McKinsey suggests and practices a rule about growth: don't grow more than 25% per year if you want to preserve your culture. I think once HN started having self-reflective posts it passed into "Shirky Completeness", a stage in communities where the old hats become preoccupied with preserving the culture and cannot keep up with training new users to fit their mould. Sub groups fork off to the point that the several concurrent streams stop interacting. My friend and I realized we were reading completely different aspects of HN.

Karma is (or should be) a proxy for quality. But there are no mechanisms except social ones.

I also suspect that there are certain commercial "reputation" companies that have HN in their sights now. Not spammers per se, but father along the continuum to PR. There have been quite a lot of activity geared toward "whipping the froth" and post-storms around specific topics.

It may be time to fork HN. I actually also suspect PG has already forked HN for private YCombinator use. I haven't seen a post from RTM or TLB for over a year.

Be sure not to miss "Learning from mistakes" from 37signals. http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/60-learning-from-mistakes...

This is just a muddled explanation of monetarism, which is pretty well clearly nonsense at this point. No macroeconomic developments of the last 100 years confirm it.

> We’re not being punished for our exuberance

We're being "punished" for massive malinvestment. Wealth was poured into assets and ventures that could never achieve positive returns. A recession/depression is the process of liquidating malinvestments and redeploying wealth and labor to economically profitable ventures.

The malinvestment happens partly from mass psychology and mostly because of artificially manipulated interest rates. The natural market interest rate reflects the amount of wealth available for investment (capital). When people have saved a lot and there's a lot of wealth stored up, interest rates are low. When interest rates are artificially held low, investors and business people get the mistaken impression there's much more stored wealth in the society than there actually is. Then eventually many business plans come to tears at roughly the same time, as it becomes apparent there isn't the wealth to drive demand for the ventures. This is a recession.

Kent Beck is one of the original Smalltalkers....way back. If I recall correctly, Kent won the "competition" for the best answer to "How many lines of code does your app have?". His answer (best recollection) was "lots, but with some effort I was able to remove most of them".

Kent and his circle of friends were refactoring before there was a word for it; when XP and all its many ancillary methods were just called "best practices".

Not sure I've ever seen him publish something like this before. This is part of the problem with dismissing people over the Internet without really knowing their backgrounds. It is very easy to make a fool of yourself.

I think he treated Joel fairly. He was complimentary to Joel's efforts in writing but simply told him that he doesn't really know him and should be more careful with his opinions.

It sucks to have your life's work strawmanned like this by pop programmer podcast banter. I hope Joel addresses it professionally.

XP/Agile/TDD (like any movement) is filled with rabid fanboys who misapply the principles and try to ram them down everyone's throat, but it's rarely the case that the inventors of popular methodologies are filled with the same blind zeal. After all, their ideas were originally informed by first-hand experience.

It seems 37signals is running out of things to be contrarian about. It is easy to "invert" a saying like "learn from your failures" and make it seem profound but that doesn't make it any more valuable or useful. It is easy to learn from success as it generally carries momentum and begets even more success. Learning from failure is hard because it tends to cause people to give up altogether, requiring those who have experienced it to either stay optimistic and cull important lessons from it, or to simply go home defeated.

Each of your comments detracted from the conversation, so I downmodded them all, if that makes you feel better.

Lose the splash screen and the "enter" link.

I already typed in the URL, of COURSE I want to enter!

You've only got one goal with people visiting the website: get them to buy one.

With your website, what's my next action as a customer?

It should be "enter my credit card, click submit".

I can forgive you for not having an ecommerce solution set up yet, but failing that, what's my next action?

To get on your mailing list, so you can pitch me with interesting articles, discounts, etc.

...but you're not collecting email addresses.

Well, failing that, I guess it's to call you on the phone.

What's your phone number?

It's the absolute last thing on the page, in the smallest font on the entire page.

"Call Us (415)-810-3343"

should not be a footnote: it should be the POINT of your website.

(at least until you can get a mailing list set up, or better yet, an ecommerce solution).

Their dump would be more useful if they...

(1) Used a preexisting aggregate web content format. Their ad hoc format is simple enough, but can't handle content with NULLs, and loses valuable information (such as time of capture -- you can't trust server 'Date' headers -- and resolved IP address at time of collection).

They could use the Internet Archive classic 'ARC' format (not to be confused with the older compression format of the same name):

http://www.archive.org/web/researcher/ArcFileFormat.php

Or the newer, more involved and chatty but still relatively straightforward 'WARC' format:

http://archive-access.sourceforge.net/warc/

(2) Explained how the 3.2 million pages in their initial dump were chosen. (That's only a tiny sliver of the web; where did they start and what did they decide to collect and put in this dataset?)

(FYI, I work at the Internet Archive.)