The Ludum Dare October Challenge: Finish a game, Take it to market, Earn $1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/09/27/announcing-october-challenge-2012/

<comment><USER2> Despite being a pretty active participant in Ludum Dare, I've never pursued the October Challenge yet.

Working on the last 10% of a game (the polish) is the hardest part of the development process; not only is it a lot of work, but at that point you're much more likely to be burned out from working on said game.

Despite this, I'm currently working on a game with great potential that I hope will end up somewhere :)

<comment><USER3> "The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." —Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

That last 10% is a killer. :)

<comment><USER4> aka 'if your work is 90% complete, you are half way done'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is general to Ludum Dare (not to this challenge) but since it's infrequently discussed here I thought I'd post.

I'm not really sure what the point of Ludum Dare is. I participated once in the main competition for LD23. I produced a pretty horrible game with the time I had allotted but did enjoy having a reason to screw up my schedule and drink too much coffee.

The winning game I thought was innovative and I actually played it for more than 10 minutes. There was one other game that I played (I played twenty or so to vote on them) that was fun to play. It also (deservedly) ranked well. The rest (based on an admittedly small sample) simply _weren't_ games, at least not yet.

My observation is that if Ludum Dare is about creating games -- if nothing else than for the sake and love of games -- then the format is completely wrong. If you look at the industry as a whole there is an abundance of poorly made games (largely made in Flash, though iOS, Android and most other platforms have their share) that do nothing for the developers or the limited number of people that play them.

This October challenge reemphasizes the misplaced focus of Ludum Dare: make something overnight that makes just $1. The world doesn't need any more games worth $1. Here's a better challenge for the game development community: Make a game in a month that makes (over its life) $1,000 - $10,000. I want to play those games. A month is still insanely short, especially assuming most could only put in their free time, but it's infinitely better than 48 hours. A simple game has some chance of being polished in that amount of time.

Instead of Ludum Dare squandering the significant amount of attention is generates on 1000s (it broke 1000 entries in LD23) of shovel-ware games, why not encourage and then help promote a smaller number of reasonably well produced games. Raising the bar for entires would cut the numbers dramatically so it would be win-win.

You could say that I already answered my question when I said I enjoyed participating. I did enjoy it yes, but I don't think I would do it again. I also don't think that it has any value for the game development community or people who love games for the reasons I've already outlined. The emphasis is all wrong. You don't want to _just finish_ a game. Games aren't made that way. Instead shift the emphasis to creating, _polishing_ and even marketing simple games.

<comment><USER6> I had a similar experience to yours -- when I was in college. LD was run on an infrequent basis then. I participated in two, as well as some student-run ones, and figured, "ah, I think I've done enough jams, I should do bigger games. These little ones aren't serious, they aren't what I want to be doing."

Years later, LD started getting run more frequently and got more popular. Remembering having a good time with it previously, I participated again and put in a lot of effort, thinking I could crush it with more experience, and soon realized I was wrong about both my experience and my prior perspective. Here's what I realized:

\- Most of the time I spend on a big project is spent on learning something specific to that project. Minimizing the schedule means that I only learn things necessary towards finishing. This is not an easily dismissed skillset. It isn't the _only_ skill, but it's your most easily monetized one.

\- Tangibility is really really important towards motivating future work. This is why prototyping software is worthwhile in the first place. When it's finished, you have a reference, one which you own and probably understand better than anyone else. The reference isn't the code(which is probably butchered) or the assets(which are necessarily cheap) but in the possibilities suggested for future improvement.

\- Prototyping - and creation itself - is a fractal endeavor. Each time you build a new feature, you have to do the same kind of work that goes into a game jam in order to prove and flesh out its capabilities. This is repeated the whole way up the ladder, until the project is complete. At each step you can prototype until you hit tangibility, polish it a bit, then move on to the next feature, etc.

While I agree that of 1000 entries, most are going to be half-baked, that's kind of the point. You're being encouraged to go in and pick up the experience of _every_ stage of the project, so that when you want to expand scope, it's not hard or surprising, it just involves more learning and specialization.

As well, it helps you in identifying bad, unmarketable ideas faster, which is the real problem that plagues game developers - a lot of time and money sunk into something that could never sell.

<comment><USER5> I absolutely see the value in "getting down to it" and producing and MVP or demo or whatever. I think iterative, agressive development is the way to go when making any software product (which is what I do for a living).

My point is to criticize the emphasis on turning out "just enough" and then moving on. This isn't only within LD but I've seen plenty of it in the indie game development community in general as well. As a strong undercurrent in the community I think it's harmful.

If LD is to be about game development as a craft in its entirety (and maybe that's not LD's role) then I think it has to be about more than just producing a quick demo of an idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I googled to learn what "ludum dare" means (I know some Latin and could guess that was an expression) however people kept translating as simply "to give a game" which obviously makes no sense.

So I looked it up and according to Lewis & Short it means "to humor or indulge someone". So there you go.

</comment><comment><USER8> Glad to see Ludum Dare getting some exposure on HN. It's come from such a small thing to something that's having a serious impact both for beginners and experienced game developers. (The first Steam Greenlight approved game, McPixel, was originally a Ludum Dare entry.) They pretty much have the online hackathon idea nailed down.

</comment><comment><USER9> First time hearing about Ludum Dare and so far the community + concept look fantastic!

Since anyone can write a post, is it hard to get your post seen? (Not sure how many new posts get written per day)

<comment><USER10> It varies a lot. During one of the big thrice-yearly compos, your posts will fall off the main page within minutes (but there are tons of people reading), between compos a post might stay on the front page for a few days (but no one is checking the site). During the other events like a Mini-LD and the Oct. challenge it's somewhere in between.</comment></comment>


Ethereum Foundation Researcher arrested for North Korea assistance. - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3andj/researcher-arrested-for-allegedly-teaching-north-korea-about-ethereum <comment><USER2> Discussed at length yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21665984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21665984)

</comment><comment><USER3> It says he "participated in a discussion that touched on using it to evade economic sanctions."

His defense is that "his presentation contained basic concepts that could be looked up online."

Since this is all I see in the article, it really looks like a somewhat ignorant prosecutor over-reaching. Unless there's some significant part of the story being left out, I can't imagine he goes to prison over this.

<comment><USER4> The fact he actually travelled to North Korea to give said 'presentation' makes it likely he gave them more assistance. Helping a country evade sanctions is a crime in the US, so dunno what he thought would happen.</comment></comment>


Bayes vs. Paul the Psychic Octopus - <AUTHOR> http://jasmcole.com/2015/02/07/bayes-vs-paul-the-psychic-octopus/#more-15290

<comment><USER2> Argentinean here. Paul almost always chose the German flag. If you learn to choose the German flag you'll get a high probability of predicting the outcome of a football match :(.</comment>


Google+ : making users angry ... - <AUTHOR> https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/b73f522b-ccb9-4a3e-82a0-26b9d7cca783/fb001bc0914e4158239fa80af7c6b67e/deep/0/Google+.png

<comment><USER2> Where did you get this form?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure I understand you. This is something I found on the internet. I submitted the link here because I thought it might interest some HNers, and possible provoke some interesting discussion.

This isn't my form, nor is it a form I was being asked to complete. I'm not the person who took the screenshot, nor the person being asked to confirm my identity.

This is the way HN works - when people come across things they think the HN community might be interested in, or might like to discuss, they submit a link to it.

Or have I completely misunderstood? if you want to know more then you might ask the person mentioned in the screen-shot. here:

[https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=idan+gazit](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=idan+gazit)

[https://twitter.com/idangazit](https://twitter.com/idangazit)

His story continues: [https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/a05b2608-0066-4adf-95b0...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/a05b2608-0066-4adf-95b0-dd2c3cdc7b2c/a130fc82c2f4d7bfbcc6ad57f8b8e1b1/deep/0/Google+.png)</comment></comment>


Woz says he's still an Apple employee, paid 'about $50 a week' - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/02/06/steve-wozniak-says-big-money-changed-steve-jobs-personality-in-apples-early-days/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure what it is about this story, but it really causes me to 'geek' out.</comment>


Cleanweb keeps growing: new branch in Scotland - <AUTHOR> http://www.cleanweb.org.uk/blog/2013/03/14/cleanweb-opens-in-scotland/

<comment><USER2> It's always an encouraging sign to see the tech community tackling big problems.</comment>


Age of Empires Definitive Edition's pathing and movement - <AUTHOR> https://richg42.blogspot.com/2018/02/on-age-des-pathingmovement.html <comment><USER2> The fact that this post seems to be engendered by a comment on a forum ("The pathfinding in the game is terrible.") reminds me of 'Designing Video Games is Hard Work, But the Millions of Angry Players Make It All Worthwhile'

[http://thehardtimes.net/harddrive/designing-video-games- hard...](http://thehardtimes.net/harddrive/designing-video-games-hard-work- millions-angry-players-make-worthwhile/)

<comment><USER3> I use to be a high level Age of Kings player (Even got an invite to the first World Cyber Olympics in NYC).

The pathing was ALWAYS horrible but the PATCHING by the developer was even worse. There were times when the community just banned certain things because they were just broken (Teuten's Town halls were only costing wood but did more damage than high costing resource units and buildings).

As a high level player a broken pathing allowed me to micro my troops and get an advantage over other players. Most players play with the speed of a 4X and there were few of us who played by trying to make 150+ commands a minute.

So this horrible pathing was seen as an advantage by faster players.

Scale APM Description ~50 Casual player ~75 Experienced player ~150 Proficient player >200 Proficient player with superfluous actions

<comment><USER4> Brood War does this _all_ the time. The pathing is notoriously bad[1] and nothing has been done to fix it because it's not a problem. It allows players extinguish themselves by working with the weird behaviors.

[1] Day[9] on Pathing in BW [https://youtu.be/rWvoMrYCQBU?t=17m50s](https://youtu.be/rWvoMrYCQBU?t=17m50s)

<comment><USER5> As a casual gamer I find this aggravating. Why should the NPCs be left dumber and less human than they could be? It breaks immersion and makes the game harder for novices to enjoy.

<comment><USER6> Because it's hard to fit a lot of intelligence into the game, when it has to run on a 90MHz Pentium I with 16MB of RAM available.

I thought it was pretty good, and more than enjoyable, when it came out 19 years ago.

<comment><USER5> As did I back in the day. But now I'm older with less time to micromanage pathfinding. And our devices are much faster than when many of these games launched

<comment><USER6> Well, in general, the rest of the answer to your question is that _newer_ games tend to have better pathfinding, but adding better pathfinding to older games will make them essentially different games. Casual players might like it; serious players would throw a shit-fit. It's one of those "we can, but _should_ we?" questions; everyone's going to have a different opinion.

Now...I don't see why they couldn't have included it as a toggle-able option. I know that I've considered trying to build updated versions of old games, and when thinking about how to do it, that seemed like the best choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having played the game for a bit, one of the charming things is that the path finding still feels a lot like the original. It's certainly better. As mentioned, the new version fixes a lot of villager collision issues. They preserved the behaviors that made AoE what it was and fixed some of the bad aspects of it.

</comment><comment><USER8> For people interested in path finding, there was some fascinating research done in the 90s:

[http://faculty.nps.edu/ncrowe/snell2.htm](http://faculty.nps.edu/ncrowe/snell2.htm)

They used Snell's law to design pathfinding directly on region polygons, based on ray refraction. This is in contrast to the more common type of "grid searches" (A* being the most prominent example) which superimpose a grid and then do a wavefront graph search on that.

I remember implementing this "refraction search" in the 90s as a C++ PoC. It was a fascinating and elegant concept, but a complete bitch to get right due to its "continuous" nature (rays just barely hitting polygon vertices, parallel edges, numerical instability).

<comment><USER9> I think it's more popular nowadays to do a search on an adjacency graph of polygons and then smooth the path with something like the funnel algorithm. [http://digestingduck.blogspot.ca/2010/03/simple-stupid- funne...](http://digestingduck.blogspot.ca/2010/03/simple-stupid-funnel- algorithm.html)

<comment><USER10> Yes, a lot of people are doing this, and it's not a bad approach.

There's another approach you can take for continuous space pathfinding, however, which is to use visibility graphs.

See [http://www.cs.kent.edu/~dragan/ST- Spring2016/visibility%20gr...](http://www.cs.kent.edu/~dragan/ST- Spring2016/visibility%20graphs.pdf), for example, for some explanation and diagrams.

This is the approach I used in PathEngine (www.pathengine.com).

A lot of people are put off by the possibility for graph explosion in situations where there are a lot of obstacles in an open environment, but PathEngine works around this quite effectively by detecting these kinds of obstacles and pulling them out of the visibility graph (and pathfinding search).

<comment><USER11> And I suppose when encountering them (since they were culled not truly removed) switching to a backup collision avoidance mechanism or replanning?

<comment><USER10> The trick is to detect obstacles that are likely to have minimal affect on the global result of pathfinding search, e.g. convex obstacles that are in the middle of open spaces, or, more specifically in the case of PathEngine, obstacles that don't combine with other nearby obstacles to form larger blockages.

After the initial graph search, the path is modified to avoid these obstacles locally (by pushing the path around the obstacles, essentially), before it's returned from the pathfinding query.

So the way it's set up in PathEngine this optimisation is largely hidden from application code (code that calls into the pathfinding API).

Leaving this to be handled later on, by agent local obstacle avoidance, could also work..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Talk about a thankless job! That's an extensive list of bugs and working on someone else's (very old) playground is incredibly difficult.

<comment><USER13> I imagine its more of a passion project. If I had free time, I would love to delve into the internals of the game that I played so many times as a kid.

Side note: Age of Empires 2 was the first computer game that got me truly hooked on to computers. I was never interested in the shoot em ups, but a strategy game, with such gorgeous graphics (for the time) and compelling semi- historical storyline... it was enchanting!

<comment><USER14>
        > gorgeous graphics (for the time)

Google image search "age of empires 2." Those graphics are still amazing and can't really get much better, which is why all they need is HD remastering.

Gorgeous and captivating 2D work, just like booting up the game Pharaoh after all these years. Just needed a user-made patch to allow higher resolution support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >DE's pathing system's findPath() function was speeded up by approx 3-4x faster vs. Age1's

How would that make any impact at all given that the game ran just fine on 1997 hardware?

<comment><USER16> The fact that you don't need to optimize something doesn't mean you shouldn't.

<comment><USER17> Avoiding premature optimization is one of the most important best practices of modern software development.

<comment> qu4z-2 This isn't premature... the algorithm and performance are understood. That said, I agree that it's not always the best use of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would've guessed that bad pathfinding in these old games was caused by very aggressive optimizations to improve performance but then the author starts off by saying:

>DE's pathing system's findPath() function was speeded up by approx 3-4x faster vs. Age1's

So the old code was just that bad? It's a bit odd, you'd expect such a critical piece of code in an RTS to be reasonably well written and optimized.

<comment><USER19> Before saying the old code was just bad, put yourself in the shoes of an AoE1 developer.

Google and stack overflow don't exist. If there is a good A* implementation to start from, it's still going to be hard to find. At the time AoE1 was developed, it would require _considerably_ more skill and effort to develop a high quality path finding engine than it would today.

Contemporary games also had bad pathfinding. Today, we know what is possible with good pathfinding. Would you have known at the time? Just knowing what is possible is very valuable information. My guess is that if an AoE1 engineer could have time traveled for just a few minutes to observe modern pathfinding, they would be able to very quickly make progress on improving to something closer to what we expect today.

The old pathfinding might have been bad, but I wouldn't assume that it would have been easy to make it that much better at the time. We have a lot of knowledge now that is easy to take for granted.

<comment><USER11> Are you for real? The good path finding algorithms were devised in 80s and are described in detail in chestnuts like Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein Introduction to Algorithms. Released in 1990.

I can understand skimping $40 on a book... but not the argument that it was hard to find those things.

<comment><USER20> 'Pathfinding' in the scope of an RTS means a little more than just 'pathfinding' in the scope of a graph.

If you had read the article you would have seen that there is a lot of dynamics behavior going on that is essential for the gameplay, but mostly unrelated to the A* search itself. I don't think you would find many books from the 80s about pathfinding for RTS games.

<comment><USER21> Exactly. There's a huge difference between a theoretical algorithm in a book (that performs 1 search) vs having 120 real time units all trying to walk together, or even worse, through each other.

In the 80's and 90's you were lucky to dig up docs from BBS releases that had math and graphics tutorials in them, it was very hard to find anything practical.

<comment><USER11> 120 real units. By that you mean plotting 120 paths simultaneously using a common flow algorithm used by internet routers which is more than fast enough and reasonably easy to speed up or truncate.

The tricky part is on assigning nodes on a contiguous map or reducing number of nodes. (Or expanding node resolution on demand.)

Of course many games of the time side stepped it by using greedy truncated pathing instead. Easy, dirty, mediocre results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I hate that it's only available on windows 10. Bad move Microsoft!

<comment><USER23> Genuinely curious: what other platforms would you like to see this on?

<comment><USER22> I use windows 7, I refuse to use windows 10 because of the clear privacy issues in it. So I would've liked if it worked on windows 7.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I just did some teaching of A* on my stream on Tuesday night in golang, tonight we make it fast by implementing a proper priority queue from scratch.

[https://www.twitch.tv/videos/233560937](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/233560937)

Much simpler case since it is on a grid and turn based!

</comment><comment><USER25> A total rewrite is almost _never_ worth it _unless_ the thing you are rewriting is not under development in-production. eg. you don't have to fix bugs in the old version during the rewrite. As you will have a very clear specification and domain experience (if you also worked on the original).

<comment><USER11> And this is why Age of Empires never got its pathing or engine rewritten in later versions... oh wait.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Age1's pather's A* implementation was outright broken (the open list > management was flawed, so the cheapest node wasn't always expanded upon > during each iteration)

What is left of A* if even that doesn't work?!?

<comment><USER27> maybe it picked the cheapest node quite often. you might still get 85%-95% optimal paths - roughly heading the right way with occasional strange sidesteps and zigzags in the route

if it was completely broken it probably wouldn't have shipped that way, so the defect meant it was probably only somewhat broken and the end result was workable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Just pre-compute everything. Put your vector fields in textures at map design time and be done with it. No point in overthinking this once its a simple lookup per frame.

The real fun is designing the agent's AI: exploration, avoidance, engagement ;)

Crowd Pathfinding And Steering Using Flow Field Tiles

[http://www.gameaipro.com/GameAIPro/GameAIPro_Chapter23_Crowd...](http://www.gameaipro.com/GameAIPro/GameAIPro_Chapter23_Crowd_Pathfinding_and_Steering_Using_Flow_Field_Tiles.pdf)

Flow Field Pathfinding Tutorial

[http://leifnode.com/2013/12/flow-field- pathfinding/](http://leifnode.com/2013/12/flow-field-pathfinding/)

<comment><USER29> > Put your vector fields in textures at map design time and be done with it.

I think you're forgetting there _is no_ map design time in Age of Empires since the maps are RNG. Also, walls, structures, and destroyed forests are critical to gameplay, so it has to be an extremely dynamic process.

There are obviously ways to improve the pathfinding, [https://github.com/SFTtech/openage](https://github.com/SFTtech/openage) has many plans, but your dismissals are starting from wrong assumptions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sounds like many player complain about, that the game is too much like AoE1 :D

So far I played only one match but that felt pretty much like the AoE1.

<comment><USER30> As someone who was a big RTS fan back in the 90s, the level of enthusiasm for AoE seems kind of odd to me. I always thought of it as an also-ran. I remember it coming out kind of late, only a little before Blizzard released StarCraft and basically killed the genre.

It did have a fairly unique setting among RTSes at least. So I could see the niche among historical enthusiasts who also wanted to play RTS. That wasn't me though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Cool. I've coded a RTS myself, and I might be able to add some information.

 _DE 's pather gives up if after many thousands of iterations it can't make forward progress towards the goal, to avoid spending CPU cycles on hopeless pathing unnecessarily. (It's more complex than this, but that's the gist of it.)_

The right way to do that is to make a unit _pop_ the action on top of its stack if it cant perform it. So if a unit cant move somewhere, it just removes the action that says it should move there. Now, the trick is: a user click pushes an action which isnt the actual move but which generate actions with actual move. It allows the unit to not give up when it cant perform an action on a user order but make it retry later, say in half a second.

 _I implemented the A_ early exploration optimization*

I did something similar. The way I did that was that a unit of the group would perform an A* but on a grid that has say 64x less cells. The path would be marked and the following, per unit, precise A* would not push into the openlist a cell that's not in the marked grid. Subsequently, if another unit of the group starts a precise A* but is not itself on a marked cell, it performs again a big cell A* marking (union-ed with the previous one). Note that when you select units and perform actions with them, 1) they will have the same actions by definition and 2) they will group if you move them, which 3) makes that algorithm quickly efficient in practice.

The only requirement is a map of the walls at the size of the "big grid". Could be problematic I guess in some cases. Not that it doesn't take into account dynamic walls which is ok (units and such).

 _For short range paths, straight line paths are preferred vs. the tile path returned by findPath() if the straight line path is safe to traverse_

I understand the constraint of this new Age of Empire. Still it's a good introduction for the next topic. I dont know what the guys from blizzard used in SC2 but here is what I did to improve the grid system.

Essentially it all goes down to 2 constraints: 1) you dont want a non-idle unit to be ever blocked by friendly idle units and 2) you want the attacking units to block any unit - because you dont want an attacking unit to move because eh, it's making damage right now. The difficulty is that (1) seems incompatible with (2) at first, when using A* (on a grid or anything else). (1) makes multiple units to be on one node, (2) and more generally combat, make you dramatically want a node to have only one unit for obvious reasons: you want a unit to be able to fire immediately if at order range and to block the other units.

The way I solved that is by using marching squares. All units moves freely on the map, at the "pixel scale", the floating point scale - though it's all integers because the network algorithm, the lockstep, needs integer. Anyway, so you have some fix point math which divide a cell into say, 1024 integer- units.

When performing a pathfinding, a marching square mesh is first built (environment can be precomputed, attacking units are dynamic walls I recall). But the trick and the cool thing is that, when building that marching square mesh, you can actually and easily make a graph of it, which includes a lot of the original cells nodes. Now that you have a graph, you can do an A* and (1) and (2) are all solved. It's quite super simple to implement and as fast as the grid basically. There is also an added benefit: it's easy to make units go straight all the time because the marching squares will gives you the vertex that are reflexes and units can jump from reflexes right away.

The magic moment is that when you select a group of unit and make it attack a single target, the units will form a circle in a very elegant way. Here: [https://gfycat.com/TediousThoseKitty](https://gfycat.com/TediousThoseKitty)

<comment><USER11> Pretty decent, alternative approach is to form virtual "formations" when units near each other and move as blocs. This removes multiple problems like units bumping into each other on the way and is kind of the behaviour a strategy player would expect. On obstruction, make neighbours slow down and indeed use obstruction avoidance (local pathfinding) to "squish" the formations. Return to these later when possible.

Marching squares indeed produces a similar result of "squishing". However as it is ran per unit you will have more collisions.

<comment><USER31> _Pretty decent, alternative approach is to form virtual "formations" when units near each other and move as blocs. This removes multiple problems like units bumping into each other on the way and is kind of the behaviour a strategy player would expect. On obstruction, make neighbours slow down and indeed use obstruction avoidance (local pathfinding) to "squish" the formations. Return to these later when possible._

Yes definitely. That is orthogonal to the main pathfinder. Moving units doesnt count as "walls" and so they can just push each other using a physic/collision engine and move all together like one body as well using that engine which is a sort of "local pathfinder" in some ways (it can be tweak so that units tend to avoid each other and all).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Something has puzzled me about pathfinding in games. There is a well-known algorithm[1] for finding an optimal path: you start at the destination, assign that a cost of 0, make a queue from the points that can reach it directly, compute for each of those points the minimum "cost of directly reaching a marked point + cost written on the marked point", and then, while the queue is nonempty, taking the point with the cheapest minimum cost, marking that point with that cost, adding the point's neighbors to the queue, and recomputing the "minimum cost" for everything that can directly reach the point. You can then either terminate when your source point gets marked, or maybe keep going and keep the whole table around for the next time you need a path to that destination.

At least in turn-based games like Civilization, where most of the runtime is spent letting the player think while refreshing the display, it seems eminently feasible to do this every time a unit is given a goto command. (Also the number of points isn't that large: probably a few thousand distinct squares, much less if you restrict yourself to continents.) Yet Civilization II, at least, yields obviously suboptimal results, and I think I read that one thing it does is run a "perfect" search for every square on the screen, but do something more stupid if part of the optimal path is off the visible screen.

In an RTS, the terrain is probably somewhat more continuous, so there may be more "points" to deal with, and probably more paths need to be computed. Structures are built and destroyed, changing the terrain and the paths; units are moved around much more frequently, though arguably the presence of units should be ignored unless you're very close to the destination. Commands are issued much faster. All these add to the problem, but still...

I would expect games to be implemented first with perfect pathfinding, and then, if that was prohibitively expensive, to have optimizations, possibly "lossy optimizations" (i.e. heuristics), perhaps a bunch of caching or maybe "computing things at low resolution first"... And every optimization could be easily tested against the perfect pathfinding. If the optimizations would often lead to abysmal path-choosing, then this would be very easy to discover in testing.

So I'm surprised that games could have been released with pathfinding bad enough to become infamous. And yet this seems to have happened in multiple games (e.g. in Starcraft). How? Am I severely underestimating the problem difficulty? Did people not even try for perfection because of how slow CPUs were? Did people just assume basic heuristics would work and not bother to check—I guess _they_ didn't have the advantage of learning from the failures of the previous generation?

[1] "Dijkstra's algorithm" seems to be what the kids call it. Did Dijkstra only ever come up with one algorithm? I think "frontier algorithm" would be an improvement. Oh well. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm)

<comment><USER33> 'Perfect pathfinding' sucks with swarms. The first unit gets to the choke point; the rest about-face and start marching off the long way around the forest (because that's now the shortest path with the primary path blocked). Happened all the time in Warcraft I, and was astonishingly annoying.

<comment><USER34> It seems like a harder problem than that as well - you might want some of the units in the back of the swarm to go the long way because they'd wait a long time at the choke.

 _But_ maybe you don't want to do that - those units in the back are squishy and need to stick with the units at the front of the choke.

 _But_ maybe that's ok - the alternative path isn't too far away and it's not a risky move to make.

Maybe that's too complicated. Probably best to make the swarm operate as if other moving units don't exist (to make pathing predictable) and let the player micromanage via waypoints/grouping.

<comment><USER11> Typically in RTS it is better to keep formation. If the user spots that units are choking they will order them elsewhere.

The moving units are often easily handled via local avoidance as needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Meanwhile I will be in forests... Kingdom Come.</comment>


How Target failed in Canada - <AUTHOR> http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-canada/ <comment><USER2> I think these two paragraphs sum up the article well.

 _It didn't take long for Target to figure out the underlying cause of the breakdown: The data contained within the company's supply chain software, which governs the movement of inventory, was riddled with flaws. At the very start, an untold number of mistakes were made, and the company spent months trying to recover from them. In order to stock products, the company had to enter information about each item into SAP. There could be dozens of fields for a single product. For a single product, such as a blender, there might be fields for the manufacturer, the model, the UPC, the dimensions, the weight, how many can fit into a case for shipping and so on. Typically, this information is retrieved from vendors before Target employees put it into SAP. The system requires correct data to function properly and ensure products move as anticipated.

A team assigned to investigate the problem discovered an astounding number of errors. Product dimensions would be in inches, not centimetres or entered in the wrong order: width by height by length, instead of, say, length by width by height. Sometimes the wrong currency was used. Item descriptions were vague. Important information was missing. There were myriad typos. "You name it, it was wrong," says a former employee. "It was a disaster." _

<comment><USER3> Would the width x length x height measurement even matter? It's still the same shaped box.

I guess if boxes could only be stack standing up it might matter.

<comment><USER4> For shipping I don't think it would matter much but for in-store displays it helps to show the front of the box to customers.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, shelf face space is the most precious commodity to a retailer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Complicating matters was the dummy information entered into the system when SAP was set up. That dummy data was still there, confusing the system, and it had to be expunged_

Testing in production, good job.

Sounds like a typical systems integration fail, IT incompetents trying to hook up SAP, JDA, Manhattan, and NCR with no clue how much time and money it really takes to assemble such a complex systems infrastructure, and getting fleeced by consultants in the process.

<comment><USER7> "IT incompetents trying to hook up SAP"

The major incentive for SAP is to drive customers to their consultants. It's basically designed to be impossible for anyone else to maintain, or use.

Target should have modified their American in-house system instead, where the incentives align with Target running smoothly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _A small group of employees also made an alarming discovery that helped > explain why certain items appeared to be in stock at headquarters but were > actually missing from stores. Within the chain's replenishment system was a > feature that notified the distribution centres to ship more product when a > store runs out. Some of the business analysts responsible for this function, > however, were turning it off—purposely._

 _Business analysts (who were young and fresh out of school, remember) were judged based on the percentage of their products that were in stock at any given time, and a low percentage would result in a phone call from a vice- president demanding an explanation. But by flipping the auto-replenishment switch off, the system wouldn't report an item as out of stock, so the analyst's numbers would look good on paper. "They figured out how to game the system," says a former employee. "They didn't want to get in trouble and they didn't really understand the implications."_

I think this article, and the employee quoted here, works too hard to excuse immoral behavior in their junior business analysts.

<comment><USER9> For me it is the fact that they receive punishment for stock outs, especially in a company in such trouble!

Why would you only look at stock amount and not stock turn. I would be concerned at "in stock, sold zero".

This whole story is a clusterfuck.

"We are going to have a new product, it ships on June 1st, no matter how ready it is" has never been a wise choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I live in Minneapolis and Target is a huge presence here amongst just about every type of professional. Everyone knows someone who works(ed) at Target corp and from catching anecdotes from various people it became clear it was no secret that Target Canada was in bad shape from the beginning.

This failure not only damaged the careers of many Canadians but also irrevocably damaged the professional lives of people in my town who were laid off. While the job market in Minneapolis is fairly good it became a struggle for some of these newly jobless Target folks to find work in town because of the massive white collar layoffs.

Target should have been successful in Canada, all of the problems in this article are linked to over the top pressure and hubris.

</comment><comment><USER11> My thought is that because Target's downfall was really location. Zellers got significantly worse and worse over the years that eventually, people stopped shopping there and took their business elsewhere. As a result, Zellers only existed in dead-end malls with low foot traffic because the majority of people went to Walmart.

Target decided it was a good idea to buy up all the Zellers locations and put their stores in there. But by that time, people's habits changed. Target wasn't going to revive dead malls.

<comment><USER12> That's not entirely true. I know that Target in Waterloo was in one of the major K-W malls that gets a lot of traffic. Even still, the few times I shopped at the Target, it was dead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I loved my local Canadian Target store while it existed. Probably for some of the reasons it eventually went out of business...

Target was always easy to shop at - nobody else was there - I could walk down any aisle and not have to deal with other people getting in my way.

Fresh food delivered from the local Sobey's distribution centre (at least I'm pretty sure that's where it came from). And nobody else pawing through it before I chose what I wanted.

Somewhat unique stuff - sure they had all the same mass-produced junk that WalMart did - just slightly different. So it was basically the same but just different enough to be say "Ha! I'm unique"

Good prices - I know people were always complaining that WalMart was cheaper but that wasn't necessarily true. Target had some good deals as well. And if you combined your Target shopping with an occasional trip to Costco you were pretty well covered.

<comment><USER14> This was my experience too. I enjoyed shopping at my local Canadian Target. Clean aisles, brightly lit. Well priced, good quality. Superior experience to Walmart, Canadian Tire, or Loblaws. Sad when they exited the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> When Target opened in my town I went in to see what they had for men's clothing and walked out five minutes later. Nothing.

There were piles of clothing for (obviously) teen girls, a lot for women and boys but for men there was nothing. I'm in my 40s I have no interest dressing like a 15 year-old.

Overall choice for everything else was very limited and the prices were higher than the previous store there (Zellers). Some people who went to Target in the USA said the choices in Canada were very limited and prices were double for the same items.

I bet millions were spent on renovating the local store here alone since it was pretty grungy before Target took it over.

Worse is when Target took over they were the anchor store and demanded all the little kiosks in the main route of the mall be closed. No sunglasses huts, engraving, tobacco or lottery booths either since rumour was Target is owned/started by a fundamentalist religious family(?). Target put a lot of small stores of of business before they even opened the Target store causing a lot of hurt feelings in a small town.

<comment><USER16> >since rumour was Target is owned/started by a fundamentalist religious family(?).

I think you might be confusing them with Hobby Lobby, the company that went to the US Supreme Court so they could deny contraceptive coverage in their employees' health insurance plans. I won't set foot in a Hobby Lobby now.

With them closing the kiosks, that just sounds like your typical dick corporation move, to try to shut down competition and drive up traffic in their store.

<comment><USER17> > I think you might be confusing them with Hobby Lobby, the company that went > to the US Supreme Court so they could deny contraceptive coverage in their > employees' health insurance plans. I won't set foot in a Hobby Lobby now.

They didn't deny contraceptives; they denied (what they believe to be) abortaficients. Big difference.

<comment><USER18> That's not so much a difference as it is an elaboration. The original statement is true, the incorrect belief about how contraceptives work merely explains why.

<comment><USER17> > The original statement is true, the incorrect belief about how > contraceptives work merely explains why.

No, because they are fine with contraceptives which they don't believe are abortaficients. A contraceptive prevents conception (hence the name); other drugs, devices or procedures end lives (whether by preventing implantation or directly killing the fœtus). I think that several of the things they believe are abortaficients aren't, and that there's decent science behind that, but I also can't blame them for not trusting folks who don't apparently care about the distinction between something which prevents contraception and something which prevents implantation.

I also don't think that an employer should be made to pay for the health care of employees in general. I eat more than I ought; my health is worse than it should be. Who should foot that bill which results from my choices: my employer or myself?

<comment><USER18> I'm well aware of the difference between contraceptives and abortifacients.

If you want to correct the original, the correction would be that they oppose _some_ contraceptives. The fact that they oppose them based on ignorance about how they work is, again, not a correction but merely an elaboration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's my anecdote.

It was late November after Target had been open for a while. I popped in to look for Christmas stuff and I was blown away by the quality. All of their decorations and trees were dramatically better in quality than the usual cheap garbage found at Canadian Tire and Walmart. I was super impressed. I was on my lunch break and I didn't have a lot of time, so I decided I'd come back on a weekend to pick up some things.

I show up again next week in the first week of December with my friend, because he was looking to buy an artificial tree, and I was shocked to find out that they were basically sold out of all trees. They still had some decorations but not a lot. I couldn't understand it. How on earth do you run out of Christmas trees in the first week of December? I asked this to a young guy who was working there and he just shook his head in disappointment. He'd clearly been hearing a lot of this.

Their logistics were completely messed up.

</comment><comment><USER20> > SAP, Accenture

I'm surprised they opened at all.

<comment><USER7> Nonsense, SAP is great.

All Target needed to do is G42 their VV6s into a bunch of CC5 subtables. Then they'd have been free to JK8 the W1 data to an F123098 batch, and... abracadabra, Y29 reports for the whole company!

Hmm, wait a moment. I think that should be G420, not G42. Let me call my consultant, and I'll get back to you.

<comment><USER21> "RPCEWGJ2 is a standard Executable ABAP Report available within your SAP system (depending on your version and release level)...If you would like to see the full code listing simply enter RPCEWGJ2 into the relevant SAP transaction such as SE38 or SE80"

Found some documentation on Google - I thought you were joking :(

<comment><USER7> I like their use of "simply" in that sentence.

<comment><USER22> What I love about SAP is that the only way to work in it is to be trained inhouse at the cost of literally tens of thousands of dollars.

Even _Oracle_ lets you install their database for free to figure out how to use it. You'll never get that chance with SAP. Is it any wonder SAP analyst get paid so much money? I'd say it's not just for their expertise, it's because SAP have sewn up the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > what emerged is a story of a company trapped by an overly ambitious launch > schedule, an inexperienced leadership team expected to deal with the biggest > crisis in the firm's history, and a sophisticated retail giant felled by the > most mundane, basic and embarrassing of errors.

Big-bang launches aren't just bad in software. Imagine if they had opened one store, and then iterated on it until they got it right. Then a second store, maybe a third, and slowly spread out. They'd have built a successful organization in 5 years rather than one that collapses after 2.

<comment><USER24> _" Imagine if they had opened one store, and then iterated on it until they got it right"_

They couldn't launch just one store. That was the root cause of everything according to the article.

Target Canada took over the leases on all that real estate at once - it was costing them money to leave those stores empty. That's what drove the insane schedule.

<comment><USER23> They didn't have to buy all those leases. That was their choice, they're decision for how to run the project. And that was their downfall.

<comment><USER25> The leases were more or less all from the same company so it's most likely they got a deal for taking them all at once:

Fourth paragraph:

 _" Under Steinhafel, the company paid $1.8 billion for the leases to the entire Zellers chain in 2011"_

Also later we read that Walmart were sniffing around the same real estate:

 _Walmart approached him and offered to buy the Zellers chain from HBC. Baker realized there was more value to Zellers' real estate than to the operation itself, since Walmart had soundly beaten the brand. An astute deal maker, Baker and his team reached out to Target to stoke the company's interest._

And they'd planned for a fast entry into the Canadian retail market:

 _But the company had previously decided it wanted to grow as quickly as possible if it were to enter Canada, rather than pursue a slow, piecemeal expansion. The challenge was in acquiring enough real estate to make that possible. The Zellers sale provided just such an opportunity._

And all because they thought they really could do this:

 _But Steinhafel may have felt justified in making such a bold move. In the three years since he was appointed CEO, he'd boosted revenue 8.3%—not a huge number, but an impressive one, considering the U.S. was experiencing the worst recession since the Great Depression. Steinhafel had joined Target in 1979, and his entire professional career had been spent with the company. Target experienced steady growth during that time, and Steinhafel had simply become accustomed to succeeding. "The company had never really failed before," says a former employee who worked in both the U.S. and Canada. There was no reason to think Target wouldn't be able to pull this off._

<comment><USER26> Seems walmart is buying up some of these failed target leases.

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/walmart-to-buy-13-former- tar...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/walmart-to-buy-13-former-target- canada-stores-and-a-distribution-centre-1.3066182)

2 of these locations are within 20km of me, and not too far from 3 other walmarts within 20 minutes apart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here is my anecdotal reason why Target failed.

Target missed the boat by about 15-20 years. I entered 4 or 5 different Target locations in Canada and none of them had a full grocery selection. Targets were basically Walmarts before they began converting to full grocery stores.

Therefore, shoppers had the option to either go to a Walmart Superstore and get everything they needed, or go to Target and get 80% of what you needed, the remaining 20% being available at a grocery store.

Beyond all the data logistics issues, Target would have never succeeded in my opinion as they couldn't compete with Walmart on selection (or Great Canadian Superstore for that matter).

<comment><USER28> The problem I found is in the US there is a class system of those who despise Walmart as being for the "commoners". In Canada the stigma is much less to non-existent. Walmart pays more, has the same insurance for all its employees, and does not actively promote "anti-union" videos to new hires.

<comment><USER29> I wouldn't even say commoners. Walmart has a reputation for having very trashy, uncouth people walking about. The employees at Target also seem a bit friendlier, whereas Walmart probably scrapes.the bottom of the barrel for its employees. My mother has been the weekend manager at a Walmart for 30 years and it's a real shit-show keeping staff because most are incredibly unreliable and don't give a damn about their job.

<comment><USER30> Walmart in Canada is much, much nicer than in the US. In the US, we almost never went to Walmart and preferred shopping at Target. When we moved back to Canada, we initially were delighted that there was now a Target store in our area. We had horrible experiences and it turned us off completely.

I feel really bad for the people who lost their jobs.. for young people in their first job, it might be okay. For older folks who probably quit a job some place else, it is really a hard experience.

Walmart stores in Toronto that I visited, definitely seemed crowded with long check outs. Other cities in Ontario, the checkouts seem to be adequately staffed. I'm surprised how different Walmart Canada is from the US operation!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't think that Target spent enough time researching Canada. Perhaps if they had hired some Canadian executives, the result would have been different.

My favourite example has to do with winter hats. In Canada, we call them toques (it is not pronounced 'toke'), yet in Target, all the signage said 'hats'.

That sounds really small, but it was my most memorable example of a company that genuinely did not get Canadians. They treated us like Americans and, while Americans are cool, we aren't Americans!!

<comment><USER26> tuques are a type of knitted hat usually, not specific to winter.

them generalizing a section including tuques as hats is correct, i dont think i have seen a "tuques" section in any canadian store, they would be in the hat section.

toques are hardly a canadian thing, and alot of canadians refer to them as beanies.

target did not fail cause they werent canadian enough(is anything really canadian?), they failed due to locations, business model, inventory, and technical issues on their backend.

if anything they failed because they werent "american" enough, as canadians were expecting a similar experience to USA target shopping

<comment><USER32> >> is anything really canadian?

Yes. Many things. Watch TV? Vancouver? Nickleback? Or drake? Or pretty much 1/3 of Hollywood? Canada and canadians are very over-represented in US culture. They are just hard to spot.

Cruz 2016 -

<comment><USER33> Well Nickelback is obviously Canadian, but that third of Hollywood you're talking about tries very hard to blend in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This failure could have been predicted with a simple understanding of Systemantics, one of the precepts of which is:

A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

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

</comment><comment><USER35> OOC, Why do people shop at Target instead of Walmart? For me, the only reason is distance---if there's a Target closer than a Walmart. Otherwise the two are pretty much interchangeable.

<comment><USER36> Where I live, Walmart is like DMV.

You need to avoid going there at the beginning of the month, after work, Saturday afternoon, Sunday night, after 9 etc. There's either 2/30 lines open, or 15/30 with 300 people waiting.

If you go, they don't merchandise. They cut the top off a box of food and throw it on the shelf. The workers suck because the workplace sucks.

Target, the prices are same or better, selection is different (i.e. You can't get car parts or hunting gear), and the staff is much more useful.

<comment><USER37> "You need to avoid going there at the beginning of the month"

Yes, Walmart is the preferred vendor if you are on EBT and that is why police departments will stake them out at the beginning of the month. Walmart is pretty much the place to get the most food for the buck.

<comment><USER36> They also do fee based bank like services.

I don't care about that at all, it's just that Walmart doesn't bother to do things like have more staff available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I was living abroad in Canada at the time and when Target showed up I was super psyched. I was the only one.

I think it's easy to blame the horrible and run down locations they took over from Zellers but people still shopped at Walmarts in similar places. In the end, it felt like the same experience we had with Amazon (or Netflix) in Canada; the shell is there with some good products but mostly lacking in everything that makes Target a fun (and addictive) place to shop. The lack of products didn't help but that had more to do with Quebec's super bizarre language police/laws.

The irony is Target Canada was at least slightly better than Walmart Canada and many MANY times better than Canadian Tire, a place that was almost always packed with people.

It's sad but I don't think Target ever had a chance in Canada.

</comment><comment><USER39> That data goofiness issue is pretty much use case #1 for Mechanical Turk. Pay a bunch of people a few cents to do a sensibility check on the data, collect 10 for each item, and put any that are less than 100% through another round.

Not even all that expensive. 10 cents each, 75,000 items, 10 checks each. $75,000 is quite a bargain for that kind of data validation.

It'd take a day or two.

(There's probably some horrible flaw with this idea)

<comment><USER40> There's no real way a turker would know if the data is bad. Really only the merchandiser at HQ who was checking with the supplier would have had the source data (dimensions, units for those dimensions, case quantities, and so on) or warehouse workers who actually receive the product and can physically look at it. Suppliers sometimes change product attributes, quantity per case or pallet, or packaging without giving advance notice so the warehouse often ends up making these updates as they notice them, if they do. Data quality in supply chains is a constant struggle for many companies. It sounds like Target got hit bad with this due to a perfect storm of poorly trained merchandisers and SAP having dummy data that probably looked somewhat reasonable to the untrained eye.

<comment><USER41> Some of their issues were with the measurement system (English vs metric) and order of dimensions (length * width * height or width * length * height).

I can see a turk system where they show a picture of the product and ask if the unit of measurement looks correct (being 2.5x off is pretty easy to guess) and if the order looks correct. They might not get the width and the length correct but the height could probably be guessed. Course that can probably be done with computer vision.

So for $75k they could get it so at least the product would fit on the shelving units. That could easily pay for itself in a day. Products that failed these two simple tests should be looked at more closely for other issues.

<comment><USER40> True, but again, that assumes they have a picture of the data. If the product was sold online through target.com, a picture may exist somewhere. Otherwise, most company's item master data tables (that I've seen) don't include a picture. Also, they chose not to use data out of the old systems, because they wanted to avoid getting it out of the old and into the new system. This seems like it should've been the easier route but for whatever reason their legacy software probably made it much more difficult than needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Most everyone I asked about it's failure said that they just didn't get Canada. It acted as it Canada was a 51st state.

The lack of inventory didn't help either. The one closest to me had about 10,000 options for bath mats and bath robes. Everything else was out of stock and the food section had limited selection and higher prices than other nearby stores.

</comment><comment><USER26> i went to the target a handfull of times in canada. most targets were in old zellers locations...

when they opened, they seemed like a bit more modern and cleaner zellers, but still in the same not so high traffic crappy locations. the zellers theme was red, so was target...

people were excited about target opening based off experiences crossing the border and shopping at USA Target.

the USA stores differed from the Canadian stores. 1)canada target didnt have the same selection/inventory of products. 2)prices were significantly different... even when factoring in the exchange rate, it was still cheaper to shop at USA target locations on a trip across the border.

walmart here, atleast in locations near me in canada are far cleaner and newer looking compared to walmart USA. most existing were upgraded to "super centers" and several more locations are opening soon where as in the states they are downsizing and closing locations.

</comment><comment><USER43> Every time I read an article about Target, the only people who come out looking good in the end is the Hudson's Bay Company. While I loved Zellers and shopped there on a regular basis, it was worth more for its locations than the actual business. I worked at Zellers briefly in the years leading up to its eventual dismantlement and the question on everyone's mind was really "what is going to happen to all of these stores?" HBC made out like a bandit by seducing Target into buying them in one fell swoop.

<comment><USER44> Do you have any insight into when Zeller's was good and what went wrong? HBC seems to have done a much better job turning around The Bay locations (albeit very gradually) and apparently they also own Saks?

I'm pretty young and all of my experiences were a combo of dirty, badly stocked stores, products that I didn't care about, bad fluorescent lighting, and employees who didn't give a shit. I also don't really shop at Walmart, but Walmart seems kind of sterile and organized, at least. I honestly did not know why anyone would ever go into a Zeller's - they had clothes and housewares and groceries and stuff, but somebody else seemed to do all of those things much better.

<comment><USER45> Zellers (no apostrophe, even though it was started by a guy named Zeller) was able to stay 'on top' of the Canadian department store game for quite some time. They were founded in the 20s, profitable well into the 90s, and had a niche and a format that was poorly understood by existing department stores. Their only real competition was K-Mart.

HBC bought them out in the early 80s and then started shovelling more acquisitions on top; Bonimart, Fields, Woodward's. They had enough capital to start fixing things - in the mid to late 80s your parents probably remember "Club Z" and pushing aggressively against their remaining competition to make sure they had the lowest price in town.

In the late 90s, just as Walmart was starting to show up in Canada (by buying up the burned-out corpse of Woolworth's) and threaten pretty much every brand under the HBC umbrella, HBC centralized decision making and planning in HBC's Toronto offices and under HBC execs.

K-Mart basically collapsed at this time from the same pressure; HBC opened up the purse and bought a lot of old K-Mart locations, intending to convert them. Eatons also died, and their assets were acquired by Sears.

I worked at Zellers to put myself through school briefly during this general time period, and I remember hysteria and confusion in all ranks of retail and management staff. Communication with HBC was generally command-and-control with no mechanism to individually fix brand-wide or regional problems.

Actual Bay stores in the late 90s were also doing poorly, and it was likely that Zellers was seen as a losing anchor that needed to slash margins further to compete with Walmart.

I will miss the chain. I had never really gone in prior to working there, but after working there I had gained enough weird institutional memory to be able to quickly find whatever I was looking for even in Zellers I had never visited before.

It is now basically a race in Canada to see if HBC or Sears will pull out first. Neither one of them are doing particularly well.

Canada is, in general, not kind to its department stores. [http://ottawacitizen.com/business/local-business/canadas- big...](http://ottawacitizen.com/business/local-business/canadas-big-box- graveyard-target-joins-illustrious-company)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is why the leveraged systems integrator consulting model (i.e. Accenture, Deloitte, etc.) is inherently flawed. If only these firms would take a few experience senior people (as opposed to a tiered leveraged or pyramid hierarchy with tons of juniors at high margins) and implement the systems I think they would find a lot less failures.

</comment><comment><USER47> People are mentioning Walmart as a competitor, but not Amazon. Is Amazon not competitive in Canada?

</comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like they got played by Walmart too.

"Raise you $1.6bn"

"Raise you $1.8bn"

"I'm out, enjoy Canada"

</comment><comment><USER8> What an incredible debacle. Select quotes regarding their technology decisions:

> "While SAP might be considered best in class, it's an ornery, unforgiving > beast. Sobeys introduced a version of SAP in 1996 and abandoned the effort > by 2000. (It wasn't until 2004 that the grocery chain tried again.) > Similarly, Loblaws started moving to SAP in 2007 and projected three to five > years to get it done. The implementation took two years longer than expected > because of unreliable data in the system. Target was again seeking to do the > impossible: It was going to set up and run SAP in roughly two years."

> "The company wasn't doing it alone, however, and hired Accenture (which also > worked on Loblaws' integration) as the lead consultant on the project. [...] > Accenture, which Target hired as a consultant on SAP, said in a statement: > "Accenture completed a successful SAP implementation for Target in Canada. > The project was reviewed independently and such review concluded that there > is no Accenture connection with the issues you refer to.""

> "The company had purchased a sophisticated forecasting and replenishment > system made by a firm called JDA Software, but it wasn't particularly useful > at the outset, requiring years of historical data to actually provide > meaningful sales forecasts."

> "The depots were hampered by other factors, caused by lingering data > problems and the learning curve associated with the new systems. Manhattan, > the company's warehouse software, and SAP weren't communicating properly."

> "The auto-replenishment system, which keeps track of what a store has in > stock, wasn't functioning properly, either. Like many other parts of retail, > replenishment is an exacting science that can go haywire without correct > data. At Target Canada, the technology relied on having the exact dimensions > of every product and every shelf in order to calculate whether employees > need to pull more products to fill an empty rack. Much of that data was > still incorrect, and therefore the system couldn't be relied upon to make > accurate calculations."

> "To add even more headaches, the point-of-sale system was malfunctioning. > The self-checkouts gave incorrect change. The cash terminals took unusually > long to boot up and sometimes froze. Items wouldn't scan, or the POS > returned the incorrect price. Sometimes a transaction would appear to > complete, and the customer would leave the store—but the payment never > actually went through. The POS package was purchased from an Israeli company > called Retalix, which worked closely with Target Canada to address the > issues. Progress was maddeningly slow. In 2014, a Retalix team flew to > Toronto to see first-hand what Target was dealing with. After touring a > store, one of the Retalix executives remarked, "I don't understand how > you're using this," apparently baffled the retailer managed to keep going > with so many bugs. But Target didn't have time to find a new vendor and > deploy another technology. [...] Unlike SAP, Retalix is not an industry > standard, and why Target chose it isn't entirely clear."

> "Like SAP, the replenishment software was brand new to Target, and the > company didn't fully understand how to use it."

</comment><comment><USER48> Walmart. Thats how.

</comment><comment><USER49> Hi Diego! Please update the link to the original Canadian Business article (given in the article):

[http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target- cana...](http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-canada/)

The Maclean's copy of it is unreadable due to the ridiculous font combined with narrow column width.

<comment><USER50> We changed the URL from [http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/what-really- happened...](http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/what-really-happened-at- target-canada-the-retailers-last-days/).

That reveals that it was posted before ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10952937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10952937)), but since there is active interest in this story we'll leave this one up and merge those comments here.</comment></comment>


2013 Automobile of the Year: Tesla Model S - <AUTHOR> http://www.automobilemag.com/features/awards/1301_2013_automobile_of_the_year_tesla_model_s/viewall.html <comment><USER2> Even if Tesla do not survive, ten years from now every new electric car will be a descendant of the Model S in all the major ways - floor-mounted battery pack, lack of physical buttons, etc.

<comment><USER3> I'm a big Tesla fan, but I disagree. The only way electric cars can possibly make sense is if the batteries are swappable. The electric cars being built now are evolutionary dead ends, IMHO.

<comment><USER4> As an electric car owner, I haven't found a need for swapping batteries. Consider this: if a refueling station offered battery swapping they would also need to exhaustively test your batteries to determine that they were not abused and to determine how much credit to offer for their current capacity. How does that save much time from just using a quick-charge station?

Today, I have plenty of range to get to and from work and most activities driving a car with 1/3rd the EPA range of a Tesla Model S. Consider that you can still do long road trips simply by stopping at a quick charge station for a meal and a fillup or you can use some small part of the money you're saving on fuel to rent a car. Given how few road trips I take, I could probably take a limo every time if I wanted.

<comment><USER3> _As an electric car owner, I haven't found a need for swapping batteries. Consider this: if a refueling station offered battery swapping they would also need to exhaustively test your batteries to determine that they were not abused and to determine how much credit to offer for their current capacity. How does that save much time from just using a quick-charge station?_

Because the batteries wouldn't have to be tested while you wait. Like laptop batteries, they could have their own embedded controllers that would keep track of each individual unit's charge state and condition. (Actually it's almost certain that they already do.)

The analogy I like to use is swapping out propane cylinders for a gas grill. It should take _less_ time to refuel an EV than a gasoline-powered vehicle, not more.

This is also important for power management, if Musk's prediction comes true and half of all cars sold by 2025 are indeed electric. Swappable batteries can be charged when/where the power is available, using industrial rates and infrastructure. Instead of seeing gasoline tankers driving around, you would see trucks delivering and picking up batteries from service stations.

People will understand why hardwired batteries are a bad idea as soon as half their neighborhood tries to charge their EVs every night the way we currently charge our smartphones.

<comment><USER5> Forgot to mention that I am an electric car owner as well (Roadster).

I don't really like the idea of battery swapping. It seems like a big hassle. The current Supercharger seems totally fine. I guess it remains to be seen how well it works in practice, once a lot of people have the cars, but right now things look really good.

One of the most common pieces of anti-EV rhetoric is "the infrastructure doesn't exist". This is actually FUD. The infrastructure is everywhere: we have electricity pretty much everywhere. (Consider: all these gas stations have electricity, so the penetration of electricity is a superset of the penetration of gasoline). What we don't often have is the right plug, but that is a relatively small problem.

But if you start talking about installing a widespread battery swapping paradigm, then that _is_ a huge infrastructure problem, because you need to have stocks of all these physical things all over the place.

On the other hand, with Supercharger, you don't need that. You just need some electricity. It is much simpler.

<comment><USER6> "You just need some electricity."

If you wave your hand enough anything is trivial. The "some" you are talking about is 250A @ 400V (100kW) which is a trifle more than a typical gas station can readily supply (especially if you want to charge more than one at a time).

<comment><USER5> Okay, so what if a particular gas station can't supply 100kW, so what? You charge at 50kW? That is definitely less convenient, but still feasible for filling up your battery and getting you where you want to go. It's still infrastructure that works, so the anti-EV argument "there's no infrastructure and the infrastructure can never be built" is still obviously wrong. It's also still obviously wrong if you drop the charging to 25kW. etc, etc.

Besides, do you know that a typical gas station can't readily supply 100kW? How do you know? Has anyone even thought about this seriously (except Tesla)?

I am a little bit shocked by the amount of specious naysaying that is happening in this thread. This is supposed to be Hacker News, where people are motivated to really think about problems, to build solutions, etc, etc. I don't see any of that attitude in some of these replies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If they can get to volume production, I think the $50-60k models, leased, could be great sellers. The really interesting thing would be to rip off Better Place's model and lease the cars at a discounted monthly payment plus a per-mile "fuel equivalence" charge. It's just accounting, but you could basically price the Model S at BMW 3-series lease rates (or even Toyota Avalon!), plus a per-mile fuel cost which was 10-20% less than gasoline. Combine that with the quality of the Model S, the environmental/status benefit (90+% of the girls I've polled would be more impressed by a Model S than a 2-3x as expensive Ferrari), and HOV lane access, and it would be great.

The Leaf, which basically sucks by comparison as a car, is essentially free in California ($200/mo lease, $2500 California incentive tax credit covers the first year, fuel, HOV lane, and toll savings vs. a less-efficient gas car pretty much cover lease payments IMO).

I'd have a Leaf as a hold-over until Teslas ship in quantity if I had a second parking space.

<comment><USER8> > (90+% of the girls I've polled would be more impressed by a Model S than a > 2-3x as expensive Ferrari)

maybe in SF (or US in general, I don't know). around most of Europe flashy loud cars are still cool, fortunately.

<comment><USER9> In general, you should be careful in choosing which set of girls you want to impress.

<comment><USER8> personally I don't need material stuff to impress one.

tesla S is impressive for the technological hipster crowd, yet it's the kind of ride you won't notice in the parking lot in a few years, and you won't fool anybody - those cars aren't exactly pussy-magnets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Tesla Model S is a great-looking car but, unlike some, I still don't see electric cars as being the future. Batteries are still too heavy, take too long to charge, are too expensive and require materials that in widespread use will probably become far more of a problem than fossil fuels in terms of scarcity.

Of course, there can be and no doubt will be technological innovation in this space but (IMHO) the future of personal powered transportation will still be fuel-driven.

What will change is the source of that fuel. It may be some kind of hydrogen- rich fuel (methane or ammonia) or it may be making the necessary hydrocarbons from the air and/or seawater.

Portable fuel supplies are just too convenient. The relative simplicity of the internal combustion engine (or some derivation thereof) is just too advantageous compared to even optimistic long-term alternatives.

EDIT: the amount of cognitive dissonance when it comes to electric cars is mind-boggling eg:

A: the benefits are too numerous to list

B: can you use it in an apartment?

A: no...

Or the amount of infrastructure retro-fitting that needs to happen (power to parking garages being just one). Or ignoring issues or range and recharge times. Even with swappable batteries, even if that were a thing that people would do (there are security, weight and cost issues), the recharge time is still an issue.

Power is not free. An electric vehicle still needs to get power from somewhere and that power requires all the normal transmission infrastructure.

Someone brought up what's happening in NJ but if you had an electric car you'd be even more screwed. At least now you can transport gas to people.

Seriously, out of cost, weight, range and charging time _all of them_ need to get an order of magnitude better to even be on par with fuel-driven vehicles.

How exactly have electric vehicles "already won"?

<comment><USER5> Those of us who own electric cars know that electric cars have already won. They are just too good compared to regular somewhat-junky gasoline cars. The benefits are too numerous to list.

The _only_ problem that I have with my Roadster is that if I want to take a long road trip, there has to be a big stopover in the middle, which makes trips much longer. The Model S solves that. Therefore, EVs have won. They are here now, they are real, and they work. All that needs to happen is for the cost to come down, but there is nothing preventing that.

If you have parking at home, an EV is _way_ better than gas or hydrogen because you never need to take your car somewhere to fuel it, ever (unless on a very long road trip). You just come home, park, and plug it in. It is hard to communicate how good this feels until you've had an EV for a few weeks and you're driving past all these gas stations and kind of laughing because you don't need them.

<comment><USER11> Aren't EVs totally unusable if you live in an apartment? That was my impression when I looked into them. Like, how would I charge a car in my parking stall?

<comment><USER5> It is definitely less convenient if you don't have a garage. But as mentioned, this is starting to be addressed. Also, the Supercharger-style charging station becomes a lot like a gas station would be for a normal car.

I do think that "I don't have a garage / dedicated place to park my car" is in fact the only current anti-EV argument that has any basis in reality. But it's addressable.

<comment><USER12> Really? The _only_ argument? How about my family lives 575 miles away from me, and even with the ideal 250 mile range of a $100k Model S I would still need to add at least an hour and a half to my already 10 hour one-way trip when I visit them a few times per year? Meanwhile my $5,000, 14-year-old Toyota might only get 20mpg, but the tank holds 350 miles of fuel and I only need to refill once (rather than thrice) during the trip, costing me literally _minutes_ of time.

Finding a place to recharge overnight is a problem. But let's not pretend it's the only _real_ problem. I already have enough problems charging my phone every night when I'm staying over at someone's house. Asking them to install an outlet so I can charge my car is asking a bit more than many people will stand.

<comment><USER13> Congratulations - you are the 1% who this model fails for. The rest of us will be just fine, since 99% of us don't travel more than 250 miles a day.

And for the couple times a year we need to take road trips, we can rent a luxury sedan with the money we've saved on fuel costs.

<comment><USER12> >And for the couple times a year we need to take road trips, we can rent a luxury sedan with the money we've saved on fuel costs.

False.

See another discussion I'm involved in. To give you the gist: I drive a 14 year old gas guzzling truck. Let's say it broke down and I wanted to save money, so I bought an electric car. Here's the breakdown in costs-

Buying another 14 year old gas guzzling Toyota truck: $19,000 over 5 years. ($1400/yr in gas, 32 mile round trip to work, plus a one-time cost of $5000)

Renting a minivan for vacation trips: $110/day plus gas (20mpg).

High-end Model S: $108,680 over 5 years. ($100,000 plus 5 years of renting a minivan for one week)

Base Model S: $66,080 over 5 years. ($57,400 plus 5 years of renting a minivan for one week)

Nissan Leaf: $42,500 over 5 years ($35,000 plus plus electricity costs plus 5 years of minivan rental)

The fact is, if you want to save money, you can do it more efficiently with an ancient gas guzzler than you can buying a new electric car. Yeah you're saving money on fuel costs, but you're spending a lot of money on the car itself. The Leaf is built on the same platform as the Cube and the Micra, yet costs $20,000 more MSRP. Even comparing it to the truck, it would take 14 years to save enough on fuel to pay off that $20,000 you could have saved by buying the Cube or the Micra.

I highly doubt that only 1% of the population needs to drive more than 250 miles at some point once a year. We have salesmen at work where some of them drive that far _every day_. My mother was a home care nurse who drove that far one day a week. If the car works for you, I'm glad. It's a nice car. But don't fool yourself into trading in your old car for promises of saved money. The numbers just don't work out, even for the average American driver they're targeting.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4730973>

<comment><USER14> Although it might not invalidate your argument, you have ignored the residual value of having a 5-year old Model S / Nissan Leaf.

We don't know what that will be, yet, but it will probably be higher than the residual value of a 14 year old gas guzzling Toyota truck.

<comment><USER15> If you're doing prudent financial planning, you have to assume close to zero. The technology is moving very, very quickly, and there's no telling what it will look like in five years and if your present-day car can be retro-fitted to fit into it.

<comment><USER16> It's not unlikely that breakthroughs in battery technology could be retrofitted into present-day electric car. I can totally imagine that 5 years from now you take your Model S to the shop, and replace your battery with a new and improved with 3x the range. It wouldn't be cheap, but cheaper than a brand new car.

<comment><USER15> Sure, I'm not claiming that it's impossible. But what if the technological breakthrough is a sustainable way to mass produce bio-fuel?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here are some video reviews of the Model S (notice the gas-heads gushing at how awesome it is to drive/look at/fun):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kCG-WqpVnI>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOdsTuaJEfc>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoFVO31CbE0>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpySOCBqntI>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEkIMmAX1iM>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9SsUbBqOkY>

</comment><comment><USER18> I've owned an electric car for about two years now. The article missed a few points:

1\. The regenerative braking means you do not need to replace your brakes nearly as often. (Tires are a different story.)

2\. There are far fewer moving parts than a normal car. This decreases the amount of maintenance you need to do.

3\. Since there are no moving parts, it's less damaging to the car when drive it hard. Accelerating quickly with non-electric sports cars wears out very expensive components very quickly. With an electric car, you can get that 0-60 performance every single time you accelerate without wearing anything out. (Except the tires.)

When you're comparing the annual fuel bill to the extra cost of the Tesla, don't forget that you are buying a premium sports car. Something like a BMW M5 gets 14/20 MPG, and expects that you feed it premium fuel.

<comment><USER19> Interesting observation, though I think you're missing a few points in your analysis:

1\. Engine braking + looking ahead to see when I need to lift = I seldom need to replace brakes. And my driving is quite spirited. (I go through brakes far slower than does my wife, who doesn't drive with as much zest, but accelerates towards red lights, etc.)

2\. Yeah. It'd be nice to not have to worry about oil changes. But besides that, good modern drivetrains are incredibly reliable.

3\. Not if it's engineered well. There are sports cars that can be driven hard for the better part of a decade with nothing but oil, filter, and tire changes. (This is from experience.) Sure, there are plenty of lousy sports cars out there, but the causes of their poor reliability are more rooted in lousy engineering than in their having internal combustion engines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Good for Tesla. I have seen and sat in, the Model S at their showroom in the Park Meadows Mall in Denver (well, south of Denver). It is an impressive looking car and everything just feels right. I have not driven it, however.

<comment><USER21> That screen in the center console is huge. Was it on and if so how was it to use? Looks pretty useful for mapping.

<comment><USER20> It was huge! I didn't pair my phone to it, but all the features were very cleanly laid out (you control many things, from music, web, to climate control , fan speed, etc. from it).

In trying to imagine what it would be like to use while driving, I can see that it would work just fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> When will the Google self-driving fleet include a Tesla?

<comment><USER23> Considering both Sergey Brin and Larry Page are investors in Tesla, I would think that's a distinct possibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Now the galleries would look a lot better if they used normal photographs; instead of hideous HDR and heavy photoshopping.

<comment><USER25> In one in particular, there is a fake depth-of-field effect which makes it look like they took a picture of a toy car on the ground.

This is the image: [http://image.automobilemag.com/f/features/awards/1301_2013_a...](http://image.automobilemag.com/f/features/awards/1301_2013_automobile_of_the_year_tesla_model_s/41380834/Tesla- Model-S-front-right-side-view-2.jpg)

Edit: Whoops, it is actually the car's key, laying on the ground. See this link for the key shown in someone's hand: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahelliott/2012/07/24/a-quick...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahelliott/2012/07/24/a-quick- test-drive-the-tesla-model-s/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Tesla is still a niche luxury car, and I still think they will not remain in business in their current form. Several top-name brands are hot on their heels which will put a lot of pressure in their customer acquisition prospects.

As for the Automobile endorsement, I don't like how they are misleading consumers with their data. The test vs. M5 was designed to take account Tesla's sweet spot of performance, "...drag race to 100 mph with a 560-hp BMW M5". At 0-60 M5 will beat Tesla, and Telsa hits the top speed 130 mph and M5 is limited at 155. So it's really around 100-120 mph where Tesla has the edge. This doesn't even include racing them on a track to include handling aspect of a car. I would have preferred the article stating something like:

in one aspect, Tesla is even faster than the BMW M5, the drag race to 100 mph.

In general I'm seeing a downtrend among publications when it comes to educating consumers, especially educating them on how to think about data. This will have a long-term consequence on how consumers can be duped by faulty advertising, especially with political ads.

<comment><USER27> The M5 may beat the Tesla at 0-60 on paper (3.7 seconds vs 3.9), but in practice the Tesla will beat the M5.

A 0-60 is measured from the time the car starts to move. If you measure from when the accelerator is depressed, the Tesla gains a huge advantage and will beat the M5.

EDIT:

Here's a 0-100 video:

[http://ca.autoblog.com/2012/10/09/sport-sedan-shootout- tesla...](http://ca.autoblog.com/2012/10/09/sport-sedan-shootout-tesla-model- s-beats-bmw-m5-in-a-drag-race/#continued)

Now unless there's some tricks in the video, it's quite obvious that the M5 does much better at the latter half of the drag than the first half. So if a Tesla can beat an M5 at 0-100, it will destroy it at 0-60.

<comment><USER28> This is very strange and foreign reasoning to me. I competitively raced cars in an amateur series.

You are claiming that the Tesla's superior throttle response makes it faster 0-60. The car needs to move the weight, so measuring it from when it starts moving to when it hits the desired speed seems like a perfectly reasonable metric.

Throttle response needs to be measured separately.

The M5 comparison is more than enough to get an idea for the car's capabilities. I've never driven a Model S. I've driven several cars in the area of the M5. If the Model S is in that class, _it's a beast!_

<comment><USER27> It's not throttle response, it's torque at 0RPM.

When you're racing, you rev your engine before the light turns green and pop the clutch when it turns green.

You don't do that when you're not racing, because it's hard on clutches, and the vast majority of daily drivers are automatics.

When you're racing an electric car, you mash the accelerator when the light turns green, the same way you start the car moving when you're normally driving. So you get race-track start feeling every time you drive your car.

<comment><USER28> Only electric vehicles start at 0 RPM. Normal combustion engines idle under 1,000 RPM and the M5 has a fairly flat torque curve for a naturally aspirated car with somewhere around 260lbs at idle. That's very good and about 50% of its peak torque.

The M5s also have SMG which is a computer controlled manual transmission. No manually operated clutch. Even has a launch mode if you want the computer to control wheel spin for you so you get the best possible launch.

Throttle response is still the wrong metric to use here. And is a bit of a red herring in the discussion.

<comment><USER5> My 2006 M3 had SMG and I didn't like it much. (Fine for highway driving, sucks for city street driving). Maybe the new one is better?

<comment><USER28> I'm not a fan of the SMG myself (or equivalents from other manufacturers) nor is anyone else I know. But it's not really because of any real performance metric. SMG is far better at changing gears than any of us mortals could accomplish. But it's just not _fun_.

If you didn't like yours for the same reason I don't know if you'd like the new iterations. You're still not doing the shifting yourself.

ps. Your project looks interesting and I signed up for the mailing list. The success page said an email had been sent but I haven't received anything. Not sure if there's a long delay or it's a bug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The Fisker Karma was their 2012 Automobile of the Year. In 2011 it was the Volt.

<comment><USER30> That's not true, in 2012 The Audi A7 was their car of the year. So that shows that they're not just always picking an electric car no matter what.

The original article also mentions that the Fisker Karma won their "Design of the Year" award in 2012, but not the "Car of the Year".

<comment><USER29> > The Audi A7 was their car of the year.

Sorry, you're right. The Karma was the "Design of the Year".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> One of the things that I really, really like about electric vehicles, is that, with a widespread distribution we are also getting a well-distributed accessible reservoir of electric energy!

See: <http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100106/full/463018a.html>

</comment><comment><USER32> When cars were introduced gasoline was cheap, today that is very different. Electricity today seems to be cheap, but how will that be in 100 years ? In Germany i already pay twice what people in the US pay for electricity (about $0.28 per kwH) and its only getting more expensive.

Of course, gasoline is a fossil fuel which will run out some time, but dont forget that most of our electricity is still generated by the same fuels (coal!) and with rapidly rising electricity usage i dont see a complete fossile-fuel free electricity infrastructure anywhere near. Even if thats possible with lots of wind/solar/whatever power, i highly doubt its going to be cheaper as we already pay a premium on "green-energy" today, governments move away from nuclear power etc.

</comment><comment><USER33> No one is mentioning Hydrogen fuel-cell cars that have been in trials, such as the Honda FCX Clarity (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_FCX_Clarity>).

Relative to battery-powered fully-electric vehicles, some advantages are: \- Quick re-fueling (like with a gasoline vehicle) \- No loss of range in cold weather (and seems like earlier freezing issues have been addressed) \- No deterioration of a battery's performance over time

Some disadvantages: \- Hydrogen economy is not here yet and may be difficult to make efficient relative to electricity delivery (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy>)

</comment><comment><USER34> Is that why TSLA stock is up today?

<comment><USER4> I would guess a mix of the positive jobs report and short covering from margin calls is at fault. Right-leaning investors have seemed to want the company to fail for months, but Tesla is looking resilient with their good backlog and a strong economy. They're paying back their DOE loan early.

<comment><USER35> >Right-leaning investors have seemed to want the company to fail for months, but Tesla is looking resilient with their good backlog and a strong economy. They're paying back their DOE loan early.

Seriously? You think people are prepared to lose money to make a political point?

<comment><USER36> It's not a political point. They actually believe Tesla will fail. They want it to fail because it's fun seeing your predictions come true.

Folks' politics and their beliefs about the world are all tied up together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> That's a pretty sexy car, I'd take one in a second if I had $60k+ to drop, and I'm not even in the market for ANY car (bike commuting ftw). That said, I'm holding out for a Model X. The falcon wing doors are just SO badass.

</comment><comment><USER38> They need a lot more dealerships. Look at the map of their dealers and there's a huge hole in the middle of the country. A couple in Chicago, one in Denver, and one in Houston. That's it. If you live in say Tennessee you're looking at close to a 10 hour drive to even see one.

<http://www.teslamotors.com/locations>

<comment><USER39> remember, tesla is not actually selling cars inside their "dealerships". customers still have to do this themselves on the tesla homepage - and even then it's just a reservation. source from a previous hacker news thread: [http://autos.yahoo.com/blogs/motoramic/tesla-plans-short- cir...](http://autos.yahoo.com/blogs/motoramic/tesla-plans-short-circuit-car- dealers-194619627.html)

<comment><USER38> You can't buy a Roadster?

<comment><USER23> Nope. They stopped selling them in August 2011 when their supply of Lotus Elise gliders ran out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Dear Elon Musk:

Want to make cars? Need a lot of workers? Space?

How about old car factories in an old car factory town. Come to Flint, Mi man, Change the world.

<comment><USER41> The workers required to make Teslas are no doubt different to the ones used to make cars the old way.

Would be interesting to see what the unions would say about Tesla workplace practices

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is good news considering I've been hearing Tesla as a company has been having trouble.

Besides it being an EV, what really appeals to me is the maintenance plan. 600$/year covers everything. Having a car hit the 100k mark and having everything break down unless you replace it entirely is such a pain and is expensive.

</comment><comment><USER43> Wow, I hate that top navigation bar following me everywhere. I'm trying to read your article not navigate your site! If I want to change pages, I know where to go, back to the top.

</comment><comment><USER44> does anyone else think that screen is a bit too much?

<comment><USER45> I thought so, but when I got to see one 'in action' its a lot less of an issue. In terms of surface area the intrument panel on most cars is about equivalent, its just shaped into a long dashboardy kind of thing.

I worry about glass shards in a side collision though.

<comment><USER46> It looks a lot nicer and less ambitious than the prototype that they showed at CES earlier this year.

[http://pictures.topspeed.com/IMG/crop/200903/tesla- model-s--...](http://pictures.topspeed.com/IMG/crop/200903/tesla-model-s--- touc_1280x0w.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Did I see user emails in comments there?

</comment><comment><USER47> Good thing Romney keeps wanting to throw Tesla under the bus, way to support innovation, way to cheer for jobs n0t.

<comment><USER48> Valuable innovation doesn't need to be on life support. Technologies that can only exist with subsidies destroy capital and jobs.

I'm all for dealing with problems like pollution, but a tax on the polluters is the way to go. The federal government should not be picking replacements and throwing money at them.

If electric vehicles cannot yet compete with gasoline vehicles that are taxed to pay for their pollution, then its too early for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Great to see this. There are exactly three automotive companies that excite me these days: Tesla, Better Place, and Google.

Tesla has done a magnificent job of making electric cool and sexy, and that's almost absurdly important with a purchase as emotional as a car.</comment>