Apple's mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/apples-mind-bogglingly-greedy-and-evil-license-agreement/4360?tag=nl.e539&h=1

<comment><USER2> MS Office comparison is weak. You pay for MS Office to own the output. iBooks Author is free. You pay Apple only when you produce something out of it and sell it for profit. It is absurd to expect proprietary software to be free.

Based on the past and recent history [think of all the products that Google shutdown recently], it sounds to me that it is much reliable for users, especially if you are going to put your career into it, that the company developing the software is making money from it.

</comment><comment><USER3> An important detail:

"Updated to add: By "it," I am referring to the book, not the content. The program allows you to export your work as plain text, with all formatting stripped. So you do have the option to take the formatting work you did in iBooks Author, throw it away, and start over."

This is about format, not content. Nothing to see here.

</comment><comment><USER4> The problem is the combination of this evil clause and Apple's general attitude and evilness.

First on the EULA: even if you used a program to do a formatting, said formatting is still your work, and the EULA recognize that by using the term work, so Apple is basically saying: if you use our "free" tool you have to give us a part of your work. So how exactly is that free? i don't know.

Then what happens if you use something else to do the formatting then just convert using Apple program (if that is possible)? Or if you can't convert redo exactly the same formatting, or something really near. Apple risk to argue that you breached the agreement even if you technically might not have.

And then what happens if they recognize that you used another tool to publish on other platform, but the too version are still too close to their taste? That's when Apple's general attitude and evilness will enter the game. They will say: I don't publish you, and I don't have to give any reason for that. You might say, yeah it is the game, it is their right. Except two things: the kind of people who object that typically also fake a taste for liberalism and free markets and so on (they are more probably thinking about something anarcho-capitalism style and how it could be great to make a lot of money fucking people all around you just because you can). I recognize that given the current laws, it is not obvious that Apple's don't have the right to do that, they even might have. But I found this way of doing business highly disgusting. The second thing is that a numerical publisher in Apple style has nothing in common with a real publisher. Their marginal cost for publishing you is absurdly low, their margins guaranteed, and they don't help you with you work (well yeah they kind of help you by "giving" you a program, ok in that case i suppose buying a fancy pen gives the builder some right on the story you wrote with? -- in any case this "help" as nothing in common with the help of a real publisher).

It all can be summarized with: Apple is constructing a giant monopolistic market, because well it is obvious that monopolies works and brings an absurd amount of money. And now every other giant multinationals find how brilliant this is and are trying to do the same, even for PC. They might even say it is not monopolies because they are multiple of those, and if they turn their sentence to say that "well" people might even believe them.

If this is the kind of world you want and like to live in, good for you. On my side, it makes me vomit.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't really see the problem. This is not a word processor, this is - as the name suggests - a software which lets you create interactive eBooks in a proprietary format which is only compatible with the iPad.

It is its sole purpose.

Apple as a publisher provides you this software for free specifically to help you publish on their own store. And they restrict you to use it only for that. They don't own your content.

You can create ePub documents with Pages (for example), which are readable with any ebook reader, and you are not limited in any way in how you choose to distribute them.

I don't think this is comparable to restricting the use of a Word or PDF document.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't think this is about the potential worst that can happen.

My guess:

Apple is betting that the tablet is the future of the PC. Apple is also betting that hardware prices will crater like the PC did. The future is about services and less about hardware and the iPad will get cheaper over time. Apple wants to guarantee their 30% cut on publishers, devs, etc. while making it difficult to port it over to other platforms.

I think it's wrong in believing this may have to do with lawyers. I think this is Apple's intent so they can close up any potential loopholes that would give a competitor an equal ground. Apple may not have to do this anyway since Android will probably not be the favored OS to use in education but Apple wants the guarantee.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sheesh, that's an emotive title.

The only end to this noise that I can see is that Apple will supply an update that removes the .epub capability, making the tool specific to iBooks.

Will we be any poorer for that? It's like having a machine that prints money - you could use it...but you're likely to get into trouble if you do.

</comment><comment><USER8> That is a mind-bogglingly stupid headline. Give me a break.

</comment><comment><USER9> There's no implication that you give up your copyrights to apple. They won't allow you to sell iBooks elsewhere, that's it. It's not exactly pro-open market but that's Apple: musicians and app developers already knuckle under.

The real disturbing part is this: Apple censors worse than China, and books tend to be provocative, a lot more than music or apps. They essentially want to act as a publisher too, but without taking any risks on the part of authors. I sincerely hope for good literature that ibooks ends to be a flop.

In any case the problem will be solved with 3rd party tools that take an iBook and convert it to (swf|html|exe) that people can sell anywhere they want. Surely apple cannot claim that the output of a conversion program belongs to them as well. Although it would be interesting to see how they react when the first ibook-to-iOS App converter appears.

<comment><USER6> > The real disturbing part is this: Apple censors worse than China, and books > tend to be provocative, a lot more than music or apps. They essentially want > to act as a publisher too, but without taking any risks on the part of > authors.

The rules may stipulate this but I don't think it's Apple's intent. If that was their intent they would never have control of the music and movie marketplace. Yes, certain books have been previously banned from apps but that was more about engineers not getting fired.

The app store model is still fairly new and Apple is still learning, even with books that existed 1,000 years ago.

I think they want to be open while protecting kids. That is a very fine line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For some reason a large number of people on this site become 'non copus mentis' in regards to Apple, and fall for absurd claims, eagerly swallowing ZDnet tripe.

The whole tone of HN floundering.

If your hoping for Apple to fail you have my sympathies. It is only going to get much, much worse.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't know if it costs anything to sell a book in the iBookstore, but to sell on the App Store, one needs to pay the $99 annual program fee.

Suppose there is an annual fee to join the iBookstore. Would there be a different reaction to this EULA if Author was hidden behind that "paywall"? Or what if Apple just charged $99 for this app instead of making it free?

The reason everyone is so upset about the EULA is that Apple filled a huge void in the eBook creation software market and Apple filled that void but is rightfully limiting the tool for their own benefit. Everyone was hoping Apple would swoop in an create an awesome tool for making eBooks, but instead they made an awesome tool for making iBooks. Are non-iBook creators worse off today than they were a week ago? Nope.

A better solution (from a PR standpoint, not from a technical standpoint) would have been for Apple to make Author output a proprietary format. After all, no one is crying out because Xcode can't produce Android binaries or standards-compliant webpages. Still, an open format is the best solution for this type of product. You don't want authors having to learn how to cryptographically sign their books or be able to generate ad hoc builds just to get a book to a student. Apple is enforcing DRM at the EULA level rather than at the technical level.

<comment><USER12> doesn't iBooks Author output a proprietary format still? It may be based on ePub but I thought it was still only readable by iBooks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why do they add the option to save as PDF if they want to lock you in to their store?

It is easy to export as PDF. You lose some of the pretty stuff but it does work. <http://i.imgur.com/cy8g2.jpg>

<comment><USER14> And based on my reading of the terms, you're likely free to sell that PDF anywhere you want (and likely the standard epub output also). What it looks like is Apple took the epub3 format and added some simple modifications to make it do the iBooks interactivity. Those modifications is what they don't want other stores selling, ie a Kindle update that works with Apples iBook format.

My guess is there will be some clarification from Apple if there hasn't been already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is just new people seeing the agreement. The point where he starts yelling about the fact that he might not be allowed into the store was a big indicator. A little research will show you what you can get away with.

The rest just sounds like Apple might mean the actual compiled digital book is their property. Not the actual internal content, but the functional storage and execution of it. They're trying to keep people from cloning a iBook reader, not trying to lock down the author's work. Indeed not clear and not easy to make clear.

</comment><comment><USER16> I can't imagine them defining "Work" so vaguely if they were trying to write a clear contract. More likely Apple wants to wait and let the courts decide how much they can get away with. God knows how that will turn out. I guess either the license will be ruled invalid or some ludicrous precedent will be set.

I can't think of any sensible way to decide whether or not data was "generated by" a piece of software. If you export your book to plain text, is that not "generated by" the app? Why not? It's the app's output. But it's also your own copyrighted work in a more or less rudimentary form.

Imagine you first write your book in Apple's app and save it to an iBook file that falls under Apple's restrictions. Then you retype your entire book in a 3rd party app that can export iBooks perfectly. The 3rd party generated iBook is bit-for-bit identical to Apple's. Now you have "two" files that are subject to different licenses, except of course they are the same file.

That's already absurd. But what if instead of retyping your book, you just import it into the 3rd party app from the Apple generated iBook file. You should be able to do that, right? Surely the legal status of the data can't depend on whether or not you typed it by hand. But again, this is absurd because you are importing and exporting to the same format. It optimizes to a file copy.

And this isn't a reductionist argument. The above is an entirely realistic scenario that will inevitably come up whenever an iBook author wants to sell their book outside of Apple's store.

<comment><USER17> This interesting article ("What Colour are your bits?") goes in depth on some of the reasons that different licenses on the same bits can happen: <http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think it's time to block zdnet content on HN.

<comment><USER19> I'm not in favor of banning (see Gruber discussions), but it does worry me that there are HN-ers that use ZDnet as a source of information. Let's please stop giving these dinosaurs any more traffic and hope they die soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's amazing that Apple thinks they can get away with this. What they offer is far from special. I'm glad I'm part of Exvo where we'll launch our Books app soon and do away with these crappy business proposition.

<comment><USER21> Nice to hear from someone without vested interests in this ebooks thing.

Now, about that "what they offer is far from special" line. Are you serious? If what they offer is far from special, how come nobody else offers something like it?

Have you seen how Lulu proposes you format your books? Have you seen any Amazon kindle book maker? Have you seen the Blurb photo books app? Not even close.

Also, there's nothing amazing that "Apple thinks can get away with". What the said is only:

1) Here's our huge store with a market of 50 million devices.

2) Here's the reading program we have made for them.

3) Here's a free app to format your book content.

4) IF you want to sell something _you have formatted and exported_ from our app, you have to sell it through out store, and we get 70%.

This would be reasonable _even_ if the app (3) was paid for.

Actually, in that case, it would be like the "iOS membership program"'s $100.

<comment><USER22> should be "and we get 30%" -- you have a typo

<comment><USER21> Yep, sorry.

And it could even stated as:

and we get 30% --compared to 95% to 80% traditional publishers get from you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> TL;DR; Tempest in a teapot.

The author missed the definition of "Work" until after they published the article. "Work" is clearly defined in the EULA as the output of the Apple software.

The Apple software in question is the last encoding step in a workflow to publish iBooks. If you aren't publishing an iBook, use a different tool for that last step.

<comment><USER24> Where is that clear definition of "Work"?

<comment><USER25> "If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a "Work")"

Second paragraph of the EULA. Unless my English is bad, that defines a "Work", capital W, to be the generated output of the software.

<comment><USER24> That's just an informational note. It does not appear to carry any legal weight, but is just a tl;dr for what they think is an important clause.

<comment><USER25> The license is the entire document, not selected bits and pieces of it.

<comment><USER24> But does that piece determine the meaning of the word for the entire rest of the document?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'll be honest, I don't understand this uproar. Apple isn't marketing iBooks Author as a general-purpose eBook publishing tool, they're providing it _for free_ for the _express purpose_ of publishing to their platform. This is how they describe it on their website:

"iBooks Author is an amazing new app that allows anyone to create beautiful Multi-Touch textbooks — and just about any other kind of book — for iPad."

That's why every comparison between iBooks Author and Office or Photoshop or 3DS Max or any other creative application rings so disingenuous in my mind. They're not even restricting distribution outside of their platform, they just don't want you making money from it. What evilness am I missing?

<comment><USER27> They are using their dominance in the tablet market to own another market, exclusively on their terms. Similiar to what Microsoft did when bundling IE with Windows. I would not be surprised to see an antitrust case against Apple in the near future.

<comment><USER21> Only you can read Kindle books on the iPad with the Kindle app, also with the Stanza app and tons of others. Also plain ole PDFs with the built-in viewer.

And iBooks is not bundled, you have to download it.

And even if it was, bundling IE was not what got MS in trouble in respect to antitrust laws. It was things like pushing computer makers in under the table deals and such.

Actually lots of programs are built-in to any modern OS, from browsers to ftp to pdf viewer to text editors. Nothing anti-trust about it.

<comment><USER28> Others can do it because they don't have a monopoly. Windows still must be distributed without its media player in Europe.

And Apple already tried to abuse its position with the Kindle app by forcing a distribution commission for books it didn't sell. Also a guaranteed lowest sales price. They've hardly been kind to competition on their platform.

<comment><USER21> """And Apple already tried to abuse its position with the Kindle app by forcing a distribution commission for books it didn't sell."""

Well, regarding Apple forcing Amazon to play a distribution commissions for books sold through the iPad, it was either that, or allowing other companies a free ride to sell on Apple's platform, the Apple spend tons of R&D on, without Apple getting anything.

Apple puts those restrictions because it considers not just the hardware of the iPhone, but also the App Store as a platform that it have invested money, engineering and infrastructure in, and wants to profit from it too. Apple doesn't believe in the old mantra "apple only makes profit from the hardware". With multi-billion app/song/book/etc sales, why should they?

Allowing others to sell stuff in your platform without paying you makes sense if your platform is an operating system.

It _does not_ make sense if your platform is an application market.

Now, regarding "being kind to competition on their platform", indeed they have been not. But they would have been foolish to be. They invest in building a game changing phone device, then a game changing app store AND a game changing mobile platform, why would they invite competition in their own platform? Let competition exist between multiple platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This seems to be a misreading. My read is "If you sell the output of this, you grant us exclusivity. If you breach exclusivity, we have a variety of options in dealing with you, including refusing to carry your work on our platform. _In the event we do this_ we don't owe you anything even if you think it sure would have been a swell thing if we had distributed through our platform and are inclined to sue us over the imputed lost revenue."

Exclusivity is still a very cruddy contractual term for authors, if viewed against the universe of "all possible contractual arrangements", but it is far from uncommon in the publishing world. I mean, everyone is pretty much in the business of exclusive distribution towards channels they control. If you sign with a dead-tree publisher, they're going to want exclusive rights to be your only dead-tree publisher in a geographic, cultural, or linguistic territory, even if you could get someone else to kill trees on your behalf and double your sales that way.

You'd have to weigh access to the Apple megaphone versus the sales you could be making through other platforms/channels. If I were (hypothetically) going to get into ebook publishing, I'd take note that Amazon is _much_ more generous (off the top of my head standard Kindle publishing requires no exclusivity and one of their programs wants just a 90 day exclusivity window for e-publishing). This would allow you to simultaneously sell through e.g. your own site to a pre-existing fanbase and avoid the 30% (or whatever) rake, or do things like "Hiya I'm the author of five novels and counting in this sci-fi universe I created. The first one is $0.99 on Amazon or totally free if you sign up for my email list."

<comment><USER30> In the publishing world an author provides exclusivity in exchange to something. Usually the author gets some type of advance and the commitment from the publisher to publish and market the book.

Here you are supposed to give up commercial exclusivity merely for the ability to use a piece of software. And there really isn't anything special or expensive about that software either, there are plenty of free ebook creation software options.

Furthermore, in the usual publishing contract if the publisher that has exclusivity declines to publish something, the author can usually shop the work to other publishers. Not here. Here apparently if Apple says no, you are pretty much screwed, you cannot sell your work anywhere.

And by the way, I do not think that the original article authors are misreading anything. The agreement says:

"Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution"

This means they can refuse distribution for any reason, and you do not need to do anything wrong to be refused. And of course if they refuse you do not have the right to sell your work anywhere else.

<comment><USER21> _Here you are supposed to give up commercial exclusivity merely for the ability to use a piece of software. And there really isn't anything special or expensive about that software either, there are plenty of free ebook creation software options_.

Then USE THOSE. The only exclusivity you give is of the file output you made with that software.

Not of your literary work itself.

<comment><USER31> Unfortunately, that depends on the definition of 'Work' in this context which is far from clear.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to find employment when your proprietary speciality has disappeared? - <AUTHOR> I am proficient in the proprietary SequenceL language.
"SequenceL is a concise, high-level language with a simple semantics that provides for the automatic derivation of many iterative and parallel control structures"
I can re-code your existing algos and make them fast.
I'm available for hire, NYC or remote only.
My preference is science and not for profit <comment><USER2> By picking up a new different language, of course.

<comment><AUTHOR> SequenceL is translated to C++ (or others). It's especially well-tailored, still, to time-critical and performance optimal multi-core systems. For HPC, no better alternative atm imho</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to implement "office hours" as a software engineer? - <AUTHOR> I suffer from frequent interrupts, and I'm finding it increasingly difficult to go back to being productive after an interrupt. Sometimes coworkers come to me with urgent problems, which is sort of OK, but often times they interrupt me for issues that could have been an email, or non urgent issues that could have been postponed.
I'm thinking about implementing "office hours" where I'd be open to interrupts. The rest of the day I'd like a "no admittance except on ~~party~~ urgent business" sign.
What are some tips to go about this, or maybe some pitfalls to avoid? Thanks. <comment><USER2> I have found that using a flag system works wonders. Luxafor makes a USB powered light that I have attached to my station. Green means chat me up. Red means leave me alone. I have it set to an interval of 25 minutes red to 5 minutes green. (Like pomodoro timer). Took some time to get people on board but now its great and has expanded to not only my entire team, but other teams in the org.

Note: not in any way involved with Luxafor. Was given their product by a friend.

<comment><USER3> It's noteworthy that Luxafor supports Windows only. Mac is coming "soon", and no mention of Linux. I'd expect a large portion of hackernews readers to be Linux users.

<comment><USER4> Could be a fun reverse-engineering project. I can't imagine there's that much complexity in controlling a LED.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like a generic usb gpio and a couple lines of bash, maybe a cron job. Nothing.

Maybe a few more lines of bash to do some sort of dynamic activity monitoring, to detect a "coding" usage pattern vs a "checking email, browsing web" usage pattern and adjust the availability automatically.

Still almost nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, this happens everywhere I've been, but many times, the reasons and who does it are different. Sometimes it helps to look at the classes of interruptions:

1) Coworkers needing help with their thing (rubber duck, for example)

2) Coworkers needing help with your thing where you are the expert

3) Bosses asking questions about the future

etc.

Different strategies can be helpful for these things. For long term planning, make a meeting. Say you'll think about all those things and have some great ideas for the meeting. This takes you off the spot, and hopefully will start some recurring thing where you get interrupted less.

Coworkers working on things is a bit harder, since you don't want them blocked, but you don't want them interrupting your either. I've done a lot of different things for this:

1) Is it something you can document that you are asked constantly by lots of people? Document it!

2) Is it something you can't document or schedule? Sometimes before getting started on something big, or before lunch, before scrum time, (when I am not in deep work) I will proactively ask some of the people who are likely to need me that day if they need me. Definitely ask and get a feeling at your standup if you have one if you need to help people out.

3) Sometimes I've adjusted my hours, where I will work from home for a few extra hours a day, where I'm harder to interrupt. Turns out if you're not in your office, and it takes a little more effort to bother you, that people might not, or they wait.

One of the tricky things to watch out for is when people come to you first after having a problem, rather than trying to solve it on their own. Try to not get in the habit of being the line of first defense. Teach them how to fish.

</comment><comment><USER7> Fighting for "heads down" time is a worthwhile endeavor. You will never be able to have 100% heads down time, but even a 2-3 hour uninterrupted block in the afternoon is a wonderful thing.

The problem I've had with trying to establish signals that I am heads down (e.g. putting up a sign, headphones are on, hoodie is up, etc etc) is that I will inevitably still get interrupted, and I will be angrier than usual when it happens. An interruption can be small as folks popping their heads over your cubicle wall to "see if you are busy". This drove me crazy, so I stopped doing it.

Another thing I've tried with little to no success: blocking off times on your calendar. People will figure it out and book over it.

Requesting days to work from home or a coffee shop (if possible with your job) is a great option, and I've found that I am way less irritated at interruptions when I regularly take days at home. People are way less likely to pick up a phone and call you.

Another good option, if your office has the available space, is to take over a small conference room every now and then. For this to work, you can't do it every day. Otherwise, folks will start to treat it like an office, and knock or peek through windows to see if you're busy.

But the best advice is to have honest and regular discussions with the offenders. Try not to be angry about it, and try to understand their point of view. If it works, the effect will wear off, and you'll have to remind them every now and then, but I've found this to be the most effective strategy. I usually ask people to Slack me, and promise them that I'll check Slack and respond to them in at least 30 mins. Those incoming messages may break up your heads down time, but you can at least silence them until you finish your current code :)

Hope this helps!

</comment><comment><USER8> It's definitely a culture thing. I do freelance work so I've been part of 4-5 different companies in the past 2 years alone.

In one team with 8 team members at a midsize company consisting of mostly junior devs and the CTO being a scrum/agile supporter, we would have discussions constantly, and features development would be consensus-based and tasks would be broken into tiny parts. One of the juniors had complained that they have too many meetings and suggested a meeting to address this issue (oh, the irony).

In another team, we're 5 people, all seniors with different skill sets. We do some agile planning with a simple scrum board, but everyone trusts the others to do their job. There have been days where I was in the office with 2 other devs in the room and I spoke maybe 10 words (I mean that literally) in the whole work day.

It could also be a symptom of "nice guy syndrome". I used to be that person. People would not just ask me about project stuff, but maybe the printer is broken. Or WiFi is slow. Or coffee machine needs cleaning. I couldn't do project stuff anymore. With each passing project, I learn how to be less of "that nice guy" towards more of a "that expert guy who will help if it helps the team". And if it's a junior team and everyone keeps asking me tech stuff, I will talk to the tech lead and ask whether or not it would be more sensible to reduce the number of tickets assigned to me and use me more as a coach, doing small workshops and doing pair programming.

<comment><USER9> > I couldn't do project stuff anymore

Did you have to move to a new company?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like you need a buffer. A person who's job it is to keep everyone away from you while that person records what everyone needs and presents it to you at specific times.

<comment><USER11> That, and proper internal documentation. And if that exists, encourage people to use it.

Usually when a single person is swamped with questions by co-workers, this will be because the information isn't properly documented in some sort of internal repository.

Wouldn't be the first time I've heard it argued that this takes too much time to implement.

I'd argue that it takes far less time than fielding all those questions manually.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually a really good point. Internal documentation is severely lacking. Encouraging people to submit more questions by mail/chat would probably make it easier to build up an internal knowledge base (in the sense that I can copy/paste those questions & answers as a starting point).

<comment><USER11> Kindof like a private stackoverflow... or something else...

I've tried Confluence but without strict adherence to a set of internal rules, that can easily become a mess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It has to be part of the company culture. All our engineers have company scheduled "flow time". This is 5 hours that is blocked off on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If someone wants to add the same on another day I'm sure people would respect it as well.

<comment><USER13> This would be _awesome_!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't trust people to do what I need, so I invert - if you can find me, you can have me.

And then I pamper myself with work from home days and firewall the access, either with tech or with good habits. Close the email, slack. Boss has a phone number, bosses make good default routes to get to me.

I don't do the pamper thing a lot, because I want to be available. I budget 20% of my week for heads down, inaccessible. I prefer it in 4 or 8 hour chunks because it can take me 2 hours to get into the zone. Once I'm there, I'm getting the majority of my output done in a week.

On the weeks where I do 50% heads down or more, I find I start hurting myself. I can do it for a few weeks, maybe a month or two, but if I run in the red zone for an entire quarter, I took too much and now I'm going to have a bad next quarter. I'm not a 10xer, I need to pace myself to get my 100% in and have something left over to help everyone else out, too.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have a reputation for telling co-workers to leave me alone. I've had co- workers wave their hand in my face or come and tap me on the shoulder when I'm wearing headphones or send me e-mails marked as urgent and a variety of other ways to get my attention.

I'm nice, especially if I am new to the company.

I ask that if something isn't urgent that they send me an e-mail and I'll review it later, often at home in the evening.

I also would be open to a chat during lunch time, but not over a meal. Come to my cube and let's chat while we eat. I'm eating, you can choose not to do so. Eating is the priority, this isn't a hands on show me the code and get my keyboard all grease and food.

If something is urgent and it's my job, by all means come stick your hand in my face.

If something is urgent and it's not my job and you think I can fix it, please come stick your hand in my face but please don't do this often if it turns out you just want any geek at the company.

During the day I don't answer e-mail except for first thing in the morning and during the evening. I don't have notifications on.

Please don't stick a post-it note on my screen! I'm sure I have an inbox or a mailbox someplace you can deposit things in.

All of this being said, I try to be flexible with everyone, over and over, until I have to insist that I get my projects done. I like completing work that makes everyone say "Wow". This means my full attention to details and general awesomeness.

<comment><USER9> My personality leads me to feel extremely guilty if I behave this way. I'm not saying you should feel guilty - your post makes complete sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Software engineering and building products is a social activity. Embrace it and take pride in helping others. Its part of the role too.

I understand that to you, as an individual, it may seem detrimental and even a waste of time but realize that overall it's a positive thing for everyone.

Instead of having some engineer waste hours struggling to solve a problem, just get them unstuck and go back to whatever you were doing.

My attitude is that when I'm in the office, it's all office hours. I'm there to collaborate. If I'm not in a meeting, then I'm available for questions. With that said, it's ok to say please wait or I'll get back to you on that.

Please don't take it the wrong way but I've always been bothered by engineers who have this attitude. Very often these are the same engineers that can somehow focus on writing code and watching Netflix on the side. A large portion of what we do isn't very complicated and it doesn't really require 100% concentration (hence netflix on the side). IMO, this is just an excuse we engineers use to pump our chest about how important our work is and to be anti-social.

Some tips

\- make sure you have good documentation

\- create a slack room where team members can ask for help and encourage them to use that instead of asking you directly. Other team members can pitch in too

\- be proactive and get to know the engineers you work with. Ask them if they need any help or if they are blocked by something

\- figure out the weakness of your team and hold internal trainings to fill in the gaps

\- have some empathy for your fellow coworkers

<comment><USER13> I _very_ much disagree. To characterize engineering as a social activity implies that this is the foremost characteristic. It is not. It is very much a personal art. It is a science, and it is math. It is you vs. the machine. The engineering part is done alone, between you and the universe. It is you vs. you. It is _not_ about people.

Do not misunderstand me, helping your peers and all manner of social skills are used, and are all necessary. There are other parts to this career and it requires balance and diverse skills.

But don't say that "engineering is a social activity". Nope. Bollocks. Staying employed as an engineer is a bit of social challenge we need to learn to deal with. Writing good code is not a social thing. Architecting good systems is not a social thing. The right answer is apolitical almost magically unfies people automatically. Mediocre answers are the domain for arguing and politics.

People are not the solution. Citing Dilbert: [https://dilbert.com/strip/2015-04-24](https://dilbert.com/strip/2015-04-24) \- people are the problem.

Help? Learning? Asking for help is fine, giving and receiving help is fine. This should be viewed as a mentoring or apprenticing and learning relation. But you _really_ need to figure things out _yourself_ or it doesn't count. After the hint, or the explanation, what do you do? You go home, alone, and try to do it _yourself_.

Engineering is a life of learning to DIY. If you can't DIY, then you should, very much, not be giving advice, nor continuing this career. So by its very nature, the core of this field is a very solitary venture.

All good tips, btw. I concur with all of them. But I'm just _immediately_ suspicious, on purpose, on principle, of people taking the line social first, maths second.

Having drinks with friends is a social activity. It doesn't pay as well.

<comment><USER17> Professional software development is very much a team sport, even when it comes down to the code. If you're not writing the code with the humans reading it in mind then in most cases I would say your priorities are off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Had the same problem. Not just me, all sw engineers, but it was more of a problem for the ones that actually were working on bigger projects involving a lot of coding.

A coworker tried using an availability light but.. good luck trying to get people to respect it. Either people will miss it, forget it, or ignore it (specially if they are above you on the org chart).

I tried mufflers a few times, but it didn't work that well. Same issue as availability light, plus the fact that everyone looks weirdly at you and initiate conversations when you have the mufflers on..

So what I did was push working from home more and more until I went to working 1-2 days from the office per week. Now I have a much better productivity, ability to focus throughout the day, etc, besides all the advantages of not having to commute 5 days per week.

</comment><comment><USER19> Interruption is the enemy of productivity.

Usually unintentional.. when people burst in on your maker time, they're saying in action what they have is far more important than anything you could be working on. This isn't true, so it's ok to at first gently nudge people to set some healthier boundaries so people know how best to get your help.

If you have a helpful nature (very good quality) there's better ways to not end up a path of least resistance where people can ask you before looking into it themselves.

You can decide if it is best to put up a sign, send an email, or verbally tell anyone who interrupts you to help you help them in one of the following ways:

\- Use Calendly to block out available times. use these for overflows of conversations and solving problems. 30 minute slots.

\- Answering things via email quicker than than in person. Batch the communication. Save in person for dedicated problem solving.

\- Consider starting a lunch and learn on Monday's to help people share what kinds of problems they helped someone out with that others might have too. People learn to help each other.

\- If these are your direct reports you can ask them what they tried before coming to you, not give th,e the answer and work through it with them,

\- Use headphones to indicate you shouldn't be interrupted, ask ppl to respect it. I know someone who would flinch a little when he was interrupted.

\- When someone interrupts you, before replying, you can say I'm in the middle of something and have a minutes now if we need more time we can schedule something later in the day. They won't get all the help they need and will focus on how to best get that, worst case.

\- Start using the phrase "I don't like interrupting you, can we talk when you reach a good stopping point" in your correspondence when requesting time of others. It sinks in over time.

\- There is a busy light you can buy that can sit on top of your monitor and is red, yellow or green to be approached. I forget what it's called but they look interesting.

</comment><comment><USER20> What has gone wrong such that they can't do things without having to frequently get your take on it? Why don't they already know how to do these things, or if they do know, why do they need to hear it from you as well?

That's the problem here. You being interrupted frequently is just a symptom, and unless you're hoping that making yourself unavailable will force them to rise and no longer need you in some kind of "sink or swim" situation, that's quite a risk. Don't mask the symptoms; cure the disease.

<comment><USER21> You'll need to prepare the team for when you get sick/go on vacation anyway so better start on that now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Office hours is the wrong approach or terminology - I would recommend focus hours. The later is more about your block of time to do deep work and less about them but serves the same purpose.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is one of those issues where you need your boss to resolvec it. I'd request a meeting with your boss, explain how and why these interruptions cost the company money, because you need to refocus after every interruption. Give examples when this happened.

If however, you have a boss that will interpret this as "Yeah, I haven't really worked much because I constantly talk to my colleagues.", it's going to be hard to introduce these quiet hours now. Highly depends on if your boss wants to support this.

<comment><USER24> Completely agree. You have to present the situation to your boss and let them decide how they want to handle it. Either they respect your assessment of the situation and help you, or they decline to assist or place the onus on you. In the second situation you then have to clarify if they're okay with the decreased work output this situation causes, or if they still expect you to produce at the uninterrupted level at your own personal cost of time and exhaustion. Finally, you'll have to decide if you are okay with the outcome of that conversation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Come in earlier before the others arrive or come in later/leave later. No matter what scheme you use there will always be a means to interrupt you. The longer the overlap between you and others then the higher probability of interruption as it gives more opportunity to be interrupted. If you reduce the overlap then you squeeze interruptions into a smaller time slice, and you'll get more done.

</comment><comment><USER26> Schedule personal meetings with yourself on your calendar that aren't any different from ones with teams and others. This is time to get stuff done. Just like a meeting with your boss, a report, or a team it is not to be interrupted unless someone is crying or dying. Set boundaries, set expectations, stick to them.

<comment><USER27> I did this for a long time. I had random looking recurring meetings on my calendar called things like "Backlog Grooming" and "JIRA Ticket XYZ-1923". It cut down on the bullshit meetings for a while, but people eventually figured it out and scheduled on top of it. It also did nothing to stop the people who just walk up and demand attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> If things aren't urgent tell them you don't have time right now but if they send an email you will respond when you have time. Make sure to actually respond. If you do this consistently for a while people will learn.

There is nothing wrong with telling people politely that you don't have time right now. They will respect that.

</comment><comment><USER29> "Office hours" as an individual contributor developer will never happen. But for the sake of argument..

1) Do you have the organizational and political clout (and skill) to institute this?

You can say "no admittance!" all you like, but if you're a mid-level dev and your lead needs something, you're going to get interrupted. Like it or not this sounds like a big culture change and it's not something even most senior devs have the organizational power to implement.

2) Are you prepared for the objections and potential backlash?

Whether we like it or not software has gotten written for decades with the devs fighting against constant interruptions from peers, managers, and other random coworkers.

3) Do you really need this?

Sort of building off #2, what makes your project or your work so special that you need to be available for only certain specific times of the day?

4) Are you prepared to push back?

So let's say you actually get this implemented. Then your boss's boss's boss comes up to your desk in the middle of your working time and asks to talk to you. Are you going to tell them no in front of all your peers? Are you prepared for them to get upset with you? There's no way your "no admittance" time would be on their radar unless it was a team-wide change (and even then, maybe not).

\--

In reality, most of us are not working on anything so complicated and important that the occasional interruption is a terrible thing. The same way 99% of companies do _not_ need to hire the best rockstar developer they can find, most developers are good-not-great at their jobs and realistically being interrupted is not going to cause us to miss deadlines or put out terrible code.

</comment><comment><USER30> I always chat a higher up or coworker asking if they have a minute for a chat before I go seem them. The fact that this is not common courtesy is annoying.

</comment><comment><USER31> A personal office hours might come off as arrogant, but pooling with others who support the same topic area / technology can work wonders.

</comment><comment><USER32> I've found that hiding in a meeting room or even working in a different building works for me. Coffee shops, coworking spaces, etc.

</comment><comment><USER33> There is no solution, you'll always be interrupted.</comment>


Ask HN: How lacking speaking and writing could I get a programming job? - <AUTHOR>

 I have a Ph.D. in math and four years in CS (I drop out of CS because I began to study my Ph.D, luckly I was able to put together my studies in Math and CS and publish some papers about complexity of algorithms in top rank publications (I got tenure in a good university). I can program in many languages, python, ruby, lisp, scala, javascript, Mathematica, julia, R  and others.  But my main weakness is lack of experience  developing any big project. I don't have a github account, it seems I am always learning and I, perhaps wrongly, believe that learning increase my opportunities more than developing, I have very little to show up for any prospective employer. Also,  as I read English only sporadically and write a little bit, my speaking and writings skills are very weak.
What would you advice me to do to get better prospects to get a programmer job?  I would prefer to do it remotely but that seems much more difficult.
On top of that, I am not so young, more than 30.  Perhaps you could suggest another kind of job related to programming?
As I have never worked with a team, I imagine there are many unknown unknown, so I don't have any clue about how I would fit in any team.  One day I was reading about advice to be a good data analyst, and P. Norvig words are etched in my memory: you need to have a lot of experience in big data analysis, It doesn't matter what or where you studied, you need to have a lot of hand experience with big data.
Perhaps is too late for me, to pursue this path and I may find a career outside of programming, but I enjoy learning and coding and I will try get a job in this field.
Added at 17:51, Madrid local time.
Thinking about all the difficulties, it may be an alternative to think about creating a start-up, but now the problem is what kind of product or service can I/my team/, provide that is of real value? But perhaps this problem is bigger than the first one, is a bootstrap. <comment><USER2> It's never too late to switch or alter the direction of your profession. Plus you're asking for help which means you're moving in the right direction.

It sounds like you're at a bit of a crossroads. The first thing I'd suggest is to pick one thing and stick with it. Stop the learning.

If you want to get into programming and develop your portfolio the following is what I'd suggest

1\. Create a github account.

2\. Find a project that interests you. I'd look at this thread from the other day on what OSS projects need the most help with documentation for projects [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8551624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8551624)

2a. As you're looking through projects, look for ones that have maintainers who show they welcome contributions and are willing to go the extra mile with communication. The way to figure this out is to look at past pull requests and closed issues.

3\. Once you've contacted the maintainer start helping. I'd suggest focusing on the documentation and issues first. Steve Klabnik had an excellent post on how to be an open source gardener [http://words.steveklabnik.com/how-to-be-an- open-source-garde...](http://words.steveklabnik.com/how-to-be-an-open-source- gardener)

4\. Start a wordpress, medium, or blogger blog.

5\. Every time you learn something write about it and PUBLISH it

All this advice is applicable to working on two main things 1) Figuring out if you really want a career in programming 2) working on your weakness, which is communication in English. If you have any questions or want to talk about better next steps feel free to contact me. My twitter handle is in my profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, sounds like a very good advice. But perhaps documentation is a no so appealing endeavor.

Another weakness of mine is that whatever I do I want to be paid in advance. I just don't see a quick ROI from working on documentation but I may be wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sorry that I don't have time to do your question justice, but real quickly now:

(1) "Over 30" is still quite young.

(2) Don't worry about finding an _ideal_ job right now. Or for the next 3 years, even. Just get any job that pays the bills in whatever city you happen to live, which doesn't drive you crazy every day (just some of the days), and which doesn't look like _too much_ of a "resume stain." (A little bit of a resume stain is OK, for now).

(3) And how do you get that job? Just keep applying, applying, and applying. It's like dating: you'll encounter (a hell of) a lot of rejection at first, but soon enough you'll find someone who sees the "real you", and will look past the faults that others can't get past.

(4) Once you've done that -- everything else will take care of itself. Time will expand, and, as if by magic, you'll find space and energy to work on your big data skills, your github profile, your English, whatever.

(5) And BTW, don't worry about your English. It might ding you in interviews (and you should definitely keep working on it), but it's really quite good. And you can take comfort in the fact that 99% of the people born in monolingual English-speaking environments in the U.S. (if that's where you are), i.e. the very people dinging you in interviews for your sub-perfect English skills, are themselves total wimps and klutzes at foreign languages, and would basically starve to death if dropped in a non-English environment and no one was willing to take pity on them and help them out despite their being too "lazy" to immediately become natively fluent in the local tongue.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Just keep applying, applying, and applying."

I know persistence is great virtue, but I was wondering if there is any way to get real work experience (team, communication, real job conditions) and at the same time getting a good salary, that seems highly unlikely now. Only way to get it if you are able to, in same way, show something outstanding of a great value for your employer, what doesn't seem easy to achieve.</comment></comment>


Multiple personas, and multiple interest graphs - <AUTHOR> https://developers.vufind.com/wordpress/?p=23

<comment><AUTHOR> We think this trend is here to stay, what do you think? thanks.</comment>


Google Analytics data of being slashdotted and posted here. - <AUTHOR> http://smellslikedonkey.com/wordpress/?p=313

<comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing!

Here's what my analytics looked like when someone submitted my <http://www.patiencepractice.com> site to Digg: <http://imgur.com/p3gpd>

I don't have my server set up to alert me when it starts getting higher traffic. Does anyone have any good tips on how to do that? I'm running this on Linode.

<comment><USER3> Here's my analytics during my most popular submission reaching 30k views in 1 day.

<http://www.codexon.com/temp/traffic.png>

What may also interest you is that I earned around 50 cents in advertisements during this increase of traffic. I can't legally tell you the other statistics because of the AdSense TOS.

I had hoped that I could at least sustain the cost of the hosting through ads, but I don't know how I am making pennies on mountains of traffic while everyone else claims they are making $5+ a day.

<comment><USER4> Your ads might not be well targeted enough/have low CPC rates.

Plus, your site seems to be aimed at techies. Most of us don't ever click ads so it's tough to monetize that way.

Nice blog though :-)

<comment><USER3> Do you mean that the only way to earn a reasonable amount (at least enough for hosting) is to target a dumber audience?

<comment><USER4> I didn't say you're targeting more intelligent people, just more technologically inclined people who are most likely accustomed to Adsense ads and therefore less likely to click on them and provide you income.

There are a lot of niches out there that are full of really intelligent people who are less technologically inclined than most of us who would be more likely to give consideration to an Adsense ad than we would..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My Beginning Ruby royalties post that did pretty well here got about 3000 visitors from HN in the first 24 hours, and 4000 from Slashdot in.. several hours, before I took it down due to their erroneous summary (and having had a kid the same day) :-)

</comment><comment><USER6> Purely in terms of traffic, slashdot or reddit doesn't give you anywhere as much traffic as Digg or Stumbleupon can send your way.

They all have a high bounce rate, I think it is normal for traffic from social media sites.

<comment><USER7> Digg will give you a big spike right away but it fall off the front page so fast that it doesn't last long. Slashdot seems to give you a boost for a whole day.

<comment><USER6> Each link on digg stay on the homepage for approx. 2-5 hours (depending on the time of the day), there are roughly 50-60 links on the frontpage a day. It makes sense that slashdot is likely to send you traffic throughout the day at more or less same pace. In case of digg, even after it gets removed from the front page a story can move to the "top 10 list" for the nest 10+ hours which sends huge amount of traffic.

Speaking from personal experience, I have seen digg send traffic from 5k to 60k in a day. Here is a recent example: <http://imgur.com/NWAWG.png> google analytic roughly shows the same traffic numbers.

<comment><USER8> Digg pages rank pretty OK in Google. I got very roughly 10k hits for a site from the Digg effect, then 1.5k over the next 2 years from people who randomly found the Digg post and clicked through.

Biggest effect of all was that many blogs found my site through Digg, then linked back to it, leading to an improved ranking that brought 31k hits from Google (over 2 years).

Still all of this is peanuts and didn't amount to anything, time spent on that site was mostly good as a learning experience. It brought in less than $500 in revenue (total) over the years, despite being in a very lucrative niche (domain names) and being on Digg, Reddit and del.icio.us main pages.

Currently the site is broken and I am not maintaining it anymore, but it was a list of domain names that are expiring soon. It didn't make much revenue because right after a hit of popularity my affiliate partner cancelled their affiliate program for registering expiring domain names, and I could never find another one and could only slap AdSense there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't think a slashdotting is what it used to be, both in the number of users, and in the amount of bandwidth available to the site getting slashdotted.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. I am not a programmer by any stretch of even my own imagination, but I do have a website that kindof sortof seems to work. I've had things make it to the front page of here, and slashdot and was _extremely_ surprised that it didn't just crash my machine (it's slicehost's cheapest VPS).

This was weird to me because I grew up around fark and slashdot hearing stories about servers going down almost immediately after being posted. I think that those days might actually be gone.

<comment><USER11> It's always been a case of severely underpowered hosts. I've gotten slashdotted several times, and frankly it's not that much traffic (anymore, anyway)

The biggest problem seemed to be sites running on hosts with far too little memory, far too low maximum number of Apache (or whatever) processes, or mismatched maximum number of Apache processes and database connections.

Though I'm sure there's at least an order of magnitude difference depending on the post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> <http://www.fudgie.org/slashdotted.html> \- a recording of the traffic glTail got from Slashdot after it was announced. If I remember correctly, it got a bit over 4000 requests/minute at the 'worst'.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just for the record, this isn't my site, but a friends'. Posting it here cause it seems in line with common topics.

</comment><comment><USER13> Your bounce rate is surely very high (90%) - do others also have this large bounce rate? Ours is close to 50%

<comment><USER14> you get 50% bounce from spikes from reddit, slashdot? or you get 50% bounce rate normally?</comment></comment>


YouTube is deleting comments with 2 phrases that insult China's Communist Party - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270290/youtube-deleting-comments-censorship-chinese-communist-party-ccp <comment><USER2> I wonder what the effect of a protest by millions of YouTube users adding "五毛" ("50-cent party") to comments for a week would be? No additional labor, since deletion is automated, but what other secondary effect costs would be incurred?

The comments are stored, and indices updated, so perhaps a lot of compaction might slow the site or cause other problems. What other secondary impacts, if any, can you think of?

Also, what happens if YouTube users put "五毛" ("50-cent party") in their profile descriptions?

Not advocating this mind you, but thinking of it as a thought experiment. It's useful because it is a real world case of where a protest might incur an indirect DDOS (IDDOS?), and how can we prepare a site we manage against that kind of protest. Also, I am firmly against any kind of censorship that isn't clearly protecting against the equivalent of someone yelling 'fire' in a theater.

</comment><comment><USER3> Who cares?

Youtube deletes lots of comments that are vulgar or tasteless or obvious coordinated uselessness before anyone sees them.

Just because this one is an insult to China's ruling party doesn't make it more meaningful.</comment>


Why Arby's is testing meat products that look like big carrots - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/26/business/arbys-fake-meat-carrot-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> I dunno - "We have THE CARROTS" does not resonate with me.

Or are these carrotoids really real meat, meat that's grown in some unholy lab, meat that never sees the light of day, never knows a mother's care, meat that develops into unspeakably deformed teratologies?</comment>


Unilever to Facebook and Google: Clean up 'swamp' or we'll pull ads - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/12/media/unilever-advertising-facebook-google-swamp/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16362705](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16362705)

250+ points

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> (contains autoplay video)</comment>


Ask HN: Lego case for iPhone - kickstart - <AUTHOR>

Can anyone offer any advice on getting the word out on a kickstart project without seeming spammy? I've submitted to reddit a couple of times, and tweeted a little bit, but am walking on eggshells in fear of seeming spammy.
the project was created by my brother who is a teacher, and I'm doing my best to help as I'm a "prgrammer" so I must know how to do these things. Little do they know I program via search?&q= and thus need to do the same here.
Any help/advice/criticism would be appreciated.
There's more info on the project at his website: http://tinkerbrick.com/
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Hmmm, I'm having the same problems with one of my sites. I have no proven solutions for you, but I would suggest:

* Try and engage with the lego community - post to forms, blogs, etc. The lego community is very large online, with many active forums. Even if you just have a link to <http://tinkerbrick.com/> in your forum signature, people will click it.

* Offer up free review samples for prominent blogs in the lego community . * Run competitions in the lego community, offering up your iphone cases as a prize.

* Purchase google ad words.

* Write articles on your site, and try to get them linked to from other lego related sites.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a way to control lego motors and sensors using an ipod instead of the mindstorms control bricks?

Also, have you tried posting on lego forums (lego.com has a message board)?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not aware of any other way outside of mindstorm. But there is a cool integrator for mindstorm that allows you to connect MS to wi-fi thus allowing integration with iOS (and other platforms I'm sure). So with this and a couple of iPhone/iTouch devices you could definitely do what you're asking.

Yes, I think there has been some effort on the Lego forum front by my brother, but I think he's a bit hesitant to scream in Lego's face that he's created something base on their product. Even though it's all perfectly legal, it's still touchy. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Call To Action; You need to have me at hello. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.derekperez.com/post/230495880/call-to-action-you-need-to-have-me-at-hello

<comment><USER2> Minor hacks which can improve conversion rates for Zumbox:

* Lady is facing away from the signup form which focuses visitor attention away from the form. Signup conversions can probably increase if she were facing towards the form

* More details on how the service works below the fold can actually help. I think the page doesn't do a good job in convincing people who are there to learn about the service. It stresses too much on conversions.

* Having "Totally secure" and "Privacy Protected" in bold large font just next to convert button can help.

They ask personal and potentially sensitive info right on the homepage, better convince visitor that it is worth it and his data is safe.

Of course, all my suggestions can be split test :)

</comment><comment><USER3> You should add that _NO_ landing page analysis is near complete without numbers from testing.

My experience with landing pages is that your deepest assumptions of what is _better_ can be proven wrong by your visitors.

<comment><USER4> My favorite data-driven decision: one company I worked at ran a contest for the best-converting copy for the homepage. The secretary came in first place, the marketing guy came in last.

<comment><USER2> Is that study documented? Looks interesting..

<comment><USER4> The marketing guy ran the study, so he made sure that the results beyond 1st place were quickly buried.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I visited Zumbox yesterday, as it was mentioned in a post here. I was unhappy with the design. I felt there wasn't enough information there, and I grudgingly watched the video, only after I couldn't find information in non- video format. I should note that I am in the market for this service and only gave them the extra time I did, because of that. Were I a more idle visitor, that back button would have had skid marks on it. No, I didn't convert. I went with another company, also mentioned yesterday.

The author doesn't like "distracting nav links". Maybe. If I was an expert, I'd be rich. But after struggling with this stuff for awhile, it's my opinion that when the user's trigger finger starts getting itchy, he's going to click that mouse. On Zumbox, there's almost nowhere to click but away from Zumbox. Seems like it would be better to let him stay on your site at least.

Zumbox was notable for me, in that I actually had a negative opinion of it's landing page, where usually I'm neutral or I find things to admire about almost any established companies page.

</comment><comment><USER6> At some point some things are a matter of taste and some people will like one design while others will like the other.

For example for me it's the opposite than this author: I don't like video too much; I'd rather read and a sign-up page is more intimidating than some text explaining the service.

<comment><USER7> I agree with you. The video is a big turnoff to me. Give me details somewhere in print. I'd bounce off the Zumbox page quickly. It looks more like someone just trying to gather my info to sell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is video that important? I hate it when the only way I can understand what a product does is by spending 2 minutes to watch a video. Has anyone does tests to see how much video improves conversions?

<comment><USER9> If the only way I can get at product information is a video, I leave. It's that simple

<comment><AUTHOR> I think thats a little to B&W. I don't think you should only ever have a video, Its important to have features in writing. You never know when you need to print something out for your boss to review.

My big point is, let people trust in and rely on a video as their first experience, make that experience priority, if it makes sense for your business.

ECM and Zumbox both offer very new strategies to dealing with a problem most people don't really conceptualize immediately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well said. I could learn from this technique!

</comment><comment><USER11> How does zumbox work? do they scan mail... or do you only receive digital mail from businesses that have a partnership with them? How is this different from email?</comment>


Mumps, other outbreaks force U.S. detention centers to quarantine 2k migrants - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-outbreaks/mumps-other-outbreaks-force-u-s-detention-centers-to-quarantine-over-2000-migrants-idUSKBN1QR0EW <comment><USER2> Terrible...we should hurry up with the deportations so they can get adequate health care from their home country...lingering in a U.S. detention center instead of their home seems inhumane.

<comment><USER3> It's not like they made a choice to leave their home.</comment></comment>


Amazon CloudFront Now Supports Streaming Media Content - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/12/amazon-cloudfront-now-supports-streaming-media-content.html

<comment><USER2> The most useful information on the current state of RMTP client libraries I could find: [http://captsolo.net/info/blog_a.php/2009/01/19/rtmp_flash_vi...](http://captsolo.net/info/blog_a.php/2009/01/19/rtmp_flash_video_streaming_protocol)

I suppose it was only officially published by Adobe at the beginning of 2009...

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish they would enable some sort of HTTPS support on CloudFront. It's a major pain to have an image or file on CloudFront and try to serve it on a secure page. IE throws up a security warning and people run away.

HTTPS can be done by falling back to the original S3 bucket address, but still, a major pain in the ass.

</comment><comment><USER4> One thing that isn't apparent to me is if these new Cloudfront features support Live streaming. Does anyone know if Live Streaming is supported, and how one would go about implementing?

All I can see from initial docs and tutorials is that you upload static flash content.

<comment><USER5> Given that S3 must be used as the origin, I suspect live streaming is not possible at this time (S3 does not support streaming upload).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am very happy to see this--setting up streaming servers is a pain and I already have tons of video up on S3.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone know if you can stream using Adobe Media Server to a silverlight player?

<comment><USER8> It is possible to write a Silverlight client that understands Adobe's RTMP protocol if you really need it, but for non-live streaming to a Silverlight player i recommend IIS with smooth streaming on the origin server(s). The media chunks are delivered through HTTP so any CDN will do.

<comment><USER9> Except, say, CloudFront, which requires S3 as origin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How much per mb is amazon currently charging for bandwidth?

<comment><USER11> You can find the Amazon CloudFront prices here: <http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/>

For United States Edge Locations it is $0.17 per outbound GB for the first 10TB. So using between 0MB and 1024MB will cost you $0.17. Use 1025-2048MB and you will be charged $0.34.</comment></comment>


C++17 Fold Expressions - <AUTHOR> http://baptiste-wicht.com/posts/2015/05/cpp17-fold-expressions.html

<comment><USER2> It seems very ironic that C++ adds _more_ rules to the language in order to get _less_ cluttered code.

This "..." syntax, which probably won't be used a lot of times, will be nice because you'll understand intuitively what the code does at the first sight. And that's good. However, you'll have to spend the rest of your time dealing with the surrounding code: templates, iterators, move-semantics double- amperstands, std::forward and other subtleties of modern C++.

(Note: not being negative here, I actually do enjoy C++; I'm just staring at the giganormous complexity of the language.)</comment>


Scanning world's every book means turning many, many pages - <AUTHOR> http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jMr8wAZqhesLHmGt1TW9jtUT04EgD9090FB80

<comment><USER2> It sounds like the article is giving Google a hard time:

 _Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive at the Open Content Alliance, said Google may be trying to "lock up the public domain" by making proprietary copies of works whose copyrights have expired — which includes the vast majority of the world's books_

They have a "license" to do anything they want with the books (that's what public domain is), and they chose to develop scanning and OCR technology to make money off of that. Why is that wrong? If another company wants that database, they should get some scanners and start scanning.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know if it's only me, but I don't like reading books online.

I like the touch and smell of paper. Also, I guess there is a psychological aspect as you can feel how much you've read and how close you are to finish.

Anyways, if someone could create a device that mimics books but digital... I would buy it. Maybe a couple of OLED screen with the feel of paper?

<comment><USER4> I think buying a physical book, even if it's available for free online, denotes and reinforces a commitment to read it. For example, I could read SICP online anytime but I know I'll read it only when I buy it.</comment></comment>


Don't Forget: Prince Was a Selfish Asshole about Copyright - <AUTHOR> https://festivalpeak.com/dont-forget-prince-was-a-selfish-asshole-about-copyright-fa6334b5f6f5#.k6dqjijeg <comment><USER2> That's a really harsh headline targeting a recently deceased person, and then the article more or less fails to deliver. At best it shows that he was what you'd expect from a very talented artist... he was a little weird. He got weirder after he figured out just how crooked his industry was, and it would seem that his solutions to perceived problems left a lot to be desired.

That said, "Selfish asshole" is the worst kind of clickbait.</comment>


The Original Sin of Software Metrics (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoq.com/articles/metrics-original-sin/ <comment><USER2> I'm reminded of this story from ancient apple lore:

[https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...](https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt)

<comment><USER3> Also this:

[https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13](https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

— Goodhart's law as phrased by Marilyn Strathern

<comment><USER4> Add to this Conway's principle and Greenspun's tenth rule and you have an environment where the culture ends up somewhere between animal farm and Brazil and the only ones benefitting are spies from former and current communist dictatorships

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My argument against defect rate metrics is much simpler: the really scary situations are the ones where no one is looking closely enough to file bugs in the first place. That's where you find out it hasn't worked at all in six months.

Whereas the functionality subject to many discerning eyes filing bugs about every little thing is probably doing pretty well.

<comment><USER6> This reminds me of a good example from work: the emergency stop button on an industrial robot. By definition, the customer should not be pushing it. Pushing it means something has gone terribly wrong. But when they push it, they expect certain things to happen and they are unhappy when they don't.

(Your typically industrial robot does not rely on software for safety. However software can make the robot respond more gracefully.)

<comment><USER7> We once tested industrial robot fences- those fences do not stop the robot, if you deactivate the safety break zone- the robot goes clean through. All variants.

They are there to prevent humans from entering.

PS: Warstory seems familiar? Sebastian? Olli?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Instead of measuring "enhancements" vs "defects", just treat them all as one. Things that go into the product via demand usually has some backlog anyway ("Backlog item", "User story" etc on a higher level). What might be interesting is marking things as regressions or not regressions which might give some hint about which areas are too complex or too undertested.

<comment><USER4> Next you're going to start assigning story points to bugs and have a velocity of dozens of points per sprint while delivering zero usable features

<comment><USER8> Yes. I don't subscribe to the idea that bugs don't belong on the backlog with everything else. You can separate into two different backlogs (bugs and features) but you still need to pick from both.

If you don't keep them on a backlog then people will start arguing whether something is a bug or in fact a feature request/missing functionality. _That_ is a waste of time.

If you get a bug report for a bug that will take a week to fix you need to "assign story points" to it (in the sense that if you commit to fixing it you will at least know you have a week less available for something else!). Fixing the bug becomes a prioritization between the bug and adding features. So the bug is measured in the same units as features and prioritized against features. And fixing the bug adds value too - if you have feature X not working and you make it work, that is value. If you fix X instead of implement new feature Y you deliver value with feature X instead of feature Y. Does that value not count because it was "implemented before"? If you fix bugs for a month and ship a new version with only bug fixes then that is zero new features yes. Your velocity can be counted in terms of "new features" and be zero. Or "rate of fixing bugs" and be high (it's still a good measurement for knowing whether you have enough resources to hit a goal such as a yearly release - which might be planned with 50% bug fixes and 50% new features!).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Enhancements could be capitalized, a defect could be an operating expense.

I think this is where it truly came from.

<comment><USER10> Is this true for both internal IT departments and Software companies?

This is actually a 2nd examples of businesses optimizing too much on the wrong metric. (100% focus on earnings rather than cash, or vice versa)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So instead of measuring number of feature delivered, measure time to delivery? Do we not have an implicit time constraint in "number of feature delivered"?

</comment><comment><USER12> Taylorism perverted since 19-something. Without the boni of course.

Bad management? Yes.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you buy LinkedIn shares? - <AUTHOR>

With the upcoming IPO of LinkedIn today, would you be buying some LNKD stock or not? Any experts here?<p>What about Groupon/Facebook/Insert other hot startup? <comment><USER2> First off, I know absolutely nothing about the stock market. Actually, if it was possible - I know less than nothing about the stock market.

Anyway, I wouldn't pay over $45 a share if I wanted to buy. Why? 'Cause that's what you could have gotten it for at its best value. You can't possibly buy right now. Why? 'Cause it was at $45 a share! You missed your opportunity. You can't possibly settle for $65 a share when it was $45 a share just a few hours ago. YOU CAN'T.

But now, if it dips below $45, then I'd say it's time to start pondering buying.

(the above is based on sports betting and I believe the same principles hold true)

</comment><comment><USER3> I read that cramer said that linkedin was very overvalued. With that in mind, I would probably buy the shares.</comment>


OPW Linux kernel intern develops QR code for Oops messages - <AUTHOR> http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/200-libby-clark/773488-opw-intern-develops-qr-code-for-linux-kernel-oops-messages <comment><USER2> This could be one of the few remotely practical uses of QR codes in existence, easily capturing ephemeral data. Now, most kernel messages can get logged to a file, but there are cases in which that's not practical.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is pretty cool.

This title as posted on HN (not in the article) is silly, though. The Linux kernel does not have "interns", this person is an intern for GNOME's OPW (Outreach Program for Women):

[https://gnome.org/opw/](https://gnome.org/opw/)

<comment><AUTHOR> True! She was an OPW intern for the Linux kernel. See more on Kernel Newbies: [http://kernelnewbies.org/OPWIntro](http://kernelnewbies.org/OPWIntro)

The latest round of kernel internships (through OPW :) just started.

<comment><USER3> This looks like a neat program :) I look forward to seeing more cool stuff come out of it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Welcome to the club :) [https://www.haiku- os.org/blog/mmlr/2012-07-01_qr_encode_your...](https://www.haiku- os.org/blog/mmlr/2012-07-01_qr_encode_your_kdl_output)

<comment><USER5> The write up leaves a lot to be desired. Using QR codes to display kernel oops messages was proposed and demonstrated back in June 2012.[^1] Matt Garret even mentions this in the lkml thread[^2] that the article links to, but for some reason the author did not bother to look into mjg's response. So I am not sure "welcome to the club" is accurate since the kernel has been a member (to the extent that this patch is evidence of membership) of the club since June 2012.

[^1]: [https://lwn.net/Articles/503677/](https://lwn.net/Articles/503677/)

[^2]: [https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/3/18/673](https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/3/18/673)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome ! Two points I'd like to make:

a. This idea, of using QR code to capture debug info, by itself is very interesting and innovative (AFAIK). Does there exist user space applications (desktop/web/mobile ...) that do similar things ? (ie: don't send us the logs, just click a pic and attach it to your support ticket ...). I personally haven't come across any, but of course my knowledge is limited. In any case, I think this sort of log capturing for debug purposes certainly should've be done more, IMHO.

b. Something like this could have never come out of proprietary software, simply because this is someone developer's specific itch that needed to be scratched. Whenever they say that open source software cannot compete with proprietary software, because proper 'product management' doesn't exist which guides feature development or that proprietary software will do the 'hard' things that aren't interesting/fun or just too much effort, I always argue against that. This sort of thing makes such arguments easier.

<comment><USER7> > Does there exist user space applications (desktop/web/mobile ...) that do > similar things ? (ie: don't send us the logs, just click a pic and attach it > to your support ticket ...)

If you're going to go to the trouble of adding extra code to handle that behaviour, why not just add functionality to the app to report its own crashes, error log excerpts, etc.? This is likely the reason you haven't come across it: it makes less sense than just providing the option to submit the crash reports directly. Less work for the user, less support overhead for the developer, etc.

> Something like this could have never come out of proprietary software, > simply because this is someone developer's specific itch that needed to be > scratched

I'll point out that most other OSes have a way of capturing crash reports, stack traces, memory dumps, etc. and sending them or storing them for debugging. Linux is the only modern OS I've used that doesn't have the capability to send crash reports back to the developers, which is why the QR code trick is necessary in the first place, and the QR code functionality is worse in all cases except where your storage system is completely inaccessible/irreparably damaged.

<comment><USER8> _Linux is the only modern OS I 've used that doesn't have the capability to send crash reports back to the developers_

Red Hat's abrt does that: [https://github.com/abrt/abrt/](https://github.com/abrt/abrt/)

Using kdump, it can also report kernel panics. Kdump acts as a kernel that is executed after the main kernel panics. The fresh kernel has a clean state and can store the dump in a file system.

 _the QR code functionality is worse in all cases except where your storage system is completely inaccessible /irreparably damaged_

It's worse because it's not an automatic process. It's also better, because it doesn't require external dependencies like abrt and kdump -- it's part of the kernel.

<comment><USER9> It's also better on account of being accessible to a wider audience. I'd wager far more users know what a QR code is than abrt, kdump etc. If there's just a cursory error message and a QR code with dump nearly everyone can submit helpful bug reports.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What happened to storing the oops in EFI variables? You can store much more data there than you can convey through QR codes displayed on the limited screen space.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ugh another hateful mobile phone thing being introduced just because it's new and therefore better. What next? Removing the kernel and replacing it by web service calls to a mobile phone "app".

Keep this rubbish out of my kernel please.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wicked cool. I may steal, er, adopt this for our work!

</comment><comment><USER13> Good idea!</comment>


The third Los Angeles: Can it truly become a green, sustainable city? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/metropolis/2015/04/the_third_los_angeles_can_it_truly_become_a_green_sustainable_city.html <comment><USER2> As a life-long LA resident, I say don't believe the hype. The article says that the centerpiece is the revitalization of the LA river. As far as I can tell, this isn't happening. Some bike paths were added along the river, which is nice, but that's far from what I'd call revitalization. The bike paths are still poorly lit, they still smell like shit, and they're not getting much use. There's a huge trainyard east of downtown (one of the coolest parts of the city, imo) called Piggyback Yard, which is owned by Union Pacific, who doesn't want to sell the land. It'd be hard for the city to do any significant revitalization of the river without turning the Piggyback Yard into a park that can provide flood control. Furthermore, the US Army corps of engineers controls the LA river, so the voters have no say in what happens here.

The metro extensions have been planned for decades, and there never seems to be much movement. Recently the blue line has been creeping steadily towards Santa Monica but I doubt this will have much of an impact on city life even if it does connect downtown LA to the westside beach communities. I used to encourage everyone to try taking the train, and I used to do it myself all the time, but I haven't hopped on the train at all in the last 12 months. The stations are too spread out, the paths of all the lines make little sense, the trains only come every 15-20 minutes, and a huge chunk of the city is totally cut off from the transit lines. As much as I don't like uber/lyft, they've made it much more enjoyable to live in LA.

Ciclavia is cool, but its just 1 day out of the year. LA is the worst city in the country to ride a bike. They claim to have more bike lines than any other city, but that's only on paper. Just because you paint a person riding a bike next to the gutter of a 2 lane street doesn't make it a bike lane. Yet that is exactly what the city has done in the name of adding bike friendly streets.

All of these projects are little more than photo-ops for city politicians.

<comment><USER3> The LA river revitalization project is a decades-long project that just began 4 years ago. It's already made significant progress in restoring portions of the LA river (though no significant stretches near downtown).

The metro extensions _are almost complete_ for the Expo and Gold lines. Initial preparations for the regional connector connecting the various lines underneath downtown (i.e., utility removal) began 2 years ago. Construction on the Airport Spur and a line connecting the Expo and Purple line (extension) has already begun. This time next year, construction will have begun on the _next_ extension of the Gold line, heading for the eastmost reaches of LA County. (By the way...the Red and Purple lines run every 7 minutes during busy hours, the Blue and Expo lines run every 10. Only the Gold line runs every 12 minutes or less.

Civlavia is held multiple times a year. LA does have more bike lanes than any other city...but LA is also geographically one of the largest cities in the world, so the _density_ of bike lanes is poor.

There is real change in LA, and they're definitely not photo ops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a native and lover of LA (currently in NYC), I've been enjoying all the press we've been getting recently. But as I skim this article, I'm confused. LA has massive urban sprawl. LA County is very, very vast in area, and many people live 1-2 hours by car (without traffic) away from their work. How is public transportation going to get so good that this car-dependence will go away? I'm all for it, I hate cars. The subway system in New York is great, but not including metro areas, LA is quite a bit larger in area.

<comment><USER5> It won't, ever. And that's okay. LA County won't be served by an awesome network of public transit, but if investments continue into dense areas of LA City you should see market forces at work -> public transit availability driving higher density development, driving more desire for public transit.

You can't de-sprawl Southern California as a whole, but you can make the dense urban core more palatable.

<comment><USER6> The sprawl in the LA metro area was built on the back of the then largest interurban system in the world, the Pacific Electric. If you take a map and overlay it on the modern freeway system, there are large parallels. There are also parts of LA City that have (and not even recently acquired) density rivaling Manhattan.

The future of maintainable sprawl is workable wide ranging rail and bus options, rail for the distance, bus for the last mile.

<comment><USER7> There was an interesting study recently showing that population density in LA is still greatest along the long-vanished streetcar lines.

It's also worth noting the streetcar lines were built specifically to serve land development goals, so they drove the development in the first place, not the other way around. In a way, streetcars _caused_ the sprawl of Los Angeles.

[http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2014/09/23/long-dead- stree...](http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2014/09/23/long-dead-streetcars- still-shape-l-a-neighborhoods/chronicles/who-we-were/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just would like to contribute one picture of this threa. It is from [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Pacific-E...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Pacific- Electric-Red-Cars-Awaiting-Destruction.gif)

More here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy)

I don't think that the politicians in charge changed that much since the 60s to let a green LA happen.

<comment><USER9> A wikipedia page whose neutrality is disputed?

<comment><USER8> Yes, so any time you go there you can follow what is happening, eventually there will a consensus what happened according to Wikipedia and end of story. What do you think what is the real story of those pictures with the trams?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The LA `pLAn` mentions steps to reduce the urban heat island effect. One way to reduce heat in cities is to increase tree canopy cover.

Here is recent lesson from the city of Melbourne, Australia, regarding drought and tree cover:

* the city experienced a drought from 1999 - 2007 [1] * as a short-term measure to conserve water, a decision was made to stop watering the city's trees [2] * consequently, ~40% of the city's trees are dead, or are in decline. The council now expects that 27% of the trees will die in the next 10 years, and 44% of the trees will die in the next 20 years.

Melbourne city now is aiming to improve tree canopy cover from 22% to 40% by 2040 [3], as a means to reduce the city's temperature by 4 degrees C. There is also work to capture storm water run-off from the city to use for irrigation.

Note that this is only talking about Melbourne's city centre (0.12m residential population of 4.2m total) [4].

As an aside, outside of cities, there is a recent Nature Geoscience paper that links lethal tree water stress thresholds to long-term climate models, and forecasts tree deaths due to drought in the southwestern United States by ~2050, assuming the world follows a high-emissions business-as-usual scenario (RCP 8.5, i.e. uncontrolled emissions, which tracks reality to date) [5].

[1] [https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/Sustainability/AdaptingClim...](https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/Sustainability/AdaptingClimateChange/Pages/Drought.aspx) [2] [http://citiscope.org/story/2015/can-melbourne-lower-its- temp...](http://citiscope.org/story/2015/can-melbourne-lower-its- temperature-4-degrees) [3] [https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/Sustainability/UrbanForest/...](https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/Sustainability/UrbanForest/Pages/About.aspx) [4] [https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/AboutMelbourne/Statistics/P...](https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/AboutMelbourne/Statistics/Pages/MelbourneSnapshot.aspx) [5] [http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo24...](http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2400.html)

<comment><USER11> The streets of most cities in South Europe are covered by deciduous trees. IMHO, it is the best way to make the cities walkable in summer while not preventing the sun to warm the streets in winter. Also, cities with trees on the streets are beautiful.

Of course, that mean that the council has to spend money taking care of that trees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Much of the rail expansion is rather disappointing. For example in expo phase 2, closer you get to ocean the better spaced the stations are (closer together), but between Bundy and sepulveda, there are no stations and little sane way to go in between, yet Bundy station is less than a mile away from 26th st station.

To add insult to injury, I recently followed the much touted bike path that is supposed to connect to existing SM bike paths at 17th street, but the damned thing ends at Cloverfield with no way that I can tell of safely getting to 17th street or anywhere near a designated bike lane. And no, I do not consider it safe to try and ride on Olympic blvd without a protected lane...

</comment><comment><USER13> A question for the LA natives on here.

Last year at this time, I had the chance to visit LA for my first time. I stayed in a B&B in Los Feliz and spent a few days walking around it and Silver Lake. My first day I asked the B&B owner about walking to the reservoir because I read online that it's a gathering point for people in the area. The owner told me he had never walked there and recommended that I drive. At most, it was a 2-3 mile walk. Do people in LA really consider it incomprehensible to walk that distance?

<comment><USER2> Yea, 2-3 miles is a very long walk in LA. Walking from los feliz to the reservoir would be especially tedious since the most direct paths are on boring residential streets. No one would ever do that walk unless they 1) dont have a car 2) are looking to get exercise.

<comment><USER13> For me, the residential streets were even pretty cool. There was some great graffiti art, lots of Mexican food available, etc. I found a good comic bookstore to get something for my daughter. Overall, it's a pretty nice walk.

<comment><USER14> I've had similar experiences in other U.S. car-oriented cities, too. I have a driver's license, but I've lived in big cities and literally haven't driven in years and always walk or take transit anywhere I visit.

I think people with cars in those cities often just don't know what routes are walkable and which aren't and assume the worst. People do the same with "the bus," I've found--I've been to many places where people who don't take public transit and don't even know how much it costs or where the routes go assume that it's dirty, unreliable, filled with criminals, etc.

But I'm probably doing the same with renting a car when I travel-- overemphasizing the expenses and inconveniences and discomforts involved.

One problem I have had walking in various car-oriented cities is poor-to- nonexistent signage for pedestrians. A busy, curvy street might suddenly go from having sidewalks on one side to sidewalks only on one with no prior notice pretty far from the last crosswalk, forcing you to backtrack half a long block, walk on the shoulder of the road or jaywalk-sprint through traffic. Or a complicated highway interchange running through the middle of a city might be easily circumvented on foot, but there's no signs telling you how to do it, leading to a lot of backtracking and meandering through no- man's-land.

I think the transportation planners unfortunately fall into the car-only group in a lot of cities, so they don't notice the need for pedestrian signs, or to adjust traffic lights so they're more visible to pedestrians, or trim foliage encroaching on sidewalks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think Los Angeles--and much of southern California--need to worry about preserving their water supply--especially the deep aquifers that take millenia to recharge--before worrying about anything else. They need to fix this problem now, because if they don't, southern California will become a wasteland. The rate those aquifers are being depleted by farms in the San Joaquin Valley is astounding; measurements have been taken showing subsidence of an inch a month in some places. It may already be too late for southern California, in all honesty. If I were living there, I would be finding a way to move out as soon as possible. Yes, the water crisis out there really is that bad.

Sorry I don't have any links handy, but my opinions are the result of spending two days a couple of weeks ago researching California's and India's water problems. I highly recommend doing some reading and watching some YouTube videos to educate yourselves on these issues.

<comment><USER16> The rest of the nation's attitude to California's water problem is very short sighted. I don't think most people realize how much food is produced in California. If California agriculture goes down, the result will be high food price increases everywhere. Many just have a cavalier attitude of "the market will adjust". There are big issues with just assuming "the market will adjust"

1) There is a big lag time for some crops to grow. Something like corn is no problem. But apples or anything else grown from a tree? Or any other crop that requires years of growing before it's productive? It will be many years until the California output could be matched.

2) Other places like the Midwest have potential water issues too. For example, look at the history of the Ogallala Aquifer. If a greater strain is put on the aquifer, it's possible they will also have the same water shortages that California has now.

The California water crisis is a national issue, but the rest of the nation would rather just laugh at us. The western states should be discussing serious proposals to build more aqueducts or pipelines to divert water from water-rich states to California. Maybe the Federal government could help with financing desalination plants. But this kind of cooperation isn't happening. I'm worried that what will happen is everyone will continue to just laugh at us until they go to the grocery store one day. Then they will care, but by then it will be much too late.

<comment><USER17> No, we are not laughing. We are screaming because nothing was done sooner.

<comment><USER18> I am neither laughing nor screaming, but rather praying for nuclear desal.</comment></comment></comment></comment>