Open-Source Seeds - <AUTHOR> https://www.opensourceseeds.org/en/home <comment><USER2> Also, related: [https://www.opensourceecology.org/](https://www.opensourceecology.org/)

From their About page:

 _We're developing open source industrial machines that can be made for a fraction of commercial costs, and sharing our designs online for free. The goal of Open Source Ecology is to create an open source economy. [...]

OSE (Open Source Ecology) is currently developing a set of open source blueprints for the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – a set of the 50 most important machines that it takes for modern life to exist – everything from a tractor, to an oven, to a circuit maker. In the process of creating the GVCS, OSE intends to develop a modular, scalable platform for documenting and developing open source, libre hardware – including blueprints for both physical artifacts and for related open enterprises.

The current practical implementation of the GVCS is a life size LEGO set of powerful, self-replicating production tools for distributed production. The Set includes fabrication and automated machines that make other machines. Through the GVCS, OSE intends to build not individual machines – but machine construction systems that can be used to build any machine whatsoever. Because new machines can be built from existing machines, the GVCS is intended to be a kernel for building infrastructures of modern civilization._

<comment><USER3> That's a cool idea, but it suffers from the same problem that OLPC suffers from[1]: it's a lot of dreams and not a lot of substance.

Looking at their Machine Index[2], there are 50 machines.

Some of these are obviously _not_ "important machines that it takes for modern life to exist": a 3D Scanner[3], for example, is still an immature technology at best, and is ultimately useless without a computer, which isn't one of the machines (the same criticism applies to all their CNC machines). Similarly, the design for the car[4] is purely aesthetic without any concern for pragmatics--the exterior is covered in futuristic-looking curves that will make manufacturing more difficult, but it's unclear whether any design time has been spent on the actual, difficult parts of making a car work, things like the differential[5] which will be needed regardless of whether the car is gas-powered or electric (I'll point out that whether the car is gas-powered or electric is unclear from the designs).

Meanwhile, they're missing a lathe: it's boring technology, but I'm not sure how they're planning to make bolts to bolt together their machines without a lathe. Think of a "boring" tool you have in your house and it's probably not there: saws, drills, sanders are all missing. If you can't build a drill or a saw, I question whether you're ready to build a truck[6] or an industrial robot[7] (which again, won't work without a computer).

And if these are actually open source, I certainly can't find the source. All I see are PNGs. Their GitHub[8] contains mostly designs for parts of a 3D printer, which isn't one of the machines listed, and is even less important to modern life existing than any of the machines listed.

I'd be able to forgive _everything_ I've said if there was even _one_ working design on their site, but even simplest things like the Electric Motor/Generator[9] don't even have the descriptions filled out. If you wanted to build an electric motor/generator, you'd find more useful information on Wikipedia or YouTube.

Their most fleshed-out project seems to be the MicroHouse[10] which is, incidentally, not a machine. This means it doesn't require the engineering that the other projects do (which is probably why it's more fleshed out) but it also means that it isn't really useful: people have been figuring out how to build shelters since prehistory, from local materials rather than the super-cool-ultra-modern-eco-sustainable materials they're proposing. And this project suffers from the same problems as their overall projects: it has three sources of electricity but no apparent reference to plumbing.

I hate to be so negative about all this, but I fear that wildly unfocused projects like this take money and expertise away from projects with real potential and direction. Ideas are a dime a dozen: implementation is much more rare.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21046984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21046984)

[2] [https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/gvcs-machine- index/#p...](https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/gvcs-machine- index/#prettyPhoto\[portfolio\]/2/)

[3] [https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/3d-scanner-2/](https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/3d-scanner-2/)

[4] [https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/car/](https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/car/)

[5] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_(mechanical_dev...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_\(mechanical_device\))

[6] [https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/truck/](https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/truck/)

[7] [https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/industrial- robot...](https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/industrial-robot/)

[8] [https://github.com/OpenSourceEcology](https://github.com/OpenSourceEcology)

[9] [https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/electric- motorge...](https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/electric- motorgenerator/)

[10] [https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/microhouse/](https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/microhouse/)

<comment><USER4> The essential elements of building civilization involve making stuff by hand. You can't build "machine construction systems that can be used to build any machine whatsoever" unless and until you _know_ how to make those machines. If _you_ can't make a Jacquard loom or an electric motor, your machine sure can't either.

My list of essential machines are the ones I'd need:

Metalworking: before you can make cars and transistors, you have to get your hands dirty, make steel and machine gears.

First, Lathe. kerkeslager is right, it's the foundation tool of machining.

2: Blacksmith's forge. You can make a lot of useful starting tools with one. Just slow.

3: Steam engine. Even a crappy one is a game changer.

4: Bessemer furnace, for larger scale. It was the backbone of the Industrial Revolution.

5: Milling machine. You can make about anything, including basic gears.

Agriculture

1: Combine

2: Cotton gin

Misc

1: Windmill

2: Electric motor

3: Battery.

4: Internal Combustion engine

5: Printing Press

6: Waterwheel. (But I live in Florida.)

7: Jacquard loom

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most of what you'd call open source seed are varieties produced through university research programs. Independent seed farmers reproduce and sell the seed in commercial level quantities.

I think this license is potentially important. There are commercial seed companies taking these public varieties, renaming them and selling them as their own product. There is nothing technically wrong with that.

However where it gets sticky is where they place legal demands on the farmer buying and planting the seed. If the open source license prohibited them from doing that it would be a very good thing.

If somewhere on the bag they had to put the public name the university assigned that would help. Farmers sometimes plant seed from two different companies and think they're spreading diversity risk when in fact they're planting the same variety!

<comment><USER6> >However where it gets sticky is where they place legal demands on the farmer buying and planting the seed. If the open source license prohibited them from doing that it would be a very good thing.

Maybe something like GPL for seeds?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a hemp farmer. I definitely believe we need some kind of system like this to prevent corporations from monopolizing certain phenotypes. Sadly, I can't see this working very well in practice for our industry. Cultivars already go to great lengths to protect their unique strains. Which is unfortunate for a lot of research on the endocannibinoid system.

</comment><comment> kube-system I'm not sure 'open source' is a very good qualifier to use in the name of this project. I read the license, and I'm not seeing anything analogous to 'source'. It doesn't appear that any details about the development of the seed has to be shared along with the rights to use the seed.

If I'm not mistaken here, this just looks like a copyleft license, which is a totally separate concern from 'open source'.

<comment><USER8> I agree. I think they used the term 'open source' in reference to the freedoms that open source licenses often afford. I'm sure RMS doesn't like the inclusion of this sentence.

> The rules of open source were first introduced by computer scientists in the > GNU Manifesto and lead to development of the General Public Licence (GPL) > and Creative Commons Licence, which are often used instead of copyright.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem with this is that there's no legal mechanism to enforce it besides (perhaps!) contract law.

If an entity receives the seeds without the contract attached, it can hardly be considered to have agreed to the terms. The providing party may be in breach of contract, but there's no way to bind the receiving entity. A single 'rogue' link in the chain makes it all meaningless.

Of course, a variety would have to be truly spectacular for any company to take the effort and PR risk to get involved in that kind of shenanigans, so this approach may have some practical, if not legal, efficacy.

Ironically, a potentially stronger way to enforce the license terms would be to... patent the varieties. It's a quagmire of varying rules internationally, though, and there are some exemptions for the use of protected varieties in further breeding of varieties that could then be protected and subject to less 'free' terms. Plants won't ever be subject to the GPL.

I'm very sympathetic to the project's aims, but even on a purely ethical basis there is room for argument. If we want more plant varieties to be produced to tackle humanity's next challenges (and... we do), should we not be encouraging companies to make very significant, long-term investments in breeding efforts? It's hard to see how that can happen without some kind of time- and scope- limited intellectual property rights, even if the systems we have now aren't ideal.

<comment><USER10> What aspects make the contract unenforceable? It seems to meet the legal requirements.

<comment><USER9> It's only enforcable against the parties to the contract. If a party receiving the seeds then passes them (against the terms of the contract) to another entity without the contract attached, that ultimately-receiving entity has not accepted the contract and therefore isn't bound by it.

An action can be taken against the initial party for breach of contract, of course, for whatever good that does, but that the seeds are now free of the contractual obligations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The fact seeds can even be patented is absurd. Nice to see others agree.

</comment><comment><USER12> Do they patent something which is available naturally ?

<comment><USER13> Define "naturally". People can spend decades breeding and crossing plants to optimize various properties, and such 'products' can get legal protection. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeders%27_rights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeders%27_rights)

<comment><USER12> Nice. But instead of cleaning up licence and all digital protection looks like we are adding more to it.

<comment><USER12> Because all these grip the commercialization concept very strong. If we have to break the system we cannot do by adding another gate.

This is something which I wanted to convey by mentioning naturally.

Living beings shouldn't be tied up or held in control by means of money and other concepts.

Open source seeding I misunderstood than what it actually means. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Related, in French: [https://www.letelegramme.fr/finistere/morlaix/roscoff- une-ma...](https://www.letelegramme.fr/finistere/morlaix/roscoff-une-maison- pour-les-semences-26-09-2018-12090211.php)

</comment><comment><USER15> It's bizarre there is a need to come up with "open source" seeds, to counteract the insanity of "patented" seeds. But I guess until patents on genes will be forbidden for good, it's necessary.

</comment><comment><USER16> >Three requirements have to be met for the licensing: > > The variety must be new.

I'm curious, what's the legal status of existing varieties that aren't patented?

<comment><USER17> Patents require novelty - long-standing varieties are therefore not subject to patenting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is this related to the OpenAg thing that was discussed on HN earlier? Because as I recall, there were quite a few doubts about how that sort of thing would work.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think I was the only one who thought about pseudo RNG and some distributed seeds to use.

</comment><comment><USER20> this website is very sensitive on scroll event!

<comment><USER21> Seriously. I can't imagine the rationale behind it being so sensitive and acceleration-packed.</comment></comment>


Meaningless jobs that are killing the human spirit - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-15/bullshit-jobs-by-david-graeber-review <comment><USER2> basically a dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389) . That's an article written by the author of the book.

<comment><USER3> Who does this guy's PR?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't help but think of the telephone sanitizers from planet Golgafrincham in _Hitchiker 's Guide to the Galaxy_ whenever someone makes the claim that a class of jobs is useless.

 _These tales of impending doom allowed the Golgafrinchans to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population. The story was that they would build three Ark ships. Into the A ship would go all the leaders, scientists and other high achievers. The C ship would contain all the people who made things and did things, and the B ark would hold everyone else, such as hairdressers and telephone sanitisers. They sent the B ship off first, but of course the other two-thirds of the population stayed on the planet and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone._ [0]

[0] [http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Golgafrincham](http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Golgafrincham)

<comment><USER5> I've read a lot about Douglas Adams and it's my opinion that these pieces of his books are aimed exactly at what the article is about.

</comment></comment><comment> le-mark _For instance, consider the poor souls whose work entails implementing the ubiquitous feature of automatic phone systems: when you call about a bill or service issue, you have to speak your name into a computer system; once you've articulated "speak to an agent" some 16 times to said computer system, waited 20 additional minutes, and finally reached a human being, you immediately have to provide the same information you already gave the system._

So funny and so true. With respect to software development, I've worked on so many projects that were cancelled before ever being released. Built e-commerce and warehouse systems for a $300M company that went bankrupt. Millions of lines of code just disappeared. It's hard to take software development seriously after experiencing this a few times.

This profession is a money grab, get what you can while you can get it, before the bubble bursts. Surely developer salaries are in a bubble, right?

<comment><USER6> The quote you provide shows a breakdown in process, not software. Wherever this human being is, they do not have access to the information provided beforehand (lack of communication between human software and phone software), did not look/can't find it (lack of training), or they have to go through a checklist of processes regardless of information provided (managers don't trust the phone system to do the job right).

Either way, I do not understand your correlation between that quote and how your lines of code disappear - as with all things, when a company does, sometimes so do the products they offer - there is nothing different here.

<comment><USER7> The correlation is if you spend months or years working on something that has no value or that immediately ceases to exist, then your job is BS.

<comment><USER8> So does that mean the scientists and astronauts that worked on Space Shuttle Challenger had a BS job?

<comment><USER7> Arguably the entire shuttle program was BS. It was a huge white elephant for NASA: prodigiously expensive, saddled with impractical requirements by the Air Force, and producing negligible new scientific results compared to the unmanned probes.

<comment><USER9> Oh really. The whole point is to figure out ways of inhabiting outer space. The " negligible" results gave such silly things like advanced radiation shielding, thermal clothing, advanced air filtering, developments in radioisotope generators and solar panels, material science, even project planning (though saddled with bureaucracy).

What it did not improve is the cost of space travel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > It hardly matters if Graeber's history is accurate. His best-selling Dept: > The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, $22.99) garnered some controversy in > this regard, with academics identifying myriad false claims—for instance, > that Apple Inc. was started by former IBM engineers.

Sigh. I was thinking of reading the book until that point.

<comment><USER11> Here's from a review of it:

> Now, this may sound a little silly - if someone wrote a book called "Metal: > The First 5,000 Years," and then filled that book with stories of war and > bloodshed, never failing to remind us after each anecdote that metal was > involved in some way, we might be left scratching our heads as to why the > author was so fixated on /metal/ instead of on /war itself/. And in fact, > that is indeed how I felt for much of the time I was reading Graeber's book. > The problem was exacerbated by the fact that Graeber continually talks > /around/ the idea of debt in other ways, mentioning debt crises (without > reflecting deeply on why these happen), the periodic use and disuse of > coinage (which apparently is just as bad as debt in terms of enabling the > capitalism monster), and any other phenomenon related to debt, without > weaving these observations into a coherent whole.

[http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review- debt-...](http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt- first-5000-years.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I found one section of this particularly ironic:

"For instance, consider the poor souls whose work entails implementing the ubiquitous feature of automatic phone systems: when you call about a bill or service issue, you have to speak your name into a computer system; once you've articulated "speak to an agent" some 16 times to said computer system, waited 20 additional minutes, and finally reached a human being, you immediately have to provide the same information you already gave the system."

We work with rural smallholder farmers in Kenya, building phone systems to serve them and help them get information about better farming and helping service their agricultural input loans.

I don't feel my job is pointless at all. Then again, we're on track to build much better phone systems than the average mega-corporate in the US builds, but I still think this is amusing.

</comment><comment><USER13> A few problems:

1\. Lots of basic scientific research historically has not panned out. Does that mean that scientific research is somehow intrinsically unvaluable? To me, it seems not. There are lots of jobs out there that end up not themselves being valuable, but because society tried lots of different things some of them end up being valuable.

2\. "To the ancient Greeks, he claims, you were either a slave and your whole life was owned, or you sold a good" \- there certainly were paid laborers in Ancient Greece. See eg, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_drachma#Value](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_drachma#Value) \- a drachma was roughly a day's wage.

3\. Is the claim people make that the existence of unnecessary jobs is somehow a unique problem to Corporations in Capitalism? Are there not unnecessary jobs in socialist of communist societies? Are there not unnecessary jobs in government? Arguably, governments today "are less and less about making, building, fixing, or maintaining things, and more and more about political processes of appropriating, distributing and allocating money and resources" \- why the fixation on corporations?

<comment><USER14> The article felt like it had a definite political slant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> >Anthropologist David Graeber's new book accuses the global economy of churning out meaningless jobs that are killing the human spirit.

You know what really kills the human spirit? Poverty, starvation, war.

Maybe there are a ton of crappy jobs people are taking, but they are making a living in the most peaceful and prosperous times in human history.

>"That one person's time can belong to someone else is actually quite peculiar"

Huh? You come into this world with nothing, of course you're going to trade your time for other things you want. It is possible to not do this, but then you're probably not making money, relying on family/state for financial assistance, and generally not being productive. Business owners' time is owned by their customers, by the way, that's how they make their living.

>He says he periodically receives "unsolicited communications" from such people, who insist that no one "would ever spend company money on an employee who wasn't needed." LOLOLOLOL.

Of course the free market isn't 100% efficient. You can criticize and laugh at that all you want. But good luck coming up with a better alternative. Lord knows we've tried, through all of human history.

>By positioning themselves as job creators and maneuvering the political system to laud any and all jobs, rather than asking if they're meaningful or help society or the employees, "they" can maintain power indefinitely. (This would be Graeber's ruling elite, the 1 percent targeted by the Occupy Movement.)

Ah yes, that pesky 1 percent. They earn 21% of all income. But guess what? They pay 40% of all income taxes [1]. The top 1% pays as much in taxes as the bottom 90%. Such terrible people.

Of course they're not perfect, let's get rid of all rent seeking behavior, but let's also not throw the baby out with the bathwater by demonizing the most productive and highest contributing people in society.

People don't appreciate the foundations of their society that they take for granted. They have a hard time feeling useful, so they criticize. Nothing new.

[1] - [https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income- tax-...](https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax- data-2016-update/)</comment>


Hermes – A message broker built on top of Kafka - <AUTHOR> https://allegro.tech/2019/05/hermes-1-0-released.html <comment><USER3> Can someone help me understand the value proposition for Hermes? The only thing I can see is that it abstracts away producing to and consuming from Kafka. The use cases provided answer why you'd use a message broker system, but not why you'd want to do it over HTTP.

Edit: I understand HTTP is easier than Kafka, but is this something developers really struggle with when adopting Kafka? My experience is that they struggle with the nuances, behavior, and maintenance of Kafka/ZooKeeper more than anything.

I also didn't see how it dealt with concepts like exactly once delivery - <USER2> experiences in that area?

<comment><USER4> Exactly once delivery is not a thing, and confluent needs to stop openly lying to people about it. At least once delivery and idempotence is not the same, and has existed forever.

Calling it "exactly once" is marketing BS. It's the same as Oracle claiming for years to support serializable transactions when they didn't, except that one is technically possible, they just didn't support it in actuality.

<comment><USER5> They do not use the phrase exactly-once delivery as far as I've seen, they say "exactly-once semantics". And this is referring to a specific set of Kafka features that you previously had to build yourself if you used Kafka. I have not seen any reference to them claiming their solution is somehow novel. In fact, it just wraps up patterns people were doing anyway.

Oracle claiming to support serializable transactions is also false (as you say), but calling it a lie is not the whole story. "ANSI serializable" and actually serializable are not the same thing. Oracle is "ANSI SQL-92 serializable", as in no named anomalies from the spec. There just happen to be more anomalies like write skew which are not in the spec.

<comment><USER6> No they do, I completely agree with the original poster on this. Confluent over egg the marketing, I think they may of changed to the phrase "exactly once schematics" as Apache Pulsar labelled it that from the start and people calling out exactly once.

<comment><USER4> Even from their announcement blog post, they're intentionally mixing words - [https://www.confluent.io/blog/exactly-once-semantics-are- pos...](https://www.confluent.io/blog/exactly-once-semantics-are-possible- heres-how-apache-kafka-does-it/)

They may never describe Kafka itself without the word "semantics", but here are some other snippets:

\- "I know what some of you are thinking. Exactly once delivery is impossible" \- "While some have outright said that exactly once delivery is probably impossible!"

They mix their phrasing depending on what they're talking about, and whether they are referring to Kafka directly or indirectly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This sounds very interesting. Did anyone get from the homepage what kinds of guarantees this offers? What if the HTTP endpoint where Hermes should push the data to is down? Does it retry? If yes, for how long?

<comment><USER7> Answering my own question (RTFM): [https://hermes- pubsub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/subscrib...](https://hermes- pubsub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/subscribing/)

You can configure how long it retries and with what strategy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If any of you looking for message and streaming system under single system then pulsar.apache.org supports both and lot more reliable and scales better than kafka

</comment><comment><USER9> Very nice with a simple wrapper. That said I'm wondering if 9 out of 10 use cases could do with something simpler, ie zeromq, which scales really well.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can someone provide actual high-level use cases for using Kafka? Prefereably use-cases not handled by RabbitMQ.

I've seen a few talks about Kafka but they focused on the internals. My guess is that Kafka is for large systems for which managing a multi-node RabbitMQ cluster is too much trouble.

<comment><USER11> I've long had the inverse view - I'm not sure what good use cases there are for Rabbitmq that couldn't be handled better by a Kafka cluster.

One company I worked with used Kafka as their central source of truth across the organisation. All events generated by users were thrown into a massive Kafka cluster. Each team in the organisation cared about a different view into that data (financials, marketing, fraud, what we display to that user on the website, etc). Each team would ingest the same kafka queue and do different things with it - often consuming certain events into their own Postgres instance, or other things like that.

I used Kafka when I made my reddit r/place clone a few years ago because it gives great read and write amplification. With Postgres as a central source of truth, you can only handle thousands of writes per second. And reads will slow down the instance. With Kafka you can handle about 2M/sec. And reads can really easily be serviced from other machines - you can just have a bunch of downstream Kafka instances consuming from the root, and serving your readers in turn.

It may be that you can also solve all these problems with a well configured rabbitmq cluster. But coming from a database world I find it more comfortable to reason about architecture, performance and correctness with Kafka.

<comment><USER12> Sounds like your org used Kafka for event sourcing. This is almost always a bad idea, event sourcing and aggregate reconstruction is a nightmare IMO.

Kafka used as a pure FIFO cache for regular CRUD endpoints works fine

<comment><USER11> Yes; they did. It worked pretty well actually.

Why do you think it's a bad idea? Most of the arguments against event sourcing that I've read seem to be "yes but the tooling isn't very good". That might be true, but maybe we solve that problem with more investment into event sourcing; not less of it.

<comment><USER12> TLDR the tooling is so bad it's basically impossible to run at scale. I worked for a company that tried. Maybe on a small scale it's fine, but replays and storage of past events takes insane amounts of space at high event rates. To the point that storage costs and replay times became a real problem. (Many terabytes and days)

I also don't think it's a great idea in general. The event stream directly replicates a DB commit log, and the aggregates your tables. It's building your own database

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Increasingly, all technology news sounds like:

"X: a blazingly fast X built on top of {something I vaguely thought did X}"

<comment><USER14> "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ironically: Hermes was the name of a JMS user interface/testing tool.

<comment><USER16> It's also the name of a hilariously bad courier in the UK - so bad in fact that most people call it Herpes instead.

<comment><USER17> It's also the name of a bureaucrat on a certain tv show.

<comment><USER18> curiously, nobody mentions the clothing designer :)

<comment><USER19> thought it was a handbag designer.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>