[HN Gopher] Beautiful Racket (2016)
___________________________________________________________________
Beautiful Racket (2016)
Author : gurjeet
Score : 101 points
Date : 2022-05-12 16:41 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (beautifulracket.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (beautifulracket.com)
| gurjeet wrote:
| I had read the post [1] here on HN at the time, about how he
| faced abuse in the Racket community, but when posting this
| submission I did not recognize the author of the book was the
| one.
|
| I'm glad his work hit the frontpage. This would hopefully attract
| more attention to his work, as well as the problem in the Racket
| community, if the problem still persists.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27531508
| arimbaud wrote:
| After that piece appeared on HN, Racket leadership posted an
| apology [1] but didn't announce any changes to their policies
| or procedures to prevent the issue from recurring. In
| particular, there were no consequences for the person in Racket
| leadership who had committed the abuse
|
| [1]: https://groups.google.com/g/racket-
| users/c/7F4Y5Xsdny8/m/r_g...
| nextos wrote:
| Matthew Butterick's work is pretty well known within Racket and
| has brought many people to the language.
|
| I found it sad to read he had been bullied by Matthias
| Felleisen and as a consequence no longer contributes to Racket.
| It is a big loss, and I hope something can be done to bring him
| back.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| Interesting model, it's an honor system to a read "free" (as in
| not toll-gated) book on the web, with a starter price of $40 USD.
| https://beautifulracket.com/how-to-pay.html
|
| I admire the model, and the try-before-you-buy but somehow paying
| $10 for a book I won't get around to reading ever most likely is
| a lot more appealing, whereas starting a book knowing that I
| should pay $40 somehow is off-putting enough to not make me want
| to try.
|
| Good on the author for being creative. Just sharing how my grey
| mush responds to the whole situation.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| It's really curious that in terms of energy spent on a problem,
| the site seemingly ranks feedback regarding price & price
| complaints higher in annoyance than freeloaders who pay nothing
| & say nothing. Feedback about pricing is also categorized under
| excuses, and boiled down to a simple set.
|
| The boiling down builds on the implication that the author is
| happier if you are a freeloader than a feedback-giver,
| especially if your feedback meets the condition that you aren't
| yet comfortable paying.
|
| This is also just as true if you are trying to give the author
| any amount of money, as long as it's less than $40 and you
| aren't a student.
|
| So, you could be fully employed but living on a strict budget
| so you can move out of an unhealthy living situation, and
| decide that the book was worth your time to read but that you
| don't have the money, and then discover that the author thinks
| of you as "bro" and boils your exceptions down to "I already
| heard it." And that's just one example.
|
| If you have questions about why you should pay, you will have
| to exert more energy than a freeloader (in time spent
| reading/parsing/contacting the author about your proposal
| that's higher than $5).
|
| This is a problem. Sure, the book being free is "generous,"
| especially if you're a freeloader, but the book is also very
| not free and the author makes this clear to the reader. Readers
| are considered to be reading under tacit subjective agreement
| governed by the author's published pricing frameworks.
|
| The author (I don't know them, nor have I read the book) also
| seems rooted to the concept of intrinsic value. A lot of people
| in programming are not, and find it not only foreign, but a
| highly subjective, awkward way to request a judgement of
| others. Some people are really bad at deciding what is "worth"
| their time and many people do not actually think of their time
| in this way. Many of those same people also really want to
| support their community with what amounts to boundless
| creativity, if they can.
|
| Like a lot of people who use the phrase "vote with your
| wallet," the author ends up redirecting a lot of the purchasing
| conversation to an either-or dichotomy: Worth it, not worth it.
| However in reading the details, it's clear that the author is
| also aware of a number of different ways of looking at the
| value of the book, but those ways aren't directly involved in
| the pricing mechanic. This reads strangely and creates an
| unnecessarily awkward hand-wave effect.
|
| Racket is presumably a very nuanced language. I wonder if the
| book's audience is really comfortable with such a binary
| treatment of the customer & payment mechanic.
|
| I think a really good start in repackaging this situation, as
| an author, would be to first determine exactly how much you
| need to make to keep the book alive. Especially if the book is
| in danger of not surviving/living on. What does it mean to you,
| in terms of expense, to keep the book alive? What is the
| minimum you'd accept yearly, for example? This is probably a
| huge point of leverage in communicating with the readers.
|
| An exact number is important, because it's pretty unfair and
| inconsiderate to ask that the book's best audience blindly
| subscribe to a potentially limitless concept of paying the high
| end of the spectrum for works that are also free-to-most, in
| order to keep a book "alive". Especially if it's also fair to
| say that the book is of potentially infinite worth to the
| author, because this does not also reflect the reality of a
| single book in the market in isolation and could really muddy
| the emotional waters of charging money for something for which
| one could never be paid enough, if being honest in one's own
| intrinsic-value view.
|
| Even if you think it can never be reached, publish the number.
| Update it as you make money and update the pricing model as
| things get better.
|
| This would be much more fair to those who like the book, but
| who also grasp the inequity of the situation as it stands.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > nor have I read the book
|
| My background: unlike the parent, I have read the book. I am
| a freeloader, but I am a _grateful_ freeloader. It 's clear
| love and effort went into producing the book.
|
| Frankly, I think the "tl;dr" response above by someone who
| hasn't even read the book totally justifies the author's
| alleged dismissal. The author set the price. The author
| doesn't want to hear your complaints/criticism/feedback that
| their pricing is wrong. I believe that is their right.
|
| I think this is exactly the same situation as a startup
| trying to convert free customers to the paying tier. There
| are free customers that you don't really want as customers.
| You set your price so you don't have to deal with them...
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Beautiful Racket_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17033533 - May 2018 (53
| comments)
|
| _Beautiful Racket v1.0_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13881535 - March 2017 (58
| comments)
|
| _Beautiful Racket_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11220237 - March 2016 (53
| comments)
| uneekname wrote:
| Before I started feeling comfortable with the official Racket
| docs, Beautiful Racket served as an accessible reference as I
| began exploring the language.
|
| I'm turning into a big Racket fan. I just rewrote my website's
| backend in Racket [0], and I've been learning how to publish
| packages for the ecosystem.
|
| [0] https://github.com/jacobwhall/jacobhall.net
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-05-12 23:00 UTC)