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| February 2009 Hacker News was two years old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news. It's grown bigger and taken up more time than I expected, but I don't regret that because I've learned so much from working on it. **Growth** When we launched in February 2007, weekday traffic was around 1600 daily uniques. It's since grown to around 22,000. This growth rate is a bit higher

I'd like. I'd like the site to grow, since a site that isn't growing at least slowly is probably dead. But I wouldn't want it to grow as large as Digg or Reddit—mainly because that would dilute the character of the site, but also because I don't want to spend all my time dealing with scaling. I already have problems enough with that. Remember, the original motivation for HN was to test a new programming language, and moreover one that's focused on experimenting with language design, not performance.

time the site gets slow, I fortify myself by recalling McIlroy and Bentley's famous quote > The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases. and look for the bottleneck I can remove with least code. So far I've been able to keep up, in the sense that performance has remained consistently mediocre despite 14x growth. I don't know what I'll do next, but I'll probably think of something. This is my attitude to the site generally. Hacker News is an experiment, and an experiment in

very young field. Sites of this type are only a few years old. Internet conversation generally is only a few decades old. So we've probably only discovered a fraction of what we eventually will. That's why I'm so optimistic about HN. When a technology is this young, the existing solutions are usually terrible; which means it must be possible to do much better; which means many problems that seem insoluble aren't. Including, I hope, the problem that has afflicted so many previous communities: being

by growth. **Dilution** Users have worried about that since the site was a few months old. So far these alarms have been false, but they may not always be. Dilution is a hard problem. But probably soluble; it doesn't mean much that open conversations have "always" been destroyed by growth when "always" equals 20 instances. But it's important to remember we're trying to solve a new problem, because that means we're going to have to try new things, most of which probably won't work. A couple weeks

I tried displaying the names of users with the highest average comment scores in orange. That was a mistake. Suddenly a culture that had been more or less united was divided into haves and have- nots. I didn't realize how united the culture had been till I saw it divided. It was painful to watch. So orange usernames won't be back. (Sorry about that.) But there will be other equally broken-seeming ideas in the future, and the ones that turn out to work will probably seem just as broken as those that

Probably the most important thing I've learned about dilution is that it's measured more in behavior than users. It's bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out to be surprisingly malleable. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to; and vice versa. Though of course forbidding bad behavior does tend to keep away bad people, because they feel uncomfortably constrained in a place where they have to behave well. But this way of keeping them out is gentler

probably also more effective than overt barriers. It's pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened

and the transformation was equally dramatic. I'm not criticizing Steve and Alexis. What happened to Reddit didn't happen out of neglect. From the start they had a policy of censoring nothing except spam. Plus Reddit had different goals from Hacker News. Reddit was a startup, not a side project; its goal was to grow as fast as possible. Combine rapid growth and zero censorship, and the result is a free for all. But I don't think they'd do much differently if they were doing it again. Measured by

Reddit is much more successful than Hacker News. But what happened to Reddit won't inevitably happen to HN. There are several local maxima. There can be places that are free for alls and places that are more thoughtful, just as there are in the real world; and people will behave differently depending on which they're in, just as they do in the real world. I've observed this in the wild. I've seen people cross-posting on Reddit and Hacker News who actually took the trouble to write two versions,

flame for Reddit and a more subdued version for HN. **Submissions** There are two major types of problems a site like Hacker News needs to avoid: bad stories and bad comments. So far the danger of bad stories seems smaller. The stories on the frontpage now are still roughly the ones that would have been there when HN started. I once thought I'd have to weight votes to keep crap off the frontpage, but I haven't had to yet. I wouldn't have predicted the frontpage would hold up so well, and I'm not

why it has. Perhaps only the more thoughtful users care enough to submit and upvote links, so the marginal cost of one random new user approaches zero. Or perhaps the frontpage protects itself, by advertising what type of submission is expected. The most dangerous thing for the frontpage is stuff that's too easy to upvote. If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by the reader to decide whether or not to upvote it. An amusing cartoon takes less. A rant with a rallying cry as the title

zero, because people vote it up without even reading it. Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it. Hacker News has two kinds of protections against fluff. The most common types of fluff links are banned as off-topic. Pictures of kittens, political diatribes, and so on are explicitly banned. This keeps out most fluff, but not all of it. Some links are both fluff, in the sense

being very short, and also on topic. There's no single solution to that. If a link is just an empty rant, editors will sometimes kill it even if it's on topic in the sense of being about hacking, because it's not on topic by the real standard, which is to engage one's intellectual curiosity. If the posts on a site are characteristically of this type I sometimes ban it, which means new stuff at that url is auto- killed. If a post has a linkbait title, editors sometimes rephrase it to be more matter-of-fact.

is especially necessary with links whose titles are rallying cries, because otherwise they become implicit "vote up if you believe such-and-such" posts, which are the most extreme form of fluff. The techniques for dealing with links have to evolve, because the links do. The existence of aggregators has already affected what they aggregate. Writers now deliberately write things to draw traffic from aggregators—sometimes even specific ones. (No, the irony of this statement is not lost on me.) Then

are the more sinister mutations, like linkjacking—posting a paraphrase of someone else's article and submitting that instead of the original. These can get a lot of upvotes, because a lot of what's good in an article often survives; indeed, the closer the paraphrase is to plagiarism, the more survives. I think it's important that a site that kills submissions provide a way for users to see what got killed if they want to. That keeps editors honest, and just as importantly, makes users confident

know if the editors stopped being honest. HN users can do this by flipping a switch called showdead in their profile. **Comments** Bad comments seem to be a harder problem than bad submissions. While the quality of links on the frontpage of HN hasn't changed much, the quality of the median comment may have decreased somewhat. There are two main kinds of badness in comments: meanness and stupidity. There is a lot of overlap between the two—mean comments are disproportionately likely also to be dumb—but

strategies for dealing with them are different. Meanness is easier to control. You can have rules saying one shouldn't be mean, and if you enforce them it seems possible to keep a lid on meanness. Keeping a lid on stupidity is harder, perhaps because stupidity is not so easily distinguishable. Mean people are more likely to know they're being mean than stupid people are to know they're being stupid. The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken argument, but the dumb joke.

but mistaken arguments are actually quite rare. There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you wanted to compare the quality of comments on community sites, average length would be a good predictor. Probably the cause is human nature rather than anything specific to comment threads. Probably it's simply that stupidity more often takes the form of having few ideas than wrong ones. Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be short. And since it's hard to write a short

that's distinguished for the amount of information it conveys, people try to distinguish them instead by being funny. The most tempting format for stupid comments is the supposedly witty put-down, probably because put-downs are the easiest form of humor. So one advantage of forbidding meanness is that it also cuts down on these. Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If someone submits a lame article,

other submissions don't all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes. Maybe the solution is to add a delay before people can respond to a comment, and make the length of the delay inversely proportional to some prediction of its quality. Then dumb threads would grow slower. **People** I notice most of the techniques I've described are conservative: they're aimed at preserving the character

the site rather than enhancing it. I don't think that's a bias of mine. It's due to the shape of the problem. Hacker News had the good fortune to start out good, so in this case it's literally a matter of preservation. But I think this principle would also apply to sites with different origins. The good things in a community site come from people more than technology; it's mainly in the prevention of bad things that technology comes into play. Technology certainly can enhance discussion. Nested

do, for example. But I'd rather use a site with primitive features and smart, nice users than a more advanced one whose users were idiots or trolls. So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as

as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there. The downside of tuning a site to attract certain people is that, to those people, it can be too attractive. I'm all too aware how addictive Hacker News can be. For me, as for many users, it's a kind of virtual town square. When I want to take a break from working, I walk into the square, just as I might into Harvard

or University Ave in the physical world. But an online square is more dangerous than a physical one. If I spent half the day loitering on University Ave, I'd notice. I have to walk a mile to get there, and sitting in a cafe feels different from working. But visiting an online forum takes just a click, and feels superficially very much like working. You may be wasting your time, but you're not idle. Someone is wrong on the Internet, and you're fixing the problem. Hacker News is definitely useful.

learned a lot from things I've read on HN. I've written several essays that began as comments there. So I wouldn't want the site to go away. But I would like to be sure it's not a net drag on productivity. What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site that caused them to waste lots of time. I wish I could be 100% sure that's not a description of HN. I feel like the addictiveness of games and social applications is still a mostly unsolved problem. The situation now

like it was with crack in the 1980s: we've invented terribly addictive new things, and we haven't yet evolved ways to protect ourselves from them. We will eventually, and that's one of the problems I hope to focus on next. **

| May 2008 Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why. There may also be a benefit to us. We were all lied to as kids, and some of the lies we were told still affect us. So by studying the ways adults lie to kids, we may be able to clear our heads of lies we were told. I'm using the word "lie" in a very general sense: not just overt falsehoods, but also all the more subtle ways we mislead kids. Though "lie" has

connotations, I don't mean to suggest we should never do this—just that we should pay attention when we do. One of the most remarkable things about the way we lie to kids is how broad the conspiracy is. All adults know what their culture lies to kids about: they're the questions you answer "Ask your parents." If a kid asked who won the World Series in 1982 or what the atomic weight of carbon was, you could just tell him. But if a kid asks you "Is there a God?" or "What's a prostitute?" you'll probably

"Ask your parents." Since we all agree, kids see few cracks in the view of the world presented to them. The biggest disagreements are between parents and schools, but even those are small. Schools are careful what they say about controversial topics, and if they do contradict what parents want their kids to believe, parents either pressure the school into keeping quiet or move their kids to a new school. The conspiracy is so thorough that most kids who discover it do so only by discovering internal

in what they're told. It can be traumatic for the ones who wake up during the operation. Here's what happened to Einstein: > Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the > conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The > consequence was a positively fanatic freethinking coupled with the > impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through > lies: it was a crushing impression. I remember that feeling. By 15 I was convinced the

was corrupt from end to end. That's why movies like _The Matrix_ have such resonance. Every kid grows up in a fake world. In a way it would be easier if the forces behind it were as clearly differentiated as a bunch of evil machines, and one could make a clean break just by taking a pill. **Protection** If you ask adults why they lie to kids, the most common reason they give is to protect them. And kids do need protecting. The environment you want to create for a newborn child will be quite unlike

streets of a big city. That seems so obvious it seems wrong to call it a lie. It's certainly not a bad lie to tell, to give a baby the impression the world is quiet and warm and safe. But this harmless type of lie can turn sour if left unexamined. Imagine if you tried to keep someone in as protected an environment as a newborn till age 18. To mislead someone so grossly about the world would seem not protection but abuse. That's an extreme example, of course; when parents do that sort of thing it

national news. But you see the same problem on a smaller scale in the malaise teenagers feel in suburbia. The main purpose of suburbia is to provide a protected environment for children to grow up in. And it seems great for 10 year olds. I liked living in suburbia when I was 10. I didn't notice how sterile it was. My whole world was no bigger than a few friends' houses I bicycled to and some woods I ran around in. On a log scale I was midway between crib and globe. A suburban street was just the

size. But as I grew older, suburbia started to feel suffocatingly fake. Life can be pretty good at 10 or 20, but it's often frustrating at 15\. This is too big a problem to solve here, but certainly one reason life sucks at 15 is that kids are trapped in a world designed for 10 year olds. What do parents hope to protect their children from by raising them in suburbia? A friend who moved out of Manhattan said merely that her 3 year old daughter "saw too much." Off the top of my head, that might include:

who are high or drunk, poverty, madness, gruesome medical conditions, sexual behavior of various degrees of oddness, and violent anger. I think it's the anger that would worry me most if I had a 3 year old. I was 29 when I moved to New York and I was surprised even then. I wouldn't want a 3 year old to see some of the disputes I saw. It would be too frightening. A lot of the things adults conceal from smaller children, they conceal because they'd be frightening, not because they want to conceal

existence of such things. Misleading the child is just a byproduct. This seems one of the most justifiable types of lying adults do to kids. But because the lies are indirect we don't keep a very strict accounting of them. Parents know they've concealed the facts about sex, and many at some point sit their kids down and explain more. But few tell their kids about the differences between the real world and the cocoon they grew up in. Combine this with the confidence parents try to instill in their

and every year you get a new crop of 18 year olds who think they know how to run the world. Don't all 18 year olds think they know how to run the world? Actually this seems to be a recent innovation, no more than about 100 years old. In preindustrial times teenage kids were junior members of the adult world and comparatively well aware of their shortcomings. They could see they weren't as strong or skillful as the village smith. In past times people lied to kids about some things more than we do

but the lies implicit in an artificial, protected environment are a recent invention. Like a lot of new inventions, the rich got this first. Children of kings and great magnates were the first to grow up out of touch with the world. Suburbia means half the population can live like kings in that respect. **Sex (and Drugs)** I'd have different worries about raising teenage kids in New York. I'd worry less about what they'd see, and more about what they'd do. I went to college with a lot of kids who

up in Manhattan, and as a rule they seemed pretty jaded. They seemed to have lost their virginity at an average of about 14 and by college had tried more drugs than I'd even heard of. The reasons parents don't want their teenage kids having sex are complex. There are some obvious dangers: pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. But those aren't the only reasons parents don't want their kids having sex. The average parents of a 14 year old girl would hate the idea of her having sex even if there

zero risk of pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases. Kids can probably sense they aren't being told the whole story. After all, pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are just as much a problem for adults, and they have sex. What really bothers parents about their teenage kids having sex? Their dislike of the idea is so visceral it's probably inborn. But if it's inborn it should be universal, and there are plenty of societies where parents don't mind if their teenage kids have sex—indeed,

it's normal for 14 year olds to become mothers. So what's going on? There does seem to be a universal taboo against sex with prepubescent children. One can imagine evolutionary reasons for that. And I think this is the main reason parents in industrialized societies dislike teenage kids having sex. They still think of them as children, even though biologically they're not, so the taboo against child sex still has force. One thing adults conceal about sex they also conceal about drugs: that it can

great pleasure. That's what makes sex and drugs so dangerous. The desire for them can cloud one's judgement—which is especially frightening when the judgement being clouded is the already wretched judgement of a teenage kid. Here parents' desires conflict. Older societies told kids they had bad judgement, but modern parents want their children to be confident. This may well be a better plan than the old one of putting them in their place, but it has the side effect that after having implicitly lied

kids about how good their judgement is, we then have to lie again about all the things they might get into trouble with if they believed us. If parents told their kids the truth about sex and drugs, it would be: the reason you should avoid these things is that you have lousy judgement. People with twice your experience still get burned by them. But this may be one of those cases where the truth wouldn't be convincing, because one of the symptoms of bad judgement is believing you have good judgement.

you're too weak to lift something, you can tell, but when you're making a decision impetuously, you're all the more sure of it. **Innocence** Another reason parents don't want their kids having sex is that they want to keep them innocent. Adults have a certain model of how kids are supposed to behave, and it's different from what they expect of other adults. One of the most obvious differences is the words kids are allowed to use. Most parents use words when talking to other adults that they wouldn't

their kids using. They try to hide even the existence of these words for as long as they can. And this is another of those conspiracies everyone participates in: everyone knows you're not supposed to swear in front of kids. I've never heard more different explanations for anything parents tell kids than why they shouldn't swear. Every parent I know forbids their children to swear, and yet no two of them have the same justification. It's clear most start with not wanting kids to swear, then make

the reason afterward. So my theory about what's going on is that the _function_ of swearwords is to mark the speaker as an adult. There's no difference in the meaning of "shit" and "poopoo." So why should one be ok for kids to say and one forbidden? The only explanation is: by definition. Why does it bother adults so much when kids do things reserved for adults? The idea of a foul-mouthed, cynical 10 year old leaning against a lamppost with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth is very

But why? One reason we want kids to be innocent is that we're programmed to like certain kinds of helplessness. I've several times heard mothers say they deliberately refrained from correcting their young children's mispronunciations because they were so cute. And if you think about it, cuteness is helplessness. Toys and cartoon characters meant to be cute always have clueless expressions and stubby, ineffectual limbs. It's not surprising we'd have an inborn desire to love and protect helpless creatures,

human offspring are so helpless for so long. Without the helplessness that makes kids cute, they'd be very annoying. They'd merely seem like incompetent adults. But there's more to it than that. The reason our hypothetical jaded 10 year old bothers me so much is not just that he'd be annoying, but that he'd have cut off his prospects for growth so early. To be jaded you have to think you know how the world works, and any theory a 10 year old had about that would probably be a pretty narrow one.

is also open-mindedness. We want kids to be innocent so they can continue to learn. Paradoxical as it sounds, there are some kinds of knowledge that get in the way of other kinds of knowledge. If you're going to learn that the world is a brutal place full of people trying to take advantage of one another, you're better off learning it last. Otherwise you won't bother learning much more. Very smart adults often seem unusually innocent, and I don't think this is a coincidence. I think they've deliberately

learning about certain things. Certainly I do. I used to think I wanted to know everything. Now I know I don't. **Death** After sex, death is the topic adults lie most conspicuously about to kids. Sex I believe they conceal because of deep taboos. But why do we conceal death from kids? Probably because small children are particularly horrified by it. They want to feel safe, and death is the ultimate threat. One of the most spectacular lies our parents told us was about the death of our first cat.

the years, as we asked for more details, they were compelled to invent more, so the story grew quite elaborate. The cat had died at the vet's office. Of what? Of the anaesthesia itself. Why was the cat at the vet's office? To be fixed. And why had such a routine operation killed it? It wasn't the vet's fault; the cat had a congenitally weak heart; the anaesthesia was too much for it; but there was no way anyone could have known this in advance. It was not till we were in our twenties that the truth

out: my sister, then about three, had accidentally stepped on the cat and broken its back. They didn't feel the need to tell us the cat was now happily in cat heaven. My parents never claimed that people or animals who died had "gone to a better place," or that we'd meet them again. It didn't seem to harm us. My grandmother told us an edited version of the death of my grandfather. She said they'd been sitting reading one day, and when she said something to him, he didn't answer. He seemed to be

but when she tried to rouse him, she couldn't. "He was gone." Having a heart attack sounded like falling asleep. Later I learned it hadn't been so neat, and the heart attack had taken most of a day to kill him. Along with such outright lies, there must have been a lot of changing the subject when death came up. I can't remember that, of course, but I can infer it from the fact that I didn't really grasp I was going to die till I was about 19. How could I have missed something so obvious for so long?

that I've seen parents managing the subject, I can see how: questions about death are gently but firmly turned aside. On this topic, especially, they're met half-way by kids. Kids often want to be lied to. They want to believe they're living in a comfortable, safe world as much as their parents want them to believe it. **Identity** Some parents feel a strong adherence to an ethnic or religious group and want their kids to feel it too. This usually requires two different kinds of lying: the first

to tell the child that he or she is an X, and the second is whatever specific lies Xes differentiate themselves by believing. Telling a child they have a particular ethnic or religious identity is one of the stickiest things you can tell them. Almost anything else you tell a kid, they can change their mind about later when they start to think for themselves. But if you tell a kid they're a member of a certain group, that seems nearly impossible to shake. This despite the fact that it can be one

the most premeditated lies parents tell. When parents are of different religions, they'll often agree between themselves that their children will be "raised as Xes." And it works. The kids obligingly grow up considering themselves as Xes, despite the fact that if their parents had chosen the other way, they'd have grown up considering themselves as Ys. One reason this works so well is the second kind of lie involved. The truth is common property. You can't distinguish your group by doing things

are rational, and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people, you have to do things that are arbitrary, and believe things that are false. And after having spent their whole lives doing things that are arbitrary and believing things that are false, and being regarded as odd by "outsiders" on that account, the cognitive dissonance pushing children to regard themselves as Xes must be enormous. If they aren't an X, why are they attached to all these arbitrary

and customs? If they aren't an X, why do all the non-Xes call them one? This form of lie is not without its uses. You can use it to carry a payload of beneficial beliefs, and they will also become part of the child's identity. You can tell the child that in addition to never wearing the color yellow, believing the world was created by a giant rabbit, and always snapping their fingers before eating fish, Xes are also particularly honest and industrious. Then X children will grow up feeling it's part

their identity to be honest and industrious. This probably accounts for a lot of the spread of modern religions, and explains why their doctrines are a combination of the useful and the bizarre. The bizarre half is what makes the religion stick, and the useful half is the payload. **Authority** One of the least excusable reasons adults lie to kids is to maintain power over them. Sometimes these lies are truly sinister, like a child molester telling his victims they'll get in trouble if they tell

what happened to them. Others seem more innocent; it depends how badly adults lie to maintain their power, and what they use it for. Most adults make some effort to conceal their flaws from children. Usually their motives are mixed. For example, a father who has an affair generally conceals it from his children. His motive is partly that it would worry them, partly that this would introduce the topic of sex, and partly (a larger part than he would admit) that he doesn't want to tarnish himself in

eyes. If you want to learn what lies are told to kids, read almost any book written to teach them about "issues." Peter Mayle wrote one called _Why Are We Getting a Divorce?_ It begins with the three most important things to remember about divorce, one of which is: > You shouldn't put the blame on one parent, because divorce is never only one > person's fault. Really? When a man runs off with his secretary, is it always partly his wife's fault? But I can see why Mayle might have said this. Maybe

more important for kids to respect their parents than to know the truth about them. But because adults conceal their flaws, and at the same time insist on high standards of behavior for kids, a lot of kids grow up feeling they fall hopelessly short. They walk around feeling horribly evil for having used a swearword, while in fact most of the adults around them are doing much worse things. This happens in intellectual as well as moral questions. The more confident people are, the more willing they

to be to answer a question "I don't know." Less confident people feel they have to have an answer or they'll look bad. My parents were pretty good about admitting when they didn't know things, but I must have been told a lot of lies of this type by teachers, because I rarely heard a teacher say "I don't know" till I got to college. I remember because it was so surprising to hear someone say that in front of a class. The first hint I had that teachers weren't omniscient came in sixth grade, after

father contradicted something I'd learned in school. When I protested that the teacher had said the opposite, my father replied that the guy had no idea what he was talking about—that he was just an elementary school teacher, after all. _Just_ a teacher? The phrase seemed almost grammatically ill-formed. Didn't teachers know everything about the subjects they taught? And if not, why were they the ones teaching us? The sad fact is, US public school teachers don't generally understand the stuff they're

very well. There are some sterling exceptions, but as a rule people planning to go into teaching rank academically near the bottom of the college population. So the fact that I still thought at age 11 that teachers were infallible shows what a job the system must have done on my brain. **School** What kids get taught in school is a complex mix of lies. The most excusable are those told to simplify ideas to make them easy to learn. The problem is, a lot of propaganda gets slipped into the curriculum

the name of simplification. Public school textbooks represent a compromise between what various powerful groups want kids to be told. The lies are rarely overt. Usually they consist either of omissions or of over-emphasizing certain topics at the expense of others. The view of history we got in elementary school was a crude hagiography, with at least one representative of each powerful group. The famous scientists I remember were Einstein, Marie Curie, and George Washington Carver. Einstein was

big deal because his work led to the atom bomb. Marie Curie was involved with X-rays. But I was mystified about Carver. He seemed to have done stuff with peanuts. It's obvious now that he was on the list because he was black (and for that matter that Marie Curie was on it because she was a woman), but as a kid I was confused for years about him. I wonder if it wouldn't have been better just to tell us the truth: that there weren't any famous black scientists. Ranking George Washington Carver with

misled us not only about science, but about the obstacles blacks faced in his time. As subjects got softer, the lies got more frequent. By the time you got to politics and recent history, what we were taught was pretty much pure propaganda. For example, we were taught to regard political leaders as saints—especially the recently martyred Kennedy and King. It was astonishing to learn later that they'd both been serial womanizers, and that Kennedy was a speed freak to boot. (By the time King's plagiarism

I'd lost the ability to be surprised by the misdeeds of famous people.) I doubt you could teach kids recent history without teaching them lies, because practically everyone who has anything to say about it has some kind of spin to put on it. Much recent history _consists_ of spin. It would probably be better just to teach them metafacts like that. Probably the biggest lie told in schools, though, is that the way to succeed is through following "the rules." In fact most such rules are just hacks

manage large groups efficiently. **Peace** Of all the reasons we lie to kids, the most powerful is probably the same mundane reason they lie to us. Often when we lie to people it's not part of any conscious strategy, but because they'd react violently to the truth. Kids, almost by definition, lack self-control. They react violently to things—and so they get lied to a lot. A few Thanksgivings ago, a friend of mine found himself in a situation that perfectly illustrates the complex motives we have

we lie to kids. As the roast turkey appeared on the table, his alarmingly perceptive 5 year old son suddenly asked if the turkey had wanted to die. Foreseeing disaster, my friend and his wife rapidly improvised: yes, the turkey had wanted to die, and in fact had lived its whole life with the aim of being their Thanksgiving dinner. And that (phew) was the end of that. Whenever we lie to kids to protect them, we're usually also lying to keep the peace. One consequence of this sort of calming lie is

we grow up thinking horrible things are normal. It's hard for us to feel a sense of urgency as adults over something we've literally been trained not to worry about. When I was about 10 I saw a documentary on pollution that put me into a panic. It seemed the planet was being irretrievably ruined. I went to my mother afterward to ask if this was so. I don't remember what she said, but she made me feel better, so I stopped worrying about it. That was probably the best way to handle a frightened 10

old. But we should understand the price. This sort of lie is one of the main reasons bad things persist: we're all trained to ignore them. **Detox** A sprinter in a race almost immediately enters a state called "oxygen debt." His body switches to an emergency source of energy that's faster than regular aerobic respiration. But this process builds up waste products that ultimately require extra oxygen to break down, so at the end of the race he has to stop and pant for a while to recover. We arrive

adulthood with a kind of truth debt. We were told a lot of lies to get us (and our parents) through our childhood. Some may have been necessary. Some probably weren't. But we all arrive at adulthood with heads full of lies. There's never a point where the adults sit you down and explain all the lies they told you. They've forgotten most of them. So if you're going to clear these lies out of your head, you're going to have to do it yourself. Few do. Most people go through life with bits of packing

adhering to their minds and never know it. You probably never can completely undo the effects of lies you were told as a kid, but it's worth trying. I've found that whenever I've been able to undo a lie I was told, a lot of other things fell into place. Fortunately, once you arrive at adulthood you get a valuable new resource you can use to figure out what lies you were told. You're now one of the liars. You get to watch behind the scenes as adults spin the world for the next generation of kids.

first step in clearing your head is to realize how far you are from a neutral observer. When I left high school I was, I thought, a complete skeptic. I'd realized high school was crap. I thought I was ready to question everything I knew. But among the many other things I was ignorant of was how much debris there already was in my head. It's not enough to consider your mind a blank slate. You have to consciously erase it. **

| November 2008 One of the differences between big companies and startups is that big companies tend to have developed procedures to protect themselves against mistakes. A startup walks like a toddler, bashing into things and falling over all the time. A big company is more deliberate. The gradual accumulation of checks in an organization is a kind of learning, based on disasters that have happened to it or others like it. After giving a contract to a supplier who goes bankrupt and fails to deliver,

example, a company might require all suppliers to prove they're solvent before submitting bids. As companies grow they invariably get more such checks, either in response to disasters they've suffered, or (probably more often) by hiring people from bigger companies who bring with them customs for protecting against new types of disasters. It's natural for organizations to learn from mistakes. The problem is, people who propose new checks almost never consider that the check itself has a cost. _Every

has a cost._ For example, consider the case of making suppliers verify their solvency. Surely that's mere prudence? But in fact it could have substantial costs. There's obviously the direct cost in time of the people on both sides who supply and check proofs of the supplier's solvency. But the real costs are the ones you never hear about: the company that would be the best supplier, but doesn't bid because they can't spare the effort to get verified. Or the company that would be the best supplier,

falls just short of the threshold for solvency—which will of course have been set on the high side, since there is no apparent cost of increasing it. Whenever someone in an organization proposes to add a new check, they should have to explain not just the benefit but the cost. No matter how bad a job they did of analyzing it, this meta-check would at least remind everyone there had to _be_ a cost, and send them looking for it. If companies started doing that, they'd find some surprises. Joel Spolsky

spoke at Y Combinator about selling software to corporate customers. He said that in most companies software costing up to about $1000 could be bought by individual managers without any additional approvals. Above that threshold, software purchases generally had to be approved by a committee. But babysitting this process was so expensive for software vendors that it didn't make sense to charge less than $50,000. Which means if you're making something you might otherwise have charged $5000 for, you

to sell it for $50,000 instead. The purpose of the committee is presumably to ensure that the company doesn't waste money. And yet the result is that the company pays 10 times as much. Checks on purchases will always be expensive, because the harder it is to sell something to you, the more it has to cost. And not merely linearly, either. If you're hard enough to sell to, the people who are best at making things don't want to bother. The only people who will sell to you are companies that specialize

selling to you. Then you've sunk to a whole new level of inefficiency. Market mechanisms no longer protect you, because the good suppliers are no longer in the market. Such things happen constantly to the biggest organizations of all, governments. But checks instituted by governments can cause much worse problems than merely overpaying. Checks instituted by governments can cripple a country's whole economy. Up till about 1400, China was richer and more technologically advanced than Europe. One reason

pulled ahead was that the Chinese government restricted long trading voyages. So it was left to the Europeans to explore and eventually to dominate the rest of the world, including China. In more recent times, Sarbanes-Oxley has practically destroyed the US IPO market. That wasn't the intention of the legislators who wrote it. They just wanted to add a few more checks on public companies. But they forgot to consider the cost. They forgot that companies about to go public are usually rather stretched,

that the weight of a few extra checks that might be easy for General Electric to bear are enough to prevent younger companies from being public at all. Once you start to think about the cost of checks, you can start to ask other interesting questions. Is the cost increasing or decreasing? Is it higher in some areas than others? Where does it increase discontinuously? If large organizations started to ask questions like that, they'd learn some frightening things. I think the cost of checks may actually

increasing. The reason is that software plays an increasingly important role in companies, and the people who write software are particularly harmed by checks. Programmers are unlike many types of workers in that the best ones actually prefer to work hard. This doesn't seem to be the case in most types of work. When I worked in fast food, we didn't prefer the busy times. And when I used to mow lawns, I definitely didn't prefer it when the grass was long after a week of rain. Programmers, though,

it better when they write more code. Or more precisely, when they release more code. Programmers like to make a difference. Good ones, anyway. For good programmers, one of the best things about working for a startup is that there are few checks on releases. In true startups, there are no external checks at all. If you have an idea for a new feature in the morning, you can write it and push it to the production servers before lunch. And when you can do that, you have more ideas. At big companies,

has to go through various approvals before it can be launched. And the cost of doing this can be enormous—in fact, discontinuous. I was talking recently to a group of three programmers whose startup had been acquired a few years before by a big company. When they'd been independent, they could release changes instantly. Now, they said, the absolute fastest they could get code released on the production servers was two weeks. This didn't merely make them less productive. It made them hate working

the acquirer. Here's a sign of how much programmers like to be able to work hard: these guys would have _paid_ to be able to release code immediately, the way they used to. I asked them if they'd trade 10% of the acquisition price for the ability to release code immediately, and all three instantly said yes. Then I asked what was the maximum percentage of the acquisition price they'd trade for it. They said they didn't want to think about it, because they didn't want to know how high they'd go,

I got the impression it might be as much as half. They'd have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps millions, just to be able to deliver more software to users. And you know what? It would have been perfectly safe to let them. In fact, the acquirer would have been better off; not only wouldn't these guys have broken anything, they'd have gotten a lot more done. So the acquirer is in fact getting worse performance at greater cost. Just like the committee approving software purchases.

just as the greatest danger of being hard to sell to is not that you overpay but that the best suppliers won't even sell to you, the greatest danger of applying too many checks to your programmers is not that you'll make them unproductive, but that good programmers won't even want to work for you. Steve Jobs's famous maxim "artists ship" works both ways. Artists aren't merely capable of shipping. They insist on it. So if you don't let people ship, you won't have any artists. --- * * * ---

| December 2010 I was thinking recently how inconvenient it was not to have a general term for iPhones, iPads, and the corresponding things running Android. The closest to a general term seems to be "mobile devices," but that (a) applies to any mobile phone, and (b) doesn't really capture what's distinctive about the iPad. After a few seconds it struck me that what we'll end up calling these things is tablets. The only reason we even consider calling them "mobile devices" is that the iPhone preceded

iPad. If the iPad had come first, we wouldn't think of the iPhone as a phone; we'd think of it as a tablet small enough to hold up to your ear. The iPhone isn't so much a phone as a replacement for a phone. That's an important distinction, because it's an early instance of what will become a common pattern. Many if not most of the special-purpose objects around us are going to be replaced by apps running on tablets. This is already clear in cases like GPSes, music players, and cameras. But I think

will surprise people how many things are going to get replaced. We funded one startup that's replacing keys. The fact that you can change font sizes easily means the iPad effectively replaces reading glasses. I wouldn't be surprised if by playing some clever tricks with the accelerometer you could even replace the bathroom scale. The advantages of doing things in software on a single device are so great that everything that can get turned into software will. So for the next couple years, a good

for startups will be to look around you for things that people haven't realized yet can be made unnecessary by a tablet app. In 1938 Buckminster Fuller coined the term ephemeralization to describe the increasing tendency of physical machinery to be replaced by what we would now call software. The reason tablets are going to take over the world is not (just) that Steve Jobs and Co are industrial design wizards, but because they have this force behind them. The iPhone and the iPad have effectively

a hole that will allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot of new areas. No one who has studied the history of technology would want to underestimate the power of that force. I worry about the power Apple could have with this force behind them. I don't want to see another era of client monoculture like the Microsoft one in the 80s and 90s. But if ephemeralization is one of the main forces driving the spread of tablets, that suggests a way to compete with Apple: be a better platform for it. It has

out to be a great thing that Apple tablets have accelerometers in them. Developers have used the accelerometer in ways Apple could never have imagined. That's the nature of platforms. The more versatile the tool, the less you can predict how people will use it. So tablet makers should be thinking: what else can we put in there? Not merely hardware, but software too. What else can we give developers access to? Give hackers an inch and they'll take you a mile. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit,

Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this. --- * * * ---

| | **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator. --- January 2012 There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call _schlep blindness_. Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a tedious, unpleasant task. No one likes schleps, but hackers especially dislike them. Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting