The Economics of Writing a Technical Book - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/the-economics-of-writing-a-technical-book-689d0c12fe39 <comment><USER3> We've published several books, and the author for our latest Vue book earned $20k on the opening weekend.

The economics change completely if you self-publish or publish with a smaller firm that has marketing abilities (and better royalty rates).

Self publishing is awesome because you keep all the money, but it takes years to build an audience.

Honestly, writing the manuscript is the easy part. Building an audience, marketing it, keeping the book up-to-date is just as hard as the original manuscript. But it can really pay off.

I'm ready to share this now: our book on Angular 2 did $400k a revenue, per year, the first two years. BUT the reason this was possible was _we had a huge audience that trusted us_.

Email marketing is more powerful in this space than you might believe. Even today.

If I could give you one piece of advice, it would be to sign up for Ramit Sethi's emails and watch how he markets. After that, get every book on copywriting you can and learn how to write copy.

(Also, if you're interested in writing books with me for 50% royalties, my email is in my profile. I want to do books on Python and Node this year.)

<comment><USER4> Well, the other reason $400k in revenue was possible: you were writing about a popular JavaScript framework. There aren't many topics with such a wide audience.

<comment><USER5> > There aren't many topics with such a wide audience.

What now? The number of people who develop in angular actively is probably in the low 6 figures. In the context of the world that's a very small audience.

<comment><USER6> In the context of programming languages and tech stacks, that is an astronomical audience though.

I work in a niche where there are two books that have ever been written, by the same author, and there might be a couple thousand people total in the whole world that use this particular SDK. Most technical books appeal to an incredible narrow slice of the already small pie that is software people.

<comment><USER7> What niche? It's almost a disservice to your niche not to mention it by name! The books too

<comment><USER6> Microsoft Lync/Skype for Business development. Michael Greenleaf has written a couple books, and there are maybe a double handful of people blogging about it.

<comment><USER8> What's your plan for Skype for Business getting canned? Teams development?

<comment><USER6> That's many years down the pike, honestly. We still see a lot of customers using Lync 2010. People do not move fast in this segment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Author here of a technical book published with Packt several years ago. I had the first mover advantage as the only book of significance covering a Java library that was (and is) very widely used.

Total page count was ~350-400. It took me approximately 600-800 hours of research, authoring, editing, and final to complete the book. I had a full- time job and so spent about 6-9 months of nights and weekends.

I actually haven't added up the total of royalties but it was probably somewhere over $15-20k on sales of several thousand copies.

I wasn't in a position at the time to capitalize on the consulting / speaking gigs that folks have mentioned, and had I thought more about it I would have put myself in that position.

It definitely has been worth the experience as folks mentioned both in terms of resume-building (a book is a great thing to bring to interviews) as well as general reputation.

Also, if you are truly building a quality technical book, the level of research and knowledge required to do a good job was (for me) at least 5x the depth of my day-to-day work. As goes the old adage, you think you know something well until you try to teach it -- this was definitely true of my research efforts.

Summary - not worth it financially, but it definitely changed my career overall for the better.

If anyone wants to know more details, please reply here or PM me and I'm happy to answer as best I can.

<comment><USER10> I had the same experience, scaled down by a factor of 10 (it was a quick start book).

<comment><USER11> The level of depth of knowledge and research was at least 0.5x that of your day job? :)

Genuinely curious about how hard the book was to write/research.

<comment><USER9> Yes, it was actually a lot more in depth than my day job. But I chose to write a deep technical book rather than a shallow "cookbook".

Unfortunately most readers today are more interested in the latter than the former.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My experience in writing a technical book 8 years ago was the same:

[https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2010/01/the-economics- of-w...](https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2010/01/the-economics-of-writing-a- book/)

I made more money from Amazon affiliate fees linking to our book than I did the actual book. Way more. If you're out to make money short term, you're better off writing book reviews then books.

Having said that, the book gave me some credibility with clients for a couple of years when I was starting a consulting practice. When clients asked, "have you got experience with performance tuning databases?" I was able to point to the book. Today, with self published books being so prevalent, I don't think having a listing in Amazon is as influential as it was.

<comment><USER13> That's the main reason I would write a book: to tell people that I wrote a book.

You can literally say, "I wrote the book on that."

<comment><USER14> Hi, you've been shadowbanned, which is a shame because your last three or four comments have been perfectly reasonable (I vouched for them so they'd show up). I'd contact a moderator or something if I were you.

<comment><USER15> > your last three or four comments have been perfectly reasonable

His first banned comment looks pretty reasonable too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been pitched to write books a few times, by editors at reputable technical publishers. (HN readers would recognize the names of the publishers.) One of them told me up front that I would be offered an advance of $8K, that it would take 3-6 months to write the book, and that I shouldn't count on earning back the advance. She was clear that the benefits of authorship were reputational.

(The price wasn't why I turned down that and the other offers. Working on a book just isn't the thing I wake up eager to do. If I were an author I think I'd know by now…)

<comment><USER17> > the benefits of authorship were reputational

LOL. I published a book through Wiley about 8 years ago. I got an advance which I did earn back, and I'm still earning a small bit on sales every year. Reputational? The only time it's ever come up was when I was interviewing for the job I have now and one of the interviewers asked, "oh, I notice you wrote a book about SSL. Do you know stuff besides SSL though?"

<comment><USER18> Did you continue the interview? That is a pretty big red flag for that interviewer.

<comment><USER17> Oh, actually I continued the interview, took the job, and work there now. They just didn't (and still don't) care much about my knowledge of SSL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've written a book with Manning (Grokking Algorithms) and had a good editor experience: I had 2 editors that stayed with me through the whole book. They gave me a ton of great advice -- I even asked one of them if they would like co-author credit, it was that good. Manning regularly scheduled technical reviews and readability reviews, and I got a lot of comments from those as well.

I have also only written one book so I wasn't sure how "typical" my experience was, but I'm really surprised to hear that your book didn't receive the same level of support!

<comment><USER20> Would you recommend Manning to a first-time author?

<comment><USER19> Yes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Another payout of writing a technical book is that it pretty much solidifies you as an expert in the topic and can be a springboard leading to great job opportunities and things like paid offers to speak or teach. If I ever write a technical book, it won't be for the immediate monetary payout, it will be to solidify expert status in a topic.

<comment><USER22> Be careful what you pick.

I've done a couple of projects (book, video course) because the opportunity presented itself. Then, at the end of the projects I either was burnt out on it, or wasn't in a career position to take on consulting around it.

So, nice resume burnisher and proof I can finish something, but not a springboard.

<comment><USER20> I think this speaks more to differences between people than anything else. If 5-10 extra hours a week for 6-12 months burns you out on a topic, writing a 250+ page technical book is probably not a great use of your time if the finances alone don't make it worth it.

<comment><USER22> Ah. I wasn't burned out because of the book, but because of what I'd been working on (I'm just not a mobile developer).

But the bigger issue is that I would write a book based on something that I was working on, and then stop working on it (because of different work priorities or because of changing jobs) and then not have any interest in updating the book.

Whereas I think, for a technical book to be really worth your while, you should really focus on an area and dive in and become an expert, and continue to work in that area after the book comes out (consulting, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I authored and co-authored some books.

I wrote a book on Akka for Packt that has made maybe 5k. Packt is out of India and they have some different standards around topics and contents, but the experience wasn't much different from O'Reilly overall.

And there was a mini book for O'Reilly that netted a couple k, mostly because of later sponsorship. Writing a book is a really tough experience. I found it taxing. It's interesting going to meetups and having people come up to me and shake my hand though saying they read my book.

I'm not super super happy with either book tbh. It's just such a crazy process to try to get something you're 100% happy with, and once it goes into print that's it forever more.

I would say the impact on my career has been noticeable maybe? You become an expert on a topic by writing well on it because you're forced to fill in all the gaps as you go, and then people give you the credit because you have a book. It sort of happens together when writing a book - becoming an expert and receiving the trust because you're an expert. Even if you thought you knew the subject before, you might find you didn't as well as you do at the end of writing on the topic.

<comment><USER24> > Packt is out of India and they have some different standards around topics > and content

That they do. I pretty much won't buy a Packt book anymore, burned too many times. And it's shameful the way they astroturf Amazon reviews.

<comment><USER20> This is a shame, I hadn't looked too deeply into the content but everything looks high quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Really useful, thank you! I had saved this post of John Resig's from 10 years ago (!), which also gives some numbers:

[https://johnresig.com/blog/programming-book- profits/](https://johnresig.com/blog/programming-book-profits/)

(I'm not sure if my expectation is reasonable, but I would have thought that a book the most popular JS framework author would have sold more / made more in profit.)

I know you said you weren't planning to write another book, but I wonder if in retrospect you would have self-published? I feel like the publisher provides a few things:

1) Editing

2) Marketing

3) Writing tools, typesetting, etc.

It seems like you had to take control of #1 yourself to some extent. As for #2, you got unexpected "sponsorships" income, which is very interesting, but it seems like you also had to take control of it yourself.

I was surprised that between the 2 of you, you would only make about $2 per physical book and $1 per e-book for a $40 book. If you end up having to do work in areas #1 and #2, why have the publisher at all? I would have expected them to give you more of a sales bump.

Here are some other posts I saved:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13876514](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13876514) _How I Made $70k Self-Publishing a Book about Ruby on Rails_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14334845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14334845) _Why We Are Self-Publishing the Aviary Cookbook_

Anyway, thanks for sharing! I am just trying to think of what the publisher adds. The main thing I think would be marketing / sales / distribution. It's better to make a smaller amount on a larger number of copies than a large amount on a small number of copies. But it doesn't feel like it adds up in general, and in this particular case?

EDIT: also [http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2007/10/081247.html](http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2007/10/081247.html) _Hard Work, No Pay: What 's the Point?_

(Not trying to be negative, just sharing sources I found. I have read at least one book by Petzold.)

<comment><AUTHOR> _author here_ From what I hear from other O'Reilly authors my experience was more negative than most. We got very little support from our editors because of various situations (job change, maternity leave, etc.)

If I tried to self-publish my first book it would have never happened. I feel like there's too much to figure out I'd spend a year yak shaving and never produce a book. O'Reilly helped me focus on writing and making the content good and they took care of the rest. Coordination with editors, reviewers, and actual printing I'm sure would have taken me months to figure out and with O'Reilly it was just weeks.

Marketing had some push just because it was an O'Reilly book. Podcasts picked it up and that is where the sponsors started to get interested. If it were a self-published book I doubt it would have carried the same authority and not had as much interest. WRT sponsors, I did no work to bring in the sponsors or organize contracts. I only had to review the foreword and then was sent an "congratulations" email from O'Reilly that the book was sponsored. I did a webinar for one of the sponsors for free but haven't done any other work. We also were lucky enough to have CNCF marketing sponsorship who sponsored some of the book signings at events.

I still think O'Reilly added a lot to the process. Most of the extra work I did (website, affiliate programs, ad campaigns etc.) were minor work and didn't drive any meaningful sales.

Let me know if you have other questions.

<comment><USER25> Thanks, I do see that there's value in having a "turn-key" proven process like O'Reilly's. Yak-shaving might be the stage I'm in now :)

Did you have any technical diagrams in the book? If I were to write a book, I would want some, but I'm not sure if I should invest the time to make them myself. I imagine that most publishers can help with that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, there were a few diagrams. We gave rough sketches and descriptions of what we wanted an they had someone create the diagrams for us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's a bit dated, but Philip Greenspun's "The Book Behind the Book" is also good on this topic: [http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead- trees/story](http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story)

I myself have thought about it when I think about writing a grant writing book: [http://seliger.com/2011/03/06/why-youre-unlikely-to-see- seli...](http://seliger.com/2011/03/06/why-youre-unlikely-to-see-seliger-and- associates-presents-grant-writing-confidential-the-book-and-musical-anytime- soon)

</comment><comment><USER27> I wrote a book for O'Reilly: [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920043027.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920043027.do)

This post is so accurate. I have nothing but good things to say about the O'Reilly staff. It didn't make a dent in my finances but was a good experience to understand the challenges in writing something like that.

The most meaningful experience for me was when someone reading the early access version found me on the internet and sent excited questions to me out of the blue: [https://medium.com/@xrd/sending-two-signed-copies-of-my- book...](https://medium.com/@xrd/sending-two-signed-copies-of-my-book-to-a- guy-i-ve-never-met-in-michigan-8832cb405dcf)

<comment><USER20> How would you recommend someone with a limited audience go about becoming an O'Reilly author?

<comment><USER27> In my case, I stumbled into it. I went to Google I/O and talked to someone who already had written several books for O'Reilly. He proposed the book to them long before I got involved. Honestly, the hacker in me thinks that finding a list of people who have already written for O'Reilly and then seeing if you can help them complete a book in progress might be a good way to get into the oreilly ecosystem.

I proposed a book 16 years ago to O'Reilly and the rejected the idea. So maybe just show up multiple times and you'll get lucky? I think I did.

But once I got "lucky" then I did have three years of hard work for very little money. Be prepared for that!

<comment><USER20> > _I did have three years of hard work for very little money. Be prepared for > that!_

Oh my wife and I own a gym so I am very familiar with working a lot and getting little to no money in return haha

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've self-published two books and my economics have been completely different. Since first publishing Mastering Modern Payments in 2013 I've grossed almost $75k directly from product sales. Of that, I've paid about 3% to Stripe and PayPal for credit card processing, a few thousand for server hosting, and another few thousand for design and editing work over the years.

</comment><comment><USER29> The same kind of report, written a few days after releasing a self-published open source book: [https://medium.freecodecamp.org/taking-off-the-successful- la...](https://medium.freecodecamp.org/taking-off-the-successful-launch-of-an- open-source-book-7553a2262898)

Nine months later, the book earned a little more than $3,000 in Leanpub royalties. Like other said, marketing is definitely the hardest part, especially if (like me) you had no initial audience. Since the book is free to read on GitHub, I hoped word-of-mouth would be enough to make it widely known and popular. Boy was I wrong.

The experience was worth it for a number of reasons, honing one's skills being the number one. That said, would-be authors without an existing follower base should prepare themselves for a multi-year commitment in order to reap any significant rewards.

</comment><comment><USER30> This sponsoring is cool. I wonder if they would work with self-published books.

Writing a book is a huge effort (I'm the author of a couple Python books, one of which is on the current Python Humble Bundle). From speaking with (many) other Python authors, most would do better financially self-publishing. There are few titles that sell very well from publishers (they do 2nd, and 3rd versions), but these would probably do even better if they were self- published.

Of course, there are other reasons for publishing. (People really want their name on an animal book). One of those reasons is that a book is a really good business card. This is especially useful for consultants or when looking for a job. "Why yes, I do know about ...., in fact, I wrote a book on it".

I could blame quite a bit of my business (I do consulting and corporate training) on writing books.

<comment><USER31> Re: sponsoring and self-publishing.

Probably not. The marketing programs people who are mostly the ones paying for these things are mostly looking for predictable content from the publishers who do this sort of thing regularly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > From December through March the book has sold 1337 copies.

That's a pretty 'leet number :)

</comment><comment><USER33> I've never written an ENTIRE technical book, but I've written a number of chapters for multi-author titles (namely, Solaris certification study books).

I don't remember making more than $500 from any single chapter I wrote - <USER2> even that sure came in handy at the time. It was usually done as work-for-hire plus I got a couple copies of each finished book.

Ended up being worth more as lines on my resume than anything else.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you change jobs? Were you able to negotiate a higher salary because of the book? Seeing as this book was just published in November I'm curious to learn how to leverage it into a more long term success.

<comment><USER33> I've been a career sysadmin, so having chapters authored in a couple of Solaris certification study books certainly looked good on my resume and was relevant to my experience; nobody ever told me if that helped cinch the deal when moving onward and upward, though.

I know that for one position (where I spent 12 years and lived in two different cities) part of why I got the job was that an interviewer said "He's one of the guys that maintains the Sun-Managers mailing list!" (they still had a large number of Sun boxes at the time).

I will say it was weird writing about the VI editor but then having to submit to the publisher in Word/DOC format. Of course I used free/OSS tools to convert to DOC before submission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I once did a technical review for one of those small O'Reilly books (the German ones went for 10-15 EUR) - it was a lot of fun. I was paid in store credit, not cash, but it was a good deal because I did it mostly for the experience and then enjoyed some reading material. Sadly I've no clue how much the author made and if it was worth it financially.

That said, just the thought of having to write a book makes me want to run away screaming. Producing my diploma thesis was the least enjoyable part of all the years of school and university. I'm absolutely ok with writing technical documentation for my dayjob, but this rigid form with a threshold of pages to reach... bah

<comment><USER20> How did you get on board as a technical reviewer? That seems really interesting.

<comment><USER34> One of the folks at the publisher was looking via Twitter. As I tried to convey, it was a small reference book - not the new "bible of <x>".

After the fact I learned that a former co-worker (sitting next to me) had been the technical reviewer for the first edition, that gave me a good chuckle as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> OK. Doesn't anyone else who read this now think, "Well gee why would I ever write a book then?" You could easily make $23 an hour as an entry-level server in a diner if you include tips.

<comment><USER36> _You could easily make $23 an hour as an entry-level server in a diner if you include tips._

I don't think this is true—the median pay for servers is $10 an hour in the U.S. [0] Even servers in areas with unusually high pay barely reach $23 an hour. [1]

With a median personal income in the United States of $31,000 [2], most people make significantly less than $23 an hour.

[0]: [https://www.bls.gov/ooh/food-preparation-and- serving/waiters...](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/food-preparation-and- serving/waiters-and-waitresses.htm)

[1]: [https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes353031.htm](https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes353031.htm) Scroll down to "Top paying metropolitan areas for this occupation"

[2]: [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N)

<comment><USER20> Keep in mind this is going to be reported income only. When I was waiting tables nobody declared more than half their tips if they declared any at all. In fact a lot of folks just declared whatever amount they need to go to $10 an hour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It was very interesting comparing and contrasting this author's experience with my own. I just finished a technical book about managing all of the information in the project aside from the code -- and doing it using DevOps principles. There's a free compiler, there's video, yadda yadda. [https://leanpub.com/info-ops/](https://leanpub.com/info-ops/)

My experience in writing a book was that it was a long, hard slog, followed by a brief moment of self-congratulations before the "real" work begins. That might sound negative, but overall it's been a very happy and enjoyable experience. It's just the "writing the book" part of writing the book is just a small piece of it.

I did not find a publisher, although I think I could have. Instead, I used LeanPub and dove right into the nuts and bolts of creating content and finding an audience instead of filling out forms and making marketing pitches. There's nothing wrong with that. It probably makes for a more profitable book. But I wanted a book that I could wallow in. A book that would be me. I own and am responsible for every little period, piece of art, sentence fragment, and graphic in there. I wouldn't want it any other way.

Once I got rocking, I set up a beta list. Sent out links to a shared Dropbox folder and watched as the comments came in. (Meanwhile I was continuing to write.) I found reader feedback to be eye-opening. Because I was getting it as I went along, I was able to adapt and change to meet the audience where they were, instead of where I wanted them to be. This feedback process made me realize that I had to narrow the scope. So I did. No editors to get approval from. (And I love editors. They are the key to any good work. But as publisher, I get to choose strategy. LeanPub changes the dynamics.)

A few weeks back I had gotten to the end, edited and reworked each chapter a couple or three times, gotten feedback on most of it. Time to publish. Note that a bunch of stuff was crappy as hell: layout sucked, some of the footnotes needed changing, and so on. But this CI/CD applied to books. It was good enough for now, passed the smoke tests. Away it went.

I also tried various promotions. Facebook, as far as I can tell, is a complete scam. (But I don't know much.) When I target an XP programmer that knows Scrum and get likes from people in nursing homes who haven't posted in a year? That's not only fraud, that's somebody either blanket covering the entire FB audience with bots or having a direct feed to ads as they're purchased. I promoted a post with a link to the book. After 1500 people liked it, nobody looked at the book. Nobody commented. You can't have 1500 people look at something enough to like it without having any other interaction with it. That just defies reason.

Finally I settled on funny pictures on Twitter. I've collected funny pictures for years. It was a chance to make my own memes about the book. They seem to work okay. Nothing great, but it's a more honest experience than I got over on that other site.

The best part, aside from making something to help people, is that _I completely own it_. Sure, it might not be great now, but I can republish. In fact, I _should_ republish. The book was as worse as it was ever going to be on the day I hit the publish button. From here on out it only gets better.

I know that there's a ton of the business part that I missed and am ignorant about. But you know what? I always screwed these things up by getting wrapped up in stuff like that. I'd spend a week rewriting one chapter and choosing a font. The LeanPub paradigm let me change and focus instead on getting the thing out the door while moving to align with the readers. The rest of that can be added on later.

Would I do it again? Sure! I've had a blast. But it was -- and remains -- a slog. This is no get-rich-quick adventure. It might be nothing more than a fancy business card. But I said and explained things nobody else was saying and explaining. It had to be done so I did it. The rest of it is just icing on the cake.

tl;dr The old economics models are going away. Instead we're seeing startup ideas applied to book publishing. That's good -- but it puts a lot more responsibility on the author.

</comment><comment><USER38> My experience is that the self-publishing business is a _business_ that generates money from publishing and marketing books. If you decide to self- publish and self-market, all you are doing is skipping the publishing step of recruiting an author, and substituting the step of writing one or more books yourself.

The key insight here is that it is a business, and the actual writing of the book is incidental to the success of the business. I repeat, incidental. The main drivers of the publishing business is marketing to acquire more customers, and finding ways to build additional revenue streams to generate value from each customer.

If you don't care to know what LTVs and conversion rates are, you will not be happy running a publishing business regardless of who wrote the book(s) you are publishing.

The other road forward is to have a publishing hobby. Some hobbies make token amounts of money. I know two brothers who buy collectible corvettes, fix them up, drive them for exactly one Summer, and then sell them.

The money they make seems like a nice side-business, until you listen to them tote up the hours and expenses and tax implications. They would make way more money selling almost anything else part-time. And that is my personal experience with my own writing hobby.

The money sounds nice until you actually look at it as a business, and then you start asking why I am on Hacker News writing this comment when I should be curating my email list. The "problem," of course, is that writing is my hobby, not curating email lists.

So I believe you need to decide whether you have a business or a hobby. If it's a business, then you have to put 80% of your work into the activities that produce 80% of the revenue. And that is _not_ writing, in my experience or observation.

Whereas with a hobby, you put 80% of your work into the activities that produce 80% of the happy juice in your brain. If writing does that for you, you can write and make a little something on the side that will pay for some discretionary lifestyle purchases. In my own case, that's things like a 1950s-era Rietveld Crate Chair.

Blatant Endorsement:

FYI, I publish with LeanPub [http://leanpub.com](http://leanpub.com), because it generates the maximum revenue for the small scale of my writing hobby, and its "lean" approach helps me maximize my contact with my readers as part of the writing process. Since writing is my hobby, that's a win for me.

They also help people with a writing business in some amazing ways, like their tools for creating courses, which helps generate more revenue from existing content, and the ways they help you build a mailing list so you can develop other revenue streams from your existing readers. If you want to build a business, they help you build your business.

<comment><USER39> It could also be that you write off the cost of the book-writing as an expense in an experience-establishment communications effort. Like building up your professional resume. In effect you are giving time and maybe a little money to be able to say "I'm an author who has published N books on this subject." That's part of the equation, if not the whole equation, for many people.

<comment><USER38> Quite a few people make this argument, thank you for mentioning it.

My feeling is that this is a holdover from a time when there was a substantial barrier-to-entry for authorship. Back when publishers were the gatekeepers, anybody could write a book, but relatively few were published.

People could vanity-press anything, but nobody would hear about them, because just as publishing was concentrated, so was marketing.

\---

But today, anybody can publish a book, and likewise anybody can market a book, super-cheaply. "I wrote X" is worth geometrically less today than it was a decade ago.

If you write a book for other reasons, by all means bask in the reputation. But I find it extremely unlikely that if you are doing it strictly for economic reasons, that writing a book and then marketing it is going to be superior to the many other ways you might have of building your professional resume.

Maybe you should answer a lot of questions on Stack Overflow. Or--like me-- become a blowhard on Hacker News.

<comment><USER39> I don't think it's really as easy as you say. At the same time, it wasn't really hard to self-publish in the 20th century either; even self-marketing could be a matter of buying mailing lists and paying for help with bulk mailing. I had friends who did it and sold their books in local bookstores too.

Putting a book together, as compared to many things, takes a lot of time and energy and definitely sends social signals. Just last night a friend dropped "he just published a new book" in conversation where Stack Overflow creds would have sounded like a joke. SO just isn't known the way book publishing is. Since the comment was an effective social cue to the audience, she freaked out and asked a bunch of questions. It still works just fine.

<comment><USER38> What you describe sounds more like "proof of work" than "proof of competence." The bottom line of your story seems to be that anybody who publishes a book must have worked hard to write it. And we are to assme their expertise because... They wouldnkt have bothered unless they had something worthhwile to say?

That may appeal to some, but given the number of books written that are absolute dreck, the argument carries no more weight with the discerning audience than saying that you put in the work to get a CS degree, so you must be smart.

Now, if you write a book and get nice reviews, thatks a different signal. But absent that... I doubt it's more than an invitation to a conversation.

I wouldn't want to belong to any club whose sole requirement was that I had written and self-published a technical book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > _The contract stipulated that Kris and I own the copyright for the content, > but O 'Reilly has exclusive rights to use the content any way they see fit > throughout the world now and in the future for the duration of the > copyright._

I'm a little confused by this. Can Justin and Kris use the content they own? Or does O'Reilly's exclusive use rights supersede their ownership?

<comment><USER40> "Exclusive" pretty much means exclusive. E.g. the publisher would not want to spend a lot of time and money into promoting a book, only to have the author have the same book available on his/her own website at a lower price with 100% of the profits.

A real world example of this is the US Chess Federation's rule book. The 5th edition was published in the early 90's, and a book was pretty much the only thing that made sense. After the web came about, a lot of people asked why the rules weren't available on-line, and the board members pointed to the agreement with the publisher that they had exclusive rights to publish the material. Of course with the latest edition of the book, they're still not publishing them on-line, so maybe there's more to the story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> > This breaks down to we each get $.99 for a physical book and $.46 for an > ebook.

Isn't this just a huge rip off of the authors. They'll probably make way more money if they did a humble bundle or just ask readers to pirate the book and send them a $5 in bitcoin or something.

<comment><USER20> Keep in mind this is for first-time, untested authors. The publishers are spending what, $10k or more on publishing and order fulfillment? Payroll or contract rates for graphic design, editing, reviewing, etc?

Yes the ebook split seems much lower than expected, but the book is also cheaper.

If you have a proven track record of writing books people want to pay $60+ for I'm sure you can negotiate better deals as time goes on, including advances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> TLDR: Unless you are dying to have the O'Reilly animal in your book cover, go self-publishing or alike, and earn some real money. The OP doing earning-per- hour math on the task of writing a book is very very odd. You write a book investing what you learned in a life or in many years at least, the amount of time to write it is not a meaningful metric.

<comment><USER25> Hm I think you might be misunderstanding what kind of book we're talking about.

I think it's helpful to divide computer books into 2 categories: those with a short shelf-life and those with a long shelf-life.

Most (all?) O'Reilly books are in the former category. They probably sell 90% of their volume in the first couple years (at least one comment in this thread said something like that).

How many copies a year do you think jQuery books are selling right now? Especially if they haven't been updated since 2009? Are publishers even asking for updates for those books?

jQuery was extraordinarily popular and a real innovation -- probably more popular in relative terms than Angular is now.

So time spent writing it probably matters. It probably makes sense to get the book out when the technology is on its upswing, which may only be a window of a few years. Especially with frameworks, less so for languages like Python or C.

I think this is fundamental to the subject of programming. On the other hand, computer science is knowledge that lasts longer. I think it's justified to spend more time on a computer science book, but perhaps not a programming book. Of course many books are a mix of both.

I have several old programming books, like "Programming Pearls", "The Awk Programming Language", Computer Lib by Ted Nelson. Although I have to say that I have no problem finding those books used, so I don't need to buy new copies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Wow, I must say that was one of the most informative articles I have ever read about the topic. I've known a few technical book authors but none have given such an awesome breakdown of the process.

Thank you!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you liked it. I wanted to write down all the information I wish I had a year ago before I started writing the book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Does O'Reilly still use DocBook? Is this the choice of the author?

<comment><USER45> What's DosBook?

<comment><USER46> Typo: should be DocBook. O'Reilly (used to?) use DocBook and now seems to prefer AsciiDoc (Atlas). Some info about it (and other useful style info for writing ebooks) is here: [http://oreillymedia.github.io/production- resources/styleguid...](http://oreillymedia.github.io/production- resources/styleguide/)

<comment><USER47> The open source AsciiDoc Python tools support translating it into fairly reasonable DocBook XML. I assume that's what O'Reilly's doing behind the scenes with Atlas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's some awesome, that a lot of people here wrote a book. I would like to write one too, but I think, that I don't have enough experience, or it will suck.

<comment><USER49> Start writing a blog, now. That will:

1\. Give you practice finishing smaller written works before you work your way up to a much larger book project.

2\. Let you practice all of the various skills in writing.

3\. Improve your writing/marketing based on the feedback you get from people. Publishing on the web is a fantastic feedback loop for learning what resonates with people and what doesn't.

4\. Build an audience for your writing. Set up an email list and put a link to it on your blog.

The way you get experience writing is the way you get experience in any other artistic pursuit: practice and feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> TLDR; the books on specific tech is lighly sold, gets out of date fast and publishers are ripping off authors by throwing them 10% revenue share.

 _Because we co-authored the book we each got 5% of revenue for physical books and 12.5% for ebooks and digital access (10% and 25% for individual authors)._

 _So far I have received $539 over 5 months._

 _On average, the book has sold 222 copies per month which is greatly skewed by the first month which had 930 sales. The last month (March) had 34 physical book sales. I suspect that number will go down even more over the next few months._

<comment><USER51> Isn't the typical rate for royalties around 10%? Given that it's 'specific tech' that is not likely to be sold as much, 10% is pretty good.

<comment><USER50> Typically I expect 70:30 split between creators and distributors for the information products. Information product typically have negligible manufacturing cost and most of the price is paid by the customer is purely the information value. Less than half of other way around is ripping off creators in my view.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Great read. Interesting to see how many total copies were sold for a book in this genre.</comment>


How should LA urbanize? Look to Seoul - <AUTHOR> https://entrepot.blog/2020/05/08/how-should-la-urbanize-look-to-south-korea <comment><USER2> i'm just gonna repeat my little mantra that all residential parcels should be at least 4+1 (fourplex + granny unit) _by right_ and all commercial parcels should be highly, highly encouraged to be mixed-use.

i love LA, but it would be even better if everyone didn't feel the need to use a car to get everywhere. i've been to both seoul (too long ago to remember much) and tokyo, and it's fantastic to get around by subway and foot everywhere.

<comment><USER3> Very agree. Four floors and corner stores wherever residential can be built and not just on arterials. We neatly avoid a huge swath of the gentrification and massive upswings in property cost if we don't artificially restrict where walkable, moderately-dense neighborhoods can be built.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Should LA urbanize? I find the lack of density to be a benefit, not a problem. The problem is rather the lack of public transport + lack of self-driving, green vehicles + lack of widespread remote work. Making LA as dense as Seoul or NYC would kill the unique vibe it has IMO.

There are many cities in the world which manage to have effective public transport _and_ not be ultra-dense. Warsaw, in Poland, is a good example and probably one more useful in a comparison to LA, as both cities are mostly flat, sprawl for miles/kms and have large road systems that can't easily be removed and replaced. Berlin is another good example, although it's more dense than Warsaw.

<comment><USER5> LA's high housing price is one of the top social issues that people who live there face, due to low supply. I think a little bit more urban character in exchange for lower rents is a fair price to pay. I lived in the LA area for five years and found that the more urban areas were the more lively and interesting, but there were a lot of dead sprawling areas too. LA stands to gain a lot from having more of the former and less of the latter. I suppose I agree that becoming Seoul is not necessary; but the lack of density isn't ideal.

<comment><USER4> I agree that building more housing is good, however: better public transit, self-driving cars, and remote work are a far more viable path for LA than turning it into a super-dense city.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Stop building cities around cars. Create pedestrian only zones.

Another thought: I've always seen public transport as lagging behind the people's needs in the west, as opposed to how it is in China, Korea, Taiwan, HK, etc. (Japan is one extreme)

</comment><comment><USER7> I've lived in LA. I've also lived in Seoul. I miss living in LA. I do not miss living in Seoul.

Seoul is a concrete jungle where the vast majority of people live in tiny concrete apartments. (Literally concrete, I destroyed a lot of masonry drill bits trying to hang pictures on the concrete walls of our apartment.) Sure the subway network in Seoul is extensive but it's still not exactly a fast way to travel.

Speaking from experience the fastest way to get around Seoul is on a scooter. That's because scooters routinely jump red lights, go the wrong way down one- way streets and take shortcuts on sidewalks with impunity. Lots of fun when you're young with no kids, as I was at the time, but it doesn't scale and would never be allowed in LA.

The easiest way to cut down on vehicle traffic is to stop forcing people commuting to workplaces where they sit down at an internet connected computer that they could just as easily do at home. As the current pandemic has forced so many of us to do, which is one big upside.

<comment><USER8> What do you mean when you say it "doesn't scale?"

* Seoul has twice the population density of LA.

* Seoul has less than half the number of road fatalities per 100,000 people.

The point about "not a fast way to travel" is interesting but it's also worth recognizing that with double the population density there are twice as many destinations to visit, so that can be deceptive when you look at trip length. If there are 5 grocery stores within 5km vs. 5 grocery stores within 10km, it doesn't matter at all if it takes twice as long to travel 5km in the former case, it's equivalent. (And it's more likely you can do it on foot, which is healthier in terms of lower pollution, more exercise, and fewer road fatalities.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Both YIMBYs (who argue for affordable housing) and PHIMBYs (who argue for public housing) make an excellent case for high-density housing. This is a prerequisite for modern cities.

Also: cars ruin cities.

<comment><USER10> Watching the smog modulate day to day here in LA with the stay at home order has been truly eye-opening. I think most people are oblivious, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The biggest stupidity in LA is that the train does not reach LAX, but ends a couple miles short of it. This alone would greatly reduce LA traffic. What city planners didn't see that?

<comment><USER2> it's even dumber, given the hub-and-spoke model, that one of the first lines wasn't directly between downtown and LAX. lobbying by LAWA (the org that runs LAX) to protect parking revenue and the taxi industry is apparently to blame.

<comment><USER11> Interesting, I always thought it was the taxi companies lobbies that stopped that. Never thought about the parking lobbies, but it sure makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Longer term, California must cut down on vehicle travel in order to reduce > Greenhouse Gas Emissions and stave off climate change.

Is this statement really true if car manufacturers continue to migrate towards electric vehicles?

<comment><USER13> Yes, using less energy is better, dirty or not.

Reducing our dependency on cars also has many other benefits: fewer traffic accidents; reduced parking requirements means more space for _people_ in cities; less sound pollution, which is better for our bodies and for our ecosystems in and around cities; lessen the cost of living by no longer requiring a $15,000 machine as a prerequisite to having a job; increased density means increased foot traffic to small businesses, encouraging healthy competition; increased density can (has the potential to) mean a stronger, more connected community, less segregated by wealth etc. etc. etc.

<comment><USER12> > Yes, using less energy is better, dirty or not.

But that is not the question. The question is whether California must cut down on vehicle travel in order to reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions and stave off climate change?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How is this feasible? Redeveloping land in SoCal would be cost prohibitive. Even in the area of Long Beach they were using as an illustration, the average house price is at least $500,000. It's part of the reason the last major freeway to be built, the 105 had to be scaled back from going to from LAX to Riverside (Like 60-70 miles) to ending in Norwalk, (less than 20 miles). And that was in the late 60's to early 70's when that was being planned.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think you can look at nearly any city and the layout makes more sense than LA currently. It's a shitshow.

</comment><comment><USER16> > On the other hand, the average cost for a studio in a "normal" neighborhood > in Seoul is only 537 dollars.

From the link, that's a 480 sqft studio with no parking, which is essentially illegal to build in any "normal" LA neighborhood.

<comment><USER17> I'd rather rent that small apartment than be homeless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are many reasons why people in an American City would be wary of traveling by mass transit, reasons that simply don't exist in Korea.

</comment><comment><USER19> Not a problem. 20 more years and most cars in California will be electric.

</comment><comment><USER20> Replace car parks with social housing.

</comment><comment><USER21> Hello, Seoul resident here — AMA!

It's always surprising when you see our city's name in HN...

Looks like the TLDR is that LA only has subways in downtown (I can't understand the reason... why would people use subways then?), they should fix them. Looks like it strongly correlates with the car-centric culture of the US...

<comment><USER12> > Looks like the TLDR is that LA only has subways in downtown

This is not really true. The rail system extends out to other areas but those areas are typically served by a single line.

While the rail system benefits many people, I also wonder whether it has led to more people moving here, increased rents, and ultimately more traffic as people realize they need the expense of a car to fully get around.

<comment><USER22> > _I also wonder whether it has led to more people moving here, increased > rents, and ultimately more traffic_

This argument applies to _anything_ that improves a city.

<comment><USER12> By that logic, any movement to decrease rents will degrade a city.

<comment><USER23> This inverse statement is not equivalent to the parent comment. The logically equivalent contrapositive is "something to degrade a city will decrease rents". Though, this might be an intentional confusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> TLDR: Have an extensive efficient subway system

</comment><comment><USER25> Wrong, the Netherlands.</comment>


For the first time there's more people worldwide aged 65+ than aged 5 & younger - <AUTHOR> https://reason.com/2019/05/01/this-one-chart-about-global-aging-changes-everything/ <comment><USER2> I'm 56. Today, we got legal custody of our 13 month old son, whom we are adopting. Three grown children; five grandchildren age 1-6. Their future matters more to me than my own. I'm deeply concerned for the second half of this century; I want my loved family to have a better life than I've had.

<comment><USER3> I'm in my early 20's.

I'll not be having children because I believe that we will be facing mass extinction events in ~2030's, so I think it's immoral to bring another person into that.

<comment><USER4> If that's your belief, why bother doing anything productive at all like earning a paycheck or learning a skill. What if you're wrong? What does that cost you?

<comment><USER5> > why bother doing anything productive at all

Just because there's something awful in the future doesn't mean you should throw away the present.

> What if you're wrong? What does that cost you?

If he's wrong it costs him having raised a child. If on the other hand he's right but assumes he's wrong then it'll cost him having raised a child into a terrible world. It's a tough choice to make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Population shrinking is a good thing long term.

<comment><USER7> If extraordinary ability is a function of a percentile of the population, then a smaller population will have fewer geniuses and prodigies in art, literature, science, and politics. A smaller population leaves us poorer and less capable. There's no reason our current (or a larger) population isn't sustainable by changing how we generate energy or dispose of waste.

<comment><USER8> > If extraordinary ability is a function of a percentile of the population, > then a smaller population will have fewer geniuses and prodigies in art, > literature, science, and politics

I doubt it is, but if so, and education just "exposes" natural talent, I wouldn't be worried. We already have a lot of natural talent in the developed world that's untapped. India alone should have 4x more geniuses than the USA.

> A smaller population leaves us poorer and less capable.

I'd like to discuss this with HN. Less capable to do what? We won. Nature won't kill us any more, we have no predators, we know how to produce more food than we need [1], transportation is so easy we get access to things from all over the world and communication so seamless we can stay in touch with anyone.

What do we need more people for?

Our largest existential enemy right now is unsustainability.

> There's no reason our current (or a larger) population isn't sustainable by > changing how we generate energy or dispose of waste.

I don't think anyone really knows this to be true, and in fact I suspect it might apply to small communities, but not to the world at large.

Even if we could continue growing for now, eventually we'll reach a limit. But in any case, why do we want to keep growing?

[1]: [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/world- hunger_n_1463429](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/world-hunger_n_1463429)

<comment><USER9> >Our largest existential enemy right now is unsustainability.

When has 'unsustainabilty' ever caused the destruction of a large portion of a human population? Seriously. Can you think of any?

The two existential threats -- the two things that can, have, and will -- wipe out millions are War and Disease.

Everything else -- asteroids, climate change, sustainability -- are speculative. But, evidence-based analysis clearly points to War and Disease.

<comment><USER10> The destruction of the Western Roman Empire due to enormous migrations comes to mind. Those migrations were due to 'unsustainability'.

<comment><USER11> The Late Bronze age Collapse and the Classic Maya Collapse as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does this statistic actually have meaning? Wasn't this always expected to happen following the prolific height of baby boomers, and their offspring who had a higher infant mortality rate than previously?

I know I'm mostly focused on developed world, but baby boomers are now 65+, their children have exited the child-bearing/rearing age and many had only 1 or 2 offspring. Those children are yet to begin having children of their own and as people are having children later in life, there is a somewhat expected lull.

I have a sneaking suspicion as AI becomes prominent and if we are able to convert those capabilities to giving us more free time and a higher quality of life, this trend will reverse dangerously quickly.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting to consider the long-term repercussions of this one little fact. Soon countries will be in open competition for immigrants.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is going to suck, especially for democracies. Large voting blocks of old people with little savings and non vested interest in the long term outcome of the world. Yikes.

<comment><USER15> Speaking as one who is not quite old, but can see that status coming in the near future, I don't agree that old people are not invested in the long term outcome of the world.

Old people tend to have children, grandchildren, and beyond, and tend to be very concerned with what sort of world they'll be living in. That's a very strong investment.

<comment><USER16> It's not that people don't care, it's that we're pre-wired to be biased towards the short-term.

The relatively abstract problems of the future tend to take a backseat to the more concrete problems of the here-and-now, disproportionately so in regards to risk

<comment><USER15> > it's that we're pre-wired to be biased towards the short-term.

But that is itself a function of age. We are pre-wired to be in favor of the continuation of the species. Below a certain age, that means a short-term focus. Above a certain age, that means ensuring that the kids are OK.

<comment><USER16> I don't believe that this is a function of age. There's quite a bit of behavioral economics research to support this that was done on undergraduates, for example.

<comment><USER15> > that was done on undergraduates

There aren't a lot of old undergrads (and undergrads themselves are not terribly representative of the entire population within the same age group -- this has been a known problem with tons of university research for a long, long time).

This implies that the research you're referring to wouldn't necessarily speak to what drives older generations.

<comment><USER16> Ah, sorry, I think I missed your point (or reversed it). To my knowledge, I'm not aware of any research that can support that bias is function of age. Was the claim that it's a function of age based on research or your personal opinion?

<comment><USER15> > Was the claim that it's a function of age based on research or your personal > opinion?

A bit of both. There is research that suggests, but does not prove, as far as I am aware, that this is a function of age (or, more accurately, a function of having children). And my personal observations are in accord with that.

The underlying hypothesis is that when you're young, the priority in terms of species preservation is personal preservation: you have to stay alive and healthy enough to reproduce. That encourages short-term thinking.

After you've had children, though, the priority in terms of species preservation becomes the preservation of the children: they need to stay alive and healthy enough to reproduce, not you. You've already done your reproduction bit.

<comment><USER16> What's interesting is that humans are unique in their early-onset menopause. One theory is that it's to help foster investment in later generations (i.e. help raise the grandchildren rather than continuing having your own). I think the trade-off to protect your offspring rather than yourself is different than the present-bias argument I was making, though.

I'm still not aware of research that speaks specifically to the present-bias though in terms of it changing as one ages. If you have research related to it, it would be something I would be interested in reading.

<comment><USER15> > What's interesting is that humans are unique in their early-onset menopause.

It is! IIRC, the thinking is that the usual reproductive strategy is to have as many babies as possible, so that enough will survive by chance to reproductive age. Humans veered away from that as a result of the need to give birth far earlier in the development process than other animals (because of our huge skulls).

This increased the cost (in terms of time and energy from the parents) of children significantly, making it impossible to have huge numbers of offspring. Thus a different species survival strategy was needed, involving increasing the chances that any single child will survive. This, the thinking goes, led to social structures such as the continued involvement of grandparents, etc.

If you look at other animals that have "expensive" children (such as, for example, elephants), you see similar effects.

The whole subject is really fascinating.

> If you have research related to it, it would be something I would be > interested in reading.

Me too, actually. I came across this stuff a long while ago while working with a researcher in a closely related field, and haven't kept up with it much since. I may have a list of the related research papers in my archives somewhere. I'll see if I can dig it up.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can I learn more about info that ad companies gather? - <AUTHOR> Like many of you, I'm rather paranoid about online information that 3rd parties gather and store about me. I use uBlock origin, Privacy Badger, and have disabled third-party cookies. Somehow, much of my browsing is still being tracked and stored. How can I opt out of this mess? How can I browse safely? How can I purge my existing data from every available service? I'm worried that given enough years, my private internet history will be up for grabs and every one of my insecurities, curiosities, and mistakes will be known to all who want to take a peek. What can I do to protect myself? <comment><USER2> First, you can't purge data others have collected - there is literally no way to know who has what copies.

Options like Tails exist. Or "just" things like Tor Browser.

If you're actually as paranoid as you say, don't browse on your own devices. Don't browse in anything but anonymous browsers. Don't browse from the same places. Always use https not http (if the site(s) you want to visit support it, or course).

Maybe just don't browse.

I use a combination of proxies, anonymizers, ad blockers, vpns, and more for various reasons and at various times - but I also use services with logins, like convenience, etc.

I'm also under no illusion that I can be fully anonymous for most things I want to do - and am ok with that.</comment>


Apple's New Privacy Technology May Pressure Competitors - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602046/apples-new-privacy-technology-may-pressure-competitors-to-better-protect-our-data/ <comment><USER2> Unfortunately nobody is selling the phone I want: an actual open-source (probably linux) phone. I had the original iPhone, but won't get another one unless they go open-source. I have an Android, but I hate it's closed-off, blobby mess. I'm extremely glad Apple is pushing privacy, but I just can't support them until they put their money where their mouth is. I'd love an alternative to these, but I've yet to see any decent ones that are available to me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Apple is on a PR campaign to sell privacy to users the past few years. Do customers care though?

<comment><USER4> > Do customers care [about privacy]?

A data point: Yesterday, a German net politics outlet published a representative poll conducted on behalf of the German government, which showed that 92% of citizens polled want the government to take a stronger stance on data protection. Source: [https://netzpolitik.org/2016/bundesregierung- befragt-bevoelk...](https://netzpolitik.org/2016/bundesregierung-befragt- bevoelkerung-die-wuenscht-sich-mehr-netzpolitik-und-eine-staerkung-des- datenschutzes/)

<comment><USER5> I can't read German, was the question:

 _Should your phone help protect against criminals stealing your identity?_

Or

 _Should paedophiles be allowed to swap photos of children in secret?_

<comment><USER6> Neither/both.

 _How much should politicians care about data privacy?_

Proponents of either of your examples would have answered "lots".

<comment><USER7> Meh, that's phrased in a way that is hard to say "yeah" to. I mean, if you ask someone "do you want ice cream?", who would really say no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know if the "differential privacy" is done on the device before send the data to Apple? Seems unlikely, but oddly couldn't get an answer from Apple.

<comment><USER9> It looks like it is done on the device based on the framework header : [https://github.com/JaviSoto/iOS10-Runtime- Headers/tree/maste...](https://github.com/JaviSoto/iOS10-Runtime- Headers/tree/master/PrivateFrameworks/DifferentialPrivacy.framework)

<comment><USER10> Interesting. I thought that with DP the user data is anonymized by a random function with the value range based on the complete sample set. I also expect that the data is encrypted before transmission and I expect some kind of unique signature which is somehow stored on the device. The transmission itself is certainty logged on client and server side.

If I understand this framework correct the epsilon range for the randomization can be selected by hand before the transmission and also the number of collected parameters is not limited. Why is this called "differential privacy"?

<comment><USER11> Perhaps named because the system is based on differences between the true value and the reported value .... and then summing the aggregate data removes these 'differences'.

<comment><USER10> If a data collector can choose the epsilon range and the linked parameters by oneself, s/he could choose small (irrelevant) or too large (expandable) ranges and could try to cross reference the result via data-mining (already collected data).

<comment><USER11> True.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am fairly happy with my "hardware stack" right now: iPad Pro, several Linux laptops, leased Linux servers, and a nice Android phone. Great gear.

However, because of privacy issues, and even as a FSF member, I can imagine a possibility of 10 years from now just using Apple solutions if they keep promoting privacy and security.

My preference would be all open source in my hardware but I am not sure if small production libre hardware will ever be competitive.

</comment><comment><USER13> If Apple really cared about privacy they wouldn't ask for your data. But, they quickly realized they needed your data to even be remotely competitive. It's funny that they criticize Google and other companies for using your data, but seem to think their impervious to the criticism because they're using "differential privacy". Apple is no better than the other companies using your data and trying to cloak their objectives with a PR campaign to justify their actions is typical Apple hypocrisy.

<comment><USER2> I have yet to see evidence of Apple selling personal data in the same way that Google does. I don't trust them, because they are closed off, and could be collecting it nefariously, but we really don't know if they are being genuine or not.

<comment><USER13> Google doesn't sell personal data. I'm amazed how many people don't understand this. Google makes their money by allowing advertisers to target certain demographics - the same way Apple tried to with their failed iAds service.

<comment><USER2> Possibly poor phrasing on my part, but that doesn't affect my point.

Also, Google _stores_ personal data, which makes it an issue. Privacy isn't just about sales, it's also about malicious actors having access to it.

<comment><USER13> Apple, as do countless other companies, also store personal data and use it for personal gain.

<comment><USER2> I'm not defending apple, I'm just saying we don't know what they collect, or how they use it. Google clearly has a business model that relies on gathering the most data and using it.

<comment><USER13> And Apple doesn't have a business model, either direct or indirect, for collecting and using your data? We're in the age of context. Every company that wants to play in this game needs as much data as they can get about you. Apple is no exception, but they're going to use their PR machine to deflect the negative connotations surrounding it.

<comment><USER2> Oh, I totally agree that it's possible, and even likely that they can and do use your data. That's one of the reasons I don't use their products. I'm saying that they don't rely on it nearly as much as Google, and at the end of the day, we don't know what they collect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How are they going to apply this to data sent to the iCloud? Is that data encrypted client-side?

Something smells fishy here.

<comment> SG- Its done on device before its ever sent to iCloud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> When people talk about apple they are always quick to call out that "Apple has all your data", yet are complicit with google snarfing up everything they can.

Until Apple can fix this PR image, then they wont be pushing competitors to do anything.

<comment><USER16> I don't think that Apple has a PR problem regarding privacy when compared with Google. Especially looking at the privacy adverse stance Microsoft has taken with Windows 10, Apple seems like the smallest privacy evil out there. I personally will be switching back to iOS with my next phone after using Android for three phone generations.

<comment><USER4> The smallest privacy evil is still Linux. (Which, of course, is not an OS most people consider.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> But the same MS researcher that developed "differential privacy" has said and explained how its not really effective except for in short terms studies. I'm surprised a publication coming from MIT would not bring that up. It seems like its just "clever" marketing on Apples part. Also Chrome already employees "differential privacy" for w/e thats worth.

<comment><USER18> Do you have a quote for the first point? It doesn't sound (i) correct, or (ii) like something Cynthia would say.

<comment><USER19> More so, is there proof of the second quote that Chrome uses differential privacy?

<comment><USER20> Not sure if this[0] is exactly what you're looking for but, I think it's baked into chromium[1].

[0][http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/42852.pdf)

[1][https://www.chromium.org/developers/design- documents/rappor](https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/rappor)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AT&T 1993 "You Will" Ads [video] - <AUTHOR> https://youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8 <comment><USER3> As with everything, there's an emacs extension for it : ).

;;; youwill.el --- generate meaningless marketing hype

[http://www.splode.com/~friedman/software/emacs- lisp/src/youw...](http://www.splode.com/~friedman/software/emacs- lisp/src/youwill.el)

I got:

have you ever been forced by your TV to eat peaches? or been transported to an alternate reality where you lost your piglet? you will. and the company that will bring it to you: AT&T

<comment><AUTHOR> This is hilarious. Thx!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's kind of funny to me that every single one of these more or less came true with one notable exception: "Have you ever carried your medical history in your wallet?" As it stands today, at least in the US, most people's medical history is still fragmented across dozens of proprietary, non-interoperable EMR systems or locked away in paper charts in doctors' offices. I can't think of a single company that's tried to play in the personal health portal space—Google included—that hasn't failed utterly.

Digitization of health data has increased massively since 93' of course, but the landscape is still completely Balkanized and there is a growing body of clinicians who believe healthcare IT is actively making healthcare worse.[1] Put another way, the idea of a complete, centralized, _useful_ medical medical history being available for everyone in the US still seems like a pipe dream. Interesting discussion to be had about how, in this particular industry, progress has been so slow...

[1][https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors- ha...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-hate-their- computers) and [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/magazine/heal...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/magazine/health- issue-what-we-lose-with-data-driven-medicine.html) for example

<comment><USER5> In Ontario 15 years ago, my health card had a mag stripe they could swipe. But I don't know if it pulled up my medical file or if that stripe is still on the health cards.

Part of it, along with my photo, a hologram, and 5 year expiry date, was really meant to prevent insurance fraud from out of province people. ie: Americans.

<comment> frosted-flakes Ontario health cards still have the mag stripe, 2D bar code, and photo hologram. I don't think they've changed since the old red and white cards that didn't have photos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This was right at end of of life for AT&T as an innovator, but I don't think people really appreciate just how much AT&T did for technology. Sure, they had a monopoly. Government backed, really. But you can trace just about every piece of modern tech back to Bell Labs or someone who worked there. The transistor itself, UNIX, the C programming language, the laser, CCDs, solar panels, and the list goes on. I don't think there's ever been a company before or since that has done so much.

I can't help but wonder what a modern day Bell Labs would be able to do.

<comment><USER7> I'm convinced AT&T did all those things _because_ it was a monopoly. Look at what happened to Xerox after the DOJ killed it's copier monopoly by forcing it to license its patents. PARC rapidly went downhill. Companies in highly competitive markets can't really afford capital intensive innovation.

<comment><USER8> This. Competition and rational buyers with perfect information will move prices close to production costs plus risk compensation. There's no room for anything more than incremental innovation and quick wins at those kinds of companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Have you ever watched a twenty-six year old commercial on your phone? You will."

<comment><USER10> "Have you ever argued with thousands of complete strangers in another country while you sit on the toilet? You will."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One Usenet signature[0] that I saw during the mid-1990s was "Have you ever taken credit for something that hasn't even been invented yet? You will."

[0] Yes, I'm dating myself.

</comment><comment><USER12> I REMEMBER THOSE! Wow.

Really, that campaign is a great way of showing younger folk just what they're taking for granted, and what used to be thought of as "futuristic", and how close the present matches the predicted future.

<comment><USER13> Me too, and that's a good point. Judging from comnents above, I don't think viewers today (who weren't used to life before the internet and mobile) don't really grasp the level of foresight required at the time to be so spot on (with the exception of the phone booth still being a thing).

I'm sure there's another name for it, but I call it the "Bob Dylan Effect". Basically, if you were born after or too young to remember something having a revolutionary and influential in scope as Dylan was (for music and culture), the impact becomes so woven into the fabric of life that in the wake of the revolution, it's difficult for most people who didn't live through it to grasp the magnutude of the impact.

I have a lot of friends who hear Dylan and say "meh, sounds like the same old folk music, I don't get what the big deal is about". But that's the point! Where do you think that sound and approach to music came from? Seems to be the same case with the internet and mobile. Everything seems obvious now, so the ideas of people who really were ahead of their time, simply seem (to some people) like obvious inevitabilities, when that's not at all the case.

Note that something like the moon landing doesn't fall into this "Bob Dylan affect". The moon landing today is still as captivating as it was when it happened. That's because the space race didn't persist, and people aren't taking vacations to Moon City, so we're not really in the wake of a space revolution. But, you bet your sweet bippy that in 80 years, well after Musk gets humans to Mars, there will be someone saying "meh, what's the big deal - of course we were going to get to Mars"... when in reality, without a visionary like Musk, we'd still be floating around the planet and moon poking weightless blobs of water (a.k.a. videos I can't stop watching once I start).

<comment><USER14> _don 't really grasp the level of foresight required at the time_

Is there anything much to grasp there, though? These are fairly straightforward near-future sort of extrapolation of then-existing technology, for an ad. "A colour Newton that actually works and you can use on the beach" is hardly some mind-blowing prediction nor was it intended to be.

<comment><USER15> At a time where it took hours to download a picture, pagers were more popular than cell phones, WML/WAP wasn't even a dream yet, and e-Commerce did not exist, these ads were pretty prescient.

<comment><USER14> Sure, but they are prescient in a completely obvious way. The bit I'm questioning is the 'level of foresight'. 'Faxing from the beach' required exactly zero foresight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> These kinds of future looking ideas are always terribly wrong in the small details, so its important to look at what the general prediction was. The thinkers behind these things had to settle a vague predictive idea like "video phones" on some kind of physical representation in order to ground it enough to make the advertisement, but didn't know enough about the small bits the future would hold to make it _exactly_ what's come to pass.

So you can sort of score how good future predictions are based on these broad ideas even if the particulars didn't work out. "People will generally start to commute on personal flying vehicles" is one that hasn't really come to pass in any form, so the it's a bad prediction. But these ones are really stellar.

I think even more importantly, these ones were so provocative and the grounding in the particulars was so plausible that an entire generation of engineers grew up remembering these video and trying to make the prediction self-fulfilling. Thus these videos were both drivers of innovation as well as prophecy. There's an overly academic book on this topic with a great title that I think captures this well: "The Dreams our Stuff is Made of"

The biggest prediction here that underlies _all_ of these predictions is that there is going to be a global communications capability that enables most of the things in the ads -- and it was going to be so ubiquitous, commoditized and possess so much bandwidth and low latency that anybody could use it anywhere. In 1993, this wasn't a forgone conclusion -- Windows 95 didn't even ship with a built-in TCP/IP stack.

The obvious thing they missed was miniaturization and device convergence. Most of the activities here involve people still going to fixed or installed devices -- the smartphone was never considered.

<comment><USER17> > Windows 95 didn't even ship with a built-in TCP/IP stack.

Are you sure about that? Win 3.11 did not, you had to install trumpet winsock, but win95 did have winsock.dll shipped with it IIRC. You may have had to separately install it, but it was on your handy win95 cd-rom IIRC

<comment><USER18> If I remember correctly, the original release did not. Only in 95a or 95b did it have it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm over 40 so I remember this watching this as high schooler who grew up on Hayes and usrobotics courier modems dialing out to local bbs in search of free pr0n.

Anyway... these appear pretty prescient. However given technologies available in 1993, I actually find almost all of these pretty laughable as examples.

Would've been cool if it were made in 1973 though.

<comment><USER20> There was a certain sense of accomplishment when you had to wait 30 minutes for a single jpg to download...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I remember when these commercials came out, they seemed annoying - <USER2> corporate hype with nothing real. There was even a parody on some show (SNL?) that made fun of them: "Have you ever been seduced by your toaster? You will." Of course the real predictor from 1993 was Demolition Man: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnSIOlF132w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnSIOlF132w)

</comment><comment><USER22> This looks like some valid and interesting info on these commercials. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/01/04/how-atts- you-w...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/01/04/how-atts-you-will-ads- from-1993-predicted-the-future-with-surprising-accuracy/#7de331f633b5)

<comment><USER23> It's hilarious that there are ultimately _three_ overlay ads obscuring the text of that article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Posted to YouTube 13 years after they aired, 13 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER25> Have you ever had your phone gain access to a "5G" network with a simple software update? Or had that same update not actually increase the speed of your network traffic? You will. And the company that'll bring it to you? AT&T.

</comment><comment><USER26> AT&T is the combination of several "Baby Bells", including Bellsouth. I worked at Bellsouth (Advanced Networks) in the early-mid 90's. Bellsouth was a technology leader among the Baby Bells (but were too cautious buying other Bell's). Anyway, there were a ton of innovations at Bellsouth, but Marketing was always one of the biggest drivers, as was Finance. And that is what prevented 'Fiber to the Home', and so many other innovations. Tons of great ideas never escaped the labs, because there was no vision for the market, or fear that one technology would cannibalize other existing revenue streams.

</comment><comment><USER27> "driven cross country without stopping for directions", "paid a toll without slowing down", "unlocked your front door with the sound of your voice", "attended a meeting in your bare feet", and "watched the movie you wanted, when you wanted" all turned out pretty spot on. I'd be willimg to give them "sent a fax from the beach" if an emailed PDF counts as a fax.

</comment><comment><USER28> Anyone think it strange that a phone company wouldn't see the emergence of the smartphone?

Guffawed when I saw those phone booth picture phones.

<comment><USER29> The tablet that they show sending a fax from the beach is essentially a smartphone. The thing is that smartphones weren't popular until Apple even though they had existed.

Palm, Nokia/Symbian, Danger, and Microsoft had been pushing smartphones before the iPhone came out. BlackBerry was pushing non-touch smartphones as well. The issue is that none of them really had a compelling user experience before Apple came along. You can say that the iPhone was obvious, but no one else saw to use capacitive touchscreens at the time. Even after the iPhone came out, everyone thought that the lack of a physical keyboard was Apple's hubris and would be their downfall. Windows Mobile, Symbian, and PalmOS didn't integrate a first-class web browsing experience. Heck, I remember Windows Mobile emphasizing scroll bars rather than the natural movement that Apple introduced with the iPhone, never mind pinch to zoom.

Apple came along and showed everyone what the point of having a smartphone in your pocket was. You'd have the best music experience. You'd have the full internet for any question you'd ever have. You'd have maps. You'd have a great photos experience. Part of that is that they recognized that the capacitive technology they'd been using in iPods and trackpads for years could be used as part of a fuller operating system. Part of it is that they really spent a lot of time figuring out how people could use a touchscreen well. Others had just tried to take desktop UI concepts and put them on a touch device.

AT&T saw the emergence of the smartphone. Heck, Microsoft, Palm, Nokia/Symbian, BlackBerry, Danger, and even Google tried to build it before Apple (Google was targeting Symbian and had to "go back to the drawing board" when the iPhone was introduced). They all missed the key affordances that would drive consumer adoption. Google's pre-iPhone prototypes were basically BlackBerry/Symbian competitors. Microsoft wanted scroll bars, a start menu, and windows. Even after the iPhone, many tried pushing devices with keyboards: Moto Droid, HTC's first Android device, the Palm Pre, etc. It's not about saying "we'll have X in the future!" People saw smartphones/tablets. Heck, Star Trek had tablets in late 80s, but they didn't need them to be usable, just props. People just never figured out how to make them compelling for users before Apple did.

<comment><USER30> > The tablet that they show sending a fax from the beach is essentially a > smartphone.

Except for the fact it's sending a fax.

Smartphones don't send faxes, but they could. They don't because they exist in a world where faxing someone something is a niche application, and approximately nobody would buy a smartphone based on how well it faxes. The technological culture is different. The world has changed in more ways than just "We can stick a good computer in your pocket and power it all day long" and AT&T didn't predict that.

I realize I'm partially repeating some elements of your comment, but I do have my own point to make here: In looking at history, avoid Presentism. Try to see the past on its own terms, not through the lens of the modern day. That is a learned skill, and not having it is shown by crediting people in the past with predicting things they never thought of.

<comment><USER31> I built the wireless modem that sent that fax. People often forget how primitive cell connections were. AMPS was the system, and the A or B ('B' as in 'Bell') carriers were your only choices. PenPoint OS had the notion of sporadic / opportunistic connections, and that's how one did email -- batched it up so when you'd plug in the RJ-11 you'd send/receive in batches.

The wireless (cellphone) capability would add a new dimension: on-the-go connectivity. In theory.

One of our sales guys was going to NYC and asked for us to load 'the latest build' and against our best judgement, we did. He reported back next day to us that he had successfully send a FAX to a potential client from the back seat of his cab. We all thought "What the heck! We never said that would work!" and then, "Oh, wow, looks like that worked!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder what today's version of this campaign would be like. Ideas?

<comment><USER32> Have you ever taken a nap in your car...on your way to work?

Have you ever eaten a steak...that didn't come from an animal?

Have you ever had an iMax movie theater...in your eyeglasses?

<comment><USER33> or for the less optimistic:

Have you have missed talking to a real humam being face to face, you will.

Have you have missed going outside without a radiation suit, you will.

<comment><USER34> Have you ever been denied a loan because of a tweet?

Has your car ever changed its route home to pass by businesses who bid the most?

Have you ever paid more for rent because of your search history?

You will!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Qwest had similar commercials in 1999 [0]. "Every movie ever made any time" was kind of mind blowing at the time - then 10 years later it happened.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ9qcp6Lcno](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ9qcp6Lcno)

<comment><USER36> then almost as soon as it became possible everything got segmented into product groups by distributors

What a shame

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Gotta love Tom Selleck's voice.

</comment><comment><USER38> Have you ever ordered McDonald's food from a feces covered touch screen?

</comment><comment><USER39> Wow I think the video caller is a young Jenna Elfman.

<comment><USER40> It is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> These are mentioned a few times in the Internet History Podcast [0]. Glad to finally see them.

(AT&T also ran the first major banner ads on the web, on Hotwired, also extensively covered on the Internet History Podcast)

[0] [http://www.internethistorypodcast.com](http://www.internethistorypodcast.com)

</comment><comment><USER42> AT&T of that era could see all these futuristic possibilities, but couldn't see it's own demise.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Corporation#Acquisition...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Corporation#Acquisition_by_SBC)

</comment><comment><USER43> I haven't even clicked the link. And my mind plays back...

"And the company that'll bring it to you is AT&T"

That's still etched into my mind all these years later. I've made jokes about this call-and-response as recently as a few weeks ago.

VERY effective campaign.

</comment><comment><USER44> It made me think about the hosts of the Today show discussing the Internet in 1994.

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

</comment><comment><USER45> > You will

True

> And the company that will bring it to you? AT&T

Less true

</comment><comment><USER46> These commercials had a profound impact on me as a kid. I was 10 in 1993, so I was at just the right age to be thinking about the future for the first time.

</comment><comment><USER47> The mobile carriers have cleaned up running the internet data toll roads...we pay for bandwidth and 'free' content...

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm unable to predict similar changes on our way of life happening in the 2019-2045 timeframe

</comment><comment><USER49> Love me some retro-futurism

</comment><comment><USER50> I remember watching this in grade school. Ah, memories

</comment><comment><USER51> Music by Peter Gabriel.</comment>


Show HN: Professional personal assistants for $2.99/hr - <AUTHOR> http://www.tryaccelerate.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN fam!

I recently partnered with other colleagues in finance / consulting / start ups to launch Accelerate - a service that allows you to find vetted assistants starting at $2.99 / hr.

Our thesis is that personal assistants should be available to everyone and that pricing should not be a barrier. Additionally, we are helping the community by fighting against the the job crisis in Philippines (read about it in our FAQ page!).

Let us know what you think!

The Accelerate Team

<comment><USER2> How much do the assistants get paid? And how does that compare to average wages and the cost of living in the Philippines?

How many people does each assistant assist in one day?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Classy Jacket! Thanks for the thoughtful questions.

Our assistants get paid based on how long they've been with the service - after training period, they'd get paid anywhere from $2.50/hr - $5.00/hr (high end for some that work for our platform). Minimum wage in Philippines is ~$1.16 / hr which is typical for a lower paying job such as a personal assistant.

The average wage in Philippines is ~$2.50/hr. Keep in mind, this is including higher paying jobs such as engineers, doctors as well as higher wage areas (Manila) etc so we are paying VERY well, especially to the assistants in lower wage areas. We've heard that some government workers in the Philippines get paid less than $2 / hr, causing them to spend more than half of their wages on transportation.

Cost of living in Philippines ranges from ~$490 - $1060/month if you have to travel to work (main pain point we've heard from our assistants as many commutes are >4 hours a day) as transport costs ~$150/month due to inflation / gas prices. However, if they are able to work with us at home, their costs drastically are reduced (transport costs and decreased food costs) to ~$300 - $500.

We like to have dedicated assistants who are able to cater to our clients' preferences. Ideally, the assistant would assist one client for 40 hours / week. However, we offer 5 hours / week chunks for some professionals who do not require as many hour. On average, our assistants assist ~2 clients each.

Thanks and let us know if helpful :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm personally in the market for an assistant, so when I came across Accelerate's website I thought I would take a stab at finding an assistant using your services. So far I've interviewed one assistant. It was a pretty quick and painless process, but I'm still looking to interview more. What happens if the assistant I want isn't available for as many hours as I need them to be? How quickly do the assistants on your website get hired?

</comment><comment><USER4> What tasks do people usually use for them? What's hiring turnaround time / process?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Florencetusk! Great question - have some of the answers on the FAQ but to quickly reiterate.

Tasks: Depends mainly if you're a working professional, have a side gig, or a full on entrepreneur. It could be anything from managing schedules, answering calls, booking travel, to social media management, working through taxes (almost April!)

Hiring is fast - you can hire someone in less than 3 minutes if you choose from one of our fully vetted assistants on the page. You can also schedule a quick skype video interview beforehand as well through our booking service :)</comment></comment>


Public Speaking Advice - <AUTHOR> http://speaking.io/?

<comment><USER2> Great ressources for tackling public speaking. Though it misses an important part I believe: behaviour and how to express yourself while public speaking.</comment>


Tricky CSS Selectors Quiz - <AUTHOR> http://milanlandaverde.com/css-quiz

<comment><USER2> This is interesting, but you basically have to keep guessing until you get the right answer.

Would be nice to have a 'done' button to suggest that you think you've found the answer and the site can tell you you're wrong. Otherwise you wonder if you're wrong, or if the site is just broken.

<comment><USER3> Yeah that and/or a 'skip' button in case you can't sort it out.

I didn't figure out 15 and peeked at the JS source to get through, skipping would have been simpler.

<comment><USER4> A quicker way would've been to run document.querySelectorAll('the_selector') in your console to identify the elements to click

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pretty cool tester, I think #2 isn't correct, at least in Chrome and Firefox, the third article doesn't match: [http://jsfiddle.net/Ldgdh/](http://jsfiddle.net/Ldgdh/)

<comment><USER6> Yes I think too #2 It's working here [http://jsbin.com/epexom/1/](http://jsbin.com/epexom/1/) did you passed it, or I am doing some thing wrong

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> These were pretty simple except for that last one.

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://css-tricks.com/how-nth-child-works/](http://css-tricks.com/how-nth- child-works/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I wouldn't say tricky ;) Only one's that had me thinking were :root and :last- of-type

</comment><comment><USER10> This would be a great quiz to give during a job interview if you're hiring a web developer.

<comment><USER11> No it wouldn't. Sadly most people don't seem to understand that IE8 and IE9 and even IE10 do not support CSS3 selectors/ or some of them. And to top it off, they also don't understand that IE is still the most popular web browser there is when you add IE8 and IE9 together.

And really anything that can be done using CSS3 selectors can be done by thinking ahead on the development and providing proper classes/ids/wrappers/elements.

<comment><USER4> When learning about CSS people typically don't choose to specifically learn what isn't in IE n

<comment><USER12> I might be a bad example, but when I see a "not supported in IE" mention and there's no pollyfill, the feature goes to the same bucket as the cool Dart features and the fun things you can do in the next version of ecmascript. Good to hear they exist, but I'll properly learn them when I'll be able to use them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That was fun. I hadn't played with any of the new css selectors.</comment>


Want to build your first iOS app? Start here. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.iosdevtraining.com/2014/want-to-build-your-first-ios-app-start-here/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm here and happy to answer any questions you have about getting started with iOS.</comment>