Unpleasant Design - <AUTHOR> http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/unpleasant-design-hostile-urban-architecture/ <comment><USER2> One of the most important paragraphs:

> _Most of these goals seem noble, but the overall effect is somewhat > demoralizing, and follows a potentially dangerous logic with respect to > designing for public spaces. When design solutions address the symptoms of a > problem (like sleeping outside in public) rather than the cause of the > problem (like the myriad societal shortcomings that lead to homelessness), > that problem is simply pushed down the street._

Can't agree more. It's so common in France and really depressing. On the linked video (which looks to be shot in Paris, actually), we see dozens of these contraptions right in front of metro ads which cost most than it does to feed and shelter homeless people for several weeks.

<comment><USER3> >like the myriad societal shortcomings that lead to homelessness

I think the author has oversimplified many important things related to the problem of homelessness. I want to point of some other aspects of this problem.

Let me explain.

How the homelessness of all the homeless people can be blamed on the societal shortcomings? What about the homeless person's shortcomings?

Blaming everything on society and ignoring the personal shortcomings may gain political advantage but it sets very bad precedences and spoils the entire societal fabric. (The Marxists/socialists always use this as a tactic to sway public mood and that is more harmful for the free and humane society.)

e.g. I may be homeless because I sold my house and spent all the money on drugs or in the casinos or on watching movies or on prostitutes or on the internet or on something else to derive various types of carnal/non-carnal pleasures. In this way, not only I became homeless but I made my entire family of 4 children and a wife homeless.

This is just one example. The other major reason is immigration of huge number of people who are unskilled and/or are unwilling to work and migrate to cities which are more popular and hence are more costly and thus find themselves homeless.

How exactly can such homelessness be blamed on the society? In the first example, the person, who enjoyed the freedom of choice, must face the consequences of his/her actions.

In the other case: it is EU leaders' foolish (almost suicidal) decision to allow unchecked immigration to flood the European cities and make the life of the people already living there a hell. One of the very important reasons for Brexit is related to immigration, especially the immigration of people unwilling to integrate: i.e. people from Islamic countries.

I don't deny that there are some people (especially children) who are homeless not because of their own but because of someone else's actions. Let's agree, for the sake of argument, that a more humane society must take responsibility of such homeless people.

But even then, even if the homelessness of such people is partly due to some societal shortcomings, why the rest of people should suffer to provide space (e.g. public benches) for the homeless ones to sleep on?

<comment><USER4> Are you really using the outcomes of a decision by elected officials as a counter-example to the theory of homelessness as societal shortcomings?

<comment><USER3> I guess you caught me here logically. Thanks for it.

But I guess with the adoption of the policy of taking such decisions by public referendums is a good way to counter this shortcoming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The Camden Bench is virtually impossible to sleep on. It is anti-dealer and > anti-litter because it features no slots or crevices in which to stash drugs > or into which trash could slip. It is anti-theft because the recesses near > the ground allow people to store bags behind their legs and away from would > be criminals. It is anti-skateboard because the edges on the bench fluctuate > in height to make grinding difficult. It is anti-graffiti because it has a > special coating to repel paint.

It's a bench for sitting on, I don't understand how anyone gave this a second thought.

And are they treating the anti-skate/anti-graffiti as negatives? Why would the city not want to protect their property and make keep the tear to a minimum.

<comment><USER6> Consider it this way. The Camden Bench has a clear dictum - thou shalt only sit. It's pretty clear that this object has been placed by a rigid authority with strong opinions on the right and wrong way to use their bench.

A "standard" bench is more neutral - here is a bench. Do with it what you like. The user is invited to exercise their own preferences in how to use it. It acknowledges that the user may have their own valid ideas about how to use it. Consequently, the user feels more respected.

It's like using a locked-down phone vs one where the user is free to install their own firmware. The former may be adequate for many and more straightforward to use, but it may not serve all users and many would bristle just at the suggestion that they are being limited in what they can do.

<comment><USER7> "It's pretty clear that this object has been placed by a rigid authority with strong opinions on the right and wrong way to use their bench."

Should benches even be fixed in place? That is an expression of authority also. What if we were to built it out of modular components, and place it, without it being bolted in place? There would be problems from doing this. Are some of the same problems true of the multi-use bench you describe?

There are problems with your analogy to phones. Phones are private property. The benches in this thread are public property. We could quibble about what those terms mean, but it's clear that they are affected by different priorities and dynamics.

<comment><USER6> It's a rough analogy, I admit. But the meaning of "public" vs "private", that's one of the central issues here. What rights does a random person have over an object in the public space? They don't own it, but somehow they should have some say. Maybe that's a bad question; this is not just about legal rights. Does the object suggest a sense of partnership, of shared ownership, of community? If I feel engaged in my city, I'll respect it, I'll take care of it, I'll help it develop. If not, I won't bother. Maybe it'll get littered, broken, tagged. Design plays a role here in forming that impression.

<comment><USER7> I'm interested in this idea: can we imagine a world where people are so engaged that individuals just take care of problems like graffiti without there needing to be a council for it. What would it take to produce that spirit between people?

For there to be a bench, and for its use to not be defined, and for people to use it as it is marked.

> If not, I won't bother

Often there are communities who feel differently. The people who are invested in the community will maintain it. Outsiders will respect it less. Some will take it for granted, others will actively undermine it for the lulz. These groups live alongside one another, and share resources, but they are socialised differently.

Sometimes, though, things stick. In Australia, people leave their things on the beach when they go swimming. Messing with people's stuff seems to be a universal taboo. There'll be weird individuals who break it, but no subculture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why do people sleep on benches instead of shelters? When you look at a typical homeless person nest, it is arranged to protect them from theft and violence. It's either in a well populated place, usually with middle class people who will report violence, or where they can hear people coming, has good visibility, a corner for their back, etc.

When you look at a typical homeless shelter, it has bunks or cots, no security, people with no reason to report violence, and it's full of desperate homeless people with addictions and erratic mental illness. They don't want to be around each other because they know it's dangerous. Why would you go to a shelter unless you were looking for trouble? It's full of predators.

Charitable organizations don't give homeless people privacy for fear of the human things they will do, like drink, use drugs, have sex, etc. The street or a park provides relative privacy and freedom, within walking distance of services.

Given most homeless people are men, the solutions are more likely to involve providing basic physical privacy and security than comfort or sympathy.

<comment><USER9> >Why do people sleep on benches instead of shelters?

When I was homeless in NYC, I followed the advice of a local and called 311 to see if I could get a bed. In order to use the shelter's facilities I had to check myself into drug rehab. I also wasn't allowed to work a job if I was sleeping at the shelter. I was neither drug addicted nor willing to give up the full-time temp work I had taken up to survive. This was the only option offered me by the person over the phone. I asked if there were other options, she said no.

I figured there might be private (religious?) charities but I figured I needed it less than most being a white young male. Instead, I slept on the street (about a week?) until a reddit user let me crash at their place until I got on my feet.

That's why I slept on an uncomfortable park bench in Brooklyn rather than in a shelter. NYPD left me alone anyway. I would talk to them when I woke, around 5 or 6 am.

I miss how well-rested I was then. I still remember how it felt.

<comment><USER10> "I figured there might be private (religious?) charities but I figured I needed it less than most being a white young male."

I honestly don't get this mindset. You're already homeless. Those private/religious charities exist for exactly the purpose of helping you out.

<comment><USER9> I wasn't in any physical danger. Some people on the street have exes and other sorts to fear. I also knew I could seek shelter from private strangers with relatively little fear because I was male.

Part of the reason shelters are the way they are is because they are desperately limited in terms of beds they can offer. The hassle is a way to keep demand down.

I wasn't going to contribute to the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This isn't necessarily bad, and there are plenty of innocuous unpleasant designs: doors with locks, fences, car alarms, even those faucets in airport bathrooms you have to keep pushing to keep them from turning off. Sometimes you need to make something less friendly in order to prevent certain unwanted uses.

The important thing to remember is that you aren't fooling anyone. It's quite clear what your unpleasant design is designed to prevent, and the design itself serves as a constant reminder of the problem it was designed to solve. Locks remind you of burglary, airport bathroom faucets remind you that people often leave the water running, and spiky windowsills remind you of homelessness almost as much as actual homeless people do. This may not be the kind of feeling you want to build into your city!

<comment><USER12> > This isn't necessarily bad, and there are plenty of innocuous unpleasant > designs: doors with locks, fences, car alarms, even those faucets in airport > bathrooms you have to keep pushing to keep them from turning off. Sometimes > you need to make something less friendly in order to prevent certain > unwanted uses.

I think the key difference here is that these things prevent burglary, trespassing, grand theft, and thousands of gallons of wasted water. The Camden bench just makes it so you don't have to see a homeless person. There's something distinctly dehumanizing about that, moreso than door locks.

<comment><USER13> The difference between locks/fences/car alarms and those benches is literally the difference between criminals and homeless people. All those designs are purposeful attempts at deterring a particular social group. The question to ask is when it's right to act this way.

<comment><USER14> Do you think is right to prevent homeless people from sleeping in your car or your home?

<comment><USER13> It is. But we're talking about preventing homeless from using public space to live.

<comment><USER14> I think we agree in that case that the difference with locks on doors is not literally the difference between criminals and homeless people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Something I didn't see mentioned in the article are aluminum benches. They act as a giant heatsink and makes your butt ice cold if you sit too long.

They have them at the Copenhagen airport.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure that's "unpleasant design" so much as outright bad design. Aluminum is cheap and easy to extrude into rectangular tubes suitable for use as bench slats. Unfortunately aluminum is a pretty terrible material for this use. It's freezing cold in the winter, as you noted. It can also be hot enough to burn in the summer sun. And it's hard. And it's ugly (when used this way). I don't think any of this is intended to deter people from sleeping on it. It's just a cheap way to install a bench.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I see two main claims in the article:

* "Unpleasant design" is different because it aims to exert social control in public spaces

* "Unpleasant design" is different because it is intended to create a hostile atmosphere - it increases unpleasantness rather than pleasantness

I don't really agree with either claim.

All design of public spaces is intended to exert some form of social control. Creating a manicured park with flower beds, comfortable benches and beautiful splashing fountains is intended to exert social control by encouraging people to congregate and spend time in the park. In fact, any good designer attempts to exert control by encouraging certain behaviour patterns over other behaviour patterns.

"Unpleasant design" is not intended to increase unpleasantness. Some groups perceive people sleeping on benches or congregating ("loitering") as unpleasant, just as other groups find preventing people from sleeping on benches or congregating to be unpleasant.

I'm not defending the particular examples of design referenced in the article. I'm not saying it's a great idea to make benches you can't lie down on. But I don't agree it makes sense as a distinct category of design. It's just design that tends to favour groups higher in the socio-economic hierarchy at the expense of groups lower in the socio-economic hierarchy. This may be a very bad thing, but I don't think it's a different type of design.

<comment><USER18> "I don't think it's a different type of design."

For some reason whenever I see articles like this on design, I think of conway's law. See, broadly, design is a process of questioning and understanding. This process is limited by and maybe starts to metaphorically resemble the structure of the organisation which produces it.

This is for some reason much more apparent where there is a social/political aspect to the design, rather than being purely commercial. Maybe a better design for a toilet to prevent injecting.. is a safe injecting room. ie. The problem as identified by the client is not 'people shooting up unsafely', the problem is 'our voters don't like these people hanging around'. The blue light somehow exposes the cold blooded rationalism of a council wishing to satisfy its benefactors at the expense of its inhabitants.In fact, it is just as important that it also _illustrates_ this point, as it is as much about symbolism as utility.

So I guess while I agree with you, I still think it is worth drawing attention to the unpleasant designs for unpleasant clients..

<comment><USER19> But that _is_ the whole point - the "society" intentionally wants to exclude certain activities and people, and thus makes systems, laws and also physical items and environment to make that desire happen.

Blue light in e.g. macdonalds bathrooms is not actually intended to influence how people inject their drugs, it's intended to make so that the people who want to inject their drugs don't come there, to exclude them from their community. A safe injecting room would not solve _that_ , I'd rather argue that the blue lights are a cheaper solution doing the same job as e.g. face control and bouncers throwing people out from some other types of estabilishments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This works also towards animals.

For example, on top of the information displays at outdoor stations, there are spikes, as seen on this picture:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/IMG_6146...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/IMG_6146_Hamburg_Hbf.JPG)

These prevent birds from sitting on these displays, which keeps the displays clean and prevents passengers waiting below that display from unpleasant surprises.

<comment><USER21> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse#Design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse#Design)

Queues at Disneyland etc. follow these principles too, to stop you from getting stressed by a long wait.

</comment></comment><comment> Anthony-G The "leaning benches" remind me of the _mercy seats_ found in late medieval churches. Old or infirm monks and other clergy could use them for support during long prayers for which standing was obligatory.

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

</comment><comment><USER22> I hate those high pitched buzzers for teenagers. I'm in my 20s and can still hear them.

<comment> guard-of-terra To me, "buzzers for teenagers" is an extremelly unsettling slash dehumanizing idea. I thought it's a proof of concept, I can't imagine how anybody will actually install one of these.

It's totally like installing a bump in your door frame so any people with disability will have difficulty passing. We're not wanting any limp lamers to destroy our healthy mood inside, do we?

One day people who embraced this kind of thing will be old and helpless, and "teenagers" will held all posts. Just sayin'.

<comment><USER23> > I can't imagine how anybody will actually install one of these. //

You run a shop, a convenience store. Until recently you were making a living for you and your family but a group of teenagers have taken to hanging out outside your store. They do petty criminal damage, graffiti, break the bins, that kinda thing. What's more troubling is that they verbally abuse your clientelle and provide a hostile environment. Your clients stop coming because they're intimidated, rightly or wrongly, by this crowd of teenagers: they don't want to be asked to buy alcohol, and jeered at if they refuse, just to get a pint of milk and some bread or get their morning papers.

You call the police, who send someone a few hours after the teenagers have left, or on occasions clear them away; but they just come back.

Installing a "Mosquito" high-pitch noise generator means that the teenagers will be put off congregating here, they'll meet perhaps at the park over the road, or go to the skate park, or meet at each other's houses, or ... the harm they'll suffer is extremely limited. The benefit is now that the community can again use the store in a relaxed way, you can now make a living again. The teenagers end up playing football or skating or something, not intimidating people trying to use a convenience store at least.

Some people perhaps complain about the noise, but once inside it doesn't affect them, it's a minor inconvenience as they enter the store.

Can you really not see the benefit nor imagine someone using such a device?

<comment> guard-of-terra > Installing a "Mosquito" high-pitch noise generator means that the teenagers > will be put off congregating here

So here you're installing a mosquito device _outside_ of your venue? A device that produces constant noize pollution in a common street? I can surely see how somebody should complain to police, and they surely should confiscate that device and write you a fine. It's strange if that would not happen.

Also:

> ...a group of teenagers have taken to hanging out outside your store...

There's some kind of weird narrative here, because I've never heard things like this happening where I live. Not once.

> The teenagers end up playing football or skating or something, not > intimidating people

Why won't they do that in a first place? If they also enjoy destroying bins and drawing gravity they can surely do that in ten minutes or so, doing all the damage and avoiding too much nuisance from your device? I can't imagine teenagers hanging in one place all the time, won't that be extremelly boring?

<comment><USER23> It happens where I live, a poorer city in the UK. Sometimes it's a very similar thing outside people's houses.

Have you ever been asked to buy alcohol by underage kids as you approach a shop? If not then you probably don't live in an area where things like this happen (or alcohol laws in you country are more liberal).

<comment><USER24> I think you don't realize how loud these things are. The whole street becomes painful to walk on.

<comment> guard-of-terra Why don't you complain to authorities?

<comment><USER24> It's apparently legal to use.

<comment> guard-of-terra Then somebody should totally install such a device near the shop owner's home. Encompass perhaps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I really hate all of the effort taken to prevent people from sleeping (or generally relaxing) on the street in San Francisco. I have on many occasions picked up a sandwich and then walked a mile without finding a good place to sit and eat it. All because we're worried some homeless person might be too comfortable.

The problem is not that homeless people want to sleep on benches, the problem is that we've failed so badly at taking care of each other that people have nowhere else to sleep.

</comment><comment><USER26> > Concrete or metal spikes are used to keep people from urinating in dark city > corners

[https://ablersite.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/anti_urination...](https://ablersite.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/anti_urination_utrecht_01.jpg)

[http://www.slab-mag.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/10/Sorbonne....](http://www.slab-mag.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/10/Sorbonne.JPG)

[http://unpleasant.pravi.me/wp- content/uploads/2011/10/anti-w...](http://unpleasant.pravi.me/wp- content/uploads/2011/10/anti-wewe-02.jpg)

? [http://www.slowtrav.com/blog/jgk/DSCN5768ant.jpg](http://www.slowtrav.com/blog/jgk/DSCN5768ant.jpg)

<comment><USER27> I didn't realise spikes, etc. were used for this; I would imagine this just "shifts the problem" a few centimetres, requiring spikes to stop people urinating on the spikes.

I think the "splash-back" approach to stop urination is a much more interesting topic, compared to unimaginative spikes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> A friend had a shoe store downtown and one of the most unpleasants things about it was that every night someone would piss in the front gate/door. How do you deter that?

He closed the business (not only for that reason, of course) and has a store in the mall now.

<comment><USER27> Install a urinal nearby?

<comment><USER29> This is what the city can do. What can you do as a shop owner?

<comment><USER28> Electrifying the metal doors comes to mind, but its illegal, evil, and probably disproportionate to the damage done by the drunkard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I always wondered if this is hostile architecture or just plain stupid

[http://i.imgur.com/FUuFPgK.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/FUuFPgK.jpg)

See how the lady walks on the right? Bicycles stay on the two rails on the left and often pedestrians too. All the space in the middle is nobody's land. It's rounded pebbles in a concrete pavement.

</comment><comment><USER31> You see this a lot of airports. One particularly egregious example is EasyJet's 'boarding lounge' (which you are funneled into long before a plane even arrives), which has a few leaning benches but is otherwise standing room only. This isn't for any public good - it is meant to push you into paying for 'speedy boarding', which gets you access to a roped off area with proper seats.

</comment><comment><USER32> It seems like this is the real world equivalent of the design that has to go into social software.

It's a universal rule of the public Internet that spam and abuse make everything suck. Therefore it's not enough that your design encourages good usage. It also has to discourage bad usage.

</comment><comment><USER33> Generally I avoid the homeless. I don't give them money and I frown on their activities. However, they are humans, and they deserve to be treated with respect. It warmed my hearts when the anarchists in London used cement to cover up the spikes at a Tesco. I'm not advocating destruction of property, or the breakage of any laws, but I do think we all need to change our views on the homeless. They're people. Treat them with respect, even if you disagree with their way of life.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm convinced that someone(s) in Santa Monica, CA's urban planning divsion has been practicing unpleasant design ruthlessly.

The first pass replaced normal bus bench seating with low blue toadstools. Once they figured out that they're terrible for people with any kind of knee problem or more serious disability, they added a pair of poles to the sides. Useless, uncomfortable seats, but by God, no homeless people (or regular people) can enjo y their use.

More recently, at a rail station they added a wavy pattern to the sidewalks[1]. I heard second-hand that the texture causes disorientation and nausea, and then I experienced it myself. Now I'm convinced that it's to keep bicyclists off the sidewalk, because it makes anyone sick to look at it, but bicyclists are slightly faster and usually _have_ to look where they're going more carefully than pedestrians.

[1] [http://ronslog.typepad.com/ronslog/2016/06/santa-monica- phot...](http://ronslog.typepad.com/ronslog/2016/06/santa-monica-photos.html) , particularly the sixth photo. Not mine, but the best shots I've seen of it.

<comment><USER35> Good lord that sidewalk is horrible when looked at from eye height. Does it give the same impression of lumpy/wavy when you're crossing it rather than walking along it?

<comment><USER34> It's mostly oriented so that you can only walk along it -- that is, it's bounded by the road and a barrier, so that you can only really experience it one way.

It is pretty miserable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Then there's the Columbia, SC final solution to the homeless problem.[1][2] Their concentration camp plan didn't work out, though.

[1] [http://www.columbiasc.net/depts/city- council/docs/old_downlo...](http://www.columbiasc.net/depts/city- council/docs/old_downloads/08_13_2013_Agenda_Items/Emergency_Homeless_Response_13_August_2013.pdf) [2] [http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/08/28/south-carolina- ca...](http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/08/28/south-carolina-capital-city- forces-its-homeless-out.html)

</comment><comment><USER37> There is some artist working on this in a critical way that could have been quoted in the post:

\- [http://www.the-wabsite.com/works/relaxation- situationnelle](http://www.the-wabsite.com/works/relaxation-situationnelle)

\- [http://www.the-wabsite.com/works/paris-a-place-to-stay](http://www.the- wabsite.com/works/paris-a-place-to-stay)

\- [http://www.the-wabsite.com/works/skate-anti-skate](http://www.the- wabsite.com/works/skate-anti-skate)

</comment><comment><USER38> There is an old classic book about the topic about NYC from a famous researcher. Everyone should read that book. (I don't recall the details, but I have it in my bookshelf at home)

<comment><USER39> Are you thinking of "the life and death of great american cities" ? I'm reading it now.. very interesting book and still relevant.

<comment><USER40> Jane Jacobs, for those unfamiliar with the author. A true gem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I would love to see fewer street lights. Especially in village / suburban settings. But the word is that they reduce crime. Are there any studies to this effect?

<comment><USER4> Some studies:

[http://www.popcenter.org/library/crimeprevention/volume_10/0...](http://www.popcenter.org/library/crimeprevention/volume_10/03-PeaseLighting.pdf)

[http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2015/07/08/jech-2015-20601...](http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2015/07/08/jech-2015-206012.short?g=w_jech_ahead_tab)

<comment><USER42> Sorry, I meant to upvote you but got the wrong arrow. Anyway, I once read a nice article about light pollution that made this point: light to reduce crime is a common misconception. Criminals don't like dark places any more than we do, and a lack of light makes their job harder, not easier. It would seem that the primary literature continues to bear this out.

<comment><USER43> Yes this is why there is _no_ nighttime lighting on my farm. I know the place well, so I have no trouble walking about and doing whatever I need. Recently a mare and foal were delivered by semi van at the front gate (our hill is too steep for this vehicle) at 1:30 AM. It was no trouble for me to lead these animals the half mile to their pasture, down the hill, across several other pastures and a creek, in the pitch-black darkness of a moonless cloudy night. Someone unfamiliar with the property would have broken several ankles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Reminds me of a scandal with Tesco in London when they installed "anti- homeless" spikes in front of their stores. [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/12/tesco- spikes...](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/12/tesco-spikes- remove-regent-street-homeless-protests)

</comment><comment><USER45> It's basically applied actor-network theory from sociology and the delegation of control to objects [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93network_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93network_theory)

</comment><comment><USER46> The irony that the second edition of the book is digital only, so can't be used for stoking fires, covering windows, making paper airplanes... etc.

Unpleasant design ?

</comment><comment><USER47> aka, design.

</comment><comment><USER48> the blue toilet isnt bad design - its used to stop people injecting drugs in public toilets

<comment><USER49> I don't think anything in this article is designed "poorly" and I don't think the author meant to convey that the design was bad - the designs of these objects just have a goal of being unpleasant. If your goal is to design something unpleasant, and you succeed, I would say that is a good design.

<comment><USER50> I think you maybe just skimmed over the article. They didn't state that something was designed "poorly".</comment></comment></comment>


Things I learned making the fastest site in the world - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/10-things-i-learned-making-the-fastest-site-in-the-world-18a0e1cdf4a7 <comment><USER2> He says three of his ten suggestions are crap, but he's lying. All ten are gold.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a very poor article full of kitchy writing, no real information and no relation to the title.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Perhaps ncmncm is the author or a friend, because this article is a fluff piece with a clickbait title.

I mean come on: "#1 Try not to make a slow site"

And, no, this person did not make the fastest site in the world. They put up a static HTML page, compared it to Twitter and Medium etc., and then advised you to, for example, not server side render your site with React.

Trash article.

<comment><AUTHOR> No not a friend just thought it was genuinely interesting</comment></comment></comment>


World's First Patented Unhackable Computer Ever - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/microsafex/worlds-first-patented-unhackable-computer-ever <comment><USER2> "Interesting" pitch ... "patented", "In my research, I found out that all the PC manufacturers follow the IBM Personal computer design that IBM came out with in the 1980s.", hardware designed and custom operating system written in 3 months, absolutely no details about what it'll do differently, ...

I wonder if that's a strategy to make money: sell something with preposterous security claims, so a bunch of security people will jump at buying one to prove you wrong. Should probably a bit more realistic for that.

<comment><AUTHOR> > sell something with preposterous security claims, so a bunch of security > people will jump at buying one to prove you wrong.

my first feeling too. title alone is already going to outrage the infosec community. it'll lead to discussion and condemnation, and that drives traffic ... some will come to his defense and point to "oh but he has a patent" ... then the discussion will splinter further into sub-threads about the merits of the US patent system or whether patents make sense for cash-strapped founders.

Once there is enough traction other would-be con-artists (the Craig Wright types) jump in to defend him or at least amplify the message on social media (maybe even John Mcafee will invest).

I can't tell if the kickstarter campaign was written by a child or a mentally ill person. The patent immediately shaves off 20 IQ points from anyone reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I find the website particularly amusing - it appears the "specs" are just copied from those of a Macbook [https://microsafex.com/](https://microsafex.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> "Where did the idea come from? In a dream. "

Yep. And a dream it shall remain. And what's up with the cringy video presentation?

</comment><comment><USER5> Apple claims their computers and OS are "secure by design" (their own words) and it helps sell computers.

[https://www.apple.com/business/resources/docs/macOS_Security...](https://www.apple.com/business/resources/docs/macOS_Security_Overview.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: How do I find a marketing/sales/business guy (university)? - <AUTHOR> I'm a fairly well-written guy, and I have way more people-skills than the average coder.
Even though we have a few customers on board and I'm getting some great feedback, I have no idea how to get more people in the feedback loop.  There's no way the lunch-and-how's-it-going process is going to scale to hundreds of customers.  My cofounder and I have sat down and basically have determined that we need to find someone with serious people skills who can go out and talk to potential customers, aggregate feedback, and give us some pulse on how to move forward.  Do we need to add feature X?  Change the billing process?  Change the product?  I have no idea, because I can only talk to three customers at once and still keep development moving quickly.
I'm at a (fairly technical/nerdy) university campus and I can't seem to find that guy†.  (Our market at the moment is professors/education, so campus is pretty relevant).  S/he's not in the CS/math/engineering departments, obviously (my social circles).  I'm also decent at literature and music, and know a lot of those people--none of which are really sales-ey.
Short of turning up in the School of Business and saying "So, do you have any decent students?" in a condescending tone I'm not sure what actual, practical steps I can take to find someone who can go find potential customers.
1) Where do the people who are good at marketing/sales/business hang out?
2) How do I tell whether a candidate is any good?
† Or should that guy be finding me / selling himself on me?  Am I going about this all wrong?
A) Our test market is our current professors, so finding another student (or someone at least affiliated with the school / nearby) is better than not
B) Yes, I could go take business classes / read books and such (and I've learned a ton this year) but the work involved really deserves a dedicated person. <comment><USER2> Consider talking to marketing professors for recommendations. I've found that professors in general are pretty receptive to giving free advice and help though the obvious caveat is that book smart doesn't always translate (try meeting with them during office hours - they may even provide you with some free advice).

If you're really lucky you'll find a prof who is willing to use you as an example for a case/class in which case you'd have exposure to a number of business students who might end up being interested in working with you after.

I would also clearly define whether you're looking for someone who is strong at sales vs marketing as the skill sets are different. You may find better and more driven candidates in sales at a technical college.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Take out an ad on Craig's List.

2\. Look for someone who has some _maturity_ and a few years experience. Try to interview a few people so as to give yourself some selection.

3\. Make sure you supervise this person closely in order to ensure s/he is actually working everyday for a full day.

</comment><comment><USER4> drew: i'm in boston. here's a project i'm working on: <http://www.slideshare.net/rcmorin/say-hi-presentation>

let's connect. rcmorin (at) gmail.com</comment>


Ask HN: Should the People who create software be called Engineers? - <AUTHOR>

'The IEEE offers two certifications (Certified Software Development Associate and Certified Software Development Professional). The IEEE certifications do not use the term Engineer in their title for compatibility reasons. In some parts of the US such as Texas, the use of the term Engineer is regulated only to those who have a Professional Engineer license.'<p>'E. W. Dijkstra, wrote in a paper that the coining of the term software engineer was not useful since it was an inappropriate analogy, "The existence of the mere term has been the base of a number of extremely shallow—and false—analogies, which just confuse the issue...Computers are such exceptional gadgets that there is good reason to assume that most analogies with other disciplines are too shallow to be of any positive value, are even so shallow that they are only confusing."' <comment><USER2> I think that such terminology in the software world has sailed past the point of trying to impose restrictions on it. The whole field is commonly called "computer science", with frequent arguments that it is neither science nor particularly about computers.

Instead of focusing on certifying the people (they can call themselves whatever they want), perhaps we should focus on certifying the product. Not all software is safety critical, and someone who works on flight control systems by day may well work on cheap iPhone entertainment apps by night.

And in fact this is what does happen, in the fields that demand it. Avionics software is verified and certified; the individuals who made it (for the most part) are not.

</comment><comment><USER3> What about those 'Financial Engineers' in Wall Street? Are they qualified to be called engineers?

Creating software is as much an engineering activity as any other traditional engineering disciplines. So yes, Software engineer is an appropriate title.

On the other hand, plenty of licensed PE's have never worked in an engineering environment, but they got licensed anyway, simply because they got an engineering degree and worked in a so called related field (such as business, LOL!!). I've seen too many of those. I would not take the PE title seriously.

</comment><comment><USER4> In general, no they should not because most of them don't actually do engineering of the code that they write. But some developers actually do approach the task like engineers and they definitely do deserve , the title for that. Devops is a movement that brings developers and sysadmins together and that is one sign that there may be real engineering being done rather than buggy code being flung over the transom to the Ops team. Engineers pay attention to design, do TDD, write acceptance tests, integrate pieces written in several best-of-breed languages rather than relying on the compiler and link editor for integration.

If SEMAT gains traction then there will be a lot more real engineers in software and the people who use the title because it is cool will be forced out by a new generation of fizzbuzz type questions. <http://semat.org/?page_id=28>

</comment><comment><USER5> Practically speaking, the most common term for the job of creating software is "software engineer", so just use it.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you commonly or conceivably work for a PE who is legally responsible for your work, and you have a path to earning your PE, then sure. That would imply particular education and career paths. Everyone else, no.

Not to be elitist, it would just be nice if the term meant the same thing that it means to other fields. I've never voluntarily called myself a software engineer. Software developer is the better general term IMO.

Texas at one time was going to require some sort of Engineer designation to work in software at all. I disagree with that.</comment>


Fooling Production-Grade Classification Systems with Adversarial Traffic Signs [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1907/1907.00374.pdf <comment><USER2> Just if someone is interested, here is the link to the "landing" page, with the metadata and abstract of the paper:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.00374](https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.00374)

</comment><comment><USER3> Makes me think that there is still a long way to go here. All of the changes they made to the signs leave them still easily readable by humans. One could see how reflections, weather and other environmental factors would distort a road sign more than this. Speed limit signs are possibly the hardest example though because it requires the system to recognise the exact number on it, rather than just its existence. I wonder how much harder it would be to get it to misclassify a stop sign?

<comment><USER4> The road sign has to be modified in the specific manner of the attack; not just any distortion will do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The training set for the classifiers must not contain real-world traffic signs which are weathered, rusted, peeled, bent, smudged, and spray paint tagged.

<comment><USER6> Don't forget perforated by shotguns.

And stickered.

And those ones you sometimes find in malls, apartment complexes, or office parks that are an architectural standard sign with the traffic control sign symbol painted on one side, so you can't identify what the sign is from other angles. I hate those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow I've read about adversarial images before but didn't think attacks would be this practical. It's weird to think that the added smudges have any relevance on the result when there is so much contrast. It appears easy to us because we're constantly training, cross-checking, and adjusting to conditions without much conscious interference.

At some point, not now, we will accept what the machine says. Machines will be better (faster and more accurate) at number recognition than us. But this paper shows how far behind they are still. In the context of cars I think the machines will just refuse to drive like we do. They (really their builders) will demand much better controlled conditions to operate safely.

<comment><USER8> We can still be fooled by sirnple things. Whats a siRNple?

<comment><USER9> Dealing with typos is the sort of robustness that people have, but that these image recognition programs are not displaying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice! I really appreciate the real-world testing and not just "proving" the NN can be fooled by running it against image files.

This always seemed to me like a huge omission in reports about adversarial attacks, sure it can be fooled with pixel-perfect changes of input data, but would it survive literally any "real-world"-like environment? I am quite surprised it does!

</comment><comment><USER11> [https://m.xkcd.com/1958/](https://m.xkcd.com/1958/)

Not quite the same problem but the result is pretty much the same. The fact that computer vision can be fooled by attacks like these are lower risk than we might imagine. The more important question is what is the likelihood that such conditions occur naturally and randomly.

Edit: also, the summary comment about this being the first time a physical object was used to fool a commercial classification system sounds... dubious...

<comment><USER12> The XKCD you linked is reasonable on the surface of it, but if you mull over it a bit more, you'll see the three glaring omissions:

1) people care much, much less about "hurting" automated systems, and

2) people feel much less responsibility for accidents & failures if they are separated by a level of indirection of automation

3) people feel much less responsible for mass actions that affect anonymous people far away

Together, those three factors will indeed cause more incidents of people attempting to fool the self-driving cars. Especially if done by displaying malicious images via mass devices, like the light-up info boards, electronic billboards etc.. I don't expect much more actual accidents, tho.

<comment><USER13> Also, people aren't generally fooled by bad road lines.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps not. And they certainly aren't fooled by adversarial speed signs. But they are fooled by plenty of other things which are equally easy to implement and equally dangerous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This seems like a meaningless attack. If you're modifying a sign, you can simply replace it with any other sign.

What exactly is the utility?

<comment><USER10> The near-invisibility of the attack to a layman's (human) eye. I would think this kind of attack would take a non-negligible time to discover, unlike simply replacing a sign which is obvious to any random passerby.

<comment><USER14> Why would you think so? The signs that worked would look very odd when driven past. Tiny pictures on a screen don't do these things justice.

On the other hand a different sign is just a different sign.</comment></comment></comment>


A Positive Solution for Plagiarism - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/A-Positive-Solution-for/134498/ <comment><USER2> I will be honest (full disclosure: I work in an academic institution). This obsessions with plaigarism is utter crap.

I know this is an opinion, but I have built a philosophy through years of failing at tasks. If you do not do your work, who cares? Time and time again, I see kids that cheat and they never tread water. Even if they graduate, they have problems. Because the final product is irrelevant in the education process, it is the developmental process you are paying for. The real world is dissimilar of course, but without skills and reasoning skills it is harder and harder beat competitors when making a superior product, whatever it is. Therein lies the rub.

I was a language major, intentionally or not, because I wanted to study in speciliazations where there is a binary choice: you know or you do not, you are fluent or you are not. Now there are tests that "prove" that, but only by application and communicating in a native way you can advance and miscommunication with a native speaker reminds you which side of the spectrum you are on. It took me longer to appreciate it, but computer science, as an extension of the language of mathematics, is something you apply and grasp, or you do not. You cannot fool a computer into a sorting algorithm without grasping and explaining the requisite steps (unless you end in system administration and the continued absence of 4th generation languages, haha).

No academic institution will espouse this view, as credentials cost money, and cheating devalues the brand when moronic indivdiuals with said credentials showed they have no skills in applying skills or analyzing info.

Just my thoughts. Seen it so many times as a student and an employee, I lost count.

<comment><USER3> > Time and time again, I see kids that cheat and they never tread water. Even > if they graduate, they have problems.

Graduating these students is bad for them and bad for the institution. I've always wished that more students could be made to see that the goal of assignments is not to produce something (a paper, code, proofs) but rather to get _the experience working through producing the thing_. All too often they seem to think of the situation as like a job where the instructor (boss) tells the student (worker) to do something and then they do it because that's what the instructor wants. With that mindset, it's easy to see why they think they're getting away with something when they plagiarize, when in fact they're mostly cheating themselves.

What universities _should_ be doing is communicating more clearly to students about the nature of the activity that they're paying four years of their lives and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to participate in.

Another point: especially in courses where the grades are magically adjusted to fit some curve, allowing cheating is extremely unfair to honest students. Even if there's no official curving going on, it's hard for the instructor to accurately gauge what students in the course should be capable of when a bunch of them are cheating. I've seen the effects of this firsthand as a student: one result is inflation in the difficulty of assignments. Finally, even when neither of those two concerns apply, it can be demoralizing for students who work hard and have a fair grasp of the material to get Cs or Bs when their know-nothing classmates seem to be breezing through, snapping up As.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You could also not count homework towards the GPA.

I studied in France where the system is a bit different. We had homework, and they were graded so we could get feedback, but the idea that a homework grade would count towards your GPA would have seemed utterly absurd. Homework was meant to help you master the material and figure out if you understood it, not evaluate you!

Exams were taken in a large hall, with many supervisors. We also had graded projects to complete during the semesters, but no two students (or group of students for group projects) were assigned the same project.

Doing my graduate studies in the US came as a shock. There was a ton of homework, and the grade mattered! This meant that if you already knew or understood the material, you couldn't just skip the homework: you had to do the whole stupid thing.

<comment><USER5> I went to school in Canada; all of the classes had homework, but in some classes homework counted for GPA and in some it didn't. A good chunk of the students would do the homework that counted and skip all the homework that didn't, whether they needed it or not. The end result being less learning and lower grades in the classes where homework didn't count. To be fair most of those students weren't exactly on the high end of the grade scale to begin with and it's their own fault if they chose not to do the homework. But from the prof's POV, if they wanted people to succeed in their classes, it was better to have the homework count. There is probably some cultural reason why French students can be relied on to do their homework more than US/Canadians.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are few original thoughts ever. Plagiarism and the ownership of thoughts are so misplaced, particularly in modern society. Think of your writings as your gift to society for its betterment and not something you've done for the advancement of your personal brand and the idea of owning a thought seems silly.

Having to rephrase something because someone already said it that way is an insane waste of time from a bygone era. Open source thought already.

<comment><USER7> > Having to rephrase something because someone already said it that way is an > insane waste of time from a bygone era.

Which is precisely why you are not required to do it (and never were), as long as you properly quote and attribute it :).

<comment><USER8> >Which is precisely why you are not required to do it

Right or wrong (I know, it's wrong), this silly 'phrase it in your own words' idea is taught to many students as the way to avoid plagiarizing others' works.

<comment><USER7> It's taught as the way to avoid plagiarism because, for students, the rate of "accidental" plagiarism is extremely high: they tend to unintentionally repeat an author's affirmation simply because it is so well formulated that it "sticks" to their mind. It also helps them avoid "newspaper clipping" articles, where they write a ten-page paper full of "X's view on the matter is that... whereas Y disagrees because...", which _is_ considered a form of plagiarism.

<comment><USER8> >It's taught as the way to avoid plagiarism because, for students, the rate of "accidental" plagiarism is extremely high

Well it's wrong because it is teaching students to avoid detection, not to avoid plagiarizing.

Which is it? Can you "properly quote and attribute" or not? Your post seems to be in conflict with what you said two posts ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We could start by ceasing to teach students to technically avoid "plagiarism!" accusations with the simple-minded application of a thesaurus. "Write it in your own words." Which often becomes s/word/similar word/. This was never a good idea. There may have been some tiny amount of value in this approach[1] when it was required to actually find a thesaurus and a dictionary and learn new words, but that is certainly lost today when there are myriad tools which will automatically do this for you. I'd still argue that it does more harm than good since it teaches students how to use others' ideas without attribution.

[1] Not as an exercise to instil honesty or principle, but as a simple vocabulary and grammar teaching activity.

</comment><comment><USER9> It strikes me that perhaps the simplest way to kill plagiarism is to simply require a handwritten rough draft. Take the copy/paste convenience out of cheating, and far fewer students will cheat: writing your own thoughts is a lot less tedious than hand-copying someone else's. It also has the bonus of ensuring that at least some minimal editing has taken place, over the course of writing the paper a second time.

Students with disabilities that prevent writing a draft by hand -actually missing the dominant hand or not having use of it, or arthritis in the wrists, or carpal tunnel syndrome, or whatever- will need accommodations, of course. No solution will catch everyone. But it should still radically shrink the pool of copied (and copyable) papers.

<comment><USER10> A reasonable alternative to this would be to require a hardcopy draft with visible editing marks as a draft. Going to paper at least once helps alot in the editing process.

<comment><USER3> Hardcopy or not, making students iterate over their work with feedback at each step, is the right way to do this. Make submitting drafts and responding to feedback part of the grade. The only problem that this is a lot of work for the instructor, who increasingly is an adjunct with little experience running all over town to teach six courses just to make ends meet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Perhaps a good approach would be to assume a format is compromised as it is, but still focus on doing the best possible job of testing students. It should be possible to gear things such that plagiarism does not really do enough to be worth it (e.g. you would still do poorly on oral presentations / interviews, exam essay questions, etc.).</comment>


Apple may have chosen the wrong new font - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/6/4/5778972/apple-may-have-chosen-the-wrong-new-font

<comment><USER2> How is this newsworthy? I'm not an Apple user, so forgive me if I'm wrong but can't users just change the fonts?</comment>


Sharp Drop in Start-Ups Bodes Ill for Recovery  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125409527512844979.html?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_news

<comment><USER2> Don't subscribe, so can't read the whole article, but the opening paragraphs are consistent with what I see here (Boston) -- technology/biotech is experiencing moderate growth, but other areas (retail, construction, finance) show only low or moderate levels of new company formation. Just anecdotal observations on my part, but definitely seems slow -- especially in areas like retail and construction which experience cyclical bankruptcy/restart patterns.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not a subscriber so haven't read the whole thing, but I suspect startups were responsible for very little of that 14% of new business hiring.

<comment><USER4> _Businesses in their first 90 days of life accounted for 14% of hiring in the U.S. between 1993 and 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics._

Ie., that 14% is just in their first 90 days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sharp drop in WSJ subscriptions bodes ill for this news item.</comment>


What I'm Telling Business People About Why Relational Databases Are So Bad - <AUTHOR> https://codeburst.io/what-im-telling-business-people-about-why-relational-databases-are-so-bad-6f38d3d6c995 <comment><USER2> My issues with the article. First, I didn't know enterprise systems fail so regularly. Really? Where? Who is having these failures so regularly? Secondly, I'm a bit surprised about the 'across the field' statements against relational database engines and the SQL layer. After all, there are so many different implementations. They all work and function quite a bit differently in performance and design. This article sounds like someone who is selling books or perhaps the author is one of the many great corporate management seminar- tarians. A person selling specialized lectures designed to appeal to middle management held at opulent motel conference centers across the land. Oh, I can't wait to get my hands on those croissants and fresh coffee. I'm going to be so smart now.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is hilarious. SQL has had parameter binding for most of its history; SQL injection is just a recent effect of people no longer caring about parse or serialization overhead.

You can go back 20+ years and find similar rants to this; I remember going through these OODB arguments in the 90's.

</comment><comment><USER4> People like this only contribute to the idea that most CTOs have 0 technical knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER5> I didn't see you propose an alternative?

<comment><USER6> It's bullshit. Almost any modern SQL client lib does parameter substitution and escaping to prevent injection, the DRY thing is a red herring, and the OOP thing is appealing to something that is increasingly falling out of favor.

This article is a fraud, and the author is a hack.</comment></comment>


Introducing the Photographers' Identities Catalog - <AUTHOR> http://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/03/25/introducing-pic <comment><USER2> I know the guy behind this, David Lowe. He's been working on it for a long time. It represents a massive amount of research and work and will be useful to many people.

Congratulations to David, the team, and the NYPL!

<comment><USER3> Thanks, Ratsbane! I'm David Lowe the editor of the data in PIC (the beautiful interface was built by the NYPL Labs team, specifically Mauricio Giraldo). Happy to field any questions or comments.</comment></comment>


Facebook's Zuckerberg Becomes Poster Child for New Privacy Settings - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/12/zuckerberg-facebook-privacy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+(Wired%3A+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))&utm_content=My+Yahoo

<comment><USER2> That's cool for millionaires and Time's most influential people. But some of us are looking for jobs. And we're pretty paranoid.</comment>


Ask HN: Best modern web stack for new self hosted projects - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
I'm looking to develop several small, self-hostable apps, likely wrapped in Docker for easy deployment.
There needs to be API support, as well as front end support. It should be fast and reasonably lightweight to host on small servers (Raspberry Pis etc). I don't want to write a ton of boilerplate to get user registration, API keys, etc working.
I don't want to spend all day wrestling with types or memory management (looking at you Rust and Go). The code should ideally be somewhat approachable for other people to be able to contribute.
A million build dependencies is also undesirable so Node is probably out.
At this point I'm leaning towards just plain ol' PHP like Laravel.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> Build a dapp in Go right now. It's not good for modeling complex business problems but if your app is mostly API it's great for self-hosted. Memory management isn't a problem but def more verbose and less "fun" than ruby. If you use SQLite or badger as database it has a great install story- no configuration or docker even really needed. Front end is in Vue and that gets packed into 25mb binary I can run locally on win/Mac or throw on a VPS and run at scale.</comment>


Observing the second law of thermodynamics in software - <AUTHOR> https://nick.comer.io/post/2nd-law-of-thermodynamics-in-software <comment><USER2> There is a cost to everything-private, which is that downstream consumers of your software hate you because now they have to get PRs merged for every little thing that you didn't anticipate. Actually it probably makes the problem worse because we're just going to patch your shit and access the private fields anyway.

The functional programming and especially the data driven schools of thought tackle the same problem more elegantly.

<comment><USER3> > downstream consumers of your software hate you because now they have to get > PRs merged for every little thing that you didn't anticipate

If that's the case then the build system or dependency management tool is too stupid. NPM is, for example, because you can't install most dependencies straight from git repositories. Most npm packages need to be built on the developers machine and only artefacts are uploaded to the npm registry. If you need to patch for example babel (which you depend on through five levels of intermediate dependencies), you're in for a hell.

Haskell, on the other hand, makes it very easy to fork & patch a dependency (even a transient one) and you can use that while upstream figures out how to merge a PR.

<comment><USER4> The ability to quickly use your PR for a system that was overly private is beneficial, but is still decidedly non-zero in terms of time and effort. The PR has to be written in the first place, for example. And that's before we get into whether upstream even accepts your patch without modifications, or even accepts it at all.

<comment><USER2> he means we can fork and vendor locally but it doesn't scale when doing enterprise java for many reasons

<comment><USER3> I'm always assuming that upstream will either accept the PR, or explain how to achieve my goal without requiring a change to upstream. Either way, such a pull request should be resolved fairly quickly and not linger around for too long.

Why does this not not scale when doing enterprise java? Is it the 'enterprise', or 'java', or the combination thereof?

<comment><USER2> Many reasons, cultural, not often on github or developed openly, huge variance in quality, maybe not so agile, huge code drops every 6 months with tons of churn so even tiny patches can add huge overhead to the rebase when you upgrade versions soooo you don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author talks about a piece of software as if it were a closed system, where disorder would inevitably increase. This is not the case, disorder in software can be decreased by doing work. However, the business requirements will inevitably become more complex over time, and there will come a point where the cost of adaptation of the software is higher than the cost of starting over with a design that better accomodates the current requirements. Inability to adapt is observed in ageing organisms also.

<comment><USER6> Lehman's 2nd (increasing complexity) law addresses this. He defines an E-type system as one which is embedded in the "real world" and thus both influences and is influenced by it, and then claims that:

"as an E-type system evolves, its complexity increases unless work is done to maintain or reduce it" [1]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman%27s_laws_of_software_ev...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman%27s_laws_of_software_evolution)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> However a software is not an isolated system.

<comment><USER8> Honest question, what would prompt you and so many others to assume that the laws of thermodynamics are only applicable to isolated systems? Do you honestly believe that we don't have a model that is useful for realistic systems? Like thermodynamics is only some pipe dream that. Vet actually planned out because we do not only have isolated systems?

<comment><USER7> Because actually the laws of thermodynamics are only applicable to isolated systems. "The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time." But usually you can build quasi-isolated systems and minimize the external interference so it is negligible (i.e. a car engine). This is hardly the case of software systems though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _In the attempt to make this move, the first step will be to find all the > places in the code-base that make use of this public property and fix those > so that they don't do this anymore. If the tooling around the project is > amazing, there will be some static code analysis to use; but most will end > up having to grep the entire code-base_

Isn't "find all usages" a pretty basic feature in modern IDEs? If you're working in a single self-contained codebase this really isn't very hard to do.

IMO a lot of the teaching around best practices in OO programming doesnt differentiate enough between things that matter in authoring libraries versus self-contained proprietary code. When everyone is committing to the same repo certain types of encapsulation and abstraction aren't always as critical as they're made out to be.

<comment><USER10> > When everyone is committing to the same repo certain types of encapsulation > and abstraction aren't always as critical as they're made out to be.

Until you want to refactor or reuse. We develop a lot of in-house tools for our rather esoteric systems and systems analysis. We start by writing specific solutions, then refactor as we find common elements across tools. Now we have several libraries that can be used by anyone to develop custom solutions to problems because we've factored out common elements into those libraries.

Treating encapsulation and abstraction like they're unimportant would've resulted in a lot of extra work over the years.

<comment><USER9> It's definitely important. My point is simply questioning whether it's really critical to always get it right from day one. Certain types of refactoring like public -> private really aren't always that hard in a closed system. I've done it many times with a few clicks in my IDE. Of course the difficulty depends on the nature of the change and the type of abstraction you need modify; but to me the difference between public and private is pretty low on the list of things that create big headaches. Especially in Java where unless you're using immutable objects everywhere, hiding something behind a getter that performs no additional logic is often useless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a real thing, not an analogy to physics, called Technical Debt

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt)</comment>


Adding Digits in Python (or Smarter-looking doesn't mean better) - <AUTHOR> http://explique.me/Adding_digits/

<comment><USER2> Surprised you didn't have `sum(map(int, number_string))` in there.

      In [5]: def f(x):
         ...:     x = str(x)
         ...:     return sum(map(int, x))

      In [6]: %timeit second_way_optimized(x)
      1000 loops, best of 3: 200 µs per loop

      In [7]: %timeit f(x)
      1000 loops, best of 3: 223 µs per loop

Marginally slower, a hell of a lot easier to read what's going on.</comment>


I Got a C on My Orgo Exam What Should I Do?  - <AUTHOR> http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/04/01/i-got-a-c-on-my-orgo-exam-what-should-i-do/

<comment><USER2> A good look at how to effectively study hard stuff. +1 for the reference to Carol Dweck's _Mindset_ (a great book).</comment>