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Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to note that Colin - who apparently explicitly asked for this feedback from a close friend who happens to be an eminent domain expert - appears to have taken basically none of Patrick's advice in a decade.

I don't know the inside baseball, but if I was @patio11, I'd be more than annoyed by this. I might ratchet up to lightly insulted, given how master-of-the-obvious some of the advice is.

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Advice is worth what you paid for it and even if you solicit advice you are not required to take it, especially if taking that advice implies you have to do stuff that runs counter to your nature and views.

Patrick's advice is very good: for Patrick. But for Colin it was more of an exercise in how you could run Tarsnap, not how he should run Tarsnap. Meanwhile, Tarsnap is still in business many years later, has happy customers and as far as I know happy people running it.

All fair points, and Patrick acknowledged this at the time - and in the previous HN thread back in 2014. I remember it was a good one.

The detail that really pets me backwards is the whole "if you're here, you already know what this is for and how to use it" vibe. It's not just Tarsnap; many aspects of the OSS world uphold this most unfortunate tradition. I believe with all of my heart that it is unnecessarily hostile and antisocial.

Many of the founders and teams I've mentored over the years have experienced me spending a large amount of time and effort explaining the importance of clearly stating why a thing exists and why you should use it; how it works and how it will not create additional unknown risks; what tools it is intended to replace... as the barest civil minimum.

This is just my opinion, but it's a hill I'd die on if necessary.

It matters to you because you care about seeing things succeed according to your definition of success but consider that there are different kinds of people some of which are more than happy to present their works in such a way that it doesn't turn into a runaway marketing machine but presents itself more like you would look at a utility. I have a project like that myself in the works and if it ever starts to take on a life of its own beyond where I'm having fun with it and it is just useful to others I will have to make a very hard choice: transform it into an actual business or to hobble it in such a way that it won't take off (or possibly even to shut it down). Which of those two it will be I can't tell you but in the meantime I've done what I could do to ensure that no matter what I choose users of the service will have perfect data portability with a local installation.

Founders that are in the funding cycle would obviously benefit from Patrick's advice they are going to increase their chances at commercial success that way. But if commercial success isn't your #1 goal there are other viable paths based on your priorities in life. And that's a hill that I'd die on if necessary because I don't believe that everything has to be run as a marketing driven profit maximization engine. The OSS world upholds that tradition pretty good and I'm fully supportive of it, there are many paths to a happy life and not all of them run through a wallet.

I agree, understand and appreciate.

I want to clarify, though, that in talking about the unfortunate number of OSS projects which convey the "if you're here, you need no explanation", I am absolutely not hung up on profit motives.

Instead, I am talking about the times where you are searching for a technical solution with only a vague intuition about the shape of an approach and some faith that it might exist. And you land on a project homepage that contains so little context that the only reasonable reaction is to have serious doubts that you're in the right place.

You're right, I do care. I have spent a huge amount of my life publishing OSS under different licenses and I want people to experience maximum benefit from that effort. It boggles my mind that people work so hard to build useful tools and then appear to actively gaslight potential users into feeling inadequate instead of attempting even the most basic onboarding advice.

Folks are not obligated to make their code or projects accessible, but if you can't justify even a simple "this is why this exists" statement somewhere prominent that conveys intent without inference or telepathy, I believe that they give up their right to grumble that nothing they do matters and nobody cares.

Well, there is an old English proverb that applies here: you don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Obviously OSS writers could in many cases do better at communications. But communicating clearly is a skill that is unfortunately not all that common and there is an interesting thing about the very best programmers that I know: they all seem to excel at dialogue with the machine but only a small fraction of them is equally skilled at dialogue with humans, present or in writing. This creates an obvious and immediate problem: without infrastructure those people are still going to be able to create useful software, various tools and so on, but those tools are going to be bereft of documentation and explanation. This is the case for a large chunk of all open source projects and if you look a bit more closely at this you'll probably find that the most successful open source projects are successful primarily because their creators either had great communications skills (possibly even better than they had software skills) or that they found someone to contribute that skill early on in the project.

So what you are seeing is entirely the expected outcome!

> I believe with all of my heart that it is unnecessarily hostile and antisocial.

I used to believe this. And maybe at some point it was, but then the world, and the sector, was absolutely _flooded_ with script kiddies.

Now things that immediately confuse people that don't at least have a halfway decent idea of what they're about satisfy me.

Patio11 is a professional advice giver, while cperciva makes a living running a niche service. The ability to give eloquent and persuasive advice is professionally valuable to the giver, but should not be mistaken for domain expertise. It's important when running a business to lash yourself to the mast sometimes and not listen to people without direct experience or skin in the game.

That was a good description of Patrick at the time he wrote this post, but stopped being accurate shortly afterwards. The majority of his career, in fact, has not been consulting or advice-giving; he made his living on a micro-SAAS, like you, for a bunch of years, and left consulting after an ill-fated startup he did with some schmuck on HN and spent the longest stretch of his career to date working in the payment industry mines at Stripe.

Your point is well taken! I appreciate also that you're not making an absolute declaration that advice is untrustworthy. I spent a long time as a professional advice-giver too, but if you lashed yourself to the mast and ignored my advice that there was a CBC padding oracle in your session cookie implementation, you were plotting a course to the ocean floor. Running a business means being careful which advice you let in and which you don't.

My only nit here is: between this and your other comment on the thread, I don't think Patrick's advice here was unwelcome. I have a vague recollection of Colin being asked first. Also: if anyone was going to ask before publishing unsolicited advice about someone else's business, it would be Patrick. So the Bingo Card thing is a bit of a low blow. Also, easy to make fun of when you exclude the context that he lived off that Bingo thingy for years.

I respect Patrick for living off his Bingo card thingy! If I fault him for anything it's giving up that life; may we all find a Bingo card thingy to sustain us.

Unlike you I don't know either person in this discussion personally and you should construe my comment strictly as beating my favorite dead horse, "be wary of smart-sounding advice from people whose livelihood is built on sounding convincing to people like yourself."

Absolutely. I get that you're coming from a good and useful place here! It's special pleading for me to say "HN is awash in dubious business advice but you should take Patrick's advice more seriously than most, while remembering that it's just outsider-looking-in advice". But that's my take!

Mostly I was just moved to comment because I got the vibe that Patrick was coming across to you as condescending, and I know he was working hard not to come across that way.

Why would he be annoyed? The lifetime business value and goodwill from this public analysis probably earned a lot more for Patrick than any consulting gig Colin would have paid for.

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