QuickBASIC Lives on with QB64 - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2018/02/22/quickbasic-lives-on-with-qb64/ <comment><USER4> QBasic was my first programming experience.

Back in 2008 I bought a computer for 50 uruguayan pesos (around 2 dollars), Pentium MMX and 32MB of ram. It didn't boot W98 because the hard drive was corrupted.

It did load MsDOS and I found Qbasic using the help command.

I didn't have internet so I used to go to the internet cafe with a floppy disk and download tons of tutorials in plain text to read with EDIT.EXE

Now I've been working as a software developer for almost five years and love it, all thanks to QBasic and that old cheap computer.

<comment><USER5> Qbasic is something that simply has no modern-day parallel.

It started very simple, PRINT and GOTO were enough to get you started. It had the tools to expand along as you learned, and a great community of amateurs who would make cool games with it. Eventually, you'd grow out of it and try your hand at C, because by that point you were encouraged to learn so much (and with a gentle curve) that you exhausted its capabilities. It was an _excellent_ educational tool, an excellent way to get kids "hooked" into "real programming".

Learning programming today isn't quite as simple as it was with Qbasic. It involves setting up a large toolchain, and for a beginner, the experience is daunting as the language community reviled both anything imperative and unstructured. There's no easy way to do anything other than text from the command line, which makes for some thoroughly uninteresting demos and examples. Qbasic wrapped an IDE and graphics library around the language in an all-in-one solution; it was so cool seeing colourful, pseudo-graphical demos like Nibbles or Gorillas. If a beginner wanted to do anything "cool-looking" today, this same beginner programmer would need to set up render to texture on an OpenGL surface. Yuck! And so they lose interest, believing programming is the mysterious and complex domain of gods.

This market did not go away. I don't quite think QB64 fills it, being little more than a nostalgic, artistic homage to Qbasic. If someone were to design a programming language with a learning curve as gentle as Qbasic, and wrap a simple IDE and graphics library around it, all while modernising some of its more dubious qualities...you'd have a real shot at recapturing the magic for a new generation of young programmers.

<comment><USER6> > If someone were to design a programming language with a learning curve as > gentle as Qbasic, and wrap a simple IDE and graphics library around it, all > while modernising some of its more dubious qualities...you'd have a real > shot at recapturing the magic for a new generation of young programmers.

They did, years ago. It's called "Processing", and it's very popular. It's also used by a lot of artists to let them make active or interactive art pieces without needing to be an experienced programmer.

<comment><USER7> i took a look at the examples here [1] and the syntax looks similar to Java. I wonder if it is really that easy to teach programming with this language?

[1] [https://processing.org/examples/](https://processing.org/examples/)

<comment><USER6> > the syntax looks similar to Java

Syntactical it is similar to java, although only the simplest Java. No generics, no inner classes, etc. And let's face it, even at its most complicated, Java isn't syntactically complicated.

> I wonder if it is really that easy to teach programming with this language?

Well, it's been in use for a number of years, and is popular among non- traditional programmers, so the answer seems to be yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've used the QB64 for a few projects that extended old stuff I had done. But I've had some stability issues with the interface and applications. That was a few sub-versions so that may have been fixed.

I've had really good luck with FreeBasic. It supports classic QBasic as well as a lot more new commands, libraies, and is more modernized. You can also compile Windows, DOS, and Linux binaries. The drawback is that it doesn't have it's own GUI and is a bit harder to set up.

[https://www.freebasic.net/](https://www.freebasic.net/)

<comment><USER9> As a heavy FreeBASIC user for 13 years, I like to describe it as a subset of C++98 with BASIC syntax and decent builtin strings. Unlike C++ it compiles very quickly, and if you want faster code, it can emit C code and compile via gcc. the very nice fbfrog tool automatically translates C headers to FB headers, so you can use almost any C-compatible library and do almost anything you can do in C. Using it like C is not necessary a good idea.

Compared to all other BASIC dialects I've tried (which doesn't include VB), it seems better engineered. Compared to C, the main drawback is the immaturity of the compiler, and error messages are often poor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The first "useful" program I ever wrote was in QBasic. In 5th or 6th grade (can't recall which), for spelling assignments, we'd be given a list of words and we'd have to write them 10 times each. I asked the teacher if we'd be allowed to type the list and print them out and she agreed to it. I hacked together a little program where I'd type in a word and then it would automatically print out 10 copies of it to my dot matrix printer.

When I first started, I really had no idea what QBasic even was. I think I was just poking around the DOS file system one day looking for EXE files and found it.

<comment><USER11> My high school required everyone to take a "typing" class and the instructor didn't know the word processor installed could do cut and paste. Those of us that were computer savvy in the early 90s therefore were the fastest typists in the class by a wide margin :-)

<comment><USER12> Nearly the same thing happened to me.

Except the instructor felt the other kids would be dissuaded by my typing and told me I couldn't stay in the class.

And, similar to your case, typing was a prerequisite to taking any other computer course. They wouldn't give me credit, but wouldn't let me stay in the class either.

I would up taking it in summer school of 9th grade, spent 2 days, the program clocked me at 139wpm and the teacher(a different one) said I couldn't stay there either. She talked to the office and I got to hang out in the school office for the rest of the summer.

What fun. All because they didn't want to make the other kids feel bad. At least they gave me credit for the class.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What strikes me is that back then we largely did the same things that we do now (run businesses, play games, manage personal data like calendars, notes, and contacts) with a fraction of the capabilities that modern hardware and software provide. And it was much simpler and easier to get into.

You could really only count on someone having an 80x25 text display (usually 16 color but might be monochrome), a keyboard for input, and a floppy drive for storage. Once you learned to do 4 simple things - position a cursor, print text, read keyboard input, and read and write to the drive, you could do almost anything that any professional software could do. There might be a parallel port with a printer or a serial port with a modem, so learning to read and write those ports gave you more options, but again that was simple.

None of that required frameworks on top of libraries on top of dependency managers on top of package managers. You didn't need to memorize a 7000 class object inheritance hierarchy. Just a few simple statements and concepts that all easily fit in your brain at once with plenty of room left for working on the actual program.

Of course, you couldn't watch streaming videos while chatting with people online in another window. We've added a lot of complexity for the sake of GUIs, multitasking, media, and networking, and in the process killed the ability to learn or do anything simply.

</comment><comment><USER14> I found a book on BASIC in the school library when I was 8, and my brothers showed me how to use QBasic to run the examples. Then I got one of my friends into it. We made a bunch of programs and games - even got one of the younger classes at our school to use a math game we made. Now we both have really successful, fulfilling software careers that started very early. Years later my school library had a sale to purge outdated books, so I went back to see if I could grab that first BASIC book I brought home: it now sits on my bookshelf to remind me what a big difference it'll make if I teach my kids cool stuff outside of school.

</comment><comment><USER15> My first programming experience was on my Atari XE. It would run 2600 games, but if you didn't put a game in it would come up with BASIC. I didn't have the optional floppy drive, nor did it have a hard drive of any kind, so when the computer shut off, my program was gone. I used to LIST and write the programs into a notebook and give hell to my mom when she would turn off the machine while I was at school (I was 9).

Years later I got an old IBM PC JR with a Cartridge version of BASICA. That had a floppy drive (the 5.25 ones that were actually floppy) and I was able to save my programs. I wrote a few simple games. At this time, the Pentium had already come out, I had just been playing with older machine.

My next machine was a Pentium 75 Mhz with 16 MB of ram (which I eventually upped to the max 128 MB). I got my hands on a floppy drive and brought all my code over and opened it up with quickbasic. Unfortunately I had been relying on the CPU timing and all my programs were way too fast (e.g. the pong paddle would move instantly to the other side of the screen). And it wasn't until about a month in that I had realized (being self-taught, sometimes you miss things) that the line numbers were optional. I could create functions! The rest was history.

<comment><USER16> XE did not run 2600 games.

<comment><USER17> But it did run 400/800 games, which is probably what the gp post is thinking of.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, that's right it ran those other games. But the name Atari 400/800 doesn't sound familiar for some reason. Maybe there was another name for it at the time. I was 9 at the time, so I don't remember exactly. I do remember playing Bug Hunt, Dig Dug, Missile Command (built in), Arkon, Lode Runner. I was never able land in Flight Simulator II. I should go find an emulator and try now.

<comment><USER16> They were beautiful machines. I was a Commodore user at the time and had no idea what I was missing, but I own a bunch of Atari 8-bits now. Emulators are great, but you should hunt yourself down an original Atari 8-bit to collect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A QBASIC/DOS inspired Bootstrap theme - [https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386](https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386)

We modified this for our project ETHDenver hackathon last weekend - <USER2> Drugwars-inspired cryptocurrency trading game: [https://www.cachethegame.com](https://www.cachethegame.com)

</comment><comment><USER19> Happy memories. I wrote a MUD engine in QuickBASIC 4.5 (back in 1988 or 1989 I think) which ran on a Compaq 486. I wrote the engine, while my friends did the world building.

It was hosted at a system in the UK called IOWA. They had a really neat multiplexer "front-end" with lots of serial ports. Each host spoke to it using a custom protocol over a 19,200 baud serial connection. Other serial ports were connected either to modems (they had 10 phone lines IIRC) or to internal terminals.

I progressed to C and C++ pretty quickly afterwards, but writing (and re- writing and re-writing) this MUD engine in QB45 was a formative experience in my teens.

</comment><comment><USER20> For anyone who remembers the magic of compiling QuickBASIC programs but never experienced Visual Basic for DOS at the time, I highly recommend tracking down a copy and having a play!

It's really special - visually editing forms/controls in text mode is great fun.

</comment><comment><USER21> I also started with BASIC. Easy to learn/read/write, compiled ultra-fast, ran fast, crashed less than C, and had p-code for portability. Great stuff for beginner. Anyone wanting an open-source solution for that should check out FreeBASIC which was simple to setup and use last time I tried it:

[http://freebasic.net](http://freebasic.net)

GAMBAS is another for Linux that reminds me of VB6 a bit:

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

Wikipedia also has a list of BASIC dialects which shows possibly full range of what was tried in BASIC variants on what platforms:

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

There's a number of proprietary, cross-platform BASIC's still being sold and updated that illustrate a demand for its advantages. Main one being it's close to pseudocode in readability. BASIC also got some attention for game development with dialects developed specifically for making that easier. Only one I can remember looking at was DarkBASIC. It's FOSS now under MIT license.

</comment><comment><USER22> Like alot of others are saying I first programmed in basic. My dad had gotten a Tandy 1000 that we all played games like King's Quest III on. I wanted to learn to make my own games and he showed me how to do some simple things in basic. I can't remember if QBasic was included or I later obtained it somehow but ended up using that down the road.

As time went on I moved on to C programming with DJGPP and Allegro to work on games with my brother (I think that was in the 90s). But QBasic will always hold a special place for me because I learned beginner programming principles by just playing around with it.

What are kids today using to do this kind of 'make my own tinkered games' stuff -- do they go straight to Unity, or still something like QBasic?

<comment><USER23> > _What are kids today using to do this kind of 'make my own tinkered games' > stuff -- do they go straight to Unity, or still something like QBasic?_

Python, with pygame, is the modern equivalent I think. It's relatively easy and straightforward for beginners, free, and very popular (lots of resources, tutorials, etc...). [https://www.pygame.org/news](https://www.pygame.org/news)

For something more advanced but still python-ish, there's also Godot, which is a real engine and adds a visual IDE to game creation. Quite easy to install/setup too (everything comes in 1 file). Overall a very cool project. [https://godotengine.org/](https://godotengine.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> TIL that Qbasic has structure types (user defined types) [https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QBasic/Arrays_and_Types#User-d...](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QBasic/Arrays_and_Types#User- defined_type)

If it had functions as values then it would have had object based programming.

i think the good part about basic was that it supports both unstructured programming with goto/gosub (gets you going quickly) and structured programming (if you don't use goto/gosub and write functions). Maybe we lost this multi paradigm aspect with later (more powerful) languages.

That may have been because of Dijkstra and his 'goto considered harmful' rant : authors of programming languages do not like to support the unstructured paradigm out of fear that they will be taken as a not-so-serious-programming language. Somehow they did not take notice that unstructured programming is quite good as a teaching method and that one can choose not to use goto when it is available. I really don't think that it is such a strong habit that is impossible to unlearn. It is far easier not to learn how to program at all...

</comment><comment><USER24> For those that want a great "period" archive of BASIC code (not just QB!) - check out the ABC Packet archives:

[http://www.phatcode.net/downloads.php?id=204](http://www.phatcode.net/downloads.php?id=204)

I have a few pieces of code in the archives (and scattered on the net - <USER3> to see my name from back then); there's a ton of stuff in there, that can really show off what was possible back then.

</comment><comment><USER25> Important question, does it run edit: gorilla.bas?

QBasic was a good upgrade from BASIC from 8-bit machines. Still, it is limited. VB then brough its power to Windows, it might have had a lot of quirks, but it was a good prototyping and RAD tool

<comment><USER26> Are you thinking of gorilla.bas ?

I was reminiscing about gorillas, qbasic and nibbles.bas just a few days ago.

edit: yes! QB64 comes with Gor64.bas: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_\(video_game\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Gave me my first exposure to software piracy. I wrote a skateboarding game in QBasic, sold it to a kid at school for 10 pence, and soon after all the computers were running it.

</comment><comment><USER28> I recently was able to recovery a floppy that had almost 100 programs I wrote in QBasic when I was a kid. There was something magical being able to command a computer so easily that's hard to appreciate today. Often the simple magic of programming is cluttered with so much independant tooling that lack a simple cohesive experience, although there are benefits to use small small tools over one monolithic toolchain of course. Just yesterday I spent an hour trying to hunt down a JavaScript webpack build issue that has nothing to do with the actual code. It's a fact of life now, but there's a part of me that misses the one-in-one integrated experience. However, I don't miss Basic as a language... so very limiting and often forces you to not follow DRY principles.

</comment><comment><USER29> As a kid, someone gave me a subscription to "3-2-1 Contact", a children's science magazine. Towards the back there'd be 1 or 2 pages of source code for a "game" written in BASIC. The one that still sticks in my mind was a a text- only downhill derby where you selected from a couple options for hill steepness, axle lubrication, and maybe car shape, and it would return how fast your car completed the race. There might have been fewer than 50 lines.

I didn't even have a computer at the time, but I was hooked.

The magazine format changed a couple years later, and they stopped including programs.

But when we started using computers at school, I remembered the instructions for accessing BASIC on our Apple II's, and thus me and my friends were introduced to programming.

</comment><comment><USER30> Interesting comment in the article about how VB is still being used in some organizations. One company I worked for ran some critical business processes in Excel + VBA. I hope they've moved on from that. I imagine there's a lot of that lurking in Fortune 500 companies.

<comment><USER31> In engineering companies, Excel + VBA will never go away. Most engineers who are not CompE or CS folks really do not want to program. Excel is powerful for nonprogrammers, and the allure of automating some of it with VBA is almost impossible to resist. Excel gives you a platform where you can feed in numbers, do some calculations with a click of a button, and produce charts - all in one file. And it's trivial to tweak if you need to change something. An engineer with little programming knowledge can be "operational" quickly, and the "tool" is safe to pass around to customers.

I had to live with this for a few years and hated it. Fortunately, the Ipython notebook (now Jupyter) and Pandas came along, and to some extent I managed to stop using Excel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This was my first language too. I remember sitting there all night when I was about 8 years old writing my first game - Dancing Dobbins (a horse racing and betting game). I had to manually draw each horse line by line and the refresh rate was appalling as they flickered across the screen. It got gradually more elaborate and foolish as I added features like horses going mad and attacking each other. I so wish I had the original code but it died along side the cutting edge 80meg hard drive.

<comment><USER33> Do you still have the HDD?

Define "died". The platter(s) might still be okay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Here's the QBasic code for one of the first complete games I wrote in the 90s: [https://git.elephly.net/?p=software/windelprise.git;a=summar...](https://git.elephly.net/?p=software/windelprise.git;a=summary)

I remember spending many days as a kid at my IBM PC to finish it. By the time it was ready everyone else in the family already knew all the solutions to the puzzles, of course.

(I haven't tried running it in QB64 yet.)

</comment><comment><USER35> Wow, I had totally forgotten about QuickBASIC. It came slightly late for me -- I cut my teeth on line-numbered BASIC in ROM on TRS-80s, and by the time of QB I was firmly absorbed into the Borland world (mostly Turbo Pascal and Turbo C) -- but folks who came slightly later to programming that I knew loved it.

I'm glad it lives on!

</comment><comment><USER36> This is neat - remember using QuickBasic back in the day. Fun times.

I really wish Visual Basic would be open sourced from Microsoft, so the community would revive it. I still have fond memories programming with VB and the productivity it allowed - it had it's issues (oh, man...) but also made programming accessible.

<comment><USER37> QBasic got me interested in programming, I owe a lot to it even if by modern standards it's a pretty terrible language.

VB6 is dead though, everyone wants COM to die so even if MS open sourced it there's no real reason to continue putting effort into it. There are alternative that work reasonably well though, like Gambas (open source).

<comment><USER24> Actually, it's debatable on whether VB6 is "dead". Certainly not sold any longer, but Microsoft keeps including the runtime DLLs in Windows; they still exist in Windows 10.

The main reason is the sheer amount of software out there that businesses rely on to run their business, which they might not even have the source code to. Those that do have the code do hire people to maintain and extend the applications (shades of COBOL there).

It wouldn't surprise me to find out that new VB6 applications are being created - lots of people love it and loved using it (though I personally preferred VB5, because the compiler was separate from the rest of the system and could be used at the command line). VB.NET was widely viewed as a travesty to the language; some moved to C#.

What is strange is how few of these programmers seem to be aware of Gambas (and similar "VB-like" languages). I moved away from Windows at home in 1995 and move on to Linux; over time I became aware of other BASIC programming languages, but I moved away from BASIC as well, though it will always hold a place in my heart, since that's what I started out with.

<comment><USER38> VB.NET is widely used in life sciences labs, where most of the systems are Windows machines connected to devices like this one.

[https://www.biotek.com/products/imaging-microscopy-cell- imag...](https://www.biotek.com/products/imaging-microscopy-cell-imaging- multi-mode-readers/cytation-5-cell-imaging-multi-mode-reader/)

So researchers already used to VBA, usually get IT to install VB.NET and go from there.

However I have started to see a trend of them moving into R.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> You can run the original QBasic on your browser at archive.org:

[https://archive.org/details/msdos_qbasic_megapack](https://archive.org/details/msdos_qbasic_megapack)

It comes with a large collection of games & demos, including the gorilla game.

</comment><comment><USER40> OK, I just gave QB64 a try.

Compiling a single line of: print "Hello world"

took more than 1 minute, the result is a 1.4 MB exe which launched its on window and displayed "Hello world".

The very same code, compiled with FreeBasic: much faster, much smaller, and a real command line app.

Hmmm....

</comment><comment><USER41> When I was little, my dad had a DOS PC in his office. I remember writing a quadratic equation solver in QBasic. It was so unbelievably fast compared to struggling with pen and paper. Truly magical!

</comment><comment><USER42> Despite the enormous welling up of sentimental joy I feel whenever QBasic is mentioned, on a more professional note I still find it incredible when I meet a programmer that goes through their days without breakpoints, or an interactive debugger, or a REPL/immediate window to try stuff out, or the ability to jump to the definition or docs (in hypertext!) of a function. Heck, I know some R programmers that don't even know they're allowed to write their own functions.

</comment><comment><USER43> BASIC is a rediscovery of last months to me. As "most programmers" I classified it as a language completely unfit for any serious work. It turns out there are quite a few successful and popular projects using BASIC for specific applications, such as micro-controller or mobile programming. I had to deal with some internal barrier to give these projects a try.

<comment><USER24> There's still a ton of BASIC code being used and maintained today. Most of it by businesses. Back in the day (70s and 80s) the class of code was known as "Business BASIC"; tons of compilers and interpreters geared for business use were available on all computing platforms (IIRC, there's a version of BASIC for the Cray supercomputers of the day).

One very popular variant that's still sold and used today is/was known as the PICK system. It's based around a "multi-value" relational database structure (which is pretty cool all on its own - data is stored in "cubes" \- rows, columns, then within each "cell" can be further dimensional data). It's main "claim to fame" was a certain level of interpreter compatibility - code from one vendor could be run on other vendor's products. PICK Basic compiled down to a bytecode which was run by an intermediate "interpreter", which was a kind of virtual machine. The bytecode looked a bit like assembler (and could be coded in directly if you really knew what you were doing). There were even a few companies that made hardware CPUs that could run the bytecode directly (instead of thru an interpreter VM). Think of it as Java before Java was a thing.

There also was (is?) one of the major industrial robot arm manufacturers who sold a version of BASIC geared toward programming their robot arms; I imagine that some of that is still out there running in the "wild".

<comment><USER38> You can still get BASIC compilers for embedded programming.

For example from MikroElektronika

[https://www.mikroe.com/mikrobasic](https://www.mikroe.com/mikrobasic),

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> QuickBasic was nice, but I was more fond of Turbo Basic, but Borland ended up killing it.

Ironically Microsoft did the opposite, they killed Quick Pascal.

<comment><USER44> Actually, they sold it off, and eventually it became PowerBASIC.

That was my starting point too, after some dabbling with Oric, C64, and GW- BASIC/BASICA. Nice little environment, though I wasn't all that impressed with the size of of the output executables - over 30Kb for a raw Hello World program.

<comment><USER38> Ah, thanks for the clarification. I lost track of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> People will laugh, but I used QuickBASIC and 486's to build and launch an auto auction in Las Vegas in the early 90's... Built a file-based system ( a database really ) to hold car data and allow searching ( index files... ), printing of invoices... you name it... it really was a full featured, easy to use "language" and much more.

</comment><comment><USER46> In my part of the world GW BASIC was more popular.

</comment><comment><USER47> I got my start with programming in QBasic. Now I work at a Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor. FWIW I don't write much code that gets merged into anything important, but I wouldn't be working in the tech industry at all if it weren't for the curiosity QBasic sparked in me twenty years ago.

</comment><comment><USER48> Using QBasic with the RadioHands tutorials was one of my first times programming, and also my first exposure to assembly.

[http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/tutorials/tuts/vicstuts/](http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/tutorials/tuts/vicstuts/)

</comment><comment><USER49> An Argentinian wrote a MMORPG in QBasic/QB64.

[http://www.indiedb.com/games/guerreros- qb](http://www.indiedb.com/games/guerreros-qb)

In itself a daunting task, considering the choice of language it is really impressive.

</comment><comment><USER50>
        I could write simple code and compile it into an .exe,

Any one care to explain how this was done??

I remember trolling BBS's as a youth attempting to learn how to do the same thing, to no avail...

<comment><USER51> QuickBasic could do this (IIRC it generated an EXE that bundled a bytecode interpreter along with your code). The slightly later QBASIC, which was a cut- down version of QuickBasic distributed free with DOS, couldn't make an EXE. The best you could do was to make a .BAT file that invoked QBASIC with the right options.

It's amazing, in retrospect, how important it felt to create a "real EXE". Nowadays, we write huge professional systems in scripting languages that need explicitly invoking with an interpreter - but back then, "grown up" programs were the ones that didn't need that.

<comment><USER37> To be fair, when you're on a UNIX-like system a program written in bash or a scripting language doesn't look any different from a compiled C binary from the endpoint of the user - shebang lines and the execute bit were a honking great idea.

The whole issue with creating a "real EXE" was it was incredibly obvious when your program WASN'T an EXE on DOS and still to this day on Windows, to this day it still irks me when I download something and there's a .bat file to launch it - but I could care less if there's some wrapper shell script on Linux.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I've had a lot of fun reminiscing with QB64, it plays most of the games and demo's and junk I wrote as a kid perfectly except the ones that have music.

</comment><comment><USER53> As my profile says, qbasic has a special place in my heart. I spent many, many middle school hours and late nights in it before learning c++ in high school.

</comment><comment><USER54> maybe we should have something like basic for lambda, but i guess lua fulfills that criteria.</comment>


Moving Out of Brooklyn Because of High Prices - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/realestate/moving-out-of-brooklyn-because-of-high-prices.html

<comment><USER2> This article seemed so tired. For one, the whole cycle of gentrification story has been done so many times, and this article had nothing new to add.

But also, the NYT has been such a cheerleader for Brooklyn and the "creatives" that have transformed it, that more interest in their latest impulses and self-imposed dilemmas seems too obsequious.

It's also sad that the tone is like, this is not Brooklyn, but it's the closest to Brooklyn we can afford. So limited.</comment>


Linux 5.9 Brings Safeguard Following Nvidia's Recent "GPL Condom" Incident - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-59-Proprietary-Shim-Taint <comment><USER2> It was a facebook employee that was commiting the code I think it should be Facebook's Recent "GPL condom" Incident</comment>


Show HN: BonFive – A Reddit Like Community Supporter for Content Creators - <AUTHOR> https://bonfive.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN,

Re-post as I forgot to include the URL in the previous post.

I originally designed BonFive as another possible revenue stream for Content Creators, and a more centralized way to discover new content and creators across the different platforms. A DB for Content Creators if you will.

If you have any questions or suggestions please don't hesitate to reach out! Appreciate any feedback and thanks for checking it out.</comment>


Show HN: Richly interactive map of COVID-19 cases by US county - <AUTHOR> https://covid19map.us/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I couldn't find a richly interactive COVID-19 map anywhere that includes historical data, so I made my own. I used SvelteJS and deck.gl to create a fast and functional frontend. The dataset comes from USAFacts[1].

Source code can be found here: [https://github.com/freedmand/covid19map](https://github.com/freedmand/covid19map)

[1] [https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus- covid-19-spr...](https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus- covid-19-spread-map/)

<comment><USER2> Here's a map from Johns Hopkins: [https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html](https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've definitely seen/used that map, which as far as I know is one of the authoritative ones worldwide. I wasn't able to see how to paginate back in time with that map to view growth, which was one of my primary motives for building this one. Is there a way to do that with the John Hopkins map?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I get disappointed when cool stuff like this is made with <canvas> instead of <svg> because I want to look at the DOM, and understand how it was made, but I can't.

That being said, this is a great visualization.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I love SVG and actually iterated with that at first, but getting the site to be zippy and responsive required using WebGL

<comment><USER3> It's not a criticism of choosing the canvas element, that is completely reasonable. All I'm saying is, there could be better tooling for inspecting them and how they work.</comment></comment></comment>


Sidejacking 48 popular sites - Complete list    - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/codebutler/firesheep/wiki/Handlers

<comment><USER2> I tried a few with firesheep, (on my own network of course) they work!

</comment><comment><USER3> omg. wolves.</comment>


Unibox - A New Take on the OS X Mail Client - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2012/08/27/unibox-a-new-take-on-the-os-x-mail-client/

<comment><USER2> I thought twitter didn't allow this kind of aggregation across services in native clients anymore?

<https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api></comment>


Obama takes on zoning laws in bid to build more housing, spur growth - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/obama-takes-on-zoning-laws-in-bid-to-build-more-housing-spur-growth-228650 <comment><USER2> This is the time to whip out those executive decrees.

<comment><USER3> In the US system the Federal government has almost no power to change local zoning directly - except for the big carrot/stick approach implied in the article. The states and local governments have become reliant on streams of federal dollars to build roads - so tying road money to "your zoning law must be this tall to play" seems likely if there is enough buy-in from the civil servants involved.

<comment><USER2> Little wonder everything they do for you is becoming more expensive.

Fair warning: This is a political opinion, but without a tight feedback loop with executive command and a diffusion of power, you are asking for corruption when you spread out responsibility and incentives to too many actors. It becomes like two horses pulling the cart both left and right, you shall inevitably end up in a ditch.

Judging from how the Russians took the chance on Crimea and the Chinese snubbed Obama recently, they think that there is a lack of rulership.

<comment><USER3> I'm a fellow traveler with regard to reactionary thought. It boggles my mind that people in the US don't perceive the downsides to mass democracy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Suicide of the East? - <AUTHOR> http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65628/philip-d-zelikow/the-suicide-of-the-east?page=show

<comment><USER2> "Yet divided after Mao's death among competing visions of national development, the Chinese made a pivotal choice in 1978. They rejected the Soviet model, opting instead for market-oriented economic reform, but without political reform. (At about the same time, Hungary's Communist leader, János Kádár, with his similar market-opening program of 'goulash communism,' showed how such a model could work in Eastern Europe, too.)

"The Chinese were probably influenced less by the example of the United States itself than by U.S.-backed examples closer to home, such as Japan, South Korea, and--although they would not admit it--Taiwan."

Yes. The startling fact near the end of the 1970s is that the economic gap between China and Taiwan had become so large (because Taiwan was prospering while China was stagnating) that Taiwan's overall economic strength was becoming almost as great as that of all of China, even though China has SIXTY times the population. That much economic strength attracts the attention of a dissatisfied population in a poorer nearby country. ("Democracy Wall" writers in this transition period referred to the example of Taiwan as a basis for criticizing the Communist Party regime in China.) And that much economic strength provides more military options even to a country that is heavily outnumbered. (Meanwhile, China's army was humiliated during its brief incursion into Vietnam in 1979.)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War>

So China had no choice but to loosen economic regulation and tacitly reject orthodox Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist doctrine to catch up to Taiwan. And, yes, Korea's south prospering while the north stagnated was also a cautionary example to the rulers of China.

<comment><AUTHOR> I bet Hong Kong was also an influence.

<comment><USER3> Hong Kong is perhaps the best modern case study of relatively free capitalism in action. In just a quarter of a century, a poor country with few natural resources raised its standard of living above that of the UK, its colonial parent.

There's an old story that once, in a meeting, Milton Friedman was chastising Sir John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong's Financial Secretary, for not collecting the economic statistics that Milton and other economists wanted. Cowperthwaite replied that the omission was intentional; he knew that if he collected the data, the bureaucrats back in the UK would see the numbers and expect him to _do something_ about them.

<comment><USER4> Slight statistical effect though - it was a small place that had concentrated banking/shipping etc. The average income of the city of London (the financial centre) is higher than the average for the UK - that doesn't mean the solution is for the rest of the country to build banks on all the farmland.

<comment><USER5> Right. What works for Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, the Isle of Man, and other low tax city states just does not work for the rest of the world--it doesn't scale.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. Regulatory arbitrage doesn't work if everyone shares the same regs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wonderful article, I have a bit to contribute:

"The words "Soviet" and "union" are worth a moment's reflection. They were extremely meaningful, and they were originally devised to replace two other words: "Russian" and "empire." If the republics were no longer bound together by their supposed Marxist-Leninist ideological fraternity, what would happen to a "Soviet Union"?"

This is not clear to non-slavic speakers, but Soviet is the anglicized form of "suvetski", from the base "Suvet" meaning "committee". These Suveti/committees were the secret gatherings of communists/bolsheviks dating back to the late 1800s/early 1900s.

</comment><comment><USER8> I remember the Pristina standoff between the Russians and Nato forces and thinking oh oh... that was a very close call.

We'll never know how much we owe Mike Jackson.

</comment><comment><USER9> Paul -- as a fun aside, one of the books in that article (The Year That Changed the World) is my father's latest book.

Let me know if you want to borrow my copy ;-)

</comment><comment><USER10> _Wars are not just lost; they have to be won. Traditional accounts of the Cold War understandably focus on the United States and the Soviet Union. But that contest was a kind of global election, and the swing states were in Europe and East Asia._

Ok. I'm done.

No, not at all.

If you think the cold war was a kind of global election, you need to go back and study up some more. Somebody has convinced you that you know what you are talking about, and that person has, unfortunately, defrauded you.

I guess the rewriting and oversimplification of history will continue as long as there are writers. But it sure is a pain in the ass.

<comment><USER8> The cold war had many elements that you could attribute to an election, lots of places had to choose which party to align with, and the dividing lines were drawn in the 'not-sure' portions of the globe.

Western-Europe was in one camp pretty much by default, and lot of us feared what would happen if world war III would break out. The peace movement had a slogan which doesn't translate very well but which effectively was 'better red than dead'.

States that didn't align themselves openly with either the Soviets or the western block were bullied or bribed in to doing so, one way or the other usually proximity determined the outcome there.

I don't think it was a global election either, but there were definitely elements of an elective process in there, and to this day there are plenty of people in former eastern bloc countries that would gladly return to the former state of affairs simply because life was more certain for them then.

In a true elective process these people would vote for a re-alignment with Moscow in a heartbeat (even today).

They're a minority, but they do exist.

So, even if the analogy is flawed it does have its valid points.

<comment><USER10> The cold war was a very complex thing. To understand it completely you really need to go back to mid-19th century ideology.

I can't summarize it in a few hundred words. If I could then my point would be invalid! Suffice it to say that the voluntary parts of the non-aligned countries were based just as much on the use of soft and hard powers, ideologies, and internal political disputes as some overall narrative.

I don't mind simplification and the use of analogies. And I agree that in the long run the natural democracy of the populace will win out, no matter what the system. But to say that somehow these countries were acting in the same sense as a person acts when they go to vote is really taking the broad brush a little too much, I think.

Ideally you use analogy to illustrate a point or to carry an idea further. When you just throw it out there, mid-essay, it shows that you're taking a lot of shortcuts in your thinking. Shortcuts that may not be justified upon closer inspection.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook's traffic growth leaving rivals in the dust - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2009/01/07/facebooks-traffic-growth-leaving-rivals-in-the-dust/

<comment><USER2> In the last couple of months, many of my friends and acquaintances have suddenly hopped onto Facebook. They cross the spectrum of education and career experiences, though most tend to be a more thoughtful lot.

It's just anecdote, but I've had a few times where anecdotal experience has presaged an industry trend. Facebook, right now, feels like one of those moments. I may be wrong, but in my life, it has a certain "buzz" at the moment.</comment>


Is gmail down for everyone? - <AUTHOR>

Can't access it since 7:15 am <comment><USER2> No.

<http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/mail.google.com>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> btw <http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/mail.google.com>

won't work for this

</comment><comment><USER3> gmail+gchat working fine here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Still We're sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won't be able to use your account while these errors last, but don't worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

Please try accessing your account again in a few minutes.

Try Again Sign Out

<comment><USER3> Try using a proxy to get a server in a different location.</comment></comment></comment>


Deep Learning Courses - <AUTHOR> https://developer.nvidia.com/deep-learning-courses

<comment><USER2> Few other Machine Learning / Deep Learning courses here - [https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome-courses#machine- learn...](https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome-courses#machine-learning) </shameless-plug>

</comment><comment><USER3> So I see a link at the bottom: "Andrew Ng's Coursera course provides a good introduction to deep learning" which links to his "Machine Learning" class. This leads me to believe that "deep learning" is a synonym for "machine learning." Honest question: is that the case? Just a rebranding?

<comment><USER4> "Deep learning" is used a couple ways. In the loose sense employed by some journalists, deep learning is probably synonymous with both machine learning and AI. It's at the cutting edge of the current hype.

In the strict sense, deep learning refers to neural networks with more than one hidden layer. The depth of neural networks is equal to the longest path between input and output nodes. "Shallow" networks like a simple autoencoder might have two layers. They're not considered deep or part of deep learning. But if you stack them together, you have a deep net; e.g. many restricted Boltzmann machines form a deep-belief network. [1]

As @paulsutter mentioned, one aspect of having several hidden, or intermediate, layers in a neural network is that you can combine relatively simple, granular features (like individual pixels or words) into more complex combinations. Neural networks recombine simple features automatically, and then learn which groupings should be lent significance as signals through the backpropagation of error.

They're attracting all this hype because they actually do something amazing, albeit through brute force computation. Many in AI scoff at neural networks because they've been around a long time and have no particular elegance, but we're now in a historical moment where we have the hardware to make them work, and they're breaking records in almost every data type; e.g. images, sound, time series, etc.

So no, it's not a rebranding, it's a thing. We can now replicate the human faculty of perception with machines in many domains, and that's going to make the future quite weird.

[1] [http://deeplearning4j.org/restrictedboltzmannmachine.html](http://deeplearning4j.org/restrictedboltzmannmachine.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Glad to know there are recordings of this. I registered, but I've been missing the lectures because of timezone differences.

</comment><comment><USER6> Translation: CUDA indoctrination courses.

<comment><USER7> Is indoctrination even needed at this stage?

Are there openCL equivalents to the popular GPU-accelerated NN frameworks/libraries?

You only need to convince people when they have another choice.

<comment><USER8> Disclaimer, it's my project, but I run an open source project called deeplearning4j, who's algorithms have a hardware abstraction layer built in to them called nd4j. You get numpy on the jvm and hardware as a jar file. Deeplearning4j itself is built on top of that. Would love to help spread deep learning to different runtimes.

Here's the current work being done on opencl: [https://github.com/deeplearning4j/nd4j/tree/master/nd4j-jocl...](https://github.com/deeplearning4j/nd4j/tree/master/nd4j-jocl- parent)

We'd love to get this finished. Bit more to do yet though...definitely looking for contributors here. You'll get opencl neural nets for free.

<comment><USER9> interesting. What's the performance like on the same/equivalent GPU when comparing CUDA to OpenCL?

<comment><USER8> Need to run empirical benchmarks. CUDA is usually faster. I'd like to run my own benchmarks with nd4j though. We have our own benchmark setup that works for every backend. It allows us to do some interesting things. Cuda itself is usually faster with data transfer latency though[1].

Looking forward to running these ourselves after our opencl support kicks in (only the kernels are written =/)

I plan on basing the work for open cl on our cuda work which is fairly well established at this point (mainly doing optimizations not much change in architecture)

[1]: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1005.2581.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1005.2581.pdf)

<comment><USER6> "CUDA is usually faster."

I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out not to be accidental. I mean, it wouldn't work against NVidia for OpenCL to continue to be seen as the "slower option". So I'm sure their efforts to improve their OpenCL implementation aren't considered as important from a business point of view.

<comment><USER9> True, though if you compare roughly equivalent Nvidia and AMD GPUs, my impression is that the CUDA implementation on Nvidia still outperforms OpenCL on AMD for deep learning. Is this right?

AMD cards are a lot cheaper, would be good to be able to use them for deep learning too - [https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2zgpj8/15000_nvidia_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2zgpj8/15000_nvidia_developer_system/cpjjff5)

And new fast, low power FPGA's from Altera support OpenCL. [https://www.altera.com/products/design-software/embedded- sof...](https://www.altera.com/products/design-software/embedded-software- developers/opencl/overview.highResolutionDisplay.html)

<comment><USER6> "Is this right?"

Yeah, I think this is the previously mentioned float performance thing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen? (1950) - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1950/05/13/how-do-you-like-it-now-gentlemen <comment><USER2> Long. Excellent. Funny, having just moved to New York City for the summer, to get Hemingway's impression of it: "It's a town you come to for a short time. It's murder."

</comment><comment><USER3> Mirror?

</comment><comment><USER4> Stopped reading after the first part of the first sentence: "Ernest Hemingway, who may well be the greatest living American novelist and short-story writer..."

I don't understand why people like him. He sucks. Back in high school AP English, his book was the only required reading I just couldn't bring myself to finish because the writing was so terrible. If it wasn't a professionally bound book on the required reading list, I'd have mistaken it for an attempt at writing by another high school student in my class who lacked literary talent (as well as vocabulary skills appropriate to the most advanced English class my high school had to offer).

To me it seems like there's some shadowy cabal of literary critics who magically decided to appoint him as a great writer with no reason whatsoever, and their influence is so powerful that his praises are spoken in locations and times as diverse as a mid-century issue of The New Yorker, a millenium-era AP English required reading list, and #13 on a 2015 HN frontpage.

What am I missing?

<comment><USER5> Hemingway eventually developed a tendency to self-parody. Jonathan Yardley, who used to review for the Washington Post, said that "Bad Hemingway" contests were pointless, for Papa had long ago retired the prize. And he was not well served by his mid-century admirers, who couldn't always tell the good from the bad. (The same happened to D.H. Lawrence, I think) One can find oneself reading the earlier, better Hemingway by light of the later, which is unfortunate.

I haven't read much in years, but some time ago, I opened _A Farewell to Arms_ , and I must say that the first few pages are beautifully written.

<comment><USER4> That was exactly the book I couldn't finish. I remember being turned off within the first few pages...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Mentlegen.</comment>


Man Who Stole Plane Near Seattle Raises Troubling Security Question - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/11/us/seatac-stolen-plane-richard-b-russell.html <comment><USER2> It seems to me to be a continuation of the pattern of labor 'Going Postal' in the labor hostile environment that has emerged since Reagan.

This should be a wake-up call to everyone in the country. We can't survive without being able to trust and respect each other as human beings. Part of that is recognizing that even the most humble occupations deserve a fair wage and chance at advancement in life.

If we can't respect the people who put in 8 hour days on our behalf and fulfill our obligations to them as responsible business owners/organizers, we are doomed to see repeats of this type of tragedy.

People seek purpose, and many are content to do even the more "mundane" jobs so long as the compensation is fair. Too many places seek to be successful on Wall Street's terms rather than in providing a service to their community.

I'm sure an MBA will surface and tell me I'm wrong, but I've not encountered a workplace that didn't marginalize their workers and generated a tragedy of the likes that has become a hallmark of the last 50 years.

God Speed, Russell. May your death have not been in vain.

[0]Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion in America, Mark Ames

<comment><USER3> Pointless attempt to tie a political view to a tragedy, please don't do this. There have been massacres, bombings, dramatic suicides, etc long before the Reagan administration and none of them have claimed "If I would have only had 20% more compensation I wouldn't have violently murdered these 20 people."

P.S. It's godspeed, not "God speed".

<comment><USER4> No one says that outright but poverty and violent extremism are pretty closely linked. Its not the only factor ofc, and youll always have outliers, but comfortable people with things worth losing are less likely to do something to endanger that.

<comment><USER5> _Income inequality_ and violent crime are linked. Absolute poverty is tolerable to the psyche so long as everyone is in the same boat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article title seems like an overreaction to a really sad situation. We have to trust at least someone, and although he clearly had some issues (maybe recent), he wasn't out to hurt anyone or aligned with any groups that wanted to inflict harm.

Fighter jets were there immediately, people tried to talk him down, and he was lost. Nothing better could have been done all around. Yes, commercial planes could be keycoded or controlled in some other way, but I think most engineers in a controlled setting will agree this creates exponentially more day-to-day headaches than catastrophic situations it prevents.

<comment><USER7> Hmm I don't think it's that much of a headache to have some PIN code provided to pilots as an additional measure.

These planes aren't cheap, even a small personal jet is in the low millions. A Boeing 747 or similar is in the hundreds of millions.

<comment><USER8> Airline engineering employees need to power on planes, fire up various systems to test, and even move them around. It's absolutely routine. All the reports I've seen seem to suggest that this was one of those employees. So it seems reasonable to assume that he would have had the PIN or "key" or whatever in this case anyway.

<comment><USER9> valet mode for aircraft. of course we can never eliminate the risk but perhaps a two key mode similar to launch controls for missiles to do anything with a plane other than low power movement?

<comment><USER10> You put so much (undeserved) faith in the missile launching crowd...000000 comes to mind.

<comment><USER11> Other industries have controls that prevent simple passwords from being used. Who audits the missile control groups?

<comment><USER12> The all zero thing goes back a while when someone in the military was told to put launch codes in and defiantly made them 0. Because God forbid there should be any protection on the most deadly device ever created by man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Two things really caught me about this story besides the security implication.

First, the skill Russell deployed from (only?) having used a PC flight simulator surprised me. If Russell in fact never had any flight experience outside a simulator, well, I'm just stunned at what he was capable of doing. (Linked in article, here for convenience.) [0]

Second, and more importantly, Russell's demise is tragic, pure and simple. He seems relatively smart, had loved ones who cared about him, and was well-liked and well-regarded by his peers and co-workers.

Yet, something was very broken for Russell.

I won't speculate about what may have caused Russell's despair, but I can't help but feel his demise could have been avoided. I wish this story had a different ending.

[0] [https://twitter.com/CameronThomsen/status/102815764815856844...](https://twitter.com/CameronThomsen/status/1028157648158568448)

EDIT: readability

<comment><USER13> I have put many hours in flight simulators (the ones you can install on your own PC). One day I decided to take a real flying lesson. It was almost the same as in the simulator. Obviously the controls are a bit different because of different feedback, but you get used to it quickly. I think what helps a lot is that there are so many very detailed plane packages out there you can buy for the simulators. Too bad the community is kind of toxic, so I stopped playing these games.

Obviously it's not enough to get a pilot license because there are some things that you just can't do in a simulator.

<comment><USER14> There's one thing that really bugs me: why is everyone so surprised that an airport worker who was familiar with the planes managed to take off?

The reason this bugs me is that the 9/11 investigation concluded that multiple people with 0 flight experience can be taught to accurately steer a large commercial jet after just a short time training on small aircraft. In this frame of reference managing to take of in a small turboprop in good weather conditions shouldn't surprise anybody.

P.S. OK, I missed the part where "the plane was doing deep dives, broad loops and at least one upside-down roll"... But the "bug" is still there. If it's generally accepted that you can learn your way in a 747 cockpit on relatively short notice, doing dives and loops with a small plane shouldn't be that unbelievable. And I say this as a person who can comfortably take off and land a Piper Cherokee but was pretty dumbfounded when sitting in the captain's seat of a 747 for the first time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is something we handle really, really badly. One bad thing happens one time (like a failed shoe bomb), and so everybody forever-more has to be permanently inconvenienced every day.

Whatever the response to this incident is, I hope (and doubt) that it will also balance the CHANCE of this happening against the huge cost and inconvenience of making it "impossible" to ever happen again.

We all know that 100% and "impossible" is not going to work, and we all know that lame "for show" security measures are a huge waste of money that could be better spent elsewhere.

The question that needs to be asked and will not is: what would be the most best positive impact for that same amount of money?

It won't be asked because it's a hard question and people are scared of hard questions.

Better make a Space Corps instead.

<comment><USER16> I've always wondered about the true value of "for show" security measures. Requiring millions of passengers to spend 5 minutes more going through security to undergo procedures that wouldn't stop a determined terrorist definitely seems like a huge waste.

However, if the government didn't do "something", it's pretty likely that trust in the US air transportation system would shrink. Wouldn't crush it, but maybe 3 of 100 passengers would forgo air travel because they didn't feel comfortable or that their government isn't on top of it. And maybe that 3% decrease corresponds in $XXX Million in lost revenue for airlines.

So I'd believe that "for show" security measures don't actually increase security, but I'd also bet that they increase airline ridership. The moral of the story is that it's an economic response, not a security one.

<comment><USER17> The opposite effect happens as well: [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/excess_automo...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/excess_automobi.html)

> The inconvenience of extra passenger screening and added costs at airports > after 9/11 cause many short-haul passengers to drive to their destination > instead, and, since airline travel is far safer than car travel, this has > led to an increase of 500 U.S. traffic fatalities per year. Using DHS- > mandated value of statistical life at $6.5 million, this equates to a loss > of $3.2 billion per year, or $32 billion over the period 2002 to 2011 > (Blalock et al. 2007).

<comment><USER18> Don't forget the direct time waste of people getting to the scareport early and waiting in line to get molested.

The average lifespan is 79. 700M passengers * 1hr / 79yrs --> every year, over 1000 babies are killed by the TSA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Surprising it has taken decades for someone to try this. At least we don't have to wait on delayed planes while the pilot tracks down the key...

<comment><USER20> It's not like the engine start procedure on one of those things is a turnkey solution. The amount of domain knowledge needed serves as a form of soft security.

<comment><USER21> Yet there's plenty of knowledge out there if you know where to look.

Want to steal an Airbus A320? Here's the complete startup procedure:

[https://youtu.be/uqKeSO6msDk](https://youtu.be/uqKeSO6msDk)

<comment><USER22> Keep in mind that almost all of this was safety checks, if you don't care about that then there were only a few pretty simple steps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Your average airport has thousands of employees. Airports are thoroughly infiltrated by criminal gangs smuggling drugs. They don't do full background checks on everyone who works there let alone psychological tests.

</comment><comment><USER24> There is of course a lot sad about this story but something joyful as well. Many people commit suicide without such a final moment of exhilaration.

<comment><USER25> > Many people commit suicide without such a final moment of exhilaration.

...and without costing tax payers (F-15 fighter jets scrambling) and private companies (the airlines that owned the crashed plane) millions of dollars, causing stress and anxiety to people boarding other flights at Seattle airport and the subsequent delays to everyone else.

<comment><USER26> You've clearly never been suicidal. When you are, you don't care about anything; not even yourself. Also, nothing scares you. So when you finally kill yourself, pain to yourself and others are the least of your worries.

<comment><USER27> But that was not the case here. The guy was pretty open about not wanting to hurt or even inconvenience anyone else.

<comment><USER24> I think he drew a great line: he didn't want to hurt anyone but didn't mind destroying property.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A somewhat similar incident: FedEx flight 705.[1] Hijack by an authorized person.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705)

</comment><comment><USER29> > Mr. Russell and his wife were active church members, Mr. Orr said, "so he > doesn't really fit the bill of someone who would steal an airplane."

Can we please stop insinuating that people who attend church are perfect and incapable of doing wrong and, by omission, insinuating that those of us who do not are evil?

Edit: If the downvoters would like to explain how I'm wrong, that would be lovely.

<comment><USER30> I think you're arguing a point that isn't being made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > "Mr. Russell...had worked his shift on Friday."

So glad they told us this important fact. I wonder if his final direct deposit (to his estate) will include that days' pay or if it will count as a vacation day?

Has the news always been this inane?

<comment><USER32> That sentence did stick out to me too. As abrupt and lacking further information as it was it did serve to notify us as to how he was able to be on the tarmac and gain access to the airplane. I do feel that the author could have expanded that thought a bit more.

<comment><USER33> I think helped show how sudden this change was. One day, he's working his normal job, another he's stealing a plane and crashing it into an island.

<comment><USER31> But you could just as well read it another way: the pressure built up and eventually he snapped, or he was just waiting for an opportunity and finally one presented itself, or he was just spontaneously overcome (not that we'll likely ever know).

That's what I meant by the inanity: it's just a random trivial fact jammed in there without context nor explanation of why it should be relevant. Writing a story is selecting the relevant facts and dropping the rest: if there was a bank robbery I wouldn't expect to see "the robber wore a blue baseball hat" unless it were explained _why_ it was worth mentioning.

It could of course be poor editing, but it reminds me more of one of those high school essays where you just jam a few extra things in there to get the word count up. Admittedly, this isn't the most important article in the world and could easily have been assigned to a junior reporter -- and reporters write a lot so I don't mean to harsh on this one.

<comment><USER34> I don't know that it's fair to describe it as a random trivial fact; it at least _implies_ that he worked that shift and nobody noticed anything amiss. The events of his final day are just a tiny part of the story, but they're a part of the story nonetheless. Journalists are going to look for narratives, and the narrative of "he worked his day normally and at the end of the shift stole a plane" is different than "he wasn't scheduled to even be there that day and came in to steal a plane," or "he hadn't shown up for work the last four days, until he came in to steal a plane."

(I'm not sure the bank robber in a blue baseball hat is a good example of an unnecessary detail, by the way. Almost every story about a robbery with witnesses is likely to include basic details about what the witnesses saw. I'm not sure I've read a single story about such a robbery that _wouldn 't_ include a detail like that!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's really nice to see American Air Supremacy in response to a potential terrorist air threat. Neutralizing the stolen plane with a Sidewinder missile would have provided a slightly better show of force to would-be terrorists, but this was pretty good IMO. Our Air Force is more powerful than it's ever been, while our mental health system was better off back in the 1940s.

<comment><USER36> Had the guy been a terrorist, he could have flown that plane into Seattle or into SeatTac airport itself. They wouldn't get here in time because they were flying in from Portland. We all got lucky this time.

<comment><USER37> F-15 max speed is 1646mph (around 0.45 mi/s). From take off in Portland to arriving at SeaTac would be less than 5 minutes at top speed. I assume it takes longer than that to get pilots in planes and takeoff.

Seattle also has JBLM (joint base Lewis/McChord, army and air Force), along with Bremerton naval base. I'm guessing they picked pdx because of pilot availability, travel time is near nothing compared to getting a plane in the air at those distances.

This could have been much worse. I feel bad for the guy, he needed help, but I'm glad it ended how it did. Crashing into another plane, or anywhere populated, would have been catastrophic.

<comment><USER36> Q400 can do 69 miles in 10 minutes. Distance between SeaTac and Space Needle is 15 miles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > Mr. Russell stole a plane from the airport and flew it for _about an hour_ > before it crashed. (emphasis mine)

Wonder why Air National Guard's scrambled F-15s [0] didn't engage and bring the plane down before the individual commandeering the prop -- Mr. Russell -- brought the aircraft down with himself in the Ketron Island.

IIRC, the plane flew over several densely populated areas before going down, and I can imagine a thousand horrifically different ways this could have turned out.

[0] [https://www.military.com/daily- news/2018/08/11/f-15s-scrambl...](https://www.military.com/daily- news/2018/08/11/f-15s-scrambled-after-sea-tac-airline-worker-takes-plane- spree-ends-crash.html)

<comment><USER39> And to think, even if they decided to take him down, it would have likely been over a populated area. Unless they disintegrated it with missiles while in the sky, it likely would have ended in a catastrophe. The decision to not take the plan out as soon as they had the chance to safely was interesting. Their lack of action could have resulted in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of people.

Interestingly enough though, a lot of people aren't too mad at what he did. Quite a few people have paid their respects to this guy. He took the plane, saw some great views and did a barrel roll, then told the fighter pilot guys he was going to bring it down himself. I do like that most sources aren't trying to paint this guy as the devil. Sure what he did was wrong, but he sure did go out in style. Who else can ever say they did a freaking barrel roll in a commercial airliner.

The way the news outlets handled this was sickening. They all hopped on the opportunity to make a headline that they knew damn well would lead people to believe a fully loaded plane was hijacked mid flight.

Now the implications that a ground crew person was able to board a plan unnoticed, and take off is insane. This brings up the whole perspective of sleeper agents and inside jobs. Most data breaches are from insider threats, who's to say the next big thing isn't mass deaths resulting from insider threats.

Nice to see this was down voted?

<comment><USER40> > _Who else can ever say they did a freaking barrel roll in a commercial > airliner._

Tex Johnston for one:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaA7kPfC5Hk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaA7kPfC5Hk)

<comment><USER41> And the English and French chief test pilots for Concorde.

Sadly no pictures or videos of exists.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


FDA approves first medical accessory for the Apple Watch–an EKG sensor - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/fda-approves-first-medical-accessory-for-the-apple-watch-an-ekg-sensor/ <comment><USER2> Nope: [https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfpmn/pmn...](https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfpmn/pmn.cfm?ID=K171816)

"Type: Traditional" means it's a traditional certified EKG with AI, not an AI certified EKG. I.e. no AI is involved in AFib detection.</comment>


In a fatal crash, Uber's autonomous car detected a person, but chose to not stop - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611094/in-a-fatal-crash-ubers-autonomous-car-detected-a-pedestrian-but-chose-to-not/ <comment><USER2> Lots of discussion here already: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014807](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014807)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I looked but didn't see it. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A while back some academics at MIT designed some surveys for probing what tradeoffs humans would make if they had a chance to decide between bad outcomes in a vehicle fatality incident.

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/542626/why-self- driving-c...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/542626/why-self-driving-cars- must-be-programmed-to-kill/)

This shows that the menu of ethical dilemmas posed at that time was not complete.

In addition to "should I veer left, avoiding the grandmother and grandfather couple, but killing the pregnant mother" the survey questions should have also included some questions like "should I brake hard to avoid killing the homeless person detected with 40% probability, or should I assume the detection is a false positive, in order to maintain a smooth ride of luxurious comfort for the occupants?"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Many years ago I was coding the UI for one of the first touchscreen check-in systems at an airline. The guy in the next cube was doing weight and balance software for the actual flights. I realized that I could not handle the pressure of thinking that a bug in my code could lead to a crash, no matter how remote the chances actually were.

I'm sure that some of you work on code where lives are at stake, how do you deal with the possibility of truly fatal bugs?</comment>


SSH Key Collision Found on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Foone/status/942938543608938498/photo/1 <comment><USER2> What are the odds? Is this another CVE-2008-0166 style bug?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like that could be a possibility. I found a Stack Exchange answer with a great explanation of the reason that might happen[0].

[0]:[https://security.stackexchange.com/a/70696/106972](https://security.stackexchange.com/a/70696/106972)</comment></comment>


Tearing down the world's first mass-market electric car - <AUTHOR> https://neo.ubs.com/shared/d1wkuDlEbYPjF/ <comment><AUTHOR> ...we expect that electric vehicles will have 6-7 bearings in the drive module (e-motor and mini gearbox) compared to 40-50 bearings in a traditional internal combustion engine.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Mechanical complexity is much lower, whereas electronic complexity is higher. We counted 24 moving parts in the Bolt's powertrain, versus 149 in the Golf.</comment>


Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/technology/internet/29face.html?pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> "'It's not a democracy,' Mr. Cox says of his company's relationship with users. 'We are here to build an Internet medium for communicating and we think we have enough perspective to do that and be caretakers of that vision.'"

<comment><USER3> "PEOPLE, of course, sometimes like to keep secrets and maintain separate social realms - or at least a modicum of their privacy."</comment></comment>


Free higher level physics lectures from the Perimeter institute - <AUTHOR> http://www.perimeterscholars.org/317.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The videos can be downloaded from here: <http://streamer2.perimeterinstitute.ca/f4v-med/></comment>


Faced with a Five-Page Limit, Lawyer Files Cartoon Amicus Brief - <AUTHOR> http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/faced_with_a_five-page_limit_lawyer_files_cartoon_amicus_brief_with_proper_/ <comment><USER2> For completeness, here's a non-cartoon summary of the other side of the story: [http://www.courtneymilan.com/ramblings/2012/07/24/your- unspe...](http://www.courtneymilan.com/ramblings/2012/07/24/your-unspecial- antitrust-snowflake/)

<comment><USER3> Inexpensive books? This must be stopped! The last thing the country needs is educated citizens. Think of the job creators! They are special snowflakes.

<comment><USER4> Did you actually read the story? It's not that the books were low priced. It's that they were priced predatorily. Preditory pricing is bad for consumers in the long run, and in every industry outside of software is seen as a bad thing. In the software business that seems to be the standard VC-backed- company model.

<comment><USER5> I've actually wondered about this for a long time: why is it legal for software companies to offer products and services at below marginal cost? Clearly zero is below whatever the actual marginal cost is, and Eric Schmidt summed up the industry's view of charging zero: "Consumers like the price of free."

I would love to learn from a knowledgeable lawyer why the practice of giving software away for free -- even when it potentially harms new entrants by eliminating entirely their potential for revenue generation -- is legal.

<comment><USER6> I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that you're suggesting that you think that it should be illegal to contribute to open source software that is naturally available for free. As someone who has contributed to open source software, I had plenty of legitimate reasons for doing so other than anti- competitive behavior. One of them is advertising - if I'm in an interview and am asked for a code sample I can just point to CPAN.

Similar considerations happen in a proprietary context. For instance this website is funded and built by programmers whose time is _incredibly_ valuable, yet it is available for free. My belief is that pg sees this discussion forum as an advertising cost for ycombinator. Why shouldn't it be legal for pg to spend his advertising budget giving away a discussion forum when there are competitors that are trying to do similar things as a paid product?

<comment><USER5> Sorry, I wasn't clear. Obviously the only reason it would be illegal would be if it were done to restrain competition or trade, and done by an entity with a monopoly.

Giving things away for below marginal cost can also run afoul of WTO anti- dumping laws. I am also curious why there are never any dumping complaints made against software companies whereas they are quite common in adjacent markets like RAM chips.

<comment><USER6> Well, what is the marginal cost of software distribution?

Just bandwidth cost. Literally a fraction of a cent.

There are a lot of costs to software distribution, but the vast majority are sunk costs, not marginal. By contrast manufacturing has significant marginal costs.

This economic fact may be relevant to any decent analysis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It looks novel (and obviously succeeded in getting attention) but I don't think he used the comic medium potential - it was all mostly bullet points, but instead of bullets, he put a comic frame around each point.

The question and answer format was OK, but really, it did not clarify any points for me or make them less dense.

But then, this was still meant for other lawyers, and not as a layman's explanation.

</comment><comment><USER8> So he's weighing two bad things against eachother:

\- collusive price-fixing

\- predatory pricing

These are both definitely bad things, and using one to justify the other is itself problematic.

But there's another dimension - are these allegations _true_? As I understand it, predatory pricing is when a large player throws its weight around, offering goods at below cost to edge out competitors.

But there's _nothing stopping_ other retailers from offering similarly low prices. Ebooks have almost no marginal price. Just because someone else _wants_ to sell ebooks for a higher price doesn't make prices lower than that predatory.

<comment><USER9> >Ebooks have almost no marginal price. Just because someone else wants to sell ebooks for a higher price doesn't make prices lower than that predatory.

To Amazon ebooks have a marginal price as they're paying the publisher a fixed value for every copy. They were charging customers less than that value so that's where the accusations came from.

<comment><USER10> Very true. And it's highly unlikely that another distribution channel could come along and convince the same publisher to sell the ebooks to them at a lower price, so they could compete with Amazon without selling below cost.

It seems a lot of people are fixated on the idea that digital goods have no cost, which is simply untrue. Even discounting the fact that the seller has to purchase the item from the publisher (under the traditional model), there's still a base cost associated with the good because of licensing issues. People need to get paid, and certainly some people do get paid on a royalty basis. As a trivial example, someone needs to pay the author, which is typically done through royalties. But the publisher also needs to get paid, as does anyone the publisher employs.

If you're self-publishing and selling on your own storefront, then no there's probably no marginal cost as you don't have any sort of license or royalty agreements with yourself. But as soon as multiple parties are involved, things change.

<comment><USER11> "As a trivial example, someone needs to pay the author, which is typically done through royalties. But the publisher also needs to get paid, as does anyone the publisher employs."

Those aren't marginal costs.

<comment><USER10> Any time someone is paid based on the number of units sold (e.g. royalties), sure it is. If I sell one more ebook, I need to pay out more royalties, and therefore my total cost has gone up.

I realize I'm handwaving a bit, but my basic point is that selling more ebooks is not free for the publisher. There's definitely a cost here. And it's somewhat tangential anyway, because the marginal cost that's important here is Amazon's. In the traditional model they buy ebooks from the publisher at a fixed price, just like with physical books, and then mark them up and resell them. So the marginal cost here is the amount they pay the publisher per copy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is a pity that his argument is a load of bollocks.

As I understand it, he argues that an e-books price fixing cartel is in the interests of all, including the consumer, because otherwise, companies such as Amazon will lower the price to a point (whilst continuing making a loss), such that all others e-book sellers are unable to compete long term.

Or, have I misunderstood his five pages of cartoon genius?

<comment><USER13> Maybe.

But you haven't explained why it's a load of bollocks.

<comment><USER14> Because it is a non-sequitor. It uses hypothetical future bad behavior (which itself isn't proven) to justify an actual "bad" behavior to compensate before it occurs.

But, I am anti-anti-trust, so I don't have a problem with collusion of this sort; any inefficient collusion will eventually bloat and be disrupted (unless protected by the government as a sanctioned monopoly).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The argument of the cartoon is great except for one thing, the marginal cost; for e-books the marginal cost is so close to zero it might as well be considered zero. This was also stated by another commenter on the OP discussion section.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. But this bonehead wants to argue that it's "presumed illegal" to sell them for what they cost: almost nothing.

<comment><USER16> If you're paying a $3 royalty to the rightsholders per copy sold, then the marginal cost is at least that plus minor distribution and transactional costs. If you sell the e-book for $2.99, that's below marginal cost.

<comment><USER17> But that is not what the comics argue since they are attributing it to DOJ guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property.

There is not a single reference to marginal cost or copyright infringement in that document. The guidelines focus around market power, and competitive prices.

Contrary to the comic, the guidelines do to define what an competitive price is, or public goods, or systems goods, or the effect of supply & demand on IP. The closest we get is a statement that market power exist if the consumer can not get the product beyond from a single source.

If someone edited the Wikipedia article about IP and used the same wording as the comic, it would get reverted with the comment ("Does not exist in source").

<comment><USER16>
      > There is not a single reference to marginal cost or
      > copyright infringement in that document.

Did we read the same document? These references are from <http://www.abajournal.com/files/AppleAmicusBrief.pdf>

Page 2 panel 2:

Woman: "Oh, because of illegal downloading." (aka copyright infringement)

Page 3, panel 2:

Woman: "Who said Amazon was a predator?"

Man: "The DOJ did in their own complaint & CIS. Amazon sold e-books below marginal cost."

Page 4 panels 1 & 2:

Woman: "So, how does all this help solve the case?"

Man: "You see, when Amazon lowered e-book prices below its marginal cost..."

Man: "... any conduct that raised them back to marginal cost could not have harmed consumers."

<comment><USER18> I believe he was referring to the "DOJ guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property" not the comic. I'll assume he means this: <http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/guidelines/0558.htm>

<comment><USER16> You're most likely right and I misunderstood. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Somehow I was expecting an ending where the author is awesome. Maybe he lifts a car, maybe the girl gives him a series of unreasonable compliments... just _something_

</comment><comment><USER20> "The illustrator attends school with Kohn's daughter, Katie, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in film studies at Harvard."

"Attends school with." Mmmhmmm.

</comment><comment><USER21> So it boils down to "let collusion go unpunished this one time, because we did your job for you!". Right.

Not only would it create a precedent in letting collusion slide, but it would also misrepresent the problem: it's DRM that supports Amazon's monopsony, and only because publishers asked for it.

</comment><comment><USER22> After reading the comic, I have no idea what the point is. Is he for or against whatever is going on? What's even going on?

I just feel so confused.

<comment><USER23> Initially, Amazon set prices at whatever level they wanted because they had a distribution model with publishers. This means the publisher would charge a set price to Amazon and Amazon could then charge whatever it liked to end- consumers. Amazon engaged in low pricing to build market share.

Apple and publishers didn't like this because lower book prices meant lower revenues and sales for them.

Discussions were had and publishers then collectively went to Amazon to demand a switch to the agency model. In the agency model, the publisher sets the end retail price and the intermediary (Amazon) takes an agreed cut.

The lawyer argues that the above one-time step by the publishers against Amazon was necessary to correct the anti-competitive action of Amazon in engaging in pricing at a level which would reduce competition over time.

Effectively, the rise in prices resulting from the agency model was justified because without the reversion to the agency model, Amazon's continued low pricing would eventually lead to monopsony effects in terms of Amazon being able to control publishers.

The lawyer goes on to say that what is important is not the price level, but its effectiveness in terms of encouraging competition. In the short term, consumers benefit from a low price, but if one actor becomes the only provider, it is likely to have a detrimental effect on the ability of upstream providers to compete.

<comment><USER24> Which model ended up benefiting the consumer the most, though? I thought that's what antitrust is all about.

Sure, we could make theories all day long about how 10 years from now Amazon will increase their prices, but that's highly improbable, as I think Amazon would like to make book prices even lower if they could. That's why they are allowing self-published authors to sell books even for $2.99, and singles for $0.99. They are working in the same time to disrupt the traditional publishing model. And that's a _good thing_.

I was hoping Google would be the more innovative company with Google Books, and try to disrupt Amazon with new models of selling books (or free/ad-based, promote self-publishing more, etc), but they've disappointed me in doing that, and honestly I have no idea why they even bothered entering the book market, if they weren't going to be serious and do something radical and disruptive to gain market share from Amazon.

I'm not even a fan of Amazon, and I'll _never_ forgive them for what they _voluntarily_ did to Wikileaks, but so far Amazon has proven time and time again to be the most innovative company in the book industry.

<comment><USER23> It is of course very difficult to forecast into the future and that is the problem with intervention into free market matters.

I do think it is interesting to note the German approach in terms of protecting publishers, and how there appear to be many more book stores in Germany catering for niche areas of publishing owing to the fixed pricing arrangement for the sale of books.

[http://www.thenation.com/article/168124/how-germany-keeps- am...](http://www.thenation.com/article/168124/how-germany-keeps-amazon-bay- and-literary-culture-alive)

For me, it suggests that price is not the only factor to consider in terms of satisfying consumers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So Amazon is being bad because they might seize the market and raise prices. But the publishers want to raise prices right now.

Got it.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't know if Poe would be considered a novelist, but he can really blow you away in less than 5 pages.

1) <http://www.online-literature.com/poe/335/>

<comment><USER27> I don't think the comic format was legitimately for fitting more info in to 5 pages. Probably more of a publicity gimmick.

<comment><USER28> I agree. This isn't a space-saving brief. It's an attempt to inflame. But...

I think it's pretty cool that a new medium for legal discourse has been actually used. Several years after absorbing Scott McCloud's phenomenal book Understanding Comics (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics>), I set out to argue for a very technical (programming) project at work through a goofy comic. It was surprisingly effective, and got more eyes on it than the more traditional internal wiki plea. I assume that the novelty and incongruence of the medium brings the audience out of whatever comfort zone they routinely occupy.

<comment><USER29> Reminds me of "Why's Poignant Guid to Ruby" [1]. I can't say how efficient this medium is for transferring information/knowledge, but it's certainly captivating -- sometimes what's needed to get a point across is not efficiency, but captivation.

[1] <http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Maybe it's just the looks of the main character, but this reminded me a bit of Scott McCloud - although I would like how he would do things like this in a "Understanding Comics" style.

</comment><comment><USER31> Related to Bret Victors work: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4421235>

I really want to try this in my next paper!

</comment><comment><USER32> _ahem_

Marginal costs on ebooks are essentially zero after factoring payment to authors/publishers. Fixed costs, even long-term variable costs, cannot be considered marginal costs here. The costs are hosting and delivery of content.

So unless Amazon is selling books at a price lower than what it paid to authors/publishers who distribute through them, I don't follow the inherent marginal cost pricing argument.

Perhaps the author means average costs?

</comment><comment><USER33> A bit gimmicky (since the argument could easily have been stated in a couple of pages), but he developed the argument cleverly.

<comment><USER23> Although the argument relayed in the comic could be stated in a couple of pages, I believe the point of the comic is to mock the judge for imposing a 5-page limit as this is an insufficient amount of space in which to relay the full argument that the lawyer wanted to make.

The last section states 'it's impossible to tell a complex story in only five pages'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I can't imagine that this was more efficient, or potentially even more enjoyable, than something that used the space more efficiently: between the handwritten and crowded text, the repetitive panels, and the irritating premise of a conversation that would never have happened, I found reading that document very difficult.

</comment><comment><USER35> Not that we can see it in black and white, the case is settled. Pictures can't lie.

</comment><comment><USER36> If all legal briefs were like this I suspect more people would be able to understand the law

</comment><comment><USER37> Who knew -- lawyers can be creative. Count me impressed.

</comment><comment><USER38> this is excellent!

</comment><comment><USER3> This guy is your typical lawyer who has no life outside of his job. Just a tad bit overeager. "Look at me I'm an annoying laywer! I will argue the moon is made of cheese if you pay me." I can only imagine how long his brief would have been without the limit. The judge was wise; she obviously values her free time more than he does.

"Efficient" prices. Yeah right. In other words, Apple prices. We all know how they work.

Go Amazon!

<comment><USER39> > _This guy is your typical lawyer who has no life outside of his job._

Far from it. If the comic author is who I think it is [1] (and I'm pretty sure it is), he's not at all your typical lawyer. Way back in the day, he was the general counsel of Borland International [2], which published Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Sidekick, etc. Bob's Christmas-card newsletters were always a blast to read, although I haven't been on his mailing list for a number of years now.

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

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland>

<comment><USER3> You're right. I'm wrong. Apologies to Mr. Kohn.

He's not a bonehead either. But that is a boneheaded cartoon and he is making boneheaded arguments.

When you look at what he's doing now and who is clients are it makes perfect sense why he wants to submit an amicus brief.

As a consumer, Kohn is not looking out for my interests.

The internet makes publishing less expensive. We are getting things for free that we used to pay for. This aggravates lots of people. But technology has no moral sense. It is a means to an end. (The information in legal research databases, not to mention the dubious "copyright" status of court decisions that some "Legal Publishers" assert, are fine examples you should be familiar with. The internet does not benefit every business. Poor Lexis-Nexis. Poor Westlaw. Poor Martindale. They have to adapt and compete. What a tragedy.)

But the internet clearly benefits consumers. We get lower prices and better access to information. How is this a bad thing?

Amazon may be no angel but they have embraced the internet, openness and interoperability to a far greater degree than those who now oppose them, seeking the help of the courts to slow Amazon's progress.

Royalty rates are a matter of negotiation not actual production and distribution costs. It's interesting to see how some commenters seems to view what the publisher deems a reasonable rate as a "fixed cost".

The top post in this thread is spot on. There's nothing to stop anyone from offering low prices like Amazon. It's pretty obvious why they do not want to and why they would go so far as to suggest Amazon is breaking the law.

I don't want to see people's book collections turn into some ridiculous propreitary iTunes-like lock-in, denying people ownership or any reasonable amount of interoperability.</comment></comment></comment>


ILike's $20m Valuation - Platform Dependency has a Cost - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/venture/iLike_A_cautionary_tale_53692587.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This just blew me away. 50 million registered users (1/5th of Facebook and 50x what Friendfeed had when they sold?). Near breakeven with some profitable- looking features on the horizon. Selling for $20m in the same month where Friendfeed sold for $50m...?

<comment><USER2> Do we have a solid source on either figure?

<comment><AUTHOR> Naw, but a few sources are quoting the $20m figure. I know a bunch of guys at iLike, so I will eventually have solid sources. ;-)

If the $20m holds, it still seems staggeringly low in light of lots of other exits. 50m users plus near profitable plus team of really talented guys (the iLike guys are pretty top notch and very engineer-centric) seems like it oughta command more than $20m.

<comment><USER2> If $20M is correct, it is evidence that your impression of the state of the company could be wrong. I agree with your intuition though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's a huge concern. When a company starts hitting that $100M range, you're essentially worth a decent percentage of what Facebook is worth (maybe 5%). At that point, it starts making sense for Facebook to put a little work to competing with you and putting you out of business.

These platforms can be good if you're willing to be unnoticed in the corner. However, if you find something highly worthwhile, your landlord can copy you and shut you out.

If you're talking about a $50M buy, you have to be thinking that you'll be able to get at least triple out of that on such a risky purchase. And if a Facebook app is that worthwhile, how long until Facebook itself moves into the space?

</comment><comment><USER4> Windows does not belong in that list - it is much more open and plenty of companies have built large, sustainable businesses on top of it.

<comment><USER5> And Microsoft tries to crush everyone that makes significant money on Windows -- Quicken, Adobe, Borland, etc. there are tons of examples.</comment></comment>