Show HN: Three and React = react-three-fiber, a new renderer based on Fiber - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/drcmda/react-three-fiber <comment><USER2> Doesn't seem like a great fit. Immutability is a waste of memory when working with complex 3D scenes and React is already pretty processor and memory heavy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would help in the same way that react-dom helps the dom, especially performance. React basically manages the scene, only updating the parts that change. As for processor speed, React only mounts/unmounts, it maintains THREEs performance otherwise. In the demo for instance there are two animations, the stars are driven by the render loop (outside of react) and the thing in the middle using react-spring, which also animates outside of react.

I think the performance increase for a large project with a complex scene graph could be drastic compared to handling it manually - just like vanilla js would not easily get even with react unless you implement change detection, read/write queues, etc. With react-fibers scheduling the difference will only get larger since now it can bail out of or defer actions that would blow the 60fps frame budget.

As for memory and immutability, the actual v-dom tree is next to nothing, a node is a couple of bytes. This is the same as for a huge dom UI app with millions of divs and spans and table fields. The logical tree never hurts. One big problem with THREE has always been garbage and the object overhead - it's super easy to create leaks or create objects needlessly

        mesh.position.copy(xyz.clone())

I've been doing three for a couple of years now and to not be wasteful takes _a lot_ of discipline as basically everything nudges you into re-creating objects since re-use can have unexpected side-effects. With the reconciler you can stow away objects into the graph, which means they're managed. Probably will reduce the memory footprint in the end, even with a v-dom on top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool! But why and when? How would I use loaders with this? (GLTF etc)

<comment><AUTHOR> You would use them as you always did. You have raw access to everything. But if you want loading results to be managed, put them into useEffect/useMemo and render out the results. For instance i've just made a text-sprite component that looks like this:

        function Text({ children, ...props }) {
          const { camera, size, viewport } = useThree()
          const { width } = viewport()
          const canvas = useMemo(() => {
            const canvas = document.createElement('canvas')
            canvas.width = canvas.height = size.width * 2
            const context = canvas.getContext('2d')
            context.font = `bold ${size.width *
              0.45}px -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, avenir next, avenir, helvetica neue, helvetica, ubuntu, roboto, noto, segoe ui, arial, sans-serif`
            context.textAlign = 'center'
            context.fillStyle = 'black'
            context.fillText(children, size.width, size.height + size.width * 0.4)
            return canvas
          }, [children, size.width])
          return (
            <sprite scale={[width, width]} {...props}>
              <spriteMaterial name="material">
                <canvasTexture name="map" image={canvas} premultiplyAlpha onUpdate={s => (s.needsUpdate = true)} />
              </spriteMaterial>
            </sprite>
          )
        }</comment></comment>


Tech Women Choose Possibility - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2015/05/13/tech-women-choose-possibility/

<comment><AUTHOR> First, the number of women starting tech companies is rising in absolute (if not yet relative) numbers. To illustrate what's possible, we've highlighted a cross section of 230 women on this list who have collectively started or led 298 tech companies across all sectors and stages of growth over this period. Approximately 29 percent of women on this list are serial entrepreneurs.

The women on this list founded heavyweights such as Lynda.com, Nextdoor, Houzz, VMware, ASK Group and Mozilla; growth-stage stars like Stitch Fix, Slideshare, Indiegogo, LearnVest and StyleSeat; and earlier-stage startups like Lumoid, Heartwork, Other Machine Company and Trendalytics. On this list alone, we were able to identify 13 IPOs and another 54 exits through M&A. The average amount of capital raised per company is approximately $34 million (for a subset of 167 companies on which data was available).

Link to the list: [https://medium.com/@sukhindersinghcassidy/choosepossibility-...](https://medium.com/@sukhindersinghcassidy/choosepossibility- project-90a217ff0a86)</comment>


Arduino command line interface - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/arduino/arduino-cli <comment><USER2> In the past I've had a great experience with PlatformIO which has a CLI and a front-end in Atom+VSCode

In contrast to Arduino, I've found it does a great job of handling your dependencies.

[https://platformio.org/](https://platformio.org/)

<comment><USER3> > Atom+VSCode

Excuse my ignorance, but how can something be in Atom and VSCode? Are there two separate versions?

<comment><USER4> > Are there two separate versions?

Yes. (The website says "Install for Atom .. or .. Install for VSCode")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great! Really like the idea of being able to move a lot of manual IDE setup/usage to a Makefile. After using the IDE for 3 years now, has anyone used a different IDE that boasts a lot of the same features but is a bit more... friendly?

edit: I guess we can use any IDE we want with this CLI, and make tooling around the CLI. I meant the question in past tense :)

<comment><USER6> You've been able to do that for years[1]. I've been mostly programming my arduinos through headless rpis, because I don't like the idea of my untested electronic designs having any connection with my desktop. Plus it's really way more handy that way, vim + all my keyboard shortcuts etc.

1\. [https://github.com/sudar/Arduino- Makefile](https://github.com/sudar/Arduino-Makefile)

<comment><USER7> With all due respect the Arduino CLI is superior to Makefiles and similar tools. it's a single binary (no python or other stuff to install) that uses clang and other tools to automatically deal with dependencies and the process of converting an ino file to a c++ file that can be compiled. it interfaces with the library manager and core manager , downloads all the necessary files etc.. it saves you a ton of time and pain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Arduino co-founder here. Let me know if you have questions and suggestions. We have a lot of features in the making so your suggestions can help us shape the roadmap

</comment><comment><USER8> This is really exiting to me, I've wanted a native cross platform Arduino toolchain.

</comment><comment><USER9> Excellent, one of my major gripes with arduino is that you couldn't upload code remotely on a headless machine. This is a very useful for embedded systems in hard to reach or sealed off places.

<comment><USER10> You've always been able to do this via avrdude (which is also what this tool uses). The Arduino IDE at its heart is just package manager + a wrapper for various tools, specifically avr-gcc and avrdude for the AVR platform.

<comment><USER7> Arduino does a bit more than just "wrapping" other tools. otherwise it wouldn't have had the success it has

<comment><USER10> Right, it's a case of the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The philosophy of making things easy for beginners by automating things like setting up toolchains and managing libraries is a major feature, plus the Arduino libraries and hardware of course. I'm not trying to downplay what it does, just point out that the tools to do what OP wanted have been there the whole time.

Please keep up the good work, I've learned a ton from Arduino!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Boggles my mind how little Arduino has advanced since it was introduced. Just use mBed.

<comment><USER12> You can get a good Arduino clone for $4. From what I can tell, mBed boards cost an order of magnitude more.

<comment><USER13> Or an Arduino Nano clone for half that, even.

[https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1pcs-lot- Nano-3-0-controller...](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1pcs-lot- Nano-3-0-controller-compatible-for-arduino-nano-CH340-USB-driver-NO- CABLE/32824272738.html)

<comment><USER7> Careful with the exploding Nanos :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The tech startup that made a $700 juicing machine has shut down - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/01/the-tech-start-up-that-made-a-700-juicing-machine-has-shut-down.html <comment><USER2> This whole thing never looked like anything other than and experiment in what yuppies will pay for.</comment>


Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence - <AUTHOR> https://voxeu.org/article/advertising-major-source-human-dissatisfaction <comment><USER5> Folks in this thread may find this interesting, a 4 part documentary on Edward Bernays and the history of advertising and PR as we know it today.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04)

From the video description -

"The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass- consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.

His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.

It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world."

<comment><USER6> Fun fact: Bernays grandson is the co founder of Netflix. And you may think what brainwashing are all of these memes by Netflix? (Stephen Bernays Randolph his father)

<comment><USER7> Wow. And I suppose they managed to eroticise Netflix itself via "Netflix and chill". Pretty brazen stuff when you think about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To me, it is worrying how much human effort we're investing into advertising as a whole. The top minds of our generations, backed by billions of dollars in funding, are working on increasingly manipulative ways to capture people's attention and use it to generate profit.

We're constantly getting better at it; who knows what path this will lead us down. I suspect it might not be the one we had wished for.

<comment><USER9> Here's the reason they keep doing-- It works. Stop rewarding it and they'll stop.

I actually think a large number of societal issues today are stemming from people's inability to think rationally for themselves. Things like fake news, being vulnerable to advertising, taking bad deals like minimum wage etc. If someone were able to think rationally and into the future to figure out, "4 years from now if I choose this [politician, car, job]" I'll be as bad or worse off, then those things would die out for want of funding...

<comment><USER10> > Stop rewarding it and they'll stop.

Here's the thing...

I'd taken quite a lot of advertising courses during my education, and among the many truly scary things that I learned in them, one stood out above all others:

Knowing how advertising manipulates you, and even noticing it in the moment that it's happening, in no way makes it less effective. People who claim that they aren't affected by advertising are incorrect.

Nobody can just decide not to reward advertising, short of keeping a list of all the advertising you're exposed to (and are you sure you can spot it all?) and refusing to buy any product or service that appears on that list.

<comment><USER11> > _Knowing how advertising manipulates you, and even noticing it in the moment > that it 's happening, in no way makes it less effective. People who claim > that they aren't affected by advertising are incorrect._

Is there any evidence for such a claim? I've heard people say this again and again, but I can't see how this is true based on myself. Sure, I've been guided to a product based on advertisement once in my life, but everything else I've ignored obvious advertisements. I can't say that I haven't been swayed by an advertisement that's masked as a review, but that's divorced from this I think.

> _Nobody can just decide not to reward advertising, short of keeping a list > of all the advertising you 're exposed to (and are you sure you can spot it > all?) and refusing to buy any product or service that appears on that list._

But buying something that's advertised doesn't mean you're rewarding the advertisement. If you would buy that product regardless, then even if the advertisement stopped (or never existed) you'd still buy it.

<comment><USER12> There's research on nudging behaviours, and that being told you're being nudged doesn't negatively impact your decision vs not being told you're being nudged, which could be considered synonymous with advertising transparency [0] (although there are caveats at play that might make that unsound).

[0] [https://www.coglode.com/gem/transparency- effect](https://www.coglode.com/gem/transparency-effect)

<comment><USER11> I don't doubt the effects I'd advertising. What I wonder is whether advertising affects everyone. Studies can show that it affects people on average, but it doesn't mean it affects everyone.

<comment><USER10> Advertising does affect everyone in the broad picture. Specific advertising campaigns don't affect everyone, though. Also, different people are affected by different approaches. What works for one set of people doesn't for another.

This is why there are a set of different approaches that have been shown to be effective (given names like "the bandwagon" \-- which covers the group of people who can be swayed by convincing them that everyone else is into something). A comprehensive campaign will have different ads for the same thing, each using a different approach, to maximize the number of people they affect.

By the way, if you ever want a deep-dive into this stuff without actually taking college courses on it, my recommendation is to find a copy of guidelines provided to car dealerships. Those things are very comprehensive, unabashed, and to-the-point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What can I say

"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't."

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fight_Club_(film)](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fight_Club_\(film\))

<comment><USER14> I'd say that's not true any more. We do have a war to fight, the war against destruction of our planet by humanity. (Hoping our politicians would fix it has turned out to be ineffective so far.)

If we could have a war against drugs or terror we can also have a war against climate change, soil degradation, desertification, insect decline and biodiversity loss.

<comment><USER15> What's a war without killing people?

<comment><USER14> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_as_metaphor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_as_metaphor)

Even though that was meant tongue in cheek, I fear there will be innumerable deaths before this is over. We can discuss who killed them then.

edit: A war-economy-level effort is needed, with the same dedication of all participants, so there is another similar line of though.

<comment><USER16> Here's another take on the war metaphor in international relations:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization_(internationa...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization_\(international_relations\))

> an extreme version of politicization that enables extraordinary means to be > used in the name of security

<comment><USER17> Wow, nice term, I hadn't heard of it yet.

Too many people in the EU don't know that our many decades of peace (longer than _ever_ before!) is due to how the EU effectively did some reverse securitization. Basically, after WWII, any discussion of foreign countries was heavily securitized. "Germany" wasn't considered a major indutrial competitor, but a threat. And who knows, maybe France would be the next aggressor? Better be prepared.

The creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (the EU's predecessor) transformed the _language_ in which politicians discussed neighbouring countries. Right now, it is unimaginable to have war within the EU.

When people (rightfully) complain about how, say, Germany abuses their position of power, or how the EU is un-democratic, or how too many MEPs are corrupt fucks, then it always strikes me how _ridiculously successful_ the EU has been at preventing war among its member states. I mean, if there was any grounded reason to fear war, the last thing people would worry about is some MEP spending public funds in a strip club.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think they are missing the biggest issue with advertising, which is it incentivizes businesses to create things for the sole purpose of drawing their attention to the advertising. Truth is less important than shock value. Utility less important than appearance of utility. Extremist rhetoric gathers more eyeballs than moderate views. Advertising's biggest negative effects are in how it manipulates people into manipulating people's attention.

<comment><USER19> It's a colossal move but we have to move the marketplace away from the current growth capitalism towards one of real utility.

<comment><USER20> While there are bigger changes we may need to make in terms of growth capitalism you refer to, for the simple subject at hand - advertising - <USER2> is a simple fix. Simply ban advertising in more places and ban more types of advertising. It's really not as heavy handed as it sounds. Bans on billboards in parts of the world show the way.

We can ban tracking of users. We can ban collection or sale or personal data. Things like this really aren't that crazy, it's how the world used to be up until a few years ago and the world still existed. Yes it might mean that some websites won't exist anymore. Other websites will be smaller and subscription based. Essentially your service will need to have some utility that at least a small portion of it's users will pay for. That's really not a big ask.

<comment><USER21> I formed the opinion a while ago that we should go a step further: ban advertising entirely (not exactly a new idea, Bill Hicks came first [1]). Billboards, TV ads, newspaper ads, paid-for articles, promoted Instagram content, all internet ads, everything.

One of the main tenants of capitalism is that it naturally produces a meritocracy. Products which are of a higher quality or cheaper than their competitors should, in theory, sell better. Advertising in any form subverts that. More expensive and lower quality products can completely outsell competitors by out-advertising them, which fundamentally undermines capitalism. I do not believe that any limits can be imposed which will make a meaningful impact: banning individual forms of advertising which we think have gone too far will be a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Kill the industry entirely.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0)

<comment><USER22> Unfortunately, I think your solution would effectively destroy democracy at any level other than mayor and dog-catcher in tiny cities.

Televised presidential debates? Those are advertising for party-sponsored candidates to the disadvantage of write-in candidates. If all publicity is good publicity, then the same holds true for all news articles about candidates running for any office. How is a newspaper editorial proclaiming that "Elected official X is bad for Y!" any different than a campaign ad in the same newspaper that "Elected official X is great for Y!"?

In one case, the newspaper makes money to put the content to be there, in the other, the newspaper makes money because the content is there.

The same goes for books: how is publishing a biography of someone not a form of advertisement for or against that person?

If I'm not mistaken, that happens to also be the heart of (at least one of the justices' deliberations on) the Citizens United case that declared corporate spending on elections to be covered under free speech.

<comment><USER23> All democracy should be grassroots. I find the concept that you simply can't win an election or a candidacy without a large warchest to be abhorrent.

We live in an age where media dissemination costs essentially zero. All politicians should have volunteers and not be able to raise donations nor spend a cent on advertising. Easier said than done yes, but still a far better outcome for democracy.

Let the best ideas flourish by themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Isn't this what you would expect? Advertising fundamentally is trying to convince you that you need something. If you're perfectly happy with your current situation then what else would you need? So the advertising has to convince you that you're not happy but that there is a product that you can buy that will increase your happiness.

You're basically being negged by advertisers.

<comment><USER25> Well like it says there's two kinds.

One is "Hey, did you know this thing exists? Check it out! Here are all the tests it passed, realistic cost of ownership, and locations where it is in stock".

The other is "Look at this woman, isn't she fascinating? People like her will desire you more if you buy the thing she's lying on top of. Actual woman not included."

Unfortunately, people have discovered type 2 is effective for a lot of things. Not only that, there are no scruples at all with appealing to people in this kind of way. It's not lying in the normal sense, but it is manipulation, or an attempt at it. Current dogma seems to be that rational people can just take the type 1 info out of your type 2 advert and think with the appropriate organ.

<comment><USER26> > One is "Hey, did you know this thing exists? Check it out! Here are all the > tests it passed, realistic cost of ownership, and locations where it is in > stock".

I almost never see ads of type one - in fact, even finding that information is usually made accidentally or deliberately difficult.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your post had me thinking the consumer pharmaceutical ads for prescription medicines would fit but then no, they flunk all three of the elements you called out. The marketing just weirds me out -- I'm supposed to select chemotherapeutic agents peddled from a TV ad? One of a dozen patent autoimmune remedies? Prescription medicine ads deserve their own abusive category and are particularly abusive in that their costs are taxpayer-subsidized.

<comment><USER27> I don't know what you even do with that information. Are you supposed to ask your doctor to put you on medication? "Uhh, sir you don't even have that disease."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The biggest offender in my opinion is not the web, where you can install ad blockers and avoid certain websites, but television, where you're forced to sit through something before you can get to the content you're trying to watch.

I find it especially offensive on paid services like Hulu. I'm paying for the thing, just let me watch it!

It's also pretty bad for F2P mobile games, although the solution there is easy (play different games).

I actually don't mind advertisements in big cities or on billboards, sort of adds to the flashiness factor in some cases. Though if I lived in a more concentrated metro area I might feel differently.

<comment><USER27> Cable TV used to be ad free when it first came out. The whole reason people were willing to pay for it was to not see ads like they got on the free broadcasts. Then once telecoms got their market share the ads trickled in, as was originally planned I'm sure.

<comment><USER29> I used to watch cable tv when it was ad free. Then ads came about and I was really baffled why anyone would pay to watch ads. That was the end of cable for me many many years ago.

Also, I'll never forget the first day I saw and ad in the movie theatre. That was mostly the end of theatres for me except on some occasions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Doubling of advertising expidenture (Which is a massive, sea change) would apparently make people 3% less happy. So basically it has a negligible impact on happiness even if this analysis is true.

I highly doubt it is true though. It's a purely correlational study, that says from 1980-2011, advertising increased and people in general got 3% less happy. They say they accounted for GDP when doing their regression, but so many other things affect advertising spend as a whole that wouldn't show there. More globalization coming to a country (as markets open up and global firms find advertising worth their while), changes in industry make-up, political election cycles becoming more heated, internet connectivity (which would be huge in the time period they studied, and would greatly impact ad spend numbers with it), etc.

It is really, really hard to actually change people's opinions with advertising. The closest you can do is convert their existing opinions into actions. There is a ton of good academic literature on this - here's a good primer: [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.amazon.com/Advertising- Uneasy-Persuasion-Dubious- American/dp/0465000800&ved=2ahUKEwihqqSaj7_iAhXyRd8KHY3YCIYQFjAAegQIBxAC&usg=AOvVaw0KfSud7yAwUmzwvRqc9Jye)

<comment><USER31> Happiness is the one thing we should be optimizing for. 3% is not negligible if there is no trade-off.

<comment><USER30> Again, I don't think the correlation holds in the first place. But if it did, there absolutely is a trade-off. It's more or less impossible to grow any endeavor beyond local scale without ads, unless you're lucky enough to be an industry with a strong viral or press component. Take a look at the S-1s of most companies that go public. 9/10 of the companies have been able to grow because of ads.

<comment><USER31> I don't think you understand what I mean by "there is no trade-off". Those endeavours are only useful if and to the extent they create happiness.

Also: Companies need ads to grow because their competitors also have ads. That doesn't mean they'd need ads in if ads didn't exist.

The one legitimate purpose ads serve – could easily be served through other mechanisms, e.g. by the press. Maybe the press would have to expand but advertising isn't free either. In any case, an independent press is much more suitable to actually inform people than the ad industry which at best informs people by accident while trying to convince people to buy $PRODUCT.

Ads are like military: It's mostly necessary because it exists.

<comment><USER30> Okay. So say you make an app that helps plumbers do their job well. If every plumber used it, plumber productivity would go up 50%, making life easier for all. It cost you years of your time and lots of money to make this great app, and you need a lot of plumbers to buy it to afford to continue working on it.

There's a big plumber app on the market already, but yours is way better.

How do you get plumbers to hear about your product?

1) The press? Uninterested. Plumber magazines or sites? Very low traffic - <USER3> way to scale.

2) Call or knock on doors of every plumber near you? If everyone did this, the spam would be unreal. Also inefficient and not scalable.

3) Referrals? You get some, but most plumbers aren't chomping at the bit to help their competitors. And because you started with so few, referrals are a snails pace and by no means exponential.

4) Organic postings and SEO? The big plumber app is way ahead of you. And 100 other worse apps clog up the listings. No one sees your posts.

See the problem? Without ads, you can't grow many many categories of genuinely valuable products. Even if no one else is advertising, you can't really grow without them.

This is barely a hypothetical by the way. I've worked with a dozen companies with similar situations.

<comment><USER32> This is fallacious thinking. If you had an app that would increase plumber productivity by 50%, plumbers would be lining up to get into the Beta. Find any plumbing supplier or trade group, and if the effects are actually that good, they'll tell their members at no-charge because that knowledge would be a service to them. Plumbers would be cold-calling other plumbers trying to get a beta invite. All you need is a marginally competent sales person.

Advertising is a waste money for quality products, only makes sense for inferior ones.

<comment><USER33> > If you had an app that would increase plumber productivity by 50%, plumbers > would be lining up to get into the Beta.

How would plumbers know about the app without advertising?

> Find any plumbing supplier [...] they'll tell their members at no-charge

In other words: They would advertise it.

<comment><USER31> > In other words: They would advertise it.

It's quite clear we are talking about paid advertising, not the broader concept of people saying things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Advertising is necessary to stave off the greatest threat against Western civilization: [https://potterswealdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/fullsi...](https://potterswealdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/fullsizerender.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER34> I view advertising as a form of pollution. In many cases, it erodes the human experience. It is abusive to families with children creating strife where there was none. I spend a lot of time managing expectations and sharing philosophical ideas, like "less is more". I don't mind teaching my children, but I don't like feeling people are trying to take advantage of us all the time. I explain it to them as if it is a game we're all playing, "if you keep your money you don't have to work forever." Another fun game I'd like to suggest is looking at an index fund calculator and see how much money you'd have if somebody had invested 1K (or $50 a month) in your name on your birthday. I use this as a means of giving them a plan; nobody had ever done it with me growing up, hopefully my kids are clued in on how to earn financial freedom. Now, I just hope my advice withstands the test of time.

<comment><USER35> It's good advice, but I find it ironic.

Keep your money. Stick it in an index fund. It'll get invested in Google, Facebook, Apple who make money from ... advertising their own or other people's products.

To really be minimalist I think it's better (if less lucrative on average) to start your own business that takes a small chunk of business away from the giants, that you have ethical control over.

It's getting harder to do that without needing help from Google, Facebook etc. though, and definitely hard to do without advertising. But there's simple advertising "Painter for hire" and then there is the manipulative advertising based on spying on people etc. I think they are two different things.

<comment><USER36> On simple vs manipulative advertising being different things, I think mostly it's not the intent of the business advertising to be manipulative but rather just to save money. That is it's not the end that's bad, but the means.

Take our humble 'Painter for Hire' \- an honest business looking to do real valuable work for people who genuinely want to pay for that service. That's the kind of advert we all want to see, when we need it.

To the painter, and perhaps even to the customer, it's just all round better if their straightforward advert can be targeted at people who are very likely to need the service, on demand. They can spend the same and reach some multiplier X more warm leads, or spend 1/X on the same amount of warm leads. Warm leads being people who genuinely need the service and are happy to pay for it. There's no real manipulation going on at that level - both advertiser and customer are basically better off for the targeting, with respect to that genuine painting service being facilitated more efficiently and therefore likely more cheaply.

The manipulation in this case is more at the level of the advertising platform itself - i.e. how is the targeting achieved (spying, etc), and what potential negative externalities might that have.

It's an open and interesting question if the ends justify the means in cases like this. I think I err towards saying they don't, but still at the end of the day the positives are undeniable. That is all basically a long winded way to say, I don't necessarily think it's a question of simple vs manipulative ads _per se_ , I think the more important difference for the majority of ads is naive & expensive vs manipulative & cheap ad platforms, with a lot of tradeoffs in place between the two that are really hard to balance for both advertiser and customer.

<comment><USER37> But if someone needs a painter, they could just use an unbiased search engine, right? There is no need to bother anyone with ads.

<comment><USER36> You're right, but that's a very customer centric viewpoint - from the point of view of the advertiser this is not so great.

This specific painter pays the ad platform to be the one that comes to you, when you're busy with all the other things on your todo list, so that you choose them and not one of the other 10 painters in your area.

It still doesn't make them bad, or manipulative. You actually want this service and not having to do the search yourself is a bonus, all things being equal (price and service level is in line with the local market etc).

<comment><USER37> > It still doesn't make them bad, or manipulative.

I don't see why not. Ads have negative externalities, for example: now everybody sees the ad (not only people in need of a painter), and also now the painter with the largest advertising budget will get more customers (not the best one), and finally the advertising costs will eventually be paid by the client (the client pays for being manipulated).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> One of the nicest things about been a techie is I rarely see/hear adverts.

I don't listen to the radio (programming podcasts and music), watch broadcast tv (streaming and..other sources), ublock origin deals with the web.

So I see maybe a one or two per day (billboards near work).

I'm reminded how nice that is every time I touch a windows work PC that isn't mine (I run fedora on a box I built myself), at least everyone is running ublock origin now after I suggested it.

<comment><USER39> The perfect VR app would be a visual ad blocker. IEMs have taken care of my ears (at least until iTunes or audible have ads).

<comment><USER27> Plenty of people are probably chomping at the bit to get AR ads rolling . I can't wait for the youtube ads to pause and wait for my eyes to re center on them before they continue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I get that advertising is a necessary evil but I've become numb to accepting any form of advertisements due to it being abused.

Ad block + refuse to watch pretty much anything on TV. Life is too short to lose +-10% of my leisure time being brainwashed over a product I don't care about

<comment><USER26> > necessary evil

Whatever convinced you it was necessary? A few cities/states banned billboards, and as far as I'm aware, the sky didn't fall.

<comment><USER41> How many big content websites do you know that are doing well without ads?

<comment><USER42> Does Wikipedia count as a big content website? n=1 and all that, but I think it's a decent example of how things that are actually useful do just fine[1] without ads.

This might sound harsh, but if people are unwilling to pay for something with any currency they don't implicitly count as worthless, maybe it shouldn't exist. The 20xx equivalent of checkout aisle gossip mags going quietly into that good night is a feature, not a bug.

Beyond that, think about how many of the ills of the modern internet can be traced back to advertising profit motive. Shitty clickbait journalism? Yep. Engagement-optimized filter bubbles and radicalization machines? Check. Fake news (of the traditional definition)? Practically the poster child. Indiscriminate data collection? Of course. I admit that I'm far from a typical internet user, but from my point of view the death of ad-supported services is an unalloyed good.

\---

[1] Much of the funding from Wikipedia drives goes to other efforts of the foundation. The frequency and tone of drives might imply some precariousness, but taken alone Wikipedia is fairly firmly in the green.

<comment><USER41> > _This might sound harsh, but if people are unwilling to pay for something > with any currency they don 't implicitly count as worthless, maybe it > shouldn't exist._

That's essentially every news source that isn't purely propaganda with billionaires footing the bill for its dissemination. This stance seems pretty closely similar in effect to "The only things that should exist are the interests of the rich."

I agree there are a lot of societal illnesses (even beyond those mentioned in the OP) that trace back to ad-supported websites, but ads have been the main reason information has been available to average people for literally decades now, dating back to print and broadcast media in the 20th century. I think if we want to replace them, we need to be thoughtful about how to do better.

<comment><USER42> > _That 's essentially every news source that isn't purely propaganda with > billionaires footing the bill for its dissemination._

I guess if you're feeling optimistic an argument could be made that the public broadcasting services of various nations provide a counterexample, although their political independence/status as maybe-not-propoganda is frequently contentious. The emergence of various low-budget OSINT-type outfits like Bellingcat is another indication that the future of investigative reporting doesn't necessarily have to exist within the current framework of media as ad- driven profit engine. Mass connectivity cuts both ways: obtaining and synthesizing relevant info is a lot easier when you can go pull videos of war crimes off of Twitter instead of shipping out an expensive war correspondent. Of course, I don't mean to suggest that this sort of thing will ever be a complete replacement for old-fashioned professional journalism.

> _ads have been the main reason information has been available to average > people for literally decades now, dating back to print and broadcast media > in the 20th century._

One significant difference between then and now is that the cost of distribution of information is approaching zero. In the 20th century, much of what your newspaper's ads were funding was the physical newspaper itself. Broadcasting equipment was prohibitively expensive and you had to go through the FCC (and hope you were one of the ~epsilon sanctioned outlets) to not get shut down. Today, any CDN will happily sell you the bandwidth for millions of page views for a song. This definitely doesn't mean that good journalism is free to produce, but there's a lot of overhead that was being supported by the ad model that doesn't necessarily apply these days.

I agree that some form of revenue replacement is in order, but I hope that these and similar considerations mean that the gap that needs filling is smaller than a naive "well, ads made this much in FY 2018, better spin up micropayments for 100% of that" analysis would suggest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There is a very underrated old movie called Roger Dodger, where the main character is an advertising executive. He said something to the effect that his job was to convince people that their lives were shit. Only after you convince them that their lives are shit you can then convince them that the new product is the very thing they need to fix their lives.

</comment><comment><USER44> Advertisers are also the "moral police" and strong arm media companies into compounding the short and long term toxic effects of their original message.

<comment><USER45> That's only true in very extreme cases of "original message", and advertisers only act if there's demonstrable proof that a large percentage of the audience of the toxic message will bail out on their particular product.

<comment><USER44> Youtube proves otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The financial industry was huge (it reached 8% of US GDP, and 40% of corporate profits [1]), sucked up many bright students, and made many of its practitioners rich, while arguably not creating much value.

It really seems to me that the same holds, more and more, for advertisement (Google, Facebook). (Well, banks created the ATM, as Volcker famously remarked, and Google a better search engine, so there's that.)

[1] [https://www.fa-mag.com/news/how-finance-took-over-the- econom...](https://www.fa-mag.com/news/how-finance-took-over-the- economy-26428.html)

<comment><USER47> i agree with your sentiment about the finance industry, but an economist would argue that it did create value through greater monetary velocity (which is basically buying more stuff).

but to take your points further... when the limits of tangible goods constrained by population, like housing and food, are reached, a voracious economy must move to less bounded products like (access to) money itself to continue growing. similarly, advertising created monetary velocity out of access to attention, an intangible industry relatively untapped until the 20th century unlocked it.

the long-term approach to aligning the value created by these industries with our collective expectations is of course to change the metrics by which they're evaluated, but that will take decades (just as doctrines like trickle- down economics that got us here took decades to take root). lots of people here have noted that it's not bad to find out about products you're interested in, but what we don't like is having our attention wasted on things we don't care about in an effort to manipulate us into buying things we don't really need (by exploiting information asymmetries about the value of those products).

in the meantime, we have to continue having this discussion and putting our money where our mouths are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I view any and all non-obiective advertising as literally evil. There is absolutely no good reason for advertising to exist it's current state.

Are there any nations or states which outlaw or heavily regulate advertising? I've heard some governments outlaw advertising to children.

<comment><USER45> I could not agree more. I have gone out of my way to teach my children that advertising is lies. Literally. That's what I told them, and demonstrated to them.

I also use uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and NoScript in browsers I control, plus my own DNS-based advertising domain blocklist.

<comment><USER49> If only lies were illegal

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> When I lived in London, I often wondered what it would be like if the adverts that covered the underground and streets were replaced by pictures drawn by children.

<comment><USER49> That actually sounds like a pretty damn awesome suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This article misses by far the number one benefit of advertising: it makes products and services cheaper.

That notion obviously applies to the plethora of "free" (free in quotes because I am not trying to dodge the fact that you are always paying something) websites which everyone frequents, but goes beyond that as well.

There's a comment on here complaining about how Hulu shows ads despite the fact that they are paying for the service. Well, you can pay more and not see those ads, but you have made a conscious decision to pay less for the service, so you get to pay some of your attention instead.

Back to the article -- it claims that "a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction." What I would like to see is some analysis of how much life satisfaction is earned back if all relevant products become proportionately cheaper. Then we would be in position to figure out what the sweet spot for society is using a price:advertising ratio as a slider.

That would be very interesting and result in a more productive conversation.

<comment><USER52> this talking point just doesn't die, and that's not how economics or profit maximising agencies work. It also fails to explain why, over time, advertising encroached on almost all platforms unless actively resisted and why it's so difficult to find a genuinely ad free service.

in short, these platforms work to maximise profit. ads serve to form another income stream, and as long as they don't push sufficient numbers of customers away, it's always in the short term interest of the provider to expand advertising income until the marginal gain equals the marginal loss in marginal revenue from the consumer base.

In most mediums and content/ subject matters, this is at a non-zero level of advertising, especially if everyone else is already advertising.

while advertising does really result in free services (if you do not account for negatives of advertising or assume all increases in consumption generate positive utility), it is not generally the case for most consumers that advertising results in cheaper products, or that you could pay 5% more and be rid of ads.

<comment><USER51> Hah, perhaps I was not clear enough in my original comment because I agree with everything you wrote after the first paragraph.

I strongly agree with this sentence: "in short, these platforms work to maximise profit. ads serve to form another income stream, and as long as they don't push sufficient numbers of customers away, it's always in the short term interest of the provider to expand advertising income until the marginal gain equals the marginal loss in marginal revenue from the consumer base."

That is 100% accurate. However, that doesn't mean that ads do not affect the price of goods and services.

Businesses are always looking to find the sweet spot to maximize profits by pulling on different levers. These levers could represent price increases, advertising, lowering production costs, etc. Businesses will always be looking for the most efficient lever to pull. And I guarantee you that if you somehow figure out how to take the advertising lever away, they will pull a different lever. This could result in a higher price, a lower quality product, or something else, but ultimately something has to give.

This explains why advertising is likely to encroach on all platforms, because as users become more accustomed to it there is a higher likelihood that it is the most efficient lever to pull.

And of course I agree that it is generally not the case that you could pay 5% more to be rid of ads. The Hulu example was just a good illustration of how to think about the relative value of advertising to Hulu / the consumer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Root of the problem is measuing everything in GDP.Natural resources such as rivers and oceans, topsoil and forests, the ozone layer and the atmosphere, are seen as essentially valueless—unless, of course, they are exploited and converted into revenue. Gdp measures mainly market transactions. it ignores social costs, environmental impacts and income inequality. Seen through such a lens, the most economically productive people are cancer patients in the midst of getting a divorce. healthy people in happy marriages, in contrast, are economically invisible, and all the more so if they cook at home, walk to work, grow food in a home garden, and don't smoke

</comment><comment><USER54> I assume brand advertising to be specific is the real culprit here. As a huge fan of Mad Men some of Don Draper's (main character) quotes are illuminatung here.

"Advertising is based on one thing, happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay."

</comment><comment><USER55> Imagine having a person _constantly_ walking too-close next to you, picking _just_ the wrong time to JUMP IN FRONT OF YOU before _every_ little thing you try to do, and shouting in your face and refusing to go away until they can finish what they were going to say. This is what modern advertising does, for everything! It isn't exactly surprising that this could be a net negative for pretty much everyone.

</comment><comment><USER56> my kids only watch netflix and shows/movies we buy on iTunes

so basically they see virtually no ads, SO unlike my experience growing up watching network TV where every 12 minutes there was a series of 5 or 6 30-second ads

<comment><USER57> And what do you think Netflix's ranking is if not advertising?

'movies we recommend based on other movies you've seen' and so on.

<comment><USER52> assuming he's like me (ad blockers, limited tv, etc), I have a Netflix account, and I don't even honestly know what 'Netflix ranking' is.

Assumimg it is something like Netflix's recommendation service, well, this might come back to an difference in philosophy: I don't need/want to be recommended shows to watch, and I don't use recommender/suggestions.

One does not have a need/desire to consume media as an abstract concept, so the idea that one has a problem of "I want to watch something but i don't know what" is a literal nonsensical statement/problem.

<comment><USER58> How do you decide what to watch?

How do you become aware of new shows you would be interested in?

For me this is one of the benefits of Netflix's recommendation service. While I feel like the quality of the recommendations has gone down over the years, it still has value. I tend to watch 1-2 shows at a time until I have watched the entirely of them. When I finish one I want to find another to watch, but don't always know what I want to watch next. So for me "I want to watch something but i don't know what" is the exact problem I have on a regular basis.

<comment><USER52> well, presumably the same method I use to figure out how to read books I haven't read yet, listen to music when I don't have a radio: organically or through picking some out from good reviews or subject matter sharing/experts.

An actual benefit to this in my eyes is that marketing and fads tend to have short attention spans, so if you're interested in quality as opposed to 'riding the social wave', most fads won't hold their quality/appeal after a few years.

And besides, we're so overwhelmed with media, the desire to 'get more' is about the definition of an anti- problem... we actually need to find ways to consume less...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I think there's (at least) another factor not investigated here - <USER4> as a stress inducing, unnecessary noise in life.

People are trying to bombard you, through every possible avenue, with advertising. They want your eyes and your mind and they won't waste a second or a flat surface when trying to get at them.

I find it abusive and exhausting.

</comment><comment><USER60> Advertising is inherently predatory. I'm well aware of the arguments like "we're providing customers with useful information about things they might like to buy," but that's a lie. It's using propaganda and persuasion techniques that were discovered in the early 20th century and have been increasingly perfected. And that's just the first order effect. The higher order effects of advertising are even more pernicious. Advertising has destroyed far more lives than guns ever have. That's not hyperbole, the opioid epidemic is the result of predatory advertising and lobbying by pharmaceutical companies such as Purdue Pharma.

</comment><comment><USER61> I don't see a link or reference to it, but I guess this is a slightly condensed version of [https://andrewoswald.com/docs/AdvertisingMicheletal2019Easte...](https://andrewoswald.com/docs/AdvertisingMicheletal2019EasterlinVolume.pdf)

Tax ads!

Added: actually it's in the reference list as:

> Michel C, M Sovinsky, E Proto, A J Oswald (forthcoming), "Advertising as a > Major Source of Human Dissatisfaction: Cross-National Evidence on One > Million Europeans", to be published in 2019 in a volume in honor of Richard > Easterlin.

</comment><comment><USER62> Real luxury is being able to pay for the content you want, to watch how and when you want, without subsidizing the experience with attention-sucking ads. I refuse to hook up our cable box for this reason.

</comment><comment><USER63> Big Advertising is a root cause not only for mass mental dissatisfaction, but also mass health epidemics (i.e. obesity in the US), and ecological destruction/climate change.

<comment><USER32> Advertising is a cancer on our society. Every time you see an ad, make an effort to to make that impression net-negative ROI. Tweet about how the brand causes horrible health problems, makes customers look like idiots, has disgusting business practices etc. Who care's if it's true, most ads (or tweets for that matter) are not either!

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Why would people buy anything if they are content?

Combine this with the need for constant growth encoded in management incentives and the push to remove content from everyone is pretty powerful.

</comment><comment><USER65> I remember developing an App. And then we have talked about, how can we be seen. And then all my grudges on advertising disappeared. Thank god, that it exists.

<comment><USER66> Probably your app is not that special then.

You know: build it, and they'll come.*

* If it's worth it.

<comment><USER30> Definitely not. See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20034730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20034730).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> This URL was blocked by a content blocker. Hm! [https://outline.com/KrV9Pw](https://outline.com/KrV9Pw)

</comment><comment><USER68> I really want a study to show what percentage of online ads are downright deceptive (or at least highly misleading). I suspect it's well over 60-70%.

</comment><comment><USER69> I hate to be the typical HN contrarian, but I actually love advertising. I think its messaging and visual language is unparalelled in its ability to succinctly depict the modern values and behavioural norms of our societues.

If you take an 'observe not absorb' approach, advertising can be extremely insightful of where the needle has moved or is moving.

</comment><comment><USER70> There is a documentary from BBC about the history of philosophy of happiness that was on YouTube, in the documentary it is mentioned that the Greek Philosphers had discussed advertising as lowering our happiness in order to replace the hole with their product. I think it was epicurus but I am not certain. the narrator is Alain de Botton

</comment><comment><USER71> Our economy is dependent on advertising so that revenue increases every quarter. Any curtailing of advertising would also have a impact on revenue and then result in job loses. We need to arrive at solutions that is able to reduce such impact on individuals and families.

</comment><comment><USER72> "Advertising exists to make you feel bad about yourself, then inserts product as solution"

</comment><comment><USER73> This has been a problem since Mick Jagger sang about it, last century.

[https://genius.com/The-rolling-stones-i-cant-get-no- satisfac...](https://genius.com/The-rolling-stones-i-cant-get-no-satisfaction- lyrics)

</comment><comment><USER31> > Easterlin (1974) found early evidence suggesting that society does not > become happier as it grows richer.

This is why equality is important. A society becoming less equal is a problem, even if everyone gets richer.

</comment><comment><USER74> I've wondered if the reason governments haven't passed legislation taxing or otherwise outlawing advertising is that they rely on advertising companies to get elected (election advertising)

</comment><comment><USER75> It would also be interesting compare if a consumer could pay for a product without advertising vs having a product for "free" with advertising, does this finding still hold true?

</comment><comment><USER76> I read over the page twice, and didn't see an actual study linked. Does someone have a link to the PDF? And was this actually published in a peer reviewed journal?

</comment><comment><USER77> If there's big negative externalities to advertising, wouldn't you ideally tax it and use the funds for initiatives to improve subjective well-being?

</comment><comment><USER78> I wish that there were some easy way to integrate the general philosophical concept of ublock origin into the rest of my life, outside a web browser.

</comment><comment><USER79> Though without advertising don't we have less jobs and seamingly greater dissatisfaction with lack of income?

<comment><USER80> It seems like it's the gospel of capitalism (or neo-liberalism?) that has fooled of us that we need more money to be more happy.

[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism- ideology-problem-george-monbiot)

As a loner, one night I was sitting with friends, talking and laughing and I thought "I'm really happy right now! So this is what I've been missing, a social circle!". There are also many articles written about how having a good group of friends improves your health so much as you grow older.

Admiteddly we were sitting in a restaurant, where the food and drink cost money.

<comment><USER58> Well money does significantly increase happiness, up to a point. The hard part as an individual is recognizing when you have hit that point. If you can realize it, then as your income grows you can avoid increasing spending which means you can save more and spend less years working. Working just to make and spend more money that doesn't substantially increase happiness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> "The effect implies that a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That is approximately one half the absolute size of the marriage effect on life satisfaction, or approximately one quarter of the absolute size of the effect of being unemployed."

Does marriage, on average, across cultures, have a proven detrimental effect on life satisfaction?

<comment><USER82> I think they say "absolute size" to mean absolute value. e.g. 3% drop is half the absolute size of a 6% rise.

<comment><USER81> ah, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> "They Live" should be classic shown in every 5th grade classroom.

</comment><comment><USER37> I suspect the root of the problem is with the way we view our economy. Instead of measuring happiness we use e.g. GDP as a metric, but I wouldn't be surprised if a high GDP correlates with and causes unhappiness and on top of that it certainly also negatively impacts the environment.

Also, capitalism/the free market seems like a very unfair system (no need to provide examples I hope), and unfairness is also a known cause of unhappiness.

But meanwhile, instead of addressing these problems, our brightest minds are trying to make people click more ads ...

<comment><USER84> Well there are some people trying to measure happiness now eg [https://worldhappiness.report/](https://worldhappiness.report/) and there seems a trend in that direction, may it continue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> Mimetic theory explains why

</comment><comment><USER86> I'm not surprised. Advertising is nothing but private-sector psyops.

</comment><comment><USER87> I can't help but imagine there are worse companies than others for this.

Between Apple and Samsung, these are companies that advertise Average products but charge luxury pricing.

I find this incredibly unethical. But my non Engineering counterparts believe that Sales are necessary.

</comment><comment><USER88> > Germany after 1989,

Convenient. I think they should include DDR which had no advertising at all.

<comment><USER57> That is not correct. Over the highways there were all kinds of signs back in the day, mostly insurance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Ironically, advertising your position against advertising is also a form of advertising. I dont think it's right to view advertising as inherently unethical. Communication and signaling are parts of human nature

<comment><USER46> Rape and murder are parts of human nature, too. Still inherently unethical.

<comment><USER88> you think communicating with you is unethical?

<comment><USER46> I'm objecting to the argument that things that are natural are, therefore, good (the "appeal to nature" fallacy).

<comment><USER88> "not inherently evil" != "good"

<comment><USER46> I'm objecting furthermore to the argument that things that are natural are, therefore, not inherently evil.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Full width or fixed width? - <AUTHOR>

Pros/cons please <comment><USER2> Assuming you mean web pages, I'd go with neither: use max-width instead. You avoid forcing people with narrow windows to scroll horizontally, while also avoiding excessively long lines of text on wide windows.</comment>


A Costly, Deadly Obsession with Coal - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-costly-deadly-obsession-with-coal-1528282800 <comment><USER2> The partisan obsession with coal is cultural, not practical. West Virginia coal miners are a convenient proxy for the image of hardworking Americans being oppressed by unnecessary and burdensome regulation (as if regulation was the source of the woes of the coal industry).

In practice, the entire coal mining industry employs fewer people than Arby's (true fact). Expensive changes to environmental regulations, environmental costs aside, will help very few people in that industry. Coal is gonna go the way of buggy whips, and and politicians will still do the moral equivalent of demanding we ban cars because they frighten the horses.

The real trick is going to be reworking the grid to take advantage of the intermittent nature of wind and solar. And the Invisible Hand has opinions about that. If you can cache enough power to stabilize the grid, then the whole "baseline" model currently provided by coal and nuclear plants running at near-capacity goes away.

And storing power isn't exactly rocket surgery. There are a whole lot of ways to do it - batteries, compression, gravity, thermal, etc. Add in smart micrometering (which also isn't exactly rocket surgery), and you create an arbitrage opportunity. Buy energy when it's cheap (when the wind blows and the sun shines), and sell it when it's dear (the demand is up and the sun is down). The invisible hand smooths out the ripples for us. The difference is power prices metered by the second or the minute, not the year. Market forces will regulate the prices, not actual regulation.

And because this combination cache baseline and zero-margin generation is so efficient, it'll quickly displace fossil and nuclear financially.

We just need to survive another couple of decades.

<comment><USER3> > The partisan obsession with coal is cultural, not practical. West Virginia > coal miners are a convenient proxy for the image of hardworking Americans > being oppressed by unnecessary and burdensome regulation (as if regulation > was the source of the woes of the coal industry).

Bang on.

The knock-on effects of this are surprisingly nasty, though. Whole swaths of country _identify_ as mining country. Taking that away from them with economics is an assault on their culture, and the people concerned react like any culture that senses its core is under attack.

You can treat them as something obsolete, a dying beast we can circle like vultures. Or you can find a way to get them off of coal that doesn't involve invalidating how they think of themselves.

<comment><USER2> And lots of people who don't live in mining country identify culturally _with_ the miners. They see themselves as the " _real_ Americans", being victimized by shadowy cultural elites and unnecessary regulations. So the coal miners as a political force aren't relevant per se. The coal miners as a _symbol_ are extremely relevant. This only becomes more potent as American conservatism drifts away from a free market ideology and toward a protectionist/nationalist ideology. It doesn't matter that market forces are doing this to the coal miners. Their traditional way of life must be defended! The importance of intergenerational poverty and black lung disease cannot be overstated!

<comment><USER4> And the miners keep dying of black lung and caveins, and their neighbors have their water poisoned by runoff.

<comment><USER3> You can tell people that their identity is killing them, and it might actually be true. But most people tend to think of losing their identity as functionally equivalent to not only their death, but also the deaths of everyone they hold dear.

It's not something you can prize people away from readily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Coal emissions kill... which is why zero-cabon-emission nuclear power is essential for powering the base load of the green future. Though if the current rules prohibiting the recycling of partially spent fuel, lack of incentives for LFTR reactor research, streamlining regulations and environmental studies, and moving from gigawatt-scale reactors to designs using a cluster of SMR (small, modular reactors) isn't pursued then, unfortunately, it's probably better to ignore nuclear.

<comment><USER6> I work in a Climate and Energy R&D group, so while I agree it would be great if nuclear power was resurrected (being safer and cleaner than any other form of power, solar included, despite its representation in the media), it very likely will never happen--purely for economic reasons.

Ironically, it's wind and solar that finished off nuclear power. Renewable energy has high variability in supply, but sells power at zero marginal cost. That means grid demand becomes highly variable during the day.

Nuclear (and coal) are both systems with high capital costs and very low marginal cost. To be cost competitive, they both need to produce power 90%+ of the time to amortize the initial capital. However, with the current variability in demand, they can't get anywhere close to 90% demand from the grid.

This leaves a market opening for peaker plants with very low capital costs, notably natural gas and hydro in the US. Hydro is saturated, and combined with low-cost fuel due to the fracking boom, natural gas is exploding.

Basically, the net result of wind/solar is actually a wash, from an environmental standpoint. That will get better with HVDC interconnects (reduces variability of wind), but in general it is not happy outcome.

<comment><USER7> I hope you can answer a theoretical question I've had about Nuclear energy for a long time: if instead of stopping the construction of new Nuclear plants, the US had continued to build more of them, would that have lead to a decrease in capital costs and enough of a Nuclear Energy Ecosystem that it would be cost-competitive with Coal, if not with Renewables? Or are the costs of safety-measures the main cost center for building new reactors?

<comment><USER6> If I had to guess, overly aggressive safety regulation adds about 50% to the cost. A lot of the cost is actually just in concrete (it is amazing how much concrete a nuclear plant uses), and concrete costs wouldn't have come down with volume.

Even if you relaxed the safety regulations, natural gas has an edge with fracking.

<comment><USER8> The engineering and construction requirements are costly and burdensome, but I don't think that explains the insane costs.

I think most of the market burden stems from the regulatory delay and uncertainty. That delay and uncertainty makes it impossible to quickly build plants, regardless of how stringent the engineering specifications. And if you can't quickly build one plant, you can't quickly build ten of them, and you lose the expertise and proficiency needed to build them cost-effectively.

I remember reading an article about the South Korean nuclear industry. At their peak they could build a nuclear power plant quickly, on time, and on budget. Presumably these plants adhered to Western standards. Repetition built project management proficiency and a skilled, specialized workforce.

Ultimately I don't blame the regulatory agencies, per se. I blame the mandate they've been given by a very fearful population. Industry doesn't know what will pass regulatory muster because the regulators are winging it because the public makes safety demands completely divorced from concrete science and engineering.

My takeaway is that _if_ you're going to regulate, you better be darned sure what, why, and how you're going to regulate. If you (i.e. Joe Public, Senator Smith) can't answer those questions, then regulation will prove disastrous. If you _can_ answer those questions well than the true regulatory burden will quickly become apparent and industry will adjust accordingly or exit, without all the confusion, bickering, and wasted resources.

It's like with GMOs: people against GMOs (or proposing strong oversight) can't articulate well why, how, or precisely which aspects of the industry they want to regulate. Which makes it easy for me to vote against propositions purporting to regulate the industry. A poorly articulated solution is no solution at all, and a poorly articulated problem is strong evidence there may not be any problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This country's willingness to dump massive entitlements on the coal, etc. industries while simultaneously deriding individual entitlements is the height of hypocrisy. Really makes me wonder what the breaking point is for this particular brand of cognitive dissonance. You'd think things like the recent Carrier factory shutdown would at least present a speed bump to this sort of thing.

<comment><USER10> Individual entitlements are a majority of federal spending. In comparison, government incentives for coal are almost non-existent. You seem to be off by at least 10,000%.

<comment><USER11> The funding model is completely different. Entitlement programs are funded by employers as a cost of doing business and taxpayers, and they've been providing intergovernmental loans for years to keep loan costs down. Meanwhile shoving billions to cover miner health programs and re-shore busted pension funds are paid by the taxpayer, who maybe gets lower coal energy costs, but probably not. That's before we get into the uncalculated, externalized costs of coal on the environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The coal industry deserves the same respect they show Silicon Valley and my peers, which is none.

</comment><comment><USER13> The Crown made me re-learn about this event.

[https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-12-16/the-crown- discove...](https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-12-16/the-crown-discover-the- real-great-smog-that-brought-london-to-a-standstill/)

</comment><comment><USER14> No one's really arguing for coal, truly. They're arguing for jobs, respect, and a livelihood.

I've got a lot of family from southern Appalachia (N GA to WV).

If coal sunsets, America needs to make a promise that we're going to do right by miners. In a bigger, more sustained way than recent token retraining efforts. Something on WPA / TVA scale.

If we made that bargain, and stood by it, then we'd be able to start seriously transitioning away from coal, with broad local political support, today.

And I feel like this is something that we as a country need to get better at anyway, as it's going to happen to a lot of industries in the next 100 years.

<comment><USER15> There are only 50k coal miners in the USA. I'm not at all against generous job retraining programs, but why does the rest of the country/world need to be held off any progress on this issue for the sake of a relatively small group? There are individual companies that have more employees.

After 9/11 the airline industry _lost_ something like 40,000 jobs. We didn't resurrect the WPA then. What makes coal special?

<comment><USER16> The airline industry is scattered all over the country. If you lose your airline job in, say, Chicago, there are a lot of other jobs in Chicago. But coal is the backbone of a big chunk of Appalachia. If you lose your coal job in Welch, West Virginia, _there 's nothing else_. And if there are a few other jobs, the number of laid-off coal-related people absolutely swamps the openings.

<comment><USER15> Honestly, I'd love if our society chose to be more generous and invest in retraining workers across the board. But if someone loses their job in Welch, West Virginia, and there's nothing else ... they might need to move.

How is it different from steel jobs drying up in Gary IN? Or automobile jobs in Detroit? Or fishing jobs in Maine? Or tobacco jobs in ... wherever tobacco was grown

<comment><USER14> _> tobacco_

The Carolinas and Virginia, I think.

And you're right, it's not that different.

The only thing I'd say is that I believe steel jobs were a bit slower of a transition. I believe most of the slide took place in the 60s - 80s as lower cost Japanese steel took off?

Tobacco is also somewhat replaceable. If you were planting it, you can plant other things. So the glide path is a bit easier.

<comment><USER17> Most of the lost coal mining jobs were also lost in decades past:

[https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES1021210001](https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES1021210001)

Set the "from" date back to 1985 (earliest year available in this UI).

There were 170,500 American coal mining jobs in January 1985. When Obama entered office in January 2009, there were 86,400.

<comment><USER14> Point. So I guess the jobs left are the last of the industry.

The irony is that production of coal seems to have increased (see top graph; [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_St...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_States) ) since 1970.

Goes to show the power of political narrative vs a reality of automation. But I suppose even for the companies it's a lot easier to blame Washington than tell people you bought a $250,000 machine to replace them.

<comment><USER16> > The irony is that production of coal seems to have increased

I think that's the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. But that's all strip mining with giant machines. It's more capital and fewer workers.

> But I suppose even for the companies it's a lot easier to blame Washington > than tell people you bought a $250,000 machine to replace them.

It's more like: somebody else bought a $250,000 machine to replace them five states away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Status quo at what cost?

It shows how embedded the powers-that-be are into coal that they can convince the government to waste tax-payer money on propping it up for a little while longer.

Maybe it'll give them a bit more time to continue their divestment process, so their paper value doesn't drop off a cliff once this policy is scrapped.

</comment><comment><USER19> > In one study, Mr. Greenstone and his co-authors found that in China, which > is currently negotiating to buy more U.S. coal, life expectancy is reduced > by three years in households that use subsidized coal in the winter.

Even though life expectancy has been dropping across the U.S., here in NYC life expectancy has increased by 3 years over the last fifteen due largely to new policies around home heating fuel and other laws to reduce fine particulate emissions. Sad to see Trump trying his best to take us back in the other direction.

</comment><comment><USER20> paywall circumvention: [https://outline.com/fJDRmH](https://outline.com/fJDRmH)

</comment><comment><USER21> For anyone not in the know, Trump is merely following the recommendations of the Department of Energy regarding providing economic payments to Coal/Nuclear to value the very very real value they provide in fuel-mix diversity. I recommend reading up on "Resiliency" and the Polar Vortex event of 2014. Essentially, the east coast almost ran out of the necessary power to serve load. This is because they had gas pipeline delivery issues and much gas was being used for residential heating. Fortunately, ~80% of the Coal slated for retirement in the region was available. The DOE stated things would have been "catastrophic" without coal there.

So yes Coal is uneconomic and awful for the environment. However, it is important to recognize the value that it and Nuclear bring as they often have a minimum of 3 months of fuel on-site unlike gas, intermittent renewable, and batteries.

<comment><USER22> He's following recommendations from a department where he appointed a leader who wanted to shut it down, and also didn't know what it did? That makes it so much better!

<comment><USER21> Rick Perry probably wanted to keep the coal industry from being shutdown regardless, but the facts (2014 Polar Vortex) are on his side. The need to reimburse coal for the value it provides is well understood by all the experts at the DOE, FERC, and the ISO/RTOs. ISO-NE is deeply concerned with the upcoming retirement of several large coal units and has run into hot water for considering subsidizing them. These organizations run reliability studies to determine the impact from these retirements. They KNOW this is a problem and are trying to determine possible market solutions.

Just saying we don't need any coal shows a definite lack of understanding of the industry and the problem. I work in power system transmission, but have zero connections to either coal or nuclear. My only "skin" in the game is a deep concern for premature coal retirements based off of all the public studies which have been run.

Edit: My memory is a little foggy, but I just double-checked myself and the coal plants in ISO-NE I was thinking about were actually natural gas plants that wouldn't be impacted by loss of pipeline as they were served by a local source. If they had enough of those, you wouldn't need to keep nearly as much coal around. However, I bet they're fairly rare.

<comment><USER22> "but the facts (2014 Polar Vortex) are on his side"

Can you explain that parenthetical? I'm at a loss.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Learning to Predict Without Looking Ahead: World Models Without Fwd Prediction - <AUTHOR> https://learningtopredict.github.io <comment><USER2> Just came here to post this ;)

Obscuring parts of the whole picture. And having an agent attempt to "fill in the blanks". Seems to be the key to self-learning predictive systems.

In real world, high dimensional spaces, the unpredictability of "black swans" will certainly need to accounted for by some mechanism. Great work, and if you are not following @hardmaru on twitter you are certainly missing out!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We still haven't figured it a way to get this method to work directly for high dimensional obs space (just used a VAE to compress it for now)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This story sounds similar to the AI-plays-hide-and-seek one [1]. More abstract/general skills than detailed modeling.

[1] [https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/20/20872672/ai- lea...](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/20/20872672/ai-learn-play- hide-and-seek)

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the link to the paper referenced in that article: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.07528](https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.07528)</comment></comment>


IOS app giving trouble after update to OS mavericks - <AUTHOR>

Our application uses G+ feature that was working fine before I upgraded my system to OS mavericks
Now we are getting following error "ld: library not found for -lGooglePlusUniversal clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)"
Can anyone help me resolve this. We have tried many things but somehow struggling to fix this, I am sure it is some silly mistake that we are over looking
Any help is appreciated <comment><USER2> it looks like a problem with your xcode project file. Try to create a new project with your code and run it again.

After that; diff your project files and you can see what the issue is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Steffex We made a new project file and project is running but without G+ & Fb login.</comment></comment>


In a Remote Part of Utah, Life Alone in a Hangar (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/garden/in-a-remote-part-of-utah-life-alone-in-a-hangar.html <comment><USER2> >Having being denied an exit visa, Mr Zdarsky decided to take matters into his own hands and built his own plane; a hang glider with an engine from a car.

> On August 1984, he set off at 3am and made good his escape to Vienna where > he requested political asylum.

That's one of the most impressive achievements I've ever heard in my life time. It's like I've just read RMS' portfolio again. That's a huge stunt, probably done on a budget, and it worked!

<comment><USER3> Here's another story of a family escaping from Eastern Germany via a home-made hot air balloon: [https://www.ballonflucht.de/html/englisch.html](https://www.ballonflucht.de/html/englisch.html)

<comment><USER4> This was also made into a movie called Night Crossing [0]. It's available for streaming from a few places [1].

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Crossing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Crossing)

[1] [http://www.canistream.it/search/movie/Night%20crossing](http://www.canistream.it/search/movie/Night%20crossing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of Peter Heller's "The Dog Stars". The setting is America after some type of virus destroys civilization. The protagonist has a Cessna and a dog and lives in a hangar. It's probably my favorite book that I read last year. I think about it all the time.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the recommendation, just ordered a copy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've driven through Lucin a few times on my cross-country offroad adventures. Here are some pictures of the area if you're interested:

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/9047700186/in/album...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/9047700186/in/album-72157634923143210/)

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/9105660682/in/album...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/9105660682/in/album-72157634923143210/)

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/9045451327/in/album...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/9045451327/in/album-72157634923143210/)

This one is quite sad. A pioneer baby died on 2 March 1878 and his parents died the next day. Cholera?

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/9047695750/in/album...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/9047695750/in/album-72157634923143210/)

<comment><USER8> Any of the host of easily-transmissible diseases, but probably cholera, yes. "You have died of dysentery" didn't become _the_ meme of Oregon Trail for nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are more pictures (though it looks like the same article syndicated) at:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2123200/The- ultimate...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2123200/The-ultimate-man- cave-Stunning-aircraft-hangar-middle-Utah-desert-plane-designer-lives-plane-- guns.html)

<comment><USER10> actually there is a link in the story:

[http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/03/29/garden/20120329-...](http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/03/29/garden/20120329-UTAH.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm happy that there's still space for people like this in the world. I wouldn't want to live his life, but I'm glad he's living it.

</comment><comment><USER12> I live in Utah, and was just recently looking at land out there. I'm kind of sick of the struggle for some breathing room to do anything interesting here in Provo without having to ask permission from the city, and pay through the nose for real estate... I'm probably just bitter about my recent interactions with the mayor and zoning and the council, and whatnot...

I'd like to not have to care what my neighbors think about the things I'm doing.

<comment><USER13> When I lived in Utah, I owned some land. If you want cheap desert and sagebrush, Iron / Millard / Box Elder Counties are good options. For treed, remote, secluded parcels, check out Hamlin Valley if you have a sturdy 4x4. Cheap desert can be be had in lots of places, like Modena and Delta.

Your limiting factor will be procuring water rights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would think that he needs some insulation. Those thin metal walls can't do much to keep out the cold in the winter.

<comment><USER2> Being as far out as he is, he should just become a ham. Trust me, it gets rather.... "warm" working next to some of the larger repeaters.

Don't warm your house! Warm you!

But yea, he probably did install some insulation. It would bake you alive on a hot day if you sat in there with nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The title reminded me of Slick Henry from 'Mona Lisa Overdrive'.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you want to get an overhead view: [https://goo.gl/maps/i3qrnhjnhoo](https://goo.gl/maps/i3qrnhjnhoo)

</comment><comment><USER17> "There is a shotgun if the badgers get too close."

</comment><comment><USER18> Vertical take off planes, looks like the "Holy Grail" off personal flight, everyone is after it.

</comment><comment><USER19> I like this guy.</comment>


Why Fontdeck is Retiring - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fontdeck.com/post/133794978966/why-fontdeck-is-retiring <comment><USER2> I pulled this line from their pricing page:

        Typical price is $7.50/year per font

And that, in a sentence, is their real problem: underpriced by at least an order—if not two—of magnitude.

<comment><USER3> You have to remember that any typeface you'd want to use probably consists of several fonts. Usually you have at least regular, bold, italic and bold italic.

So that's already four fonts: 4*7.50 = $30 / year.

<comment><USER2> $30/year = $2.50/month. Good luck trying to run a business on that.

<comment><USER3> True. In my case, I've been paying for 10 fonts. That's $6.25 / month -- still peanuts.

If they had doubled the price and changed the billing period to 6 months, I wouldn't even have noticed because the price is so low.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's no mention of them trying to sell it. I wonder if they tried? I'd imagine anything with 1000s of paying customers would have some interest.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, kind of weird.

IIRC there are foundries whose fonts are only available on Fontdeck. (I pay for some fonts on Fontdeck for that reason.)

Wouldn't that exclusivity have market value for someone like Adobe's TypeKit? But perhaps the contracts with the foundries have a termination clause that activates if Fontdeck were acquired, so the buyer would have to renegotiate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _we have thousands of paying customers_

> _Typical price is $7.50 /year per font_

Assume there are 5000 paying customers. The annual income is only $37500. It's too low. The company is running out of money.</comment>


Ask HN: First Kinect startup? - <AUTHOR>

With the recent news about Microsoft releasing Kinect's SDK (http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/13/microsoft-details-kinect-sdk-for-windows-pc-promises-robust-sk/)<p>When would you expect (if at all) to see a Kinect based startup? <comment><USER2> Based on usual MSFT behavior, I would assume there are already several companies in an Partner relationship and working on products under NDA. At the time the commercial version (if not the Academic version) of the SDK is launched, I'd expect the usual parade-of-demos by CTOs of those companies.

So, I expect to "see" those startups at whatever event MSFT launches the SDK officially.</comment>


Find a pickup game anywhere in New York - <AUTHOR> http://nycbigapps.com/submissions/417-sportaneous

<comment><AUTHOR> Be sure to toss this app a vote if you'd like to see continued development/more cities!

full disc: This app is the work of a friend.</comment>


CouchDB first impressions - <AUTHOR> http://www.jacobian.org/writing/2007/oct/18/couchdb/

<comment><USER2> More here: _"System overload - Choosing JSON over XML: XML SUCKS!"_ ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=55345> ) and here <http://www.couchdb.com></comment>


Pyjaco - Python to JavaScript translator. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/buchuki/pyjaco <comment><USER2> This looks great and more advanced than the other Python to JavaScript translators on the market.

Last year, I wrote a comparison of the ones I could find, but none of them actually was in very good shape: [http://chargen.blogspot.com/2011/08/survey- of-python-to-java...](http://chargen.blogspot.com/2011/08/survey-of-python-to- javascript.html)

<comment><USER3> Since you seem to be the expert, let me try to bother you...

I'm in the very early stages of porting an app from Python to Javascript, and I have no illusion that it's going to work out of the box from a translator (lots of third party libraries, and switching from server side to client side). But it would be nice if at least some of the obvious syntax could be translated.

However, all of the several translators I've tried simply die with a message like "this library is not supported" or "this language feature isn't supported" and then they produce absolutely no output, which isn't any help at all. Are there any translators that will simply skip over stuff they don't understand while translating stuff they do understand?

Also, side note, those floating boxes on the right side of your blog make it impossible to grab the scrollbar thingie when it is under them, as it is near the top of the page, which is very annoying to me.

<comment><USER2> I'm afraid I'm no expert - I just reviewed the converters because I would have liked to use Python both on the client- and the server-side; however, I eventually abandoned the idea.

I'm not sure how a converter could "skip over stuff it doesn't understand while translating stuff it does understand": it may make sense to work on "small" translation units (e.g., a function or method), but the code that comes out of the translation of a unit should be -at least syntactically- correct in the target language. Indeed, the more mature Python-to-C translators (e.g., Cython) do restrict the Python that are allowed in the source file, and refuse to compile the entire file if your code contains unsupported syntax.

If you are willing to invest some effort into adapting a translator yourself, (besides Pyjaco! :-)) PJS and Py2Js are both very clean and easy to understand/patch. Although they are no longer developed, they might provide a good starting point to build the "simple minded" translator that you would like to have.

(Thanks for the remark on the blog layout - I just picked one of the standard styles and did not pay much attention to the details.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is really cool and it's the first time I see this project. Is there still progress going on? The last commit was 3 months ago.

Unfortunately, the error reporting of the live demo isn't very helpful at this stage. I quickly ran into some compilation errors:

        syntax not supported (IfExp: <_ast.IfExp object at 0x7f161d834a10>)

<comment><USER5> This fork seems to be more active: <https://github.com/chrivers/pyjaco>

<comment><USER6> Thats the one being in development, Allthough it's going a bit slower recently. There are plans to completely overhaul the project. Since it was built upon fork upon fork. Lots of decisions are outdated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is an awesome and exciting project!

The unique trouble I found by myself is that list comprehension are not fully supported.

        [x for x in (1, 2, 3, 4) if (x % 2) == 0]

This won't work as expected. I opened an issue about this: <https://github.com/chrivers/pyjaco/issues/69>

</comment><comment><USER8> > print [] == []

True

ok, I love this thing already!

wow, it also knows about bound-methods <https://gist.github.com/2947907> , no need to hack with _.bindAll().

</comment><comment><USER9> It doesn't appear to be further along than Pyjamas.

<comment><USER10> The issue I had with Pyjamas is that the whole tool-chain and compilation was a bit borked and the documentation a bit vague. After playing around with it for a day I decided it was too cumbersome so I ditched it in the end and tried py2js which Pyjaco is forked from. Mind you that was 2 years ago so a lot might have improved in that time but it convinced me that writing JS in Python is (was) not really feasible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does this provide a sane way to deal with callbacks? Obviously, in JavaScript you're writing callbacks all the time, and nested defs (think callbacks which call something that requires a callback... repeat) in Python are ugly and annoying. For example, try writing factorial in CPS style sometime in Python.

<comment><USER9> Twisted's Deferreds solve this problem for Python already. They might even work unmodified with this translator, but they are a simple enough concept to re-create if necessary.</comment></comment>