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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

You're right to single out that sentence, or rather that word "all" in "All the interviewing and evaluating will be done in regular HN threads". We didn't stick to that, and I'm sorry. That's precisely what we changed, and yes we changed it at the last minute.

I didn't think of this experiment as having fixed rules, but rather as something we'd figure out as we went along. I tried to make that clear up front: "Note that word experiment! We'll start small and figure it out as we go. But here are the initial conditions." I can see why that wasn't enough.

It occurs to me only now that "figure it out as we go" and "changing the rules" are the same thing. So yes. We changed the rules, and I'm sorry.

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The only catch with this is that "Note that word experiment! We'll start small and figure it out as we go. But here are the initial conditions." can very easily be taken to mean "we'll start small this time, and adjust things for the next time, figuring it out as we go." That's how I, and seemingly some others, interpreted it.

"We'll change things next time based on the results of this experiment" and "We'll change things this time as we see fit and appropriate" are very different, though your initial statement can be read as implying either.

I don't even think one is better than the other - I would just be more careful about communicating which it really is, next time. You guys are free to do what you want, heh. This entire "debacle," if you can even call it that, is actually a great case study in how and why clear communication is so important. The problem wasn't the decision that was made, but rather how it was communicated.

> can very easily be taken to mean "we'll start small this time, and adjust things for the next time, figuring it out as we go."

That's not what I meant at all. This is the first time this interpretation ever occurred to me.

If that's what people thought I meant, I can certainly understand some of this thread better. But it floors me that my intent would have failed so completely to come across.

Surely the point of an experiment is to run it. Observe the results. Then change things in the next run.

Interesting. I'd interpreted it as "we'll start small this time, and adjust things for next time, if there is a next time". Usually an experiment (in science) implies that you don't change the conditions of the experiment while it's running, you let it run and record the results, whether they're positive or negative. Otherwise, you limit your ability to be surprised, which is the whole point of science.

It gets a little more muddled with social experiments, where it's often hard to delineate an "ending point" of the experiment, and there's often real collateral damage in the process. Even with social experiments, though, you get a more accurate signal if you let them run past the point where your gut tells you it's a bad idea.

> That's precisely what we changed, and yes we changed it at the last minute.

no rule of law -> automatic bullshit.

I don't agree with that at all, and taken literally it would make adaptation impossible, which can't be right.

HN has never been a rule-driven, legalistic kind of place, and isn't going to get that way. But I've had to learn a lot about people who do feel this way and obviously have a lot to learn yet. My own temperament is very far from this; it's almost impossible for me not to read "we'll figure it out as we go" as a good, fine thing.

If the "we'll figure it out as we go" is used just to reiterate the status quo, it's not a very sound or innovative approach.

About that, I like the point zellyn makes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633818

You're missing the point others are trying to make. I'm all for experimentation - by all means. I experiment literally every single day, often failing, but occasionally succeeding.

The issue was that it wasn't clear there would be rule-changing or experimentation /during/ the experiment, rather than after the experiment.

I agree that if that wasn't clear, it was a huge problem. The whole idea was to figure this particular experiment out as we went along. Not putative future instances of it, which we hadn't even thought about or mentioned amongst ourselves. Why would we, when the first one hadn't even started?

From my point of view that sentence about making it up as we go was the most important thing in the original post. It meant that we didn't have to plan a fixed set of rules: if and when something unforeseen came up, we'd adapt to it then. That's why I said "initial conditions". I'd never have proposed anything that took away our ability to adapt in the middle of this, and especially not about something so untried.

You changed the rules to keep Pinboard out of the program. Even Kevin Hale admits that. You weren't turning the knobs to see what would change. The outcome was clear, you didn't like it, and so you prevented it from happening.

I think, at this point, the issue is that it's clear to most of us what happened, but YC is still trying to put a gloss on it.

The more you and Kevin Hale try to mitigate this, the more polarized it gets, and the meaner some commenters get about Maciej, who didn't do anything wrong. You don't have to accept Pinboard into YCF, but you have a responsibility not to let him take any of the blame for this.

> You weren't turning the knobs to see what would change. The outcome was clear, you didn't like it, and so you prevented it from happening.

Yes. I wasn't arguing against that.

It is very difficult to have a meaningful experiment if you change what you're doing in the experiment as you go. "Initial conditions" makes sense as "the conditions for this initial run".

Or maybe, now that you've figured out what this experiment is supposed to be, you should actually run this experiment, i.e., start it over, with a clear understanding of what's going on and what the parameters are. It's unsurprising that people were confused about the parameters since you yourselves were confused about them. Their confusion is on you.

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