Bezos: A CEO Who Can Write - <AUTHOR> https://mondaynote.com/bezos-a-ceo-who-can-write-2f368ee36599 <comment><USER2> Business writing suffers from an epidemic of post-fact rationalization. Looking back, it is trivially easy to parse out whether something someone said was "insightful wisdom" or "useless". I am continually amazed by the scope and depth of this hindsight bias disease.

While this author tries to make a point that bezos is a good writer, I am afraid that this is just riding a wave of bezos worship (like Elon worship, Jobs worship, Buffett workship, ['name successful business person, preferably, billionaire'] worship) — _after_ bezos' company is seeing good results.

I wish more business writing was devoted to 1) suggesting ways so that people have their own original thoughts 2) Discussing merits of strategies _before_ they become successful 3) Discussing problem solving frameworks 4) early days of companies when they weren't successful etc. I believe learning about the first 100-300 days of companies would be very instructive. Someone should write a book about that :-)

<comment><USER3> If you read the stories of self-made billionaires they strikingly have a lot in common. Also all the following billionaires had troubled times and if you read their stories, you will see how they overcame them.

From the books I've read about the following self-made billionaires so far (Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Yvon Chouinard, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger) the most important things I've found they have in common are that:

They avoid competition, think long-term, and don't copy others foolishly.

Longer explanation:

-They break down the world to the fundamentals, the essential, the Feynman method. When Musk wanted to build SpaceX everyone thought he was crazy. But when he broke it down to the raw costs for space shuttle manufacturing, the typical costs were too high and he saw opportunity. Many people tend to learn complex abstract concepts without truly understanding the building blocks or learning trees that it took to get there. There can be times when someone calculated incorrectly but everyone took it for granted and it became the status quo of knowledge. I believe these are one way to access the secrets in plain sight. Question everything.

\- They focus on the long game like the power of compound interest. They operate with a vision of what the future might look like 10 years down the road, and then they work backwards to create that vision. Did they see the future, did they just build it before anyone else, or both?

\- Most of the billionaires I've read about had humble beginnings. Yvon Chouinard used to sleep in his van. Elon Musk couch surfed during his worst times. Jeff Bezos started out in his garage and made tables from doors.

\- All of them have very strong beliefs. They are not swayed by what everyone else is doing which is how most, even big companies fail. Peter Thiel mentions mimetic theory, basically that people copy each other, even companies, and that's how you get competition. Buffett indirectly talks about it too. ExxonMobil hires a fertilizer expert and then all the other oil companies start hiring a fertilizer expert even if they don't really know why Exxon hired one in the first place. Or how big companies (GEICO) can lose focus of their circle of competence by getting distracted by what everyone else is doing and creating inferior copycat products - which eventually leads to value loss of their core competency and what actually drives value for their customers.

I think that's one thing that makes them all special. They all took different routes to get where they are. To be tacky, they didn't follow someone else's road, they created their own.

\- They didn't do it alone. All those people knew how to build and lead a great team. If they didn't, they found someone who could.

Books I'm getting this info from:

Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin

Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard

Zero to One by Peter Thiel Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

<comment><USER4> > Jeff Bezos started out in his garage and made tables from doors.

I was under the impression that Bezos founded Amazon after he graduated from Princeton and had worked for a hedge fund for a few years. Wikipedia also says that his parents invested an estimated $300,000 into Amazon. I would hardly call that humble beginnings.

The list of the 15 richest people in America also include the two Koch brothers (inherited their wealth), three Waltons (inherited their wealth), and plenty of people with Ivy League educations who earned their wealth but did not have humble beginnings.

You seem to have drunk a little bit of the kool-aid the comment you're responding to is talking about. I suggest spending some time reading about people who are NOT billionaires (and some less high profile billionaires) and you will see that there are plenty of poor people with the traits you describe and plenty of rich people without them.

<comment><USER3> 1\. Humble and humility, more as a mindset. Even if it wasn't, according to the book, Bezos was very frugal in the beginning.

2\. My list was for self-made billionaires.

3\. I like reading about self-made billionaires because as an entrepreneur- why wouldn't you want to learn from the best? At the same time, I don't want to be a billionaire if that's the kool-aid you're referencing.

I grew up in poverty and love reading about poverty because I want to learn more about the circumstances that affect my reality today. Why can some people like my mom work 60 hours a week at $10/hr and never become a millionaire or even afford to retire? While others can? I wish I knew. Poor decisions? Poor environment? Or both?

I haven't met any billionaires but I've met many self-made millionaires who literally built their way from nothing. In my experience, most of them built their wealth over years or decades. It's very hard to build something from nothing overnight.

If there's anything I learned from reading self-made billionaire stories- it's simply better decision-making. Can't do much about a poor environment but at least you do have control over the decisions you make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bezos' role is to get everyone working toward the same vision. Stories go a long way toward articulating that vision. If you can write well (in your native language), it is typically a sign you can reason well.

Leaders who can't write well are also interesting. There is almost a cliche about dyslexic type-A personalities, where the adapted skill of misdirecting people from your reading and writing ability as a kid manifests as a glad handing sales and dealmaker personality later on.

Just as someone who doesn't write well probably doesn't reason too abstractly either, someone who writes exceptionally well can often be considered too intellectual and theoretical to lead, or lacking in the required adaptability and spontaneity.

It's great that this super-CEO can write, but it's also a signal that the company is still run by a technocrat, and that it is not mature and autonomous enough as a business to be operated by a mere chief dealmaker.

<comment><USER6> > _Bezos ' role is to get everyone working toward the same vision. Stories go > a long way toward articulating that vision._

Definitely. And maybe he's both, but Bezos seems like more of a "mandate" guy than a "story" guy, per Steve Yegge's infamous Google platforms post[1] and other anecdotes by people who know him.

> _So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He 's doing that all the time, of > course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet > whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus > or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and > eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like > unsolicited peer bonuses.

> His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

> 1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through > service interfaces.

> 2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

> 3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no > direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared- > memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is > via service interface calls over the network.

> 4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom > protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care. > > 5) All service > interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be > externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to > expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

> 6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.

> 7) Thank you; have a nice day!

> Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately > that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not > give a shit about your day._

[1] [https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A CEO who got his start from selling books, probably has more than average attention to literature and writing. Such people should typically be able to write. I'm not surprised at all by this.

Further, such people also have more attention to philosophy. And have more grandiose visions of the world.

But I find it surprising he was able to succeed so well, compared to your typical bookseller.

<comment><USER3> If you're interested in Amazon's story you should check out the book The Everything Store. Bezos started by selling books but his long-term plan was an online store that sells everything. He started with books because they were easy to ship, catalog, and that there were two major book distributors at the time that made creating an online bookstore easy. Not only that but he figured out how to game the system of one distributor so he could always order one book he needed, and 11 obscure books that were out of print, to avoid the 12 book minimum order requirement.

<comment><USER8> Books are also easy to choose to buy online at a time when online shopping wasn't fully trusted (or indeed, trustworthy). While I can see the condition of an item in a physical store, books basically just require not being completely soaked and keeping away from toddlers who might destroy the pages. Back in the 90's, it was a good step to establish trust with the customer.

<comment><USER9> Especially since there were (and are) vastly more available books than available shelf space. Online is the only way to get some books.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A very smart gui indeed: This is from his year 1999 shareholder letter. Mobile was growing back then, too. But writing this at the end of 1999, shows that he indeed had a very good grasp of technology and his market.

 _In closing, consider this most important point: the current online shopping experience is the worst it will ever be. It's good enough today to attract 17 million customers, but it will get so much better. Increased bandwidth will result in faster page views and richer content. Further improvements will lead to "always-on access" (which I expect will be a strong boost to online shopping at home, as opposed to the office) and

we'll see significant growth in non-PC devices and wireless access.

Moreover, it's great to be participating in what is a multi-trillion dollar global market, in which we are so very, very tiny. We are doubly-blessed. We have a market-size unconstrained opportunity in an area where the underlying oundational technology we employ improves every day. That is not normal._

</comment><comment><USER11> The author assumes that Bezos doesn't have an editor helping him craft the letter going out to thousands of investors. While Bezos seems entirely capable of writing letters on his own, he's running Amazon. As someone who is known to optimize company time, he would probably write a draft and then have correspondence with an English-phd type for help.

<comment><USER12> _The author assumes_ …

Speaking of making assumptions:

 _As someone who is known to optimize company time, [Bezos] would probably write a draft and then have correspondence with an English-phd type for help._

Being so busy running a company that one has no time to write, is like being so busy programming that ones has no time to type.

Running a company – especially a large one – is all about communication. In most companies, much of that communication is verbal, in various meetings. Amazon is different from most companies in the high value they place in written communication, and the low value they place in ephemeral verbal communication. It would be very surprising if the CEO didn't exemplify this ethos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Steven Sinofsky (formerly of Microsoft, now at Andreessen Horowitz) recently wrote something similar about Bezos and the power of writing:

[https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/writing-is-thinking- an...](https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/writing-is-thinking-an-annotated- twitter-thread-2a75fe07fade)

<comment><USER14> This triggered the article by Gassee.

Follow a bunch of them on Twitter and you can see the think-piece triggering play out in real-time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am just confused.

Why can he write? It is not clear.

How does the author know that this letter is not edited/approved by PR and legal?

The culture of worshipping CEO sets very low bar on human ambition.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, drafting and redrafting a few hundred words is easily delegated _entirely_ to PR staff, and it says nothing about a CEO's ability if they take that route (nor will anyone outside certain circles ever know).

The samples of writing are entirely unremarkable too. Thousands of CEOs or CEOs' PR teams writing shareholder letters or microbusiness blogs achieve a similar fairly informal style using formal language, deploy anecdotes and vanity metrics and make aspirational statements about the future. Some of those businesses succeed at different scales, some fail, few even attempt what Bezos did.

"Divinely discontent" is a nice phrase, and props for giving the illusion of specificity by saying "trained random forests of decision trees" rather than the more buzzwordy "processing Big Data using Machine Learning". But that isn't even necessarily Bezos' personal stamp, never mind one of the qualities that actually made him one of the most successful business leaders of the internet era.

<comment><USER17> PR cannot write this type of stuff. They can edit it a but but they can never create it.

<comment><USER18> "Never" is a long time.

<comment><USER17> It's not a reference to time and not even to capability but license.

<comment><USER18> Why not? PRs ghostwrite things for CEOs all of the time, speechwriters have written some of the greatest talks by the most famous people of all time.

I don't understand the notion that these kinds of work can never be the product of a PR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Good to hear from good ol' Gasse! whenever he is mentioned I can't help but remember this quote of his:

"We must always give our users pure sex. It's like a rendezvous in the back seat of an automobile with a beautiful girl. One's experience with the personal computer should be better than the greatest orgasm you could have."

<comment><USER20> O_O

That is a straight up terrible quote. First of all, hearing about some old dude's sex fantasy is a bit gross. Second of all, computer experiences should be predictable and efficient. I don't know many people who associate either of those qualities with (good) sex.

<comment><USER21> The quote is over the top, but this vision pushed Apple beyond merely "predictable and efficient" products. If they'd stuck to predictable and efficient, there's no way they'd be an $800+B company today, so it seems to have worked out for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _Our Leadership Principles aren 't inspirational wall hanging..._

Admittedly I sympathize with the 501 programmer sentiment, nevertheless these corporate manifestos, principles, credos etc. make me gag a little. But probably that's their purpose anyway, so great writing there.

</comment><comment><USER23> The examples don't really show an exceptional writing ability. Is this one of those things where we're happy he's written at all?

It's also important to be aware we give more slack to those we admire.

</comment><comment><USER24> It may be just me, but I spent about 3 minutes trying to see the outstanding writing, but nothing I read kept me past minute 3.

<comment><USER25> Try reading Buffett's Annual reports, you might like them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> >In 2010, he penned a tribute to Amazon's engineers ... The tone was just right, neither disingenuously geeky nor overtly tongue-in-cheek.

I'd love to see a similarly graceful and well-penned tribute from Bezos to the workers who routinely collapse from exhaustion in his fulfilment warehouses (1), before they are swiftly replaced by another Oompa Loompa who will scrape just above minimum wage if they make their hourly dispatch target.

(1) [https://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-warehouse-like- pri...](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-warehouse-like-prison-where- workers-used-pee-bottle-2018-4?r=UK&IR=T)

<comment><USER27> > 'd love to see a similarly graceful and well-penned tribute from Bezos to > the workers who routinely collapse from exhaustion in his fulfilment > warehouses

Why? Did they do anything noteworthy or exceptional?

<comment><USER28> > Why? Did they do anything noteworthy or exceptional?

Yes, they are collapsing due to being overworked in one of the most valuable corporations in 21st century. The fact that a lot of people seems to be so dismissive about this fact is a very scary thought, and I happen to be pretty liberal when it comes to economics. This is an anomaly that should be addressed with a lot more attention.

<comment><USER29> Maybe they're collapsing because they didn't get enough sleep.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Introducing Jonathan Nadeau, new FSF campaigns intern - <AUTHOR> http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/jonathan-blog-intro <comment><USER2> A really wonderful initiative, I really hope he does well.

If such a distribution can help improve accessibility for blind or low-vision using GNU/Linux I think that will lead to a better platform for everybody in the end.

</comment><comment><USER3> Soo this is how the Taliban recruit new people..

<comment><USER4> Did you even click through the link ? The intern is blind and will work towards building a "completely free and fully accessible distribution of GNU/Linux". I don't understand why one need to be so sarcastic about a noble deed.

<comment><USER5> I can't even make the mental connection between the title/article and this comment. Not even the racist/hateful mental connection. Am I missing something?</comment></comment></comment>


USDA let millions of pounds of food rot while food-bank demand soared - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/26/food-banks-coronavirus-agriculture-usda-207215 <comment><USER2> From every $10 you spent in a supermarket, the farmer gets $1.20. The rest is transportation, distribution, and retail.

While producers (and supply-side aggregators like USDA) currently have excess food they can't sell and might therefore be willing to give away for free, this would only reduce the retail price to $8.80 in this example.

Intuitively, I'd think it would maybe be possible to run a truck of potatoes to some larger city for less than that. But remember that the food distribution chain is among the most streamlined and efficient structures capitalism has produced. Some overhead might fall away if you don't charge for the food, but you'd still need to do whatever processing and safety measures it involves, and giving stuff away for free doesn't mean dumping it in a parking lot.</comment>


Show HN: NFLScoreBot, a Twitter bot that generates summaries of NFL games - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/nflscorebot

<comment><USER2> Pretty cool. Hopefully, the lawyers will leave you alone.</comment>


Video with Ali Partovi CEO of iLike, the most popular Facebook app - <AUTHOR> http://uk.intruders.tv/Interview-with-Ali-Partovi-founder-of-iLike-the-most-popular-application-on-Facebook_a220.html

<comment><USER2> What I found interesting was that he's been working on this startup for about 5 years now, and just recently made an "overnight" success. It enforces what I'm starting to realize that those companies that explode all of a sudden are not just lucky, but they probably work for years experimenting with different models an failing, and then failing again, until they finally find something that works. It's encouraging and discouraging at the same time.</comment>


New Firefox JavaScript engine is faster than Chrome's V8 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2008/09/03/new-firefox-javascript-engine-is-faster-than-chromes-v8 <comment><USER2> Two words: Competition is great :)

<comment><USER3> I hate to point out that there are _three_ words there.

Or is this comment some kind of joke that went over my head?

<comment><USER2> It was a joke. That's what the ":)" was for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> TraceMonkey was the fastest engine two months ago, now its SquirrelFish Extreme.

</comment><comment><USER5> Using one number to represent 14 benchmarks is meaningless. Check out the original blog to see the breakdown by benchmark, which is more informative: [http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/09/trac...](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/09/tracemonkey_update.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a month and a half old article, snore.

<comment><USER7> Snide comment aside, two months right now is an eternity for how fast these engines are evolving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It doesn't surprise me that IE javascript performance is worse. MSoft has incentive to keep it its Javascript engine throttled back. If it gets too fast, then javascript-based web apps will start to perform on-par with their office suite of apps, and then where will they be? ;-)

<comment><USER9> I don't think its so malicious. It's simply the case that MS has to support its own JS standard, in addition to the "standard".

<comment><USER10> This is exactly correct. Backwards compatability is a bitch.

Additionally, you need to account for Microsoft scale approaches. There are two Javascript engines (that I know of) at Microsoft: IE's implementation and Managed JScript [1] which is built on the DLR [2]. The DLR is a set of extensions to the in-development .NET CLR 4.0 to support Managed JScript, IronPython, and IronRuby. The DLR is the place for all these fancy pants modern optimizations that Google, Mozilla, and Apple are implementing. In fact, the DLR already has many of them. I believe that Silverlight 2.0 (now released) has some version of the DLR in it and .NET 4.0 is coming sooner or later. Who knows if or when IE will ever use Managed JScript or the DLR.

Remember: Microsoft is full of plenty of smart, non-evil engineers. You can try to call it ignorance, but really it is bloat, process, and scope. It's almost never malice ;-)

[1] [http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/05/04/managed- jsc...](http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/05/04/managed-jscript- announced.aspx) [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Language_Runtime>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would like Firefox to steal the one-process-per-tab feature of Chrome, desperately. Sometimes when I have too many tabs running in the background with just a single one stop responding, Firefox stalls for a couple of minutes ...

</comment><comment><USER12> > _Eich also praises Chrome. He says that the V8 JavaScript engine is "very- > well engineered" and he describes the multiprocess design as "righteous"._

He went on to describe JavaScript as "totally OK" and "mauve."

</comment><comment><USER13> FF3 still runs at 700 MB of RAM on my system. I've switched to Camino for daily browsing and FF for development only. Until they fix this ridiculous memory usage, I'm not switching back.

</comment><comment><USER14> IMO chrome is overall ahead as long as it's the only browser with a separate process per tab. (Its memory management is a nice bonus too.)</comment>


Ask HN: How to get rich in tech with minimum effort? - <AUTHOR>

The question itself may be joke, and I myself really appreciate hard working.
But I am still curious to know some interesting, funny and slightly serious ideas, such as "million dollar homepage", " sites" (at the extreme soul cost), etc. <comment><USER2> \- Buy stocks of all tech. companies and hope for them to always go up and not down.

\- If you like women, Get Marrisa Mayer to divorce her husband and marry you. If you like men, get Zuckerburg to divorce his wife and marry you.

\- Start a kickstarter project and ask every tech. company CEO to donate for your "minimum effort" cause.

\- If nothing works, Pray and Dream about it every day. You never know if someone up there is listening

EDIT: I know I was probably going to be downvoted by some. But do we really want to entertain such questions on HN ?

</comment><comment><USER3> Sorry, but there are a bunch of people who are willing to work really hard who are in your way.

</comment><comment><USER4> Become friends with everyone who wants to do a startup and seed them a grand. Cash in later.

</comment><comment><USER5> vendor lock-in</comment>


My terrifying deep dive into one of Russia's largest hacking forums - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/24/darknet-dark-web-hacking-forum-internet-safety <comment><USER2> Excuse me for this one, but the entire article is an exaggregated bullshit and complete ignorance of a russian forum culture, language and level of practiceness. While this particular site probably has nothing to do with Raymond's hackers, it feels like TFA goes for Evil Russians all the ways round.

<comment><USER3> I see nothing in the article to support your point. Care to elaborate?

I see listed credit card scamming, ddos'ing, phishing, trojan discussion and identity theft. It's not clear to me any relation to Russian forum culture, or how that would apply here.

<comment><USER2> Author didn't even recognize a quote for who true hacker is; neither is he. But that can't stop him from leaving a toxic commentary on it: he goes straight to the darkest side.

>For this article, I'm going to focus primarily on the hacking and security sub-forum. >Russians Russian Russians

"The Grandfather's Way of X" means just "Good old way", btw.

>It's fascinating to see how this community works together to take down 'western' systems and divulge chaos and profit from it

>It's incredibly comprehensive, and the other Russian users thank him kindly and comment about how concise and informative this chaos-wreaking method is.

>A lot of the information on this forum is incredibly worrying, even if a lot of it is harmless 15-year-olds trying to be edgy and hack their friend's phones. In any case, it's important to know these communities exist. The dark underbelly of the internet isn't going anywhere.

Booh. Do worry. "How scary to live" – yet another russian idiom that would describe author's intents. English variant is "spread FUD".

I could elaborate in my first comment, but the entire article is just a big pile of scary journalism. That would require to copypaste it and nitpick from every sentence.

>In Russia, however, the authorities don't seem to care that these hackers are wreaking havoc on the west.

We probably have to bow before the evidence of this statement and embrace the havoc which these 15-yos wreak. Until russian authorities finally convict all these guys who _discuss_ things on a forum.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for? - <AUTHOR> A lot of people are happy to pay $10/month for https://www.stratechery.com. Interested to see who else out there has loyal readerships willing to pay them! <comment><USER2> I'd happily pay for these:

List of real life ideas/pain points that can be solved and sold with software, with some decent research into it (not like "my uncle says he will pay $3.50 to automate his antique shop")

Same as the previous one, but in the non-profit space and not for making money. Specific problems that I can write code for, without having to worry about whether it is actually useful or not

Stories/commentary/interviews about companies working on solving very hard problems with tech, regardless of whether they succeed or not (not photo sharing apps, but problems like genetics, pharma, privacy etc)

Actionable insights/ideas on improving my abilities - creativity, problem solving, health etc (no pseudo science, no "motivational" stuff)

<comment><USER3> > List of real life ideas/pain points that can be solved and sold with > software, with some decent research into it (not like "my uncle says he will > pay $3.50 to automate his antique shop")

Does anyone know if this exists?

<comment><USER4> [https://nugget.one/daily](https://nugget.one/daily)

Last i checked here sent an email with some background research. The ideas are from people willing to pay for a solution.

Also see:

[http://www.opportunityoverload.com](http://www.opportunityoverload.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it bad if I'd say absolutely none? If any I read started charging I'd find similar content somewhere else.

<comment><USER6> > _Is it bad if I 'd say absolutely none?_

If you're okay with ads or donate to journalistic non-profits, I think it's okay. Otherwise, it is unsustainable.

<comment><USER7> I've been blogging since 2004 with no real ads or affiliate revenue to speak of, and it's news to me that it's "unsustainable." But then, I guess it depends upon whether we mean "sustainable as in keeping me motivated to write," or if we mean, "financially sustainable as in keeping me in fresh sock garters and Camambert risotto."

I get maybe $500 a month from people buying my books, and another $20 a month in amazon affiliate revenues from links to other people's books. If I tried to live on this, I'd starve. But this is not unusual, and I suspect that I am making more money than most people who blog.

Let's be clear: It's very rare for someone to make their primary living from blogging. But that's true of most creative things, be it writing, music, art, custom bicycle frames. These are, by and large, terrible businesses from a venal point of view.

Most people are in it for the love, because writing scratches their own itch. It's an awful business to be in: Like pop music, it's mostly a few big winners scooping the lion's share of the revenues, with everyone else scraping by or having a day job to pay the rent.

I am ok with people paying me zero dollars, because I write for myself. If I tried to live off it, I'd have to make insane compromises, like putting out a new book every time a new language looked to become popular, or writing clickbait blog posts on a schedule. And even then, the odds are that I would just get by, and need to supplement that income with speaker's fees and consulting.

Writing for money is a questionable model for a vocation, and a terrible model for an avocation.

Writing for yourself is an excellent model for an avocation, but unsustainable as a vocation.

<comment><USER6> > _It 's very rare for someone to make their primary living from blogging. But > that's true of most creative things, be it writing, music, art, custom > bicycle frames_

Some kinds of blogging/newsletter-writing is cheap. Other kinds, particularly the investigative kinds, are not.

<comment><USER7> That's true, and what we are witnessing in real time is those forms of journalism evaporate, as the web destroys their business models.

I think that blogging is not the same thing as journalism, in many, many ways.

<comment><USER6> > _what we are witnessing in real time is those forms of journalism evaporate, > as the web destroys their business models_

The _Wall Street Journal_ and _New York Times_ are doing fine. Smaller publications, too, like _The Information_ seem to do okay. Paywalls work because (a) online ads are crap and (b) most readers are too cheap to pay unless forced to.

> _I think that blogging is not the same thing as journalism_

I agree. I also think this blurring of the line has caused people to expect both for free, which is clearly untenable. That said, newspapers include op-ed sections and some "thinker" newsletters I subscribe to ( _e.g._ Mike Allen's political daily) have broken legitimate news.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think I would pay a monthly membership for a website, but what I would be willing to pay for is Google and Facebook to stop watching me and showing advertisements.

If I could pay the online ad companies to pay the content creator like I was a "click" or a "view" I could have an ad-free online experience while the content creator continues to get paid like I had seen the ad.

The opportunity for Google is huge I know a lot of people who would cough up $5-10/mo for an ad-free online experience.

</comment><comment><USER9> None of them. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of blogs and media sources I like, but at the end of the day I can get any information I want somewhere else for free.

Heck, in many cases, the information I need is either paid for by taxes (the BBC) or provided by hobbyists for free anyway.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure this is correct always. Sure you can get _much_ of the information for free, but not _any_ , as you mention. And even if you did, you'd be paying for it with your time, spending hours and days poring over data and separating facts from noise. For example: if you are an investor, can you get information on potential opportunities (stocks to buy or whatever) without having to spend money or a lot of time? What about real estate? If you or a loved one has a unusual medical condition and you're interested in knowing every recent development in the diagnosis, treatment etc of the condition, can you get it accurately and quickly for free?

Happy to be proven wrong, but I guess we'd be paying for good information/commentary/analysis etc one way or other - with time or money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was recently introduced to the 3blue1brown youtube channel. Easily worth $5/mo, IMO.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for introducing this to me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just began paying $5/mo to be a "member" at Medium. It's meant to enhance the discovery feature and the ability to access curated archives. Really it was a spur of the moment decision after I found myself reading and greatly appreciating an article from 2015[1], but I haven't really used the membership or understood it well enough to say that I'll continue yet. I think there's great need for a specific type of personal journalism Medium is known for, and I do want to support it especially if it means better research and discovery. Also given how much I've read off of Medium (good and not so good), a payment of some sort felt due. Let's see.

[1] [https://medium.com/matter/living-and-dying-on- airbnb-6bff8d6...](https://medium.com/matter/living-and-dying-on- airbnb-6bff8d600c04)

<comment><USER13> I would categorize Medium as a product rather than a publisher, there's quite a bit of the ambiguity behind the term "website" these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Interested to see who else out there has loyal readerships willing to pay > them!

So, shouldn't the more apt question be - Which blogs/newsletter you _are_ paying $x/month for?

</comment><comment><USER15> I would gladly pay $10/month to read Slate Star Codex. Heck, I'd pay $10/month just to have access to its archived posts.

I'd pay $5 for ranprieur.com. Not a ton of content, but he keeps me thinking about interesting questions.

I don't follow Gwern actively but I'd probably pay to have access to his site too.

</comment><comment><USER16> I read more blogs (single articles based on headlines of interest) than newsletters (digests that show up in my inbox). While I find many of them interesting and informative (krebs, schneier, ars, hn...) there's so much duplicated info around there isn't much I'd be willing to actually pay $60/year for.

Would rather do something like cryptocurrency micro-payments per actual article read to the end (or upvoted, clapped, etc) as opposed to spending a set amount of money per month for potentially unhelpful content or articles I don't get around to reading.

That would reward content creators for writing good material that actually gets read and the economy of scale would pay based on that mutual incentive. Such micropayments would also be a better metric than simple impressions and clicks.

</comment><comment><USER17> 5/month is too much. Consider how many different websites you're reading in one month, then imagine they all cost $5/month. It will start to hurt.

On the other hand, sites that charge you directly have to charge a minimum because of banking fees etc.

What we need is some middleman that will charge you $15/month then distribute it somehow along all the sites that you wish to support. Criteria to be done, maybe evenly, maybe based on how much you read from each...

<comment><USER18> If Brave / BAT actually catch on, this is the exact problem they're solving

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There aren't many. HN is the closest, but the truth is that I'd not start out paying $5 a month for it: I'd have to have 3 months free to test, then .... maybe. I'd probably pay for Reuters, AP, or BBC. The thing with these is varied content or content I check on my own.

The problem with most things bogs is that I don't get that much out of them. They are like newspapers or magazines: Might be OK every now and then, but nothing I'd read daily without getting bored of the content or finding it not nearly as useful as paying attention to them occasionally. I really wish advertisements were responsible and non-intrusive, but unfortunately this is rarely so. It wasn't so with television, newspapers, and magazines pre- internet either. Paid cable was filled with so many ads! Even paid channels advertising their own advertising long after a decent cable guide on demand existed.

My other big exception might be a cooking blog if it lacks the horrible ad experience and stops people from forcing their morals on me (I can buy organic flimsy brand butter if I choose, but listing it as an ingredient annoys me to no end). But again, I'd not pay it upfront and a free full-access trial would be necessary.

<comment><USER20> > and stops people from forcing their morals on me

Those are almost certainly not their morals that they're including in the recipe, but rather their monetization strategy. Those brand-specific ingredients are likely examples of brand placement.

<comment><USER19> The brand specific ones are probably so. Simply listing "organic butter" isn't such a thing, and it happens quite often. I understand enough to just use the butter I have, but some folks truly aren't. (I once had someone tell me ibuprofen didn't work for them: they had to have Advil. Same stuff happens with cooking, even with ingredients mandated to be the same).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I will be very reluctant to pay a monthly fee for any website.

<comment><USER22> I'm in the same boat. I have a subscription to a music service and a VPS provider but that's it.

Recurring charges are weird, maybe stressful is the right word. I'm constantly pressured to use the service to feel like I'm not waisting money but then when I do I have to keep evaluating whether it's worth it.

Perpetual licenses I have no trouble popping though.

I think my gaming habit is a good example, I probably spend on average $10-20 on games every month from the same service but I wouldn't pay $15/mo for their entire catalog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I stumbled upon [https://www.dailycodingproblem.com/](https://www.dailycodingproblem.com/) recently and it's the first time I want to pay for a newsletter. I don't need to pass a coding interview, but I used to be a competition programmer in high school and love thinking of tricky coding problems to solve. The newsletter includes a detailed solution to each problem (the next day.) What a great idea.

I also used to pay for [http://railscasts.com/](http://railscasts.com/) by Ryan Bates - back when it was a paid subscription. I paid for how succinct the information was organized, despite there being a tonne of other Ruby blogs out there.

</comment><comment><USER24> Almost none, unless it was something I'd read every day + found more than 1/2 articles relevant + useful. Won't even pay for NYT if only 5 or 6 articles/month add significant value.

We need a subscription business model that aggregates content like cable/pay tv, so I can pay a fair price once, and continue grazing across most sites without worrying about individual subscriptions or micropayments. WSJ and Economist are only sources I would pay for (at a reasonable price) that aren't providing specific data points I can use. And, most people wouldn't find those as useful as I do, so it's down to personal preferences and how much of any source you'll get value from.

It's why individual subscriptions to everything is a dead-in-the-water business model that's going to kill off most journals. Most sites will be abandoned if there is a paywall.

Think about it this way -- how many people would pay for The History Channel or HGTV as individual add-on tv channels? Yet a very large number of people will occasionally watch those sources if it's included in general subscription, and they add value to the overall package, even if you rarely watch them. That's the way I view 99% of online content.

And, you have to make it dead easy, and not be constantly harrassing me about subscriptions or micropayments, or I'm gone. And, I also expect sites I'm paying for to be ad-free and not slowing down my browser, or I won't pay.

</comment><comment><USER25> Hi,

I was curious to see the responses to this question. I run Opportunity Overload and we have paying subscribers for our pro-tier. We started at $10 per month and now have a $50 per month plan (still working on the details of this).

We send out the best weekly entrepreneurial opportunities in the form of sites, side projects, domains, broad opportunities and courses that we write.

[http://www.opportunityoverload.com](http://www.opportunityoverload.com)

Focus on providing something that you would want to pay for. 'Scratch your own itch' sort of speak.

Hope this helps, Vic

</comment><comment><USER26> I was paying $5/mo for Ars Technica, and recently switched to paying $50/year, because they were giving away a Yubikey with it. You don't get any more content, but no ads and full text RSS.

</comment><comment><USER27> I tell you what would be amazing: content aggregators (like HN) that charged and distributed money to the content providers.

Unfortunately it's really hard to build a community if you charge.

<comment><USER28> Are you familiar with steemit? They're trying to do something like that, although the result is not as good as HN or even reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I discovered it primarily as a YouTube channel but the guy who makes [http://iliketomakestuff.com](http://iliketomakestuff.com) has some great projects out there, including a number of arduino based projects. I'm trying to expand my horizon beyond web development and it appeals to my inner maker.

</comment><comment><USER30> How do you know that "a lot of people" are paying to read stratechery.com? Any sources to back this claim?

<comment><USER31> He makes $200k / year from his newsletter: [http://www.niemanlab.org/reading/ben-thompsons- stratechery-i...](http://www.niemanlab.org/reading/ben-thompsons-stratechery- is-doing-200000-a-year-in-revenue/)

<comment><USER32> wow, that seems really not much for a publication focused on business strategy.

<comment><USER33> That was a few years ago when he said he had 2000 subscribers. He doesn't say how many he has now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> LWN.net gets a bit more than $5. You pay to get quality content a few weeks ahead of time. Well worth the money.

<comment><USER35> _You pay to get quality content a few weeks ahead of time._

Just a week ahead of time:

[https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#subs](https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#subs)

But I agree, LWN.net is awesome, I am also subscribed for $7 per month. They have really well-researched articles about Linux and the Linux community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> LWN.net

It's not a blog or a newsletter but proper journalism and definitely worth the $5/mo I pay for it. I don't think there is any newsletter that just recycles other people's content would be worth the money.

</comment><comment><USER37> LWN.net. I don't read their articles often, but seeing what's on the forefront of the Linux project and associated work without combing through tons of commits is useful

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm subscribed to the correspondent but it's more their mission and work I'm supporting than actually paying to read their articles, though they are very good.

</comment><comment><USER39> [https://blog.acolyer.org/](https://blog.acolyer.org/) \- for summary/overview of CS papers.

</comment><comment><USER40> Seriously don't know. Anything I can think of seems like a stretch. I pay a monthly fee for access to a popular Polish newspaper/news portal though.

</comment><comment><USER41> I would pay for a professionally edited newswire service that doesn't advertise and doesn't sell content to anyone other than end users.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'd pay $5/mo for a digital-only Lapham's Quarterly, and I'd be willing to pay separately for The World in Time.

</comment><comment><USER43> I would pay $5/mo to use Twitter, but only if every other user paid the same amount and there were no ads.

<comment><USER44> I'm curious, what is it about Twitter that you'd pay for?

<comment><USER43> If it ceased to be free it would possibly maintain its utility and gain some civility b/c most of the people that constitute the political echo chamber would balk at paying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Currently I don't pay for any blogs or newsletters. I'd be willing to pay for high quality content as long as it were still made freely available, ideally with a permissive license. It is my belief that knowledge should generally be accessible to society.

I support content creators that have used similar strategies in other mediums. Some examples:

1\. Exploring ES6 [0]. The book is freely available online which means I can access it anywhere and easily share relevant sections if the need arises, such as when having an online discussion or explaining to a beginner how a specific feature works. I happily bought a copy and regularly recommend it to others.

2\. Textual [1]. It's an open source IRC client which charges for the precompiled version. I like having the option to dig into the source and compile it myself if the need arose. Paying for it allows the developer to continue working on bug fixes and improving the tool.

If I were more involved in the topics they covered, I'd happily start paying for LWN.net [2]. They allow linking to articles without paywalls and seem to produce very high quality content.

[0] [http://exploringjs.com/es6/](http://exploringjs.com/es6/)

[1] [https://www.codeux.com/textual/](https://www.codeux.com/textual/)

[2] [https://lwn.net/](https://lwn.net/)

</comment><comment><USER46> very good entertainment that hits my niche and isn't widely available for free.

Investigative journalism ("sponsoring" good work being done)

Content that helps me make more money that I can't get for free elsewhere online.

Content that helps me save costs that I can't get for free elsewhere online.

</comment><comment><USER47> I would pay $5/month for Hacker News, Drudge Report, and reddit.com/r/all.

<comment><USER48> Well, [https://skimfeed.com](https://skimfeed.com) is free. Get yourself something nice with that $5 :)

<comment><USER49> This is nice, didn't know skimfeed. I've been working on a news aggregator too, just released my first beta :-) [http://aktu.io](http://aktu.io)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> None

</comment><comment><USER51> Kottke.org. The best digest of the culture side of the Internet.

<comment><USER52> In case you didn't already know, kottke does already have a membership model: [https://kottke.org/members/](https://kottke.org/members/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I already do for Ars Technica, Wikipedia, and NPR.

</comment><comment><USER54> Matt Levine's Money Stuff

</comment><comment><USER28> Definitely [http://slatestarcodex.com](http://slatestarcodex.com)

Extremely engaging, educational, well-researched articles.

More articles from EY at [http://lesswrong.com](http://lesswrong.com).

Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER55> hn

</comment><comment><USER56> I'm willing to pay $5/month for one blog: my own. That is what a basic VPS with plenty of bandwidth costs.

edit: Interesting, this is fast approaching my most downvoted comment ever. Wonder why that is. I didn't even bother to link my own blog in case that came off as overly self-promotional.

If you think that content should be free, what is wrong with putting your money where your mouth is and giving your own away?

<comment><USER57> Same -- I pay about $5/mo to host a blog. Part of me wishes people would pay to read it, but the rest of me is in touch with reality. People who want to give me money can buy other things.

I am also willing to pay for good reporting and writing, e.g. the New Yorker and my local paper, because they require actual work. I wouldn't pay for Stratechery, which is just an opinion blog.</comment></comment>


Piracy on Android and iOS - an Interview with Madfinger Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/piracy-on-android-and-ios-an-interview-with-madfinger-games-20120731/

<comment><USER2> I might be completely off the track.. But as it is games we are talking about of which mostly attracts the <18 year old audience...

How many of those have a credit card readily to pay for apps and games on an android phone?

<comment><USER3> The average gamer is 37 years old. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_culture#Demographics>

A game like dead trigger might attract a younger audience than that, but I guess we're still talking adults here.

<comment><USER4> "Gamer" is an unbelievably broad term, akin to an average "reader" age of anyone who reads something. The pdf (can't find any actual study confirming any of that data) sourced on wiki doesn't explain what most of those extremely broad terms mean. My mom is 59 and plays games on facebook nearly every night, so that makes her a "gamer" too.

I wouldn't even consider that an accurate number for the Android gaming platform. Overall that's no more valuable of a number than it's stated, which is incredibly insignificant.

I would say that a majority of game pirates aren't causing lost sales (i.e.: if piracy was suddenly made impossible, those people just wouldn't play the game at all). I know of a few documented incidents offhand where an outbreak of piracy led directly to increased sales, for what it's worth. Not to say that piracy DOESN'T lead to a lost sale, but that rather the losses are vastly overstated in "big picture" estimates. Like so much else in the world, the truth is much more complicated than any one absolute answer.</comment></comment></comment>


Boids - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids <comment><USER2> I have an implementation here [0] if people want to play with it. Supports dynamically changing the controls, has obstacles and predators. Setting weights for separation, alignment and cohesion to zero and then increasing only one of them nicely shows which role each of them plays. It's actually made as a workshop [1] for my company, where the shell is provided and one has to implement it step by step. In Norwegian, though.

Update: Dang linked other discussions, and I see I commented on one from 2015 [2]. Someone there asked for the course content, and that's available (in English!) in a PDF in [1]. This workshop/implementation is actually an example of what I wanted the students to make at the time. Which I then retrofitted to a fun workshop for my colleagues.

[0]: [https://matsemann.github.io/boids- workshop/](https://matsemann.github.io/boids-workshop/) [1]: [https://github.com/Matsemann/boids- workshop](https://github.com/Matsemann/boids-workshop) [2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9300142](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9300142)

<comment><USER3> I had fun playing with the parameters, thanks! Now, I want a wallpaper version of this with low maxSpeeds. Very relaxing.

<comment> w-ll Remember when Windows allowed you to set a .html file as a desktop background.

Wallpaper Engine [0] might be your next best bet.

0\. [https://store.steampowered.com/app/431960/Wallpaper_Engine/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/431960/Wallpaper_Engine/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Boids are my favourite hello world for 3D simulation environments. For the last few weeks, I've been using boids to update my GPU programming skills and knowledge of related algorithms in Unity and Unreal.

Yesterday I got 0.5 million boids simulating in Unreal Engine at 45 fps on a GTX 1080 [0]. The bottle neck is rendering so many instanced cone meshes, the simulation without rendering can do 1 million boids at 120 fps. I'm borrowing a common data structure used in GPU fluid simulations, the dynamic hashed grid, to calculate the neighbourhood of each boid (cool tutorial here with full source code [1]). We need the neighbourhoods to calculate their urges. My code is a mess at the moment, but if there is interest I can post it to GitHub (Unity and Unreal).

Boids are an example of agent-based modelling and swarm systems. I used agent- based modelling in my PhD thesis to construct and simulate realtime, interactive 3D biomolecular models of mitochondria and neuromuscular synapses [2,3]. Now that I'm free (graduated), I'm building an iPad app to teach and communicate structural and molecular biology with immersive, and realtime simulations. Our vision is to make molecular and structural biology immersive and fun. It's not a textbook, it's a little more like Neil Stephenson's young lady's illustrated primer! :D

[0]: [https://twitter.com/timd_ca/status/1243941167005192192?s=20](https://twitter.com/timd_ca/status/1243941167005192192?s=20)

[1]: [https://wickedengine.net/2018/05/21/scalabe-gpu-fluid- simula...](https://wickedengine.net/2018/05/21/scalabe-gpu-fluid-simulation/)

[2]: [https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/111493](https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/111493)

[3]: [https://youtu.be/6CsxADBpal0](https://youtu.be/6CsxADBpal0)

<comment><USER5> It wasn't Unreal Engine that gave you that perf. It was your GTX 1080. Unreal Engine (or any Engine) in this situation is doing next to nothing.

Sorry it's just this kind of thing pushed my buttons. I see someone showing their engine and claiming perf when their example is 99.999% GPU and 0.001% anything to do with their engine.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, I didn't mean to mislead you. This has little to do with Unreal (or Unity) and everything to do with GPU programming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're in 3D animation/modeling/whatever and have a little bit of experience, Blender has a pretty stable simulation of Boids that is lots of fun to play around with. It's been built-in into Blender since... For as long as I remember, and it has lots of properties you can play around with, and you can also make the boids be rigid bodies as well so they can interact with other elements in your scene.

Some links if you want to try it out:

\- [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/physics/particles/...](https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/physics/particles/emitter/physics/boids.html)

\- [https://www.blendernation.com/2019/07/06/how-to-use-boids- in...](https://www.blendernation.com/2019/07/06/how-to-use-boids-in- blender-2-8/)

\- [https://www.blendernation.com/2008/01/05/simulating- flocks-h...](https://www.blendernation.com/2008/01/05/simulating-flocks-herds- and-swarms-using-experimental-blender-boids-particles/)

\- [http://feeblemind.tuxfamily.org/blog/index.php?post/2007/12/...](http://feeblemind.tuxfamily.org/blog/index.php?post/2007/12/28/106-setting- a-prey-predator-relationship-using-boids-particles)

<comment><USER7> For even more Blender boid related fun, here's Ian Hurbert's ",lazy tutorial" for animating moths. He's fun

[https://youtu.be/imkSdlbXB_U](https://youtu.be/imkSdlbXB_U)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've confirmed with Craig Reynolds that yes indeed, then name of Boids was inspired by The Producers:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL6mTMShVyk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL6mTMShVyk)

>"He's up on the roof with his boids. He keeps boids. Doity, disgusting, filthy, lice ridden boids." -The Concierge, not a Madam

<comment><USER9> I had no idea! I would have guessed it was a contraction of "bird-oid", or something like that.

<comment><USER8> That too, but it's only the cover story for people without a New York Metropolitan accent!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids)

>Boids is an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulates the flocking behaviour of birds. His paper on this topic was published in 1987 in the proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH conference. The name "boid" corresponds to a shortened version of "bird-oid object", which refers to a bird-like object. Incidentally, "boid" is also a New York Metropolitan dialect pronunciation for "bird".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I recently implemented boids in a compute shader [1]. It's using Apple's Metal framework, and rendered in 3D. The boids are simple triangles, and I added a bit of specular shading to give them a little bit of a "shimmer" as they flock.

I implemented an NVIDIA algorithm for running n-body simulations on the GPU. The constraint is memory access, which can freeze up in a case like this. [2]. Converting from CUDA to Metal wasn't too bad.

1: [https://www.instagram.com/p/B4t4ewCplfR/?igshid=1uxnng6idsqb...](https://www.instagram.com/p/B4t4ewCplfR/?igshid=1uxnng6idsqb8)

2: [https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems3/part-v- physics...](https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems3/part-v-physics- simulation/chapter-31-fast-n-body-simulation-cuda)

edit: Here's a low-res animated GIF for anyone who doesn't want to click an instagram link: [http://gregorywieber.com/assets/images/art/murmuration.gif](http://gregorywieber.com/assets/images/art/murmuration.gif)

<comment><USER11> Love it, and the others on your instagram. You should start a dedicated account for them. I would like to follow your art, but feels weird seeing family photos of someone I don't know :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Beautiful example:

[https://twitter.com/OskSta/status/1219340987299966976](https://twitter.com/OskSta/status/1219340987299966976)

[https://twitter.com/OskSta/status/1219343599336333319](https://twitter.com/OskSta/status/1219343599336333319)

[https://twitter.com/OskSta/status/1225037781858234368](https://twitter.com/OskSta/status/1225037781858234368)

<comment><USER13> Oskar's tweets showing his city-builder are some of my favourite things on the internet. His combination of 3D rendering and artistic style is just black magic to me.

<comment><USER12> A real challenger to the Return of the Obra Din Devlog :)

[https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=qvfvkcqtfr9...](https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=qvfvkcqtfr9q3kb2rtlqj3j3c1&topic=40832.20)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Might be a dumb thing to post on hacker news, but I tried using the word boid or boids in Scrabble and my competitive wife wouldn't let me because it wasn't in the dictionary. It fit so well too!

<comment> banana-slug You need a better dictionary: [https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/boid](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/boid)

Long before the flocking model, "boid" referred to snakes of the Boidae family, like boas and anacondas.

<comment><USER15> Previously we played with the Australian reference, the Macquarie Dictionary. Subsequently, as an international family finding that an expensive and static resource insufficiently engaged with international usage we began to play admitting anything in either dictionary.com or wiktionary with an English entry, excepting proper names and non-naturalized acronyms. As official scrabble cheat words cover a lot of random Scots/Welsh, you might choose to permit those (single result page on Wiktionary). It starts to get ridiculous fast. I personally love the learning aspect and we do not play the traditional "challenge" rule, in fact we actively encourage consultation of reference works before and after each play. I am a big fan of Wiktionary, occasionally adding to existing English and Middle Chinese entries.

For example, according to Wiktionary, _boid_ (and its plural) should be permitted under etymology two, ie. _member of the family Boidae of non- venomous snakes_ or etymology three, ie. _Nonstandard spelling of bird representing the New York City pronunciation_. We would not permit it under etymology one (computer program name). Now look - you learned something! [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/boid#English](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/boid#English)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I recommend one of my favourite books, Gary William Flake's 1998 _The Computational Beauty of Nature_ to anybody interested in boids or other computational models of social, chemical, and physical phenomena.

Therein the author covers boids extensively and in detail. If I am not mistaken it is in section 16.3 that the author treats boids fairly extensively.

<comment><AUTHOR> He just did a great interview @ [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gary- flake-scientist-a...](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gary-flake- scientist-author-former-cto-search-at-salesforce/id1480732807?i=1000469330999)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Boids in 3D Unity: [https://github.com/SebLague/Boids](https://github.com/SebLague/Boids) and the excellent related video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqtqltqcQhw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqtqltqcQhw)

<comment><USER17> Does it use the GPU?

[https://github.com/SebLague/Boids/blob/master/Assets/Scripts...](https://github.com/SebLague/Boids/blob/master/Assets/Scripts/BoidCompute.compute)

If so, then awesome :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Related from 2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9298338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9298338)

2011: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2504652](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2504652)

2014: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7293350](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7293350)

One comment from 2018: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17167077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17167077)

(Links for the curious. Reposts are ok after a year: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html))

</comment><comment><USER17> I made a Three.js boids implementation for an interview once. The role was for web dev, but the theme was "come and teach us about something that interests you" :)

[https://github.com/juanuys/boids](https://github.com/juanuys/boids)

</comment><comment><USER19> Reynolds put up a page about Boids in 1995 and added links to related work for a few years. Great stuff.

[https://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/](https://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Dan Shiffman over on The Coding Train has a nice walkthrouhg of implementing this in P5.js

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhjuuHl6qHM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhjuuHl6qHM)

<comment><USER21> Recently did that code as presented using pygame, but I haven't uploaded it anywhere yet, that might be a good idea, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I did a browser based Boids version that simulated galactic colonization: [https://coldwar.io/deepspace](https://coldwar.io/deepspace) and a simpler variant with predators: [https://coldwar.io/predators](https://coldwar.io/predators)

</comment><comment><USER23> I also have an implementation [0] that shows the paths of the boids. Based on the parameters, some very interesting patterns emerge!

[0] [http://jzlabs.com/](http://jzlabs.com/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Good old Boids! I implemented a clone of Boids in C as my senior project in high school. It included 3D wireframe graphics from scratch. My teacher said it was "A nice screensaver".

</comment><comment><USER25> WGSL [0] implementation of Boids: [https://dawn.googlesource.com/tint/+/refs/heads/master/test/...](https://dawn.googlesource.com/tint/+/refs/heads/master/test/compute_boids.wgsl)

[0]: [http://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/wgsl](http://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/wgsl)

</comment><comment><USER26> > Incidentally, "boid" is also a New York Metropolitan dialect pronunciation > for "bird".

</comment><comment><USER27> StarCraft 2 used boids, and I'm using boids to rewrite Age of Empires II:

github.com/glouw/openempires

<comment><USER28> I've often pondered the feasibility of using boids (or a boid like rule system) to implement ancient combat formations like pike squares skirmish lines. Is that what you're doing?

<comment><USER27> Yes, though I'm not at the formation stage just yet. Boids just know how to stear organically much like Zerglings do.

Boids just provide distancing at the micro level. Astar or Greedy First Best at the macro level ultimately provides the boid with a final destination, and the boids organically work together on path to their respective final destinations.

Rise of Nations did it almost perfectly in the early 2000s with left box drag for selection and right box drag for retangular placement. Rome Total War upped the antics a bit with 10,000 unit scales over Rise of Nations 200 unit scales, but suffered some serious bugs. In my opinion no one except Julius Caesar can "program" so many units to properly do their bidding!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I posted this simple boid drawing toy a year or two ago: [https://miniatureape.github.io/boiddraw/](https://miniatureape.github.io/boiddraw/)

</comment><comment> ur-whale Slightly OT, but this is a _very_ interesting problem to implement on a GPU because it very much resembles in its structure the implementation of exact N-body simulator on massively parallel machines.

<comment><USER27> Yes boids are great for parallelization. Each boid must compute a stressor imposed by neighboring boids based on the three rules in the paper (separation, alignment, and drifting towards center of mass). The stressor for each boid is simply applied to each boids velocity. Given a thousand threads / cpus / cuda cores, what have you, each unit can be applied to a single boid

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Now who doesn't have an implementation of Boids of their own... :)

[https://anoopelias.github.io/boids/](https://anoopelias.github.io/boids/)

<comment><USER31> It's a classic :)

I made a little framework for building these types of models: [https://github.com/jrhdoty/SwarmJS](https://github.com/jrhdoty/SwarmJS)

Here's a boids implementation using it: [http://jrhdoty.github.io/SwarmJS/](http://jrhdoty.github.io/SwarmJS/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> My simple implementation in C / ClojureScript.

[https://dimovich.github.io/art/](https://dimovich.github.io/art/)

</comment><comment> banana-slug Nice boid-related tutorial: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqtqltqcQhw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqtqltqcQhw)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/search?q=boids](https://github.com/search?q=boids)

<comment> banana-slug Note that this one ([https://github.com/meshula/OpenSteer](https://github.com/meshula/OpenSteer)) is the "semi official" port of OpenSteer, a library for steering behaviors, which is the generalization of the ideas underlying boids, as described in [http://www.red3d.com/cwr/papers/1999/gdc99steer.html](http://www.red3d.com/cwr/papers/1999/gdc99steer.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I remember boids was one of the example programs with the direct3d sdk back in the '90s

</comment><comment><USER34> It is a beautiful paper, well worth reading the original.

</comment><comment><USER35> Could that be used to simulate the pandemic?

<comment><USER36> #3Blue1Brown has decent (simple) SIR epidemic simulation

[https://youtu.be/gxAaO2rsdIs](https://youtu.be/gxAaO2rsdIs)

<comment><USER4> It's a great video. His source is here: [https://github.com/3b1b/manim/blob/shaders/from_3b1b/active/...](https://github.com/3b1b/manim/blob/shaders/from_3b1b/active/sir.py)</comment></comment></comment>


Eich Says Not Stepping Down as Mozilla CEO - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/1/5572202/mozilla-ceo-resists-calls-to-resign-amid-furor-over-anti-gay-marriage

<comment><USER2> Thought experiment: what if Eich were a Muslim who had donated to his local mosque? Would the pitchforks be out then?

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

Clarification: I'm an atheist who is completely supportive of gay marriage. I also think that some religions and philosophies get a free pass for bigotry, and others don't. That makes me sad, angry, or resigned depending upon my mood at the time.

<comment><USER3> You can be a muslim (or catholic, or whatever) who disagrees with the leadership on particular issues. Or some people think it's acceptable for religions to prefer one idea of family while realizing the government should accommodate all families.

Eich supported a very specific cause, banning gay marriage in California.

<comment><USER2> Please re-read my post; I very specifically mentioned financial donation to an organisation opposed to gay marriage.</comment></comment></comment>


General purpose programming languages' speed of light - <AUTHOR> http://tratt.net/laurie/tech_articles/articles/programming_languages_and_the_speed_of_light <comment><USER2> This "Magellanic view" of programming language exploration doesn't seem quite right. Programming language design is mostly not about finding virgin territory by inventing brand new ideas (which was admittedly easier in the era when high-level languages were brand new – i.e. in the 1950s). Rather, it's mostly about finding unexplored folds hidden nearby in the vast, combinatorial manifold of ways to combine existing ideas in a single, coherent language. In my experience, people who have spent a lot of time designing languages are the _most_ sympathetic to people trying new permutations – precisely because they are so painfully aware of all the awful compromises they were forced to make in their own designs and their understanding that much better ways of combining those features might be so tantalizingly close.

Scala is a great example: the innovation of the language is not so much in new language features, but rather in its ingenious combination of so many powerful features into a single, coherent system. Of course, some may argue that Scala has too many features (I'm a bit terrified of it), but it's indisputable that putting all those pieces together in a way that works is tour de force of language design.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra Am I the only one who sees no clothes on this article?

I mean, it seems that the person who wrote it spends a lot of time thinking about programming and much less time programming; that's where he ends up with meta-ideas that are interesting but also mostly wrong.

Languages are substantially different. You don't (and can't) understand every concept under the hood to drive the thing. You can't add and substract features, they're interdependent.

<comment><USER3> The comment about the last 20 years also makes me twitch a bit. That sort of thing always makes me wonder if it's supposed to be about the state of actual usable programming languages or of recent PL research. Either way, the first two things I think of when asked about recent advances are substructural types (maybe stretching the 20-year limit) and higher-order contracts, and these are both available in things intended as general-purpose languages (Rust and Racket).

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it's almost like he's making a definition that's impossible to satisfy: the changes in mainstream languages (since 1993!) don't count because the features already existed in academic languages, but the new features in academic languages don't count because they aren't mainstream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A bit off topic, but I've been learning about languages like ML and Scala, and what does everybody have against static typing? I feel like if we used type systems better, we'd have a lot fewer problems. You can prove that your programs have no bugs! That's much stronger than unit testing.

When thinking 'static types', does everybody just think C/C++/Java? Is it upfront costs? My first ML program, I took half an hour to write a function that output all the words in a trie. It gets easier, and more interesting afterward, but I might have given up had it not been for a class. Are static types too rigid for prototyping? Scala, Haskell and OCaml have REPLs.

Some of the "experimental features of static type systems" like dependent types are really powerful; you can make some strong proofs about the logic of your program. I'd be willing to give up (or at least try going without) duck typing for that.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, a lot of people's only experience with static types is C or Java. (A programming-language-theory PhD student friend-of-mine was first exposed to C while writing her dissertation. "This isn't a type system at all!" was the diagnosis)

Also, sometimes in Haskell it's so hard to write a function that mostly-works (because they type system sees your mistake but you don't) that you can't get enough of your half-baked idea down so that you can see it clearly enough to figure out how it's supposed to really work correctly

Also, I've seen plenty of programs that provably have no bugs, but still grow to exhaust all system memory or occasionally take several hours to return from a function call for no apparent reason. And those are a major pain to diagnose.

<comment><USER6> >Also, I've seen plenty of programs that provably have no bugs, but still grow to exhaust all system memory or occasionally take several hours to return from a function call for no apparent reason

I think you mean programs that type checked, not programs that provably had no bugs.

<comment><USER4> What if those programs were guaranteed to do the right thing, if only that had enough time or space to finish? Maybe they're still "correct".

Or, to put it another way: our existing type systems don't make code "provably correct", and when people say that it does (like the commenter above), they're trying to talk you into something.

<comment><USER6> >our existing type systems don't make code "provably correct"

That is what I am telling you.

>and when people say that it does (like the commenter above)

They said no such thing.

<comment><USER4> Yes, you're telling me something that I was already trying to demonstrate with my example.

<comment><USER6> I can't speak to your motive, all I can do is read what you posted. What you posted was wrong, and I explained that.

<comment><USER4> What I posted was obviously self-contradictory, which is not the same as wrong.

<comment><USER6> What you posted was wrong, like I said. There are programs that have proofs demonstrating they are free of bugs. You have not seen them do either of the things you claim to have seen. You were stating something false.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting concept, but the flaw at the heart is the presupposition that lack of progress right now means we are at the ultimate limit of what can be accomplished. Imagine if cavemen learning to paint on walls said, well we haven't improved in a few millennia, so this is probably the most complex thing that can be represented by drawings. Or what about math stopping with Euclid? It was thousands of years later that progress happened.

Technology comes in fits and starts. A lot of new things happened in the 50s and 60s, we are still trying to figure out ways to use and apply them. Just because someone thought about and prototyped something then doesn't mean it's not new when that feature goes mainstream (e.g. garbage collection in Java, channels for concurrency in Go, etc).

For a long time we couldn't break the sound barrier, which is a limit, but not the speed of light limit. Because progress is stalled now doesn't mean there will never be progress in the future.

<comment><USER8> The author addresses this in the post. First by comparing major technological advances to earthquakes: "they occur at unpredictable intervals, with little prior warning before their emergence." At the end of the post he says that he doesn't think we've reached an ultimate limit and that the language design space needs to be explored more fully.

<comment><USER9> Which would mean even he doesn't agree with his ridiculous main point. But I think you're being too generous.

<comment><USER8> I think it's more of a thought experiment; just an interesting idea to entertain even if we haven't reached the limit. The more immediately applicable point is that of a cognitive limit moreso than the suggestion of a technological limit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub._

<http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html>

</comment><comment><USER11> We went backwards when we went to the web in terms of development tools. It was necessary but RAD (Delphi, Visual Basic, yes that VB) were far ahead of where we are now today in the ability to put basic pieces together to make an application. I've not used visual studio in a long time, but I would hope they retained their core philosophy of reuse.

<comment><USER4> A symptom of this: we have Object Oriented languages that can't produce UI elements that are objects. And that's because we can't figure out how to let objects live from one web request to another? And _that_ 's because despite all the new database paradigms, nobody has made a widget-object model that can be saved to the database and reloaded transparently, and _that's_ because our models of serializability of objects are brittle and unsafe (see the recent YAML bugs), and _that_ 's because we have no good systems for seamlessly migrating data structures from one version to another

<comment><USER10> Objects do too much to live in a heterogeneous world. We'd do better serializing maps (JSON is popular, of course, but EDN is better) and operating on them using generic functions rather than trying to bind functionality to data. It's easy enough to serialize the properties of a UI widget when the functionality is data-driven and lives elsewhere.

<comment><USER4> I think you're probably right? I mean, with the tools available in 2013, I certainly agree that the Clojure way is the least crazy. But I miss some OOP stuff when I'm doing that - like, I kinda like the organizational qualities of OOP; lots of the time I wish I had ruby-style polymorphism (on immutable structures?) instead of having to put all the logic in one function. Maybe that means I should just learn how to use defprotocol. But I guess that still doesn't give you an event model - what's the EDN equivalent of onClick ?

<comment><USER10> You should learn how to use records, protocols and hierarchies if you want to organize things that way in Clojure. You'll have to be a bit more ad-hoc about the same kinds of things when you're sending them to Javascript or storing them in a database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've always had a kind of feeling that there is an upper bound on the rate at which a human can articulate an (original) idea/program/function in explicit enough terms for a computer to then run it.

Even to do this in the first place will always require a bare minimum understanding of the language of logic; basic control flow statements, variables and so on.

This is why I feel things like Bret Victor's idea of the 'MathKiller' (which as I understand the idea, is his general term for a hypothetical universally- intuitive computing environment which can model _anything_ ) are goals which we can only ever approach asymptotically - there will always be some uncharted waters where the only option available to those who want to explore further is simply to straight up write some code.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that I feel improving the sophistication of the programming languages we use or changing the core paradigms upon which they are based will not help the situation; improving the sophistication of the tools we use to write them with will.

<comment><USER13> The author's argument is a classic literature criticism / philosophy argument and I'm kicking myself trying to remember which specific person/theory from philosophy / lit crit he is more or less paraphrasing.

Note that I'm not by any means accusing the original author of plagiarism or of trying to pull off a stunt. Convergent evolution makes perfect sense. Although comp sci languages are a bit more rigid than other human languages, trying to express creative / complicated stuff in a human created language is an old, heavily discussed problem, even if the original author doesn't know it. Does this go all the way back to Plato? I can't remember its just too early in the morning.

The bright side is "we" as a species have been churning out new lit more or less continuously for a couple millenia, so even if lit production dies off at some point in the future (and I don't think it will) that means that in computer languages we "only" have a couple more millenia of productive programming left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I agree in the sense that I don't think there's going to be a killer new programming language or language paradigm that's going to overturn the existing languages within the problem domains they're suited for.

Since the current high-level languages are so extensible, the new paradigm seems to be moving beyond programming languages to a higher level of abstraction based on frameworks and DSLs. We're not just "writing code," we're always writing code that writes code (that writes code, and so on, of course, until it's a stream of 0's and 1's.). We do this because working at a higher level of abstraction is usually more productive. The recent crop of programming frameworks are just another layer on top of this. Next I guess we will have some sort of meta-frameworks on top of those. So the specific language choice will only matter insofar as it's a part of the framework stack.

</comment><comment><USER15> I like to envision something like 'augmented coding', where the concepts are driven by the programmer, and some friendly bot fills in the nitty gritty. I'm not talking about something like a GUI driven language, more like autocomplete - just that the autocomplete is doing way more than calling up a list of method names.

<comment><USER16> Sounds like AI and maybe machine learning. Once we get to that point though, why do we need a person telling the bog what to do?

<comment><USER13> If you don't intentionally give it a god, repeated experimental evidence is it'll invent (at least) one for itself, so you'd best keep in the loop, unless you really trust evolution or don't really care what happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A post on the future of programming languages without mentioning Agda, Coq, or OMeta?

I think we are just now getting beyond the "low-hanging fruit" era of programming languages.

</comment><comment><USER18> Haskell's type system can be unwieldy (and often on the edge of experimentation, it is) but that's because it's not so different from a programming language itself. That said, both the type system and the language, Haskell, itself are based on incredibly simple pieces.

</comment><comment><USER19> How would scissors invention fit in that reasoning?

I vote for the tooling option or, to be more precise, for a different combination of tooling and features.

</comment><comment><USER6> I hope the author spends some time learning about programming languages and programming language research. The core point is simply false, and the evidence to support it ranges from flimsy to nonsense.

"The plain truth about programming languages is that while there have been many small gains in the last 20 years, there have been no major advances"

There have been many major advances. The fact that they were not included in java does not mean they do not exist.

>There have been no new paradigms

Arguably there have only ever been two paradigms: imperative and functional (object oriented and procedural simply being minor variations of the imperative paradigm). It is not reasonable to expect entirely new paradigms to be discovered on anything other than an incredibly rare basis.

>I'm not even aware of major new language features

The first thing this should do is trigger your "I should research new language features" instinct, not your "I should assume there are none" instinct.

>beyond some aspects of static type systems

So, he does know some, but chooses to ignore them because why exactly?

>The core of virtually every extant programming language is largely similar.

No. And it is entirely possible for new things to replace old things, programming languages are not required to take the C++ approach of accumulating every possible feature that has ever existed.

>Some of the things Haskell and Scala's type systems can express are astonishing; but I have also seen each type system baffle world-renowned experts

That is an awfully bold statement to just pull out of nowhere with nothing to back it up. Who are these experts, and what baffled them exactly? Haskell has been a hotbed of programming language research in the last decade, with a large number of advances being made and being put into actual use, then more advancements being built on top of those. Dismissing the entire concept of type systems based on an unnamed "expert" who was somehow "baffled" by some unmentioned aspect of the language is insane.

>Verification techniques and tools have made major advances

Yeah, like those crazy type system things you just dismissed as being unconvincing, oversold, and baffling to experts. Go learn agda and then tell me nothing new has happened in 20 years.

<comment><USER20> > I hope the author spends some time learning about programming languages and > programming language research.

The author is a programming language academic. See: <http://tratt.net/laurie/research/pubs/>

<comment><USER6> I am aware. And as I said, I hope he spends some time learning about programming languages and programming language research. Not just a tiny subset of virtually identical languages that are not used for research. Look at what he has published. His work has been entirely in the world of unityped languages, and his characterization of type system research is that "some stuff has happened but I don't know what it is and its types so who cares". Making claims about programming languages as a whole requires a far broader knowledge base than he appears to have acquired. Very deep knowledge in a very small space is certainly very useful, but not for making general statements about broad topics.</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon crowns winner of first warehouse robot challenge - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/01/amazon-picking-challenge-winner/ <comment><USER2> That's a nice bin-picking system. Bin-picking is a classic robotic manipulation problem [1], and they're doing a good job. They target the object and approach it from an angle where pickup is possible. The unusual thing here is the range of objects picked. Most bin-picking has a far narrower range.

It's a vacuum picker, which is limited; they couldn't pick up a perforated metal pencil holder. But over 90% of the items tested were vacuum-pickable. That's probably a reasonable figure for Amazon's inventory, since books are vacuum-pickable. Amazon can sort their inventory into machine-pickable and non-machine pickable.

The new system is really slow, but that can be fixed.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh2GRA9enN4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh2GRA9enN4)

<comment><USER3>
        > since books are vacuum-pickable

Really? I'd have thought they were one of a class that weren't. If you latch on to the outer cover, you'll splay the book, which can damage hard backs.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps all the books are shrink-wrapped to hold them shut.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How can self-driving cars handle going down the road at 70mph, yet bin-picker robots have to move so slowly to be accurate?

Seems like a contradiction to me.

<comment><USER6> They don't. It is a convergence problem. If you've ever seen a pick-and-place robot in a factor you know they can be quite fast.

Simply put, the convergence problem is getting to the correct orientation and position to positively pick up an item. Factory robots finesse that by putting parts in a narrow area in the work space but modern car assembly robots can pull parts in a wide variety of orientations and positions.

Current research has focused on visual systems as it is pretty cheap these days to put a couple of cameras near the end effector to provide a stereoscopic view to the effector converging on the target.

<comment><USER7> Here's a pretty sweet pick and place robot for reference: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzHpDDttIBU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzHpDDttIBU)

<comment><USER8> That reminds me of the famous Lucille Ball chocolate scene [0], except in this case the robot is keeping up just fine!

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NPzLBSBzPI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NPzLBSBzPI)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congrats to Team RBO!

And whatever is the antonym of congrats to Amazon's warehouse workers!

<comment><USER10> Based on stories about those positions, even though they'll lose their job, hopefully they'll have a better position.

Amazon warehouse positions have high attrition and turnaround

<comment><USER11> It's not just warehouse, it's engineering. Amazon as a company treats employees (outside of the executive suite) like dirt. IT's a retailer, more like Walmart than Microsoft, and so they have no respect for engineering. The only reason AWS happened was Vogels had enough power to isolate his people from the rest of Amazon (though I bet that team is suffering now too.)

My boss was trained to be a prison guard and couldn't operate spreadsheets, after a re-org, his boss was, I kid you not, one of those DMV ladies who has no interest in doing anything but covering her butt. (I mean, literally worked at the DMV and then got a job at Amazon managing dozens of engineers.)

They like to say things like "only hire A players" but their entire management is D players. It's hard to get a job as an engineer there but as an engineering manager all you need is a college degree in basket weaving and a demonstrated ability to kiss ass.

<comment><USER12> I do agree Amazon is just another retailer in the end. As to being a cutting edge technology company, I don't put Amazon in the same league as any of Musk's companies, but what do I know? I know I'm tired of UPS trucks delivering one package. I don't feel shopping on Amazon is good for the environment. Maybe one day--when the drones deliver all the stuff we really don't need? Sorry, I don't like these huge stores. In Amazons defense, they do allow little guys to sell through their store. Is Amazon as evil as Wallmart-- no!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cool, it would probably be less complex if the items were at one place all the time, like with a robotic warehouse: [https://youtu.be/6EmR0KHBj_M?t=1m](https://youtu.be/6EmR0KHBj_M?t=1m)

<comment><USER3> I have built an automated warehouse very similar to the one in the video; you get different items in the same totes - any other approach is simply not feasible from a space perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> say no to spec work

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if it would be better to have a smart bin that would simply push products down a slide to a conveyor belt instead.

<comment><USER16> Yes, it does seem like they're using a robot to solve a human problem. If the robots were the ones who decided how the shelves were initially stacked then surely there would be more elegant approaches to this? picking and packing is a tiny part of the whole ordering and delivery system which would probably be best re-designed from the top down if all parts are to be conducted automatically.

That said, I'm all for businesses encouraging research to be done in this area. Automation will swallow us all eventually, but it's going to take a while yet...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's nothing like giving away something for tens of thousands of dollars that they could have sold for tens of billions.

<comment><USER18> Can you skip the snarky comment and explain why this kind of contest is bad? To me it seems like a great idea for everyone. The contestants:

1\. Can win money

2\. Gain exposure

3\. Network with other contestants

4\. Potentially get more funding

<comment><USER17> If you could teleport packages to my front porch, would you be willing to give that to Amazon in exchange for $25k and "exposure"? Amazon becomes the first trillion dollar company in history and you get your name on a press release and some snack money. I would never want any sort of exposure that told people that I'm easily duped about the value of my brain.

<comment><USER19> The problem is very very far from solved. Amazon is supporting students to work on problems Amazon cares about, and these events are very important for Amazon to recruit engineers. Some of these young people will go work for Amazon and some of them will start companies that Amazon will buy. I don't think they are being duped.

Amazon's robotics group is the Kiva Systems startup they bought for a huge amount of money a few years ago.

I was at the conference and dropped in to this event. Lots of energy and committed teams. Many/most teams did pretty badly. I heard (but couldn't confirm) that only one item was correctly picked on the first day. It's not easy.

<comment><USER20> Do they fund the research groups?

Having been a grad student (EDIT: Hey, it turns out my research group has published at ICRA! But not while this has gone on.), I get why these events are interesting/important. However it seems like AMZ could do a little more than <1/8th of an engineer in prize money (not counting the cost of running the conference).

<comment><USER19> I believe they did not directly fund these group's research. Just the challenge.

Amazon does in-house R&D and is precious about the IP, like most companies. Academic research needs to have flexible IP deals.

Most of the Amazon funding for this event went to supporting student travel and registrations, plus gear shipping. Details are probably confidential but think roughly an order of magnitude more than the cash prize. Shipping is expensive.

Funding challenges is smart. Some groups are doing funded research anyway, on more-or-less related things like grasping, vision, manipulation, planning, whatever. The challenge gets teams to focus on a more complete and realistic task, thus guiding the development of their general tech in Amazon's direction.

Bottom line: Amazon, the historically conservative low-margin retailer, showed up at the premier IEEE robotics research conference, brought some money and hired some grad students. Students worked hard, learned a lot. Amazon and winners got some good press. Awesome.

It's interesting how the best team was way ahead of everyone else. I'd be very interested to see what Amazon can do internally.

<comment><USER12> "Amazon, the historically conservative low-margin retailer"

They are slowly raising prices. It's off topic, but I have noticed their prices are slowly rising. I saw this happen to Home Depot, and Costco. I'm not knocking Amazon, I just got too comfortable clicking away, and should have been looking around for the best price.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>