Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/google-got-it-wrong-the-open-office-trend-is-destroying-the-workplace/?tid=sm_fb <comment><USER2> I'll play contrarian for a moment: the most productive office I've ever worked in was an open office layout. What worked for us:

* Separate clusters by function / noise level -- We didn't put sales people and developers next to one another. People who spent all day on the phone were near other people who spent all day on the phone.

* Keep clusters small -- We had 4 person "pods" of desks for most of our early lifecycle. You weren't constantly interrupted by a dozen people from every direction, but you had a few people you could bounce ideas off of when you needed to.

* Lots of breakout spaces -- If you need to have a conversation that lasts more than a minute or so, find a private space. It was nice to hear a snippet of a conversation and decide "I care about this topic, let's break out and discuss further" or "This is not relevant right now, I'm going to disregard."

* Be respectful of flow -- If someone is deep in focus, just leave a post-it on their desk or send a message via chat. (This was a good form of one-bit communication for us.)

I don't think it's impossible to create a great open office layout. People just copied the ceremony without the essence. It's no different than "Agile is broken! We have 20 minute standups 3 times a day and nothing gets done!" Maybe the reason is because you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER3> Your advice is on the same level as "eat healthy" and "exercise more". It's nice, we should all do it, however for some people it never happens.

And here's the problem - some people just cannot be respectful of other people's time or flow and also you can find a lot of variation between communication styles (e.g. synchronous vs asynchronous) or noise tolerance of people.

For example, some people only want to work from home, whereas I cannot work from home, but on the other hand I need a very distractions free environment. I have really good and respectful colleagues and yet I find myself saying no to requests and interruptions several times per day even, actively declining attempts at synchronous communications between us, just so I could get anything done. This happens to the point of becoming nauseating, not only because " _Alex, can you talk?_ " is distracting enough, but also because I have to say NO a lot. And I'm probably labeled as being a jerk, yet I cannot help being one, because contrary to other people, I really, really need to be left alone when focusing on something.

On your experience, I'm not arguing that the open office in question wasn't productive _for you_ or for your close peers, but have you asked the others about it?

<comment><USER4> I'm bothered by people who prioritize synchronous communication over asynchronous. On a recent project, I worked with someone who was remote. Every time I sent an e-mail, he picked up the telephone. Then he took a long time to get to the point, and couldn't ever seem to disengage cleanly.

Open floor plans would probably work great for people like that. I prefer to not be pre-empted from my current task, and to have a written record of the things you wanted to tell me, so I can refer to it later. Face-to-face conversations are fine if I'm not already doing something else, but don't force me into one just because you're doing your "manager walk" or can't be arsed to have a specific agenda for the conversation.

If I have a door, I can hang a "do not disturb" sign on it, and lo, I am not disturbed. Otherwise, it may just be closed because the compressor from the fridge in the break area bothers me. I don't mind interruptions, provided they are more important than what I am currently doing, but it seems like open plans lower the threshold for interruption. Some people see that as also lowering the threshold for collaboration. But there are ways to design a space to encourage one without also encouraging the other.

<comment><USER5> > I'm bothered by people who prioritize synchronous communication over > asynchronous.

Amen. My voicemail greeting for my work phone is "Hi, you've reached the voicemail box of Jack Maney. Instead of leaving me a voicemail, please leave me an email. Thank you."

<comment><USER6> I don't get it. They're both async.

<comment><USER5> What voicemail system allows you to "skim" through voicemails (roughly the equivalent of fast-forward and 2x speed playback capabilities) and is as convenient to use as email? Honest question. Because if you can name such a voicemail service, I'm sold!

<comment><USER7> FYI: Google voice will transcribe your voicemails.

<comment><USER5> Great. Now please talk the IT people at the Enterprise company at which I work to either a) ditch their voicemail system and go with Google Voice or b) integrate Google Voice into their existing voicemail system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Open offices are type A/extroverted personality wet dreams. Everybody they need is within earshot and they can see EVERYTHING so they can properly control everything. However for introverts, people with noise sensitivity, or people with ADD this is an absolute nightmare. I find a lot of engineers tend to be either introverts or have some type of manageable ADD so it doesn't surprise me that many people would be negatively affected by an office layout like this.

<comment><USER9> I don't feel this way at all, and judging from the number of similar comments that popped up while writing this, I don't think I'm in the minority either. Why can't an introvert put on headphones or simply disregard irrelevant conversations in an open office? Why do type A extroverts feel the need to control things they happen to be nearby?

<comment><USER10> "Why can't an introvert put on headphones or simply disregard irrelevant conversations"

The whole point with the office (for me) is to provide an environment to maximize developer output of value.

I do not need to serendeptiously eavesdrop on every discussion on the floor with 40 people to provide maximum ouput. What I do need, is quiet.

Vice versa it is fair to ask why cant the people who yearn extra stimulus to install disco lights in their offices and play some bazar tape from their headphones :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wouldn't attribute the movement to Google, strictly speaking. I worked at a large insurance agency for a few year. They had partially open cubes (low walls). I don't presume they've ever been influenced by what Google does.

The low walls were a blessing and a bane. My team worked well like that. None of us are particularly loud people. We all had headphones and quiet music. The flow of the pen allowed easy communication and rolling between each others cubes.

The bane came from other teams around us. There was a woman that was going through an extremely messy divorce (attempted murder of herself and children by arson). She was understandably upset. Rather than taking family medical leave she would talk to her mother for hours in her cube. Her voice was particularly grating to me. I ended up leaving one day to buy a pair of firing range headphones and firing range earplugs.

Sadly the headphone/earplugs only sort of worked. They're designed to reduce low noises like a gunshot. Her voice was higher. They did help. I was able to concentrate.

<comment><USER12> > large insurance agency

> she would talk to her mother for hours in her cube

Hello HR, they would be all over that.

<comment><USER11> I know, but two things kept me from doing that. 1) I was a contractor. Historically that made me little better than dirt at the client. So I didn't want to rock the boat. 2) Given that her husband tried to kill her, I felt that the emotional toll on her having to get a talking to might be a bit much at that time. That was entirely an emotional argument, not a rational one. I could be wrong.

On the plus side I have firing range headphones now. So I can go to the actual firing range a few blocks from my house. I am also prepared if I ever have a child. Crying gets to me. So I'll put those on and be one of the most loving fathers ever. I'll probably have music earbuds in too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I thought it has been solved years ago. Open offices have the same benefits as huge halls in a 20th century industrial factories as long as workers are doing "routine, mechanical tasks". Filing forms, coding html, translating a small specifications into Java code, any kind of a "drone work" \- repetitive tasks with a little or no variation - could be done in an open space with the best benefits/costs ratio for an employer.

The only kind of work which cannot be done efficiently in a constant noise and distractions are these "engineering tasks" which require intense mental concentration (or what they usually call "meditating on a problem").

But such kind of high-skilled jobs are about 5% (and the best guys have their rooms, because they are worth it) so there is no wonder that 90% is an open space.

An example of such a task, which requires a quiet place would be "analyzing and decomposing an unfamiliar problem domain into a reasonable, valid metrics/heuristics to be used within machine-learning algorithms, given that you have no PhD in ML or problem domain's field". Very common scenario, isn't it?

<comment><USER14> yep, when programming had the status of academic or engineering discipline it was done in the offices, when it got down to "technical associate/stuff" it moved into cubicles, now it is just a blue collar job of the 21st century and thus it is done on an open factory floor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wrote about this some time ago in a ranty way: [http://georgestocker.com/2014/04/15/how-to-destroy- programme...](http://georgestocker.com/2014/04/15/how-to-destroy-programmer- productivity/)

I really believe that the open office floor plan led me to leaving my former job -- I simply could not be as productive as I needed to be in an open floor plan environment.

I wouldn't be surprised if Open-Office floor plans cost more in productivity than they save in rent. I don't mean to 'hate' on it so much; but it's hard to explain just how distracting, noisy, and damaging to productivity it can be.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, but the difference between rent and salary is that they're taxed differently (probably, I assume, I'm ignorant), and while the amount of space you get from a given amount of rent is constant, you can always coerce, shame, or threaten an employee to worker longer hours. For, you know, the crunch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yay. Another "Let's argue about open floorplan offices" article. Never can have enough of those.

I'm not going to take apart the article: there's simply too many errors to get into. I will say in the author's defense that many companies will jump onto a bandwagon without having any idea of why other people are riding or where it's going. [insert long list of good ideas that corporate america adopted and killed]

On a personal note, I do not like co-location. I also do not like open plan offices. I like it quiet, with my space, my music, my 3-screen development setup, and my door. Which I can shut.

And that's what makes this discussion so painful for me to both watch and participate in. You see, as somebody who helps teams perform better, for certain kinds of work -- creative work where there is a lot of change and risk -- open plan beats the hell out of other setups. It's not even close. [for the proper definition of open plan.]

In the past couple of years I have seen several teams that were unable to accomplish much of anything start working much more effectively by simply sitting beside each other and being there during the day. In some cases, they did nothing else: just sat beside each other. Still, work improved. The effect is so noticeable you could almost write a book and start a movement just on open floorplan.

The last misconception I'll address, since it seems to run rampant, is that open floor plan is not about productivity or cost savings. It's about having people work with each other. This may actually mean _less_ work gets done; but it's the right work. Open floor plan is where the guy at the end of the table late on a Friday afternoon observes aloud to himself "You know, maybe we should be doing X instead of Y" and everybody has the social and emotional context to realize that you just changed the scope of the work from 10x to x. [insert many more examples here]

</comment><comment><USER18> At some point, open-offices will be the only thing that the majority of software developers know. If you've never experienced the productivity that comes from being able to think without interruption, you won't know what you are missing. At that point, the trend will probably be irreversible.

For me personally, this trend isn't all bad:

When I work someplace with this setup it's kind of nice to "hang out with my friends" even if it isn't nearly as productive.

When I'm working for myself, being able to think deeply gives me a competitive advantage over places with open-offices. :-)

<comment><USER19> "If you've never experienced the productivity that comes from being able to think without interruption, you won't know what you are missing."

I keep a diary of learning notes and have throughout my career. It's interesting to go through it and see that in my university days I was picking up concepts, tools, and techniques far faster than I do now despite the fact that I am considerably better and more experienced. I chalk it up to the fact that I can't just "go dark" for a week to properly learn something distraction free even if it would be in my companies best interests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> That anybody got it wrong is not the problem. That those same companies do not recognize the problems and just chalk it up to a failed experiment and restore offices is the real failure that is impacting workplaces.

<comment><USER21> Yup. When it becomes clear that it's not helping anyone actually get work done, companies just stick to their guns and refuse to change.

Which helps illustrate that point that its never been about increased productivity and collaboration-its always been about cutting the cost of office space and increasing the supervisor's ability to monitor what you're doing every second of the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The best office setup I've ever worked in was a narrow building that had smallish offices (big enough for two people) on the outside (each had a small window) and open meeting space in the middle. Everyone had their own space (like to leave junk on your desk? clean freak? everyone is happy) and if you wanted to hang out or hold an impromptu meeting the common area was literally outside your door. Most of the time people's office doors were wide open so no one was closed off but if you wanted to really focus or take a call or listen to a video or just disconnect for a minute you could shut your door.

<comment><USER22> The best one from my history was a startup (aprox. 15 people at this time) simply in house which was designed as home for 2+3: 2-3 people in a room, normal kitchen, front-yard and even attic for stuff.

I don't get why we stuck in cookie-cutter office spaces which leads to everything expect producitivty.

<comment><USER23> +1 My experience as an architect and as an office worker confirm what you say. Somehow a mixed solution is the best. Spaces for small teams (max. 5 people), keep some privacy but also allow communication. Spaces of 15-20m2 are perfect for that, making a small house the best option. "Normal kitchen, front-yard and even attic for stuff" are also a great complement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Open plan offices: 30% drop in productivity for a 20% drop in real estate costs.

<comment><USER25> Plus an approximately 0% chance of hiring anybody who currently has their own private office, unless you have something really special to offer (considerably above-market compensation or prestige or a position on a remarkably interesting project).

<comment><USER26> I went from private office to open floor plan when I switched jobs last. It was towards the bottom of things I cared about when I was considering the move.

Private offices are definitely nice, but I also enjoy the positives of an open office

<comment><USER25> I could see going from a private office to, say, a well-designed cubicle, but I definitely think for a lot of folks the transition to an open floor plan could be incredibly disruptive.

I suppose it depends on the personality. Generally, though, with private offices, well-designed communal areas, and huddle rooms (plus larger conference rooms), it's hard to see how an open floor plan has any advantages other than supposed cost cutting. The crux of the issue, I think, is that it requires a rather special type of personality to be really productive in a more chaotic open floor plan, whereas it requires a much less special type of personality to be really productive when one has the option of retiring to an office.

Really, what's most important to me is that one has the option of retiring to a private space when the extra concentration is needed. If one were to sit in an open space by default, but always was guaranteed a small private space when needed, I wouldn't see many issues. But I've seen very few open office plans that can legitimately offer that sort of dynamic. Headphones do not constitute a private space -- they're more of a bandaid.

<comment><USER26> I personally find cubes to be the worst combination of collaboration vs privacy. You still have people who will walk up to you when you're working, but the cubes really break up the space.

In my office, they have small "conference rooms" which really only have space for 2-3 people that you can reserve if you want to hide away in somewhere quite. I usually fall back to these if I need to go heads down on something.

The best part of the office is the ability to close/lock the door to prevent the annoying "walk ups" that really disrupt work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Many moons ago, interviewing for my first full-time job out of school, I visited a certain large aerospace company in the Seattle area :-) One of the things that turned me off and helped lead to my turning down their offer was their bullpen-style office arrangement. (Arguably even worse than today's incarnations, it was just a bunch of desks in a large open area though we seem to be heading back in that direction.)

Mind you, it wasn't the only thing. Everything about the hiring process and people I spoke with screamed replaceable cog--they actually hired me solely based on my resume and only gave me a plant visit when I asked for one--but the bullpen office arrangement sure didn't help.

<comment><USER28> I believe I interned for the same said company :)

A fun-fact(tm) proudly shared on a tour still haunts me to this day:

"Behold the largest office space (er...cubical farm) in the US... 5,000 or so seats."

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This article is a classic case of "link journalism".

Not a single study she linked to is conclusive and applicable to all situations. The studies merely suggest that there may be drawbacks to open offices.

Additionally, she mentions the camaraderie among teammates masking lost productivity. Who's to say that this doesn't contribute to the overall well being of the office? Even if it does mean some near-term productivity is lost.

Each company is different, and each department within the company is different. We just moved into an office space, and our sales floor is much different than our dev area. Sweeping generalizations like the one made in this article aren't helpful for anybody.

<comment><USER30> "Near-term productivity"? What can that mean? If you are in an open office all day, every day, the it means "all productivity" is lost.

<comment><USER31> Sounds like an extreme position you're taking. Anecdote to disprove your negative - one day I was talking with a customer about an issue, one of my open-office coworkers heard me then IM'd me an internal forum page that helped me seamlessly resolve the issue.

Were I working from home or out of that persons earshot, I would have dug around for potentially hours or days before finding my solution.

Were I heads down writing code a lot (I don't do that very often these days), I'd head over to the private (no-noise-policy) work rooms nearby.

<comment><USER30> Hoping for one random interaction a week, and torpedoing productivity the rest of the week, is a net loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Nathan Marz (of Apache Storm fame) also wrote about this topic recently:

"Now, I don't want to comment on the effectiveness of open floor plans for fields other than my own. But for software development, this is _the single best way to sabotage the productivity of your entire engineering team_."

[http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open- flo...](http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-floor-plans- in-tech-companies.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> Yup. Its impossible to really focus in an open-office work area. I have to meet with another team occasionally that's management bought into the open- office hypetrain. Its awful. The noise is overwhelming, there's constant distractions (even small noises like people shifting in their chairs can become overwhelming when its coming from you from every direction)

<comment><USER33> It sounds like the acoustics are pretty bad if small noices are that noticable. Can you get them to install sound dampening?

<comment><USER34> Whatever you do, don't do what my office did - they installed speakers that play pink noise. It helps with the noise (so much chatter) but it's annoying as hell.

<comment><USER21> That sounds like the closest thing to work hell that I can imagine

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> i never thought anyone would come up with something worse than cubicles, but it turns out that's easy; just remove them.

</comment><comment><USER36> I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that some people are introverts, and that those people work best when they're nobody around them.

Also programming requires a minimum of focus, I might not consider programming a hard, highly intellectual task, but personally I'm very easily distracted. I also have a very hard time concentrating at something properly if I can sense I'm watched or analyzed.

Maybe it has something to do with how people want team interaction. You could ask teams to meet at least twice a day, and they might prefer having their own office.

The best way, I think, would be to always workers if they either prefer to have their own small office or to work in a open space.

To me, the best is to use my laptop in a empty park, with or without internet access, preferably without. I just download any documentation, some article or tutorial, eventually some wikipedia offline browser, and I'm able to concentrate.

</comment><comment><USER37> This has been known to be a productivity killer for years, but I still haven't seen significant moves being made to change it. From a management standpoint I know an open layout allows you to pack a lot more people into the same space, so perhaps the costs outweigh the benefits for many businesses?

<comment><USER38> An open floor plan is one of the big reasons I started abusing our work from home policy at my last job, and a huge reason for not wanting to return to the work force since leaving that job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Open office + headphones was the best place work space for me, one big reason for me to have a job is to be surrounded by people and feel that I'm part of a team, otherwise I could just work from home instead of a stupid cubicle that makes me feel like a gear in a big machinery.

</comment><comment><USER40> _These new floor plans are ideal for maximizing a company's space while minimizing costs. Bosses love the ability to keep a closer eye on their employees..._

From my limited experience working in these areas, I do believe this is the crucial insight and the real reason behind the movement...Occam's razor and all that.

Where I last worked in an open-office environment, we had a fairly strict "no talking" policy, and were expected to use IM to communicate to the people next to us.

I always thought, "well, isn't this defeating the purpose of the open floorplan?", and of course it does, unless you factor in the above insight.

</comment><comment><USER41> This keeps coming up every so often, so here's a different discussion I'd like to get into. How do we measure something as ambiguous as productivity?

And I contest some of the points raised: For companies where people are mostly left to themselves save for meetings and sync ups, is it really about a supervisor's ability to monitor what you're doing? Collaboration is probably the driving force, which again raises the question as to how does one measure and evaluate such things?

<comment><USER42> I think it's pretty easy. Can you honestly say you get more work done in a day with constant interruptions and distractions? Not only output is affected but the quality of the work completed. I might get the same volume of work out the door but if Im distracted I promise there are bit and pieces that have careless errors in it, which leads to re-work. This is something that you can easily ask your employees if they'd like private working quarters vs open office.

<comment><USER43> Even if people got more and better work done in private offices, maybe the increased communication in open offices is causing people to work on more important things, which could be worth the tradeoff. (I don't think it is, but such an effect is not something you'd notice with introspection.)

Plus, are private offices really the alternative for most people working in open offices? I think the cubicle is a much more likely replacement than the private office.

Amusingly, Wikipedia's page on cubicles has a photo captioned "before cubicles: open office with desks arranged in rows, 1937."[0]

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

<comment><USER42> I dont think they need to go full enclosed office, privacy cubes might work. I prefer an office being a programmer, but I can see how other people, like the marketing or sales department, might not need that extent of quiet and/or privacy. I know cubes are much cheaper than offices, so for any employer, unless you are flush with cash, cubes are probably what you are willing top pay for.

I wonder if open offices spread illness faster than other layouts? (I say this has I'm listening to half my office coughing their lungs up with a cold)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Still relevant: [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html)

</comment><comment><USER45> It's really interesting. I think it has to do with whether the teamwork necessary to do the task is real, or only exists in the mind of managers.

My first job was on a newspaper production floor. It was an open office clustered by role, with matching support people clustered nearby. I have never seen an environment that had the astonishing level of productivity per person of this team, and I mean by easily a factor of 10x. Any question I had I could get an answer in 2 seconds. We were using laughably old equipment, but there was no emailing anything, and there was no possibility of miscommunication. It was exhilarating.

OTOH these were well defined tasks, with a deadline at the end of each day. So it was like running a team tough mudder every week.

My next office job, years later, had a semi-open floorplan. It was an absolute nightmare. My coworkers would listen to Howard Stern every morning, and then leave the radio on afterwards. People would have protracted calls on speakerphone. Compared to the newspaper, it seemed like no one was ever actually working, instead they were just talking about nonsense, and torturing me in the process. Typically someone would send you an email, then immediately walk over to your desk and explain it to you with no regard for whether you were busy.

But this work was complex, boring, intricate, different every time, and the deadlines were months away, the biggest challenge was planning and focus. There was much less reason for teamwork and a much greater need to delve in to your task and be left alone.

So I think generalizing about open floorplans is difficult. It obviously has to do with company culture and the type of work.

</comment><comment><USER23> Last year I designed an office for a small business with 20 employees. Having worked in several offices (with different layouts) made me very "bearish" on open-offices so I advised the business owner against it. While explaining all my arguments to him, he told me:

 _I completely agree with you but without an open layout how do I control my employees?_

And:

 _With an open layout I can put more people in less space._

This is what business people think. All the rest is poetry.

</comment><comment><USER46> The thing is, if you ask any rank-and-file Google engineer, they'll totally agree that the sweatshop layout -- oops, I mean the _open-office_ layout -- is hugely detrimental to productivity and morale.

So it's not like the company isn't aware; it's just that they seem to believe the negative effects aren't bad enough to offset the cost of more office space (or the opportunity cost of slower hiring)

</comment><comment><USER47> Really, open office leads to more flu infections?? Based on her utterly anecdotal evidence of a bunch of her co-workers got sick. If that's the standard for evidence for the rest of the claims in this article, I would cast it aside.

Cornell did a study while back that found that communication gets worse with private offices. The pernicious thing is that employees' very perception of "frequent communication" _changes_ depending on which kind of environment they're in. If they're in open plan it's several times a day often on the fly. If they have a private office, it plummets to "several times a week in a scheduled meeting". [1]

So that's consistent with private office people saying everything's fine -- because their very perception of the standard for team interaction has vastly diminished.

They also noted that office workers may be biased to favor plans that maximize their personal productivity _even at the expense of team productivity_ , because their compensation is tied more to the former. Whereas management sees the bigger picture of both elements.

That may go a long way towards explaining why employees and management are often at odds over how to arrange the office.

(Having said that, by no means do I think that a constant barrage of noise in your face in a maximally open office is optimal. There are many degrees of openness, and I'm just pointing to evidence that private offices may swing too far in the other direction.)

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20140615182702/http://iwsp.human...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140615182702/http://iwsp.human.cornell.edu/file_uploads/office_ex2_1238259706.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER48> For me, it really comes down to energy.

It takes me lots of energy to ignore something. Like someone walking behind my computer monitor. Like someone having a loud unrelated conversation next to me. Like being conscious of my appearance and behavior (out of respect for others). And it takes energy to solve problems and write great code.

I simply can't do it all every day, day in and day out. Monday is fine. I can work long hours on Monday in the office, getting lots of good work done. But on Tuesday, I am irritable and can't focus as well. By Wednesday, I'm useless. If I go into the office, I come home exhausted, unable to even speak.

Fortunately I can work from home, but it's a heartbreaking trade. It's not as much fun (or productive) to collaborate over the internet as it is in person. I am definitely not going to accidentally end up going out to lunch or coffee with a new friend. Etc.

Comments to the tune of "suck it up", "wear headphones", are nothing new to the ears of introverts. We've been dealing with this _extroverted culture_ all our lives. Extroverts thrive on stimulation. Introverts drown in it.

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm not a big fan of these articles. It depends on what you're doing. I'm a professor, and in order to get certain tasks done, you need a private space. I don't even know how you could grade exams, for instance, without a private space in order to concentrate and prevent others from seeing what you're doing. When I'm working on a paper, on the other hand, it's way more productive to have my coauthors right next to me.

The effect on productivity therefore cannot be determined without knowing what you're going to be doing.

I do find these articles fascinating from the perspective of an economist. Economists frequently assume workers get paid based on their productivity. Then we see that in the real world employers are willing to adopt an open office model that workers hate, even one that can reduce productivity, because they want to monitor the workers to see what they are doing. If workers were paid according to productivity, it wouldn't matter how many times they checked Facebook between 8 am and 5 pm.

<comment><USER19> "When I'm working on a paper, on the other hand, it's way more productive to have my coauthors right next to me"

And this is why a lot of startups work well in an open plan. When there are only 5 people in the company it can work well.

It is a completely different situation than the typical 80-150 people per floor open plans of larger companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Ugh, open offices are toxic for development. Low cubicles are almost as bad, tall cubicles are almost tolerable. Barring private offices for everyone, my best experience was with a very large office occupied by my team (myself and two others).

The shared space is much more tolerable when everyone is part of the same role (developer in this case), meaning approximately the same sensitivity to interruptions, the same frequency of phone conversations, etc. Contrast that with the open office I worked in, with Customer Service and Sales folks mixed in with sysadmins and developers. That environment isn't good for anyone: the devs are irritated by all the chatter from the CSR and Sales folks, who in turn feel guilty even though it's their job to be jabbering on the phone all day. Ironically, the office space was occupied largely by people who were rarely IN those offices because they were all in meetings constantly.

</comment><comment><USER51> Open office is by no means a new thing Google invented. It existed a long, long time ago. [http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/04/23/opinion/23rfd...](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/04/23/opinion/23rfd- image/23rfd-image-blogSpan.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER52> I work on a large open-plan floor. My two 24" screens completely fill my field of view. My earphones block my ears and fill them with beautiful, not very loud, flow-inducing music. A low wall separate my desk from passing people.

On the other hand, when I want to give my eyes some rest, I can focus on Manhattan high-rises in the window. When I need to talk to my colleagues face to face, or just see if they are at their desks, it is easy to do, too. If we need to talk for more than a minute, we could walk to the coffee point of to a meeting room.

I can imagine an open space implemented badly: people cramped together, with little elbow room, phone-talking sales reps next to code-laden programmers next to number-crunching financial guys, and no meeting rooms. I won't like such a setup either.

But from where I sit, the open space plan looks pretty okay.

</comment><comment><USER53> I work at a company where most people are in open areas. The key that makes this work IMHO is that the desks are trivially movable; just unplug two wires and wheel the desk elsewhere. Want to work next to Joe? Move there. Need to get away from a noisy cow-orker? Move his desk, or yours (both have happened).

There is closed office space available, if you want it. Most people choose not to use it.

Once you have mobility, you get to choose who you work with. You can get together in ad-hoc groups for a while, bring more people in as necessary, and leave for some other place when you need to. It sounds too simple and maybe too stupid to be as powerful as it actually is.

I've also worked in open plans where you don't have a choice of where to sit. It sucked hard. I wouldn't do that again.

</comment><comment><USER54> Nobody likes the feeling that someone is watching over your shoulder. Not at work, not at home, nowhere.

<comment><USER55> Not everybody hates it. If you have the same interests as your manager, you won't worry or be reprimanded for posting on your faovourite knitting forum for 15 minutes of each day or answering an im from your friend who lives halfway across the globe. Some people really feel like they're doing nothing wrong and have nothing to hide and if you feel that way you're probably right.

<comment><USER54> See, this is your (and most peoples) mistake: Don't mix up the fear of getting caught watching a cute little cat playing the piano on YouTube and a natural habit of around 95% of all people. A lot of companies which are using this concept are totally fine with you watching cats, they don't even care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I've been a developer for over a decade, where I'm currently employed they have adopted low-partitions (lets be honest, no partitions). I can hear people twitch, breathe, randomly talk with others 3 isles down. Every developer has on headphones _trying_ to ignore all the movement/talking around them, it's just a horrible setup. I find myself being less confident in my work, because I can't concentrate due to a all the distractions around, wearing headphones/earbuds is a nice work-around, but not a solution, I would like to not have my earbuds on 6+ hours a day.

While I see the advantages to open offices, not everyone works the same way, companies who want to maximize employee effectiveness should cater to both types of needs.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, cutting costs and Taylorian big brotherism.

Effectively companies trade productivity for higher transparency and cheaper office space. What happened to the need to actually maximize productivity?

To give the benefit of doubt it is plausible people might confuse open plan offices with team rooms.

<comment><USER57> > What happened to the need to actually maximize productivity?

It has gone away since governemnts started supporting specific companies all around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> And there is also some evidence that open offices don't necessarily foster closer relationship among employees. [1]

[1] [https://hbr.org/2011/07/who-moved-my-cube](https://hbr.org/2011/07/who- moved-my-cube)

</comment><comment><USER59> I'm fairly young but my experiences with open offices have been that they are more distracting, but it's possibile to minimize the distractions with headphones. It's difficult for me to listen to music while working so I use coffitivity which pipes in background noise from coffee shops. It sounds like hustle and bustle, but you can never actually latch on to a conversation since there are none.

When I worked in a private office I found it hard to stay motivated. This is in contrast to an open office when I can look at the people around me all working hard on the same problem. It makes me feel motivated to keep working.

</comment><comment><USER60> As an employee in a small early-stage startup, the open-office arrangement suited me very well. Being able to at least eavesdrop on _all_ of the verbal conversations from the tech challenges to product development to financial concerns kept the information flowing very well. Every member of the team could draw from the full context of our effort to strengthen their individual contribution. As a developer I felt I learned a lot more about the business and our customers than I would have if they had given me a quiet, productive office. I think it was a net win in the early years.

</comment><comment><USER38> Finally an article I can cite when people act like I'm just trying to hold on to the old ways of development when I complain about open floor plans. No one listens to the goddamn developers.

</comment><comment><USER61> This is an opinion piece with a baity title that points to a New Yorker article which has had three extensive discussions on HN, including a month ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8696391](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8696391)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7832209](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7832209)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024488)

<comment><USER62> This was the #1 story a few minutes ago but not to be found on any of the top pages anymore. Out of curiosity, do you mod down stories you feel aren't fitting and/or duplicate discussions?

<comment><USER61> One task of HN moderation is penalizing stories that don't fit the mandate of the site. Duplicates are part of that, though of course a story can be a duplicate without being inappropriate.

We demote duplicates, but if there are already comments on the thread, we leave the post open so discussion can continue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Amusing historical note going back to 1939:

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

</comment><comment><USER64> I still firmly believe I work better from my house. Companies such as automattic seem to work fine in that setting. I know peraonally I block off 10am - 2pm for meetings in the office (early lunch at 10am, or late a 2pm).

I then work from 3pm-5pm and 10pm-12pm at home. Im usually one of the most productive and it keeps me fresh. Fyi I have done this at several companies and my bosses always seem happy with it

</comment><comment><USER65> This debate is easily solved by simply asking people, "Which do you prefer: open offices or closed door offices?"

90% of people will answer the latter.

Case closed.

<comment><USER66> That needs a citation. When I polled my largeish team in 2007 it was nearly 100% hard wall office.

</comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands My best friend works for Cargill and they're going to an open floor plan for all of their offices. She said her and few of her co-workers are germ-a-fobes so they're going to have a ton of Purell around.

I was pretty shocked since I thought the open office had been well debunked over the past 4 years or so.

</comment><comment><USER67> This is just some writer who could easily do her job in a cave. Collaborative efforts require as few barriers to collaboration as possible. Some of us like to participate in things that are larger than we might be able to facilitate entirely on our own.

</comment><comment><USER68> Why must editors title articles this way?

The article says: there are many ways in which open offices are not great.

The headline says: they are destroying the workplace.

The article doesn't come close to making that claim, even if "destroy the workplace" were a meaningful idea.

<comment><USER69> Probably because it works. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a newspaper that has survived using bland (read: accurate) headlines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Anyone have good tips for surviving in an open office? There are the obvious ones like noise-cancelling headphones — but are there any other good hacks for making an open space at least somewhat tolerable?

</comment><comment><USER71> I think googles own Eric Schmidt had the best response to this. If open office's were bad for buisness or destroying the workspace the free market would bear that out. There are tangable benefits which is why companies move towards it. I understand some people hate it, but most don't so why do we keep getting the same articles every few months saying the same thing. We get it _you_ don't like the open office space others do. I am sorry your not able to have the office the way you like it, I am upset that no one else seems to like TV shows I find enjoyable and they keep getting canceled.

<comment><USER10> If market _can measure it_ or understand it they will adjust.

Before Toyota and JIT factories were run generally really inefficiently.

"I am upset that no one else seems to like TV shows I find enjoyable and they keep getting canceled."

You are comparing trivial entertainment with the environment most people spend the most of their productive hours as adults?

"Oh, I see you have lost an arm. Well, my finger itches sometimes. It happens."

<comment><USER71> You raise a good point in my defense. When Toyota introduce 6-Sigma the benefits were so great that companies began moving to that methodology en masse. Private offices and offices with more privacy exist and people are moving _away_ from them towards open offices. In the case of 6-Sigma it costs more to run your assembly line in accordance with its principles, but when companies saw the tangible benefits they started to switch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I'm in an open office situation. It is the worst. I spend most of my time trying to adjust my posture so that my eyes don't meet anyone else's eyes.

</comment><comment><USER73> Why is it called open office ? It looks like factory floor to me.

</comment><comment><USER74> Consider reading Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister

</comment><comment><USER75> However

Communication between teams/etc IS IMPORTANT

And we need people to be able to be productive using other tools if they won't meet face to face (like HipChat, or others)

</comment><comment><USER76> First of all, Google isn't to blame for this trend and Google's open-plan offices, although flawed, are more spacious and better planned than what most companies use. I've seen startups and banks under the 100 SF/employee barrier.

Second, it's not even the noise that wrecks people but visibility from behind ("open-back visibility"). That's not because people are constantly hiding things. It suggests low status and makes it hard (and stressful) to perform at one's best.

There are environments where open-plan offices are better, but they're rare. One is a trading floor, where seconds matter (a lot) and information must be broadcast quickly and verbally (i.e. yelling). Unless there's a real-time sensitivity to what they're doing, programmers are better off with more privacy.

If you are going to use an open-plan office, the least you can do is to give everyone a 7-foot wall at his or her back.</comment>


Ask HN: How to "level up" as a software engineer? - <AUTHOR> After nearly a decade in the industry, the long term career prospects of being a rank and file web developer hacking on React UIs seems tenuous at best. What's the best way  to go about transitioning to "real" software engineering i.e. systems development, aerospace, finance, AI/ML, etc.?<p>I find the future of the web platform dubious, and staking my entire livelihood on its' existence is increasingly a terrifying thought. What are the most in demand skills outside of web development? <comment><USER2> Web applications will be a thing for awhile. The long term strategy is to develop financial planning skills that can handle not needing employment in a decade -- that way, whatever way the winds of change blow, you have a choice if you'd like to be part of it. And if you do, great, and if simple React app development becomes totally commoditized and developer salaries decline, you're still secure.

It's indeed a terrifying thought, but in risk assessment, there's two main considerations: impact and likelihood. Your speculation is high impact, but low likelihood.

</comment><comment><USER3> >aerospace, finance, AI/ML

I used to think they were handled more 'professionally' too - I don't think that anymore.</comment>


Patents Are Eating the World and Hurting Innovation - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/06/patents-are-eating-the-world-and-hurting-innovation/ <comment><USER2> The chart in the article, showing patent suits filed as a function of time, is a little misleading. It appears to hockey stick in 2011 (after a long upward trend). It's worth noting that in 2011, the rules on how many defendants you can group in a suit changed, causing what used to be a single suit to spawn multiple separate suits, even though the number of companies affected didn't necessarily change. I think a better chart would lists defendants as a function of time.

<comment><USER3> What is the best way to get data on who is litigating, who is being sued, and over what patent? For only 5000 lawsuits it would be relatively easy to understand the scope of the problem.

<comment><USER4> It would be nice to just read in the court filings, which are a public record, and produce data extracts to explain the world. Unfortunately the PACER system -- officially a public agency -- charges you by the page for those public documents.

Once you've got them, they're free for you to share, but sharing projects threaten the revenues of the system and the publishers (Westlaw and Lexis) that prosper from the lack of public access to public data. Those publishers and PACER have worked hard to block and shut down and even bring unrelated federal prosecutions against people who organize free systems.

One of the reasons Aaron Swartz was a major target of federal prosecutors even though his nominal accusers didn't want charges brought is that he was active in promoting free access to federal court documents. [0]

Companies like Lex Machina [1] work with the officially supported publishers to offer analysis of patent lawsuit filings and patent office documents (also officially but not really public) to answer questions like yours for very wealthy clients.

[0] [http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/8/3968824/aaron-swartzs- battl...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/8/3968824/aaron-swartzs-battle-to- free-the-pacer-legal-document-database)

[1] [https://lexmachina.com/](https://lexmachina.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since the thread is full of insane suggestions for reform, I'll make some sensible ones:

1) non-physical implementations or items already covered by copyright should not be patentable. Pure software and media carrying it should be treated as speech and creative works; it should not be possible to infringe a patent simply by writing _or running_ software.

2) re-introduce the requirement to deposit an example of what's being patented. A set of photos plus manufacturing drawings in usual electronic form should be acceptable as a substitute to avoid a storage problem for the patent office. (Want to patent a chip? Send Verilog or GDSII along with your application)

3) following from that, if there is a software component in the claims then the source must be provided in the patent application.

</comment><comment><USER6> What has a better return on investment? A Comp Sci BS or a JD? I'm betting the Comp Sci has a higher mean, median, and max.

<comment><USER7> Should be pretty easy to find aggregate stats on both.

Law follows a bimodal distribution, though, so you'd need to factor that into account. Basically, there are two types of law degrees, and two types of lawyers: those from top-N schools, and everyone else. Those who land prestigious clerkships, and go on to practice things like securities or corporate M&A at top BigLaw firms, and those who don't.

When we speak of a "JD," we can't really speak of it as a homogeneous class. You could argue that this effect could be found with any degree, for instance, that a CS degree from Stanford leads to much better outcomes than a CS degree from a mid-tier university. But the effects of school, class rank, career track, and prestige in the legal profession are near-total, and the divide in outcomes is quite dramatic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I agree that patents are making innovation difficulat. This company seems to be changing that, and may help solve the problem. I thought it was interesting, at least! Bideas: [http://bit.ly/bideas_com](http://bit.ly/bideas_com)

</comment><comment><USER9> The only fix patents really need is a decrease in time. Make it 2 or 3 years instead of 20(retroactive, no grandfather clause) and dump software/DNA/genetic patents. Go back to patents being actual inventions instead of ideas and processes.

<comment><USER10> If you drop DNA patents would you recommend it be covered by copyright? Tough if there is bothing preventing direct copying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Have there been any proposals aimed at reducing the transferability of patents? Perhaps the lifetime of the patent could halve each time it is transferred to a new legal entity along with some reduction in possible damages.

</comment><comment><USER12> true but initiates need to be taken by the legislative if they wish to overcome these patents.

</comment><comment><USER13> I read the headline as "Parents are eating the world and hurting innovation."

<comment><USER14> I couldn't agree more with the article. The US Patent system is broken and needs revisions to meet today's marketplace.

Patents are awarded to non-practicing entities and people who can't act on nor implement the very patent they were awarded.

Idea's should not be patentable. If you can think of something, so can I. _Especially_ when it comes to software, since software is nothing but an idea written down.

Idea's that oneself cannot implement and/or act on, should not be patentable. To be awarded a patent, you should, at the very least, be required to provide a working POC. I'm tired of companies being awarded absurd "future thinking" patents that have vague wording along the lines of "something will happen when the user does something, etc".

Patent Trolls (aka Non-Practicing Entities) should not be able to hold patents if they are not using and/or implementing them. How can you collect money on an idea for years/decades but not have the capacity yourself to perform the service/make the product the companies you are suing are doing?

The US needs drastic patent reform. It is stiffling innovation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The expression "X is eating the world" is eating the world.

<comment><USER16> I can't believe X ate the whole thing.

<comment><USER17> No, it's still eating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here is a hypothetical solution:

(0). Make patent issue fee ridiculously expensive (100k+ ?).

(1). Increase the salaries of every patent examiner to ridiculously high levels, supported by the extremely high fee.

(2). Make every patent examiner personally liable for approving a patent, to the extent of a lien on their personal assets. No bankruptcy allowed (as for student loans).

(3). If any patent is later proved to be carelessly approved, infringing on prior art or broader than it deserved to be, the patent examiner should be held liable and pay damages for every patent they approved that was struck down.

That might help cut down the indiscriminate issuance of patents that should never have been allowed in the first place.

<comment><USER5> _(2) Make every patent examiner personally liable for approving a patent, to the extent of a lien on their personal assets. No bankruptcy allowed (as for student loans)._

This is never going to happen and would be an abusive illegal employment practice if it did.

<comment><USER19> You could make the agents self-employed on a bounty basis rather like the old Lloyd's Names

[http://moneyweek.com/how-to-become-a-lloyds- name-42723/](http://moneyweek.com/how-to-become-a-lloyds-name-42723/)

However, the inevitable Black Swann event caused changes even in that very high risk system...

 _" Historically, Names had unlimited liability to the risks they were underwriting. In the late 1980s/early 1990s, Lloyd's entered the most traumatic time in its history. Unexpectedly large legal awards in US courts on asbestos, pollution and health hazard policies (APH) served up huge losses to many Names, a large number of whom lost their shirts. Names' numbers dropped from over 30,000 to below 10,000."_

I think just giving patent examiners enough time and resources to actually verify the claims would probably cut down a lot of the problem. That and a specialised court like

[http://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/rcj-rolls- building/patents-...](http://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/rcj-rolls- building/patents-court)

instead of a general purpose district court sitting with a lay jury</comment></comment></comment>


How to Run a Startup for $0 - <AUTHOR> https://soundcloud.com/techinboston/how-to-run-a-startup-for-0-tech-in-boston-26-with-jonathan-kim

<comment><AUTHOR> Audio interview with Appcues founder Jonathan Kim.

As a journalism major at Boston University, Jonathan taught himself how to code to help pay his way through college and eventually landed at HubSpot, where he led front-end development on their Social Inbox tool. He was able to get 20 people to put down their credit card before a product was even developed and since January 2014, over 100,000 users have been onboarded with Appcues.

They got their first 500 users without spending a dime and he shares his tips/tricks here.</comment>


Leaked: Facebook Homepage New Design - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2009/10/19/revealed-new-facebook-design/

<comment><AUTHOR> I really just hope they introduce some of FriendFeed's features into this update.

FriendFeed's traffic's already down by 40%...I hope it wasn't another bad acquisition and Facebook uses their technology into making Facebook a better service quickly.

<comment><USER2> Well, it was made clear from the start it was mainly a talent acquisition. Any technological merger is just a lucky bonus for us the users.</comment></comment>


Meteor possibly seen in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/paulg/status/258761735169789952 <comment><USER2> Meteor.js?

</comment><comment><USER3> Where are the pics ?</comment>


Why Mark Zuckerberg's First Public Response To Google+ Is The Right One - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/06/zuckerberg-first-public-response-to-google-plus

<comment><USER2> Arguments along the line that Facebook holds an advantage or a competitive edge because of the size of it's userbase are patently flawed. By that reckoning, myspace would still be a serious contender, but the size of it's userbase couldn't mitigate the damage inflicted by bad management, poor quality, contentedness and lack of vision.

I personally think that Facebook suffers form the same problems, especially contentedness, with the additional problem in the fact that their founder and public face isn't all that likeable.

In short, solely because of Google+, Facebook is the new Myspace in all the wrong ways.

And of course, it would be naive to discount the advantage Google has through the presence of one person and one person alone; Andy Hertzfeld. He's a big hitter... a really big hitter. To me, it feels like Yoda just turned up to show the young upstarts what it really means to be a Jedi.

<comment><USER3> The situation with myspace then and facebook now is vastly different.

The concept of social networking was still being defined. Now, facebook _is_ social networking in most people's minds. The concept has been solidified. Google's recent offering does nothing to reinvent the concept.

Also, social networking was still something mostly young people were into. The network-effects now are much greater in magnitude than they were then.

The biggest factor in myspace's downfall was that it was perceived as a "ghetto" (I had multiple people describe it to me as such). People didn't join facebook because it was more compelling, they left myspace because it had degenerated to a ghetto and facebook was the most viable option.

The social networking battle is facebook's to lose, not google's to win. As long as facebook doesn't stumble majorly, they're not going anywhere.

 _edit:_ There is a serious anti-facebook downvote brigade going around here.

<comment><USER4> _The network-effects now are much greater in magnitude than they were then._

True, and in fact, they are so much greater in magnitude that they're no longer always a good thing.

I don't benefit from any 'network effects' when my mother, my boss, my wife, my girlfriend, and the kid who used to beat me up for lunch money in 4th grade are all part of my one and only 'network.' If Facebook doesn't get a clue about that, Google can and will eat their lunch.

<comment><USER5> > _If Facebook doesn't get a clue about that, Google can and will eat their > lunch._

Come on now, isn't it a bit premature to make a statement like this?

Google has positively sucked at social every time they tried anything until Google+. Now they have something that is obviously a lot better and interesting in many ways, but I don't understand why the bubble pundit set is frothing at the mouth so vigorously. They have a _huge_ road ahead to compete with Facebook in any meaningful way.

Everyone wants to sound the Facebook death knell, but you can't look at Friendster or MySpace for historical lessons, neither of those sites crossed the chasm, and both suffered from severe technical setbacks that hampered development. Despite the valley mentality of always searching for the next big thing, there's no sign that the public at large has any appetite for a new social network. It could well be that social network adoption was a fad, and Facebook just becomes the defacto standard for non-techies, and the up-and- comers all end up serving smaller niche audiences. I'm not saying that's what I believe will happen because I think it's foolish to make any predictions about something as volatile as social networking, but it certainly seems just as likely to me as Google+ just up and "eating Facebook's lunch".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really enjoy Toms post on Google+: <https://plus.google.com/112063946124358686266/posts?tab=mX>

Pretty balanced when it comes to fb vs. Google+.

Also I think he his right on this one pointing out the power of fb-groups where you basically all join the same circle ready made for you by someone else. On of the few groups I am in was created around a wedding. There is currently no way to do that with Google+ (everyone can put up new posts which can only be seen inside the group without adding/friending anyone themselves).

<comment><USER7> I suspect that Google+ will launch an equivalent feature, I think there is some real incompatibilities with the way that Facebook is handling it and Google+'s current privacy model that they are pushing.

If you share something with a group-circle and then someone joins the group then they can see your post; you are suddenly sharing with someone that you didn't actively intend to. Right now if you share with circles and the people in those circles changes it tracks the changes, but since you are the only person who can change the circles that doesn't provide any similar issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think Tom Anderson is right, but there's something that bothers me about Facebook Groups and Facebook in general.

I do not like that I can be added by other people in groups without my permission. I do not like that people can tag me in photos without my permission.

And to revert a photo tag for instance, the person that did it doesn't get a notification, sometimes thinking that it is his fault -- for this one photo that was posted in a group, I had to untag myself more than a dozen times, as people kept adding me. And same with groups -- for one group I didn't want to be in, I had to remove myself like 3 times.

And to add insult to the injury, when people realize that I don't like being tagged or be part of their stupid group, it's in human nature to get upset, feelings hurt and all that, so they get upset.

But Facebook doesn't care about me; as it's in their best interest to encourage pictures of drunken teenagers and other things that generate gossip and traffic.

</comment><comment><USER9> Disagree. The Google+ circle group integration is MUCH better than facebook's one - which is what makes it totally different. Also, talking about user base.. everyone who's using a google service will automatically be on google+.

<comment><USER10> and those who use Google search number approximately 6 billion compared to FB of 750million

<comment><USER11> Not every person on earth uses Google. There are still _continents_ where the major concern for most people is living past 30. The Internet is not even on their radar.

<comment><USER12> Which continents? I wouldn't have asked had you used a singular term.

<comment><USER13> Antarctica is the obvious one.. I'd guess Africa is the other.

<comment><USER12> If anything Africa is the closest to being obvious. Antartica doesn't qualify, as it has no permanent population [1]. Even if it did, its non-permanent population is so many orders of magnitude behind the rest [2] that its inclusion in the original term 'continents' would be clearly misleading.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica>

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_continents_by_populatio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_continents_by_population#Area_and_population)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ban on local plastic bag bans now Michigan law - <AUTHOR> http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2016/12/ban_on_local_plastic_bag_bans.html <comment><USER2> Clearly, we need a Federal law that bans states from banning local plastic bag bans.</comment>


Show HN: The Only Tech and Economics Newsletter You'll Ever Need – Using A.I - <AUTHOR> https://thetechonomics.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey Guys & Gals, I'm CJ.

Over a year ago, I launched a Finance Newsletter called The Crypt. This Newsletter used various NLP techniques to automatically summarize News Articles and help me grow a budding Newsletter that was later acquired.

Over the past couple of months, as I've been stuck in the house... I have refined the tech, moved from Flask to Node, and determined better techniques, APIs, and Libraries to help develop a Simple, Concise, Tech & Finance Newsletter I think you will enjoy.</comment>


Fail Series: Doing Too Much - with Scott Gerber - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/scott-gerber-fail-seriesinterview/ <comment><USER2> Hey, so you don't want to fail right? Learning from the mistakes of others is cheaper and less stressful than making those mistakes ourselves. In this Mixergy interview, Scott Gerber shares:

1) how to bounce back after hitting rock bottom 2) how to provide a service people actually want to pay you for 3) how to get started without moving in with your parents</comment>


Judges: Lawful Immigrants Clear to Enter U.S. Despite Trump's Order - <AUTHOR> https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/01/29/judges-put-temporary-stop-trump-immigration-order/UQiz2kEXJMDQHuiIFoguuJ/story.html <comment><USER2> The problem with a judge declaring Trump's order illegal, is that a judge has no way to enforce that. As long as DHS chooses to obey Trump rather than the law, the "immigrants" (some of them have been living in the US for many years) still can't go home.

I fear the next few years are going to be a drawn out battle between Trump and the law, with government institutions having to decide which one to obey. Their conscience is what determines how far Trump can push this.</comment>


Etherpad gets a makeover and becomes even more of a threat to Google Docs - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/23/etherpad-gets-a-makeover-and-becomes-even-more-of-a-threat-to-google-docs/ <comment><USER2> I haven't used Etherpad, but isn't Google Wave going to capture the essential feature of Etherpad (N-way realtime collaboration) while being federated, backed by Google, and open source to boot?

I know that there is still room to be a niche player in a market even after someone dominates a space, but I am curious to hear if the AppJet folks have any more ambitious plans for dealing with this.

<comment><USER3> Trying to do one thing -- text editing - really really well is probably a good defense to Google Wave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We use etherpad for allowing candidates to write code during phone interviews. We love it, and would never go back to using Google Docs for this (what we use to do before, and what I did when I was at Google).

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks like it has a lot of potential. I wouldn't be scared of google wave, the wave server could easily be a backend for this. Let's see how it scales, join my pad <http://etherpad.com/Lrg64lFCKU>

<comment><USER6> Nice, I have found EtherPad to be really fast, and if it remains that way I think that's a pretty good advantage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone know if this new interface is utilizing any JavaScript front-end library? I'll assume safely the answer is no, since each public pad instance (<http://etherpad.com/qT6VIf0T1j>) also generates a css file ([http://etherpad.com/static/compressed/031904e16a8466d1d48452...](http://etherpad.com/static/compressed/031904e16a8466d1d48452524966d865.css) ~2000 lines) and a js file ([http://etherpad.com/static/compressed/d0537b549791338e55ba31...](http://etherpad.com/static/compressed/d0537b549791338e55ba312bed91f13e.js) ~8000 lines), not to mention the developers founding this venture are ex- Googlers and probably preferred defining the front-end from scratch.

If you're in for a trip, copy and paste the JavaScript into a beautifer (<http://jsbeautifier.org/>) then clear your mind because it's gonna get blown.

</comment><comment><USER8> I find it strange that TechCrunch mentions Google as a competitor but not SubEthaEdit, which is clearly what inspired Etherpad in the first place.

<comment><USER9> SubEthaEdit is Mac-only software, which sort of rules it out as a competitor.

<comment><USER10> I wish there was a standard protocol for collaborative text editing, so that SubEthaEdit and Etherpad (for instance) could talk to one another. (Google Wave doesn't count, since it's trying to do much more than text editing.)

<comment><USER11> Perhaps a well-defined subset of Wave? Wave is to EtherTextEditProtocol as XML is to Atom?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I miss the syntax highlighting option... hopefully that will come back.

</comment><comment><USER13> (Another day, another hundred apples-and-oranges link-baiting comparisons.)

Mind, Etherpad _is_ great for what it does - real-time collaborative, persistent plain-text editing on the web.

</comment><comment><USER14> I see several YC startups in Google's collision path and for some time I have wondered if the advice of not competing with Google in things they are good at is valid.

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/09/02/an-interview-with-vc- pa...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/09/02/an-interview-with-vc-paul-graham- of-ycombinator/)

My opinion is that it never was valid: most startups at the list bellow were doing things Googlers are good at and they got adcquired, and those startups' ideas weren't so wild (according with the second advice in that interview).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google>

</comment><comment><USER15> Everyone now and then you find one of those products that makes you go "woahw". Etherpad is one of them.

<comment><USER16> But TechCrunch pegging them against Google Docs is just not nice for the AppJet guys. Instead of emphasizing Etherpad's selling points, they're made to look like ex-employees out for revenge; neither the screenshot nor their numbers in raised capital make them seem ready for any "fight".

<comment><USER17> _Instead of emphasizing Etherpad's selling points_

Meh, that's the nature of the press. One day they're doing fluff pieces for FasterWeb and the next they decide to pit an unsophisticated web app against Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> During my software engineer internship interview with Google they wanted me to write code using Google Docs, but the interviewer couldn't even get it to work properly (what a great way to impress candidates). Here's to Etherpad showing them how to get it done :-).

</comment><comment><USER19> I've found recently that a nice option for emacs users to get 99.9% of the same functionality is to have two (or more) users ssh into a server, share gnu screen sessions, and start emacs 23 + emacsclient. Everyone has full access to their own emacs, but share buffers with everyone else. You can simultaneously edit the same buffers, etc.

I know this isn't the niche that etherpad is aiming for, but there are a number of groups dispersed looking for this kind of functionality. For team coding while separate, this plus ichat provides a very compelling experience.

<comment><USER20> You can actually open a new emacs window in a different screen. So the cool use is to have someone login to their machine on their laptop, open emacs, then have them spawn a new window in the running X server.

Yay emacs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Are there any collaborative text editing plugins for vim?

Or, I guess more generally, are there any collaborative text editing servers for which vim has a plugin available?

</comment><comment><USER22> Considering how emacs is very old (lots of person decades of development), is focused on niche/advanced text editing, and is built around one of the most praised languages, it's interesting that it doesn't have this.

SubEthaEdit's use of bonjour to fing other computers on the LAN running it is a great advantage. Heck, even MS OneNote has a collaborative edit feature if you give the hostbnames/IPs.

</comment><comment><USER23> Has anyone done pair programming with one of these kind of tools? That might be pretty bad ass. Or it might be terrible. I'm not sure.</comment>


A Different Kind of Hack: Starkist Class Action Settlement Means Free Tuna - <AUTHOR> https://www.tunalawsuit.com/Home.aspx

<comment><USER2> What's the "hack"?</comment>


How We Engineered CMS Airship to Be Simply Secure - <AUTHOR> https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/03/how-we-engineered-cms-airship-be-simply-secure <comment><USER2> Okay, I'll compare and contrast with my own expectations.

First, "simply secure" to me means adopting a capability-security model. CMS Airship unfortunately appears to not be capability-based. On the other hand, there's little existing art for designing capability-safe CMSs, and certainly users aren't ready for capability-safe systems, so perhaps it's for the best.

The usage of PHP, on the other hand, is very disappointing and, in 2017, inexcusable. (Yes, I know that it started in 2016. It was inexcusable in 2016 too.)

SameSite cookies are cool but not on the standards track, and I'm sick of Chrome-specific stuff. I also wish to reiterate the standard position that cookies are terrible and it would have been so nice if HTTP/2 had remembered to replace them with browser-side identifiers. (Thanks Google.)

libsodium is a great building block.

Ignoring the meta-issue of whether automatic upgrades of this sort of software are appropriate, the "Keyggdrasil" update system appears to have been thoughtfully designed.

ACLs are the great antipattern of our time. I hope that capabilities will eventually end the crime of ACLs. It's fine if you disagree with this point, but please read [http://srl.cs.jhu.edu/pubs/SRL2003-02.pdf](http://srl.cs.jhu.edu/pubs/SRL2003-02.pdf) and then consider whether you still disagree.

Thoughtful engineering continues to be a theme with programming tools meant to help programmers write secure code by default. The POST fields, the ACL design, etc. suggest certain patterns which probably do improve code quality in their users' systems.

The design of the file uploader is good, and it strikes close to a capability- security concept; the file system is a great example of _ambient authority_ , which grants too much power to applications. Removing that root file system access is important.

Finally, treating DDoS as a security issue is an interesting step. I've been treating it as an economic problem personally.

Summary: Well-engineered compared to its competitors, but falls far short of my ridiculously high expectations.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The usage of PHP, on the other hand, is very disappointing and, in 2017, > inexcusable. (Yes, I know that it started in 2016. It was inexcusable in > 2016 too.)

No, it's really not.

[https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/69-php-secure-it-if-you-do- it...](https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/69-php-secure-it-if-you-do-it-right- anthony-ferrara)

Until someone produces concrete evidence that proves the statement "It is impossible to write secure PHP code", I tend to issue a challenge to these sentiments and then discard them.

Furthermore, if it is currently impossible to write secure PHP code, then that's a problem that needs to be fixed. Over 82% of the Internet runs PHP. Fixing the language would be an enormous win.

Alternatively, if it's not impossible to write PHP code, then it's not "inexcusable" to write software in PHP.

> First, "simply secure" to me means adopting a capability-security model. CMS > Airship unfortunately appears to not be capability-based. On the other hand, > there's little existing art for designing capability-safe CMSs, and > certainly users aren't ready for capability-safe systems, so perhaps it's > for the best.

> ACLs are the great antipattern of our time. I hope that capabilities will > eventually end the crime of ACLs. It's fine if you disagree with this point, > but please read > [http://srl.cs.jhu.edu/pubs/SRL2003-02.pdf](http://srl.cs.jhu.edu/pubs/SRL2003-02.pdf) > and then consider whether you still disagree.

Capabilities seem more appropriate in a distributed system (Tahoe-LAFS comes to mind). ACLs are great for a centralized system (one website, many visitors).

Otherwise, you've just turned an O(n) maintenance burden into an O(n^2) maintenance burden by having an explicit and pedantic whitelist of permissions copied and pasted across every user in the system. This doesn't seem to offer any value if most (99.99%) of your users will have the same set of permissions.

I'd like to think, given the sort of software Airship is, ACLs are more appropriate. Furthermore, it's much simpler to maintain.

I'd also like to think that, given the flexibility of our ACL system (role- based or user-based, whitelist, overlapping contexts, per-site action matrix) that we reach a good balance of security and usability.

Maybe I'm failing to see it, but what is the tangible security gain of capabilities over ACLs to an open source content management system written in a scripting language behind a single webserver?

Or more to the point: What is the threat model in which capabilities are more appropriate than ACLs for such a software project?

Or is the answer something to the tune of, "It's more explicit and easier to formally verify in an academic context?" It's okay if it is, I just want to know.

> Summary: Well-engineered compared to its competitors, but falls far short of > my ridiculously high expectations.

Heh, I'll take that as a compliment.</comment></comment>


Pricing Your Product - <AUTHOR> https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/pricing-your-product/ <comment><USER2> One of the biggest lessons I've learned as a VC in the past few years is that pricing really has to be aligned with and proportional to the value your product provides. If someone gets $100 of value per seat and you charge $15/seat, that's great. If you charge $15/seat for a product that creates value per gigabyte, people start gaming the system. E.g. they'll buy one seat for their company and ask that person to be the proxy user for your product. Or if you charge $10/GB and people get $20/GB of value of the first few gigabytes and then $5/GB of value after that, you're going to run into problems.

So figure out how users perceive and quantify your value to themselves, and then try to come up with a simple pricing scheme that captures 10-25% of that value. That way every time someone pays you $1, they get $4-$10 of value, and that's a no brainer purchase.

Getting pricing right has a huge ROI across the board. Good pricing improves margins, reduces sales friction, and creates happier customers.

The best book that I've read on pricing is Monetizing Innovation: [https://www.amazon.com/Monetizing-Innovation-Companies- Desig...](https://www.amazon.com/Monetizing-Innovation-Companies-Design- Product-ebook/dp/B01F4DYY1I)

<comment><USER3> The First Round post "Madhavan Ramanujam–It's Price Before Product. Period" captures about 80% of the value for startups so I would start there. Its at [https://firstround.com/review/its-price-before-product- perio...](https://firstround.com/review/its-price-before-product-period/)

I reviewed the book when it came out and extracted "9 Rules for Monetizing Innovation" at [https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2016/11/16/nine-rules-from- mon...](https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2016/11/16/nine-rules-from-monetizing- innovation/)

There are better books on pricing: for a straight up analysis of product pricing "The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing" by Thomas Nagle is the best book that I have read. It's on Amazon at [http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics- Pricing-Profitable-De...](http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics-Pricing- Profitable-Decision/dp/013026248X)

<comment><USER4> I've been working on a pricing project using a methodology largely influenced by Nagle's work. The premise is that it's possible to learn what customers value before pricing something and for the price to be optimized around customer value, and perceived value. It feels much more promising than other pricing projects I've been involved with. This podcast gives an overview of some of the thinking here: [https://impactpricing.com/podcast/ep46-alan- albert-why-much-...](https://impactpricing.com/podcast/ep46-alan-albert-why- much-of-what-you-know-about-your-customers-is-wrong/)

<comment><USER3> Mark Stiving at Impact Pricing does a very good job at exploring and analyzing pricing issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My problem with this advice of testing your pricing strategy is how to communicate this to actual customers. Maybe this isn't a thing in Europe or USA; but in third-world countries a change in the price it is important and something your customers want to know.

If I set my prices higher, I can't change it for my current customers. They will get mad. So I ahve to create a full logic on the backend for customers created after X date, etc. It is a mess.

If I set my prices lower (i.e., display lower prices on landing page, etc), my current customers will get mad at me if I don't change them for them too ("Why I am paying more than the price you are saying this costs?"), etc.

So for me, this strategy of A/B testing prices, find the right price, etc, has been always too complicated to implement. When I tried, I end up adding more problems to me to deal with, and at the end I couldn't analyze the trends I wanted it.

<comment><USER6> One trick you can use is to figure out a set of product parameters that you can tweak into new combinations to create lots of pricing plans. They may be effectively identical to previous ones as far as your cost and engineering are concerned, but different enough that customers don't feel someone is getting a different price for the same thing.

E.g. your previous "Medium Starter" plan included 10 foobags and up to 1.5 zoffobytes of data for a price of $19. Your new "Basic Plus" plan includes 15 foobags and 1.2 zoffobytes for $25.

<comment><USER7> I didnt buy a robot vacuum because of this. There was a crazy amount of different ones from the same company with different pricings. Maybe it is better now. But usually I want a product which fulfills my supposed needs for a reasonable price. Too many different products (especially from the same vendor) give me the certainty no matter which one I choose one or the other criterium will fail.

<comment><USER6> The advice is more applicable to SaaS products where users can easily switch between plans, and creating new combinations of the product parameters is free.

Assuming you don't overdo it, having multiple plans for different types of users can actually help customers feel more confident that your company has the experience to understand their needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article hits its stride at paragraph 14, where they talk about the importance of "value-based pricing" rather than "cost-based pricing."

My wake-up moment came in 2013 or so, when I was pricing the digital version of a long-ago print book I'd written. ("Merchants of Debt"). I knew that it kept finding a niche audience among investment bankers and people who want to be investment bankers.

E-book prices were dropping, and I wanted to get full value from my best customers without seeming out of step with the market. After all, most finance types can afford to be price-insensitive, but they still want to feel like they're getting good value. The solution was to create an unabridged edition for $9.99, and a condensed edition (about 40% of the content) for $3.99. Truth is, the condensed edition gets very few orders. But the fact that it exists makes it much easier for serious buyers to pay up for the full edition.

Knowing the customer's frame of mind -- which usually is quite nuanced -- is the key. Especially when, as the Sequoia folks point out, the marginal cost of another digital copy is always very close to zero.

<comment><USER9> I fall for this time and again.

I want to buy a board game. I've already decided I'm buying it but hey there is a deluxe version for a price I wasn't planning to pay... so yeah I buy it.

<comment><USER10> > _I fall for this time and again._

That tactic is called _price anchoring_ and the reason it tends to work on a lot of people is because it relies on a cognitive bias called anchoring [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_\(cognitive_bias\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pricing is HARD. I launched a SaaS in 2016 with a 100eur per month recurring plan. only 5 signups in two years. Then around 2018 someone wrote me "that's incredibly cheap. why?" So, I doubled it to 200eur per month. Today there are 60 recurring plans at 200 per month, and only 3 @100(grandfathered plans from the early days.)

Clients tend to think that if something seems too cheap, something is wrong with it.

<comment><USER12> Did anything else besides the price change since 2018?

<comment><USER11> Also, at the end of 2018, based on their feedback, I added a "pricing" & comparison page: [https://geocode.xyz/pricing](https://geocode.xyz/pricing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Natera recently brought to market a non-invasive pre-natal test that can > detect Down syndrome and other conditions in a mother's blood. Previously, > testing for these conditions required a risky procedure that extracted > tissue from the fetus. Other non-invasive tests aren't as comprehensive.

> Because Natera's test is better than its competitors' products, the company > charges more.

> "Premium pricing communicates a premium product," says Matthew Rabinowitz, > the company's CEO.

Is this normal in the USA? Talking of "premium offerings" in the context of healthcare seems sickening to me. Premium hospital beds with high speed broadband, alrighty, but premium healthcare itself? I understand that one needs to recoup R&D costs a few times over for it to be worth the risk, but that's simply cost price (risk * R&D cost / unit count * unit cost) and not a "premium product". This isn't a non-essential premium Ferrari, it could help a lot of people. Is it just me who finds this a really weird example?

<comment><USER14> That stuck out to me as well, but it makes sense as an incentive for companies to create better products. Why pour money into R&D to develop new products if you're restricted to charging existing prices? Might as well just develop the existing product and save on the R&D costs.

<comment><USER15> Bounties are a good way to solve this. Invent a new therapy? The government buys your patent for a sum proportional to the value created (not to the dollars invested) and releases it to the public domain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Value-based pricing is the worst societal invention. Imagine a medicine can be made from simple ingredients, but you discovered a recipe by accident. It's very valuable since it might save lives, so the value is high, the cost is low and you can reap the benefit on the mere basis that you discovered something by accident. You also need to make sure that no one "gets it", so do not educate people, just milk them - and in the worst case, mislead them, work against any threat "knowledge" would pose.

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.

Imagine a world, where progress and invention would be something shared and done not out of greed but out of ability and ultimately generosity that would add to the grace of our race.

Instead we celebrate greed, as if we were a bunch of apes.

My fear is that human society needs to reach new lows before we actually have the chance to see our own potential (and then it might be too late, anyway).

<comment><USER17> Supply and demand dynamics =/= invention, but rather description.

<comment><USER16> I understand the price signal and the process of price detection through the myriads of needs and abilities. That's all fine and actually great, as a relatively robust distributed system.

What I do not get is why keeping people in the dark is a cornerstone to many endeavours - value-based pricing just being an example of that.

Edit: maybe I spend too much time in the open source world and mistake it for some model setup for other parts of society that do not work like that at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's insightful to learn that in their guide on pricing Sequoia cites Phil Libin, then-CEO of Sequoia-backed Evernote, who was later kicked out exactly because the company struggled to find the right pricing model.

<comment><USER19> Reminds me of seeing job posting's from Softbank for a "Valuation's Director" immediately after finmeme accounts trashed the WeWork S-1

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How ironic given that it's biggest winners in its portfolio are companies that never sold anything (at least not initially), Linkedin and Instagram for example.

<comment><USER9> The article seems to indicate that Linked In has made a lot of money selling services.

<comment><USER21> $250mil/year is 1/100th of what they eventually got acquired for. Linkedin was probably eventually making more than that, too (need to look) but I'd be surprised if revenue was the main reason for LI's success, probably more of a nice to have...

<comment><USER4> LinkedIn has constantly amazed me as far as how little they have done with their main asset, the professional social graph. That they don't offer paid products for hosted professional associations, or verified credentials, a CRM, or even intra-organization communication fascinates me. There are so many other examples of how you could make money with what they have, not even counting creepy ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a helpful article and I would add to the general "value-based" pricing discussion:

Price is limited by perceived differential value.

So if there's value that the buyer doesn't perceive, it doesn't count. (Often, there's value that the buyer perceives and you don't in the SaaS world.)

If there's perceived value, but you charge $1000 and someone else offers the same perceived value for $100, it's going to be hard going.

This feeds back into understanding your customer subsegment really well. In the example above, perhaps the general market thinks you are at -$900, but for your niche, there are some critical aspects that make it worth much more.

Another corollary is to offer different price points, all aligned with how the buyer perceives value, such that you're happy with whatever choice they make.

</comment><comment><USER23> A better title might be "Pricing Your Service" since the overwhleming majority of examples cited are services, not products.

</comment><comment><USER24> When it comes to pricing I relate it with Jobs to be Done. Pain, desire to progress and willingness to pay as a prime lever.

Whatever pain you are solving, if customers have no money they are not going to buy the product.

If customer has no desire to progress, they will stick with existing software even your product will make like 100X better.

</comment><comment><USER25> Good read, emphasizes an importance of figuring out a customer-perceived value of your product.

Sidenote: reading it was very much painful on eyes, at least on my phone screen. That thin font looks almost like a watermark. Maybe it'd be better on a laptop screen.

</comment><comment><USER26> ICYMI (Was on the front page most of the day 2 weeks ago):

Once you figure out general price, here's a good guide to Pricing Plans

[https://capitalandgrowth.org/answers/Article/3169972/The- Def...](https://capitalandgrowth.org/answers/Article/3169972/The-Definitive- Guide-to-Pricing-Plans)

</comment><comment><USER27> This is a stub root comment to collect comments about website formatting, which have been transferred hither.

<comment><USER28> Why not just have white text on a white background? No idea what's in the article

<comment><USER29> It's like #222 on #FFF ... not bad contrast?

<comment><USER28> Not sure why, but on my phone it's barely readable.

<comment><USER30> Night mode or dark theme related maybe?

Some sites don't set a body background color thinking it will always be white.

Might be related.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


As Animal Poaching Surges, Organized Crime Plays Bigger Role - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/150526-wildlife-crime-elephant-rhino-poaching-organized-crime/

<comment><USER2> Who buys this stuff? Are they so uninformed they don't know what's going on?

<comment><USER3> I recently went to Bangkok, Chinatown. They openly sell their "chinese medicine" stuff like tiger penises and whatnot, plainly visible in their shop windows. And around the corner, you can probably order a shark fin soup.

The "low risk, high profit" assessment seems pretty accurate to me.</comment></comment>


From WikiChina - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/opinion/01friedman.html

<comment><USER2> >>America's politicians are mostly lawyers; not engineers or scientists like ours

Is that so? /* Am really asking an honest question! */

      A google_search("chinese politicians scientists"); seems to be a story by it's own, BTW.</comment>


Freelance/Consulting pages - <AUTHOR>

In the past weeks I been doing a freelance work in elance. But I noticed that there are few interesting projects, and almost all of them are php clones. I tried some other sites but with no luck.<p>What freelance pages do you recommend me?, I'd like to work on Java or Node.js projects. <comment><USER2> Where are you based? We connect freelancers & contractors with work at creative and digital agencies, which results in higher quality work. (<http://dragonflylist.com>)

<comment><AUTHOR> Argentina</comment></comment>