Valve: Linux More Open Than Windows 8 for Gaming - <AUTHOR> http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2012/10/valve-linux-more-viable-than-windows-8.html <comment><USER2> The title (and article) is really bad journalism. I'm an Ubuntu Developer at the summit and listened to this talk live about an hour ago and he said nothing of the sort.

He did say that Microsoft and Apple are moving away from the open platform model and that Valve has always been in favor of open platforms. Linux is the best option for a continuing open platform in the future.

Actual video of the talk will be online within a day or so, so I suggest you watch that instead of reading contrite stories like this one.

Here is a much better article about the talk from OMG Ubuntu: [http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/10/valve-talk-steam-for- linu...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/10/valve-talk-steam-for-linux-at-uds)

<comment><USER3> In this case "open platform" means "platform where a publisher other than the operating system vendor can make a profit".

<comment><USER4> In my view the ability for anyone to hack on their own device is valuable, too. I learned to program because GORILLAS.BAS came with the source code (and I think required you to view it in order to run it!)

I use closed devices with some mixed feelings about it, the thing I'm most sad to support is the move toward devices with bigger barriers toward tinkering than what I had as a kid. I'm probably more accepting of it when it's a device I never had as a kid, but when barriers are constructed for once-open platforms it starts to irk me.

<comment><USER3> I've heard this argument before and it's a load of crap.

If I had a choice between a C64 with BASIC and an iPad with a browser, I'd take the browser _every_ time.

Within twenty seconds you can have <http://jsfiddle.net/> up in a window and be programming JavaScript.

Within a few minutes you could create a Linode account and be using vi through ssh.

Within a few days you could be creating a much more significant application using the enormous selection of _open-source_ tools that never, ever existed on the same platforms that GORILLA.BAS came from. You could do things that were virtually impossible in the 1980s in a matter of days or weeks, even with no prior experience.

People decry the App Store as "closed", but it's basically open to anyone with a hundred bucks and the ability to ship an executable to Apple. Sure, _theoretically_ you could've shipped your game on your C64 on floppy disks, as some people successfully did, but the enormity of this undertaking is well beyond the ability of most beginner programmers. It was basically impossible to go it alone without a publisher for distribution. Now anyone can self- publish.

If you ask me, the ecosystem has never been more open and accessible to developers of all ages and backgrounds. It's also more open, more friendly to users of all stripes, not just enthusiasts. Your grandmother can buy apps through the app store. This sort of thing simply didn't happen in the so- called glorious old days of "open" computers.

<comment><USER4> The barrier to entry for GORILLAS.BAS was "hey, what's this number do and what happens if I change it?"

I didn't even have to know I wanted to learn to program.

I agree with you that there are tons of awesome things at our fingertips for shipping applications to people, or for learning to code once you know that's what you want to do. jsfiddle looks great, if you know you want to learn JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Linode is awesome, once you know you want to host a site. The App Store is incredible, once you can write an acceptable app.

Those are all great things, and they are all a few steps beyond the stage I'm talking about. You're talking about learning to walk; I'm talking about learning to crawl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FTFA> _Windows 8 ships with its own app store and it is not an open platform anymore._

If having an app store is the criterion for not being an open platform, not even Ubuntu qualifies. And last I checked, I can still compile and run whatever I damn well please on Win8.

There wasn't even this level of derp when Apple launched the app store for OS X.

Straight up FUD. Windows will always be the premier gaming platform as long as it has the majority of the desktop base, and by extension the best driver support, and by extension the most games written for it.

Valve is going to kill themselves to attempt to make a point, at this rate.

<comment><USER6> > If having an app store is the criterion for not being an open platform, not > even Ubuntu qualifies.

It doesn't say "Because Windows 8 ships with its own app store, it is not an open platform anymore," so you misinterpreted that.

The difference between the Windows 8 app store and Ubuntu's Software Center is that you can easily add 3rd party repositories to the latter. Also keep in mind that on Windows RT (the ARM version of Windows 8), you can't install any apps from outside the app store, period.

> Windows will always be the premier gaming platform as long as it has the > majority of the desktop base, and by extension the best driver support, and > by extension the most games written for it.

Linux doesn't have to have the best driver support to be sufficient as a gaming platform. If it has enough driver support for games to run well, it has a chance. And the proprietary NVIDIA Linux drivers right now work quite well in my experience. There are a few bugs, but nothing that can't be ironed out with a little time.

Just because Windows has the "majority of the desktop base" doesn't mean it has to be the premiere gaming platform. Gamers are a very select group of people, and there's no reason Valve couldn't target them.

If I were Valve, I would start programs such as "if you spend X hours playing Steam games on Linux, you get a discount on your next game." That would have a _huge_ impact on what gamers are using to play games, and could push other developers to port their games to Linux. As the middleman between millions of gamers and hundreds of game studios, Valve has _enormous_ power here.

<comment><USER7> >> And the proprietary NVIDIA Linux drivers right now work quite well in my experience. There are a few bugs, but nothing that can't be ironed out with a little time.

The proprietary NVIDIA drivers for Linux are built directly from the same source base as the Windows drivers, the only difference being the interface layer between the kernel and the driver. Feature set and performance are identical to the Windows drivers.

I'm not aware of any known critical bugs in the kernel parts. Usually when stuff breaks in the NVidia drivers, it's because of a combination of a kernel update and sloppy package management by the distribution. None of this should be an issue if Valve decides to release some kind of Linux based 'Steam loader' that boots directly to the game itself, or make their own Linux distro with tight control over the kernel and GPU drivers.

I'm not sure how good the ATI linux drivers are these days though.

<comment><USER8> > _"None of this should be an issue if Valve decides to release some kind of > Linux based 'Steam loader' that boots directly to the game itself"_

That's a pretty interesting angle. But it might be a bridge too far. Gamers would almost certainly follow Valve to Linux. But asking them to give up their mp3 players, chat programs and background tasks while they're gaming?

Only if it were a living room solution, which has its own "day 1" sorts of challenges. (e.g. the number of titles with not only gamepad _support_ , but where you truly do not need the keyboard/mouse to play.)

<comment><USER9> >But asking them to give up their mp3 players, chat programs and background tasks while they're gaming?

Wat.

Linux programs like Pidgin have support for almost all IM protocols known to man, it can handle any Portable Media Player with sane behavior (read: identifies as removable storage, which pretty much all players except the shitty Apple ones do) and last time I checked, Linux is capable of multitasking, too.

<comment><USER5> >identifies as removable storage

Managing your music collection as a distinct set of files and folders is a rather 90's concept. What matters is how the files are presented to the end user - they can be all slapped into a single folder and given GUID names as long as the resultant database presents them in a clear and meaningful way.

(Only partly kidding - I think your criterion for a "shitty" music player will find a great deal of dissent :3)

>Linux programs like Pidgin have support for almost all IM protocols known to man

 _Weak_ support. Anything beyond simple chatting almost universally doesn't work. File transfers, picture syncing, god forbid voice and video chat.

<comment><USER9> The thing about identifying as removable storage is that it allows you to use whatever music syncing tool or library program you want, and aren't locked into the universally horrible vendor-supplied excuses for an application. Files in a directory structure are a universal API that almost any program can understand and make use of.

As for the IM protocols, maybe this will prompt people to migrate to better protocols like XMPP. ICQ, MSN, AIM and all those other proprietary protocols with their ad-laden, bloated clients (which I classify as nothing short of malware) should have died years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can only assume that he actually means "we have less competition on Linux", because my experience with Windows 8 as a gamer has been pretty damn good. Everything gaming-related works just as well as Win7, as far as I can tell. The games available on the app store are alright, but I don't see it competing with Steam when it comes to the high-powered AAA titles.

Edit: From another comment, it sounds like this is a bad quote, and that the Valve guy said nothing of the sort. Sorry to Valve for what I wrote previously, and shame on UbuntuVibes...

<comment><USER11> Does Crysis 2 work? The guys at bit-tech.net couldn't get it to run on Windows 8: [http://www.bit- tech.net/bits/software/2012/10/26/windows-8-p...](http://www.bit- tech.net/bits/software/2012/10/26/windows-8-performance-benchmarks/7)

<comment><USER10> I don't own Crysis 2 to test, sorry. The only program that I had installed that flat-out broke due to the upgrade was actually Media Player Classic Home Cinema, which works fine now after updating to the latest version.

Edit: To expand a little bit on that, I've been a Windows user since the 3.1 days. I've done most (if not all) of the upgrades during that time frame at some point, and there are always programs that break. Games tend to be particularly fragile in this respect, possibly due to relying on undocumented/unsupported behavior to squeeze out extra performance.

Win98->XP (ME? what's that?) and XP->Vista were both particularly bad for games, as I think anyone old enough to be a PC gamer during those times remembers. However, it wasn't because XP or Vista weren't 'viable' for gaming - the games just needed patches to adjust to new OS behavior or remove reliance on deprecated APIs. Win7->Win8 is more comparable to Vista->Win7, judging by my experience so far. There are things that will break and certain games will need patches, but it won't be anything like the days of needing "Vista patches" for 90% of your games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm really excited by this. I've always thought of gaming as one of the things really holding linux back from taking a more reasonable market share on the desktop (I said one of). Even people who prefer linux are forced to dual-boot or use a VM. This certainly isn't a magic bullet, but I sure hope it makes linux a more viable and mainstream choice.

<comment><USER13> The problem is as far as I've seen: people don't shift 'just because' or even when the other option is 'slightly better'. In fact, Linux is going to be a sub-standard choice for gamers for a good amount of time even after steam for Linux catches on with the Linux community. The Windows games that people already purchased aren't going to vaporise there's a lot holding them back to the old platform.

People will install Linux enmasse when Linux gets something that the other options don't have -- when desirable games come out that can ONLY play on Linux and no other platform.

<comment><USER14> I'd be a bit more optimistic than that. It's not unusual to meet technically minded people who use Linux for getting stuff done, but dual boot Windows for gaming. If enough games are available for Windows, that's going to increase the market for Linux-only computers, which is another key part of the puzzle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't really get the reaction by Valve.. How is Windows 8 is going to affect Steam?? Current users will still be able to install Steam. The only thing that the Win8 app store going to sell is the Metro/WinRT apps, which is a completely different thing than what Steam is offering... are they worried about their future plan or something?

</comment><comment><USER16> > When asked about new Team Fortress 2 Hats, he said that some rumors have > been circulating but he has no information about it.

Glad to see we've got our priorities in order!

</comment><comment><USER17> If companies like Valve find it difficult to distribute their content without paying a vendor tax, I fully anticipate some kind of boot to Acme Games Inc. bootstrapping.

All one requires is a lite distro that'll fire up steam. They can ship it on USB sticks. If it's not possible to boot from USB, just install it from the USB. Would make the physical packaging smaller.

Imagine popping into you local shop, picking up a free (or nominal) USB. Installing the mega lite distro before downloading and playing games.

Whilst the vendors will inch towards owning the ecosystems for their platforms, they'll always be innovators who will circumnavigate. Unless you're leasing the hardware under license I struggle to see one can realistically prevent OS installations on standard hardware.

</comment><comment><USER18> They "need" pulseaudio? Yikes. I was hoping people had stopped using it D:

<comment> iso8859-1 what's wrong with it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone find it bizarre that Valve is so upset about the Windows Store not being "open" when they, in Steam, run an app store that is far, FAR harder to get your software distributed in?

<comment><USER20> No, as the Windows store is baked into windows 8 so Microsoft controls to to bottom but steam only controls your games.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Valve wants to be _the_ Linux app store for proprietary apps. Proprietary apps presently tend to crap all over the system in unpredictable ways; Valve offers not having to worry about this.

This is why Valve is so dead against Windows 8: the Microsoft app store.

</comment><comment><USER22> I totally need to get a gaming-capable computer to run Linux on, and install Steam on it! (Currently my Linux laptop just has old Intel graphics which is ... rather underpowered. Also need to wait for Steam-for-Linux to become public, obviously.)

<comment><USER23> Now that's something I don't know if I could change. I've always installed Linux on my older, outdated hardware. I've never purchased a brand new, top of the line machine and thought about installing Linux.

<comment><USER24> I did, and then overclocked it. Totally worth it to combat my tendency to switch over to hacker news while compiling.

<http://xkcd.com/303/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Valve in cooperation with Canonical. Now we know why Ubuntu needs to have some secret projects.

</comment><comment><USER26> > When asked about new Team Fortress 2 Hats, he said that some rumors have > been circulating but he has no information about it.

Did people really ask about hats at the Ubuntu Developer Conference?

<comment><USER2> This was a random audience question during the Q+A at the end of the talk, jokingly asked before a real question

<comment><USER27> And if they were passing out a limited number of Unique or Unusual hats, it'd be like passing out Benjamins. The TF2 hat market is _fascinating_.

<comment><USER2> My guess is there will be a hat for people who have run the game on linux at least once, very similarly to the way there was a hat for people who ran the game on mac at least once

<comment><USER27> They probably won't limit it like they did earbuds, which are the most fungible of high-dollar-value game items (c.f. <http://tf2finance.com/> for dollar value).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cost-Efficient Continuous Integration - <AUTHOR> http://taras.glek.net/blog/2014/02/06/cost-efficient-continious-integration/

<comment><USER2> A little sad to read they're thinking about replacing Buildbot. I spent quite a bit of time making a Buildbot-based CI system and was very impressed with its capabilities.

> "Bare metal virtualization with OpenStack for Mac, Windows, ARM boards is an > open problem"

I guess, more specifically, is the _programmatic_ virtualization of these systems. As you can't easily program into the cold-start process of Mac or Windows. Whereas e.g. with RedHat/CentOS you have a kickstart file.

<comment><USER3> I use buildbot but it does annoy me. Apart from things like not understanding ipv6 (Twisted's problem I gather), the main issue is that it is hard to actually get reproducible builds as unlike say Travis CI it does not rebuild an environment from scratch for each build.

<comment><USER2> That's not really buildbot's fault. You have a lot of control on how your project builds.

Our build system created a chroot each time it went to build - so that got us the clean environment we needed. Buildbot had no effect on that, it just ran the build script.

If you really wanted to you can have buildbot coldstart a machine from scratch - we coldstarted machines for testing, but it was definitely doable for building as well.

<comment><USER3> True, I probably will do. But I also forgot to mention its inability to clean up stray processes, ita habit of crashing, and all the other small annoyances...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand how it can be cost efficient running CI on Amazon AWS? Seems like it would be cheaper with a private cloud ...

<comment><USER3> Well it is a bursty workload, depending when people commit, so some spillage into public cloud probably makes sense, with base levels on private infrastructure. But they do say they intend to do most in house.</comment></comment>


Taking down 1.6 lakh bots disrupting Twitter trends - <AUTHOR> https://www.firstpost.com/india/amid-anti-caa-protests-this-coder-amplified-anti-establishment-voices-by-taking-down-1-6-lakh-bots-that-disrupted-twitter-trends-7898331.html/ <comment><USER2> Just a test comment to see if it shows up, because this shitty website seems to be shadowing me (and probably thousands of other users, w/o their knowledge; they're just posting comments and they don't show up).</comment>


Show HN: An Opinionated Erlang Autoformatter - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/old-reliable/steamroller <comment><AUTHOR> By coincidence there are a couple of other Erlang autoformatters under development at the moment:

\- rebar3_fmt: [https://github.com/AdRoll/rebar3_format](https://github.com/AdRoll/rebar3_format) \- offers lots of config options, as opposed to steamroller which has very few.

\- erlfmt: don't think this has been released yet. It's designed to (probably) only change whitespace, as opposed to steamroller which makes minor code improvements.

An exciting time for Erlang developer tools!</comment>


Show HN: My weekend project in Corona - <AUTHOR> http://motivatedideas.com/2011/01/unbroken-chain-written-using-corona-in.html

<comment><USER2> Did you have iPhone dev experience before the project? If so, how does Corona compare?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I haven't developed with Objective-C, so I can't really compare. What I can say is that Corona makes it extremely easy to get something on the screen and start going.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Are there any questions that I can answer about Corona development or the app?

<comment><USER3> I've also been thinking about Corona for some non-game apps. How is it at handling text in general -- working with fonts, wrapping text, special formatting, etc.?

Thanks for offering to ask questions. Also, I had no idea apps were compiled on their servers... that's an interesting approach.

<comment><AUTHOR> Using different fonts is easy. You just list the font that you want and the size. As for wrapping, in their code exchange, someone has implemented wrapping functionality.

Text objects are just like anything else in corona, you can rotate and animate them to your hearts content.</comment></comment></comment>


Toronto is experiencing a "brain gain" - <AUTHOR> https://blog.brainstation.io/what-we-can-learn-from-torontos-brain-gain/ <comment><USER2> Another important thing the article didn't mention is that the Toronto house price bubble is popping pretty hard[1], which is making it a very attractive city to settle down in, especially considering its consistently high quality of life scores (e.g. in the Mercer survey).

[1] [https://toronto.listing.ca/real-estate-price- history.htm](https://toronto.listing.ca/real-estate-price-history.htm)</comment>


A Letter from Iceland: A World without Money - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/66c87994-aec1-11dd-b621-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1 <comment><USER3> Use this link to bypass the "register to read the whole article" rubbish:

[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/66c87994-aec1-11dd-b621-000077b076...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/66c87994-aec1-11dd-b621-000077b07658,Authorised=true.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F66c87994-aec1-11dd-b621-000077b07658.html%3Fnclick_check%3D1&nclick_check=1)

<comment><AUTHOR> This should work: [http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/66c87994-aec1-11dd-b621-000077b076...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/66c87994-aec1-11dd-b621-000077b07658.html)

<comment><USER4> Gave me only the first two paragraphs. jgranby's link, above, gave me the whole thing.

<comment><USER5> I had the opposite result - tortilla's link worked, jgranby's didn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can watch this whole thing play out, and see how it ends, if you read about the Argentine bank crisis:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_economic_crisis_>(1999–2002)

(I have friends in Buenos Aires, which is for some reason a security hacker hotbed).

In some ways I can think of, Iceland is much better off than Argentina was; Iceland is the victim of a short-lived failure of financial engineering, while Argentina's bank run was caused by long-term systemic corruption and unemployment.

<comment><USER7> Tyler Cowen says "I genuinely cannot imagine what the endgame looks like."

[http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/10...](http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/10/iceland- what-do.html)

Since you can see how it ends you should explain it to him.

<comment><USER6> Did you notice all the references to Argentina in the comments for that post?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is, by far, one of the best written articles I have read in a long time. Thanks.

<comment><USER9> It surely is well written, but distilled to its essence, here it is: Our banks collapsed and our credit cards stopped working. Bad banks!

So there's no real subsistence crisis yet? I wish there was about how the people who were hit the hardest were coping, but then again I remember that Iceland's population is less than half that of Boston and wonder how much more press coverage they are getting relative to their population size. Now why a population of 320,000 would elect to face these coming hardships by hunkering down and not moving to a more diversified and larger economy, that is fascinating and the author does speak about the cultural roots responsible for that attitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> there's plenty of money in the world, just no value. any government can print up a trillion dollars. we have half a quadrillion dollars in total outstanding global debt (all govt, private, hedged, and derivative-based debts)...one must wonder when global citizenry will awaken to the fact that global fiat currencies are all converging at worthlessness simultaneously

<comment><USER5> Sigh, this stupid meme again.

Fiat money is backed by something - the majority of the time it's backed by real estate, or other real property.

Fiat money allow the value of property to be represented as cash.

If I build a house there is more value in the world, so there should be more paper money too - without affecting inflation. This is what happens with fiat money.

On the other hand if we use gold, then if I create value - a house - you can't also create more gold to match it, so instead I just deflated the value of the gold (i.e. the ratio of value of real propery vs the value of all the gold just changed) - that's bad.

Gold money does not, and can not work unless you are in a static economy. Fiat money works in both cases.

Please spread the news: the anti fiat money/anti federal reserve/anti fractional reserve banking meme's are dead.

<comment><USER11> _Fiat money is backed by something - the majority of the time it's backed by real estate, or other real property._

Does that mean I can redeem my dollar for a specific amount of land or real property? Or do you mean it's 'backed' by such property to the extent that I could trade it for such property, maybe -- in which case the value of everything I own is 'backed' by a diversified portfolio consisting of basically every other asset in the universe.

 _Fiat money allow the value of property to be represented as cash._

Any currency allows this. If you have a currency backed by gold, or barrels of oil, or heroin futures, you can represent the value of a house in terms of that currency. In fact, you can represent the house as a single unit of a currency denominated in houses.

 _On the other hand if we use gold, then if I create value - a house - <USER2> can't also create more gold to match it, so instead I just deflated the value of the gold (i.e. the ratio of value of real propery vs the value of all the gold just changed) - that's bad._

Why is a declining real price level bad? It rewards saving, keeps interest rates low, and makes people want to accumulate productive assets rather than natural resources, property, or other hedges. Also, why do we trust people not to print up more fiat money? I can certainly trust gold miners not to 'print' up more gold -- the market is just too inelastic.

 _Please spread the news: the anti fiat money/anti federal reserve/anti fractional reserve banking meme's are dead._

I'm sorry the meme is are dead. It has lasted a surprisingly long time, what with the long history of governments' responsible stewardship over printing presses, banking systems, and the like. Why on earth would anyone think that a fiat system does anything other than adjust, like clockwork, to the size of economy? Why doesn't someone just tell them that $1 in 2008 can buy about as much real estate, food, or clothing that $1 in 1908 could?

The dollar is a pretty stable currency, and it hasn't faced any serious crises. So shouldn't its ability to hold most of its value be a great argument in favor of fiat currency? I bet people would even consider your ideas sensible if the dollar had only lost a modest amount of its value -- 5%, 10%, maybe 15%. So, __ars __, how well has our tailored-to-the-economy, modern, anti-meme fiat currency done during that time period?

<comment><USER12> _It rewards saving, keeps interest rates low, and makes people want to accumulate productive assets rather than natural resources, property, or other hedges._

People won't accumulate productive assets, they'll horde money, which will contribute further to declining prices. This will put an economy into a deflationary spiral.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: govuptime.com - <AUTHOR> http://govuptime.com/ <comment><USER3> Metrics are cool and all, but this glosses over the really important story here, which unfortunately seems to elude much of the general public: that a small minority of republicans are subverting the budget process because they don't like a law. They cannot be allowed to do this. I can only assume the rest of the RNC is going along with it because they are stupid or cowards.

<comment><USER4> > a small minority of republicans are subverting the budget process because > they don't like a law

So, not to get into a partisan argument (because I'm not a Republican), but the Supreme Court battle for the individual mandate imposed by the ACA circumvented the House's budgetary authority here, and that's why we're log- jammed at the moment.

The Constitution prescribes that all spending bills must originate in the House. This is called the 'Origination Clause' (Article 1, §7), and states that "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills".

The ACA originally imposed fees, but as the Supreme Court challenge (NFIB v Sebelius) declared imposing fees would be unconstitutional, but that could be easily circumvented by imposing the fees as a tax, for which Congress has authority. In that process though, taxes are at the discretion of the House, and the Senate ignored that -- then neglectfully failed to pass even a single appropriations bill over the past five years that could have headed this off.

Yes, I know that blaming Republicans is cool and all, and fits the current media narrative, but in this particular case, it bluntly ignores the absenteeism of the Senate for the past five years, and both parties, and indeed both wings of Congress are at fault.

<comment><USER5> > So, not to get into a partisan argument (because I'm not a Republican), but > the Supreme Court battle for the individual mandate imposed by the ACA > circumvented the House's budgetary authority here, and that's why we're log- > jammed at the moment.

This is simply false.

> The Constitution prescribes that all spending bills must originate in the > House.

Presumably, you mean tax bills, as saying this of spending bills would both be _wrong_ and _irrelevant to the issue at hand_.

> The ACA originally imposed fees, but as the Supreme Court challenge (NFIB v > Sebelius) declared imposing fees would be unconstitutional, but that could > be easily circumvented by imposing the fees as a tax, for which Congress has > authority.

No, _NFIB_ v. _Sebelius_ [1] upheld the individual mandate _as_ a valid exercise of Congress' taxing power.

It did not strike down a "fee" in the law and say that that "could be easily circumvented" by imposing a tax to replace the fee, as you suggest.

> In that process though, taxes are at the discretion of the House, and the > Senate ignored that

No, as noted, tax bills must _originate_ in the House, they are not at the discretion of the House. And, in any case, that's all irrelevant, since, contrary to your mischaracterization, the Supreme Court didn't strike down the PPACA individual mandate and invite Congress to replace it with a tax, it found that it _was_ valid _as_ a tax.

[1] [http://www2.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/Natl_Fe...](http://www2.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/Natl_Federation_of_Independent_Business_v_Sebelius_No_Nos_11393_1)

<comment><USER4> It was not originally presented as a tax, but as fees, Justice Roberts' categorization of the fee as a tax was the first time that had happened.

Beyond that, yes, I did conflate spending and taxation, but both taxes are indeed at the discretion of the House, or we wouldn't have the impasse that we currently do.

Regardless, my point remains that either the Democratically controlled Senate or the Republican controlled House could reopen the government today with a simple vote, and I cannot fault Boehner or Reid for being just as obstinate as the other, when both are clearly being equally bull-headed.

<comment><USER5> > It was not originally presented as a tax, but as fees.

How something is presented is tangential, and often outright irrelevant, to its Constitutional status. You statement that the Court struck down the mandate but offered a tax as an option is simply, directly, factually _wrong_. They upheld it, which is exactly the opposite of striking it down.

> but both taxes are indeed at the discretion of the House, or we wouldn't > have the impasse that we currently do.

No, if anything relevant to the current situation (in which the critical thing which allows it to produce a shutdown is _spending_ , not _taxes_ ) was at the _discretion_ of the House, we would _not_ have an impasse. The House would dictate their will, and it would be done -- no impasse.

We have an _impasse_ because, like any law, appropriations (whether in the form of the budget or more limited appropriations bills) must be approved by both houses and the President (or by both houses with sufficient support to override a veto), and there is a lack of consensus between the _three_ (two colletive and one individual) actors involved, not because the matters involved are at the discretion of any one of those actors.

<comment><USER4> I feel like this argument is one of semantics, so I'll just attempt to clarify.

Justice Roberts, the swing vote, would have struck down the penalty but for his characterization of it as a tax, as well as having characterized that tax as a flat penalty against which modifiers were imposed. As a result of its tax characterization, it violates the Origination Clause of the Constitution, which has never been remedied.

Whether not the House approves of a new tax is at the discretion of the House. You are clearly correct in that both wings of Congress need to approve of it, but either party can reject and be simply done.

I appreciate the corrections, but much of them were, I feel, implicit in the tone of my original post, though yes, I did overstate the NFIB decision.

<comment><USER5> > As a result of its tax characterization, it violates the Origination Clause > of the Constitution

That's a fine assertion, but _if_ it were true _then_ it would not be a valid exercise of the taxing power, and since the Supreme Court ruled that it was a valid exercise of the taxing power, a majority of the Supreme Court clearly does not believe that it is true. And note that the issue of whether it was a proper exercise of that power was briefed in the case by both supporters and opponents of the bill.

The procedural history of PPACA is, to say the least, convoluted, but the actual bill in which it was contained was a bill originating in the House (as was the reconciliation measure immediately passed amending it which is generally viewed as part and parcel of PPACA) [1] -- so, strictly speaking, the bill _did_ originate in the House (every single letter in the final bill was the result of an Amendment in the Senate, and the House then concurred in the Senate amendments, but the Origination clause _explicitly_ permits the Senate to amend bills subject to it the same as any other legislation.) So, even ignoring the fact that _NFIB v. Sebelius_ essentially forecloses the argument anyway, the facts seem pretty clearly contrary to your Origination Clause claim.

> Whether not the House approves of a new tax is at the discretion of the > House.

The House _did_ approve of the individual mandate in PPACA. Otherwise, there wouldn't be an Act of Congress to be the subject of _NFIB v. Sebelius_.

[1] for details, including an in-depth discussion of the procedural history, see [http://www.aallnet.org/main-menu/Publications/llj/LLJ- Archiv...](http://www.aallnet.org/main-menu/Publications/llj/LLJ- Archives/Vol-105/no-2/2013-7.pdf)

<comment><USER4> That'll take a bit to read, so don't take my non-response as ignoring you. Thanks for the link, I'll get back to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a misleading dataviz, I'm afraid. There are around 4 million federal personnel, of which 800k are furloughed, which means the government is running at 80%.

So, at the very least, 'Is the federal government operational?' should be 0.8 instead of zero (aka, 'no'). I would also expect the 'service level' calculator to reflect this.

Update, citation from US Office of Personnel Mgmt: [http://www.opm.gov/policy- data-oversight/data-analysis-docum...](http://www.opm.gov/policy-data- oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal-employment-reports/historical- tables/total-government-employment-since-1962/)

<comment> brown9-2 Do you have a source for the 4 million number? Most reports this week have said 1.8 million total.

Regardless of how many are furloughed versus working unpaid, not paying that many people will have a big economic impact the longer this goes on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I chuckled at the "A SysAdmin would be pissed." line and then checked the source to see if there was any javascript which was going to change this line as the uptime % dropped lower and lower.

I was disappointed there wasn't, but perhaps it is some dynamic magic that happens on page load or something....

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea.

<comment><USER8> I don't get the downtime comparison. In government, it's not the result of an unplanned outage that is being addressed to bring the system back up. Rather our governmental "sysadmins" decided to bring the system down, and can simply decide when to bring it back up.

<comment><USER9> Downtime is downtime - if you're measuring service reliability the planned or unplanned nature of it being offline doesn't really come into play. When people say five 9s, they don't mean "except for when you decide to take it offline".

<comment><USER10> What? No, that's completely untrue. We guarantee 4 nines on some of our services, but they're measured with 2 hours of allowed downtime early Sunday mornings (we usually don't need this, but very occasionally we do).

<comment><USER9> Then I'm sorry to say, you're doing 4 nines wrong.

<comment><USER10> How do you figure? 99.99% of the time our clients expect us to be up, we're up. We're not the electric company; if we're up the right 166 hours in a week our customers aren't impacted.

If you turn your monitor off at night, does it suddenly have 70% availability/reliability?

<comment><USER9> 99.99% availability is almost always predicated on 24/7 uptime numbers, not 24/6 plus an extra 22 hours.

If you say to someone "We have four nines of uptime", and they ask how you apply kernel patches, and you say "oh we just do it during our 1% of downtime", they'll boggle at you, and for good reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The federal government _is_ operational, so the text at the top of the page is politically dishonest.

We still have a federal government that is taking care of national defense, among a number of other things.

"Non-essential" services have been suspended, while "essential" are still operational.

Frankly, I'd like it if it stayed this way. The government shouldn't tax-and- force in "non-essential" areas.

<comment><USER12> Why, no, I don't _really_ need to get an SSN, but thank you for asking! I guess it's not really _essential_ to me and my family... [1]

Seriously, though, why are people popping up like mushrooms saying how it would be much better to get rid of stuff the government currently does, without proposing to actually replace it with _something_? I recommend reading Yegge's "Have you ever legalized marijuana?" [2]

[1]: [http://www.socialsecurity.gov/shutdown/](http://www.socialsecurity.gov/shutdown/)

[2]: [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever- legali...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legalized- marijuana.html)

<comment><USER13> I would greatly prefer not to have a SSN as long as I wasn't the only one.

That essay's factual assertions were disproven by later events in Colorado where a chaotic and mostly unplanned transition (which neglected to come up with solid answers to any of stevey's questions) towards mostly-legalization went down without any serious consequences.

As it turns out, it really is as easy as saying "whatever, just do it now" and answering every hypothetical issue with "if that actually happens, we'll deal with it when it happens". The demons the government is protecting us from don't actually exist.

<comment><USER14> Yegge wasn't trying to say such things are impossible, just that they are non- trivial. The legalization process here in CO is still underway, and is involving a lot of hard work from both lawmakers and the fledgling MMJ industry, not to mention all the years of leg-work by activists to pass the law in the first place.

While it's good that the sky isn't falling, and the situation represents a _vast_ improvement over the Drug War, neither is it all sunshine and roses. Everyone involved has their laundry list of complaints and injustices as the exact laws and policies are being defined and implemented, whether it's the dispensaries, the authorities, or the consumers (not to mention all the counties that trying to opt out or pass their own laws). And of course, no one knows what will happen if/when the feds change their (mostly) hands-off approach.

Should we tackle hard problems? Absolutely. Voters in Colorado and Washington made the right choice, and in the end we'll have more freedom and fewer wasted tax dollars. But the worst way to start solving a hard problem is to pretend it's not hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ah, that chart on the bottom is on a log scale. I wasn't expecting that... and if I didn't look closer I would have completely misinterpreted it (for example, it appears that the DoD is mostly shut down).

<comment><USER16> It's downright deceitful, in my opinion. The entire page is trying to exaggerate the significance of the shutdown.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not attempting to be deceitful. The problem is the DOD has 8x as many employees as the next largest agency. If spaced without a logarithmic scale, the rest of the agencies are so insignificant it doesn't have any effect at all.

To try to avoid the confusion, I'm working on another graph of percentages working for each agency, and a disclaimer about the scaling.

<comment><USER17> Make a 2nd chart, with little inset zoomy lines to connect the 2 charts (like you see on a paper map that shows a zoom of the downtown core)

Like this: [http://xkcd.com/radiation/](http://xkcd.com/radiation/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there a good js library for doing this style chart?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nice dashboard :) Out of curiosity, where did you get the data re: who is furloughed from which departments? I have been working on a similar data graphic but had to collect that data in a Google Doc by hand with a couple colleagues from the OMB's list of contingency plans. I'd be curious to compare my data with yours.

FWIW I'm working on visualizing it with a treemap instead of bar charts - <USER2> progress is here but still has lots of design work left to do:

[https://github.com/dandelany/shutdown2013](https://github.com/dandelany/shutdown2013)

[http://cognitiveharmony.net/experiments/shutdown2013/](http://cognitiveharmony.net/experiments/shutdown2013/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've got to ask one of the other guys where he got the data. It's available via json in our project here: [https://github.com/dvito/govuptime](https://github.com/dvito/govuptime)

<comment><USER18> Thanks! If anyone is interested in my data, there's a CSV & JSON in the github and the shared Google Doc is here:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsyXWqYXia4PdGl...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsyXWqYXia4PdGlDWGVFODF2T0hYV05nM1NESXp4OHc&usp=sharing#gid=0)

Looks pretty similar to yours, mostly... Mine is less-complete at the moment but also tries to break some agencies down by sub-agency (eg. IRS-specific stats within the Dept. of Treasury). If anyone would like to contribute, let me know and I'll make you an editor on that doc (my email is in my HN profile or on that github project).

<comment><AUTHOR> I talked to dvito, he said he compiled it by hand, so he might incorporate your data into ours.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the data. Any idea where to get $ of salary not being paid to each department.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the only source for that data would be through the OMB, but I'm not sure where you could find it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It'd be nice to see a percentage of the Federal government shut down. I heard it's only around 18%.

<comment><USER21> Just going by the rough employee counts it would be 40%, 800k furloghed out of 2 million total. This whole business of forcing "essential" employees to work without pay, which would be illegal for any other employer to do, is keeping things from getting out of control for now.

<comment><USER22> Point of technicality, it's not "essential," it's "exempt from furlough."

There are plenty of government functions that are "essential" that have been mothballed for the shutdown. For example, there's no money for Federal Highway Grants, so the people who manage Federal Highway Grants are furloughed. When there's no funding, there's a lot fewer people needed.

The "exempt from furlough" employees constitute a much smaller pool of activities: those that can not be stopped. For example, FEMA employees that are responding to TS Karen, Border Patrol agents, TSA employees, VA Hospital workers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's too bad the [http://www.usdebtclock.org/](http://www.usdebtclock.org/) isn't updated for Furlough, it would show some pretty happy numbers right now.

<comment><USER24> Except I had the impression that restarting shelved projects, catching up after delays, etc. is going to end up costing more money than the shutdown saves. Not to mention the effect on the economy if it goes on for too long, which will affect tax revenues.

[Edited to add:] Also, my understanding is that you can't get an EIN (Employer ID Number) issued during the shutdown, which means you can't legally start a new business and hire employees until this is over.

<comment><USER25> Interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It would be cool if on the bar chart the two bars for each agency could be combined; make the furloughed employees in blue and show the rest of the agency in grey-blue or something like that, so it more visually shows how the agencies are diminished.

<comment><USER15> If the author chooses to do this, _absolutely_ get rid of the log scale. The chart makes it look like 95% of the DoD civilians are on furlough. Its 50%. The author is simply trying to show too much on that chart, and s/he is inadvertently making it look way worse to the average person (who doesn't know what a log scale is) than is intended.

I may lose my salary because of this shutdown (this thing affects way more than direct govt employees), so I am probably biased towards making this seem as bad as possible. But I can't stand charts that are misleading.

<comment><USER27> Seconded--I like seeing my data on a linear scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Excellent. I look forward to that downtime number getting worse (or better, depending on how one looks at it).

</comment><comment><USER29> Do you think they have some kind of SLA, you get your money back a la amazon EC2 ? :)

<comment><USER30> not until Bezos becomes President. How about Government-as-a-Service? (I mean for regular citizens :)

<comment><USER31> Read "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson, if you haven't.

<comment><USER30> thank you, sounds interesting about brainstem BIOS/etc... , while other staff (i looked up from Wikipedia):

" The federal government of the United States has ceded most of its power to private organizations and entrepreneurs.[3] Franchising, individual sovereignty, and private vehicles reign (along with drug trafficking, violent crime, and traffic congestion). Mercenary armies compete for national defense contracts while private security guards preserve the peace in sovereign, gated housing developments. ... . The remnants of government maintain authority only in isolated compounds where they transact tedious make-work that is, by and large, irrelevant to the dynamic society around them."

sounds very similar to USSR/Russia around 1989-92. It were a fun times :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Since a major part of the federal budget is its several million employees, I'd also like to see a ticker that shows how the deficit is behaving during the massive furlough ... is it going down?

And what about unemployment? Is it funded even with the shutdown? And are furloughed federal employees eligible for unemployment compensation?

I'm not going to pick sides in the current battle, but I do think the federal government is far too big, and that we really don't get enough for the money we put into it. One interesting side effect of the current standoff is that we can see what it's like without most of the government ... perhaps we should trim off the parts we (collectively) don't seem to miss.

<comment><USER33> "I'd also like to see a ticker that shows how the deficit is behaving during the massive furlough ... is it going down?"

Doubtful; historically furloughed employees are given back pay once a shutdown of this nature is over. Also don't forget all the lost productivity from all those employees sitting at home instead of doing what they normally do.

"are furloughed federal employees eligible for unemployment compensation?"

Yes.

"we can see what it's like without most of the government"

I don't think you can. If you didn't mow your grass or trim the landscaping in your yard for a week or two no one would likely notice. Let it go longer and all of a sudden your property is the eye sore on the block and you're going to get angry calls from the neighbors.

I'm with you on government being generally too big or rather inefficient but politicians never seem to want to address that in a meaningful way it's always in terms of we are spending to little or to much. Instead they might look at making it easier to fire an under performing worker and provide more budget flexibility and incentives for automation and efficiency instead of just throwing more clerical workers or benjamins at a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I made another chart to visualize percentage of furloughed. NASA, HUD, ED are among the hardest hitters:

[http://vida.io/discussion/WgBMc4zDWF7YpqXGR](http://vida.io/discussion/WgBMc4zDWF7YpqXGR)

thatrailsguy, thanks for the data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank dvito for compiling. This is a great visualization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Feature request: hover pop ups explaining what each of the acronyms mean.

<comment><USER34> This is exactly what I was going to recommend. Maybe a sentence or two describing what the department does as well. I'm sure most non-Americans (and even most Americans) don't know what the DOI does, for example.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll look into this.

<comment><USER25> Ya, this would be awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> NSA still working. Damn.

</comment><comment><USER36> Nice! Just a suggestion: add mouseover tooltips to the department acronyms w/ their full name.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm not sure if it's just me but the scale on the graph seems a little odd.

</comment><comment><USER38> There are a lot of contractors sitting on the sidelines, too, made to take leave or, if they don't have leave, they go without pay. In other words, the "man hours lost" is probably much higher.

<comment><AUTHOR> But very hard to calculate. If we had a solid source of information on this, I could add it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Looks great! Id advise adding some Facebook sharing tags and maybe an image. Right now its just a link with no content or image on my fb feed.

<comment><USER25> Can do!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hi everyone, @GSMcNamara here reporting from a car on the side of an interstate over 4G. Deployed an update just now. Once at my destination I'll respond to all the comments. Thanks for the support! 13,695 unique visitors so far, keep it up!

</comment><comment><USER40> It would be nice if this also showed how much money the shutdown has cost, being that it costs $12.5 million/hour.

[http://www.cnbc.com/id/101078145](http://www.cnbc.com/id/101078145)

<comment><USER41> like this? [http://shutdown.outline.com/](http://shutdown.outline.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Most enterprise apps have an SLA of at least 99.9%. If the government was an email server for example, for the month of October they'd like have to give a partial refund to their customers for the downtime.

</comment><comment><USER43> My condolences to people living in countries with dysfunctional politics.

<comment><USER44> So, most of the world population?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> That could benefit from the <abbreviation> tag.

</comment><comment><USER46> Non-linear bar graph scales should be a last resort.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The other guys that did most of the work will weigh in in a couple of hours. I just wrote the hour calculation.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dvito](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dvito) is one of the creators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Feature request: It would be nice if this page had the total # of employees / furloughed employees.

<comment><USER48> I'll get on that. I'm thinking of adding some other ways of looking at the data as well, since I'll have some actual time this weekend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> The funnier version: [http://www.thedailyshow.com/](http://www.thedailyshow.com/)

Or as a download: [http://thepiratebay.sx/search/daily%20show/0/7/0](http://thepiratebay.sx/search/daily%20show/0/7/0)

</comment><comment><USER50> Is the IRS still operating?

<comment><USER51> Yes and No. They are still collecting their "fair share" but their support lines will go unanswered.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2013/10/04/cant- stop...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2013/10/04/cant-stop-the- machine-during-shutdown-irs-computers-still-churn-out-tax-liens-levies-and- bills/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Could you add comma formatting for the mouseover bubble numbers?

<comment><USER25> Added to our TODO!

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> How many 9s does the US government have for its existence?

</comment><comment><USER54> What does ``Service level for last year:'' mean?

<comment><USER55> It's the percentage of time that the government was functioning for the last year. So, if they are "down" for 36.5 days, their service level for last year would be 90%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> It reminds me of the counter for Belgium.

<comment><USER25> Oh? Got a link?

<comment><USER56> [http://lerecorddumonde.be/](http://lerecorddumonde.be/) Now they have a government, so they changed the page. But it was a counter of days, with comparison to other countries, then they passed Iraq, and got the world record of days without a government.

If you're unfamiliar with the situation, they got stuck in the reverse situation of the US, where they didn't have a government (technically the government resigned, but stayed in place for the transition), so they where simply passing the same budget as the year prior, and rolling everyday life as usual, but not starting any new project or making any change to the laws (not making any real political).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Should include cost to the economy!

<comment><USER25> Really hard to calculate

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> The IRS is also shut down.

<comment><USER59> Partially, they are still collecting money just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Very nice, good job!

<comment><USER25> Thank you!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Visualize Kickstarter Projects - Written in Clojure with C2 - <AUTHOR> http://canhekick.it/

<comment><AUTHOR> A few cool things about CanHeKickIt:

The entire app is written in Clojure, with the exception of some less for css.

I'm using ClojureScript, a compiler for Clojure that targets JavaScript. This means that I'm able to use the same code on the front-end as I do on the back- end. The code that draws the graph, for instance, is exactly the same in Clojure and ClojureScript. Most everything works even if javascript is disabled (try <http://canhekick.it/togglejs>).

It uses a kd-tree to store the points in the graph. This lets me efficiently place the tooltip when someone hovers over the graph.

</comment><comment><USER2> Some design comments:

\- far too much space is used for the colored boxes, which shout the stats that should be easily apparent from the visualization.

\- categories need to be included...the titles can often reveal nothing about the project

\- you might as well add the thumbnails of the projects

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions! I really appreciate you commenting on my work.

Those colored boxes are meant to serve as a legend for the graphs. Maybe I'll be better off with some tooltips on the horizontal bar instead.

I shrunk the boxes and put them all on one line for now. Thanks again for pointing that out. What I have now isn't perfect, but it's much better.

As far as categories and thumbnails go, I'm not sure that's the direction I'm headed. I don't want to replicate anything Kickstarter already does and I'd prefer to categorize things based on the data.

I'm working on applying a bit of the machine learning I learned from the Coursera class to predict success. If I can do that, I'll be the first to categorize the projects by probability of success.</comment></comment>


Linux Mint Debian Edition (with new "Update Pack" system) moves into RC status - <AUTHOR> http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=141&t=79217

<comment><AUTHOR> Blog entry on new 'safe' rolling release Update Pack thing: <http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1781></comment>


Ask HN: How can a community website make money to sustain itself? - <AUTHOR>

I am thinking of creating a community website to undertake community improvement intiatives. I am curious to find out what options are available in order to make sure that the site is able to sustain itself. The possible options I am thinking of are -

    Asking for donation
    Google Ads
    Referral links to Amazon etc.
 Are there any other means of making some small revenues for these types of websites. <comment><USER2> local business ads - extremely well targeted and higher cpm than Google ads. Also maybe you can get government funding of some kind.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply. Is there some ad network specially targetting local ads?

<comment><USER2> most do but you don't get a premium - i would call 10-20 businesses in your town.</comment></comment></comment>


The Confessions of a Professional Ghost Tweeter - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/06/the-confessions-of-a-professional-ghost-tweeter/240705/?n=confirm

<comment><USER2> Someone is employed to tell 2,000 people that the NYC Comptroller spoken at a kindergarten today.

Every time I hear "zero marginal product workers" I think of social media consultants.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Ghost Tweeter" seems inaccurate since the accounts are for organizations or public figures. Sure it's interesting that an Italian-American female is tweeting on behalf of an Islamic Imam but it's just like any other media outreach job. If the tweeter was intentionally crafting an alter ego or pretending to be the person/organization that would be an issue.

The author touches on Nate Weiner but I definitely think he would have benefited from a "ghost" tweeter.</comment>


How To Split A Pizza - <AUTHOR> http://schani.wordpress.com/2013/04/27/how-to-split-a-pizza/ <comment><USER2> You can divide the pizza fairly with N players as follows:

       * The cutter proposes to cut a small slice (say 5 degrees) and asks who wants it

       * If nobody does, he proposes to cut a slightly larger slice and asks who
         wants it?  The proposed slice gets larger and larger until somebody
         calls out 'yes'

       * Once somebody says they want the slice, it is
         actually cut and given to them.

       * The game continues until all the pizza is divided up

This balances peoples 'greediness' against their desire to get a slice. You can keep waiting and waiting for the proposed slice to get larger, but the risk is somebody else will call for it first. If you keep waiting for a large slice, the pizza will eventually be gone and you will have none. It forces everybody to choose the smallest size they would be satisfied with, until all the pizza is gone.

<comment><USER3> If there were two players, and A was cutting, B would just wait until the "cut" was the whole pie, then take it.

If there were three players, B and C would both call at half, cutting out player A.

You can't solve this by letting the cutter also call out, because you can't trust him to both cut and choose at the same time.

<comment><USER4> > _You can't solve this by letting the cutter also call out, because you can't > trust him to both cut and choose at the same time._

You can with certain types of pizza cutters. With this sort ([http://www.amazon.com/RSVP-World-Class-Pizza- Cutter/dp/B0000...](http://www.amazon.com/RSVP-World-Class-Pizza- Cutter/dp/B0000E2GT5/)) for example you can propose a cut by aligning the cutter before actually performing the cut.

If you can't trust the cutter to cut the slice he said he was going to cut for himself, after demonstrating the proposed cut, then you can't trust the cutter to not simply devour the entire pizza right there in front of everybody.

<comment><USER2> "then you can't trust the cutter to not simply devour the entire pizza right there in front of everybody"

The guy does have a knife after all ... what are the others going to do to stop him!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Commonly called fair division or cake-cutting. There are "fair" algorithms for the general n-person case:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cake_cutting> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brams-Taylor_procedure>

</comment><comment><USER5> Oh, fun! This is sometimes called an envy free division. A nice book on this topic is

Fair Division: From Cake-Cutting to Dispute Resolution www.amazon.com/Fair- Division-Cake-Cutting-Dispute-Resolution/dp/0521556449

Stable matchings are a related problem (sometimes called the stable marriage problem), where you want to match men and women to "marry", such that no two couples would want to swap partners. It is applied in real life to matching medical interns to hospital placements. One of my all time favorite technical books* is on this subject:

Two-Sided Matching: A Study in Game-Theoretic Modeling and Analysis [http://www.amazon.com/Two-Sided-Matching-Game-Theoretic- Econ...](http://www.amazon.com/Two-Sided-Matching-Game-Theoretic-Econometric- Monographs/dp/0521437881)

(* yes, that may make me weird)

</comment><comment><USER6> An interesting and related problem, from the Sydney University Maths Competition [0] 2007 [1] goes as follows:

      The sisters Alice, Bess, and Cath are fighting over a triangular pizza, which may be
      imagined as a triangle PQR.

      Their father David proposes the following procedure for sharing it between the four
      of them.  Alice will select a point A on the edge PQ, then Bess will select a
      point B on the edge PR, then Cath will select a point C on the edge QR.

      David will then cut the pizza along the lines AB, BC, and AC, and take the centre
      piece ABC for himself, leaving three corner pieces (some possibly empty, if
      endpoints of edges have been chosen).

      The sisters will then either all take the corner piece to the left of the point
      they selected, or all take the corner piece to the right of their point; Alice
      (as the eldest) will get to choose left or right.

      As everyone knows, each sister will make her choices purely to maximize the area
      of her own share, except that Alice and Bess, if their own shares are unaffected,
      will act to the advantage of the youngest sister Cath.

      If they all reason perfectly, what will they do?

The constraints on this problem lead to an interesting result, but the fun is in teasing out a logical argument to why that result is the case, so I will leave it for those who want to try it.

[0] <http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/SUMS/>

[1] <http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/SUMS/sums2007.pdf>

<comment><USER6> Applying the concept from this problem to the one at hand, try the following scheme:

Alice picks an arbitrary point A on the pizza.

Bess picks a second point B, and Cath then picks a point C.

Cut the pizza from the centre to those points. Alice then picks the piece either to the left or right of her point A. Everyone else has to take the piece in the same direction of their point.

Under this scheme, if Cath makes a bad choice she will get the smallest piece, and either Alice or Beth gets a bigger piece then the other depending on which way Cath's choice was bad.

If Beth makes a poor choice, assuming Cath makes the best choice, she will always get the smallest piece.

If Beth and Cath conspire against Alice they can force her to have a tiny piece, however one of them will have an even smaller piece. If each instead tries to get the most for herself then it will work out roughly even.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We discussed this fair splitting problem when I was in high school. I understood the theoretical implications of the problem, but I never liked the splitting method in a practical sense.

For instance, the "fair" way to split a pizza into two is to let one person cut, and the other chooses.

But if you've ever cut pizza, you know how hard it is to cut it evenly. So clearly the person who gets to choose has the better end of the deal.

</comment><comment><USER8> There's an open textbook (David Lippman's Math in Society -- "a survey of mathematics for the liberal arts major") which covers several topics like this. The chapter on fair division is bite-sized, so you can read it without investing a lot of time.

The book's page is

<http://www.opentextbookstore.com/mathinsociety/>

from whence you can download the entire book or just the fair division chapter. The method discussed in the post and a separate method discussed in a comment are both covered by this book.

</comment><comment><USER9> "The standard way to avoid all such problems is to let one person cut the pizza in two halves, and the other person choose who gets which half."

Unrelated to the intellectual pursuit of the problem, but this algorithm is a bit of a silly sore point for me.

Several years ago I used to periodically split a giant burrito with my friend and I proposed the above algorithm. So I cut it and my friend would choose a half. After a couple times I realized that thanks to the fact that it's not humanly possible to cut it in half perfectly, the person choosing will always get the bigger half. Clearly my friend realized the same thing as he always insisted that I do the cutting!

<comment><USER10> I find that typically the person choosing will pick the smaller half out of politeness.

For the same reason everyone is reluctant to take the last slice of a pizza or cake if they feel they will have had more than others.

Is this just a British thing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So who ever cuts is always worse off since they always get the smaller piece of pizza.

Unless they can use tricky psychology to make the small piece look bigger, possibly.

Fair to me is I thought obvious, you cut it then flip a x sided coin.

<comment><USER12> Oh, you just have to make your model more interesting. If the involved parties have different value functions for the pizza, cutting can be more advantageous.

Suppose you really like tomatoes and I like everything equally. Than I will make a cut that has slightly more than half of the tomatoes in one set, and everything else in the other. This way I will gain almost all of the pizza (minus half the tomatoes plus epsilon).

Even more extreme, if your utility functions are `context-sensitive'. I.e. suppose there's a grid pattern on the pizza: horizontal mozzarella stripes and vertical ham stripes. I care about getting long mozzarella stripes, but don't want short stripes. Same applies to you and the ham stripes. Of course, the cutter has an advantage there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> what if it's harder to cut a perfect half than it is to tell which half is bigger? what if the pizza usually 'splits' into a bigger and smaller half?

i'm not sure the protocol is a good answer, the assumption bothers me.

<comment><USER14> If there's a limit to the precision to which one can compare slices of pizza, any algorithm that can meet or beat that precision can be successful.

But the game gets more interesting if the perceptions of the players are subject to influence! Say player A can choose to buy a pitcher of beer for player B, or cause him to travel at relativistic speeds with respect to the pizza . . .

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > I have solved a problem that smarter people have already solved for more > general cases.

Yes, here in Italy, everyone gets their own pizza, rather than the US-style large pizza that gets divided :-)

</comment><comment><USER16> What if B & C collude to make A think that A & B are colluding so that A cuts an unequal slice? Just draw random slices instead. Works for any n.

<comment><USER17> Having a random person cut slices and then randomly allocating slices is not a bad idea, but has a problem too. That procedure is unfair to those who value reliably-sized slices.

Say A and B use this procedure. A and B both hate each other and want to make the pizza selection turn out bad for the other person. But while A is just normally hungry, B is at death's door from starvation and needs at least 1/3 of a pizza to live. This procedure gives a 1/4 possibility that A can starve B to death, by letting A cut a tiny piece and a huge piece, and randomly assigning A the huge piece. Whereas no matter what B does, even if he is lucky enough to cut and receive a huge piece, A is not going to die. So A has the advantage. But a truly fair procedure would assure both A and B at least 1/2 a pizza, a property that would assure that B would live.

<comment><USER16> The important question here is how you define fairness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Or, A cuts the pizza down the middle, B chooses a half, A and B cut their halves into thirds and C chooses one third each from A's and B's halves.

</comment><comment><USER19> Seems like after you have the solution for 2 and 3 people, the N-solution is just to split up in teams. Say you have 8 people, split in to two teams of 4. Team 1 (With 4 people) now represents "Person A" in the 2 person scenario, so Team 1 gets to cut, Team 2 gets to choose. Now Team 1 and Team 2 repeat the process internally for their halves of the pizza, and so forth.

<comment><USER20> That's good for most cases, but I don't think it works for groups of prime cardinality. In addition, the problem often allows each participant to have a different value function (e.g., one person wants lots of pepperoni but the others prefer mushrooms). In such a variant, a team might have problems agreeing on which piece is most desirable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There is also the Pizza Theorem[1] which says that _even_ if you don't cut the pizza through the middle but so long as the slices are of equal angles, you can divide it equally by area by choosing alternating slices.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_theorem>

</comment><comment><USER22> In the case of three people sharing one pizza:

Slice the pizza in four, and eat three of the quarters (the two people who aren't slicing picking first of course). Repeat with the remaining quarter until what's left is not worth being disappointed about.

I would never actually do this, but it's a good illustration of limits of geometric series.

<comment><USER23> You assume that any pizza can be reliably sliced into four more or less even parts. Also you assume that cutter is interested in getting the best share. That is not always the case.

Imagine that slicer makes 1 huge and 3 tiny pieces. He obviously won't get the biggest one, but the second chooser will be mistreated too. Thus, evil divider can starve the second chooser to death.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can't you simply generalize the "I cut, you choose" algorithm? A cuts the first slice, then B divides the remainder in half, then C picks a slice, then A picks a slice.

If A cuts a slice bigger than 1/3, C will pick that. Likewise, B, as the last one to pick a slice, has an incentive to split evenly.

<comment><USER25> But A and C can still collude against B, no?

<comment><USER24> Good point, I didn't consider collusion. If A cuts a smaller slice on purpose, B can cut the remainder so that A and B still get the same amount, but C gets more. But if A can trust C to give a part of his share later, then B can't do anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For most pizza, the pie arrives at the table already sliced, thus the problem is generally just one of negotiating fair distribution.

P.S., I just read the first chapter of Concrete Mathematics, and I thought this was going to be about lines on the plane.

</comment><comment><USER27> It seems like a Nyquist-rate of slices would do the trick, but is probably not the lower bound on number of slices.

<comment><USER14> "Yes, we''' have two of the large veggie specials, to be called 'left' and 'right', divided evenly with 16x oversampling. And a box of toothpicks."

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Personally I think such a dilema means it is time to find new friends.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm just not that hungry/greedy to care about this error margin.

</comment><comment><USER30> But what about a fair distribution of toppings?

<comment><USER8> As you suggest, size is not necessarily the appropriate quantity to consider. The general idea would be that each player has "valuations" of slices, and that a player chooses based on this valuation. This might result in a sort of sliding scale: a player might choose one piece over another, even though it's smaller, because he prefers the toppings strongly enough.</comment></comment>


"WTF Wikipedia" on Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/#!/search/wtf%20wikipedia <comment><USER2> As an aside - it's funny how twitter memes are invariably overrun by people talking about how twitter is overrun by a meme. At the moment, "WTF Wikipedia" is full of tweets like:

> _bored? search for wtf wikipedia tweets. should make you laugh for at least > five minutes_

It's like that game where you find a 2 word combo that produces 1 (and exactly 1) Google result - but as soon as you post it, it get's indexed and bang, no longer a single.

There should be a word for it - memeplosion? memecursion? memetition?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's crazy how many people on Twitter specifically are using Wikipedia EN right now.

Spelling errors and profanity aside, Congresspeople should just do this search to see the effect of their bill.</comment>


Bird Box: Unbelievable Numbers - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/statspotting/status/1087411434936586241 <comment><USER2> I can see Bird Box on my Netflix account in Denmark. Or don't other countries count?</comment>


Lost C64 Games: Daffy Duck – 1992 Hi-Tec - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/daffy-duck/

<comment><USER2> Great that they were able to recover this game.

Kind of crazy that it will be copyrighted for another hundred years or so (assuming it's an unpublished work for hire), when the last copy was barely readable, and the owners probably don't even know they own it.

<comment><USER3> Welcome to copyright law in this country. It's insane, and all to save Mickey Mouse from the public domain. Every time he comes up for copyright lapse, Congress kicks the copyright limit down the road another 20 years.

<comment><USER4> Everybody should just make crazy-ass Mickey Mouse remixes and mashes so much that nobody can stop them. Now, how to get this viral? :)

<comment><USER5> Step 1 - Introduce young people to "Mickey Mouse"

Step 2 - Get people to care about this "newly acquainted with" character

Was that the first golden age of animation? I know Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry was one golden age.

<comment><USER6> Mickey was first drawn in 1928. Tom and Jerry started in 1940, as did Bugs. Until the 40s, animation was largely a crude curiosity; by the early 40s, there was a sufficient body of technique and skilled artists to start making some nice stuff. Color and sound helped a lot.

(And I say that it was a crude curiosity despite being someone who absolutely loves the 30s output of the Fleischer studios.)

However, Disney was cranking out cartoons all through the 40s and 50s, competing with the stuff from MGM and WB. Including Mickey shorts.

Realistically, I feel like if you're going to assign a 'golden age' of animation it would be the 40s and 50s; there were three major studios cranking out shorts, Disney was starting to do features, everything was awesome. In the 60s the market started to change to cheap TV cartoons (a change lead in no small part by Bill Hannah and Joe Barbera, who directed a ton of lavish Tom & Jerry shorts at MGM, then completely changed the industry when they started cranking out TV stuff at their own studio). The 70 and 80s were generally a wasteland of low-budget TV stuff with a growing wave of quickly-dubbed Japanese stuff; the 90s saw a renaissance at the high end when Disney started having a string of feature hits, leading to multiple other movie studios opening feature animation studios. Most of which died horribly over the next decade, though this era also saw the beginning of the rise of 3D animation from a curiosity to a serious medium that eventually pretty much took over the feature scene.

(I grew up devouring animation history and went into the industry around the time the 90s boom was hitting its peak; I am now quite far away from that scene.)

<comment><USER7> From one animation fan to another, that's one of the best summaries I've ever read!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a story of a lost PC game... Long ago, around the time of the first Scary Movie, the company I worked for was tasked with creating "Scary Game"... and we were given one month.

Since there wasn't much time, the game basically amounted to a few simple Flash-type minigames. Not great, but that's what they wanted.

After we finished, the client informs us that they goofed and they don't actually have the legal right to release the game. I wasn't on the project, and I didn't hear exactly how they made that blunder, but we still got paid.

The best part was that at the end, those who worked on it got T-shirts saying, "I see dead games."

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, I love that not only are they providing the game, they have an interesting history available. I"ll be keeping an eye on this site in the future.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anybody know what "Commodore Format infamously burned such things in almost ceremonial fashion." refers to? I could not find anything.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd be interested in seeing the source code. Is that also available for viewing somewhere?

</comment><comment><USER12> I hope someone can record video of the gameplay.

<comment><USER13> Looks like some video has already hit YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYk2600dZTc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYk2600dZTc)

<comment><USER14> Awesome music.

<comment><USER15> Wow. Not only did the group that recovered the game put a flashy intro on it... the game's programmers _also_ put a flashy intro on it back when they made it.

It clearly spends a lot of time loading that kickass drum sample that's totally disconnected from the gameplay.

Worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The page mentions Phil King as if that is a name I should be familiar with. This game was just before my time, is this some industry big-shot I should know about but missed?

<comment><USER17> Phil King was one of the longest serving reviewers of Zzap!64 magazine (mid 1989 through to January 1993), so his opinion would be particularly valued / experienced. Zzap! let their reviewers have their own personality/character, so you got to know your favorite reviewers over time if you were a regular reader.

For anyone who wants to read the original Zzap!64 review of Daffy Duck, it was in Issue 87 on pages 12 & 13 - but sadly the scans are currently offline:

[http://www.zzap64.co.uk/cgi- bin/displayissue.pl?issue=087&ma...](http://www.zzap64.co.uk/cgi- bin/displayissue.pl?issue=087&magazine=zzap)

<comment><USER18> The scans are also available on archive.org

[https://archive.org/details/zzap64-magazine-087](https://archive.org/details/zzap64-magazine-087)

Glad to see Mort's (zzap64.co.uk) scanning efforts were not for nought. He has scanned a lot of British comp magazines not just Zzap64.

And Zzap64 was pure gold in it's heyday (mid-80's). Do check out the earlier issues. Especially things like the developer diaries (Andrew Braybrook's "Birth of a Paradroid") or the special columns like Mel Croucher's "classic computer cock ups".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can someone tell me how to run this? I managed to install the emulator using this guide:

[http://www.n00bsonubuntu.net/content/how-to-install-vice- com...](http://www.n00bsonubuntu.net/content/how-to-install-vice- commodore-64-emulator-on-ubuntu-12-04/)

But I have no idea how to start the game.

<comment><USER9> Hey! On an unrelated note I just noticed your name and thought I'd pop by to thank you. You released the Gr8W8UpD8M8, and I used that as a base for me to set up my own version of it. I still use it daily, so thanks for that! My code is available on GitHub as well[1], forked from your own. I never did get around to making it simple enough for other people to start using it out of the box, but I came pretty close. Just thought I'd say thanks for making your project open source!

[1][https://github.com/Ryan-Myers/Wiiboard-Net](https://github.com/Ryan- Myers/Wiiboard-Net)

<comment><USER19> Thank you for your contribution, I'm glad you like it! Unfortunately the pairing failed for me months ago, and I haven't managed to get it to pair again. I'll look at your code, maybe it'll help me get it working again!

<comment><USER9> Awesome, let me know if you don't get it working again. For me, the key was finding that xwiibind script[1]. It also took em a while to find a way to get it to programmatically run the script as soon as the device connects, and I ended up with a method that has a hard dependency on Bluez 4.99.

[1][https://github.com/Ryan-Myers/Wiiboard- Net/blob/master/xwiib...](https://github.com/Ryan-Myers/Wiiboard- Net/blob/master/xwiibind.sh)

<comment><USER19> Will do, I had to search for a long time for the arcane bluez commands as well. Does your balance board auto-pair now, so you can connect by just pressing the front button (rather than the red one under the battery cover)?

<comment><USER9> Yup, my board works by just hitting the front button to pair, which then kicks off the script that logs my weight, and automatically shuts down when it's done. I even left in that little blink you added that signifies it's ready to be stepped on :)

<comment><USER19> Aw, that's how I used to have it :( You can even see the graph of how much I love food over time!:

[http://www.stavros.io/misc/weight/](http://www.stavros.io/misc/weight/)

<comment><USER9> Heh, mine is much more simple looking, and has very few fluctuations. [http://ryanmyers.ca:8088/](http://ryanmyers.ca:8088/)

<comment><USER19> What happened on Nov 16? :P

<comment><USER9> Haha, I'm still not sure to be honest. I actually didn't believe it at first, but I verified it with another scale about half way through that week. I felt perfectly fine. :p

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Mirror: [https://web.archive.org/web/20150903224132/http://www.gamest...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150903224132/http://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/daffy- duck/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Dann, tried to play it but my homemade multi system joystick to USB adapter went bust. Any recommendations on a ready made adapter easily procurable on Europe/Germany?</comment>


The A=432 Hz Frequency: DNA Tuning and the Bastardization of Music - <AUTHOR> http://themindunleashed.org/2015/09/the-a432-hz-frequency-dna-tuning-and-the-bastardization-of-music.html <comment><USER2> That's certainly a hypothesis, alright.</comment>


Show HN: A platform for beginners to learn programming in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alexmojaki/futurecoder <comment><USER2> Man, personally, with Python, programming with the language seems to be the easy part.

I have struggled with virtual environments and runtime executables across various OSs.

What are current best practices?

<comment><USER3> 1) Create a virtual environment. python3 -m venv myproject (download an interpreter).

2) Run pip install. myproject/bin/activate; pip install requirements.txt; (download all project dependencies).

3) Start the application. myproject/bin/activate; python myapp.py

If you can assume that there is an interpreter available on the system, say /usr/bin/python3, you can use that instead of creating a virtual environment.

If you want to embed all the dependencies, you can save all the files created by pip install in the /lib directory if I remember the name well.

Should I write a full blog post with example? I used to deploy python applications in a bank, can explain all the advanced usage with and without internet access, with and without dependencies.

<comment><USER4>
       " you can assume that there is an interpreter available on the system, say /usr/bin/python3, you can use that instead of creating a virtual environment."

Please DO NOT do this. It is so much easier to always create a virtual environment, and then you never have to worry about installing two applications on the same system that may have conflicting versions. Additionally, you don't know what else may be installed into the system's default python environment.

<comment><USER5> I find you're better off pretending that your system doesn't have any builtin Python. I use virtual environment for everything.

<comment><USER6> Using the system Python for scripts that only depend on the standard library should be pretty safe. As soon as I need any third-party dependency I create a virtual environment.

Edit: Although if startup performance is important, using a virtual environment might be a good idea even for simple scripts. Running a "hello world" program using the system Python takes twice as long on my system as running it with "python -S" (i.e. ignoring site packages) or from a fresh virtual env.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice work! I tried to clone the project and run with Docker with the hope of contributing but I'm getting this error message on the "Introducing the Shell" page:

      The process died.
      Your code probably took too long.
      Maybe you have an infinite loop?

Do you have a chatroom or something where project devs can discuss work in realtime?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

I'm thinking I should start a Slack. Any opinions on that?

In the meantime can you open an issue to talk about it?

<comment><USER7> I highly recommend Zulip. Free, open-source alt to Slack but with good threaded conversations: [https://zulipchat.com](https://zulipchat.com)

If you don't want to create a full chat I'm happy to host on a Zulip chat for hackers I'm part of, just let me know.

I'll open an issue, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is Python the language of choice to teach/learn programming nowadays?

I learned to code with Java like 10 years ago. I haven't touched it again after graduating, and to be honest I was not so fond of the language (too verbose and too much OOP for my taste), but I'm glad I learned the benefits of having static types and a compiler from the start.

Obviously, Python is closer to pseudo code than Java, which is also great when you just start learning.

<comment><USER9> I've had about 6 people in my work area learn Python. We're not employed as programmers, but we're scientists in an R&D team. My colleagues varied in experience, some had used Matlab in college, but none had programmed extensively.

The scripting aspect is great because you can get useful things done with a few lines and minimal constructs. There's a pile of solved problems on Stackoverflow. Folks can approach it at their own pace and on their own terms, at work or at home. I promise them that if they hate it, I'll refund the price. ;-)

Now, germane to the discussion in this thread about installing the packages and so forth. That's a drawback to Python that I tell people about, but my approach is to provide complete hand holding on installation until they've come up to speed on programming. If they've never programmed, then they've probably never approached a computer from the command line or dug into its file structure. So, learning a bit of programming first is a good way to prepare for doing that other stuff.

I originally learned BASIC without knowing how to install BASIC on the mainframe.

We're a Windows shop, so I help them download and install WinPython. Running into a useful library that WinPython doesn't have is pretty rare, and then a pip install within the WinPython shell usually works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like this idea very much. I've thought about making something similar.

The example in the readme isn't idiomatic Python. It would be better to use enumerate.

<comment> The-Toon It's an example for beginners, presumingly to illustrate the range function, so that's probably why it's done that way.

To continue to be nit picky with that example, the range function produces an iterable object, which is different from a list.

<comment><USER10> This seems to be non-standard, but I make a serious effort to never teach the wrong way to do something. Primacy is just so strong.

It makes teaching harder. You really have to work to come up with great examples. But it makes learning easier and there's less correcting to do later.

<comment><USER11> In general, I agree, and I think it's especially important in text.

A teacher is in a position of authoritative trust. As a student, after I learn an example is flawed, I often wonder if I'm just missing some context because I trust the teacher to have gotten it right. In a setting where communication is already established ( _e.g._ , a class room) this can be cleared up quickly with a question. In other settings ( _e.g._ , reading a text), it can leave me wondering until I reach a much higher level of competence.

<comment><AUTHOR> When the course reaches the point that students are ready to learn about enumerate (see my reply above) the course will definitely cover it and emphatically point out that it is the better way.

<comment><USER10> Take it for what it's worth, but that's exactly what I think is a bad idea. It violates the principle of primacy in learning[1]. It also erodes trust in the lessons. (Is this the _real_ way to do it?)

There's a similar strategy of building things up and then refactoring when they get bad (this ifelse is getting too big. We could use a dict). But the difference is every step along the way is valid or immediately corrected.

[1] [https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Principles_of_learning#Pri...](https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Principles_of_learning#Primacy)

<comment><AUTHOR> What would you do in this case?

The student has never seen a tuple, or iterable unpacking of any form. Would you just show them `for index, word in enumerate(words)` and tell them not to worry about what that means?

Quite shortly after this, I ask them to essentially do `zip_longest`. Given two string variables:

        string1 = "Goodbye"
        string2 = "World"

output:

        G W
        o o
        o r
        d l
        b d
        y
        e

Here's what I expect their solution to look like:

                length1 = len(string1)
                length2 = len(string2)

                if length1 > length2:  # one could use max, but I don't expect them to
                    length = length1
                else:
                    length = length2

                for i in range(length):
                    if i < len(string1):
                        char1 = string1[i]
                    else:
                        char1 = ' '

                    if i < len(string2):
                        char2 = string2[i]
                    else:
                        char2 = ' '

                    print(char1 + ' ' + char2)

That's not something that can nicely be solved with enumerate. Do you think this exercise is bad because they should just use zip_longest instead?

<comment><USER10> I'd split the problem into two. You're talking about these problems like they're fixed, but they're not. This is _your_ project.

I'd teach index access and number generation separately, with small incrementing variations. Then I'd show iteration, then enumeration (maybe after tuple unpacking).

When you combine two concepts it doesn't create just a combination. It creates one or more new concepts. Those new concepts have their own idioms and they should be taught properly.

Combining looping over numbers and index access creates two new concepts: looping over items and looping over items with their index. Both of those things have their own idiom in Python and your solution shows neither.

I think telling someone not to worry about the details of how something works because you'll get back to it later is _way_ better than showing them the wrong thing and then correcting it. One is a promise kept, the other a promise broken.

In my opinion, nailing this kind of stuff is like half of the value of the project you're doing. You need to lean way in on it and get it right.

My take is right now you're thinking backwards from the position of someone who knows how to code. You need to think forward like someone who doesn't, at least more often. A student isn't going to be motivated to learn a, b = c by learning return a, b first because they won't know that second concept exists!

In short, if your students aren't ready to use enumerate or zip_longest, don't hand them problems that call for enumerate or zip_longest.

<comment><USER12> > I think telling someone not to worry about the details of how something > works because you'll get back to it later is way better than showing them > the wrong thing and then correcting it. One is a promise kept, the other a > promise broken.

I'm not sure I'd say teaching someone to do something by hand for which they could use an existing function is "wrong". There's huge pedagogical value in knowing how powerful tools you _didn 't_ make work. Going bottom-up is a very effective way to do that (just ask the lisp folks), and a culmination of "nice job, you've implemented something so useful that it mirrors what the language designers/library authors did as well, here's how to use their version to save time in the future" is far from a broken promise.

<comment><USER10> > I'm not sure I'd say teaching someone to do something by hand for which they > could use an existing function is "wrong".

I didn't say it was wrong the wrong way to teach. I said the code was wrong. Like, if I removed myself from teaching and I just saw that in a PR, I'd definitely suggest they use enumerate instead.

I'm a huge fan of reimplementing built in functions as a way to learn. I'm learning Clojure right now (like I stopped to write this comment) and I do it all the time. But, I know I'm doing it.

The other thing that's fine is building up to the abstraction. "Let's get the index, now the item. Okay, there's a better way to do this". But you have to do it immediately.

I'm just not a fan of showing someone something, letting it sink in, and then having to go back and correct it.

And while I hope my arguments stand on their own, and I certainly could be wrong, I'm at least not speaking out of complete inexperience. I've spent a decent amount of time teaching people to code, juggle, work at rope courses, and fly airplanes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you get reply notifications?

<comment><USER10> No, I just check my comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a cool idea. In a similar vein, I use Google Colab heavily to induct new students to python. Requires no setup, we can collaboratively edit and the output is instantaneous.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is awesome! I was looking for something to teach children programming with. (10-12 years onwards)

Your project looks amazing. I hope I can find ways to contribute.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is awesome, I'm sure this was fun to make. I love digging into the python internals

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, it is fun, and quite rewarding. There's still a lot to do, wanna join in?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Have you considered using friendly-traceback?</comment>