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Comment by RVuRnvbM2e | Hacker News Reader

> It’s important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time. First of all, you probably don’t even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don’t actually have “more experience”. You’re just going to make most of the old mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren’t in the original version.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

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The irony whenever someone references this article is they always seem to forget that he was arguing against the decision to rewrite Netscape, specifically, to create version 6, also known as Mozilla.

Looking back, updating Netscape may have been the correct choice.

This is an impossible counterfactual to figure out. Microsoft crushed Netscape, and it's far from clear that continuing Netscape as it had been going would have had anywhere near the success that Mozilla ultimately had.

Mozilla’s success had a lot to do with Microsoft practically abandoning internet explorer. IE6 which came out in 2001 was only replaced with IE7 coming out in October 18, 2006. Meanwhile Mozilla 1.0 came out in 2004 which was effectively the perfect time to gain market share.

Not really. Netscape wasn't trying to be Mozilla Firefox, it was trying to be The Internet.

I think this a lot about our politics now, we seem to want to tear down all the institutions and values that got us here.

> we seem to want to tear down all the institutions and values that got us here.

Strike a "we", replace by "rich elites". "Small government" means in practice that most of what governments are doing now with taxpayer money at no-profit will be done by private for-profit companies, at a worse service level, or that regulations/regulatory agencies will be torn down.

For the first, just look at private prisons - make a lot of profit for their owners, while the level of care for the prisoners (access to healthcare, drug withdrawal treatment or education is often spotty, human rights abuse claims the norm).

For the second, look at how e.g. environment regulations were "relaxed" during the 45th.

It's all about the grifting opportunities.

Sorry to invoke a No True Scotsman here but if you ask an advocate of truly small government (of which I am one) I very much doubt private prisons would be an example they’d accept as a fair representation of their position. The expansion of criminal law is often in pursuit of and to justify growing government and its reach. By all means end private prisons, they’re only needed at that scale because big government is violating its position and the rights of citizens by criminalising actions it should have no part in.

"The purpose of a system is what it does".

Maybe you didn't mean for your position to lead to private prisons. But it does, anyway, and that is all that matters.

Contracting out the running of prisons by the government is a recent innovation[1]. Are we to say that government was historically small in 1983 and has remained small and then notice that somehow there are more private prisons in the US now? That's not a description I'd want to defend.

The US is also not the only place where prisons are private[2], there's the southern hemisphere's Sweden a.k.a. big government paradise, and it has a private prison.

To say either "public" or "private" and ascribe some sort of good or bad to them without providing any reasoning is presumptuous in the least, but to then tell someone what their actual position is - in your view - after making such a presumption would only be to compound an error.

I know what I meant, try to focus on what you mean and fixing that before mischaracterising my views again, thank you.

[1] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/history-of-amer...

[2] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/crit...

You claim to know what you meant, but that isn't clearly the case. GP's post was short and to the point. Your posts are long and confusing.

We do have private prisons. As you note, they started under Reagan, in response to Reagan's "anti-crime" policies. Reagan is notorious for claiming to support small government and balanced budgets while actually spending us deep into deficit in order to purchase boondoggles. How are your preferences different than Reagan's?

> Your posts are long and confusing

What’s the average length of a post on HN and where does that post stand?

> How are your preferences different than Reagan's?

You just stated that he acted contrary to his claims, if your position is that I say I’m for small government but wish to spend, spend, spend, then I can see why you’re confused. Try dropping the assumption I’m lying, the principle of charity is a wonderful thing.

More to the point, as you are confused by sarcasm in the service of proof by contradiction, I’ll rephrase:

Would you claim that the government was historically small in 1983?

Is today’s government smaller or bigger?

How do both of your answers correlate with the increasing number of private prisons?

Finally, since your answers should be no, bigger, and bigger government correlates with more private prisons, what on Earth are you on about?

> where does that post stand

i think the bit where you talked about Sweden being in the southern hemisphere places it in the top tier of 'confusing' for me...

Ah, a helpful comment. I meant to write

there's the southern hemisphere's Sweden a.k.a. New Zealand, the big government paradise

I can't edit now but thanks for pointing out something in a reasonable way.

np, makes more sense now, tx.

Correlation is not causation (I hate having to post this.) This is an awful lot of words to avoid the question of whether the small-government philosophy you personally subscribe to, whatever it may be, would prefer that government contract out prison services, or run them itself. If you prefer contracts, stop arguing, if you don't, explain why you think the operation of prisons is a proper function of a small government. It's not hard.

> Correlation is not causation (I hate having to post this.)

And yet you're going to avoid defending it, or even looking at, nor answering any of my questions and then accuse me of such matters. Ironic.

> This is an awful lot of words to avoid the question

What is it with those who support big government ascribing mendacity to their opponents? I'm not avoiding anything (except fallacies like ad hominem and false dilemmas).

> whether the small-government philosophy you personally subscribe to, whatever it may be

Here you admit that there is more than one possible outlook, yet you go on to produce this:

> If you prefer contracts, stop arguing, if you don't, explain why you think the operation of prisons is a proper function of a small government. It's not hard.

A false dilemma. Make your mind up, are there many types or only one?

Perhaps if my questions were answered I might feel more in the mood to answer those from people who accuse me of avoiding theirs.

> would prefer that government contract out prison services, or run them itself

My answer is either, it's irrelevant. The government is regulator and enforcer. It should promote (high) standards which it then enforces regardless of whom is running a service. Problems may arise when:

a) the one running the service is also the regulator, a clear conflict of interest and though in some cases permissible, it's not one for incredibly powerful entities like government.

b) the ones providing the service are also over-represented in government i.e. they have more than a vote, they have lobbying power (or straight up corruption) which in this case would lead to criminalising essentially non-criminal behaviours to produce whatever positive outcome for them and not for the populace they're supposed to serve. How many people are in gaol for marijuana possession?[1]

More criminals means more prisons, more tax money, more staff and budget (hence more power), more cheap labour… how does that sound anything like small government?

This[2] will come in handy for you.

[1] https://www.drugtestpanels.com/blogs/articles/jail-time-for-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

Long. Confusing.

Strike a "we", replace by "rich elites".

I don't agree. My 'poor' leftie friends are all about tearing shit down, while most 'rich' people I know are pretty happy with the way things are, wanting only to make small tweaks here and there.

Yeah rich people are (usually) Tories, also known as "Conservatives" here in the UK

This was at least an observed property of some modern reformers in 1929:

> In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence

In Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson dedicates the first chapter/rule to this:

"Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement."

Really confused by the initial -4 votes on this comment... If that's not sufficient proof downvotes are misused..

The joy at a standup when you hear someone talk about fixing bugs they had to fix the first time they wrote the thing in a different language. We learnt nothing

Except in rust. There is no way to write buggy code in rust.

There is. You may accomplish preventing any memory leaks or buffer overflows but there always exist a bug in your code.

The program is the implementation of an intention, if the conception of how to achieve that intention was itself faulty the program does not actually implement the intention.

A program that does not implement its intention is buggy.

Is this the same guy that says that interns should work for free and that absolute rights to employees off-work time are OK ? from New York City ?

Counterexample: SpaceX. Sometimes, starting from scratch can be very helpful.

SpaceX didn’t start from scratch. The goal for Falcon 1 was to be as conventional a design as possible and save money via vertical integration. By comparison many other companies tried to reinvent things by launching from aircraft etc.

> SpaceX didn’t start from scratch. The goal for Falcon 1 was to be as conventional a design as possible and save money via vertical integration.

This is still starting from scratch. The design may be conventional, but you're benefiting from a modern approach to processes and design from the beginning.

This is one of those differences between engineering and software. For physical projects how much something is starting from scratch is kind of arbitrary. Knowing for example the ideal nose cone shapes and tradeoffs is a huge advantage.

I mean this is the best way possible, the Falcon 1 didn’t reinvent the wheel. They basically said what’s the simplest useful rocket for getting stuff to orbit copying as much of the design as they could, and built that.

You could make the same argument for software. Where do you draw the line "starting from scratch" in software? Does incorporating third party libraries make it not from scratch? What about the standard library of your language of choice? What about using the abstraction of a high level language in general vs a low level language, or straight machine code? For that matter, is it from scratch if you didn't design the logic gates on the chip itself? Or perhaps even come up with the concept of logic gates from electrical and material science principals.. etc..

I'd say that if you are gluing together a bunch of known-good components into a specific configuration that isn't a full copy of something else, you're building from scratch.

Falcon 1 also included 3rd party equipment and software. IMO, that’s fairly analogous to using 3rd party libraries. I am specifically talking about elements they where designing and building in house which where directly copied from earlier designs.

Take say all those identical looking highway overpasses. Even if one of those projects started with a blank file, applying standard solutions to standard problems isn’t starting from scratch.

If you're going to just quote someone and pretend that serves as a cogent argument you'll probably want to pick someone a little smarter and more well-rounded than Spolsky.

If it is already so, your comment is equally lacking.

Is your only objection towards the argument that it was made by Spolsky?

Have you ever made a happy comment on HN? Not like ecstatic or anything just.. not this sort of thing

You alright?

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