Id vote to take it a step further and charge agriculture market prices for water regardless of where they sell their crop. Seems like that would largely solve the issue altogether.

I've been long in favor of this and didn't understand why we don't do this, since it's a no-brainer. Then I learned that farmers don't get their water from the faucet. The water comes from their own wells, creeks running over their property etc. They have water rights that in many cases have been in place for 100+ years. Touching those and attacking their livelihood through such big moves would likely lead to more upheaval than any politician is comfortable with.

55% of the California's allotment of water from the Colorado river goes to farms that grow feed for livestock. That's a considerable amount of non-well water that's being practically given away to allow corporations to profit.

Well, then why not buy that water from the farmers at a market price?

That's an interesting idea. I wonder how that would work for things like not taking water out of the aquifer. I guess a rate could be negotiated.

Everyone has to make their bed somewhere…

I think they are already regarded as one of the most intelligent creatures we know about.

Yes, but that's like regarding your child as special in their own way. I think there's way more than that.

I wrote a book, Computer Engineering for Babies. I’ve sold about 25k copies in the last 12 months, but I don’t have a publisher, a marketing team, or even an Amazon listing. I talked to a publisher once, they told me if you sell 10k books you can easily be classified as a best seller. But The NY Times, or anyone else, doesn’t care about some guy selling baby books out of his living room, and I don’t care enough about awards to try chasing them.

> I don’t care enough about awards to try chasing them.

It's great if you're satisfied selling what you're selling, but placement on the NYT list is more than just an award, it's a huge marketing opportunity. Getting on the list could easily 5x your sales and revenue, and have publishers and booksellers knocking on your door instead of other way around.

The "best selling" lists have some pretty "strict" criteria, and they're all kind of lame, even if arguably some are there to prevent "gaming" the system.

And "best selling" as a substitute for quality doesn't hold that well, either.

"Best selling" by the NYT has its own algorithm which weighs audiobooks, ebooks, indie vs big store sales, etc. all differently. Additionally I would suspect selling children's books would have to compete with school-sized purchases. 25k over a year is great, but in the realm of children's books you're dealing with Scholastic magazines book hawking to every school in the nation.

> I don’t have a publisher, a marketing team, or even an Amazon listing

Interesting, how do get them manufactured? I guess there are printing companies that operate separately from publishers?

There are countless self publishing companies, and while idk if it's still active, even Amazon had a try at this.

Yes, Amazon still runs theirs. It's part of the KDP program now.

lulu.com is another relatively big one. (They have a nice service, Lulu Xpress, if you just want to print copies for personal use.)

And then there is the other monolith, IngramSpark.

I just got my copy a few weeks ago! My 14 month old loves it, though she hasn’t yet figured out the AND gate yet. :)

Good work. How did you market your book?

Thanks! At first it was just a couple posts on Reddit and HN,m. Every once in a while someone will share it on Twitter or something and it will blow up for a few days. I’m spending a few hundred dollars a day on paid ads right now, but even that ebbs and flows on wether it’s profitable.

> HN,m

what's the 'm' ? typo?

One hundred. Every year.

Still reading but your first game screenshot isn’t loading for me! Edit- a lot of images don’t seem to be working for me. I’m vowing this from mobile safari.

I'm having the same issue with images on Android. It's a great article though, I love your frankness with the downs as well as the ups of your process.

FWIW, The Nintendo link is UK only, which is a mild trip hazard to people installing in other countries. I'm curious as to how my 8yr old enjoys this

I think popular adoption driving the maintainer to the point of burnout is the exception. I run deckofcardsapi.com. It’s been fairly popular and I’ve never felt like the load has been more than a few hit issues that I can happily ignore. It’s also been a great bullet point in my resume, but that’s about it. But I’m just one data point.

Thanks for the reassurance. I guess I need to just take the leap of faith.

Now this is something I can understand why you wouldn’t be sharing it with your parents.

Can you not unsubscribe from the ones you don’t care about? And, with iOS at least, you should be able to disable or group notifications to only show up once a day. Does this not solve your problem enough?

MSP430 g series are under a dollar depending on what package you get. The DIP package is a little more expensive than the Smaller TSSOP but they are incredibly powerful.