Comment by jrozner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrozner | Hacker News Reader

I know Joel well and think a lot here is both accurate and well written. I led the Yahoo bug bounty program from 2023-2024 and was involved in it from about 2021. A major event that this glosses over is Covid which also happened right around this time as well. Covid killed travel (and budget) which in turn made it impossible to do the live events. A lot of companies ended up shifting to virtual live events which just never delivered on the same value, scale, or impact.

When COVID restrictions were lifted, travel and t&e budgets just never returned. Layoffs started happening and what were lavish, expensive events just couldn’t happen anymore. Hackerone charged for and likely made a lot of money on these events. I think a lot of what is talked about in the article is true but I think Covid is a big part of the why that led to it.

> travel and t&e budgets just never returned.

It is also worth remembering that the cost of travel itself, and the cost of venues itself has also increased substantially. As well as associated costs such as catering and insurance.

So in-person events have issues from both sides, those attending and those hosting.

You also do not mention corporate policies. Under pressure from investors, their employees and sometimes their home-countries, many corporates have also introduced environmental policies. So if you want the company to pay for your flight, you not only have to justify it financially, but you have to justify it environmentally too.

Cost of everything has increased massively, but they tell us inflation is 4%.

Iphones are still with the same price tag attached, bit you also get more compute for the same buck.

You can find many examples like this.

That's true. I bought 256GB RAM for an amount that used to only get 32GB. Wait, I swapped those two numbers around.

Inflation famously measures iPhone prices alone.

Now you're thinking like a central bank! Houses +200%, iPhones -200% (as measured by CPU clock speed), inflation 0%, everything is good!

Do they? https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-pri...

The link shows the first six months of 2026 for "all items" as: 2.4%, 2.4%, 3.3%, 3.8%, 4.2%, 3.5%. Gasoline ranged from -7.5% to 40.5% over the same range, which I've definitely noticed.

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