codinghorror

Wow a shout out for our Discourse project from Avi. This made my day, thank you!

And yeah, distributed discussions are moon-shot hard, unfortunately.

Yes please he is one of the best writers on the web in my estimation. Plus, he runs pinboard. I backed it, you should too!

Incorrect. Closed questions (and answers) can be edited even by anonymous users.

Voting is also possible on closed questions and answers.

This is also incorrect. There can be multiple answers, there just should not be dozens, or hundreds. The dozen case is where you start to see that the question isn't a question, but a discussion.

Incorrect, you can vote on closed questions. You just can't add new answers.

Didn't Bill Gates set the model here for everyone to follow? This reads like an exercise in how many times he can use the word "hack" in an article.

I really, really do not recommend doing a family with kids and a startup at the same time. That is hardcore mode.

Family is hugely important but try to avoid both startup mode and family mode at the same time.

HAProxy will be using Lua in future releases for similar reasons. Interesting trend!

Hmm. Sam was only at Imgur for less than a year. That's a lot of management lessons for a limited period of time...

Many customers run Discourse sites on the $10/month Digital Ocean instance just fine. It is true that you can't go below that, though, as 1 GB RAM is the minimum.

Revenge: a dish best not served at all.

Yeah please don't use phpBB. This is one reason I started the Discourse project.

One thing to consider here is the difference between "help us track our bugs" and "let's build a community around our product". In the long run, the community will be far more valuable than merely acknowledging a feature request or bug report.

There are a lot of bugs and even feature requests that require a fair bit of back and forth discussion, both internal and external, to decide what the best approach is. I like GitHub for straightforward bugs, but it is not great for discussion. And involving your active users / customers in the future of your product, including your own team, is a huge strategic advantage.

Could be worse, could be a Yahoo Answers result.

Epinion? I see what you did there! :)

More seriously, I remember bringing up Get Satisfaction at a VC meeting and the VC said "Don't talk to me about Get Satisfaction." I guess now we see why.

This is a very, very strange article to find on HN.

I sourced that because I was curious... these quotes are terrifying:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf

I mean, I'd be first person to tell you that I am a scripter at heart, but I would never, ever say "I don't care about this [computer science] crap at all." I feel like my job is to defer to the many programmers that are smarter than I am. Including the parser and compiler and linker etc

More of a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario.

You know you can put a bit of water on toilet paper to make it wet, right?

This is really beautiful, thank you for sharing this.

All communities trend to strictness over time, otherwise they do not survive.

But anyone can bring this up on meta, if they have data, if they have examples, and lobby for change.

The issue is Creative Commons content, if you are legitimately pruning old low value content of yours that is totaly fine. But rage quits where people just want to take their content and go home, withdrawing it from the commons out of anger, is not OK.

You can always get to older content even deleted content through the regular Creative Commons data dumps that the whole Stack network publishes torrents of. You can also, if you sign an NDA, get a more complete data set for research purposes.

A disclaimer is the right way to go. The more guidance you can put into the question, the better off everyone is.

Do you mean closed or locked from vandalism by drive by users? A lot of popular stuff gets locked due to noise answers and bad edits.

We will look into this. Not very different than voting rings on HN or other places. You want vote diversity.

This isn't true. Shog, Jay, and many others were hired from the community precisely because they were avid long term users who had demonstrated deep insight into the culture and organization of Stack. I would easily rate them as equal to myself if not, frankly, better at helping the Stack community govern itself.

The reality is that good Q&A takes a fair bit of discipline to get right, and that means rules and standards. This rubs some people the wrong way, but it is the ONLY way to achieve reliable, sustainable, long term quality.

If you have specific examples of where things went wrong in a question, take it to meta and discuss it so that the community can adapt and change. That is how community works, and Stack is a democracy in that sense -- anyone can provide evidence and push for change.

(warning, though, scroll down in the comments here to see an example that turned out to be an anti-example when examined closely. A lot of times people just complain when they don't like rules, and the rules don't favor their personal needs versus the needs of the community or the greater Internet)

Kudos, this is exactly the kind of response I love to see.

I guess he was the first to come up with this radial heatsink design?

http://www.google.com/patents/US20040200601

Stock Intel coolers do look like this today and have for a while.

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about heatsinks. It is all tower and heatpipe models today, though, e.g.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6830/cpu-air-cooler-roundup-si...

Originally popularized by the Scythe Ninja back in gosh, what, 2004 or so? It was a super effective design, main refinements over time have been more and more "slices" and direct contact heatpipes. Nobody afaik has beaten efficiency of the tower heatpipe design to date.

Yes, he died a while ago. I love this guy though. The ultimate contrarian, and for all the right reasons: optimism.

http://www.aei.org/publication/julian-simon-still-more-right...

Every new human birth is not a drain on the planet, but another great mind working together with us towards solutions.

If any article needed a date in the title this one does. Seen it on HN a few times now.

(can HN have code that checks for dupe links from the past and forces the year in the title, if so, just as an additional signal to long term readers? That'd help a lot.)

> People are questioning the real reason because they can't accept that a CEO of a hugely popular site has chosen to resign on good terms instead of being involuntarily ousted

They're probably questioning those terms because the New York Times is also questioning it..

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/reddit-chief-execut...

> But things have been tumultuous at Reddit in recent months. After the company raised a major investment round, Reddit management requested that the company’s global employees relocate to San Francisco or leave the company, according to tweets sent by Mr. Wong. Mr. Wong also recently had a public argument with a former employee of the site in which he laid out the terms of his former employee’s termination in excruciating detail. That incident, according to people close to the company, made some of Reddit’s current employees uncomfortable.

There are many ways to tell a partial, incomplete truth. You don't talk about certain parts. Doesn't make what you said any less true, but it is not the complete story.