Giles Bowkett

I think this is ultimately caused by developers not quite knowing where and how to place their ambition. It's easy to look at the big legacy app and be like, "I can fix that!" Then they roll up their shoulders and go to work, management be damned. Management can't see or understand what he does, and they're paying him for his expertise, so they give him the benefit of the doubt and let him do what he thinks he needs to do.

I documented my own answer to this situation here. Basically, don't treat organizational problems as technical ones. They're paying you to do a job, everything else you do is basically an ambition. First rule of ambition is to do no harm.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8768524

If you're going to refactor, don't refactor in the direction of new. Refactor in the direction of coherency. Do things that you can finish, or, that at least, don't matter that much if you don't. Like adding tests. Nothing wrong with that.

If you want to fix the legacy app, you need to make less ambitious changes, because you need to be able to finish them. Instead of changing the data types, refactor the initialization code. The initialization code runs once, data manipulation code is basically convention and you need to change it everywhere at once or not at all. Refactor it to the point where you can change it everywhere at once and then do that. Or get really good with a text editor and macro the changes.

Giles Bowkett has a great book on it. Unfuck A Monorail For…

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "it should tell us something." So, I apologize in advance if the following is a misunderstanding. (For the record, I don't much care about someone's HTML per se. I'm talking about presentation. I'm not being a web standards fanatic, if that's what you meant.)

If you mean that they are all substance and no frills and that that's a good thing (or something along those lines), I would argue that presentation matters. You don't have to follow the latest fashions, but Crockford's site makes it literally hard to read his (excellent) articles. There are no margins. The line spacing is painful. Applying Readability to that page makes the article not just prettier but more substantive (because I can draw the meaning from it more easily).

Giving literally zero thought to the visuals of a webpage is comparable to giving literally zero thought to the order of a presentation or paper. All writing is partly about communicating, and giving no thought to such things is not cool and intellectual. It's likely to be lazy or pretentious.

(One of Giles Bowkett's posts about this page makes an interesting comparison of the visual layout of Hacker News versus that of the Guardian. Found the post: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-newspaper.html. The bit that struck me is this:

> If you are a geek, you are probably consuming information in a less sophisticated structure then your non-geek peers.

I think there's some truth to that,…

Just create a new account. I get banned all the time. This is my third account. You can't take it personally. It's either some person being wrong about you or some automated system. Who cares?

I love it when I get banned, it means I won't be back for a while, until the desire for attention overcomes the inertia. This site is kinda like Get Satisfaction for bloggers. "You don't have to create an account. It's just that everybody on this one thread is talking about you right now, and they're all taking your lack of response to mean something."

I hate the karma system. Any site that has one is fundamentally flawed (detailed rant: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-heal-or-die.html). It's an automated, massively parallel abusive relationship, and I hate to kick somebody when they're down, but this guy, with all his sad whining about "I don't know what I did wrong, why don't you love me any more"? That is not the sign of a healthy community. That is the sign of an automated, massively parallel abusive relationship.

Any venture capitalist knows that you run a lot of experiments and some things fail. The karma system is fail. Throw it away.

PS, please ban me.

"... Good points but why not just comment within the thread? ..."

Read ...
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-heal-or-die.html

and specifically ...

"...
When you build a system where you get points for the number of people who agree with you, you are building a popularity contest for ideas. However, your popularity contest for ideas will not be dominated by the people with the best ideas, but the people with the most time to spend on your web site. Votes appear to be free, like contribution is with Wikipedia, but in reality you have to register to vote, and you have to be there frequently for your votes to make much difference. So the votes aren't really free - they cost time. If you do the math, it's actually quite obvious that if your popularity contest for ideas inherently, by its structure, favors people who waste their own time, then your contest will produce winners which are actually losers. The most popular ideas will not be the best ideas, since the people who have the best ideas, and the ability to recognize them, also have better things to do and better places to be. ..."

This is not a new phenomenon. When I first found HN, I conducted an experiment: Along with ordinary attempt-to-contribute comments, I made a couple of content-free remarks whose only attractiveness was the shared premise that "startups are awesome". They immediately received nearly an order of magnitude more upvotes than anything else I had written.

That was all it took to convince me that Giles Bowkett's original critique of HN was entirely correct, when he said several years ago that this transformation was inevitable: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-heal-or-die.html

I just checked, and my last comment was 906 days ago. This phenomenon is not new, and any reaction predicated on the idea that this is a relatively recent, relatively sudden decline are unlikely to succeed. It's a structural problem, possibly with human nature, and the best we can do is slow it down (at which HN has been successful, but that's probably only because it's not a business, and so explicitly does not share other sites' preoccupation with growth).

I wouldn't be surprised if this works, because I've done something similarly drastic that worked for me. Here's my story:

Last year I read something by Giles Bowkett about how he lost weight and got healthy. I've read about many fad diets and they all seem crazy or impractical. What he described sounded just boring enough to work. If you think about what a silver-bullet diet would look like, this is it. Here's his touched up version of what I originally read: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/06/how-i-lost-75-pounds-in-six-months-and.html

It's Dr. Fuhrmann's Eat To Live diet: Eat more vegetables. Lots more. Eat mostly vegetables. I didn't follow the diet exactly. I just tried to eat lots more vegetables. I was a young, fairly healthy guy but maybe 15 lbs overweight. I ate more vegetables, lost 10 lbs in a month, and felt fantastic doing it. I didn't eat any less or more. I didn't workout more. I simply lost weight and felt great.

I don't know if the no-grain thing will work for anybody, but the more vegetables thing sure worked for me.