Hacker Laws
github.com
github.com
In turn, the users who do actively post and comment have an amplified affect on what the 90% actually see. I find this to be particularly interesting when the culture of a userbase changes. I've been a long time user of Reddit, however rarely am I ever logged in. Overtime, I've felt that the culture of Reddit has changed to be much more liberal with posting low-effort comments. Many new users post on every post they see, while a previous generation of users may have dismissed that kind of behavior as being "Facebook-like" behavior. I think it may be another factor in the age old rule that the larger a site grows, the more the quality of discussion drops.
How can an online community avoid this? What techniques can be used? What technology can be used? What skills are needed? How should communities be organized and staffed?
I've run online communities with hundreds of thousands of active users. The problem as an owner was that as soon as I wasn't able to moderate it myself I had to hire volunteer moderators from within the userbase. I would slowly step back as this staff took over my workload, but as I created a hierarchy and promoted staff they would all become increasingly power-hungry and dictatorial, without exception. I would end up in a constant churn of having to ban the most senior staff (who would then turn into demons of revenge trying to burn down everything) and again promoting less staff who swore they would not become what they had despised.
Surely there must be books on this shit?
How? Why? This seems crazy to me. As a long time Reddit user, I've cultivated a nice list of subreddits specific to my interests; without all the noise. Reddit's default frontpage has become pretty terrible and useless.
BUT, there has been an explosion of subreddits, some of which are unbelievably high quality with thousands of users even in the most niche interests. This leads to large amounts of content of value being created.
I'm very, very happy with where Reddit has gone. Also, porn.
Said no-one, ever.
Subreddits are almost different websites with different moderators and different cultures. HN is now one of the only forums I consistently visit. Otherwise subreddits dominate this method of topic-focused discussion.
> But they're not voting so they're irrelevant.
Thank you for this patronizing attitude. TBH I don't vote (and most of the times comment) anymore because I have accepted that my opinion differs too much from most opinions out there so people who run platforms do not want to read it. Even if I do not curse or insult somebody my words will be downvoted, censored etc. so it is just no use to waste my time sharing my opinions and knowledge (yes I have that, too - not just opinions you do not like).
You probably come from US or live inside the same bubble the active HN users do.
Just created this account some weeks ago to be able to answer again, don't know if my comment will even show up here (I think new accounts are not allowed to post).
I prefer Reddit because the users come from different places of the world and have different opinions. It's not a hive like a Borg cube or HN which will try to assimilate you and punish those who think differently.
Of course there is toxic communities, too but at least you can go somewhere else and have a normal conversation or exchange knowledge.
HN is a stub for the opinion of US patriots, average age 40+ with high salary and very specialized IT know how. Just look at the kind of problems people here discuss about and you see what I mean. Reddit is a public forum where different people talk about things they are interested in. Yes, Reddit is also not a mirror of society and in some cases biased but at least you can speak more freely there. Maybe this is what you expressed with "Facebook-like" behavior but I like that you can use it without needing a PhD to be accepted (so dumb people like me can have and share opinions, too).
I think politics is similar. Many people don't vote and this makes them irrelevant to politicians. They are irrelevant in terms of winning an election. In a place with low voter turnout, the interests of those who do vote is amplified.
HN is CS/Tech/Entrepreneurship focused so I don't see a problem with it being a bubble of people who are skilled and participate in these activities. All people are welcome to the site which I think is fantastic but the site has a certain culture. If you don't enjoy hacker news than go to a site whose culture you enjoy more. I frequent here because I enjoy the content more than other forum sites such as poetsandquants or bogleheads or the infinite set of subreddits.
Simple mental reference tools like the six reliability curves and mean time between failure, pareto distribution, network and cascading effects, shortest paths and solvability, recursion, mutability locking and versioning, complexity classes, logical contrapositives, dependent and independent probability, are all things the fortune file seemed to have quips about and if you had a sense of humor, you could map them to everyday situations. Hackers are an old trope now, but when you read these together again, it was a very rich and distinct culture and way of thinking. I appreciate seeing these put together.
Full text here: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfile...
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfile...
With “Hacker” in the title, I was expecting more unwritten rules like “When you find yourself in a place you’re not suppose to be in, like admin access, make no changes that cause harm”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic
Interestingly I only knew the German version by the Chaos Computer Club.
All organizations are perfectly pathological, their hierarchy being divided up between sociopaths (management), clueless (middle-management) and losers (everyone else). Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.
[0]https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
But realizing that and accepting it for what it is can be liberating.
Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment, also known as Zawinski's Law:
"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
Some have interpreted this as commenting on the phenomenon of software bloating with popular features:
Zawinski himself has stated:
"My point was not about copycats, it was about platformization. Apps that you "live in" all day have pressure to become everything and do everything. An app for editing text becomes an IDE, then an OS. An app for displaying hypertext documents becomes a mail reader, then an OS."
Popehat's Law of Goats
"He who fucks goats, either as part of a performance or to troll those he deems has overly delicate sensibilities is simply, a goatfucker."
He claimed he was just pretending to be racist to trigger the social justice warriors, but even if he is telling the truth, Popehat's Law of Goats still applies.
"If you're not 5 minutes early, you're 10 minutes late."
"The expectation that more programmers on the team leads to faster shipment times is like expecting two women to give life to a baby in 4.5 months."
"Only 50% of programming is writing code. The other 90% is debugging."
Hofstadter's law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."
In the past when lists like this come up I read a bit, then bookmark for later. Later never comes and now I just have this bookmark lying around amongst the thousands of others I have made over the years.
Maybe a more useful way to present this stuff is figure out a better way to give you the law relevant to the context in which you are in? For the sake of argument I could see something like this being useful:
INPUT
I am a `_developer_` working at a `_start up_` who `_needs to give_` `_an estimate_`
OUTPUT
- see Hofstadter's Law
Probably a non trivial task and I'm sure there's a law in that list that describes this phenomenon!
So let's take your example of Hofstadter's Law
> It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
So your reaction to this might be one of:
- Yes, that's a funny way to put it. I've spent many years estimating projects and matching up the final time taken, and even though i've gotten better at it, i still underestimate a little on each project. Here are different patterns i've seen for how my estimates end up going wrong. Here are different approaches i use now to try to mitigate how wrong my estimates end up being.
- Huh, that's interesting. I've just started being a manager, and i've been wondering why everything seems to take longer than i expect. Am i just the only one who is bad at estimating? Or is this some kind of problem that everyone encounters. Maybe i should look up techniques or ask advice on this subject.
- I don't know what this means. Why would anyone's estimates be wrong? Writing a website is like making a ham sandwich right? Once you do it once or twice, you must be able to estimate it perfectly every time.
This is spot on. There is a time and a place for these "laws" which is sometimes forgotten. Don't be dogmatic about following them. They will be detrimental to a team following them blindly.
..wait, it doesn't include the Lindy Effect :D
Later down the line, you're going to encounter a problem and one of the ideas in the list will be helpful in framing the context of your problem. It may or may not help in finding a solution, but it can help articulate the problem to other people.
Greenspun's tenth rule of programming is an aphorism in computer programming and especially programming language circles that states:
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."