
Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process - LukeB_UK
http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/zenefits-program-let-insurance-brokers-fake-training
======
tyre
I used to work at Gusto (ZenPayroll back in my day) and dealing with Zenefits
was always a pain for this reason.

They were the consummate hackers, using screen scraping and automation to do
whatever the hell they wanted. One nightmare example was when a bug in their
"automated" system rewrote bank account information for tons of employees to
just be the last 4 digits of their account number. Such a mess.

Even if this weren't a tightly regulated industry, you're dealing with how
people are paid and covered for health conditions.

We didn't hire hackers[1] because that attitude just doesn't fit for certain
classes of problems.

Hats off to the investigative journalism by BuzzFeed, uncovering some
frightening immaturity pervasive in Valley companies.

[1] I authored this post about our hiring at the time:
[https://gusto.com/blog/zenpayroll-is-not-hiring-
hackers/](https://gusto.com/blog/zenpayroll-is-not-hiring-hackers/)

~~~
mixmastamyk
> uncovering some frightening immaturity pervasive in Valley companies.

This is one of the dark sides to having an entire engineering team in the
25-30 age range. They can sling http just fine, but sometimes don't fully
grasp the consequences of their work.

~~~
tyre
I was 22 when I started and cared very deeply about the consequences of what I
was doing.

It's more about heavily interviewing for alignment with your mission. If
people care deeply about the problem you're solving — not just the technical
problem, the people problem — then you're far less likely to have these
issues.

I interviewed dozens if not hundreds of people at ZP and there were two red
flags for engineers:

1) They only care about the technical problems. In this case, they're likely
to make decisions more aligned with "that's interesting" than "that helps our
customers"

2) Once we raised our Series A, we had a lot of applicants wanting to join a
rocket ship. I literally heard that in an interview with a Facebook engineer
who found us by "googling startups with 9 figure valuations." If you care
about growth at all costs, you're going to cut corners and fuck over your
customer.

Mission matters. Values matter. Interview for them.

~~~
itsjeremy
This is the essence of why Zenefits is in trouble. One of the mantras Parker
would frequently state around the office was something very close to "growth
is responsible for all of our problems and also the solution to all our
problems".

His view, if I'm recalling correctly, was that hypergrowth makes customer
problems more visible due to scale while making the company inherently more
valuable. There was absolutely no downside to growing as fast as your
imagination could manage - despite an accumulation of red flags, technical
debt, and unhappy employees.

As you mentioned in your comment, values absolutely matter. I think Sacks gets
this, but a company this deep in with so many employees is a big, unwieldy
ship that's hard to turn.

~~~
tyre
> There was absolutely no downside to growing as fast as your imagination
> could manage - despite an accumulation of red flags, technical debt, and
> unhappy employees.

I worked at LivingSocial early in my career and this is so true. There is a
limit to how quickly organizations can grow (given our current understanding)
and still be healthy.

Employee happiness and related metrics (e.g. retention) is the biggest
indicator of health. I don't care that you hired 400 people this year. Can you
retain 40 world-class people?

------
jasode
Another source[1] had more info about " _The Macro_ ":

 _Many of our California sales representatives received access to a software
tool called a “Macro” that may have allowed them to complete mandatory online
pre-licensing education courses offered by a third-party test preparation
provider in less than the legally required 52 total hours. The Macro
functioned to keep a person logged into the course and prevented the person
from being logged out for inactivity. The Macro did not advance through the
required material or quizzes in the education course -- the Macro only kept
the person logged in. The Macro only pertained to the prelicensing education
course and did not affect the broker exam taken later. Use of the Macro
enabled -- but did not cause -- a person to spend less than the 52 hours of
required time in the prelicensing course._

Ok, I have no judgement about the morals of this but I think the "hacker"
mentality is hilarious.

I was at a Fortune 100 company that had an obligatory "security training"
webcast that you had to watch and then at the end, answer some test questions.
This was required to get a door badge and network id. Well, one programmer
simply wrote a script to "watch" the video and automatically answer the
questions. The manager knew we all used it and condoned it because the
security video was out-of-date and irrelevant.

I can see someone at Zenefits using that mentality and justifying it because
skipping the training material gave them no benefit to passing the actual
exam.

[1][http://www.businessinsider.com/zenefits-using-secret-fake-
tr...](http://www.businessinsider.com/zenefits-using-secret-fake-
training-2016-2)

~~~
jacquesm
Sounds to me like the real problem was in the test. If someone can get by
without actually absorbing the material then they should be given the pass, if
they can't then it's a different story. Of course as soon as the program
starts answering test questions or something like that it is a different
matter but to spend less time than required and still pass means that either
the test is inadequate or the course is needlessly fluffy.

~~~
spacehome
Or there's a wide spectrum in people's ability to learn.

The real issue is that there is a designated time at all rather than just a
test.

~~~
hluska
Then why not lobby to have the rule changed instead of outright breaking it?

~~~
fixermark
Because while company A is lobbying for change through the front door, company
B is eating A's lunch by innocuously bending the law through the back door.

History won't remember that A did the right thing; only that B made it to
their next round of funding and A folded.

------
BRValentine
FWIW my company had a terrible, terrible experience with Zenefits and ditched
them after less than a year. Incompetent customer service, crappy software
(one problem we had was a result of a corrupted database record, according to
one of their reps, that had to be manually corrected by a developer), no one
seemed to know what they were doing. As a founder I told their reps multiple
times that we were a startup too -- ostensibly their target market -- and that
we were willing to work through some problems with them, but they didn't seem
to care and frankly just kept fucking up. Once we hit 5 people we switched to
TriNet and have gotten great service AND we're saving tons on the insurance
side, even accounting for TriNet's monthly per-employee fee.

Generally I avoid rooting for others to fail, but I can't help but feel just a
teeny bit of schadenfreude with this recent news. For the last couple years
I've been rolling my eyes with each new piece of breathless coverage. The
Zenefits people are talking about now sounds a lot more like the one I
experienced dealing with.

~~~
jasonlaramburu
This sounds like sponsored content for TriNet :)

------
Analemma_
I guess this is a useful lesson to any would-be founders who want to make a
business out of breaking the law: make sure you don't break laws higher than
those on the municipal level. The difference between Uber and
Zenefits/Theranos is that cities have limited resources and angry citizens can
convince them to back down (and if you lose, hey, just ignore that city and
try somewhere else), whereas state and Federal agencies can nuke you at any
time and don't really have to worry about the vox populi.

~~~
nostrademons
It reminds me a bit of the Ben Horowitz essay "Why I did not go to jail"

[http://www.bhorowitz.com/why_i_did_not_go_to_jail](http://www.bhorowitz.com/why_i_did_not_go_to_jail)

In general, laws are not something you want to fuck around with as a startup.
You can break _proprieties_ , you can do things that will piss certain people
off (you're almost guaranteed to piss off your competitors if you're doing
anything interesting, for example), and typical business ethics assumes that
everybody is looking out for their own interests and can advocate for
themselves. But when someone has explicitly said where the boundaries are -
and _particularly_ if that "someone" is a government - it's good to respect
those.

~~~
x0x0
because I remembered reading it, there's a wee bit more to the story than Ben
shares. It took a while to find it since Bloomberg reorganized their site [1]
but here you go [2].

tl;dr: what Sharlene really went to jail for was more than shifting grant
dates around (some by more than 60 days, which is more than a month last time
I checked.) She appears to have changed grant _and_ exercise dates both to
increase income and to shift exercise income to long term capital gains, and
then mislead auditors about these practices. Specifically, she want to jail
for listing a false exercise date on her income tax return.

The point is, according to the reporter, what she went to jail for was more
clear-cut than Ben is claiming.

[1] [http://go.bloomberg.com/market-now/2014/02/12/dont-worry-
ben...](http://go.bloomberg.com/market-now/2014/02/12/dont-worry-ben-its-a-
long-way-to-san-quenti/)

[2]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20140309175428/http://go.bloombe...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140309175428/http://go.bloomberg.com/market-
now/2014/02/12/dont-worry-ben-its-a-long-way-to-san-quenti/)

~~~
igurari
Ben doesn't share that backstory, but it's irrelevant to his point. He is
suggesting that he might have gone to jail by association with her and having
done something illegal at his own company. Hence his statement:

"Since we had the same head of finance, we almost certainly would have been
investigated.... The whole thing was a case of the old saying: “When the paddy
wagon pulls up to the house of ill repute, it doesn’t matter what you are
doing. Everybody goes to jail.” Once the SEC decided that most technology
company stock option procedures were not as desired, the jail sentences were
handed out arbitrarily."

So even if she did much worse things at her old company, the SEC could have
decided that he broke the law too (even if in a less major way), and should go
to jail too.

~~~
x0x0
No.

She did not go to jail for option grant backdating. She paid a fine for option
grant backdating.

If you were honest with your auditors and did not lie to the SEC, you
generally had at most an enforcement action and income restatement.

[https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/optionsbackdating.htm](https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/optionsbackdating.htm)

------
jefftchan
[https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/](https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/)

> Some examples of ethical behavior we expect from founders are:

> ...

> \- Not using misleading, illegal or dishonest sales tactics.

> ...

Does this mean Parker is no longer a YC Founder, if the allegations turn out
to be true?

~~~
iaw
I don't think any of their sales tactics fell under "misleading, illegal, or
dishonest." It was their California pre-certification practices that was
blatantly illegal.

~~~
ceejayoz
Well, that still falls under the "Not behaving in a way that damages the
reputation of his/her company or of YC" and "Generally behaving in a
professional and upstanding way" rules listed on that page.

------
maxcan
In this one particular instance, good for them and its a shame that they got
caught. I've had to watch quite a few of these "unskippable" videos for
various government mandated trainings and there are a complete waste of time
so that some bureaucrat can check a box and some company's lawyers can
mitigate some liability. They don't educate the captive viewers and they don't
protect consumers.

Lets see how any customers were actually harmed by this.

~~~
uptown
Yes, it should absolutely be up to the individual to decide whether they've
met the legal requirements for their job. I hope my surgeons self-certify that
they're ready to operate, and the technician that repairs the airline I'm
flying on should have the last word on whether he's qualified to start
tinkering with the ailerons!

~~~
unethical_ban
If, after 8 years of med school, your surgeon had to sit through a 2 hour
video made 15 years ago about "The importance of surgery" and "where to keep
the scalpels", he's probably be a bit frustrated.

~~~
conorh
You've pretty much described what happens when a surgeon joins a hospital.
Well perhaps that is an exaggeration, but my wife sat through several required
classes on basic procedures before starting her surgery job. Hospitals, like
any dysfunctional bureaucracy driven partially by lawyers, thrive on this
stuff.

------
fennecfoxen
The mandatory 52 hours spent _logged into the course_ requirement hearkens
back to this recent discussion on occupational licensing:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11054527](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11054527)

~~~
maxerickson
However arbitrary or dumb it might be, it's still a rather low bar.

edit: which I think might not sound how I intend it. I meant to get at it not
requiring a great deal of investment of time or other resources to become an
insurance broker.

~~~
lmm
It shows a real lack of faith in the exam, I think. If the exam is testing the
requirements of being an insurance broker correctly, why have an "x hours of
training" requirement as well?

~~~
maxerickson
The interesting discussion from the occupational licensing story was whether a
given licensing requirement creates an undue barrier to people that want to
pursue the career. That's what I was getting at, regardless of how terrible
this hours requirement might be, it doesn't create much of a barrier to people
that want to become insurance brokers. It's little more than an inconvenience.

(There's an argument to be made that an inane hours requirement is unfair to
people that must work long hours to support themselves, but in this case it
was the company urging paid employees to spend their time otherwise)

------
leroy_masochist
I wonder if this incident and others such as the recent Homejoy / Flymaids
kerfuffle have caused PG to rethink whether he's still looking for
"naughtiness" in founders [0].

That's not meant passive-aggressively. I completely get why naughtiness might
be indicative of a propensity toward innovation -- it's a pretty
straightforward and intuitive concept. I'm just wondering whether PG still
puts as much faith in the heuristic as he used to.

[0]:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html)

~~~
username223
I doubt it. "Naughtiness" is creativity combined with a lack of conscience,
which is a good way to make a quick buck. Regulatory arbitrage or capture,
exploiting known cognitive biases, and creating subtle information asymmetry
should all feature prominently in "YC 1[6-9]."

~~~
leroy_masochist
If we're trying to define the better side of naughtiness, I'd substitute "an
irreverent and inquisitive attitude" for "a lack of conscience" in your
definition above.

------
trevmckendrick
This is being way overblown IMO.

If you've worked at a big, regulated company, you know there are tons of
trainings that you have to do.

Often said training provide little to no value, other than covering the ass
(CYA'ing) of the employer.

But what's worse: these programs will sometimes log you out if you're not
paying 100% attention.

Everyone I knew working at our Big 4 accounting firm would do our real work
while these "training" videos played in the background.

Some engineer likely thought s/he was helping everyone out. And rightly
so...their time was likely much better spent in other places given their
incredible growth.

~~~
phonon
LIC-EN-SING

This isn't some perfunctory blah-blah training.

Unlike professions where you are expected to get a post-college degree and
pass a multi-day difficult test given once or twice a year, all you need to
become a health insurance broker is take some classes (in person or online)
for a few hours, pass a test (which you can retake as often as you like) and
pay ~$100. That's it!

Zenefits is large enough they could actually not treat licensing as a nuisance
(gotta SELL SELL SELL) but could have had a full time in-person instructor
give a week+long onboarding/training/prelicensing class for every new sales-
person. You know, so that people who are expected to be explaining the
intricacies of health care laws and pro and cons of $100,000+ yearly group
policies might actually know a little of what they are talking about.

How many of those accountants didn't study ACCOUNTING for at least 52 hours?

~~~
lmm
What on earth does spending x hours on something prove? If someone spent their
52 hours zoned out while the video played, just aware enough to click the "I'm
still watching" button that shows up every 5 minutes or whatever, how would
that make them any more qualified than the macro?

It sounds like the real problem is that the test is grossly inadequate. The
regulations should specify a test that's stringent enough. Specifying x hours
of training isn't helping anyone.

------
wiseleo
I took pre-license training while developing some software for insurance
brokers to better understand their industry.

There is not enough material there to spend 52 hours studying. You spend 12
hours on code and ethics, 20 hours on life, and 20 hours on medical.

The material is very simple. The hourly requirement is based on the offline
classroom, but should be compressed for online learning.

------
NDizzle
Can someone give me a good explanation of how the COO wasn't responsible for
this kind of stuff? It's mind boggling to me how hard Sacks is throwing Conrad
under the bus, despite possibly being just as guilty.

I mean, I get it - power plays and all. But aren't they both responsible?

~~~
timv
You're questioning the reality, when all of this is about perception.

The board needed to hold someone responsible for this mess in order to satisfy
the regulators that they're taking the problem seriously, and things are
different now.

Effectively, the message they want to send is that _the adults are in charge
now_.

There was no way Conrad could stay. Even if they could somehow hide any
evidence that he knew about the violations (and they probably couldn't), it's
very clear from his public statements that he had built the _fast and loose_
culture the had allowed and sustained the problems. He had to go and the
message needed to be that the company has no place for him anymore. He's not
stepping into a reduced role, he doesn't have a board seat, _it 's over, he's
dead to us_.

Sacks has a different record. He wasn't there from the beginning, he hasn't
been the public face of the "ready, fire, aim" culture, there's plausible
deniability. And he has credentials to justify his position - Yammer,
Microsoft, PayPal - he can be painted as a safe pair of hands.

And, since he's been the COO for a year, he can step straight in an take over
without needing a handover period from Conrad.

The board need Sacks to stay on and be the new face of Zenefits. And they've
decided that the regulator investigations are not going to find damning
evidence against him. Maybe because he had no idea. Maybe because he was smart
enough not to leave any evidence. Maybe because there's a paper trail of him
reporting the issues up the chain in way that makes him look like the good
guy.

You're asking the question "How can a COO not know about all this stuff, and
not have had some responsibility over it?" and that's a good and fair question
- the regulators will ask it too. I take it the board will be able to provide
a plausible answer to that question when the regulators come knocking.

But that's not really the #1 question that the board's worried about. They
want to know "who has the best chance of saving this company?" And what Sacks
provides is:

\- Plausible deniability

\- Credibility in the market

\- Credibility with the regulators

\- Knows the business

\- Can do the job

\- Ready to start now

There's no one else with those credentials, so Sacks needs to take the job.

Once that's decided it's a matter of execution - almost literally. If Sacks is
going to save Zenefits then he needs to look innocent, and blame Conrad for
everything. That might actually be true, but that's actually not the key
question for the board. They just need something that they can sell to the
market and regulators.

~~~
NDizzle
Thanks for taking the time to write that up. It makes sense from that
perspective.

------
1stbubblevet
I think the focus on "TheMacro" is a bit overblown. "TheMacro" sounds
sinister, but AFAICS it just keeps a web session from expiring. Depending on
Session timeout length, the 52 hour requirement can still be gamed by having
multiple browser windows open.

------
ralmidani
One aspect of this whole debacle that needs to be highlighted more is the
culture that allowed Zenefits to behave in shady ways.

The culture I'm referring to is the "give me complex software, and host and
maintain it for me, but have someone else pay for it" culture.

Whether it's through intrusive ads, creepy data practices, and/or Zenefits-
like shadiness, insisting that software should be paid for by anyone but the
people using it is a disaster waiting to happen.

I'm founder of a startup building an application that is free (as in freedom)
for small businesses. If future customers want us to support and maintain the
software for them, they will need to pay for it the old-fashioned way. Any
other arrangement would compromise both our customers' interests, and our
company's integrity.

------
ryporter
How is Sacks able to assert moral authority when he was the COO working side
by side with Conrad? Are there any Zenefits employees here who can tell us
what the internal opinion is of the two?

------
gadders
Move fast and break things. Laws, mostly.

------
batmansmk
I moved in USA recently, so maybe can help me understanding the impact of this
beyond not respecting the law. What value this license provides to american
workers? Do the healthcare system get better with the help of trained brokers?
Thanks!

~~~
dininglogistics
Yeah it does, especially now in the USA because new healthcare laws don't
allow insurance companies to refuse coverage to consumers for any reason. If
you have medical issues, or your spouse does, or your kids do, a licensed
knowledgeable health insurance professional will take the time to help you
select a plan that will actually be beneficial for you and your family.

Zenefits was hiring people who worked at the Yellow Pages and Yelp, previously
selling advertising, and was turning them into "insurance brokers". Apparently
in very short order.

Healthcare is complicated, and assuming that it could be treated in such a
careless and reckless manner, or that 52 hours of training is a waste of time,
it is beyond irresponsible, it shows an incredible lack of respect for the
companies that Zenefits is supposed to serve, people who are relying on them
for advice on the most important benefit employers provide, and finally their
families. It's shocking and sad that Parker, someone who survived cancer,
would be careless with peoples lives.

If Zenefits ended up being the "hub" that millions of consumers within the USA
had to rely upon, there would be a lot of people hurt by that.

There are lots of companies who not only struggled to get coverage for their
employees via Zenefits, but some didn't end up getting coverage through them
at all. I have heard direct from CEO's of some small but successful companies
who very much wanted to support Zenefits, that they gave up on working with
them after exhaustive efforts to get coverage that in some cases went on for
as long as seven months. Not providing coverage for your employees for seven
months, that's disgraceful. I can not imagine how the CEO's of these companies
felt.

Parker had to go, as should Sam Blonde, his right hand. Parker just cared
about scaling the business, at any cost, he didn't care about the collateral
damage.

------
hosh
Huh, I was wondering why the new CEO had emphasized culture and value on his
day 1 letter.

------
run4yourlives2
Let's just forget about the entire ethical argument around breaking an
existing policy/legal condition of doing business, as important as that is wrt
health insurance.

Who in their right mind thinks taking the time to design, then publish, a way
to defeat a relatively straightforward education requirement is in any way a
worthwhile thing to do? There is a level of ego there that goes beyond
rational decision making: you aren't cheating the system for an advantage;
you're cheating just because you can, because it makes you feel better than
others. That's some borderline psychopathic behaviour really.

Did Zenefits employees really gain anything from not having to complete the
required 52 hours? Was it really that big of an ordeal? Or was this a matter
of just being smug about 'not needing' to do some very basic requirement they
felt was beneath them? There is an element of hubris there that is unbecoming
in and of itself.

These are (very minimal, really) licencing requirements. There is a minimal
amount of effort that an employee should be expected to put in to do their job
legally. The assumption is that exposure through time to the subject matter
will increase knowledge. That may not be true in every situation, but it
likely is in a majority; the rule exists. The exposure generated from choosing
to "fight this battle" and losing is miles greater than any particular payoff
achieved in victory. That alone indicates to me that the person in charge has
a poor grasp of weighing risks/rewards, regardless of personal ethics.

Some things just aren't worth fighting because the risks in losing are so
disproportional to any net gain from winning. This is a perfect example. A
good CEO needs to know how to pick and choose the hills to fight on.

Lesson learned here: Not every component of your business needs to be
disrupted. Some things aren't worth disrupting at all, really.

~~~
stordoff
> Did Zenefits employees really gain anything from not having to complete the
> required 52 hours? Was it really that big of an ordeal?

That was my first thought as well. I can see the appeal in streamlining (what
at first glance seems like) an arbitrary process if the final exam is passed
legitimately, but a one-time commitment of 52 hours at the start of employment
(a good chunk of which you'd probably need to do anyway for the exam) barely
seems worth bothering with. As you say, the risks are disproportionate - it
certainly makes me wonder what other corners are being cut.

~~~
run4yourlives2
Well, based on what I read elsewhere it seems like they didn't think licencing
was that big of a deal at all really, which is an even larger demonstration of
hubris than this.

I do feel bad for their employees who may end up being blacklisted from
insurance period for practicing without a licence.

------
minimaxir
The BuzzFeed Article on Sacks' memo was written/submitted first and is more
comprehensive:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11083597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11083597)

~~~
brown9-2
HN seems to have what amounts to a systematic ban on buzzfeed, even though
their news org helped break this story (and many others).

~~~
dang
Of course we don't:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buzzfeed.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buzzfeed.com).
Two of the biggest HN stories from the past two days alone were from Buzzfeed:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11075336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11075336),
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11061992](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11061992).
Usually the complaint I hear is "why is Buzzfeed on HN".

Buzzfeed is one of a class of sites that produce a lot of dreck as well as the
occasional high-quality article. There are many such sites, mostly media
outlets. HN's solution is to penalize them (a little) by default, but take the
penalty off under different circumstances, such as if a moderator sees than an
article is good or the submitter has a solid track record.

This has proven to be a reasonable compromise. The alternatives—not penalizing
these sites at all or banning them altogether—are a lot more problematic,
which is how we arrived at this strategy in the first place.

~~~
robbiemitchell
Buzzfeed has proven itself by now to be a legitimate news source, even if the
money is coming from the other division (clickbait). And not just tech
stories: when big-name publications cut their education coverage entirely,
Buzzfeed hired a reporter dedicated to it.

I would expect similar penalizing treatment of other "mixed-quality" sources
like Quora, Forbes, Techcrunch, Business Insider, etc.

~~~
tptacek
The problem isn't the legitimacy of Buzzfeed; it's that the low-quality
content comes from the same domain as the high-quality stuff, and so if you do
nothing to penalize that domain, you get cat pictures on the front page. It's
not a moral judgement, but rather a practical measure.

~~~
minimaxir
> _it 's that the low-quality content comes from the same domain as the high-
> quality stuff_

But is the low-quality content being submitted to Hacker News? To my
knowledge, I've never seen a traditional listicle in the /new page.

~~~
tptacek
Not recently, it doesn't seem. Maybe the penalty should get removed. I'm glad
it's not my job to figure this stuff out.

------
dang
We changed the URL from [http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/11/zenefits-under-
investigatio...](http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/11/zenefits-under-
investigation-in-california/). That article points to an earlier Buzzfeed
story ([http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/zenefits-under-
investig...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/zenefits-under-
investigation-in-california)), but since this one appears to be the current
canonical source, we'll use it instead.

~~~
uptown
Just curious - since you switched the URL, why did you credit this version
instead of the one I submitted about an hour earlier? My submission was even
referenced in a thread you'd replied to.

~~~
dang
I'm afraid I don't understand the question. What do you mean by "credit this
version"?

~~~
uptown
When a link from a HN post is changed, and the link it's changed-to had
previously been submitted by another user, should the "posted by" and karma
attribution get re-assigned to the user who submitted the link to-which the
story is re-pointed, or does attribution and karma continue to credit the user
who submitted the link which was replaced? Just curious how the internals of
link-replacement works.

~~~
dang
It's the latter. We do try to privilege the original submitter's post when we
can, but that's not always easy.

It's a bit of a lottery who gets the karma in any individual case, but in the
long run it evens out. We would like to make the duplicate detection system
give more credit to original submitters. I used to think that didn't matter,
but have changed my mind, because doing that would incentivize users to find
good stories that no one has submitted yet, and that seems like it would be in
the community's interest.

~~~
uptown
Thanks for the answer. Karma, while fun, isn't personally that big of a deal.
Appreciate the clarification, and thanks for your continued oversight of the
HN community.

------
merkle_tree
All I can say is way to go! Buzzfeed journalist. Literally nothing positive
came out of this for anyone. It sounds like all of the brokers were capable of
completing the training material in under 52 hours. Now this is getting blown
up #bureaucracy

------
free2rhyme214
I think Parker is really, really smart. If you hear him talk he sounds like
he's somewhere on the intelligence level of Patrick Collison. It's too bad he
tried to shortcut a regulated industry but I'm curious what his next ambitions
are.

