Walking in L.A. - <AUTHOR> http://www.walkinginla.com/ <comment><USER2> A couple of years ago, I walked the entirety of Wilshire Boulevard, from One Wilshire in Downtown all the way to the beach in Santa Monica. It's about 16 miles, and it takes all day, but you can do it.

Breakfast at Eggslut, lunch at the Food Trucks at LACMA, and dinner in downtown Santa Monica.

Landmarks along the way include Downtown, Macarthur Park, Koreatown, LACMA, La Brea Tar Pits, Beverly Hills, Westwood, and of course Santa Monica.

It's a great way to re-experience the city.

<comment><USER3> My dogs are barkin just thinking about it.

<comment><USER4> Now that is a thing I haven't heard since my grandpa was still alive.

<comment><USER3> Got the expression from my mom, she had a lot of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So as somebody who lives in London, explain to me why Los Angeles always looks so featureless, so lacking in any kind of urban identity I'd expect to find in a city?

It always looks to me no so much as a city, but rather merely some buildings that are connected by freeways.

<comment><USER6> I'm going to assume you have never been to LA.

Just like London it is a collection of "villages". What were originally separate cities: Santa Monica, Hollywood, Pasadena etc have all been absorbed into the whole that is LA. I'm sure you can recognize the same process in london where Hampstead and Stratford have distinct personalities and yet are now both a small part of the whole that is London.

Now LA, unlike London is a city much easier to live in and less easy to experience as a tourist. Tourists try to travel from Malibu to Hollywood boulevard to the Broad museum all in the same day. This is a wonderful way to experience LA traffic. Any person who lives here would recommend you choose on area and spend most of your time experiencing it properly. If you want a walkable neighborhood go to Santa Monica, West Hollywood or Downtown. If you want nature, hiking and to feel like you are not in the city go to Malibu or the Hollywood Hills.

I would argue that all of the LA neighborhoods I mentioned are very familiar to most of us because we watch movies and television and LA is traditionally where those products are made. Maybe you don't watch tv or go to the movies - in that case go to the David Hockney exhibition in london and you will see that LA is one of the most distinctive cities in the world. It is good weather, easy living, good looking inhabitants and it is surrounded by a natural beauty few other cities possess. I could argue it makes London look like a giant rat hole in comparison but to each their own!

I think London has its historic sights and some pretty neighborhoods but the livability of the city is shockingly bad. From crappy housing stock to antiquated tube - I am much happier in LA. But that's just me.

<comment><USER7> I recommend "Los Angeles Plays Itself" to any interested in seeing the juxtaposition of what you see in movies/tv with the reality.

There's also a much shorter, funnier one called "Vancouver Never Plays Itself" \- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojm74VGsZBU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojm74VGsZBU)

<comment><USER8> At first I thought the title was a play on this meme:

[http://i3.kym- cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/056/730/597...](http://i3.kym- cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/056/730/597.jpg)

<comment><USER9> Actually, that's a turn of phrase that's been around since probably the 1970's, so it pre-dates internet "memes" by a few decades.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Symphony_(song)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Symphony_\(song\)) (1987)

      Big Daddy Kane's famous line, "Put
      a quarter in your ass 'cause you played
      yourself," pops up as a looped sample...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ82kNPgqpc&t=494](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ82kNPgqpc&t=494)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh heck yes, El Segundo and Hawthorne: [http://www.walkinginla.com/2016/Jul24/07_24_16.html](http://www.walkinginla.com/2016/Jul24/07_24_16.html)

My daily walking commute is between these two cities. El Segundo is home to several firms as it's a particularly business-friendly city. Meanwhile Hawthorne is best known as the home of Spacex.

The In N Out that several of us go to more often than we should is in one of the photos.

<comment><USER11> Bizarrely, about the nicest commute I ever had was to El Segundo. I lived in Santa Monica by the beach, and worked in El Segundo by the beach (crappy job but that's a different story).

It was a 13 mile cycle down the beach, with the terrible exception of Marina Del Rey, where you had to go inland.

I saw bonfires every Friday after work; an episode of Wilfred being filmed; and once even a pod of Dolphins swimming along and jumping out of the water as I cycled along this unusual formation: [https://goo.gl/maps/WXaZm1Kb5Lu](https://goo.gl/maps/WXaZm1Kb5Lu) (long and narrow with water on either side). I saw numerous beautiful sunsets, drum circles in Venice beach, homeless encampments waking up for the day (I always liked the idea that the homeless at least got to sleep with a ten million dollar view), and the occasional tallbike. Of course, my own recumbent got a fair amount of attention.

This all took about 50-55 minutes. The drive down 405 was 40-50 minutes by comparison.

All the while I inhaled loads of particulates, no doubt, and my rib still hurts from the crack put there by an inattentive driver for the 1 mile stretch between my apartment and the beach. I got screamed at the few times I tried to cycle down Lincoln, and one guy got out of his car and threatened to punch me. I was buzzed too many times to count by gigantic brodozer SUV's and lifted pickups.

Man, I usually say I hate LA but those 8 months of commuting were amazing. I really wish I'd gotten a helmet camera. Paradoxically every commute I've had since has been under 10 minutes and kind of dull. At the risk of being melodramatic I weep to think of the city it could've been.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've lived in three areas in LA -- Hollywood, downtown and Marina del Rey. I walked all the time, to most of the places I needed to go. I currently live next to a Ralph's, with another Ralphs, Gelson's and Pavilions within 0.5 miles. Plus tons of restaurants, banks etc. And between Uber/Lyft and the Metro Rail, I can get anywhere.

<comment><USER13> I live next to a Trader Joe's, target, and Ralph's in Westwood. It is also two short blocks away from where I work. I pay money for that, but damn is it convenient.

I have to remember to drive my car every so often so the battery doesn't drain completely.

<comment><USER14> I use one of these plugged in to my car's always-on cigarette lighter. It works. My battery is never flat, even if I don't drive for a month or two.

[http://www.harborfreight.com/15-watt-solar-battery- charger-6...](http://www.harborfreight.com/15-watt-solar-battery- charger-68692.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Best viewed, of course, with this playing in the background:

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

<comment><USER16> Thanks I did not know this song. Was expecting Drinking in LA ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQsQZvsR_QI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQsQZvsR_QI))

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is really a neat site, thank you. Have lived in LA all my life, so recognizing places was really fun.

Makes one want to take pictures themselves so they don't forget it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Urban walking is a great thing. Last year I was walking Singapore and had a great time.

Please note: blog spam not intended. Only to illustrate my experience : ([https://medium.com/@thisTenqyuLife/a-day-out-in- singapore-68...](https://medium.com/@thisTenqyuLife/a-day-out-in- singapore-689183129bf2))

</comment><comment><USER18> Awesome find. Amazing how much more enjoyable the world can become when you step out of your car, out of traffic and venture on your own two feet. A lot to see that is easily missed when looking at your own speed as you pass by.

</comment><comment><USER19> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography)

Seems vaguely related.

</comment><comment><USER20> Reminds me of [http://bahiker.com/](http://bahiker.com/) which was a terrific resource when I lived in CA 2000-04.

</comment><comment><USER21> Get a metro day pass and try to use it as much as possible. You'd be surprised how much you can do and see without getting in a car once

</comment><comment><USER22> Ha. I see he walked down Gage Ave. I grew up on the opposite end of it Next to East LA. The area (s)he walked thru can be pretty sketchy.

</comment><comment><USER23> Anyone else disappointed that the random walk link produced an almost everywhere differentiable path?

</comment><comment><USER24> I like that the html has changed with the times.

</comment><comment><USER25> Nobody walks in LA

<comment><USER26> Information is my vice, I try to obtain it without a price, and without a doubt, the results aren't nice...

shoot, trying to remember lyrics to a great song about "nobody walks in LA" but simply can not find it any which way online! I'm going to have to dust off an old hard drive and transcribe it at 3:23am because now it's driving me crazy, thanks a lot meddle!

<comment><USER25> Are you thinking about the Missing Persons song Walking in LA? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> LA is so ugly compared with SF.

<comment><USER28> That's what I like about LA. Keeps out the superficial people, and draws those who can see past appearances.

<comment><USER29> California native here. This is the first time I've ever heard anyone say this about LA. Most generalizations usually go the other way; this is new.

To be clear, all the generalizations are bad, IMO, but this perspective is new, and I think maybe the least accurate.

<comment><USER30> Pretty sure it's a joke ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Obligatory: Walken in LA. [https://gist.github.com/gruber/1063574](https://gist.github.com/gruber/1063574)</comment>


Cuil Crawl Data: 310 terabytes of compressed data, snapshot from 2007-8 - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/details/cuilcrawl

<comment><USER2> He gives you a hamburger, but it turns out you don't actually exist. He gives you terabytes of data. Something good comes out of it in the end.

<comment><USER3> For those wondering:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7da5i/police_raid...](http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7da5i/police_raids_reveal_baby_farms/c06cqxb)

<comment><USER4> care to explain/give further context? Even looking at that whole reddit thread I don't understand.

<comment><USER5> From what I can gather, Cuil was a sort of search engine that created summaries of pages using some algorithm. This algorithm often spliced together strange sentences without context. If you look at the whole thread, it seems that the person before the linked comment makes an analogy between Reddit's algorithm to determine thumbnails for a given link, and Cuil's algorithm to generate summaries.

Then, the user that was linked to, goes on to describe a technique to use the term "Cuil" as a unit of measurement, for how disjointed something is from something else.

<comment><USER6> Also, to give more context, that was not too long after the initial launch of Cuil and the feeling on reddit at the time was that Cuil search results where pretty bizarre. So reddit did what it do best and made a meme of the whole thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd love to hear the story behind getting the data to the Internet Archive, from Cuil. 310TB is a massive amount of data, and was even more massive in 2007. The biggest hard drive you could buy were only 500-750GB. If they were SAS drives they were probably only 300GB at the biggest. Did they just throw 6-8 racks worth of a SAN onto a truck and ship it over? What did they (Archive.org) do with it once they got it?

<comment><USER8> Here are some photos of their hardware (business insider claimed their local setup held 7 petabytes in the article circa Nov 2009).

[http://static.businessinsider.com/image/4af8564f0000000000e6...](http://static.businessinsider.com/image/4af8564f0000000000e660d4-590/their- local-data-center-holds-7-petabytes-of-data-heating-is-a-big-issue.jpg)

[http://static.businessinsider.com/image/4af84e320000000000b7...](http://static.businessinsider.com/image/4af84e320000000000b72feb-590/server- cabinets-that-have-been-built-but-not-yet-deployed.jpg)

[http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/4af880fe00000000009...](http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/4af880fe00000000009cd72c-590/cuil- gets-about-five-complaints-a-day-from-webmasters-worldwide.jpg)

[http://www.businessinsider.com/cuil-office- tour-2009-11#cuil...](http://www.businessinsider.com/cuil-office- tour-2009-11#cuil-is-currently-headquartered-in-menlo-park-in-an-building- once-occupied-by-tshirt-company-zazzle-1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So for about $12,000 in bandwidth fees, $17,000 in 4TB SATA drives, and say another $15,000 on 10 2U hosts, you could have a slightly stinky copy of the Internet that would fit in a half-height rack.

That's freaking awesome.

<comment><USER10> Even more interesting is, will in the future that space that represents the entire internet ( the rack ) grow in size or will disk storage improve faster than the growth of internet when finally you will be able to fit internet on a small hand held disk.

<comment><USER8> Media alone will vastly outrun micro storage capabilities over any relevant length of time we can project (5, 10, 20 years). It might be an interesting thought experiment regarding text (and probably only a fraction of a fraction of that due to social media).

YouTube alone will guarantee you could never store the Internet on a small hand held disk. They're adding 72+ hours of video to the service every minute. And ten years from now, it'll all be HD+ content, and they'll probably be adding 500 hours per minute or something similarly crazy.

I think Wikipedia is around 42gb right now, uncompressed (just the content pages). I don't think that includes the images. So right now we're just to the point where you can store a text Wikipedia on your smart phone with a $30 or $40 sd card. I'd guess in eight to ten years we'll have 500gb to 1tb smart phone equivalents depending on how that all evolves. You might be able to store a dozen plus dual layer full blu ray discs on your smart phone in a decade.

In other words, it's easy to say that we're not going to get anywhere near storing even a sliver of the Web / Internet on a small device in our lifetimes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can barely remember Cuil, but what I do remember is it being touted as a "Google Killer". Funny how that worked out; I wonder where they went wrong. Oh that's right, I searched for Fedora Linux and got pointed to a menswear retailer in the south of France.

<comment><USER12> They touted _themselves_ as a "Google Killer". They basically came out of the gate claiming to be the best search engine in the world, and then they went down in spectacular flames. Whoever developed their launch PR should have been put up against a wall and shot.

If they had rolled their technology with less fanfare they _may_ have made a minor dent in the market, but even then its unlikely. But at least then they could have taken their IP and gone into the Enterprise Search space and perhaps have gotten bought out by someone evil.

<comment><USER13> The press picked them up before they were actually ready to launch. Their search model was to segregate results into different categories and show all the categories at once, in sections of the page. When the traffic spike, the most popular categories went offline, leaving only the long-tail sections active. Most people never saw how the search would have looked when the software was finished and the servers beefed up.

<comment><USER14> This is false.

At cuil we were told by mgmt of the launch date and our very talented PR team kicked into gear and generated a ton of buzz via a nationwide press tour.

Despite popular opinion, the ops team kept the site up during the massive traffic surge. A combination of poor mgmt, initial deference to user testing, last minute commits and a nasty indexing bug were the reasons the relevance sucked on day 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anna Patterson, one of the Cuil founders, previously worked at archive.org and built an early search engine over their archive (named Recall, IIRC). According to her LinkedIn profile she currently works at Google.

<comment><USER14> It wasn't just Anna, there were many former archive staffers at cuil. I suspect that's how the data ended up being transferred.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can't wait to check this out in my Flock web browser!

</comment><comment><USER17> Is the actual data available for download yet? I'm just seeing hundreds of meta-data XML files.

<comment><USER18> I don't think so. If you go to one of the items (e.g. [https://ia601408.us.archive.org/18/items/cuil-domainshard- co...](https://ia601408.us.archive.org/18/items/cuil-domainshard- corpus5-large-merge-rev1.00355-of-25000/)) and try downloading one of the .arc.gz files, you'll get a message saying "The item is not available due to issues with the item's content." I've seen this happen before with other crawls, like for Youtube ([https://ia600301.us.archive.org/26/items/IA- YOUTUBE-000-2007...](https://ia600301.us.archive.org/26/items/IA- YOUTUBE-000-20070509025513-45711-crawling02.us.archive.org/))

It could be a copyright issue or to keep bandwidth low, but I don't know for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Will this be integrated with the Wayback Machine?

<comment><USER20> how effective will it be? It is 5 years old

<comment><USER21> The Wayback Machine archives old snapshots of pages as they appeared at various times. If the Cuil crawler has snapshots from 2007-08 of pages that aren't already in the Wayback Machine's own snapshots from that time (the Internet Archive crawler doesn't manage to get to everything), they could be used to supplement the archive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is this a product of Cuil's infamous Twiceler bot?

</comment><comment><USER23> Has the NSA downloaded it yet? That would be a good start to the Utah Data Center's contents.

<comment><USER24> The way they're spliced in means they don't have to crawl anything. When you surf the Web you're crawling for them.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: What books on marketing do you recomend? - <AUTHOR> I'm into buying books now and would like to know, which ones to buy for better (web) marketing understanding? <comment><USER2> Of all the books and research we've read, these are the ones we've found the most useful information from and influenced a large part of our redesign at Wufoo :

Call to Action <http://www.calltoactionbook.com/> (how to think about landing pages and navigation)

Landing Page Optimization <http://landingpageoptimizationbook.com/> (best technical book on how to measure landing pages, do not buy SEO books, they're all terrible and rehash what you see on most blogs)

Word of Mouth Marketing <http://wordofmouthbook.com/> (sometimes great marketing has nothing to do with what you do on the web)

Made to Stick <http://www.madetostick.com/> (just a great read on how you should shape your copy and ideas so they have maximum sticking power)

<comment><USER3> Whoah! You realise you are referring to yourself as 'we'? You realise that you are losing your voice as an individual, and taking on a more neutral tone that represents a company? You realise what is happening, right? Your company is no longer a collection of startup founders, it's just a polite 'we'.

Lose that, it's the new world. Companies are made up of vocal intelligent people, not neutral hollow 'we's.

<comment><USER4> If you look at his profile he gives his real name and his company and he clearly stands behind and owns his comments. You seem to be pushing "Cluetrain" as some form of political correctness. At some point a company becomes more than a collection of startup founders, which it must to succeed, and makes commitments as a firm based on a working consensus. I don't find it hard to believe that the founders talked over what books had been most useful: for me the "we" sounds natural now hollow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A start would be any second-year business degree marketing course textbook which discusses MASH analysis, among other foundational aspects of marketing.

This one (link is for a used copy): <http://www.antiqbook.com/boox/3rs/004826.shtml> has been absolute gold for me.

You wouldn't learn the basics of programming from a 'design patterns' book, right? I'd suggest learning the basics of marketing from a text which focuses on the basics of marketing (not advertising -- that's different). The other trendy "how to synergize your paradigms to leverage the new economy's zeitgeist" stuff can be picked up later.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd highly recommend "The New Rules of PR and Marketing" by David Meerman Scott.

[http://www.amazon.com/New-Rules-Marketing-PR- Podcasting/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/New-Rules-Marketing-PR- Podcasting/dp/0470113456)

Good read and very practical.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ogilvy on Advertising is one of my absolute favorites, and I go back to it regularly. It's also a beautiful book with lots of large photos of campaigns. It's not specifically "marketing" of course, but it covers that area, as well.

The funny thing is that a lot of folks in the business writing books today like to present themselves as being innovators and mavericks going against the "old school" of advertising and marketing...but Ogilvy covers a lot of the "new" techniques that folks like Godin and Ries and many others in the web era are pushing. Stuff like directly talking to your customer; the power of personal messages, for example, is covered in great detail in Ogilvy's book. Sure, the technology wasn't there yet to tweet and blog, but the ideas translate quite clearly and easily if you just think about it for a minute.

Another "old timer" (who also considered himself a maverick fighting the Ogilvy ways) is George Lois. His book "What's the Big Idea?" is full of great stories of reaching a market on the cheap.

</comment><comment><USER8> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=193123>

That recommends several books and blogs. The blogs seem good, but I haven't read the books yet.

Although, I do generally have pretty good luck with slate.

</comment><comment><USER9> Ries & Trout "Positioning" is a classic, and a short read.

<comment><USER7> Ries and Trout are excellent. I've read several of their books, and they all basically amount to the same ideas presented in Positioning, but they include a lot of great anecdotes that make things concrete--sometimes it's hard to see the right positioning for your products, so it can help to hear stories of how they found the right positioning for various products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If any book results in me becoming a multi-millionaire, I'm thinking it'll be Ready, Fire Aim by Michael Masterson. Written by someone with waist-deep experience in multi million dollar revenue businesses and full of crazy amounts of advice. The focus of the book is marketing, although it most certainly crosses over into entrepreneurship a long way.

[http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Fire-Aim-Million- Agora/dp/047018...](http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Fire-Aim-Million- Agora/dp/0470182024)

The reviews on that Amazon page should show how well it's regarded.

The thing about many "clever" marketing books, such as Seth Godin's (which ARE good), is that they don't help you clarify if what you're building is actually WORTH marketing. Ready, Fire, Aim looks at that side a lot more. You need to work out WHAT your product quite is before marketing it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Crossing the Chasm - Geoffrey Moore

[http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-Geoffrey- Moore/dp/00605...](http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-Geoffrey- Moore/dp/0060517123/)

<comment><USER9> Another good book where I'm not sure I know of too many people actually accomplishing something practical as a result of reading it.

<comment><USER12> Crossing the Chasm is mostly useful as a reality check for startup founders, i.e. just because you're on TechCrunch doesn't mean you're successful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's a corresponding YC link from today titled, "The best Web sites and books about advertising": <http://www.slate.com/id/2191446/>. It's from slate.com so I doubt there's anything useful though :)

I'm saving this as I'd like to see what others recommend as well.

</comment><comment><USER14> Many of the ones that have been summarized here are pretty good:

<http://www.squeezedbooks.com> (currently undergoing a server upgrade, sorry for random bits of downtime).

Some favorites include "20 years of high tech marketing disasters", "crossing the chasm", "innovator's dilemma".

</comment><comment><USER15> Just pick the one that's most popular :)

<comment><USER16> I use the same strategy when I look for an SEO expert, I just google SEO expert or some other relevant keyword and go to the #1 link.

<comment><USER15> I didn't actually come up with this, he did: <http://xkcd.com/125/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Tipping Point

<comment><USER9> I enjoyed reading this book, but:

(1) some of its arguments have been regularly refuted; for instance, "the power of context" and "broken windows".

(2) I've never heard a story about any real business using the "lessons" of this book to accomplish a marketing objective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Differentiate or Die

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got

The Irresistable Offer

<comment><USER19> Some observations:

Isn't the first title just the first volume of the Calculus textbook used in 'Saw'?

Does the second title have errata?

Does the third book describe the current political climate in the States?

Is the fourth book written by the Mafia?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Purple Cow and Trading Up

</comment><comment><USER21> The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing... a must have on any desk.

</comment><comment><USER22> Everything from Seth Godin. Permission Marketing, All Marketers are Liers and Purple Cow are my personal favorites.

<comment><USER23> Second the Seth Godin recommendation. Best books there are on marketing. I also really like "The Big Dip"

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Influence," by Robert Cialdini - although it's not necessarily packaged as a marketing book.

</comment><comment><USER25> Any book by Harry Beckwith. The Ultimate Sales Letter - Dan Kennedy.

</comment><comment><USER24> "The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR," by Al and Laura Ries.

</comment><comment><USER26> The Only Sustainable Edge

This is pretty much the only book that matters ;-)

</comment><comment><USER27> If possible ... Dont buy books, try marketing techniques in your own small enetrprise. In this way you will discover what works and what doesnt work.

<comment><USER13> Wait - so instead of spending $11.99 on a book that tells you what to do, you advocate spending tons of money and losing tons of sales while you reinvent the wheel? Come on, man...</comment></comment>


How I have avoided "JavaScript fatigue" - <AUTHOR> https://bhelx.simst.im/articles/how-ive-avoided-javascript-fatigue/ <comment><USER2> Thank you for writing this.

I think the biggest contributor to JS fatigue is almost every tutorial pointing its readers to tool up in a number of ways just to get started.

It becomes very difficult for anyone new to the language to imagine being useful or taken seriously if they can't use these tools.</comment>