Analysts argue that over-automation is to blame for Tesla problems - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-robots-are-killing-it-2018-3 <comment><USER2> Original and expanded story here:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-robots-are-killing- it-2...](http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-robots-are-killing-it-2018-3)

Can we please replace the link with this article?

It answers why the analyst think Tesla's way of doing things is an issue:

> the Japanese, try to limit automation because it "is expensive and is > statistically inversely correlated to quality." Their approach is to get the > process right first, then bring in the robots — the opposite of Musk's.

And, a hypothetical but expansive example on why Tesla's automation strategy might not achieve the desired cost savings.

<comment><USER3> _the Japanese, try to limit automation because it "is expensive and is statistically inversely correlated to quality." Their approach is to get the process right first, then bring in the robots — the opposite of Musk's._

Of course, they use Japanese workers, which have a completely different work ethic than American workers.

I say that having worked in an American assembly line (not automotive though). I haven't worked in Japan myself, but the attention to detail of Japanese workers in even the most menial of jobs is amazing.

<comment><USER4> > Of course, they use Japanese workers, which have a completely different work > ethic than American workers.

The Japanese manufacture most of their American market cars in America, using American labor.

Take your biases somewhere else, this isn't the place for them.

<comment><USER5> The big differences are union versus non-union and quality control, not necessarily the nationality of the workers.

<comment><USER6> So why did Johnny555 specifically bring up a purported relationship between nationality and work ethics?

<comment><USER5> Because he's prone to stereotyping based on nationality?

<comment><USER6> Then why are you chiding kchoudhu who's simply pointing _that_ out?

<comment><USER5> I wasn't chiding kchoudhu, I agreed with him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just a short time ago there were negative headlines about Tesla parts being built by hand [1].

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/behind...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/behind- teslas-production-delays-parts-of-model-3-were-being-made-by-hand-1507321057)

<comment><USER8> wallstreet analysts don't know jack shit and come out with statements whenever the wind blows their way from the woodwork. Wallstreet is short Tesla, bonds are trading new lows... Goodluck - so basically you are shorting the guy that is landing fucking rockets back down on this planet? great thesis. I will take the other side of that bet.

<comment><USER9> What does landing rockets have to do with building cars?

<comment><USER10> Let's rephrase that: what does creating the world's finest space program in a mere decade and a half have to do with succeeding at profoundly difficult technological ventures where you have no prior experience? Quite a lot.

<comment><USER11> "He did this one hard thing, therefore he can do all hard things"?

<comment><USER10> Ah, so now SpaceX has been designated a "single achievement" (not a vast range of achievements over 16 years), and the singular "SpaceX" is apparently also the only thing Elon Musk has ever done. Is that what you're saying?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hmm, who do I trust, the guy who figured out how to land rockets onto a barge, or some "analyst" desk jockey who has been consistently wrong his entire career? Tough question. I think I'll go with the rocket guy. He has a pretty good track record.

<comment><USER13> Does he really have a good track record? If I recall correctly the Falcon 9 has a terrible success rate for a modern rocket. Something like 94 percent.

<comment><USER14> Falcon 9

51 launches

48 completely successful

49 partially successful

94% success rate (complete success)

96% success rate (partial success)

Ariane 5

97 launches

92 completely successful

95 partially successful

95% success rate (complete success)

98% success rate (partial success)

Atlas V

76 launches

75 completely successful

76 partially successful

99% success rate (complete success)

100% success rate (partial success)

Delta IV (including Heavy)

36 launches

35 completely successful

36 partially successful

97% success rate (complete success)

100% success rate (partial success)

Proton (since 2010 as an arbitrary cutoff)

65 launches

58 completely successful

59 partially successful

89% success rate (complete success)

91% success rate (partial success)

I don't really think there is any way in which the adjective "terrible" would be an appropriate use of the word here. Also note the low numbers involved here, the different contexts and the plain arbitrariness of such comparisons. One failure more or less can make a world of difference here, despite maybe not being the most reliable indicator.

94% is about the long term ballpark figure for successful orbital launches but it is true that some newer rocket families may have ever so slightly higher reliabilities.

<comment><USER15> Now divide that failure rate from dollars invested in each project to truly see the differences.

<comment><USER16> (Adjusted for inflation etc and remove the arbitrary cutoff for Proton.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> well maybe tesla really thinks the existing automation research is outdated and maybe they think it will massively pay off. but they surely must recognize that there are learning pains involved in this especially when it sounds like no other auto manufacturer is involved in this level of process automation, there's no one with relevant knowledge to simply poach, and therefore the cost of learning has to be borne completely by tesla... for what kind of improvement over tried-and-true existing processes in the short and medium term? for a new auto company that by many accounts is running out of money, this is a silly gamble to take. it might be a good bet 10 years down the road when Tesla is pumping out 1m autos/yr in line with BMW and MB but not right now when they are bleeding cash out of every orifice and failing to make deliveries.

sounds like one of those sad stories where the engineers fell in love with the stack and forgot about the product.

<comment><USER18> >sounds like one of those sad stories where the engineers fell in love with the stack and forgot about the product.

Sounds like Steve Jobs... in 1986.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSj6kvv7_Sg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSj6kvv7_Sg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is running theme of Tesla "not knowing" specifics of mass producing cars. The head of prod for Tesla Peter Hochholdinger was at Audi for 20 years. He led the manufacturing programs of the Audi A4, A5 and Q5 vehicles.

<comment><USER20> Modern Audi production is an interesting example of horizontal integration which might not map cleanly to Tesla.

Chassis, drivetrains and minor parts-bin components are developed group-wide by VAG. Putting them together in the desired pattern and adding premium components and materials is what makes an Audi.

All Audi A, Q and TT models are examples of this. They are built in shared plants with other VAG models which use the same platform. Even the R8 has a shared platform.

In contrast AFAIK Tesla does everything bespoke without the advantages of volume and standardisation.

<comment><USER19> I would imaging Peter is aware of this difference and they are trying to mitigate the risks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My previous comment on this subject (reproduced below):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16614247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16614247)

\----

Disclaimer up front: I work for a Tesla competitor.

Tesla is making several very interesting bets on the Model 3.

Bet 1: Model 3 mix - Tesla is betting that the ratio of expensive, high- content Model 3s to cheap, low-content Model 3s will be sufficient to make enough money to offset investments and pay back loans.

It will not be sufficient to make a small profit on each Model 3 sold given the debt load that Tesla has accrued, so they will want to sell a good ratio of expensive Model 3s.

If it takes to long to produce the cheaper Model 3s, Tesla will lose some potential customers. Many investors are looking at that "top line" right now - the number of customers and potential customers. If the top line moves too much, investors may get spooked.

Bet 2: Vertical Integration - Most automakers rely on a web of parts suppliers, who are under enormous pressure to reduce costs, but Tesla produces most of its components in-house. The contract with an external parts suppliers ensures that the supplier is responsible for any re-work or replacement of defective parts. This allows the automaker to concentrate on internal production issues.

Tesla's bet is that internal production of parts will lead to better and cheaper components. This has not worked for any other automaker.

Traditional OEMs shoot for a mix of components where the internally produced components are part of the company's core competence: Body Shells, Engines, Transmissions - and externally produced components may be generic - switches, latches, seats, frames, tires, wheels, etc.

If Tesla spends too much capital on component manufacturing, they will be inefficient and investors pressure them.

Additionally and probably more importantly, if Tesla is not able to spend the time and attention to iterate on cost and quality of these parts, it will also lose this bet.

Personal opinion: I think Tesla has learned the wrong lesson from previous dealings with suppliers. For instance, the original Roadster was designed with a two speed transmission. A supplier claimed they could make it, but it never really worked. Tesla learned the lesson that suppliers are stupid and suck at making new things - I think they should have learned that lesson that it is really really hard to make new things.

Bet 3: Automation - But first a detour - There are 3 main areas of auto assembly, and most manufacturers have already fully or almost fully automated 2 of them: Body Shop (welding and assembly of the body shell) and Paint Shop. The 3rd area is General Assembly.

General Assembly is the bloody, thorny, devilish poster child for multiple single points of failure. A high feature vehicle may have on the order of 1000 assembly stations (aka footprints) in General Assembly. The Model 3 is designed with much lower complexity in mind, and may only have 100 footprints.

If and when any of those 100 footprints has an equipment failure or parts issue, ALL 100 stop running in a short amount of time. Human assembly workers are rather resilient and can figure out a multitude of small issues on each and every operation. This may allow for a hypothetical variation of 5% in non- critical parts.

Automated assembly may only allow for a 1% variation.

Additionally, automated assembly only runs well when EVERYTHING is designed for automation. That is not impossible, but it is expensive and time consuming.

\---

Most importantly, these three bets are linked:

If not enough base models are sold, the cost of design and equipment spending will be excessive on a per vehicle basis.

If internally produced parts are too far out of spec, you have strong negative impacts on automation.

If automation fails, you cannot produce enough vehicles at a low enough price to satisfy your low-end customers.

But, if Tesla wins all three bets, they win big time.

<comment><USER22> > _Tesla 's bet is that internal production of parts will lead to better and > cheaper components. This has not worked for any other automaker._

It's working well for SpaceX who are doing just that while the incumbents in the rocket industry are not and the prices reflect how well it can work.

> _Traditional OEMs shoot for a mix of components where the internally > produced components are part of the company 's core competence: Body Shells, > Engines, Transmissions - and externally produced components may be generic - > switches, latches, seats, frames, tires, wheels, etc._

Ummm, which automaker makes it's own transmissions anymore? Quite a few don't even make their own engines either (Dodge with Cummins engines, Jeep with VM engines, etc. etc.)

<comment><USER23> I don't think you can really compare a 10's each year assembly line Winther one that has to do 10's each hour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I heard the same thing in the 80-90s. Toyota has over automated and is spending more on robots, than it would have, had they used manual labour.

<comment><USER21> The funny thing about that is that GM (and others) assumed Toyota had more automation than GM in the 80s, but Toyota had LESS automation!

Toyota simply used their people more effectively.

<comment><USER25> One of the things I remember from the plant tour at the facility in Toyota City was being impressed with the logistics they had to enable a heterogenous assembly line. One car rolled off every minute, but they were different models with different options. Most of the assembly steps were performed by humans, but all the parts needed for each step, which differed based on model/options, always arrived at the right station at the right time. There was a massive computer-controlled overhead distribution system that shuttled parts (including large/heavy parts like engines) around the factory that was damn impressive. With as many steps as were needed to assemble a car, that system was at least as impressive as the robotic welding arms and other fully- mechanized assembly steps.

Automation isn't necessarily just about replacing people. It can also be used to make the people you have a lot more productive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My 2p guess: maybe traditional automakers have a very good, experienced and cheap workforce where Tesla has many very smart and costly engineers. Focusing on what makes Tesla different instead of mimicking concurrence is risky, bold, but also very ambitious and promising (sorry for my bad english, I hope you see what I mean).

<comment><USER27> Your English is fine, except I think you meant 'competitors', not 'concurrence'

<comment><USER28> Yes. In portuguese, "[the] concurrence" is also a false-cognate for "[all the] competitors".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> In my expierience with automation the last mile to full automation is biggest hurdles for little rewards. But when you finally reach 100% new possibilieties open that are just not available if your process is even in a very small part manual. I believe Tesla set their eyes on a bigger prize.

</comment><comment><USER30> Automation pays off over time. I'm rooting for them.

</comment><comment><USER31> Optimistically, those over-the-industry-ratio of line investments in automation will be profitable after more models are introduced for the mainstream audience.

Other car makers take no risk in the short term by not investing to automate more final assembly. But 2 times more is not like 10 times more. It is very probable that Tesla will get to have lower production cost & better capacity than other car makers in just a few more years.

Yeah I know they may need more cash very soon and are way under their targeted rate, but Musk still has lot of money in the bank I think?

I always think of Tesla of a company with a more long-term vision than other car makers. I think analysts sometimes just want a lower the price so they can get more of it.

<comment><USER23> There is a reason most big car makers have not been selling electric cars yet, it is not very profitable, they believe that around 2020 batteries are becoming cheap enough to sell them. And if those companies can produce more and cheaper cars than Tesla they are going to have a problem.

<comment><USER32> There are only four or five significant old school car manufacturers and India and China bought some technology and are ramping up. The complex non linear investment decisions they have to make are just that: complex. If Tata or somebody succeeds in stealing mindshare and then market share leaving their run until after 2020 could turn out to be as suicidal as investing in cocaine to make the Delorean

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Hopefully he can generalize their automation developments. Seems like this would have to be a bigger play then just the Model 3 at this point.

</comment><comment><USER34> > But while all that exotic capital might allow Tesla to remove 5 workers, it > will then need to hire a skilled engineer to manage, programme and maintain > robots for $100 an hour (our estimate of a robotic engineers' hourly rate).

These analysts, what are they analysts in?

<comment><USER35> More context:

"Let's say there are 10 hours of labour in final assembly (the part of the production line where parts, interiors and the powertrain are installed in a painted bodyshell). In a regular plant, final assembly typically has less than 5% of tasks automated. If Tesla attempts to automate 50% of these tasks, it could cut out 5 or so hours of labour. This might save $150 per car (assuming wage rates, all in, of $30 per worker, per hour).

"But while all that exotic capital might allow Tesla to remove 5 workers, it will then need to hire a skilled engineer to manage, programme and maintain robots for $100 an hour (our estimate of a robotic engineers' hourly rate).

"So the net labour saving may be only $50 per unit. Yet putting the automation into the plant seems to involve an apparent capital cost that's $4,000 higher per unit of capacity than for a normal plant. If the product is built for 7 years, that's over US$550 of additional depreciation per unit built. It's hard to see an economic case even if somehow the Fremont Model 3 line can be made to work. So why exactly has Tesla taken this route? It's unclear."

[http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-robots-are-killing- it-2...](http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-robots-are-killing- it-2018-3?r=UK&IR=T)

<comment><USER36> The point is that that skilled engineer can manage and maintain robots across many factories. That's an aspect of Musk's "the machine that builds the machine" goal. It does have a high up front cost, but the long term advantage is real. Namely the ability to print factories, roughly speaking. Tesla is aiming for production volumes that are much higher than any current automaker.

<comment><USER5> That skilled engineer is not something you easily clone and when you are trying to debug 250 stations at once you will need many of those engineers, not one that can maintain robots across many factories. That's for when things are working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Meta-comment : I personally don't trust any information coming from businessinsider / wsj / theverge. Everytime I open one of their articles, I feel like it wasn't really worth reading. I only read the HN comments. At the end of the day, it's always tiring to analyze their articles to get the truth from the buzz and ove-generalization eg "the robot are killing Tesla". They are probably good starters for discussions on HN. By the way, the title on HN is way better than the actual title of the article.

</comment><comment><USER38> It's funny how exactly everything Tesla does deserves a scandalous sounding headline..a couple of weeks ago they didn't have enough automation, now they're overusing it..

<comment><USER39> You can't make money on stocks that don't move. You can make money on stocks rising or falling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is a rule that can been extended and which in my opinion is the main objection to "AI will replace [ _insert any profession here_ ]".

Even if you have sufficient data to train an algorithm, you still need AI experts who understand the domain (another big obstacle) and the cost of these AI experts creating and maintaining the algorithm needs to be less than the cost of the workers who's jobs you want to automate.

</comment><comment><USER41> One thing this article fails to consider, is with more automation, there are fewer human limitations. For example, if a human is able to perhaps join a weld per minute, it's possible a machine could go 10x that speed.

<comment><USER42> Or make mistakes at 10x the speed.

If it were as simple as being able to perfectly replicate a skilled human and do everything 10x faster, then this should really be simple. The fact that automation is so problematic suggests to me that there are a lot more variables and problems.

<comment><USER41> I would argue that they are not simply repeating the same motions over and over again, but adjusting with real time feedback, making the speed and error rates dynamic rather than static numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Great thing about Elon is that he believes in everything so much he is probably laughing reading those articles. I understand that myself, would lough too. There will be no future without 100% automation and for me this is the best bet you can make. We have so many areas of life that need to be automated and someone has to be first. Companies that have ancient roots are too unreformable and don't want to change what already works well for them, which is why BMW is lagging behind, despite the fact that it can produce millions of cars a year.

People will go crazy, say that he lost everything, he is stupid, etc... But he will not give a f%#k just to return with double power and hit like no other.

<comment><USER5> The devil is in the details. Automation is all about part variance, if they can't control that it will be a huge problem. Humans are flexible, robots much less so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Didn't someone tel musk he cant reuse rockets and that was a silly and expensive idea. I wonder where those guys are hiding now?

</comment><comment><USER45> One benefit of automation they also failed to consider is customization. All sorts of exotic designs, configurations, adjustments and test iterations could be made. Hopefully with a standard base so they can be repaired or swapped out later, but the less human training that's required to get an assembly line up the faster you can change and improve it

Another aspect is potentially repairs itself. If every part can be added by a machine, they could later be removed and swapped out as part of the maintenance cycle too

<comment><USER46> Those don't make much sense.

Programming an automated line to build a car (or any other product) in a different way is a tremendous amount of work, since all of the motions have to be exactly right. Usually customization weighs heavily in the favor of humans, who can adapt much more easily to parts that are different.

Also, an automated production line isn't going to be any use for repairing cars, all it can do is bolt them together.

These aren't some kind of AI robots. They are mechatronics that are programmed to follow very specific toolpaths. Reprogramming them by even a few millimeters is a monumental task, and to test them, you have to try to build a car ...

<comment><USER45> Do you know this for a fact?

They already have advanced computer vision, for a new facility surely they'd be building this in at least partially

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Is it just me, or is there suddenly a _lot_ of media backlash against the wunderkind of yesteryear? Holmes, Zuckerberg, Musk — all sold impossible visions but they were just crazy enough to think they could pull them off because they were trying something _new_.

Was the whole innovation economy all snake oil? How many of the "Unicorns" will be left in the middle of the next decade?

<comment><USER5> Holmes and Zuckerberg are not even in the same league as Musk. The first is a fraud, the second the sneaky CEO of one of the worst online entities (a perfect example of a fish rotting from the head) the third a visionary that tends to deliver long shots with alarming regularity. If Tesla gets its house in order it will survive and prosper, if it _can 't_ get its house in order Musk's personal brand will definitely be damaged, let's hope that SpaceX won't end up suffering from that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> With the cash crunch, this is going to be interesting to watch Tesla try to thread the eye of the needle.

I can easily see building out and proving the final assembly automation being related to Elon Musk's Mars colonization ambitions.

</comment><comment><USER49> Sometimes optimization is not the optimal solution. They should have optimized their optimization methods first. Or should they?

<comment><USER35> Someone doesn't like your comment, but when I searched to find context for a quote from the article, I found this expanded paragraph from the Bernstein Research report:

"What is the inspiration behind Tesla's automation? Tesla has bought German robots and a German automation company (Grohmann). But the German OEMs – traditionally the most enthusiastic proponents of automation – have actually been rowing back on it in recent years. The best producers – still the Japanese - try to limit automation. It is expensive and is statistically inversely correlated to quality. One tenet of lean production is "stabilise the process, and only then automate". If you automate first, you get automated errors. We believe Tesla may be learning this to its cost."

[https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/03/28/1522248619000/No- one-...](https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/03/28/1522248619000/No-one-needs-to- buy-Tesla--redux/)

<comment><USER5> The Grohmann acquisition was mostly botched, they got far less out of that than they would have if they had properly managed that.

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/27/15457472/tesla- grohmann-e...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/27/15457472/tesla-grohmann- engineering-germany-ousted-elon-musk)

Couple that with a couple of Tesla bigshots walking when they heard Elons plans for fixing the Model 3 production schedule and you can see why things are not looking all that rosy right now.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+execs+leaving](https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+execs+leaving)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> An example of: No pain, no gain.

</comment><comment><USER51> LOL. Analysts are correct, but musk is more correct! (intuition!) Its like uno, automations not perfect yet, gaps in process, missing feedback signals and other signals on various fails. Solution! Densify all of the problems and hundred dollar hour guys in your super factory, raise TC, phase transition to factories making factories as a service, earth conquered, again. We are just getting to the full spectrum buildup, next.. red alert, its a tank rush!

</comment><comment><USER52> Yea. I wouldn't be surprised if this was Tesla's PR itself. Make a bunch of people say you can't do something and then do it.

10x the PR and the you have successfully projected the illusion of capable of doing the impossible in front of the naive public...Worked well for Elon till now..

<comment><USER53> It didn't work so well for Theranos.

<comment><USER52> Well, of course, you should have some sort of assurance that you ll be able to pull it. The PR tactics is just to give 10x PR when you actually do it...

And I think Theranos did much more than make people say what they are doing is not really feasible...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Imagine, LOL, this headline (now or >) "Slump in automation developments" almost as joked out as "Useful home robot, that while remaining totally and completely useful, is totally unable to kill the shit out of you by meerly having a series of unfortunate electric field states rise in its transistorized brain nugget" yeh laff</comment>


Nuclear detonation visualizer - <AUTHOR> http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ <comment><USER2> i believe that the singularity would be the result of any kind of war between at least two military powers: [http://ncomputers.org/singularity](http://ncomputers.org/singularity)

</comment><comment><USER2> i have been waiting for around 10 minutes for the casualities calculation</comment>


Storj releases 90 page v3 white paper - <AUTHOR> https://storj.io/blog/2018/10/introducing-the-storj-v3-white-paper/ <comment><USER2> Launching a white paper... seems a bit odd from a phrasing perspective.

<comment><USER3> Public alpha also launched today. In addition to reading/commenting on whitepaper, developers can run Storj V3 and view public roadmap and public Jira. Contributing now significantly easier at [https://github.com/storj/storj](https://github.com/storj/storj)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Excellent article</comment>


Shall We Use Clojure? - <AUTHOR> http://www.andrewhjon.es/142343729 <comment><USER2> The other thing I think is worth considering in a move to Clojure is how different functional thinking is. I mean, if you're used to moving between C and Perl and Python and PHP and Java and Javascript and so on, you're used to language transitions within more or less the same paradigm. It feels like a categorically different problem to try to transition a team from one of those to a functional language.

I'm thinking in particular of this section from O'Reilly's Clojure book: [http://books.google.com/books?id=I8KdEKceCHAC&ots=wNiLN6...](http://books.google.com/books?id=I8KdEKceCHAC&ots=wNiLN6Tce5&pg=PA138)

They lay out a couple of algorithms in an imperative style, and then gradually morph them into a functional style. It's pretty wild: you go from a story, "do this, then do this, then do this" to a math problem: "your answer is a list composed of f() of g() of h() of another list". (Unfortunately you only get snippets from that link -- it's worth the money to get the whole thing if you're interested.)

Anyway, having followed through their examples and done some of my own Clojure programming, I ended up not so convinced that people who are good at solving story-style imperative problems will necessarily be good at solving math-style functional problems. It felt like a different part of my brain.

This is not _at all_ a reason not to dabble with functional languages, just a potential pitfall to be aware of if you're thinking of bringing a whole team over. And maybe I'm overstating it? I haven't dabbled too much myself.

<comment><USER3> "C and Perl and Python and PHP and Java and Javascript and so on, ... It feels like a categorically different problem to try to transition a team from one of those to a functional language."

I just have to throw a flag here and point out that Javascript is also a functional language. With Javascript you can declare functions as variables, pass functions as arguments to other functions, return functions as the result of other functions, and use them as part of a data structure. Javascript is much closer to Scheme than it is to a C paradigm.

<comment><USER4> Well, you can pass around function pointers, return function pointers, and store function pointers in data structures in C, too. You can also use closures - a closure is just a (function pointer, struct with its closure values) struct. Sure, OCaml, Scheme, and company box the pair for you, garbage collect it, and don't make you flatten your code into a single file-level scope, but the difference between Javascript and C isn't as big as you think.

Javascript is kinda sorta maybe functional if you look at it right, but it's still mostly the same imperative/object-oriented mishmash as Java, Python, or Ruby.

<comment><USER5> Being able to nest first-class functions without manual closure-conversion / lambda-lifting makes a big difference for the feel of a language, to me.

(Java is sort of in between -- it technically has that feature but with verbosity getting seriously in the way of using it.)

<comment><USER4> Indeed. I'd certainly rather be able to nest functions, but C became a lot more powerful to me after I learned how to compile a bunch of high-level features to it. (Your 'ichbins' helped, by the way. That, LiSP, and some SML papers.) I'd still rather automate much of the heavy lifting, of course.

I'm weirded out by the idea of writing CPS-transformed code _by hand_ for node.js, but apparently people like it? Perhaps it's something similar.

<comment><USER5> The thing I don't get about node.js is that it used to have a promise abstraction and they dropped it to go callback-only. I guess the abstraction leaked, in a language not built around it?

I like to imagine Node's success comes from bringing some of E's insights to a community just ready to use them, and if the cost is manual CPS, apparently it's not too high. (Relevant E theory at <http://erights.org/elib/concurrency/overview.html> )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This example is missing the corresponding Clojure code, which is important for Java interop:

        object.method(arg) // Java

        (.method object arg) ; Clojure

I'm not sure if focusing on syntax and succinctness is such a great approach though. When I've discussed Clojure with colleagues familiar with Java, they've been more interested in the concurrency support via immutable data structures and reference types, which really sets Clojure apart from other Lisps. I think it's a much more compelling sell that way, since Java programmers seem to be attached to Java's syntax and static typing, but are aware of how difficult it is to write correct concurrent code. YMMV of course.

<comment> Tuna-Fish I agree. A good way to sell Clojure to an experienced Java programmer is to ask him has he ever serialized data to a string for passing it around in a program, and why. Then when he explains how the semantics for all the composite Java types except for string suck, tell him that every type in Clojure just works right, like string does in Java.

<comment><USER7> Why would anyone do that? We use immutable collections, immutable value objects, unmodifiable views and deep/shallow copies, but never serializing data to a string just for passing it around. I think most experienced Java developers would go for the type-safe alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I made a similar presentation a year ago to a bunch of fellow quants at the bank. I chose Scala, and my presentation was mostly code. Quant Finance tends to be one of those areas where Scala really excels. For example, a time series is just a running fold. So instead of having an imperative for block with various indices & guards, you can write a 1-line prefix scan to price a 5 year CDS. My examples also included bond pricing, vanilla calls and puts, binomial trees, monte carlo generators, portfolio optimization, risk calculations ( VaR & CVaR ) and a few graphics. My manager was very open-minded when it came to technology choice, and my fellow quants were somewhat tough on the 2 hour presentation, but the end result was what I believe is called a win-win. We've since pushed a bunch of apps coded in Scala into production, and the group has embraced the language quite enthusiastically.

<comment><USER9> > where Scala really excels.

Functional programming in general.

An awful lot of finance (that used to run in Excel) is just side-effect free, compute-centric transformations over data. Time series, for example, have a relatively nice algebra that makes it easy to manipulate in terms of maps, scans and folds. And anything that makes it easier to avoid off-by-one errors is a big win, especially if your traders and quants aren't trained software engineers.

<comment><USER10> For offline analysis, I'd eagerly agree. But have you had any success with FP for online analysis? E.g. you have 100 time series updating every second, and must yield some other series and events.

<comment><USER9> Yep. We use Haskell for all systems, online and offline, including the soft- real time stuff that watches the live feeds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If I was manager wanting to decide on a substantial technology change like Clojure with a presentation like that I'd have to answer "no". It doesn't answer some of the most important questions:

1) What level of support is there for the Clojure toolchain? Is this likely to be around in 5 years from now?

2) We are going to need to hire programmers in the future. Are there people with Clojure skills (or those that we can cross-train) around? In our geographic region? At the price point we can afford? In 5 years from now is it likely that this is going to be a marginalized technology that we have trouble finding skills for?

These are the more important questions, not how succinct the language is. I've had first-hand experience of how technology choices affect companies and it can be very painful down the road.

(Note: this isn't intended as a dig at Clojure, you could replace it with Scala, or any other up-and-coming language choice.)

<comment><USER8> While I wholly sympathize with your rather pragmatic pov, technology is not a staple industry like agriculture or the diary business or the furniture industry. It is more like the fashion industry. You have to be a bit of a visionary to succeed in this trade.

>Is this likely to be around in 5 years from now?

In 1997 when I graduated, career services told me to erase Java from my resume and replace it with "Borland C++ OWL 2.0" so that I could land a job. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Windows_Library>) At that time, Java = dancing duke on netscape navigator. Right now, I'd give a million dollars to find another OWL 2.0 developer ( ok not a million, maybe $10 )

>5 years from now is it likely that this is going to be a marginalized technology

5 years == light years in tech. Nobody can predict that far out.

>it can be very painful down the road.

If you future-proof yourself by only using the most stable, well supported toolchain, it can be much more painful down the road when you are stuck with some legacy platform nobody is willing to code in because everybody has moved on to the next big thing.

>you could replace it with Scala, or any other up-and-coming language

There should be a statute of limitations on when you can stop using "up-and- coming" w.r.t a language :) Seriously,Scala has been around in some shape/form since 2003. We've had stable releases since 2008. At this point it is no longer "up-and-coming".

<comment><USER12> Pedantic point: Light years are a unit of distance, not time.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightyear>

<comment><USER13> So it's further ahead and you can't see what will happen there. Sounds like a perfectly good use of the word, given the context :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> To the OP: If you have to take a cheap shot at Perl in order to demonstrate the benefits of Clojure, then you have failed.

For the record, I am not implying that Perl is above criticism. But, showing a single arbitrary perl code segment, and touting that Clojure doesn't look like it is not fair comparison.

<comment><USER15> He was anticipating the argument that succinctness leads to unreadable code. Perl is a language where you can choose to be so terse as to be nearly unreadable.

I don't think he was trying to claim that was idiomatic perl. Rather he was saying that clojure is succinct and still very readable.

<comment><USER14> If he chose his example without consideration of idiomatic Perl, then his attempt appears even worse. Further he chose to remove all spaces from the example, presumably to demonstrate that Perl code is "not clear".

I have not written a single line of clojure, and don't know how idiomatic clojure looks like. I tried to translate his example to clojure using my very limited knowledge and looking at the examples on ClojureDocs site:

        (sort #(compare (second (re-matches #".*([aeiou]).*" %1)) (second (re-matches #".*([aeiou]).*" %2))) %)

I am sure this is not idiomatic clojure, and probably a very bad way to write. If I cited this as an example of typical clojure code, then I'd be making a totally unfair judgment.

The funny thing is, when I just add spaces to the Perl code segment, it looks quite readable to me. But then, I probably know more Perl than him.

        sort { ($a =~ /([aeoui])/)[0] cmp ($b =~ /([aeiou])/)[0] } @_

<comment><USER16> You've pasted a broken Clojure example here.

<comment><USER14> I did not paste the Clojure example from anywhere. I wrote it. It was not intentional on my part to write broken code, but if it was, it actually nicely illustrates my point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Andrew mentioned _The Joy of Clojure_ ([http://www.amazon.com/The-Joy-Clojure- Thinking-Way/dp/193518...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Joy-Clojure-Thinking- Way/dp/1935182641)) and _Clojure Programming_ ([http://www.amazon.com/Clojure- Programming-Chas-Emerick/dp/14...](http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Programming- Chas-Emerick/dp/1449394701/)). Both books are good, and each has its strong points.

 _The Joy of Clojure_ goes into to Clojure philosophy and explains the "Why?" of Clojure. _Clojure Programming_ is divided into five parts, and parts III and IV provide a good overview of how to set up your environment and structure projects.

But the best book for learning the language is _Programming Clojure_ ([http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Clojure-Stuart- Halloway/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Clojure-Stuart- Halloway/dp/1934356867/)) by Stu Halloway. Stu works alongside Rich and understands Clojure at a deep level, but he's still in tune to the beginner's mind and is able to clearly explain concepts and provide the context you need for the ideas to resonate.

<comment><USER18> I disagree, I found joy to be a much better text for learning than halloway's book. Halloway's book didn't have as good a flow from one section into the next and felt more disjointed

<comment><USER19> I haven't read Halloway's, but I found the O'reilly book much more helpful for learning Clojure than The Joy of Clojure. They're both great, but I'd definitely read the O'Reilly book before Joy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> -slightly off topic-

I really like some of these languages. Clojure is something I've worked with but haven't built a complete product from, but I'd like to make something standalone.

I just wish there was a single website devoted to re-creating the terribly boring "Employee Directory Website" app in each language of choice.

It would be even better if the creators of said language would go through the time to make the example site so I could see how they imagine a CRUD layer working, or sessions, or REST/XML data, or the sql connection.

For every "new" language it seems I can find a hundred examples of fibonacci sequencing (or more recently everyone seems to enjoy creating 'twitter in 5 lines of code!') but almost no real "boring web stack" examples.

<comment><USER21> There are quite some interesting web apps implemented in clojure. Build web app with clojure is where clojure shines. I've built a few, some are for the company which pay me. One for myself, the source code <https://github.com/shenfeng/rssminer>. You can have a look, It did the things you mentioned

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Many of these presentations come across as proselytizing. It's an immediate turn-off to some developers and most all managers. The proselytizer claims to know or be able to understand things that others on the team cannot. It's condescending. You wouldn't say to a co-worker... "I understand why we should use X, you do not, so I'm going to enlighten you and explain this to you in a way that you can understand and see the benefits of."

The best way to gain traction and to get others to use your favorite tools is to write code and implement projects on time and under budget that are reliable and easy to maintain. If you do that, then the tools that you use will be in demand. Others will _want_ to use them and they will speak for themselves.

</comment><comment><USER23> Pretty nice intro / advocacy piece for Clojure. I have high hopes that once we're flooded with more example code people will start to see the simplicity of Clojure. Right now the reference is somewhat terse, but you can dig around GitHub quite a bit which is nice. Also, it seems that the combination of people working with contemporary problems and small and succinct generics that you wind up making in Lisps, there could be a lot of great reusable code for this language out there soon. I'm also curious about <http://www.collaj.net/> ... the Redfoot project for RDF / Python seems to remind me of this... that we're not paying enough attention to the "Google / Paste / Execute" loop.

</comment><comment><USER24> This may seem superficial, but Clojure's usability is a problem. The source- code itself is hurt by the same thing that makes it strong: homogeneity. Even at a superficial level, skimming with the eye, closure code looks strange. It is exactly the same problem that markup that is all divs has when compared to markup that uses common top-level markup. It's hard for the eye to pick out what's important, and what's going on. In addition, indentation rules are not agreed upon and it's a bit stutter stop. (I actually think this is a worse problem then the "inside out" problem).

Aha! I just had a really good idea! Let's call it "Clojure folding". It's like code-folding only instead of hiding lines, you pull up all the code into one line. Some of the internals may be elided - and revealed with a tooltip.

I also like the idea of coloring the entire content of the parens, so that you can embed a large item and then clearly see that you are now back in the containing list. Indentation doesn't do a good enough job, nor do rainbow parens. Further, you'd get a good intuitive sense of place in the code if you have a consistent series of colors. Emotionally, you'd know that if you're typing read you're like 6 layers deep - and that's really deep, in the danger zone, and you probably want to pull some stuff out into definitions.

Chris Granger, feel free to include these ideas in Light Table.

<comment><USER25> We have been using Clojure for a product for about 9 months now, and in my experience, I have no trouble identifying what different blocks of code do. It may depend on proper syntax highlighting, but I think one of the keys is that there is so little boilerplate in Clojure that _all_ of the code is important. You're not skimming over getters and setters, assignment of constructor parameters to the object, or some of the other things your eyes tend to automatically skip when reading, say, Java or Python. It tends to be pure logic or pure data, with very little else in the way.

<comment><USER24> The problem is that you don't have cues about what you're looking for. Keywords and actual syntax give a lot of those cues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Clojure keeps looking more and more interesting. Noir, in particular, has caught my eye. Anyone have a link to a high-quality Noir tutorial? (high- quality in the sense of straightforward yet useful)

Nice article, BTW. Good intro for those not familiar with Clojure yet.

<comment><USER27> I gather you've already seen these? <http://webnoir.org/tutorials> They got me started, and then I went to the Hiccup docs (<https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup/>) for more detailed information. I have yet to find a more comprehensive walk-through but I'll post again if I find one.

<comment><USER26> Ah. Hiccup is new to me. Will have to play around with it. Thanks for posting that.

Likewise, if I find a more comprehensive tutorial, will post as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting article, but its only skin deep... The larger issues are down the road, it's where the engineers and the sophomore programmers are separated.

</comment><comment><USER29> I really like Clojure as a language, but the JVM implementation takes over a second to start. This lack of responsiveness makes it a poor choice for many small scripts that should run quickly. If not for this issue, I would probably use Clojure on a regular basis.

<comment><USER30> As did java just a few years ago. Once it has been started once though, it's quicker.

<comment><USER31> As does java - it's all the same jvm.

The VM is optimized for long-running applications, not brief scripts............ bang those out in whatever.

<comment><USER30> Although you could argue the .NET CLR is also optimized for long-running applications, because it's directly competing with Java. Why is the CLR so much quicker?

For interests sake, I typed "java -version" on my new MacBook Pro now and it took 0.9 seconds. Second time it took 0.11 seconds. It's still unacceptably slow, in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What about speed. If one writes, for example, a video processing library in Clojure will it run slower than if it had been written in pure Java?

<comment><USER33> A clojure program written in "canonical" style will usually be slower than the equivalent "canonical" java program (as long as canonical != enterprisey canonical), if only because canonical Clojure uses immutable datastructures and therefore spends quite a bit of time churning memory _but_ Clojure lets you type-hint programs (to generate more type-tight bytecode, closer to what statically typed Java would provide), use Java mutable types and alongside compile-time metaprogramming that can be used to generate code which will likely be as efficient as tight Java code: [http://www.learningclojure.com/2010/09/clojure-faster- than-m...](http://www.learningclojure.com/2010/09/clojure-faster-than-machine- code.html)

A bigger drawback to Clojure, in my experience, is that error messages are complete shit (most errors will yield stack traces to compiled bytecode, so you get java traces with a layer of obfuscation in that they're tracing the bytecode generated by clojure). The same issue exists when trying to improve performances, you get performance counters for java bytecode and have to match them to clojure code "by hand".

<comment><USER34> You may know this, but Clojure's immutable data structures don't spend near as much time churning memory as they would if they were implemented naively. Change one element of a sequence, and in your new sequence all the unchanged elements will reference the same memory locations they did before.

<comment><USER33> Sure, but you'll still need to reallocate all the tree path leading to the changed value, there's only so much immutable datastructures can share. And this _does_ result in signifiant churn compared to an object/imperative system where most of the manipulations mutate existing objects (with very little allocations or deallocations comparatively).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I do consulting for small businesses around where I live (Mexico). And since like 3 months ago I switched to clojure and I couldn't be happier. I used ruby then python before. Now there is one minisupermarket doing billing and inventories and backups and charging customers with clojure in Mexico and that number is looking to grow!

</comment><comment><USER36> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines>

</comment><comment><USER37> This finally actually won me over. Starting the clojure book - let's make this happen.

</comment><comment><USER38> To someone who is about to learn Java, would you recommend Clojure instead?

<comment><USER39> Totally depends on why you want to learn Java.

<comment><USER38> I'm looking to expand my knowledge range and open a few more doors to different areas. I currently am fairly proficient with python, php, mysql, dhtml. Java seemed like a natural progression especially since I'm interested in mobile phone development, but I'm also interested in the strengths of the JVM and Java's libraries.

<comment><USER39> If you want to learn for the sake of expanding your knowledge range, Java is a pretty bad choice; there's very little that's novel about Java. The two advantages it has over Clojure right now are are 0) it's much easier to find employment in and 1) Clojure isn't yet suitable for Android development.

<comment><USER40> I used Clojure and now I'm using a little bit of Java (and reading Effective Java) and I'm pretty glad I'm doing so: interfaces, generics, concurrency, data structures, mutable vs immutable objects, etc etc: most I just ignored when programming Clojure... and they are interesting to know IMO.

(I intend to return to Clojure/Python on the next project because Java really makes CRUD style web programming a PITA).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Needs a diagram "Number of parenthesis by language".</comment>


Revenue reality of a book on the New York Times best-seller list  - <AUTHOR> http://www.genreality.net/more-on-the-reality-of-a-times-bestseller <comment><USER2> I'm not too sympathetic, on account of the following:

\- Her figure of $24K is per book, and then she says (paraphrased) "well, if I were to write one book like this a year." Most authors producing mass-market paperbacks write somewhat more than one per year. The author in question appears to write several per year (looking at the Amazon listings) which probably gross a fairly similar amount. So, what's the meaning of this "if I were to write one" business?

\- She expects to see the rest of her advance and some non-negligible amount of money coming in in the future from royalties and other rights, so it's not really fair to say that her "income" from this book is $25,000. As a professional author, she would be earning that $25,000 this year and also earning money from prior sales this year, and then she would be earning more from this book later.

\- Finally, here's the Amazon synopsis:

 _Immortal Darkyn Lord Valentin Jaus and landscape artist Liling Harper are two lost souls. Brought together by fate, bound together by passion, Valentin and Liling find solace in each other's arms. But the ties that bind them are deeper—and more dangerous—than either of them can possibly imagine..._

No offense to struggling vampire romance novel writers, but why is it important that people are able to earn a great living writing books like this? I don't think it's a big loss to society if people aren't getting rich at this particular trade. When authors who are really advancing the art can't make a good living, then let me know.*

* No, this isn't totally subjective. People will be reading Pynchon 30 years from now, but they won't be reading Lynn Viehl.

<comment><USER3> In my mind, the issue is more to do with other people getting rich off the back of this authors work while the author gets hardly any thing.

So the question is not the value of the book to society, but the percentage of the value the author should get versus everyone else in the stack.

<comment><USER4> well, I hope the ebooks will change this. With the costing of printing going away, you don't need a publisher anymore. The only thing you really still need to do is marketing.

<comment><USER5> Publishers with a good reputation will likely continue to act as a combination of editor and gatekeeper. Anyone can put something out now, but saying that it has been edited, approved, and possibly marketed by a major publisher will likely to carry some weight.

In fact, there is a possibility some publishers or indpendent editors functioning as publishers will begin to take that on as a primary role and become very selective in what they attach their name to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We have it ridiculously fortunate selling software/services relative to folks whose IP requires a physical embodiment. If you think the _publisher_ is a waste of money from the perspective of the author, why not consider what _retailers_ get out of the transaction? Like most retail products, books need to be keystoned to make money, which means 50%+ of the price you pay for the book gets absorbed by the point of sale.

This has truly perverse effects such as an affiliate for Amazon who generates one marginal sale of Bad Vampires And The Librarians Who Love Them getting just about as much as the author does out of the marginal sale. (I mock but I spent $50 this month on "urban fantasy" on my Kindle, so it is good natured mocking.)

My little brother is trying to break into writing. For authors below the tip- top, it requires endless participation in book signings, tours, and whatnot to build a fan base and, essentially, move books at retail scales. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, insane. Authors need to get savvier about marketing their books on the Internet, and disintermediating as many players as metahumanly possible.

(I've got high hopes for the Kindle bringing book readers kicking and screaming into the mainstream. Granted, at the moment it makes you about as dependent on Amazon and your publisher as you've always been. However, if it goes iPod and moves the core book buyers from buying paper to buying bits, then you could have alternate business models like "Thanks for buying Vampire Loves Sarcastic Female Mechanic last week. It is the first book in a planned series of seven. For only $49.99 you can buy a membership in the VLSFM fan club, which in addition to our exclusive newsletter gets you the next 6 books of the series -- each delivered a month before street date directly to your registered device. Be the envy of your friends!")

</comment><comment><USER7> From the comments:

 _Thanks for sharing this. As a writer, I still don't understand why we receive such a small pay check when the publisher reaps big profits. Yes, they take the chance, put up the money, and promote the book, but they would have nothing to sell if we didn't write the book. Because of that, I'm self publishing my next book. I figure that I only need to sell 10% of what I would through a publisher to make more money than I would receive from them. With the internet and a modest fan base I think this is possible._

This is the correct mindset. Currently publishers take 90%+ of the revenue. They also take all the risk & also fund the unsuccessful publications. Authors are trading risk for stability at (what seem like) a high exchange rate. I don't believe that today & into the near future publishers really have such a monopoly over the distribution & promotion of books that no one else stands a chance of succeeding.

If the commenter is wrong & can't sell 5%-10% the number of books on his own, then the publishers are adding the value that they are getting paid for.

They could try to do what the publishers do. They could promote & sell direct to public online (I imagine >10% of all book sales are online, so if you can keep the number of online sales consistent while writing off brick & mortar entirely, you beat your goal). 1K true fans (or maybe 10k true fans) may be a viable approach. Maybe the author can do the direct to public thing & sell books at a fraction of normal retail price. I'd order a lot of books if they cost $3.

The problem with all this is obviously that the author then needs to be good at both writing & "publishing." For this to be scalable, there needs to be a wider structure that works for writers that are only good at writing. Then again, maybe that kind of structure exists and costs 90%+ of revenue.

<comment><USER8> Publishers are not just marketing machines, they also have editors. One of the dangers of self-publishing is not getting robust feedback from a good editor.

<comment><USER7> I disagree. Editors is the type of service that is defined enough in scope to outsource effectively. It is one of the expenses of self-publishing, sure. It shouldn't be skipped. But just like they can pay to have a book printed, you can pay to have it edited.

I don't think that there is really an argument that all the stuff that publishers do is unnecessary. Only that authors might be able to do it themselves. The point that seems to be brought up every time (I've never worked in publishing, so I don't know) is that their ability to promote a book is not replaceable. The reason that comment caught my attention is that it offers a solution to that problem: You don't need to match them, just get within an order of magnitude.

I suspect that one of the hard to replicate aspects is the filtration that publishers offer. They reject books with low chances of success. If they are better then average at selecting, that should increase average ROI. This is where the decade comes in to play. Printing smaller runs is getting cheaper all the time. Distribution is getting easier. ebooks may make getting a book out the door very cheap. If you don't have high up front costs, you don't need filters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > After paying taxes, commission to my agent and covering my expenses, my net > profit on the book currently stands at $24,517.36

> ...the publisher's portion of sales on this book has grossed them around > $453,839.68. ... If I had to make a guess, I'd say they probably netted > around $250K on this one.

Wow.

<comment><USER10> The publisher makes more profit than the author, but they also take more risk. The author is guaranteed $50,000, while the publisher could (theoretically) lose $50,000 plus the cost of printing and distributing if the book doesn't sell well.

<comment><USER11> When publisher's give advance that high it's because they know that the book will sale. So I don't think they are really taking that much of a risk with publishing this book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This looks like another case of those controlling the means of production and distribution primed for disruption. There's no shortage of "iTunes for Books" ideas out there, but imagine giving authors a means to distribute their work without a middleman taking _quite_ so large a cut. Similar to what's happening in the music industry.

It wouldn't have to rely solely on digital distribution either… well-known authors or books that meritoriously rise above the rank and file could then be picked up by the remaining smart book publishers and given real print distribution for those who still like to show off their bookshelves. Sort of like people still buying vinyl even though they have the MP3s.

<comment><USER13> There are some means, like Lulu.com, for example. Their charges aren't unreasonable, though you won't be making much money if you want to roll out a $7 paperback through them (for bigger, pricier books though, you end up with a good margin).

The problem is the vast majority of authors aren't marketers and aren't that _interested_ in marketing and promoting their own books even if they have some ideas. The relationships publishers have with distributors can prove significant in getting those first few thousand copies out the door. (And it's certainly not as if I'm a massive fan of publishers here.. <http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/> )

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find this very interesting, but the way she explains it isn't clearly laid out. Annoyingly, she keeps referring to her own income in terms of net profit but anything else is gross.

Anyway, a link to her first post: <http://www.genreality.net/the-reality-of-a- times-bestseller>

She got an advance of $50000 of which 1/3 was paid only when the book hit the shelves. Expenses (including agent fees) approximate $9000. If she took a year to write the book, her book would have earned her $35k (gross, $26k after expenses) in July 2007, plus $13000 (gross) in July 2008. And that's it - until she covers the advance, that's her income for this book to date. Hardly stellar. You'd _need_ returns from other books to support yourself in order to make a living from this.

She took back $40k against her advance in the first 4 months followed by a buffered -$2k loss in the next 6 months. That's one hell of a short tail.

</comment><comment><USER15> I am not sure how this is true. Look at past serial writers and they all seem to be making a better living then $25,000 a year. Stephen King, John Grisham, Dean Koontz, Harry Potter lady, they all have done very well for themselves.

Even making only $25000 on one book a year, if you have written 5-10 books the past 5 to 10 years, you have to be making money off those books as well... Especially if her advance is $50,000 a book!

I have to agree that I have no real sympathy for this.

<comment> barry-cotter "I am not sure how this is true. Look at past serial writers and they all seem to be making a better living then $25,000 a year."

Serial writing is practically dead. Short story rates have stayed constant in _nominal_ terms for decades, soinflation has eaten them.

"Stephen King, John Grisham, Dean Koontz, Harry Potter lady, they all have done very well for themselves."

Those authors combined are less than 0.0001% of the professionally published novel writing population but I would be surprised if they took less than 5% of all US author royalty dollars. Very, very skewed distribution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sad but then again just about every book seems to make it onto the New York Times best-seller list.

Oh, right, I've been spending too much time in airports.

</comment><comment><USER17> Clearly, we need to outsource book publishing to China.

<comment><USER18> I assume your being snarky. To be a bit more serious though, China has a large ebook publishing economy. An author in China would be thrilled to make $25k off a book. Royalty payment in China are horribly low and accounting of books sold or read is highly "inaccurate".</comment></comment>


Building a High-performance Computing Cluster Using FreeBSD (2003) - anand-s http://people.freebsd.org/~brooks/papers/bsdcon2003/fbsdcluster/

<comment><AUTHOR> 2003 - 12 years ago

For fun some stupid and simple calculations:

300 CPUs*287 = 86.100 (Passmark Score for the Xeon)

86.100/11981 = 7.2 (Passmark Score for Intel Xeon E5-2660 @ 2.20GHz)

So only _one_ 8-socket 4U rack machine with e.g. 1TB memory and a few SSDs will be faster than this cluster... likely a lot faster because no need for network...

If you look at the energy it's even more clear:

TDP:

300x65W = 19.5kW

8x95W = 0.76kW

25x more energy efficient only considering the CPUs while having the same or better speed. Crazy.

If you take into account everything else it's likely an even wider gap:

150machinesx300W = 40kW (considering DDR1/DDR2 FB ECC RAM is energy hungry)

1machinex1200W = 1.2kW

So... so the same power even faster at 1/33 of the energy consumption.. in 10 years. Crazy.

If you choose better CPUs e.g. 12cores it's even better.. at least in theory...</comment>


The Great Grocery Game - <AUTHOR> http://teejm.com/the-great-grocery-game

<comment><USER2> Wow, just wow. Life hack for the win. As for female vs male shoppers I'd disagree with that women make better shoppers. What I would agree on is that in America there are more women doing grocery shopping which means your odds of having a women deliverer do better is good. However I'd argue that in this case Exec just provides a more thorough service hence the extra cost. My wife classically falls victim to marketing ploys and fancy packaging rather than getting the best deal. She often doesn't remember what supplies we already have at the house so I end up with a new bag of powdered sugar every holiday season.

</comment><comment><USER3> How does this sort of service compare to direct supermarket delivery? Seems like they can significantly reduce overheads due to bulking the deliveries, although at the expense of speciality requests (i.e. ripe avocado).

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting to see so much difference between three similar services on the same area. Though I do not understand why you felt having a woman on one team made it better. Seems as this heavily biased the results.

<comment><USER5> I expected most of the services to screw up on the avocado, that's why I made it part of the order. When the Postmate got it right we speculated over why. The answer we came to is that women are more likely to closely evaluate produce. After talking to some of the services, it turns out that women are overwhelmingly better shoppers. I assume this is because culturally women grocery shop more than men.

<comment><USER6> I would edit that into the post. Right now, "It's hard to say whether this was due to the startup or because the competitor was a female and thus had more attention to detail" sounds quite different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very detailed analysis of different grocery services. I love how the items that were selected with some additional information (freshest milk, ripe avocado, etc…).</comment>


Ask HN: Is this a good time to invest? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It is impossible to time the market, so it doesn't really make sense to answer this in absolute terms. Is it a better time to invest than last month? Yes. Than last year? Yes. Could it be even better to invest next quarter? Possibly. But this is a unique situation and the markets are forward looking, so it is difficult to say.

The safest thing to do is average into it. Say you have a target to invest $2K/month under "normal" conditions. On a really bad month, maybe make it $4K. If conditions worsen next month, increase your investment even more. Eventually you might not be able to stand it...

</comment><comment><USER3> From technical perspective wait until markets retest the bottom. They will.

There would be a lot of distressed assets after it is over. Lots of opportunities, so conserve cash.</comment>


Why IRC as corporate communication is BAD - <AUTHOR> http://mljsimone.blogspot.com.ar/2013/05/why-irc-as-corporate-communication-is.html

<comment><USER2> The only actual reason given in the article is that EFnet etc. suffer from netsplits – the remaining 95% of the text complain about non-problems (age of the protocol) and the fact that an infected computer is, well, infected.

So IRC would be perfectly fine to use if the company ran their own server, which is far from impossible. And while I'd prefer a XMPP server, this is definitely not a big problem.</comment>


Courage – Never lose your AirPods again. Strap on a pair - <AUTHOR> http://www.getyourcourage.com <comment><USER2> Wonderful idea, but competition exists on AliExpress, 0.75€...</comment>


Refugees make great entrepreneurs and workers - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/business/2019/11/21/refugees-make-great-entrepreneurs-and-workers <comment><USER2> Ok, I thought this was common knowledge.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Paywall bypass - [https://outline.com/LgWwWn](https://outline.com/LgWwWn)</comment>


How Borderline Douchebaggery Helps Land A Great Roommate - <AUTHOR> http://kalv.in/how-borderline-douchebaggery-helps-you-land-a-great-roommate/

<comment><USER2> I will say that I find the "rejection therapy" crap nauseating. How on earth does making strangers feel uncomfortable and/or obligated to give you something or interact with you self improvement? It's not like it actually develops any of the skills required for rejection heavy jobs like cold calling -- the point of cold calling is not to get rejected a lot, it's to get rejected less than average for that particular call.

If you want to work on those types of skills, volunteer for a phone drive or something. You can get plenty of rejection while actually contributing something to some worthy cause.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm really glad I'm beyond the phase of my life where I think living with roommates is a good idea... for any reason.</comment>


Ask HN: Could we please replace "IANAL" with "INL"?  (as in "I'm no lawyer") - <AUTHOR>

I realize how stupid this is, but every time somebody wishes to disclaim their opinion on a law-related HN post I have to look over my shoulder to see whether some passer-by is at risk for misinterpreting what I'm reading.
For those of you with pre-teenage kids, help me out here and validate this ridiculous problem.  I am more than slightly embarrassed about the conversation I just had with my 12-year old nephew...
s/IANAL/INL, PLEASE. <comment><USER2> Yup, this is very likely to happen - just like the confusion of hacker/cracker got cleared up ;)</comment>


Zzyzx, California, or the Biggest Health Spa Scam in American History - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/zzyzx-california-or-the-biggest-health-spa-scam-in-american-history <comment><USER2> I don't get it. Most of the remedies listed sound exactly like those sold every day by proponents of homeopathy and alternative medicines. Boiron, which has a stable presence in the USA, has thousands of employees and revenues in the hundreds of millions, selling stuff like "Oscillococcinum", which is plain sugar, at a price of around $1000/kg. Have they been condemned for fraud and false advertising?

<comment><USER3> Yep. They have been condemned for fraud and false advertising.[0]

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Video of Curtis Howe Springer and Zzyzx:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91rdB5fDMaA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91rdB5fDMaA)

</comment><comment><USER5> i took the exit pictured here out of curiosity once.. drove 10 miles into the desert to the remains of the retreat. walked inside a small library or welcome center and found a warm cup of coffee but no person to accompany it.

then, walking around the grounds outside in the sun (it was summer), i started to have a panic attack. i climbed in my car to leave but my car wouldn't start. -eventually it did. strange place

</comment><comment><USER6> I made a trip to Zzyzx as part of a CSUF geology trip years ago. Strange place, but I wish I had known the back story back then!

</comment><comment><USER7> To use a Yiddish word, this guy had real chutzpah. Then again as long as there have been suckers, there have always been people to take advantage.</comment>


Contacts that Facebook collected from your phone - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/mobile/messenger/contacts <comment><USER2> Why must I log in to FB to read this?

<comment><USER3> It displays information from all the contacts Facebook managed to collect from your phone if you've given it permission at the moment, so this obviously requires an account.

<comment><USER2> Thank you. From the headline I assumed it was a PR piece.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the oldest piece of software still in use? - <AUTHOR> I use a 13 year old copy of Quicken for bank account management. I'm interested in examples of software that are older than that and still being used.<p>I'm not interested in software that's been patched over the years, but code that's been unchanged for years and is still in active use. Are you using any DOS programs, for example? <comment><USER2> I wrote the lot traceability module of Compufact's ERP package in 1987. 3 years ago, I engaged a company that still used that software. Just for fun, I searched for my initials in their repository. Good news: that software was still being used. Not so good news: one of my programs had been changed 120 times, including bug fixes. I pretended that it was written by another "edw".

<comment><USER3> So over 26 years, there have been 120 edits? Including bug fixes? Which means not all 120 edits were bug fixes, presumably it included other things like feature enhancements? That's less than 5 _changes_ a year on average for a 26 year old program. In my book, unless you're working on a life-or-death system or a space-bound system [1], less than 5 changes a year over 26 years is something to be proud of!

[1] And no one individual programmer should be _solely_ responsible for life- or-death systems or space-bound systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let's define "still in use," because that's the heart of the question. Technically speaking, I'm sure someone could dig an Apple IIc out of storage somewhere and successfully run a game on it. Hell, someone out there might be doing that right now. To me, that anecdotal experience doesn't translate into "in use."

I'd define "in use" to mean still in productive service to a group of people or institutions significant enough to represent a niche market.

For that, I'd probably look to things like avionics software in certain airplanes, navigation systems on old ships, firmware in medical devices and diagnostics, or perhaps to inventory management systems in old warehouses.

And who knows what firmware we loaded onto our Cold War-era ICBMs, for that matter? Or what dusty, backwards-compatible systems we would need to maintain control over them? Would anyone like to play a game? :)

<comment><USER5> Similarly: I worked on some avionics networking software a few years back, written in C, and a surprisingly old version of GCC (I think from the late 1990's, in 2006-2007, so approximately a decade old then) was being used. That particular version had already been qualified for avionics development at the company, and to upgrade to a newer version would have meant assuming the cost of requalification.

Just so long as the old compiler worked well enough, they had no reason to upgrade. (I did uncover a bug in the compiler which I had to work around, but wasn't enough to warrant an upgrade.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There was an article a few months back about a company in Texas using a very old computer dating to 1948: [http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if_it_aint_broke_dont_...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if_it_aint_broke_dont_fix_it_ancient_computers_in_use_today.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Ask a mainframe shop. The back-compat date for mainframes, even just-off-the- line System Z boxes, is 1964.

\--edit-- I also play Commodore 64 games in emulators, and they date from the 80s, but I suspect this is not the sort of answer you're looking for.

<comment><USER8> I'm doing an internship at a mainframe shop right now.

I took a look into it and the oldest macro I could find that I use semi regularly is SYS1.MACLIB(DCBD). A utility for working with data control blocks which dates back to 1977, putting it at 36 years old.

There are definitely older programs on the system, but I'm not sure how often they're used.

<comment><USER9> I bet IEFBR14 beats it. I also think it wins in the "smallest number of patches per year for actively used software" category.

<comment><USER10> And (apocryphally) "largest number of patches per byte" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEFBR14#History_from_the_RISKS_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEFBR14#History_from_the_RISKS_Digest))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Prehistorik 2 (1993) even displays a notice on startup "wow, this game still runs in 2013", blisfully unaware that it's inside DosBox on an Android tablet.

So indeed, the oldest software will probably be running inside a VM.

<comment><USER12> Titus the Fox also does this (1992 by the same developers IIRC)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The "running unpatched" part would make me bet on embedded software. Maybe some machine in a factory still usefully following a 50-year-old punch-card to "print out" patterned carpets, for example.

</comment><comment><USER14> This seems relevant:

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if_it_aint_broke_dont_...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if_it_aint_broke_dont_fix_it_ancient_computers_in_use_today.html)

<comment><USER15> The article initially concerns a company that uses an IBM 402 - a punch card reading/writing accounting machine with plug-board programs - that has been in service over 50 years.

It covers PDP's and some home systems (eg Apple IIe) too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> WinAmp 2, which I believe is from 1998/1999.

I have a zip of the download, and just keep installing it and moving forward. I never quite made the jump to Winamp 3 and once I stopped moving forward every update to Winamp deterred me some more.

<comment><USER17> Try Foobar2000.

<comment><USER16> I have.

Over the years I have tried everything, but I like WinAmp 2.

WinAmp 2 just works great. It's no nonsense and I love the quick find (CTRL+J) on the library... search file name, path, and metadata. Which is how I need search to work, based on my file conventions as well as the metadata.

<comment><USER18> Don't older versions of Winamp contain security vulnerabilities?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Canadian nuclear industry has committed to continue the use of PDP-11 until 2050. I guess they have some software there running from 70s. Here's a recent ad for PDP-11 assembly coders they're in dire need of:

[http://www.vintage- computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?37827...](http://www.vintage- computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?37827-Greetings-from-GE-Canada)

<comment><USER20> That is simply incredible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> In military maintenance we use loads of software developed in the 70s on old test stations. These programs slowly get rehosted to newer testers, or until the systems under test go obsolete.

Where I work we have hundreds of engineers programming in Teradyne's LASAR software, rehosting old programs onto new digital test platforms. LASAR was developed in the mid 80s and we have it running on VAX and UNIX servers. Since electronics no longer use combinational logic in discrete chips, no newer software is available.

</comment><comment><USER22> I work in a biochemistry research laboratory at a large, well funded university. It's interesting to observe the software/hardware usage around the lab.

The boring majority of software in the lab is just the latest iteration of a 'Microsoft-whatever' suite stuffed into a standard enterprise Dell box.

It's the exceptions that are interesting.

For example, a few weeks ago the lab's last PC that ran Windows 95 died. That really sucked for a few people because a piece of proprietary software that ran an important microscope camera only ran on Windows 95. (Only ran on Win95 if you didn't want to pay big time for an upgrade to a modern OS.)

Intriguingly, a PI I am working with is planning on using his old Silicon Graphics machine very soon. He told me there are still certain features lacking in modern software that can be found on software written for some older SG machines.

Finally, we are in the process of restoring an old machine that is frequently used for pulling apart very thin pieces of glass for electrophysiology experiments. Granted, all the software inside is embedded. But the software and the hardware still exceed 13 years of age by a wide margin.

It's really neat to see older programs and hardware chugging along. And it's strangely reassuring to see that while encountering the latest Javascript framework debate on Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER23> Do space probes count? [http://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html](http://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> We use DOS programs within virtual machines to process data that comes in on 1/2" tape from government sources and return it to them on DVD's. The oldest of these would be mid 80's I guess.

Edit: Changed "in-virtuo" to "within virtual machines" for clarity.

<comment><USER25> The science lot usually call simulation 'In silico' in their papers. Personally, unnecessary latin makes me cringe.

<comment><USER24> You're probably right. I can still edit, I'll change for clarity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I was doing some work for a friend of mine late last year and he was still running his DOS-based accounting software from 1987 I think. I can't remember the name of it though. He wouldn't abandon it, so now that he has a new computer he's running it in a VM, including a virtual parallel printer since it wouldn't recognise his new one.

I still tease him about it.

</comment><comment><USER27> There is an accountant at a company I briefly worked for who still uses an Apple II and some archaic accounting software that he learned to do accounting on. He refuses to change, so they just have a big stack of Apple IIs in a closet to replace them when they wear out. That software probably hasn't been touched since 1980 at the latest.

<comment><USER28> Can we get a picture of that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I worked for a small rural telephone company who still operates a DMS100. One of my job duties as an on-call Unix system administrator was to perform a reel-to-reel tape backup on it. This DMS100 was installed in 1983 and the programs that operate on it must be much older than that. Still operates today.

</comment><comment><USER30> We are using Ingres Databases from the early 90s or late 80s. We have tens of billions of rows.

List of missing things: EVERYTHING. Primary/Foreign key relationships are buggy, therefore, not used. Views are somewhat available. Joins are buggy. Have to build all indices by hand choosing the relational columns and data structure/allocation. Cannot subtract sets without huge where clauses with very odd syntax. Rely mostly on WHERE EXISTS/NOT EXISTS or WHERE IN. Can only perform single column queries in a where clause, no WHERE (a, b) IN. Its free and it works. IT is a cost center. No new databases anytime in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does my copy of Asteroids for the Atari 2600 count? It's been locked up in storage in my mothers attic for about 15 years and the last time I was back home it still worked perfectly. I believe the game is close to 30 years old.

</comment><comment><USER32> Compilers are pretty interesting- the current compiler was compiled by the previous compiler. Theoretically, our modern compilers embody ~40 years of history..

</comment><comment><USER33> I made a website that's by now obsolete for anyone but me, but I still use it. It went live in late 2002 and hasn't been patched since early/mid 2003. This year 1and1 (my host) disabled MYSQL 4, so I moved database to MYSQL 5, but did not change the code. I have grandiose hopes to update it to look current.

Although now that I look at it, they say my version of php will be phased out August 1'st :( And they are raising the price on August 1'st ...

<comment><USER34> Link to the site before time runs out? I love seeing "antique" websites.

<comment><USER33> [http://orig.anywherenotes.com/](http://orig.anywherenotes.com/)

If you click something that goes to page-not-found, make sure the link has 'orig' in front of it, because in some places I went directly to www

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Not that old, but I always found it interesting that we learned C/C++ in highschool using a version of Borland from 1993, which made the program as old as myself.

</comment><comment><USER36> This isn't the oldest, but is definitely one of the oldest softwares that is used at almost every restaurant in the US and maybe other countries as well.

Aloha Restaurant POS

Watch this youtube video, then watch what servers use at your favorite restaurants.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlXCfs75SkI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlXCfs75SkI)

I used it back in 1998 at a restaurant and it felt old then. Still used at almost every bar, restaurant I go to.

</comment><comment><USER37> I know of a Government organisation still using 25 year old software running on VAX/VMS ! Hardware support is the main reason they are getting rid of it !

</comment><comment><USER38> Though not the oldest by any means, the testing software used for the Architectural Registration Exam in the US and Canada uses Microsoft Media Viewer, Macro-Vision, and the Sirlin engine for handling AutoCad R12 files - all early 90's technology from before NT and 95 [i.e. Windows 3.x].

It was patched for Vista, but doesn't run fully under any x64 version owing to it's 16 bit code.

There is a new version in the pipeline at the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, but the old validated test engine is still in everyday use.

The hangup is the Media Viewer 1.3 technology. I believe based on comments I previously [2007] made elsewhere that this was Windows 3.0 technology - it's pretty much impossible these days to do a native search for anything which can be interpreted as related to a current commercial technology.

The practice programs for the Architect Registration Exam still use it and can be downloaded from NCARB:

[http://www.ncarb.org/en/ARE/Preparing-for-the- ARE.aspx](http://www.ncarb.org/en/ARE/Preparing-for-the-ARE.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER39> The software on the Voyager probes is pretty old, 1977, and I can't find anything that says it's been (or can be) updated since.

<comment><USER9> Amsat AO-7 from '74 handily beats it.

Some of the "program" in AO-7 is discrete hardwired. Depends if you demand its reprogramable. In which case mask programmed rom devices are unintentionally removed. Or keyboards which are debounced in hardware instead of software are unintentionally removed because the debouncing is done in hardware logic not software. AO-7 is probably "close enough to count" although I can sympathize with an argument against it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The (probably very small) pieces of software on-board the Pioneer 10? It was launched in 1973 and has certainly never been touched since.

<comment><USER10> Pioneer 10 didn't/doesn't really have a computer. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_10#Power_and_communicat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_10#Power_and_communications):

 _" The spacecraft included two command decoders and a command distribution unit, a very limited form of processor, to direct operations on the spacecraft"_

If we call what it has a computer, it was reprogrammed remotely:

 _" Much of the computation for the mission was performed on Earth and transmitted to the probe, where it was able to retain in memory up to five commands of the 222 possible entries by ground controllers"_

That happened as late as March 2001 (and possibly even later, as communication was finally lost in January 2003): [http://www.strobedata.com/home/pioneer10.html](http://www.strobedata.com/home/pioneer10.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's an unusual question because you've not really defined the goal posts very well.

I know a lot of old pub quiz machines still running on Windows 2000.

However, the real question here is: Why are you using a piece of software that is 13 years old even though there are patches/updates for it?

</comment><comment><USER42> It's worth ruling out embedded software.

The utilities (include the telecom companies too if you want) have a lot of assembly code written ages ago that they're afraid to touch. I suspect that's worth a good first look. I think 50 years is a reasonable guess.

</comment><comment><USER43> The jacquard loom at the museum in France?

How about our very own jgc running calculation jobs from Charles Babbage?

If that's too historical then the chances are good it is written in Fortran, and being used by a cosmologist on a telescope somewhere up high.

</comment><comment><USER44> For a lot of people in non-technical professions it might actually be Windows XP.

That is, of course, if we're putting aside some of the basic UNIX tools that probably haven't changed since the 1970s—which I think is fair.

<comment><USER45> I believe that honour goes to dc (if you're in linux, you can still use dc).

<comment><USER46> In Linux, "dc" will be GNU dc, which would have been written late 80s or early 90s, like most other GNU utilities. And it would have been maintained/modified over the years.

(A better example would be the bsdgames collection. It's a lot older and has barely been touched over the years.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I found some Perl code of my coworker's in a recent internal product. It had his name at the top of the file, and the year 1997. I mentioned it to him, so he pulled out the original in his ~/bin, and we diffed them.

The core program was unchanged, there were just some minor changes for this specific application (e.g. the path changed, and there was like one if block added for this purpose). So it was pretty much unchanged for over 15 years.

</comment><comment><USER48> The safe bet would be on corporate/academic mainframe software. While lots have been patched or replaced, I bet there's code from the 70s (perhaps 60s) still running out there somewhere.

Let's put it this way: there's a market for teaching people how to program like it was 1975. Nobody around can do it anymore, and the code base is large enough that both the teaching and skillset are highly valued in some circles.

</comment><comment><USER49> I know that some of the British Ports systems are running something written in Delphi 5 that's around 20 - 25 years old for their tickets.

</comment><comment><USER50> Emacs was launched in 1976:

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

</comment><comment><USER51> WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. Why? Because it rocks.

</comment><comment><USER33> At work we have character-cell UI for financials. New applications plug in dynamically into the UI. I don't know how old the UI is, but company started in '78, and I believe that was their first UI. There are various new UI's, but power users run in character cell - it's fastest and all features enabled.

</comment><comment><USER52> There are still PDP-11's out there running nuclear power plants:

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/19/nuke_plants_to_keep_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/19/nuke_plants_to_keep_pdp11_until_2050/)

</comment><comment><USER53> Foxpro/Clipper Apps running on DOS , there are couple of shops using them still in India

</comment><comment><USER54> We're still using a PDP11 with software written in 1981-84 to run parts our cyclotron.

</comment><comment><USER55> The oldest stuff I've seen in use would be PDP-11s, Wangs, NetWare 3.x and assorted OS/2 Win 3.1 desktops.

I used 90s versions of Winamp and Xnews until I just stopped caring up local MP3s and USENET.

</comment><comment><USER56> gkrellm-bfm. It has had a couple of patches in the past 10 years, so it's not strictly a fair candidate, but they were trivial.

bfm is 'bubblefishymon', a system monitor that packs a lot of info into a picture, being that of a fish tank. The level of the water represents RAM usage, the amount of bubbles indicates CPU usage, fish moving leftwards is network traffic in, fish moving rightwards is network traffic out, and there's even a floating rubber duck... which represents a duck!

</comment><comment><USER57> Turbo C 3.0 is still used in many schools and colleges!

<comment><USER58> I was about to say that, thankfully I searched for Turbo before posting.

I know many who use many years old DOS based Tally, accounting software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Lotus notes!

<comment><USER60> You poor soul.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> nbench from 95/96 [http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/bmark.html](http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/bmark.html)

</comment><comment><USER62> If we consider all forms of software. DNA is the oldest.

<comment><USER63> RNA is older.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> When I use Windows, I tend to use PFE as a text editor.

<comment><USER65> I also used to be an avid PFE32 user, but I finally gave in to Notepad++, and have not regretted it.. you may want to check it out!

<comment><USER64> Thanks for the suggestion. I don't really use Windows anymore, but will keep it in mind. I do wish I could find a simple text editor with PFE32 like macro record and templates for OS X.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> vi. Whenever I log on to a UNIX system, I end up using vi in some shape or form.</comment>


Time Might Be Running Backwards Inside Black Holes - <AUTHOR> http://www.iflscience.com/physics/time-might-be-running-backwards-inside-black-holes-unfinished <comment><USER2> This was written in surprisingly easy-to-understand language. The original article[0] goes into a little more detail but mentions something fundamental about black holes that I do not yet understand:

"The so-called teleology of the black hole event horizon is an artifact of the way in which physicists define an event horizon: the event horizon is defined with respect to infinite future elapsed time, so by definition it 'knows' about the entire fate of the universe[...]".

Can someone explain to me why this is? Why infinite future elapsed time if you don't see black holes as holographic screens?

[0]: [http://phys.org/news/2015-09-law-implies-thermodynamic- black...](http://phys.org/news/2015-09-law-implies-thermodynamic-black- holes.html)</comment>


Direct correlation: imap use and tearing my eyes out - <AUTHOR>

What has been your experience with using imap (e.g. gmail and outlook)?  I gave it a shot and was trying to be smart about it (e.g. not downloading spam folder).  However, I found that performance was very slow.  I'm thinking of going back to pop or just using the gmail client.<p>Looking to understand other's experiences and maybe learn how to improve performance or other approaches to utilizing IMAP.   have a good one. <comment><USER2> I find of the 6 IMAP mail servers I use from my Mac, gmail is the least reliable. It will hang or be unable to connect every couple of days. I suspect this is related to me leaving my mail program running on multiple machines. It seems to be better if I close the mail program on machines I'm not using, though this still leaves one machine and my phone dueling with each other for access.

</comment><comment><USER3> While I haven't done anything fancy, using IMAP with Thunderbird and Mutt has so far been a pleasant experience. I find it to be faster than POP. It also doesn't need to poll like POP.

Empty your spam folder once a week or so? Or try using Thunderbird?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> good points. Maybe I need to try another client like Tbird. The multiple machines is a no-no believe - I one time rec'd a gmail message along the line of "too many connections".</comment>