> (not (hacker-news-p))

T

:(

I'm just sick of hearing about it. This is like the OJ Simpson trial of hacker news.

Or I should say Reddit. The responses here were fairly normal until someone pointed out that reddit-ers were freaking out about it. I really hate to beat the old 'reddit is teh dumb' dead horse, but it kind of seems like it sometimes.

I think someone read into that essay what he wanted in a search for controversy, and then a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon in order to grind an axe with PG or YC, or to appear politically correct, or any number of other reasons.

It's just like when the whole world had a cow over the (lack of) unicode support in Arc0.

I am currently a caged lion, and I feel like one. I dream of nothing else but the open savanna and a tasty gazelle. How is that for taking a metaphor too far? I understood the whole thing as "startups are liberating to hackers" ... not "hackers that aren't doing startups suck" as others have suggested. I think his points about giant organizations not being natural make sense, and I really don't see why everyone took it personally.

Sure, people can enjoy their big company jobs. But you have to wonder... I have yet to meet an (ex)entrepreneur that hated running his own business. Just because you happen to like your company job doesn't mean you wouldn't get more done and feel more free in a startup. And just because you would get more done and feel more free in a startup doesn't mean you should quit a company job you are happy at either. It's up to the individual. It's not like we are arguing over religion here.

Or are we? It sure sounds like it lately.

The site has been diluted a bit. The TechCrunch post increased our traffic by 20% like a step function, and since then I've noticed slightly dumber stories getting slightly more votes. I don't think getting rid of karma would solve the problem, though. The problem is voting, not submission.

I may finally try turning on some kind of vote weighting. But there is a more organic solution:

Long-time users: please vote more.

If people voted up good stuff more often, that would fix the problem. And I know there is a lot of room to do that, because we now get around 12k unique visitors a day, and yet top stories rarely have more than 100 votes.

I did that for about 9 months before going full-time 6 months ago. I'd usually work on the startup for an hour before work and then 1-2 hours after dinner, so maybe 15-20 hours/week.

I've found that my coding time hasn't really increased much since going full-time, and yet I'm vastly more productive. The limiting factor in startups does not seem to be time: it's attention. Having that extra 8 hrs/day to think about the problem - and more importantly, not having to shift gears and think about my employer's problems - makes all the difference in the world.

I've found it also changes the incentives around development and leads to better development practices. For example, I was much less likely to use frameworks or large libraries when doing this part-time, because I didn't have a solid block of time to thoroughly learn the library. If there was a major problem in the design, I'd be inclined to hack around it rather than tackle it head-on, because I didn't have the necessary brain-cycles to hold the whole problem in my head. I'd often cut the design down to what I knew how to do, rather than the product I'd want to use, because that was all I could handle in blocks of an hour.

I don't think it's really speed that suffers when you work part-time. Rather, it sets a ceiling on the difficulty level of the project you can do. So you're fighting over the same problems as all the other folks who're doing startups part-time, while many of the harder problem lie unsolved.

I for one believe this conversation has reached an absurd level.

It's embarrassing to see this story at the top of News.YC. Think of all the sentences in history (in recent history) that have sent streams of people to their deaths, and this is the saddest and stupidest he's ever read? Honestly, this is at worst a bike shed painted slightly the wrong shade of green.

Time for Catholic school, maybe.

At any rate, you will see this time and again in any institution that has an internal disciplinary system. The effect is twofold:

1. Small infractions are amplified in importance. Thus, it is possible to be socially humiliated for...writing on a desk, talking out of line, chewing gum.

2. Large infractions are covered up. Thus, beatings, which in the real world could result in prison, are punished with 3 day suspensions.

Both of the above are designed to preserve the power structure. Minor infractions are punished for the sake of exercising that power, reminding people of it, to prevent cracks from forming, etc etc. Meanwhile, large infractions are covered up so that the outside world doesn't realize that it needs to intervene.

The situation with reddit is a unique one. I think I'm the only person who both writes a lot and started a news site. Not surprisingly, people who like what I write tended to switch to that news site. The switch was particularly extreme in the case of reddit, because News.YC is in a sense an offshoot of reddit: most people who switched from another site to this one came from there.

The result is that practically anyone left on reddit who has an opinion about me has a bad one. At this point, I could write an essay saying 1 + 1 = 2, and the reddit comment thread would be pretty unanimous that I was mistaken, and moreover, an asshole for saying so.

Usually this doesn't effect anything much, but I think you're right that it did in this case. I exchanged email with Atwood and it seemed clear he'd been influenced by the tone of the reddit thread.

I don't think there's anything one could actually do about this problem. I only mention this because it is so far as I know a novel one.

No.