/2009/06/17/youre-not-going-to-be-a-pro) . People would say things like, "I run a group of online entrepreneurs, and am a member of another, and between the two groups there are well over 200 people, a majority of whom are pulling down 6 to 7 figure incomes based _primarily_ on the advertising on their blogs, not by "selling ancillary services."" But they wouldn't link to the sites in question! To me, such claims smell bad.

<comment><USER6> <http://www.awio.com> or <http://www.dangrossman.info/folio/> if you'd like to take a look.

I'm extremely open about my business. I've thought about writing this type of article to share on HN before, but it always comes across as bragging instead of sharing so I can the idea soon after starting.

This is not an overnight success story. I earned my first paycheck on the internet when I was 15 or so, 10 years ago. I've had a long time to build my skill at development and marketing, try ideas, and build up my user base across the websites.

Some of the sites took a year or two to break even on up front costs and hardware. But since I build services that require almost no ongoing development or support beyond basic "how do I sign up, where do I find feature X" questions, each customer added in the following years is almost pure profit.

Very incremental, steady growth, and sometimes a leveling off. A bigger business wouldn't want a site to level off at a couple thousand a month in revenue, but if it's only supporting and supported by one person, a couple of those and yes, you hit 6 figure annual profit.

I also sell websites from time to time, if they level off and it seems like it'll require more work than I'm willing to put in to reverse that trend. Here's a site I sold on Flippa for $90,000 earlier this month. It generated over $200,000 in sales in the 18 months leading up:

[http://flippa.com/auctions/84185/11000month-Revenue-No-- 1-In...](http://flippa.com/auctions/84185/11000month-Revenue-No--1-In- Market-1500-Customers)

<comment><USER8> Oh, wow, you run W3ROI? Please do write about your experiences. I (and many others) can learn a lot from it.

I'm trying to do something similar with <http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/> \- hopefully I will also be able to join the "5-hour workweek" club.

<comment><USER9> Hey Paras, I'm one of your beta testers. I can assure you that you will go a lot further if you put in a consistent 40 hours a week for the next five years around the core idea of website conversion optimization rather than abandoning the product at some point in the future.

<comment><USER8> Hi Sunir,

Thanks for replying. Yup, I am committed to the product and thankfully it has been positioned as one of the easiest website optimization products available. What I meant by the comment was that I was quite impressed by W3ROI as a product and thought it was a consistent effort. But when I realized it is a "5 hour" effort, I was really surprised.

Rest assured the product isn't going anywhere. I have built a team (not a single man effort anymore) and is a serious startup now. What I said was a bit like hyperbole, sorry if it came across as I am abandoning the product :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A marvelous post about Patrick's start of his "wee business" and how he got there on the time left over from his salaryman day job with a three-hour train commute to boot. Whether this overall will work for any of the rest of us, given what seems like incredible focus Patrick seems to have, is unknown.

And this is not "work four hours per week to gain huge success in life". Like everything else he writes, this is backed by expedience, external constraints, and data-backed experience.

Patrick's business is what I call the Chicago School of Startups. (I might have just made that up.) (And at the risk of tweaking Joel, as Fog Creek Software seems to be following the Chicago model.) This is, like 37Signals, a self-funded operation, and eventually self-sustaining. The SV School, or more precisely, the YC school, emphasizes the path of seeking venture capital, and has the side benefit of a seriously enviable network of other founders and former founders.

What has been most interesting is the data-driven nature of his decisions. Many longwinded discussions on HN have focused on the importance of design,. Patrick, among others, points to A/B tests (not to mention highly successful sites like Craig's List) indicating that such design obsession might be misplaced. _Minor heresy: while Mac developers are very graphically intensive people who will buy software just to lick it if the UI is good enough, many Mac users are just regular people. My Mac version has a conversion rate fully twice that of the Window version, and it is not noticeably pretty._

Perhaps there is a little leeway to tease Patrick--it does not seem that this five hours per week is sustainable. It is successful enough that he is quitting his day job, and I bet he now can't help but spend more than five hours per week on it. Congratulations.

<comment><AUTHOR> _I bet he now can't help but spend more than five hours per week on it_

It is a very open question how much I'm going to be working after I go "full time", but I've rarely seen myself do great things after ~20 and that would leave me with plenty of time to catch up on living, so I think I might try that on for size. But hey, if I decide to do more or less in any given week, there won't be anybody to tell me not to.

<comment><USER11> Start another project.

If you can do this one on average at 5 hours per week, theoretically after the initial burst you could sustain 8 such jobs in parallel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _(Aside: I know many Americans consider the last option shockingly irresponsible. My ability to prevail over my employer — a major multinational — in a lawsuit is effectively nil. A contract is just a formalization of a promise. In Japan, the ongoing relationship with my bosses is the part of the agreement that provides security, not the piece of paper.)_

This is one of the more important bits of advice I've seen Patrick give, and I think it applies to those of us full-timing with our companies _even more_. Your lawyers are going to tell you that contracts matter a whole lot, too. And just like Patrick with the company in Nagoya, your ability to prevail in a dispute, contract or not, is usually going to be nil.

This is something I think a lot of us learn the first time they get into a dispute (for instance, when we are first aggrieved by a giant business partner who breaches our carefully-considered contracts.)

<comment><USER13> This is a large part of why I advocate waiting to incorporate until you can do it right. The instacorp LLC won't really protect you when you need it most.

<comment><USER12> I think that's pretty misleading. What protects you when you've incorporated is that your contracts are between your _company_ and your customers, vendors, or partners. It's not the nature of the contracts themselves. Consolidated Gypsum can put your _company_ out of business by dragging you through a lawsuit until you BK. It can't take your _house_.

The reason contracts don't protect businesses is that they cost too much to enforce. When you're not in the same league as your adversary, they will simply outlast you. The same dynamics do not apply to an attempt by Consolidated Gypsum to make themselves whole on a debt by _trying to take your house_.

Incorporate early. There's no good reason not to.

<comment><USER14> Good advice. Also, in most states setting up an LLC is cheap and easy. Here in Colorado, it's only $50 and a fairly thin form that only ask for the obvious stuff like; what's the company name, what's your name(s), etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As someone who struggles to come up with 'lifestyle business' ideas, his advice on just talking to people was like a punch in the gut. So obvious it hurts, yet I ignore it and spend time 'thinking.'

<comment><USER16> So, how would you describe your experience with part-time development ? I'm wondering if working 20+ hours a week on top of a regular 9-5 is enough.

<comment><USER17> I agree. See relevant blog entry - [http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2010/02/part- time-entrepreneur.htm...](http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2010/02/part-time- entrepreneur.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I acknowledge the fact that a product is more likely to be successful if it is made simpler. And I face the difficulty of trying to create a complex product every day. Hence his advice:

"Are you considering starting up a business because you wish to work on wonderfully interesting technical problems all of the time? Stop now — Google is hiring, go get a job with them. 90% of the results of your business, and somewhere around 90% of the effort, are caused by non-coding activities"

But... then who is eligible to build a complex product? Like writing a database from scratch, or some other complex piece of work. I think a startup should also be able to do it somehow.

<comment><USER19> I thought that was the best line in the piece, because it's so true. Probably 90% of the engineers at Google are there because they want to work on wonderfully interesting technical problems all the time, and don't want to deal with all the other bullshit that comes from running a company. And I suspect that a major part of the reason my startup failed was because I wanted to work on wonderfully interesting technical problems yet _also_ wanted to get rich. There're a limited number of problems that people will pay you to solve, and most of them are boring.

As for who is eligible to build a complex product? Nobody. If you set out to build a complex system from the start, it invariably won't work at the end. Remember Gall's Law:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galls_law>

Before you cite counterexamples like Linux or Google, it's worth considering what they looked like when they started. Linux started as a terminal emulator that would spit back "ababa" when you turned on the computer. Google's early webserver was a dozen or so source files that looked vaguely like Tornado, except that instead of having all those webframeworkey goodness like regexp- based dispatch rules and templates, it would just issue "prints" on the file descriptor for the user's connection.

If you want to write a database from scratch, you should start with some sort of basic persistent key/value store. Then give your values a column-like substructure. Then figure out how to index it. Then figure out how to index it based on multiple columns. Then figure out how to handle joins and sorts. Then slap an SQL parser on top of it, and you'll have something similar to MySQL c. late 1990s. Then endure all the laughs as people say you're not a "real" database, and put in 10 years of incremental improvements while you add transactions, and better SQL compliance, and query optimizers, and wire protocols, and replication, and clustering, and all that stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Congratulations on making the move to full-time!

At the beginning of last year I made a similar move from being a Japanese salaryman to my own business. I was writing code in a notebook on my 1.5 hour train commute and on my lunch break and then typing it up on weekends. After I went full-time on my own business I found that the scope of what I wanted to do expanded and my productivity dropped. Also, the time-management skills that worked well on a part-time basis didn't work as well when I went full-time. I also found that it was easy to get sidetracked by side-projects and that personal life (time with friends, holidays) became a larger part of my life. I also found that a lot of things that I wasn't so great at (web design, graphics) etc. took up a large amount of my time.

So I would be interested to hear your thoughts on time-management, prioritization and working from home once you go full-time if you decide to do this as a series.

</comment><comment><USER21> _In our periodic bouts of crunch time, such as the last three months, I end up sleeping at a hotel next to the office (about 25 times this calendar year)._

Oh man. Maybe it's just me being an ignorant American, but doing that for anything but a company you founded is just crazy. I can't believe that's the norm in Japan.

<comment><USER22> It Japan, as far as I know, it's not "periodic bouts of crunch time" that brings salarymen to small hotels instead of home, but "nightly bouts of alcohol".

<comment><AUTHOR> I do not drink. Most of the engineers in my company go straight home to their wives and children when they leave the office. (Our salesmen appear to have the more traditional salaryman attitude.)

<comment><USER22> patio11: I certainly wasn't implying you drink. (A few downvotes to my post tell me that people thought I was attacking you)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I appreciate the point that running a software business is only 10% development and 90% business. "If you want to spend your time writing code, go work for Google."

This hits close to home as I am gradually learning that I provide far more value to the world by using my knowledge to have others do technical implementation than if I were doing it myself. For someone who loves code, it's a painful transition. But I think you can learn to love business just as you learned to love code.

<comment><USER19> That's a complicated statement. The depth of your own technical knowledge sets a ceiling on the depth of the people willing to do technical implementation for you. After all, most people are unwilling to do grunt work for people dumber than themselves. The main thing your workers get out of it is a learning experience and the chance to be mentored by others more experienced than themselves, so if you're not more experienced, why should they work for you?

So yeah, you get more leverage by using your knowledge to mentor others to do the development for you. But you could end up getting stuck as CEO of a startup that's in a backwater corner of the industry, rather than as a developer in a company that's doing interesting world-changing stuff that you can then leverage when you start your company later.

<comment><USER24> It's a simple statement. You confuse naïveté with stupidity. If there is a "ceiling" as you describe, then Sergei and Larry must have godlike intelligence to have 20,000 engineers working for them.

The point is not "I'm not capable of coding this, I must hire someone smarter", it's "I'll manage someone to do the coding I don't have time for, and they can observe my attempts to run the rest of the business (or whatever)."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "...However, you'll quickly find that there is literally a world of people out there who are willing to work for $1.50 an hour and would be terrifically overpaid at that price..."

That's the number one reason why some clients of mine comeback to me saying their last developer didn't quite accomplish what they wanted. And the reason why sometimes I have to struggle to fix bugs and identification (yes, many low-cost devs don't have a tab key) on other peoples code.

You normally get what you paid for, but I hope it worked nice for you.

<comment><USER25> identification/Identation

<comment><USER26> That's one of those little things that really annoy me- not because they are important, but because it's so easy to get right!

Hell, most IDEs would indent your code correctly for you, I'd have to actually work to override eclipse's auto-indentation!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I find it incredible that he's a Japanese Salaryman having recently read another such peron's Q&A on reddit: [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bewof/iama_salaryman_僕...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bewof/iama_salaryman_僕はサラリーマンです/)

Seems like once you've finished working 10 hours every day for your lifetime employer, there's not much to do than the obligatory heavy drinking!

<comment><USER28> See also patio11's own IAMA Salaryman: [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9g79p/i_am_a_japanese_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9g79p/i_am_a_japanese_salaryman_ama/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Have you thought about writing an ebook like Getting Real?

<comment><USER12> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1186157>

<comment><USER30> Yes, but he's already written large parts of the book on his blog. He could outsource an editor or even ghost/cowriter to assemble it. Could be a possible project for after he quits the day job, but there are probably others that would pay better.

<comment><AUTHOR> This advice is written from the perspective that writing is 100% of the project. Writing is 10% of the project. Writing a salesletter, a marketing site, linkbaits, and obsessive promotion is the other 90% of the project. That is time debt that I take on as soon as I sit down and say "OK, I'm going be become an author."

The upside to it is miniscule: I know I can sell thousands of copies of software for $30, because I've done it, and am reasonably certain that I could sell accounts at a new SAAS for $100 / month, given time to work on it. I am not sanguine about my ability to sell thousands of copies of a book/ebook -- my most loyal blog readers number in the hundreds, if that. I'd also expect massive pushback on the prices that I think make sense -- for examples, take a look at every launch of a non-software info product on HN. (I think I'd be particularly at risk for that because a non-trivial portion of my audience likes the fact that I started a business for $60 -- and when you have $60 in your budget, $X00 on a book is right out.)

There are also psychic costs to me. I kind of value my participation at HN and the Business of Software, for example. It is my sanity-preserving lifeline. I'd really hate to have every post carry the implicit disclaimer "Warning! He is trying to sell you something."

<comment><USER31> Now, there's absolutely no money in it, but getting published dead-tree can give you a lot of credibility and publicity, and it's not as hard as it once was (see the bit about 'there is no money in it')

As far as I can tell, writing a dead tree is /easier/ than writing a ebook, and distribution is easier, etc... you keep less of the money, but more of the credibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think a large part of it is competition...you don't really have any so you can work as much or as little as you want.

If you have competition like in 99% of the niches...you'll be working a lot more than that

<comment><AUTHOR> There are three companies listed on the American stock exchanges with over 1,000 employees who sell products which directly compete with me. (They are, of course, much less important to those companies than they are to me.) Software-wise, there were ~15 shareware products and ~7 web applications last time I checked a few years ago. At least three of them actually know what they're doing (and one of those was launched by a participant from another forum I'm on who, ahem, paid me the sincerest form of flattery).

In a broader sense of the word "competition", my program is a proper subset of Microsoft Excel, I compete with the world's savviest Internet publishers (like Demand Media) for large portions of the queries of interest to me, and a portion of my queries are dual-use for a multi-billion a year industry. (Teachers are not the only folks interested in the top ten for [bingo cards].)

I mean, its not like I went and made a URL shortener or zip file extractor, but I also didn't go make something so staggeringly unique the world had not heard of it before or since.

<comment><USER33> Just out of curiosity, have you ever thought about adapting your bingo card creator to make cards for plain old bingo. You know, with the numbers and not words?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> An additional interesting number is the number of hours that freelancers have worked on this project, if that wouldn't be telling too many secrets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yikes, no clue. That would be upwards of 10 freelancers and $6,000 worth of projects.

(I have always paid by task, not by hour -- as you might have noticed I tend to center on small, well-defined projects with easily verified deliverables. I cultivate trust with my freelancers such that they know I'm not going to screw them on a neverending scope-creep deathmarch for the $400 project. Thus, I've really got no clue whether they're taking their sweet time doing projects or figuring out ludicrously efficient ways to do them and earning more per hour than I do -- and if they have done that, _bully for them_.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Hey patrick/patio11, there are quite a few things I disagree with you about, but I love that you're a genuine guy. I wish you all the success and happiness in the world now that you're following your dreams full time. I'm very glad you're a hacker; the decisions you make and the thought you put into them always inspire me.

Peace.

</comment><comment><USER35> Wow, this was amazing, and better than almost all of the other time management posts out there.

</comment><comment><USER36> Patrick, what is the best way to contact you a la PM for startup advice?

<comment><USER10> Alternatively, if he isn't able to do the contact, I would highly recommend reading all of his comments <http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11> and all of his blog <http://www.kalzumeus.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Before even reading it, I just wanted to say thank you for finally writing up your experience.

</comment><comment><USER18> How large is his business now with 5 hours a week?

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month>

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> We look forward to the next part in the series!

</comment><comment><USER39> How many articles can you write on Bingo cards?

All the power to him however.

<comment><USER11> This article is not about bingo cards, it is about the 0 to 55 Mph stretch that you face when you're starting a 'side' job, and achieving the point where you can quit your day job.</comment></comment>


Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income - <AUTHOR> http://www.patrick-wied.at/blog/let-the-adventurous-journey-begin-passive-income <comment><USER2> To OP: Your passive income ideas are pretty grandiose. Those are legit startup ideas. For passive income think: solve the smallest problem possible. Simple SaaS software. A lead-gen blog (I know a guy who puts up reviews of expensive niche products and gets hundreds per month in amazon affiliate fees). Simple mobile apps? An ebook with information that people need? Find something that is ALREADY SELLING and do it better/different.

Also, think cheap marketing. SEO? Or is there a product that you could sell whose use would be inherently social? Passive income is barely a software problem-- you shouldn't be building anything super-complex. It's more a marketing problem. How do you talk about it? How do you find customers? If you can solve THAT on paper before you write a line of code, you're way ahead of most people who take a shot at this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi Patrick,

Good luck. I've been doing app dev since Jan of this year. I blogged about the profits I experienced in the first few months here:

[[http://burnsmod.com/business/2012/04/23/My- First-2-Months:-A...](http://burnsmod.com/business/2012/04/23/My- First-2-Months:-App-Sales-Report-For-Android-And-WebOS/)]

What you have right, in my opinion:

\- you have low expectations to start

\- you haven't quit your job

\- none of your plans sound crazy

\- of your proposed ideas, writing wordpress themes is probably the most potentially lucrative.

What you (may) have wrong:

\- passive income in my experience (app development) is constant work. Whether its blogging to keep traffic up, answering customer support requests, to adding features or new revenue-generating products, etc.

\- Blogging for ad revenue is not going to be very successful unless you start a porn blog. Blog for SEO gains and to funnel to your product sale pages.

\- If you _really_ want passive income, try to come up with something that is a subscription service people will pay you monthly for. It's a lot easier to maintain a service for existing customers than have to bring new customers in the door every month.

<comment><USER4> > Blogging for ad revenue is not going to be very > successful unless you > start a porn blog.

I have a successful porn blog but have not monetized it. How can I do that? Which ad networks will provide me with the most revenue? Any advice would be very much appreciated...I've been mulling this question for a while but don't know much about ad networks outside of AdSense.

<comment><USER3> When I did this for about 2 months in college (before meeting my wife and deciding to exit the 'seedy' business) I made about $2000 if I remember correctly.

The money is in affiliate networks that pay you a fee for signup/purchases. Fleshlight was about 70% of my revenue, and paysite affiliate networks was the rest.

I was hosting my blog on blogger at the time so I just integrated banner ads into the template and submitted my links to FARK at the time for views.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've done a few passive income projects, and by far the most lucrative have been:

a) Self-serve subscription services (SaaS/hosting platforms have a high buy- in, but are very low maintenance once they're revved)

b) Ad-supported projects targeted at loyal niche markets. (Building enough audience for any ad-supported project is hard enough already; if you can build a tool that hooks into an existing community, go for it!)

<comment><USER6> I totally agree with b. I made approximately $2000 from ad supported sites over a 3 year period. The site wasn't particularly unique (a wiki) and I did very little to contribute to it. I was part of a community, noticed a need for somewhere for people to share information about a particular piece of hardware, and introduced the solution at the right time.

I think with most of these things the ability to make money is largely related to timing and luck. If you get a large community behind you, people will promote your site with very little effort on your part.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely. I did several for World of Warcraft players (~11m people in that market), and each made $150-$1100/month in AdSense revenue for between 6 and 18 months. Each product has died off as it has become obsolete or replaced by something better, but plugging into an existing loyal and social community meant that I just had to give each product a gentle push, and off it went under its own steam.

This does touch on the other edge of the passive income sword, though, which is that passive income projects of this sort tend to not sustain themselves for too long. If it's a good idea, someone will come along and do it better. If it's a bad idea, it'll eventually wither on its own. The passive AdSense project that makes you $40k/month in perpetuity is more or less a myth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To OP, I wouldn't feel so bad writing about this: "I decided to give passive income a shot and I'm going to write about my experiences (yep, like almost everybody these days)".

My request is to be open and stay on top of the writing, even if things don't go well. If you're marketing the articles, market the "I lost" articles as much as the "I won" articles. If passive income is myth, as was commented on previously, part of the myth comes from only seeing positive results. There is a lot to be learned from failures.

That said, I hope you hit your targets and goals, but if not, I want to hear about it!

</comment><comment><USER8> Passive income is a myth. It's the HN equivalent of an infomercial.

Cue stories of the masses who had wealth rained down on them by doing very little work:

<comment><USER9> I don't see passive income like that. I see passive income as something you can gain by spending some of your free time to get recurring money.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. I think it's better to say it takes time up front. But the upfront work may take a while.

I spent six months last year writing explanations for a standardized test. It was _extraordinarily_ boring. But now I get $1000-$1500 per month in licensing fees.

I think there are lots of passive income opportunities for developers to make passive income in non-technical niches.

For instance, I've only been learning programming for a few months, but I have a Wordpress blog. I'm probably going to buy that plugin. Always wanted to track that, but didn't know how.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here is my impression of code canyon… most devs would be better off building their own site for selling their code (not true for themeforest and themes).

Look at gravityforms, ninjaforms, popup domination, eventespresso etc.

I think if I were going to focus on wordpress analytics (assuming from your post). I would build a free plugin that had paid components as add ons all revolving around analytics.

See --> [http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/is-this-the-future- product...](http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/is-this-the-future-product- placement-model-in-free-wordpress-plugins/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Passive income is indeed real, but is often exaggerated.

I've been doing quite nicely from my ebooks and ad-supported sites for some time, with no additional promotion or other activities to drive sales since they were each published. However I could certainly not pay all of my bills from them.

However, just like anything else, you get out what you put in. If I had no other career and just spent all my time writing ebooks, I would probably be earning from ebooks as much or more than I currently earn from my other, non- passive, activities. It's all about what you put into it.

The guys who lead you to believe that you will make millions of dollars with no effort are just plain frauds. If they really had a method for doing that they wouldn't sell it to you...

<comment><USER13> Well, they do have a method, it's just that the method is "defraud suckers who think they can make millions in their spare time".

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> In the light of recent UK news, I suspect someone could make good money by selling a user-friendly browser plugin that proxies connections to blocked sites like the pirate bay. Of course, you probably don't want to be living in the UK whilst doing that.

<comment><USER15> That could be exceptionally risky as the mechanism used to block access to The Pirate Bay is the same used to block sites identified by the Internet Watch Foundation as child porn.

Even if it's not your intent, the last thing anyone needs is to be branded a pedophile-enabler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hi Patrick, Good luck with CodeCanyon. Well, as a seasoned seller in CodeCanyon, here is my bit of advice:

1\. Quality. Users buy appearances. They judge your application by its quality. Focus on that, and you'll sell.

2\. Solve a wide spread problem. Like for example, sliders.

3\. Innovate. I don't mean invent thing, but just tick new ideas. For example, a different slider will sell at $10k/year, with its WordPress plugin, you are at $20-25k/year from two items only.

4\. Help, Videos, Presentation, Customer Support, Branding... that bullshit.

5\. Once you made your product and making $2.5k/month, start the old fashioned marketing way.

6\. The money is on the forest. Team up with a designer and make the money.

</comment><comment><USER17> thanks for the upvotes guys, but I'd even more appreciate some valuable feedback, tips, and would love to hear about your experiences in this field :)

<comment><USER18> Some pretty good passive suggestions! My personal favorite is iOS app sales, which seem to bring in a couple of extra bucks per day if you have something people use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I guess you're employed and you're looking for some extra money. I have a boring question I'm afraid: what about taxes? How does it work in Austria?

<comment><USER17> I'm currently doing contract work for a client in the US and well yeah this is some sort of approach for getting some extra money. Right now I'm studying in Germany and the german tax law applies to me. If the extra money gets over a specific amount per month you'd have to register a traders-license (in case you're selling stuff next to your job, there's the usual income tax and if you get over a even bigger amount you'd have to pay sales tax too) since my passive income approaches didn't pay off a lot yet I'm still in the boundaries where I don't have to worry about that.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for your answer!

It's probably a country specific thing, but I looks like you're usually allowed to have some income that is tax free (up to a limit; ie UK income tax personal allowance is £8,105 for 2012 - as long as you total income is less than £100k).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As a long-time affiliate marketer, I'd have to say be careful about the prospect of passive income.

For online advertising at least, there are many ways to generate large amounts of money - the difficulty is that there is a very low barrier to entry but an exceedingly high barrier to _success_.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've had (very) modest success at passive income ($60-100 a month) with a niche iPhone app. The nice thing about it is that it is truly passive. I haven't touched the ting in over a year (I know I should update and improve on it but I lost interest in it pretty quickly).

</comment><comment><USER17> I just wanted to say thank you for all the nice comments. great feedback!

</comment><comment><USER22> I wouldn't call it completely passive, but I was making $3000/month with only about an hour of work/day. However, this was after I put 6 months and many hours of work into figuring out exactly what works.

<comment><USER23> I'd love to read a blog post on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> At least with Adsense the payment for the same amount of clicks increase over time. And the difference between what Adsense pays is order of magnitudes bigger than what any other ad network pays; an of course is better if your visitors come from one of the hight-paying countries (USA, Canada, UK, Germany, etc)

</comment><comment><USER25> "Advertising [...] the amount you get [...] isn't big and only pays off with high traffic"

Realy? Glad you think that.

And: no, it does not suck but can provide a positive user experience if done correctly. And: no, I am not talking about hit-the-monkey ads. And: no, it's not as easy as copy-pasting some random ad code into your HTML.

<comment><USER26> You had an opportunity to provide useful information here, but instead just chose to cop a supercilious attitude. That's disappointing.

<comment><USER25> Could you be more specific, because I really have no idea what you mean.

I provided "useful information" in saying that it is possible to earn good money with ads, but that it takes more than just copy-pasting a random ad code into the pages.

What is "supercilious" about what I am writing?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do recruiters communicate between companies? - <AUTHOR> I was wondering - do recruiters communicate information about their candidates between companies? See who's applying with who while tracking their progress. So if you say I'm applying with XYZ they'd use their network to collect data about your application from a friend, etc. <comment><USER2> Recruiters get paid to find candidates. One of their biggest assets is their book of contacts. I don't see an incentive to share that information with their competition. On the other hand your past employers definitely do share certain details about your employment with recruiters.</comment>


Build a JavaFX Game: Space Invaders in 15 Minutes - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVo1fm52hz0 <comment><USER2> This needs a 2nd part where the author shows how to solve/remove the stutter problem from the game. Every time I move the player the graphics stutters, never had this problem with Java Swing.</comment>


Backdoor account in several AMX (Harman Professional) devices - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sec-consult.com/2016/01/deliberately-hidden-backdoor-account-in.html <comment><USER2> > As usual, SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab communicated this issue according to > our responsible disclosure policy. Initial contact and exchange of the > security advisory was performed through the European sales team at AMX.

My stance with these things, is if it's a backdoor, "responsible disclosure" is out the window.

Just expose the criminal to the public.

<comment><USER3> > My stance with these things, is if it's a backdoor, "responsible disclosure" > is out the window.

Responsible disclosure doesn't just protect the company who built the product; it also protects all the people who bought it.

<comment><USER4> unless of course bad people are abusing it (they are smart enough to find these things too)

<comment><USER3> But not 100% of the potential abusers will know about the backdoor.

By disclosing irresponsibly, you're making an actual attack _much_ more likely, since now theoretically _every_ bad actor now knows about it.

<comment><USER4> you have no way to quantify those numbers, "irresponsible disclosure" is frankly, just a bullshit term.

<comment><USER3> > _you have no way to quantify those number_

Neither do you, therefore we're just having a bullshit argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When selling things to the federal government that are used for the transfer of classified and top secret information, isn't there at least some checklist that the Gov't asks?

1\. Is this product backdoored?

If they say "no", and they turn out to be lying, then there should be criminal prosecution brought against the company. This seems like a no-brainer.

<comment><USER6> That would be a tough one to get a simple answer from.

Legally, they could say "no." because the backdoor might legally be a "lawful intercept" or "super-duper debugging thing" or "cheney's naughty dungeon".

<comment><USER5> I would assume they are smart enough not to sell the same version to the White House.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Given the backdoor was reimplemented immediately, can we safely assume there is external pressure to have this available?

Would be interesting to see an email dump of AMX after the disclosure here to see how far down the rabbit hole it goes.

<comment><USER8> They could at least try harder to cover the new access method. I really wonder why they did not. They should have assumed that this particular backdoor will be disclosed. So even in the event of having legitmate use cases for access like this they still decided to endager their customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow.

So, Hanlon's razor in this case: malice or stupidity?

<comment><USER10> _malice or stupidity?_

FTA:

"These tools are only available to our superhero as the power they hold should not be available to simple administrators."

Then the tell the researchers it is "fixed", but just change from BlackWidow to "1MB@TMaN".

Realistically, it's a tech support account for onsite troubleshooters. Also realistically, it's not well guarded, and thus is certainly exploitable by basically anyone.

<comment><USER11> "These tools are only available to our superhero as the power they hold should not be available to simple administrators."

Yeah, I tend to add companies that make statements like this to my banned vendor list. Its up there with telling me that I have to pay GSA pricing instead of Educational prices because we're a tribal community college or charging for firmware upgrades to fix bugs for servers.

<comment><USER12> I'm pretty sure that's a quote from the person documenting the backdoor, not a public statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The punchline reminded me of the JS "nan nan nan batman" joke([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqhZZNUyVFM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqhZZNUyVFM)).</comment>


Nabla containers: a new approach to container isolation - <AUTHOR> https://nabla-containers.github.io/ <comment><USER2> They are down to nine system calls, perhaps they can "pledge" the rest away after the container bootstraps? I am thinking of what OpenBSD has been designing:

[https://man.openbsd.org/pledge.2](https://man.openbsd.org/pledge.2)

</comment><comment><USER3> I read that as...never mind.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. That name is ..... unfortunate</comment></comment>


Google's chief futurist thinks we could start living forever by 2029 - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-chief-futurist-thinks-we-could-start-living-forever-by-2029-2016-4 <comment><USER2> This is incredibly naive, IMHO.

So far the ubiquity of computing power has not had a measurable effect on the mechanisms of aging. Yes, we've made some progress on specific disorders and pathogenic diseases by designing and screening active molecules but it is tangential to the various ways we age.

The gene therapy ideas are similarly in early ages, and if we start hacking away at the various aging mechanisms, it will be well after 2029. Additionally, there are complicated long term effects on tinkering with our machinery. The fact that aging as a natural phenotype is not very diverse means it is pretty complicated. We don't have humans who naturally live to be 200 years old. for example.

<comment><USER3> Have we been trying? SENS isn't exactly swimming in money and Calico and other ventures are too new to expect results yet. 2029 is probably optimistic, but there's going to be some very motivated tech billionaires in the next decade, e.g. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/3ocsbi/ama_my_n...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/3ocsbi/ama_my_n..).</comment></comment>


Helping with SEO - <AUTHOR>

My sister owns a photography business and she's looking at SEO as a solution to bringing in more business. She's a fantastic photographer deserving every bit of business she has brought in so far, but she thinks that SEO could ramp her business up from a solely word of mouth business to people finding her "organically" on web searches.
The problem is that the guy she has communicated with is going to charge $9k over the year, though he has the "results" to prove he's worth it. Does anybody know any resources or trips for somebody with limited time (aka me) to hack the system and help her improve her SEO without paying such exorbitant fees?
http://www.simplygreenphotos.com/ <comment><USER2> Check-out this "moster" post on SEO for photographers: [http://www.foregroundweb.com/blog/seo-guide-for- photographer...](http://www.foregroundweb.com/blog/seo-guide-for- photographers/)

Hope it helps.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.warplife.com/tips/webmaster/](http://www.warplife.com/tips/webmaster/)</comment>


AdamW and Super-convergence is now the fastest way to train neural nets - <AUTHOR> http://www.fast.ai/2018/07/02/adam-weight-decay/ <comment><USER2> A 5x to 10x reduction in training time versus other approaches is _impressive_ , regardless of how it's achieved. Hours of waiting become minutes; days become hours; weeks become days.

Among the examples mentioned:

* They fine-tuned a Resnet50 to 90% accuracy on the Cars Stanford Dataset in 60 epochs vs 600 in previous reports.

* They trained an AWD LSTM RNN from scratch to state-of-the-art perplexity on Wikitext-2 in 90 epochs vs 750 epochs in previous reports.

* The trained a QRNN from scratch to state-of-the-art perplexity on Wikitext-2 in 90 epochs vs 500 epochs in previous reports.

There are more examples of improvements in training speed (and accuracy) in the blog post, which provides persuasive evidence that a training regime combining (a) "AdamW" (which fixes a well-known issue with weight-decay in Adam) and (b) "superconvergence" (i.e., raising then decreasing LR, and doing the inverse with momentum) now appears to be the best/fastest way to train deep neural nets.

Interestingly, no one yet really knows _why_ or _how_ AdamW and SuperC together can achieve a 10x improvement in training efficiency.

<comment><USER3> Jeremy from fast.ai here. Thanks for the thoughtful summary. A few more clarifications which hopefully are of some interest:

\- Sylvain tried AdamW + 1cycle on many different datasets and with different architectures. The 5-10x improvement over regular SGD and LR annealing was not a rare occurrence, but was the most common result

\- Accuracy was always at least about as good as the regular approach, and usually better

\- So our main result here is to strongly suggest that AdamW + 1cycle should be the default for most neural net training

\- The goal of this research was to improve the fastai library, not to write a paper. But since the results were so practically useful we figured we'd take the time to document them in a blog post so others can benefit too

\- fastai is a self-funded (i.e out of my own pocket) non-profit research lab.

<comment><USER2> Thank YOU.

I posted this comment here only because the prior top comment was unfairly negative, in my view. Sometimes I'm afflicted by this: [https://xkcd.com/386/](https://xkcd.com/386/)

Had you posted on the main thread I would have upvoted your comment over mine.

Have you considered accepting donations from third parties?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does this work on any other dataset than Cifar-10 with ResNets? I ask because I worked on reproducing this paper for ICLR 2018 Reproducibility Challenge and the paper noted that this was the only setup in which super-convergence would be observed.

The paper's authors didn't succeed with Adam (which this article seems to have overcome) so I'm curious if they attempted this training method on any other datasets?

From the last paragraph of: [https://openreview.net/forum?id=H1A5ztj3b](https://openreview.net/forum?id=H1A5ztj3b)

> Our experiments with Densenets and all our experiments with the Imagenet > dataset for a wide variety of architectures failed to produce the super- > convergence phenomenon. Here we will list some of the experiments we tried > that failed to produce the super-convergence behavior. Super-convergence did > not occur when training with the Imagenet dataset; that is, we ran Imagenet > experiments with Resnets, ResNeXt, GoogleNet/Inception, VGG, AlexNet, and > Densenet without success. Other architectures we tried with Cifar-10 that > did not show super-convergence capability included ResNeXt, Densenet, and a > bottleneck version of Resnet.

EDIT: I see now that they mention a few other datasets: Cars Stanford Dataset and Wikitext-2.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your work on the reproducibility challenge - we read your results and found them interesting. The good news is that we had a lot more success, although it took many months of work to really make it sing, and bringing in AdamW was an important part of the success. Note that the super-convergence paper has been greatly improved through the recent 1cycle work, which includes a lot of important points to make it work in practice.

We tried the most divergent datasets and architectures we could think of, including even AWD-LSTM and QRNN. We got great results for pretty much everything we tried.

(We didn't try ResNeXt, since it's so slow in practice, or VGG or AlexNet, since they're largely obsolete. We did look at inception-resnet-v2; I'll have to go back to check to see the results, but IIRC it worked quite well.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure how to interpret the argument of the article or the results in the appendix here.

The first table shows AdamW having the best results, which follows the argument of the article. However, the following three tables all have plain Adam producing the best results.

The way the article is written it seems to be championing AdamW, but the results just seem to conclude that AMSGrad is bad and Adam is the best with AdamW having negligible performance increase over Adam in a single task.

<comment><USER6> From the article:

 _So, weight decay is always better than L2 regularization with Adam then? We haven't found a situation where it's significantly worse, but for either a transfer-learning problem (e.g. fine-tuning Resnet50 on Stanford cars) or RNNs, it didn't give better results._

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the article:

> 200% speed up in training! "Overall, we found Adam to be robust and well- > suited to a wide range of non-convex optimization problems in the field > machine learning" concluded the paper. Ah yes, those were the days, over > three years ago now, a life-time in deep-learning-years. But it started to > become clear that all was not as we hoped. Few research articles used it to > train their models, new studies began to clearly discourage to apply it and > showed on several experiments that plain ole SGD with momentum was > performing better.

This is not true for all domains. In machine translation Adam is used in all top results papers I can think of.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice to see great advancements in the training speed for deep neural network algorithms. We are also very interested in improving the speed of training. We at alpes.ai have developed a non-recursive neural network algorithm which has a very fast training time. We got very good results for standard open datasets, training time in the range of seconds and accuracy on par with standard results on normal laptops without any special GPU`s or hardware.

[http://alpes.ai/](http://alpes.ai/)

These are the results of some of the datasets

DataSet Training Time Accuracy

Extended Yale DB 40 sec 94.00%

Human Activity Detection Dataset 3 sec 86%

MNIST 90 sec 97%

Google Speech Dataset 60 sec 92%

Liver Dataset 2 sec 89%

<comment><USER9> The page you linked is very light on details. Could you point to a paper?

<comment><USER8> hey paper is on its way probably we will be publishing it in couple of weeks from now.

<comment><USER6> Make sure to post it to HN so we can criticize your work into the ground ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This reads a bit too much like a plug for fastai's framework, which, frankly, is not very good and training performance results are not much of a reason to care about it (for instance, adding AdamW to Keras is basically trivial).

In most use cases, the difference between these optimizer choices, and how they interact with initialization schemes and metaparameters, is extremely overkill. If you're training a pretty standard variant of e.g. ResNet50, for some fairly common classification or localization task, splitting hairs between these things just doesn't matter.

I actually really think these optimizer hacks are not a productive line of research for deep learning. Too many projects try to do just the slightest amount of incremental tweaks to an optimization scheme to eke out something they can call "state of the art" and milk it for conference presentations and the release of some sexy new deep learning package. But these changes are often entirely immaterial except for the very largest network training schemes, which are usually already doing their own highly customized and distributed optimization schemes anyway.

Especially when it's tied to making a plug for a framework, like this is for fastai, it's just too focused on hype and creates this peacock feather effect where everyone had to spread themselves so thin just to keep up with all this middling, incremental tweaks, that it actually very likely inhibits research that might actually produce _difference of kind_ results.

<comment><USER11> I have an orthogonal perspective - I really think that current Deep Learning works only because somehow those non-linear optimization tricks like Adam fit the model structure - you as a model-preparer restrict the search space with some structural rules (CNN, LSTM, 1x1 conv etc.) and unleashing fairly simple non-linear optimization procedures suddenly works as they don't have to wander unguided around much more complex space (like why these simple optimizers don't work well with large fully-connected networks, which in theory should be better than any specializations).

By combining both structural rules (reducing dimensionality, providing some guidance in form of restricted connectivity) and making optimization procedures that can take advantage of it IMO gives us current great DL performance; if we can squeeze even more from optimizers that could help, and I am glad fast.ai people are doing it. I simply view it in a dual(-metaoptimization) way and both structural and optimization "match" should be researched.

<comment><USER10> What you call "structural rules" is just the machine learning term regularization. Dropout, early stopping, batch norm, advanced initialization, etc. are all equally useful ways of regularizing models as are explicit penalty terms or implicit restrictions to subspaces of the possible weight space. Whichever of these _engineering_ tricks works best for your use case either (a) doesn't matter much because they all work about the same or (b) is a matter of specialized experimentation and case-by-case analysis anyway.

Also, the theory of using this type of approach for model fitting is not new in modern deep learning. Older models like RANSAC did similar things even when the model itself is far simpler and there is no network topology effect. Arguably, advanced MCMC methods like NUTS, or approximation methods like ADVI, are even more formalized approaches to the deep learning hacks, where the network structure and regularization constraints defines a prior over model parameter space, and when combining with the data to get a likelihood model, you really just want something that draws from the posterior over model parameter space.

The reason it's a "hack" in deep learning is that nobody is trying to formally define the posterior based on the model and the complicated metaparameters, rather they are just adding tweaks on top of tweaks to use deeply inefficient momentum SGD methods to sample from the posterior and optimize a la simulated annealing, instead of making the models truly amenable to something like NUTS. Which IMO is yet another reason to view incremental optimizer tweaks as a negative thing, slowing down and distracting the community.

<comment><USER2> Yes, deep learning today is a _trade_. If we want to be more charitable, we can call it an _experimental science_ \-- some work truly deserves the moniker.

The state of deep learning today is analogous to the state of bridge- engineering before the advent of physics: [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608911/is-ai-riding-a- one...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608911/is-ai-riding-a-one-trick- pony/) \-- everyone in the trade is aware of this, I think.

But that doesn't mean we should stop building better deep-learning models, finding more efficient ways to train them, and improving state-of-the-art performance in increasingly challenging tasks.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps we can reach the singularity with slowly-trained models, and from there get fast training methods for free ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how this compares to Neuroevolution and other GA based methods [https://eng.uber.com/deep-neuroevolution/](https://eng.uber.com/deep- neuroevolution/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Wonder if anything similar can be applied to gradient boosting to speed up learning forests by tweaking LR?</comment>


Peter Thiel's Quick $1B Facebook Share Sale Lacks Precedent - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-23/facebook-director-s-quick-1-billion-share-sale-lacks-precedent.html

<comment> the-expert Yeah, all that stuff is the article is great, but the Facebook experts here on HN (aged 18-24, most likely) said what Thiel did is no big deal. He's just diversifying. And besides, there's the upcoming Facebook Wallet (TM). It's gonna be big, big, big. Huge.

Bloomberg? What do they know?

</comment><comment><USER2> It does seem kind of fucked up that investors have a three month lockup while employees have six. It should be the standard 180 days for everyone; if anything, employees (who have more of their net worth tied up in FB stock) should be more free to sell than funds.

The whole deal with FB effectively being public for 18 months before IPOing (via second market) is new and messed up.</comment>


The Oracle Java Trap - <AUTHOR> Programmers of HN, next time when you think about downloading Java from Oracle's website, just have a look at this license[1] first. Hint: you aren't allowed a commercial use.<p>[1] https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/javase-license.html <comment><USER2> Related [https://blog.joda.org/2018/09/do-not-fall-into-oracles- java-...](https://blog.joda.org/2018/09/do-not-fall-into-oracles- java-11-trap.html) (on HN [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18074727](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18074727))

</comment><comment><USER3> Just use OpenJDK

[https://adoptopenjdk.net/](https://adoptopenjdk.net/)

[https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/](https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/)

[https://developers.redhat.com/products/openjdk/overview/](https://developers.redhat.com/products/openjdk/overview/)

<comment><USER4> I had trouble running Android Studio on Ubuntu 18.04 (specifically the emulator) with OpenJDK and ended up having to use Oracle Java.

I assume there are other such compatibility issues as well.

Is there a list of projects somewhere that work with both, work with Oracle and that work with OpenJDK?

<comment><USER3> There should be essentially none [0]. There is no list because there are no issues between using OpenJDK vs Oracle for virtually any project. The JDK's are 99.99% the same. Doesn't android studio come with it's own OpenJDK implementation? [1].

0: [https://www.baeldung.com/oracle-jdk-vs- openjdk](https://www.baeldung.com/oracle-jdk-vs-openjdk)

1: [https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en- us/articles/206...](https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en- us/articles/206544879)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You _are_ allowed to use it for development purposes, though.

If you don't want to pay for support to deploy with Oracle JDK then use one of the alternatives (OpenJDK/AdoptOpenJDK, Amazon Corretto, Azul).

<comment><USER6> OTOH, if you are going to deploy with OpenJDK (etc.), why not develop with the same implementation?

<comment><USER5> Agreed, I just want to make it clear that by downloading and developing with the Oracle JDK you haven't irreversibly stumbled into some licensing trap.

At this point there's really no reason to consciously choose the Oracle JDK.

Even if you want a supported JDK experience you're better off getting it from a company like Azul (we've had a good experience with them so far, anyway).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is the future of Java in the next 5 years ? What do you think ? I don't see enterprise going to pay. Is it going I slowly die?

<comment><USER6> Enterprise will pay for stability until they've evaluated alternatives, but unless Oracle JDK support or features provide at least an apparent benefit justifying the additional cost, they'll switch to an alternative.</comment></comment>


A rumble in Amazon's jungle: AWS now rents out homegrown 64-bit Arm servers - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/27/amazon_aws_a1/ <comment><USER2> Anyone care to hint why this was not done ages ago? Seems like an early strategic thing to do?</comment>


Ask HN: Any hackers in SoCal/Los Angeles area? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I'm moving there in about a week to work on a startup with a friend. I've been on the lookout for people to get to know in the area.

<comment><AUTHOR> NICE!! Excited to meet you guys sometime!

If we get a bunch of folks here maybe we could put together a hangout!?

<comment><USER2> You bet, send me a tweet (in my profile) ... also this is very relevant:

<http://www.meetup.com/Los-Angeles-Hacker-News/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't even know about this. Sounds excellent. I will try to make it on Thursday.

BTW by now I am somewhat of a LA native. Let me know if you need any help or have any questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Whereabouts in SoCal are you moving to? If you're in San Diego let me know and I'll get you connected with folks.

</comment><comment><USER4> I live in LA but I don't get out much (health problems)</comment>


Become productive by making a habit - <AUTHOR> http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/07/secrets-of-superstar-programmer_13.html

<comment><USER2> This is just so painfully slow. I watched for about 45 seconds, then skipped to the 2 minute mark, then to the 5 minute mark where "Dr McNinja" is introduced, then skipped forward and found him talking about how there are _so_ many things people want to do and they all take time.

He's right. There are lots of things I want to do, and they all take time. I particular, I don't have time to watch this. Produce a transcript and I might be interested, perhaps I might then even watch the video, but based on the two minutes I've spent trying to evaluate it, it's not worth my time.

A general lesson to learn: You may have interesting things to say, but unless you say them well, people won't listen.

Learn the art of presentation.</comment>


The Rogue Data Scientist - <AUTHOR> http://www.datasciencecentral.com/forum/topic/show?id=6448529%3ATopic%3A273425

<comment><USER2> > [Selling fake Twitter followers] can only work if the people automatically > creating fake Twitter accounts (used to follow others) do a better job than > the data scientists supposed to catch them.

The creator only needs to evade detection in the creation and early account phases. Spam accounts seem to be detected and removed within a month, based on my experience purchasing bulk followers for pranks. (It's seriously confusing and a bit worrying for someone to wake up with an extra 5,000 followers, though only until they figure out they're not real.)</comment>


Why We Shut Down Reddit's 'Ask Me Anything' Forum - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/08/opinion/why-we-shut-down-reddits-ask-me-anything-forum.html <comment><USER2> "We feel strongly that this incident is more part of a reckless disregard for the company's own business and for the work the moderators and users put into the site. Dismissing Victoria Taylor was part of a long pattern of insisting the community and the moderators do more with less."

I think this really gets to the heart of it. The moderators of the site only learned of the termination after a celebrity flew out to NY to meet with Victoria and was told that the meeting was cancelled. As expected, panic ensued among the subreddit's moderators. Whether the firing was justified or not, the fact that Reddit's leadership didn't immediately see the consequences of their action on one of their most popular communities just shows their disregard. Or even worse, they realized the consequences and just didn't bother to help facilitate them. I mean these are real people with real meetings spending real dollars for the community, which is all run but volunteers, and Reddit's leadership didn't feel it was important enough to communicate with them to help avoid unnecessary consequences. I understand the frustration.

<comment><USER3> This article is falling on me as tone deaf. Most people who frequent the site dont care at all about the plight of the moderators. Moderators are not elected, they arent forcefully drafted, they dont step down when the community dislikes them. They are landowners who got there first, followed by a lot of cronyism/nepotism. It's an old boys club. They do a lot of hard work for the site, but they would be easily replaceable if the site rules didnt protect them. The moderators think they are special, the admins see them as interchangeable. Moderators are largely faceless human spam filters. It is a task that could be crowdsourced better so more people are doing less work. Slashdot had better moderation tools than reddit. When I see the moderators throw tantrums demanding more respect, it reminds me of Reagan firing every air traffic controller who went on strike, people who thought they were above being replaced. The reddit admins should fear the power they have given the moderators, and are probably brainstorming ways to reduce it.

The "woe is me" cry of the moderators doesnt resonate with the majority of the userbase, because the moderators volunteered. The apathetic majority doesnt comment in situations like this, so you wont hear their voices. In the immortal words of southpark, if you dont like America, then you can get out. But everyone knows they wont actually step down, because they crave the power they have accumulated, and are using the veneer of "we do this because we love the community" to generate a populous outcry that they know will gain them even more power. Theyre not fooling me.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_apologize/csu119e)

<comment><USER4> > Most people who frequent the site dont care at all about the plight of the > moderators.

They care about the quality of the comment they see on the subreddits they follow. That transitively means they _really_ care about the plight of the moderators. They just don't know it.

> Moderators are largely faceless human spam filters.

On the well-moderated subreddits—which are increasingly the largest ones—they do a hell of a lot more than spam filtering. Moderators at subreddits like /r/NoStupidQuestions, /r/science, or many of the "Ask ___" subreddits are responsible for instilling the voice and culture of the subreddit.

> When I see the moderators throw tantrums demanding more respect, it reminds > me of Reagan firing every air traffic controller who went on strike, people > who thought they were above being replaced.

I'm not saying they couldn't be replaced. But if you do that, those subreddits will fundamentally change. And, in many cases, the userbase may go elsewhere before the subreddit finds its feet again.

> In the immortal words of southpark, if you dont like America, then you can > get out.

I don't think reddit needs to worry much about moderators leaving. But they should _really_ worry about content contributors leaving. The Digg v4 exodus happened virtually overnight. There's nothing magical about reddit that ensures that can't happen to them.

<comment><USER3> >they really care about the plight of the moderators

no they dont. its like henchmen in a movie. if some fall more will take their place. its a thankless task. they dont care at all about the individual, they just care that the group functions. the group will function without the individual as long as there are reenforcements.

>in many cases, the userbase may go elsewhere before the subreddit finds its feet again.

probably to another subreddit, like when /r/trees replaced /r/marijuana (thats still a win for reddit corp)

<comment><USER5> There was a post on reddit by a user emphasizing your reasoning but reaching a different conclusion. The user argued that he didn't not care about the plight of the moderators or content creators in one bit, he just wanted to selfishly consume his content.

He recognized the importance of the people that do care in creating the community that provides the quality of experience he desires and he was quick to emphasize that the second the quality drops he will find a new community.

The quality in subreddits are a direct function of the capabilities of their moderation staff.

<comment><USER3> thats the post i linked to at the bottom of my comment

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe this will be enough to silence the folks on here who insist that nothing is wrong with Reddit management and that it's just a bunch of angry children complaining without cause. The mods in question are adults and professionals, and they've clearly and succinctly explained their grievances with Reddit management.

This piece doesn't touch on some of the other issues that have angered users, particularly the matter of heavy-handed censorship that appears to be applied inconsistently. That too is a legitimate complaint, one that shouldn't be shouted down or conflated with shameful behavior on the part of relatively few individuals in the community.

<comment><USER7> No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on.

The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's _wrong_.

And your claims of censorship are, quite frankly, disturbing. The subreddits shut down last month were all hate groups that were targeting individuals for harassment and posting their photographs without permission in order to attack them. I've personally seen my pictures posted by one of these groups _twice_ , and the day before those subs got banned, there was a very upset mother asking what recourse she had because these hate groups were posting pictures of her _underage child_ and refused to take them down (and I distinctly remember this because I was one of a handful of people who helped teach her how to message the admins).

<comment><USER8> I laugh when people complain about removal of /r/fatpeoplehate being censorship. The only reason that subreddit was such a problem is because of aggressive moderation and banning of users - i.e. censorship at the moderator level rather than the admin level.

<comment><USER9> It's a cognitive bias. The assertion from the admins was pretty clear regarding the harassment of individuals and threats of violence, but rather than acknowledge their prejudice, some have tried to make it into a first amendment issue. On a _privately owned_ website.

<comment><USER10> Just because the Amendment doesn't apply doesn't mean the ideals behind it are irrelevant. I could choose to exclude all individuals of a certain race from my home. No law could prevent me from doing that. But people would still be against me for the same reasons that there exists laws that prevent discrimination by government or businesses. It just seems most people do not articulate the difference between 'wrong because I like the First Amendment' from 'wrong because I like the ideals behind the First Amendment'.

<comment><USER9> Yes it does. If you banned vandals and violent people from your private property for their malicious behavior, people would not band against you or cry about first amendment "ideals". Ignoring select information, such as the reasoning behind the bans, is exactly what cognitive bias is.

If you honestly think that what Reddit did is the equivalent of racism, then that is very clear proof that you have a bias.

<comment><USER10> >If you banned vandals and violent people from your private property for their malicious behavior, people would not band against you or cry about first amendment "ideals".

The government is allowed to ban such people from its premises as well. You choose a poor example.

As for the reasoning behind the bans, you are ignoring the unequal application of those bans which shows such claimed reasons to have been lies.

>If you honestly think that what Reddit did is the equivalent of racism

I never called it the equivalent of racism. I used racism as an example of where the ideals that ban the government, while not banning the individual, can be used to cast moral judgment upon the individual. That you could confuse these gives evidence to your own strong bias.

<comment><USER9> It's a perfect good example because it's analagous to what Reddit did, and you're splitting hairs because it doesn't fit your own narrative on racism and moral judgement that you crafted for your own personal reality.

You even admit that you don't think that what reddit did is the equivalent of racism, so you admit your analogy isn't even relevant to the situation. Just as if you gave the analogy of "people judge a bar that doesn't let you bear arms because of second amendment ideals!", it's still moot, because while yes, they do pass moral judgement, it's completely irrelevant from people selectively ignoring safety reasons behind the firearm ban.

Passing moral judgement that resulted from a bias _is still a bias_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Never surprise your team.

This incident looks like it comes from inexperienced, counterproductive leadership, as do the several incidents leading up to it and that will follow. Or maybe authoritarian. Several days after a firing, people are complaining in the NY Times that they are still surprised.

Not surprising your team is one of the top principles I've learned in teamwork. If, as a manager, your firing someone surprises them or their team, you almost certainly mismanaged the process. If you have a reason for firing someone, you should be able to create a process everyone understands even if they don't agree to it. The people left should certainly not be surprised, especially after the firing.

If your team is surprised by your strategy, if your customers are surprised by your product, and so on, you probably managed poorly. You should only surprise your competition.

At least the rest of us can learn from Reddit's management what not to do: motivating competitors to satisfy their users and customers while they're alienating them.

<comment><USER12> >Never surprise your team.

It's never been more clear that the managers of Reddit Inc. do not consider the moderators of their most popular subreddits to be part of their team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What really baffles me is the way reddit management handled this situation. There were many things they simply fucked up - They did not install the new AMA team properly (hell, the subreddit mods did not know about it), they reacted childish to the shutdown (something along the lines of "popcorn tastes good" \- one of your biggest communities just shut down because you failed to do basic management, in what universe is this a proper response?) and they won't address the real issues, it's all PR speech (take a look at the "we' sorry" post, a lot of important questions raised are not answered).

This is just horrible - You cannot anger your community in such a "business model". reddit depends 100% on their users and especially the content creators and moderators. They do very little by themselves, and most of it is stuff around the core functionality only a small percentage is even using.

<comment> steve-howard "Popcorn" as a metaphor for drama is a daily in-joke at SubredditDrama, where that comment was posted. What kn0thing didn't count on was that a lot of readers had never been there before and instead took it at face value.

<comment><USER14> I believe it was the opposite, people got outraged because they got the exact meaning of the joke.

People were expressing loud and clear their grievances and one admin response was in the lines of "we know about it, let's do nothing and watch the drama unfold, it will die down".

<comment><USER15> And, to be fair, it did die down. Even though there's still some aftershocks to the initial revolution, reddit seems to be mostly back to normal now.

<comment><USER16> Except, you know, Reddit moderators having editorials run in the New York Times.

<comment><USER15> That's a fair point, but if you read the article, it reads like a post-mortem: "this is what happened, this is why it sucked, life goes on, let's try to not do this again."

Maybe competing websites (Voat in particular) got a bump because of what happened, but at the end of the day redditors aren't an activist crowd (or rather, they are a slacktivist crowd.) I doubt this will have any big consequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When you consider exactly how much information we have to go on, I think people are overreacting by immense proportions.

Do we even know why Victoria was fired yet? Maybe she was about to blow the lid off a vast internet conspiracy. Or maybe she's actually the bad guy, and she went crazy and tried to destroy the office. We just don't know, and we might never know.

Besides, what is reddit corporate supposed to do when they want to fire an employee? Message the mods and say, "Oh, btw, we're going to fire Victoria in a couple days and Xyz will take over her duties, just thought you'd like to know."? That's simply out of the question, and not enough people even thought about this scenario.

The responses to this event are entirely unjustified, because there is no information at all to base a reaction on.

<comment><USER18> As the article explains, the issues aren't to do with Victoria herself. In that respect, why she was fired doesn't matter. Note that the story is _not_ a campaign to bring her back personally.

Corporate Reddit should have had a plan in place when they got rid of her, but as it became clear, they hadn't thought about it at all. That's what the mods were complaining about.

<comment><USER17> >Corporate Reddit should have had a plan in place when they got rid of her, but as it became clear, they hadn't thought about it at all.

What if she did something really bad and was fired on the spot? How could they "have a plan in place" for a situation like that?

<comment><USER19> You should always have some kind of plan for what to do if key employees get run over by a bus.

<comment><USER20> The problem seems to be that reddit didn't have a plan for when the users started believing it wasn't a bus at all, but a conspiracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >> ...We are disheartened by the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, who was one of the most high-profile women at the company — and in the technology field. We hope Reddit recruits someone with the talent and necessary background to fill her position in a similar capacity...

May I propose a good candidate? Victoria Taylor.

<comment><USER22> Does anyone know why she was fired? Few things get you fired immediately, so I guess it's something quite bad. As much as I agree with the IamA moderators about shitty decisions at Reddit, their owners might deserve credit for not disclosing whatever Victoria did to get fired.

<comment><USER23> Rumors abound. The most prominent rumor is that it was because of a bad public reaction to a Jesse Jackson AMA. Some leaked info from a supposed disgruntled Reddit admin says it's because Ellen Pao pressured Victoria into pushing an NDA + promise of a cut of future sales resulting from AMAs on the AMA subjects, which Victoria disagreed with a little too loudly.

<comment><USER24> The moderators of IAmA have said that they believe the decision was made to fire her before the Jesse Jackson AMA happened.

EDIT: whoops, didn't mean to downvote you. mobile misclick :(

<comment><USER23> Which is still speculation.

<comment><USER24> Sorry, I was a little vague. The mods of r/IAmA have been in contact with reddit admins about the situation, and from how the timeline was explained to them by reddit staff, the decision was made before the Jesse Jackson AMA even happened.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/3bw7ms/top_mod_of_r...](https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/3bw7ms/top_mod_of_riama_explains_why_its_been_set_to/csqa8bj)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> People often say that the users of a site like Reddit are the product, not the customers. In the case of Reddit moderators, they are also essentially employees. Employees who need to be treated more as customers, due to the fact they're volunteers.

Anger the masses of Reddit all you want, but don't piss off the volunteers that hold your product together.

</comment><comment><USER20> The problem with volunteers is that you can't easily fire them. It's great that reddit gets a lot of free labor from moderators, but their sense of entitlement is a huge drag. Regardless of why Victoria was let go, it's very difficult to run a business when you can't make staffing changes without threat of open revolt.

I would hire a replacement for Victoria and swap out every moderator of /r/IAmA who was part of this coup. It's not their property, it's reddit's. It will be ugly (not that it isn't already), but in the end there are a few moderators and millions of users who literally could not care less and just want to read interesting stories.

</comment><comment><USER26> Apparently Reddit has exactly 2 board members: Alexis and Sam Altman [1]. Why would Sam Altman, and by extension YC, have thought that Ellen Pao would make a good ("interim") CEO for Reddit?

This scenario should really be causing shareholders/board members to think about how dependent Reddit really is on moderator goodwill [2]. There needs to be a CEO and leadership team that can at least create a credible perception, if not the reality, that Reddit values moderators who donate their time to make the business viable.

For this purpose, it would seem you want a CEO who is going to be non- inflammatory (i.e., not Pao) and perceived as a relatively neutral arbitrator between the needs of shareholders for monetization and the needs of moderators for adequate support (i.e., probably not someone from a VC background). Considering how little it should actually cost the company to provide a reliable support network for mods, including honest, non-HR-speak communication, this hardly seems like a demanding task, but somehow they continue to manage it very poorly.

Does anyone know if there have been public comments by YC about any of these issues?

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/board.asp?p...](http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/board.asp?privcapId=29927936)

[2] [https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_apologize/csu119e)

</comment><comment><USER27> A discussion between an admin and the science mods leaked: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3c4x6h/leaked_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3c4x6h/leaked_conversation_from_kn0thing_and_the/)

<comment><USER28> Not just an admin. YC alum and cofounder Alexis Ohanian. This conversation tells you everything you need to know. They aren't sorry. This wasn't bungled. They are doubling down on their lack of communication.

<comment><USER27> I feel bad posting it because it's a leak but it informs the conversation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Rambling and self contradictory (presumably even after editing).

"We did not anticipate or intend for other communities to follow our lead as part of a protest."

"The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that ..."

Own up to one or the other.

<comment><USER30> How so? Their community shut down to regroup and protest, without anticipating others doing the same.

<comment><USER29> And "The secondary purpose" was a protest, contradicting the claim protest wasn't one of their purposes.

<comment><USER30> They didn't claim they didn't want to protest, they claim they didn't expect their protest to have followers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> How hard would it be to fork reddit AMA on a third party site? I'd imagine if you got Victoria on board, a lot of the mods/community would follow.

Certainly some custom support for the AMA would be nice, like getting cleanly summarized final outputs and highlighting direct conversation with the askee, and making it easy to find highly upvoted non-answered questions.

<comment><USER18> I imagine it'd be extremely difficult. It's the users that give reddit its power. You can set up another site but if it hasn't got the readership, fewer people are going to do AMAs there. There are already several reddit clones but they are nowhere near as successful.

<comment><USER27> When Barbara Walters switches networks viewers and celebrities follow her because they like and trust her, people feel the same way about Victoria.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Article>The issue goes beyond Reddit. We are concerned with what a move like this means for for-profit companies that depend on the free labor of volunteers — and whether they truly understand what makes an online community vibrant.

It's time for companies to stop treating the free work of contributors as a given, and pay them for their contributions: [http://newslines.org/blog/reddit-and-wikipedia-share-the- sam...](http://newslines.org/blog/reddit-and-wikipedia-share-the-same- disease/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Based upon the facts if and as described here, I would have to consider Pao entirely incompetent in her current role. Regardless of how one feels about her as a person.

I regret a bit jumping on the bandwagon, here, but if things occurred as described, the facts alone are damning.

P.S. I also have to question what the hell Alexis is up to. I've read elsewhere that he conducted the actual termination. Is he really so clueless at this point about his own site? (Even if he agreed with the termination, for whatever reason, its manner and fallout is just simply unacceptable.)

There has to be some serious dollar play behind this. Which does not speak well for the future of reddit; it may make it to the other side, but only based upon the gigantic momentum it has built that may sustain it through to some better policy -- if Management has the brains to see the light.

P.P.S. Is voat back up, now?

<comment><USER34> Yes voat is back up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I can't believe people take reddit so seriously. Its amazing to me.

<comment><USER35> Some people have been on that site for 10 years.

<comment><USER36> That's fine, but it's effectively a giant forum with volunteer moderators. I feel like it can best be described as the social equivalent of trying to steer a boat that's really 30,000 small boats all tied together.

They have volunteers with the ability to simply turn off huge traffic parts of their site? How is this a for-profit company?

<comment><USER37> I'm guessing they will take that power back from the community, under "responsibilities for default subreddits".

But if they would update their site (vs relying on 3rd parties) and update stuff and actually talk to these volunteers, they wouldn't be in this position. It's pretty impressive how they've managed to give an appearance of not caring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Why is it okay for a corporation to do it, but when mods do it everyone accuses them of pushing their own agenda?

</comment><comment><USER39> This article makes it seems like the moderators actually work for Reddit, which isn't the case. This is the problem, actually. Because it's not a paid position, the company can't use that as leverage in situations like this. The moderators essentially have nothing to lose.

Even in the article, it states that it was shutdown because of the abrupt termination of Ms. Taylor. Anybody that makes these sort of emotional decisions shouldn't be anywhere near a position of power.

If I were the CEO of Reddit, I would be making it my next goal to slowly take away the power away from these moderators.

<comment><USER40> If you were the CEO of Reddit it would go the way of Digg.

The community is what makes the site successful, and the moderators shape the community, in addition to being the chief content creators. Developing an adversarial relationship with the community or the moderators is the absolute __fastest __way to torpedo the site.

In addition, as a few other comments on this article have pointed out, the shutdown was not a reaction to the (sudden) firing of a (vital) employee, but to _years_ of serious issues and mismanagement.

The first subreddit to shut down did so because it literally couldn't keep functioning without Victoria, and the rest saw an opportunity to finally voice their complaints and be heard.

<comment><USER41> > moderators shape the community, in addition to being the chief content > creators.

Moderators create very little content. Most of the content is taken from other places, and most content is posted by people who are not mods.

<comment><USER40> You're right, I phrased that poorly. I'm aware that most posts are links to other sites, what I meant was:

\- Some of the "flagship" subreddits, and AMA in particular, only work because of constant effort from admins/mods, with the bulk of community contributions ranging from useless to toxic.

\- What differentiates Reddit from, say, 4chan is having some semblance of community, coherence and civility. This is partly due to the karma system, but mods play a big part in this too. "Content" was the wrong word to use, but good moderation is (IMO) as important as good submissions in many cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think the management is doing the right thing for the long term. They will try to make it more and more social and maybe even try to act as a news portal; things that bring in profits. It should attract a lot of new people. It won't be the reddit you remember but it will be a more profitable reddit. On a personal note I feel nothing as I find reddit to be quite a distraction to my productivity and many subreddits of my interests are dead.

</comment><comment><USER43> There seems to be an incredulous "we gave our time to a for profit company for free and got fucked" attitude that I can't help, undoubtedly because I'm a bad person, but think 'duh!'.

</comment><comment><USER42> [http://str8c.me/](http://str8c.me/)

<comment><USER44> Could you provide some details on this rather than just a naked link?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> An article critical of reddit? Let's see how fast this is taken out of HN frontpage.

Edit: Same as top post (NYSE) 1h and same votes, and it's at 9th position... Bring me your downvotes. Truth hurts?

<comment><USER41> These threads are pretty toxic, so it's not surprising they get flagged.

Also, your comment got downvotes for baiting.</comment></comment>