What happened with LEGO | Hacker News Reader

What happened with LEGO

therealityprose.wordpress.com

300 pointsAlexMuir124 comments

I don't have a problem with the price of lego, having — as a child in the 70s — saved my own pocket money to buy lego. The real criticism of lego is that it's gone from being a collection of parts that can make the thing on the cover of the box but also many interesting variations, to something that isn't very malleable.

First, lego no longer has a consistent color scheme, so only pieces from one genre go with other pieces of that genre.

Next, there's the proliferation of zany specialized parts. I remember getting a lego cargo ship as a kid (the hull was four specialized pieces — bow, stern, and two mid sections and thinking this was awful. Lego doesn't do ship sections any more but many similar things.

It's not a get off my lawn thing. I still love lego. But it does seem to have exchanged its DIY charm in the pursuit of merchandising.

That said, you can build much better looking models now — just not out of any reasonable selection of pieces.

My beef is that Lego have become so highly branded. I would rather my kid play with generic space and castle and pirate blocks, than with Star Wars and Harry Potter and Pirates of the Carribbean blocks. As a product of the 80's I can say I spent a lot of time playing with highly branded and marketed toys, so it's not necessarily a bad thing; but there's something special about Lego that makes me feel like they should be above film tie-ins and in a special airy realm of pure imagination.

1. They still have the generic sets.

2. You can go to places like bricklink.com to buy almost any block or set that you want.

3. Branded sets usually mean more specialized pieces which only increase the source material you have to draw from when building things.

4. Lego also puts out stuff like this: http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=67132. Highly specialized pieces that aren't tied to a brand.

When I was a kid I would have been in heaven if they had all of the sets out there today. Buying a Harry Potter set wouldn't have meant that I can only play Harry Potter[1]. It would have meant that I had more legos to combine in other ways with the rest of my parts (all sets ended up broken down and stored in a huge bin of Legos). I realize that ultra-specialized pieces like 3-CPO or R2D2 minifigs can't really be reused elsewhere, but most specialized pieces tend to be pretty generic (e.g. Harry Potter wands don't have to only be used with Harry Potter).

[1]: Example, I recently saw a Harry Potter set that used a combination of a translucent 1x1 brick and brown stud to create 'potion bottles.' It's a pretty generic idea that translates elsewhere.

When I was a kid, one of the things on which I spent a fair amount of time was trying to figure out how to make a Lego vehicle with independent front suspension (and steering). Nowadays, they have specialized pieces that have effectively solved that problem.

I don't know whether I ever came up with a decent solution back then, but I do know that trying to come up with one was an excellent exercise, one that I probably would never have embarked on if I'd had the pieces they make today.

edit: grammar fix

So your endeavour is replaced by others. Your logic could easily be used to rail against using calculators rather than slide rules or to rail against all Lego in favor of Erector sets, etc.

As others have stated, Lego was in trouble before adopting the franchise sets. Would it be better if Lego was 'pure,' but out of business? It's not like they removed the ability to do what you're talking about, they just added new things. You could easily limit yourself, or your children, from using the new things.

> My beef is that Lego have become so highly branded.

The problem was no one bought general Lego blocks. This is still the trend today.

I guess not many people remember, but Lego was in deep financial trouble during the 90s and early 2000's. Until they started creating licensed packages and video games based on 3rd party franchises like Star Wars, Lego wasn't selling anything.

As a seven years old, all I wanted (and saved up for) was the biggest, most generic set I could possibly have. I still remember running like crazy to see my mom coming back from the city, carrying LEGO 733 Universal Building Set.

Highly branded sets probably push children more into playing roles and sticking to, probably still imaginative enough, scenarios rather than into creative process of building.

I don't disagree. My point still stands though: kids don't urge their parents to buy generic sets.

Honestly, I doubt a kid will play much differently with a PotC themed Lego ship vs a non-branded one.

They basically look the same; http://www.brickset.com/brickLists/?5954

Also, pirates was a dead theme until PotC came around.

The reason why Lego makes sets that are branded is because other companies make good-enough lego-compatible blocks that are cheaper than legos. If lego stuck with the "generic sets only", they'd be history by now. Who would bother buying a pack of lego-branded red bricks when you could get the megablocks-branded one that is 90% as good for half the price?

The megablocks stuff we have bought either has nobbly extra molding bits still stuck to the bricks meaning they just don't work OR the bricks are not of a uniform enough size so they don't stick together for any length of time.

I would estimate at 40% as good as logo. Which puts it down in the play with it a bit and then ignore 'while the cat (or hoover) eats it' camp.

Only the dorky neighbor kid whom everyone hated to play with thought megablocks were an acceptable substitute for Lego.

Yeah, poor people are losers.

Even if they do someday stop using third party brands for sets, it will only be to replace them with their own brands. Take a look at the new Lego sets like Ninjago and Chima. These are as branded as the Star Wars ones, the brands simply happen to belong to lego. They also have toys and TV shows and games attached to them, as well as a whole backstory. This is arguably what they should have done in the first place to not find themselves in a position where they needed someone else's brands. The reality is that it is very difficult to sell an unbranded toy nowadays. Imagine making the same request of other toy companies "I wish they made a generic knight toy", I know these exist because you can find them in non huge toy stores, but it's hard to compete with something that has a comic book, TV show, and movie attached to it. I don't know if its necessarily a bad thing, there are pros and cons.

Their in house brands are really well developed product lines. They come with story lines that advance from year to year as the set goes along, and have associated comic books that are sent free to children that request a subscription. Does a great job creating brand loyalty. They also have mini theme parks and play centers set up in many major cities.

When I was a kid they had sort of started the branding effort. At that time LEGO was primarily doing creative in-house theme lines, but some branding as well.

Kid-me deduced that the more generic sets had more pieces, so in an early attempt at cost optimization I leaned generic the few times I had money. Though, it was also cool to get some sets with interesting pieces that let me branch out. Vanilla bricks can be limiting at times.

Totally agree. I hope Lego will move back to the more generic themes by the time my kid(s) get old enough. (Currently my 1.5 year old loves Duplo blocks; apparently there are even licensed Duplo sets though he doesn't have any of them.)

You can get all the generic Lego blocks you would ever want. The "problem" is kids want all the fancy sets.

For instance: http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Bricks-More-Builders-Tomorrow/dp/...

There's a difference between generic blocks and the non-licensed theme sets. I've got a couple Lego stores nearby, I know that the generic blocks are available, and that's definitely great. I was talking about, e.g., a fancy castle set, but just with a generic "knights" theme, rather than something from the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter movies or whatever.

However, I realize it's working out for Lego, and if the licensing is what's necessary to keep them going, then I'm not faulting them too much.

This generic knights theme?

http://kingdoms.lego.com/en-us/default.aspx?icmp=COUSFR33Kin...

And this fancy castle?

http://kingdoms.lego.com/en-us/Products/Default.aspx#7946

The kids want what we make them want, on tv and elsewhere. There is a general trend toward collectibles away from diy, confirmed by someone working in retail. That's very sad and probably harmful in long term for all the society: collecting things is borderline psychiatric while diy I'd the root of progress.

Well yeah. What's advertised? What's in stores? I haven't seen a 'plain' lego set in stores in years, outside of lego-brand stores.

If they don't know it exists, they're less likely to want it.

Thank you for pointing this out. I've been looking for a set like this for quite some time, just a variety of normal, colorful pieces. Ordered on impulse :)

Now, a way to organize these...

It's all rather subjective and I can't say you're wrong. But I have a 9 year old son who loves lego. When he gets a set he builds what is on the box, that usually lasts a couple hours (maybe longer if it is a bigger/more difficult set) and then it gets torn down and put into the bin. Then all kinds of different stuff comes out. He and his friends have a great time with that bin. I do too. I don't think there are many one-off pieces. In fact he gets rather creative repurposing a lot of what might be thought of as specialized pieces. So my experience at this point is that he can do a lot more and be a lot more creative than I could when I was a kid.

I agree, and this is my experience with my own kids. Some sets stick around longer than others (the Quinjet comes to mind), but they are happily building new things with the more specialized pieces from other sets.

The trend you describe is old news. Lego realised that the vast proliferation of pieces was undermining their profitability, by bogging down their supply chain. Over the last eight years, they have massively simplified their inventory, cutting out huge numbers of single-purpose pieces. The number of colors in use has been halved.

The Lego you remember is still available under the Bricks & More line - big boxes and buckets of simple, primary-colored pieces.

One of the graphs shows that LEGO have increased the number of different sets they're producing a lot, but I frequently still see boxes of "just bricks" for sale, so it just seems as if they're offering the consumer more choice.

This opinion is about 10 years out of date. Lego now forces their designers to mostly use simple pieces and colors; if they want a specialized piece they have to gain support from many other designers and only the most popular pieces are created. Otherwise, the designers have to make do with pieces that mostly would have looked familiar 40 years ago. It's a really refreshing change and I'm happy that it's helped Lego to return to profitability and domination of their market.

I'm 42. I tend to agree with you that I dislike over-specialised pieces. But then people are creative (which is the point of Lego, after all) and they use the thing for something else entirely.

I would like there to be a few good base sets. Luckily, there are, you just have to search to find them,

I'd really like to be able to buy blocks by the kg - 200 g of 2x1, 300 g of 2x4; etc.

You can buy (or sell) any and all types of LEGO parts or sets at BrickLink ( https://www.bricklink.com/ ) . The site serves as a marketplace for thousands of sellers who maintain what appear to be fairly large inventories (tens or even hundreds of thousands of pieces).

You can find parts by condition (new or used), sort by price, filter by location (to minimize shipping costs and/or delivery time), and more. If you need more of a part that came in a particular set, you can find the set (by name or by number) and drill down to a parts list.

Have you been to a lego store ?

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5215/5460874051_7fbf9e4bf3_z.j...

No, but that'd be great.

I've been to the lego stores in Germany and England and the "pick your own bricks" has been in all of them (although the smaller ones have fewer different types).

Lego Education does a spare parts catalog - but not sure if you can buy from it as a private individual. I used to use something similar when I was a kid - I couldn't afford (say) a complete new pneumatic set, so I just bought a pneumatics parts pack from a mail-order catalog and used those bits with my generic technic stuff.

(Another great resource is the ideas magazines they used to print - not sure if they still do - with loads of pictures of creations, but with minimal or no instructions).

They fulfilled my order for a pair of the Education Resource Sets ( http://www.legoeducation.us/eng/product/lego_mindstorms_educ... ), I'm sure they'll be happy to take your money.

This is not a new trend, it extends back to at least the late 70s. As a child of the 80s my 'bag of legos' is full of specialized pieces like castle flags, pirates, and spaceship hoods. I still fondly remember building futuristic space pirate ships with medieval horses on the deck - the diversity really helped my creativity.

That said, if you want large sets of generic pieces look into a creator bucket. They come out to something like 5-10 cents a piece and sound like what you are talking about. They're fairly new so I haven't used/bought them, but I think they're basically the same thing as the 'basic' buckets I had as a child.

Go look at bricklink.com sets from around the 1970's. They were ALL just a bunch of blocks. An airplane was basically a long rectangle. Then the 80's brought in some really nice "Legoland" sets. The lego airport from that era was the sweet spot. Not too many specialized pieces, but enough to build proper airplanes and a control tower.

> I remember getting a lego cargo ship as a kid (the hull was four specialized pieces — bow, stern, and two mid sections and thinking this was awful.

From an aesthetic point of view it was indeed awful, yet necessary: those ships were meant to float in real water, so they had to be sealed surfaces. I remember trying to build ships out of regular pieces; they were nice, but when put in the sea, the result was not funny at all.

Oh, even the weird pieces turn out to be more malleable than you might first imagine. I've even seen a game based on making LEGO robots by using surprising combinations of pieces (http://mobileframezero.com/mfz/). That's inspired me to take custom pieces from my kid's LEGO sets and put them to all kinds of new uses.

Agreed -- in fact, it's hard to find a book or other instruction manual that describes how to build something cool, without it requiring a bunch of "special" pieces.

Also, I'm not sure what's happened, but I've noticed color variations in the standard bricks: yellow bricks that look washed out compared to other yellow bricks. It's a real bummer when trying to create a consistently colored model.

While my son loves the Star Wars and City sets, I encourage him to use the standard bricks (I buy 'em in bulk) to build what he wants and to help him learn how to come up with creative solutions given the "constraints" of standard "generic" bricks.

Steve Yegge has a rant somewhere about how Lego used to make kits that could build special things, using entirely off-the-shelf parts, with maybe one or two exceptions for things that just couldn't work otherwise. And now (for older values of "now") it sells kits loaded up with special parts so that you can't really build as good a Batmobile without getting the Batmobile set.

He was comparing it to programming languages that cram in all sorts of edge-case special features, but it still reminded me my modern Lego seems less . . . pure, I guess.

shakes cane

My take on it is this:

In the 70s and 80s, Lego was low resolution. Block, 4 bit color.

Now its just higher resolution (smaller pieces with more non-right angles), and higher bit-depth.

Lego has just paralleled video game evolution.

Depends on how you look at it. Specialized sets with specialized pieces just increase the breadth of your Lego collection and the type of pieces available to your imagination.

Yes, when I was a child I played Star Wars using any brick compatible with the idea of a ship, transformers with some moveable pieces. The branding is bad because children think that to make a star wars ship you need a specific lego package instead of roughly creating something from the available tools (hacker mind)

Look at the Creator series from Lego. Every model has three very different variants on the front of the box, and they are built from pretty standard old-school Lego parts. It's pretty much exactly what you are asking for.

What? Using a great diversity of pieces is what’s fun! I never understood this view on Lego – plus specialized bricks are very much out these days.

I agree with the thesis that the presumed expense of Lego sets as an adult is based on an incomplete economic understanding of child experience.

I say this by comparing to personal history. The author writes "The 1990s and before were a nostalgic heyday of affordable LEGO sets." but as a teenager in the 1980s, really interested in the new "Expert Builder" sets, with gears, axles, motors, I was astonished at how expensive they would be. I really wanted the Auto Chassis/956, but it took a lot of lawn mowing (and help from my parents) before I could afford it.

That's a high-end set, but even in the late 1970s, when my parents found that I liked Lego, it was expensive enough that they would go to garage sales to find old collections rather than buy new ones. Which also meant I had some of the 1960s gears and wheels which really didn't go with the rest of the collection.

So I, at least, never regarded Lego as being "affordable."

On the other hand, that same collection, augmented, was often used by my sister's kids, making it affordable on an amortized basis.

I love it! Summary: Legos seem expensive now because the first time you got them they were free! ;p

First one free, and once you're hooked it's exorbitantly expensive? Sounds familiar. :)

> There is no way LEGO sets have always been this expensive; it is just molded plastic.

This is the worst kind of fallacy. First of all, plastic is more expensive than you think when many different pieces in many different colors need to be produced, stored and packaged in a precise manner. Secondly, the cost of development obviously gives huge added value to those pieces of 'just' plastic.

What happened to lego prices? The company is figuring out ways to stay viable in the market, that's what happened.

If you read the rest of the article instead of just the first few lines, you'll discover that "There is no way LEGO sets have always been this expensive; it is just molded plastic." is simply part of the conversational setup leading into the discussion that disproves that part of the setup.

Don't forget tolerances. LEGO pieces have pretty sharp tolerances for a toy.

Wow - a lot or work went into that article. Very impressive! On a vaguely related note, here's the video that the quote at the top is taken from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVCOAFKjaoY

What I find amazing in the linked article (from the footnotes[1]) about Lego's financial situation was that every product engineer used to have carte blanche to go out and acquire tons of resin, just to make one set. That, and the effort they went to to service small, local stores. It's both amazing and depressing; obviously it doesn't scale at all, but it really sounds like a kickass corporate culture. Wired had a similar article about people who design Nerf guns; they also had an amazing lab-area dedicated to cobbling together new toys[2].

My point being, toy-making sounds like an awesome job. I wonder if the people who do it are mech/materials/structural engineers, or if it's still a craft? I would totally go and design toys and write Python scripts to model Nerf trajectories for the rest of my life.

1. http://www.strategy-business.com/article/07306?pg=1

2. http://www.wired.com/design/2012/09/how-nerf-became-worlds-b...

> My point being, toy-making sounds like an awesome job

Unfortunately, toy making and designing is a vicious ultra-competitive business, dominated by a few huge companies.

The book "The Real Toy Story: Inside the Ruthless Battle for Britain's Youngest Consumers" is interesting. And the biases (as you can tell from the title) are pretty clear.

(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-Toy-Story-Ruthless-Consumers/dp...)

I have an acquaintance who by profession is a toy designer. She is independent and highly thought of, but all the work is speculative. If your design doesn't make it past the first review, all your work is for naught.

She is very creative and bright and is quite resourceful in putting ideas into prototype phase and has had some big wins. But there is a certain stress level associated with any creative endeavor.

The situation you are noting is within the big toy companies, and no doubt that they have an awesome job.

I can imagine in her case, it would require a very well-rounded individual to design the toy, come up with marketing/branding, build it and pitch it. I was definitely thinking of working in the pipeline at a larger company, like you said, where someone could be more specialized and focus on one aspect of the design.

Does she have any interest in moving to a big company? As in, doing spec work until she demonstrates she's competent, and gets hired on? Or is there a career in freelance toy design? Like any self-employment it would be stressful, but you'd be more exciting at parties than the millionth person building FarmBookVille Freemium.

I would say that she is very well-rounded.

She came from a big company, and I think it fell apart or moved away from Chicago (at one time, the toy-design capital) and struck out on her own. I think it is quite unlikely that she would now leave the freelance life.

When swapping a plastic cat in place of a plastic iron makes BBC news because 'social media', I reckon the market is saturated by nostalgia trips and unless you get the gig to design a plastic cat and social media strategy? Nostalgia tralalala

Where I think this analysis is wrong is using the general inflation number. If your inflation basket of goods was full of products similar to Lego – plastic toys – the real price of Lego would not appear to be going down. Well, "wrong" isn't perhaps the right word, but it doesn't address the perceived price of Legos in a world where plastic goods are constantly going down in price relative to other goods.

Exactly. Pace the article, the reason that Lego seems expensive to us is that other toys are now much cheaper (in real terms) than they were in the '70s. If you corrected for "toy inflation" instead of "general inflation" this would be apparent.

Unfortunately, with the 3D printers on the raise, the faith of a LEGO(r) brick is doomed.

In the near future, there will be printers especially designed to print small LEGO pieces. Of course none of those 3DP will market as "print your own LEGO bricks", but kids will figure this one quickly.

It will work a bit like a baking machine. Turn it on, leave it overnight and bunch of blocks roll out when you wake up in the morning. theLegoBrickBay.se will arise where kids will be able to download any STL file for any brick, LEGO set, minifig, etc, and LEGO with their tiny revenues (comparing to MAFIAA) will not be able to shut down the site.

Even if, arguendo, price of that printer will be $2,000 or more, its a cost of couple StarWars sets and any parent understanding the basics of financials will go with "print your own" instead of "keep buying new sets" thought.

Material will be cheap and reusable. After you are done with playing or simply dont need so many 1x4 bricks in grey color, you will put them all in a "melter" and within couple of hours all your grey bricks will become one solid cartridge ready to be used in printing new bricks, trees, horses, flowers, or whatever you want to.

You will see this coming in <> 5 years. Whatever the future holds, its probably wise NOT TO buy LEGO stock nowadays.

I'm not holding my breath. There is no way that home 3D printers will be able to maintain the same manufacturing tolerances as the LEGO factories, definitely not within the next 5 years.

I agree. On the other hand, 3D printing itself could displace LEGO as a creativity outlet for kids. But there's something about physically snapping blocks together and experimenting that couldn't be replaced by CAD software.

3D design and assembling LEGOs are different levels of learning/play. Perhaps we could compare it to oil paints vs. watercolors. A very young child is perfectly capable of smearing oil paint on a canvas, but watercolors are a better starting point.

Not to mention I found the inherently limited nature of LEGOs was a great exercise in working within a set of constraints & thinking "outside the box" to beat them.

That seems unlikely to me, given the precision required to make a LEGO brick that's actually fun to play with. I bet it will be quite a while before we get commodity 3D printers that can produce bricks that consistently hold together and come apart.

The stability of real prices per piece over the last decade or so even after substantial work on reducing costs suggests that Lego is pretty close to the limits on cheap manufacturing of Legos.

Have you ever tried some of the competing brands - the quality is terrible!

Alternate hypothesis: pieces are getting smaller. Cost per piece looks like it's falling because we've gone from http://brickset.com/detail/?set=WEETABIX1-1 to http://brickset.com/detail/?set=10223-1

The article mentions this and also shows that cost per gram has gone down as well.

Smaller pieces are probably also more dense; less internal air.

I agree. I think there may be a dimension that's missing that isn't accurately captures in weight/pieces. I remember the Lego castles of old being large - the ones I see today in shops for $70 are like one piece of a wall.

OTOH, it might be that I was physically smaller when I made those memories, so they just seem smaller today.

Lego prices were my introduction to economics and budgeting as a kid.

My parents worked out and explained that you should look for value per brick in the sets when choosing purchases. I learned how to rapidly estimate mental arithmetic largely from wanting to get the most Legos for my allowance. The benchmark was 10 cents per brick (in the mid 80's), sets which worked out below that were good buys, sets above that were a ripoff. Surprisingly, it didn't correlate much with set size, bigger sets weren't always so economical. There were quite a few very small sets in the Space line, things like one figure and a spaceship composed of about thirty pieces for $2.49, which were good buys and I accumulated several.

Side note, I actually didn't play with Legos as much as with a different builder set called Construx. Anyone else remember that?

The thing Im noticing with the sets these days is that overall, there are a lot more tiny pieces, variations on a 1x1 or a 1x1 flat, round, or light or something. That can really drive the piece count up on a set. I was just looking at the Fire Plane that my 6 yr old got yesterday (yay, birthday, 5 presents, 3 lego sets), and it's got a ton of little pieces to be the water that fills the plane's hold.

(Also, Compare the Tower Bridge @ 4k pieces for $250, vs the Death Star at 3k pieces for $400, though there's some licensing difference there as well)

Average set size has gotten bigger, so the average set costs more, so they seem more expensive. Seems straightforward.

The average price per gram chart is interesting, as it shows price fluctuated quite wildly 1980-1995 and then smoothing out to a much more stable curve 1996 onwards.

http://therealityprose.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/priceperg...

I have some possible ideas:

1) There's more data in recent years, so the smoothness is just reflecting less variance in the data 2) The author didn't consider currency exchange rates when most production was done in Denmark 3) LEGO got better at managing shock from fluctuations in supply costs (i.e. buying futures in petroleum) 4) LEGO got better at managing production costs with more larger, cheaper factories (central Europe, Mexico) 5) It's harder for the supplier to experiment wildly with retail costs because everyone (distributor, retailer, consumer) has access to year-on-year comparison information now (no need to look up last year's prices in a huge catalog)

As the father of two boys, I'm amazed people are willing to pay these prices. After buying a couple of sets, I refused to do it again. The pieces come apart easily and wind up as vacuum fodder in the carpet. And in my experience, they didn't actually get played with very much. The plain bricks, though, got played with a lot over the years.

The question should be what happened to the US dollar not lego. Lego is manufactured in Denmark, where they managed to spare themselves from several rounds of quantitative easing.

The author could really spare herself all the time and effort and just post a chart of dollar. He/she took it from the wrong end.

How does this explain the trend of legos getting cheaper?

I've always called them Lego. Not Legos. Is that an American thing? (UK citizen here). Just curious.

I'm in the UK too, and it's always been `Lego' for both singular and plural, so I suspect `Legos' is something they say Across the Pond. I'm pretty sure I've heard it used in American films in the past.

I am from the midwestern US, and my friends and family all called them "Legos". We would say things like "play with Legos"; the alternative "play with Lego" sounds stilted to my ears. I guess the reasoning is that one block is "a Lego", so multiple blocks must be "Legos".

It's a bit of an annoyance. The company really wants people to say "Lego", not "Legos", out of trademark concerns. Starting in the 1980s, "Susan Williams" from Lego included a message in the catalog saying that they don't use the name "Legos" but instead "Lego bricks or toys." As http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10839/legos-not-l... says, it became a shibboleth; if someone said "Legos" then they weren't a true fan.

This was in Miami in the 1980s. Others at that link tend to say that "Legos" is an Americanism. My information could easily be insular and outdated.

Lego is definitely, definitely a collective noun like 'sand'.

You have a grain of sand or if you have a lot you just have sand. You have a Lego brick or if you have a lot of them you have Lego.

I am also British

But wouldn't different types of sand taken as a collection be "sands?" Just as many types of fish are fishes?

I'm not sure 'fishes' is valid (British) English either TBH, maybe it's a pointer to a more general rift between UK and US language use. The OED does list 'fishes', but I've never heard it used except in jest or by people trying to be cute. Lolcat speak :)

We would say 'The sands of the sahara' and 'different types of sand' or 'different sands' sound equally valid.

See also formal versus notional agreement. British English tends to favor notional, prime example being sports commentary: "Liverpool are playing well" versus "Boston is playing well". Wikipedia highlights some other good examples: "The staff is busy" versus "The staff are busy", "The Rolling Stones are a classic band" versus "The Rolling Stones is a classic band".

The differences sound stilted if you're not used to them. Except, of course, when they're poetic: "Oliver's Army are on their way/Oliver's Army is here to stay".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_collective_nouns#Metony...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_di...

Er, I'm pretty sure fishes is wrong...

edit: I stand corrected! Thanks Google. :)

In Australia it's definitely just Lego

A little off topic but last weekend I had the privileged of watching an FLL (First Lego League) event. This is a robotics competition for kids ages 9-16. And it's AMAZING. The energy from the kids and parents was exhilarating. Details are here http://firstlegoleague.org/. There are also a lot of videos from the competitions posted on YouTube (search First Lego League). If you have children I definitely encourage you to introduce them to FLL. And if you don't have kids consider volunteering to coach one of the teams.

And if you are an adult and want to get involved volunteer! I've volunteered at several levels ranging from helping a local team all the way up to judging at their World Festival and it's probably the best reminder of why I went into engineering. Plus, hearing a student be excited to explain the concepts of torque is just awe inspiring.

One frustration with Lego is the difficulty with buying it in wholesale quantities and prices.

A small charity wants to buy up a lot of Lego (and Duplo) to redistribute to children of poor families. There are some suitable sets, but they're expensive, and you need to buy eye-wateringly huge amounts to get a price break on it.

And the second-hand market keeps value, meaning they can't even buy loads from auction / parent websites or car boot / yard sales for redistribution.

Still, it's a good idea and they're working the problems out before going any further.

They might want to try talking to the local LEGO Users Group/AFOL group and see if the group participates in buying bulk from LEGO and would be willing to order for the charity. The members of the group in my area, NCLUG, jointly and annually order in bulk at a discounted rate. It is a slow process, but saves them a bunch of money.

> I wrote a web scraping program

Better to ask beforehand, many websites are quite happy to hand you data if you ask nicely and your goal is something non-competitive.

> Better to ask beforehand, many websites are quite happy to hand you data

If they say "no", what then? If it was within your rights to scrape the data, and you go ahead and do it anyway, then you're going to (a) look like a jerk, and (b) if the company is litigious, they're going to use this as evidence that you knew what you were doing was wrong.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't ask, but pointing out that there are sometimes downsides to asking.

Scraping a website is absurdly easy. You can have the data before you'd have finished writing the email.

But it's not very polite to do (someone runs that website that you're hammering), and it doesn't open you up to a conversation that might get you even more access/data than you originally thought was accessible.

You don't have to hammer a website to scrape it. You can write scraper programs to limit the number of HTTP requests per second.

As long as you obey their robots.txt, who cares? Google is scraping them far more often then your one-off script is going to.

A little off-topic but I find LEGOs are usually over 50% more expensive in Canada than in the US :-(

http://www.amazon.ca/LEGO-Star-Imperial-V-wing-Starfighter/d...

http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Star-Imperial-V-wing-Starfighter/...

That is bizarre. I always attributed the higher Canadian prices to the fact that the Canadian dollar was weaker than the US dollar, but nowadays they're about equal.

Lego is now competing for attention with applications such as Minecraft. It will be interesting to see if pricing trends hold, or whether they attempt to preserve market share by cutting costs. Maybe Minecraft will start to move into the themed application market (Lego Star Wars, etc.).

There is a Minecraft themed Lego set.

My kids enjoy both!

It would be interesting to see price per brick variation with pack size - those $500 dollar sets have prices per brick under $0.05. The increase in volumes of larger sets could be balancing the increased pricing of small sets, leading to the stable average.

Again this post?

Well, at least this time I can comment.

I must say that Lego in Brazil is ABSURDLY expensive, it is just ridiculous.

And this is very bad, since I love Lego!!

And I miss "Tente" (a Lego clone that existed here, and had some nifty stuff, like wheeled blocks with metal axles)

I can't find it previously posted to HN, is that your meaning?

I didn't find this post, however there are similarly-themed articles by Wired and others:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5040545

Yeah, I've seen them. The key point I took from this is that Lego is at an all-time low in pricing terms, even though it seems expensive.

To go even deeper, actually the value of money is at an all-time low.

Everything imported has ridiculous taxes here in Brazil. I wonder if Lego is just "normally" absurdly expensive or if its even worse.

You have to import stuff under 50 USD to get it without taxes, but then the shipping gets (proportionally) expensive.

Good question.

I don't know either, but it is a very good question.

I saw about 3 weeks ago, this exact same post. I am pretty sure of that.

I think any perception that LEGO has become more expensive is because other toys have become cheaper. Or more correctly, cheap low quality toys have taken a larger part of the market.

The one thing I'm thinking is this: Didn't the pieces used to be a bit bigger? Like, not the studs, just the number of studs on each piece?

Seems like a lot of pieces now are 1 and 2 stud-ers.

Profitable companies charge what the market will pay for their products.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5039567

Your link doesn't work for me:

> We've limited requests for old items. If you're running a crawler, you can get this data a lot more easily from http://hnsearch.com/api.

In any case, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_clone#Legal_challenges

It was a HN link to this: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3394-how-to-price-something

... and leave room for new entrants at the low-end. (This is why I think (someday) the Maker/3d-printer market will be trouble for LEGO (someday).

I don't think that the prices are adjusted for inflation. I remember asking my dad for 100$ sets in the 80s, which would amount to gazillions of today's dollars

$200 - $250.

there is a great planet money podcast on this issue:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/12/13/167055503/why-lego...

I'll tell you what happened to LEGO. They stayed in business.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com