Show HN: A color picker I made without fiddly sliders - <AUTHOR> http://quick-pick.herokuapp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Backstory:

I woke up this morning and saw the color pickers in [http://www.uibox.in/](http://www.uibox.in/) and started thinking about whether I could make a color picker that didn't require me to pick a color in multiple steps.

With a little bit of fiddling I came up with this. I'm sure someone with a graphic design degree will tell me some Swiss person much smarter than me invented this 50 years ago, but that's life. Instead of picking a hue and then picking a saturation/brightness you just pick the color you want.

This is not the color picker for everyone:

* It's not very fine-grained

* There's no pure white or pure black (you shouldn't need/use these anyway)

* Actually all of the really dark/really light/really unsaturated parts of the spectrum are removed because they all sort of looked the same.

* It forgets your palette when you reload the page

But it's fast, doesn't require you to grab any 4 pixel wide sliders, and it prevents you from thinking too hard. Might be useful for someone else, so I thought I'd post it.

I think it'd be a good basis for a color-picker for end users: it covers most of the useful colors without overwhelming people with complexity.

</comment><comment><USER2> My Style Adjuster chrome extension uses sliders to change colors, but what makes it good is that it changes the color of a CSS property value in the page, as you slide the slider, while looking at the thing that the color applies to. (It does dimensional values also.)

Sliding is better than clicking, because you can't click on something without actually looking at it. But once you've started sliding a slider, you can continue to slide it without looking at the slider.

</comment><comment><USER3> After I create my palette, I want to be able to copy the #NNNNNN for each color without resorting to trickery.</comment>


P-value statements and their unintended(?) consequences - <AUTHOR> https://errorstatistics.com/2019/11/30/p-value-statements-and-their-unintended-consequences-the-june-2019-asa-presidents-corner/ <comment><AUTHOR> The ASA's P-value project: why it's doing more harm than good [https://errorstatistics.com/2019/11/14/the-asas-p-value- proj...](https://errorstatistics.com/2019/11/14/the-asas-p-value-project-why- its-doing-more-harm-than-good-cont-from-11-4-19/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> P-value thresholds: forfeit at your peril. [https://errorstatistics.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/mayo-201...](https://errorstatistics.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/mayo-2019-forfeit- own-peril-european_journal_of_clinical_investigation-2.pdf)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The ASA's latest recommendations to journals is to ban using "significance" & "significant", & never use any pre-designated p-value in interpreting results. The result is that there can be no tests & no falsifications even of the statistical kind.</comment>


John Deere has turned itself into a poster-child for the DMCA - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2017/04/22/drm-eschatology.html <comment><USER2> The article does not cite where Deere says that.

Cisco has been doing this for years. They're worse than Deere; if you buy a used Cisco router, you don't have the right to run the software. You have to go through the "Cisco Hardware Inspection and Software Relicensing Program" to get a new license.[1]

[1] [http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/hw-sw-relicensing- prog...](http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/hw-sw-relicensing-program.html)

<comment><USER3> And as a result, now we switches running Linux!

[https://cumulusnetworks.com/products/cumulus- linux/](https://cumulusnetworks.com/products/cumulus-linux/)

<comment><USER4> Honestly, the existence of Linux (and other open source software) is a miracle after seeing all the bullshit around copyright and licensing these days...

<comment><USER5> Open source also comes with all sort of string attached. Licenses that either force you to share the code or restict it in certain applications, etc. It's not a free world (as in you downloaded it you do whatever you want with it).

<comment><USER6> Free software comes with the "string" that you grant the same rights to your users that you enjoyed. That's not so terrible, it's common courtesy.

<comment><USER7> Sure, but this Free Software of yours is less free than say, FreeBSD, which also gives Cisco the freedom to extract money from 2nd hand sales of their equipment ;)

<comment><USER8> Is the net gain of a BSD license better than if it didn't exist, considering public companies use it for profit and don't contribute back? Absolutely, but same with LGPL. Actuaĺly I just wanted to argue it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Deere's just reiterated that position to a US Copyright Office inquiry on > the future of the law, joined by auto manufacturers (but not Tesla)...

Bravo, Tesla.

<comment><USER10> Tesla is not hugely better. If you have an accident, the car's computer shuts down and only an authorised Tesla garage can reactivate it. They have effectively DRMd the entire repair process.

<comment><USER11> I'm a little torn about that one. It's honestly not a bad idea, but I see how it negatively impacts people ability to repair their own cars.

In Europe it's not uncommon for BMW, Mercedes and other luxury cars to find their way to Romania and other eastern European country after they been in an accident. These cars aren't repaired in western Europe because they've been damage so badly that they would be unsafe, even after repairs. It was even the reason for massive thefts of airbags in northern Europe. The airbags would be sold in Romania to the people who where repairing the damaged cars.

My point is that the reactivation by an authorised garage helps ensure that dangerous cars are driving around in less regulated / poorer countries.

<comment><USER10> I can see why they would want to prevent a reactivation of a car that was extremely badly damaged - but then, I don't agree that they should be the ones deciding. I am around people who go off roading a lot and you know why modern vehicles are not a good choice for extreme off roading? Because if you hit a tree and the fender falls off, the computer will tell you that you can't continue driving and shut off the engine. Why is it making that decision for you?

Now, I'm not saying that Teslas are used for off roading, but I suppose it's a huge worry that in 10 years time if you have even a minor accident that can be easily repaired, Tesla will just say "sorry, we can't reactivate the computer on that model, it's out of support since 2025" and the only thing you can do is buy a new model. You wouldn't have that problem with a 20 year old Mercedes, would you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> People should start to distinguish between "Intellectual Property" and "Intellectual Property Rights". IP is not "owned" in the same way that tangible property or intangible assets like goodwill. What is "owned" is the rights to exploit the intellectual property. These ownership "rights" are granted by the state (US Constitution or in other countries, statute).

What is being debated is whether those IPRs (which can only be licensed or sold outright) can be extended to cover the end user's use of the product that contains the IP.

The DMCA doesn't say you can't do what you like to the product, it says you can't circumvent "locks" on the IP that enforce the licensor's IPR. That's a very contentious position and is inherently anti-competitive and anti- innovation.

IPRs are provided by the State for specific purposes. Extending those rights beyond those purposes should be ruled either unconstitutional or against the best interests of society.

</comment><comment><USER13> Do a GPL request on Deere ;)

<comment><USER14> First I laughed, and then I thought this wasn't such a bad idea - sure you want to absorb the mind numbing true cost of the entire stack, then knock yourself out, be as 'Gollumy' as you like - get caught leveraging OSS for that and you pay the difference - a pipe dream, but a nice one - the real solution is more along - 'Dear John Deere, try not to be a complete dick all the time' but that rarely works

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't disagree with the authors overall premise, but I disagree that only corporations can own "property". The title is misleading as it refers to intellectual property. Anyone can own intellectual property, but I suppose only corporations have the money to defend it.

<comment><USER16> If you dont own intellectual property included in an object you bought, you don't own it. Ownership is unhindered use of the object.

<comment><USER17> If I buy a book, I don't own the IP in the book. Even though I can do what I want with the physical item, I certainly cannot (legally) sell copies of it.

(To be clear: John Deere and the rest are in the wrong, I'm just nitpicking your comment)

<comment><USER18> You own _your copy_ of that book. You do not own the right to make copies of the book, but you can do own your copy and can do with it what you want.

"IP" is disinformation - "copyright" is not "property", it's a temporary monopoly granted to the creator of a work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A middle solution here is in order. If you buy a John Deere tractor or Cisco router you should be allowed to do whatever you want with it if you remove all of that companies branding from it. Leaving their brand on it confers a promise of a certain level of standardization/reliability compromised by DIY repairs/mods.

<comment><USER20> Isn't there already a middle solution? You can do whatever you want, but you void the warranty.

<comment><USER21> The problem with "you void the warranty" is that one person voids the warranty, then sells the equipment to someone else, and that second person gets upset with John Deere when it doesn't work. On the hardware side, we have "warranty void if seal broken"; but there's no easy way for someone buying used farm equipment to know if someone messed with the software.

<comment><USER7> > The problem with "you void the warranty" is that one person voids the > warranty, then sells the equipment to someone else, and that second person > gets upset with John Deere when it doesn't work.

No, that's an imaginary problem invented to rationalize this bullshit.

I don't think there actually exist people so ignorant to not realize that buying used hardware comes with caveats and that you usually get what you paid for.

<comment><USER22> Based on what I read and hear about us laws and how they are enforced this might very well be a real problem there.

A company I worked for decided to settle after someone broke in, stuck something in the safety switch and got injured while illegaly operating a machine we had made.

The reasons were simple:

1\. There were no sticker saying this was bad. (But as mentioned we had other safety measures that were deliberately overridden.)

2\. While we had a fair chance of winning the costs and risks were simply not worth it.

Lessons learned: if something goes to the US, make sure the stickers are in place.

<comment><USER7> _A company I worked for decided to settle after someone broke in, stuck something in the safety switch and got injured while illegaly operating a machine we had made.

The reasons were simple:

1\. There were no sticker saying this was bad._

And this shows that if Deere cared about liability and not about ripping customers off every time they need to repair something, they would use stickers instead of DRM.

And you can laugh at safety stickers, but IMO they are a good thing. They mean that your responsibility is limited to providing basic safety interlocks sufficient for the intended use and informing what is and what isn't intended use. Everything else is user's problem, as it should be. I certainly prefer this over wasting manufacturers' time on elaborate idiot-proofing and then later wasting hackers' time on breaking it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One could discuss the corporation taking away personal responsibility for actions performed for example harming the environment. In case of farming One could view it as the tractor as a piece of hardware with software. One licenses the software but should be able to tinker with it. Most inventors tinker if we as a human race are not allowed to tinker we will not innovate.

Global warming requires a lot of invention and cooperation together or we will be doomed.

A forsee farming tractors going the same route as routers. First they where propietary hardware routers running closed operating ststems. Then came propietary routing hardware mostly broadcom based running open software Linux for software defined networks. Then came facebook open hardware for seitches and open software. The same will probably happen with tractors. Crowd funded community constructed open hardware and software.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Property" is a big term. This is about IP, not chattles or "real" property. The queen is human and certainly can own those types of property. You will need more than lawyers to tell her otherwise.

<comment><USER25> "The queen is human and certainly can own those types of property."

Actually, I believe you're technically wrong - the Queen is essentially the CEO of The Crown, which is a company and can therefore own those types of property.

<comment><USER24> There are other queens than that one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Let corporations think closed system can help their profit until someone come with an alternative open source system and customers flock over. More startup opportunities for smart tractors.

<comment><USER27> If it works that way, shouldn't we be able to look at an industry and see that happening? I can't think of a good example, though I may not be thinking hard enough.

There are definitely open source alternatives to many many things, but how often are they the ones capturing most of the market?

<comment><USER26> It needs not to be wholesale open sourced, but dev-friendly, hackable, after market support. Android is a good example. Even some OEMs favor lockdown (looking at you, Samsung), there are dev-friendly OEMs (OnePlus, Google). End users don't need to be tech-savvy, especially farmers, but knowing there is alternative support from community is good enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Humans, as compared to corporations, have (probably) inbuilt timespans which govern their lifetime. If you 'own' a property after you die, how do you enforce your ownership?

<comment><USER29> You'll be dead so technically you won't. But, a proper will drawn up by competent legal representatives will preserve your ownership for your descendents and see that your real assets, and a tractor is part of your real property that can be passed without any trouble on to your descendents.

John Deere would have nothing to say about that. They would not likely want to have a lot of older machines showing up on their lots every time a farmer passes. Their focus is on keeping the buyer in the machine upgrade cycle.

John Deere in this case is trying to do what auto-makers do with their cars in selling the car and then trying to lock the buyer into long term service and maintenance at a company dealership where their OEM parts are sold at a premium and installed by trained techs who also earn a premium for the dealership service department.

There are a lot fewer tractors sold than cars and there is increasing competition from foreign rivals so Deere could be seeing part of their traditional market evaporate as smaller farm operations shift from their products to cheaper and easier to maintain foreign equipment.

There is currently a thriving market for used farm equipment, especially equipment old enough to be pre-sensor, pre-electronics. A lot of this is bought up here and shipped overseas to small farms where people understand how to maintain them through prior exposure to the older tech.

I read an article not long ago somewhere that described how older Massey Ferguson tractors are especially in high demand since they had a global distribution system before being bought by AGCO.

There is a lot of technical and service information available for old equipment. Parts are available from salvage yards and NOS (new old stock) suppliers as well as high quality reproduction parts from other sources.

John Deere risks driving their traditional customers away if they stick with the "you never own it" model. There are competitors who are advertising use of commonly available parts and sensors or tractors that don't use sensors at all making them simple for a reasonably skilled mechanic to maintain. Believe me that if you are a farmer maintaining a tractor is one of the normal parts of your life. You likely have all the tools, a large well-equipped shop, and plenty of able assistants if you need them.

I digressed a bit there. Sorry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> As I commented on another thread, the whole stuff is taken (without any need) to extreme points, that is ideology, what the farmers want is much less than freedom to tinker with their machines, they simply want to:

1) have their machine run (to do some actual work)

2) be able to repair quickly their machines when they break(and at a reasonable price)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14077327](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14077327)

</comment><comment><USER31> Worth noting, this article points back to an opinion piece on Wired from 2015: [https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john- deere/](https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Ripe for disruption.

This disgusts me, frankly.

<comment><USER33> This is not an easy market to disrupt... the barrier to entry for manufacturing a $200,000 tractor or $500,000 combine is high, and the market is not that large.

This isn't like coming up with a better lightbulb that cost $2 to manufacture and will sell millions. And while the large farms may cycle through their equipment in 5 years, a small farmer may keep his in operation for 20+ years, so there's not a whole lot of equipment turnover for an upstart to break into.

<comment><USER4> What about replacing only the software? Or will they claim it's illegal and you still don't own the hardware?

<comment><USER6> Then they'll only allow signed software to run. Trying to start a business on a hostile platform doesn't sound like a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Time to retire property

</comment><comment><USER35> Title change, please? Boing Boing and especially Doctorow have a serious hyperbole problem, but even their original title didn't put Doctorow's words in John Deere's mouth. The quote marks are completely false.

<comment><USER36> I flagged the article for this reason.

<comment><USER37> You're being downvoted, but flagging (and/or emailing email@example.com) is the moderator-sanctioned method of drawing their attention to a post.

<comment><USER22> Didn't downvote but still disagree a lot.

Flagging off otherwise interesting articles is seriously annoying IMO.

I'd say commenting or upvote if there is already a comment (and maybe emailing if necessary) is the solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> But I thought corporations are also people?

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't anything enterprise software companies haven't been doing for decades. John Deere just didn't set expectations. If there's enough demand for an open alternative, that's a business opportunity.

Personally I think it's stupid. Release the code under GPL and you'll save yourself a PR nightmare and future proof the company. Manufacturing and design of farm equipment is what keeps competition out, not software.

<comment><USER39> > Manufacturing and design of farm equipment is what keeps competition out, > not software.

How can you be sure? I have never used a "smart tractor", so I have no idea.

Sure you can do all the work with a 1960s tractor, the improvement is incremental compared to using a donkey, but apparently there is such a thing as an improvement coming from software.</comment></comment>


TumbleSeed Postmortem: what went wrong - <AUTHOR> http://aeiowu.com/writing/tumbleseed/ <comment><USER2> I really appreciated this write-up, and I can 100% empathize with the struggle of the game designer [1].

I'd like to give the author one piece of feedback: please refine your color palette to use contrast and hue to make it easier for players to identify the various game entities! Looking at the screenshots and watching the gameplay videos, it's really hard for me to pick out the what's important and what's just background. Everything blends together and just looks like _noise_.

Take a look at other games, e.g. Raptor: Call of the Shadows, which make it _really easy_ to scan the screen and identify/differentiate background terrain, power-ups, enemies, and bullets. When it's hard to tell what's going on, you add an unnecessary barrier to entry.

That said, keep making games!! Seems like you're good at it. :)

[1] [http://www.atomicarmies.com/](http://www.atomicarmies.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> As an aside does anyone else find their landing page really poorly designed ?. It scrolls up instead of down and shows a bunch of static screenshots where I wasn't entirely certain where the playable character was. it was all quite confusing until I finally landed on the explanation video which should have been the first thing they showed.

[http://tumbleseed.com/](http://tumbleseed.com/)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that landing page is not doing the game any favors. I closed the tab halfway through scrolling up the page.

<comment><USER3> I was about to do the same. I think this and their playability issues could have been caught very early on with simple A/B testing.

<comment><USER5> For a _simple_ AB testing they would need thousands of unique visitors and players for just one test. Just not possible for an indie game I believe

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice write-up. It's heart-rending to read an article about coming to terms with the fact that project you poured your soul into didn't work out (I've certainly been there).

The control system would doom this game for me. Squishy, indirect controls means a lot of frustration. The fact it is the central idea around which the entire game is designed doesn't help.

I think that's exacerbated by the visual design. It looks good, but a critical part of the mechanic is the ball ("seed"), is being rolled up a wall. You should intuitively see and understand the danger of a hole, the presence of obstacles, things you can roll up or roll down or over or through. But everything is flat and has almost uniform visual weight. There are some 3D cues, but they aren't consistent and don't seem to directly match the mechanical geometry.

It's tough to read the environment. This makes the indirect unresponsive controls even more frustrating: even when you can get the ball to roll where you want, you have a hard to seeing what you want to roll toward or avoid.

</comment><comment><USER7> A crucial element that wasn't mentioned here was the lack of play-testing. Having a dozen people play the game and give feedback would have informed the makers that it was too hard, and where.

It ties in with the lack of time and resources too -- if you don't structure your development to have time to do user testing, you won't magically find that you have time to do it at the end, either.

<comment><USER8> My first thoughts too, although my guess is that they _did_ let other people play the game to find out if it's fun, but there's def a difference between that and a structured blind playtest with randos. It's super crucial early & late in development.

<comment><USER9> And if they used the same people, they get better at playing the game, it gives the appearance of a game that is easier than it actually is.

<comment><USER10> That can be an asset though, and ideally you want to have both "longitudinal" testing with the same group of testers as well as frequently testing with people who are fresh to the game. The former can reveal trends that the development team is otherwise blind to. It can also help to exercise subtleties of the gameplay that a new player wouldn't discover, or aspects of the "elder game" if the game has a linear progression that takes significant time to unlock.

<comment><USER9> I agree with the value you're talking about, but they don't help evaluate how hard a game is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Decent read. I bought this game on the switch as soon it was release, and stopped playing probably 60 minutes into it because the difficulty really did my it less fun. I'll definitely play again once the patch comes out.

Overall the game has an amazing and original design, and I hope the patch improves sales.

</comment><comment><USER5> Indie game development is pretty cruel compared to starting a business software company. No mercy, even early adopters are much more demanding and less forgiving, the launching it is a major part of the success (and it is much less lean as it is not just a CRUD, but a fully featured software published on another platform(s)), almost no chance to correct more fundamental flaws and pivot.

The first version of a SaaS is responsible for 0.0001% of its lifetime revenue. For an indie game it is what, 50%?

And a new SaaS is compared to your a home made Excel sheet. A new game is compared to Zelda, Mario and games built by thousands of people with millions of dollars.

<comment><USER12> For sure. The challenges are different but paying the bills with a boring business SaaS is way easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It seems casual styled platform-ish games are a tough thing to sell without some sort of catch, or interesting premise. I follow a fairly large number of indie games and looked at TS when it came out, but it was pretty easy to pass up.

It's a game in the purest sense of the word "game". It doesn't seem to have a catchy style, and it covers up the lack of fulfilling gameplay with the "rouge-like" descriptor which is so overused as to be meaningless. If it were on the phone, or I owned a switch maybe I could give it a try. On the PC, I expect a little bit more out of the video games I choose to spend time with.

</comment><comment><USER14> To be honest, the game itself just _looks_ confusing. I can't tell up from down, where the character is, or anything useful from the website at all.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow, this article kind of makes we WANT to play it. I had read about it (before it was released, so didn't see a wall of complaints about difficulty) and watched the trailer, but the aesthetic and the core game mechanic led to a false assumption that it was a really simple game. I honestly almost bought it for my kids (who would probably have found it daunting). I'll pick it up on Switch when the patch is out.

<comment><USER16> I picked it up on switch and was majorly disappointed to discover that the controls don't take advantage of the joycons at all. It would make the game even harder but it would be fun to control it by juggling the joycons.

I also gave up pretty quickly because it is pretty hard

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good read, and perfectly captures the things that frustrated me about the game.

Looking forward to playing the updated version on the Switch!

</comment><comment><USER18> Perhaps a dumb question, but in this case, could the core game mechanic have been testable by external players/users with minimal development to see if it is fun or not?

And a second question.... if it's too hard why not make it easier and launch again?

<comment><USER15> Article makes clear they just pushed a big update to Steam

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interestingly in my sphere of critical game review this game did quite well. Everyone seemed to like it and it surprises me to see a postmortem like this.

They might be throwing in the towel too early, games these days seem to have long tails.

<comment><USER20> I think this 'throwing the towel' article is more of a PR stunt to get the word out and inform that a new patch is coming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Their website is confusing and doesn't explain the game. The first video from the article's tweet is awful at explaining the game. Jump cuts every few seconds, talks about powers that it doesn't explain, gameplay is totally unexplained.

These guys need a non-artist on the team. No one is limiting them and making sure they understand that the game is more important than just the art.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why not just make it easier instead of all the drama?</comment>


Newly discovered formula explains efficiency gains from bifacial solar cells - <AUTHOR> https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2019/Q4/solar-power-from-the-dark-side-unlocked-by-a-new-formula.html <comment><USER2> We need a variety of cell that is transparent to wavelengths plants use, so they could be used above farmland and pasturage. Many plants could probably be grown under them in places where it would otherwise be too hot, maybe even needing less water.

<comment><USER3> I imagine different plants need multiple different wavelengths.

<comment><USER2> Most of the plants I know about are green, and rely on chlorophyll electrochemistry.

<comment> m-p-3 Don't they look green because they reflect most green wavelengths?

<comment><USER2> Yes, they don't use green. Or infrared, beyond 700nm. I don't know if they reflect the IR like they do the green.

Conversion efficiency of the part they do use can't be more than a few percent, so they probably radiate in IR. Converting IR radiating from plants, as suggested in TFA, thus seems like a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Surely a small stepper motor will still consistently win?

I mean this is cool for fixed structures but overall finding some empty space and pointing the thing straight at the sun seems better.

<comment><USER5> Sun trackers are marginally more efficient, but the complexity of motors and a moving frame make it less desirable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> looks like there are (led?) lights under the pictured double-sided gas station solar panel canopy. letting some of the light through would be more efficient that the conversion to electricity and then back to light.

and yes, you'd still need lighting at night, but a semi-transparent roof combined with the wider area lights already in use at gas stations would still likely be more efficient.

(of course this doesn't consider the value of the shade on hot days)

</comment><comment><USER7> Woof, what a title. FTFA:

> The formula shows that the efficiency gain of bifacial solar cells increases > with light reflected from a surface.

Perhaps a better title would be "Newly discovered formula explains efficiency gains from bifacial solar cells"

<comment><USER8> Done. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Innovating Cron: Announcing Norc - <AUTHOR> http://blog.perpetually.com/post/230779975/innovating-cron-announcing-norc

<comment><USER2> Celery supports scheduled tasks (including recurring ones like cron): <http://ask.github.com/celery/introduction.html>

It was originally written in the context of Django but it is a general purpose Python library now.

<comment><USER3> I've heard some great things about Celery, and I think it may be better at handling massive amounts of tasks (10s of thousands) without using SQS like Norc.

How does it handle logs, resources and changing trees?

Gonna have to look into it more!

<comment><USER2> Instead of SQS it uses RabbitMQ. I don't know about it's limits but since a serious RabbitMQ installation can handle something like millions of messages per second I assume the limits you will hit are in the persistence solution on celeryd. It can use a Tokyo Tyrant or MongoDB backend instead of a RDBMS, as well as memcached support. Those seem like they would help in that department.

I don't think you can change trees after they are sent (you mean subtasks, right?).

You can see logging example at "defining and executing tasks" section here: <http://ask.github.com/celery/introduction.html#usage>

Sorry, I am only a light user at this point in time.

<comment><USER4> <http://www.rabbitmq.com/faq.html#performance>

"From our testing, we expect easily-achievable throughputs of 4000 persistent, non-transacted one-kilobyte messages per second (Intel Pentium D, 2.8GHz, dual core, gigabit ethernet) from a single RabbitMQ broker node writing to a single spindle."

Or what do you mean by serious?

<comment><USER2> I was thinking more about multiple brokers working together.

Also, hmm, I didn't think rabbit was so significantly behind other AMQP implementations like zeromq: "4,100,000 messages a second" - <http://www.zeromq.org/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apple has supplanted cron with launchd within Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server:

<http://developer.apple.com/macosx/launchd.html>

<comment><USER6> It also replaces /bin/init, init scripts, xinetd scripts, and more! Almost everything that executes something automatically is now done through launchd (except LoginWindow still does its own instead of providing input to launchd).

The only annoyance is Apple's worst-of-both-worlds XML plist format, which replaced something fairly close to JSON with an awful pair-wise angle-bracket shit-pile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While cron is clearly pushed way past its capabilities by many people (without always realizing it), this strikes me as a reinvention of something that's been around forever: the batch system.

If the goals are improved reliability, management, fault-tolerance, etc., you'd be better off using mature software that was designed to solve this problem, and already has good community support, like Condor.

<comment><USER3> Comparing Norc to batch is similar to comparing it to cron. Many of the limitations of batch processing come with retrying or auditing complex trees of dependencies (bigger than a handful of tasks).

It's like wrapper scripts. They work well until they don't: managing the logs, getting efficient execution, understanding what happens when all become quite unwieldy, whereas a Norc-like approach proves more self-documenting and easy to manage.

I believe resource management is limited to overall system load. Batch isn't designed for things like managing available licenses.

I'm not a huge expert at batch, so if I've missed something let me know.

<comment><USER8> _Comparing Norc to batch is similar to comparing it to cron. Many of the limitations of batch processing come with retrying or auditing complex trees of dependencies (bigger than a handful of tasks)._

Condor has DAGMan (<http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/dagman/>) for managing DAGs of jobs, and I suspect that it can scale higher than just a handful of tasks.

 _I believe resource management is limited to overall system load. Batch isn't designed for things like managing available licenses._

Condor acts as match maker for jobs and cluster nodes using "classified advertisements" (<http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/classad/>). Classads allow you to describe the jobs and the cluster nodes, and to express arbitrary requirements and preferences for both. This allows jobs to say "I need a node with X", but it also allows nodes to express requirements (e.g. "I won't any run jobs coming from the psych department"). I don't see why you couldn't use this system for expressing requirements regarding licenses.

However, Condor appears to be _very_ complex. The PDF version of the Condor 7.3 manual has 991 pages in it. OTOH, Red Hat MRG Grid is based on Condor (<http://www.redhat.com/mrg/grid/>), so commercial support should be available.

<comment><USER2> > _don't see why you couldn't use this system for expressing requirements > regarding licenses_

People do just that: <http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/techpaper/licenses.html>

I would not say it is "complex" but ultra flexible. You will not have things working in just one day or anything, but I've set it up without a significant hassle. People have had a lot of ongoing success with Condor in large (and very large) computing environments.

<comment><USER9> I'd agree that "length of manual" is a poor heuristic for complexity. Condor is super-customizable, and they document those options pretty extensively. To the direct point, they've even started highlighting the use of condor as "condor cron" in the Open Science Grid to run monitoring applications: [http://vdt.cs.wisc.edu/releases/1.10.1/notes/Condor- Cron.htm...](http://vdt.cs.wisc.edu/releases/1.10.1/notes/Condor-Cron.html)

Without that, I'd say it would be a slightly masochistic exercise to take a big system like condor and try to make it a cron replacement; while it clearly has that capability, if that's not one of its use cases, it's going to be a real bear to force it into that configuration. I've been a fringe user of condor before, and it can result in some unfriendly "rejected your job for unknown reasons" situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "AutoSys is a closed, proprietary system, and SQS / RabbitMQ are queueing systems, without support for scheduling."

Right, why would a message queue support scheduling?

<comment><USER3> Norc isn't meant as a replacement for any queuing system, rather a replacement for Cron.

We use Norc in conjunction with SQS, and find the former is good for scheduling, management, logging, while SQS is better for lots and lots of repetitive tasks that we want processed ASAP.

Perpetually.com crawls, archives and versions any web site on demand, with any repeating schedule. One of the challenges is managing bursts of activity, so what we do is use Norc to manage the timing of archive requests, then SQS to manage farming out the actual archiving to available hosts. Since we hook SQS into Norc we can easily monitor/audit any system delay or outage.

We also use it to handle system backups, sending alerts and other system administration tasks.

<comment><USER11> So it's a hybrid between a batch job processor and cron? Batch cron?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> fcron has always been my 'go to' for a 'better cron' (<http://fcron.free.fr/>) and thankfully it has been available as an 'alternative' to cron in most distros for a while now.

That said, norc appears interesting, and I'll certainly be keeping an eye on it (I doubt I'll switch until it's a bit more established - and available in my favourite distros :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Is it possible to start a task inside a job and have it's dependencies start up after it finishes without starting the whole job? Like, say I have a sequence of operations to one, in the middle, something screws up (like a network connection is down for some reason). Can I rerun from the step that screwed up and get the rest to follow through?

<comment><USER3> If I understand the question the answer is yes. I think you're asking if you can retry portions of a job, like if a task breaks but doesn't exit with an error, thus causing the rest of the job to continue.

In this case, yes, you can retry a task in the middle of a tree of tasks, and retry all the children tasks as well. This will leave some tasks untouched (the parents and peers) and retry the children in the same order as the first time.

If a task in the middle of the tree fails children tasks will not run until it's been skipped or successfully run.

Retrying children tasks would be a great job for a GUI for Norc because then you could choose which children tasks to retry interactively from a web app or somesuch...

<comment><USER13> Yep. That's what I wanted to know. Sorry for the poor phrasing.

I was little confused because it seemed like norc would only start jobs at the top level.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, the terminology isn't well-defined.

Jobs start with any tasks that return True when asked due_to_run(), which can be schedule, parents' status, etc.

Glad I could clear it up!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I know I'm abusing github.com, but does anyone get a redirection loop error in firefox when trying to view [http://github.com/darrellsilver/norc/blob/master/core/models...](http://github.com/darrellsilver/norc/blob/master/core/models.py)?

</comment><comment><USER15> Darrell,

I know this is a bad place to ask for it, but we actually have just started a story at my company to look for a better scheduling tool--mostly, just a distributed cron. Do you have any preference for Q&A? Should we use HN?

If not, feel free to send me an email so I could bounce some questions off you (amcfague at wgen dot net)

EDIT: Considering these questions are not answered in the current README, I'd also like to be able to propose additions to the documentation as a result! :)</comment>


Hackers (1995) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_ihcJbwzV0&feature=related For all who like that movie! <comment><AUTHOR> [Reading from "The Hackers' Manifesto."] Agent Bob: "This is our world now. The world of the electron and the switch; the beauty of the baud. We exist without nationality, skin color, or religious bias. You wage wars, murder, cheat, lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto." Huh? Right? Manifesto? "You may stop me, but you can't stop us all."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> HACK THE PLANET!

</comment><comment><USER2> HACK THE PLANET!

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the truly great pictures ever made. Still my favorite Angelina Jolie movie.</comment>


Robots Are Catching Up to Humans in the Jobs Race - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-04/jobs-data-robots-are-catching-up-to-humans-in-workforce <comment><USER2> Just once I'd like to see a balanced study on automation that:

* Properly takes into account jobs created by technology as well as destroyed.

* Properly takes into account jobs destroyed by austerity (e.g. government budget cuts).

* Doesn't conflate outsourcing with automation - e.g. statistically pretending that because a job no longer exists in the US, that it doesn't exist at all or (worse), as the ball state university study did, literally (and probably deliberately) mixing cost savings from automation and cost savings from outsourcing.

Instead all we get is the steady drumbeat of that old investor pipe dream - the idea that employees are an unnecessary expense that will soon be dispensed with as soon as we find a deep learning model thats sophisticated enough and studies like the ball state U one that argue that the investor pipedream is coming true at the same time as (weirdly) showing their political affiliations by arguing for lower corporation taxes.

At the same time the investor automation hysteria has been good for my wages, so... maybe I should just shut up.

<comment><USER3> What's wrong with the ball state university study? Are there conflicting studies which show the opposite?

It seems fairly obvious that any new automated technology removes more jobs than it creates. A team of 20 engineers designs and maintains self service checkouts, they're fabbed by maybe 100 more, and then thousands of grocery workers have their shifts cut.

Here's the part which makes me feel a little guilty:

The self service machines are priced according to what the customer is willing to pay, so as to be competitive with the labor they replace, so in effect the money that used to be going to those thousands of grocery employees end up being funneled to the handful who do the automating.

The economy becomes more and more winner-take-all, the gini coefficient rises a little bit more, and like you said we all enjoy our wage increases.

<comment><USER4> >It seems fairly obvious that any new automated technology removes more jobs than it creates.

Widget A has $10 labor costs and $10 material costs. Widget B has $2 robot costs (=robot engineers labor) and $10 material costs.

My budget is $200. When I buy 10 Widget B I will have $80 remaining that I can spend on something else which will pay someone else's salary and therefore create at least as many jobs as were destroyed by the robot.

<comment><USER3> > I will have $80 remaining that I can spend on something else which will pay > someone else's salary

Will you pay someone else's salary or will you issue a stock buyback?

So far it seems like the later is happening, and as a result wealth accrues at the very top percentiles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's also a recent trend - robots and automation as a service, i.e. rental.

This together with simple installation(since newer robots aren't risky to humans and don't require a cage), and fast programming leaves relatively little barriers for adoption of robots.

So it would be interesting to see what will happen.

<comment><USER6> I used to work at a manufacturing company. I know the company tried renting some robots for putting items on a rack and getting them off said rack. On the surface it seemed like a good idea since this job is repetitive and boring for a human. Sadly it didn't work out. The amount of change in the parts being put on the rack proved to be a challenge for the robot and the company ended up ending the rental agreement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This headline bothers me: it's simple, expedient and even whimsical, but it describes the situation as if the robots have agency and an innate drive to seek jobs, and by continuous self improvement, are closing in on human candidates.

</comment><comment><USER8> So why still so many people in offices? There are now a huge number of employees for whom everything goes in and out over a wire. Those are the ones who should be most vulnerable to automation.

<comment><USER9> Asked my barber last week...

You worried about brexit?

Barber said, nope hair still grows whether we're in Europe or not.

OK, you worried about a deep recession and mass unemployment?

Barber said, nope hair still grows and needs cutting especially if people are interviewing more.

Ok, ok, so what about Automation?

Barber said...would you trust a robot to get this close to your ears with a razor sharp blade?

Honesly, true story which might explain why 3 new hairdressers have opened up in my high street in the last year. Also as someone who works in software and has to deal with 'bugs' his last point made me really think!

<comment><USER10> Honestly, that's why I'm moving into real estate. People will _always_ need a home to live in. More affordable housing will always be in demand.

The price of homes is pushed up by everyone _except_ those who want to buy their first one: Banks, Insurance companies, incumbent owners, construction companies, land owners, real estate agents, governments.

Everyone wants higher home prices except people who don't own a home.

I _will_ work against that tide. I am going to build a company that will build me an affordable house and then I will sell affordable houses to people.

<comment><USER11> > I am going to build a company that will build me an affordable house and > then I will sell affordable houses to people.

How?

<comment><USER12> With robots

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The way I read it - Bloomberg writes an alarmist article.

Nothing to worry about, unless you're invested in automation stock.

</comment><comment><USER14> [https://outline.com/E6EL7W](https://outline.com/E6EL7W)

<comment><USER15> Thanks! That's useful. Are you doing this manually or you programmed a bot?

<comment><USER14> Manually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> a little annoying they swap Mexico and Canada's keys in the two charts. Beyond that, I didnt read anything that was particularly compelling. the tittle could have just as well been: "Robots are getting cheaper" rather than "Robots Are Catching Up to Humans in the Jobs Race"

<comment><USER17> And if you're a biz owner, and you're making hiring decisions, which of those headlines is more compelling? Let's not be naive, they're the same.

<comment><USER2> The question is can people change their taste in manufactured goods quicker than a robot can adapt?

A robot that builds shoddy shoes that people don't particularly want any more getting cheaper isn't compelling.

A robot that makes Budweiser 5% more efficiently isn't compelling if what people really want is craft beer.

<comment><USER17> Yes. However. Changing tastes isn't very important if you have no money...because the robot has your job.

The best example is autonomous long haul trucking. No drivers means no need to truck stop food. No need for food means no dinner staff. Etc.

Replace a single job and multiple downstream jobs will be affected. That's true everywhere.

It's coming. Can we adjust and readjust quick enough? At what point does unemployment become permanent state? Then what?

<comment><USER2> In the 1930s the answer was to create a job guarantee in the form of a massive public works program. That's how stuff like the Brooklyn Bridge and the LA Griffith Observatory got built.

The other option is to keep the retirement age down. I'd like to know why so many people who believe in this automation revolution are instead advocating for the exact opposite on the grounds that we actually _really_ have the opposite problem...

You can't take both sides of this fence. Either the automation revolution is real and retirement ages can be lowered or it isn't and articles like this are spouting horseshit.

<comment><USER17> Yes. Now when are we going to have this discussion? It should have been a 2016 issue. 2016 had no issues. Does anyone reasonable expect 2020 to be different?

<comment><USER18> It should have been a 2018 issue as well. Arguably these are legislative matters, not executive.

<comment><USER17> Yes and no. The Executive branch can set vision and tone. JFK's "we're going to the moon" always come to mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Think resource extraction, transportation and processing, for self- sustainance.

In that regard, there's a 200 years old phenomenon where humanity is by the day more reliant on the industry whereas the industry is less and less reliant on humanity.

If it continues, it won't end well.

[https://www.xkcd.com/605/](https://www.xkcd.com/605/)</comment>


Capitalism won't rest until every single American takes yoga teacher training - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/style/corepower-yoga-teacher-training.html <comment><USER2> Whenever I point out to people there are 4 types of Yoga, and if you believe in the physical type (which has proven scientific benefits) then maybe consider the other types too as those hindu sages might have been onto something. I often get blank faces.

Modern day yoga, hot yoga, goat yoga, christian yoga, are all commercialised forms of what was supposed to be a free entity for ones well being and progress in this life.

</comment><comment><USER3> This has nothing to do with yoga. It's shameful that people can borrow the term 'yoga' and market it as some miraculous fitness program. A lot of the people who do this would never have the guts to admit their money-based intentions.

But, seeing as how this is already flagged, it doesn't warrant a longer response.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why is this flagged?

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is this capitalism's fault? It sounds like one crappy company has a pyramid scheme business model. What we should expect under capitalism is that competing studios where they don't spam you about their teacher training should start winning their business.

<comment><USER6> Why would they win if you don't know about them?

Glibness aside: it's not like Capitalist thought has definitive opinion about the quality and character of businesses that amass capital. That's part of free market economics. Captialism is the opinion that capital owners should have total and singular control of business. I think you're talking about the mechanics and stability of free markets, which may or may not occur under various forms of capitalism.

<comment><USER7> It looks like all of the dictionaries in the world need to be corrected on that point.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure that's quite true. The very first sentence from the wikipedia article on Capitalism[1]:

> Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means > of production and their operation for profit.

I do agree however, that capitalism and free markets are so often confused (much like "I could care less" and "I couldn't care less") that there may well be no point trying to distinguish the two in ordinary discourse. Perhaps we need a new word to represent what "capitalism" was supposed to mean?

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

<comment><USER7> That's different from what you said. You said that capitalism is an a opinion about what should be rather than a description of what is.

> Capitalism is the opinion that capital owners should have total and singular > control of business.

<comment><USER6> Are you suggesting that Capitalism as a philosophy is objective in some sense that say, monarchism or socialism are not?

Of course it is an articulation of an opinion about what should be. There are disagreeing opinions about "what should be."

<comment><USER7> It a concept, not an opinion. Most Kings get tired of being monarchs, for what it's worth. But, no matter whether they think it's the right way of doing things, they are kind of stuck with it.

<comment><USER6> Your first part? Okay, sure. I'm referring to the notion of capitalists in abstract, not capitalism outside of minds (which doesn't exist). So: my sincere apologies for not being precise there. It didn't damage any point I was making and I seriously doubt this is what you were objecting to originally, but I'll offer the apology all the same.

The second part... What? Why? Since when? And no, they're not. Obviously not. I'm confused why you'd say this, why you'd think this and why you'd think OF it in this context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting, can't get any nytimes nor wsj links to work on outline.com. The other few publications I tried did work. Is there finally a crack down?

<comment><USER10> NYT articles can be read by opening them in a private tab.

<comment><USER11> > _You 're in private mode. Log in or create a free New York Times account to > continue reading in private mode._

This appears to not be universally true.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you consider the current social web trend among startups? - <AUTHOR>

Currently the focus of many startups is on sharing life experiences. Foursquare, Instagram, Vine are all great examples of this. Do you think that this kind of ideas are among the organic ones PG describes in one of his essays [1]? Did the founders that started Instagram feel the need to share their photos with all the world? Many startups are following this trend, so something must be going on, but my guts tell me that it will pass because it's not tapping in our real needs, but just exploiting the rise of the mobile phone as a medium.<p>[1](http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html) <comment><USER2> Foursquare started because Dennis Crowley wanted an application where he could share his location to his friends and have them meet up with him.

Instagram started because Kevin Systrom's current app was mostly being used to broadcast photos so he pivoted. He also had experience in photography which led to the photo filters being a key addition to the product.

I don't know enough about Vine to comment, but Foursquare and Instagram both provide a ton of consumer value. Based on how they tell the stories of their origins, it seems they were also "organic."

Lastly, social is not a trend; in fact I believe it is in its infancy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree it may be in its infancy but so many of the startups I see (among the ones that fail too) are all about sharing and nothing else. A joke that turned into viable idea[1] is emblematic. Foursquare started like you say, but I'd say it's not used by the majority of people to meet with friends. Instagram pivoted to follow themselves this trend. It doesn't answer to a need of the founder so it is not an organic startup if you consider pg's definition "those [startups ideas] that grow organically out of your own life"

I am not arguing that sharing is not popular. I am saying that it's and ephemeral trend.

[1](<http://www.jotly.co/>)

<comment><USER2> Why do you think sharing isn't a need? We've been improving upon sharing things since the beginning of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sharing something beautiful you did will always be a need. I am talking about serial, massive sharing. Every share is the same. All the food pictures on Instagram, all the places at the beach on Foursquare are shared mostly to brag.

When there were no smartphones, people went to concerts and enjoyed them, now everyone is pointing up their phones taking videos or pictures. How much time will it take before people realize it's better to enjoy the concert instead of streaming their lives constantly?

<comment><USER2> Everything you just said is subjective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sharing/communicating information/experiences/ideas will always be. And the tools to do it will change and adapt to technology. Google glasses will probably have an impact. Tablets are already having an impact. Surface tablets, e-ink, gestures will impact. Photos(moments in time), music, opinions, videos all need shared in the future too.</comment>


NHS.uk allowing Google, Facebook, and others to track you - <AUTHOR> http://mmt.me.uk/blog/2010/11/21/nhs-and-tracking/ <comment><USER2> You know, I never really thought about this before.

It's obvious that clicking the "like" button will give Facebook information about you, but what's less obvious is that just by loading the widget, Facebook gets the referrer, and can essentially track every page you visit (at least, the ones with like buttons).

And the same would be true for Facebook Connect widgets. Even if you don't use it to log in, Facebook still gets your IP and the URL of the page you're on.

It's a brilliant strategy. Figure out how to get your iframes on as many pages as possible, and you've got an easy way to track your users' surfing habits, second-by-second, as they navigate from one widget-loading page to another...

Of course, ad companies have been doing this forever, but ad providers aren't ubiquitous, and they don't have your real name, address, etc. And everyone [edit: everyone who cares about these things] runs adblock anyway. But how many people block widgets, or would even think to?

<comment><USER3> _And everyone runs adblock anyway._

You're overestimating the number of people who use AdBlock. Most people don't. Myself included.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google analytics users have to specifically opt in to share their data with Google.

</comment><comment><USER5> At work we were debating how this happened: Someone in marketing said hey the hot trend is add these social buttons to everywhere, security team: small change no detailed review or thinking of implications

</comment><comment><USER6> Good thorough article. I think we'll soon need to make "incognito mode" the default and have to explicitly enable "social mode".</comment>


"I fell down a bit of a ruins research rabbit-hole" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/paulmmcooper/status/933753595174031361 <comment><USER2> readable version [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/933753595174031361](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/933753595174031361)

</comment><comment><USER3> Mark Twain's _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur 's Court_ (1889) has a lot of fun with irreverence toward hermits, especially one on a 60-ft pillar:

> His stand was a pillar sixty feet high, with a broad platform on the top of > it. He was now doing what he had been doing every day for twenty years up > there—bowing his body ceaselessly and rapidly almost to his feet. It was his > way of praying. I timed him with a stop watch, and he made 1,244 revolutions > in 24 minutes and 46 seconds. It seemed a pity to have all this power going > to waste. It was one of the most useful motions in mechanics, the pedal > movement; so I made a note in my memorandum book, purposing some day to > apply a system of elastic cords to him and run a sewing machine with it. I > afterward carried out that scheme, and got five years' good service out of > him; in which time he turned out upward of eighteen thousand first-rate tow- > linen shirts, which was ten a day. I worked him Sundays and all; he was > going, Sundays, the same as week days, and it was no use to waste the power. > These shirts cost me nothing but just the mere trifle for the materials—I > furnished those myself, it would not have been right to make him do that—and > they sold like smoke to pilgrims at a dollar and a half apiece, which was > the price of fifty cows or a blooded race horse in Arthurdom.

[https://www.gutenberg.org/files/86/86-h/86-h.htm#c22](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/86/86-h/86-h.htm#c22)

</comment><comment><USER4> Tom Cahill, in his book "Mysteries of the Middle Ages" [1] explains explains how in ancient times, people had very different attitudes towards hermits, stylites, and anchorites:

"Though often represented as a period of repression... the Middle Ages offered - at least in religious roles - more options than now allowed. ...in the Middle Ages such social oddities were welcomed and assigned a place of honor. While the rest of us went about our worried lives, they prayed for us continually, speaking to God on our behalf."

[1] [https://books.google.com/books?id=_vikHFhqIwIC&source=gbs_na...](https://books.google.com/books?id=_vikHFhqIwIC&source=gbs_navlinks_s)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm impressed by the way he used Twitter as a table of contents to his own writing. [https://twitter.com/PaulMMCooper/status/915959278028148736](https://twitter.com/PaulMMCooper/status/915959278028148736)

</comment><comment><USER6> A question for any passer-by historians: how did they deal with urination and defecation? Was there a secondary bucket system for that? Or do you just know to not approach the north side of the pillar?

<comment><USER7> I can't speak authoritatively, but most likely have a bucket which is lowered every now and then. These guys weren't claiming to be foodless, waterless, shitless divine beings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those looking to see more on this kind of thing....

Simon of the Desert is a famous 1965 foreign film by a famous director (Luis Bunuel) that is loosely based on the life of one of these Stylite ascetics.

It is a product of both the 1960s and Mexican magical realism (like Juan Rulfo) so expect it to be weird and you won't be disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's surprising that any part of the temple survived at all, given the early Christians' destruction of "pagan" temples.

<comment><USER10> That's a vast oversimplification. Go to Egypt and you'll find a large number of Egyptian temples adapted to Christian use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So how do these people got on the top of these pillars? What did they do there all day?

<comment><USER12> > What did they do there all day?

From the wiki page on Simeon Stylites, the most famous of these type of saints (and I think the first one who chose to live on top of a pillar) ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeon_Stylites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeon_Stylites)):

> Even on the highest of his columns, Simeon was not withdrawn from the > world.[citation needed] If anything, the new pillar attracted even more > people, both pilgrims who had earlier visited him and sightseers as well. > Simeon was available each afternoon to talk with visitors. By means of a > ladder, visitors were able to ascend within speaking distance. It is known > that he wrote letters, the text of some of which have survived to this day, > that he instructed disciples, and that he also lectured to those assembled > beneath.[9] He especially preached against profanity and usury. In contrast > to the extreme austerity that he practiced, his preaching conveyed > temperance and compassion, and was marked with common sense and freedom from > fanaticism.

Interestingly enough there is a similar character in season 2 of the HBO TV- show "The Leftovers", which I highly recommend (the show, that is). Here's its IMDB page: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2699128/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2699128/)

<comment><USER13> Also interesting is that the reason given in the Wikipedia article why he lived on top of a pillar was not to be closer to God but to be further away from people that would otherwise disturb his daily routine.

<comment><USER11> That to be on pillar would put him closer to God is a stupid idea only anti- Christians would think of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This shows the joy of our profession; find a loose thread and pull it.

<comment><USER15> Which profession is that? In the last week I've read great posts by a pilot, a beekeeper, an HVAC engineer, a programmer and someone who does something with economic forecasting.

<comment><USER16> Internet person

<comment><USER17> ...the pay is terrible. I've barely gotten any retweets/karma/clicks in days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Monty Python would have had a field day with this.

</comment><comment><USER19> Fascinating story and a reminder o how poor a fit Twitter is for long form writing. I would love to read the atlasobscura version of that thread.

<comment><USER20> I'm glad it was condensed and terse. I dislike skimming through long-form writing to get at the interesting bits.

</comment></comment><comment> DC-3 Interesting stuff, but is there a more obnoxious way to tell a story than in a twitter thread? I was hoping that Medium was starting to solve this problem, but clearly not everyone has adopted it.

<comment><USER21> What does Medium do that the million other blog services don't in this respect?

<comment><USER22> It annoys the crap out of non-logged in users!

<comment><USER23> Yes, Medium starts with a modal nag screen, then has a sticky header and footer which breaks paging (Mac/Chrome). Medium has totally lost any claim to being better for readability.

<comment><USER24> Also they still haven't figured out consistent urls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Writer notices that a 1800s picture of the temple of Jupiter at Olympus had an addition above the pillars that isn't there in other images nor in the temple reproductions. Turns out it was a dwelling for Christian ascetics, the dwelling being censored from some images and removed to return the ruins to their "original".

Think that's about it, from a scan through.

<comment><USER26> It's Zeus, not Jupiter, and it's in Athens, not Olympus.</comment></comment>


MinoMonsters (YC W11) Nabs $1 Million From Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/minomonsters-nabs-1-million-from-andreessen-horowitz-sv-angel-and-more-for-mobile-monster-battles/

<comment><USER2> Congrats guys! Great stuff. The screenshots look very appealing already and I'm not even much of a gamer.

</comment><comment><USER3> Super excited watching this take off. Congrats Josh and TJ.</comment>


'All our ICU patients are in their 50s or younger' – frontline Welsh doctor - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejlbCmRJMW4&feature=youtu.be <comment><AUTHOR> This is a 20 minute interview with an ICU doctor in Wales.

He talks about the pressures on intensive care, about the reduction in capacity and how they'll have to overflow to other areas quite soon; he talks about the difference in intensive care for covid-19 patients and other patients (all staff are in full PPE all the time, which isn't normal, and the covid-19 patients in ICU are more ill than other patients in ICU); he talks about good morale in the circumstance.

He also talks about the unexpected impact on younger patients -- all their ICU patients are in their 50s or younger, and do not have comormid conditions.

He speaks about the distress of people not being able to have visitors, and of having to think about how family members can be with their loved ones as those people die.

He talks about the mechanism of death, which includes respiratory failure, multi-organ failure, but he says the main cause is myocarditis.

He speaks about his experience of having and recovering from covid-19.

It's a great interview and well worth watching.

The UK went into covid-19 with fewer doctors, nurses, beds, ICU beds, per 100,000 population than most other EU countries.

</comment><comment><USER2> > _" All our ICU patients are in their 50s or younger"_

I was expecting a Triage-scenario to be the cause of this, but since they're not just yet at capacity, that can't be the case either.

How is this anomaly to be explained?

EDIT: Apparently, they are over-capacity, I was left under the impression, they hadn't turned anyone away from ICU... nevertheless, I still don't understand how that anomaly is possible... it's statistically very unlikely: [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8181359/Doctor- retu...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8181359/Doctor-returns-work- recovering-coronavirus-capacity-intensive-care-unit.html)

<comment><USER3> 13 patients is not a big anomaly.

Check the historic number for respiratory related illnesses and deaths for the region and you will have context. Could be a lot of smokers .

<comment><USER2> Yeah, but for a virus that even more heavily affects older people, it's super unlikely you'd get 13 under-60s and not a single over-60. It's like flipping a coin and getting 13 times heads, possible, but super unlikely. And we're not even talking about odds of 50:50, but 33:67 for young/old.

So, he got 13 times heads in a row? If yes, he's probably at the only hospital in the world to have that kind of a luck.

EDIT: The odds for 13 times heads in a row, is about 0.01%. So, one in 10,000 hospitals... hm, ok, that does seem likely to occur more than once on a global scale.

<comment><USER3> Agree we wouldn't be hearing about it if it wasn't odd.

Just saying subtract out what conditions/ages in normal times occupy those beds and the odds will change.

But I am too lazy to do it - [https://statswales.gov.wales/Catalogue/Health- and-Social-Car...](https://statswales.gov.wales/Catalogue/Health-and-Social- Care/Births-Deaths-and-Conceptions/Deaths/Deaths-by-Cause)

[https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/weeklyprovisionalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In The Netherlands around 90% of ICU patients are obese [0].

\---

[0]: [https://northerntimes.nl/umcg-investigates-possible-link- bet...](https://northerntimes.nl/umcg-investigates-possible-link-between- weight-and-covid-19-illness/)</comment>


Pipino: Gentleman Thief - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/epic-magazine/pipino-gentleman-thief-ede9713dafb1 <comment><USER2> I cannot believe that things like this still happen in today's world, although I'd be surprised if it wasn't a little bit embellished. This piece reminds me a little bit of the documentary about the Russian mafia, Thieves By Law (I'm pretty sure it's on youtube, go watch it). Aging master criminals who want their stories to be told to a world that they know is eager to hear about them. How fortunate that we have such an accessible medium to distribute their tales.

<comment><USER3> Yeah it still happens, like this 10' x 6' painting for example from 2 months ago

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/11034...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/11034178/Renaissance- masterpiece-by-Guercino-worth-5m-stolen-from-Italian-church.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That is an amazing story.

But... it kinda sounds like Pipino and Palmiso were running a two man confidence racket. Pipino would steal, Palmiso wouldn't catch him but would manage to recover something priceless that had been taken.

<comment><USER5> >Antonio Palmosi left the force after a bribery scandal in 2004

I guess, that is not exactly coincidence. Probably he got kickbacks from Pipino for not arresting him.

<comment><USER6> Or just recognition for a job well done, for recovering the work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Man this makes me want to go back to Venice. Amazing city - getting lost in the back alleys and searching out the best cicchetti is a fantastic way to spend a week or two.

</comment><comment><USER8> _" Have you looked at them?" Pipino said, holding up a fork. The craftsmanship was impeccable. "If you don't take them, it's a sin," he declared. "Plus, they're worth about a million lire." That was roughly $100,000. Claudio nodded and moved on._

In 1991, one dollar was worth about 1,200 Italian liras, so a million liras would be about $800.

<comment><USER9> > "If you don't take them, it's a sin"

That's... an _interesting_ sense of morality that he has.

<comment><USER10> Different groups have different moral codes. If you're a highly respected, professional burglar then not taking something so good could be considered professional misconduct.

The origin of the word "sin" as most people use it today is a word from archery. It means hitting the target but missing the center. Pretty apt for a renowned burglar to not take something which is highly valuable and very portable on a robbery.

<comment><USER11> > The origin of the word "sin" as most people use it today is a word from > archery. It means hitting the target but missing the center.

This page (which gives the OED as a source) says that's true of the Greek _hamartia_ (often translated as "sin") but not of the English word itself: [http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/trespass_...](http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/trespass_sin_debt/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Impressive guy, I guess, but... a _gentleman_ wouldn't steal in the first place. Not even from the wealthy. Though refusing violence is in fact a nice thing in a criminal...

<comment><USER12> I recall reading that in (medieval?) Europe, some nobles who ran out of money would rather become highwaymen and rob travelers than actually work for a living, as this was deemed beneath them.

I have absolutely no recollection where I read this, so it could easily be false.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> His book is titled "Rubare ai ricchi non è peccato", "Stealing from the rich isn't a sin". Sadly there doesn't seem to be an English translation.

<comment> daniel-cussen There's a similar, but not identical, saying in Spanish: "El que roba de un ladrón tiene cien años de perdón", or, "He who steals from a thief is forgiven for a hundred years."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a Venetian, it's incredible that I didn't know about Pipino at all. Probably something that we try to forget.

Maniero, on the other side is incredibly famous, and still considered honorable nonetheless. Make your conclusions…

<comment><USER15> How's the tech scene in Venice?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Found this on vimeo: [http://vimeo.com/69183293](http://vimeo.com/69183293)

</comment><comment><USER17> amazing story!</comment>


Neutrinos Faster Than Light, or FPGA artifacts? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=58 <comment><USER2> A nit, but this struck me as highly speculative. I, like the author, want to see the FGPA equipment analyzed further.

I kinda felt like I was led down the garden path a bit here. In the end, the entire essay (to me) boils down to "Stuff we don't know about could be stuff we should worry about" This is a true statement, but I'm not sure how useful it is to the reader.

Perhaps it would have been better to list all of the possible problems, then show why the FGPA was the biggest concern. That way I would be more informed about what the state of the discussion is. While it's really cool the author can outline the myriad ways an FPGA device reading can be misread, context here is more important than the ability to impress us with all the technical details (which are also important, no doubt, but only with context) Put another way, this was a bit of "nerd porn" -- lots of cool little technical details that need to be considered when dealing with FPGAs in places like this. For that, it's definitely great HN material.

Just a structural criticism of the essay, not the topic or author. The topic and writing quality were awesome.

<comment><USER3> I've worked with high resolution timing devices, data acquisition systems and NIST traceable timestamps, PMTs and APDs and FADCs. 10ns precision is a relative cakewalk, and can be done with about $600 in equipment. Often times some people neglect some latency introduced due to analog filtering, but it's nowhere near the order of 60ns. Furthermore, most of these systems are almost always calibrated daily with fiber optics, lasers, or other subatomic particles or particle accelerators. So often times the delay is actually relative to a particle (usually a photon) moving at or near the speed of light in a medium with a known refractive index. I'm sure it's not too hard to find the whitepaper for the equipment if you really wanted to look for it.

I'm not saying it's not possible, it's just extremely unlikely. The author is asking for FPGA analysis when he should be asking for calibration analysis.

<comment><USER4> > _I'm not saying it's not possible, it's just extremely unlikely._

Which is more unlikely though, that the FPGA has an issue where precision can be worse than 60ns, or that we're wrong about the speed of light / the ability of matter to travel beyond that speed? We're talking about hard to believe things here, so we shouldn't discard the possibility that this was the failure point simply because it's unbelievable.

I know you're not discarding the idea, and I welcome the context you bring to the discussion; I just wanted to point out that in this case there really isn't much that should be thrown out as impossible.

<comment><USER5> But saying it's extremely unlikely doesn't mean the speed of light is wrong, it means the error could be elsewhere in the system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Firstly, if this FPGA-based system is using DRAM and implements caching, results may vary due to a single variable or data structured being in a cache line or not, which may or may not delay a code path by up to 10-100 ns (typical DRAM latency). This discrepancy may never be discovered in tests because the access patterns by which an FPGA (or CPU) decides to cache data are very dependent on the state of the system._

Clearly, the author did not know what he is talking about.

<comment><USER7> I'm not an expert on such systems. Could you to elaborate on this a bit more?

<comment><USER8> The only design I can think of in an FPGA that would use a "DRAM cache" is a processor. And by definition, no one assumes processor code execution to be timing accurate to 10ns.

<comment><USER9> Lot of people use SDRAM with FPGAs. [http://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&q=fpga+sdram&...](http://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&q=fpga+sdram&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8) SDRAM is used commonly with FPGAs for storing largish amounts of data at a reasonable price (static RAM is fast, predictable, and very expensive for large fast memory arrays).

SDRAMs are horribly complex state machine driven pipelined devices. On a system I was working on, a simple write operation to the SDRAM could vary from several clock cycles to 52 (IIRC) clock cycles, depending on what was going on before the "simple" write. I forgot what the worst case stack up was, but it was probably something about a refresh followed by a page miss that needed a precharge...

AnandTech has a good intro... note the _simplified_ state machine diagram (Figure 2) is _not_ simple. If they published the full state machine, your head would explode. [http://www.anandtech.com/show/3851/everything-you-always- wan...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/3851/everything-you-always-wanted-to- know-about-sdram-memory-but-were-afraid-to-ask/)

Trivia: The data throughput listed by SDRAM manufacturers is the best case sequential access fully pipelined scenario when all -nine- eight planets align.

Speculating here: The variability of SDRAM access latency is one reason for putting a high speed cache in front of it. For instance, the cache could be a simple FIFO operation to buffer the data to avoid dropping data when an operation got hit by a long latency stackup. The SDRAM may have the _average_ throughput to handle the data stream, but the (unpredictable) major bumps in latency may required "cache" buffering to keep from dropping data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's the beauty of revealing lots and lots of details about the measurement process: some "random guy on the internet"[1] can point out possible mistakes, or at least suggest where to search.

So some people from the telecom or HPC community who have much experience with lags and timing jitters can contribute their experitse.

[1] I don't mean to disrespect the author, just point out that he's probably not involved with the experiment at all.

</comment><comment><USER11> >latencies of the order of 10-100 ns unexpectedly added or subtracted to a baseline

Perhaps my stats is a bit rusty, but if its the discrepancy is +60ns (only plus) & <20ns uncertainty, doesn't that rule out a -+100ns source (plus minus) as the cause of the (possible) error? i.e. We should be looking for an issue that shifts the results, not something that is adding noise.

<comment><USER12> I think that the author's point is that these latencies would, in fact, add a systematic bias to the measurements (i.e. they would shift the results, not add noise). I interpreted "added or subtracted" to mean that this bias could either be added at the source end or subtracted at the receiving end.

<comment><USER11> The diagram being discussed is labeled "LNGS" so I'm pretty sure it both green and blue relates to one end (receiving), just different parts of the receiving end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "I tried that! Don't you think I would have tried that?" --Paul Richter, WarGames

Not that it's not a worthy thing to consider (after all, the claim is extraordinary), but it was probably considered.

<comment><USER14> The bug is almost always something you overlooked as too simple or obvious to check.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The observations are worth looking at. I could pull down a part of an article about CERN's 'faster than light' claim. Here it is; "An American experiment involving Fermilab and a Minnesota mine showed the same thing back in 2007, but the results were within a margin of error that kept anyone from jumping up and down about it. (The CERN results are within a margin of statistical certainty that, were this not such an unexpected result, it would be considered a new discovery.) Now the team plans to update that experiment with about 10 times more data". We can't rule out the possibility of an entirely new perspective on quantum physics. The tests are on and we can here a follow up story soon.

<comment><USER16> > Now the team plans to update that experiment with about 10 times more data

FYI, more data taken by the same experimental set-up isn't going to help. This is already a 6-sigma result, which means that a statistical fluctuation is ruled out as an explanation (~ 1 in a million chance). Instead, there's almost certainly a systematic error which is being made in the same way for every data point, so taking more data doesn't do anything.

<comment><USER17> 6 sigma is 1 in 506 million.

<comment><USER16> Ahh, thanks. I just typed "six sigma" into google and pulled the number off the wikipedia page about that business practice. Should have gone with Mathematica.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Regardless of the technical details, I believe the author of the article is making the wrong assumptions.

He is talking about errors depending on the internal state of FPGA, or "the guy operating the device leaving the door open" leading to a change in temperature (very unlikely, but still you have to consider everything).

The problem is that all of these possibilities would lead to different readings on multiple trials, while we are not talking about a "one off" experiment, but one that has been tried several number of times and the result has been consistent.

An error might still be there, but clearly is not based on a random internal state or outside conditions, but must be systematic.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is easy to figure out. Move the detection station to, say, half the current distance. Do the neutrinos still come out 60ns faster? Then it's a problem with the apparatus. Do they come out only 30ns faster? Then some of the Physics needs to be rewritten.

<comment><USER10> This sounds easy, but it's not.

The neutrino detector needs to be far underground (to shield it from cosmic rays), is pretty heavy (I remember something about 60 metric tons, but it could be more), its location needs to known very precisely, and it needs the same sophisticated timing infrastructure as OPERA has.

I guess it would be easier to build another neutrino emitter at a different particle accelerator, and direct the beam towards the OPERA lab (or another existing lab).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It sounds like most of the things that concern the author would introduce substantial amounts of scatter on top of some possible systematic shift, so I have a hard time believing they wouldn't have seen that.

</comment><comment><USER21> They said that they measured the FPGA delay by shining a beam on it and seeing how long it took to register. It seems like there is a lot of room for variability in this practically un-analyzed system.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't want to sound elitist, but I really think the team double-checked all the trivial reasons which could explain this extraordinary result (à savoir : faster than light particles).

<comment><USER23> Probably, but think of all those times when you checked and double-checked your code, only to find out that it was a simple typo causing the bug.

This will need to be experimentally verified (preferably with a completely different set of equipment), but it doesn't hurt to double-check and triple- check the simple stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Couldn't this possibility be eliminated by calibration?

<comment><USER25> e.g. having a source of neutrinos 1 km away from the receiver, and see if they still detect it 60 ms "before" (perhaps even before they fired them)

Is the cost/technology for doing this kind of quick check prohibitive?

I was wondering if the neutrino detector does have to be directed precisely towards cern or it's omnidirectional. Does anyone know?

<comment><USER26> A neutrino detector is omnidirectional. It would be almost impossible to make it directional even if you wanted to.

You can try to measure which direction the scattered particles from a neutrino collision travel. But the actual detector is omnidirectional.

But all that said, a strong neutrino source isn't easy to just do.

<comment><USER25> assuming the emission is also omnidirectional the required strength decreases by square of distance, so it shouldn't require a strong source for 1km.

I guess it's more difficult to tell exactly when the bursts are being emitted.

<comment><USER26> No, the emission is directional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> <http://xkcd.com/955/> applies here.

</comment><comment><USER28> Seems speculative. Haven't they measured the speed of EM, or possibly some other subatomic particle than the neutrino, with the very same equipment, and gotten the expected and scientifically agreed-upon speed as a result? It seems to me that testing the measuring/timing hardware with a known phenomenon would be a fundamental step before releasing and using it.

<comment><USER29> As I recall, the path taken by the neutrinos in this experiment is several hundred miles of solid rock, so, no, there really isn't any other type of particle that could be tested with it.

<comment><USER30> Sure there is... dark matter particles; now if only we can find them!

<comment><USER31> Aren't neutrinos part of the dark matter?

<comment><USER30> No.

<comment><USER26> That depends on how you define dark matter. (i.e. do you mean only cold dark matter).

Dark matter is just matter that isn't visible electromagnetically and neutrinos do qualify.

<comment><USER30> While that is technically true, the context of this comment should make it clear that I'm referring to cold dark matter, otherwise my comment about finding them wouldn't make sense.

<comment><USER26> But if this discovery is true then there is a lot we don't know about neutrinos. For all we know they could be dark matter, and there is no other particle.

For example if they are a type tachyon, then the closer to c they are the less energy they contain, this would actually make them very cold.

(Personally I doubt they do exceed c, but I do think that they are actually dark matter, only created via some process that keeps them slow.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> More info on the time-transfer system that was just released today: <http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cngs-time-transfer/wiki/Wiki></comment>


FFmpeg receives legal threat from ex-dev over disputed logo - <AUTHOR> http://www.ffmpeg.org/threat1.png

<comment><AUTHOR> There's some more information on the project homepage - <http://www.ffmpeg.org/>. The news entry isn't anchored so I couldn't link to it directly.</comment>


Plants repeatedly got rid of their ability to obtain their own nitrogen - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/plants-repeatedly-got-rid-of-their-ability-to-obtain-their-own-nitrogen/ <comment><USER2> > "Use it or lose it" applies to genes as much as (or maybe even more than) > anything else. Genes involved in biological processes are lost if the trait > they confer is unused or unnecessary."

Why would this be true? Can't a gene be dormant? Or perhaps over-ridden but another gene or genes?

Or is, over the long haul (read: __many__) years any and all genes will naturally mutate (that is, be lost). Then if the "replacement" is more advantageous, the replacement will persist.

Fair enough. But that's not use it / lose it per se. It's still in use, but less so (and is over time replaced).

<comment><USER3> While you make a significant distinction in that evolution does not necessarily make a decision to eliminate unused traits, most traits that consume resources and energy do get culled as it almost universally improves survivability.

After all, one of the things that's so hard for us to grok about evolution is that it's not a goal-oriented process in any way. It's not engineering, it's the process of random chance and what can persist.

For example, a lot of people think that all our junk DNA actually does something profound and important, and while some of it probably does have a purpose we don't yet understand, I think it's almost certain that any process that makes a bunch of random decisions that are mindlessly culled by environmental forces will inevitably generate some flotsam and noise in its code. It's kind of like training AI; it definitely won't give you the most minimalist method of carrying out that task, but it will eventually find some way to carry it out. Almost as a brutal, automatic tropism.

<comment><USER4> The "survival of the fittest" phrase is a huge disservice to generations of students.

Traits that are _maladaptive_ are culled. Ones that have no effect are preserved, increased or diluted depending entirely on what other genes they appear with. Not the gene themselves.

If pale eyes were not beneficial in northern latitudes, we would _still have blue eyes_ because the norsemen had them, and they were very successful. That gene will stick around until something forces it out of the pool because there is otherwise nothing to stop it.

<comment><USER5> In the simplest case there is a default state (e.g. eyes have color of whatever pigment just happen to be produced there as a sideeffect of important genes). And then there are genes that override this default. They may disable the normal pigment genes, they may produce additional pigment, they may break down pigment. These genes can then exist in variants (alleles). Following the example, they may produce pigment molecules with different colors.

In the absence of selection pressure the override genes will mutate randomly. The end state of that process are broken genes that don't do much of anything (loss of function), and so the color goes back to the default.

For human eyes, the default is blue eyes and there are then some genes that overrides this by producing melanin, which turns the eyes brown.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wasn't taking too much care of the grass and fertilizing it and after a few years I started seeing more and more clover. It turns out clover fixates nitrogen from the air. The clover took over in some areas almost completely. After a while I started liking how clover looked.

<comment><USER7> This happens on my parents' lawn too. I don't understand though, if grass grows better than clover in nitrogen-rich soil, why doesn't the grass come back once the clover has replenished the nitrogen?

<comment><USER8> If you overseed with grass seed it will. Grass and clover makes a really nice sward. When I had a lawn (more than 10 years ago!), I eventually realised the beauty of this. Mix in camomile for an even lusher, softer lawn. Let it grow long enough for the clover and camomile to flower and it's amazing. The longer grown inhibits other weeds. It's practically maintenance free -- just run over it with a push mower every once in a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The ability to synthesize compounds is often lost when those compounds abound in the organism's environment because synthesis consumes energy and an organism's energy budget is limited.

Examples from the animal kingdom include frugivorous humans lacking the ability to synthesize vitamin C, and cats lacking the ability to synthesize taurine.

<comment><USER10> > _cats lacking the ability to synthesize taurine_

Where, in the wild, do find their plentiful taurine?

<comment><USER11> Small mammals!

<comment><USER12> And birds and insects!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if the symbiotic bacteria provide other benefits, such as fighting off other bacteria that would attack the plant.

</comment><comment><USER14> Fava beans! Easy to grow, fun to watch, nice flowers, tasty, and big nitrogen nodules.

<comment><USER15> Plus they pair well with a nice chianti.

<comment><USER16> I feel like this pairing lacks a protein to really balance it out.

<comment><USER17> Fava beans have a fair amount of protein in 'em already!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Couldn't it be as simple as as a selection of ample seed production over ample nitrogen availability in an environment where adequate sunlight was more often a limiting factor than adequate nitrogen. It takes significant energy to produce the root exudates that encourage and feed the specialized symbiotic bacteria that will fix some amount of nitrogen for the roots. The plant already needs lots of energy to build it's carbon structure and immune system. Then more energy for seed production, which is the most important of all. This energy has to come from sunlight. In growing competition with other taller plants and trees, sunlight is often greatly diminished. The plants that 'stopped' producing these exudates and used the available energy in structural fitness / robust seed production were able to compete more effectively as a species over a larger area.

</comment><comment><USER19> This may be an evolutionary stable strategy ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy)).

If nitrgoen-fixating species already cover N% of the niche, other species may not be pressed too hard to retain their own nitrogen-fixing ability.

</comment><comment><USER20> Yay for outsourcing.

</comment><comment><USER21> How do non-symbiotic plants normally process their nitrogen into ammonia?

Article didn't mention.

<comment><USER22> Ammonia and other nitrogen containing molecules are already in soils in varying quantities and are taken up by the roots like other nutrients.

<comment><USER4> This article is showing its biases. You only need to fix nitrogen in a _monoculture_ , and rather than giving up on that idea they're going to keep trying to make plants that are everything to everyone.

If your ecosystem contains nitrogen fixers you can scavenge nitrogen from your neighbors. In some cases this could be construed as a second symbiosis: A vining legume is working with the bacteria for nitrogen and its neighbors for loft. It has access to more sunlight in the spring, and can lay down more nitrogen before the trees wake up. At which point the trees have access to more nitrogen for manufacturing leaves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> To my way of thinking, this makes a ton of sense.

I don't think Darwin got it right. It's not "survival of the fittest". It's "survival of that which can find its place in an ecosystem".

<comment><USER24> I think it's "Survival of the Fittest Ecosystem," actually. So not like, "Humans are fittest," but instead, "Human eating corn cow sheep soy etc. while building machines is fittest"

<comment><USER25> It's interesting how selection acts at different levels. Individuals are reasonably good at enslaving their cells so they cooperate (when they don't, they get cancer).

But cooperation between individuals is much less effective, not to mention between species. An ecosystem is incapable of enforcing a contract between species to prevent a selfish species from destroying the whole thing.</comment></comment></comment>