Sometimes the best managers are the ones that aren’t emotionally vested and just expect the work to be done right.
You don’t have to be anyone but yourself. You don’t have to change who you are simply because you’re a manager now. You can simply continue being you. Allow those under you to be them. The hardest part of management is managing up.
HN (and Reddit) are not social media, they are forums. Social media are platforms where the main purpose is to socialise. Forums are platforms where the main purpose is to discuss the topic of any given thread. Just because you can talk to someone, doesn't make it social media. I will die on this hill.
Fully agree. And more than that, I think you're objectively correct.
Think about the evolution of the term "social media". It evolved from social networks, which themselves evolved from forums.
The "media" in "social media" refers to third-party content that is algorithmically boosted through social signals, with signals from your own network weighting higher, and in the end creating a personalized algorithm of media content.
There is no personalized media on HN. It's the same feed for everyone. There is no network on HN. No friends, follows, private messages.
So there's no social to HN, and no (personalized) media, and no network.
Fully agree. Forums predate social media and are some of the oldest parts of the internet. And it's not quite socializing... it's more like, are you broadcasting and consuming content? Or discussing it?
The moment you insert algorithmic curation it stops being “just” a forum IMO. The moment you add gamification on top (karma points, likes, rewards) it stops being just a forum.
Reddit is definitely not a forum the same way old-school forums were forums. And I don’t believe you can, with a straight face, say that they’re the same.
Also, “Forums are platforms where the main purpose is to discuss the topic of any given thread”. That’s a very broad definition. Depending on how loose you want to enforce that you can convince me that Twitter and YouTube are forums.
Plus, “discuss the topic of any given thread” you say this in a thread about TikTok collecting more data while you’re clearly talking about something unrelated to that.
These definitions are blurry. If I told you “we should set up a forum” you’d not instinctively think we’re creating Reddit, and for good reasons.
But I’ll agree that HN is probably the more forum than social media if we were to place it on a scale. And that’s how these platforms should be judged imo: on a scale.
I remember a time when Reddit didn’t exist. When phpBB and vBulletin were the hottest ways to build a community around a theme. I remember when they would get so large that you would need volunteers to help moderate.
Now, karma and all that came from a way of making it so that the admins of this site have to do less moderation and let the best participants of this site have that power. It’s ultimate democracy.
HN and Reddit aren’t traditional forums because of the way downvotes and upvotes work. I would consider a forum to be defined by the most recent activity bringing the thread to the top of the list, not a popularity contest via upvote and downvote.
I also think HN has become too general purpose to be similar in spirit to most forums. Being seen on HN has major dollar value just like trending on Reddit does.
Also, have you used Reddit recently?
Open up Reddit on the app. No using old.reddit.com, doesn’t count. That’s not the experience most users are using.
Go to the watch section. I think you swipe left or right or something? I forget, I deleted the app.
On the contrary. I like agile for when you don’t know exactly what you’re building but you can react quickly to change and try to capture it.
Moving fast and breaking things, agile.
On the other hand. When you know what you want to build but it’s a very large endeavor that takes careful planning and coordination across departments, traditional waterfall method still works best.
You can break that down into an agile-fall process with SAFe and Scrum of Scrums and all that PM mumbo jumbo if you need to. Or just kanban it.
Knowing exactly what you want to build is pretty rare and is pretty much limited to "rewriting existing system" or some pretty narrow set of projects
In general, delaying infrastructure decisions as much as possible in process usually yields better infrastructure because the farther you are the more knowledge you have about the problem.
...that being said I do dislike how agile gets used as excuse for not doing any planning where you really should and have enough information to at least pick direction.
If someone comes to you and says: "I want to build a platform that does WhizzyWhatsIt for my customers, it has to be on AWS so it's mingled with my existing infrastructure. It needs to provide an admin portal so that I can set WhizzyWhatsIt prices and watch user acquisition make my bank account go brrrrrtt. It needs the ability for my quazi-illegal affiliate marketing ring to be able to whitelabel and brand it as their own for a cut of the profits."
This is obviously satire but there's a clear ask, some features, from there you know what you need to have to even achieve those features, what project management process would you employ? Agile? Waterfall? Agile-fall? Kanban? Call me in 6 months?
The real value I see is being able to clone a voice and change timbre and characteristics of the voice to be able to quickly generate voice overs, narrations, voice acting, etc. It's superb!
We have ID.gov and we have blockchain. If we can ensure that the person submitting the vote is indeed that person, would it matter whether it was online, in a booth, or by mail?
There’s only two meat packers… two. Where are the cattle farmers to go? It’s like this across the industry thanks to monopolies like ConAgra, Tyson’s, etc.
“The U.S. meatpacking industry is dominated by the "Big Four"—Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef—which control 80-85% of the beef market and significant portions of poultry and pork”
It's so much worse for poultry. My state and the bordering states represent more than half of US production and there's exactly one USDA facility available to independent producers. They're quite small and the cost approaches today's retail price for a whole Tyson chicken.
There are USDA exemptions for tiny producers (up to 20K/yr vs 150K+ for a single modern broiler house) to slaughter and package themselves for in-state sales but anyone operating under one of those exemptions won't be able to grow that business large enough to self-finance constructing their own USDA-monitored facility.
Yup, this is called a ladder pull. A business moat. You legally are able but the economics make it so that you physically can’t. Not unless you have outside investment.
You don’t even need to do that anymore. It’s capable of visiting those sites and just copying the components look and feel. Try it. Ask it to make a template based on a theme you found and show it the link to the demo and BaM! You got something similar.
It's really weird to me how people on this site used to have a much bigger problem with ripping off other people's designs and work, but the minute it became turnkey it was like, "sorry art nerd guess you starve now roll coal".
It wasn't that many years ago when startups or open source software were being built on the back of stealing others' art: Napster, Mega, Bit Torrent, etc. Not everyone, but forums like this were filled with apologists claiming it was the fault of those rights owners for not making their content available cheaper.
I don't anything about Mega, but BitTorrent was not designed for stealing other's art. That's an unfair claim to make.
Yes, Napster was specifically started for sharing files people didn't have the rights to share, but I still don't think it's a fair comparison because nobody sharing files on Napster ever tried to claim it was their music they were sharing. If people were taking Metallica's music and recording their own versions of it that were 99% identical and then claiming they were the original artist, that would be a closer analogy. Napster also didn't receive the massive PR campaigns, huge institutional investment, the government blind-eye-turning, etc. that AI is enjoying today. Napster was also successfully sued for promoting copyright infringement.
You don’t have to be anyone but yourself. You don’t have to change who you are simply because you’re a manager now. You can simply continue being you. Allow those under you to be them. The hardest part of management is managing up.
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