The Dutch Reach: A No-Tech Way to Save Bicyclists' Lives - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/smarter-living/the-dutch-reach-save-bicyclists-lives-bicycle-safety-drivers.html <comment><USER4> I think the key to safety for bikers in the Netherlands is simply the sheer number of them. When you visit the Netherlands. Within 15 minutes you have gotten used to scanning for bikers everywhere. There are so many of them and they come so frequently that you cannot not get into the habit of looking for them.

The importance of numbers is something often overlooked. I read an article discussing the different approaches to biking the Netherlands and my native Norway has. Here in Norway we are obsessed with bike helmets. The dutch never use helmets. Yet we have more head injuries in Norway for bikers.

So the number of bikers in the Netherlands seem to create a better protection for bikers than the usage of helmets. And here is the kicker: If you don't demand that people use helmets when biking, the number of bikers will rise to a level, where the number of injuries will be lower than if everybody used helmet.

That is what the research suggested anyway. I will probably still use a helmet in Norway due to the terrain, but it is still food for thought I think.

<comment><USER5> This and the law: cars are always to blame.

Even in The Netherlands this law was needed to keep bikers safe.

And when introduced even the Dutch made fun of it: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ivY06w83fKU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ivY06w83fKU)

Edit: if you want to look this up, the law is called: "Artikel 185 Wegenverkeerswet".

It's very broad and is not only to protect cyclists. I think this law is more about making drivers of motor vehicles more responsible.

<comment><USER6> Cars aren't always to blame. It's just that it starts from the presumption that the car is at fault - which is the case in approx 90% of cases in the UK (although the UK doesn't have this strict-liability unfortunately)

<comment><USER7> Strict also doesn't mean 'always' in the Netherlands. There are exceptions.

See: [https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/strict- liabili...](https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/strict-liability-in- the-netherlands/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Dutch Reach is a reach to ask for, IMO. I write this as a cyclist living in Vancouver (one city named in the article) who has been doored and nearly doored. IME, shoulder checks _while actually driving_ seem to be a dying art form. So asking for a while-parked check like the Dutch Reach ... seems optimistic. But no harm in trying. The illustration is great. I applaud all efforts to make this technique more known.

Fellow cyclists, you already know this, but please watch sideview mirrors of parked vehicles and all other signs of people and passengers and assume the worst.

Infrastructure should, IMO, allow an extra foot or two in lane designs especially when they are adjacent to different users (i.e. motorist, cyclist, pedestrian). This allows for swervy cyclists, swervy motorists, bad parkers, and people "not from here" a safety buffer. The latter group is one you're just not going to ever reach with urban education like the article, yet they are a significant vehicular presence in a many popular cities, whether they're driving their own vehicles, an unfamiliar rental, or getting out of a taxi cab.

I'll give an example. All infrastructure design decisions have pros and cons. Here's a style of bike lane on the "passenger" side that catches motorists off guard (when they park too far to the right, near the lane) and passengers off guard because neither expect to find a cyclist on their right.

[https://email@example.com,-123.1195244,3a,75y,2...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-123.1195244,3a,75y,214.64h,71.34t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s7rZLbmXvAV0-H9ApXRwRcg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

How about some opening-door-tech that alerts you quickly and loudly when an object approaches your door as you begin to swing it open? Good for passing traffic, bicycles, etc.

BTW, I appreciate that cycling news shows up on HN from time to time. It's truly a civilized activity and IMO has an important role in the future of cities. Keep pedalling. :-)

<comment><USER9> As a cyclist - just don't ride in reach of car doors. If that means taking the lane and blocking cars, do so.

At any speed trying to figure out whether or not someone is in it in time to slow down is impossible. Even if you slow down to a crawl as you pass someone sitting in the car you are still relying on them not opening it into your side. If you are right beside the cars you have no space whatsoever to swerve, because swerving towards faster traffic is suicidal.

<comment><USER10> As an occasional driver (I take the transit more), yes please take up the whole lane; is safer for both sides. If I find you too slow I can overtake you when safe (either in a different lane or in the opposing lane when safe). Essentially, treat you like a slow moving farm vehicle.

However, please do not lane split even when it's legal to do so. I can't see out the far side of the vehicle, so you're basically somewhere I have less control over. Further, if you take a whole lane _then_ lane split at the red light, it will anger me and I will end up driving more aggressively, which is rather terrible for safety. If I can tolerate you being slow in front of me, you can tolerate me being slow to accelerate.

<comment><USER9> Switching to lane splitting at red lights isn't about tolerating you being slow to accelerate.

Cars usually accelerate much faster than cyclists. It can appear the other way because I'm watching for the light to switch much more carefully - so I can make sure the car to my left will see me before right turning.

It's generally about letting people behind me get in front of me. Once I pull over to the side though I need to act like a 'normal' bicycle and pull to the front of the line. That's where people expect me - and that makes sure everyone turning right has seen me so they won't hit me.

It can also be about using the vehicles moving in my direction as a shield against people turning left. I worry that people don't expect me when I'm riding in the lane at a light, and as a result won't properly see me.

That said, if you're use to farm vehicles you probably drive in very different places than I ride (downtown in a big city).

<comment><USER10> What usually ends catching my attention is bikes filtering to the front, starting faster after the red light (possibly because they're watching the light closer), and getting ahead of the cars in the lane. Then once they're ahead, switch to the middle of the lane and blocking all the cars from going faster.

Basically, the complete opposite of letting cars behind get ahead.

As for left turns: that car behind you (when you take up the whole lane) is your shield; the opposing car doing a left turn can't go because that other car will T-bone them. When driving, there are few enough bikes that having to look for two lanes (even though only one is marked) is the unexpected thing, so I'm actually _less_ likely to see you. If you're blocking the car behind you, I'd actually look for you to figure out why the car is so far back.

The bikes accelerating faster thing is the excuse I've heard before for the bikes filtering at the red light; apologies if that's incorrect.

<comment><USER9> I certainly don't accelerate faster than the average car. I've heard other cyclists claim to and I basically just assume they are mistaken (apart from maybe some tiny subset of cyclists who race)...

Filtering on the right to pass and then immediately taking the lane for an extended period of time is certainly rude, and would piss me off as well. It's not something I've seen or would do myself but I can easily believe there are cyclists doing it.

The trick with the whole 'car as a shield thing' is I'm assuming you won't see me, but if I pass through the intersection with a car traveling in the same direction to my left it doesn't matter, you literally couldn't hit me short of shoving that car into me. The phrase I've heard for this sort of stuff is riding as if you were invisible. You're right that a car behind me is almost as good, but that assumes that I'm not the last person in the line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm dutch, and I've only ever heard about this on the internet, never here. Notably, I don't recall this whilst getting my driving license only 2 years ago.

To check, I got my theory book. It says the following:

> _After the part about doing visual checks_ > When it is visually safe, hold > the door handle with the left hand, and open the door using the right hand > as far as is necessary and exit the vehicle.

So it explicitly states that one should grab the door handle with the left hand, not the right. Moreover, one should check visually (using mirrors and an over the shoulder check) before doing 'the reach')

I can't find the year of publishing, but it seems quite old, 2005-ish. The ISBN is: 978-90-72967-03-9 (26th printing)

The original dutch: > Als het veilig is houdt u met uw linkerhand aan de handgreep het portier vast en opent u met uw rechterhand het portier zover als u nodig hebt en stapt uit.

<comment><USER12> > After the part about doing visual checks > When it is visually safe, hold > the door handle with the left hand, and open the door using the right hand > as far as is necessary and exit the vehicle.

That is the Dutch reach, to my understanding. 99% Invisible did a story on it a couple years ago, and that was covered here.[1] 600 comments.

1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12674533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12674533)

<comment><USER13> No. The dutch reach is with the _right_ hand, which forces you to turn the upper body to reach the handle. Supposedly this sort-of forces you to do a over the shoulder check.

I think if you were taught proper driving technique, then there is no need for such concortions. You will always check the mirror and look over your shoulder before opening the door, even if only subconsciously. Just like you always check lengthwise traffic before making a turn, or checking traffic behind you before switching into another lane.

This is an issue of driver's education. Not which hand you use to open the door.

<comment><USER14> I think it also depends on whether you have auto-folding mirrors. (I was taught to check my rear-view mirror before opening the door. That doesn't work in my new car with folding mirrors; so now I sometimes use the dutch reach, even though I was never taught it back in the day)

<comment><USER13> I only know the auto-folding kind that folds in after you lock the car... usually by holding the lock button or pressing it twice quickly.

<comment><USER15> Sadly, my Seat Alhambra, 2016 has no such functionality. Almost unbelievably

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This "Dutch reach" thing is an example of a phenomenon I've seen several times before.

People who promote a practice seem to think their argument will be more persuasive if the practice came from an admired foreign country, yet the people who live in that country have never heard of it and/or do not commonly do it.

In this case it's the Dutch, but I've seen all kinds of similar nonsense about Japan.

<comment><USER17> The article explains clearly that it _is_ a thing in the Netherlands; it's a standard part of driver education there.

> "It's just what Dutch people do," said Fred Wegman, professor emeritus of > Traffic Safety at Delft University of Technology and the former managing > director of the National Institute for Road Safety Research SWOV in the > Netherlands. "All Dutch are taught it. It's part of regular driver > education."

<comment><USER16> Here come Dutch HN commenters who never heard of it. And there are more elsewhere in the thread.

The article is not accurate. It's a perfect example of what I was talking about.

<comment><USER18> Most people don't remember the rules of the road, they just adapt to common and intuition practice over years of driving.

In the USA, many or most states have laws stating that drivers must yield to pedestrians at unmarked crosswalks (every intersection is a legal crosswalk), but most drivers don't know that "unmarked crosswalks" exist.

<comment><USER16> I think the Dutch people posting here know whether or not they reach across their body and open their driver-side door with their right hand. So I believe them when they say the article is wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When riding in London a few years ago I came off my bike when a car driver - who hadn't seen me - turned across the road in front of me. I slammed on my brakes, and went over the handlebars only a few inches before hitting the car. I landed on the road with my hip and my head whiplashed over into the road. If I hadn't been wearing a helmet I would undoubtedly have fractured my skull, and possible worse. Since then I've been a vocal proponent of helmets - <USER2> London - because this accident was nothing to do with my riding. I had a front light on, a reflective vest and light-coloured clothing.

The real issue for me is cycling infrastructure. London is getting sort-of better. There are cycle "superhighways", but they're quite narrow and have their fair share of idiot cyclists who ride very fast and loose, and make it dangerous for other cyclists. If there was better infrastructure there might be a critical mass of more sedate cyclists who set the tone for cycling in general, so everyone takes account of that new paradigm. Until that happens, I don't think there's a good safe way of cycling in somewhere like London without a helmet.

<comment><USER20> Sorry to hear about your accident. May I ask how fast were you going when this happened?

I don't wear a helmet when commuting but I also rarely exceed 20km/h to avoid the exact kind of collision you just described. I have to say a helmet will help when going over the bars, but you could've just as easily been critically injured in other ways, such as breaking your neck, rupturing an artery etc.

One thing you notice about cyclists and cars in Amsterdam is that everyone goes quite slowly and with a fairly high level of awareness.

<comment><USER21> You want to wear a helmet. The risk-reward ratio is highly in favor of wearing one. What is the burden of wearing one vs. having some protection in case you fly?

<comment><USER22> Do you wear helmet while driving a car? What's the burden of wearing one vs. having some protection in case you have an accident? Car drivers are much more likely to die of head injuries than cyclists. Do you also wear a helmet while walking, especially in winter? What's the burden of wearing one vs. having some protection in case you slip and fall?

Why don't we do that? Because while the burden is low - it's mostly dragging the helmet around wherever you go and ruining your hardcut - the actual probability it might help is quite low. And with good infrastructure, the same is true for cycling. If you look at this years stats for causes of death for cyclists in Berlin for example, the leading cause is "crushed by a truck".

Note: if you do cycling for sports at high speeds or rough terrain: wear a helmet.

<comment><USER21> Wearing a helmet in a steel cage seems kind of redundant. Wearing a helmet walking at 5 km/h pace, likewise. I am wearing a helmet commuting daily, travel speed around 30 km/h. If you don't want to destroy your haircut, fair it's your choice.

Edit: To be clear, I was riding years without a helmet until a crash made me reconsider my priorities. Also, I am not in favor of mandating helmet usage on bikes.

<comment><USER22> > Wearing a helmet in a steel cage seems kind of redundant.

All kinds of race car drivers were helmets - and their steel cages are much much more sturdy than the ones that commuters have. Statistics als indicate that many car drivers suffer head injuries. So by all available evidence, wearing a helmet in a car is not redundant. Still, people don't do it - <USER3> they engage in particularly dangerous activities.

The parent poster that you refer to explicitly gave his speed as about 20km/h for commuting, which is neither particularly fast nor particularly dangerous on good infrastructure. So why wear a helmet?

<comment><USER21> So now you are comparing race car drivers to the typical commuter driver, apples to apples. You can cite all the evidence you want. When shit hits the fan and you don't have protection, you can only wish for not regretting your decisions.

For me this discussion is done. I have this particular perception, you have yours. We are both happy with it. Stay safe.

<comment><USER23> Had commuter cycling without helmet was really so dangerous as you claim, there would be way more head injuries of commuter cyclists. As is, they are quite rare.

I understand fear of someone who actually was in one, but please stop forcing your fear on everybody else. Just because you are afraid does not mean not being afraid is irresponsible or any more irresponsible then not having helmet in car crash.

<comment><USER21> Do whatever the fuck you want. But please be careful with what accusations you are throwing at people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm Dutch. I've never heard of this, nor has anybody I asked about this. I've never even seen someone in the driver's seat use their right hand to open the door. Dooring is not an issue here either since Dutch cyclists tend to anticipate very well.

What we do have here in the Netherlands are bike lanes, so in a lot of places the bikes pass the parked/stopping cars on the right hand side.

<comment><USER25> There are a lot of idioms in U.S. English which contain the word "dutch" but which are not recognizable to actual Dutch people. Some of these will come from e.g. stereotyped interactions with the Pennsylvania Dutch, etc.

<comment><USER16> This particular "dutch reach" idiom is not related to the Pennsylvania Dutch in any way.

<comment><USER26> None of the "Dutch" idioms will be from Pennsylvania Dutch, they all come from being the neighbour country to England.

<comment><USER27> Pennsylvanian "Dutch" is a corruption of "Deutsche", and the community German is it not? As I understood it many of American "Dutch" idioms were originally meant to be referencing German.

You _do_ get cookie from Dutch though. Cookie comes from the Dutch keokje.

<comment><USER28> koekje :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm a runner. Out of habit I usually run against traffic even when on the sidewalk. I'd be happy if drivers making a right out of a side street/driveway/parking lot would just come to a full stop behind the crosswalk and check to their right. Many drivers don't check to their right, or for that matter even come to a full stop when turning right. There isn't a single run I go on that I don't encounter at least one car rolling through a right.

Running on the opposite sidewalk so that I'm running with traffic is no safer because then I have to look over my left shoulder at every crosswalk to make sure a car making a right off the main street isn't about to run me over as I enter a crosswalk.

In summary: many drivers suck, don't follow the law, and self-driving cars can't get here soon enough.

<comment><USER30> Amen. I'll just add that _sometimes_ part of the blame should also go to the planners who set up intersections with odd angles and obstructed sight lines so that drivers can't see anything until they're already intruding into the roadway.

Related phenomenon: pedestrian crossings and cutouts placed twenty feet down a side street. Yeah, it might be further from the busier street, but it makes it much harder for either party to see each other or recognize each others' intentions. Ultimately quite _bad_ for safety, even for regular pedestrians but especially for runners. No thanks. I'll stay out where I can see them and they can see me and there's no ambiguity about which direction I'm going, even if that means hopping on and off curbs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> While I generally think things like this article are great and helpful, I think incentivizing individual behavior changes is a good way to distract from actual changes that will make cities more liveable: actual infrastructure and road and transit changes. That's the real answer to all of this. The unsafe nature of many cities especially in the US is a systemic problem, not just a personal behavior problem.

<comment><USER32> It's both an infrastructure and driver behavior problem.

As a daily transportation cyclist for about 10 years, I know from experience that much bike infrastructure in the US is more safety theater than actual safety improvements. Infrastructure makes cyclists feel safer, but it can amplify certain problems to the point where it might be making the roads less safe.

There are two cycletracks near where I work in Austin. I almost never ride on either, mostly because many drivers turn into them at intersections without looking. The city put up many signs to say to yield to cyclists, but these have had no effect best I can tell. I'd much rather take the lane and be seen. This is counterintuitive to many people, particularly non-cyclists, but the evidence I've seen in my daily life is overwhelming. These types of crashes are often called "right hooks" and they are well known to experienced cyclists.

Add on top of that the unsafe passes from drivers. Add the distracted driving. Add the speeding. Add the illegal parking in the bike lane (even protected lanes). Add the tailgating. Add the abuse from thankfully a far smaller number of people than any of the mentioned problems. It's clear to me that both infrastructure and behavior changes are needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Relying on an uncomfortable behavior change is one option, but as many have noted - really a "reach".

Why don't we instead take the experience of cities that instead of trying to integrate cars and cyclists, integrated cyclists and pedestrians? Physics are more on your side here - a lot closer weight and size of objects. Possibly even closer speed differential.

On a recent trip to Munich, the clear markings and cyclists on a protected wide sidewalk made a lot more sense. With cars and bikes sharing the narrow city roads, doorings are only one problem. Even side view mirrors can be a hazzard.

It's more costly to have wider side walks, but it's so much safer!

<comment><USER34> As a bike commuter in a city environment, I'd rather be near cars than mix with pedestrians. Cars are more predictable, and move at closer speeds through downtown. Out of congested areas, where cars are going much faster than me, I like being farther away.

At times, I do ride on the sidewalk because of road design or convenience, and it requires a much slower pace if there are pedestrians nearby.

<comment> your-nanny not German but have ridden in Bremen and Hamburg. the system works. But leisure cyclists in their spandex and too expensive bikes who like to go fast to "get their cardio" would probably hate it.

pedestrians and cyclists have separate lanes on the sidewalk, and pity the fool who crosses over to the wrong one!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm always using the Dutch Mirror which is that shiny reflective thing attached to the driver's door which I cleverly abuse to see if something is coming from behind before I get out of the car. I've been testing it a lot in The Netherlands. Nobody died so far so it must work but YMMV.

\--

edit: I have a Dutch driver's license and definitely would've known about it.

<comment><USER36> You need to also check the "blind spot" (1) which is big enough to lose a truck in let alone a cyclist.

1 - [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=car+blind+spots&t=brave&ia=images&...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=car+blind+spots&t=brave&ia=images&iax=images)

<comment><USER26> Is this novel enough that you felt you needed to give a link?!?!

It was literally the first thing my driving instructor spoke about, after I'd got in the driver's seat, and something the examiner was particularly careful to ensure was being checked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Same concept, _very_ thoroughly discussed two years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12674533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12674533) \-- with plenty of tangential bike shedding as HN does with bike articles.

Including the observation ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12675829](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12675829)) that the "Dutch Reach" is perhaps not universally known in Holland.

</comment><comment><USER38> Every time a article like this is posted I'm just flabbergasted at the fact that 'looking behind you before actually opening a door' is such a foreign concept to Americans.

<comment><USER13> My impression is that driving education in the US is rather lacking overall, though it's of course not federalized, so there are probably fifty shades of deficiency. (That being said many driving schools here suck as well, though that's mostly a money drain for the driving students; 40 % or so failure rate in the practical exam).

<comment><USER39> I've got a British driving license and an American driving license. The British driving license was hard work. The American driving license involved little more than proving I could make the car go forwards and that I had a pulse.

There's really a 40% failure rate? That's insane given how easy it is to pass the test.

<comment><USER13> I remembered it wrong, it's 36 % for the theoretical and 28 % for the practical exam.

[https://www.kba.de/DE/Statistik/Kraftfahrer/Fahrerlaubnisse/...](https://www.kba.de/DE/Statistik/Kraftfahrer/Fahrerlaubnisse/Fahrerlaubnispruefungen/fe_p_zeitreihe.html?nn=651942)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I don't need to awkwardly reach across my body to remember to check for traffic before exiting my car after parallel parking.

Here's what I do. I pop my door open an inch, just crack the seam, to give people behind me a signal that I'm exiting. Once the door is ajar, I do my check to see if the way is clear. As much as you should be worried about dooring a cyclist, you should be worried about getting cracked in the skull by your own door should a bus clip it.

</comment><comment><USER41> Does anyone else have the problem that nytimes.com articles remove themselves after loading? I can see the content for about a second, and then it vanishes. Probably related to my browser settings, but this is the only site that does it.

<comment><USER42> I do as well, but only when using a browser embedded in my HN app (Materialistic). It's persisted during my Chrome -> Brave transition, so I'll be giving Firefox a try to see if that makes a difference.

<comment><USER41> I've googled a bit and found more people who had this problem with Chrome. Sadly their solution (anonymous mode) doesn't fix the problem for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Training is great but making it impossible is better. Blind spot detection systems need to evolve the ability to keep the door closed when something is rapidly approaching a door.

<comment><USER44> And then that technology needs more technology to ensure that it doesn't accidentally disallow egress in an emergency, or misfire due to a bad sensor and keep the door permanently shut.

<comment><USER43> Yes, that's important too. Such a system shouldn't work at all when there's no power. I imagine that can be accomplished with a mechanism that has to have power to stay in a position that interferes with opening the door.

What happens when power fails is pretty important. What happens to an automated vehicle when that happens, for example? If there's no driver, they'll a mechanical brake that isn't used whenever power IS available. When power fails, it would engage.

More to your point, I've heard the Tesla Model 3 rear doors can't be opened from inside when power is lost in an accident. That could be a serious problem in an accident. Maybe they've fixed that or will soon. They will definitely fix it before I would purchase one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Like many people already mentioned in this thread, it's silly to attribute bike safety in the Netherlands to just this. To get a better view on why bike safety _is_ so much better here, i think this video really explains it very well in five minutes: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2THe_10dYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2THe_10dYs). The other videos are very much worth the watch as well.

</comment><comment><USER46> While _drivers_ may remember to "reach across your body" with opposite arm because they're in driving-mode, _passengers_ probably won't-- from personal observation.

Specifically, this is from experience involving a passenger door opening into a curb-side bicycle lane. The door opened before the car came to a complete stop and quite a ways back from the intersection. The car was still compressing front springs from braking when passenger door opened. (Enough other posts here today described what happened next.)

Since then, I wear bold red striped shirts or jackets when riding and red helmet.

When they found "Where's Waldo" (or "Where's Wally" for those from UK), I know that they've seen me, and that's the whole point.

I've used this very successfully in my present home of Vancouver, BC. Previously, it also worked well when residing in SF and Seattle. There was a confirmed Waldo sighting near English Bay just yesterday, but now you can call me by my real name.

</comment><comment><USER47> In NL this is not common either. This is not what keeps us safe. We use the mirror like any other country (but we do not forget). This topic has reached FP before. Original article and comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12674533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12674533)

<comment><USER48> _We use the mirror like any other country (but we do not forget)._

Except that passengers in the back seats do not have mirrors. Although I never learned the Dutch Reach (but I don't have a driver's license), my dad always warned us as a kid that we should check for cyclists before opening the door.

<comment><USER49> The rear doors in my car can't open from the inside for the kid's safety. I always check the mirror on the passenger side and will ask my passenger to wait when necessary. My mother-in-law is notorious for throwing the door open wide without looking (often hitting parked cars). She can't be taught so I just put her on the back seat now.

I live in an area where the parking spots are on the left side of the road. I don't know how common it is for Dutch people to check the mirror for the passengers door. Maybe it just depends on your mother-in-law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The door handle of some models of the Mini Cooper affords doing the Dutch Reach.

It is a circle with a shelf that faces forward in a way that makes it awkward to use the hand nearest the door to open. So, you reach across your body with your other hand and in doing so, you turn your body and head and your peripheral vision can catch a moving cyclist.

</comment><comment><USER51> If you think about it, it's crazy that personal motorized vehicles are allowed in cities. I mean, with the amount of petty legislation that we endure without thinking about it twice, having those huge noisy and smelly masses of metal moving freely in our streets is a bit insane.

</comment><comment><USER52> Sorry to be a party pooper, but this is a non-existing thing (and a repost, btw).

It's true that we are taught to look over your shoulder when opening a car door, but to label it "the Dutch Reach" is really too much honor. It's just common sense.

</comment><comment><USER53> In Italy you'll also fail your driving exam if you don't reach with your right.

</comment><comment><USER54> I've spent time with Dutch drivers in cars in the country, and I have never seen them do this "Dutch reach". I like the idea, but I'm not convinced that it's really a thing here.

</comment><comment><USER55> I've gone through bouts of trying to adopt this habit. One thing that makes it harder is that the door handle in my car is designed to make it easy to open with the door-side hand. It is forwards on the door (near the hinged end) and opens by pulling the handle back.

If the handle was at the back of the door it would promote the habit as it would actually be easier to open the door by reaching across with the opposite hand then try to scrunch your door-side arm back to get at the handle.

I wonder where the door handles are located in the majority of cars in Holland.

<comment><USER56> > I wonder where the door handles are located in the majority of cars in > Holland.

The hinged end, just like yours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> During my driving test (rural countryside of Austria, after 2000) not doing the "Dutch Reach" could decide about fail or pass. Now I live in a bigger city and cycle every day and I wish this was common practice.

As a cyclist you have to treat the typical motorist like an idiot with no perception of their surrounding and no knowledge of traffic rules. Sadly the same is true also for cyclists (especially with sunday-nice-weather-cyclists).

</comment><comment><USER58> Another no-tech way would be to repeal the keep as far right as practicable law that specifically applies to bicycles so that they have, by default, the right to the entire lane they're in. Then the general slow vehicle law would apply (meaning that one uses the rightmost lane available for traffic unless passing another vehicle or preparing to make a left turn).

</comment><comment><USER59> Another good trick is to pop the door before swinging it open. Pull the door handle so it pops out of the lock, but wait a second or two before actually opening it. This alerts any cyclists you might have missed that you're about to open the door.

</comment><comment><USER60> It would be wonderful if car makers could position the interior door latches to make this the natural way to open the door. E.g. just under the window near the pillar.

</comment><comment><USER61> Seems like one more sensor on my car could do this far better.

</comment><comment><USER62> It's not just cyclists that hit opening motor vehicle doors. If nothing else, looking first is just self-preservation.</comment>


$150K and up for Software Devs in Austin - <AUTHOR> http://www.statesman.com/business/technology/austin-battles-shortage-in-high-end-software-engineering-2024970.html?viewAsSinglePage=true <comment><USER3> I'm a freelance mobile developer in Austin.

My experience is that companies are "desperate" in the sense that they're willing to invite you to lavish parties and fill you with free alcohol to get you to work there. But as soon as you start talking contracting, telecommute, or anything other than "sit at this desk for 60-hour weeks trying to get permission to fix an awful codebase with terrible equipment," suddenly they're not interested.

Story time: one of the best, most experienced local developers I know interviewed at a name-brand tech firm who is covered once a week on HN. _Twelve separate times_ , they told him "We'll let you know today" as to whether or not he was hired. Several weeks later he found out third-hand he was the fall-back guy for some other non-qualified person they ended up hiring instead. He's told me horror stories about their code base that would make your hair stand up. This company keeps inviting me to parties about once a month.

There is a developer shortage in Austin, but the article blows it out of proportion. In reality the reason these few companies are "desperate" has to do with developers who want respect as human beings, autonomy to get things done, reasonable hours, a company that understands the need for technical excellence and not "put out fires" mentality, etc. If you do those things it's not that difficult to hire...

<comment><USER4> Bias: I'm a co-founder of BuildASign.com, an ecommerce company in Austin, and we're hiring. (Extra bias: we're a great company to work for, if Austin interests you.)

I agree that this article blows the issue out of proportion, but then again, any intelligent internet company realizes that its future success and future value is determined, more than anything else, by the quality of its software people. That being the case, any company where the higher-ups don't think finding the best software folks is the #1 problem (or at least one of the critical issues) at the moment is probably not a company you'd want to work for anyway. I think this is the #1 problem we face as a company, and yet I agree this article blows the "problem" out of proportion in the way the article presents the issue.

<comment><USER5> Word on the street is that you guys have a core group of developers that are set in their (old and busted) ways.

<comment><USER4> I think that's likely to be the perception any time you have a company that's grown quickly and organically, at least when your whole company depends on your software as much as ours does. Ditching something that's interwoven into every business process is tough, and making new approaches play well with existing ones is tricky. We're all for doing things the best way.

If you have specific ideas, I'd love to hear them, and would gladly buy you lunch. Shoot me an email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just wanted to share my experience as a junior software engineer straight out of college (May 2011, UT Austin) with experience at 3 different startups now.

There's been a discussion lately about the city of Austin being unable to retain engineering graduates, most of whom leave the city unable to find entry level work here (refer to [http://blog.infochimps.com/2011/11/30/keeping-tech- talent-in...](http://blog.infochimps.com/2011/11/30/keeping-tech-talent-in- austin/) to get what I'm talking about). Many of my college friends want to stay in the city that they've grown to love, but many don't and end up moving back home to find work. The growing exodus has become a problem over time, but prospects seem to be on the rise again with initiatives by the City of Austin and other organizations (campus2careers is a great one) to keep graduates in the area. HireStarter, the recruiting agency that was mentioned in the article, was excellent in placing me at my current startup even though I had little experience. There's hope out there for junior guys, but it's still going to be tough.

I don't expect things to get better tomorrow as this movement is still early stage, but if this momentum keeps up, suddenly Austin will have a new supply of junior and (formerly junior) senior devs.

Again, I still consider myself very fresh to the local industry so my observations may be a bit myopic :).

<comment><USER7> Not wanting to take entry level software engineers is possibly the most bone- headed move a big company can make. Someone needs to send a memo to management.

Big companies with no technical culture are not generally fun places for engineers. Experienced engineers can probably sniff out the really bad ones from a mile away. If they don't take new grads then essentially they're staffing up with the desperate and the downtrodden.

Telling the HR guys to hire new grads would, just by youthful ignorance and the law of averages yield a much better team over time. Granted retention would be the next problem, but at least they'd be _somewhere_.

<comment><USER8> On the contrary, experienced engineers are the ones most likely to be comfortable with a non-exciting big company that provides solid benefits, a reasonable working schedule, and mature, well-considered engineering practices.

Our own company isn't large, but we're rather traditional. We're not hackers, we believe in technical correctness, test-driven development and choosing the best tool for the problem at hand. This means that we generally write mobile software in the target platform language, server software in JVM languages, and on the occasions where we get to work on hardware and OS development, C and assembly.

The work approach is not laden with technical culture and "fun", unless you find solid engineering to be fun (personally, I do).

However, we've had great success in hiring genuinely senior engineers with at least a decade of experience each. We experimented early on with hiring junior engineers, but found that the overhead of dealing with untrained engineers was exceptionally high -- something that models my experience elsewhere, at larger companies.

With the caveat that these are generalizations, I've found that the cost to hiring junior engineers is expressed in obvious and (perhaps) non-obvious ways. There are the obvious costs of the training and mentoring required, along-side lower productivity, and a lesser ability to estimate complexity and time to completion. There are also more abstract costs, such as technical and design debt that junior engineers are much more likely to incur simply due to a lack of experience. There are also cultural costs -- if you hire too many junior engineers, you'll create a technical culture and working experience that drives senior candidates away, amplifying the costs I've listed above.

Of course, I readily admit that _someone_ must hire untrained junior engineers, and I realize the implicit unfairness of hiring standards that would exclude myself were it 15 years ago. However, there are companies other than our own that are willing to bear these costs in exchange for being able to recruit at the scale they require -- we're just not one of them, and I think our reasoning is sound.

That said, there are some things a junior engineer can do to make themselves less junior, (possibly before even entering the labor market):

\- Get experience (class projects don't count). A great way to do this is by contributing to OSS, especially projects that demand high-technical competence (eg, contribute to the ruby interpreter or MacRuby, not just high-level Ruby on Rails). Senior engineers have past experience to draw on when implementing software projects; this allows them to design not just for the immediate requirements, but with an understanding of how the requirements, maintenance costs, and performance will evolve over time.

\- Study practical implementation topics (... and then get experience implementing them). A lot of the value of a senior engineer is in their broad understanding of the practical topics of the field. Coming out of a CS program, you should hopefully have a firm grasp of the fundamentals of CS, but what many candidates are missing is a firm understanding of applied programming. Some off the cuff general book suggestions: UNIX Network Programming, Application Programming in a UNIX Environment, Mac OS X Internals, Applied Cryptography, The Design and Implementation of The FreeBSD Operating System, Database in Depth. This list is probably incomplete :)

\- Don't settle for _just_ an internship. Internships at big companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft) serve as a relatively cheap first-pass filter on college candidates for hiring. Of a given pool of software interns at a company like Apple, it's unlikely that more than a 10% of them will be hirable material, and of those 10, maybe 2-3 will actually get jobs. Other companies may hire a larger percentage (I don't have any experience there). If you want to work for Apple, Microsoft, or Google (or think you might), then don't sit on your laurels if you get an internship there. Pick a real, practical problem that, and work on it, hard, leveraging your access to senior engineers for advice and guidance as much as possible. If you just coast through the internship, you probably won't receive an offer. I think some students look at internships at the big companies as prestigious. However, they _may_ be viewed as the opposite -- an internship at one (or more) of those companies without being hired is a red flag for me, since I'm wondering why you didn't get an offer.

<comment><USER7> You seem to have some kind of chip on your shoulder, because you are reading a bunch of things into what I said that were not intended and are way out there.

In short, the company you describe _does_ have technical culture.

<comment><USER8> > _You seem to have some kind of chip on your shoulder, because you are > reading a bunch of things into what I said that were not intended and are > way out there._

I wouldn't read my response as a line-by-line rebuttal of your post. It wasn't.

> _In short, the company you describe does have technical culture._

By that measure, all companies have a technical culture.

However, big company culture (outside of Google and Apple) is usually not appealing to junior engineers, but is to senior engineers -- which is the opposite of your original point, and what I intended to address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Austin's supply crunch for software developers was bad enough by September to prompt 25 Central Texas tech executives to fly to California in search of new talent."

Awesome idea - cause there's certainly not a dev shortage in California, is there?

They'd probably have more luck doing a whistlestop tour of the midwest and north atlantic states, hitting up the more rural areas. Many techies in those areas have few options, or may be stuck with remote-only options, and may not enjoy the weather as much. The Austin companies have an automatic 'better lifestyle' story against more of those areas (weather alone) rather than trying to compete with California (where most of the devs are there _probably_ because of the Valley and the software dev culture already).

In short, I'd guess it's an uphill battle to get people to move from SF to Austin, probably much harder than getting people from, say, St Joseph, Michigan to uproot for Austin.

"After resumes were shared, business cards exchanged and several follow-up phone interviews completed, not a single one of those California candidates has made the move to Texas, according to the Austin Technology Council, which organized the trip."

Oh wow, and look at that, it didn't work. Wh not?

"It's even tighter there than it is here," said participant Rod Favaron , CEO of Austin startup Spredfast . "The challenge is there just aren't enough good software developers to go around."

They didn't think of that before? Or just can't think outside the bubble?

<comment><USER10> You are absolutely right about them hitting the wrong geographical area.

However, as a developer in the mid-Atlantic, I think the lifestyle here is just as good :)

I'd love to find a remote opportunity with any of those firms, but it seems that is difficult to find these days.

<comment><USER9> Many people do like where they live, but... I suspect more people would prefer to leave, say, Maryland for Austin than leaving SF.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> May I submit that if companies collectively hired some junior/entry level employees, they might eventually have some mid and senior level developers in the market? Just looking at Startuply for example, there is maybe one junior position out of 53 positions listed in Austin.

Perhaps hire one senior level and a two or three junior level developers to work closely together, and try and raise the productivity of the new devs.

If there are NO senior level programmers available, maybe they should get creative.

<comment><USER12> Spot on. I've seen this again and again: everyone is hurting for senior people, and everyone wants rock stars/ninjas. Hardly any companies that I see are willing to hire a junior dev or admin and contribute anything at all to his/her personal development, skill accumulation, and experience. They just wanna plug the hole and fill the position as fast as they can, and that's usually bad for both employer and employee long term.

<comment><USER13> Bull.

Companies have been hiring tons of inexperienced devs throughout the late '90s and early '00s, and they have been hurt badly by it. Incoherent teams full of junior devs that lacked practical skills and didn't know how to work in a team nearly killed many software based companies.

A CS degree teaches barely any professional skills, it's all on the job training, so training a junior is extremely costly.

So nowadays, smart companies build their team around seniors, and only then start hiring juniors one at a time. Which means 3 to 4 seniors for every junior dev.

It's not about "plugging the hole", it's about making sure the ship doesn't start leaking so badly it sinks.

<comment><USER9> "Companies have been hiring tons of inexperienced devs throughout the late '90s and early '00s, and they have been hurt badly by it."

Hiring "junior devs" and "hiring inexperienced devs" can be a world apart.

Hiring someone for position X who turns out to be inexperienced is not the same as explicitly hiring a junior developer with the intent of training them up.

I've seen a lot of the former, but not much of the latter. The two ideas get conflated quite often, but in reality are different and the latter takes a bigger commitment of resources.

"So nowadays, smart companies build their team around seniors, and only then start hiring juniors one at a time."

5-10 years from now, the conventional wisdom will probably be different. Sr devs might be more willing to leave, and if there are fewer of them, a larger percentage of your company knowledge, culture and IP resources go with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm a developer in Dallas and many of the same things are affecting our market, although we're mostly big companies and less startups.

I personally work with a geographically distributed team and as long as we meet face to face on occasion, we're highly effective and we can hire when ever we find good talent no matter where they live.

I know companies like GitHub, LivingSocial, and 37 Signals all embrace this remote team model and utilize it well to find the talent they need without taking desperate measures.

That begs the question, why aren't most of these startups doing the same thing? I understand big companies are often too paralyzed in bureaucracy to hire remote workers, but shouldn't startups be a little more flexible in this regard?

<comment><USER15> It seems like most hip startups want you in their office, drinking coffee/beer/coolaid with the rest of the team. I don't know more companies don't give a distributed team a chance, but from my observations it seems like they're all inherently against the idea.

<comment><USER13> Distributed teams work when the company, its culture and processes are stable and clear. Most software related companies don't get anywhere near that in the first five to ten years. In the mean time, fast growing start-ups look for the engineers they hire to be their future technical leaders, and to be deeply involved in the entire company, not just writing code.

In short: drinking coffee/beer/koolaid with the rest of the team is of vital importance, even if the actual work can be done remotely.

Also, the people that don't get this aren't good hires for remote work anyway, because one primary skill needed for a remote worker is knowing how to compensate for not being physically present.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Okay HN – (forgive the personal bent to this, please) what's the best way for me to find a decent paying, but fun job?

I've got ~8 years of python experience, ~2 years of experience with Javascript/JQuery/etc. and will be finishing up my masters in design (and an MBA) in the spring and, while I'm actually really proud of a lot of the work I've done, I'm irrationally terrified that I won't find a fun job that pays halfway decently... so, without becoming a plumb for a recruiter with their own best interests at heart, do y'all have any tips for finding a job worth having?

(Backstory -- I haven't been out of a job since I got out of college, so I'm feeling totally out of practice with regards to the job search)

<comment><USER17> Wall of text ahead. Sorry. :)

Don't sweat it too much. You can do things to adjust your odds, but there's a lot of luck involved, so part of it is out of your control. Who's hiring, what they're looking for, how your resume matches what they want, and how you interview that day can all turn good candidates and good employers into non- matches.

Mind your ethics and personal preferences, but don't over-emphasize the fun part of a fun job. Your attitude can control your opinions to some extent, and this plays in your favor here. Employers generally trip over themselves to try to convince candidates that they're a fun and exciting place to work. They're not trying as hard to pour money on you (generally). Geeks are generally bad at negotiating, and bad early steps can have a long-term, sometimes nearly permanent, effect on your salary level. It's also common to feel bitter if you ever realize you're being screwed over financially.

Don't sweat recruiters too much. As a candidate your interests don't directly align with theirs. That doesn't mean that you're necessarily always at odds. If you care about a fun work environment you will probably find that they don't have much to offer you. It doesn't hurt to talk to them, but don't expect much.

Probably the single biggest attack point for hitting your stated goals is during the job interview. Make sure that you realize the interview is, and treat it as, a mutual process. Are your future teammates boring, stupid, or difficult? What's the manager looking for, explicitly and implicitly? Why did the last person on the team leave (even/especially if the team is growing)? How does the hiring manager (or the higher-up "fit" interviewer, usually a Director or executive) think about the company culture, and what do they do about it?

You will probably not benefit by bringing up salary or benefits before the interviewer does, so don't. Once that topic has been broached don't be afraid to dig. If you're feeling brash, ask how the company makes salary decisions. There are services out there that offer salary ranges for employee positions. Maybe they use that data. If so, how?

Eventually you'll get an offer. Congratulations! It's very common for employers to set a tight expiration on one. If your offer expires sooner than you're comfortable making a decision, push back gently but firmly. Commit to a response deadline, but give yourself the time you need to decide.

<comment><USER16> Thanks. I'm often one to write long replies – it's actually a bit gratifying to be on the receiving end of one, so thanks for your time.

So, I dig everything you're saying... I guess I should have been more specific – by fun, I mean 'rewarding' in just about every sense except financial/ladder-climbing, etc, but I think all of what you said still applies.

In response to what you said, however, do you have any tips on negotiating?

A classmate was just offered 65k for a job in NYC that would pay 80-85k at a comparable firm in Chicago and he took the offer with no negotiating because he was afraid to do so... which blew my mind, honestly... so, I am to not be that guy...

<comment><USER18> > do you have any tips on negotiating?

Interview like it's going out of style; it'll help you feel more comfortable, if nothing else. When you have multiple offers, you can tell one company that the other is offering more. Then you can say that you have a significantly higher offer that's much closer to the average offer in your area, without revealing the exact dollar amount. Plus, you actually have a second offer you can go with if the first company doesn't offer more.

Also, look up online what average salaries are for your occupation and your area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It is pretty depressing to realize how under-paid we are in the bay area when you factor in cost of living. A lead systems administrator in SF tops out at about $150k, but more likely is about $120k, which is the same my friends in Wisconsin and New Jersey make, where the cost of living is 60% and 30% lower, respectively.

<comment><USER20> But you get to live in San Francisco rather than Wisconsin or New Jersey. It might not matter to some people, but I have almost zero desire to live long- term anywhere other than San Diego, LA, or San Francisco. There are enough people who feel the same way that I do, and so employees can pay a bit less.

<comment><USER21> I live in SF right now. It's not even that nice... it just _costs_ a lot, and in many ways I feel like the insane amount of love the city gets from its residents is at least in part to feel better about _paying_ such ridiculous living costs.

I've lived in a lot of major cities in my life, and SF is the first one where I've had to literally dodge human shit while walking on the sidewalk.

The weather is pretty much the only reason I don't regret moving here. Even the famously liberal population drives me up the wall sometimes - <USER2> cliquey, and way smugger than even South Park portrays this place.

<comment><USER12> I'm a denizen of the East Coast. On every visit to SF I notice shit on the sidewalks that public services never clean up. I guess it's the vast number of homeless people and crackheads. They just pull their pants down and defecate wherever they are. I never saw that in Philly.

But yeah, the weather sure is nice. I figure that's part of the problem, though: if you're homeless, you'll head somewhere that's warm all the time. Everbody had the same idea and solution.

<comment><USER21> Talking to other people in SF about the city always strikes me as somewhat Stockholm Syndrome-y. People take pride in paying $2K for an apartment on a street where the police warns you to stay inside because two people got raped blocks apart in the same week. It's so surreal.

Oh, the crime isn't so bad. _Everyone_ knows to stay away from the west side of Dolores Park! The crackheads in the TL won't bother you unless you show fear! Haha! Another person got shanked on my block this week - if only they were as street smart as the rest of us! I deftly dodged a piece of human shit on the sidewalk on my way to work without missing a beat, how delightfully urban-sophisticate!

I've never before lived in a place where violent crime, rampant substance abuse, and extreme poverty was treated in such a blase way, and often glorified as "vibrancy" and "color". The more I live here the more I feel like people here have these _giant_ goggles on that _only_ allows them to see the charming mini-muffins, startup parties, and great coffee.

<comment><USER22> I have lived in SF for 5 years, and seriously have no clue WTF you are talking about. The crime rate in SF is quite average as far as big cities go. You make it sound like some post apocalyptic hellhole.

<comment><USER23> San Francisco has a higher incidence of violent crime per capita than does New York, despite the fact that San Francisco is concentrated into 46 square miles, while New York spans 301 square miles.

What this means in practice is that nobody in San Francisco lives more than walking distance from an area of the city in which people are routinely mugged, whereas you have to get north of the 140s in NYC to see drastically increased crime.

San Francisco is, for its population, anomalously small. That plays into a lot of the problems perceive in it: it drives housing costs, makes transportation infrastructure harder to build, retards home ownership (and thus neighborhoods --- had a block party lately?), puts people into closer contact with crime, &c &c.

I lived in SF for several years, and I think 'potatolicious is if anything understating his case.

<comment><USER24> Shouldn't the small size make transportation easier to build? I've always assumed muni sucks so bad because it's part of some grand plan I never understood. Incompetence cannot explain it, it's so bad it has to be deliberate.

<comment><USER19> Can you explain to me why Muni and BART suck? I take BART or AC Transit every day, and Muni 2 or 3 times per week, and have for years. A decade ago I was afraid of Muni because I was afraid of poor people. I'm no longer afraid of poor people, I'm afraid of the rich, so Muni feels really natural.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There's a lot of discussion in this thread around "junior" vs. "senior". This misses the point, which is to hire good programmers and avoid bad ones. It's as if the industry has finally burned itself out of the "programmers as replaceable cogs" model and has replaced it with the next-laziest model, "hire senior, not junior". That is an improvement, but it's still so off-base that the words "junior" and "senior" applied to programming make me cringe.

Here are two factors the junior/senior model does not take into account. First, a good but inexperienced programmer will learn so quickly that they will run rings around mediocre experienced programmers in no time. Second, experience isn't only a good thing. Once people have repeated something a certain way enough times (and surprisingly few repetitions are required), they become locked-in and unable to see alternatives. This loss of flexibility is toxic to effective programming.

Of course that happens less to good programmers than bad ones, but that only puts us back at the real question - how do you tell a good one apart from a bad one? - something we have no satisfactory way of answering that is compatible with current hiring practices.

What we need is a healthy culture of interaction between "junior" and "senior". Our industry lacks this. What is our path to learning? We have the sink-or-swim model in which people once hired are installed in a silo and told to work on their tasks. Everyone recapitulates all the classic mistakes and has to figure everything out for themselves. I know I did. It cost me at least 5 years developmentally, and I'm only putting the number that low to save face. This way is so inefficient that it must eventually yield to something better. Hopefully when that happens there will also be less of the prickly auto-didact about most of us - but that's another story.

<comment><USER26> _What we need is a healthy culture of interaction between "junior" and "senior"._

Reading other people's code is too hard. We go through life trying to do it as little as possible.

<comment><USER27> Reading other peoples code is a great way to learn, but often other peoples code is not very accessible. How often do you look at the code written by a star dev in another department on another project. I can't:

-identify star devs unless I work with them directly,

-look at the code base of the project they are working on if I am not also working on it,

-find out which portions of the code they wrote (without looking through commit logs)

In many places a <i>healthy culture of interaction between "junior" and "senior".</i> is not facilitated by the employer.

<comment><USER25> In my experience, it happens through personal interaction and is a matter of culture. Facilitated by employers? Most employers are decades away from knowing how to do that. Or rather, most employers that exist today will never do it.

The interesting question is how many good programmers would be happier working in such a culture. I believe the answer is significantly many, and that this is a competitive edge waiting to be exploited. We hear so much about perks and benefits. My programmer soul says: fuck perks and benefits. Give me an environment that is teeming with creativity where I get to work with great people that I learn from and am inspired to do what seemed impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "We've fallen into a trap of fighting over existing talent," Favaron said, "and that's a zero-sum game that hurts everyone."

Everyone? No, it does not hurt the employees.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, but they aren't anyone, they're just talent.

<comment><USER30> May favorite was when a very large corporation started to call their HR department Human Capital Management. Human Resources is bad enough, but once you start calling me captial I'm never going to work for you again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Here's my gripe about this:

Ok, so startups have limited funds, fair enough. But way too many of them offer way too little in the way of equity to make up for a below-market salary and the risk and opportunity cost of taking the job.

I have zero sympathy for larger firms. When they talk of raising H1-B limits and how tight the market is, what they really mean is that they can't find developers for what they're willing to pay. the work these developers do is critical to the bottom line of the company. Why should a CEO make out like a bandit through compensation or stock prices while the teams that enabled it toil away for a pittance, comparatively speaking? Wages across all industries have been mostly flat for years—its only in the last few years that the IT/development industry is starting to show some movement.

(And before someone points out that everyone in a software company contributes to success, even non-developers, I totally agree—everyone ought to share in success.)

</comment><comment><USER32> One of the companies mentioned in the article was advertising internships and failed to even call me in for an interview. And it took them 5 weeks to respond saying that they did not have a position that matched my qualifications. It's possible that I suck, but I have a 4.0 GPA advertised on my resume and offered a pretty compelling cover letter.

It's possible that many of these companies have a hard time recruiting talent because their recruitment process is broken.

<comment><USER33> Notice the quote "I'm not going to pay the California wages".

Keeping salaries low is clearly a priority for these people.

I have a strong feeling this might be a fluff piece to increase the H1B quota.

<comment><USER34> So what are the actual salaries they are offering in Austin? The HN post says 150k but that's roughly the SF rate anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why are companies so averse to telecommuting? There is an endless supply of S/D around the world.

<comment><USER36> The telecommuting issue is separate from the "rest of the world" issue; the former is primarily a communication and culture problem, but the latter is all about concentration of talent around leading technical companies (primarily in the US).

There are indeed many people all over the world with programming knowledge; there are far fewer with _experience on a technically sophisticated project_. The latter class of talent is highly concentrated around the hotspots of sophisticated technical companies which, on average, keep their most important teams in the US.

If you are just reading and writing rows on a single instance of MySQL you can get all the talent you want from just about anywhere in the world. If you want to roll your own fault-tolerant distributed filesystem your options are (statistically) much more narrow, because anyone who can do that is likely to have been tempted by an offer to work at, e.g., Google in Mountain View.

<comment><USER37> I don't know about that. I am located in Toronto, Canada and would be interested in a UX design/front end development telecommuting job that paid $120k+.

However, nobody really wants to hire somebody that they can't watch. In the past I have emailed several companies about job postings that list telecommute as an option, and in all but one of the cases they where not open to somebody more than 3 hours away from the office.

I don't really understand this position. I am in ET so the time zone can't be an issue. I am in an English speaking country so there won't be any language barriers. I think companies in the US need to realize that increasingly fever people will want to move there because it the US is become very scary.

<comment><USER33> The US is only scary for Canadians and Western Europeans perhaps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think there are 2 parts of the problem.

1-companies want to pay a pittance compared to what the person is actually worth. Face it, if you offer $90K, and your competitor offers $120K, the person has to be insane to take an offer that differs so much.

2-companies have really high requirements when they don't actually need them. If you are doing something simple, you don't need a Google level engineer...especially if you are not willing to pay a proper salary for one.

</comment><comment><USER39> I moved from CA (Palo Alto and San Diego) to Austin in August to start my PhD at UT. Austin is pretty good in the sense that it's probably the best possible city you could live in that's in middle America.

That said, it's not California. The people in Texas are generally just plain rude and self-centered. There is a lot of "get out of my way" attitude, both metaphorically in how people interact in conversation, and literally on the roadways. It's also landlocked, and I miss the ocean terribly.

I'm here purely because the CS department at UT Austin is the best in the world for my area of research (Evolutionary Algorithms and Neural Networks). However, in a couple of years when my class requirements are done, I'm planning on finishing my dissertation research remotely from a coastal city.

There really is nothing at all I can imagine Austin has to offer me that is worth staying here over SF, SD, or even the east coast like NYC or DC. Maybe I just don't get it.

<comment><USER40> "That said, it's not California. The people in Texas are generally just plain rude and self-centered."

No offense, but that might be the most backward thing I've ever heard. Have you seen LA or SF? I feel like you might live in a one or two person bubble. Honestly, where are you hanging out in Austin?

<comment><USER41> I agree. Austin is one of the most chill places in the world. As a matter of fact, the only thing people bitch about are all the self-centered Californians who moved to TX in order to escape high real estate prices.

<comment><USER31> ... Who then drive up real estate prices here in Austin enough that "normal" people have a hard time buying in town.

To the OP: get out of your bubble, man. Austin is one of the friendliest places around.

<comment><USER42> I left Austin and even I know that Texas is in general much friendlier than the big metro areas in California. :-)

I agree, the OP needs to hang out with more Austinites. Unfortunately, the reason I left Austin was precisely because the ratio of "Austinites" to "Transplants" was headed in the wrong direction FAST. I've been gone almost 4 years now and I hear that it's only getting worse.

Austin still has pockets of cool left, but it's nothing like it was in the 80's, 90's and 00's. It's been on the steady decline for decades.

All that said, it's probably a much better choice than most anywhere else in Texas and probably the south/southwest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> So I've been toying with the idea of relocating to Austin, because New York is f __*ing expensive.

I even sent a couple of job applications some time ago before I got my new job in NYC. I'm not a rockstar, but I'm good and my resume shows it. I get a LOT of bites in New York metro area.

However, these Austin companies didn't even bother to respond, except one. The interesting thing about the one that responded was that the job was tailor made for me. It was uncanny...it's almost as if they read my resume and produced the job listing to match. Which is why I sent in the application in the first place.

The response was that they found me unqualified for the job. What a load of horse manure. If you're sending form letters to rejected candidates, please take some time to actually use the right template. I believe this one should've been the "no_relocation" or the "ceos_son-in-law_was_more_qualified" template.

</comment><comment><USER44> I keep hearing of this huge shortage of developers, but the situation I have encountered while looking for a job seems to be saying something else.

Is there really a lack of good talent, or is the recruiting process so horribly broken that good developers don't make it through the first levels of filtering by non-technical people?

<comment><USER27> I think you have a point. We are trying to hire at a large company and we don't see many resumes that make it through the HR filter. I still haven't figured out how this process works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Austin is a great place to live.

<comment><USER46> Question: how far outside the Austin cocoon can a gay man go without being lynched? (I mean this metaphorically, of course.)

Austin has a great reputation, but it's still in Texas.

<comment><USER47> I moved to Austin from SF and was told by a friend prior to moving that "Austin is California surrounded by Alabama."

You can definitely sense a cultural contrast outside of Austin.

<comment><USER46> I come from Tucson, Arizona actually :) it's the same type of cocoon there, though Tucson is starting to get more conservative as people like me move out (this month even!) and more conservative people move in.

Seeing people smoke pot openly in the streets still messes with me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is good news.. atleast for texas. I'm about 45mins from austin and finding local gigs are always hard. Wonder if they do remote work...

</comment><comment><USER49> > "We've fallen into a trap of fighting over existing talent," Favaron said, > "and that's a zero-sum game that hurts everyone."

If they've made an agreement to not recruit from each other, they're in violation of anti-trust law.

Google, Apple, and at least one other company got busted for this in SV about three years ago.

<comment><USER33> Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Pixar, Lucasfilm, Intuit, ..

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkerschberg/2011/05/04/apple-a...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkerschberg/2011/05/04/apple- allegedly-at-center-of-employee-compensation-conspiracy-involving-google- intel-adobe-pixar-and-lucasfilm/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Guess I'm moving to Austin!

</comment><comment><USER51> I think the only reason this article was so popular and generated so many comments was the clever marketed headline

</comment><comment><USER52> Free beer, taco's and a job interview can't make a good mix. I suppose that if I let one rip before I start slurring my qualifications, and the company isn't interested, then it was never meant to be.

<comment><USER30> Your son Rip is on line toot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> the biggest obstacle in moving to Austin is not what the article states..

Think about it people..if the developer has a house mortgage will he move? No..

If the dv still has edu debt will he move? no..</comment>


Android Spyware Can Record Almost Anything on Infected Devices - <AUTHOR> https://hackwarenews.com/powerful-android-spyware-can-record-almost-anything-on-infected-devices/ <comment><USER2> The phones we carry around freak me out a lot when I think about what they can do. In many ways they really are a worst case scenario when it comes to privacy. I once heard someone use the term "Little Brother" to describe our smartphones and their respective corporate owners.

So yeah, this malware can record almost anything. That's sort of a feature of these devices. They're built to record almost anything.

edit: I fixed a typo

<comment><USER3> Why is there no open source alternative to Android or iOS?

<comment><USER4> Android is open source?? You can compile it however you want and dont even have to use Google services.

<comment><USER5> By that logic so is ChromeOS. Point being, Android without _any_ closed- source/google components is rather useless.

<comment><USER4> Android is perfectly usable without the Google services. It may not be as polished and of course apps that depend on Google services may not play nice with the drop in replacement but its not like your smart phone suddenly becomes a dumb phone.

<comment><USER6> While that's true, you are losing one of the most critical components of Android. Not the Play Store but Firebase Cloud Messaging. It's not part of AOSP and so deeply integrated into Android that removing it cripples a lot of apps. Replicating FCM's functionality inside apps leads to a _significant_ increase in battery drain.

<comment><USER7> Take a look at microg. I use it, it supports FCM. Ok so I'm still using Google to some extent, but the amount of information they get out me is vastly reduced and similar to Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> On Windows, I can use ProcessExploror + TotalVirus to check every single running app's exe, dll Signatures against 60+ virus scanner's databases.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnPtuTbqzd4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnPtuTbqzd4)

It is not perfect but give me a lot of comfort about all the running app, .dll files in my system. It helped me easily detect my kid's game machines of some internet drive by download issues before and work very well to remove those apps/files.

I really wish Google can create something similar for Android. Love to see something similar for iOS, OSX also.

<comment><USER9> Is it odd to others that after decades of Windows security nightmares we seem to have basically replicated the issue on an entirely new platform?

I get that it's a fundamentally hard problem. But I can't shake this feeling that we maybe missed an opportunity to do better with the fresh start that mobile OSes represent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The scary thing about this is that, while you may have a good "security hygiene" around your devices, you have no control over others who you socialize with.

It's a bit like ending on Facebook even though you have no account: someone posted a picture of you, you got tagged, and now you exist in FB.

All it takes is one person with an infected phone to show up around a table of a private event/conversation and, through no fault of your own, you get recorded.

The moral of the story (that I've been trying to follow for a few years now, quite unsuccessfully I must add), is that if you want a private conversation with someone (or a group of people), you need to keep all devices away.

On the bright side, it has taught me to be very diplomatic in my discussions with others. My default behavior (when I don't slip) is to assume that whatever I say could become public somehow.</comment>


What housing "filtering" can and can't do - <AUTHOR> http://cityobservatory.org/what-filtering-can-and-cant-do/ <comment><USER3> In the case of the Bay Area, where are these new homes for high income buyers supposed to go? There isn't a whole lot of green field space left to develop into new, high-end, homes, so that the old homes can filter down.

Silicon Valley, by-and-large, has always zoned for lots of cheap office space to keep light industrial rents cheap, in order to create jobs and reap the resulting tax revenue. But it has created an imbalance. Really, if you believe the thesis of this article, the only solution is to declare Sili Valley (and the peninsula) "full", or maybe even overflowing. Then rezone some industrial areas, bulldoze them, and build McMansions. Oh wait, industrial rents will go up and companies will move out or start elsewhere. It is hard to have it both ways.

<comment><USER4> The solution is, of course, to build higher.

Eg even the plentiful office zoning could become even more plentiful by building higher.

The new homes for high income buyers could come as part of a tower where there was only a single home earlier.

Density, not McMansions. Rich people, by and large, seem happy enough to live in `luxury condos' stacked on top of each other. (Or at least enough rich people are happy to stack to drive demand.)

<comment><USER5> //Lots// (flood the market with) of luxury condos and apartments and hotels (for long, medium, and short duration living).

Extensive design validation _, solid construction, not cutting corners to badly, generally actually build them to last.

_ Plan for maintenance to happen during the building's lifetime.

* Have a 'car/dog wash' area in...

* A parking garage with room to actually park cars for families.

* Actually acoustically isolate rooms (even within the same unit) for privacy.

* Design ventilation paths that route 'waste' air away from /all/ residence windows.

* If you aren't going to hard-ban smokers from occupying residence within the building, make sure that there are designated smoking areas on each floor. (A scrubbed exhaust room).

<comment><USER4> That looks like a sketch of a decent business plan. I hope you didn't mean it as a suggestion for legislation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The real solution for SF of course is that anything within walking distance of shops should be built at > 20 storeys (or so). And 60% of the increase of value derived from this should be captured by government to build public transport, improve streets and parks, etc. to handle the increased density.

<comment><USER7> >20 stories is what a lot of SF residents fear from new construction. "Manhattanization" was a big fear there.

As a political compromise, consider low-rise (~5-7 story) buildings. This is what most of Paris and some of the trendiest Manhattan neighborhoods (West Village, East Village) have, and it feels nothing like what people picture when they think of densities at 80k+ people per sq. mile.

I agree mid- and high-rise buildings are best for transit and commercial hubs, but low-rise in all other walkable areas is sufficient to make a huge difference in SF with less dramatic change in character, sunlight, etc--the usual NIMBY concerns.

<comment><USER8> What if they picked one small, area, perhaps somewhere in SoMA, and built all the skyscrapers there and not anywhere else? That way the buildings are all centralized and nobody gets gentrified.

<comment><USER7> Sure, I agree it'd be great to pick a hub and fill it with high-rise buildings. But I'd advocate a multi-pronged approach; high-rises at hubs, low- and mid-rises elsewhere. Consider the following:

(1) Skyscrapers are very expensive per livable sq. ft. and take long to build. Low-rises are comparable to single-family homes, so they're lower-risk for developers, come about faster, and have a lower minimum rent price (in the wonderful event SF builds enough housing for rents to go down).

(2) If you neglect the rest of the city and create a sharp density cliff, transit patterns will be wonky. SF is in an odd in-between stage regarding public transit, and creating a transit-oriented dense central neighborhood hurts commutes from other semi-car-based neighborhoods: they should be denser to justify an increase in buses and trains needed by the city.

(3) In a medium-density city like SF, low-rise apartments would make a huge difference in supply. Consider the fact that the NYC neighborhood East Village, comprised mostly of 3-6 story low-rises, is (IIRC) the 2nd densest residential neighborhood after a part of the Upper East Side, pushing over 100k per sq. mile. Because this avoids the problems of high-rises[1] (e.g. blocked sunlight, like Manhattan's FiDI), it's not nearly as unattractive to NIMBYs. The few I've met hate skyscrapers, not low-rises.

I think HN might have a skewed perception of what levels of density correspond to different building heights, and what those buildings cost (in time and money). You don't really see huge swaths of residential high-rises in Manhattan most anywhere. That's due to both quality of life and cost reasons[2]. SF doesn't need to become Hong Kong anytime soon--there's not _that_ much demand--so it's worth considering other options for the sake of political tractability.

[1] [http://images25.blocksy.com/L_2027825/122330054/original.jpe...](http://images25.blocksy.com/L_2027825/122330054/original.jpeg)

[2] You could argue that in the past 10 years, Manhattan has had an increased need for more high-rises. But because of cost and the cliff reason mentioned above, it turns out a big part of the cost pressure in NYC has come from an inability to build low- and mid-rise buildings in Queens (which has comparable density to SF).

<comment><USER6> These comparisons of midrise to highrise are common but not accurate. What you miss is (1) nobodys going to build the quality of east village or european cities (2) similarly high rises are much better now than the doom and gloom of the 60s housing estates (3) density comparisons (jane jacobs) were built on the above models where towers had masses of unusable apace around them. In reality of course towers allow greater density. (4) east village and europe dont allow parkig which is a necessity in most of SF outside centres worthy of greater density anyway (try adding 100 cars and driveway entries to your photos) (5) absolutely there is hk levels of demand built up - it will take a lot of towers in sf to dent the housing prices. Let me assure you - <USER2> would well prefer to build high rise than low rise. (6) For a comparable density towers will actualy provide more evenly shared sunlight than a street wall approach. (7) increased infrastructure requirementts for density are far easier to provided in small dense areas than spread across a city

Vancouver is a good example of a city successfully adopting towers as a typology (as well as the obvious asian examples). You wont find something comparable with midrise as its not adoptable at the same scale for the reasons above.

<comment><USER7> Sounds like we have different philosophies on dealing with political hurdles and managing cars as SF gets denser, so I won't further my argument.

But I'm curious if you have sources for claims (1), (5), and (6), since they don't line up with any knowledge I have. And I really like this topic so I'd love to learn more :)

And just some FYIs you probably already know but just making sure:

* #2/#3, high-rises in the vast majority of non-NYCHA Manhattan aren't the (horrific) towers-in-the-park style you're referring to. I'd forgotten about those!

* #4, East Village does have parking garages.

* Asian cities vary so much in planning that both you and I can probably find dozens of examples of what we're referring to :) (I'm partial to Tokyo and Taipei myself.)

<comment><USER6> I probably wrote that a little quickly. To clarify

(1-3) the broader issue is to ensure an even comparison. Typical debates around this issue show very nice historic examples of low-rise apartments and at best mediocre high rise. Originally the density comparisons of jane jacobs who this argument derives from were arguing (very rightly) for the retention of heritage areas like grenwich village against turning into terrible 60s estates. However when comparing new with new and in todays context the result is quite different. In general terms the quality of new build high rise tends to be better than new build low rise and the streets for new build low rise dont look much like your photo (though i wish they could)

(4) im all for reducing parking. But apart from a few places (which should focus on higher densities imo) SF is not approaching grenwich village levels of walkability and will need more cars.

(5) not sure which part you disagree with. Any developer (big enough to be able) will tell you theyd rather build high rise. Comparative hosuing prices to other cities show that there ia huge pent up demand in SF. In hong kong it started from the other direction - huge amounts of public housing were built to ensure employers didnt have to pay workers too much.

(6) 'perimeter-blocks' over a few storeys tend to strongly overshadow low levels and streets while large upper storeys get good sun all the time. Towers (or rather slender, well separated towers - like vancouver) have shadows which move around more and distribute the overahadowing more

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the response!

I'm not familiar with Vancouver -- is this what you're describing? [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-123.1245358,3a,75y,...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-123.1245358,3a,75y,273.81h,118.78t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sjS1C9OGjlNdu53U9y0hhVw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

If so I think we largely agree on SF's ideal future, and differ only in how to manage the politics and our understanding of the extent to which low- and mid- rise development would benefit SF.

<comment><USER6> Yes that link is a good example. Obviously some parts are less than ideal architecturally but the form works for the density.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Something I suspected was the case but hadn't heard the term - or seen any research on.

In SF the battle is over what will happen in the next 5 to 10 years. In that context it is politically dangerous to support market rate "luxury" housing. On a longer timeline this is the only thing that will make a serious dent.

Instead they are pushing for 25% of all developments to be affordable housing, which will retard the whole market and worsen the problem.

<comment><USER10> As long as the absolute number of units in that 75% is large enough, it can still successfully kick start this filtering process.

Fascinating to see actual studies supporting what the free market is already pushing for, more luxury housing.

<comment><USER9> More what I was trying to say is that we're focused on short term gains in affordable housing (the 25%) instead of maintaining our current 12% and focusing on total volume of new housing - whether it's luxury or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The discussion on "if SF (or wherever) didn't have X, we could..." is amusing. Communities have building regulations for a reason. Despite all the towers going in in SF around SOMA/etc., you can still venture out to the pan handle, the haight, etc. and find houses and neighborhoods that aren't high rises.

Here is Santa Cruz, we have progressives that tell us that we must accommodate every tom, dick, harry, and jane that wants to live here whether or not they can afford to do so. Bullshit.

Companies building and hoping to scale in an area need to take the cost of living, availability of housing, and how that impacts attracting talent into consideration. They shouldn't suddenly demand that blocks of 5 story buildings be replaced with 20+ story buildings.

As a bay area native, what people desiring to live in SF and what they have to pay amuses me. Yes, there is a direct impact on job growth and housing demand, but rather than insisting that a community change and build such housing, maybe the businesses wanting to grow, expand, and hire in said city should fund the development of said housing -- even if it is outside the location of the office. We already have "corporate buses", why not bring back company towns and corporate housing?

Or, maybe, rather than requiring people on-site full time, think about fostering distributed teams.

It's amazing how many companies refuse to even allow a modicum of "work at home" in this day and age. Any engineer is likely to get contacted by recruiters from some of the big bay area companies. Shuttle buses are better than driving solo, but you are still sitting going from point A to point B for 45-60min each way, plus your work day.

<comment><USER12> In most functional urban centres there is a balance between commercial and residential tenancy which leads to a "virtuous cycle" where by the growth of one supports the growth of the other, both are allowed to grow and they both contribute to the revenue of the region though appropriate municipal/state government systems such as taxes and fees for essential services.

SF got all kinds of broken by trying to have one without the other... How would increasing the burden on commercial residents help the situation in any way other than reducing demand by driving them away?

Remote work is a possibility I think it's more of a long term cultural shift that is unlikely to solve the current problems without resorting to regulations enforcing remote work. Regulations which would be shifting the burden to commercial residents and relevant that would just be

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> London just "filters" lower incomes out completely...</comment>


Google's 'Don't be evil' creed disappears as company morphs into Alphabet - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/3/9445453/google-dont-be-evil-replaced-in-alphabet <comment><USER2> Clickbait title. The "Don't be evil" motto hasn't been removed; it just hasn't been copied over to Alphabet's Code of Conduct. But it's still sitting pretty at the top of Google's Code of Conduct.</comment>


Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Engineering-Management/Why-are-software-development-task-estimations-regularly-off-by-a-factor-of-2-3

<comment><USER2> I doesn't matter what estimate software developers make, program management sets arbitrary release dates.</comment>


Show HN: Our weekend hack for WWF's Earth Hour - <AUTHOR> http://bonobolabs.com/post/41690775453/bonobos-hacking-the-earth

<comment><USER2> It was great to witness Bonobo Labs in action and be a part of it for the weekend. Thanks :)</comment>


Bill Gates is worried about artificial intelligence too - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/news/bill-gates-is-worried-about-artificial-intelligence-too/

<comment><USER2> I'm worried about AI too; I'm worried it won't work soon enough, and that fearmongering will slow it down.

Yes, unfriendly AI is a serious threat. On the other hand, _friendly_ AI will be one of the most significant developments since the original evolution of sentient thought.</comment>


Airmail FTW - <AUTHOR> http://sef.kloninger.com/2013/12/airmail/

<comment><USER2> I use Airmail, but man, I have never encountered a buggier app.

Every release breaks introduces a new little bug; when you report it, they advise you to use the newest beta, which is okay for a while, but then there is a new bug, a new beta, more bugs... I have a long list of tickets reported, often about really trivial things that escaped their QA. To make things worse, the developers are Italian, and they English is extremely poor, almost non- existent.

I keep waiting for a proper replacement for Sparrow. Airmail is decent, but I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone.</comment>


Perils Of URL-Shortening: Major Garrett's Inadvertent Link To Softcore Porn - <AUTHOR> http://www.mediaite.com/online/perils-of-url-shortening-on-twitter-major-garretts-inadvertant-link-to-softcore-porn/

<comment><USER2> The problem is that some short urls are prefixes of others. You could fix this by creating a shortner where the links were always 6 chars long and never shorter or longer (giving you almost 20 billion URLs anyway)

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, apparently there's a market for "safe-for-work" URL shorteners, huh?

Could be a nice weekend project for an aspiring Hacker.

<comment><USER4> How do you determine the "safe for work" part? And what constitutes safe for work? I think my work is a lot more tolerant than some others, esp US based.</comment></comment>