Once again the top story is an embarrassment to News.YC. And unfortunately it is mostly the recently arrived users who voted it up. Maybe it's inevitable that I'll have to turn on some form of vote weighting.
Sure the (original) article does not deserve to make it to the top of HN, so why is it up there? Is it being up-voted because of the content of the article, or the content of the discussion, or because commenters have posted in a popular article and want their comment seen/possibly up-modded?
The last case is obviously the least desirable, but what about the other two? What should the community be voting on?
I've temporarily replaced the rant with my more complete and restrained thoughts on the subject.
For example, you could add a penalty for negative-rated comments. A trashy article is more likely to cause the sort of argument that gets comments downrated.
Or you could try to classify the comment contents and organization to get a sense of how "argumentative" vs "quality" they are. Bayesian if you want. You could use article contents, too, if you had a scraper.
Either way the ranking algorithm will have to get more complicated as time goes on. Logically you should have more information with more users, so the quality of articles should actually get better. The problem with vote weighting is that by downweighting votes you are discarding this extra information rather than using it more cleverly.
Are the recently arrived users simply voting up articles yet not adding any comments of their own to explain why they've voted up?
How about this?
If a person votes up an article (which costs a point), a contributing comment by the same person can start out at 2 points instead of 1. You're basically paying back the point taken to vote up an article. This would give more incentive for users to voice their opinion instead of simply voting up (without commenting) as well as now giving others a chance to agree/disagree. If their comments don't really add any value, they'll receive bad karma as normal.
You can also show a flag next to the user id to show whether they voted for this article or not.
What about users who vote up a story so that it is stored in their history? I do it often, i like a story but don't think i have much to add to the conversation, but still want to keep it.
Requiring a small karma minimum before allowing users to vote on posts & comments, or submit new posts could work well. This way new users can only influence the community by engaging with it, which would filter out votes from casual users and trolls, while also giving new users a chance to grasp the community norms though participation.
Other approaches like vote-weighting and down-voting ignore the root of the problem, which is dilution of the community and its norms.
So, maybe comments's karma should be kept as a different record. And there should be comments weighting too, because we wouldn't want new users to game the system with each other and thus game again the weighting system for the story order.
"Quality" could be expressed as "experience" because obviously people adapted in the climate of YC.news who behave the expected way, as you say you expect to happen and thus the problem correct it self. But expecting the situation to correct it self may not be the right way.
Expected way though shouldn't be mean is the correct way, because the community would remain closed instead of being open.
So, because of the problems that arise with a weighting system making it probably not democratic, the most correct way for weighting would be to happen in manual down voting, which should appear only for "experienced users".
Weighting should happen there, so for example if you have 1 experienced user up voting and another one down voting, their vote is eliminated, which positive/negative difference could be used in two ways:
1. added in the current points of the story
2. or a non-linear scale be used that would determine the quality of the story.
what do you think?
Regardless of his feelings on solutions and causes, it's not like an Internet rant is going to change post-industrial work relations in developed countries. Certainly the people at fault will never read it.
While I don't disagree with the point of the post I think that many hackers should step back and look at how many great marketing people, CEO's etc. they know. The actual programming part is only a small part of starting a company, but many hackers seem to think it is all they need because hacking something together happens to be the first step to creating a great company.
The key insight is that no great company was made by only one guy. It takes both great hackers, great marketing people, great CEO's and great sales people. Hell, maybe you even need a great janitor...
So start showing some respect for each other instead of haggling over who needs who.
The needs of your startup will vary based on your business model. Smart, motivated people have a way of being useful, regardless of their education.
Marketing is the social component of design, and you need brilliant marketing before you can create that brilliant product.
Hackers should try and become better at selling themselves and knowing their worth. This, however, is an art - selling yourself well is a very subtle and hard thing to get right. Underdo it and you won't get results. Overdo it and you'll sound like a pretentious asshole.
The nature of programming work is not so far removed from what a corporate lawyer or financial analyst does. Yet programmers have a much different public image. I think it's fair to say programming attracts certain idiosyncratic personalities that affect the general perception of the work.
On the same theme as the grandparent post, don't undervalue the soft touch. There are people who bring to the table little more than that they're nice and likeable. I've seen such people in analyst roles responsible for retaining or creating substantial business.
Computers are, lets face it, logical things. How much programming skill do you _really_ need to build a prototype? The ability to logically think through a problem, the ability to decompose it into small enough chunks, and then to make those chunks work. Sure, it won't be pretty or elegant or scale if you suck at data structures and algorithms, but it doesn't _need_ to be pretty and elegant to get through the prototype stage. Heck some major sites are ugly, inelegant, and scale like a man climbing a wet glass wall.
Fortunately computers are viewed as 'super hard' (genuine quote) by the general population... for now. If that changes, by virtue of people being introduced to start-simple-get-complex coding (eg excel macros, flash) or easier creation tools being developed, geeks who bang out simple web apps could be much less competitive as startup founders.
That's not to say they won't be valued - someone will need to clean up the huge pile of steaming junk thrown out by Dreamweaver 6. And there will still be genuinely hard problems to solve... which is one reason why I'm basing my startup on a problem set that requires efficient graph coloring and traversal :)
Just about every month, some business student will come to me and say they've got some "amazing idea" and just need someone to do the work of implementing it.
Before I even hear their idea, I do a simple mental calculation.
First, I have to see their skills at least exceed mine in the same areas. For instance, I'm a competent but mediocre designer and marketer in addition to being a programmer. They better at least match that and have actually worked on (and finished!) some project that they started themselves.
The person needs to be as competent in their supposed field as I am in mine. The value that people who are good at selling and networking bring is incalculable, I'd kill for a co-founder that could bring that. But they have to be as crazy and devoted to it as I am towards my coding, or else it just can't work.
Maybe that's why I suck at finding people to work with. :(
This blogger...lots of attitude, but doesn't sound like a team player. Attitude will take you only so far.
That's because those were movies.
Who is upmodding such rubbish? Seriously--
1) Apple was a hardware startup. Hardware startups need funding and someone to aggressively sell the product in person to big vendors. Software startups don't usually need that kind of person (unless they're going after the Enterprise cookie).
2) It was in the 70's, and startups were, in general, harder to start than they are now.
http://subwindow.com/articles/12
It turns out that Apple is a totally perfect example.
Clearly, many such businesses exist.
the authors comments are emotionally loaded opinions that are quite frankly, a result of immaturity and frustration.
so my original comment stands:
stubborn.
If you have an idea, and can't programm you can:
1. Pay lots of money to hire programmers, or outsource your work, which needs money, i.e. capital.
2. Find good programmers to work for your company, that are willing to do it with little pay, or only equity.
If you have money, you can buy the programmers, but if you have no capital to start off, no matter how brilliant your idea is, it will go nowhere, and remain nothing more than a day dream.
See people value what they know, and for businness types they would like to think that "ideas" are worth more, and that programmers are just little disposable things that they can just hire anywhere.
As we have seen, the most successful companies are being started by hackers, and not businness types.
The question was: how did the situation get this way, with creative and knowledgeable people being told what to do by often clueless managers and MBAs, who have no particular expertise? It seems irrational and it's not obvious why the world would work this way.
Jerry Weinberg, who was one of the first few computer programmers in the world and later became famous as a writer, was asked this once. He said that the first few generations of programmers (up to 1970 or so) were arrogant towards customers, businesspeople, and managers. Programmers were so scarce, and computing itself so unfamiliar and scary, that programmers expected and were given a kind of godlike deference, which they abused. After a while, customers got angry about the fact that they didn't have a say, were treated like idiots, and given stuff that didn't work very well. Eventually, Weinberg said, this led to a backlash whereby managerial control was imposed on programmers. The effects of this backlash persist today.
I don't claim that this is the only answer to the question, but it sounds like a piece of the puzzle, at least in the software business. The thing about the backlash is that it also failed, leading to the irrational situation the original questioner described.
Perhaps the current generation of entrepreneur hackers can be seen in this context, as programmers who have creative control, but also really care about building what customers want.
"Jobs attended Cupertino Middle School and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California,[9] and frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He was soon hired there and worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee.[12] In 1970, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester,[13] he continued auditing classes at Reed, such as one in calligraphy. "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts," he said.[14]
In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak.[15] He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India. During the 1960s, it had been discovered by phone phreakers (and popularized by John Draper) that a half taped-over toy-whistle included in every box of Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal was able to reproduce the 2600 hertz supervision tone used by the AT&T long distance telephone system. After reading about it and later meeting with John Draper, Jobs and Wozniak went into business briefly in 1974 to build "blue boxes" that allowed illicit free long distance calls."
there are plenty of people who aren't hackers but they certainly understand tech and aren't beef-headed MBA's. mitch kapor and joe kraus never wrote a line of code.
Delegation of responsibility is a concept of pivotal importance for any entrepreneur to grasp if they want to go very big. Isn't Richard Branson dyslexic?
My advice: Never pass up a good opportunity.
