What Insiders Say About Yahoo's Problems | Hacker News Reader

What Insiders Say About Yahoo's Problems

searchtrack.co

10 pointsanimeshk10 comments

As someone who used to work at aol, it was all similar problems there. Facebook was based on Aim and Aim away messages. Aol didn't give a shit about Aim internally and just let it die. Aol also invented a lot of devops-y tools years before stuff like chef was released, then didn't open source any of them and slowly laid off all the teams working on them. They spent years in this weird gray area where nobody knew how to use their own tools any more, but there wasn't any real buy in or understanding of modern development practices (Agile? What's that?) so there wasn't any buy in for AWS/chef/Jenkins/etc, either. Just years and years of wasted time.

I think the "hacker-centric" culture has a lot to do with that. It definitely seems technology companies should if nothing else, at the least, identify "technology & their hackers" as their core competencies. Only when they do that will they create a culture like Google, Facebook because ideas to open-source internal tools and seeing the potential in it can only come from hackers. I had read once, that Facebook keeps jumping their hackers from one project to the other every few months to expose them to fresh ideas. Hackers do love building new things all the time; Facebook has probably cracked this.

> Aol also invented a lot of devops-y tools years before stuff like chef was released [...]

You mean before cfengine that started in 1993?

> [...] then didn't open source any of them and slowly laid off all the teams working on them.

Back then it was not a common practice for companies to publish their tools as open source. It's a very recent development. It cannot be held too much against AOL that they didn't.

> [...] there wasn't any real buy in or understanding of modern development practices (Agile? What's that?)

Again, time doesn't match. Agile manifesto was written in 2001.

Your opinions would have much more substance if the timing of the events was right.

You are aware that aol continues to exist, right? They had 15 years to implement agile. Some groups did. It wasn't widespread though.

Seing as this article is only about the length of a mid-sized Medium post, I see no reason for the annoying interface. Is this a modern version of using slides to increase clicks?

I'm one of the founders of the site. Thanks for explicitly mentioning this.

We're testing a new format which helps people learn easily about a new topic. The idea is to break down information around a topic into bite-sized, slide-like chapters making it less overwhelming and more effective compared to a lot of information dumped in a single page. We're working to make this more interactive in future, from a learner's point of view.

Albeit we're still getting more feedback on it - yours being one of them. If you have any ideas related to improving navigation, i'd be happy to learn more.

Also, it'n not intended to get more clicks nor it generates anymore page views than 1 per user visit (no matter how much you go back and fourth within a single guide).

I'm not a fan of the way the article/site is done. Why did it require that I enable JavaScript to load the text/navigation? Why was it spread across four pages instead of one?

I'm one of the founders of the site. We're testing a different format which helps people learn easily about a new topic. The idea is to break down information around a topic into bite-sized, slide-like chapters making it less overwhelming and more effective compared to a lot of information dumped in a single page. We're working to make this more interactive in future, from a learner's point of view.

Enabling JS makes sure the slides work.

If you have any ideas related to navigation, i'd be happy to learn more.

The content for this particular article would work fine as a single page. The sections are small and bite-sized with clear headings and separations.

It's a bit discombobulating to paginate and scroll. The slide approach would work better if the contents were limited to a single page without vertical scroll (IMO). Feels a bit like a "mixed metaphor" in terms of design patterns.

Good luck!

yeah, makes sense. We're indeed trying to find ways so authors could keep the contents of a single slide contained within the users view. Hope we get to a design sweet spot soon.

Thanks so much!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com