Can American soil be brought back to life? - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/soil-health-agriculture-trend-usda-000513 <comment><USER2> Like a lot of things, soil infertility is a symptom of a much larger societal problem. Within society, there are many different competing groups that have "the answer". Progressives want a specific list, conservatives want another list, city dwellers want a list (irrespective of being progressive or conservative), country dwellers want another, business owners want their own list, workers want another, government wants a list, law enforcement wants one, radicals want one, etc., stc., etc.

All of these lists of wants are at cross purposes. All of it is based on self- interest. Very little of it is based on a wider responsibility for all citizens and the country that supports them.

This won't change as people won't give up on their list of wants. The attitude of "us and them" just reinforces the basic problems. Is there a solution? Most certainly. But it requires a change in the basic attitudes of every citizen and most will object to having to face who and what they are.

When a society is focus on "rights" instead of responsibilities then the society loses its ability to think in the large. When a government is focussed on it continuation and power it loses sight of its responsibility to build society.

There is no short term solution that is a quick fix. In the case of America, it is heading down the path of civil war and devastation because pretty well every level in the American society is in the mindset of "them and us". This is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes. Law enforcement has forgotten that they are there to serve and protect the citizenry and not themselves. Government is self-serving. Corporations are treating their customers as slaves and a resource to control. The general population is focussed on their own little problems of day to day self-gratification.

<comment><USER3> You've hit the problem on its head, but the solution is not to try and change people's behaviour on a large scale, but to incentivise based on the self- interest you've mentioned.

From the consumers perspective, there is little indication as to the quality of soil something has been grown in. But there must be an effect on the plant itself if it is grown in poor soil in the form of lower macro, trace minerals and other indicators of plant health detectable within the plant.

Like the organic standards that cover production methods, we need an opt-in food quality standard. If plants were tested after production for indicators of plant health and labels could be put on vegetables indicating quality. Self-interest of the consumers buying higher quality foods would quickly incentivise farmers into increasing plant quality, which in turn will correct our soil.

<comment><USER2> I grew up in an area in which the major crop was sugar cane. Some years ago (15 or so), I was talking to my father about the fertility of the soil in the area.

He passed onto me a conversation he had had with one of his farmer friends. He was told that the soil was totally infertile and was only there to hold up the cane. All nutrients came from fertiliser that they put into the soil.

In this case, the results is sugar which you can't tell how good the plant is.

There have been a number of farmers over the years in that area who did crop rotation and field resting. But they were far and few between. In other areas, they are using recycling methods to put organic matter back into their fields. However, this is not common, even though there are groups of farmers who see the benefit of these processes for themselves and the surrounding environment.

Part of an education process that we undertake with our young people is for them to understand where food comes from, including when we have the opportunity to teach them gardening (vegetables), animal husbandry and the killing, dressing and butchering of animals for food (sheep and goats).

Some take the lessons well, some do not. But they do start to understand where their food comes from.

Too many people have no idea of what is needed to produce the food they consume. No idea.

Testing foods can be quite simple. The taste of good quality well grown food (meat, vegetables, fruit, milk, eggs, etc.) is quite different to those that are grown in the common farming practices of today.

I am currently enjoying eating 7-8 year old mutton and it is better than the best spring lamb that I have had. They ate and they wandered and were not stressed.

<comment><USER4> >I am currently enjoying eating 7-8 year old mutton and it is better than the best spring lamb that I have had.

Where do you get this?

<comment><USER2> The sheep were originally given to me by people who just wanted to get rid of them, I still have a goat that was originally intended for someone else and I had been asked if I could look after it for a few weeks. The person who was to receive it moved into a nursing home and it was subsequently given to me. My 6 year old granddaughter has been keen to be involved with doing the goat, which I'll be doing later. If the weather is still cold when I get back from visiting my parents, I'll be looking at doing it then. In the meantime, he will be fattened up as much as possible.

I have 2 acres just on the edge of town and for many years, we have run some level of stock on it. All of the various beasts have ended up in my freezer. The last lot I killed, dressed and butchered myself (with the help of a number of young people) out of necessity as no butcher would come in for just 3 sheep.

As the sheep had little need to run anywhere and had luscious feed, they turned out to be so tender. I did try to source some more via the local butchers, but found that would be extremely expensive as most of the sheep are culled for lamb and not kept for wool in our region.

If you ask around, you might find some appropriate beasts that you can get cheaply (whether that be steers, goat or sheep). Though you may find getting them to the abattoir and then to the butcher somewhat expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The federal crop insurance program is based on farmers planting the same > crop in the same place each year to have a record for production, and it is > not flexible enough to account for practices like cover crops.

If you want to take an actionable item away from this article that fits (potentially) the skillsets of your friends and neighbours on Hacker News, it is this one. This is a data problem and an actuarial problem. Solving it can result in net social benefit disproportionate to the investment in infrastructure, politicial capital (to change legislation), and (already existing) government programs required.

I don't know if, politically, there are any groups who would be organized to swing into action in opposition to federal crop insurance reform, but they or any who may shake out of the math (presumably there's some practices and crops _cough_ corn that benefit from less information, relatively speaking) have an uphill battle to fight against a variety of constituent-motivating narratives. It's hard to argue against big government spending when tens of millions of dollars is at stake.

<comment><USER6> So, after the Dust Bowl, there were all kinds of things promoted by the Federal Gov't like crop rotation, contour farming, and planting wind breaks to keep the soil from blowing away. When did we forget that lesson?

And I looked up what I think is an actual rule regarding Crop Rotation when it comes to the FCIC[0]:

>(B) ASSIGNED YIELD.—If the producer does not provide satisfactory evidence of the yield of a commodity under subparagraph (A), the producer shall be assigned— (i) a yield that is not less than 65 percent of the transitional yield of the producer (adjusted to reflect actual production reflected in the records acceptable to the Corporation for continuous years), as specified in regulations issued by the Corporation based on production history requirements; (ii) a yield determined by the Corporation, in the case of— (I) a producer that has not had a share of the production of the insured crop for more than two crop years, as determined by the Secretary; (II) a producer that produces an agricultural commodity on land that has not been farmed by the producer; or _(III) a producer that rotates a crop produced on a farm to a crop that has not been produced on the farm;_

Just search the doc for "rotate". It is only mentioned once. I think the FCIC only applies to wheat and some other grains.

[0][https://www.agriculture.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/75-30%20-%2...](https://www.agriculture.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/75-30%20-%20Agricultural%20Adjustment%20Act%20Of%201938%20&%20Federal%20Crop%20Insurance%20Act1.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recently took part in a course on doing farm work with horses. It was a large garden where all the farm work had been done exclusively with horses for about 10 years, after decades of using tractors. The tractors had turned the soil into hard, clumpy clay which yielded bad crops and required more and more fertilizers every year. In about a decade of using horses, manure and traditional methods, the topsoil had turned nice and soft and nutrient-rich. Not at all like the hard clay my grandparents' farm and the owners of the garden were more than happy with the results.

Working with horses was slow, hard and laborious work but it was a lot of fun! Much more fun than doing the same with tractors (which I also think is quite fun).

Unfortunately, going back to horses or oxen never going to be viable in a large scale. The recent trends in agriculture have been making machines larger and larger to reduce the amount of labor required, causing the soil to be packed even harder, requiring more tilling for the next crop.

Maybe autonomous farm equipment could reverse the trend, as machines could be made smaller without increasing the amount of human labor.

<comment><USER8> "The tractors had turned the soil into hard, clumpy clay which yielded bad crops and required more and more fertilizers every year."

Mechanization is of course the main driver of soil compaction, but here too there are advances in technology that mitigate issues without having to revert back to horses (or needing revolutions like swarms of small autonomous bots). For example, soil compaction can be reduced to the point where it doesn't affect plant growth significantly any more by using the correct tire pressure on tractors; i.e. (much) lower pressure when the tractor is on the field. But those pressures are not suitable for riding on roads or longer distances, so many farmers (actually, generally the contractor doing the work, although this varies by region/country) don't deflate their tires because it takes so much time to adjust them every time.

So, modern tractors have automatic inflate/deflate installations, making it much easier to use the right pressure for every task and on every soil type. Of course this costs extra, so you still need to convince people of the need for it, and enforce the habit on those actually doing the work.

<comment><USER9> It's not practical to deflate a liquid filled tire. Most tractors run liquid filled tires for weight/traction.

<comment><USER8> Not sure if you're saying I'm just making things up - here are some of the first links off a quick google:

\- [http://www.fwi.co.uk/machinery/tractor-tyres-make-sure- your-...](http://www.fwi.co.uk/machinery/tractor-tyres-make-sure-your- pressures-are-right.htm)

\- [https://www.agribrink.com/](https://www.agribrink.com/)

\- [http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/field/news/croptal...](http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/field/news/croptalk/2013/ct-1113a1.htm)

Now I'm not a soil scientist, but I am a programmer who's for the last year or so been programming models for assessing soil threat risks, including soil compaction (one of the biggest soil threats in agriculture); and work with some of the world's foremost expert scientists in this field, as well as with representatives of e.g. machine manufacturers. They all say that compaction is mostly due to increases in weight of machinery, and that proper tire pressure is the most important mitigation measure we have available. Liquid-filled tires are never mentioned in this context, it's a rarity.

You claim that 'most' tractors run liquid filled tires - I'm not sure what you're basing that on, or what locality you're talking about, but while I do not have any numbers at hand, I have never heard of this being something other than an incidental thing. For example, the Michelin site ([http://agricultural.michelinman.com/us/Properly-use-your- tir...](http://agricultural.michelinman.com/us/Properly-use-your- tires/Ballasting-tyres-for-better-use)) mentions it as a possibility, but not as something that 'most' tractors would have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well the obvious answer is "Yes" but I am honestly uncertain whether it can be done while maintaining current profit margins which is was always the _real issue_.

A well-educated farmer, focused on a plot of land that is meant to be kept for generations without a profit focus can certainly do it. I suspect if you try to scale this process up, the issue is its more expensive if you were a corporation who has to pay a better educated class of labor to maintain soil quality.

Till, fertilize, water is alot simpler than trying to build an ecosystem that spans a 4000 acre plot of land.

I think until society values externalities more accurately, it is unlikely to catch on like so many other things that cost even a tenth of a percent of the overall corporate profit margin.

<comment><USER11> This is also a society that happily wastes a vast amount of food which is produced based on conformity issues, and other nonsense designed to maximize profits in supermarkets. At every level, we're deeply complicit, and our revealed preferences are clear.

<comment><USER10> I think the majority's preferences as a society is clear.

I also believe there is a substantial minority that would prefer a more sustainable approach to many things in the interest of long term sustainability.

The reality is our level of infrastructure spending, to the way we produce power, to the condition of the majority of the arable land is fundamentally unsustainable for more than another 50 years without substantial technological change. This does not even get into climate change related impacts on agriculture.

<comment><USER12> We've historically often engaged in unsustainable practices, like:

1\. hunting whales for lamp oil

2\. cutting down trees for fuel to make glass and build ships

3\. using natural rubber

4\. no sanitation in the cities

5\. using horses for transportation

6\. using well water in cities

As these became unsustainable, alternatives were discovered and developed.

<comment><USER13> Or in some cases they weren't, and civilizations collapsed.

<comment><USER14> To support your point: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse#Theories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse#Theories)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Check out Trace Genomics [1] for a new company at QB3 that is taking a stab at quantifying what organisms are part of a particular farm's microbiome. They sequence the DNA of everything in a given soil sample, then figure out who's DNA is who's - providing a snapshot of what life is living in that soil. And with enough snapshots, a farmer can actually start to develop a quantitative picture of the web of inhabitants in a given parcel of land. And then act on that information.

[1] [https://www.tracegenomics.com](https://www.tracegenomics.com)

</comment><comment><USER16> What's somewhat amusing is this is essentially talking about a variation on the four course crop rotation, a farming practice that dates back to the 17th century, and at one stage dominated the farming practices of Europe.

from [https://www.britannica.com/topic/Norfolk-four-course- system](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Norfolk-four-course-system)

> In the Norfolk four-course system, wheat was grown in the first year, > turnips in the second, followed by barley, with clover and ryegrass > undersown, in the third. The clover and ryegrass were grazed or cut for feed > in the fourth year. The turnips were used for feeding cattle and sheep in > the winter. This new system was cumulative in effect, for the fodder crops > eaten by the livestock produced large supplies of previously scarce animal > manure, which in turn was richer because the animals were better fed. When > the sheep grazed the fields, their waste fertilized the soil, promoting > heavier cereal yields in following years.

<comment><USER17> > dates back to the 17th century

Note that crop rotation itself (2 course/3 course) is much, much older. And Wikipedia claims it was first done in the 16th century in what now is Belgium.

Actually, there are a bunch of things presented as 'new' in the article while I read nothing which I never read before, and many of the solutions bascialy come down to 'do it as our ancestors did it' so it's not all that new either. The vast scale of it though is new. And the rigid economic system attached to it.

<comment><USER16> 2 course / 3 course used to rely on fallow periods, IIRC, though it's been more than 20 years since I covered this in school :)

What's so significant about all this stuff is that this agrarian revolution lead to greater food productivity, increasing populations, and started to increase the labour pool available for other tasks. This stuff basically kick started the eventual industrial revolution. That's part of why it's so strange to see it coming around again

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What about the fact that our agriculture system is (mostly) open loop? Every time you harvest food and consume it, where do the waste products end up? I think we need to also work on closing this loop.

<comment><USER19> @seiferteric: Can you please explain this more? I don't quite understand what you mean by 'open loop'. Thanks.

<comment><USER20> Not the OP, but essentially you take vegetables out of a field. You eat the vegetables. You poop. Your poop ends up in a sewage treatment plant. Nothing ends up back in the field. Instead we add fertilisers that we have mined out of the earth for the macro nutrients.

It's not just sewage either. Every time you till the earth, you expose it to the air. This oxidises the minerals and often makes them unavailable for the plants. Because the fertiliser we add is very water soluble it drains through the water table and ends up in the rivers and eventually washes out to sea (or just clogs the rivers with algae).

Tilling and pesticides also kill the organisms that are responsible for moving nutrients around under the earth. Additionally, we tend to plant mono-culture crops with short root structures. This stops a variety of plants from breaking down nutrients in the soil and moving them to the top layer of humus. So either we till deeper (exacerbating the problem) or we essentially lock all of the nutrients below the level that the plants can access.

In the end, you basically are slowly extracting all of the bioavailable nutrients out of the soil, and depositing them in the sewage treatment fields. At the same time you are oxidising what's left and washing everything else out to the sea. Any fertility that remains is below the access of the plant roots (and probably not in a form that can be utilised right away).

"Closing the loop" means looking at the places where we are losing fertility and making sure that it is looping back. So, if you take nutrients out in the form of food, we return it in the form of sewage. You avoid tilling and you plant a variety of crop varieties that circulate the nutrients in the soil layer. You avoid adding highly water soluble salts that simply leach out of the soil and into the water table.

It sounds simple-ish, but it's actually quite a bit challenge. We don't really do a lot of research in this area (as far as I can tell). Most agricultural research is geared toward increasing yields and reducing costs as opposed to sustainability.

<comment><USER2> It is not just a bit of a challenge, it is a huge challenge that requires so many things to change in the infrastructure. There are many who have researched this problem and have published their results. But it requires some expense which many of the farmers cannot afford and certainly the corporations that control the various associated industries don't want to put funds into as it would drastically reduce their control and profits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am doing my part in my backyard as I'm fortunate to live in an extra- judicial territory of my municipality so the regulations are sparse at the moment.

Mulch, sun and water. I also dug a large bio-char pit I've been using to reduce wood-stuff into carbon and potash. I am eventually going to ammoniate these products and redistribute throughout the plot.

I also underestimated the biochar hell-pit and buried and hosed-down a hot- burning pyre and one week later woke up to a tendril of smoke curling up from the pit which later turned back into a fire with additional fuel.

I found it alarming and remarkable so be sure to be safe with pyrolysis, folks!

<comment><USER22> I would like to know more about this "bio-char pit" could you point me to a URL or three?

<comment><USER23> A good video series on the topic:

[http://skillcult.com/biochar-and-charcoal/](http://skillcult.com/biochar-and- charcoal/)

<comment><USER22> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Promoting soil health comes down to three basic practices: Make sure the > soil is covered with plants at all times, diversify what it grows and don't > disrupt it. What this means in practice is rotating crops, so fields aren't > trying to support the same plant year after year. And it means using > techniques like "cover-cropping"–planting a secondary plant like grasses, > legumes or vegetables–between rows of crops or on other exposed soil instead > of leaving it bare.

This is hardly news. How come Norfolk crop rotation has been 'forgotten'? See this Britannica article: [https://www.britannica.com/topic/Norfolk-four- course-system](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Norfolk-four-course-system)

</comment><comment><USER25> Regenerating soil is nothing new, really. The Amazonian tribes learned how to cultivate a rich black soil[0] long time ago. There is ongoing research on how to make that work again on an industrial scale - and with sufficiently short timespans.

The article mentions that even common composting helps, but the problem tends to be how to prevent it from running off. No wonder. As anything in biology, soil regeneration takes time. Having your fresh biomass flow elsewhere runs counter to the purpose.

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

<comment><USER26> I agree this is nothing new, and although I tend to believe that no till is an essential part of healing the soil it will not work alone if nothing is done to break up the agricultural economic complex controlled by the multinational companies only interested in profit.

A good book published in 1975 written by Masanobu Fukuoka called "One Straw Revolution" is very informative on this subject easy reading and obtainable for free by searching it's title followed by .pdf in your favorite S.E.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's long been known how to fix soil; see for example from 1987: "Towards Holistic Agriculture: A Scientific Approach" by R.W. Widdowson: [https://www.elsevier.com/books/towards-holistic- agriculture/...](https://www.elsevier.com/books/towards-holistic- agriculture/widdowson/978-0-08-034211-5)

Or from 1911: [https://permaculturenews.org/files/farmers_of_forty_centurie...](https://permaculturenews.org/files/farmers_of_forty_centuries.pdf)

More: [http://soilandhealth.org/](http://soilandhealth.org/)

Adding rock dust works wonders too: [https://remineralize.org/](https://remineralize.org/)

My wife and I wrote a FOSS garden simulator in the 1990s (a six+ person-year labor of love) to help people understand some of this: [http://www.kurtz- fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html](http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html)

I got the idea while working as the Program Administrator on summer for the NOFA-NJ Organic Farm Certification Program in the later 1980s, but it took many years (including more education in grad school in biology) to make the software.

See especially from the help system of that software on how conventional agriculture destroys the soil: [http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/help100/00000385.htm](http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/help100/00000385.htm) "In the soil, tiny charged particles called micelles usually have many areas of negative charge (called sites) on their surfaces. Positively charged ions (cations) are drawn to these negative charge sites and stick to the clay particles (are adsorbed). In most soils, 99% of soil cations can be found attached to micelles (clay particles and organic matter) and 1% can be found in solution. Mineral cations in the soil (mainly Ca2+, Mg2+, K+ and Na+) maintain an equilibrium between adsorption to the negative sites and solution in the soil water. This equilibrium produces exchanges -- when one cation detaches from a site (leaving it free), another cation attaches to it. Therefore the negatively charged sites are called cation exchange sites. The number of these sites per unit weight of dry soil is called the cation exchange capacity, or the capacity of the soil to hold cations. Because any cations loose in the soil solution are vulnerable to leaching as water flows out of the soil, a high cation exchange capacity is always desirable. Cation exchange sites act as a sort of mineral buffer for the soil, storing minerals important to plant and animal growth for long periods of time. The attraction of cations to cation exchange sites is strongest for H+ ions (which make the soil acidic) and for polyvalent ions such as Ca2+ and Al3+. The weakest attraction is for monovalent ions such as K+. When ammonium nitrate fertilizers are added to the soil, the ammonium ions (NH4+) are strongly attracted to cation exchange sites because of their high valence (4). The ammonium ions displace many other cations which are then leached out of the soil and lost to plants. Some of the ammonium ions are converted to nitrate during nitrification (by aerobic soil bacteria); the process produces excess H+ ions which acidify the soil (causing earthworms and other soil organisms to die or desert the area). (For an excellent description of cation exchange capacity, see Widdowson's Towards Holistic Agriculture: A Scientific Approach.)"

That's a big reason why organic agriculture which focuses on building up organic matter in the soil (which increases cation exchange capacity) is better for soil health (and human health too, as the plants are better fed). That's reflected in the article when it describes two lumps of soil put on wire mesh that behave differently -- one falling apart as dust (from lack of organic matter and so not much CEC) and one clumped together (more organic matter and CEC).

Wish I had time to bring that Delphi app to the web as a JavaScript app... And improve it further.

I don't know the exact numbers to completely quantify this, but I suspect poor farming practices on the US prairies that have reduced (in some places) six feet of topsoil to six inches of top soil have released a vast amount of carbon from lost organic matter into the air and contributed to climate change.

<comment><USER8> Does your model support root nodule nitrogen fixation? I've been looking for simulation software to estimate optimal levels of nitrogen fixers, but I didn't find any comprehensive models that included this. I didn't look at your model for it though; although I _did_ come across it several years earlier when I was looking for plant growth simulations for another reason. In what way(s) does it diverge from EPIC? EPIC & APEX are (widely) applied for policy evaluation purposes (how much sense that makes is another matter, but let's just accept reality for now); is your model robust enough for such things, I mean comparable to EPIC? And does it still run on Windows 10? I tried to install it but got some error that it failed writing to a registry key, and then I didn't look any further.

<comment><USER14> Most of the model source code is derived from EPIC (and a bit from SPUR which was about rangelands, weather, and plant competition). The EPIC conversion involved a person-year of painstaking work going through EPIC and creating sensible names for the cryptic FORTRAN variables (which were also sometimes reused multiple times with different meanings) and short function names as the code was rewritten into C++ and then later Delphi. My wife -- who I met via the PhD program in Ecology and Evolution I went to to try to learn enough to write the simulator -- did most of that translation.

It's been twenty years, so I could not answer detailed questions about it of the top of my head without digging into the code (and maybe not even then). But the core parts of the soil percolation model should be very close to EPIC's code and data. The source code for the soil models references the EPIC equations and the related scientific literature.

The simulator was written under earlier versions of windows (Win 3.1 and 95), and from around WinXP and later it seems the code that updates the registry causes an error. Not sure how to easily work around that.

You can download the source here: [http://www.kurtz- fernhout.com/GardenSimulatorSourceCirca1997...](http://www.kurtz- fernhout.com/GardenSimulatorSourceCirca1997InDelphi.zip)

Or, I just put it up on GitHub right now for you: :-) [https://github.com/pdfernhout/GardenSimulatorSourceCirca1997...](https://github.com/pdfernhout/GardenSimulatorSourceCirca1997InDelphi)

Here is the file you would want to focus on first, and it does mention nitrogen fixation and nodules, but you'd have to make your own decision about how useful that was to you as a reference: [https://github.com/pdfernhout/GardenSimulatorSourceCirca1997...](https://github.com/pdfernhout/GardenSimulatorSourceCirca1997InDelphi/blob/master/ueq.pas)

Here are the lines to look first inside that file: [https://github.com/pdfernhout/GardenSimulatorSourceCirca1997...](https://github.com/pdfernhout/GardenSimulatorSourceCirca1997InDelphi/blob/master/ueq.pas#L4741-L4764)

Remember that a lot of EPIC is empirically derived functions and values from US soils in certain climates -- so it may not be totally applicable elsewhere, even if it is a place to start.

And here is a 100 page programmer's manual: [http://www.kurtz- fernhout.com/progmanlong.htm](http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/progmanlong.htm)

I put our PlantStudio and StoryHarp code up on GitHub (which share some common code with the garden simulator) and have been meaning to someday put the garden simulator code there.

I spent a couple of months about a decade ago porting part of the code base to Java and also Python which involved writing a Delphi parser and translation tool, but the result is not a finished work. But the converted code for the garden simulator is not on GitHub (yet). You can see some of the converted plant drawing code here though: [https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio](https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio)

I had wanted to help develop self-replicating space habitats and helping people grow their own food better seemed like a good first step towards that which both had short-term on-Earth benefits plus long-term benefits for space settlement. We did this all on our own money from consulting and also credit cards. When they were maxed out (~US$100K) we took unrelated programming jobs at IBM Research and elsewhere to pay it all back on-time with interest -- it took many years to get back to zero -- and we never got a chance to do that much more with the simulator...

Our (at first shareware) PlantStudio software was a spinoff for breeding virtual plants which got substantial interest from 3D modellers -- but even there, we did not have time to keep improving it since we were both working full-time the at IBM. PlantStudio was mainly my wife's project in response to user feedback from the Garden Simulator that people liked playing with the plant design part of it. We eventually made that free and then open source. [http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/userssay.htm](http://www.kurtz- fernhout.com/PlantStudio/userssay.htm)

And then we had a kid: :-) [http://www.kurtz- fernhout.com/historyandfuture.html](http://www.kurtz- fernhout.com/historyandfuture.html)

After that effort on our own, I'd get a bit annoyed I got when I'd watch NASA and other places give big grants to people who then made proprietary software with it. That motivated me to write essays like this back around 2001: [http://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public- works.html](http://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html) "As a software developer and content creator, I find it continually frustrating to visit web sites of projects funded directly or indirectly by government agencies or foundations, only to discover I can't easily improve on those projects because of licensing restrictions both on redistribution and on making derived works of their content and software. ..."

But I can give kudos at the USDA ARS BRC and the EPIC team for developing their code in-house and putting it in the public domain. The EPIC developers (but not administrators) were annoyed a bit themselves at our own plan originally to make proprietary software from their models, which was another factor in our making that garden simulator effort FOSS.

Our hope had been to keep improving those models and getting more people involved in that process online with a 2.0 version of the software as a shared modelling environment. But our few small efforts to find funding to continue in that direction were not productive. I guess we were just better software developers than sales people. :-) Plus we have learned a lot since then about a more incremental development style. [http://gardenwithinsight.com/nsfprop.htm](http://gardenwithinsight.com/nsfprop.htm)

Anyway, I can hope that using that Garden Simulator software as an initial reference point can help a next generation of soil scientists and free software developers create even better software for research, education, and applications from bringing soil anywhere back to life. :-)

<comment><USER8> Thank you, very interesting. I feel your pain wrt converting Fortran models; I've spend quite some time doing it for models similar to EPIC. In fact, about 7-8 years ago in a fit of hubris, we submitted a proposal as part of which I would integrate EPIC into some other models, as a part of which I would have to convert it to C++; IIRC I estimated about 6 months for it. TBH I do have large libraries of simulation framework, so it would mostly be understanding equations and converting them. Still, I'm happy we didn't win that proposal :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Paul Stamets has studied the soil restorative effects of mycellium mushroom and published a number of videos. In this Ted Talk at the 10 minute mark, there's a demonstration of just how rapidly a patch of ground can be transformed compared to other commonly used methods, even land polluted with diesel fuel, which the mycellium rapidly breaks down into harmless compounds. All the videos are fascinating. [https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_c...](https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world/transcript#t-452343)

</comment><comment><USER24> The problem is not going to be really solved until we get rid of the idea that a corporation can own land. The big agribusinesses don't value the land as much as society needs them too so of course they don't look after it.

Land is a common resource and no one business should have unfettered control of it.

<comment><USER28> That is false. Big business cares about land more than the small farmers

It is the big farmers that care the most for the land. They are big enough that they have collected the data and seen that investments in the land pay off. When you have one field it is really hard to test for yourself how different practices pay off. The university will tell you "go no till, after 7 years your yields will be bigger than if you till the land every year", but small farmers generally think "yeah right, it works for your soils over there, but here we have different soils and so that won't work". By contrast the large farmers have enough fields that they are willing to try every new practice in a couple places to see if it really works for them. The largest farms are now able to scientifically show that they are building soil every year.

Second, in Iowa corporations are banned form owning farms. There are exceptions for seed companies and equipment manufactures, but those are specific loopholes with limits to what can be done. I work for John Deere (but of course do not speak for them), and we have to be very careful that the places where we test our prototypes does not count as farms. (generally the crop is destroyed before harvest - I don't know how the harvester division does their testing though)

<comment><USER24> I was not contrasting big and small farmers. I was contrasting big business behaviour with what society needs.

<comment><USER28> True, but big business behavior is often closer aligned with what society needs than small farmers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here's a great book on the subject, "New Roots for Agriculture" by Wes Jackson (forward by Wendell Berry)

[https://www.amazon.com/New-Roots-Agriculture-Farming- Ranchin...](https://www.amazon.com/New-Roots-Agriculture-Farming- Ranching/dp/0803275625)

</comment><comment><USER30> As has been hinted at by other commenters, I think the big thing that's wrong with modern industrial agriculture (including some "organic" agriculture) is that it typically does not add carbon to the soil (via composted plant matter, manure, etc) and it also unnecessarily disturbs the soil structure, allowing the organic carbon compounds in the soil to become excessively exposed to the atmosphere where they'll break down or be eroded.

(No, I don't have specific sources for this, it's mostly a combination of what I've read from the Permaculture folks and personal observation in my own garden over the past 5 years.)

</comment><comment><USER31> As a teenager, I had read this book called The Forest and The Sea, by Marston Bates, which explains many of the fundamental principles of ecology that underlie these issues.

[https://www.google.co.in/search?q=book+the+forest+and+the+se...](https://www.google.co.in/search?q=book+the+forest+and+the+sea&)

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

I thought it was a pretty good and informative book.

</comment><comment><USER32> We could probably simply compost the produce and meat that gets thrown away from grocery stores and fix that problem. A moderate sized grocery store in a small town is going to throw away a ton or two of compostable material a month. This all goes into a landfill. Most of these stores are very good about recycling dry paper waste... but do nothing about the rest of their waste sans cooking oil.

</comment><comment><USER33> Not likely, unless we turn away from corn and abusive practices. Farming has become such a money-losing venture that the only way to survive is to increase yield, and try to squeeze more out of the same acre of land. This, imo, leads to abuse.

<comment><USER34> People consume too much meat and dairy, which requires lots of corn and soy for feed. Thats one reason why corn and soy is so heavily subsidized.

<comment><USER24> Why does that make the production heavily subsidized? Surely the state doesn't need to subsidize what is already very popular?

<comment><USER28> The state has a different concern: making sure you have enough to eat. One crop failure and people starve to death. We as a society have chosen to solve this problem by subsidizing farming ensuring that there are more crops grown every year than is strictly needed. As such farmers plant more crops than people will eat. This ensures that in bad years there is still enough food.

You can argue that there is a better solution to the problem, but don't argue against subsidizes without a different solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Can half of America be given back to native American?

</comment><comment><USER36> Has anybody already tried to put Brawndo on the fields? I think it got electrolytes, that should help!

</comment><comment><USER37> Not until we figure out what's killing it

<comment><USER38> > the main change from one year to the next was intensively planting more and > more acres of corn and soy, churning up the soil and using ever more > chemical fertilizers and herbicides to try and turn a profit.</comment></comment>


Lets talk about Own-Mailbox again (home-hosted email service) - <AUTHOR> https://www.own-mailbox.com/#HowWork <comment><AUTHOR> The video and "how does it work" don't really explain much, I think.

They claim to protect meta-data because everything is behin Tor hidden services. To receive actual mail, though, they set up a central SMPT/Tor- Proxy. So that proxy knows the meta data (and in case of unencrypted mail, the content) and the hidden service associated with that meta-data.

So even though everything is open source and open hardware, you still have to trust this central proxy, don't you?

<comment><USER2> This is my favorite part of the #HowWork section:

What about software updates? What distribution _du_ you use?</comment></comment>


Only 12 vaquita porpoises remain, watchdog group reports - <AUTHOR> https://news.mongabay.com/2018/03/only-12-vaquita-porpoises-remain-watchdog-groups-report/ <comment><USER2> The enormous demand for medically useless endangered animal parts in China is surreal and tragic. Sounds like this will be the 2nd large mammal extinction this year (white rhino) purely because of stupid people paying enormous amounts of money for fraudulent TCM cures.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps this could be solved by corrupting the supply chains with endangered animal parts enriched with lethal poisons?

Surely the demand for medically useless and deadly products would fall pretty fast.

<comment><USER4> The same argument would probably be made to combat the illegal drug trade. Not sure we want to go there

<comment><USER5> To be brutally honest, recreational drug use is absurdly overrated, and the people that insist on engaging in cool kid drug experimentation merit badges are selfish to the point that they wouldn't be missed. Bombs away, and let it burn.

<comment><USER6> So edgy. You made a brand new account just to post this trash?

<comment><USER5> It's worth it to expand the conversation. Drugs aren't incredible, and really, seriously wouldn't be worth the effort even if they were 100% legal.

And how many people get sucked into the party kid bullshit, because they want to fit in and impress people. AKA: doing drugs to seem edgy.

<comment><USER7> You seem to be doing drugs wrong - I have taken drugs recreationally and have never been to a "party". Actually thinking about it, I have never taken drugs in any social setting at all (including alcohol).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We need to have a DNA bank so someday we may revive these extinct animals. But that says nothing of microbiome that accompanies a species. I do not know how to adequately preserve or catalog that.

<comment><AUTHOR> We could use the common porpoise microbiome for this.

Dolphins have grand parents, so 12 porpoises alive could translate maybe in 6 males, two old females past their fertile period and 3-4 females still in reproductive age. Each one could deliver one baby porpoise each two years. The species exclusive from USA and Mexico has a really bad luck. Too many actors currently throwing gasoline to burn all bridges instead promoting the necessary cooperation between the two countries. Mexico at least tried and failed. The species will probably not survive to see the next president.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Such an oddly phrased headline.

<comment><USER10> help us with the title @dang, you're my only hope!

<comment><USER11> At your service.</comment></comment></comment>


Social Networks Will Be the New Breeding Ground for Viruses - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2008/12/11/11readwriteweb-the_facebook_virus_spreads_no_social_network_is_s.html?em

<comment><USER2> The biggest difference between email and social network viruses is that the social networks are centralized, and should (theoretically) be able to easily block these viruses by just banning certain destination URLs.

Or is this not so easy? If not, please explain.</comment>


PayPal Customer Service Is Painful; WePay Is the PayPal Alternative - <AUTHOR> https://lessaccounting.com/blog/paypal-alternative

<comment><USER2> The problem is at the scale of which Paypal operates. They are huge and the fraud measures in place have not kept up with the needs of the various use cases. Fraud is dependent on the use case and there is no one size fits all. That is why PayPal gets a bad rap for freezing assets and generally being this monolithic entity that keeps bungling up. Dwolla/WePay have to focus on niche use cases and define their markets in terms of how many core use cases they can effectively service. Fragmentation is the only logical conclusion to scale.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish I could use WePay. Unfortunately they do not allow Digital Goods, which their customer service department pointed out includes software licenses.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Paying via WePay is just as easy for your clients and customers

Wrong. For the 200 million more PayPal accountholders vs WePay accountholders, the experience is quite a bit easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe he was referring to the sign up process, which is just as easy (if not easier). In fact, I often have a very difficult time (as a payer) paying through PayPal with my credit card and not my PayPal account. Sometimes I just don't want PayPal to be a part of all of my transactions. Basically, anything outside of eBay.

<comment><USER4> Whatever. The whole benefit of PayPal is that almost everyone is already signed up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is this any better than Dwolla (or even Bitcoin)?

<comment><USER4> Because they require quite a bit of setup by the payer, neither are very well suited for many general purpose payment scenarios.</comment></comment>


US Long-term unemployment rate still sky-high - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2011/01/27/news/economy/long_term_unemployment/index.htm

<comment><USER2> Hopefully there will be further job creation that comes from all this frothy early stage funding down the road. Time to scale.</comment>


One Lawyer, One Day, 194 Felony Cases - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/31/us/public-defender-case-loads.html <comment><AUTHOR> Just to note, the type of lawyer that's being written about here is a public defender, one that's appointed to a defendant as a constitutional right.

</comment><comment><USER2> Free lawyers for everyone. How is that working out? Free doctors for everyone. Anyone want to guess how that's going to work out?

<comment><USER3> Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, and please especially don't take threads on extraneous flamewar tangents.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER4> Eventually, any sufficiently pithy observation on HN will be isomorphic to starting a flamewar.</comment></comment></comment>


Detecting loops in a linked list - the Tortoise and Hare - <AUTHOR> http://eddii.wordpress.com/2006/11/15/detecting-infinite-loop/

<comment><USER2> Yep. This has been a standard interview question for probably at least 15 years.

<comment><USER3> Is it also standard to call it an _infinite_ loop?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _However, I cannot imagine transforming my algorithm into a recursive algorithm. It just appears overwhelming._

This is why we shouldn't teach Java (or C) as a first language. People are so used to programming the computer that they don't really stop to understand what's going on. Even when writing about algorithms.</comment>


Windows package manager does not permit opting out of telemetry - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/issues/179 <comment><USER2> On the topic of Microsoft is not less evil than before : today I needed to use Teams, I was pleasantly surprised by the fact it supported a web client. I tried to use it and got caught in a tunnel of dark ux. You go to the website, click to sign in, get asked for your email and password, then verify your email, then you discover that you actually signed up for something else and now you can signup for teams. You follow the wizard again, then you are told to use Skype because you are not a company. You restart and make sure to check the box saying you are a company, then put your company info, it works! You try to start a call, and you get told it does not work in firefox...

<comment><USER3> Yea a lot of microsoft stuff doesn't work in Firefox. They are the worst of all the big companies at supporting it.

<comment><USER4> Which is hilarious since if you spoof your Firefox UA string to be Chrome or Edgeium, all Teams features work properly in the browser.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. Google also offers a lot of "rich cards" in their search (interactive things mostly) that are only available on Chrome .. unless you change the user agent of another browser to Chrome, in which case it also works perfectly.

<comment><USER5> IANAL but would not that be grounds for abuse of dominant position? Using their dominance in web search to undercut competing browser vendors?

<comment><AUTHOR> Chrome accounts for ~70% of browser use. It is a majority, but it's not total dominance.

For reference, IE accounted for ~96% of browser use when that whole antitrust case was happening.

<comment><USER6> Ah, but the point was about using "their dominance in __web search __to undercut competing browser vendors ".

In this case, ~90% of web searches go through Google[0]. So they are using the fact that they are the number one web search engine to convince users to switch to Google Chrome.

[0]: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide- market-...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share- of-search-engines/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, true, thanks for pointing that out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's not what I understand.

> diagnostic data collection (telemetry) is not enabled for private builds

> this data collection is covered by windows 10 privacy, You can find the > windows 10 privacy statement and details of controlling the diagnostic and > feedback settings here.

So if you build from source, you can disable it, and if you don't build from source but install it from the store, then telemetry is controlled by the central privacy settings in Windows 10.

Presumably this would be a problem only if you specifically don't want MS to have telemetry from winget, but you also specicifically want them to have telemetry on the rest of your OS, which would be... weird.

<comment><USER8> You're technically correct for some use cases. For Windows 10 Enterprise users, the official tool does allow you to disable telemetry by modifying the system telemetry settings.

For Windows Home and Professional users, this is not the case. Disabling telemetry is not possible because Microsoft have decided that there is a minimum "required" amount of telemetry every OS installation _must_ send in order to function.

If the telemetry description stated that _some_ Windows users are able to opt out, they'd be correct.

It's just another example of Microsoft showing they couldn't give a rat's ass about their customers' wishes and that you'll just have to deal with them tracking everything you do.

And who knows? Maybe I do like to contribute to Microsoft about kernel bluescreens so that Windows can get more stable, but do not wish to upload a report every time I install or uninstall software? Why would it be strange that I don't like to share some telemetry but not all telemetry?

<comment><USER7> > For Windows Home and Professional users, this is not the case. Disabling > telemetry is not possible because Microsoft have decided that there is a > minimum "required" amount of telemetry every OS installation must send in > order to function.

Yes but AFAIK, winget telemetry fits entirely under the optional category. No metrics of winget fits under the "required" category that you cannot disable.

In other words, you can completly disable the telemetry of winget, which the title of this article say you cannot.

<comment><USER9> How are you determining that all the winget telemetry is in fact getting categorized as optional and can be disabled?

<comment><USER10> A Microsoft employee mentions this in the issue comments on GitHub.

<comment><USER9> Elsewhere in this discussion, a Microsoft employee working on the new terminal was completely sure that the data it collected wasn't sent anywhere, until they looked into it again and discovered that it actually was being picked up by some part of the inscrutable telemetry machinery and sent off to Microsoft.

<comment><USER10> Yes, unless you turn it off or set telemetry collection to "basic".

Or if you build the tool yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are people worried about the actual contents of these kinds of telemetry, or rather just annoyed by the fact that it's there at all?

The first position seems a bit odd for something that is open source (so presumably you can verify what's being sent). I mean it might be bad to send "I installed product X" or "I used the command X" to a remote server, but on the other hand if I _really_ feel this is a problem would I ever even be using the closed source binaries that the package manager installs, without worrying more what _they_ might do, than what happened when the package manager ran?

Some times I get the feeling that the telemetry thing just became an expression of annoyance with something else entirely, or just the current state of affairs. It's like one of those cultural wars where every battle is so symbolic that everyone forgot what the real issue was ("Why do we worry so much about who uses which bathroom again dad?").

<comment><USER12> My purchase of a piece of software does not give that software provider carte blanche access to what I do with that software. Unless I explicitly give my approval (opt in), exfiltration of information from my system is an ethical breach of my privacy if not a breach of data protection laws.

As for why this matters, you need only look at Hong Kong for that answer. And even here in the US, many large companies are kowtowing to the Chinese government and changing their products in the US to toe those lines.

<comment><USER13> I bet you also want the software to work and not have bugs. Telemetry gives devs information to prioritize and debug information fix the bugs.

<comment><USER14> You can...

1\. Make telemetry opt-in and ask the user to share data. This is what Apple does

2\. Collect telemetry and give the user an option to share that data after a crash or bug. Many companies do this.

3\. Make telemetry opt-out but be forthright with what information is sent and why.

4\. Don't allow opting out of telemetry but be open and upfront with what is being collected and why.

5\. Hide the fact that telemetry is being sent, hide what is being sent, and don't allow the user to opt out.

<comment><USER15> > Make telemetry opt-in and ask the user to share data. This is what Apple > does

You should check - apple software still contacts the mothership constantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find it outrageous; "Telemetry" is built into most new Microsoft software. For example, they recently released a replacement for powershell and CMD, called "Terminal 1.0", which also comes with some aggressive telemetry built in:

[https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/master/src/host/t...](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/master/src/host/telemetry.cpp)

This also applies to newer releases of powershell, aka PS Core. I haven't tried either, but I guarantee you telemetry in both applications is not opt-in but opt out using some obscure method, if that is even possible.

In any case, the claim that telemetry is necessary to improve anything related to customer experience is ridiculous. Not only is a general data collection unnecessary; it would be more efficient to run some experiments, and be it some opt in A/B tests. Surveillance like the above is encroaching and can easily be abused. The data collected are usually fine-grained enough to allow for some nice fingerprinting of individual users. The potential for abuse is high.

<comment><USER17> I'm just gonna recycle the bits I've posted here _before_ about this exact file :)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22331345](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22331345)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19322398](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19322398), [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19324538](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19324538)

The file you've identified produces a local, opt-in event stream that does not leave your machine unless you literally e-mail it to me. It's just got that unfortunate word in the filename that means we're bad guys.

EDIT, upon closer inspection: when this is built as part of the Windows product (which consumes source from this repository) those values may end up in an event stream. In the interest of full disclosure, those events are:

1\. Part of the console host (conhost.exe) and covered by the Windows global data collection settings

2\. Pertaining to (incomplete, but it's too early in the morning for me to do a full review of this code):

2.a. The number of times each low-level console API was used

2.b. How the _legacy_ Find dialog is being used (long strings, short strings, search direction, number of times)

2.c. Specific settings like font size, how many colors are configured, how big the window and buffer are

<comment><USER18> I should put a disclaimer at the top of this saying that I'm just a regular old Hacker News commenter who skimmed that file and really has no idea what this code actually does, so I'm not trying to scaremonger because I saw something sketchy without following up on it. However, that file seems indicate that Terminal logs process connections. Is there a way that this information might leave the device? Could it include arbitrary processes on my system in that data?

<comment><USER17> Now that I'm at my desk, I'll have a look. Thanks for the disclaimer :)

<comment><USER17> Alright, with fresh eyes:

When the console host (just C:\windows\system32\conhost.exe, not the new Terminal) exits it emits the following information for processes that had connected to it:

* How many ANSI/VT sequences they used

* How many of the above we understood

* How many of them we did not understand

* The executable stem name (ConsoleApplication1.exe, wsl.exe, cmd.exe)

* How many times we saw that executable

~1-5% of those entries make it into a data pipeline that I believe we stopped looking years ago. These pipelines are usually(?) turned off by the OS, so it's possible that these were rendered inert. Still, though, and because the executable stem name might be a little more exposure than anyone's comfortable with, I've filed [https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/6103](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/6103) to yoink it.

(It's been a long time and I still don't know how to format things properly on Hacker News :))

<comment><USER18> Thanks for looking into this, and I appreciate you filing an issue! (Hacker News doesn't really do formatting, so I think that's the best you're going to get.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Telemetry seems to be a sore and curt topic with Microsoft. I've yet to see anyone make headway on even just having a discussion about it with public facing MS devs; it almost always gets a quick, rote toe-the-line response and the discussion gets terminated or blackballed or ignored thereafter.

It has the airs of an internal mandate. I can't help but be deeply suspicious of this behaviour.

<comment><USER20> Based on the quality of today's conversation here on HN, I'm not inclined to fault them for taking that approach publicly. We can't even discuss this topic coherently ourselves. Our discussion here is filled with "this is my position" statements that are presented as arguments contradicting another's position.

I think this post here today serves only as a rallying cry for "no telemetry" extremists and contributes nothing interesting or curious or relevant to HN that hasn't been covered in hundreds of framing-implied or framing-explicit "telemetry is bad" posts prior.

<comment><USER21> > _Based on the quality of today 's conversation here on HN, I'm not inclined > to fault them for taking that approach publicly._

Oh yeah sure, Microsoft is the victim, cyberbullied by their own users. It's a classic case of innocent naive corporations getting senselessly dogpiled by mean common people, clearly that's the way this power dynamic is arranged. Yeah, fucking right.

<comment><USER20> For example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I recently installed an Insider build of Windows so I could use WSL2 to run some docker containers in a Linux environment.

The insider build requires that you enable full telemetry which includes sending your visited websites to MS. I need WSL2 so I'm just avoiding doing anything private on my personal computer for now.

I understand why the data is useful to them but I don't think they understand or care why this is an important issue to others

<comment><USER23> > I need WSL2 so I'm just avoiding doing anything private on my personal > computer for now.

This is madness. It's hard to consider a machine your "personal computer" if you're afraid of doing anything personal on it.

<comment><USER24> This is just a taste of what it means to have Operating System as a Service. Which is where Microsoft is apparently heading.

<comment><USER25> Windows as a Service has been their stated goal since prior to the release of Vista. Nadella has opted to go full speed ahead, with everything from Office to the versions of Windows running on the Surface & Xbox being entirely SaaS. I'm just waiting for the "You must subscribe" hammer to fall for Windows in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My .02 cents. To me the arguments I read here around "but product improvement is hard so that justifies collecting the data" ring hollow. When your convenience at work is balanced against someones right to privacy, there's no middle ground. Privacy wins. You need active informed consent to phone home for reasons not related to the proper functioning of the application.

I wish most applications offered 3 boxes:

1) Don't send telemetry

2) Send data needed to catch bad rollouts (think SRE style status code and latency metrics).

3) Send anonymized data to help improve the product.

4) I want to be a beta tester/insider, you can capture my logs.

<comment><USER27> 0) Don't compile the code responsible for the telemetry into the binary because I don't trust the checkboxes will always be respected in code. Especially after seeing an off-by-one error in the description :)

<comment><USER28> -1) Open source the code, so people can check that you really do what you declare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This whole bastardization of the word 'Telemetry' by the online community is completely abhorrent.

It is _impossible_ to get proper usage feedback from your programs without being swayed by the vocal minority community.

We always find posts online on how crappy software is, but how can software improve if the majority of people actually using the software don't give feedback at all?

[https://xkcd.com/1172/](https://xkcd.com/1172/)

<comment><USER30> Seeing as you posted this comment twice, here's my reply again:

No. I hope this burns to read.

Software never improves because incompetence is the norm. Not because we didn't have a magical data collection unicorn available.

Competent software companies ran user panels, had decent quality control, didn't steamroll their communities, didn't market loudly over user dissent and certainly didn't shut down their issue tracking to even their top tier partners.

That was Microsoft 10 years ago. That is Microsoft today. But you know, Telemetry solves all these problems doesn't it? No.

The real answer to your question: ask and listen. People will gladly tell you. Do not just take the data otherwise you end up with a set of poorly selected metrics which do not represent user opinion and a lot of pissed off customers who don't want to or can't tell you due to legislation and data protection.

Edit: to back up my point, Microsoft closed down Connect with over 30 issues open from me and our account manager left to go and work for a competitor because he was fed up of dealing with that kind of shit and couldn't even get basic issues from a Gold partner actually escalated to anyone. We had a ticket open for 7 years against clickonce where IE9 broke it completely for about 15,000 users.

As for community steamrolling, this is a repeat of this one again: [https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/6145](https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/6145)

Edit 2: I have removed some irrelevant stuff. This story goes on forever. I have so many anecdotes from dealing with MSFT pre and post OSS glory that I concentrate all my effort on staying as far away as possible.

<comment><USER31> I think you are underestimating the hardness of tracking the many users of Windows, and different bugs they might have.

Microsoft have a team of people who look at crash reports, and categorise the results (see for example [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050412-47/?p=35...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050412-47/?p=35923) , just a quick thing I found).

Having the ability to track the crashes of millions of machines, to find patterns in which drivers are crashing which applications, seems like an impossible thing to replace.

<comment><USER32> Yes but those crash reports used to have a send/don't send button

<comment><USER33> The average user has no idea what those buttons do and will click whatever makes the popup go away, which will be either 'yes' or 'no' at random

<comment><USER34> It's like a consent form for a medical procedure. At the end of the day, you're not a medical professional. Is the average person really informed when they do or don't provide their consent?

Nevertheless, consent is still paramount. Removing consent on the basis that most users are incapable of being informed is a poor excuse.

<comment><USER35> Also, as someone who's been doing tech support since 1995, people here either wastly overestimate the dumbness of others or they just happen to have unusually dumb colleagues, friends and whatnot.

Most people aren't really stupid, rather bad software make them look stupid and bad tech support shifts the blame to the users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> While I love WSL2, my biggest beef with the install process is I had to turn on almost every crap privacy-busting feature back on. I had 'decrapified' my Windows 10 install previously and the WSL2 reversed almost all that.

<comment><USER37> That's probably a function of WSL2 currently only being available in Insider, no? If you want to use pre-release builds, I think it's fair to expect that you need to enable telemetry.

<comment><USER38> > If you want to use pre-release builds, I think it's fair to expect that you > need to enable telemetry.

I wouldn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> When it comes to things like this, it feels like old "Linux is a cancer" Microsoft is battling the new multi-platform open-source Microsoft for whether the company should be evil or not.

<comment><USER40> There is no new Microsoft - this is the "embrace, extend, extinguish" Microsoft of always, betting that the forkable nature of open source will not matter in practice, so far correctly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Since it's open source, I wonder if anyone will be willing to maintain a branch that has all the telemetry removed, but is otherwise basically unchanged and so can connect to the normal repositories.

<comment><USER42> Don't think that is even necessary, is it? The private builds of it share no telemetry. Just need someone to build it and share their build I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Tin foil hat here. The person posting this is the lead maintainer of Chocolatey, a long standing 3rd party Windows package manager.

Although the point is reasonable (why NOT just provide an opt out, like .NET SDK?), it seems to me that there is a potential ulterior motive in dragging down winget.

<comment><USER44> Probably because the .NET SDK is a separate program, and winget is being slipped into a default component app of Windows 10.

I am irritated about Windows 10's telemetry policy, but it makes sense for component applications to obey the system telemetry configuration rather than each one having their own settings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Opt out of Windows.

My last Windows 7 machine broke down, and the few Windows programs I needed to run are now running under Wine on Linux.

I've never used Windows 10 except in a store demo. Decided I didn't want it.

</comment><comment><USER46> Why do we use MS's terminology for it (telemetry) when it is essentially theft of private and sensitive data?

From what I have gathered, they are snarfing up my browsing data and what applications I have installed. I don't have the time or energy to jump through the hoops to figure out how to stop this blatant invasion of my privacy. On top of that, I've read that win10 shows ads in the actual OS. That is so beyond unacceptable that I am stuck on an unsupported OS (7)

As a result, I now have only two windows7 boxes - one for gaming and one that I use as a front end for some specialized audio hardware. Each box is dedicated to that purpose and is relegated to a subnet. 20 years ago, 90% of my computing was on windows - now it is <10%. Soon, I'll get another mac to do all my audio work on and, eventually, I'll relegate my gaming to Linux available titles.

</comment><comment><USER47> Ha... here's an experiment you can try on Windows, assuming you haven't previously taken steps to debloat the system.

1\. Run procmon.exe /noconnect from Sysinternals

2\. Filter -> Drop Filtered Events

3\. Ctrl-L, Add Filter -> 'Path' Contains 'Telemetry' then 'Include' and Add

4\. Press OK and then Ctrl-E (Start Capture)

5\. Leave it running for a few minutes

</comment><comment><USER48> The assumption that windows package manager does not permit opting out of telemetry seems to be wrong.

The whole issue is not stating how to opt out and someone assumed that it means it is not possible. However, based on the updated readme [https://github.com/microsoft/winget- cli#datatelemetry](https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli#datatelemetry) there was a way to opt-out from the beggining, just not documented.

Yes, it should have been clarified from the start, but I think it's positive the option was always there and they managed to clarify how to opt-out in mere 7 hours.

</comment><comment><USER49> Half-serious startup idea: Telemetry Escrow, where I send data to Escrow, can inspect what it is, then Microsoft pays per datum. Escrow holds all historicals / some samples, depending on tier.

 _Does the data have value?_ , after all? How much..

</comment><comment><USER50> Here is Microsoft's privacy dashboard: [https://account.microsoft.com/privacy/](https://account.microsoft.com/privacy/)

It lets you delete at least some of the data. Although I don't know if it includes the data from the package manager.

Here you can contact their Data Protection Officer if you would like to ask: [https://www.microsoft.com/en- GB/concern/privacy](https://www.microsoft.com/en-GB/concern/privacy)

</comment><comment><USER51> According to a recent post, we spend 34 years of our lives staring at screens. If Microsoft wants 34 years of data on each of us, let's collectively bargain on a value for it.

</comment><comment><USER52> Anybody else really turned off by the unnecessary amount of internet access in these new CLI tools? It's not just telemetry. Some tools will just access the internet even when they don't need to (my favourite is checking for a new version with every command). I like the CLI because it is so minimal and transparent (compared to GUI). But that seems to be changing these days.

</comment><comment><USER53> I wouldn't mind the Windows telemetry, if it ever seemed like they were using it to actually fix things that suck. However, it's been almost ten years since the Start Menu search has worked at all, and wonky multi-monitor and settings/control panel settings dichotomies persist.

Some have posited that this official package manager will be a death blow to Chocolatey, but I doubt it.

</comment><comment><USER54> I don't use Windows, and the only Microsoft product I have installed is VS Code (with telemetry explicitly disabled), but in spite of that about 10% of all the blocked DNS requests according to my pi-hole are to Microsoft's telemetry servers at watson.telemetry.microsoft.com.

</comment><comment><USER55> I thought everyone knew it was the pseudo official Microsoft policy to extract as much data as possible. I mean if you use windows, you must be anyways used to something like this.

</comment><comment><USER56> Well, you are using Windows (basically a spyware), why do you pretend that you care about privacy?

</comment><comment><USER57> Is this package manager in the default installation? How do I find out if I have it?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a new package manager, currently just in preview.

Discussed on HN a few days ago - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236218](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236218)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Sounds like someone forgot to turn the pretend button on.

</comment><comment><USER59> Eh, looking at the code it's pretty benign

</comment><comment><USER60> So what exactly is it sending back to MS?

</comment><comment><USER61> Good example of a use case for Pi-Hole.

</comment><comment><USER62> Could Pi-hole stop it?

<comment><USER63> Microsoft adds new telemetry domains on a regular basis, so it would be a cat and mouse game.

I imagine if a large percentage of machines used DNS black holes, they'd move to DoH with a pinned certificate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would have expected Microsoft to stalk their users like always and go for an opt-out instead of an opt-in (which, by the way, is legally required according to the GDPR but national privacy offices seem unwilling to actually take Microsoft to court).

What's sad is that Microsoft actively lied in its description and privacy statement by stating it's possible to opt out of tracking. This is not possible for Windows 10 Home and Pro users. Advertising that opting out is possible when it's not is a blatant lie.

</comment><comment><USER64> > Um no, you need to allow opting out of telemetry.

Entitled people is what drives developers away from projects.</comment>


Amazon Has Pulled Its Ads from Bloomberg Over China Hack Story - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/amazon-pulled-ads-bloomberg-over-china-hack-story <comment><USER2> This can only mean they think Bloomberg is acting in bad faith. Otherwise a huge dick move of shooting the messenger. Not really sure how to feel about this, other than more intriqued. If bloomberg trusts their story, they have even less reason to back down now, so it forces a stalemate. Without evidence contradicting one party, this will just stay ugly. And its much harder to contradict a claim, so the attacks will continue. Is there an out for either side of this (assuming they both have compelling evidince to their claim)?</comment>


Bacon-powered blowtorch cuts through metal - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/bacon

<comment><USER2> Yes, pure oxygen is quite a thing. When photosynthesis first appeared on earth it did serious damage to all other life forms, they weren't used to so much O2 in the atmosphere.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reddit is going to go nuts for this

</comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of the Mythbusters salami rocket: [http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2006/04/episode_51_myths_reopened...](http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2006/04/episode_51_myths_reopened.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> So bacon is the basis for lightsaber technology?

Is it kosher? At least it smells good!

</comment><comment><USER6> Great. Now I'm hungry.</comment>


Why Is English Spelling So Weird? - <AUTHOR> http://mentalfloss.com/article/62995/why-english-spelling-so-weird <comment><USER2> 4-minute YouTube video (2015) by Arika Okrent at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhqr- GNNgGo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhqr-GNNgGo)</comment>


Why Programmers Work At Night - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/why-programmers-work-at-night-2013-1?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+businessinsider+%28Business+Insider%29 <comment><USER2> This is so stunningly true! I never actually thought about it, but with each passing sentence the light-bulb above my head grew brighter.

I love the lead-glass reference. It's true, but I personally imagined it as building a large sand castle with special grains, grain-by-grain, and than a wave of distraction smashing into it. Go find your fucking special sand grains. :(

I usually don't drink coffee at night, but I have been for a few weeks and I catch myself staring at imgur, tumblr, twitter, hacker news, even reading Wikipedia's featured article. So, I am usually telling myself "damnit, go work!" And I do, for a few minutes; then I go back to previous activities.

I can't really confirm my bright monitor is what makes me stay up--although my monitor's brightness is maxed--but my sleeping pattern is definitely fucked- up. I sometimes go to bed around 7 am or 8 am, depending on when my room mate starts making noise around the house. I sort of do it subconsciously, thinking "oh it's that late--early--already. better go to sleep."

Everyone who knows me thinks I'm a noon-waking-sloth. :(

</comment><comment><USER3> Re-print of this one from circa a year ago: [http://swizec.com/blog/why- programmers-work-at-night/swizec/...](http://swizec.com/blog/why-programmers- work-at-night/swizec/3198)

I've been thinking on and off about this since I read it then; and I mostly agree with it.

Except for the 'bright screens' cause. In my case, the same work pattern happens if I'm reading a deep (but not too abstract) book, writing on paper, or doing some hardware work.

Which I found quite interesting, as the book case kind of matches the 'sleepy brain' cause, and the hardware part happens more when I already have a plan and I'm just building with almost no stop (maker-type activity?).</comment>


StartSSL down and out? - <AUTHOR>

I tried to login to StartSSL, but the login fails. I get:
An error occurred during a connection to auth.startssl.com. Peer does not recognize and trust the CA that issued your certificate. (Error code: ssl_error_unknown_ca_alert)
I tried different browsers on different computers and different networks. I mailed them - no reaction yet. I tried to create an account on their forum, but it fails on the captcha repeatedly. I tried to login with OpenID, but no success. I created an account with their bugzilla site, and this works, but I cannot create tickets...
Yesterday I tried the first time, today no change. Does this mean they are out of business? <comment><USER2> Don't worry, we've all made this mistake, which is the reason it's the first item in their Login issue FAQ: [http://www.s-jpg.com/blog/?p=48](http://www.s-jpg.com/blog/?p=48)

Edit: note that part of creating a StartSSL account has you create a certificate for yourself to authenticate with. If you're signing up for the first time you obviously won't have done that

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> See [https://auth.startssl.com/](https://auth.startssl.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I cannot get connected, is this a SHA-1 (root) certificate by any chance?

</comment><comment><USER4> Works for me. (Chrome)

<comment><USER5> The webpage at [https://auth.startssl.com/](https://auth.startssl.com/) might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address. Error code: ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH

(chrome)</comment></comment>


Buffett-backed unicorn Snowflake nets $3.4B in record-breaking IPO - <AUTHOR> https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/snowflake-ipo-biggest-ever-software-listing-2020-9-1029593272 <comment><USER2> > Buffett agreed to invest upwards of $550 million

Berkshire. Buffet has delegated most of his investment decisions to Ted and Todd and management to Jain and Abel.

$550 million is 0.1% of Berkshire assets and 0.14% of total equity, this is not the level of decision that needs much attention from Buffet.</comment>