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Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

On the whole I like the idea, but for the edge case of those of us that are on-call, it's one more nail in the coffin of social life.

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That's more an argument for automated recovery systems and avoiding single points of failure (both in infrastructure and people). Even if someone is on-call, you should be able to do without them for the length of a concert.

I'm getting to the point where I just don't believe in the concept of requiring particular employees to be quickly reachable 24/7, even for limited periods of time. I know there are business realities that occasionally make this impossible (especially for new, small companies, or larger companies unwilling to properly staff their technical departments), but it's an unsustainable practice, and I believe we as technical staff owe it to ourselves to oppose it and find something better.

(And for the record, yes, my company does have on-call rotations, but I do everything in my power to make myself redundant and unnecessary even when I am on-call.)

> avoiding single points of failure

I still don't understand how so many businesses simply ignore this problem. The network is assumed far too often to be reliable and ubiquitous, even among people who have years of experience with radio dead zones, oversubscription, and the numerous other ways networks fail.

> reachable 24/7

While 24/7 (or other excessively long periods of time) should simply be banned for basic health and safety reasons, I do understand that on-call time is unavoidable for some businesses. The catch is that any on-call time needs to be paid. How much payment is open to negotiation, but if you are expected to restrict your life such that you can be called in for overtime, then some amount of compensation is required.

If this seems impossible due to being paid a salary instead of wages, overtime limitations/restrictions, or similar nonsense... that's what unions are for.

Wait... on-call time is not paid in the US?

I'm not aware of any regulations governing on-call time, there could be some individual states that have them. Different businesses and industries have different practices. For hourly employees, labor law probably requires some compensation at least when a call comes in. For salaried people, compensatory time when a call comes in could be an option but often times the idea is being on-call sometimes is factored into your regular pay.

There are still many phones available that allow you to be on-call and not have a large, glowing rectangle of light obscuring other people's views.

Personally, I think the company founder made a good point when he said that people should be able to let loose without fear of becoming social media clowns. We bang on about open standards, privacy being violated and 'freedom', and here we are moderating the behavior of all around to our own detriment.

If you buy a ticket you also agree to the terms and conditions, if you don't like it, don't go to the event. Is that not how this works? People keep telling me so.

I still carry an old style pager while oncall, in addition to using my phone. We would all agree single points of failure are bad in software and system design, I figure same thing applies when doing oncall.

It doesn't look like the pouch blocks incoming calls. Why not just set a custom ringtone and vibration for work and make sure you have a quick get away?

It looks like you're right - I'd assumed it was blocking due to the gray colour. On a re-read, the article also says that you can go out and unlock your phone if needed, so it looks like the story isn't too bad after all.

Don't understand why it needs to make the phone unusable. Surely something that covers the cameras and microphones, but still lets you see and interact with the screen wouldn't be infeasible?

A lot of the discussion I've seen around this is people arguing that simply the act of displaying your LED screen at a darkened concert is interfering with others enjoyment of the show. Obviously that's not the problem they are purporting to solve, but I assume it was part of the background of the design.

Same feeling but in the context of being a parent. On date nights, I usually leave my phone in the car but my wife keeps hers out in case the babysitter calls.

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