A Low-Cost Solution to Traffic - <AUTHOR> http://www.governing.com/columns/urban-notebook/gov-traffic-housing-sun-belt.html <comment><USER2> I'd like to see a little more from new urbanists than for them to endlessly restate their thesis. Yes, okay, we've now seen the 1,000th reiteration of the idea that dense mixed use residential/commercial developments have a number of advantages.

How do we actually get there? Is "just" changing zoning actually enough? Is there a case study? Over what time-frame? With what downsides?

NIMBYism isn't a magical spell cast by Satan: it's an organic outgrowth of people's incentives. What is the way around it? I don't believe that then 1,001st reiteration of the advantages of mixed use developments is the answer. What kind of compromises work to keep NIMBYism from obstructing all of these developments?

<comment><USER3> For god's sakes, just let property owners do what they want with their property (within limits of safety). If they want to keep it empty or a small 1 family house, let them, and don't let their neighbors or city government bully them into building larger. If they want to build (or sell to someone who will build) a large apartment building, let them do that too.

You'll gradually get more density and less traffic this way over time, assuming that's what people want (and if it's not, they'll get what they want instead)

The root of the problem is the impulse to be disgusted by your neighbor's choices, and wishing to harness violent force (government rules) to force your neighbor to conform to your wishes. Enough already.

<comment><USER4> Sure, but also TAX the property based on it's /potential/ value.

A land owner close to where the city is now shouldn't be able to squat on that land at the cost of the opportunity it can provide to the neighborhood(s) around it.

<comment><USER5> Please elaborate.

Should we also TAX vacant or idle storefronts that seem to have zero foot traffic any given hour of any given day? (SF seems to have dozens of those every city block. One wonders if those are some kind of fronts for illicit activities. They seem to never change ownership even with skyrocketing rents for office space nearby.)

Should a street level business that serves a large number of residents, get TAX BREAKS? Like a grocery store that vends fresh produce as opposed to a boutique book store that specializes in first editions?

Should they also get favorable lease terms, mandated by the city?

Should businesses that, by nature, serve out of town-ers be forced to move to designated neighborhoods?

Should empty storefronts be forced to take up tenants who could serve the needs of the residents?

Is TAXING even the solution to any of these problems?

<comment><USER6> It's probably very complicated, but I would answer yes to many of these questions. I think it would be worthwhile investigating a model where every home has a mini-grocery _with affordable prices_ within 2 blocks of every home in these neighborhoods - and to achieve affordable prices, there may have to be some tax breaks involved, with some accompanying price limits on "staples" (bread, milk, etc). Difficult, yes; impossible, no; worth it, I think so.

<comment><USER7> Come to cities in Germany. Everwhere I lived the next supermarket was less than fifteen minutes walking away. Price and density are inveresly proportional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The problem is zoning. If zoning didn't outlaw the type of cities they are describing, then perhaps it would happen.

This is why people are now becoming skeptical of new construction, new neighborhoods in the Bay Area. For a San Francisco example, check out the new mission bay developments. The area still feels dangerous and empty. Not enough realistic businesses - there is no legitimate reason to be on the street, other than wanting to 'hang out' in public spaces.

Once Mission Bay becomes a nightlife draw, with a mix of uses - like the Castro or Polk for example - then it will be an example of something done well. Until then, nope.

<comment><USER9> Does anyone know why we never see new apartment and office building with shops on the street level? This seems like the most natural configuration for dense city, and SF has quite a bit of land specifically zoned in this way. See the orange regions here:

[https://williamhe4planning.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/sf_ci...](https://williamhe4planning.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/sf_citywide_zoning_map_jan2013.jpg)

But almost all modern buildings I've seen, both residential and commercial, have huge lobbies. This means the shops are very thinly distributed at street- level, even in downtown areas with tall skyscrapers.

<comment><USER10> New buildings tend to have boring street-levle commercial spaces (banks, tanning salons, etc) because the underground parking requires ramps at street level, and that makes the shops shallow. Interesting businesses generally need a fair amount of space back (like old buildings all have). Basically if you build for cars you're going to lose pedestrian amenities.

<comment><USER9> This may be a contributing factor, especially in places where they are building small apartment building and each has a garage, but I don't think it's a dominant factor.

First, a couple of ramps that go underground is really not that much space in the footing of a big tower. I see old neighborhoods with lots of shops that nevertheless have underground garages. Second, I don't think shops are that deep. New city blocks, especially hosting skyscrapers, are much deeper than the typical blocks in (say) the West Village. Those shops seem to do fine with very little floorspace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 'Building Cities' is a non-trivial activity that occurs on a time scale such that by the time it's substantially implemented driving won't mean what it means today. Suburbia is not so much a response to poor planning as a reaction to the mechanization of agriculture that sparked a demographic shift from rural to 'urban' living.

Mechanization meant that a minimal family farms became approximately an order of magnitude larger (from 1/4 section of 160 acres to a couple of sections and >1000 acres). Along with all those farmers the shopkeepers had to find someplace in the city too. Automobiles encouraged the migration by making it easier to relocate off the farm.

Cities had not planned for that influx. Or for cars. Moreover, cities were increasingly discouraging tenements...with sound scientific reasoning. The suburbs were about the only quick fix. Cities take a long time and a lot of money to build. It also costs more in political capital and financial capital than building roads...multiple jurisdictions will float bonds for transportation infrastructure versus multiple private interests that must agree for many modestly scaled real-estate development projects...[https://nypost.com/2014/09/19/nyc-church-bags-71m-for-air- ov...](https://nypost.com/2014/09/19/nyc-church-bags-71m-for-air-over- steeple/)

In the past couple of years, I've started thinking about real-estate in terms of monopolies. Locations are not fungible and control of a parcel is an absolute but localized monopoly. What suburbia does is disrupt (or maybe bypass do to the locality) entrenched monopolies. Forty minute commutes are somewhat fungible. Boxes made of ticky-tacky are also somewhat fungible. Chain retail is very much fungible.

<comment><USER12> The expressway + car infrastructure to support suburban development was not cheap. It was in no ways organic. It was supported by the FHA's race-based redlining policies and banks that gave loans in the post-war era to white GIs to build homes in white-only suburbs.

[http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-12-18/site/ct-per- fl...](http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-12-18/site/ct-per-flash- expressways-0218-20111218_1_southwest-expressway-dan-ryan-expressway- construction)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining)

>Moreover, cities were increasingly discouraging tenements...with sound scientific reasoning.

Please cite said "scientific" reasoning.

<comment><USER13> That's a tail wagging the dog issue.

Cars revolutionized society in a lot of ways. They're cheap and opened up possibilities that were unthinkable beforehand. Greenfield building is cheaper and easier than retrofitting, and since real estate cartels typically dominate urban real estate, city life is _always_ more expensive than the bigger, nicer and more stable suburban home.

A lot of things happened in the postwar era beyond redlining. The poor Italians, Irish, Jews and Polish who lived in the tenements started making more money and slighter better opportunity. Jim Crow sparked a great migration of blacks from the south northward. Government thought that bulldozing tenements would fix problems.

<comment><USER12> >Cars revolutionized society in a lot of ways.

The subsidization of cars and suburbs drives people away from public community spaces and dense development.

Just look at what might have been had San Francisco not risen up against the suburbification of the 1950s: [http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2618/3897327276_33754ebfce_o.j...](http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2618/3897327276_33754ebfce_o.jpg)

"Central Parking District"

>since real estate cartels typically dominate urban real estate

Perhaps had all the resources of government been focused on fixing this problem instead of confining black and brown people to and divesting from the inner cities, we might have more affordable, walkable, dense, valuable, resource-efficient, revenue-positive neighborhoods today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The simplest hack for the traffic issue I've heard is to just change work schedules. Either run cities in 2 general shifts, or do several days of longer hours and then take a day off.

Certainly in London there seems to be a slip towards more of the working from home 1 day a week. It definitely feels like there are more working parents doing flexible hours out of necessity but there's a a fair amount of bias in that I've seen a lot more of that struggle from living it myself for the last 5 years.

I take the train from a commuter area and there's no real financial incentive to do 4 days commuting with 1 day off. Which I find sad - I think Train lines should _have_ to include discounted 4 day per week season tickets. Then again, I'm in a southern trains area so the trains aren't running half the time anyway....

<comment><USER15> I suspect the SF Bay Area is now well past the point where flexible work schedules helps with traffic. AM rush hour starts at 7am and runs through 10am; the PM rush hour starts at 3pm and runs through 7pm.

<comment><USER14> Interesting. Found a video that shows that pattern on a specific day [https://youtu.be/O4Bx0ygwBxo](https://youtu.be/O4Bx0ygwBxo)

I still think having people coming to the office less is prettty straight- forward and would help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I will never live further than 10 minutes from work again. Traffic is such a waste of life.

<comment><USER17> I totally agree, but also recognized how amazingly lucky we are to even consider making such a commitment. Most folks don't have options like that.

<comment><USER18> I think that's part of the problem though, as a consequence of car ownership we've normalized having a terrible commute. We can't build traffic-free cities if we're not committed to the idea.

<comment><USER19> The commute is created by the expense of moving closer to work.

If renting, you may suffer a rent control reset.

If owning, you lose 10% of the home's value to various middlemen. You also get a reset on property taxes.

Either way, you also have the opportunity cost associated with a house search, and you have the moving expenses.

<comment><USER18> It's still a symptom of the root issue -- sparse, car-centric cities. I live in NYC and the odds of me switching jobs to the point where I'd need to move (or purchase a car) are basically nil. Even if the only job I could find was in Stamford I'd still have a better commute than a lot of people in LA.

<comment><USER19> I think you aren't seeing all the options:

      1. super-dense city core (your current situation)
      2. mega sprawl like LA and Houston
      3. traditional suburb, with long commute into a city
      4. out on the farm/ranch, maybe telecommuting
      5. small town
      6. small city

In particular, I think #6 is what you are missing out on. By that I mean the sort of place with 50 to 100 thousand people, laid out like a suburb but not oriented around commuting to a big city. The population density would be 1000 to 2000 per square mile.

In this sort of place, commuting is easy by both bicycle and car. Traffic is seldom much of a concern. Parking is plentiful. Usually the houses are cheap, frequently 100 to 500 thousand for free-standing homes with yards. Usually the schools are good, with enough people to have a full set of advanced classes at the local high school.

I've lived in several of these in several states. My commute is typically single-digit miles. I normally drive, but walking isn't much trouble. Currently I walk less than a mile. I'll need to do 5 miles in the near future, which should take 10 minutes by car.

What is not to like about it?

<comment> crooked-v There's also option #7, small city that's a short commute away from a large city. There are a lot of places in New England that are like this.

<comment><USER20> Furthermore, there seems to be an implicit assumption that the job is in the large city--which it often isn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Low cost is not defined in this article. Absolutely no strategy is given other than "build new walkable cities someplace else", which seems hard to justify as low cost to me.

<comment><USER22> What is the cost to maintain/upgrade our current car-based transportation infrastructure? Streets, parking, enforcement, etc all have a cost and it's not $0 and 0 square feet.

<comment><USER13> Not as much as civil engineering societies claim.

In my mid-sized city, roads are reasonably well maintained. The city budget is 78% police and fire salary/benefits. Less than 8% is allocated to the public works department, which includes other functions as well. State grants ranging from 1-3% provide some assistance for roads.

<comment><USER21> Impressive! What city?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The average commute in Tokyo is 80 minutes on an extremely packed and uncomfortable train with lots of sick and often smelly people. Urban density is not in and of itself a solution traffic

</comment><comment><USER24> I hear so much about traffic and congestion, its ill effects, disadvantages and just rants of frustration. I face and feel it everyday. So why is it not solved already ?

Here's why : 1. Traffic affects those who cannot/will not make a significant difference to the problem and 2. the ones who can make a difference don't face it/ don't consider it a top tier problem / can pay for a way around it (live closer, don't have to drive the same route each day)

You also won't hear any political/marketing campaigns about reducing traffic and congestion unless public transport becomes a private thing. I believe there's tons of money to be made here but the initial funding required is astronomical and not to mention deep connections in the public sector (licensing) required to even get this off the ground. I can imagine a decentralized mechanism to do this but there are just too many failure points in any strategy that I can think of. Not a problem that a bunch of kids could start solving in their garage you see.

I don't see this getting fixed anytime soon anywhere.

<comment><USER22> Regarding #1. It has been my experience that the folks who are affected by traffic the most tend to think about it the least. When asked, they are bewildered there are even other options.

"I can't take the bus/train - it doesn't go to where I need" \- start with the 5 whys and it's a pain to get even halfway to the conclusion. The car (and the supporting infrastructure!) is just assumed in most folks' minds. At least in the US.

<comment><USER13> I don't know why a 5 whys analysis is so hard. I loved my bus commute, but it's no longer viable. Why should I limit my options?

Why do you drive?

A: Its the most efficient way to get to work in several dimensions including time, flexibility and cost.

Why don't you get a job in walking/bus distance?

A: I'm a director on a good career path in an organization that I am happy with. Opportunities with similar pay, influence and outlook are not trivial to attain.

Why don't you move?

A: My son is established at a local school that he walks to and has friends in. Migrating around like a day laborer is a miserable existence that no professional will sign up for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think this article misunderstands a bit about how cities grow. Any place that's now high density in a city, used to look something like a suburb. Especially in the US, every place that has a recently built 5 story midrise building probably used to be 1/4-1/3 acre lots with 2,000sqft houses on them.

Doesn't sound like a big deal but consider that land is cheap, land with buildings is not. You can find an acre around where I live for 250,000-350,000 dollars but you want to buy four neighboring houses and build density, that's going to start at 2.4 million.

And of course, you have to pay for each house what someone looking to live in it would be willing to pay. Density is only acheived when the price of density becomes worth it. If you're building a city from scratch, density is cheap but very few cities get built from scratch.

<comment><USER26> That's not actually true, at all.

This is from a tiny village in Germany: [http://newworldeconomics.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/03/GV-3...](http://newworldeconomics.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/03/GV-3.jpg)

This is a village in Italy: [http://newworldeconomics.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/03/iv3....](http://newworldeconomics.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/03/iv3.jpg)

A Swiss village: [http://newworldeconomics.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/07/sv2....](http://newworldeconomics.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/07/sv2.jpg)

A French village from above: [http://newworldeconomics.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/07/egui...](http://newworldeconomics.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/07/eguisheim-alsace.jpg)

Another French village from above: [http://newworldeconomics.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/07/ober...](http://newworldeconomics.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/07/obernai-alsace.jpg)

Do you notice something?

These are tiny villages; around them for many kilometers is farmland. Yet they're very dense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The _real_ problem is psychological - "managers" feel the need to control "workers" by physical monitoring.

I suspect 80% of all office work could be done remotely.

We need a cute psychological trick like "daylight saving time", to give people permission to break convention and do things like work remotely and work in offset shifts [ so as to spread out rush hour peaks ].

<comment><USER28> I think you're in the wrong thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> People want the personal freedom of driving cars, they want yards, and they want room. They don't want to be packed into stacked boxes.

<comment><USER30> There is no need to sacrifice owning a home with a yard or the ability to own a car. It is possible increase the population density in many suburbs through more effective land use, making more modes of transportation feasible.

Once those other modes of transportation become feasible, the myth of the personal freedom of driving may actually be true. Driving out of necessity is not freedom. It is a burden. It forces people to work more to purchase, insure, maintain, and fuel a vehicle. It forces people to work more to pay the taxes necessary to build and maintain more roads as well as higher capacity roads. It forces people to work more to pay higher taxes because the land lost to roads, whether it is paved over or serves as a buffer, does not generate property tax revenue. In cases where there is no business or residential frontage on a road, people are paying more taxes to build yet more roads to provide access the adjoining land. And even after you have considered how people are slaves to their jobs because of the expenses incurred by automobile centric cities, they are slaves to their vehicle because other modes of transportation are not viable.

Personal freedom comes from choice. Many of our cities are not designed with that choice in mind.

<comment><USER29> "Freedom is slavery" Very Orwellian.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I live in Austin, and the traffic is ridiculous. just this week a co-worker quit because he can't stand the traffic from Round Rock to Downtown

<comment><USER32> How is the public transit in Austin?

<comment><USER18> Is it good anywhere outside of NYC?

<comment><USER32> MARTA in Atlanta is pretty good from what I've seen. Rail has been on-time (+- 3 mins) every day since I started using it 6 months back. Service is decent, facilities are pretty clean imo, and the MARTA PD is always present.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Tax policy is key here. The most effective approach is to reduce underdevelopment of prime land, and this can be achieved through shifting taxes away from improvements and onto land value. see: Land Value Tax

<comment><USER34> It's not taxes - it's 'zoning'.

And culture. Big suburbs = lots of traffic.

We don't need 'Hong Kong' style density ...

But 'European style' density would work fine.

There are basically 0 residential high-rises in Frankfurt (they're just banks), but they still pack a lot of people in.

And it doesn't 'feel' tight or congested.

It works.

\+ Trams, Trains and Subways - it's amazing.

<comment><USER33> Tax reform, zoning reform, and light rail are not mutually exclusive ideas. The density issues we face aren't so much about too much or too little density, but uneven density.

We have urban wasteland regions, and then nearby you might see very crowded areas. Car culture and zoning play a big role in that, but land speculation ought not be underestimated. Every vacant lot or abandoned building is owned by someone. If it is left vacant, that is because the owner is choosing to keep it that way. A high tax on land value, regardless of whether it is in use, would ensure that those who aren't making use of prime locations sell it off or rent it out affordably to people who do intend to make use.

It isn't as if vacant lots provide breathing room, and make cities nice places to be. Parks do that, sure, but not vacant lots. Vacant lots just attract weeds, vermin, and used heroin needles.

I admit, my focus on tax reform is actually because it would raise wages, reduce unemployment, and improve economic efficiency... and thereby improve the rate and trajectory of social progress. But the benefit of more rational land use is a nice little bonus on top of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've got an incredibly cheap solution to your problem!

Step 1. Tear down your city Step 2. Rebuild a completely new city in its place.

How expensive could it be?

<comment><USER36> apparently japan is really good at this.

<comment><USER37> The US helped clear the cities though.

<comment><USER20> It's not really funny (though it kinda is) but back when all the talk was about how the Japanese were eating the US's lunch a frequent claim was it was because they got a fresh start after WWII. Someone or other--don't remember who--then once retorted that the problems of the US steel industry probably wouldn't be solved by dropping an A-Bomb on Gary Indiana.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> See also: [http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2017/02/10/the-happy- city/](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2017/02/10/the-happy-city/)

</comment><comment><USER39> Relevant TED talk "4 ways to make a city more walkable": [https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_speck_4_ways_to_make_a_city_m...](https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_speck_4_ways_to_make_a_city_more_walkable#t-54704)

</comment><comment><USER40> This site has some interesting proposals:

[http://www.carfree.com/](http://www.carfree.com/)

[http://www.carfree.com/intro_cfc.html](http://www.carfree.com/intro_cfc.html)

</comment><comment><USER41> US-centric commute conversations always seem to revolve around the primacy of the car. So, USA people reading this... Where are you, and could you commute by cycle or public transport instead of by car? What prevents you doing this?

<comment><USER42> > Where are you, and could you commute by cycle or public transport instead of > by car? What prevents you doing this?

I'm in Michigan's second largest city. _Technically_ I could commute via bicycle or public transit. Practically speaking though, almost no one ever actually does either of those.

Public transit is old diesel buses (exclusively), which run on poorly spaced and poorly timed routes, do not run reliably, and require long distances to walk to/from the bus stops. Walking 15-20 minutes just to get to a bus stop sucks, waiting another 15-20 minutes for the bus to arrive also sucks. They keep the buses reasonably clean, but a common subset of typical passengers are often... _not_. So having to deal with lice or bed bugs is not uncommon, which _really_ sucks.

Bicycling is fine if the weather is nice, but for about 7+ months of each year, the weather prevents it. (It was 15 degrees _below freezing_ this morning, for instance). It also sucks to arrive all sweaty to work.

Time is also a big factor. A public transit commute would take me about 110 minutes daily (if I time it perfectly, it's 150 minutes daily if I don't). A bicycle commute would take about 60 minutes daily. Driving takes just 20 minutes daily, in any weather.

The car is also flexible. I can leave to run errands and grab a meal during my lunch break no problem. If I took the bus, by the time I walked to the bus stop I'd have to immediately turn around and start walking back.

As an added bonus, my car is an EV that is effectively silent and produces zero emissions and zero exhaust (the electricity it uses is from 100% renewable sources too) where as public transit buses spews an awful lot of diesel exhaust. It gives me a crazy amount of freedom, with no additional harm to the environment.

<comment><USER41> Yep, car freedom is a powerful thing.

EVs are not completely harmless in my understanding, even if powered by renewable energy. There's the production impact, for starters. But of course you're right, it's a far better option than outdated diesel transportation.

Arriving sweaty at work is soluble. Wear cycling kit, take work attire in a panier. Your workplace may have showers. Failing that, wet-wipes work wonders :)

Anyway, thanks for your detailed reply. I cycle in temperatures just below zero but -15 daily would indeed be hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm very much looking forward to self driving cars to save us. It's hard for public transit to cover enough of a city, but we can easily build trunk lines or commuter lines and have self driving cars carry people the last mile. Public transit could then focus its limited dollars on rail for the most heavily trafficked corridors. No more slow and infrequent public buses. This would also encourage density around stations, while allowing those who want their back yards to live further out.

<comment><USER44> Why wouldn't the people in their self-driving cars just.... drive to their destination?

<comment><USER43> Traffic (along those trunk routes). Cost (some say Uber's price would drop by 2/3 with self driving, but for a long commute, a $3 train ticket is probably still cheaper). Self driving cars would be great though if your route is not a standard suburb to downtown route.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Well one thing people always love to overlook. Married couples just might not have employers with sites near each other, employers can also move, and you can change jobs.

most people just cannot pick up and move to make it easier to get there. all the solutions usually involve telling people where to live and how which is completely the opposite our society wants.

I am still waiting for a viable arcology to be built, might take a big religious group to do it but I doubt technologist ever will except off planet

</comment><comment><USER46> Isn't the low cost solution just to ban cars or tax them ridiculously and install a network of buses, instead? Cars have terrible density, in theory and in practice.

<comment><USER47> Well, we could at _least_ stop massively subsidizing them. I mean, all these people complaining about how the train never pays for itself don't seem to mind all that tax money dumped in to asphalt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> rebuilding cities with new housing is the opposite of low cost.

<comment><USER49> Not really. The price of building the house or building is a fraction of the cost of the land, in high demand areas.

It is land and zoning that makes things expensive.

Tear a building down and replace it multiple times, it doesn't matter.

<comment><USER48> The cost of land stays the same whether you rebuild or not.

The cost of rebuilding is the difference. 1 > 0

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Government needs to reduce property taxes and find ways to lower cost of construction of building mix-use towers. While they don't need to go quite this far, something like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimizu_Mega- City_Pyramid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimizu_Mega-City_Pyramid) is the direction they need to move in.

</comment><comment><USER51> Really need to talk about why people choose to live where they do, and usually the answer is school districts. It's difficult to say exactly what kind of living environment families in the USA would choose if public schools in urban areas were better choices compared to suburban schools.

</comment><comment><USER52> The book "A pattern language" by Christopher Alexander might give some good ideas to achieve this.

</comment><comment><USER53> This article, all respects to the writer, brings no solution what so ever but to cram more people in smaller places.

Instead we should be talking about effective decentralisation of work places, with more satellite offices and/or effective tele-presence and remote work.

</comment><comment><USER34> Yeah, it's called 'Europe' or 'Asia'.

Cities built before cars.

The 1970's idealists in 'Urban Planning' are the one's who created our 'new urban utopias' built around cars ...

</comment><comment><USER54> Here in Europe we have this amazing thing called public transportation with dense high capacity high frequency trains, trams, busses and metros. Works great!

</comment><comment><USER55> TIL that building cities is cheaper than building roads!

</comment><comment><USER56> I think the best solution to traffic is remote working!

</comment><comment><USER57> The "Low-Cost Solution" is merely "building cities". Well, that was cheap!

</comment><comment><USER58> Places that don't require driving more often than not have high cost of living.

</comment><comment><USER59> "Low cost" means building entire cities from scratch. hmmmm.

</comment><comment><USER60> Makes me think we should design cities as kd-trees networks.

</comment><comment><USER61> Building cities doesn't sound low cost to me.

</comment><comment><USER62> > Metro Austin has 2 million people. All of them seem to be driving on > Interstate 35 all the time.

Not really, no.

Author is a professor at Rice. In Houston.

<comment><USER63> I-35 visually looks like it's about 1/4 to 1/3 large trucks transporting goods. I've heard a lot of it is goods going to and from Mexico. I wonder if it would be just as crowded without all the trucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> One SSN = One Car

This will reduce air pollution;

<comment><USER59> Ya, screw all those people that drive multiple cars _at the same time_ /s</comment></comment>


Foursquare Puts Money Before Privacy - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/foursquare-privacy-funding

<comment><USER2> A little bit of sensationalism going on here, while they obviously did a very poor job at communicating it doesn't point to a lack of caring about users. It does point to a failure to communicate, something I am not surprised of from a young company, especially one currently sealing a funding round.

<comment><USER3> I'm not so sure. As far as I can see, they've still only fixed 1 of 3 security holes - which violate their own privacy policy - and yet have found the time to both push this funding through (not a small effort) and highly publicize it. Should they not be worrying more about their users' privacy than their PR? I know that these are different 'roles' in the company, so it's not as simple as pulling people off one thing and on to another, but it does feel a little slimy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most interesting part of the story for me was:

"Wired.com also asked the prominent angel investor Chris Dixon by Twitter..."

Is this a customary practice for journalists now?

<comment><USER5> No, but that's the only contact info listed for Dixon on his homepage or on Hunch. I say this as the author of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thought they put alcohol before privacy? Maybe that was before money. After Google?

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this really all that surprising to anyone? I wouldn't trust any of these location services...even google Latitude. My location is just something way to central to my privacy, and my safety, to be left to a company like this. Money, emails, whatever else that can be stolen on the internet can be recovered. But not my privacy.</comment>


Show HN: Healthy home food different cuisines nearby, at affordable prices - <AUTHOR> http://umeomni.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Started this service in California and Austin which lets you sell and sample Home Made Food nearby.

Please check it out [http://umeomni.com](http://umeomni.com) and join / give feedback. · SELL Homemade food to nearby people. · BUY Homemade Healthy food from trusted members · Explore your cooking passion & Sign up ( It's a free service)

</comment><comment><USER2> This looks awesome. Finally I can get a chance to sample homemade cuisine.

Keep it up ...</comment>


Homeless People in Fremont Living in Makeshift Tree Houses - <AUTHOR> https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/05/30/fremont-homeless-living-in-tree-houses/ <comment><USER2> Shows nicely how 'developed society' makes it very hard for the homeless to help themselves - as soon as you're 'out' of the system, you're not allowed to do anything. Just building a house is illegal.

<comment><USER3> "Either build something to our unaffordable standards 'for your safety' or die"

<comment><USER4> "I will nobly protect you by making sure you can only enter transactions I would agree to. No, I don't give a shit what happens to you if no transactions that meet my standards are available."

A frustrating theme with regulation in general.

<comment><USER5> Should check out what places with no/few regulations looks like, like India/Somalia/Brazil. Unfortunately, there is a balance to be met and there will be trade offs, but when dealing with limited public resources such as land/nature, it's a difficult task to simultaneously protect the rights of an individual and the needs of society.

<comment><USER4> I can propose _anything_ , call it a regulation, and half the country will be ready to defend it to the death, telling opponents "if you don't like it you should try Somalia." The other half will oppose it reflexively.

It's almost like the actual rule content, and how it changes outcomes, matters?

>the needs of society.

Life in San Francisco works as least as well as life in Sunnyvale. Which _needs_ of society are addressed by Sunnyvale's lower FAR and height limits, greater parking requirements, etc. and why don't these needs exist 30 miles to the north? What exactly is the _need_ for protection from skyscrapers, and how are New Yorkers surviving their presence?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How is Y Combinator's UBI experiment in Oakland coming along?[0] Andrew Yang could likely utilize the results.[1]

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/7sgc5g/were_the...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/7sgc5g/were_the_team_running_y_combinator_researchs/)

[1] [https://www.yang2020.com/policies/the-freedom- dividend/](https://www.yang2020.com/policies/the-freedom-dividend/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Did they try to cover up the fact that Marc was living in the treehouse, then at the end inadvertently reveal he was the inhabitant all along?</comment>


Trustable privacy policies - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I've got a business idea that tracks user's navigation with a browser plugin. How much you would trust a web application you don't still know that does that? Privacy policies will be very restrictive for the application, is it enough? Any suggestion for very trustable privacy policies? Thanks all <comment><USER2> Not in the least.

No matter how good your promise is:

a) I'm not likely to know you and have any trust that you will follow your policies.

b) If your company goes bust (which on general principles is unfortunately the way to bet), you can't keep that information (an asset) out of the hands of whomever ends up with the remains (there's been quite a bit of discussion of this issue).

c) You can't offer protection from governments.

I've already decided not to use such a service, Wowd, a rather neat distributed search engine, because I was a very early alpha or beta user, early enough that I realized my personal browsing was having significant and noticeable effect on their results. And I know and absolutely trust one of their engineering VPs....</comment>


Apple TV Adds Support for Cloud-Based Storage of Purchased TV Shows - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/08/01/apple-tv-purchased-shows

<comment><USER2> My guess is live PPV is less then 6-12 months away.With UFC and HBO boxing as likely launch candidates.

Third party Apps being rolled out in the next major iOS SDK release..</comment>


Trump says TikTok sale can go through but only if the US gets a cut - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/03/tech/tiktok-acquisition-trump-treasury/index.html <comment><USER2> Looks like Trump admires Xi Jinping afterall. This is a strategy straight out of Xi's playbook.</comment>


Court Says the FTC Can Slap Companies for Getting Hacked - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/08/court-says-ftc-can-slap-companies-getting-hacked/

<comment><USER2> This is a pretty big thing. It heavily opens up the door to go after any 'cloud' company that does a poor job securing customer data.</comment>


How Twilio screwed us over - <AUTHOR> http://feint.me/2010/09/how-twilio-screwed-us-over/ <comment><USER2> Just posted this on Anthony's blog, but thought I would post it here as well:

\--

Hi Anthony,

I'm sorry that you feel we were't straight forward, although our goal was to be completely transparent in our communication with you about the status of this feature. Since the time of launch, we thought we had clearly messaged that international SMS has been an unsupported feature, and that the entire product was in beta status. We had published this fact on our SMS product FAQs, as well as in the public GetSatisfaction forums. Our apologies that we weren't clear enough about that fact, which caused you to roll international SMS features into your app.

We do pride ourselves on putting developers and their applications first, and in being open in our communications, product capabilities and limitations. Please feel free to email me at firstname.lastname@example.com, I'm always open to feedback, questions, comments or concern.

Sincerely,

Jeff Lawson Co-Founder & CEO Twilio.com

<comment><USER3> Is this an apology? "you feel".... " we thought"

You are not really taking responsibility here. You are good guys. Just say "I am sorry" and ask how you can make him feel better.

[http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1528-the-bullshit-of- outage-l...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1528-the-bullshit-of-outage- language)

<comment><USER4> Isn't "I'm sorry" the very _first_ thing he says after "Hi Anthony"? And as if that wasn't enough, he goes on to say "Our apologies" later in the paragraph.

<comment><USER5> He said he was sorry that you feel we did x. So he is apologizing for for the fact that Anthony feels a certain way, not the same as saying "I am sorry.".

<comment><USER6> He has nothing to apologize for. You use features clearly marked 'unsupported,' you are going to get burned.

<comment><USER7> I was also planning on using twilio for a project and when looking at their faq for the initial research, it wasn't very clear that it was something completely unsupported that could be disabled at any moments...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the Google Cache of Twilio's International FAQ:

> You may send SMS from a Twilio number to an international number and find > that it works. However, this is an unsupported feature and service outside > the US may change at any time.

Can't get much clearer then that.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache:http://www.twilio.com/faq/international)

<comment><USER9> Well it would have been clearer if it said: _However, this is an unsupported feature and service outside the US may change at any time WITH OUT WARNING._

The reason he is upset is that Twilio didn't give him a warning window.

<comment><USER10> The wording could be better, but the intent is very clear. Twilo is still ok in my book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Has anyone noticed an abundance of ranty blog posts (with authors who cannot distinguish between their/there) on HN lately? Here's the issue in brief:

> The email from twilio informed me they had, without warning switched off all > international SMS functionality. ...they were able to massively degrade the > functionality of our app – an app which not only do people pay for, they > rely on.

Which I suppose is interesting enough, but then:

> But when it comes what really matters, being able to offer my customers a > reliable service, you need a written agreement.

Which isn't exactly profound wisdom. If you're charging people for a service, you better make sure that you can hold your backend providers accountable for their end of the chain.

<comment><USER12> Well, since they don't provide an SLA you can't really hold them accountable. Does that mean you shouldn't build services for which you charge money on top of twilio?

Is twilio better suited to internal use rather than for building SaaS apps?

These are serious matters.

<comment><USER13> If you give an SLA for your service, you had better have SLA all the way back down the chain. So yeah, it does mean that you shouldn't charge money for services built on Twilio (until they have an SLA) if you intend to provide reliable service yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> SMS is the ugly step-child of international communications, a thing that should cost $0, and should be easy has been made in to a nightmare to deploy and a patchwork of carrier related troubles.

I can fully understand their decision to go US only for now, but I _really_ hope that at some point they'll be able to roll this out reliably world-wide, that alone would lay the world literally at their feet.

So many services are now hard to impossible to implement because there is no easy way of doing this, in my own site I would have several applications for it right away but _only_ if I can guarantee international delivery.

<comment><USER15> There are _so_ many other SMS providers, with cool APIs, that send internationally without any issues.

I used one such service from 2000 or so when I ran a ringtone website.

It's a solved problem. Just search Google for "bulk sms gateway" etc and you'll find literally hundreds of providers with various APIs and so on.

<comment><USER14> I've tried a few over the years, and I've yet to find one that can actually deliver on a service level agreement, would you mind sharing which companies you have good experiences with?

<comment><USER15> I'll have a look back for the main one I used and had success with. They offered delivery reports, raw data sending etc I never had any trouble with SLA when I was using them for sending out ringtones. Will see if I can find the provider I used. It would have been British.

<comment><USER14> Cool, thank you very much for looking!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I invite the author to sample the basket of shit that is SMS delivering services out there before complaining about Twilio.

We have _paid_ for an "SDK" with one provider, they came to our office and installed a _hardware_ device which we also had to buy, and they still can't manage to deliver 10% of our messages. That was in Australia.

After that mess, I personally wrote Twilio a letter asking them if I can help them establish themselves in Aus and the Middle East; which they declined, saying they were getting around to it themselves, which is good.

Bottom line: I would chalk this up as a slight oversight by a bunch of very capable, if very busy people, bless their heart.

They are one decision away from being fucked over by Skype and Google, if those two ever decide to compete with them. So I am rooting for our kids, even if they have to make gut-wrenching decisions like this on the spot.

Remember, just a year and a half ago they were nothing but a RESTful URL that accepted a few XML messages. They have come a long way, imo.

<comment><USER17> Couldn't you just use a gsm modem connected to some computer with a sim card in it?

<comment><USER18> That only kind of works... Actually, once when we needed to deliver many messages, we tried to get 6 usb gsm dongles. Then we discovered that you can overload 1 gsm transmitter with 6 standard dongles - maybe the equipment was just weird in some way, but at some point messages simply started to be rejected. Another problem is the delay - you need ~4s to get an acknowledgement which seriously limits the throughput. Then there are other problems with mass-sending... there is one 8-bit counter, but I can't remember now for which functionality (either replies, or delivery confirmations), which killed the idea in the end (it was supposed to be mass-notification, so thousands of texts / hour).

Just find someone who provides smpp gateways and save yourself the pain...

<comment><USER17> Ok right. I wasnt really thinking of bulk mail. Gsm modems work fine though for less frequent usage like sending notifications when the motion alarm is triggered etc.. Twilio isn't really for bulk sending either, is it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For those wondering about the technical aspects of this decision take a look at this thread: [http://getsatisfaction.com/twilio/topics/international_sms-1...](http://getsatisfaction.com/twilio/topics/international_sms-1591m)

When we launched the Twilio SMS Beta we tried hard to support sending SMS messages to both US and International destinations. When there were problems, we worked with our customers to collect forensic data on hundreds of carriers worldwide and pass it to our carriers partners to debug.

At Twilio we are dedicated to working with top quality carriers and technology. After months of working to fix problems, were not able to deliver the reliable International SMS service our customers have come to expect.

We apologize for any problems this has caused for our customer and we'll work to bring back International SMS service after were able to deliver on the quality we do the rest of Twilio services.

Cheers, -Evan

CTO and Co-Founder

<comment><AUTHOR> That's fine. In fact it's a good move. But why email me after the fact. It's like you brlirve its ok to communicate with paying customers like that.

<comment><USER19> Hi Anthony, Twilio service status available via our public status page <http://status.twilio.com/> We communicated degraded international SMS service to customers on August 16.

You bring up a good point that the information might not be readily discoverable. We'll work to make the status page more findable and to extend the API (<http://status.twilio.com/documentation/rest>) with features such as RSS to let customer subscribe up-to-the-minute status information.

<comment><AUTHOR> Or. Just email me before you cut a feature next time.

<comment><USER20> unless automated, not a scalable response pattern.

<comment><USER21> Presumably they have a list of all their customers with contact info. Not saying you should spam them often, but for the message "no more international support"? I think it's worth telling everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As a __heavy __user of twilio (I work at groupme.com, we're entirely text message based, and built entirely on twilio), I'll say that every time we've broached the topic of international SMS, they've always cautioned us that it's experimental, and so we've explicitly marked our product as such (USA only for now).

That's not to say that we don't want international bad, but we pretty much trust their judgement as to whether or not they say a product is ready or if it ain't. Twilio does good work, and they're amazingly responsive to developer requests/feedback.

</comment><comment><USER23> So Twilio as an unsupported service which they charge others for it. They choose to close the service and don't have the courtesy to inform users before that and now say the service was beta/unsupported and they are sorry for it?

That's really lame...

They have the obligation to inform users they're going to close a service, whether it's beta or not. The answers they gave is not the way to do it, giving an excuse because the service was unsupported and completely ignoring their fault in warning their users shows that they don't give a damn about the users.

There's nothing wrong in coming here and apologize for not giving a warning before closing the service, but they choose not to do it...

<comment><USER14> They already did, and 6 hours before you posted this.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1726444>

<comment><USER23> No they didn't: "I'm sorry that you feel we were't straight forward, although our goal was to be completely transparent in our communication with you about the status of this feature. Since the time of launch, we thought we had clearly messaged that international SMS has been an unsupported feature, and that the entire product was in beta status. We had published this fact on our SMS product FAQs, as well as in the public GetSatisfaction forums. Our apologies that we weren't clear enough about that fact, which caused you to roll international SMS features into your app."

This is not an apology for not informing the developer before closing the service...

<comment><USER14> Just quoting what you quoted: "Our apologies that we weren't clear enough about that fact, which caused you to roll international SMS features into your app."

Reads like an apology to me.

Read on for a bit, they acknowledge that their communications were lacking and have improved on that by making it easier to find this information.

What do you expect of them? Groveling? A refund?

<comment><USER23> Look, what he's doing his apologizing for not making clear it was an unsupported service.

What he should have done is apologizing for closing the service without telling developers about it.

They can try to deflect this as they want but the fact remains, he should have sent a warning the service would be closed at date X, not closing the service and tell afterwards they're sorry for not making it clear...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> That is really too bad all around.

The state of SMS is ridiculous. We go through a gateway. Certification was painfully slow, and the cost... OMFG the cost of a text. -It's as if the alphanumerals had to be mined, shipped, refined, and then placed into each message by hand.

I applaud Twilio for what they are trying to do. IMO, they are playing interference for an ugly beast.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is worrying. We're using Twilio in my app - they've been good to us so far, certainly very friendly and helpful. The service has been spotty at times, but mostly reliable. Most of our customers are based in U.S./Canada, and all paying customers are; we also had a backup SMS delivery built recently. However, providing absolutely no notice (didn't seem like I missed an email from them) of such a significant change in service certainly isn't a good way to go about this.

</comment><comment><USER26> This retort to Twilio is just as unprofessional as their "poor service."

As others have pointed out, SMS is an unsupported feature and service outside the US can change at any time.

 _So in conclusion, apart from twilio losing one of there early adopters (task.fm isn't a big customer, but that doesn't mean we can be screwed over) they are also damaging there brand. They used to be all about developers._

I think only getting miffed that your _OWN_ service wasn't perfect and then posting to HN about how task.fm was "screwed over" is more damaging to twilio (is it?) than an SMS outage.

The author didn't read Twilio's own SLA and hardened entrepreneurs don't burn bridges publicly everytime something goes wrong.

I know trying to build an awesome web application is hard and its frustrating when supporting services go down, but that is the nature of our beast. We build on top of each other, so we must respect and support each other. Getting mad and cutting off your own hand because you are angry isn't helping build anything.

Google's API has bugs that my start-ups web application runs into all the time. Sometimes they change API behavior, which the visualization screws up the entire UI in the process. _This effects thousands of our users and we have to release work-arounds as fast as we can._ But I don't blame Google - it was our choice to use their APIs.

Generally, this sort of thing will continue to happen with all web service APIs. As a community of developers, I would ask them why it happened and provide constructive feedback about how important it was. You might just find they'll listen and you'll have more pull.

Great start-ups have a short list of early adopters or engaged users that they trust and continually go back to for product advice. Writing a post like this pulls the rug out from under your own service because you refuse to use it, it will cost you more, and twilio will suffer from lack of valuable constructive feeback.

Really just my POV, but hopefully you'll find why posting inflamatory articles like this only hurts entrepreneurs and our community at large. At most it sets an example of how we treat each other.

<comment><USER27> Heh, you can't really hold up Google as a paragon of developer relations or customer service. They have a pretty poor reputation on both counts.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For the record - I should have said this in the original post, I like twilio. I liked their business model and I really liked the product.

I had multiple email conversations with twilio team members over the past year and "caution" wasn't something I would say was strongly portrayed

</comment><comment><USER28> It's 11:24 in phoenix. I just finished a 6 hour sprint working on an app that will rely 100% of the Twilio api, so the headline caught my attention. By the time I came back both the CEO and CTO gave an explanation and apologized. I can respect that. I hope Task.fm gets back on track as well.

Edit: J, maybe reimbursing him would not hurt.

</comment><comment><USER29> Just curious, what are the alternatives to Twilio in case some one wants to send out SMS across countries?

<comment><USER30> www.tropo.com and www.teleku.com does both international voice and SMS I believe. There's also www.cloudvox.com, but I'm unsure if they also support international.

<comment><USER31> Yes, Tropo does international voice and SMS. We've got numbers in 36 countries and speech recognition in 9 langauges.

If you buy a number from us outside the US, we can't do SMS on that yet, but we're working on it. In the meantime, feel free to send texts to and from anywhere from your US number. We won't even charge you any extra for the international sending.

Teleku is now owned by Tropo and as such can do international SMS as well. CloudVox doesn't do SMS worldwide, but I was talking to one of their founders recently and he mentioned they're working on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Their current faq states that they don't deliver sms internationally.

<http://www.twilio.com/faq/international>

Based on that I presume they switched off the feature globally and not just for you. Correct?

That doesn't mitigate your complaint.if anything, doing that without advance notice is worse. Did they provide any explanation in the email?

Twilio has between a very reliable provider in my experience so far, so this is worrisome.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'd like to hear Twilio's side of it; they seem like such a great company this feels... weird coming from there. I think there's more to this story.

 _waits patiently_

</comment><comment><USER34> I have founded Nexmo.com, Low Cost SMS API (in private beta), early this year after spending 7 years in the Wholesale SMS industry. Delivering awesome SMS service on a global scale is tricky – but it should not be! We just finalised building our back-end SMS network.

Here are some challenges the industry faces: ———————————————————-

-Many intermediaries to reach end-users:

Between an App and an end-user you can get up to 4 or 5 intermediaries operating their own infrastructure. Adding intermediaries not only increases cost but also exponentially reduces quality – QOS is measured in terms of availability, delivery ratios, speed, features supported, etc…

Ask your provider about their sourcing strategy? Who do they buy from? Do they have a strict policy in terms of suppliers' selection? Can they share delivery ratios?

-SLA does not really matter:

What if the providers of your provider do not guarantee any SLA? A provider can potentially guarantee an SLA on its own infrastructure but can't control what happens afterwards.

-Non transparent fees:

Customers get charged on SMS sent to networks that are not or poorly covered but listed as LIVE in the provider's reach list – even when you sign a written agreement.

-Tricky to reach all Networks:

Some networks in the world are tricky to reach and sometimes the only reliable way to deliver SMS is to connect directly. Other are installing SMS filters to cut certain type of traffic (e.g. Spam). For instance, if your provider mentions networks such as Comcell Colombia or IAM in Morocco, you'd rather check again because these networks are impossible to reach with full feature support/reliable service without direct connections. Currently there are at least 26 networks that are tricky to reach and 22 that are filtering.

Another rule of thumb is to check whether in Europe their prices are above $0.055, since European Wireless Carriers (also applicable to other regions/countries) require a termination cost for reliable SMS routes. If below that price, it could mean that your provider (or the provider of your provider!) is using unsolicited routes that are not reliable/has limited life time.

———————————————————————————————————

Delivering hassle free (and Low Cost!) global SMS termination is not obvious but we are working on it :)

Tony Jamous twitter: @nexmo e-mail: tony.jamous [@] nexmo.com

</comment><comment><USER35> I was wanting to use Twilio for UK SMS sending but the system couldn't send to my own mobile. I emailed again a few weeks back and it was still "unsupported".

I'm glad it didn't work on my own mobile as I would have definitely integrated it into my site and no doubt run into the same huge problem here!

</comment><comment><USER36> Presumably, Twilio knows who their top users of the international SMS feature are. Why not just look at the logs and email the top users, telling them the service is going to be discontinued? This isn't rocket science, people.

</comment><comment><USER37> Why did they switch off international SMS? What was the explanation they gave you? That seems like an important part of the story that you're missing.

<comment><USER27> It doesn't matter why they shut it off. What matters is that they shut it off without any notice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> That blog post should've been summarized with one sentence. "dont trust twilio because they turned off intl sms without warning"

</comment><comment><USER39> Check out Moonshado SMS on heroku addons for International SMS, it works great for and its so damn cheap.

<comment><USER40> that's good to hear... we will try it

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Off topic, but the text-shadow 1px #fff really strained my eyes while reading on a iPhone 3G.

</comment><comment><USER42> (cross posting my comment from his blog)

Sorry buddy; your post is basically a hit piece about an experimental service which stopped working. It seems they sent out an email and marked it on their status page.

So I'm going to categorize you with the other startup people who have pretty blog and hurt feelings for your own mistakes.

I hope I never do business with people like you.

</comment><comment><USER43> s/there/their

</comment><comment><USER44> This is an important lesson for any startup. Don't rely on free services, insist that you pay for them and set up an agreement.

But it is also a lesson from the other end. Twilio would probably not have done this lightly. By not offering agreements for there free service, they had the option of choosing to disappointing their users instead of loosing what might be a lot of money. It's never the easiest decision but it in some cases it is the best option.

<comment><AUTHOR> Free service? This wasn't a free sevice. I was a paying customer

<comment><USER44> My bad for reading the post wrong in this regard.</comment></comment></comment>


Dangerzone: Convert potentially dangerous PDFs, documents, or images to safe PDF - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/firstlookmedia/dangerzone <comment><USER2> It's nice that PDF security is getting a bit more attention, but there are a number of things that this approach will trash, for instance, I don't have high hopes for the accessibility of the resulting PDF. (edit: and needless to say, any software in your pipeline which does full interpretation of an untrusted file will _itself_ become the target for attacks, so this is only a useful tool if it is run in an extremely restricted environment)

I for one have been looking a lot into PDF/A for security. PDF/A is really meant for archival, but as a side effect has disallowed an awful lot of weird PDF features which are a security nightmare and pdf readers tend to implement badly/buggily. PDF/A-1 for example, the strictest level, disallows JPEG2000, TIFF, JavaScript, PostScript, embedded files... (PDF/A-3, FWIW is essentially useless from this angle, because they decided to allow arbitrary embedded files, so a valid PDF/A-3 could have pretty much anything in it).

There now exists a good PDF/A validator ([https://verapdf.org/](https://verapdf.org/)) which can be used to ensure PDFs conform to the standard, but of course, won't _fix_ them if they're not.

PDF/A has an interesting implementation detail however - compliant PDF readers are _supposed_ to automatically "turn off" non-PDF/A features when they encounter a PDF which declares itself as a particular PDF/A variant (even if it then goes on to attempt to use non-compliant features), which would _hopefully_ prevent dangerous sections from being decoded and avoid exploitation). Another interesting feature of PDF is its appendable nature, which might raise the possibility of being able to "declare" an arbitrary PDF as PDF/A by simply appending an extra section to it, hopefully rendering it less harmful (though possibly at the expense of it appearing to have missing content when rendered).

<comment><USER3> Couldn't you just use a whitelist for the features?

If the reader can open a PDF/A-1 file and ignore the bad parts, can't it open a PDF file as PDF/A-1 and remove the bad parts, before saving it again?

Then you could use the "re-rendering" technique to extract images:

1\. Create a stripped PDF/A-1 file from the original PDF.

2\. In a VM, render the two PDF files to two high-resolution image sets.

3\. Use some CV algorithm to find the differences. For example, gaussian blur, subtract, threshold, find islands.

4\. Use this to come up with areas which use complicated PDF features and/or images. Say this returns that there is an image on page 9 in the rectangle ((17, 338), (400, 300)).

5\. Crop out page 9 in rectangle ((17, 338), (400, 300)) from the original PDF. Use some CV algorithm to detect the DPI and whether it's best to encode as JPEG or PNG. Encode it and add to list of images.

6\. Add sanitized images back from list, mark PDF/A-1 file with images as PDF/A-2.

Of course, you could do this for links or whatever as well. Spit out a list of rectangles and link targets in the PDF, and then put them back in.

<comment><USER2> There are myriad ways that PDFs could be re-written and re-rendered, but they would all be quite complicated and/or throw away a lot of extremely useful "meta" information (bookmarks, signed sections etc.) and almost certainly make files much bigger. The idea of the "appending" trick would be to mutate the original file as little as possible, but convince the reader to open it in a safer mode.

<comment><USER4> The small issue with the append trick is that is that it assumes the reader application will now respect the new format and not open insecure parts... which might not be fully implemented in all cases and is reader specific.

Fully sanitizing the PDF yields better guarantees of security at the cost of lost functionality.

<comment><USER2> > The small issue with the append trick is that is that it assumes the reader > application will now respect the new format and not open insecure parts... > which might not be fully implemented in all cases and is reader specific.

Yes, note my original emphasised use of the term "supposed to".

> Fully sanitizing the PDF yields better guarantees of security at the cost of > lost functionality.

Indeed it's a tradeoff. But if you're willing to throw away the features which this extreme sanitization would trample across and have any ability to design PDF _out_ of your system, you're probably better off not using PDF at all in favour of some straightforward image format.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is definitely a good brute force strategy

I ... think there's another technique that relies a bit on trusting the printing drivers to do the right thing, where you can tell Ghostscript to print your document, and target another PDF. This should at least remove interactive components in a PDF

<comment><USER6> It's definitely brute force, in that it's the equivalent of printing a document onto paper and then scanning it back in. This "flattening" is highly effective at sanitising, but also removes all the semantic content in the process; the output should be several times larger than the input (and if it isn't, then it's an indication that something very suspicious was in the input....)

<comment><USER7> Indeed, I was hoping for something smarter, that would remove only the "risky" bits of PDF, but keep the overall structure (and size).

<comment><USER3> What about converting PDF to PostScript and back? It should keep most of the semantic information while removing the exploits.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, perhaps. The "gruntwork" would be to figure out if that is sufficient. Heck, taking your idea further, perhaps convert to something non-derivative like HP's PCL5 and back. Or SVG or...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In (1) the author use as a cv a pdf that is also a bootloader , and in the comments it seems that he has improved the code. I wonder if he could render dangerzone as futile.

(1) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19344146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19344146)

Edited: Added in the comments of that post there is a reference to pocorgtfo16.pdf: is valid as a PDF document, a ZIP archive, and a Bash script that runs a Python webserver which hosts Kaitai Struct's WebIDE which, allows you to view the file's own annotated bytes. The zip archive has further resources to insane reversing deep dives, code to study and more.

[2] [https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/:w](https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/:w)

</comment><comment><USER9> Good, but I don't think the change from running the sandbox in a VM (in Qubes case even Xen, not kvm) to docker is an improvement. Escaping docker is much easier than Xen.

</comment><comment><USER10> Useful tool -- it's trivial to make a RAT bypass chat/email .doc/.PDF attachments.

I don't open any files on my PC from people I don't personally know -- use webviewers.

<comment><USER11> Odd question. Why would a webviewer be safer in this case?

edit: Thank you for both answers. I thought it had to do with sandbox rationale, but couldn't mentally get past the fact that sandbox could potentially be escaped too. Eh, I think it is time for sleep.

<comment><USER12> Well is it safe? Don't know.

Safer: definitely. Given that the collective amount of PDF attacks is some number, now this particular PDF needs to attack PDF and the webviewer. Assuming that 1% of all PDFs do that, I'd say it's 100 times safer than not using a webviewer.

If you still think that 1% of all potential PDF attacks is too unsafe, then that's a different discussion.

If you think my 1% is off, then that's a different discussion too. All I'm saying is that it's safer.

<comment><USER13> Well, PDF attacks need to attack the viewer you're using too…

<comment><USER12> True, but in most cases this is assumed to be a popular PDF reader. If it is specifically targeting a webviewer, I agree. But that still means that there is some JS PDF parser in between, though that provides very little in terms of security, I doubt that such a parser will check for malicious input.

<comment><USER14> Afaik chromium uses the same pdf renderer as foxit (pdfium)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is similar to how QubesOS converts "untrusted PDFs" in a disposable VM. Quite nifty, particularly if you use OCR afterwards.

See: [https://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2013/02/converting-u...](https://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2013/02/converting- untrusted-pdfs-into-trusted.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> This kind of makes me wonder why PDFs can even act maliciously in the first place. Why does it have the ability to do these things?

<comment><USER17> PDF derives from PostScript which is a full-blown programming language so it's an "original sin" either way.

Then over time Adobe added a number of interactive (forms), multimedia and rich media (embedded JS) features, leading to even more vectors.

<comment><USER18> The page description language part of PDF is based on Postscript, but explicitly simplified to be non-Turing-complete and safe (if implemented sanely). The later additions are the main culprit I think.

<comment><USER19> "if implemented sanely" \- oh well. The original idea was nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very nice but fyi: most malicious pdf just contains links to something else,usually shortlinks. Social engineering is hard to mitigate.

<comment><USER21> If I understand this correctly, a link wouldn't survive this as the pdf is turned into images and then those images back into a pdf. So it's essentially like a scan of very high quality.

What you would end up with is an image that looks like a link but would not be clickable.

<comment><USER22> > Dangerzone can optionally OCR the safe PDFs it creates, so it will have a > text layer again

I'm not completely sure, but wouldn't this parse links and make them accessible again, possibly even clickable?

<comment><USER23> A links displayed text and its destination URL are not necessarily the same. Rendering the document to a bitmap then OCRing that would get the display text rather than the URL. I would think that it would be normal for a malicious URL to be obscured with an innocent looking display text.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This wouldn't work for businesses because PDF forms and legitimate links and even embedded objects. I think this is a great idea if you have users preview the image version before opening the whole thing maybe? Even as an individual, I have had to fill out pdf forms for various usgov applications, job applications,etc...

</comment><comment><USER24> Obligatory humblebrag/shameless plug for my open source PDF(+ other docs) to Image converter, which runs as a web app. It's self hosted open source (but easiest to run on FreeBSD). Uses Ghostscript/OpenOffice under the hood:

[https://github.com/dosyago/p2..git](https://github.com/dosyago/p2..git)

</comment><comment><USER25>
        Download Dangerzone

So instead of opening a PDF from the internet on my machine, I now run code from the internet on my machine?

<comment><USER21> There's a big difference between opening a random PDF and downloading code which you can view yourself on github, no? Or does your computer (from cpu microcode up) only run code which you have personally written and is not "from the internet"?</comment></comment>


Self-tiling tile set - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-tiling_tile_set <comment><USER2> I wonder if any of these tile sets could work in a Tetris-like game.

<comment><USER3> When you complete a tile shape using smaller tiles the game zooms out and the shape you just completed is falling into a new self-tiling shape. _Inception Noise_

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very interesting. Is there a real-world application for this?

<comment><USER5> It reminds me of a technique for using recursive self-similar tiles to generate pseudorandomly distributed points: [http://johanneskopf.de/publications/blue_noise/](http://johanneskopf.de/publications/blue_noise/)

The idea is that you can model an infinite set of points generated by an infinitely-deeply-nested tiling, and then efficiently sample from it at arbitrary levels of detail. This lets you do things like zoom in and out while retaining frame-to-frame coherence, and without having to explicitly store the entire point set. (It's worth watching the full 5-minute video, which explains it better than I can.)

The implementation in that paper used squares with labeled edges to tile the plane non-periodically. This seems like it could be used to do something similar, except with a periodic but irregular tiling. No idea if that would have any practical benefits, but it's interesting, at least.

<comment><USER6> Oh wow, I was looking for ways to do exactly this the other day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd rather get these tiles for paving in my house floor.

<comment><USER8> These tiles have nice properties, but it seems the property that you can cover an arbitrary shape with them is missing (even if allowing cropping of the result).

<comment><USER9> If you allow cropping, you can always do this.

Suppose the tiles are T1, ..., Tn. The "self-tiling" property means you can tile each Tk with smaller copies of T1, ..., Tn. Or, equivalently, you can tile a larger copy of each Tk with copies of T1, ..., Tn.

So: pick one of the tiles. Tile it with smaller copies of the tiles. Tile each of those with still-smaller copies. Tile each of _those_ with still-smaller copies. Etc.

Now pick a region in the original tile that's the same shape as the thing you're trying to cover. This process covers (the whole original tile, and hence in particular) that region with finer and finer copies of the tiles.

<comment><USER8> Yes, it seems simple, but I'm not sure if this proof is sufficiently rigorous that it allows for mathematically pathological tiles.

<comment><USER9> I don't think it requires anything more than that at least one tile has nonempty interior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article is an interesting read. I wonder why it took so long to realize there are longer loops.

I'd think, but this may well be hindsight speaking, about everything that holds for tearm rewriting should hold for tiling.

</comment><comment><USER11> many thanks for sharing. This is rather amazing to me.

</comment><comment><USER12> That feels a little like Inception ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception)) or the Infinity mirror ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_mirror](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_mirror)).</comment>


Where did the melody go? (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.keyboardmag.com/kb-blog/1219 <comment><USER2> My issue with this article is that it elevates the 'melody' dimension as somehow more worthy than the 'sonic texture' dimension.

I think both have equal merit and I enjoy complexity along both dimensions.

Modern music seems to have the highest sonic texture complexity of any music so far and is enjoyable for that.

Bach has high melodic complexity but low texture complexity.

I suspect high complexity along all 4 dimensions simultaneously is too much for the average listener. Artists like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin get close to being high complexity along every dimension but are regarded as 'challenging'.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't say modern electronic music has a higher level of 'sonic texture' than orchestral music, or any music using traditional instruments. The difference is that in modern music 'sonic texture' is an explicit mode of "authorial expression." The sonic textures creates by acoustic instruments are arguably richer, as they are capable of much more subtle modes of expression as playable instruments.

It's just the case that the development of novel acoustics instruments is a whole separate craft, subject to the annoying vicissitudes of the sonic properties of physical matter. The instruments were developed over centuries.

As soon as instruments became electrified artists began using the ability to express themselves directly by manipulating the sounds themselves.

The sonic experimentation dominating modern pop music is entirely the result of the complete digitization of the sound generating chain.

I also think another factor is that digital synthesizers are woefully impoverished as instruments capable of expression through musical performance. Outside of the voice, modern pop is devoid of real-time musical expression. It's become a non-real-time process, closer to writing, animation, the visual arts.

This forces the composer to rely on the native capacities of the instruments to express ideas, and the one that is completely unavailable in the acoustic realm is to chain the fundamental timbre of the instrument.

I'm a producer, recording engineer. The author of the original piece is missing that the only reasons a composer could imagine they were working primarily with the modes or melody, harmony, rhythm is that there is highly developed tradition of musicianship and instrument design to fill in the most fundamental aspect of music, which is the actual sound.

Edit: there is another huge factor in the decline of melody which is the product of two interrelated technology developments. The first is the use of loop based sequencing techniques for compositional work, and the second is that the random-access editing techniques made possible by modern digital audio workstations extended the loop based composition process to all sounds, including the voice.

Loops are basically short compositions. If you spend a lot of time in this mode or composition, your ideas will tend to be short. The actual mechanics of how the music is made disincline the composer from constructing both traditional harmony and melody.

The DAW has fundamentally disconnected music from the strict relationship with linear time that was inherent before the age of recording. To some extent musical notation allowed composers to work around this, but the end result was always an expression that had to have a thought out beginning, middle, and end.

I wrote an essay on this subject that I think is pretty good. [https://dnamusiclabs.com/harmonic-distortion/daw-and-end- tim...](https://dnamusiclabs.com/harmonic-distortion/daw-and-end-time)

<comment><USER4> >> _" The sonic textures creates by acoustic instruments are arguably richer, as they are capable of much more subtle modes of expression as playable instruments."_

Synths are slowly catching up. You can pack quite a lot of expression into Serum with two wavetable oscillators, a noise and sub oscillator, modulating anything by note or velocity, alternate tunings, and a wide range of modulatable adjustments.

It's not a viola, but you can make some _very_ unique instruments with it. Most people use it to make yet another dubstep bass or hypersaw, but the potential is there.

<comment><USER3> I like Serum a lot, but it has the same set of issues that make all of these digital synths limited as performance instruments compared to, say, a piano.

The issue starts with the low resolution of MIDI. Most instruments implement only velocity connected to keys, with max 128 layers of resolution.

A real piano has near infinite resolution on velocity alone.

This exacerbates the issue that digital synths are generally deterministic, meaning for the same input they produce the same output.

Because the resolution of the controller is so low, attempts to introduce variety rely on randomness. In an acoustic instrument the same sound cant ever be produced twice. But this is a result of a complex, chaotic system, not randomness.

A major factor in the inherently chaotic sound is that each note is exciting the same physical object, even a note played with the same velocity (like a disklavier piano system could) will sound different every time based on the state of the whole large object. As notes are added to a chord or arpeggio, they are not just superimposed over each other, instead they each contribute their energy to the whole object.

The use of mod wheels definitely helps with expressiveness in the hands of a good player.

But my sense is that even "players" are forgoing using these instruments as performance tools, and instead loop the sections, and piece through the whole song, listening carefully, modifying the midi data directly based on what they a hearing.

This has definitely resulted in some very imaginative and striking work, but, to my ear anyway, it has a very different feel as a mode of artistic expression. It's more "cerebral" in some way.

<comment><USER4> MIDI 2.0 will likely improve the situation. 4,294,967,296 possible values isn't enough to match a real instrument's range, but it's quite a bit better than 127! Serum has two chaos oscillators that help avoid deterministic-y music. Too many preset designers skip them.

Take a look at Sphere from Echo Sound Works. They sampled a bunch of real instruments and used them for wavetables and noises for Serum presets.

[https://kyefox.com/soundware-explorer-sphere-from-echo- sound...](https://kyefox.com/soundware-explorer-sphere-from-echo-sound-works/)

<comment><USER5> > 4,294,967,296 possible values isn't enough to match a real instrument's > range

I don't think this is true -- I doubt our ears can recognize a 2^-32 difference in anything, and there's no way physical instruments can be played with that kind of precision either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does the author mean mainstream "on the radio" pop, or the plethora of music we not explore and listen to on music services? I've venture to say the Top 100 lists occupy a smaller proportion of today's listeners thane ever before. We are unconstrained. And melody is out there.

<comment><USER6> My apologies for the plethora of smartphone typos in the parent comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _While nobody knows for sure, it is believed that when music began, the most > dominant if not the only element was rhythm. No melody, no harmony – just > rhythm. At first it may have been random objects, and later drums. This may > have been thousands of years ago, but at the time, that was it._

What is the evidence for this theory? People sing in all sorts of societies all around the world. Are there even examples of human societies without singing?

It's hard for me to imagine some time "thousands of years ago" when there was no singing or other melodic music of any kind, but only drumming on "random objects".

If there are direct examples of 35,000 year old flutes, [https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/science/25flute.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/science/25flute.html) then presumably this "thousands of years ago" referred to is considerably older than that.

> _Melody was probably the next element that came into play, mostly through > the various religious chants; in most cases with little to no rhythmic or > harmonic context._

Chanting and singing are two significantly different forms, and chanting does not necessarily have much if any melodic content. It does not seem to me that one is obviously primary; people continue to do singing and religious chanting side by side in many cultures.

Maybe there's some better evidence about this somewhere? It would be nice to see something more convincing.

<comment><USER8> IMHO there can be no direct evidence, only speculation.

My thought is that it's easier to make sounds in a rhythm (on/off) than it is to control the pitch of those sounds (relative to previous sound).

Also thousands, I think, is probably an underestimate by a couple orders of magnitude.

<comment><USER7> It is very weak to say "it is believed that ..." and then make some very large (frankly implausible) claims without describing _who_ believes this or _why_.

I would maybe give this idea some credibility if it were changed to "millions of years ago before the evolution of vocal anatomy capable of complex speech".

But even then... completely speculative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recall reading an article on the algorithmic complexity of popular music by Knuth in 1977. It is really quite funny! See [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Songs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Songs)

</comment><comment><USER10> Modern music has regressed into something primitive and tribal. In other words, completely mind numbing garbage. And it just gets worse every year.

Post Malone is a good indication of just how fast Western society is falling.

<comment><USER11> You should hear what my dad had to say about Elvis!

<comment><USER10> Not really the same. Rock & roll still had melody and lyrics. Both are continually being simplified every year.

You should read this: [https://science.slashdot.org/story/18/01/15/231230/is- pop-mu...](https://science.slashdot.org/story/18/01/15/231230/is-pop-music- becoming-louder-simpler-and-more-repetitive)

 _5\. A researcher put 15,000 Billboard Hot 100 song lyrics through the well- known Lev-Zimpel-Vogt (LZV1) data compression algorithm, which is good at finding repetitions in data. He found that songs have steadily become more repetitive over the years, and that song lyrics from today compress 22% better on average than less repetitive song lyrics from the 1960s. The most repetitive year in song lyrics was 2014 in this study.

Conclusion: There is some scientific evidence backing the widely voiced complaint -- on the internet in particular -- that pop music is getting worse and worse in the 2000s and the 2010s. The music is slower, melodically simpler, louder, more repetitive, more "I" (first-person) focused, and more angry with anti-social sentiments. The 2010s got by far the most music quality down votes with 42% from people polled on which decade has produced the worst music since the 1970s._

<comment><USER11> Except the conclusion isn't scientific at all. It's 100% based on opinion. The author identified trends, yes, but that's about it.

Simpler and more repetitive doesn't mean worse — it means simpler and more repetitive. Never once have I listened to a song and thought, "Wow, this sucks, these lyrics would compress really easily."

<comment><USER10> Simpler and repetitive does mean worse.

<comment><USER12> Simpler and repetitive does mean worse - for you. I actually agree with you, but I know plenty of people that love club/dance music, which is about as simple and repetitive as you can get. I think it's important to take the context of the music being played/performed as well: a simple, repetitive piece would likely not be received well in an orchestra hall, while a song with complex melody, deep lyrics, and rich harmony would likely be skipped at a football tailgate party. Music serves several functions in many different environments, and labeling a piece or style as universally worse is almost never true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The author has a lot of good insights about the tends in mass media. However, there are lots independent artists who support themselves through live performances and selling cd's.

Another route is youtube and patreon. A good example is the young drummer Sina, who has over 600,000 subscribers and definitely makes melodic music. [https://www.youtube.com/user/sinadrumming](https://www.youtube.com/user/sinadrumming)

</comment><comment><USER14> Just saw a great youtube video about this.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0Vn9V-tRCo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0Vn9V-tRCo)

<comment><USER15> Every Frame a Painting has a video talking about how big budget movies tend not to have recognizable melodies, as well:

[https://youtu.be/7vfqkvwW2fs](https://youtu.be/7vfqkvwW2fs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Although the author points to the 17th and 18th centuries (Bach et al.) as the age of polyphony, polyphonic music and counterpoint were certainly highly developed in the 15th (Josquin) and 16th (Palestrina) centuries as well.

</comment><comment><USER17> When melody was at its apogee, not only did songs have interesting melodies, but they also had a bridge -- a second section melodically different from the first. The best songs had seemed to be the ones with the most distinctive bridges. Somehow, Tin Pan Alley managed to exemplify this artifact from classical music. Sousa's marches, typically in 3 parts in different keys, with one foot in the classical tradition and one in the new world stand as a memorial bridge to melodic non-monotony connecting Brahms to Broadway.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've tried to introduce my kids (who are college age) to the pleasures of classical music, mostly to no avail. I just recently rewatched the movie Amadeus (a 1984 masterpiece on Mozart) with my daughter, and she liked it.

I highly recommend it. It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won 8.

<comment><USER18> It's a very enjoyable movie, but it's almost pure fiction, just so you know.

<comment><USER9> Yes, Hollywood isn't very good at presenting the unvarnished truth.

I felt that the movie and particularly Salier's (fictional?) role as a competitive observer of Mozart in the movie reifys the absolute genius of Mozart in a particularly effective way.

I notice that my daughter and her friends now really like Queen's music because of _Bohemian Rhapsody_. In addition to _Amadeus_ I've suggested _The Buddy Holly Story_ , _Ray_ , _Coal Miner's Daughter_ , and _Le Bamba_ to her—all movies that I really enjoyed that might widen her appreciation of music outside of what she hears most today.</comment></comment></comment>