German expressions that don't exist in English - <AUTHOR> https://leowid.com/the-power-of-naming-what-we-feel-10-german-expressions-that-dont-exist-in-english-and-their-wisdom/ <comment><USER4> No, these expressions exist in English, they just have a slightly different meaning. And in the case of "Entwicklung", the English pendant "Development" even has the exact same origin: to unwrap or unfold (the opposite of envelope). There certainly are German expressions that do not exist in English, but this list does not do a good job at collecting them.

My personal impression is that German makes it easier to express abstract impersonal goals and needs. For example, consider the word "Sachzwang" which translates to "intrinsic necessity" - i.e. something that must be a certain way to satisfy the naturally given constraints. This can for example be used in the wonderful expression: sachzwangreduzierte Ehrlichkeit. (Reduced honesty due to inherent constraints.)

Often, English has very elegant and short ways to express something similar, in that case it could simply be "spin", as in giving an article a political spin. However, while "spin" is something done intentionally by someone (the spin doctor, another nice expression), the German variant is passive and implies that "die Sache" (roughly "the mission") dictate the doctoring with the truth. This again illustrates what I mean by German tending to more abstract, impersonal goals.

<comment><USER5> I dislike when people say "this cannot be translated correctly into your language" as it logically doesn't make sense. perhaps they mean word for word?

I'm sure any language can conjure up a similar feeling and combination of words. Maybe not a literal translation, but by virtue of being a human construct, any language can be crafted and molded into anything.

<comment><USER6> Some languages are inherently less expressive than others. English is not very expressive and therefore a large number of words phrases and idioms don't have an analogue that makes sense in english. Trying to reduce them to something that makes sense is like trying to explain a joke. It defeats the purpose.

Anyone who speaks >1 languages is aware of this.

<comment><USER7> > Some languages are inherently less expressive than others. English is not > very expressive...

I call bullshit. Do you have any justification for this claim?

<comment><USER6> Yeah I speak 3 languages and all 3 have mutually exclusive constructs that can't be translated while carrying over the 'true meaning'. English is by far the least expressive of the 3.

A common example is slavic мат. A repertoire of profanities that simply have no English translation, no equivalent, not even a meaningful loose translation/explanation. The best you can do is find the nearest approximate meaningful English construct, but it's a bit like projecting 3d space onto a 2d plane. You fundamentally lose information.

I'm not sure what you're calling bullshit on. The fact that not all languages 1:1 map to each other especially when some classes of languages have fundamentally different constructs like gendered variants of every word, or the fact that some languages are more or less expressive, or the fact that English falls to the side of the less expressive scale. All 3 of these statements are trivial to verify with a couple google searches without even being a multilingual speaker.

<comment><USER8> This is an entirely subjective judgment on your part that you are advancing as though it were a matter of fact. Have you considered the possibility that you know English least well of your three languages, and that you are therefore better able to express yourself in the other two? Also, please provide a source for your "fact" that some languages are inherently more "expressive" than others (whatever that means).

<comment><USER6> I provided a trivial and concrete example: мат. English is inherently incapable of expressing мат.

And English being my strongest language, I'd say no, I don't think it's because I know it least well of the three.

Perhaps this is just something that doesn't make sense to people who only know one language, but it self-evident to multilinguals.

If you want a source, click TFA - a list of German expressions that don't exist in English. The discussion here on whether or not it's a great list, but no one disagrees there are phrases that don't exist in English.

<comment><USER7> But that goes both ways. If we accept that "urspung" does not translate directly to "origin", then obviously "origin" does not translate directly to "ursprung" either. So I don't see how this proves one language is more expressive than another?

Unless you can somehow prove that _any_ English word or phrase have a direct German translation but not vice-versa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As an Italian living in Germany, and as a lover of the German language, I think this is not a good list. It reads like it was put together to fit the author's approach to coaching. Entwicklung, indeed, is the best example of this. It is exactly the same in English.

What's really fun about German: as a non native you can get to a point where you create involuntary neologisms by putting together words you already know. Surprisingly, Germans find it mostly funny and tend to understand well what you mean, suggesting that there's an underlying plasticity to this language, if you're __mutig __enough to play with it and its admittedly strict Grenzen. I just cant 's wrap my head around the rule of writing every substantive with a capital letter though, which I interpret as an annoying need to always circumstantiate a purported objectivity of the perceived reality.

With some friends we started coming up with these neologisms on purpose. My favorite one is "Sonnenschuld" or "Wetterschuld", which is that feeling you get in Berlin when you have to work during the summer while the sun is shining outside. You know you're doing the right thing, but at the same time you know you're wasting a precious opportunity to enjoy a rather seldom occurrence.

<comment><USER10> Interesting that you find beautiful days to be a rare occurrence in Berlin. Perhaps because you're coming from Italy? I have the opposite attitude -- summer days are easier to spend inside in Berlin, as the weather is generally very good and there's always another beautiful day coming!

<comment><USER9> What you describe is making Sonnenschuld worse, because you know you have to take in as much sunny days as possible in the summer, preparing for the depressing gray days of winter!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Doesn't every language have such a thing? What makes German more exceptional than English? Or Chinese more exceptional than English? I'm certain there are expressions that don't exist in every language, and even if you translated them, they might not translate well due to cultural or linguistic issues (try translating Monty Python to Chinese while keeping British wit and hoping your average Chinese viewer understands the context of the humor).

This might sound overgeneralized but I think every language has its own qualities. Most languages have evolved out of cultural needs (consider words like "Internet," "email," and "texting").

For example, Chinese has a word distinguishing language (e.g 英文, literally English culture) and the language itself (英語, literally English language). Most people in normal parlance would say 英文 over 英語 for English, because the culture is inseparable from the language. That's why Chinese speakers use -文 for languages over -語, such as 中文、英文、日文、西班牙文.

For the example of Entschuldigen or "apologize," Chinese uses several expressions such as 對不起、抱歉. In the case of 對不起 it literally means the speaker cannot face the recipient, as in loss of face. Or another expression is 「不好意思」; this literally means "poor meaning or intentions." Its English equivalent is approximately "excuse me."

I'm not trying to put down the value of the article. It's highly intriguing. I just find the exceptionalism a little off-putting when languages like Japanese have similar constructs.

<comment><USER12> I guess what makes German more exceptional than English is the common wisdom about the languages (common wisdom used here as something not necessarily wise or even insightful but just a commonly understood thing that is maybe not even enunciated very often).

The common wisdom has that English is a language that imports new concepts from other languages as needed (which implies that these concepts somehow are not English for having been imported), and the common wisdom of German is that they have a word for that slightly messed up concept you just came up with in it, also the habit of German of creating compounds gives the impression of a language in which every concept can be found because there is a word compounded of other words to describe it.

Both of these are illustrated by the importation of the word schadenfreude.

<comment><USER13> Have you ever studied German? It has an absolutely dizzying number of French and/or Latin loanwords.

<comment><USER12> yes (although I can't remember any of it now whenever I am there for about a week I start being able to communicate when shopping I suppose if I spent a month I might be doing better but I'm never there for more than a week at a time), but anyway I'm talking about the popular conception of German from the American/English perception and the self-perception of the English language from the perception of English speakers. Which I thought was obvious?

<comment><USER13> Sorry, you are right. I misinterpreted your comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> These are good examples of what linguists call a "Volksetymologie", meaning a usually wrong derivation of words which are no longer correctly understood or have changed meaning. A popular example is when a German newspaper did one of those stupid surveys for the "most beautiful German word", and the winner was "Habseligkeiten". The cited reason was because it combines "Haben" (to have) with "Selig" ("blessed"), the profane with the heavenly, but the real etymology is actually different.

As is already mentioned here, the "-mut" in Wehmut does not mean "courage" but is actually identical to the English "mood". I would also highly doubt his interpretation of "Einsam". The suffix "-sam" usually means simply to having something. "Liebenswürdig" is difficult, because "Liebe" means many things (from simply "friendly" to modern romantic "love"), and "-würdig" is more in terms of being adequate or appropriate. When you say "Er ist sehr liebenswürdig", this does not mean that HE is worthy of love, but simply that he is a friendly person, meaning he knows how to treat people properly. As was also already mentioned here, "Entwicklung" and "development" are literally the same, and the same goes for "Ursprung" and "origin".

There is also the simple fact that German allows for building compositions, so what would be considered an expression in English can be one word in German (like "Sinneswandel" for "change of mind"). But this does not mean that it "does not exist".

As a German, the word I'm _really_ missing when speaking English is the simple word "doch", which more or less means "No, but yeah". If you've ever watched German kids in a "Nein! Doch!" match, you know how powerful that simple word is. I think there was actually an article here some time ago that English used to have this with "Yay" and "Nay" in addition to "Yes" and "No", but that this got lost. Of course German is not unique in having "doch", most other roman languages have it as well (the French have "Si", which in Italy is the normal "Yes").

EDIT: Found the article:

[https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-part-of- no-...](https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-part-of-no-totally- dont-you-understand?verso=true)

<comment><USER15> > Of course German is not unique in having "doch", most other roman languages > ...

Slightly off topic but from a historical linguistics perspective, German is not a Romance language.

<comment><USER16> True but I read it as an error in writing not in understanding. It should read something like "it is true in other languages including romance languages." Or something similar but a bit more elegant

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Me: Moved to Hamburg this year, has 320 days on Duolingo and finished an actual beginner's German course so far.

I can only partially agree to the statements made in this thread about the quality of this list but I've been fascinated with German words that have no English counterparts, at least not completely. My favorite one so far is "Waldeinsamkeit"\--literally "forest soltitude" but the translation does not capture the "calm, contemplative atmosphere amidst a beautiful setting"[1]. Before moving to Hamburg I used to camp a handful of times a year for stargazing and I _feel_ that I understand this concept somehow.

On a more "Auslander" observation: when I moved in to Hamburg I was struck by how early the city sleeps, how dark the streets are at night. Sure there are streetlights[2] but for the second largest city in a European hub such as Germany, they might as well be lighting a residential village! For my connotation of a metropolitan area, Hamburg at night just ain't cutting it.

Until, I learned about "Waldeinsamkeit". Again this is probably just the Auslander talking but I have since thought that Waldeinsamkeit is the philosophy behind Hamburg's urban design. They may have urbanized for 20th century living but, if I may be poetic, they still want that beautiful serenity of darkness.

[1] [https://blogs.transparent.com/german/untranslatable- german-w...](https://blogs.transparent.com/german/untranslatable-german-words- waldeinsamkeit/) [2] though there are nooks and crannies in Hamburg that are notably really dark, sometimes only lighted by the apartments along the street.

<comment><USER18> Fellow Hamburg immigrant here. I admire your optimism and the will to perceive an intention behind the darkness (which was also one of my first impressions of Hamburg). Unfortunately, I don't see it that way, but more as general unfriendliness of the city towards a random individual. Other things in the same vain that I noticed (coming from the Balkans, if important) are: very few overhangs that the buildings offer as means of shade from the rain - <USER2> there is no place for a pedestrian to shelter from the rain, which is absurd with amount of wet days Hamburg has. Another thing that irks me is the lack of public water taps. Such a basic and affordable civilization achievement - <USER3> yet not a single one in a 2M city.

Of course, I adore and enjoy the city, these are just few things that I can't really understand.

<comment><USER19> There is the concept of light pollution, Lichtverschmutzung. If a city is too bright, you won't see the stars, animals would have difficulty to sleep, etc... The city has areas which are lighted, but in other areas it's darker. See the link to the Lichtkonzept I've put in another comment.

> public water taps

That's an interesting question. A few decades ago this was more common, but it has been removed over the years. I think there is a fear of pollution and also costs involved. There are only a few in the city:

[https://www.hamburgwasser.de/privatkunden/themen/trinkwasser...](https://www.hamburgwasser.de/privatkunden/themen/trinkwassersaeulen/)

The Aussenalster is a popular jogging training track and it has public water there.

Currently there are plans of the local government to install hundred public water taps in the city in the coming years and two hundred in schools. That's already a movement in various other cities, too: Blue Communities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've been struggling to find an equivalent for 'overengineered' in German - there's verschlimmbessern, a portmanteu verb of 'verbessern' (improve) and 'schlimm' (bad), it's what you use when you want to improve something but the end-product is worse.

However, German tech (to me!) has a overengineering problem, not a verschlimmbessern problem, there's nothing being improved. Just look at modern German cars, impossible to fix yourself, very expensive to have serviced, for no real gain, pure overengineering. Is there a word?

(edit: there's an opposite for OP's 'Lebensmut' \- 'Lebensmüdigkeit', literally 'tired of being alive', i.e. suicidal)

<comment><USER21> We don't have a word for it because we don't see it as overengineering, we see it simply as engineering ;)

On a more serious note, there is this idea that at their core systems are about accepting inefficiency in order to gain consistency and simplicity. From this perspective us Germans accept inefficiency for consistencies sake but not for simplicity.

<comment><USER22> > We don't have a word for it because we don't see it as overengineering, we > see it simply as engineering ;)

Haha! Yes, totally! No German engineer "overengineers". Ever! It's called "refinement", "evolution" and "sophistication". There is no language to criticise engineers in a nation dominated by engineers (and businesspeople). ;)

<comment><USER23> There is no 'underengineer' either though, is there?

<comment><USER22> If one would really want to name the two terms in question, one might say:

* überentwickelt for overengineered (not really used)

* unterentwickelt for underdeveloped (matches the word, even)

 _" Unterentwickelt"_ is a term we do not use lightly, since it is a word we often used in elementary school to bully some kids, so that has that smell to it. (Usually you also add a howling sound to that word and give yourself a smack on your forehead ;))

<comment><USER24> When it's not 'hochwertig' und 'langlebig', dann ist es 'Schrott'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Most of these have close English equivalents, but as a second language learner, the author does not have a large enough vocabulary to summon them easily.

Learning a second language is not the same experience as being a native speaker.

Having grown up without German in my life, I will never have the eloquence or depth of vocabulary in German that I do in English. That's OK. It is the nature of the human animal.

Knowing my limitations, I would be reluctant to write an article about "English expressions that do not exist in German"

</comment><comment><USER26> Interestingly enough the words exists in Swedish as well, spelling is a bit different but the meaning is more or less the same:

German -> Swedish

Wehmot -> vemod

Entwicklung -> utveckling

Einsam -> ensam

Stimmung -> stämmning

Entschuldigen -> ursäkta

Aufrichtigkeit -> uppriktighet

Lebensmut -> livsmod

Ursprung -> ursprung

Liebenswürdig -> älskvärd

Note that Sinneswandel is missing not sure if there is a direct translation in Swedish

<comment><USER27> I mean, technically you can do this in English as well. English is a Germanic language and compound words are fully legitimate in the language. The following don't exist in the colloquialisms or formal records of the language, but are grammatically correct:

      Wehmot -> sorecourage
      Einsam -> onepeace
      Stimmung -> innervoice
      Lebensmut -> lifegrit
      Liebenswürdig -> loveworthy

And, despite the author's claims, many do have direct equivalent words in English:

      Ursprung -> outspring
      Aufrichtigkeit -> uprightness
      Entwicklung -> unwrapping
      Entschuldigen -> unguilt

All of which could be used in the manner described in the article. As well as having accurate one-word synonyms:

      outspring: origin / original
      uprightness: compunction
      unwrapping: developing, delving, growth
      unguilt: unburden

The main difference in the languages is that modern English (especially 20th century on) has relied more on loanwords (another compound word) and hyphenations to augment. Love-worthy, for instance:

[https://www.wordnik.com/words/love- worthy](https://www.wordnik.com/words/love-worthy)

It's hard to count compound words as "words that don't exist in other languages", honestly. Meanwhile, there are perfectly acceptable (compound or not) words that actually give voice to something hard to describe in other languages. Which is a far more interesting (IMHO) concept; such as "schadenfreude" or, going the other way for many languages, "irony".

<comment><USER28> I am not convinced that Wehmut translates to sorecourage. The -mut ending appears in other emotions as well, Sanftmut, Schwermut for example. I think it relates to words like "Gemüt" and corresponds to "mood".

So

Soremood Softmood Heavymood

<comment><USER27> I took some liberties on a couple to try and capture the meaning of the German word; "einsam" for instance would better translate into "onesome".

I'm also not a native speaker, so I could be completely off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Although German language is full of great words, the expressions from the post exist in other languages, even in my native tongue Turkish, which belongs to a completely different language family.

However in Germany these expressions are regularly used on TV,press and literature. They have become and are powerful building blocks of a German speakers thoughts, giving them an advantage to think better.

<comment><USER30> So while we're in the market for "words your language doesn't have" \-- any recommendations for Turkish words you haven't seen in other languages?

<comment><USER29> I don't have a list of such expression handy. But there is one specific feature of Turkish language which I find interesting and really smart.

Check these words:

At, aş, it, us, su, ev, er, te, ot, et, ar, ön, an, in, un, en,

Literally translated: horse, food, dog, intelligence, water, house, man/soldier, far, grass, meat, honor, front, moment (time), shelter/cave, flour, most/width,

Many important aspects of daily was are words as short as possible and have survived thousand years of change and part of modern Turkish language. There are also a large number of 3 letter words for further important things such as ana (mother), soy (ancestry), boy (length/race), toy (young/unexperienced), and (promise).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> While we're proposing useful words, may I humbly suggest two useful adverbs:

"fei" (Bavarian): in contrast to what I think you're assuming. "Des is fei da letzte" \-- "This is the last one, and I think you thought there would be more".

"als" (Allemannic/Suabian): something like "in the default case, which is also frequent".

<comment><USER31> As an American, I observe that the Brits use "isn't it" to express something similar to "fei". Example: "That's the entrance, isn't it?" seems to mean "You thought that that is the exit, did you? You're an idiot." The closest we Yanks have is the sarcastic "That's an exit? Yeah, right."

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> "Entschuldigen" is a pretty fascinating verb, but not for the author's reasons. It literally means to remove guilt from someone (not specifically from oneself as the author states) and is kind of equivalent to "forgive". Commonly it is misused in German: people say "ich entschuldige mich", literally meaning they're removing their own guilt from theirselves and thus forgiving theirselves, which is kind of impossible and not what's actually meant. The right phrase would be "um Entschuldigung bitten" (to ask to be excused) which actually is rarely used.

<comment><USER33> > The right phrase would be

The right phrase, depending on your religion, is what people use in practice (descriptivism), or what's listed in dictionary (prescriptivism). In this case, the two happen to agree: [https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/entschuldigen](https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/entschuldigen) "jemanden wegen eines falschen Verhaltens o. Ä. um Verständnis, Nachsicht, Verzeihung bitten", example: "sich förmlich, in aller Form entschuldigen"

I understand where you're coming from, but the ship has sailed. The word means what it means _now_ , even if a literal historical reading indicates that it might have meant something else at some point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Alternative title: "One language that has different close compounding rules than another language has different compound nouns than that other language".

Auf Deutsch: Verscheidenzusammengesetztesgebotesprachen haben verscheide zusammengesetztes Substantive.

<comment><USER35> To the non-native speakers: "Verscheidenzusammengesetztesgebotesprachen" looks long and German, but is not a German word. Maybe its parts were auto- corrected.

<comment><USER34> As that great Germanic comedian Mr Arnold Schwarzenegger might have said: "And here are the jokes ..." :-)

<comment><USER35> And I am sitting here, thinking you actually wanted to say, "verschiedene Substantivzusammensetzungsrechtschreibverordnungen" lead to "verschieden zusammengesetzte Substantive", while you were just making jokes. Silly me :-)

<comment><USER34> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It is interesting indeed to unwrap the literal meaning of the composite words in German.

I don't entirely agree on his proposition of the meaning of 'Stimmung' though. It's not just 'the voice of the situation' but rather "state of adjustment/tuning of emotions towards a situation". For instance when we [Germans] say that the "Stimmung ist getrübt" it means that most people involved have adjusted to a rather dampened mood for a particular situation. They are then not just experiencing it in a bad way, but they are also expressing their mood non-verbally.

</comment><comment><USER37> They overlooked "hausfrauenpanzer":

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21894468](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21894468)

<comment><USER38> "Chelsea tractor" is a reasonable equivalent, I think.

<comment><USER16> Karen is the US version isn't it?

<comment><USER38> "Chelsea" in this case refers to a wealthy area of London, not a person's name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Here's a massively useful term, particularly in the case of watching the news:

Fremdschämen

See: [https://www.leo.org](https://www.leo.org) for good discussion.

<comment><USER40> I think basically it means "cringe".

<comment><USER39> Oh no no no.

It's more the embarrassment one feels on behalf of some shameless piece of work who really ought to silence themselves, yet somehow natters on.

<comment><USER13> Cringe can mean exactly that in English (although it also has slightly different meanings).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> "Wehmut" literally: 'The courage in feeling pain'.

This is powerful. I feel like this courageous curiosity has been the primary virtue or trait that I've been exploring and aiming to cultivate more than any other during the past couple of years.

As a non-German speaker I'd be interested how this relates to melancholy (these to me feel like quite different emotional states).

<comment><USER42> As a native German speaker, I wouldn't translate "mut" in Wehmut as courage. Here it rather is the same as "mood" (and the English word has the same roots). Like in "Anmut", "Dehmut", "Unmut" etc.

So Wehmut literally would be something like "woeful mood" and you could use it more or less synonymous with melancholia (or nostalgia for example).

<comment><USER43> To my (vague) knowledge, it is an word coined in romanticism to replace the French-rooted word Nostalgie, Schwermut was coined for Melancholie. The movement was fairly nationalistic and was unhappy with the dominance of French in high culture at that time. So they went ahead and coined "German" words were ones with French (or Latin) roots were used.

But please check/correct me on that, my memory might be betraying me here. Not even sure about the source...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Glück. All this talk about long compound words, when German gives the word _Glück_. It can mean luck, joy, bliss, though it is so much more than the sum of its possible translations. Hermann Hesse wrote a beautiful essay on this.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7rLsb3w8ZaM](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7rLsb3w8ZaM)

</comment><comment><USER45> On a lighter note, one of my favorite German words is "Warmduscher", literally "someone who takes hot showers", aka a wimp or a candy-ass.

Be aware that by using it you imply that you yourself only take cold showers and you may get called out on that. (Of course I take cold showers so I feel no compunction about using this word.)

<comment><USER46> I hate that word. Signs of a machismo culture to imply only "real men" take "cold showers"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is funny to the see exoticization of the German language, even though German is so close to English.

I think the author confuses etymology with meaning, and then uses wrong etymologies (e.g. translating "mut" to "courage" rather then the literal "mood") to arrive at some amazing "wisdom" in German.

Some of the words are exactly the same meaning as the English counterpart, e.g. develop also means to unwrap. It just have a French origin rather than a Germanic.

I think English is really the odd language here. Because so many English words are loanwords from French or Latin, their origin or etymology is not as apparent to English speakers.

(And of course the article sprinkles a bit of irrelevant neurobabble.)

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm not even German, but I know this...

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

 _Awesome YouTube channel, BTW. ;)_

<comment><USER48> > Kurzgesagt

That's not actually a German word. It's two words: "kurz gesagt" which is literally "briefly said".

<comment><USER49> Correct. It's an expression that a considerable amount of Germans would write as a single word. Zusammen oder getrennt, composed or separate is one of the most tricky questions in German orthography.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> One key aspect of the English language is that the meaning of any word can vary slightly in interpretation from person to person. Could breaking down complex feelings into concrete components mislead the individual into thinking that they're processing emotions in the exact same way as their neighbors? Or is it self-fulfilling, that the language shapes the emotion?

In any case, I think all these compound words definitely make learning German easier. It encourages one to adopt the mindset.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Another word someone brought up is "Geborgenheit", which translates to comfort or security. Briefly researching the origin it, it seems to come from the terminology around "Burg" (castle), and the feeling of safety and comfort we feel when we're inside one. In my understanding it also has a considerable amount of warmth next to the sense of safety and comfort. Overall, definitely one of my favorite words that I think belongs on this list too!

<comment><USER29> Geborgenheit: I always think this is a how a kid feels while sleeping on a couch under a blanket along with loving parents at a warm home while it is snowing outside.

<comment><AUTHOR> I love this, realizing that we each have our own description and meaning of the word stored in the memories we lived. Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> In Dutch we use more or less the same words, but for me the top word is "wetenschap" (which is probably similar in German). Literally translated it's "knowledgeship", which would be a better word for science.

You can believe things, and you can know things. Science is knowing things, and what better word to describe that than "knowledgeship"?

<comment><USER52> It's Wissenschaft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> My favourite German expression which doesn't exist in English is still "Ohrwurm". It refers to a catchy song/tune stuck in someone's mind [1].

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

<comment><USER54> You linked to the literal English translation of it, which definitely exists?

<comment><USER55> The article also mentions it's a calque which emerged only recently.

So... 'yeah' to both of you.

<comment><USER56> The article suggests it isn't much older in German.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I guess there are really better examples than this. One I've learened recently is Torschlusspanik ([https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torschlusspanik](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torschlusspanik))

</comment><comment><USER58> Florence King once wrote that the word "Kinderfeindlichkeit" (dislike of children) could not have an English equivalent, and was one reason she'd like to live in Germany.

<comment><USER13> How can it not have an English equivalent, when you literally wrote the English equivalent right after it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Schweigen, because English people did not reckon when to stop talking.

</comment><comment><USER60> Aufrichtigkeit – Sincerity/Honesty. Literally: To be in an upright posture

This sounds pretty similar to 'having a spine'. Its normally used for courage or sticking up for your beliefs.

<comment><USER38> We can simply use "uprightness" for exactly that meaning in English, too. Or "rectitude".

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Let's not forget schadenfreude!

<comment><USER62> Ah, but it _does_ have an equivalent in English: it's schadenfreude.

<comment><USER61> Only because we fairly recently stole it!

<comment><USER63> Not that recently, it's been used italiced and capitalised for a century, only recently it's been properly absorbed by losing those decorations. In contrast, the French absorb foreign words almost instantly, see the verb "liker" (to like on Facebook) for example.

<comment><USER61> Interesting, when I was a boy, my mother (who was a German Teacher), always used it as an example of one of these great German words without a direct translation. Back then it didn't seem to be used in popular culture, now I seem to hear it on a weekly basis!

<comment><USER63> I definitely saw it in the English music paper, the New Musical Express, in the late `70s (very Punk at the time), I remember having to look it up ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Stadtneurotiker

</comment><comment><USER24> Fahrvergnügen</comment>


Show HN: Bootrino.com – Netboot Run-From-RAM OS's on AWS, Google and Digital Ocean - <AUTHOR> https://www.bootrino.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi folks - bootrino author here.

marketing website [https://www.bootrino.com/](https://www.bootrino.com/)

technical documentation [https://doc.bootrino.com/](https://doc.bootrino.com/)

bootrino console [https://console.bootrino.com/](https://console.bootrino.com/)

bootrino is new and in beta so I'm keen to find people who'd like to give it a try and let me know if it doesn't work.

Today, bootrino is not for booting unikernels, but that was the original idea.

bootrino lets you netboot Run-From-RAM operating systems on cloud servers, but the origin of the project goes back a few years ago to when I became interested in unikernels, and how they might improve security by running only application code and minimal operating system code on a server. That seemed to make a great deal of sense to me. If it's not possible to log in to a server because there is no login system then surely that's got to be alot harder for hackers to get in. So I fiddled around with unikernels and after significant pain, got the rump kernel up and running on EC2 (for the first time).

And I thought, "wow that was way too hard". So I set out to build some sort of application that would make it easy to build unikernel cloud images that would run on all the common clouds. And along that path I discovered the crushing pain, inconsistency and sometimes impossibility of building machine images for the common cloud platforms. I targeted Amazon, Rackspace, Azure, Softlayer, Google and Digital Ocean. All cloud platforms do machine images differently, all cloud platforms make it hard and slow and painful, some make it impossible. So I sat back and scratched my beard and thought "wow, actually maybe it's not practical to build something that makes it easy to boot unikernels on all the common clouds".

I can't remember where the idea came from, probably just woke up with it one morning, but it struck me like lightning "hang on, I don't need to build machine images for all these cloud platforms". Instead of making a machine image for each cloud via its own unique process, I realised that every single cloud vendor boots almost precisely the same version of Ubuntu, and that they all support some sort of mechanism for providing a startup script to the instance. I connected this realisation to something I had read recently on Hacker News describing a way of replacing the operating system of a live machine with a new operating system [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13622301](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13622301) and my head exploded with excitement. Instead of building and uploading machine images, just use Ubuntu as a bootloader, format the root disk and replace it with whatever operating system I wanted. A MUCH better approach - faster, more consistent and guaranteed to work across all the clouds.

So I did alot of technology testing and got it to work - eureka!

The next major shift in the project was that I found that the unikernel technology wasn't really able to run on the cloud machines, or more correctly, it was able to run on some cloud machines under some circumstances. And at the same time I learned alot about embedded systems, Yocto Linux, and Run-From-RAM operating systems like Tiny Core Linux and Alpine Linux. And I realised that in fact Linux can be trimmed down so light that it has many of the characteristics of a unikernel - of specific interest to me is that it is possible to cut Linux down to not much more than the kernel and the application code, which makes things very similar to unikernels. Run-From-RAM Linux is extremely small, fast and can be configured to be quite secure. And I found that it's a real pain to boot Run-From-RAM operating systems in the cloud. So the focus of bootrino shifted from unikernels to being more generalised - bootrino would be a simple way to boot Run-From-RAM operating systems in the cloud.

Another idea occurred to me which was that the Run-From-RAM operating systems are so small that it would be possible to put them on web servers and have bootrino fetch the OS code from any web server along with a shell script (bootrino.sh) which put a huge amount of control and power into the bootrino user. My idea was that ll they would need to do is load a shell script onto a web server, and bootrino could then launch a cloud instance, pull down the bootrino.sh and there you have it - netboot Run-From-RAM operating systems on the major cloud platforms.

Along the way I dropped Rackspace (I think it was defeated by AWS and stopped being developer friendly). I dropped SoftLayer (it's extremely locked down and does not allow you to reformat your disk any way you want). I also dropped Microsoft Azure (because it's API and ways of going about doing things were so annoying I gave up on it).

So anyway thats the back story. If you've got time and inclination to boot up a Run-From-RAM OS on your cloud then I'd really appreciate to hear from you how it went so I can fix bugs and clean up documentation. thanks! Andrew firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER2> Dude, excellent work and what a great epiphany. I remember reading the source code to an early X terminal project that turned old SUN workstations (and I'm sure others but that's what I had) into X terminals ala the NCD commercial device. The code ran the X Window server in place of SunOS's init! I was like _you can do that?!? Wait of course you can!_ Mind blown.

<comment><AUTHOR> >>Dude, excellent work and what a great epiphany.

Thanks! Yes it's fun to be able to try out new ideas and form them into a working whole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow I was just doing research on this exact topic. I've been trying to boot Alpine into RAM from the network, and then run my lxd containers off the storage drives. So imagine my happiness when I see this.

<comment><AUTHOR> You'll need this link [https://doc.bootrino.com/alpinelinux.html](https://doc.bootrino.com/alpinelinux.html)

<comment><USER3> Awesome! much thx!

<comment><AUTHOR> And email me with questions email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, the issue I see here is that the run-from-ram aspect of this limits the use cases for the product.

What happens if you want to make changes to files/apps, or are using it as a webserver in conjunction with an SSG and git/CI, etc.

Anytime you want to update you'd have to update some other code on some other http server (which in itself is fine), but then, you'd have to reboot your run-from-ram instance to sync up to your updates/changes (which is the not so great part, IMO).

Am I correct on this assumption, or could this type of scenario work some other way that would prevent an instance reboot? I could be way off here, and only skimmed the bullet points of the website, and that was my first thought/takeaway.

In any case, this seems to be a great way to essentially package live environments as a PaaS, with the added full code customization benefit. Really creative, and hats off to you for thinking of this and providing it for free. Seems there would be plenty of use cases and needs for something like this!

<comment><USER5> This is probably based on the philosophy of immutable infrastructure where you never modify a server/VM/container after it has booted; instead you perform a rolling reboot to a new version. It's less efficient but more reliable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed - the original question is probably best answered via research into immutable operating system deployment patterns.

Having said that, when bootrino starts a Run-From-RAM Linux instance, it really is just plain Linux, so how you go about solving the question of deployment is really entirely up to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why Chrome only? Any Safari support planned?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just because I didn't have time do everything on the todo list and in the end I had to make the call that the target audience are likely to have Chrome installed.

It will support all modern browsers in time when I get time to examine why it doesn't work on other browsers.

<comment><USER7> What features are other browsers missing that prevents them to run Bootrino?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing at all really that I know of - it _should_ work on any latest version modern browser - bootrino doesn't do anything special.

But browsers are fickle beasts. It might be only something simple that prevents it working. If it does not work then I suspect probably because bootrino uses the web crypto API / subtlecrypto and it wouldn't surprise me if that doesn't easily work cross browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are folks who know much more about rump than I. They read HN and I stand to be corrected. But the description of bootrino seems like it is has a misleading definition of rump unikernels. It suggests because a Linux distribution and a rump kernel can both be made small enough to fit in RAM and perhap focus on a single application, they are therefore similar. That does not sound right.

On rump:

"Two different operating modes are explored: 1) a transparent mode, in which the file system is mounted in the typical fashion by using the kernel code as a userspace server, and 2) a standalone mode, in which applications can use a kernel file system as a library. The first mode provides isolation from the trusted computing base and a secure way for mounting untrusted file systems on a monolithic kernel. The second mode is useful for file system utilities and applications, such as populating an image or viewing the contents without requiring host operating system kernel support. Additional uses for both modes include debugging, development and testing."

source: [https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix09/tech/full_paper...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix09/tech/full_papers/kantee/kantee_html/)

As far as I can see (which is not far), this is quite different from, e.g., a "trimmed down" Linux kernel plus busybox. For example, I can utilise rump to mount corrupted filesystems that would otherwise crash the kernel. Maybe I am missing something here about the comparison.

I applaud the bootrino authors work and struggle against the incompatibilities between "cloud" hosting providers. Time well spent.

However I have a few alternative thoughts:

If I have an image, in a portable format such as ffs, with a bootloader and a custom kernel with embedded filesystem that I created myself that is small enough to fit in RAM, why do I need to bother with "cloud" hosting?

Why do I need to have a hosting provider run Linux (or another OS of the providers choosing) in order to boot the image when the image has everything it needs to boot on a wide variety of hardware? Is the reason one that benefits me in all use cases?

Assuming for whatever reason I am amenable to have my kernels running on the same computer as other customers software, along with the providers software running as well, then do I at least get to choose the host OS (e.g., in Xen, the dom0)? Why not? Even if my kernels run better under an alternative host OS?

If I have a bootloader that is compatible, e.g., with Xen, and does not require, e.g., Python or Grub to be used, why do I have to accept the hosting providers choice of host OS and bootloader?

There is a severe absence of choice and flexibility compared to what I get outside of the "cloud" hosting market.

What with Spectre and Meltdown, are there good reasons for me to _not_ share a computer with other customers software and the providers software? What if there are alternatives to "cloud" hosting that do not involve running other peoples software on the computer I am using? What if the real advantages of "cloud" hosting are to _the hosting provider_?

Cloud hosting may not be for everybody. Personally, I have created enough of these small images to run from RAM that I have lost count, using small sized USB sticks, SD cards and CF cards to store a. kernels with embedded ramdisks and b. other stuff I might need before network access. The amount of configuration I can do is limited only by my imagination, but none of it ever requires a cloud hosting provider or some web-based "administration console".

I prefer having physical access to dedicated hardware, or paying someone to access it for me. I am willing to pay more for this peace of mind, but as others on HN have highlighted repeatedly over the years, many times dedicated hardware is actually more economical. As always, it depends on what the customer is doing.

Using "cloud" hosting providers is overkill for own custom kernels, and way too much hassle. For example, I use ffs for the images and it "just works" on every computer. The fact that every hosting provider has to have their own "proprietary" image format is enough to keep me away. That is not user- friendly.

But, to each her own. This is only one users opinion.

<comment><AUTHOR> >> It suggests because a Linux distribution and a rump kernel can both be made small enough to fit in RAM, they are therefore similar. That does not sound right.

It's a good question. Given a unikernel and an extremely trim Linux kernel plus application code only, what's the practical difference? Does it matter at any real level if there's 4.5 megabytes of Linux kernel in there?

<comment><USER9> _Huge_ difference. It's not the kernel size, it's the interface (ABI).

In a unikernel, the kernel is part of the application (like a library). Instead of a complex/slow transition from user space to kernel space, you just call a function.

A unikernel will also know exactly what your application needs (i.e. if you only use UDP, it doesn't bother including TCP.) It's possible to strip down the Linux kernel, but it requires a LOT of work (basically, remove something, then test that your application still works.)</comment></comment></comment>


Israel Passes Anti-Boycott Law: This Week in Online Tyranny - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/israel_passes_anti-boycott_law_this_week_in_online.php#.Th4FI_eFemE.hackernews <comment><USER2> It's already a US law:

[http://www.bis.doc.gov/complianceandenforcement/antiboycottc...](http://www.bis.doc.gov/complianceandenforcement/antiboycottcompliance.htm)

<comment><USER3> To be clear, the US law is very similar, but not quite the same. It penalizes US individuals or corporations by denying them tax benefits if they engage in a boycott against Israel or Israeli companies.

The Israeli law, on the other hand, removes freedom of speech protections for boycotts against Israel, allowing anyone to sue the person or entity engaging in the boycott.

The Israeli law is worse, but both are outrageous.</comment></comment>


Embedded Rust Pattern – Zero Sized References - <AUTHOR> https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/zero-sized-references/ <comment><USER2> This is one of the better uses of Macros + Type System I've seen to enforce correct behavior and get better performance.</comment>


Ask HN: I want to solve traffic congestion problem, where should I start? - <AUTHOR> I am a Machine Learning Engineer and I am quite frustrated and fed up of the traffic congestion problems in my city (Pune, India) and want to help in solving this problem.<p>Where should I start? <comment><USER2> You need to accept that there are a large number of people who don't want to fix the problem, and will actively try to stop you, and that no matter how clever, effective, cheap and world-changing your solution might be you're going to need to become a marketer and a politician to actually get anyone to take it seriously.

</comment><comment><USER3> You could set up some ASLR cameras, and create a website showing how much the city would make by doing congestion charging. Local governments always love revenue.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't have any domain expertise but I found this project to be pretty cool [https://www.vox.com/2016/8/4/12342806/barcelona- superblocks](https://www.vox.com/2016/8/4/12342806/barcelona-superblocks)

In general I guess you'd have to get into public advocacy / local politics space.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is amazing, but as a technical guy I cannot change/plan/design city routes (I wish I could!). I forgot to add to the question description but I have added in the comment, that I cannot eradicate traffic jams as that involves government/politicians/city planner etc, while traffic aversion is more dependent on using technology, I thinks that's where I fit.

But anyways thanks for link, I got to know something that I had not known earlier.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Since I am a technologist and not a town planner or a govt. authority I want to propose a solution from technological perspective. And also I just want to start small by say using web cams to alert/predict future traffic jams and just alert authorities via social media?

Then next step would be to feed this systems output to traffic signals and dynamically increase/decrease their timings? I have a lot of radical ideas and if you have one I would be glad to hear it out.

Again keeping in mind that traffic jam eradication vs aversion are a different problems. Traffic jam eradication/prevention requires a lot of experts from different domain to work in collaboration (town planner + civil engineers + road engineers + gov. authoritarians etc).

While I think(may be wrong) traffic aversion can be done using technology + some domain knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER5> Start by realizing this will require lots of domain knowledge and expertise, machine learning by itself won't solve anything. You will need to work with a team of city planners, civil engineers, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I never said I want to use machine learning (if it needs to be used I am well equipped to use it)!

As for domain knowledge I think that can be learned with time (this is a long term project), I have worked on three domains (namely, Advertising, Retail and Finance) without having any clue about it at first.

So what I want is theories/books on this problem and how other people have solved it successfully/ not successfully etc... Ofcourse Since I am a technologist and not a town planner or a govt. authority I want to propose a solution from technological perspective. And also I just want to start small by say using web cams to alert/predict future traffic jams and just alert authorities via social media?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov](https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov)</comment>


Power Posing: Fake It Until You Make It - <AUTHOR> http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6461.html <comment><USER2> So, after you're the "alpha dog," what happens? Do all the babes start liking you? Have you finally made it?

I realize that power has an effect on social relationships of every kind, but the these sorts of articles always strike me as addressing the symptoms of a problem (such as low self-confidence) rather than the problem itself. This is probably because the root of the problem is not a simple prescriptive fix. They also assume on some level that you should strive to have the upper hand in every encounter, which is unrealistic and off-putting. The need to be the "alpha dog" does nothing to abate feelings of insecurity, as you're still engaged in a constant cycle of judgment and one-upping others.

Why do we encourage people to remain in this cycle? Oh, right, we've all been told we have to be "alpha."

Whatever that means.

<comment><USER3> That is certainly a valid way of looking at it. I have a different perspective, though.

I have been in the past, by nature, a shy kind of person. I was not into parties, I let things slide by that dug me in more deeply, I became what others wanted me to be.

Somewhere in high school, I learned the lesson in this article, and I am going to say some related things. How did the bullies, stupid as they were, gain followers? What was it about the way they acted that the strong moved with the strong instead of butting heads?

It's pack mentality. We have it, as social creatures. The posing makes a difference. Whatever you feel inside, you can move and shake things with the illusion.

Then, somewhere along the lines, you believe in the illusion, have molded yourself into it. You pretended to be an alpha, and then you became it.

Will the babes start liking you? You know it; many studies have shown a relationship between confidence (not necessarily over-confidence, not feigned confidence) and attraction.

Getting into the habit of a particular mindset CAN change you. Forcing a smile will eventually result in a real smile. Sure, your self-esteem can rise, purely on this.

And it does not have to be a practice of one-upping. Real alphas do not need to play that game. ;) We can respect the presence and domains of other alphas. You are talking about the yapping pups.

<comment><USER4> > _The posing makes a difference. Whatever you feel inside, you can move and > shake things with the illusion. Then, somewhere along the lines, you believe > in the illusion, have molded yourself into it. You pretended to be an alpha, > and then you became it._

I find this quite interesting. I'm curious if you have any articles/links to something that expands on this idea? Especially this:

> _Getting into the habit of a particular mindset CAN change you. Forcing a > smile will eventually result in a real smile. Sure, your self-esteem can > rise, purely on this._

<comment><USER2> I only have anecdotal evidence to share, but, take it for what it is worth.

I'd noticed that many people aren't always good judges of character and will fall for illusory confidence. IMO, this explains why there is undue emphasis in certain areas of life on social litmus tests: actual character evaluation is time-consuming, difficult, and requires a certain amount of introspection. So the test becomes a heuristic that works more often than not, and is relied upon. (I like to "whimsically" mention my past history of LAN gaming on 3rd dates as a way to assess how judgmental/uptight they are.)

The upshot is that other people's perceptions of you are way more malleable than you might believe...as is your own perception of yourself.

Ultimately, social exchanges are something of a game, and can be exploited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a link to the paper: <http://dericbownds.net/uploaded_images/carneyetal.pdf>

It's about a 5 minute read if you skip the statistics.

</comment><comment><USER6> That's right kids, two hands on the desk, feet on the floor, barking orders is a stress reducing a yoga pose. It's called kicking the dog. Feet up on the desk, hands clasped behind the head is called the kicking back dog. Don't forget to flare your nostrils and breathe through the nose.

</comment><comment><USER7> Just what the world needs. Managers of some future Enron, already in possession of overly-inflated egos, literally puffing themselves up before meetings. How revolting.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've got a presentation at uni today. I'm quite nervous, but this might work. Just stand up with my back straight.

<comment><USER9> Good luck and try this trick (only if you are presenting to mostly strangers) - shake hands with people entering the room. People like people who aren't strangers and someone they've shaken hands with is a little removed from a stranger.</comment></comment>


Awesome Linux Software - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/LewisVo/Awesome-Linux-Software <comment><USER2> I appreciate the effort that goes into these kinds of lists but to be honest I would advocate people getting more familiar with their package manager and learning how to search for packages within it instead of using 3rd party lists compiled in this way. The benefit of the package managers is they can convey more information (eg open source or not - just looking through that list I saw non-free software without much warning about their status) as well as actually enabling you to install said software.

Plus there are nice graphical package management tools like the Ubuntu Software Center that has screenshots and reviews which I believe would better aid those who are less experienced with Linux - those who are the likely target of this git repository - so they would benefit more greatly from said management tools than an ordered list of app names. And frankly I would trust the descriptions used by package managers more than the unofficial overviews compiled by casual users of the software (thus people who might overlook features or even just miss the point of the product entirely).

<comment><USER3> The problem is the ton of garbage that one finds before actually finding _Awesome Linux Software_ on them.

Reviews are not enough, curating is also required, because when everything is a 5 with 50% reviews going both ways no one has time to try out everything.

<comment><USER2> I get your point and that's definitely true for any reviewing system but I'm unconvinced this list does any better job. Let's take the Sharing Files category[1]:

* aria2: no reference that it is a command line program

* Deluge: no reference that it is a command line program which requires quite a bit of configuring to get a web gui working

* Dropbox: it's comment says "Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily." which isn't technically untrue but isn't really all that accurate either given the context it's placed in. Should be rewritten as "Cloud storage with paid for and free plans".

* ownCloud: no reference that this is a web project so you need to run Apache / nginx with PHP and have the whole thing port forwarded on your router.

* Teamviewer: a non-free remote desktop application. While it does support file transfer it doesn't strictly belong in this category

* uGet: described as "The best download manager for linux" which is highly subjective, opinionated description and doesn't actually describe what it does well. So it's of no help to people what-so-ever

* uTorrent: no mention that it is not open source, and only the server (ie not the desktop GUI version - the server is only controlled via the web UI) natively supports Linux. Also last time I checked it worked on Ubuntu, but there's no mention of that here either

That's just one category as well. There are issues in all the categories I looked at. Take the Office[2] category as another example, they have 12 entries, 4 are described as office suites, and 3 of those 4 are have descriptions that say "one of the best" or "the best" office suite on Linux. And ironically the only one of those 4 descriptions that actually explains what comes with the office suite is the only one that wasn't described "one of the best on Linux". So how is that helpful to users confused about which office product to run on Linux when the only one that is explained is the one that isn't recommended and all the others have no meaningful description?

The curation and descriptions of these kinds of lists really need to undergo heavy editorial work otherwise they become pointless and I'm really not convinced this meets the mark. For example if I wanted a decent bit-torrent client I could just google "linux torrent client" and I would get pages of results linking to reviews comparing different clients and listing their top 5 / 10 / whatever - often with some real in depth analysis too. That's the kind of lists that people who are looking for software need. Something that explains their use, their strengths and weaknesses. Otherwise it becomes no more effective than a list produced by your package manager.

Don't get me wrong, lists like these had a real benefit in the 90s when it was harder to search for content, but these days you need to provide a lot more than just a list of names and a terse description if you want to actually help people. As it stands, some of the descriptions given could waste a lot of people's time as they go down the rabbit hole of installing ownCloud (for example) but expecting it to function like Dropbox / Onedrive and then getting frustrated by the configuration of Apache and their home router. Or installing Deluge or aria2 and then getting annoyed that they aren't seeing an icon appear in their launcher.

[1] [https://github.com/LewisVo/Awesome-Linux-Software#sharing- fi...](https://github.com/LewisVo/Awesome-Linux-Software#sharing-files)

[2] [https://github.com/LewisVo/Awesome-Linux- Software#office](https://github.com/LewisVo/Awesome-Linux-Software#office)

<comment><USER4> > * aria2: no reference that it is a command line program

> * Deluge: no reference that it is a command line program which requires > quite a bit of configuring to get a web gui working

      $ apt-cache show aria2 | grep Tag
      Tag: implemented-in::c++, interface::commandline, network::client,
      $ apt-cache show deluge | grep Tag
      Tag: devel::lang:python, implemented-in::python, interface::x11,

<comment><USER5> Since when does apt-cache show tags? Mine doesn't, I have

      $ apt-cache policy apt | grep Installed
      Installed: 1.2.24

<comment><USER2> He's using the `show` parameter which does include tags. However you can't really grep it like he had done because the tags can span multiple lines with indentation rather than line prefixes (ie human readable rather than machine readable).

<comment><USER5> _apt-cache show_ doesn't show tags for me:

      $ apt-cache show aria2 | grep Tag
      $ echo $?
      1

<comment><USER2> Does on Debian and has done for a few releases as far as I can recall. I've done it on Wheezy (7.x) boxes and it's still there on an Jessie (8.1) machine I just tested it on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The mainteners have indeed put some effort in making that list, which is comandable. But it was an instant close for me as soon as I reached Education/BibleTime.

My personnal opinion on this is that some 'Bible study application' has nothing to do in the same list as Maple or Matlab. I'll go even further by saying that it's not to be listed under 'Education'. A todler is not 'educated' when given batism, he's just endoctrined. Again, that's a personnal opinion and I'm fine if you don't share it.

<comment><USER7> Reading the Bible is what have pushed me away from religion: when you're endoctrined you're only given the "good parts"...

<comment><USER8> *indoctrinated

<comment><USER7> Thanks!

<comment><USER8> The whole point was that people can't get past their own religious hangup to find a spell checker, which they obviously need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not sure what to make of this list. It mixes Proprietary Software with Free Software (with no clear indication of which is which, and no clear license information anyway), and software that is not just available for Linux anyway but on pretty much any other platform.

A good list for me would mention:

* License type

* Whether it's in active development or not

* Cross-platform or not

* Whether it's a KDE or GNOME application (or something else) - since it's pretty relevant for Linux users.

* Patreon/support links for projects where it's relevant

* Links to proper user reviews (folks who have spent significant time using them)

For example, backup solutions are all very, very different in terms of what they can do, and it took me a long time to find out the one that is working for my own criteria. Just listing a bunch of backup tools is not going to save time for anyone, Wikipedia is a much better resource in that regard for example.

<comment><USER10> I am maintaining kind of a rival repository to this one[0].

I heavily moderate it. Most of what's on that list has been verified by me. Contains about 50 pieces of software. The problem is: people don't give a shit about this heavily curated lists. They just want a gigantic list of every software ever. Heck, I think I have like five commits in total in that section, but at least it satisfies one of your criteria (GNOME or KDE based or something else). No KDE user ever has stumbled upon my list and made some contributions, so I'm really lacking on that front.

I'll see what I can do about the rest of your proposals. I'm pretty sure I could easily implement at least half of them.

[0] [https://github.com/aleksandar-todorovic/awesome- linux#applic...](https://github.com/aleksandar-todorovic/awesome- linux#applications)

<comment><USER9> If you add more to your list I might contribute to it. I briefly checked your list and in the distro list you are missing of the important new ones - Solus. :)

EDIT: I don't think you need to have huge screenshots everywhere (personally I rather have text info than graphics) and it's not super useful anyway to show screenshots since it does not tell you much about anything at all. Feature lists, as in bullet points, would rather get my preference.

<comment><USER10> > I don't think you need to have huge screenshots everywhere

Can't disagree with you on that. I remember seeing a couple of repos recently that have like a "More" button which actually loads the image. Will try tracking them down to see the code and using the same procedure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks good.

I'd previously bookmarked this blog (closed in 2015) for a large number of smaller utilities :

[https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/](https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/)

A bit of a treasure trove. I had a great time going through those reviews.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Another two lists that should be mentioned here are:

[1]: [https://github.com/iCHAIT/awesome- macOS](https://github.com/iCHAIT/awesome-macOS)

[2]: [https://github.com/Awesome-Windows/Awesome](https://github.com/Awesome- Windows/Awesome)

They all share the same idea.

</comment><comment><USER12> How could that be! Gkrellm.net is not ont that list. Great monitoring app for your linux desktop. I use it since 2000, I think.</comment>


A Developer's Perspective On Porting Games To Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTY4NTI <comment><USER2> One slide mentioned having to fix hardcoded backslashes to forward slashes, and using path.join to make it portable. But on Windows, you can use forward slashes as well at the system call level. You only need to use backslashes on the command line, since many programs interpret a forward slash as the beginning of an argument.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but that doesn't mean the original developers used them :)

Some developers are shockingly Microsoft-centric...

<comment><USER4> Doesn't have to be on purpose, for instance Visual Studio inserts backslashes in autocompleted C/C++ header paths by default (can be set to forward slash in the settings, but default is backslash). The case-insensitive filesystems on Windows and OSX are usually also a problem when moving games with hundred- thousands of source- and asset files over to a Linux build system.

<comment><USER5> OSX/HFS has case insensitivity? Since when?

<comment><USER4> I was baffled too but that's like it is by default, on my MBP #include paths don't have to match case, just like on Windows. Or you can do a 'echo blub >bla.txt' followed by a 'echo blob BLA.txt' and there will only be a single file 'bla.txt' which contains the string 'blob'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seeing things like this makes me really happy, even if you are a non gaming linux user, work like this benefits everything else you do and pushes companies like AMD and Nvidia to improve their drivers. I know that since valve started supporting linux a few graphical issues on my fedora laptop have disappeared.

</comment><comment><USER7> The Mesa improvements mentioned in the slides: [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTY4MjA](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTY4MjA)

</comment><comment><USER8> I hope this at least least will motivate more developers to use GL/GLES for game development since it will be easier to keep it multiplatform (iOS, Android, OSX, Linux, Windows). But still there are a lot of things mentioned there that also applies for general big project development on Linux.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do people use the term "postmortem" for retrospectives of projects that didn't fail?

<comment><USER9> Postmortem doesn't (to me at least) imply failure. Specifically for games it's just a critical analysis of what worked and what didn't on a project for the purposes of learning for the next one.

I don't know if the phrase was originated by Game Developer Magazine, but it certainly popularised it's use within the games industry. The GD Mag postmortems are generally exceptionally candid and a great series to learn things from. See [http://www.gamasutra.com/features/postmortem/](http://www.gamasutra.com/features/postmortem/) and the general archives at [http://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag](http://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag) (I'm not sure if the website has all the postmortems that featured in the, sadly defunct, printed magazine).

<comment><USER10> you know 'mortem' means 'death', right?

<comment><USER11> Not all deaths are failures. Sometimes things just end.

<comment><USER12> It's only a game. You may restart it using a new life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Microsoft seems to be rapidly losing mindshare.

<comment><USER14> Not yet, developers are still in the "toying with Linux" phase. Microsoft will be losing mindshare when people install Linux for reasons other than "I don't like Microsoft" _in great numbers_.

<comment><USER15> They might be toying with Linux, but they are shipping for Android. Every new game faces 'do we want a piece of 1 billion devices pie?' magic question.

<comment><USER14> While I don't disagree with your point, developing for Android isn't too close to developing for Linux, and the games available are very different at the moment.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Metroliner Train's Career - <AUTHOR> http://trn.trains.com/railroads/2006/06/metroliners-amazing-career <comment><USER2> I'm assuming this has resurfaced in light of the announcement that Amtrak is launching nonstop DC-NY service ([https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2019/07/25/amtrak...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2019/07/25/amtrak- launching-nonstop-train-service-nyc-dc-in-september/1813463001/))

The new service will run one round trip daily (southbound in the morning, northbound in the evening) and take 2 hours, 35 minutes - which is what the OP says was running in 1969.</comment>


Japanese 'Prince' Switched at Birth Was Raised a Pauper - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/11/29/247807768/japanese-prince-switched-at-birth-was-raised-a-pauper <comment><USER2> It's a lousy hand to be dealt, but I don't see how he deserves to take 317k from a charitable organization over it. Everyone else who is born poor just has to live with it. But he gets free money because he has the genetics of rich people who never met him nor even knew of his existence.

The one case I could legitimately see being made for harm to the child caused by being switched at birth is if there is some sort of genetic disease that they could have had diagnosed or treated sooner if they knew their birth parents. Not going to a fancy private school isn't harm though, it's just lack of privilege.

<comment><USER3> I am tempted to agree with you, but put yourself in his shoes. Being poor is a trap that you cannot get out of by yourself, it is incredibly frustrating. Along comes his ticket out of shitsville and you expect him to just pass?

<comment><USER2> Oh, I don't blame him for trying for it. Anyone would. I just don't know if he should have been awarded money based on not attending private schools that most people wouldn't have been able to attend anyhow.

<comment><USER3> I think that's just what he hung the case on because it had quantifiable value. How else do you quantify a life of missed opportunities?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Uh, this is just a PR stunt for the movie at the bottom, right? The court report link is broken...

<comment><USER5> I searched asahi.com for the article and still can't find it. I did find the below, which suggests it may be real, but given how little is available on the English web I'm now skeptical like you. Perhaps it's better sourced on Japanese language websites though.

[https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/12/28/national/media-...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/12/28/national/media- national/theres-a-cloud-above-our-silver-generation/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> He ends up a 60 year old truck driver and the person he was switched with is the president of a real estate company - and meanwhile we pretend western society is mostly meritocratic.

<comment><USER7> This story doesn't undermine the idea of meritocracy.

A rich child may end up a rich adult and a poor child a poor adult purely because of nepotism, with the two individuals being roughly the same in terms of skills and abilities.

But another explanation is that the rich child ends up a rich adult because his rich parents actually instill more merit in the child and he ends up with more skills and abilities.

In the latter case the standard could still be meritocratic.

I think there's truth on both sides - things like growing up in an intact family, or learning the value of thrift, are going to inevitably lead to better outcomes for the child - but I think there's also a whole lot of unmeritocratic signaling (who you know, where you went to school, etc) and on the reverse side, measures to prevent people from getting ahead (regressive taxation, poor schools, etc)

<comment><USER8> >But another explanation is that the rich child ends up a rich adult because his rich parents actually instill more merit in the child and he ends up with more skills and abilities.

How is that in itself not a form of privilege? is it different to attending an elite school?

<comment><USER9> It can be both privilege and meritocracy. Think of the movie Gattaca. The people with enhanced genes were privileged from the wealth of their parents, but also genuinely better in some areas because of that. The same thing if parents are able to afford tutors, or to spend time helping their child out in homework they will get better grades and do better. The key to remember is that a meritocracy is not fair.

<comment><USER8> > The key to remember is that a meritocracy is not fair.

I think you've just completely upended the meaning of meritocracy to suite your argument.

Next you'll be arguing lootboxes make games more fair.

>Think of the movie Gattaca

Was literally a movie about unfair privilege. people in it were granted privileges and opportunities based on their genes whether they had accomplished something or not.

<comment><USER9> Can you explain what you mean? This definition for meritocracy: "government or the holding of power by people selected on the basis of their ability." says nothing about fairness. If people are able to gain increased ability based on privilege than you have an unfair meritocracy. Since it is pretty clear that you can indeed do this, through parental involvement, tutoring, nutrition, better medical care, etc. than it follows that meritocracy is not fair.

<comment><USER6> There's lots of definitions, I think this one is probably closer to what we think of when discussing meritocracy:

 _an elite group of people whose progress is based on ability and talent rather than on class privilege or wealth_

[http://www.dictionary.com/browse/meritocracy](http://www.dictionary.com/browse/meritocracy)

<comment><USER9> There is still no conflict though, so long as class privilege and wealth can be transformed into ability and talent.

<comment><USER6> Well no because the definition is 'rather than class privilege or wealth.' Transforming wealth into ability and talent _is_ class privilege.

<comment><USER10> If ability comes from wealth, it's still ability. I'd read "rather than class privilege or wealth" to mean that those things aren't considered merits in and of themselves, except to the degree that they _can_ help someone achieve their full potential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not an actual prince but merely from a rich (birth) family.

</comment><comment><USER12> Amazing. This is an interesting read.

</comment><comment><USER13> He shouldn't have settled for $317,000.

<comment><USER14> On what grounds could he get more from the hospital? IANAL and am not familiar with Japanese statutes, but the law almost certainly doesn't guarantee any entitlement to wealth from being born into a wealthy family. He probably has a very good chance of making a claim on the family's estate though.

<comment><USER15> > On what grounds could he get more

I'd say he could get more if the other half of the switch paid back the amount he presumably benefitted by. Should the two values equal out though?</comment></comment></comment>


RISC OS for Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2338

<comment><USER2> FWIW, I have running RISC OS machines that I still use occasionally for the few applications that had, and have, no peer. I'll be watching closely to see if any of my older work will be of use to the community.

<comment><USER3> What applications have no peer?

<comment><USER2> !Draw, for one. I have yet to find an application that lets me draw things as quickly and cleanly as that. Anything else that has the same capabilities is a pig to use in terms of menus, actions, clicks, etc. Other packages that offer more are often harder to drive and too fussy, and anything that offers less is usually not good enough for what I want.

!Draw hits the sweet spot, for me, of capability and usability.

<comment><USER4> +1 for !Draw. I nearly cried when I got my first PC which had Paint on it. I then spent 5 years dredging through various applications and I still haven't found something better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is all very interesting from a nostalgia viewpoint (the Open VMS cluster hit that spot for me ;)) but have we seen much in the way of cutting edge OS work on this device?

The Pi gives us a great experimental platform to explore new possibilities does it not?

<comment> saw-lau My own point of view, given its supposed background as an educational tool, is that this should have been on the device from Day One, and work should never had been started on it supported Linux. The immediacy of an insta-booting machine with BASIC is one of the things that cemented my interest in computers and programming as a ten year old.

I may, of course, just be being nostalgic here...

<comment><AUTHOR> but some other people are looking forward to use pi for more 'serious' applications. luckily a quick google revealed that risc os supports lua and python, although jvm would be nice.

<comment><USER4> I'd argue, having used it extensively in the 80's and 90's, that the BASIC variant shipped with RISC OS it is _very serious_.

It's a different league to your usual BASIC variants and scales up very well to large applications and even down to system programming.

It's completely unique and people could learn a lot from how little time it takes to knock out something useful, fast and powerful in it.

<comment><USER2> FWIW, we've developed and supplied safety-critical, soft-real-time applications in BBC BASIC. It was a genuinely serious language.

I also developed symbolic execution and partial verification systems for it, and that helped confirm that our systems were appropriate for the context in which they were used.

<comment><USER6> Please tell me who you work for, so I know to avoid any of your products. Using BBC Basic like this terrifies me. If anything, because its total lack of type safety for anything but the simplest of values.

<comment><USER4> Anecdotally, I think you got the wrong end of the stick regarding type safety.

I used to work for a defence contractor who avidly programmed everything in ADA with verified compilers and mathematically proved algorithms.

Stuff still broke because the algorithms and designs were wrong. That particular problem is far more problematic than type constraints.

Regarding BBC BASIC, it is strongly typed but all casts and conversions are implicit so you need to know what it's going to do:

       REM win
       p%=4;q%=4;r%=p%/q%;PRINTr%

       REM fail
       p%=4;q=4.0;r%=p%/q;PRINTr%

The earlier has no cast, the latter does.

When it goes wrong, it's not usually the code that's gone phut:

<http://www.ntk.net/2000/07/14/dohtrain.jpg>

<comment> saw-lau Wow! Thanks for the reminder about how great NTK was. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like I need to get myself a proper (no-scrollwheel) three-button mouse again. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> What would it take to get Sibelius running on this? Is it possible to get binaries of this still?

<comment><USER4> That would require some serious work I imagine. Sibelius was 26-bit ARM (the status register was mixed with the program counter if I remember). It would require some extensive rework to do anything useful on later fully 32-bit addressed ARM processors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder what this means for the demo scene - I bet some awesome demos can come out from this.

<comment><USER4> I don't know why anyone downvoted this. Some of the demos on the old archimedes platform were awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> RISC OS was so awesome.

Windows looked like a dinosaur compared to this at the time

<comment><USER11> It's still a dinosaur in functional gui features. Separation of document window and app. Resize, move, scroll, click and type in windows without bringing them to the front of the stack. A send to back of stack button. Drag and drop load and save. Menus you can select and item and keep the menu open.

<comment><USER12> > Drag and drop load and save

This.

Open/Save dialogues simply aren't necessary with a proper desktop metaphor. Shame no-one uses them any more.</comment></comment></comment>


We're Sleepwalking into a Surveillance State - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/opinion/phone-data-privacy.html <comment><USER2> I don't know what to do.

The benefits of being tracked are many. It helps your productivity, quality of life, and breadth of what you can get out of it.

But what happens when the state or the corporation decides that YOU are someone they suddenly decide they don't want to be in their system?

They have far too much power, and our legislators seem incapable of doing anything about it. It's out of control, and it's also creating a gross inequality of wealth.

Is this Orwellian power bubble going to grow until an apocalyptic burst happens 20 years from now? Or can we start turning the cameras on _them_ and truly democratising surveillance? How about a series of exposés on the exact real-time locations of powerful and famous people by using cheap legal commercial surveillance tools? What is it going to take?

\---

It's not just surveillance of the population, it's also 'remote control'. We can be psychologically and behaviourally controlled, like puppets, from a single source, through 'nudging'. They can control not only what we see, but now, get an increasingly comprehensive set of instant, real-time feedback data on our bodies' reactions to this centrally nudged media.

<comment><USER3> Can you explain the mechanism? All I see is an excuse to show more ads. I can't name a single way that being digitally tracked improves my "productivity" or "quality of life".

<comment><USER2> Two common examples (among many more):

\- Google Maps in saving a great deal of time when travelling from one physical location to another.

\- Google News, in Google serving me up information I legitimately want to know, only because it tracks so much of the activity I'm doing online. This actually helps my productivity, it relates back to my line of work.

The list goes on. Full and meaningful participation in society in 2020 requires being tracked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That ship sailed in W's first term. Nor, did we sleepwalk into the surveillance state; we voted for it, with ballots and dollars.

<comment><USER5> Someone voted for it, with ballots and dollars. But it wasn't me.

I think it might have been Citizens United, but I don't have the first hand evidence to prove that belief.</comment></comment>


Clues to Covid-19 coronavirus's vulnerability emerge from antibody against SARS - <AUTHOR> https://www.scripps.edu/news-and-events/press-room/2020/20200403-wilson-covid19.html <comment><USER2> >"Despite the slightness of difference between the two coronaviruses, the antibody binds much less tightly to SARS-CoV-2 than it does to the SARS virus, and cannot neutralize SARS-CoV-2 in lab dish tests as it does SARS-CoV."

Oh.

<comment><USER3> There are different antibodies being tested though. So there's a good chance a properly working mAb (not inducing Antibody Dependent Enhancement) will happen.

<comment><USER4> Can anyone chime in why we're not simply looking at antibodies from those who have now recovered?

<comment><USER5> We are. Many avenues are being explored by different teams.

[https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/04/03/promising- use...](https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/04/03/promising-use-plasma- coronavirus-survivors-reaches-trial-stage/2945671001/)

<comment><USER4> Yeah the real confusion for me is why even bother looking at anything other than these actual existing SAR-2 antibodies.

"Hey these SARS-1 antibodies 'almost' work"

Meanwhile there's literally a ton of antibodies out there that work well.

<comment><USER6> One of the main reasons (most likely) is that these antibodies are already purified and in stock in the laboratories. So I'd be relatively easy to start researching the binding sites to SARS-COV-2. And since there is a relationship between the 2 viruses you can get useful information even if it's not perfect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very interesting and hopeful. There is a documentary on Netflix and one of the features docs may have another solution.

[https://sfist.com/2020/04/03/san-francisco-doctor- featured-i...](https://sfist.com/2020/04/03/san-francisco-doctor-featured-in- netflix-series-says-covid-19-treatment-could-be-ready-by-september/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Having an antibody bind the virus is good, but not enough. The antibody needs to end up activating the immune system. Sometimes antibodies binding to the virus can sometimes enhance the infection:

Potential Mechanims of Age Related Severity Of COVID-19 Infection: Implications for Development of Vaccines, Convalescent Serum, and Antibody Therapies [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340005309_Potential...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340005309_Potential_Mechanisms_of_Age_Related_Severity_of_COVID-19_Infection_Implications_for_Vaccine_Development_and_Convalescent_Serum_Therapy)

The back fo the antibody (Fc region) to COVID needs to be conjugated with an activating factor.

<comment><USER9> From my understanding when an antibody attaches to a virus it causes a signal for T-cells to eat the and destroy the virus. So the antibody would be effective in getting the body to destroy any virus found. However I don't think it would create any sort of immune memory which is what a vaccine or recovering from the illness by yourself would do.

That said it would be fantastic in that it could provide some immunity protection for a while why the antibodies are active in your body allowing health care workers to be safer. Might also be very helpful in creating firewalls in institutions like old folks homes or hospitals.

<comment><USER10> Are there some examples of antibodies like this being employed successfully like that?

I find it fascinating how the body is able to adapt to new entrants and the immune system figures out how to uniquely bind to the virus - but seemingly based on the article only when it changes into an active infection mode and exposes a certain part. Potentially ignoring it unless it's an active threat to the body.

<comment><USER3> Yes, there have been some trials in avian flu at least, and a few attempts in original SARS and MERS, with success.

The problem here is the mediocre quality of evidence. Mostly limited sizes, but also lacking randomization.

Also rabies, tetanus and hepatitis B and C sera are available. Those have high quality evidence for working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I never understood how animals without an adaptive immune system fight off stuff like this. Like spiders for example.

<comment><USER12> It may simply be the normal predator-prey dynamic. Even if the predator is infinitely more powerful than the prey it's not in their interest to wipe the prey out. They want to leave enough prey for tomorrow. And if there are defector predators that try to gain an edge by eating more than is sustainable, other predators will try to stop them from doing so.

Now, before you object: it's not always perfectly balanced like this. Sometimes the prey does go extinct.

<comment><USER13> > And if there are defector predators that try to gain an edge by eating more > than is sustainable, other predators will try to stop them from doing so.

You're talking about a virus, you know... an inert molecule.

<comment><USER14> An inert molecule that kills all its prey will not survive. The natural selection will favor those molecules that are able to spread without extinguishing all their guests.

<comment><USER15> oh wow, natural selection applies to non-living things?

<comment><USER16> My background is nothing to do with biology, but it has struck me for years that natural selection is just a broad statement about probabilities that can be applied almost everywhere.

It is something like: if something has high odds to exist, given enough time to possibly exist, it will exist.

So an inert protein coming into existence? Sure. Better odds to be replicated? Then it'll happen. We ascribe agency or will to survive. Those probably help the odds in a lot of cases. But the concept is broader than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We've had many viral outbreaks. SARS, MERS, Zika, Swine flu, HIV etc. some of them have been with us for decades. Why don't we have vaccines for all of them yet?

Also how likely is that COVID-19 will mutate like influenza and become a seasonal deadly killer ?

<comment><USER6> Short answer. Money. You might like this podcast episode from planet money [https://www.npr.org/2020/03/06/812943907/episode-977-wheres-...](https://www.npr.org/2020/03/06/812943907/episode-977-wheres- the-vaccine).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if this is why the vaccine announced from Pittsburgh [1] is effective. Sounds like they adapted a SARS vaccine candidate.

[1] [https://www.upmc.com/media/news/040220-falo-gambotto-sars- co...](https://www.upmc.com/media/news/040220-falo-gambotto-sars-cov2-vaccine)

</comment><comment><USER19> How does one isolate a specific antibody from the blood? Presumably there are thousands (millions?) of different ones in there for all kinds of pathogens.

<comment><USER20> Typically, you first test the blood to see if there are any antibodies in that blood of interest. E.g., collect blood sample, harvest serum from blood by coagulation and centrifugation, apply serum to surface coated with COVID protein(s), wash away unbound material, detect whether antibodies to serum have bound to surface coated with COVID proteins. If yes, then this is a blood sample of interest. You could also test for neutralizing antibodies in parallel/before/after/instead in a viral replication assay. Once you have identified the blood as containing what you want, you then harvest more and collect mature B cells. Mature B cells each produce one antibody. You isolate the B cells by limiting dilution and/or immortalize them by fusion with a special type of cell to make a hybridoma to isolate clonal populations of single cells that are maintainable. Then you test each clonal population for whether it produces the antibody of interest, isolate the nucleic acid that encodes that antibody and put it into a cell type suitable for manufacturing. There are other ways to do it, but the above is fairly standard. It is laborious and easy to mess up and takes time (1 to 2 months) to do correctly. Any step can go wrong and require starting over.

<comment><USER17> Here's a noob question. The coronavirus is made out of a whole bunch of proteins. Have we fully mapped out all the protein structures and corresponding DNA code?

The antigen is also a protein, I assume the DNA sequence for it is well known. Right?

How far are we in terms of tech to print custom proteins from arbitrary DNA sequences?

Is understanding protein folding and protein to protein interaction the holy grail of making massive improvements in molecular biology? What are the big unsolved problems?

Like if we know the virus's DNA and it's 3D protein architecture, we can solve for antigen proteins in a computer that outputs possible DNA sequences and we can manufacture them the next day in a protein printer. How far away are we to that future?

<comment><USER6> Protein folding is part of it. The other is finding which parts are antigenic to the immune cells. Epitope mapping is a common method to screen small bits of the proteins to see if any are hits for immune cells to recognize and kill. There are algorithms that can take the RNA/DNA, predict proteins, and then guess a percentage of those that may be important. But you still need to synthesize those in mass quantities and start testing each. Once you have candidates you then test them in mouse models (typically) to see if they actually provide an immune response. If interested check out the iedb. [https://www.iedb.org/](https://www.iedb.org/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Venezuela Wins a Seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/venezuela-wins-a-seat-on-the-un-human-rights-council/2019/10/17/e0beeb34-f050-11e9-bb7e-d2026ee0c199_story.html <comment><USER2> China got a spot there too, I don't really understand what the UN hopes to gain by putting totalitarian dictatorships that murder their own people onto "human rights" related councils.

Here's a good one about China: [https://unwatch.org/deniseho/](https://unwatch.org/deniseho/)

And Venezuela murdered 7000 civilians barely a month ago: [https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/18/venezuela- extrajudicial-...](https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/18/venezuela- extrajudicial-killings-poor-areas)

<comment><USER3> The UN hopes to be an inclusive club where nations can talk to each other rather than shoot at each other. Sometimes that gets in the way of other objectives, like letting the Human Rights Council actually care about human rights.

<comment><USER2> Sounds accurate.

I'm unclear why violators should get a seat at the table, but hey...</comment></comment></comment>


SHAInet – A machine learning library for Crystal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/NeuraLegion/shainet <comment><USER2> Thanks for the publish :)</comment>