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Comment by kome

10 years ago

> That's precisely what we changed, and yes we changed it at the last minute.

no rule of law -> automatic bullshit.

7 comments

kome

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dang  10 years ago

I don't agree with that at all, and taken literally it would make adaptation impossible, which can't be right.

HN has never been a rule-driven, legalistic kind of place, and isn't going to get that way. But I've had to learn a lot about people who do feel this way and obviously have a lot to learn yet. My own temperament is very far from this; it's almost impossible for me not to read "we'll figure it out as we go" as a good, fine thing.

  • borski  10 years ago

    You're missing the point others are trying to make. I'm all for experimentation - by all means. I experiment literally every single day, often failing, but occasionally succeeding.

    The issue was that it wasn't clear there would be rule-changing or experimentation /during/ the experiment, rather than after the experiment.

    • dang  10 years ago

      I agree that if that wasn't clear, it was a huge problem. The whole idea was to figure this particular experiment out as we went along. Not putative future instances of it, which we hadn't even thought about or mentioned amongst ourselves. Why would we, when the first one hadn't even started?

      From my point of view that sentence about making it up as we go was the most important thing in the original post. It meant that we didn't have to plan a fixed set of rules: if and when something unforeseen came up, we'd adapt to it then. That's why I said "initial conditions". I'd never have proposed anything that took away our ability to adapt in the middle of this, and especially not about something so untried.

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