Apple, publishers 'sued for price fixing' - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hg3Qe5XrIb-vs2SxDp7BBT8GFgVg?docId=CNG.a2db03834cda342663b48fb1e7f322ce.2d1

<comment><USER2> I know I have bought less ebooks since the agency model came into play and a lot of paperback books on Amazon suddenly became three or four dollars less than the Kindle version.

I certainly haven't stopped buying them altogether, but when it was priced at ten bucks or less it was in impulse buy territory.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand why they aren't selling ebooks for the same price as printed books, minus the production costs. That would be fair.

Discriminating certain distribution channels might be good for profits, but I think it's clearly unethical.

<comment><USER4> Because they're desperately trying to protect the sales of hardcover books, and, in part, trade paperbacks. They don't want to risk cannibalizing sales.

Consumers look at ebooks like another variation of the same product. Publishers don't. To them, it's an entirely separate entity. To them, the question you're asking could be (very roughly) translated to "I don't understand why concert tickets aren't the same price as a CD. It's the same music."

It's a bit backwards, and the same kind of thinking that made the MPAA consider the VCR a threat to movie theaters and the MLB think that nobody would buy tickets to the ballpark if games were broadcast for free on TV.

But I can understand why they're doing it. An enormous part of their legacy business model is wrapped up in hardcover book sales.

As for production costs, it would only be paper, printing, and distribution. Nobody ever thinks about pre-production costs or employee costs in professional editors, typesetters, and jacket design. That's a lot of dough that they have to lay out that still needs to be paid out whether we're talking ink or bits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you really want to dig deep into how the publishing industry works, how they think, and what the real story is behind ebooks and pricing, check out Mike Shatzkin's blog at <http://www.idealog.com/blog/>

</comment><comment><USER6> As much as I like Apple and ebooks, it sickens me that they want to charge more than $10 for best selling ebooks. It is an electronic file. I am willing to pay more than $10 for a physical paper book I can hold in my hand, but I can't see spending more than $2-$3 for an ebook. And so I rarely buy ebooks, even though I want to, because I can't see the economics behind doing so.

If ebooks are going to be just expensive as paper books then I'm going to buy paper books. Apple and the ebook publishers are just shooting themselves in the foot.

<comment><USER7> Printing cost of a paper book is only $3-4, so even eliminating the cost of printing, ebooks would still be expensive. I suspect most of the cost of books goes to marketing and promotion, not printing and binding.

<http://www.millcitypress.net/book-printing-costs.aspx>

<comment><USER8> That's the difficulty with books. People fee like they've paid for the physical object in their hands, when really, they've paid for all of the work that went into making that object possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Even better (from the perspective of those suing), it appears that Apple and at least one publisher (Simon and Schuster) might be "cheating" on the agency model:

[http://theorangeview.net/2011/08/is-simon-and-schuster- cheat...](http://theorangeview.net/2011/08/is-simon-and-schuster-cheating/)

As the iBookstore seems to be the only bookstore with this kind of special deal, that certainly adds some evidence pointing towards collusion.

</comment><comment><USER10> As as side project I helped a friend publish a small book on Amazon for the Kindle. At the time we looked into doing the iBooks Store, but it was not yet open to self publishing.

Apple's requirements for pricing were as follows:

1\. You could set whatever price you wanted. (e.g.: Apple doesn't fix the price at anything specific) 2\. If you sell the book electronically elsewhere, you cannot sell it on iBooks Store for more than the price you sell elsewhere. 3\. Apple gives you %70 of the sales.

I don't see how this is price fixing, nor is it trying to keep the prices higher. You can sell on the kindle for the same amount as the iBooks Store.

Amazon's terms: 1\. You can set the price as you like. 2\. You get a variable cut of the sales (sometimes it is %30 to you, %70 to amazon.) 3\. Amazon can change the price if they want and sell your book for less, and pay you less.

So, yes, it is true that Amazon can run specials where they sell your book for $0.99 to drive traffic to the store, and when they do it, they do it at your expense.

I believe the facts don't support an allegation of price fixing.

As to the idea that Apple was "trying to run the kindle out of business", that's an allegation that is true of every instance of competition. If someone prices an android tablet that is competitive with the iPad feature-wise at half the iPad's price, that's "trying to run the iPad out of business" as well. It is what you're doing when you compete for sales, you want all of them to go to you and none to your competitor.

<comment><USER11> The allegations stem from the agency model that was forced on Amazon by the big six publishers when the iPad launched. Previous to that model, Amazon treated eBooks like they did everything else -- they'd buy them at a wholesale price and then sell them at whatever price they wanted. That included, to my understanding, selling them at a loss so they could sell more Kindle hardware.

Under the agency model, the publisher sets the retail price instead of the wholesale price. So Amazon now has to sell it at that price. This is probably different than the deal you got with Amazon since you don't have the leverage that the big six have.

The agency model also includes other stipulations to protect the traditional publishing model. One example is that many eBooks don't launch for several weeks after the hard cover books. My understanding from listening to Robb Wolf and Tim Ferris talk about their recent book launches is this helps the NY Times Best Seller rating in some way.

As a consumer, I use Amazon for their discounted prices. Recently when I wanted a book, I could pay $49.99 at the local B&N or $32.95 at Amazon plus $3.99 for one-day shipping. However, had I wanted to get the same book in digital format, my options were $39.99 at Amazon or $39.99 at Barnes & Noble.

<comment><USER10> How was the agency model forced on Amazon? Apple offered a better deal, and if I recall correctly, even before the iBooks Store had launched, Amazon changed their terms to offer the same deal. Amazon offered this same deal to everyone, including us. I'm not under a misunderstanding of what the deals are... I think you believed what you read in this press release and took it at face value.

A "model" cannot include "other stipulations". It is simply a broad description of an arrangement. There are many books that are not available for the Kindle or on iBooks, and it has been many years since they were published.

In short, the linked to article is FUD, Amazon chose to meet Apple's terms because they rightly recognized they were more competitive.

I agree, it is stupid that you can buy the physical book for less than the ebook. However, no matter how stupid it is, it isn't price fixing.

<comment><USER7> Amazon chose to meet the publishers' terms because publishers began to withdraw books from Amazon:

> Macmillan CEO John Sargent had been meeting with Amazon to discuss getting > full control over e-book prices, but Amazon refused to budge and all > Macmillan's books were temporarily removed from Amazon—including the print > versions. Amazon eventually relented and is allowing the books back on site, > and is going along with Macmillan's demands for higher e-book prices.

> At issue is Amazon's practice of setting nearly all new e-book releases at > $9.99 no matter what it's paying the publisher. This means Amazon may be > paying the publisher $14 per title, for example, but is intentionally taking > a loss on sales in order to push cheap e-books to Kindle users.

[http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/02/publishers- conti...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/02/publishers-continue- pummeling-amazon-over-e-book-prices.ars)

Amazon was paying the publishers the full price they demanded -- the issue was not about publisher profit. Instead, Amazon intentionally took losses to promote ebooks as loss leaders. Publishers threatened to remove their books unless Amazon only sold their books at pre-specified minimum prices.

<comment><USER12> Macmillan didn't withdraw their books from Amazon. It was Amazon that dropped Macmillan.

Edit, for the [citation needed] crowd:

"We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles." -- [http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle/Tx2MEGQWTNGIMHV/1?_encodi...](http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle/Tx2MEGQWTNGIMHV/1?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdMsgNo=1&ref_=cm_cd_et_md_pl&cdSort=oldest&displayType=tagsDetail&cdMsgID=Mx5Z9849POTZ4P#Mx5Z9849POTZ4P)

<comment><USER9> Yes, Amazon protested Macmillan's eBook policy changes by the temporary Macmillan boycott. But don't forget what Amazon was protesting: Macmillan was refusing to sell eBooks to Amazon at the _higher_ pre-Apple wholesale price that permitted Amazon to set its own price downstream.

Let me say that again. Macmillan _demanded_ that Amazon pay them _less_ money per eBook so that Macmillan could control the price Amazon charged the end consumer. That sounds obviously anti-competitive to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Edited - My comment earlier was worded poorly and did not come across as I was hoping.

The price fixing talk did not start with Amazon. It started because when Apple joined the market the publishers where not going to give them the same deal that Amazon had forced on them. So I think Apple wanting to get a piece of the market worked with the publishers and they all set the same pricing. Now it happened so quickly that people think they fixed the price which I agree they did. Instead of each one working with apple to come up with there own pricing.

 _This whole price fixing thing came about when Amazon had 95% of the market share and was able to dictate the prices, since they where the only ones selling e-books in large amounts. Now that apple is in the market along with other people Amazon share is at about 55% so they have lost that ability to control the market._

I do think Apple and the book companies came together to set a hire price and force Amazon to follow suit or risk not having all the books that Apple would have.

I do not understand why the books have to cost that much. I agree with NathanKP in that they are just files and the cost to the publisher is almost nothing at all. I know they are wanting to make a profit but I think when you charge more then a paper book something is wrong.

Go all e-books with a lot less paper books and call yourself the greenest in the business. I find that a lot of companies are scared of change and I am not sure why. I see change as a great thing that can propel the world in to new and better technology.

<comment><USER14> It seems counter intuitive, but I think it has to do with the opening up of the ebook market. Several years ago, Amazon offered the only decent ereader in town--the Kindle. Thus, given the limited market, they could dictate price and keep the market price low because there wasn't much demand.

Fast forward several years and each of the major bookstore chains offered their own ebook reader (Nook, Kobo) and tablets started offering ebook experiences--either through Amazon/Barnes and Noble/Kobo apps or the tablet creator's own ebook reader (iBooks). The market explodes in terms of the number of devices people now read on, and publishers start treating ebooks as an accepted way of offering content--with that comes the high costs in terms of marketing, promotion, post-production costs (do they do anything special for ebooks), that kind of thing.

<comment><USER15> I'm dubious about this analysis. You seem to be saying that prices were low when Amazon had a monopoly and prices have risen as competition entered the market. That's counterintuitive so perhaps I've missed something.

<comment><USER13> I am saying the prices where lower then they are now. When Amazon had a almost all the market share they were able to bully the publishers to the pricing they wanted. When Apple entered the market publishers stood strong and got together and got Apple to the prices on there ebook store.

Amazon then was forced to raise there prices if they wanted to get the same books that Apple got. So yes as the market has grown and there are more choices the prices have gone up. The publishing industry conspired with each other to get hire prices.

<comment><USER16> But by all accounts that spat was not about what Amazon was paying the publishers. It was about what price Amazon were allowed to sell those books at to their customers. Those are fundamentally different issues.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Dolphin's Tale: The Story of GameCube - <AUTHOR> http://www.dromble.com/2014/01/07/dolphin-tale-story-of-gamecube/ <comment><AUTHOR> I really loved my GameCube, in many ways it was the best console of it's generation. But it just couldn't compete with the library of games the PS2 had.

It was kind of sad to read this. There are some thing in the article, like the idea of a console as a toy for fun, that are so quintessentially Nintendo and why I love them. But it's also so clear that it's not the direction the market went. You can see how the 3rd party problems got worse and the beginnings of the disaster that Nintendo's on-line efforts. There are points where it's just so clear their arrogance is causing them serious problems.

I really love Nintendo. I hope they can turn themselves around before it's too late.

<comment><USER3> I mean, Nintendo is not perfect by any stretch, but afaik it's not like they're on the ropes. The DS line is still immensely profitable, and they've had mixed success with consoles. There's no need to act like they're on the brink.

<comment><USER4> From what I've read online about Wii U sales, they may have a big problem. I haven't read anything about the holiday season so they might have turned it around. But I doubt it. There was no significant discounting or console bundles. I thought they'd release a Super Mario 3D world bundle to move sales .. surprising that they didn't do this in the US.

<comment><USER5> From what I've read they had fairly strong sales leading up to Christmas for the WiiU. It sold well in Japan for instance, but with little competition because the PS4 was late being released there and no XboxOne. They had enough sales to crash the online system with the number of new people trying to register accounts. But nowhere near the numbers they were projecting, of which may take quite a while before they hit their target, if ever. It cannot really compete with PS4 and XboxOne numbers.

But that matters little because they dominate with the 3DS. In terms of handhelds they have little competition. Nintendo can survive the WiiU if they're smart about it, so I doubt they'll be out of the game anytime soon.

They just need to stop doing the stupid gimmicks they pass off as innovation and focus on their strengths, making fun games that everyone can enjoy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great quote that (IMO) demonstrates Nintendo's philosophy towards new technology:

\----- [2003]

Each time Satoru Iwata did an interview with the press, the subject of online gaming would rear its head. As you can imagine, Iwata became increasingly annoyed with answering the same question over and over. He slammed critics who claimed that Nintendo couldn't survive as a business unless they embraced online gaming as the future.

"All the talk in the industry regarding online gaming has been misleading. Network swindlers have made it seem like companies can't survive in this business without network compatibility," said Iwata. "That's the same type of rhetoric people have been saying about the newspaper business, that the paper- based periodical business will be dead in three years. In reality, the number of users willing to pay a monthly fee for online games is small. Many of the American companies who were focusing almost exclusively on network games last year now view network capabilities as an advertising tool. The fact of the matter is, network games can't provide a stable source of profit for a company of Nintendo's scale."

<comment><USER7> Nintendo is used to selling games for $40-$60 a pop. They don't want to be lead into the situation like on the iPhone where the average game is 99 cents.

Their strategy so far is to pretend that it's still 2001 and that isn't a strategy that they can sustain forever.

<comment><USER8> I dunno, it seems to be working pretty well for them on the 3DS (the WiiU, not so much...):

[http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/sales/hard_soft/index.html](http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/sales/hard_soft/index.html)

[http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/sales/software/3ds.html](http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/sales/software/3ds.html)

What's wrong with making good games and charging more than a fast food lunch for them? It's not like anybody levels this complaint at Microsoft or Sony, who tend to charge even more for new releases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article was totally worth it just for the youtube link at 02:00 .

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKlbx5niBu8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKlbx5niBu8)

</comment><comment><USER10> I still use my GameCube every week (playing through the Resident Evil series at the moment). I've built homebrew, run on my XenoGC chip I soldered on myself. I'm building up the courage (and time) to buy a new one and attempt the IDE adapter. It's my absolute favourite console ever. :)

<comment><USER11> The bonus mini-game for Resident Evil that is unlocked when you complete the game was astounding. You had to get combos to score so it involved getting yourself into the worst possible situation, totally surrounded by zombies before starting your counter-attack. Incredibly suited gameplay to the zombie genre. (I think they released it standalone for the 3DS too).

My Gamecube is packed away, but I still pull out the Bongo accesories to play Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat via Wii backwards-compatibility. This is possibly my favourite game of all time, there's just something magical about getting into the flow state playing a game that you control via bongos and hand-claps.

Here's a video review that agrees with my view that this is a hidden gem that introduced a lot of concepts use later by Nintendo:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGi4yd545Ac](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGi4yd545Ac)

<comment><USER12> Just commenting to say thanks for mentioning the bongos! My house-mates thought I was mad when I bought them as a student, but it quickly turned into a house favourite. I would still recommend them to this day if you can get your hands on them.

Re: flow-state - perhaps the only game where this is possible at any level of intoxication.

<comment><USER10> I disagree.. Even when drunk, I can achieve flow state on expert for Mario's DDR...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fascinating read. I still have two Gamecubes, one with a battery pack and portable screen that is barely viewable from a short distance, but the thought is there! I think Wind Waker is the only game that my wife could cope with me playing. She watched me play it from beginning to end. I love Link's little boat on the water....

I also have my Dreamcast and PSX with screen to keep me entertained. Not sure I'll ever move on to newer hardware, other than the PC games I have! Still reliably playing Homeworld 2 every Monday, pretty sad really.

Great console. Great read.

</comment><comment><USER14> I like the WiiU concept:

\- Off TV play

\- DS on steriods kind of works

\- In a family house hold, having the game on both screens completely gets rid of "You're in the way" frustrations.

\- Wireless display streaming!? (When this gets better, it will be amazing).

<comment><USER15> I agree Off-TV play is a really nice feature, but in my opinion the cons outweigh the pros.

\- Few games use it in any meaningful way. \- It's bulky and unfamiliar. \- It muddies the image of what the console is (is the tablet the Wii U?) \- It raised the price of the console significantly. \- It threw away the momentum they had for something none of their install-base wanted.

While I love my Wii U, it's destined to become another 20m failure. I hope that I'm wrong and that with time they can really iterate on their online functionality and get some better 3rd party support, but I'm not optimistic. If nothing else the 3DS is killing it, so it's not like they're going broke any time soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Say whatever you want about the GameCube, but it's a great console.

People over here are starting to play it once again. Lot of people would gather for a beer and a game of Super Smash Melee, even our non game friends.

The controller is great, the games are great, and since the games weren't aiming for looks but gameplay, they all age very well!

</comment><comment><USER17> It was iconic in it's design no doubt but publishing for GameCube was a disaster for Capcom's Resident Evil franchise.

They released Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube and sold a total of 1.5 million copies. When they ported the game to the PS2 it sold a total of 8 million copies.

<comment><USER18> Financially not so great for Capcom, but the GameCube version was far superior to the PS2 port, so as a gamer who considers Resident Evil 4 to be one of the finest single player action games of all time, I'm glad they went out on the GC first and ported later rather than having the PS2 version be a "least common denominator" regulator during initial development because most games that went that route just used shitty low-res PS2-friendly textures across the board.

<comment><USER17> Oh of course it was. But the director flipped at the thought of it being ported to the PS2 because of this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "People do not play with the game machine itself. They play with the software, and they are forced to purchase a game machine in order to use the software. Therefore the price of the machine should be as cheap as possible." - <USER2>

If there's one thing Nintendo seems to be forgetting lately, it's this. They seem to think, nowadays, that bolting on new hardware features will improve demand, but it's never true. Software drives hardware sales. Mario sold the NES and SNES. Wii Sports sold the Wii. Pokemon is selling the 3DS these days -- until Pokemon (and to a lesser extent Animal Crossing) came out, the 3DS was doing terribly. And nothing is selling the Wii U. A tablet controller alone can't save it.

<comment><USER20> > They seem to think, nowadays, that bolting on new hardware features will > improve demand

I don't think Nintendo has ever "bolted on new hardware features" for the sake of selling consoles to _consumers._ The new hardware features are pretty much always for the sake of _luring third parties into developing something innovative for the platform._

See this excellent essay: [http://www.lostgarden.com/2005/09/nintendos-genre- innovation...](http://www.lostgarden.com/2005/09/nintendos-genre-innovation- strategy.html)

Nintendo makes money on games that explore new genres. It can't keep doing that unless it keeps increasing the design-space and interaction-space to find those new genres within.

<comment><USER19> Nintendo makes money on games that people want to play. To suggest anything else is nonsense, or at least overcomplicating the situation. Innovation _can_ help with that, but isn't _guaranteed_ to. Consider that some of the best- selling games on the Wii and DS were the New Super Mario Bros. games -- these were games that were so popular they _moved hardware_ , and yet their core genres and mechanics are identical to the Mario games of the NES and SNES era. In fact, it could be argued that their success was exactly _because_ they stuck so closely to that old formula -- other Mario games, such as the 3D platformers, don't sell nearly as well.

Innovation is good when it supports the goal of creating games people want to play. Wii Sports, for example, could not be done without the Wii Remote. That was a good innovation that served both to lower the barrier of entry to games and to allow for new modes of play that people found fun. But things like the 3D of the 3DS, which Nintendo is now wisely backing away from, or the tablet on the Wii U, which substantially increased its price tag, don't provide those same benefits. And hardware innovation alone doesn't cut it -- it needs games like Wii Sports to support it.

And I think that for a company like Nintendo, third-party support is heavily overrated. The best way to get third-party support is to sell enough consoles that they can no longer ignore you, and the only way to do that is strong first-party games.

<comment><USER20> Did you read the article I linked? The reason Nintendo makes their money from genre innovation, is that Microsoft and Sony have the resources to invest to make money from polished "genre king" titles--and so Nintendo, necessarily, must take the segment of the market they ignore. They do this by figuring out ways to make games _cheaply_ that nevertheless have the potential for a strong reaction from the market--and this basically necessitates genre innovation. (Or remakes/ports, which Nintendo is also quite familiar with.)

<comment><USER19> I did read the article, but these points don't hit the core of why Nintendo is successful, when it's successful. It's true that Nintendo tries to make games cheaper than many AAA game companies, though with the ballooning cost of AAA game development that's not saying much. It's true that it's often in new genres. And it's _very_ true that they focused on a different, broader market than Microsoft and Sony back in the Wii's heyday. What I'm saying is that innovation alone is not enough to create success. It must be pointed in the right direction. At times they've gotten this right, at other times they haven't.

It's nonsense to imply that Nintendo games aren't polished, or that third- party AAA game developers will necessarily dominate any genre that they choose to develop for. I can't think of a 2D platformer that has ever done as well as Mario, and 2D platformers are one of gaming's oldest genres -- certainly a "mature genre".

That article was written back in 2005, just after the Wii Remote was announced, when people were still speculating about that strange new controller and what it could mean. We have the benefit of hindsight now, and the best way to understand what was going on then is to take it straight from the horse's mouth, looking back at the early days of the Wii, when Nintendo talked openly about their business strategy. Back then, they outright said that they based their new strategy on the books _The Innovator 's Dilemma_ and _The Blue Ocean Strategy_. (They talked about this in their shareholder meetings, which were available online but which I unfortunately can no longer find.) These books give us a framework for understanding what they were doing then -- no need to create ungainly terms like "genre king". The books talk about conceiving of the market as the "core" \-- which were the people who were actively playing and buying games at the time, and which were the target market of their competitors -- and the "expanded audience" \-- which were those who weren't playing games, or who used to play but had since stopped. The latter is who Nintendo chose to focus on back then. Innovation did play a part in that, but it doesn't explain it entirely: some games were innovative and succeeded, (ex. Wii Sports), some were innovative and failed, (ex. Wii Music, remember that one?) and some were _not_ innovative but still managed to differentiate themselves by appealing to the expanded audience (ex. New Super Mario Bros.). To lump the latter category of games, which were new entries in genres with long and storied histories, together with games that were in completely new genres, is contradictory.

New Super Mario Bros., for one, effectively used none of the hardware features of the Wii to its advantage, and was still one of the strongest-selling games of the generation. Its success is attributable not to innovation but to being a game that many people, especially the expanded audience, wanted to play. It's as simple as that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm amazed by how long and exhaustively-researched this article is. And it's all on one big page with only a few ads at the top. How can this possibly be profitable for the author?

</comment><comment><USER22> I still vividly remember spending nights online trying to find out more about the Dolphin... This is such a fascinating read, it strangely feels like hearing other points of view of a story I was part of, even if just very remotely.

This made me seriously consider buying a WiiU again, if only to experience how that story develops...

</comment><comment><USER23> Funny how N64 to GameCube's focus on developer friendliness is similar to PS2/3 to PS4. Once number 1 then trimming the fat. [http://imgur.com/okP8cdO](http://imgur.com/okP8cdO)

</comment><comment><USER24> To me the worst part of this whole ordeal is making the games shorter. I just beat Link between worlds on 3DS, and I really wish it would have kept going. Same thing for Pikmin3 on WiiU.

<comment><USER25> A Link Between Worlds took me about ~16 hours. I only died 3 times (twice to the 50 floor challenge in the Treacherous Tower because I didn't have enough bottles at the time). I can still replay it in hero mode, but the game just felt very, very short. Don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed the game. I just wish the main content was longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Nintendo might not make great developer platforms, but they make great games and there will always be a place for a company that makes great games.</comment>


Personality traits affect the open source development process - <AUTHOR> https://www.functionize.com/blog/how-personality-traits-affect-the-open-source-development-process/ <comment><USER2> Interesting article but this quote

"For Wallen, there is another longstanding issue in the development community that needs to be addressed. "It's become clear that there needs to be significant improvement in the way the development community treats people of color, women, and members of the LGBTQ community," he says. "At this point, there must be a zero tolerance for unwanted or unequal treatment.""

does not follow at all from the rest of the post, as higher agreeableness, the trait that would most match what the author just described, is not mentioned as being relevant to their findings anywhere. It would be interesting to see a study on the levels of agreeableness of developers compared to the rest of the population, as it is mentioned in the article that "Most developers are agreeable!" but I haven't seen anything to support that assertion.

<comment><USER3> > It would be interesting to see a study on the levels of agreeableness of > developers compared to the rest of the population, as it is mentioned in the > article that "Most developers are agreeable!" but I haven't seen anything to > support that assertion.

What _has_ your experience been? Mine is that most are meek and avoid conflict. That's at least some of what agreeable means in this context, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks like the source study [1] was based heavily on IBM Waton's personality traits API thing. "Personality" is a difficult thing to quantify and my experience with Watson is that it was good, but not great. Not sure I would based a research claim on it.

Overall this seems to be a rather obvious result. "Popular people are more likely to have their pull requests accepted"

[1] [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8935389](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8935389)

<comment><USER5> > Overall this seems to be a rather obvious result. "Popular people are more > likely to have their pull requests accepted"

That is not the result at all; they are leaving social factors (follower count etc) aside to specifically examining the personality traits, and have rather counterintuitive conclusions;

\- Firstly, personality seems to _matter_ , significantly

\- Neuroticism correlates _positively_ with pull request acceptance [1]

\- High extraversion doesn't increase the likelihood of a pull request being accepted, but low extraversion does [1]

\- The personality trait differential between the requester and closer is important; the larger the gap the better [2]

[1] "In sum, we observe requesters who are high on Openness, Conscientiousness, and low on Extraversion have a higher likelihood of getting the pull request accepted. Similarly, a closer who are high on Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Neuroticism accepts more pull requests."

[2] "We also noted the absolute difference in personality traits between the requester and the closer results in positive effects, suggesting that diversity in personality is beneficial in open source projects."

<comment><USER6> So people who are sterotypically nerds do better at sterotypically nerdy things? Did the study account for the possibility that maybe those personality traits corresponded to being members of a shared cultural context, which helped their chances of code being merged because people like people like themselves?

Edit: but the bit about personality difference contradicts what i said, so maybe not.

<comment><USER5> > So people who are sterotypically nerds do better at sterotypically nerdy > things?

I don't get what makes you think that that is the conclusion. Study doesn't look at the cluster of open source contributors against "rest of the world", there is no stereotype being established here. It is examining concrete project dynamics (e.g. pull request acceptance) against personality traits _within_ open source developers.

Big five is such a widely applicable factor analysis that I don't think there is one particular configuration that would define a "nerd" except maybe for introversion-extraversion axis. Since the study shows meaningful differences on other axes too, I don't think it is about nerdiness at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The source research paper is pretty interesting but the article is not well written and conflates reputable sources with personal opinions while not shying from making big conclusive statements. Several problems;

> The researchers also examined the importance of personality factors. They > found that biases may be involved in the acceptance or rejection of open > source work. That's true despite the apparent advantage of open source > whereby you can contribute with a level of anonymity; your persona shows in > your code and comments. Someone reviews and comments on your work based on > what they see in front of them, and not how they know you as a person.

There is absolutely no mention of bias in the paper nor the study design can really account for this.

> "While the research phrases it academically as 'personality,' what they mean > is someone's ability to interact with others: the application of social > interaction skills as well as technical skills."

This is false for big-five personality traits. The most explicitly social trait is extraoversion-intraversion scale. Rest of the traits e.g neuroticism or conscientiousness has aspects that has nothing to do with social interactions but interacting with self or the environment (e.g orderliness).

> He considers himself to be open and conscientious ... Foster describes > herself as "primarily conscientious with a bit of agreeableness,"

That is not how big-five works. The factor analysis that result in traits are only statistically significant when the big-five inventory is taken (and only once). Self-ascribing these traits have no value in the context of big-five.

> "Developers are very much like artists, in that they can be very sensitive > to criticism and place a very high value not only on their work, but on the > acceptance of both their work and who they are."

Contradictingly, study finds high neuroticism translate into higher acceptance of pull requests.</comment>


Yelp – What Happened - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@maulikmmodi94/yelp-what-happened-62c325f13235 <comment><USER2> >Oh, and one more thing, Google is real. It is connected to my Google profile. That's my Gmail, Google+

article:published_time content="2019-12-01T22:43:23.284Z ???</comment>


A Bitcoin version of the SETIhome program for donating to charities? - <AUTHOR>

It'd be a great way to publicize bitcoin to the masses beyond this techno-elite/libertarian spin in the mainstream media.<p>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home <comment><USER2> It could be coded. Anything can be coded. But it wouldn't really be worth it for either party imho, even if you used idle GPU time.

Let's do some math...

Let's say that the average GPU can mine at 1GH/s and that everybody using your screensaver had that (non-existant, overly generous) GPU.

You would need ~6,000 participants participating 12 hours per day to equal the power of a single KNC Neptune ASIC miner.

It would cost those 6,000 participants about $10/month just to take part. Or about $60,000 per month total wasted on electricity, for a project that would net about $15,000 in mined BTC: [http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/cad4e45c7b](http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/cad4e45c7b)

And that's if you were able to get up and running by february.

In march, that $60,000 wasted on electricity would only net your charity $7,640. And in April, $3,900.

Had those 6,000 participants simply donated $10 to your cause, you could purchase 6 KNC Neptune miners to mine Bitcoin for you and your cause.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure I'm following what you're proposing. What's the model you're envisioning?

<comment><USER4> I assume he means build something similar to SETI that uses people's idle CPU time to mine for bitcoin, giving you the option to place the proceeds into a wallet owned by a charity of your choice

<comment><AUTHOR> Bingo. Sorry... didn't really flesh it out better. Was just bullshitting w/ my cofounder about this and was genuinely curious if anyone's done it.</comment></comment></comment>


Red light, green light with shoutbox.io - <AUTHOR> http://moviepilotlabs.tumblr.com/post/12470071570/red-light-green-light-with-shoutbox

<comment><USER2> Nice! We'll use it for our next app.

</comment><comment><USER3> nice! me likey! simple, clean and useful!</comment>


Growing Drones in Vats of a Mysterious Chemical Substance - <AUTHOR> http://thescienceexplorer.com/technology/uk-defense-company-plans-grow-drones-vats-mysterious-chemical-substance <comment><USER2> That looks like it is this process:

[http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool- tech/carbon3d-clip-3d-prin...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool- tech/carbon3d-clip-3d-printing/)

The basic idea is to have a UV hardening fluid that you then fuse using lasers or some kind of mask.</comment>


I asked people about anxiety; here's what I learned - <AUTHOR> https://bryanmillstein.substack.com/p/beginnings <comment><AUTHOR> This was one of the discussion forums. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23584241](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23584241)</comment>


Plants do sums to get through the night, researchers show - <AUTHOR> http://m.phys.org/news/2013-06-sums-night.html <comment><USER2> It would seem to me that no explicit arithmetic is being done - it's simply a consequence of natural behaviour.

Consider the case of a starch channel, the size of which is governed by two factors - the quantity of stored starch, and the time since nightfall. (Other factors may also affect the size, but are irrelevant to this discussion). This seems like a construct that could quite feasibly appear in a plant. No arithmetic is being performed by the plant, but simply these two factors working in concert cause the rate of starch consumption to appear to be based on whatever the starch level was when night fell.

The fact that the observed rate of consumption is such that nearly all the starch is consumed by morning is easily explained by natural selection - plants that consume starch too fast obviously starve overnight, while plants that consume it too sparingly are using their resources inefficiently and so would tend to be out-competed by plants that make better use of them. Over many generations, the base rate of consumption would become tuned to how long nights last in that region.

<comment><USER3> > Over many generations, the base rate of consumption would become tuned to > how long nights last in that region.

From the article - "the starch store lasts until dawn even if the night comes unexpectedly early or the size of the starch store varies."

The point is that the plants can handle 2 changing variables

<comment><USER2> Night coming unexpectedly early is just one thing that could cause the amount of starch stored to vary.

There's only factor changing here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sensationalist title. You could also argue that physics performs sophisticated calculus every moment to determine exactly where it should place your moving vehicle.

Math was created to model the world - it does not create the world itself.

<comment><USER5> The difference is that this seems more _predictive_ than merely _descriptive_. A more apt analogy might be a car that calculates the rate at which it must consume fuel in order to arrive at the next service station just as its tank empties.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> is this not basic metabolism regulation? really dont know kind of always assumed this just worked in living things

<comment><USER7> If it was that simple you'd never be hungry or feel too full.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Non-mobile page: [http://phys.org/news/2013-06-sums- night.html](http://phys.org/news/2013-06-sums-night.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> As my friend Bazza said when he read this, in the same sense that the number of sheep in a field is determined by the field doing addition and subtraction.

<comment><USER10> No, it would be like the field forcing sheep to leave at a constant rate during the night so that it was very close to empty by (but not before) morning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would love to read a review of this article by the good old Djikstra...</comment>


VirtualBox 5.1.30 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.virtualbox.org/pipermail/vbox-announce/2017-October/000173.html <comment><USER2> VirtualBox 5.1.30 (released 2017-10-16)

This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:

* GUI: translation updates

* GUI: Fixed double mouse cursor when using mouse integration without Guest Additions, actually a Qt 5.6 bug fixed with QT 5.6.3 (Mac OS X hosts only; bug #15610)

* Solaris hosts: allow increasing MTU size for host-only adapter to 9706 bytes to support jumbo frames

* Linux hosts: glibc 2.26 compile fix

* Windows Additions: 3D related crash fix (bugs #17082, #17092)

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to use VirtualBox on a Linux, but these days I've migrated to KVM/Qemu[0] + Virt-Manager[1]. It's much nicer to use native Linux virtual machine and not have to worry about kernel modules and proprietary licenses.

That said, the UI polish isn't as nice or intuitive as VirtualBox.

[0] [https://www.linux-kvm.org/](https://www.linux-kvm.org/)

[1] [https://virt-manager.org/](https://virt-manager.org/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Virtualbox is my go to on Windows. I have used VMware workstation but didn't see any advantage other than the availability of proper support for small businesses or individuals.

Why do people use VMware workstation over virtualbox?

<comment><USER5> As far as I know, you can't share your VMs remotely on Virtual Box. You can, on VMware Workstation.

<comment><USER6> Not sure what you mean with "share your VMs remotely".

You can of course install whatever remote server you want inside the VM but aside from that you can connect to a VM directly using VRDP.

But you can also manager your entire virtualbox instance using RemoteBox ( [http://remotebox.knobgoblin.org.uk/about.cgi](http://remotebox.knobgoblin.org.uk/about.cgi) ) or from a web GUI using phpVirtualBox ( [https://sourceforge.net/p/phpvirtualbox/wiki/Home/](https://sourceforge.net/p/phpvirtualbox/wiki/Home/) ).

I'm sure there are other options as well.

<comment><USER5> VMware Workstation is a type 2 hypervisor. You can install and share your VMs with remote users (give them console access). This functionality is free (you don't need a Workstation license) and you don't need add-ons.

I have played with both of the alternate solutions you have shared. These are not perfect, unlike what VMware Workstation provides (as it has, for long period of time).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Any particular reason this made it onto the HN homepage?

<comment><USER6> It is a popular and useful tool that has a great overlap with the HN community?

<comment><USER7> Sure it is, I love it and use it every day... but seeing something like this on the HN homepage makes me think something has happened I really need to know about.

<comment><USER8> That's just not how it works around here.

The way it works is someone posts a link. If enough people for whatever reasons of their own decide to upvote that link, it makes it to the front page.

There's never any one justification or reason why something gets voted up. Everyone has their own reasons. One person may upvote because they find it interesting, another because they like it, another because they agree with it, another because they think it's important, another because they want others to know about it, etc. It's a never-ending popularity contest.

Software releases get posted here pretty regularly, and if they're popular enough or interesting enough to the segment of HN readership that happens to be online at the time they get voted up. Period. No explanations given or required.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Richard Feynman's Perspective of Life - windy-topology https://twitter.com/LifeTechPsych/status/1290313308701110273 <comment><AUTHOR> I have lived by the motto "Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough" for years. It has served me well. Although I still find it hard to find accounting interesting.

<comment> andy-x I guess you did not go into it deeply enough :)

Of course you need to have an interest, motivation, and resources to go deep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Crabby comment incoming:

I love Richard Feynman as much as the next person (minus his famous misogyny), but this post is basically contentless. It's literally a motivational poster. Like why not post an essay or video instead.

<comment><USER3> Eh, content-less posts reach the front page daily. They're quickly pruned. Might as well enjoy the thread while it lasts.

I colorized an old black-and-white Feynman lecture using DeOldify. It's kind of neat watching it with an ML twist: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BzIdNGtz20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BzIdNGtz20)</comment></comment>


Fu**ed up by Google docs offline - <AUTHOR>

So for a reason I lost my internet connection for a couple of days. I had the chrome google drive app and offline enabled, and felt good to be able to work on my google docs even when offline. I thought (and as google told) all my offline changes will be synched when I get online again. And after two days work, the day came of hte mighty internet.
And guess what, google wiped away my 2 days of hard work because another author made a minor edit.
I literally threw my system out. Can't trust google services ever again. They suck! <comment><USER2> u need some of this...[http://thenextweb.com/asia/2013/08/30/forget-1tb- chinas-tenc...](http://thenextweb.com/asia/2013/08/30/forget-1tb-chinas- tencent-is-giving-away-10tb-worth-of-free-cloud-storage/)</comment>


Call for votes on default Linux init system for jessie - <AUTHOR> https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/01/msg00425.html <comment><USER2> I agree with Bdale on this one.

12345

Source: [https://lists.debian.org/debian- ctte/2014/01/msg00426.html](https://lists.debian.org/debian- ctte/2014/01/msg00426.html)</comment>


Message from Mexico: U.S. Is Polluting Water It May Someday Need to Drink - <AUTHOR> http://www.propublica.org/article/message-from-mexico-u.s.-is-polluting-water-it-may-someday-need-to-drink <comment><USER2>
      For example, in eastern Wyoming, an analysis showed that
      it would cost half a million dollars to construct a water
      well into deep, but high-quality aquifer reserves. That,
      plus an untested assumption that all the deep layers
      below it could only contain poor-quality water, led
      regulators to allow a uranium mine to inject more than
      200,000 gallons of toxic and radioactive waste every day
      into the underground reservoirs.

_WHAT THE FUCK_

<comment><USER3> What in rural Wyoming would ever justify spending half a million dollars for a single water well? I do not think an example like the massive urban conglomeration of Mexico City (greater area: 21.2 million people) naturally analogizes to such areas.

<comment><USER4> They redirect water from Northern to Southern California. Why not from rural Wyoming to, say, Colorado? We may have 5M people here, and are chronically short of water.

The water from Colorado (via the Colorado River) also supplies Utah, Arizona, Southern California, Nevada, and Mexico with water. All of those areas need more water; even if Colorado stays at its current demand level, you could imagine one or more of those areas funding a well in Wyoming to divert water to Colorado to either send directly down the river or to take the place of water that would otherwise be removed from the river, so that their allocation could be correspondingly increased. (Pretty much every drop of the Colorado River is owned by someone. [1])

Water is life. :)

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

<comment><USER5>
        Pretty much every drop of the Colorado River
        is owned by someone.

The river is actually overcommitted:

        When the Colorado River Compact was drafted in
        the 1920s, it was based on barely 30 years of
        streamflow records that suggested an average
        annual flow of 17.5 million acre feet past Lee's
        Ferry. Modern studies of tree rings revealed
        that those three decades were probably the
        wettest in the past 500 to 1,200 years – and
        that the natural long-term annual flow past
        Lee's Ferry is probably closer to 13.5 million
        acre feet, as compared to the natural flow at
        the mouth of 16.3 million acre feet.  This has
        resulted in more water being allocated to river
        users than actually flows through the Colorado.

<comment><USER4> I had heard that, but I didn't find the reference quickly, and I had to post. Didn't want to make unsubstantiated claims. Thanks for the follow-up. :)

As a result we've been in violation with a treaty with Mexico over the lack of promised water volume over most of that time as well. Again, too busy to find the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Funny for this to come up now. I'm reading Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner now which is all about water policy in the western US.

The short answer is that we consume WAY more water than all of the precipitation on the entire region can support so we end up depleting the aquifers. Eventually (likely within my lifetime) those will dry up and they we will have to either start diverting water from Canada and Alaska, or decrease the population in the west.

Edit: Changed entire country to entire region. The Great Lakes area will do just fine for a very very long time.

<comment><USER7> …or switch away from insanely inefficient (90% evaporation) center-pivot irrigation.

Not to mention our practice of shunting rainwater off fields as fast as possible. This high-speed, high-runoff condition leads to soil erosion, failure to recharge aquifers, and really gives rise to the need for irrigation.

Dynamically unstable monocultures are neither sustainable nor efficient. They're not even cost-optimal or land-optimal, merely labor-minimizing (most of the arable land in the US is controlled either directly or indirectly by conglomerates, who generally view labor as messy and undesirable).

Again, dynamically unstable monocultures are neither sustainable nor efficient. Fortunately this means that when they _inevitably_ collapse, we get wealthier as more efficient systems replace them.

<comment><USER8> Can you point to an interpretation of the data here:

[http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/agriculture/farm...](http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/agriculture/farms_and_farmland.html)

that supports your 80%?

Because when I interpret the data I end up at 'most acreage is owned by families, families that may have done some sort of incorporation'.

I guess if you throw in some of the big forestry outfits you buy a lot of acres, but that perhaps indicates the need for a more precise phrasing or more interesting measure than arable (like, land used to produce food in the last 50 years, or something like that).

<comment><USER9> I think what 'schiffern means to say is that 80% is farmed in corporate fashion, even if not literally by corporations. The families you're talking about have generally taken big loans to buy (or hire) big machinery and big fertilizer for their big farms. Some of that is the market talking, but much of it is big ag companies like Monsanto ensuring that corn and other subsidies stay in place [0], and their sharecro^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers can only farm in the manner that funnels all profits to the ag company.

(Of course there are other family farmers who aren't like that, but they farm a small fraction of the acreage.)

Apparently the Farm Bill that just passed the House is supposed to change this situation somewhat, but I'll believe that when and if I see it over the next decade or so.

[0] [http://www.yale.edu/sustainablefood/S9256YSF_farm_bill_s.pdf...](http://www.yale.edu/sustainablefood/S9256YSF_farm_bill_s.pdf.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Yep, that's exactly what I meant. Thanks for explaining it better than I could. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you have the capability to inject pollutants into the aquifer, don't you already have 80% of what you need to use it as a water source--namely, the big pipe connecting it to the surface? You just need to add pumps, right?

If someone needs a big hole to store poisons in, I'd sort of prefer that it not already be filled with nature's favorite nearly-universal solvent. The water got down there somehow, and geology makes you no guarantees that it will never move that water again.

Also, professional polluters sometimes cut corners on measures to ensure that their pollutants don't actually end up somewhere other than the planned and approved place.

</comment><comment><USER11> It seems to me that if you need to dig a well that deep you have utterly failed to address the real problem: you are using MUCH more than falls on the ground. Wait a few more years and you'll just have to dig an even deeper well. It's just postponing the inevitable. [1]

With that principle in mind, I'm not sure I care if deep resources are polluted for a few hundred thousand years.

[1] Mexico is rapidly improving economically; it may make sense for them to postpone the real solution until such time as they can afford to desalinate and ship water long distance.

<comment><USER12> Just a note in Mexico. It can be divided two parts with different water problems. In central and southern Mexico, there is abundance of rain, and it is more populated. The main problem is managing the rain. Northern Mexico is like the American Southwest, sparsely populated, great extensions of land and very little rain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > ... analysis showed that it would cost half a million dollars to construct a > water well into deep, but high-quality aquifer reserves ... led regulators > to allow a uranium mine to inject more than 200,000 gallons of toxic and > radioactive waste every day into the underground reservoirs.

Wow. The stupidity and nearsightedness exposed in this article is astounding.

</comment><comment><USER14> There is absolutely no shortage of drinking water in the US.

(1) Both US freshwater (surface + groundwater) and groundwater usage in the US has been flat for 40+ years despite the population growing by 50%.

(2) Less than 2% for freshwater and 5% of groundwater is used for domestic uses (shower, washing, drinking, etc).

(3) Less than 1% of domestic water is used for drinking.

So of the 350 billion gallons of freshwater used in the US every day only 250 million is used for drinking. That is 0.07%! We could easily double the amount of drinking water with only a miniscule decrease in the water used for farming. And it is not like this problem is getting worse as usage is flat.

There is no reason to worry about a shortage of drinking water in the US.

</comment><comment><USER15> If you live in NYC, you might want to do a spit take, too - but for different reasons: [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/nyregion/inside-citys- wate...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/nyregion/inside-citys-water-tanks- layers-of-neglect.html).

</comment><comment><USER16> Ignorance is definitely bliss because unless we know the facts about how we dispose of waste and what the limits of our natural resources are, we tend believe they are infinite. However, the sad part is also that even when people do KNOW, some don't seem interested in what will happen 100+ yrs from now and instead live the moment. I was shocked to read that we "allow a uranium mine to inject more than 200,000 gallons of toxic and radioactive waste every day into the underground reservoirs", it's troubling.

What we do to this Earth needs to be evaluated on a regular basis by our Gov. officials and in this case, hopefully we can all agree that "deep, unknown potential sources of drinking water [DO] matter" and matter right now.

</comment><comment><USER17> Why is it so difficult for people to understand that regional borders are more often than not a human concept? You do not live in the United Bubble of America!

That having been said, wasn't there an article yesterday about how 30% of Californian pollution comes from China? Or a few weeks ago that radiation from Japan is hitting our shores? This is not what they meant with "Think locally, act globally."

<comment><USER18> It's not difficult to understand, it's difficult to enforce. Mexico can set up laws about polluting their own water, but how are they going to enforce it in the USA? Same with CA--we can ask China to cut down on pollution, and they'll apparently promise it, but who's to enforce it? Ask more nicely?

Or is it on the factories / companies themselves? Is a factory in China going to sacrifice economic growth so that a Californian can breathe cleaner air? Or is a US drilling company going to buy more expensive formulas so that Mexico city can have clean water someday? These things won't happen on their own.

Ultimately that's the problem, in my opinion.

<comment><USER6> Actually Mexico threatened to take the US to international court during Nixon's presidency because the water coming out of the Colorado River into Mexico was so salty it was killing crops and un-drinkable.

The US agreed to make one of the biggest De-salination plants in the world just before the border and now the US pays about $300/ton to clean up the Colorado River before it flows into Mexico.

<comment><USER19> [http://www.usbr.gov/lc/yuma/facilities/ydp/yao_ydp.html](http://www.usbr.gov/lc/yuma/facilities/ydp/yao_ydp.html)

That says the plant is not currently operating. It also says that it's only "included" in the water sent to Mexico. I don't see any indication that it's used for anything close to the full volume of the Colorado River.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the link! Didn't know it wasn't operating. My understanding is that the treaty says that the salt content should be less than X parts per million and when the Colorado River gets saltier than X, they can turn the plant on. This diverts some of the water out and returns it in with significantly less salt, thus reducing the total salt content of the river as a whole to a level less than X.

Basically, imagine you have a glass of chocolate milk. You take a teaspoon of chocolate milk out and put a teaspoon of regular milk back in, you will reduce the chocolate content of the glass. The glass is the river as a whole, the plant only treats the teaspoon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Confusing headline. Does "it" refer to Mexico or the U.S.?

</comment><comment><USER21> Message to Mexico. Tend to your own backyard and stop dumping sewage in our ocean.

[http://www.sandiego6.com/story/county-issues- contamination-w...](http://www.sandiego6.com/story/county-issues- contamination-warning-for-beaches-near-tijuana-river-20140130)

</comment><comment><USER22> Has anyone tried desalination with geothermal sources?

<comment><USER23> Two challenges off the top:

⚫ Geothermal is available in limited areas. Few of those are proximate to salt water (though in Japan, Hawaii, and the Philippines this might be the case). I'm not aware that freshwater supplies are critically limited in any of those areas, however.

⚫ Geothermal itself tends to have substantial water requirements as a heat transfer / working fluid. Replenishing groundwater liberated through generating activities is a concern in many fields.

<comment><USER24> I love that you went to the trouble of using a Unicode black circle character (⚫) rather than a bullet (•). That's some dedication to your circles.

<comment><USER23> I went hunting for a useful bullet character some time back, and that's what I found. It's downloaded and I use xclip to copy it to my Xorg clipboard from command history ("^Runic<return>" generally brings it up:

        $ xc < ~/Downloads/unicode-medium-black-circle

But it'd sure be nice if HN had a real fucking Markdown library.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What if Flash Were an Open Standard? - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2010/02/winer_flash_open_standards <comment><USER2> That article gives Apple way to much credit. KHTML is LGPL licensed They had to release source. Blocks in GCC had to release source. The only thing he gets right is that Apple contributes to BSD licensed LLVM, but then he calls it Apple's technology. The project was around a long time before Apple showed up to contribute.

So on the whole I'd say Apple doesn't care if its technology is open or not as long as they are in control. Note the KHTML guys have said that Apple has dorked up the source so much that they basically can't use anything Apple has done, pretty much the same for GCC. LLVM is the only project where they seem to be playing nice and I don't see that lasting past the point where Apple starts using it heavily.

<comment><USER3> Apple doesn't care whether the technology is open, so long as nobody else has sole control.

Supporting open web standards is the only way Apple can provide a decent web experience without constantly playing catch-up to whatever Microsoft implements in IE.

Creating OpenCL as an open standard was the only way they could provide GPU computing that wasn't totally controlled by NVidia, but would still get support from GPU vendors. Unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn't have the resources to maintain their own proprietary GPU computing language.

Killing Flash is the only way Apple can give their users access to dynamic web content with good performance, because Adobe clearly doesn't have the motivation to do it for them.

libdispatch is Apple's way of trying to make multithreaded programming easier, and open-sourcing it is the only way that it will become popular enough for most programmers to bother to learn it. Apple wants third-party software on their systems to be multithreaded so that it won't make their system seem slow. Similar things can be said about some of their other open-source projects, like launchd.

Overall, it feels like open-source is one of Apple's tools for avoiding the influence of monopolies. When Apple weakens existing monopolies or prevents the formation of new ones, it has the side effect of helping all the other little guys, too.

<comment><USER2> Oh I agree open standards and open source has saved their bacon and will again in the future. To bad they seem intent to go the embrace and extend route.

<comment><USER3> Where do you think Apple is doing an "embrace, extend, extinguish"? Can you point to an open standard that they have added proprietary extensions to?

Apple definitely mixes open and proprietary components in their own systems, but I don't see how that hurts any of the open parts, since the closed parts serve different purposes.

<comment><USER2> They took free bsd made their own OS. Have they given back to BSD? Not in any major way. Sure they released Darwin but now they started keeping parts back to stop hackintoshes. They took KHTML for webkit sure they release source as required but they don't contribute upstream. So they embrace and extend but so far they have only taken from places that are so impoverished that their is no point to extinguish(desktop freebsd, KHTML user share?)

<comment><USER4> With KHTML they became the _de facto_ upstream very quickly, though it took a few years for the KDE people to play along, become downstream, and make it _de jure_.

Apple has employed a bunch of the FreeBSD developers, but there's really not that much relevant code there, much less contributable code. The non-mac- specific patches to the userland utilities does make it upstream.

You are correct in that most of the FOSS projects that Apple picks up were playing for relative tiddlywinks before they came along with piles of money (excepting GCC and maybe CUPS). They're one of the only companies that has done this kind of thing with any success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Apple didn't have to release WebKit as an open source project — they could have taken the BSD-licensed KHTML and kept their derivative rendering engine private._

Yes, they did have to release it as open source, as KHTML is LGPL, not BSD licensed. I don't believe for a minute that Apple is any more open than they are legally required to be, and even then only after some arm-twisting.

<comment><USER6> If the copyleft portion of the LGPL applies to the parts of WebKit outside of WebCore, then how could WebKit be released under the BSD license?

<comment><USER7> Good point, here's a block from the WebKit goals page.

WebKit should remain freely usable for both open source and proprietary applications. To that end, we use BSD-style and LGPL licenses. Specifically, we aim for licensing compatible with LGPL 2.1+. We do not currently plan to move to LGPL 3. In addition, we strive to create a courteous, welcoming environment that feels approachable to newcomers. WebKit maintains a public IRC chat room and a public mailing list where the ideas of contributors both new and old are heard and discussed with equal weight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be an interesting move. I would see one or both of two things happening. First, people would take it and run with it, eventually coming up with a decent piece of software. Second, _Apple_ could do the same. Either way, though, Adobe would lose control for sure.

The big question to me is, why isn't Adobe serious about making this technology better? I mean, if Flash worked superbly well we might be not having this discussion. If they want sole control, then it has to work. If they can't fix it, find someone who can, or release it and let the masses figure it out. I think Jobs is right, they're lazy. They wasted a good position.

<comment><USER9> <em>"The big question to me is, why isn't Adobe serious about making this technology better? I mean, if Flash worked superbly well we might be not having this discussion."</em>

It's much better than it was, and about to become even moreso. The major part of work over the past year has been invisible to you so far, but cross-device predictability is coming from almost every major manufacturer this year.

The Apple problems are only partly about technology.

<comment><USER10> I have always been under the impression that the primary sticking point with Apple with regards to Flash is that it would allow the implementation of everything in the App Store without involving Apple.

<comment><USER11> On the other hand Flash wasn't welcome on the iPhone when Apple didn't want native Apps made by third parties running on it... the App Store was an afterthought, leaving Flash on the side of the road clearly was not.

Or maybe the App Store was just a very well kept secret...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think Apple is thinking this through clearly enough.

It's pretty well agreed that Flash is a buggy resource hog (at least on non- Windows platforms). Unfortunately, HTML5 is not quite a drop-in replacement yet. Hell, even the AJAX/DHTML ninja at Google have to break down every now and then and use Flash (StreetView, Google Talk, etc).

Additionally, you have the fact that Google has hinted that Flash _will_ be on Android platform soon.

Though it would be great for web standards, the last thing Apple needs right now is to be trying to force people to quite their Farmville-esque habits cold turkey while the up-and-coming Android phones are beckoning them back into the alleyways.

Apple must have some awfully spectacular features in the works for iPhone 4 if they think they can pull this off...

<comment><USER13> What if they offer to pay for development of a Farmville app and a Hulu app and just go through one by one knocking out all of the killer Flash apps and turning them into native iPad/iPhone apps?

They've already got the YouTube app. And that looked pretty dang gorgeous.

<comment><USER14> Keep in mind that Adobe's already pushing their Flash-to-iPhone (App Store) compiler.

And that many (most? I'd imagine!) Flash games would be rather sub-optimal, if even playable, without modification to support multitouch instead of keyboard/mouse.

So if I were Farmville, why wouldn't I just wrap my modified-to-support- multitouch FLV with Adobe's tool and put it on the App Store?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's irrelevant. Apple has already decided they can move forward without Flash. If they won Flash in the lottery they still wouldn't incorporate it in their mobile platforms regardless of how clean the source is...why would they bother?

Yes, there are still large parts of the web that rely on Flash. And popular parts of the web. But none of them are _important_ parts of the web. There is no critical Flash-based infrastructure that, if Flash went away tomorrow, would prevent people across the Internet from doing their jobs. You can't run Farmville without Flash, but Farmville is a fad...six months or a year or two years from now people will be obsessing over some other online diversion.

The only people who _depend_ on Flash are the people who design and run the sites with Flash content. Lots of others _enjoy_ Flash but can live without it.

</comment><comment><USER16> _But what if the source code to Flash Player is — as many would wager — a huge steaming pile of convoluted C++ horseshit? It's sort of like what if Microsoft open-sourced the Internet Explorer rendering engine._

Flash Player was rewritten for AS3. It's actually two engines: AVM 1 (Flash 8, AS 1 & 2) and AVM 2 (Flash 9, AS3).

So only half of the pile actually stinks...

<comment><USER17> Why are you assuming the second pile got any moreattention to quality (vs. "we have to ship it") than the first one?

<comment><USER16> The point here is AVM2 is new, not "piled on" code like AVM1.

Pong: why should I assume they didn't payattention like somepeople are prone todo?

<comment><USER17> Sorry. iPod Touch combined to fat fingers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _"... I do understand the fear. It's indisputable that Apple seeks large amounts of control over its products. So it's a reasonable question to ask whether Apple sees the web itself, which they have no control over, as a problem. I don't think that's the case at all, though. The web, as a whole, is arguably the single most entrenched computer technology ever created. So where Apple seeks control with regard to the web is in the technology to render it ..."_

The weakness or limitation of the Internet is it's Hubs. Compromise or take down a hub and the network fails. Crackers go for DNS. A smart business will try to monopolise publication of information, news and media. Publishing of information on the Web is a Hub. Hence the tussle between traditional newspapers and electronic publishers like Apple and news distributors like Google.

</comment><comment><USER19> Then maybe we'd have a fast and stable implementation of it with things like built in accessibility.

</comment><comment><USER20> _The problem for Flash is just like the problem for IE — the web has already moved on._

I don't know which planet John is from, but the above is certainly not true on my planet. Some people may _wish_ and/or _hope_ that, certainly, but the reality is not that.

If he had written "the web wants/hopes/wishes/etc. to move on" I would have paid more weight to the rest of the argument, but _"has already moves on"_ , yeah right.

</comment><comment><USER21> So what exactly keeps someone from writing an open version of flash player? It couldn't be that hard could it?

<comment><USER22> It is not so much hard as very tedious. The open source Flash clones look like they have caught up to Flash 7 or 8 so far.

<http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/> <http://www.gnashdev.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This started off interesting but quickly got tainted by retardedness... zomg it's pointless opening it because the code is probably crap and zomg everyone's already using teh html5 for everything!!! That same argument could have been why _not_ to form Mozilla on the ghost of Netscape just a handful of years ago.

I think the idea's got a lot of merit, it'd definitely help Adobe in that someone competent could actually fix and stabilize their platform. But I also think it'd be pointless, the iPhone/iPad would only get an Apple-tailored fork with all app-like capabilities removed.</comment>


SICP in Python - <AUTHOR> http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa11/61a-python/content/www/index.html <comment><USER2> This is like reading a modernized version of Shakespeare. You can still kind of tell the story is good, but it just feels lacking. It doesn't convey the same kind of weird magic, even though you aren't 100% sure what they are on about.

It is a perfect example of Rich Hickey's "Simple made easy" talk from a few days ago.

</comment><comment><USER3> The very notion seems strange to me, because when I read SICP it was primarily a "learn LISP's model of computation" book, not a "learn how to program, and we just happen to be using a LISP" book. Because of that, it doesn't make much sense to me to port SICP to a non-LISP language.

<comment><USER4> The way it was explained when I took the class was that the language is irrelevant for such an intro class and he (harvey, the guy who taught in scheme) just used scheme because SICP is so good.

We actually went through tons of different programming paradigms that scheme and lisp probably weren't really designed for, like OO (closures upon closures, all the way down). Throughout the class harvey and the TA's emphasized that everything we were learning could be done in any language, and didn't actually require scheme or lisp (yes, we never got to macros).

I can understand why you it might seem strange to port SICP over to scheme if you read SICP with the intention of learning lisp, but at berkeley the point of using SICP was to iterate through many different programming paradigms and cover basic computer science. unless they've found a better manual for this, it makes a lot of sense to just translate SICP instead of starting from scratch.

<comment><USER5> I don't know, I found the way they did OO actually made more sense than what I was taught earlier in a class using Java. It also seems more logical and elegant than Python's OO implementation, even if Python's isn't quite as arbitrary and complicated as Java's.

I think the language was only irrelevant because Scheme is so simple. We covered it in a couple of lectures and then it stayed in the background.

I really don't see the case for switching to Python at all--why "fix" something that isn't broken? Everybody seems to just assume that Python is a better choice.

<comment><USER4> None of the professors want to teach in scheme anymore, and a vocal subset of the eecs students think scheme is a waste of time because it has no real world applications.

That said, I think scheme is one of, if not, the best language to begin programming in, and agree with you that none of the reasons given for switching were very compelling.

Those scheme handles OO paradigms, the way it does is kind of annoying below the abstraction. however, scheme wasn't designed to handle OO, it was designed for functional programming. if i remember correctly, mutability is a hacked on addition (one of the reasons you use set! instead of def).

<comment><USER6> Every time I hear from someone that scheme has no real world applications, I like to pass them this link: [http://philosecurity.org/2009/01/12/interview- with-an-adware...](http://philosecurity.org/2009/01/12/interview-with-an- adware-author)

<comment><USER4> if i remember correctly, some airfare calculators were/are written in scheme/common lisp for the macros as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is ok, for a CS 101 class. I'm sure the students will turn out just fine. Some of them will likely be intrigued by the purple book their class name references. Looking at the schedule, it looks like it just covers the "Structure" and not the "Interpretation". My favorite parts of SICP are the 4th and 5th chapters, on metacircular evaluation, interpreters, lazy Scheme, Prolog, and compilation to byte code. I guess it's probably too much for CS 101 though. It would also be a lot more work to do those chapters in Python, since you'd need to cover scanning and parsing, instead of just using (read).

<comment><USER5> I think that the metacircular evaluator and friends are perfect for a CS 101 class--they really changed my perception of how software works. After all, this is a CS class rather than just a programming class, and SICP is a good overview of both while this new class is probably less so.

<comment><USER7> Oh, I definitely agree. SICP was the beginning of the rabbit hole for me. But I had spent a lot of time programming before I started it, so I'm not sure if it really is the best text for CS 101, where some students maybe have never written a line of code. Peter Norvig's review sort of sums up this regarding SICP: <http://www.amazon.com/review/R403HR4VL71K8>

I've never been involved in teaching CS or programming, and while I really do think SICP should be required reading for all CS students (and for all programmers) just because it's so good, I respect that teaching is very challenging, and fitting it all into a single semester might be tough. There are some very smart and experienced people who have spent a lot of time thinking about this (see "The Structure and Interpretation of the Computer Science Curriculum"), and I hesitate to put SICP on a pedestal where it can't be touched.

As I said, hopefully some (or many!) of the students taking this class at Berkley will be curious about the original book and will seek it out on their own.

<comment><USER5> One thing to note is that this class is really more like CS101.5--if you have never programmed, you're _highly_ encouraged to take a very introductory class for a semester before this one. Apparently about 90% (or something) of the people taking it have had at least some programming experience.

I also don't think SICP is _perfect_ ; however, I think it inherently much better than anything--even itself--done in Python simply because Python basically forces less breadth. I recently read an interesting paper[1] that I think could lead to an even better class; if you're interested in this sort of thing, it's worth checking out.

[1]: <http://www.sics.se/~seif/Publications/fdp.pdf>

It's also not really designed for a completely introductory class, but I hope that most of the people coming into Berkeley CS aren't _completely_ unprepared.

On a slightly unrelated note, a completely different approach to an intro class could be cool too: instead of focusing on learning, maybe the first semester should be dedicated to just building something cool on a computer and letting the learning happen naturally. The more formal classes can always come later. For something like that, I could see using Python--although it wouldn't be my first choice by far--but that's a completely different story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I took CS61A in the spring of 2008, when it was still done using Scheme. Looking through the first few lectures and the titles of later lectures, I'm struck by how much the material is the same. Most notably, in the first several lectures, they've made a point of stripping down Python to a subset that makes its evaluation near-identical to Lisp - by using only named functions (no '1+2', only 'add(1, 2)'), they've kept the emphasis in those lectures on the environment model of evaluation.

Looking through the later lecture titles, it's quite clear that (despite what other commenters are saying) the "deeper" parts of the course have been preserved.

There's a bit that's been lost in translation; in particular, while the emphasis on metalinguistic abstraction has been kept (students are going to be implementing an object-class system, in a rather elegant way that uses Python's capability to redefine attribute getters) the more exotic models of computation pursued in the old 61A have been abandoned. No more ambiguous evaluator. This is perhaps inevitable - it's just impractical to create a metacircular evaluator for a language as complex as Python. Still, the core of the class has remained, which is a testament to the fundamental similarity of the the Lisp model of computation with that of many modern scripting languages.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm simultaneously disappointed and thrilled about this. As I've suspected, teaching SICP in a language other than Scheme would require dropping chapters 4 and 5. They're simply too hard to do in any other language. Which of course is a bummer, since chapters 4 and 5 are huge amounts of fun.

All the same, I'm thrilled that SICP is being taught.

<comment><USER5> SICP has been taught here for a long time, in Scheme. Unfortunately, the professor--Dr. Brian Harvey, who apparently contributed significantly to the second edition of the book and has taught this course for decades--has decided to retire. Now that he is gone, I guess the people running the course have decided to move away from Scheme to Python, for some odd and unknown reason, but still use the book (at least for now).

<comment><USER4> The reason they moved is because no one else wants to teach it in scheme. When I took the class in 2007 he mentioned then that after he retired the class would switch to python because he was the only one who thought SICP was worth the headache of dealing with scheme.

However, they still use SICP behind the scenes because they have a bunch of lecture notes for it, and because it really is a great book.

btw, i don't think harvey actually retires until 2013 or 14. i think he's just doing behind the scenes stuff now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well, at least they're still using Emacs. That being said, they have a weird way of describing the hotkeys. For example, for C-x C-f, they tell you to hold down C-x, release all keys, then press C-f. You don't need to release the control key, and it adds at least half a second if you do.

</comment><comment> wes-exp "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."

</comment><comment><USER11> Won't this end in disaster considering the use of tail recursion in SICP versus Guido's flat out refusal to allow tail recursion optimization in Python?

<comment><USER5> While I think that this will end in disaster, tail-call recursion is almost inconsequential---this is a very introductory course, just an overview of CS, so performance isn't important.

What is important are the big ideas. For example, the course covers several paradigms: functional, oo and logic programming. The book uses Scheme for the first two and a language with very Scheme-like syntax for the last; Python is completely unsuitable for all but oop, and even there is too complex compared to Scheme.

I took this course in its old iteration last year, and it was a brilliant course, probably the single best course I've taken on any topic. That was partly because of the professor, who has retired, and partly because of the book and language. Now that only the book is the same, I suspect the course is very far from brilliant.

I should amend this by saying that the professor, who is actually from Google, is probably good--he created a set of AI projects used in a bunch of AI classes that are very good. However, the previous professor was particularly good as a professor--his research involved CS education. So far, he has been the best professor I've had, and I've had some _very_ good ones.

<comment><USER12> > tail-call recursion is almost inconsequential---this is a very introductory > course, just an overview of CS, so performance isn't important.

> What is important are the big ideas.

Go back and read section 1.2 ("Procedures and the processes they generate") again. As far as its authors are concerned, this _is_ one of the big ideas. Basic concepts of time and space complexity and recursive vs. iterative processes are so important that they appear as soon as the basics of Scheme have been introduced. It's a core theme of the book (Why is this n-queens program slow? How can we eliminate two extra stack saves in this register machine program?), and the main questions in chapter 5 that the evaluators in chapter 4 don't answer fully (but look closely at the CPS evaluator in section 4.3) are "how do procedures return values to their callers?" and the related "how can we write an evaluator that doesn't grow the stack when executing tail-recursive procedures?"

Ultimately, the beauty of SICP isn't in the paradigms covered but the understanding of how programs execute, and the beauty of Scheme is the simpleness of its control flow . It's far easier to a understand Scheme program than one written in Python, Haskell, Prolog, or any other high-level language. Do most people understand (modulo sophisticated optimizations) how the Python interpreter actually handles, say, comprehensions, iterators, generators, or its complex object-oriented features? Can a first-year student add these features by hand (forgetting completely about macros and first-class continuations) to an interpreter herself?

It amazes me that Berkeley professors don't want to teach Scheme (and worries me, as they're much cleverer than me). The whole magic of the language is that in the end there isn't any magic at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> an abomination, pure and simple.

<comment><USER14> Any reason for that conclusion? I personally have known the instructor of the course for the better part of a decade and he's one of the finest CS educators out there and has numerous awards to show for it.

I've talked with him about this choice and he has a lot of sound reasons for making this move backed by his years of experience teaching in various languages.

What's your line of thought? I use Clojure many hours every day and while I think that LISP languages are awesome, I don't think they're a good choice for a 1st programming course either.

<comment><USER15> Full disclosure: I've known John (the instructor) for 3 years, and I'm a TA for this course right now. On the other hand, I was also 'born' Scheme at MIT (which has also switched to Python).

I can confirm that moving to Python was a very well-reasoned decision. Having TA'd the Scheme version of the same course 2 or 3 times, I can say that for all talk of Scheme having very simple syntax, it's surprisingly hard for students to get used to.

\- The code is hard to read, and, a humans, we're not built for nested expressions.

\- Useful data structures, like key-value stores, and indexable lists, are limited, or introduced late

\- Having recursion thrown at you in week 1, before you've learned basic debugging, the concept of abstraction, or how to write readable code, gets in the way of learning to program.

\- Almost nobody uses scheme.

<comment><USER16> How does the course get around the problem of functional programming being a complete pain in the arse in Python? For me the value of SICP was to teach me how easy, beautiful and powerful it can be to program that way, because everything else before it failed to communicate that. I can't see how an SICP in python could have the same effect.

<comment><USER17> Python has some powerful elements too. It sure it lacks elements and features of historical and current pure functional[1] programming languages, but I find it elegant to use python as a set-theory powered language. Often I can solve complex problems in a few lines by thinking about the sets of elements I am manipulating, constructing and transforming them. Instead of imperative, python code becomes very descriptive. Indexing a dictionary with frozensets and making use of a proper definition of __hash__ to put various objects as dictionary keys or inside sets allows for tremendous power and terseness and explicitness.

In [2] the solution given by yairchu can be written succinctly via generators, which look extremely like a mathematical set definition.

        def grandKids(generation, kidsFunc, val):
            return reduce(lambda a, v: (x for v in a for x in kidsFunc(v)), xrange(generation), [val])

I often happen to think about a problem and explicit it with pen and paper using pure mathematical set notation then implement it in Python.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1017621/why-isnt- python-v...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1017621/why-isnt-python-very- good-for-functional-programming) [2] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1016997/generate-from- gen...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1016997/generate-from- generators/1017105#1017105)

<comment><USER16> Mind: I said "a pain in the arse", not "impossible". And i think not only about the writing (writing such things regularly is not what any programmer would want to do), but also the debugging perspective.

What you have done there is cute and commendable as a mental exercise, but if i'd ever encounter that in production code someone would make a close encounter with my chainsaw. This is basically undebuggable (i don't know the line/statement debuggers python has available, so i'm guessing here at what happens) because either the debugger will step over that in one step because it's one statement, or it'll just keep stepping on the same line again and again which is also entirely useless.

Lastly, what you did there is basically golf the living hell out of that code to bring it down from multiple statement lines to a single one. If i have to reach to such means i might as well use Perl. Only Perl actually does allow me to put multiple statement subs into a lambda, so i don't have to golf there.

Weird days when i have to golf in Python but don't need to in Perl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> But they can do such cool projects! Mining twitter data? Seriously?

[http://wla.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa11/projects/trends/trends.h...](http://wla.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa11/projects/trends/trends.html)

<comment><USER7> That's definitely cool, but as I mentioned in another comment, check out what they're missing:

      metacircular Scheme interpreter
      lazily-evaluated Scheme interpreter
      non-deterministic Scheme interpreter
      pseudo-Prolog in Scheme
      register machine simulator
      compiler to bytecode for the same machine

edited for formatting

<comment><USER15> They do interpreters for Logo instead, and wow... not even 6.001 at MIT did the register and bytecode stuff.

<comment><USER5> The interpreter for Logo is actually _extremely_ similar to an interpreter for Scheme; additionally, we went over several variations on the Scheme interpreter in lecture.

We didn't do the registers and bytecode, which was too bad although fair to students taking the class with less programming experience. One happy side- effect of the switch to Python is that there is now a self-paced version that allows the students to do all that if they want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What about a compromise? Why doesn't someone translate SICP to a more widely- used modern day functional language, such as Haskell or Erlang?

<comment><USER5> Most of the reasons cited for moving to Python are much more applicable to Haskell and Erlang. Additionally, both languages--and I say this as somebody addicted to Haskell--are too narrow: the perfect introductory language should be able to accommodate both functional programming better than Python and imperative better than Haskell.

Having a statically typed language would add unnecessary complexity to the course; those languages come later anyhow.

Finally, some of the particularly brilliant insights that Scheme gives (code as data and an _extremely_ elegant interpreter in Scheme) are absent in both Haskell and Erlang.

That said, we really should have more functional programming in other classes. I think CMU does this with ML throughout the CS program, and I envy them in that regard. However, this is a different issue; I don't think a language like that would fit any better to SICP than Python.</comment></comment>


Reagent: Minimalistic React for ClojureScript - <AUTHOR> http://reagent-project.github.io/

<comment><AUTHOR> For those in SF, we're having our first meetup on March 16th, 2015.

[http://www.meetup.com/Reagent-Minimalistic-React-for- Clojure...](http://www.meetup.com/Reagent-Minimalistic-React-for- ClojureScript/events/220930045/)</comment>