Why I Did Not Go To Jail - <AUTHOR> http://www.bhorowitz.com/why_i_did_not_go_to_jail <comment><USER2> _First, when we started the company, Marc and I agreed that the company's General Counsel would always report directly to me. This is different than in many technology companies where the General Counsel reports to the Chief Financial Officer._

This needs to be in bold 72-point font. Corporate behaviour aligns with corporate structure, and if the General Counsel is subordinate to the Chief Financial Officer, complying with the law will inevitably be secondary to making money.

If you want to avoid jail time, you should either have General Counsel reporting to the CEO or General Counsel / Chief Legal Officer appointed by and reporting to the board.

<comment><USER3> What's the supposed rationale for the General Counsel reporting to the CFO in the first place? Isn't a General Counsel supposed to be "general" and not only concerned with financial issues?

<comment><USER4> that rationale is that obeying the law is a financial decision rather than a moral decision. if the (money) price of breaking the law is less than the profit made by breaking the law, then the CFO will decide to do it.

this is THE classic example of corporate sociopathy. unfortunately its still the way a lot of companies do business.

<comment><USER5> It's not that simple. Running around thinking that CFO = evil sociopath is ridiculous. It's about motivation and accountability.

The story in the article is a great example, I don't think the CFO thought that she was breaking the law. It was a practice that she had engaged in previously, it was vetted by a big-5 accounting firm, and benefited the employees. The CFO was widely respected in the industry -- this wasn't some flimflam person or sociopath.

When your attorney works for someone else, that other party becomes the client. If you, as a CEO (or an individual) are ultimately accountable for the outcome of your decisions, you want the attorney working for YOU, so that you get unfiltered information to drive decisions.

<comment><USER4> my comment was a response to the question "why do some companies have the GC report to the CFO?". it was not about the company in the originally linked article, which obviously does not use this structure (and for good reason).

regarding that CFO from the linked article though, the federal prosecutor seemed to believe she was a criminal, and proved it enough that a jury agreed also and she eventually served jail time. we're not mind readers so we don't know how she felt about her actions, but honestly, it kinda looks to me like she really was a low level sociopath. just because she was surrounded by people who reinforced and validated her behavior doesn't mean she was acting morally.

<comment><USER6> I think this is a misuse of the word 'sociopath'. There are lots of things that are not strictly legal that we do all the time. Some of them result in in jail sentences (eg. possession of marijuana can hardly be called sociopathic).

<comment><USER4> I was not using sociopath as a synonym with "broke a law, any law". I was sociopath to mean "engaged in behavior that caused some level of harm to society". A low-level sociopath does something that causes a low level of harm to society. Accounting Fraud is a form of low level sociopathy, in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What I take from this story is that the financial law is so complex and unapproachable one can not reliably navigate it without landing in jail, even being a seasoned professional. The author's council could have given him "yes" answer as easily as "no" answer - many other lawyers obviously did since 200 companies got "yes" answers from their councils. And he'd never known anything was wrong. Basically, one can become a criminal not only without knowing he's doing anything wrong, but even without a theoretical way of finding it out - unless you survey all the lawyers you can find, you can not know if a yes from your lawyer would land you in jail or not, and you have no chance of understanding the law even if you spend years studying it - ultimately, the only thing that matters is the word of the enforcers on how they understand it.

It's like living in the same apartment with alcoholic gorilla prone to random outbursts of violence. One day it eats too much of fermented fruit and you're toast. And you have no way of knowing when it happens. Maybe you'll get lucky and you'll be out that day. Maybe you won't.

If I had code that is that bad and unpredictable and nobody knew if it would work or not except by seeking an opinion of a soothsayer which nobody can validate until it's too late, and it would be prone to random catastrophic failures which nobody can predict or find out why they happened, even seasoned professionals, I'd say not even refactor it. Just bury it and start from the design up again and redo the whole thing. That's pretty much the financial code we have now, as far as I can see. Good thing I have to deal just with segfaults and buffer overruns...

<comment><USER8> There's a big difference between going to your general counsel and asking "Is this legal?" and going to your accountants and saying "Find me a way to make this legal enough." I think the options-backdating was an example of the latter.

<comment><USER7> In the case described in the story, I don't see any signs of the former. The CFO proposes certain practice, it is not obviously illegal (like not paying taxes or stealing office supplies from competitors at night), hundreds of companies do it, hundreds of lawyers approve it. If the CEO asks the council if it's OK and the council says yes, like hundreds others did, he goes to jail. If he's lucky and the council says no, he gets to write a book "how I almost went to jail but my super-smarts saved me". In both cases I don't see how this situation is good.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure that conclusion is warranted. Here's what we know:

1\. Loads of companies were doing it. 2\. When this company wanted to do it, their counsel said it was illegal, so they didn't.

Given those facts, we can't say that the other 200 companies were simply flummoxed by a too-complex regulatory framework. They may just have well had their own meetings and said, "This looks fishy, but everyone else is doing it, and we get more money." Or maybe they did no due diligence at all, and just did it anyway. Once caught, obviously many people would claim an honest misunderstanding, whether or not there was one.

Frankly, I'm skeptical of the whole, "the jail sentences were handed out arbitrarily" angle. It seems the opposite of arbitrary -- the person who instituted an illegal policy in multiple companies was punished. The law may be complex, but when you're making C-level salaries, I'm sorry but you're expected to figure out if you're committing a crime or not.

<comment><USER7> I'm not saying it was arbitrary from regulator's side. I am saying it would be arbitrary for you because you won't know if you're in the wrong or not.

>>> but when you're making C-level salaries, I'm sorry but you're expected to figure out if you're committing a crime or not.

I'm not sure how it has anything to do with the salary. I'm sure whichever lawyers OKed this practice - and I would find it very hard to believe hundreds of companies would just decide to wing it without asking a lawyer - I'm sure they were paid enough. They just thought it'd be OK, but they were wrong. How the salary helps to deal with that? Unless you're claiming the salary is just compensation for the possibility of being jailed for something you have no idea you were doing wrong. In which case I'd prefer a system with more transparent laws and lower CEO salaries.

<comment><USER9> The "arbitrary" I was referring to was from the article -- a direct quote from Horowitz.

I'm saying that if knowing things like the legal requirements for running a company isn't expected to be part of your job, then you should pay someone a hell of a lot less to do the job than most executives are paid. If you just want someone to wing it, give me a call -- I'll work for probably 10% of the salary.

It's not that the salary is compensation for the possibility of going to jail. It's that compensation correlates with responsibility. If you hire a programmer for $250,000 a year, you damn well expect him or her to be better, more responsible, and more independent than one you're paying $50,000 a year. If not, then what are you paying 5x as much for? So if I hire a CFO at say, $3.5 million a year plus stock options and all the other perks (that's Google's CFO compensation at the moment), what am I paying for if I can't assume that they won't have bothered to figure out the accounting laws?

Also, you're assuming that companies would be innocent, unknowing participants here. That's an assumption that, very often, turns out to be false when we have occasion to check. I don't think all those valley companies thought they were allowed to enter into those wage-dampening agreements, but they still did it. I don't think that was an honest mistake or misunderstanding of the law. I don't think Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing, AIG, and a million other examples thought they were shining beacons of moral virtue victimized by a complicated legal system either. People, and by extension corporations, will quite often break or at least flirt with breaking the law in exchange for money. You're asking me to just take your word for it -- sort of a "well _obviously_ we didn't mean to do anything wrong" defense. It isn't obvious.

<comment><USER7> That's what I am saying - responsibility is in finding what is right to do and doing the best you can in the situation. But what if the situation is such that there's literally no way of knowing what is right and what is not? If the law is so impenetrable that basically asking a lawyer is akin to going to an psychic - he gives you the answer, charges a lot of money, but you have no idea where it came from, is it true and if you can rely on it or not. How you can be a responsible CEO if you have to rely on psychics to do your jobs?

>>> what am I paying for if I can't assume that they won't have bothered to figure out the accounting laws?

Again, that's what I am talking about - I think it would be much better if the laws were such that you don't have to hire 3.5 mln/year CFO and _still_ not be sure if that all won't end up in trouble.

>>> . I don't think all those valley companies thought they were allowed to enter into those wage-dampening agreements, but they still did it.

That is entirely different topic, but I see you presume you have the right to tell companies how they should pay the workers. I have no idea where that came from to you, and if you do, you're the part of the problem. That is exactly the reason why these laws are so bad and convoluted - because everybody wants to pull a bit of it to their side and carve a little loophole in the law to add a bit more power to himself. I want to be paid more (no matter I'm already paid well into six figures and am in one of the best paid professions in the world) - so I want a law that tells the companies to pay me more. Then the company comes and makes their private law that makes a loophole for them so they don't have to. And then you come and carve another little loophole for yourself. And pretty soon you need a 3.5mln/year professional to figure out what your employees should be paid, and you still get sued for millions because apparently some bureaucrat disagrees.

<comment><USER9> True, I presume to tell employers that they are responsible for following the law.

I think you're exaggerating the complexity of the legal system to attempt to support a point that doesn't warrant support. In the article, Horowitz took the proposal to his company's legal counsel, and quite quickly, counsel came back with, "this proposal is illegal". It's not impossible to determine that -- it was actually determined correctly in the real world.

On the wage agreement issue, here's a quote from the recent Pando Daily article ([http://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon- valley...](http://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most- celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages/)) regarding Eric Schmidt:

"Later that year, Schmidt instructed his Sr VP for Business Operation Shona Brown to keep the pact a secret and only share information "verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?"

This isn't a case of a company honestly trying to follow the law and being victimized. Schmidt knew that he was opening Google up to legal action, and he did it anyway because it saved him huge amounts of money.

If these companies think the laws are bad, it's not like large corporations have no political power. They're free to buy as many votes as they always do and get them changed. Until that happens, they can suck it up and abide by the anti-trust laws in force in the country they've chosen to incorporate in.

<comment><USER7> It was determined in this particular case. But in many other cases, it was not, and this scheme was approved, for example, by PWC.

>>> This isn't a case of a company honestly trying to follow the law

First of all, this is not the case that we were discussing - it has very little to do with financial law. Secondly, in current climate, where companies can be sued for basically anything, given they have enough money to be attractive targets, of course that makes executives to try and minimize the exposure. Even though company is supposed to be able to choose their worker's pay as they please, obviously it is not so - the populist politicians want to mess with it to get themselves elected. And thus a savvy executive would certainly not want to make it too easy for them. It turns into an adversarial game, and the results are not good for anyone.

>>> If these companies think the laws are bad, it's not like large corporations have no political power. They're free to buy as many votes as they always do and get them changed.

That's what they are doing. That's where the regulatory capture comes from. As a result, the law becomes more and more complex, as each company and each interest group carves a loophole in the law for themselves and pours millions into buying off politicians. As a result, we get completely corrupt politicians, the law that is trying to serve a thousand of special interests and no longer has any connection to what was the original purpose of the law - to protect people's rights, huge barriers of entry to the competition, billions spent on political squabbles instead of doing something productive (think about how many people one could feed and clothe for the cost of one election campaign) and ultimately the consumers and taxpayers paying for all this baloney. And you response essentially is - if you don't like how we do it in America, GTFO? Is this really the best you can do?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> or "How I Hired a White Collar Criminal And Avoided Jail"

 _" On May 31, 2007, the Commission charged Abrams and three other former senior Mercury officers with perpetrating a fraudulent and deceptive scheme from 1997 to 2005 to award themselves and other Mercury employees undisclosed, secret compensation by backdating stock option grants and failing to record hundreds of millions of dollars of compensation expense. The Commission's complaint alleges that during this period certain of these executives, including Abrams, backdated stock option exercises, made fraudulent disclosures concerning Mercury's "backlog" of sales revenues to manage its reported earnings, and structured fraudulent loans for option exercises by overseas employees to avoid recording expenses."_ \-- [http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2009/lr20964.htm](http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2009/lr20964.htm)

 _" Federal prosecutors obtained an indictment against Abrams in 2008 for income tax evasion and aiding in the preparation of false tax returns."_ \-- [http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/09/09/mercury-plea- idUSN...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/09/09/mercury-plea- idUSN0920738920100909)

Calling these "mistakes" is highly disingenuous.

<comment><USER11> [http://www.law360.com/articles/229277/ex-mercury-cfo- gets-4-...](http://www.law360.com/articles/229277/ex-mercury-cfo- gets-4-months-for-tax-evasion)

"Noting that criminal tax evasion cases are relatively rare, prosecutors called Abrams' crime "a disturbingly familiar case of a wealthy defendant manipulating a system to gain more money."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This looks one of those cases that could have gone like this:

"Someone proposed an idea that was perhaps technically legal, but obviously failed the sniff test of ethics and spirit of the law. I reminded her of what I repeatedly tell our staff at welcome/training meetings: At this company, we do what is right, for our employees, our customers, our investors, and the public. We don't mislead one to help another. We don't waste time splitting hairs about whether something smells bad or is totally rotten. If we're not proud enough of an action to want to see it on the cover of the New York Times, we just don't do it."

<comment><USER13> There are a lot of things that I think are morally completely correct that I still wouldn't necessarily be the happiest to see on the NYT.

<comment><USER14> Unless you give an example that includes your rationale, we're not able to judge one way or the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just as it's hard to tell if someone's a good coder without yourself being a good coder, it's hard to tell if an attorney or financial expert is giving you good advice without seeking for yourself a basic understanding of the legal or financial issues. A good attorney or financial expert will help you understand the issues enough for yourself to see why their evaluation makes sense. It's not good enough to just completely outsource responsibility to someone else.

Always do and trust own analysis (with an attorney or expert you trust when needed) instead of falling for the lure of "it's fine with these other experts so it should be fine for us." That's a recipe for a herd mentality random walk through and across the gray areas of the matter.

<comment><USER15> One red flag in this case is that the CFO referred to PwC, a major accounting firm that her former company paid for some advice, as a reason why everything was OK. This amounts to "trust me" because you have no access to the terms under which PwC was retained by the other company and no idea who actually examined the options accounting or under what circumstances. Shady dealing is often obscured by appeals to a higher power.

If you run into this in your own company you should be suspicious and try to get the company to hire an independent expert to review the situation, which is exactly what Ben did. For an expert to be truly independent they need to be retained by someone outside the group under suspicion.

Suspicion is not a bad thing as long as you deal with it promptly. Dealing with it clarifies the situation and removes the suspicion, one way or another.

<comment><USER16> Not to be cynical, but isn't this why "consulting firms" exist? Part of their job is to just some "reputable" outside justification for something someone internally wants to do anyway. It's to cover their ass.

When there are mass layoffs, they hire "consultants". Because nobody inside wants to really take responsibility for the decision. It's better politically to have it come from some "outside objective analysis" (of course there is not such thing, and outsiders are often the worst people to make such decisions.)

<comment><USER15> The way you describe it they are the worst sort of consultants. I once worked on a project that a big 5 consulting firm was charging 1.7 million to deliver. After 6 months, a tech savvy guy convinced the CEO to hire me for 3 months to sort everything out. I came in, had systems up and running partially (but delivering useful results) in 2 weeks. Then I spent the rest of the 3 months delivering every deliverable that the big 5 firm was behind on. The customer refused to pay the big 5 firm's bills and took them to court to recover money already paid out. The big 5 firm settled out of court by returning all money previously paid plus 90,000 for my bill. It was one of those secret settlements which is why I am fuzzy on the details, but when I mentioned it to other people in the software development business, the stories poured out.

Note how Ben Horowitz did not just farm out the decisions to a prestigious consulting firm but gave it to a guy that he knew and who he had carefully checked out in order to know that he was trustworthy.

<comment><USER17> I once went into a project where the runtime for a complex financial calculation (as complex as it can be) was 8 to 10 hers. In 2 weeks it was 37 seconds and working perfectly. When the CFO took me for dinner, I told him that 90% of the work was the old implementation, which set the right concepts, and I merely did an optimisation. Many times, the first take is not optimal, but I always try to appreciate the input I get even from suboptimal implementations.

<comment><USER18> I hope you charged accordingly!

<comment><USER17> My employers sure did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> 1\. Backdating stock options per se is not what's the legal problem -- it's that failing to account correctly for the resulting compensation charges ("comp charges") can result in materially-false filings with the SEC.

2\. It's a different problem as far as the internal politics are concerned. When a company properly records such comp charges in its financial statements, can depress a company's financial results and with it the stock price. Hence, there's an incentive to avoid recording such charges if at all possible.

3\. Now consider the interest groups / constituencies and their incentives:

\+ Employees, sometimes vociferously, want the lowest strike prices they can get for their stock options -- that can be especially true for executives who have big grants -- and they want the stock price to be as high as possible (hence they're not wild about recording comp charges).

\+ Board members would like to keep employees happy, especially executives, and of course themselves and their fellow board members, if they can. Issuing options with an in-the-money strike price can often appear to be a cost-free way of promoting general happiness.

\+ On the other hand, the constituencies that have a strong interest in strict legal compliance -- mainly the law and finance departments -- are often weaker politically than the ones who want the low strike price and the high stock price.

As a result, there can be a lot of subtle pressure on a CFO. Employees and even senior executives can say, "look, doing this in-the-money option grant, _without_ recording a comp charge, is OK with our audit firm and with our outside counsel --- what's _your_ problem? Why shouldn't we rely on them?"

(The unstated subtext being, _they 're the experts, not you, and we like their answer better than yours._)

Finally, let's not forget that outside accounting- and law firms are motivated to keep their clients happy, to be perceived as team players, and ultimately to get hired for repeat business. They definitely have incentives to tell clients what they want to hear if they can possibly do so. Stir in the fact that when these professionals can come up with "creative" ways to make their clients happy, they gain in reputation with other potential clients and with their professional peers.

All this means that the company's senior executives and its compensation and audit committees need to be willing and able to stand up to the pressures the other way. That's been made easier by the news reports of people going to jail and being permanently barred from serving as officers or directors of public companies.

<comment><USER20> _Backdating stock options per se is not what 's the legal problem -- it's that failing to account correctly for the resulting compensation charges ("comp charges") can result in materially-false filings with the SEC._

This is the key point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Accounting compliance is serious business, for the simple reason that when irregularities cause a company to restate its books and tens of millions of dollars just vanish, it can be very difficult to tell the difference between honest mistake and purposeful manipulation.

That said, there is a bit more to the story than revealed in the article. From what I can tell, the criminal charges and jail time was for income tax evasion in connection with the backdating of stock options: [http://www.law360.com/articles/229277/ex-mercury-cfo- gets-4-...](http://www.law360.com/articles/229277/ex-mercury-cfo- gets-4-months-for-tax-evasion). Specifically, the process of her backdating her options resulted in her filing tax returns understating her income: [http://www.justice.gov/usao/can/news/2010/2010_09_16_abrams....](http://www.justice.gov/usao/can/news/2010/2010_09_16_abrams.guiltyplea.press.pdf).

<comment><USER22> True, and I don't understand why he wouldn't have brought that up. When he wrote

       "The SEC issued Michelle a Wells notice, a letter
       stating that it planned to recommend enforcement action
       against her personally. It was not an indictment, but it
       was a formal investigation, and it would be very
       distracting. I had to ask her to step down."

... he made it sound like he threw an innocent (as in "until proven guilty") and valued employee under the bus at the first sign of trouble. The way he recounts the story, it doesn't sound like he had a good reason to do that at the time. He went out of his way to make Abrams sound like a victim, even at his own expense, when that apparently wasn't the case at all.

<comment><USER8> I don't think there's any way Ben could have known that she claimed on her personal tax return an exercise date for her options that was not the actual exercise date. I doubt the Feds knew that when they issued the Wells notice. Her ex-company probably didn't know. At the time of the Wells notice, she was probably the only person who knew she had lied on her tax return.

And, though it sounds silly after the whole stock option backdating brouhaha, many people did not seem to think that these practices were illegal at the time. Even Steve Jobs was accused of it (though never charged.) United Health Group, KB Home, Brocade, and Monster Worldwide all had executives who were found to have broken the law on backdating. It's possible these executives did not think the practice was illegal (maybe because their accountants had told them it wasn't) and likely they thought that it was a law not enforced (because it had not been enforced until the WSJ brought the practice to light in 2006.)

<comment><USER23> "Even" the guy who stole from his business partner and supposed friend? The fact that Jobs was doing something isn't much argument that it was legal or right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I really enjoyed reading this story. Now imagine being in this situation if you don't have a Jordan: you've got this super reputable head of finance who implemented this great option granting process at another huge company (PwC in this case) that was approved by their accounting team, how do you figure out if the process is legit? Where do you find people like Jordan?

<comment><USER25> The accounting practice was not implemented at PwC. Mercury Interactive, then a client of PwC, is the "huge company" in question. PwC simply approved of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> So the moral of the story is don't buy into accounting gimmicks that you don't /can't understand.

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

On another note:

Holy shit Terry is back with a new account.

I've missed you Terry!

</comment><comment><USER27> Just curious. Suppose you did your due diligence, asked your general counsel, and they said, "It's within the law, go for it." Then, acting on their advice, you did the same thing this person did. Would you go to jail for the same amount of time in both cases?

E: Name removed to protect the accused, although it's thin protection indeed considering her name is disclosed elsewhere in this thread.

<comment><USER21> Almost always, something like this just results in a civil investigation and monetary penalties if the SEC concludes you did something not-kosher. The criminal indictment for "Michelle" was for tax evasion linked to the back dating: [http://ww2.cfo.com/accounting-tax/2008/04/mercury- interactiv...](http://ww2.cfo.com/accounting-tax/2008/04/mercury-interactive- ex-cfo-is-indicted). In general, tax crimes require a high standard of "willful" violation in which the defendant purposefully violates a known legal obligation. A violation based on a good faith reliance on a reasonable (or sometimes even unreasonable) interpretation of the tax law will not meet the standard: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheek_v._United_States](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheek_v._United_States).

<comment><USER27> Fascinating. Based on what everyone is saying, it seems like it is relatively much more difficult to wind up in jail if you are trying to do the right thing.

<comment><USER18> ...if you're a white collar, white well-off person, that it. Important caveat, even if not strictly relevant in this context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A relevant litigation release:

[http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2009/lr20964.htm](http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2009/lr20964.htm)

And a description of the practice in question:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Options_backdating](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Options_backdating)

<comment><USER29> From reading the first release, it sounds like the penalties imposed was for more than just the stock options thing described by Horowitz. It also describes fraudulent disclosures about backlog of sales and structuring fraudulent loans. So it's not necessarily the case that Horowitz would have had to serve jail time if he had gone along with his cfo's proposal (although he would likely have had to pay back his gains and possibly fines).

When I first read the blog, it certainly sounded like the SEC being overly harsh over a mistake made by a good CFO. But reading the release makes me think there was more to it than that. It's possible this is the reason why that excerpt wasn't published in his book.

<comment><USER30> Well, it also goes to show that public perception and reputation of a person can be largely at odds with reality. I like Horowitz's story, too, because it shows that even though people can do illegal things, it's very easy to do so with the best of intentions. Given the widespread nature of options backdating at the time, Michelle may have even been under the impression that her proposal was one of the "tricks of the trade," so to speak.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> 'Why I did not go to jail, but if I had, I would have served 1/20th of the sentence of some poor guy who got caught with 5 grams of crack.'

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snitch/primer/](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snitch/primer/)

</comment><comment><USER32> > Why I did not go to jail

Summary: I ran an accounting decision that worried me past my excellent lawyer.

This makes me wonder, as someone with little legal experience, how can we find lawyers who are truly great at what they do?

<comment><USER33> This, more than anything else, is why every entrepreneur needs a great mentor.

<comment><USER32> Turtles all the way down -- how do you know if a mentor is a great one?

<comment><USER34> I think you could re-write your summary as: I ran an accounting decision that worried me past my lawyer.

There might be a bit of hagiography of the GC in the original story based on what Ben now knows could have happened. For all we know, the illegality of the scheme could have been glaringly obvious to any lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This might be a naive viewpoint, but I don't see how this could be viewed as legal. If I as a retail investor in equity or equity options in a company was approached by my broker and asked what day in the past I would like to use for my cost basis calculation, that would sound pretty fishy. Why should it be different for inside holders?

<comment><USER12> Vanguard.com does that (but you get 2 or 3 choices that are all generally accepted, not "pick a date")

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Stay away from mirroring PWC policies unless all your executive officers have a degree in commerce, finance, and law. Because you'll need all three to get out of the fraud charges you'll be slapped with.

The reader is invited to do some research into what companies PWC has done accounting for.

</comment><comment><USER37> What boils my blood is this woman going to jail for doing something that was accepted practice and approved by PwC, where seemingly no criminal intent existed.

Laws that are that opaque, where interpretation and enforcement can change at the whim of regulators and their bosses, are not morally justifiable. IIRC Steve Jobs did the same thing at Apple and they (predictably) got a slap on the wrist.

When this was going on I was running a small public co. and our counsel (outside but on BOD) was dead-set against any options dating shenanigans, despite what others were doing, so I guess I agree with OP's main point -- that having the right reporting structure can save your ass.

</comment><comment><USER38> "In my reference checking, at least a dozen investors told me that they made far more money when the numbers disappointed than when the company outperformed, because they trusted Michelle when she said that things were not worse than they appeared and bought on the dips."

anybody sees any wrong here? Beside private hush-hush, there seems to be the same pattern - like with backdating of options - of optimizing interests of some selected "closer than arm reach" group at the expense of general shareholder population of that company.

</comment><comment><USER15> That was an _excellent_ article. One of the best that I have read recently about company management. Of course to get the full impact you need to do a lot of reading between the lines, but Ben does us the favor of leaving some broad hints. This really does have the flavor of a manager skillfully navigating the business through shark-infested waters, and IMHO, that is exactly the job of senior management. Including CTOs. While a CTO may not have direct responsibility for legal and accounting issues, they need to be fully aware of what their colleagues are up to, because, as Ben pointed out, another executive might be subverting the law in pursuit of some number. If that is happening and the CTO does not notice it and call their colleagues on that type of behavior then the CTO is complicit and will at minimum get fired, and could even go to jail.

Taking public money in any form, comes with obligations to play fair, and however much you may disagree with the laws or the people who made those laws, they are the current standard for whether or not someone is playing fair.

</comment><comment><USER39> I found more info on the CFO here: [http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2009/lr20964.htm](http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2009/lr20964.htm)

>Abrams [the CFO in Ben's article] Also to be Barred from Serving as an Officer and Director of a Public Company

I wonder what people who get caught up in these sort of things do afterwards?

<comment><USER40> Probably consultancy, there is always a need for executive consultants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The weirdest thing here is that, mistakes or not, these law violations gives someone jail time.

Come on! At most, it caused monetary damages. The proper way to make it right is to apply monetary penalties (eg. fines). What's the reasoning behind locking up someone for that? It is not like the general public is being physically harmed, so 'Michelle' should not have to be physically restricted.

Besides, depending on the amount, a fine can set someone back for way more than 3 months. The cost-benefic analysis will make her thing twice next time.

<comment><USER42> >The proper way to make it right is to apply monetary penalties (eg. fines).

What's the reasoning behind that? In-kind punishment? If somebody runs over a family with a car, should their family be run over by a car? If someone rapes, should they be punished with rape?

I get it if the law is supposed to be a game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> TL;DR: author sought legal advice before doing something he thought was illegal. Turned out to be illegal. Didn't get in trouble because he didn't do it.

</comment><comment><USER44> Much of the reasoning behind not prosecuting wall street (post MBS meltdown) has been the lack of malicious intent.

But here, we see SV hanged for "mistakes". Wtf?

</comment><comment><USER45> "Once the SEC decided that most technology company stock option procedures were not as desired, the jail sentences were handed out arbitrarily."

really?

</comment><comment><USER46> I'm not sure why Ben used a false name for the CFO. One quick search got me her real name, and more details about her eventual indictment.

<comment><USER47> As this was intended for his book, I assume he wanted to extend her some common courtesy. He makes it clear that she was well liked and, in his opinion, had made mistakes, not committed fraud intentionally. Despite the matter being very public, I think it's reasonable, even kind, not to mention her actual name in this context in his book.

<comment><USER48> Also eliminates any libel lawsuits if the subject decides what occurred wasn't 100% as-described in the book.

<comment><USER49> I'd be surprised if using a pseudonym for someone made you immune to libelling them.

Made up example:

"I once met a president of the USA, he was called Carrick O'Barmy [name changed to protect the innocent] he was snorting crack of a toilet seat at the time" ... doesn't look like it would if printed as a truth, but was really a lie, mean I would get off scott-free unless the context was clearly parody (or as here labelled as a fiction).

IANAL of course, nor even a USA citizen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Unrelated to the story, there is a dead comment on this thread.

It looks like it was written by a racist bot? What? Why is somebody paying money to do this?

<comment><USER51> It's not a bot, but an individual. If you're interested in some back story:

[http://www.youtube.com/user/losethos](http://www.youtube.com/user/losethos)

[http://www.templeos.org/](http://www.templeos.org/)

<comment><USER52> More detailed backstory: [http://9ol.es/LoseThos.html](http://9ol.es/LoseThos.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> "Michelle had no intention of breaking any laws and no idea that she'd broken any laws. [...] Once the SEC decided that most technology company stock option procedures were not as desired, the jail sentences were handed out arbitrarily. "

I find this quite disturbing. Especially the second part.

<comment><USER54> According to the numerous people in this thread who have made observations on who "Michelle", it's also probably quite untrue. Especially the first part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> >The whole thing was a case of the old saying: "When the paddy wagon pulls up to the house of ill repute, it doesn't matter what you are doing. Everybody goes to jail."

I've never heard this saying, and Google comes up with nothing. Maybe this is a paraphrase of one of those raps Ben likes?

<comment><USER56> I've heard variations of this before -- try googling just for "when the paddy wagon pulls up".

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> For the curious...

[http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2006/07/03/daily1...](http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2006/07/03/daily17.html)

</comment><comment><USER58> Did you hire her back after she finished her jail term?

<comment><USER59> (a) opsware was acquired by HP before she ever went to jail.

(b) opsware was publicly traded. part of her punishment was not being allowed to serve as an officer at a publicly traded company.

<comment><USER60> Is she going to be hired by other companies as CFO after?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Ben's blogs are the most hard hitting concentrated value of any I ever read on management. Another great piece.

</comment><comment><USER62> Just use outside counsel. It's more expensive, but it solves the problems of internal structure.

</comment><comment><USER63> This is an illustration of why _mens rea_ should be required in all criminal complaints.

</comment><comment><USER64> I wonder what happened to Michelle.

</comment><comment><USER65> I am so pumped for this book to come out.</comment>


Paying a Premium on Your First Deal - <AUTHOR> https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/paying-a-premium-on-your-first-deal <comment><AUTHOR> I published an article that I think might be helpful to entrepreneurs and aspring entrepreneurs.</comment>


Ask HN: how do you backup your servers? - <AUTHOR>

I need to think about backing up data I have on a server, and would like to know how <i>you</i> do it. Do you backup whole machines or just some specific directories? Do you do off-site backups, or local? How much data do you have in a backup job? What's you preferred method: tar, sftp, scp, rsync, paid-for services etc? What's the most annoying thing you encounter managing backups? <comment><USER2> I divide my backups into three types:

      Bare metal.

      Frequently changing data.

      Occasionally changing data.

Everything is weighted by how automated I can make it (e.g. everything but some day to day monitoring), what worse case recoveries are possible (no one cares about backups, only recovery) and time to recovery (my personal use, so a few hours are OK). And the threat level, e.g. a fire in one room (sprinklers) and the possibility a tornado would take out the local hardware but leave me alive (I live adjacent to tornado alley and have lived through a couple).

So I have a bare metal backup of a compressed image of my system drive (made with dd using a live-CD) which is updated every time I mess with LVM and nightly snapshots of my root partition (LVM snapshop of partition with dd).

From that toe-hold I can rebuild my system from any worse case short of hardware destruction, I use nightly backups with BackupPC for normal system recovery, augmented with what's below for frequently changed data.

Frequently changing data, like email and code I'm working on, is rdiff-backup snapshotted every hour. If I was maintaining customer data I'd do a continuous process.

The same data is rsyncsrypto-ed and most of that is rynced to rsync.net.

Occasionally changing data is rsynced every night.

I try to avoid common mode failures, e.g. no one piece of software, one system or one disk will cause total data loss.

Ask if you want particular details; for a long treatment of this, read _Backup & Recovery_, " _Inexpensive Backup Solutions for Open Systems_ " by W. Curtis Preston ([http://www.amazon.com/Backup-Recovery-Inexpensive- Solutions-...](http://www.amazon.com/Backup-Recovery-Inexpensive-Solutions- Systems/dp/0596102461/)). It's getting to be a bit old, but a lot of it still holds and the principles will be true for a long time.

(Note, while the above particularly paranoid approach is for my personal systems, it's based on harsh experience going back to 1977 (sic), including plenty of small scale "enterprise" systems where total data loss was unacceptable and a couple of 24x7 Internet startups.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Cron + S3 + s3cmd + small custom script for DB dumps

Cron + snapshots + small custom script for EBS on EC2.

Basically, I store all non code files on EBS and redundantly backup to S3, which amounts to living or dying by Amazon's hand.

Recovery consists of firing up a new EC2 instance, attaching a snaphot and running a deploy script, which is handled automatically by a different EC2 instance, assuming I haven't lost all instances. Manual recovery in that case would be time consuming, but doable.

Snapshots are nearly instantaneous and uploads to S3 from an EC2 instance are about as fast as you can get.

Most annoying thing? Testing recovery.

<comment><USER2> " _Most annoying thing? Testing recovery._ "

Indeed ... but at least you do that!

One of the great things about clouds like AWS is that you can now do an almost complete bare metal restore test (modulo stuff like your official DNS vs. test) for a small amount of money instead of trying to justify buying a separate system for that sort of thing (which in the real world I was never able to do, although I fortunately never suffered a total data loss despite a few close calls).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I backup entire disks using a towers of hanoi algorithm with (wait for it...) good old dump(8) to a second local hard drive. This method keeps 7 full days of backups (using an incremental diff, so it's fairly space efficient). I've used this method for almost 15 years and have used it dozens of times to recover missing things. dump has never failed me!

On my other servers I use rsync just to keep a current mirror around. I always ask myself, "How hard would this be to recover if I lost it?" and "Will I need to go back in time for some things?" Depending on the answer to those questions I make my backup strategy for the server in question.

Yesterday's Daring Fireball post on the same topic said it best: "Every hard drive in the world will eventually fail. Assume that yours are all on the cusp of failure at all times. It's good to be spooked about how long your hard drives will last."

<comment><USER5> I've used xfsdump/xfsrestore on Linux and xfs-filesystems (obviously) in the past. Very nice stuff, I second the recommendation.

Of course it only provides for the raw data-transfer task so one has to think about the scheduling and planning yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Generally rsync to a mirror-image hardware box in the same location. Everything is backed up so any fault/failure on the primary machine can be recovered (in theory) via the hot-standby machine.

Critical user data, databases, etc. are dump'd/tar'd/gzip'd to a remote location once a day, generally held as long as space permits.

</comment><comment><USER7> Considering the work we do (corporate and criminal computer forensics) backup strategies are about our second most important thing :D So naturally it gets neglected...

Gold Images: of the various OS configurations and requisite software so you can redeploy a server fairly quickly

Diff Backups taken nightly of our various data stores / databases

Weekly backups of main server data (MySQL, MSSQL, Hadoop clusters etc)

In terms of software we use a couple of commercial solutions plus Bacula (which isn't really that great unless your using tapes...).

Inspired by Tarsnap (the encryption and so forth) Im in the process of speccing up an idea to write out own in house version (I'd love to use Tarsnap directly but not a chance unfortunately) to replace our mish mash of software.

<comment><USER8> Why not a chance to use Tarsnap? just curious...

<comment><USER7> We cant transfer data offsite (even encrypted) for contractual and legal reasons (or more succinctly: I'd be locked up if anyone caught us doing that :D)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> tarsnap + bash script! <http://www.tarsnap.com/>

Tar-like interface, data deduplication, awesome support, fair pricing. What more could you ask for?

<comment><USER10> _What more could you ask for?_

You forgot security. :-)

<comment><USER9> Security is implied because I know you programmed it :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm just a mortal developer so I don't have to admin anything serious, but here's how I do backups of my personal files & server. Mainly using Git:

Any code / changes to Debian's default /etc setup go into Git and are at least on both the relevant machine (laptop or server) and GitHub. See <http://github.com/avar> and <http://github.com/avar/linode-etc> for the /etc on the server. I keep some personal data (like finance notes) in GPG encrypted files in private Git repositories.

E-Mail is backed up my Google's GMail (presumably) and data like my small collection of music is something I can always get back from the Internet.

If the filesystem on my laptop, server or GitHub is destroyed right now I can get everything working again relatively quickly just by installing Ubuntu or Debian from scratch and copying my home directory, /etc and code from Git on one of the remaining machines.

I've made a script that automatically backs up my Git repositories daily (<http://github.com/avar/github-backup>), the resulting backup is around 180MB. Losing some of my other data would be an annoyance but this is all I /really/ care about.

Follow somebody else's advice if you need "real" backups, but for my simple needs this suffices.

</comment><comment><USER12> We've been using Bacula: weekly fulls and daily incrementals to disk, and weekly fulls to tape for offsite storage. As our data size grows, tapes are going to run out of steam. I've recently began experimenting with <http://www.nongnu.org/duplicity> to do encrypted backups to S3. So far it has been working great.

</comment><comment><USER13> We do tar'ed directories/databases onto S3 and this script: <http://simonwillison.net/static/2008/backup_to_s3.py.txt>

Right now its only done weekly, as we're not experiencing high growth. We also store downloads, so the tars can get very big, but it works well.

</comment><comment><USER14> I backup code to flash once a day in case of hardware failure. Once a week I swap flash drives into a safety deposit box. I also backup any local databases to flash once a day. Use a scheduled task and a .cmd for that, which automatically stops SQL Server, 7z compresses and encrypts the database files and source code repository, then move them to a usb flash drive, then restarts SQL Server.

I never upload code to the internet, but I have copies of the repository in multiple locations separated by at least 3000 miles.

Nightly I backup internet databases to a cloud storage provider. Nondatabase files are stored simultaneously on local storage and cloud storage. The local storage is mirrored to local snapshots hourly and nightly in case a roll back is needed.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't bother backing up the full system, just the user generated data. I am storing lots of data as flatfiles rather than shoving them into the database, so rsync helps there.

I like having a complete copy of all user-data on my home machine for development purposes as well as backup. So, I rsync all user generated content (they are 99% flatfiles so this is easy), as well as a daily mysql dump. My other founder and I both perform this daily, so at any point we are only exposed with a 1 day risk (seems acceptable at this point). This also gives us two separate off-site backups, which is nice.

</comment><comment><USER16> an openbsd vm in a... secret location... runs rsnapshot (rsync over ssh) to all of my servers every few hours and keeps separate hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly "full" backups. they are stored on a usb hard drive encrypted with openbsd's softraid.

when the server boots up, i have to enter in the softraid passphrase, it mounts the drive, then i launch screen and start up the script that spawns the rsnapshot processes at the appropriate times. when starting it, i enter in the common ssh key passphrase (which is restricted on all the servers to only allow logging in from that network) and common mysql backup user password. these are stored in memory and then the script runs rsnapshot every few hours.

once a day, the script does a full mysql dump of all databases on all servers using a ruby script with net::ssh to tunnel mysql access over ssh. it does this to keep "proper" mysql backups in case the rsync'd binary mysql files are transferred in an odd state, and keep daily backups of everything. it also lets me quickly get at data with standard text tools instead of having to restore the raw mysql files somewhere temporarily, start up mysqld, and extract it.

so once the server is booted, it's completely automated. i've been doing backups this way for a couple years and have recovered files and databases from them a number of times. no complaints.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have scripts (I use fabric, keep meaning to explore chef) that bring a fresh OS install up to a production server automatically, doing all installation and configuration. This is all in a DVCS system, so I have a local copy of my repository as well as a hosted copy of my repository on bitbucket/github. That takes care of code and configuration.

I have a cron job that dumps the databases into a directory with a time- stamped name. The last few regular nightly back-ups are kept, then weekly for a couple of weeks, then monthly for about a year. The parent directory is then backed up to S3 using duplicity. I've done other, cleverer things in the past with rotating through buckets based on the month, keeping every backup, doing them twice a day, that sort of thing.

I test recovery by spinning up another server, running the scripts to bring it up to production status, and running the script that uses duplicity to pull the data dump directory back out of S3, and then restores the database from the dump.

At $0.15 a gig to store data, and about $0.10 a gig to transfer it in, the cost of S3 is pretty much just noise. I've got on-disk dumps of my database if the database is corrupted on my machine, and I've got back-ups of those dumps if I need them.

Duplicity is pretty fantastic -- definitely check it out.

<comment><USER18> duplicity is awesome. can backup to gmail IMAPS, $0.00 per gig for storage and $0.00 per gig for transfer in a high end GOOG datacenter. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> No whole-system backups. Offsite (across the country) replicated MySQL database with daily full snapshots and periodic encrypted dumps to S3. Real- time encrypted mogilefs backups to S3 on a per-file basis. S3 MFA + versioning is a huge win in both cases. rsync for a small number of exceptions: IMAP data, development trees, etc. When a server fails, just re-image it, bootstrap with puppet, start it back up.

</comment><comment><USER20> I do a lot of simple things. Servers: use cron, zip, and s3cmd tools to backup to S3; on EC2, use snapshots. Development laptops: use git repos hosted on a rented VPS and I have a cron script to ZIP these repos and back them up to S3.

</comment><comment><USER21> The data lives separate from the code: the code is backed up in Subversion, the data lives in AmazonS3 (no other backup) for images, and a database in an Amazon snapshot with daily backups automated.

</comment><comment><USER22> Rsync.net, simple, cheap reliable, and helpful. If you call their telephone # you get a real person, that knows WTF is going on, not some L1 support tech.

</comment><comment><USER23> EC2 AMI image -> S3 at milestones, mysql dbase backup to S3 every few minutes, all files stored directly on S3, so only cached on server.

</comment><comment><USER24> duplicity is great for off-site backups - full encryption, supports a wide variety of destinations (amazon s3, FTP etc)

</comment><comment><USER25> We use ZRM to automate the backup and versioning of our MySQL databases.

Then we use cron and s3sync to mirror the relevant portions of the filesystem to S3.

For those interested, the process is documented here:

<http://monk.ly/bFBd7w>

</comment><comment><USER26> Daily rsync to BQBackup, with once weekly offline backup.

</comment><comment><USER27> Cron + rsync.net and their geo-replicated package.

</comment><comment><USER28> ZFS auto snapshots, backup-server running incremental ssh "zfs send" |zfs recv.

</comment><comment><USER29> r1soft</comment>


Space Elevator: Physical Principles - <AUTHOR> http://www.zadar.net/space-elevator/

<comment><USER2> Looks like some sort of undergrad-level exploration of some aspects of the physics of building a space elevator in a loose, bizarre style (a mix of layman's terms and "omg here's some equations")... I'm not entirely sure how this is interesting...

<comment><USER3> I couldn't get past the 1995 background, but I was hoping for something more then just the usual brief summary of here's how this might work.

Sadly this is not it, but perhaps people interested in this can contribute insightful, up to date and detailed comments on the state of related technology?

Does anyone know the latest on carbon nanotube based materials?

<comment><USER4> Here's some info on the trajectory of developments over the last ten years:

<http://www.spaceward.org/elevator-when>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The space elevator is one of my favorite topics. To date, no other technology to provide cheap access to space seems as viable.

For more info, here are a few links:

<http://www.spaceward.org>

<http://www.spaceelevatorblog.com/>

Also, this video isn't really technical, but I found it motivational:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfKKy33rb0U>

</comment><comment><USER5> Space elevator is the greatest scientific hoax of all times.</comment>


Taking an Open-Source Approach to Hardware  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574559960271468066.html

<comment><USER2> Calling Arduino open-source when the very core of the hardware is still proprietary is bit strange imho. A fair comparison would be if someone threw cygwin on Windows and said it to be open-source as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Monome ( <http://www.monome.org> ) would be a better example of open source hardware. They provide source files to the 40h with schematics, parts lists and firmware ( <http://docs.monome.org/doku.php?id=tech:source_files:40h> ). The larger monomes are just tiled versions of the 40h. A group of monome users ported the monome to the arduino (I built myself a Arduino-based monome port). There is a great community centered around the monome

</comment><comment><USER4> Check out <http://www.opencores.org/></comment>


How One Developer Serves Millions of Beers: Untappd + Iron.io - <AUTHOR> http://blog.iron.io/2014/08/how-one-developer-serves-millions-of.html

<comment><USER2> I work at Iron.io This is pretty awe inspiring to see such a small team kill it.

Next up. when you check-in to 10 beers in one night it auto orders a uber/lyft for you.</comment>


Ask HN: What can I learn in Bay area for a month? - <AUTHOR>

I graduated in 2012 with a Masters degree in Computer Science, and I'm currently working as a Software Developer (making android apps). I totally love my job and also the people at work. But for various personal reasons, I want a change of place for a month (October, November) to refresh myself. So I want to move to Bay area and learn/work on some cool stuffs related to my field, and then go back to my workplace. I see that most of the Continuing Studies options at schools are only for Execs. I think I am an artist by heart and hacker by profession. What are some interesting options you would suggest for someone like me? <comment><USER2> "An artist by heart and hacker by profession" -> You are going to love Bay Area hackathons.

There are hackathons all over Bay Area almost every weekend. So pick the ones that interest you and give it a go. All good things start with people getting together at hackathons.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I had your suggestion in mind for weekends, but I also wanted a routine for weekdays like attending classes for a few hours. I enjoy routines, and if given the complete freedom to be everyday on my own - I am little afraid on handling it well!</comment></comment>


Mobile is Eating the World - <AUTHOR> http://a16z.com/2014/10/28/mobile-is-eating-the-world/ <comment><USER2> _There is no point in drawing a distinction between the future of technology and the future of mobile._

I find Evans' analysis of mobile a bit hyperbolic. Yes the growth of mobile is explosive and, in some cases, it's displacing older technology. But for a lot of use cases small touch screen devices are simply inadequate. It's probably true that a lot of people that used to use desktop or laptop computers just to check email and Facebook have shifted that activity to their phones and tablets. But its equally true that these devices are still really only good for quick, informal communication and browsing. Despite the best efforts of Apple and Samsung to persuade us otherwise, tablets are lousy for getting real work done.

So we find ourselves in the ironic situation of a domain that is experiencing almost unprecedented growth but in which almost nobody is making money except Facebook and the vendors of what are essentially gimmicky slot machine games. My take on this is that the market for richer desktop/laptop software isn't going anywhere soon. People that need to edit complex spreadsheets, compose scores for films, analyze genomes, and render 3d effects need real computers. As a developer this kind of customer is in many ways a better customer to serve than a teen snapping selfies on a phone.

<comment><USER3> If you look at the biomechanics, it does seem like a keyboard + mouse + >=20" screen is the optimal setup for doing actual work. A keyboard is simply the most efficient way to get information into a computer (the exception is that some graphics editors work might work better with a multitouch screen, it will be interesting to see if someone builds a touch-first photoshop killer). That said, there might be a convergence where mobile devices learn to run desktop software, and can be docked to a mouse/keyboard/monitor. But we are still a long ways from that point, and there is no great incentive to build office suites for mobile devices that are efficient for power/work users.

Mobile is great for 1) consuming content 2) interacting with your extended environment when you are not grounded to a computer (summoning an Uber, paying with an app, etc.) The money in content consumption will go to either the content creators or the digital sharecroppers (Facebook).

So the question is, are there large untapped areas where a phone could be used to interact with ones environment? What kind of day-to-day things could be enhanced with internet connected software?

<comment><USER4> Your assumption, which I think is wrong, is that WPM (or maybe APM) is the bottleneck for most work. I suspect reading/comprehension, problem solving, planning, usability, and access to the right tool, discovery of tools, responsiveness of tools, teamwork... These things are much more likely to be the bottleneck.

As a programmer, I suspect I could probably type the entirity of a days work into the computer in a half hour.

<comment><USER5> I can't even read a phone screen without reading glasses on, I absolutely loathe reading more than a paragraph of text on one and I really couldn't imagine getting any significant amount of work done on a mobile platform.

If we count tablets as mobile too (they're wireless after all and plenty of them come with SIM slots) then the consumption part gets a bit better, in landscape mode you can read PDFs on them but the part of work that requires significant input would - for me - not be an option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this actually true? My perception is that the smartphone bubble is bursting. Yes, there are lots more people to come online, but all they're going to do is use WhatsApp and Facebook.

The big disappointment of mobile is that all this stuff doesn't seem to result in enabling people to do their jobs better or more easily. Web apps really exploded with things like Basecamp, but the most mobile has brought along for that seems to be mobile email. (Edit to add, the only exceptions I can think of to this are actually the SMS apps deployed in the places pegged to explode in smartphone usage).

Having lots of people mindlessly addicted to notifications is not really that interesting.

<comment><USER7> Your focus on jobs and notifications is a little frustrating as there's a lot more to life than working. For example, I just traveled to the USA for the first time.

How do I get somewhere? Google maps will tell me the route, another app is telling me when the bus next comes.

Where should I eat in this brand new city? Yelp will find me somewhere good.

Coffee (I'm not a fan of American style drip coffee)? Yelp again.

What should I check out today? Originally fully researched before leaving the apartment/hotel, now I go to breakfast and look around, if it rains halfway through the day I can come up with a new plan that involves being inside.

Getting my boarding pass? No longer do I need to print anything, just show them my screen and they can scan the barcode off that.

Want to call home? No need for an expensive phone card, I can just use whatsapp or viber to chat to my parents.

Get in a cab and don't want to be ripped off because of accent? Maps again ("please take the FDR, the traffic there isn't too bad").

For work: My contract is currently approaching it's end, I managed to set up two interviews in my home from another country while on the go, never having to stop and pull out my laptop

I would say that without my smartphone I would have had to spend a lot of time asking locals, researching on a computer ahead of time, and generally looking like a tourist with a massive tourist map (a good way to get pick pocketed). As a result I was able to do most of my research on the move and really streamline my holiday to something where I didn't need to sit down for a couple hours each night to work out what to do tomorrow.

<comment><USER8> This answer is excellent. It's also a great example of how technology just disappears and allows you to get what you want to get done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From one of the slides: _Email is for grandparents_

I think this varies. I'm not a grandparent, but am close to 50 years old and have been working in computer technology my entire adult life. I have an Android smartphone (got my first one this year) but have not installed any apps on it. Email, web browser, text messages, calendar, contacts, and maps are all there and I can't really think of anything else useful I'd want it to do.

My mother-in-law on the other hand IS a grandmother and she's constantly using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and half a dozen other things on her phone. I don't see the point in any of it and don't use any of those things.

Not sure who is the outlier.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, my email usage at age 12-15 was also almost nil and that was in the 90s. Doubt stats at 12-15 correlate well to whether those kids will use email when they hit college.

<comment><USER11> Agreed, I didn't have much use for email at 15, because I interacted with all my classmates and teachers every day; coordinating things was simple, and all my schoolwork was submitted in person. I primarily used email for asking questions on Linux mailing lists, and even that pretty rarely--15 year old me would probably be pretty shocked at my current level of email traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I mainly program Android apps, many for my side business.

Some people here have said "mobile has peaked". I go around with my Android mobile phone, and I have trouble finding out what time stores close. I have trouble finding nearby supermarkets. I certainly can't find out if supermarkets have an item in stock, or if the item on sale. I can't find a nearby bathroom to use.

We are nowhere near mobile peaking. Yes, there may be a little bubble now that fizzles out before it comes back again. Kind of like how there was a website bubble, which fizzled in 2000, and then four years later Facebook was started. The day I can punch into my phone asking where I can buy a chair, and get back most of the local stores, and what they have in stock, and for what price - that is when the "smartphone bubble" is soon to "burst".

<comment><USER13> And on that note, the more places mobile puts it's fingers, ultimately, the more places that someone needs to make sure the finger points to the right thing. Every google maps, yelp review, craigslist post, etc., needs someone ultimately to vet it's place in reality before said reality can be made useless by it. I think we're on the cusp of mobile overload, where we're going to see more and more specialized mobile services made useless because we simply don't have the manpower to wire them up well without taking that manpower from something else.

So, while we may not be peaked in terms of what could be done, we're nearing the point where what WILL be done is starting to look more and more focused on the things that grab quick money.

Oddly, I think the next big revolution will be the generation that's tired of being chained to their devices and subscriptions and services, and starts to devolve back to actual interpersonal relationships. I'm seeing it every day with those of us who grew up without it, had it, and realized that it's not quite the silver bullet for living it marketed itself as.

Siri still sucks, Google maps still gets you lost, and visual studio still blows on a touchscreen laptop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My smartphone has 2 Gigs of RAM and most of it is wasted. Games on phones aren't even interesting because my fingers slide right off the screen when the action gets fast. Give me a PC with 2 Gigs of RAM and I can do amazing things with it, a mouse and a keyboard. Every single phone app I use is an exercise in futility or it feels that way. Touch is a terrible HID. Smart phones are handy when you don't have anything else but man I really prefer anything else, I'm considering buying a Chrome laptop or Surface if I can wipe them and install Ubuntu on them and can plug in a SIM card; not a bigger phone, a real computer.

<comment><USER15> Remember when phones had keyboards? Like, actual physical keyboards that slid out when you needed them and tucked away neatly when you didn't?

I really miss them :-(

<comment><USER16> Given how huge the mobile phone industry, it don't understand why some manufacturer* hasn't carved out a niche for keyboard phones. Since all the manufactures have arrived at the roughly the same form factor and spec, maybe we'll start to see one of them try something different again.

* Other than Blackberry. Despite being a BB10 user, I can understand why the general population isn't attracted to it.

<comment><USER15> You know, maybe it's time to see about sourcing a small keyboard, 4.5" or so display, and trying to squeeze down an Odroid to make your own phone. Might even make sense to make it wifi only and rely on Voip for some use cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> By these figures, 80% of the world will be carrying a mobile spy tool by 2020. I refuse to do anything on a mobile phone that is conceivably worse than PG-13. Until mobile hardware is free and open, I only view the proliferation of mobile Internet as a tool for human enslavement.

<comment><USER18> Its not like PC hardware is open fully.

<comment><USER19> It can be though, and generally is more open than any mobile hardware.

[https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/gluglug](https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/gluglug)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The western world right now is in a bit of a defeatist mood and pessimism reigns supreme. And while I can't deny that all things end and in some sense civilization is scheduled for some receding, I find myself wondering what impact this sort of technology will have on that process. Technology is speeding everything up so much and so fast... what if technology speeds up our next "dark age" from centuries to decades... or decade... or mere years? What if we're even already halfway through the decline?

We know technology is a big game changer. Sometimes we overestimate that impact, but sometimes we underestimate it too. What will it do for everyone to have a smartphone? Heck if I know! But perhaps it's reason for at least a smidge of hope.

<comment><USER21> Well, smartphones simply enable you to do things that you can't otherwise do. I don't think they'll have much of an effect on how long our next Dark Ages lasts. The dark ages were primarily due to culture, not ability. Smartphones enable culture to morph in interesting ways, but they don't override it. People will still be people.

<comment><USER14> >> Well, smartphones simply enable you to do things that you can't otherwise do.

No, that's not true at all. They are more compact and with the touch HID more frustrating but certainly far from better.

<comment><USER21> People take exponentially more photos and videos now that they have smartphones. That's the definition of "enable people to do something they can't otherwise do."

<comment><USER14> The guy said, "smartphones simply enable you to do things that you can't otherwise do". People were taking pictures with their cameras long before smartphones and uploading them. I was using Microsoft StreetMaps (I think that was the name) and a $100 GPS serial device to map trips around the SFBA. People have used a compass to navigate for thousands of years. So yes, smartphones don't do things you can't do otherwise; they are just compact and more fun, if you can them in your pocket. If you can't then you might want to look at a small laptop or notebook, more bang for the buck.

<comment><USER21> I don't know why this is controversial. You aren't going to carry a camera around with you everywhere you go, nor a GPS, nor a laptop. But you'll carry your smartphone. So you can do more things because you have your smartphone with you.

Anyway, my main point was that culture was the reason for the dark ages, not ability to do things. And smartphones don't override culture.

<comment><USER22> >And smartphones don't override culture.

What does override culture?

Talking to the people around you? Newspapers? Books? Telephones? Peoples options? News?

 _Culture: the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively._

If you don't think that an instantaneous audio/graphical communications device cannot be used as a means to effect culture you are highly confused about what culture is.

<comment><USER21> Another day, another snarky HN comment...

As I said, smartphones morph culture in interesting ways. That's a direct product of having access to all of the things you mention. But people are still fundamentally people. If the world believes that war is necessary, smartphones aren't going to change that. And that belief was one of the main reasons for the dark ages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The evolution of mobile technology has ironically been held back by its success. Today it's too easy to make money in mobile devices, just make things thinner, shinier, faster, and prettier and you're most of the way there. And then you can rake in massive profit margins in a market where people replace their devices on a timeframe measured in months. It's practically raining cash in the land of successful mobile manfuacturers.

But once we get past this early stage of mobile success people will be looking to gain more productivity out of their devices. Today have the power and OS chops to handle beefy tasks, but for the most part the UX and peripheral experience isn't there. But that'll change. There will be more attachable keyboards, more desktop docking stations, etc. And then the use of tablets and smartphones in business will drive the manufacturers to service that market more and more to meet those needs.

Meanwhile, the low end of mobile will get cheaper as the developing world starts to gain access to computing and folks find out how valuable that market is and figure out how to serve it.

This is the 2nd wave of the personal computing revolution and it's only just barely started, what we'll see in the next 10 years will blow the doors off the last decade.

</comment><comment><USER24> This remind me of the race towards smaller phones we experienced in the pre- smartphone era I don't see Sonys ultra small mobiles being in vogue anymore. We seem to forget a simple fact.

The smartphone was not a better phone but a smaller computer. The idea that mobile is somehow replacing most of the other platforms and their usage is simply misplaced.

Mobile is part of a diverting technology trend not converging.

</comment><comment><USER25> At every moment of disruption in technology people saying that the new technology doesn't replace the incumbent. By definition disruptive technologies are less functional and inadequate "replacements".

First, folks tend to talk about all the things that the new technology can't do that the old one does do. In the Steve Jobs interview at All Things D referenced in the comments, he goes on to talk about how software needs to get written--"it is just software" he says. In the near term history we have seen this same dynamic in the advent of the GUI relative to CUI or in the way browser/HTML subsumed the GUI client-server apps. People are writing more code all the time that is "mobile only" even if some of it reinvents or reimagines the desktop/laptop world. I was struck by Adobe's recent developer conference where they showed many mobile apps. As an always aspiring photog we can see how the field is transitioning.

Second, people tend to underestimate the way that new tools, as ineffective as they are, drive changes in the very definition of work. Said another way, people forget that tools can also define the work and jobs people have. It isn't like work was always "mail around a 10MB presentation before the meeting". In fact a long time ago meeting agendas were typed out in courier by a typist -- that job was defined by the Selectric. The tools that created presentations, attachments, and follow up email defined a style of working. While we're reading all this, the exponential rise of mobile is changing what it means to work--to go to a meeting, to collaborate, to decide, to create, etc.

What is so fascinating about this transition is that we might be seeing a divide where creators of tools will use different tools, at least for some time, than the masses that use tools. Let's not project the needs of developers on to the whole space. We might reach a point where different tools are needed. Two years ago I might have said this applies to a lot of fields, but the rapid rise of mobile and tablet based software for many things is making that argument weak. Cash registers, MRI machines, video annotation, and more are all scenarios I have seen recently where one might have said "needs a real OS" or "this need sa full PC". As with the the idea of underestimating software, our own desire to find an anchor pushes us to view things through a lens where our own work doesn't change.

All of this is happening. In parts of the world they are skipping over PCs (Africa and China). Everyone is seeing their time in front of a screen go up enormous amounts and most of that is additive, but for many there is a substitute effect. This doesn't happen overnight or for everyone. TO deny it though is to deny the very changes that led to supporting the idea that the mouse, overlapping windows, and color once displaced other technologies where people said those were not substitutes for the speed, efficiency, or capabilities of what was in use.

<comment><USER26> If you're really Steven Sinofski, pretty damn amazing to see you on hn. Watching you introduce Windows 8 at build two years back, I couldn't have ever imagined seeing you post on hn or any other discussion forum for that matter.

<comment><USER27> Discovering that Steven Sinofsky is now a board partner at a big VC firm, it's not so surprising to see him here. Welcome.

<comment><USER25> It is me. I've always participated in forums like HN while at Microsoft (and now). I think you can even find me on USENET archives :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very hard to compare two worlds (mobile and 'immobile' computers) without taking into account that the one is brand new and people seem to want one (and there is a very large push to own the latest and greatest) and the other is simply mature technology that works until the hardware dies. It's obvious you're going to sell more of things that sit in peoples pockets that _replaced_ their previous phone, something they were doing with some regularity before smartphones appeared.

Smartphones and tablets are interesting, they may enable new applications, they take over some of the functionality of desktops and laptops but it's more of a continuum than a very strong difference, you go from small and on your person to phablets (what a word), tablets, laptops, touch screen all-in-one PCs, regular PCs all the way to servers.

So mobile simply completed the spectrum and as long as there is a fashion element to it they'll be sold in very large numbers (the fact that the batteries die is another push to upgrade them, ditto laptops).

In the longer term it will slow down a bit but mobile phones will always be sold in larger numbers than desktop computers because of these reasons.

There is one way in which 'mobile is eating the world', which is in terms of resources consumption, and that is going to be a real problem without better and more structured ways of thinking about disposing phones during the design phase as well as some kind of rebate program.

</comment><comment><USER28> Its worth it to keep in mind that A&H are in the business of selling investors on their investment ideas. This is a marketing piece not a technology piece.

</comment><comment><USER29> Don't disagree with the market numbers, but there's a problem with mobile. It is best illustrated by the fact that I csnnot develop a mobile app on a mobile device.

There won't be any "convergence" until mobile OSes are uncrippled.

I personally see a three device ecosystem. Mobile will cut into PC on the low end, but it's really growing into a space not served by PC or server. Computing in general is expanding.

<comment><USER12> > I cannot develop a mobile app on a mobile device.

You can develop an Android app on an Android device.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui)

<comment><USER30> It's probably better stated:

cannot _effectively_ develop a mobile app on a mobile device.

Productivity largely correlates with screensize.

[https://www.google.com/#q=productivity+screen+size](https://www.google.com/#q=productivity+screen+size)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't get the "Tech Brands Are Huge" slide, specifically the comparison to the same companies in 2004. Wouldnt you compare to the top four tech companies at the time (MSFT, AOL, whatever) to demonstrate that the share of global brand value in tech is much higher now?

</comment><comment><USER32> I have been hoping for a world where developers and content creators produced reactive HTML 5 web apps that worked beautifully on all devices from phones to laptops to large screen desktops and TVs.

An analogy: writing and production tools have been getting better with output to PDF, Kindle, iBook, and print books. The overhead for creativity decreases so more effort goes to producing great content. This is what I would like for interactive web applications.

There is a lot of niche content and special interests and there will continue to be a wide range of devices. Lots very inexpensive phones in developing countries and a wide range of devices upscale. Content providers and application developers should have access to all users, world wide, with low development overhead.

<comment><USER33> I am hoping for a world where developers have a choice of a technology, without being limited to legacy semi-modernized languages like HTML and JS.

<comment><USER32> True! Of course technology choices are good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Mobile is how I know I am old.

After 5 minutes on a iphone or android phone I am like f* this give me a damn desktop.

<comment><USER35> I think my iPad ran out of battery three months ago, I haven't looked at it since. If you don't use it for entertainment, it's pretty much useless. Touchscreens and the fullscreen apps just doesn't work for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Mobile is not the future. We're in that future right now, and it's largely stabilized. I fully believe VR is the future. Anyone who's tried the Oculus and who has even an ounce of entrepreneurial imagination would agree. Just like when the iPhone came out in '07, the right convergence of technology has made it possible for truly convincing VR to make it into the mainstream. It will revolutionize gaming, commerce, socialization, productivity, and more. Those who understand this are already skating towards that puck. Everyone else is fighting over the few remaining scraps that the mobile table has to offer.

<comment><USER37> > Anyone who's tried the Oculus and who has even an ounce of entrepreneurial > imagination would agree.

People have been saying exactly the same thing since the first VR came about. For some reason, VR really excited some people. Even though there is no way it is replacing a computer or a smartphone, since they have different uses.

Unless you are suggesting VR will improve writing emails or entering data into a spreadsheet?

<comment><USER36> >Even though there is no way it is replacing a computer or a smartphone, since they have different uses.

Of course VR won't replace a smartphone or a computer. It's a completely different tool solving a completely different problem.

>Unless you are suggesting VR will improve writing emails or entering data into a spreadsheet?

Reminds me of the comments people first made about the iPhone when it came out; like "how are you supposed to type without a physical keyboard?" It's an inability to think creatively. VR isn't going to improve writing emails or entering data into a spreadsheet, those activities are already well served by laptops. Use your imagination. VR will help you buy your next car because you can actually sit and test drive hundreds before you try the real thing. VR will let you visit other countries before you plan an expensive vacation. VR will let you connect with your friends across the world in ways you simply cannot do today. VR will let you walk around in your custom built home before a single nail is driven.

> People have been saying exactly the same thing since the first VR came > about.

So the value is obvious, then. It's just that the technology hasn't been there to make it viable. People were talking up handheld devices for _years_ as well, but it wasn't until it became technologically feasible to create a user friendly experience that it finally exploded in popularity.

<comment><USER38> >Reminds me of the comments people first made about the iPhone when it came out; like "how are you supposed to type without a physical keyboard?"

I don't know if that was a common conception at the time; after all touch- screen kiosks have been common since the 1990s. And Palm had discarded physical keyboards in their PDAs as far back as 1996.

More it was a case of 'typing will be much less efficient without a keyboard', which was true and has only been addressed by lateral thinking such as Swype[0], an analogue of which Apple have finally implemented after five generations.

[0] _or, as I 've just been reminded, Graffiti on the Palm PDAs_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Actually, we are eating the world.

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population%20of%20the%2...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population%20of%20the%20earth)

</comment><comment><USER40> The problem is the definition of mobile. Mobile seems to be more like a form factor than an operating system. If at the end I can convert a tablet into a full featured PC (i.e Microsoft Surface running Visual Studio) or I can plug a future mobile phone to a keyboard and monitor and run Microsoft Office there then there is no division between mobile, desktop PC, and web.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm not sure I understand the "three phases of technology deployment" slide. Specifically, I can't think of a good example of a company that writes a check to buy technology (or the analogy to a plant on the following slide). Are these three types of companies distinct?

</comment><comment><USER42> Did a double take at the "Glass is eating the world" slide before finally realizing they were talking about LCDs and not Google's failed wearable.

</comment><comment><USER43> Technology gets cheaper and easier to use - a consistent story over time. Interestin stats.

</comment><comment><USER44> I doubt this presentation was created on a mobile device.

</comment><comment><USER45> probably because PCs had already eaten the world

</comment><comment><USER46> but batteries?

</comment><comment><USER47> Hmm, Good Information ...

</comment><comment><USER48> I saw Eric Schmidt's quote "By the summer of 2012, the majority of the televisions you see in stores will have Google TV embedded" and stopped there.

<comment><USER49> I really hate comments like this. What is the point of leaving this "review"? Are you proud of not spending the 2 minutes to finish the slideshow? You mention a quote you didn't like, but then immediately invalidate the criticism by saying you didn't keep reading to see if there was anything further to back it up or refute it.

I'm not disagreeing with your complaint, I just really hate the way you framed it.

<comment><USER48> It makes me question the entire context of the presentation.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Professional Resume Critique? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN,
I've been wondering what process you all use to get your resume looked at. Is it worth paying for some sort of professional service, if friends/colleagues have already looked over it?
I've also heard that a lot of hiring these days uses automated services to screen resumes. Can anyone who works in recruiting share anything about that? Is it all about keywords + gaming the system now?
I feel like I haven't given this as much thought as I should, and given that resumes are the bulk of what I submit to job apps, I figure it'd be good to get some more perspective on this. <comment><USER2> Ask HN: Professional Resume Critique?

If this was a proper question you may have gotten more response. It's not at all clear from that what you are actually asking, which, now I'm here, are some very good questions. I assumed you just wanted people to read your résumé. No idea why I clicked on it. :-)</comment>


BART's Warm Springs extension to open March 25th - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/BART-s-long-awaited-Warm-Springs-extension-to-10993146.php <comment><USER2> > The gleaming new glass and white-painted-steel station sat finished but > empty, disconnected from the rest of the BART system. Nevertheless, it was > staffed with five station agents, two janitors and a train controller > because of a quirk in the way BART schedules workers.

<comment><USER3> 5.4 miles, $890,000,000.

<comment><USER4> Do infrastructure projects in the US cost more, or am I imagining it? Is it proportional to what the local population can pay or something?

Anyone have an idea why or how it coild be fixed?

<comment><USER5> It depends.

When you hear about massive projects being done cheaper (especially in per- mile costs), often it's because the project _isn 't_ running through an established, densely-populated area. So what you end up getting is "cost of building in a wilderness" versus "cost of building in a dense established city". The latter is going to be more expensive.

<comment><USER6> You're right, Tokyo, Singapore, Seoul, they're not densely populated at all!

Not to say there _aren 't_ valid reasons for some projects to be more expensive (especially when you're tunneling), but by all accounts the US manages to have outsized costs for pretty much any infrastructure project.

<comment><USER7> Are infrastructure projects a lot cheaper in Japan, South Korea and Singapore? I honestly don't know. I know they have better rail infrastructure, but those societies also pay higher taxes and make rail infrastructure a higher priority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> m-j-fox I often go to work at a lab that is as close to the Warm Springs BART station as any business could be, but I will still drive because walkability is so bad it will still be a 15 minute walk. Maybe someday they will build something near these East Bay BART stations.

<comment><USER8> In Santa Clara County they have a pretty strong vision for more transit- oriented development, for the Milpitas and Berryessa Stations [0]. We'll see if that actually happens though, it seems like a lot of those East Bay stations are just meant to be driven to.

[0] [http://www.vta.org/News-and-Media/Connect-with- VTA/Milpitas-...](http://www.vta.org/News-and-Media/Connect-with-VTA/Milpitas- Stands-Ground-on-Vision-for-a-Vibrant-Urban-BART-Station-Area)

<comment><USER9> The Berryessa station, at least, should be bikable from a decently-sized residential area, not to mention reachable by light rail or bus. We'll see what people actually do.

<comment> m-j-fox There's this frustrating principle of public transit where I've never lived in a place that I could take it and get there faster than I could by some other means. There's a bus stop right in front of my house, and light rail station a few minutes walk away. The train stops in front of my office, but I can still bike or drive to work faster.

When I lived far out in the suburbs there was a commuter train once an hour and I could always count on being able to drive the freeway faster, even in traffic even though it was miserable.

<comment><USER10> Don't worry, we will soon enough "improve" public transportation by slowing down, banning, and pricing you out of the alternatives.

EDIT: Yeah, this is flippant, but far as I can tell it's the truth. Policymakers are well aware that public transit is often not the most attractive option, and are working to bring it to the top of your list of options by degrading driving until it's worse. Congestion pricing, parking scarcity, reducing road throughput, etc. I guess in principle some of this might make buses more attractive, but not trains.

<comment><USER11> If anything, it's the opposite. Public transport in the U.S. sucks, and driving _always_ gets the upper hand in policymaking. These two go hand in hand, as the more people drive, the less money and effort goes into making the public transport systems better.

Stuff like congestion pricing isn't intended to increase use of public transport (that's a side effect), it's intended to reduce traffic and make driving "better" (by pricing lower-income folks out of it, but that's generally how "better" works in the U.S. anyway).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Valley Transportation Authority buses will not serve Warm Springs /South Fremont station_

Is there a reason for this?

<comment><USER13> VTA serves Santa Clara County and the station is in Alameda County; and the next BART station will connect with VTA's light rail and be next to a large transportation center.

<comment><USER14> They have inter county busses, just see Fremont BART.

<comment><USER13> Sure, but given they are already planning on making massive changes to the bus schedule as well as light rail, might as well wait for BART to be in Milpitas before doing that, since it's supposed to be "this year".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It was great while it lasted. Living walking distance from Fremont station - end of the line - meant I could guarantee a seat on the train in the mornings. But now the train will be full by the time it gets to Fremont station if it is before 9am. On a positive note there will be far fewer people getting off at 5pm at the Fremont station and clogging up the escalators.

Stand on the right, walk on the left, people!!

<comment><USER16> How high (long) are the escalators? Above 18.5 metres (60 feet in the US) it's more efficient to stand on both sides: [http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/01/subway-escalator- stan...](http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/01/subway-escalator-standing- study-tfl-london/424950/)

<comment><USER17> It is more efficient on average, but those that want to walk will be slowed down, while those willing to stand will be faster since the overcrowding will be reduce. However, if those that are not in a hurry and are willing to stand, they should simply deal with the overcrowding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> And yet they are still running trains from the 1970s which appear to not have been cleaned (let alone been renovated) since.

<comment><USER19> They look like they haven't been, but they did get new seat covers over the last 2-3 years and they're getting new train cars.... any day now</comment></comment>