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The saying goes: it takes ten years to become an overnight success.

As for the stick or twist question, if your only goal is to make money then twisting whenever it seems to make that more likely makes sense. Most people thrive on doing work they care about enough to stick with when it is hard, and my guess is that gets better results over time.

One bit of practical advice: celebrate the little successes on the way to whatever you may think a big success looks like. Wherever the journey ends up, it's important to enjoy it as much as possible.

TL;DR: Bureaucracy in public institutions is not principally a management pathology. It is the cumulative result of a largely logical process. It is generated by policy and rendered permanent by asymmetric incentives. Nobody decides to create it; nobody is readily positioned to undo it.

Done this. Good question but I don't think it's the most helpful way of thinking about it.

Every new recruit brings their own assumptions about how organizations / employment / etc. work and many of those assumptions won't be visible until after a while. This is especially true for managers.

I found Charles Handy's thinking about four types of organisational culture very helpful and I wish I'd found it earlier in the process.

AI summary: Charles Handy identified four types of organizational cultures: Power Culture, where decision-making is centralized among a few; Role Culture, which is based on defined roles and responsibilities; Task Culture, focused on teamwork to achieve specific goals; and Person Culture, where individual interests take precedence over the organization.

Basically, 15>50 is very likely to involve a shift from one of these to another one and making that open and explicit could help you a lot (including understanding how the role of senior managers needs to change).

The book is Understanding Organisations from 1976 but still valuable.

Good luck!

+1 on Mint, specifically with the Cinnamon desktop environment for people leaving Windows

Saw this mentioned in a comment recently, I just downloaded, installed and used it to find a file while Windows Search was still saying 'Working on it...'. So I thought others might like to know.

Previously on HN a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41337268 and probably other times

Thank you, whoever you were!

The Science Media Centre (UK) has a round up of expert reactions https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-announ...

The robing room chair of state

Simon Willison has helpful recent advice on this: Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code (11th March 2025) https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/us.ing-llms-for-code/

Sometimes the BBC does make mistakes but this seems to fit their style guide:

"Treat collective nouns - companies, governments and other bodies - as singular. There are some exceptions: ... Sports teams - although they are singular in their role as business concerns (eg: Arsenal has declared an increase in profits) Rock/pop groups"

So treating a crew, like a team, as plural makes sense.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsstyleguide/grammar-spelling-punctu...

Both approaches are regularly used, so it is now more of a style choice, hence being in the style guide.

The Economist style guide says Brits are more likely to use plural and Americans singular but writers need to make a judgement in context: https://www.economist.com/johnson/2010/09/20/style-guide-ent...

It might help to know that blindness takes many forms. Having no sight at all is what many people assume but is not what many blind people experience. So some blind people can use accessibility tools together with the sight they do have which may for example only be in a small part of the area most people can see, or may be blurry, or otherwise impaired.

If you're going to start something, you need to be running to it not running from something else.

Running your own thing can be great but will be hard. The culture may well not be what you hoped for, and you may well find it hard to stay motivated. The team may well feel disrespectful and demotivating. You may not even like the founder’s attitude towards you before too long.

Personal opinion, worth what you paid for it.

Ask a lawyer whether it is actually enforceable

One of my biggest lessons from running a growing organization was: always have one level better financial advice than you think you need.

So, get an accountant from the beginning and let them decide and set it up right.

FWIW, I preferred zero to QuickBooks after using both.

"Cosmological models are built on a simple, century-old idea – but new observations demand a radical rethink" (2023) < by David Wiltshire, one of the authors of this paper, aimed at non-physicists

https://theconversation.com/cosmological-models-are-built-on...

Remember that senior roles are about building teams around you to get the job done. I'm wondering if your current experience reflects what the job has to be, or whether you could shape your team so that your job gives you energy, and other people do jobs that give them energy, and together you get the job done.

Crash into a nuclear waste container, of course https://blog.railwaymuseum.org.uk/operation-smash-hit/

"A qualitative approach was employed, involving in-depth semi-structured interviews. Thematic and content analyses were applied. Out of a sample of 47 participants using Flow, 18 participants consented to be interviewed."

https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=12882...

Some thoughts, worth what you paid...

You can't share enough information here to get really good advice. If you do this you will need someone whose advice you trust, who understands your weaknesses as well as your strengths. Could be a friend, could be a coach.

As someone else said, if you can make this a win for everyone involved, that's the best and most likely to succeed approach. To do that starts with asking good open ended questions and listening to what those with the power to make this decision want for themselves, especially the CEO, and showing them respect.

People may express confidence in you now when you're not in charge. Inevitably if you do end up in charge you'll end up less popular. If part of what motivates you is what other people think of you, be careful.

Know your plan b, and c.

Good luck to you and everyone involved.

It was a breach of their guidelines to report a method of suicide, so it sounds like they were just fixing that. This is standard in the UK because of evidence showing that reporting methods can be followed by further suicides.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/guidelines/harm-an...

Suicide, Attempted Suicide, Self-Harm and Eating Disorders

5.3.45 Suicide, attempted suicide and self-harm should be portrayed with sensitivity, whether in drama or in factual content. Factual reporting and fictional portrayal of suicide, attempted suicide and self-harm have the potential to make such actions appear feasible and even reasonable to the vulnerable.

Methods of suicide and self-harm must not be included in output except where they are editorially justified and are also justified by the context. We should not include explicit details that would allow a method of suicide to be imitated.

Agree. I thought the leverage one was the odd one out - more ego than impact. I think high impact organizations are usually made out of individually low leverage people working together

FYI it's called flash paper, plenty of sources online

I'm curious what about Fedora specifically makes the difference for you? I started using Cinnamon with Mint (derived from Ubuntu, Debian) last year and also found it a big improvement from Windows.

I was part of the team that set up a non-profit, was CEO of that, am CEO of another.

I suggest testing very carefully the idea that a non-profit is the best way to work on whatever idea or problem you're interested in. For-profits only have to get a successful two-way relationship between the customer and supplier and then when demand goes up, funding goes up. Non-profits have to get a successful three-way relationship between the beneficiary, the supplier, and the funder. Demand going up often doesn't mean funding goes up. There are problems that can best be tackled by non-profits but often a for-profit will have a simpler business model and better chance of financial sustainability.

There are also plenty of ways to configure a for-profit with some of the qualities of a non-profit, including employee ownership like the co-operative movement, donating a proportion of ownership/profits, having an explicit social purpose like the Body Shop or Patagonia.

The ISSN registry (and usually the relevant national copyright library, I think)

Both examples mentioned turn up on an ISSN search

Antarctica Journal of Mathematics https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/0972-8643 published in India from 2004 according to the Indian registry http://nsl.niscair.res.in/ISSNPROCESS/issnassignedinfo.jsp

Journal of combinatorics and number theory https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/1942-5600 published in the US Details of holdings at https://search.worldcat.org/title/228503731

I respect you for asking. Learning to manage better has never stopped for me but the difference between no training and some is massive. It will be good for you and your colleagues.

The book that has made the most difference to me as a manager is Crucial Accountability and it's very relevant to what you're asking about.

I'd really encourage you to do an intro to line management type course as well. I've never known anyone come out of one saying that was amazing but people always find them useful.

The Cochrane Collaboration does systematic reviews of the research into health interventions.

There are quite a few reviews of different tinnitus interventions here, from zinc supplements to cognitive behavioral therapy https://www.cochranelibrary.com/search

One common theme skimming through is that there is no intervention known to be effective for everyone. But it is worth looking at the ones that have been studied and seeing if any might be worth trying for you.

Full disclosure: I work for the Campbell Collaboration which is essentially the sister organization of Cochrane doing systematic reviews on subjects outside of health (education, crime prevention, business and management, international development and lots else) campbellcollaboration.org/

Can someone explain to me what is the benefit of taking control of freenode? Is there an income stream or something?

Actually Deaf people have campaigned against a proposal to ban the selection of embryos based on a preference to have a Deaf child, because they wanted to be able to choose to have a Deaf child. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7287508.stm

The campaign was unsuccessful. UK law now says that:

(9)Persons or embryos that are known to have a gene, chromosome or mitochondrion abnormality involving a significant risk that a person with the abnormality will have or develop—

(a)a serious physical or mental disability,

(b)a serious illness, or

(c)any other serious medical condition,

must not be preferred to those that are not known to have such an abnormality.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/22/section/14

I really wish polls like these would include a control question, something utterly implausible... Whatever percent of people answer yes to the hippo question get subtracted out from the other questions.

This is standard in appropriate cases. The official survey of young people's drug taking in England says:

"The survey asks about awareness and usage of a fictional drug called Semeron. Responses to these questions provide a guide as to how much pupils are over-estimating so it is reassuring to see that in the 2018 survey only 24 pupils (0.2% of all pupils)admitted to taking Semeron which is in line with previous surveys and suggests that only a tiny minority of pupils maybe falsely admitting to drugs use. However, 1,717 pupils (13%) said they had heard of Semeron which suggests awareness of drugs could be over-estimated. Hence the majority of the tables in this report focus on drug usage rather than drug awareness."

https://files.digital.nhs.uk/B8/8B8160/sdd-eng-2018-qual.pdf...

Congratulations! Nice problem to have.

Others are better placed but you've been waiting an hour...

- You say "Starting up is the most challenging job ": what if you assume it doesn't get any easier?

- What are the downside risks of an aquihire? What would you work look like? Is this somewhere you would otherwise choose to work?

- Leaving aside success for the business, what do you personally want out of life now, in the next few years, long term?

- You've had four offers without actively looking, what if you active look for buyers?

- What two people/roles could you hire that would make you enthusiastic about continuing to build your company?