What's Wrong With the American University System - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/07/whats-wrong-with-the-american-university-system/60458/ <comment><USER2> I'm a little surprised to see the negative reaction to this article. I've asked many people the question "do great researchers make the best teachers?", and the answers form a strong dichotomy: undergrads and people who completed their college education at the bachelor's level universally 100% respond "no." People who went to grad school, and especially those who continued on to be professors, mostly either answer "yes" or waffle, with only a very small number answering "no."

If the purpose of the college/university system is to conduct research, that would be one thing, but there is at least a wide belief that the purpose of the university is to educate; and my read of the original article, with which I largely agree, is that Hacker wants to raise awareness that our "higher education" system is _not_ well-geared toward actual undergraduate education. At most highly-ranked universities, teaching ability and interest are fairly actively selected against: the retention decision is made almost entirely based on research, and while they would love the professors to be good teachers _too_ , they can't evaluate that and have no incentives to promote it (and PhD students aren't taught anything about it anyway), so it is purely by luck that they manage to retain good teachers.

I guess I'd like to hear from the commenters who disagree with the article about what made their researcher-professors better teachers, particularly at the lower levels where the only things that might be cutting-edge are the teaching techniques. (I'm not that interested in hearing about the professors bringing you in on their research, which _is_ valuable but necessarily not available to every undergraduate student.)

Disclaimer: I _am_ a college professor, I value (and am good at) teaching, and was denied tenure (at a liberal arts college, even) apparently because my publications were in CS education rather than in something more "researchy". Even the liberal arts colleges are not immune to the movement placing research above teaching as retention criterion for their teachers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I disagree with his anti-engineering and anti-research points. Attacking pseudo-technical degrees like undergraduate business, sure. Attacking humanities research, sure.

When I was at MIT, the best professors in lecture were actually top researchers (to the point of winning the Nobel). The best actual experiences I had were participating in faculty research (as an undergrad, you can actually contribute fairly meaningfully outside the core focus of the research; a CS/Math student can help out with data acquisition in a substantive way in Physics). Plus, undergraduate organizations like SIPB (which has developed KSplice, and which worked on many other interesting projects before)

I don't think most of this would happen at a small liberal arts college.

High school should cover liberal arts, plus a strong math and science program; this should be a universal education since it's essential to citizenship. College should be for jobs which require it (sci/tech, or perhaps becoming a high school or college educator).

<comment><USER4> _High school should cover liberal arts, plus a strong math and science program; this should be a universal education since it's essential to citizenship. College should be for jobs which require it (sci/tech, or perhaps becoming a high school or college educator)._

In general, this is a bad idea. It's like saying colleges should only teach for jobs that exist and not for what could be. No one is hiring buggy whip engineers and no one is teaching people to be computers (ie. the human kind in the 40s and 50s). The whole point of a university is to do advanced research and break off a little knowledge on the incoming students.

Also, there is no one true degree or one true job. Engineers ,and everyone else, are at the mercy of the market. You can't get paid if no one is buying your stuff. This applies to the CEO as well as the janitor. Ask aerospace engineers how they felt at the end of the coldwar. There used to be a joke about aerospace engineers being able to only get jobs that involved burgers. Now, Boeing can't hire enough, but that's it. The only place that hire those type of engineers, in quantity, are NASA and Boeing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Honestly, these authors sound pretty nuts. Take engineering only after liberal arts because "young people today are going to live to be 90"? Really? So we're all going to work until we're 75 and hope that modern medicine is able to wind back the clock of youth and add useful working years, rather than just prevent our aged bodies actually dying? Who's going to pay for 25 straight years of education?

Even after throwing away the obviously mental comments, it's bothersome that they've framed the problem of universities doing public research as: a) Wrong - Who else is going to do it? Industry? b) American only - I've been at universities in the UK, US and New Zealand, and it's all the same.

It's not wrong for good scientists to do research, it's reality. Not only that, but America actually has a system that supports teaching colleges: the state and community colleges are almost entirely geared towards teaching. That doesn't exist in the UK and New Zealand, and I'd hazard other places as well.

Universities have always been research-oriented, even Plato's Academy was: "In at least Plato's time, the school did not have any particular doctrine to teach; rather, Plato (and probably other associates of his) posed problems to be studied and solved by the others." [1]

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_Academy>

EDIT: Because this interview is just filled with little morsels of insanity, I couldn't resist another good one: "It's a third-tier university, but the faculty realize they're going to stay there, they're not going to get hired away by other colleges, so they pitch in and take teaching seriously." Read: the faculty are resigned to the fact they're not going to get hired by anyone else because they didn't make the grade, so they're just going to teach rather than bother getting their papers rejected.

<comment><USER6> > Take engineering only after liberal arts because "young people today are > going to live to be 90"? Really? So we're all going to work until we're 75 > and hope that modern medicine is able to wind back the clock of youth and > add useful working years, rather than just prevent our aged bodies actually > dying? Who's going to pay for 25 straight years of education?

Lifespan increases are not due to dragging out the time where one is feeble and sick, but by increasing the healthy part. People in their 50s are 'younger' than they were decades and centuries ago. Thinking that the increases are increases in morbidity has been called the 'Tithonus error' or fallacy.

Here are some links for your perusal:

\- [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=compression+of...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=compression+of+morbidity)

\- <http://www.jstor.org/pss/2664720>

\- [http://www.longevitymeme.org/articles/viewarticle.cfm?page=1...](http://www.longevitymeme.org/articles/viewarticle.cfm?page=1&article_id=1)

\- [http://www.courant.com/health/sns-200910201351tmspremhnstr--...](http://www.courant.com/health/sns-200910201351tmspremhnstr --k-h20091021oct21,0,4810521,full.story)

\- <http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/87/8731sci2.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Complaining that professors spend too much time doing research and not enough time teaching is like complaining that basketballers spend too much time playing basketball and not enough time making advertisements for shoes.

Research is what professors want to be doing (at least in the sciences -- I understand it's a bit of a joke in the humanities). Teaching is what they're obliged to do. If you want to get some of the smartest people in the world and pay them a barely-six-figure salary to teach the same damn introductory-level BS to spotty-faced teens every damn year, you'd better be offering some damn good perks, and the number one perk is to be allowed to spend most of your time researching whatever you're interested in.

If you want to be taught by professors who _aren't_ at the top of their fields, you can go to a community college, but your questions will be rubbing up against the edge of their knowledge pretty damn quick.

<comment><USER8> You're presenting a false dichotomy, and nobody with who thinks of students as "spotty-faced teens" should be allowed within miles of a college faculty position.

Andrew Hacker himself (one of the co-authors of the book under discussion) is a good counter-example. He was a longtime professor at a public college (Queens College). (Full disclosure: I was a student at QC from 1986-1992. I never took a full class with Professor Hacker, but I heard him lecture a few times.) His classes always filled up quickly despite their reputation as challenging, he won numerous teaching awards and he was near-universally regarded as an inspiring lecturer. Nevertheless, he was also a respected scholar who regularly published articles and books that nobody in his field could ignore. It doesn't have to be either/or.

<comment><USER9> Great. Now find enough people like him to teach every single class.

Obviously brilliant researchers who happen to also love to teach (and are good at it) are the ideal professors that every university should want, but merely wanting people good at all parts of being a professor does not make them exist in large quantities.

<comment><USER10> With today's technology there are enough technologies to scale a great teacher. youtube(especially with it's minute by minute engagment measurement), stackoverflow (for questions and answers), and others.

And you can see this happening, slowly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I disagree with pretty much every position in this article as a matter of opinion. However, I disagree with this part as a matter of fact:

"Yet if you look at all those powerhouse [college football] programs across the country, only seven or eight actually rake in money."

I've now heard this point made by several individuals and it's simply not true. Purely in terms of revenues versus costs, the majority of division 1A programs in the country make money. For 76 of the 120 div 1A programs, revenues exceeded costs as reported to the government in 2008. In many cases (20+), the profits are significant -- 10's of millions of dollars. Football programs make it possible for other non-revenue generating sports to exist.

The raw data can be found here: <http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/>

Also, I can anecdotally say that having gone to a school with a decent football team, it has kept me in touch with a number of my friends, provided a rallying point for alumni, and will play a role in my future giving to my alma mater.

Edit: For clarification...

<comment><USER6> His numbers are pretty specific, making me think he is drawing on specific studies which naturally he doesn't cite in a short interview. (Likely the citations are in the book... which doesn't help us.)

But I'm not very satisfied by those statistics. I looked up one school, Stony Brook University (in NCAA Division I-AA, whatever that is), and looked at its expenses: [http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/InstDetails.aspx?756e6974696...](http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/InstDetails.aspx?756e697469643d31393630393726796561723d32303038267264743d372f33302f3230313020343a32323a343920414d)

I see listed salaries, recruiting costs, financial aid costs, and operating costs, which yields a net profit of ~$700,000.

I _don't_ see any entries for the $22,000,000 stadium the football team uses (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_P._LaValle_Stadium>), nor operating costs for the stadium. 22m wipes out an awful lot of 700k years.

And that's the first off-the-books cost that occurs to me, a college sports ignoramus, to look for. So now I know that those statistics are at least incomplete for the purposes of examining the overall picture; but can I even trust the statistics provided? I suspect that further investigation would reveal many more expenses and costs, and few revenues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The biggest problem I find is that universities avoid free market forces by bundling everything together. Tenure is only one part of this.

Students pay tuition that is only dependent on the number of hours they take regardless of what type of course. An industrial technology major has roughly the same tuition as an english major. Students are also shielded from the costs of the system by scholarships, loans, and parents money. They are thus less motivated, less concerned about university waste, and burdening other people with these costs or burdening their own future through debt. Additionally their unmotivated, uninformed choices are putting them behind the educational steering wheel of tax payers' and society's money. It's no surprise that people complain about the lack of funding for science and emphasis on college sports. Those are the choices students have made with OPM (other people's money).

Similarly, faculty are paid for their experience and not subject area. An exception at one university I know: the faculty in one department gamed the system by rotating several people in and out of the department head position so that they each could gain and keep a higher salary when they returned to their non-department head position. Being paid the same leads to some departments having overpaid professors who wish to protect their jobs from the hordes of graduate students by raising as many artificial barriers as they can(tenure, excessive grad student burdens, etc). Other departments may have underpaid, overworked professors who are preparing students for relevant and highly paid positions in the workforce, but who are nevertheless given the same salary as the overpaid professors.

Students are not given the choice of paying less for courses that are taught by an instructor vs by a professor. It would be nice if colleges offered something like that following:

$600 for a course taught by a tenured professor

$300 an instructor

$150 by a teaching assistant

$50 self-taught with exams at a university or third party testing center

Such an unbundled tuition package would quickly expose the inefficiencies of the university system.

Tenure works in a similar way by bundling the good and bad professors together so that they must be accepted as a package deal, much like the way unions work. I think most tenured professors are decent teachers and the truly bad ones are exceptions, but the lack of flexibility to hire cheaper instructors where there is a demand and the lack of choice for students is the real problem. Even if a department had all really good tenured professors and no instructors or non-tenured staff, the costs to students would be too expensive.

Similar to the above bundling, state government jobs often require a Bachelors degree...any major...for positions that should only require a HS diploma. This is especially bad for non-teaching staff jobs at universities which require a college degree(any major) for many jobs that only require a HS diploma...part of the universities' way of promoting their own.

The whole system is designed to shield participants from free market forces by bundling everything together and offering consumers and tax payers one bundled choice.

The university system has not changed despite increased information availability provided by the internet and online ordering of books. Most of the actual learning is done outside the classroom and verified by in-class tests. Surely a better system is available in this information age.

Full disclosure: I do tech support at a university. When I see the outrageous salaries that some professors make, tenured or not, sometimes it is infuriating. Especially when they don't understand the basics of using a computer.

<comment><USER6> > Students pay tuition that is only dependent on the number of hours they take > regardless of what type of course. An industrial technology major has > roughly the same tuition as an english major. Students are also shielded > from the costs of the system by scholarships, loans, and parents money.

My understanding is that this bundling, as far as the liberal arts/hard division goes, works massively in the favor of the latter, because the liberal arts courses are much cheaper to provide and subsidize the latter. (How much does it cost to run a poetry course? How much for a Cisco networking class?)

<comment><USER12> A networking class and a poetry class have few expenses in terms of equipment. The main expense is faculty salaries if you take a look at the budget(and my state is cutting budgets so people have scrutinized them). My point is not to argue who is favored and I have no grudge against the liberal arts or the sciences. I only point to the equal tuition and salaries to show how completely isolated the system is from anything like free-market forces and to suggest that this equality is far more likely to be caused by political and social forces.

<comment><USER6> it seems to me that a poetry class has close to $0 in expenses, and low faculty salaries since English grad students & post-docs are a dime a dozen, while a Cisco networking class involves at least as well paid faculty salaries, and a great deal of equipment - thousands and thousands of dollars worth. (The Cisco hardware itself, none of which comes cheap, basic networking setup, a few dozen computers for the students to use, software licensing fees, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The engineering courses I've taken have actually been pretty crucial at my current gig. If I had majored in liberal arts, I'm not sure where I would learn them.

<comment><USER14> Their argument seems to be that you should get a four-year liberal arts degree and then an engineering degree _in addition_. Sounds great as long as you're not paying for it.

<comment><USER15> I went to one of the small liberal arts schools the authors of the book favor.

Many of them have a 3-2 arrangement with an engineering school. You take the more general science and math courses at the liberal arts school, then 2 years of engineering classes at the engineering school.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A good readable-sized overview of the book by the authors themselves from the Chronicle of Higher education: [http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Colleges- Worth-the-Price/66...](http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Colleges-Worth-the- Price/66234/)

</comment><comment><USER16> > They blame a system that favors research over teaching and vocational > training over liberal arts.

Then go to a school that focuses on teaching (mine does).

> And they'd like to see graduates worrying less about their careers, even if > it means spending a year behind the cash register at Old Navy.

That's not an issue with the schools, it's an issue with society. People expect a high paying job right out of school, they expect a fancy house and nice things. Sadly, it doesn't happen like that.

</comment><comment><USER17> Meanwhile, it's possible to go to a liberal arts college which has a teaching focus and offers engineering and/or science degrees. For example: Pomona College or Harvey Mudd College (I went to Pomona).

<comment><USER18> If I'm not mistaken, Mudd has a very well regarded engineering school as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I found this article interesting, and agree with many of his points, but I disagree with the premise, that there is anything wrong with the american university system. There are so many options and so much variety in higher education that you can get almost any college experience you want in America. And if you think it's all too expensive or nothing is really up your alley, you don't have to go at all. If anything needs to be fixed it is high school, but that's so broken I wouldn't even know where to begin.

</comment><comment><USER19> The University System is one of the things the US gets right in my opinion. Industry - Academia liasion works pretty well, a lot of research is productized and sees the light of the day and overall the university system appears to generate substantial competitive advantage for the country. _admittedly biased CS viewpoint_

</comment><comment><USER20> When you get tenure, you should be free to live. Nothing is so inspiring as a free mind.

</comment><comment><USER21> Upvoted just for being about someone called 'Andrew Hacker'. Also has worthy and relevant subject matter...

<comment><USER21> There's also some interesting supplementary material on the website for the book. <http://highereducationquestionmark.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> _In our economy, they're not really ready for you until you're 28 or so. They want you to have a number of years behind you. So when somebody comes out of college at 22 with a bachelor's degree, what can that person really offer Goldman Sachs or General Electric or the Department of the Interior? Besides, young people today are going to live to be 90. There's no rush. That's why I say they should take a year to work at Costco, at Barnes & Noble, whatever, a year away from studying, and think about what they really want to do._

If students did this, then they would find a passion and become highly motivated. They would then enter a university, where they find that they have to shell out a large sum of money every year. This goes towards ensuring that they're able to live in small, inadequate rooms with loud, obnoxious people with whom they sit in boring, superficial lectures and take tests that assess one's ability to learn by rote. All of this, just so they can earn a piece of paper that says they are allowed to work in a field they _liked enough to learn about on their own_.

<comment><USER23> > In our economy, they're not really ready for you until you're 28 or so.

Huh? "They" are ready for you as soon as you're ready for them.

<comment><USER24> Aye, Hacker seems to miss that the years they want you to have behind you are years spent working in that field, not simply years alive.</comment></comment></comment>


Stage is a minimalistic 2D, cross-platform HTML5 game engine - <AUTHOR> http://piqnt.com/stage.js/ <comment><USER2> The performance in my mobile device feels super native. [http://piqnt.com/4/four/](http://piqnt.com/4/four/)

<comment><USER3> iPhone 11 and I'm getting what looks like 15-30 fps

<comment><USER4> Time to replace the battery?

<comment><USER3> Oops, I was on low battery. Carry on. Nothing to see here.

<comment><USER5> Actually, thanks for coming back to post this.

I appreciate it because I'm interested in this kind of thing (not necessarily just games, but graphical custom interfaces in general) and getting confirmation on why it was slow (on powerful hardware) is good to know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The matching physics engine, Planck, can be found on the same website btw: [http://piqnt.com/planck.js/](http://piqnt.com/planck.js/)

</comment><comment><USER7> The game with the little balls coming across from the sides is super simple, and super creative with its limitations.

<comment><USER8> I have no idea what game you are talking about?

<comment><USER9> [http://piqnt.com/o/](http://piqnt.com/o/) I think

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm loving that this runs on a (end of lifed) blackberry passport browser. Not many 'cool' interactive webstuff works on older devices nowadays...

</comment><comment><USER11> All around great work!

Just a heads up if the author is around: I may have found a bug in the Break Out example. Seems to have frozen when two balls collided just the right way: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/12z2au9rkkw7hlm/Screenshot%202020-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/12z2au9rkkw7hlm/Screenshot%202020-02-11%2017.55.37.png?dl=0)

</comment><comment><USER12> Game engine? This looks like just a sprite management library. Useful, but nowhere close to what's needed to make a multiplayer HTML5 shooter.

<comment><USER13> Agreed, this is basically just a glorified draw list, nowhere near a "game engine".

Is there even a spatial index for accelerating collision detection?

<comment><USER14> The same author did Planck.js, so I imagine these are designed as modules to work together. (Dunno yet, just discovered and reading..)

[http://piqnt.com/planck.js/](http://piqnt.com/planck.js/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Where would you get some free assets for making a game on this? I want to do a side scroller with some plants and mountains the background.

<comment><USER16> Itch.io has free or very inexpensive assets. Also opengameart.org has free assets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm curious why the decision to redraw the entire tree when a node has been touched, rather than just that node or that branch?

<comment><USER18> Games typically need to redraw the entire screen anyways. Imagine a sidescroller where even a 1px movement requires the entire background and every object on top to be redrawn, or in 3D even a tiny camera move shifts the position of every triangle on the screen. Even very simple games without a lot of movement often have animations, where you then have to worry about transparency so you may have to redraw the region under the animated element anyways even of it doesn't move, etc. You could do a diff hoping for the happy occasion of a mostly-static frame, but a) that gives a performance penalty to the majority of frames that would need a total or near-total redraw anyways, and b) would lead to either unstable FPS or pointlessly hitting the FPS cap.

There are exceptions to this, for example a visual novel or a turn-based strategy game, but those are often satisfied to just eat the performance penalty for the ability to use standard tooling, or can use engines or standard UI toolkits like React that can do a temporal diff. For example, I've written several text-based games [1] that just use the DOM because using canvas or WebGL wasn't necessary. I've written other games that use a hybrid approach of absolutely-positioning temporally diffed DOM over a frame-by-frame redrawn canvas, to get the best of both worlds [2]. And I've also written games in e.g. Unity where it's easier and performant enough to use ImGui and redraw it every frame. Ultimately it cones down to what's practical and what's performant enough.

[1] [https://vgel.itch.io/themengi](https://vgel.itch.io/themengi) , [https://vgel.itch.io/the-sacred-text](https://vgel.itch.io/the-sacred-text) [2] [https://vgel.me/hoverator](https://vgel.me/hoverator)

<comment><USER19> There used to be a time when the game would render to a buffer slightly larger than the screen, then blit the right portion of that buffer to the screen. This meant that scrolling just consisted in blitting from a different offset. Composing the background image, then, would only require changing the bits behind animated sprites (so you would usually intersect the old and new position of each sprite with the background tile grid to find which tiles to draw again).

All of this changed with the advent of 3d hardware acceleration, but I remember doing it up until 2005 to get significant performance gains (on bad hardware).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What's the advantage of this over, say LibGDX where you can create HTML5, Desktop, Android and iOS game all in one project?

<comment><USER21> You won't need to write C++

<comment><USER20> LibGDX is Java.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why did they have to say "cross platform"? Isn't HTML supposed to be cross platform anyway? What do they even mean by 'platform'?

Disclaimer: I really don't know anything about doing games in html/js. The question is honest.

Disclaimer 2: I do remember "write once, run anywhere". It was only mostly right back then.

<comment><USER23> mobile and desktop devices, because although html is supposed to already be cross platform, in theory, when it comes to games you have to make some assumptions about whether a user is using a mouse or a touch screen or a keyboard, specific screen sizes, testing on obscure browsers running linux and old versions of gecko and things start to break

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is great, I'll have to port my small board game from Python into this so as to be able to run it cross platform. It's a little bit frustrating working with the tkinter Python GUI and not being able to "export" the game to other platforms.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is really good, a colleague of mine has always been interested in creating a simple game, but he hasn't got the time for the big engines and all that other stuff.

Something like this might be just what he needs.

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks like a simpler version of Pixi.js without webgl support. I would imagine its probably nicer to use for small games when you don't need webgl performance.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why would the plane demo devour 50% of my CPU? Intel P8400.

<comment><USER28> That _is_ a 7 year old laptop cpu.

(Also if the demo is single threaded and not frame rate capped it probably eats as much of a single core as it can, and that's a dual core cpu so 50% checks out)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me very much of MOAI.

Any chance you're working on adding Box2D?

EDIT: n/m, I just saw Planck.js by the same author.. cool beans, will use ..

</comment><comment><USER29> Good job. Looking forward to playing with this.

</comment><comment><USER30> Good Job! Asteroids runs smooth ;)</comment>


Everyone Despises SolarCity Deal, Except Tesla Shareholders - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/business/everyone-despises-solarcity-deal-except-tesla-shareholders.html?ref=business&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Most articles paint this deal as solar + battery + car, but the car part really doesn't matter here. The key part is solar + battery.

Over the last year states have started increasing fees to hook solar into the grid and at the same time are reducing net metering rates (payouts for power generation). This has hurt Solar City over the last year and likely would've killed it long-term.

I see Tesla using the Power Wall to make an in-home grid that uses solar + battery as the primary power source, and the grid is the backup power (for charging the battery with off-peak rates) . That way people can avoid paying fees for net generation, and the net metering rates don't matter.

<comment><USER3> That still doesn't explain why they can't use cheap panels from China.

<comment><USER4> Have they ever said they wouldn't use cheap panels from China? Why would you assume Tesla would procure more expensive panels if it didn't make sense to do so?

<comment><USER3> OK, I was thinking of SolarCity as a panel manufacturer. Are they just an installer? If so then what makes them worth $2.6 billion?

<comment><USER5> They were just an installer but they acquired Silevo in 2014. They built a 1GW plant in Buffalo, NY, cut the ribbon last year and are supposedly ramping production right now:

[http://www.pv-tech.org/editors-blog/solarcitys-1gw- buffalo-f...](http://www.pv-tech.org/editors-blog/solarcitys-1gw-buffalo-fab- using-technology-from-japan-germany-and-taiwan)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Given Elon Musk's track record of spelling out exactly what he wants to do, receiving a bunch of naysaying, and then doing exactly what he said, I think betting against him is a bad bet.

<comment> bjelkeman-again The shorters, and there is a lot of them, don't think so, but I agree with you. We need a sustainable future and this is a really good effort to get parts of our society there. Waiting for the auto companies to get their act together, then we'll burn.

<comment> semi-extrinsic > We need a sustainable future and this is a really good effort to get parts > of our society there.

Even if we accept this as truth (I'm not saying it is or isn't), the fact remains that Tesla is very overvalued compared to any other carmaker, especially when we know they are losing money on each car and will keep doing so for at least three more years. Tesla has almost as high market cap as Ford, despite selling less than 1℅ as many cars per year. Tesla had a P/E of -60 last year, projected to have -100 this year. The financial fundamentals compared to current valuation doesn't look good. Will Tesla go up or down? There is more potential downside than upside, that's for sure.

Also, it's not like none of the other car companies have EVs coming out. In fact, most of them do.

<comment><USER7> "There is more potential downside than upside, that's for sure."

This may be true over very short time horizons. But if Tesla survives 50-100 years, is it not realistic to think it could be valued at 5x - 10x current? That would be a 400% upside, versus 100% downside. I say this as a habitual short seller.(haven't traded TSLA)

<comment> semi-extrinsic Tesla is currently valued higher than Subaru, Fiat Chrysler and Mazda; all successful car companies selling much more cars. With the exception of Volvo and Toyota, whose value includes much more than just the car companies (like heavy industry manufacturing, commercial vehicles, Toyote even owns 0.27% of Tesla), only a ~2x increase in valuation is realistic. If they become one of the biggest car companies in the world.

<comment><USER5> They're not just a car company, they're a battery company who happens to make cars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not so sure shareholders like the deal, I think its more of a case where they like Telsa despite the deal.

Or more to the point, they consider the deal more of a distraction than something that will sink Telsa. When you think Tesla, you probably think electric car, or autonomous driving car, or Elon Musk.

I mean if you hate the deal what are you going todo. The deal is almost certainly going to go through so holding shares just to vote against the deal won't do any good. You could short Tesla but over the past 5 years the street seems to love Tesla so much that bad news doesn't seem to affect the company that much.

This is a stock that has had a high short interest number for a long time. And quarter after quarter they miss numbers but the stock goes up as the shorts are forced to cover their positions when the stock fails to drop.

People aren't investing in Telsa due to any fundamental, int he financial sense, numbers, they are doing it on belief that Elon will come through. Which is good news for Tesla as they really need the short term investors on their side in the next year as they'll almost certainly have to raise cash to fund the production of the Model 3.

<comment><USER9> > When you think Tesla, you probably think electric car, or autonomous driving > car, or Elon Musk.

If you are an investor thinking in those terms, Tesla will probably seem like a terrible company. Overvalued and unlikely to succeed once traditional car companies start taking EV seriously. Like you say, there are no fundamentals to support current valuation and there will never be.

The only way to look at Tesla is to think about it on more broad terms. It is a car manufacturer, yes, but it also is a company that provides a long range EV support infrastructure (superchargers), the (soon-to-be) largest Li-ion battery manufacturer, a domestic energy storage provider, etc...

With that perspective in mind, SolarCity fits right within the catalog of product and services. Tesla is an engineering company focusing the different applications of renewable energy and batteries. Cars just happen to be one that offers an attractive market to address now and a personal interest for Musk.

And that, I think, it's more than just faith in Elon coming through. It is a measurable market, albeit uncertain and dependent on a lot of social transformation and full of regulatory hurdles.

<comment><USER10> The largest Li-ion cell manufacturer remains Panasonic, the other owner of the Gigafactory.

The "Batteries" that Tesla builds are just a bunch of Panasonic cells wired together plus some smarts to distribute the load. I don't see Panasonic remaining Tesla-exclusive for an extended period of time.

<comment><USER5> The Tesla IP is just as important as the Panasonic IP though. It really is a joint venture. And Tesla, as the customer connection, has more leverage than Panasonic. They could cut Panasonic out of the next Gigafactory, but Panasonic can't start selling cars and home energy systems.

<comment><USER10> Panasonic owns half the Gigafactory.

Tesla doesn't have any leverage here. Panasonic does what it wants. Tesla can decide to switch to another supplier, but Panasonic can just start selling to GM or Ford.

<comment><USER5> Of course, for Gigafactory 1 Tesla and Panasonic are married.

I was talking about Gigafactory 2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How much money has SolarCity gotten from the government? Looks like at least 2.5 billion [1].

Tesla and SpaceX haven't been super dependent on government funds. But SolarCity definitely has.

Musk's real super power might be in getting free money. I suppose the phrase here is don't hate the player hate the game. But it still rubs me the wrong way. As unpopular as that opinion may be.

[http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk- subsidies-2015...](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk- subsidies-20150531-story.html)

<comment><USER12> Specifically in response to that Times article:

[http://electrek.co/2015/05/30/opinion-times-article-on- musks...](http://electrek.co/2015/05/30/opinion-times-article-on-musks-empire- being-fueled-by-government-subsidies-is-grossly-one-sided/)

Elon argues that the subsidies only make sense because they offset the much greater subsidies that the fossil fuel industry gets implicitly from negative externalities (to the tune of over 5 trillion): [http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2015/new070215...](http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2015/new070215a.htm)

Some people still like to argue that Tesla is propped up by government help, but by this slide they put up in their shareholders meeting, that's clearly not the case:

[https://youtu.be/DvVlNkL8f_o?t=2h9m20s](https://youtu.be/DvVlNkL8f_o?t=2h9m20s)

<comment><USER11> Tesla and SpaceX are self-sustaining. SolarCity is not. SolarCity is also Musk's largest subsidy beneficiary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It makes sense. Tesla's raison d'être is sustainability. If at scale their product is still powered by dirty energy, it will undercut the product. It's not just a fast car, it's a clean car. If utilities don't keep pace with them in terms of solar deployments, it's literally a risk to the company. Empowering customers to directly source clean power at the grassroots level frees them from dependence on utilities.

<comment><USER14> > It makes sense.

It makes sense _strategically_. I think most of the people complaining about the deal are more concerned with whether it makes sense _tactically_ , since SolarCity is bleeding cash and wasn't expected to survive much longer, and will now be hitched to Tesla, which doesn't have a great cash flow situation either.

<comment><USER15> SolarCity's immediate cash flow looks a lot better when you take away sale and customer acquisition costs, in fact it brings them very close to profitability. It is widely expected that the merger will close that side and bring it closer to Tesla's sales model, which is cheaper per customer acquisition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Even if energy generation, storage and an auto powertrain are a seamless product, so-called vertical integration, in which one manufacturer makes all the components, was the old Henry Ford model and later, General Motors'. That approach has gone down in automotive history as a colossal failure.

What is Tesla meant to do if nobody else is able to deliver what they demand?

Ford Motor Company essentially created a new industry, which is why they had to make all their parts... Tesla is doing a similar thing here imho.

<comment><USER17> There are plenty of PV suppliers out there. I believe FSLR is the largest.

The deal does make sense to me though. In the beginning it worried me that Tesla only had one product. One major flaw in the product could have ended them and they we creating a completely new kind of product that is expected to last decades. Now they have storage which makes sense because they can grow it along with their auto battery technology. But they also have these stupid stores where you cant really do much and you can only buy two things- a car or a battery for your house. It makes perfect sense to be able to buy the panels from them because otherwise you can buy the batteries from whoever you buy panels from. People who like Tesla are Apple users. They want complete packages, everything brushed aluminum with an apple or tesla logo on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The best way I can describe this deal is that one of Musk's companies (Tesla) bails out another of Musk's companies (SolarCity) that owes a lot of money to yet another of Musk's companies (SpaceX).

I'm really not surprised people are concerned about this.

<comment><USER19> How much does SolarCity owe SpaceX?

<comment><USER20> About $165 million: [http://fortune.com/2015/08/07/this-is-why-elon-musks- spacex-...](http://fortune.com/2015/08/07/this-is-why-elon-musks-spacex-has- been-buying-up-solarcitys-bonds/)

Which will soon be $165 million Tesla owns to SpaceX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A thing I don't understand about this article: " _vertical integration…was the old Henry Ford model and later, General Motors '. That approach has gone down in automotive history as a colossal failure_"

Because clearly when we think about the role of pre-Baby-Boom Ford and GM in the history of the automotive industry the first term that comes to mind is "colossal failure"?

Also it seems contradictory to say "Tesla shareholders" don't "despise [the] deal" and then point out that the stock price dropped 10% when the deal was announced. What determines the stock price, if not the previous and current shareholders? Gremlins?

</comment><comment><USER22> > Even if energy generation, storage and an auto powertrain are a seamless > product, so-called vertical integration [...] That approach has gone down in > automotive history as a colossal failure.

This kind of statement always bothers me.

Just because several entities experienced failure using a method in the past doesn't mean that the method itself is guaranteed to fail always and forever.

<comment><USER23> It's also pretty irrelevant. The vertical integration isn't for producing cars, it's for producing sustainable energy products. And we all remember why vertical integration is famous... the unprecedented success of the steel industry e.g. Carnegie and the other steel barons. The article seems premised on a false equivalency fallacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The SolarCity combo is absolutely brilliant. The chattering class and peanut gallery bet against Musk on Tesla and Space X as well, and there will always be naysayers to quote in the press for bold moves like this.

The combo makes perfect sense for exactly the reasons Musk outlines in "Part Deux" of his strategy for Tesla and in the publicly disclosed rationale for this deal. If you're a long-term investor, which is rightfully the only sort of investor that Musk really cares about (at least for now, when he has the power and support to fend off activists and the like), this makes absolute sense and is a great bet.

As for governance... let's not forget the NetSuite deal involving Oracle and Ellison on both sides that just happened. This sort of thing isn't exactly unheard of, and the key question is not whether conflict exists, but whether the deal makes real business sense on both sides despite the conflict. Also recall that this was fully and properly disclosed before the deal was finalized, and that Musk got sign off from independent shareholders on both sides, even among those that were initially skeptical of the combination. One can't really do anything more than Tesla and SolarCity did here.

Also, one shouldn't be surprised that Musk had a conflict of interest here. Much as VCs sometimes rightfully say "no conflict, no interest"... part of the reason you invest in a market or begin a company is because you have a thesis about the space or the market overall. If you're taking multiple bets in that space, even if they start at different vectors, there's a chance they will collide or make sense to combine over time. For the same reason, one shouldn't be overwhelmingly surprised if in 10 years it ends up making sense to combine Space X with Tesla and Solar City as well. I don't see an explicit rationale for that today at all, but it's easy to see the possibility of a rationale existing in the future, depending on how things evolve. No one should be acting gobsmacked or thinking the SolarCity+Tesla combo is somehow a nonsensical, self-dealing arrangement.

The one thing I wish Musk would have done in addition here, or that I hope he'll do shortly following this combo, is introduce even greater provisions for his ongoing control. My biggest fear with Tesla is that it grows large enough to attract activist investors that are highly levered so as to have disproportionate impact and seek to exploit the stock. Musk may, at some point (at least temporarily) lose the halo effect, and that'll leave him and Tesla vulnerable to provocative moves form investors that do _not_ align with long- term shareholder value, but rather seek to optimize shorter-term outcomes. So, if anything, I'm directly against the calls from people that are questioning governance here. I would prefer Tesla shareholders agree to cede _more_ control to Musk and that the company limit executive liability. _Most_ companies absolutely should not have these sorts of provisions, because most CEOs are not worthy of that sort of trust. But in Musk's case, the boldness of vision, correctness of long-term thinking, and overall trustworthiness in shareholder value creation and protection have been proven for long enough that I'd be more than willing to see this happen and actually actively hope for it.

<comment><USER25> Last I heard, Space X were still spectacularly failing to meet the launch schedules promised to their customers, to the point that it was costing those customers money and meaning they couldn't meet contractual obligations to their own customers.</comment></comment>


Is Taleb a crank? - <AUTHOR> http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/review-of-talebs-black-swan.html <comment><USER3> Is Taleb a crank ? You know what, I don't know.

Is Sam Sethi a nut job ? Also no clue.

Is Dvorak a troll ? Again, it doesn't register, he might be.

What I do know is that "Is X a Y ?" where 'X' is the name of some guy that's in the public eye and Y some hyperbolic term (preferably derogatory) will get immediate traction.

<comment><USER4> It's a really sad commentary on our society, and specifically the HN community, when a headline framed as a question (a no-no in Journalism 101) gets traction. Great response.

<comment><USER5> I agree the headline does read like that of a fluff piece, but the article is considered, and it _does_ quantify & address the question in the headline. I guess what I'm saying is that if your attention _is_ grabbed by the headline, then you won't be disappointed by the article - in this case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's Falkenstein who is the crank. You can tell he's read Taleb's work with a chip on his shoulder (as many have). Taleb's not saying "shit happens," he's saying, "you can't measure risk -- ever." You can approximate portions, like VaR and bond rating agencies, but we've been _way_ too cocky that our measurements cover it all.

I think allegations of "crank"-ness were discussed until about a year ago. September vetted him. End of story.

<comment><AUTHOR> He's saying that Taleb's points are not very useful or original.

<comment><USER6> I know. I read it. My point was that he thinks that because he thinks that Taleb is simply saying 'shit happens'. He's not. We believed in the Gaussian curves and risk measured in standard derivations. We believed VaR and it ate us for lunch. If it's not very useful or original, September would not have proved him out so well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author claims almost immediately that: "Taleb's style is to severely criticize experts and authorities--lots of 'morons', 'idiots', and 'fools' out there--while implying that both he and his reader or listener are exempt from their many biases."

Actually, Taleb continuously laments how amazingly difficult it is to stay objective and analytical, especially when it comes to assessing risk.

Taleb's key point however, was that existing economic models depend on using Gaussians for modeling probability distributions, but that Gaussians are only useful in SOME cases. Real world behaviorally driven events rarely fit into a neat statistical framework, so don't try and force them to, you'll just get bad results out of your model.

I would recommend reading his fooled by randomness book as well (and I may be remembering details from that one as well in this comment).

</comment><comment><USER8> The author covers the topic in considerable depth but fails to understand the key points.

Mandlebrot makes serious criticisms of the standard models of stock and other valuations - these boil down to saying that the "tails" of market changes are going to be larger than the current models.

The simplest example is CDO's. If you believe in short-tailed, uncorrelated stock market changes, you can argue that the stocks of five different tripple-A rated major corporations have a zero percent chance of simultaneously declining. And you similarly combine together even poor quality bonds to create a "synthetic" bond which also supposedly has a nearly 0% chance of failure.

If you believe in long-tailed, correlated stockmarket changes, you believe that the chances of such bonds failing is much higher.

Guess what actually happened?

I would criticize Taleb, however, for not bringing the issue of complex random processes to the fore. I think he wants to make his ideas very accessible but the problem is that he looses the key difference between short-tailed and long-tailed distributions, since short-tailed distributions DO exist in reality, especially physics and so we're not talking generic randomness when looking the problems of understanding markets and uncertainty.

<comment><AUTHOR> > saying that the "tails" of market changes are going to be larger than the > current models

The claim is that people using the models are well aware that the gaussian distribution is only an approximation, and that substituting fatter tailed distributions into the models don't actually affect the outputs very much.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I know that's been claimed.

Do you think that, perhaps, the massive collapse of the financial system in the past year might at least cast a bit of doubt on whether that "awareness" translates effectively to behavior?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I kind of ran out of steam on the paragraph where he claims that Niederhoffer's strategy is better than Taleb's while failing to mention that Niederhoffer has blown up two separate funds during periods of market instability (1997 and 2007). I find that Niederhoffer's experience reinforces rather than debunks Taleb's arguments.

</comment><comment><USER10> Arguing that Taleb is contradicting himself in relying on small number statistics or "anecdotes" doesn't make sense. You only need a sample of one to falsify a theory.

</comment><comment><USER11> Taleb's strategy gets paraphrased as "buy out of the money puts" but I'm sure there's quite a bit more going on than that at his funds, even if that's broadly the strategy. For starters you have to figure out which puts to buy. It almost certainly isn't about buying puts on the main index, since that's almost a default no-thinking risk management approach which drives the price of the puts up.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have to say, at least Taleb can write. Reading this scrawl gave me a headache.

</comment><comment><USER13> Upvoted because I think it's important in this case to read an opposing view. After all, predicting a crash is not in itself confirmation of insight - <USER2> any point in time there will be some people making the prediction, so when a crash inevitably happens some people come out looking like geniuses.

As for who is right, frankly that's going to take a lot more digestion...

<comment><USER14> Taleb really did predict 7 out of the last 2 recessions.

<comment><USER15> I think he'd probably agree - by definition, his theory means that he's no better at predictions than anyone else, and as I understand his investment strategy, he positions himself so that being right once in a while covers the losses of being wrong the rest of the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What does whether he is a "crank" have to do with whether he is wrong? I stopped taking the author seriously when the ad hominem attacks started. Taleb may be a crank, he may be unsympathetic or inflammatory, but that has _no bearing whatsoever_ on the state of his theories.</comment>


Amazon blocks non-Prime members from buying certain video games - <AUTHOR> http://www.videogamer.com/ps4/gta_5/news/amazon_blocks_non-prime_members_from_buying_certain_video_games.html <comment><USER2> I don't get it. As an incentive to sign up for Prime it makes no sense; Prime needs to offer me things I can't get elsewhere (or at least not for the same price), not return to me things that I can easily get elsewhere. I just spot- checked Amazon US's price for GTA 5, 39.88 [1], and it's the exact same price at Wal-Mart [2], so it's not an exclusive deal or something. (Nor did I spend several minutes hunting for a comparable price; it was the third hit on Google for "Grand Theft Auto 5 PS4" for me. Google being what it is now, YMMV.)

I don't mean "this is a bad idea". I mean "I don't get it". What's the point?

[1]: [http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Theft-Auto-V- PlayStation-4/dp/B0...](http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Theft-Auto-V- PlayStation-4/dp/B00KVSQ848/ref=sr_1_1_twi_gam_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1461343449&sr=8-1&keywords=grand+theft+auto+5)

[2]: [http://www.walmart.com/ip/Grand-Theft-Auto-V- PS4/41049186](http://www.walmart.com/ip/Grand-Theft-Auto-V-PS4/41049186)

<comment><USER3> My guess:

\- They cost more than the free shipping threshold, giving shipping away free

\- New games are low profit to begin with

\- Amazon sells enough of these that they are already in every distribution center

\- Every unit Amazon ships probably arrives in a "Prime" amount of time anyway, giving away expedited shipping for free

This is just bringing some video game sales into alignment with what Amazon wanted Prime to do all along.

Amazon makes very good money on a sale that they don't control. If the costs of making that sale (or supporting returns, etc) is too high they benefit significantly by letting marketplace sellers take all the risk.

<comment><USER4> > Every unit Amazon ships probably arrives in a "Prime" amount of time anyway, > giving away expedited shipping for free

Just to add a note that this isn't always true. Sometimes they withhold shipping even though they have the item in stock at the nearby distribution center.

<comment><USER5> This is definitely true. Back in the pre-Prime days (ie, 5+ years ago) Amazon would send your package as soon as they possibly could, and even with the super saver shipping you'd still often get your order less than the minimum 5 days.

Now I'll order something on Amazon (not a Prime member) and they'll sit on the package for a week and then overnight it to me.

I'm not a fan. Paying more for faster shipping didn't used to mean that cheaper/free shipping _always_ took longer, it just meant that you were guaranteed to get it quickly.

<comment><USER6> This may be because it's cheaper/better for them to ship other orders instead of yours, since they can only handle a finite amount of orders per center at a time :)

<comment><USER7> It's a financial hack. Amazon has low margins so cash flow is king.

They make money off you either way, when they sit on the order for 5 days, they probably book your revenue a month before they need to pay for the product.

<comment><USER8> Do they charge your before the order actually ships? I don't think they do.

<comment><USER9> Charging your credit card might not coincide with their definition of revenue recognition.

<comment><USER10> What if a customer cancel the shipment?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Amazon put a lot of effort over the years into establishing themselves as the best place to buy nearly everything online. Now they seem bound and determined to throw that title away. Between rising prices, add-on items, confusing marketplace sellers, a refusal to sell certain products that compete with Amazon branded products, and now this ridiculous Prime tie-in, I find it more and more difficult to find a reason to buy stuff from them.

<comment><USER12> Trying to shove "subscribe & save" in my face 3-4 times during the process of choosing and purchasing a product is annoying, too.

Yes, I get it, you make more money in the long term when people subscribe.

I wish there was a global opt-out for it.

<comment><USER13> I've never noticed this actually. Example of a product that does this? I tried Sub&Save for Tide a while back but the one I wanted kept getting cancelled and I was offered an alternative so I stopped trying and went with buying it at LocalStore,Inc.

<comment><USER14> Yep. This has made Subscribe & Save nearly useless for me. The convenience factor is entirely wiped out when I run out of laundry detergent because I missed the e-mail stating the product is now no longer eligible.

Amazon became a killer app for me (and most, I presume) due too the UIx. You clicked a button and you generally got pretty-close-to-cheapest priced product delivered very quickly.

Now it's just getting complicated, and you have to expend energy to ensure you're not getting actively ripped off by looking at only Prime items/etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ever since there started being discounts for Prime-only members I knew it was the beginning of the end of my using Amazon.

My last online order was with Walgreens. I never tried them before but I googled for the product I had in my Amazon cart, it was cheaper at Walgreens, I added a few things to get up to $35 for free shipping, those things were also cheaper than on Amazon. I got the delivery faster than my last few free standard shipping orders with Amazon.

For a long time Amazon was the "default" in my mind for shopping online and I see now there's no reason it should be that way anymore.

<comment><USER16> > Ever since there started being discounts for Prime-only members I knew it > was the beginning of the end of my using Amazon.

For me the opposite happened: i'm now shopping more at amazon than before because I decided to subscribe to prime again. Here (Austria) prime now delivers in one or two days even to the most remote regions which previously was something they did not really do. I also get instant video, amazon music and a bunch of other stuff thrown in for free and the returns are amazing.

The value I get out of it is very much worth it. I don't see any other online store catching up with this service any time soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a weird move. I think if I didn't already have prime, I'd just go somewhere else rather than be motivated to subscribe. Hopefully this is just an experiment—I suspect this is ultimately going to be self defeating.

<comment><USER18> It is majorly self defeating. A transaction on Amazon has very little friction, because they already have your payment details, you have a history and you know the quirks of the site.

By forcing people to consider alternatives, it is making people experience that initial friction elsewhere, but once they are setup there the friction is less. It won't take very long to discover other retailers have better prices, better shipping and less quirky sites.

Essentially this is nice gift to Amazon's competitors. Amazon will find out just how "sticky" those competitors are, but this stills seems silly.

<comment><USER19> Also, Amazon should want to know _everything_ I buy to better offer me value that allows them to get more sales from me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wait, what? This is ridiculous. Amazon is a shop first and foremost, and this is exactly the sort of thing that I'll drive me to other alternatives.

It's especially silly for games, where the console manufacturers offer their own stores (both for digital and physical copies of the games). Heck, if you're buying them digital, it's about as little friction as using Amazon, since they have your payment details from other online services you use through the system (like Xbox Live).

<comment><USER21> It's not just games: I tried to buy a Panasonic bread machine on Amazon UK back in January but it was a 'Prime Exclusive'.

I bought it instead from Argos nearby for the same price.

A few days later it was no longer 'exclusive'. Presumably just more Amazon psychological experimentation.

Edit: model is SD-2500

<comment><USER22> Similarly, Pampers nappies have only been available to Prime customers for some months now.

<comment><USER23> Not everywhere. In Japan they are available to everyone still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This seems oddly customer-hostile, which is something I've grown to expect from tech companies but not Amazon in specific.

One can't help but wonder if the damage this does to the brand outweighs the strategic gains through Prime subscriptions. After all, selection and availability is a _huge_ part of Amazon's secret sauce to success, more so than customer service, shipping speed, or any other concern.

If customers lose the ability to assume that they can get anything on Amazon, it's hugely damaging to the brand.

<comment><USER25> Amazon is the only place I _have_ seen blatant user-targeted dark patterns. "Order within the next hour to ship today". Four hours later: "order within the next 2 hours to ship today". Never mind the lowest-bid delivery acting like this is the first package they've ever handled (a phone call, really?), or email spam from checking a price.

I believe a short time after a company acquires a reputation, customers develop a blind spot and you can count on reality being the _opposite_ of that reputation.

<comment><USER26> I think their shipping windows are often just messed up. I've had the opposite situation too, where it says that an item must be ordered within the next 2 hours and then when I get to checkout the window is already passed for the day.

I'm wondering whether the ship timer on the item page isn't quite accurate, and the one on the checkout goes through and does a warehouse-by-warehouse check to see where the nearest warehouse that has stock _and also isn 't closed_ is. As east-coast warehouses close you might get additional availability windows from west-coast warehouses, and their algorithm might not be doing an exhaustive search of when _the last possible warehouse that has stock_ will close.

I'm not saying that it isn't a dark pattern, but there are still some "incompetence" explanations before we need to jump to "malice".

<comment><USER27> Typical conversion rates hover around 3-4%. That is if 100 items were viewed, only 3-4 times they are bought. So, to decrease load on your sourcing engine, it makes sense to cache the "next 2 hours" calculation results and recalculate exactly during checkout.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If Amazon decided to go the Costco / Sam's Club route and charge just for access to their store, I'd probably just shrug and pony it up. I mean, I already pay for it now, and I'm not doing any analysis to find out how much I'm using it and what it's saving me vs. other options.

There are essentially two different kinds of experiences I have when buying goods and services online. Amazon-tier and everything else. I prize the experience of using Amazon so much that they'd have to double the cost of Prime before I'd even start to consider switching.

Amazon has become part of the infrastructure of my life, like Google and my local coffee shop. The switching costs simply and utterly dwarf the cost of doing business with them.

</comment><comment><USER29> I've also noticed Amazon now uses dark patterns to try and force buyers to sign up for Prime. The current strategy is clearly to pressure users into signing up Prime by absolutely any means available.

</comment><comment><USER30> Complained about this a year ago, few people cared: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9565929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9565929)

What's so amazing is that they're only hurting their own business. Nobody sane is going to buy a $99 Prime subscription to buy a $10 Blu-ray or a $60 game. We're just going to discover that Target or Best Buy sells it online for the same price and offers free shipping, and buy it there.

</comment><comment><USER31> So does anyone have a less crappy alternative to Amazon? After canceling my prime membership this year it's gotten even worse trying to use them. Their shipping fees for non-prime users are _insane_.

<comment><USER32> Even if you can get free shipping on Amazon items, the amount of time they spend stalling the shipment is ridiculous. It's better to boycott Amazon because of their anti-consumer attitudes.

<comment><USER33> I doubt they purposely stalling the shipment. When they are waving orders at their DCs. Priority of standard shipping is last. Some companies charge to be in the first waves, like newegg and their expedited processing.

<comment><USER32> Well, there are both a Quora response and a Forbes article decrying their regression in free shipping (or non-Prime) timeliness, with some people suggesting that it is intentional. Most recently I made an order of three items from Amazon and had the chance to cancel all three items two weeks later, before it made it out the door during the "preparing your shipment" phase, and buy them from a local retailer the same day.

Several years ago, it was the case that any items bought from Amazon were processed within two to three days, and the shipping carrier was responsible for any delays. It seems like a strategy to convert more customers into $99/year Prime subscribers.

I don't know why either. It seems like they are reminding their customers that online shopping _is not_ more convenient than the alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> To be honest people shouldn't be complaining they can't get it from Amazon, but getting it from someone else

It's that simple

<comment><USER11> Why not both? Complaining is useful to the target of the complaint (if they care to pay attention) and often gets results.

I don't understand why so many people seem to think that complaining is somehow not a legitimate reaction to this sort of thing.

<comment><USER34> It is certainly a legitimate reaction

But as much as I like Amazon I'm not going to give them free consulting in such a divisive decision

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I canceled my Prime membership a while back now for multiple reasons, but this is frosting on the cake. In order for me to cancel my auto-renewal I had to jump through scary 'cancel your membership' prompts to find the question about auto-renewal. The company has gotten slimier and slimier.

Exclusive markets are are what's wrong with browsers, video games, apps and the Internet today and now it jumps into the physical world as well. This isn't even about true exclusivity, which is a problem in itself, but more akin to crippleware. Non-prime members (still your customers) now have a worse experience than before. If companies that provide content and products just made it easier to find and purchase content and products, they wouldn't have to worry about locking in their customers.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is another experiment to test their monopoly power (like the conflict with Hachette.) If it's successful, expect it to happen across more product ranges. Their monopoly power is built into their valuation; if they can't make it pay, they will eventually crash.

</comment><comment><USER8> And remember, Amazon blocks even Prime members from buying Chromecast or Apple TV devices. Then they lie about the reasons, ranging from: "we're out of stock" to "too many user complaints" to "we aren't licensed to sell this" and on and on.

Amazon no longer cares about the customer as top priority. If you're a Prime member, quit. I've been a customer since 2003 and now am looking at alternatives. I even try to find books outside of the Kindle store, though I note they have strong lockin there. (I never thought it'd be a problem, since Amazon used to always put the customer so far up a pedestal.)

</comment><comment><USER37> In Bezos 2016 Investor Letter, I didn't think "We want Prime to be such a good value, you'd be irresponsible not to be a member." meant this.

</comment><comment><USER38> Only seems to be the US site, at least for now! It really makes no sense though!

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00KL4AROO/ref=s9_simh_g...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00KL4AROO/ref=s9_simh_gw_g63_i2_r?pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=desktop-1&pf_rd_r=31K02W4P4CMAV0GFPD5K&pf_rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=867551787&pf_rd_i=desktop)

<comment><USER16> Amazon UK had prime exclusive content for a while already. Some baby products for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> They actually do the same thing with other items as well. I was trying to buy a Dell monitor the other day, and it was reserved for Prime members only.

</comment><comment><USER5> As someone who buys video games on Amazon relatively often and isn't a Prime member, this is nothing new. Every now and then a game will drop in price a bit but be Prime Exclusive, and then a week or two later it will go back to its original price and be available to everyone again. It's mildly annoying, but I think this article makes it sound like a much bigger deal than it is.

</comment><comment><USER40> Maybe they are doing this on some very low margin products? Are brand new video games low margin?

<comment><USER41> My guess is they are moving loss leaders towards customers that have a higher life-time value, and want to minimize sales to unloyal customers that cost them on a transaction basis.

<comment><USER42> They lost me from Prime when they started doing ads before the programmes and messing up every other delivery. If they want to lose the hundreds of pounds of orders I continue to make, and the hundreds more pounds of AWS spend, they have certainly managed to find an approach to achieve that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> They are doing this with physical CDs as well. For a recent album, I could buy the MP3 version, but I could not buy the CD without a Prime membership.

</comment><comment><USER44> My assumption is if they had enough Prime members buying these exclusive titles they could probably just sell at cost from day 1, therefore driving more traffic to their website. This would obviously hurt local game stores considering they could never do that without a "membership". Although, some stores like BestBuy already do this sort of thing.

</comment><comment> awinter-py Weird but not surprising -- not that different from HBO / netflix negotiating exclusive streaming rights to content. Spotify and youtube's 'deal' departments are more important (and more controversial) than their coders / PMs.

If you don't like this, steer clear of strings-attached content platforms.

<comment><USER45> These games aren't exclusive in any way. They can be bought from a large from a large number of other retailers for a comparable price.

<comment> awinter-py well, they're exclusive in 1 way -- amzn seems to be enforcing the party line that these are 'exclusive items'. If you're a shopper with limited attention, the headline matters more than the comparison shopping outcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Is there a reason for non-console players to even buy in DVD form anymore, instead of Steam or similar markets?

I mean, I get that if you live in Canada or Australia your bandwidth sucks and you have caps, but for most cases download speeds are way faster than DVD shipping speeds.

<comment><USER47> I've heard a few people express concerns around whether they actually own Steam games, and whether those games might suddenly be pulled or otherwise made unavailable without the courtesy of a purchase price refund.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic, but on the other hand, to the best of my knowledge that's never actually happened, so...

<comment><USER48> Maybe not Steam or games, but Amazon has remotely pulled back digital books they sold to their customers (with refund though): [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER47> I know. That's Amazon, though, not Steam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I can't sign up for Prime. They don't offer it in the country I'm in.

So this amounts to saying that they don't want my money. Very well; there are other options.

<comment><USER50> Highly unlikely that they're going to implement this in countries that don't have Prime.

<comment><USER49> There is no Amazon site for Ireland.

I can buy things from any of their sites. However...

\- Amazon.co.uk refuses to ship a number of items outside of Great Britain.

\- Amazon.com has expensive shipping (obviously), and now this thing.

\- Amazon.de doesn't usually help. Besides, I can't read German.

Looking at the Grand Theft Auto example, it's available from Amazon.com but not Amazon.co.uk; the latter, as mentioned, refuses to ship it to me. Amazon.com... might not; I can't tell, now can I? It refuses to let me add to cart without having a Prime membership.

So it looks to me like they've done exactly that.

<comment><USER51> > Amazon.de doesn't usually help. Besides, I can't read German.

The German Amazon site is available in English too. [http://www.amazon.de/gp/switch- language/homepage.html/ref=cs...](http://www.amazon.de/gp/switch- language/homepage.html/ref=cs_switchlang?ie=UTF8&language=en_GB)

<comment><USER49> Well, the site controls are. The item descriptions usually aren't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> "Become a Patron member for exclusive content!"

</comment><comment><USER53> I initially read it as 'non-Prime numbers' \- it got me thinking.

</comment><comment><USER54> I imagine it won't take them many AAA releases to have the numbers to see if this was a good idea or not. I'm fine with Amazon finding more ways to make prime worth it without taking away features from prime members or increasing membership cost.

</comment><comment><USER55> Sounds no different than WalMart/Sam's Club.

</comment><comment><USER56> Still not as bad as when they stole my Prime membership money.</comment>


Grizzly - Java NIO library to build scalable network applications - <AUTHOR> https://grizzly.dev.java.net/

<comment><USER2> Whilst this is obviously a comprehensive library, Java NIO is very easy to use. Gone are the days of trying to get networking to work well in Java.

You can write a very simple highly scalable and reliable http server in a few pages of code (There's a few such examples from sun, including https etc).

Obviously it depends on wether this is a core component of your app, if you need anything out of the box, or massive scalability or other optimizations that the library can't do easily.

<comment><USER3> Idle question from someone unfamiliar with NIO:

My understanding is that it's basically a layer on top of select/poll/events/whatever. Right? select/etc... are a great way of whipping out static content, but if you have to stop to do some processing, you're going to lock things, unless you then spawn a thread, process, or something else to do concurrent work. What does one generally do with NIO?

<comment><USER2> Generally you make sure your network code is separate from any blocking activity.

For example, make a light "network plugin" that deals with your core functionality, then if it needs to go to DB, or do some potentially blocking action, have it call a "helper" which has it's own thread.

For instance, Mibbit handles around 7,000 connections at the peak of the day (3.5k in, 3.5k out). Those are all handled in a single thread. There's an additional thread that handles dns lookups, one to do database stuff. Each one of those just has a synchronized queue listing the jobs, each with a callback to update the network plugin with a reply.

The dns could actually be done asynchronously easily enough, but the gain wouldn't be worth it right now.

It depends on how lengthly other processing is going to be. Quite often you can separate the work up into chunks and just do a little each time (Kind of like your own time slicing). Or split it out into its own dedicated thread and have a job queue as above.

<comment><USER3> > Quite often you can separate the work up into chunks and just do a little > each time (Kind of like your own time slicing).

I was going to mention this above, but this is one of the things that makes Erlang cool - it does that automatically, so that you just write your code, and it takes care of the scheduling.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Effective ECommerce: How Bohemian Guitars Increased Mobile Sales - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sendsonar.com/2015/08/11/ecommerce-over-sms-bohemian-guitars/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a case study that talks about how Bohemian Guitars increased mobile sales by 98% by allowing customers to ask questions just before deciding whether or not to make a purchase. The guitars are really cool and I just bought a ukelele on their Indiegogo campaign! Check it out: [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-boho-series-2-0-by- bo...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-boho-series-2-0-by-bohemian- guitars)

</comment><comment><USER2> Sonar has allowed us to provide personal customer service that has ultimately increased conversions and keep customers happy! Adam - Bohemian Guitars</comment>


AI: Playing Score4 in functional and imperative style (C++,OCaml,F#,C#) - <AUTHOR> http://users.softlab.ece.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/score4.html <comment><USER2> Very nicely done. Thanks!

Just scanning the code, I think showing C++ rocks is pretty much a no-brainer (ducks to avoid food fight) but part of what's happened here, I'll bet, is that you've stayed within the default heap size allocated by the compiler.

It's just a nit, and it's an easy fix too, but I wanted to point that out. The .NET examples are probably doing some mem-safe allocations each trip around, while the C++ is just burning through what it already has.

Also there's another point that needs to be drawn out: your code is much cleaner in imperative because you've solved it functionally first. Most imperative programmers wouldn't write anything that looked like what you did. OO guys would still be constructing object graphs. The language you choose plays a major role in how you solve problems.

As far as the F# speed difference, I've struggled with staying with F# or moving on to OCaml. Right now, I think I'd rather have more libraries and slower speed, so I'm staying with F#. For some reason OCaml seems to be a tougher language to pick up -- the community is a bit scattered and finding help on easy topics isn't easy (at least for me). Plus I like the fact that a lot of stuff developed in Windows for .NET can just plop over in linux and still work. That's worth a bit of speed.

And in any case, if it wasn't, if your code is clean you can move fairly easily between OCaml and F#.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed - on all your points. And... glad you liked it :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like the idea. And at least this is a post that

\- says from the start that the solutions aren't optimal

\- shares the code that gives the quoted results right away

\- makes it easy to verify/check/contribute

First thing I notice though is that it's (looking at the functional F# code) using exceptions for control flow. It seems the author uses a 'NoMoreWork' exception as a kind of break out of a loop.

While my F# is rusty, I doubt that this is a good idea, probably neither beautiful nor fast..

Edit: Another couple of comments. Things that weren't immediately obvious to me after reading the blog entry alone:

\- The make benchmark passes really just one board with two moves to an executable. Just like the time commands before. So what we're measuring is the startup time of the process (native vs. managed/clr) and the cost to find a single/first move.

\- The whole engine thing is designed around the concept of 'I pass the whole board as arguments'. So the driver seems to compute a string representation of the board after each move and _create a new process of the engine_. So - yes, this is a bad idea for managed code. Or anything that could otherwise use JIT.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your kind words. To your points:

\- You are right about measuring the startup time of the binaries with "time"; but in this case, where the execution time for F# is measured in the order of ten seconds, the comparisons are still valid and useful, especially in the context of seeing what kind of an impact switching to imperative-style has (10->8, 1.7->1.4, etc)

\- Passing the whole board as arguments has little (if any) effect on the execution time: e.g. you can see for yourself that if you pass NO arguments (i.e. clean board) the time ratios between languages remain the same. In a game like Score4, the human has to think anyway - and you can see that using C++, even the nasty cmd-line interface leads to response times of less than a second.

\- About F# exceptions: in the absence of "break"... can I do anything else to abort a loop early?

Thanks for your feedback, much appreciated.

<comment><USER4> You could use a while loop or recursion instead of a for loop. A couple of simple things I noticed is that the complexity of your functional code is higher than the imperative - it shows the speed of ocaml that it was able to get you so much performance.

Although, one way to give some advantage back to F# would be to parallelize your code. Last I checked F# allows you to do this more easily due to constructs like async and agents and .net parallel stuff and in a better way since OCaml has a GIL.

\</comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

      List.map (abMinimax (not maximizeOrMinimize) (otherColor color) (depth-1))
      |> List.map snd

iterates through the list twice. You could just as easily have removed the second List.map.

You can replace _(map | > filter)_ with a fold.

      allData |> List.sortBy getScore |> List.rev |> List.head

could sort by negative score. There are a couple other suggestions I could give to replace the use of reference cells and for loops with recursion, comprehensions, unfolds or folds. Some would not be speed improvements but would yield shorter more colloquial code. But I unfortunately can't afford to donate that time at the moment. Sorry I could not give more concrete advice.

<comment><AUTHOR> I replaced the exceptions from the functional F# code with mutable flags and while loops - and its speed improved from being 6 times slower than OCaml, to being 5 times slower.

I also replaced the sort with a fold... and there was no speed improvement (the lists are so small it made no difference).

Oh well, what can you do? :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Why Functional Programming Matters[1] paper builds a minimax in a lazy functional language and then enhances it to an alpha-beta.

The minimax looks like:

      evaluate = maximize . maptree static . prune 5 . gametree

maximize finds the maximum value. static is a heuristic analysis of the value of the board. prune cuts the tree to a certain depth. gametree generates the infinite game tree.

The alphabeta is more complicated, but also fits well within a pageful.

[1]: <http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/courses/cs345/whyfp.pdf>

<comment> loup-vaillant I'm sure the OP would appreciate a Haskell implementation optimized for clarity (not for speed). I wonder how speedy that would be.

<comment><USER6> This is my attempt to translate from the functional OCaml version, focusing on elegancy. If you like to, please help me optimize it while retaining elegancy :) <https://github.com/phuc/Score4-haskell/blob/master/Main.hs>

<comment><AUTHOR> Added to the repos - can you please provide your prefered optimization parameters to GHC ? e.g. a Makefile?

<comment><USER6> Hey ttsiodras, "ghc -O2 Main.hs" should be enough. I've updated the code a bit. It's now half F#'s execution time on my computer :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent. And committed - I will study your code, Haskell is next on my agenda :-)

<comment><USER6> So I updated my code to also print out debug. And Haskell now is almost 4 times faster than F# on my computer ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm... the scores you printed are not correct (look at the two board edges):

C++: sh -c "time ./bin.release/score4 o53 y43 -debug" Depth 7, placing on 0, score:2 Depth 7, placing on 1, score:8 Depth 7, placing on 2, score:8 Depth 7, placing on 3, score:8 Depth 7, placing on 4, score:8 Depth 7, placing on 5, score:8 Depth 7, placing on 6, score:2 5

Your Haskell code:

sh -c "time ./score4.bin o53 y43 -debug" Depth 7, placing on 0, score 0 Depth 7, placing on 1, score 8 Depth 7, placing on 2, score 8 Depth 7, placing on 3, score 8 Depth 7, placing on 4, score 8 Depth 7, placing on 5, score 8 Depth 7, placing on 6, score 0 5

I'll try to see why your code miscalculates on the two borders, but I don't speak Haskell so don't expect much :-)

<comment><USER6> Hi ttsiodras, thanks for poiting out :D. I looked at the code and figured out where it went wrong. I discussed my problem further on <https://github.com/phuc/Score4-haskell/issues/1>. Btw I don't know whether Github notifies everytime I respond. I'm so inefficient at communicating, lol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For fun I did a trivial translation of the C++ version to Go.

Results (with gcc 4.2 -03 -mtune=native -DNDEBUG, head Go -B, Ocamlopt 3.12.0 -unsafe -rectypes -inline 1000):

C++: 0m0.611s

OCaml: 0m1.457s

Go: 0m1.043s

This is on a Macbook Pro 2.53 Ghz Core 2 Duo running OS X 10.5.8.

Go source: <http://pastie.org/2199969>

(With a trivial optimization, the Go version can be improved by ~13%, but I decided not to do that because it'd be a slightly different algorithm.)

<comment><USER7> Ah. Looks like he updated the C++ version to have the optimization I spoke of. So, here's the matching Go version: <http://pastie.org/2202611>

Time: 0m0.796s

<comment><AUTHOR> Committed to the repository - thanks!

<comment><USER7> Ah. Ok then. I spent another few minutes with it after I posted that and made it a little nicer, but not particularly faster: <http://pastie.org/2202963>

May want to use that instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Added it, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ocaml was the first functional language I ever used. I always heard it was fast. I didn't realize it was that fast. That I think is the most interesting thing about this post. I know he says C++ is significantly faster than the other languages. But, I think most people would agree its much easier to solve harder problems quicker in Ocaml thank C++.

</comment><comment><USER9> I implemented this in java when I first learned about minimax in an AI class, so this all looks very familiar to me.

My scoring function must have been weak though. I remember being frustrated that I could still beat the algorithm. It was completely blind to traps that didn't matter in the near term, but that decided the game later when the board was filling up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Me too: It took me two failed attempts before my third version (the current incarnation of scoreBoard), could finally best me.</comment></comment>


SCAMP Robot Can Climb Straight Up Walls - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/stanfords-flying-perching-scamp-can-climb-up-walls <comment><USER2> Very nice how it uses moments to perch on/detach from walls and I like how it catches itself on a fall. I wonder how strong of wins are needed to detach it from the wall. I'd assume it's more than one would think due to slim profile of all the components.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice to see the gecko feet work getting some more interesting hardware. The robotics are interesting and the applications, especially in war zones, are pretty wide open. Since the gecko feet hold without power, a robot like this could recharge via solar power by sitting there, or set up an observation point for forward observers.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow! This is the sort of hardware platform that with wider access will enable some phenomenal new developments.</comment>


Show HN: The Best Chore Chart in the World - <AUTHOR> https://choremate.co <comment><AUTHOR> I explain how Choremate works at [https://keyankousha.com/the-best-chore- chart-in-the-world.ht...](https://keyankousha.com/the-best-chore-chart-in-the- world.html)

I made Choremate for our house, but I know the problem isn't ours alone. My hope is that another household will find the approach useful too.

37% of American adults live in shared housing, up from 25% just a few decades ago. Regardless of the cause of the increase, I'd like coliving to be easier. Choremate made coliving easier for us. And even if Choremate isn't the right solution for everyone maybe it'll lead to one.</comment>