What makes BeOS and Haiku unique - <AUTHOR> https://osvoyager.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/what-makes-beos-and-haiku-unique/ <comment><USER2> I don't know if this is nostalgia talking but there is something particularly attractive about the BeOS and Haiku desktop both in terms of design and aesthetics. The interface actually has a certain depth and this is consistent across icons, windows, dialogs, menus, buttons, etc. It's a shame that interfaces nowadays are completely flat. They are almost... expressionless and with the exception of the odd drop shadow they completely lack a third dimension. When I first learned of Haiku (and BeOS), back when Gnome was in the 2.x days, I was so impressed by the interface that I installed a look- alike desktop and icon theme. I used it for quite a long time until GTK+ 3.x eventually became prevalent.

<comment><USER3> All 90s GUIs have something that I miss[1]. I think the flat movement was a desire for hyper genericity .. but turns out that a bit (just a bit) of visual signal and faux skeumorphism (some widgets emulated actual LED keys found on hardware) is good.

ps: also, flat came after both the aqua trend where effects were everywhere and skeumorphism was pushed higher. Not that surprising in a way.

[1] beos, win311, macos classic, win95 (office97 era) and nt5

<comment><USER4> I mis those from the 90's GUIs:

\- Standard interaction widgets. There was no breaking the scroll, there was no button that you can't discover how to press.

\- Expert oriented interfaces. There was no action without a shortcut. The most complex software always had some CLI or an API (optionally with an intepreter).

\- Discoverability features. The sortcut descriptions were embedded on the same places you had to click to get the functionality. Buttons were clearly marked. There was almost always some text area telling you what was happening.

I don't miss skeumorphism, but it was often used to mark real features, and those features were gone with the arbitrary skeumorphisms. Current GUI trends were created by people with no interest on making their software useful, instead they only keep an eye on showroom conversion rate. (Whether they are right or not on doing so, it's a problem nonetheless.)

<comment><USER5> > _Current GUI trends were created by people with no interest on making their > software useful, instead they only keep an eye on showroom conversion rate. > (Whether they are right or not on doing so, it 's a problem nonetheless.)_

Yeah, I feel A/B testing is really _the_ place where Satan secretly influences the world. I'm losing track of how many times I've seen user-hostile or application-debiliating decisions justified by "data" on user behaviour. Something is very wrong here.

<comment><USER6> Hello, Office's Ribbon.

# Runs horizontally.

\- Result: wastes precious vertical space on low-resolution widescreen displays (i.e. business displays and most notebooks) that should be dedicated to showing the document body.

# Due to being horizontal, GUI items appear/disappear depending on window width.

\- Result 1: having two documents on screen can be disadvantageous compared to having one on screen because a lot of the GUI items aren't showing or are hidden in submenus, encouraging wasting screen real estate by only having one document on the entire screen.

\- Result 2: due to the Ribbon's horizontality, instead of having the elements stay on screen in a consistent manner and be easily scrollable, the interface constantly surprises the user by unexpectedly hiding even key GUI items.

# No option to disable.

\- Result: if you wanted to have certain GUI items visible at the same time… well, tough. If the floating palette that inconsistently appears when the user places the mouse cursor over certain elements doesn't have your favourite item, then you're out of luck if the items you want to use exist under different tab groupings.

iWork '09 and prior had the best design: a main toolbar with general items, a smaller context-sensitive toolbar underneath, and context-sensitive inspector windows. If the revamped iWork had simply docked those context-sensitive inspectors, rather than get rid of the context-sensitive toolbar, it mightn't have received such a poor response.

The irony is that Office 2003 (and a few releases prior) already had inspectors on the side, and those would have been perfect given the prevalence of widescreen displays, leaving as much vertical space for the display of the document body as possible.

LibreOffice seems to have three GUI modes; one like iWork, one like the old Office, and one like the Ribbon.

<comment><USER7> I've been using my taskbar on the side of the screen for the past decade, because every screen I use has an excess of width and limited height. I seem to be very much in a minority here - I guess people don't change things from default?

<comment><USER8> > I guess people don't change things from default?

Precisely. The average user assumes (often correctly) that the way things are is the way things are. When it comes to what technical people think are basic features (pairing a wireless keyboard to an iPad, or changing default text size on iPhones, or any number of similar tasks on any system), the modern "ease of use" guidelines suggest hiding everything away as much as possible, severely limiting setting discoverability.

<comment><USER9> Well, I consider myself an expert user, but I rarely change the default because I switch between environments so often that it would represent a major time overhead to extensively customize application to the way I really want them. And besides, the way I really want them is so far away from the way they are shipped that it's normally unrealistic to maintain that level of customization.

So I get used to the defaults. It makes it easier to throw out, reinstall, or switch environments if I need to. In any given day I use 5 or 6 different primary environments.

<comment><USER10> Probably i switch so often because of actual limited and limiting system design: in a Plan9-like world user's desktop is the center of the world and anything start from it and being done and used from it. In a commercial world it's common to have tons of crappy devices (so you pay more things more often) and no real integration.

Time ago I have a discussion with a "commercial" guy who say that the sole really integrated platforms are cloud&mobile so they are obviously the future because we are a society and we need to interoperate. I respond plugging my laptop HDMI into the room projector and show a quick Emacs/EXWM(-X) demo: email? Hit a single key (F6 in my case) and my MUA (notmuch-emacs) popup instantly. On top of it's big search bar I have few single-key accessible saved searches and bottom the big series of tags, a far superior "dashboard" than bloated GMail UI. Of course compose a new message can happen with a single key at any time with any open application I have focused. Oh I imaging someone demand me a demo, a quick M-x skeletor (ivy-completed) popup, a single key to choose beamer slide, quick typing and slides are made, tested locally and uploaded. Another imaginary interruption and another task (skeletor again + org-mode), an imaginary patch sent via mail and voilà: magit integration. All datas are really integrated and usable in a consistent environment, anything can be done in a snap and NO other monster modern GUI or '90-style can do the same. That's the past (starting from LispM/MIT AI lab glory time) and the future like we have had "golden age" of ancient Greek polis and more modern "middle (dark) age" and again a modern age. That's integration and customization. No need to switch between systems (while can be done easily with NixOS/GuixSD + homeManager/GNU stow + unison). My system is main and I can replicate/extend it on any decent hw as nedeed. That's "switching systems" IMO :-)

<comment><USER6> I think you're talking about something very different than that about which the person to whom you responded was talking.

I'm assuming they were talking about different systems they don't own, aren't their own systems, and over which they don't have the sort of control to install their own software and set things up using their personal configuration files.

It's awesome that you've got, or at least dreamt up, a system that works for you, but if you're able to use that exact system on every single machine you use, that isn't quite what was being described. That's an ideal, but only really feasible for personal machines.

Also, I'm going to get downvoted, but please put in a few line breaks.

<comment><USER10> My point is that we should not normally need to use "other machines", of course for work there are requisite but tech users should IMO do their best to avoid working in bad environment/do their best to convince their company let them use productive software. It _maybe_ a dream but IME it works at least if you are an admin or a relevant devs or you find a good place to work in. Of course it doesn't work if you are an administrative or other roles...

> Also, I'm going to get downvoted, but please put in a few line breaks.

I still have to learn the idiosyncratic way HN handle text... I do put linebreaks, I'm edit in Emacs and paste here, however HN mess it up...

<comment><USER11> There was a nice related article linked on HN last week: [https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/optimize-your-programming- dec...](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/optimize-your-programming-decisions- for-the-95-percent-not-the-5-percent)

It mostly deals with decisions during programming, but the first part of the article describes exactly this problem.

<comment><USER10> My answer is that "the best" of anything are always a small percentage so I care "my élite" not the masses...

Always remember a thing: from diversity born evolution, from standard borne Ford-model workers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I the only one who wants a modern OS designed for single-user use as opposed to one that descends from a long line of time-sharing systems? That isn't a mobile operating system?

<comment><USER12> I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm becoming a big fan of minimalism and simplicity.

I find it particularly funny that Android is based on an OS designed for thousands of simultaneous users (although they did get some nice security / isolation out of it).

<comment><USER13> > although they did get some nice security / isolation out of it

It's hard to understate this.

The rampant security vulns of Windows were due largely to its heritage as a single user, sparingly networked computer.

<comment><USER8> As much as I agree with this, are security and single-user truly mutally exclusive, or is it just that all the single user operating systems we know of (correct me if I'm wrong) have poor security records?

<comment><USER14> Solving multi user inherently results in building isolation which translates well to security.

<comment><USER15> But you can build isolation as a part of single user.

<comment><USER14> Absolutely. I'm not saying you can't build it, I'm just saying that P(correct security | correct multi user) > P(correct security) because you already have an isolation mechanism in place.

<comment><USER15> Not necessarily. You can design your isolation system to be better suited to a single user system, rather than hacking it into a system which was meant to support multiple human users.

<comment><USER14> Again, not disagreeing. Just saying that in aggregate, and from looking at history, the requirement of isolation in multi user systems trends towards better security.

You can absolutely build a better single user system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Back in the day, BeOS used to be quite more capable with regards to multi- threading. The used to demo this with multiple videos playing.

Does BeOS/Haiku still have a technological edge somewhere (compared to say, linux or windows)?

<comment><USER17> Haiku doesn't have much of a technological edge at the moment, given that the current goal is to reproduce BeOS 5 PE to its fullest extent before modernizing.

Where it does have an edge, though, is how's its being designed first and foremost as a desktop OS with responsiveness as the top priority above all else. The latter especially is depressingly uncommon in modern operating systems.

<comment><USER18> As someone who likes responsiveness, I've always wanted BeOS to take off. However, at this time, does OS responsiveness matter?

I'm running three apps right now: VSCode, Slack, and a web browser. Given that VSCode and Slack are basically other browsers, how much does OS responsiveness matter? Has the responsiveness battle just moved to the browser?

How much are people really running other than a web browser on a desktop/laptop now-a-days? When I evaluate an OS today, I'm going to care about how good its trackpad drivers are, whether I'm likely to have wifi issues, whether it can run the *nix tools I need to do my work, maybe whether I like the way it switches between windows/apps, and whether there are modern browsers to run on it. Responsiveness was a big deal back when I was running a Pentium II and BeOS had amazing demos (and I presume real-world usage) with uninterrupted video while multi-tasking and just buttery-smooth context switching in an era where you'd have your system lock-up. Heck, it was many years before OS X got past the beach ball of death happening constantly.

However, today, it's my browser that locks up; it's my browser that I want to be able to smoothly scroll through a web page.

I really want Haiku to succeed, but it feels like we might have moved beyond the OS for so much that the OS can't have the same impact it once had. On the one hand, the web has made it so that alternative OSs don't need a boat load of software to be usable. On the other hand, because the browser is now the OS, the usefulness of an alternative OS is lower.

<comment><USER19> _How much are people really running other than a web browser on a desktop /laptop now-a-days?_

Currently open on my machine:

\- Safari

\- Firefox (streaming audio)

\- A program converting a 500 page PDF to 500 300dpi PNGs

\- A bash script extracting PDFs from a municipal web site.

\- A program downloading my video viewing for the week and converting it to a format better suited for my iPad

\- iTunes serving audio and video to TVs in two different rooms

\- An FTP program doing weekly backups

\- A mail client

\- A VPN client

\- A spreadsheet

\- An IDE (Coda2)

And if I were to look at my wife's laptop, I can guarantee that she's running more than just a web browser, and she's not technically inclined.

People have been pushing browser-only machines since the days of Novell's "thin client" strategy in the 90's. Netbooks were a fad. Consumption-only gained a small amount of traction recently with Chromebooks, but even the non- technical people in my office are dumping their Chromebooks for real laptops these days because they realize they have needs beyond Google's ecosystem.

Maybe we'll get there some day. But for now, if you want a laptop computer, you have to have an actual laptop computer.

<comment><USER20> This is so incredibly niche, though. The average person wouldn't run half this stuff.

<comment><USER21> The idea of the "average person" is always something of a red herring, though. The stuff the OP listed was:

\- Safari

A lot of people run web browsers.

\- Firefox (streaming audio)

A lot of people stream audio.

\- A program converting a 500 page PDF to 500 300dpi PNGs

That's a weird one, sure.

\- A bash script extracting PDFs from a municipal web site.

Also weird, but "average people" need to do some kind of automation once in a blue moon, so let's not discount that.

\- A program downloading my video viewing for the week and converting it to a format better suited for my iPad

The conversion is unusual, but people download videos to their iPad.

\- iTunes serving audio and video to TVs in two different rooms

A little niche, but "media server" is still a thing.

\- An FTP program doing weekly backups

Backups are a thing. A thing more people should be doing, but definitely a thing.

\- A mail client

Not niche at all.

\- A VPN client

Not niche if your office requires a VPN. A lot do.

\- A spreadsheet

Definitely not niche.

\- An IDE (Coda2)

Sorta niche-y, but think of it as "text editor" and it's less so: it could be a word processor, or Scrivener.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sometimes, I feel bad for OS with lower number of users like these, FreeBSD etc. There are so many important things in OS that even if it really excels in few things, it doesn't really count. The work that goes into creating these is phenomenal, yet I cannot replace my Mac. I have been paying at least $300 extra for a laptop and have been making so many compromises on the recent hardware.

<comment><USER23> Eh, I've been running FreeBSD on my primary desktop for about a decade now (and have been running it on every server I can get my grubby hands on). It's equally painful for me to use any other OS because of similar workflow issues. We've all got a wide variety of tasks to complete and a good handful of specialized tools to complete them with -- use whatever works best. If you're doing server work, I recommend giving FreeBSD a trial run!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> BeOS was by far my favourite operating system of that era. Fantastic platform that really put the competition to shame. Fast, stable, pretty and powerful.

<comment><USER25> Same here. I still remember when I first booted it up and ran a demo app (video playing on all sides of a rotating cube), how much it put OS 9 to shame in terms of responsiveness and performance. I'm still pissed that Apple went with NeXTSTEP instead of BeOS for OS X, but I'm glad they went with something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does anyone here use Haiku regularly? Would you recommend it?

<comment><USER27> I do. It's fantastic for browser-and-code hacktops with limited ability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I realize this maybe a corner case and slightly off-topic, but it would be really nice to be able to boot Haiku via PXE boot in our network infrastructure. This would make it so much easier for people to play with it casually. It seems[0] that there has been some effort to support this, but last time I tried (about 3 months a go), I couldn't get it boot with couple of hours effort (I know, may very well be user error ;-) ).

If anyone from Haiku is reading, would be really cool if you also offered network bootable image by default that can successfully boot from 'standard' PXE boot server setup.

[0] [https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/network_booting/](https://www.haiku- os.org/guides/network_booting/)

<comment><USER29> The PXE bootloader was broken following the merge of the package manager (which as this article implies, required changes to the boot process.) Nobody has taken the time to fix it again since then... help wanted, I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I only read about BeOS in exuberant PC World articles in the early '00s, but I got the impression it was really, really good–pre-emptive multi-tasking and all. Now this blog post says that Haiku has device servers. That sounds like the 'fast flyweight delegation' technique described here: [https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/12/04/ffwd-delegation-is- much-...](https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/12/04/ffwd-delegation-is-much-faster- than-you-think/) ... and also used by the Erlang VM.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wasn't that the base of Zeta? An OS sold by a home shopping channel around 2000.

I never understood the hype and then they went bust.

<comment><USER32> Zeta was based on binaries of BeOS Dano (what was going to be the next version of BeOS before Be went under). It's unclear whether the company ever had the source code.

<comment><USER29> They absolutely did. What came out towards the end was that they didn't really have a license for it; it's likely they had based their work on the BeOS source code leak that occurred in the last few weeks of Be Inc.'s existence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> For some reason, there's no mention of datatypes, a very nice concept they took from AmigaOS3.

</comment><comment><USER34> Thank you for posting this! Just got a new USB SSD stick and I'm gonna try it out. :-)

</comment><comment><USER35> Haiku is just so cool (although it probably can be made even better, UI included, e.g. I really love the modern Win7/macOS/KDE5/Unity desktops idea od using one icon for both launching and minimizing/restoring/switching an app). I wish it could get more popular and developed more actively. I'd also love to have Haiku-like window management (and widgets toolkit skin if possible, but this is less important of course) on Linux (in KDE preferably).

</comment><comment><USER10> Sincerely the sole BeOS concept I found really nice that is also by some extent in NEXT is the "fs database" or the ability to "query" storage by file types etc vs only access in a classic files/directories tree.

On package management IMO Nix and derived Guix are real revolution...

</comment><comment><USER36> Some of this stuff sounds vaguely reminiscent of Nix. Which is unfortunate. I rather see a port of Nix(pkgs) to Haiku so Haiku is able to continue their wonderful _unique_ innovations rather than reinvent the (albeit rarer and hirer quality) wheel.

<comment><USER37> What except for the rollback reminds you of Nix?

<comment><USER36> The immutable filesystem stuff that goes with it. Even if that's not to much, are the goals different? I'd assume they're compatible enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Linux could kill windows and Microsoft if it just had an improved UI. Currently it looks like a mashup between windows and mac and it's just not working. I've noticed improvements over the years getting closer to Apple's designs, but not quite there and it's unfortunate how much that last minute matters. Once that list mile is covered I think we'll see linux becoming more and more popular as a standard OS.

If Office Libre were to update their UI I think it would make a killer combination.

<comment><USER39> I think more then "prettier UI" is necessary. I switched from Windows to Linux a few months ago, and while I appreciate being able to use more developer tools and not have annoying ads in my OS, I feel like Linux is just more unstable. My wifi/bluetooth randomly stop working, forcing me to restart my computer. That's unacceptable.

<comment><USER40> Unfortunately there's not much the Linux community can do about bad drivers. (I assume you have some broadcom chip). The only people really equipped to write the drivers are the vendors. The documents and firmware running on the chips are not published and you can't realistically email their engineers. So Linux devs are basically SOL. Hats off to the legends who sit down and reverse what's needed anyways.

In general, vendors only have financial incentive to get windows drivers working well.

It's the self defeating prophecy of the Linux desktop.

Apple spins their own hardware and I'm sure gets proper documents from the vendors they select.

<comment><USER41> Yes there is. Windows can restart it's graphics drivers of they crash for example. And it has a stable driver ABI so companies can actually release closed source or out-of-tree drivers in a sane way.

Linux just assumes that all drivers _must_ be perfect with no bugs, and _must_ be open source and distributed with Linux itself. That's just not realistic.

<comment><USER42> Upgrading Windows from 7 to 10 caused s lot of older devices to stop working for a lot of people, despite the stable ABI; in most cases, it was just driver unavailability and not incompatibility, but that's a distinction without a difference for most users.

Linux just keeps on working with old devices across distributions and updates.

Linux takes 6m-24m till vendor unsupported drivers stabilize - but at that point, it works way better than windows (and basically forever) in my experience.

<comment><USER43> That is simply not true.

Old drivers get shaved out of the kernel tree and good luck getting them to work again in more modern kernel versions.

<comment><USER42> I am sure they are, as was the i386. And yet, from experience of ~20 people, none had hardware obsoleted by Ubuntu, even very old hardware - though some had hardware obsoleted by win10 (which was in some cases the trigger to try Ubuntu)

<comment><USER43> Tell that to my AMD card, which no longer has the same OpenGL support level as before they decided to reboot the Radeon drivers.

[https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/ubuntu-drops-amd- catalys...](https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/ubuntu-drops-amd-catalyst- fglrx-driver-16-04)

Sure, maybe I can take some weekends off to port the missing features to new kernels....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Being one of the first C++ OSes. I really enjoyed that feature.

And having a certain Amiga feeling to its culture and multimedia capabilities.

</comment><comment><USER44> "3\. States"

Solaris 10 (and now by heritage illumos) has had this with beadm(1M) since ten years ago, if not longer.

</comment><comment><USER45> If it runs the jvm, a modern browser and it handles laptop standby I'm sold

<comment><USER29> OpenJDK 1.8 is (finally) back, and with Swing support even (though only on 32-bit, it still needs to be boostrapped on 64-bit.)

WebPositive works "acceptably", Otter/QupZilla are significantly better. All can at least play YouTube, etc.

We don't have standby support at all. :/ Most of the device hooks are there, and we use ACPICA for ACPI support, so it's just a matter of wiring all the right things up and adding some buttons... but we are pretty starved for time as-is, so nobody is working on it at present.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Looking at the screenshots, I really still like the look of the windows and icons, but the system font is really holding it back. I didn't realize how bad it looked compared to modern system fonts. I get the feeling a font switch would really improve the look.

<comment><USER47> The screenshots are scaled a bit. They look better full-size: [https://osvoyager.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/dano-people- in...](https://osvoyager.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/dano-people-info.png)

<comment><USER48> Hm, character spacing is pretty much broken in this screenshot. Not sure what is going on there, but it is certainly not completely correct.

<comment><USER29> That's a screenshot of BeOS, so the font rendering engine behind that is from 1998. Not very surprising, then :)

<comment><USER46> Well, it looks the same in [https://www.haiku- os.org/slideshows/haiku-1/](https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-1/)

<comment><USER29> Those screenshots are DejaVu Sans, not Noto Sans, and with a different font rendering engine than the ones in this article. We should probably update those, though.

<comment><USER46> Ok, is there a screenshot from the current Haiku build?

<comment><USER29> Yes, the ones in this article, e.g. [https://osvoyager.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/75-packages.pn...](https://osvoyager.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/75-packages.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> >One of the coolest areas of package management is that you can go back in time and boot up into a previous state of the system, all thanks to the new packaging system. To do this, simply open the boot menu, choose the boot volume, and select Latest state or a nicely time stamped 'version'. Very cool.

New versions of programs may modify the user config files in a way that old versions may not be able to read those config files anymore and even corrupt them. How is this handled, if at all?

<comment><USER29> What config file format are you using that applications would corrupt newer ones? The only one I can think of would be raw memory structs written to disk, which is nasty and ridiculously unportable even across 32-bit vs. 64-bit, let alone other architectures.

On Haiku, config files are generally either plaintext (kernel/drivers/a few core apps, so they are easily editable) or archived-BMessage format. The former are almost always read and not written, and the latter are key/value based so at worst the application would just not know about the new keys, and possibly remove them, which isn't the end of the world.

<comment><USER50> Configuration changes depend on the developers. For example, I used to use Evolution on Linux / Gnome as my email client. Their attitude to compatibility is terrible. As in, they just don't care at all.

If you allowed it to upgrade your Evolution data store there was no going back.

In a BeOS case it would be as if it migrated to different configuration keys in the new version, then the old version would detect corruption, throw a fit and erase ALL the keys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I like the read!</comment>


One year of international phone calls, mapped - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/ucA8pwC.png

<comment><AUTHOR> Source: DHL's Global Connectedness Index 2014 [http://www.dhl.com/content/dam/Campaigns/gci2014/downloads/d...](http://www.dhl.com/content/dam/Campaigns/gci2014/downloads/dhl_gci_2014_study_high.pdf)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Probably the dusk of "international phone calls" as a relevant metric : voice over the Internet increasingly replaces POTS for international conversations.</comment>


(video) Why you need the app Twyxt in your love relationshp - <AUTHOR> http://twyxt.us:80/?p=483 Your love relationship deserves its own space! If you have a timeline for friends? How come you dont have anything for your most important relatiosnhip! <comment><USER2> Tip: A 6:49 promo video is not a good promo video.

Also promoting a video on Hacker News in general is not a good idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing! I m still new to this thing and exploring!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the best way of learning a foreign language on your own? - <AUTHOR> Amidst all of these news from Japan, an old itch of mine has re-surfaced: learning japanese. However, I live in a spanish speaking country, and can't find (decent or not) teachers of that language in my town. I've attempted to learn it online before, but haven't succeeded, mostly because I had no guidelines on how to attack this problem. I'm sure some of the HN members have faced this same issue before (perhaps with another language), so I'm asking: If you learnt the language (be that japanese or other) on your own, how did you accomplished it? Which would be the main tips to succeed in this enterprise? <comment><USER2> Immersion. Listen to Japanese music all the time, watch lots of Japanese things (all kinds of things). Just hearing the language will help, even though it all sounds like gibberish. Your brain will start to sort out the sounds and accents by itself, though it won't be that fast. As a Spanish-speaker, you already have a lead on English-speakers with the accent, since the vowels are the same.

Decide what your goal is. Do you want to be conversational in spoken Japanese? Do you want to be able to read/write well? What's your target level? Situations? Learning business Japanese is very different from learning everyday Japanese.

Get a textbook you like and stick with it. Study at least an hour everyday. Find CDs you can mimic. Use Skype and find people in Japan you can chat with -- there are plenty of people who will love to do a language exchange with you. Skype was a godsend for me in college; when I was in my second year of Japanese, I spent hours every day on Skype finding people in Skype Me mode and just chatting.

Don't be afraid to look stuff up online. If you want to look something up in Japanese, do it, and then see what you can read. Write down what you can't, learn it, and then you have a context to put it in to help you remember better.

The only really solid tip I have is to learn your katakana and hiragana now. Brute-force it with flashcards and learn them in a week or two. Romaji won't get you anywhere; it's hard for people to separate romaji from their native language (if it uses the Roman alphabet).

Best of luck! Scott

</comment><comment><USER3> First of all, this will be very hard. Japanese is quite different from pretty much any language you're likely to know, and not only do you want to learn it, but you want to do it without actually being able to practice speaking.

That said, I learned passable Italian (again, similar to languages I already knew) through a combination of self-study and visiting the country. My advice would be to start directly with the hard stuff: studying the grammar rules and memorizing tables of word forms. Of course, the language is more than just the rules, but at least for me it worked fairly well to memorize the rules, internalize them, and then be able to use them in conversation. Hopefully, you've already learned a foreign language, so you know what this process entails. Most books tend to be oriented towards classroom study, so you have to look around in order to find that works well for self-study.

Once you've learned enough to know how to use a dictionary, take a news article and translate it word for word. After about an hour, congratulations, you've just read and understood an article in Japanese. Now go back to studying grammar. Maybe using Google translate and looking at the Japanese text and the translation side by side would be just as good, but I worry it would become too easy to understand.

Much later, once you can understand spoken text, watch movies with movies in Japanese with subtitles. Don't kid yourself and think you'll get much out of this if you haven't already built up a base of grammar and vocabulary, but it's useful for learning colloquial expression and for seeing immediately how the Japanese will phrase things differently from the subtitle language.

Oh, and one other thing: learn the International Phonetic Alphabet. A book will try to guide you through the language's sounds by relating them to your native language, but this can be a crutch because sounds never match up quite right. Start following linkes from the Wikipedia page on Japanese phonology. It's a bit intimidating, but you can start with the sounds which are common to languages you already know and then come back to the more complicated ones later.

As others here have observed, at some point, you need to communicate with actual native speakers. Maybe you can find someone in Japan who wants to learn Spanish (or English?) and you can exchange emails. And, of course, if you're serious, you should someday visit Japan, which will give you lots of opportunities to speak Japanese.

</comment><comment><USER4> The best way to learn a language is to go to the place they speak it, and fall in love with somebody. Seriously, dating a native speaker, and having them commit to speaking to you in their language.

If you're willing to move, and emerse yourself, learning a language only takes a couple months. It's extreme, but unlink almost all other ways of teaching a language, it works.

<comment><USER5> undoubtedly a good advice, but notice that this may be _really_ frustrating for your partner, when he/she would be able to express in your language but is forced to go through the painful motions of using ten different words, paraphrasing and then mimicing until you finally get that she/he just wanted you to go get the sugar.

On the other hand,you may pick up some bad habits: depending on your situation, you may realize too late that your better half swears a lot and you are not supposed to talk like that to their parents, or end up using baby talk with your boss.

It's a great way to get funny stories though :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi

Ive been studying Japanese for about 5 years now. I help out at the ruby kaigi here in Tokyo as well with translation. I'm by no means perfect and still have a long way to go but conversation is no problem. My reading is good enough to read blogs and to an extent magazines but novels is a different story ( I'm working on that). So that said here are my top tips:

1) Are you in this for the long haul? If you are then master learning and writing the kanji first of all. Dont worry, its not as hard as it seems. Your a hacker so your going to appreciate this book "Remembering the Kanji" by "Heisig". Use that book with a site called "Reviewing the Kanji". The author truly is a hacker, his methodology of learning the kanji is absolutely brilliant. I finished the book in 2 months and could write about 70% of those kanji from memory. By 6 months it was closer to 95%. I put this off and i regret this so much. I wasted two precious years of studying by holding this back. You learn so much more through reading. Listening too, but with reading you can control the pace.

2) Pour your heart into the above and then tackle hirigana and katakana. If you've come this far learning those will be a piece of cake.

3) Download anki - a vocab software that uses spaced repetitions ( based on the leitner system ).

4) Buy a good Japanese to english dictionary. The Green Godess is good one. A little over the top for a beginner as its aimed at translators but its full of example sentences. You wont need another dictionary for a long time, maybe ever (one day though you might want to look into a monolingual one for children)

5) Grab the Japanese Grammar reference books published by the Tokyo Times. there a set of 3. For now the first one will do. If you want to save money. Tim Kae's online reference is very good.

6) Start learning basic vocabulary and grammar from the above and using Anki to learn it.

7) You could do this by just diving into reading blogs online. Remember you can write a lot of kanji by now so those funny symbols wont be so alien. Use a firefox / chrome / iphone and ipad plug-in called Rikaichan. This allows you to hover your cursor over a word in Japanese and the meaning will pop-up. This is really good. Place any unknown words you really want to learn into anki along with its sentence. Use your dictionary and grammar reference to write notes on the meaning. Anki will then test you on this at various points in time, increasing the interval period to stretch your memory more and more.

8) When you review in Anki, dont just mentally check your comprehension, write out the words to improve your kanji writing and reading abilities. You'll be amazed at how common some kanji are. Its like the 80/20 rule except more like 60/40. Knowing 40% kanji pronunciations goes a long way.

9) Have fun doing this. Find new words and grammar through the things you love. I do it through reading ruby books, techcrunch.jp, engadget.jp and a host of other famous Japanese websites. If you want to find interesting stuff go Japan's version of delicious called hatena.

10) Don't let not being in the country hold you back. There are ways to create your own environment if you try. My Japanese friend found Western roommates and his English has skyrocketed. Try the same in your neck of the woods. Rent lots of Japanese classics, cook from Japanese cooking boks ( cookpad.com ), learn japanese folk songs to sing at karaoke ( search for lyrics online ), build a gundam model using the Japanese instructions, read Ryan Bates Railscasts transcripts in Japanese over at asciicasts ...you get the idea.

11) Search for the language learning forum - I cant remember the name but its big and full of great advice.

12) Above all make it fun!

good luck!

<comment><USER7> I agree with most of this but I just wanted to emphasize: kanji is where most people fail. A lot of people think listening/speaking is the hard part (and it can be if you're learning a language with the same writing system as English, like French), and they put off learning kanji. Eventually they've gotten to a point where they can do trivial things in spoken Japanese but they can't read or write anything (except maybe in kana) and their vocabulary is minimal because they kept putting off learning kanji. And use Heisig - otherwise it really will take years to learn all the kanji, which isn't necessary at all. You can memorize the basic 2000 kanji in a few months. The first book I cannot recommend enough; the other two are kind of superfluous.

Whatever you do, do not under any circumstances try to learn using romaji. Not sure why but it will cripple your pronunciation. It is easy to tell who started out using romaji... and it is very hard to keep from laughing at their accent.

Don't bother memorizing grammatical rules. Languages don't really have rules, they have conventions. So you can use a grammar reference to figure out what a sentence means, but it will only take you through the basics as a lot of things that people say and write will not conform to any rule.

Make sure you are learning using things you're interested in - comic books, novels, TV shows, music, whatever. Don't waste your time with textbooks (except for textbooks on some topic you're interested in that happen to be in Japanese). When it becomes a chore, you will find excuses to study "later". "Later" eventually becomes "never". To be honest, my knowledge of words commonly used in Japanese pornography is embarassingly good because of this approach though...

The sooner you can switch to using a purely Japanese dictionary, rather than a Japanese-English dictionary, the better. It's very difficult at first (looking up a word, only to have to look up words in the definition of the first word, and so on) but you will find your comprehension skyrocket when you can ditch the J-E dictionary.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much, both of you!! I'll keep your tips in mind!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The _best_ way (as per the title of your post) to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it by going there, and at the same time, get lessons in the grammar and other fine points of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip. I'll rephrase the question.

<comment><USER8> I don't think you can learn a language properly on your own. You need people to interact with to learn how to speak it properly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Immersion works really well -- I've had exceptional results with Rosetta Stone, which teaches via immersion. It's expensive, but they're usually giving away trial demos.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wait for this project to launch: <http://duolingo.com/>

</comment><comment><USER11> My favourite way to get started learning a new language is using the "Pimsleur Method".

These consist of completely aural courses with 30-45 hours of tapes in each language. There are no written materials whatsoever and this is intentional. Dr. Pimsleur's reasoning was that you should learn to pronounce and understand a language before learning to read it, lest you pick up bad habits which will be difficult to lose further down the line.

The courses were designed to teach the most frequently used words in any given language (such as numbers, movement verbs etc.) through sample conversations and drills. Spaced repetition is used to enhance memory.

From the wikipedia entry:

"The student listens to a recording on which native speakers speak phrases in both the foreign language and the language used for teaching (usually English). At varying intervals, the student is prompted to repeat a phrase after the speaker finishes it. The student is then introduced to a new phrase and the meaning is explained. After repeating several times, the student is asked to repeat a previous phrase, along with integrating vocabulary from the new one. More new phrases are introduced, while old phrases are prompted at random, so as to aid long term memory."

I highly recommend the courses, although the downside is that they ain't free.

</comment><comment><USER12> There's only one clear answer: go there, surround yourself with the language, get a partner who speaks the language, have sex in the language!</comment>


Apple Now Biggest-Ever U.S. Company - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443855804577601773524745182.html?mod=pls_whats_now_f&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews

<comment><USER2> After reading about this yesterday, I found myself going through the catalog of Apple products at my house. Some are old and not used anymore, but at 15 Apple products in a household of 2, it's no wonder they are the biggest company in the country....ever.</comment>


Xobni for mobiles - <AUTHOR>

I am planning to make a software similar to the one that xobni is making, but for mobile phones. Any thoughts,suggestions? <comment><USER2> For myself and almost everyone I know the mobile phone is the definitive buddy list, so this is an excellent idea.

Once you've gathered information about who people contact and how often what will you do with it?

</comment><comment><USER3> Great idea, with one serious problem though. Xobni data are useful mostly to infer social relationships. You can get the data you need only for smartphones, which are small proportion of all phones. Social data are useful if you don't have big inherent holes in that social graph.

So you need to target smartphones and can't use the social network effect. But you can still add big value to the phone's owner.

</comment><comment><USER4> make it web based and target all web enabled devices. At least that way your not going to limited by device memory.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Darren. I missed this out completely. I was only targeting smart phones. Although I would still build the software for smart phones, I think I should provide a web interface for the rest. What say?

<comment><USER4> yeah sounds like a viable plan. If you develop it using an mvc design then it should be fairly easy to make it online as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> just curious, but what makes you think xobni will not be offering the feature soon, and if they will what makes you think that yours will have an advantage to theirs, knowing they are already ahead, have users, and done a good job executing it and will probably offer the services faster than you can!!!

<comment><USER6> You'll never start a startup with that attitude. ;-)

<comment><USER7> Everyone needs critics, it helps create drive. IMO.

<comment><USER8> Devils advocate or not, it's like saying you should only seek out opportunities that have no competition.

<comment><USER5> not really, it is like trying to realize there are some capable companies out there that could have some big advantages over you and trying to find solutions on how you will compete with them if they decide to do the same thing, instead of just being optimistic that it will never happen

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> i still don't really get xobni :-\

</comment><comment><USER10> What's up there. I have a mobile app that mines your phone and sends it to the server. it is up, and runnning and I have 1 corporate client. what is a good way to contact you?

<comment><AUTHOR> nice. you can mail me at mellampudi at gmail dot com</comment></comment>


Huawei Targets Apple Trade Secrets - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2019/02/18/huaweis-efforts-to-steal-apple/ <comment><USER2> >The Huawei engineer attended the supplier meeting with four Huawei researchers in tow. The Huawei team spent the next hour and a half pressing the supplier for details about the Apple Watch, the executive said.

the bar for trade secrets theft is pretty low these days

<comment><USER3> That seems like the IP equivalent of casing the joint, and being stopped by a security guard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like Microsoft in the 90's [https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_...](https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.txt)

</comment><comment><USER4> Is it just me or does there seem to be a mainstream media narrative trying to stoke the fires of nationalism against China with Huawei being the current lightning rod?

<comment><USER5> Lately noticing 3 big agendas being pushed in a more obviously biased way than I've ever seen before:

1\. Look at how evil the tech majors are.

2\. Save American institutions from Trump (worst offender was the lockstep outcry about troop withdrawals).

3\. Look at how evil China is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The very same pattern happened to Spain < Netherland < France < British < USA. The government (King) in capitalist countries from the West tried to be protective and then lost investment trust.

<comment><USER7> Are your angle brackets meant to have directional or comparative meaning, or are they just delimiters?

<comment><USER6> Not sure I understand the downvotes.

Yes, they follow the chronological order.</comment></comment></comment>


What happens in your body during a "cleanse" or "detox" - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/what-happens-in-your-body-during-a-cleanse-or-detox-1669540259

<comment><USER2> Summing up -

"Rather than worry about 'detoxing,' people would be better off thinking about eating nutritious, health-promoting foods on a daily basis. Think leafy greens, beans, whole fruit, nuts, and seeds. The idea that six months of unhealthy eating can somehow be remedied by drinking nothing but green juice for 72 hours is erroneous."

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't really answer the question of the title. The authors can't determine what happens during a detox because the detox sellers don't mention any toxins by name.</comment>


Top Gear's James May goes to the edge of space in a U2. - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6cZLfK4Zjk

<comment><USER2> I recommend watching the whole documentary if you can find it. It was all about the Apollo missions and was really one of the best Moon landing documentaries I've watched.

Mostly because May is full of boyish excitement all the time :D

And to cap it all the U2 is just extraordinary. My Dad (ex RAF) was in the states on training once and saw them flying. They glide off the end of the runway and just shoot vertical into the air in seconds. Great stuff.

</comment><comment><USER3> Stuff like this is why we'll never have a Top Gear equivalent in the USA. They have access to pretty much all the latest gov't toys.

Want to borrow a fighter plane to race against a Bugatti Veyron? No problem

Want to borrow an Aircraft Carrier to launch a Jaguar from? No problem

Want to borrow an Apache to race against a Lotus Exige? No problem

Want to participate in a sea invasion in a Ford Fiesta? No problem

Want to borrow a few tanks to race against a Range Rover? No problem

Want to borrow a few APCs to race against an Evo? No problem

<comment><USER4> pretty sure I read the US Military regularly gives "toys" to for use in movies.

I think that U2 is American in fact, he has a USA flag on his spacesuit...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I was surprised that the BBC could call up the US Air Force and say, "Hey, you know those spyplanes, the ones with the mechanics needing a top- secret clearance? Mind if we send up a camera and a goofy middle-aged bloke for a joyride? Thursday? Sure, Thursday works... thanks!"</comment></comment></comment>


Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2018/09/24/walmart-requires-lettuce-spinach-suppliers-to-join-blockchain/ <comment><USER3> IBM is quietly brushing its Watson mess under the carpet and now they're trying to focus on blockchain. However this is just as substanceless and full of marketing fluff as Watson was.

There's nothing being done here that couldn't or shouldn't just be handled with a traditional database. Having IBM "run it" also sort of defeats the whole decentralized aspect of blockchain technologies.

You don't need "blockchain" to track where your produce came from. This is just a marketing play through and though.

<comment><USER4> As I understand it, a blockchain is a decentralized database which does not require the individual instances to have perfect connectivity and perfect trust all the time.

I can see why that would be something worth doing in a food chain. To trace, for example, a particular load of soy beans to a customer eating a steak, there are a couple of completely autonomous companies/sole proprietors involved. From the original soy farmer, through feed production (maybe multiple factories because the soy is processed and later mixed with other ingredients), feed distributors and transporters, to the cattle farm. Again the individual animal can change hands multiple times, for example a bull calf can be fed soy based milk exchangers at a dairy farm where it was born, then be sold to a farm that raises it to market (with pigs there can be three different farmers from piglet to market maturity), then to the slaughterhouse, the meat goes to food processors and then into a distribution channel.

Easily a dozen or two separate legal entities. I can see why it could be hard to connect each of them to a central database reliably may be tricky.

<comment><USER5> > does not require the individual instances to have perfect connectivity and > perfect trust all the time.

The blockchain does not solve the trust issue in this scenario.

Blockchains only work there is a verify unit entirely enclosed in the system - including the origins of any "unit" on the system.

* Bitcoin/Ethereum/etc - "coins" are a completely digital concept fully enclosed by the system. "coins" are generated in a predictable, consensus based manner with consensus based means of exchanging their value.

* Distributed Filesharing - "files" are stored in encrypted in a verifiable manner. I have an identity (or multiple identities) on the system which I can use to verify the source. Trust does become a factor in something like Civil where credibility is attached to a trust that an author actually published something.

* Food - involves a physical good that cannot be verified by the "blockchain". I can verify that SOME item went through a certain set of checkpoints. I can possibly verify that the SAME item went through a certain set of checkpoints. I cannot however verify the authenticity of any item before entering into the system. I have to rely on a middle-man (e.g. Walmart, Kroger, Whole Foods, etc) to verify authenticity at the origin point. They also have to implement safe guards that ensure goods cannot be tampered with between checkpoints. That relies on trusting the middleman to have appropriate safeguards in place.

<comment><USER6> Excellent response.

Though here is another perspective I thought of. What the usage of blockchain would allow is a chain of liability to exist among different companies in the supply chain. If you are signing off on a product, you are verifying the authenticity of the item, and if it arrives defective at the next location you assume liability. As a customer, what you would really leverage, is the incentive of every individual company to not be liable for any issues to the next company in the supply chain. You would still be required to some degree to verify the direct transaction of the item to yourself, but if ubiquitously applied, it should offer some higher level of trust simply due to the transparency offered.

If this is needed in current society or will be implemented is another question, but I think large business definitely has incentive to minimize liability through something like this.

<comment><USER7> But since it's working with legal liability there's no need for blockchain. That can be done through standard contracts and having companies certify that their items are authentic. You still need such a contract with a blockchain, all the blockchain adds is some complexity.

<comment><USER6> I mean the question is if the complexity is needless.

Blockchain generally forces some level of standardization or there will be rejection, as well as being incredibly easy to audit.

In a well functioning system, there is little benefit, but I would say that a blockchain based system elevates the floor of a functioning system due to its nature.

<comment><USER8> As you stated, blockchains can be quite useful in a low trust environment. Thus currently most of its use cases are by criminals or transactions that can't be easily adjudicated, like international money transfers. I hope that the cryptocurrency craze is more just a standard get-rich-quick ponzi scheme in action than a sign that the West's hard won high trust culture is changing to a low trust one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Since so many comments on this thread are so absolutely negative, I will try to play devil's advocate here.

Is a given blockchain a more efficient database? Not efficient measured by percent of data stored in any given entry, which of course throughput and any other, "engineering metric," will suffer because of that. As an engineer, the idea of wasted energy, memory, space, etc., makes one cringe.

Efficient from the standpoint of preventing loss of human life or preventing sickness? Well, in the United States where likely most of us live, this is not as big of a problem, but likely in many other countries such as China, "food authenticity," is a problem. Let's keep in mind that Walmart has more stores and customers in China and more problems with food than the United States by orders of magnitude.

If I'm an actor within the food system in China which presumably has multiple middle-men, and I want to move one product up the supply chain through multiple, ultimately ending up on the shelves at Walmart, then I will not want to give away my source, because I want to get preferential pricing. However if I can convince my suppler upstream to use this tool (it doesn't matter if it's IBM, Google, Alibaba, or some startup or whatever, it's just a tech tool), to track and register when food was, "picked" or "harvested" then I don't have to give information to my buyer about the source, yet the database is all, "standardized," in terms of labeling. Keep in mind the alternative would be some kind of bar coding system which perhaps Walmart would have to impose. Well, I don't want my upstream partners knowing that this is going to Walmart either, otherwise they will jack up the pricing. If everyone is using some IBM tool, and assuming the IBM tool sees increasing adoption, then no one (hopefully) knows where or who a particular food is going to, yet any problem foods can be tracked back to their source by the end seller, without having to impose multiple types of key-value pair, bar-coding database systems, which - while technically easier to implement and run more smoothly from an engineering standpoint, perhaps do not take the entire use case into mind, because parties within the supply chain may be unwilling to share their source or destination due to pricing incentives.

Mind you, I am no food systems expert, I am just trying to talk hypotheticals here. I think the knee-jerk reaction on Hacker News within this thread is an almost Redditian "reaping karma" approach by putting down Blockchain, because many of us have had bad experiences working with corporate executives who have no idea how various types of technology work, and implementing non-technology buzzwords ends up being painful. That being said Blockchain at its heart, stripping away the history, is just a mathematical concept, and it's a math tool that can be used to point from one source to another. Calling it a, "mind disease," is losing sight of that.

Typically the types of discussions on hacker news that I enjoy reading are more angled toward how do you reverse engineer things, not just insulting an idea without backing up one's insult.

<comment><USER10> I really wish I could remember where I read this so I could give proper credit --

Somewhere I read a helpful way to rephrase "blockchain" that really helps cut to the heart of the issue when you're dealing with technical questions like this: A blockchain is just an ordered series of files, each of which contains a hash of the previous one in the series.

So, when you've got someone saying, "What if we use blockchain?", just mentally substitute the suggestion as, "What if we store the data as an ordered series of files, each of which contains a hash of the previous one in the series?" Any bits of the proposed system that aren't impacted by the decision to store the data as an ordered series of files, each of which contains a hash of the previous one in the series, also don't have anything to do with whether or not it needs to involve a blockchain.

(Yes, I realize there are additional questions around trust and proof of work and whatnot that come into play when you're talking about blockchain-as-in- cryptocurrency, but, as far as I can tell, it's a rare case that proposed use cases for blockchain in business are ones where anyone even wants trustlessness. See, for example, Walmart trying to use a centralized blockchain to manage their edible leaf supply chain.)

<comment><USER11> > A blockchain is just an ordered series of files, each of which contains a > hash of the previous one in the series.

Mentioning the hash is an implementation detail -- it is what gives blockchains their immutability property.

So I'd say even simpler: a blockchain is merely an append-only register that can be used by multiple parties.

<comment><USER10> It is absolutely an implementation detail.

But it's also the defining characteristic - it's the essential thing that sets blockchains apart from all the many other ways you could create an append-only register that can be used by multiple parties.

The fact that the hash is both an implementation detail and the defining characteristic is exactly why, IMO, "blockchain" is an inappropriate word to use in most business plans. Implementation details as a headline feature of your elevator pitch is a classic characteristic of a solution in search of a problem.

As far as I'm aware, nobody was talking about peer-to-peer supply chain management before "blockchain" became a buzzword. Probably because you don't need peer-to-peer when you have a natural central authority. The organization whose supply chain it is in the first place, for example.

<comment><USER12> Supply chains aren't really owned by a single entity, right? Walmart may be the biggest actor and driver of requirements but they don't own anything beyond the specific services they are paying for. Its a complicated system of actors - which is where something like a DLT or blockchain can help bring together in a more cohesive way.

Agree with everything else you said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Decentralized? No, it's "IBM Food Trust". So how is this any better or different from hosting a database on IBM's server? Secured by a PoW? Doubt it.

Here's the closest I could find to technical info:

> IBM Food Trust's blockchain solution, on the other hand, is permissioned so > invited members know exactly with whom they are transacting, similar to what > happens between business partners today. Participants also determine what > data is seen by whom, thereby providing information on a need-to-know basis. > Smart contracts also run on our blockchain, allowing business logic to help > solve disputes, automatically execute contracts, and build trust.

<comment><USER9> Where does anything in this article or anywhere in the title does it say the word, "Decentralized?" Where are you getting that from?

<comment><USER14> If it's not intended to be a decentralized system in the first place, the "blockchain" aspect is useless and turns from being a clever hack that allows to generate a certain level of trust from distributed participants, thus enabling the decentralization in the first place, to a marketing ploy that, if not just being lip-service but actually implemented, is a huge resource hog and severely reduces scalability and maintainability of the system without offering any benefits whatsoever.

Because of this situation it is natural to assume that a blockchain-based system must either have a decentralization aspect to it, or that the architects of the system are incompetent. And we don't want to assume there's such gross incompetence at IBM, do we? ;-)

<comment><USER15> What if the biggest feature about using the blockchain isn't that it's an open ledger that resists tampering from untrustworthy agents but that it has lots of hype?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Make no mistake -- this is nothing but a minimally-cloaked attack on federal food safety regulations. The word "blockchain" is only a distraction / misdirection.

FTA:

> Tests... have produced a more complete view of the food system than under > current federal regulations, according to Nestlé SA, Dole Food Co., and > other participants in the project. ["more complete" != "more > accurate/accountable"]

> _As investigators worked_ , 210 people got sick and five died, according to > the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [implying blame lies with > the _regulatory body_ , not the industry]

> A directive for suppliers to use the Food Trust blockchain will help the > industry create a more complete picture of the food system than is possible > under current federal regulations, Mr. Yiannas said in an interview. [ _yet > again_ federal regs are mentioned]

> "Today, the requirement for traceability by law is one step up and one step > back. That doesn't work any more," he said. [really obvious here!]

> Early this year, _as investigators worked_ to understand an outbreak of E. > coli linked to romaine lettuce grown in the region of Yuma, Ariz., 210 > people in 36 states got sick. Five people died, according to the Centers for > Disease Control. [ditto blame shifting]

> Blockchain establishes authorship or ownership that experts say can't be > faked and eliminates costly middle layers because of its peer-to-peer > structure. [if it _can 't be faked_, obviously there's no need for > regulators! Garbage in, perfection out! ::eyeroll::]

It's like claiming that ledgers written in pen make the SEC obsolete.

</comment><comment><USER17> Unnecessary rubbish. The article even mentions that larger growers already have a similar(one can assume non-blockchain) system in place. This is the product of excited executives listening to buzzwords and the always shameless IBM ready to play along.

<comment><USER18> Glad I asked these questions in Feburary.

Sold my alts, kept my Bitcoin.

Im seriously starting to believe in the phrase Bitcoin not Blockchain.

<comment><USER19> Monero, zCash, Ether and EOS all do things bitcoin can't and are still decentralized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Alternate solution: do not announce small foodbourne illness outbreaks.

In the article's example, 250 people got sick from a lettuce outbreak, and everyone stopped buying lettuce, hitting the whole industry. But _5 million people_ get sick from Norovirus alone in the US every year.

Leafy vegetables like lettuce are the most common source of food illness. Telling people about a minor outbreak is just letting them freak out for no good reason. We should be educating people better about foodbourne illness so they can respond without freaking out, and so they don't get sick so damn much. And the media should stop freaking people out.

250 people out of 350 million getting sick, and not even dying? It's a _minor risk!_ 35,000 die in traffic every year, and these people are freaked out by some lettuce. Take a fuckin chance, would ya please? [https://youtu.be/X29lF43mUlo](https://youtu.be/X29lF43mUlo)

<comment><USER21> The reason only 250 get sick is because of the notification. Traffic accidents aren't contagious. Comparing a static risk and a dynamic risk is inappropriate.

If lettuce is contaminated with ecoli at the source and you don't recall/stop people eating it, you will have much more adverse health events. Different outbreaks have different responses and sometimes that includes notifying the at risk population and the source of the risk. [0] (this list includes lots of norovirus outbreaks and the response for them)

We should also be educating people about food borne illness, but this isn't exclusive to outbreak control.

[0] [https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/outbreaks/multistate- outbreak...](https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/outbreaks/multistate- outbreaks/outbreaks-list.html)

<comment><USER20> Let's compare the same things, then.

 _73 million Americans_ are infected with E.coli every year and 5,000 die. Only 5 died in this outbreak. You think that number was significantly reduced because it was announced that there was a single small outbreak?

The outbreak was minor, but the effect on the economy and people's state of mind was overwhelmingly more powerful. It's fine to notify an at risk population if you can, but what do you gain if just a few less people get sick? What do you lose when people stop supporting an entire industry?

<comment><USER22> What are you talking about?

"CDC estimates that each year STEC [Shiga toxin-producing E. coli] causes 265,000 illness, 3,600 hospitalizations and 30 deaths in the United States."

[https://www.cdc.gov/features/ecoliinfection/index.html](https://www.cdc.gov/features/ecoliinfection/index.html)

<comment><USER20> Sorry, I misquoted: it's 75 million cases of food borne illness in general, and 5,000 deaths, using older statistics from smaller population sizes.

Using your stats, this outbreak was responsible for 0.1% of e.coli illnesses and 1/6th the deaths. But it's also 1/300,000 of the overall food poisoning illnesses, and 0.1% of the deaths.

So it hit the lettuce industry significantly harder than normal, even though the actual effect on health was minimal compared to the norm.

<comment><USER22> Latest data is

Estimated annual number of episodes of illnesses caused by 31 pathogens transmitted commonly by food

Domestically acquired foodborne [1]

9,388,075 (6,641,440–12,745,709)

Deaths [2]

1,351 (712–2,268)

[1] [https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/pdfs/scallan- estimated-i...](https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/pdfs/scallan-estimated- illnesses-foodborne-pathogens.pdf)

[2] [https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/pdfs/scallan- estimated-h...](https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/pdfs/scallan-estimated- hospitalizations-deaths-foodborne-pathogens.pdf)

<comment><USER21> It's pretty hard to compare the value lost to the lettuce industry vs the illnesses and deaths.

The EPA values a life at $7.4M for policy purposes [0]. So 1351x7.4M is about $10B. In 2015, the value of all US farm output was $136B. [1] So you could argue that you'd want to save more value from lives than from market impact, if you wanted to be purely utilitarian (that I hope no one in thread does).

But there's a big impact from illness. I think many people underestimate the impact of food borne disease because they are young and healthy. I'm glad you pulled up the impact because it's a big deal.

Hopefully as people better understand the danger, we'll be able to avoid reductive math where we only worry about things when they are big, and way harder to fix.

[0] [https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/mortality- risk-v...](https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/mortality-risk- valuation)

[1] [https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food- statistic...](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics- charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What does a blockchain offer in this case that submitting a line to some sort of B2B logging API where the logs are made public (like certificate transparency) doesn't?

<comment><USER24> I don't get that either. Absent proof-of-work (which is however terribly energetically wasteful), blockchain is just a public GIT repository where every commit is signed, no?

<comment><USER25> I agree that it's a buzzword,

but at least intuitively, a signed blockchain (in the true sense that each block contains a hash of the previous block) does seem to confer some additional security over a plain database.

A plain database would give you a log of events and who logged them, but security and trust resides in the database and how it's authenticated. Anyone with sufficient permissions could modify the database.

A signed block chain would give you a log of events where each party in the chain signs the new block (which includes a hash of the previous block) using their private key. The block can then be verified using each entities public key. To modify this system you would need to be able to breach the trust of the private keys.

{Lettuce from Farm A on date, <>}[Signed by farm A] => {Received lettuce on date, <Farm A block>}[Signed by shipping agent] => {Received lettuce on data, <Shipping agent block>}[Signed by Walmart store], etc

In theory then, Walmart would have a registry of the public keys of each agent in the chain, and upon receiving produce could verify the events of the whole block?

<comment> FLUX-YOU Most of the security bonuses feel anemic when it's still humans entering data into a system to track food vs. how cryptocurrencies use blockchains to track transactions.

But now you've also raised the technical requirements and are betting the security on non-technical farmers and farm staff. Even if they have technical chops since farm equipment is more complex these days, they likely don't have security chops.

There's already 'country-of-origin' scams in international shipping, so it's not a far stretch to apply the same concept to farming supply chains. Throw a disposable proxy farm in front of your real farms and change the origin. When it's human-entered information, blockchain doesn't prevent someone being dishonest from the beginning, and it lures people into a false sense of security because of IBM's advertising.

I guess limiting fraud to the beginning of the supply chain is a step in the right direction though. I don't think blockchain solves chain-of-custody well though.

<comment><USER25> I think there are two key points to making such a system work:

1\. Packaging it in such a way that it's easy to use for non-technical users.

2\. There still has to be a mechanism for establishing trust in the public keys registered in such a system.

For one I'd imagine that farmers are doing some amount of work to go from raw "lettuce in the ground" to "one unit of shipment". Once it's a unit of shipment it could have an ID/Bar/QRcode generated that is then scanned with a handheld scanner that has its own keypair. The scanners keypair would be registered with the farm and so the farm would either explicitly sign off on the package or implicitly have signed that scanners pair as trusted by the farm. So a farmer and farmstaff wouldn't need any technical know how beyond operating a scanner. Depending on the farm adding such a granular tracking system may or may not be easy to implement.

For two, I can see two options. Walmart could verify every step of the chain themselves and register/receive the public key for each step in the chain. (So a farm would register with Walmart as a verified producer, a shipping company would register, etc). Or each step of the change could make a binary decision to trust the step before it and apply pressure down chain to resolve issues, since theoretically each step could fabricate the entire chain before passing it off. In this scenario, Walmart would go to the shipping company and say "E. Coli was detected in Shipment X. We no longer want to be sourced produce from Producer Y. The shipping company then takes this into account when sourcing produce, or else Walmart discontinues business with them.

I think the big benefit is by having an associated public key, you can verify the claimed identity of any agent in the chain and build trust in that agent over time. You could keep popping up disposable proxy farms, but Walmart/Shipping provider/X doesn't have any reason to trust your proxy farm's shipments; you have to establish trust either directly with a buyer of your produce, or establish trust over time as a commodity provider. As you build trust you can probably get better prices.

I'm by no means a blockchain advocate or a supply chain manager of any kind, just doing a thought experiment of how blockchains might be effectively applied in such a scenario. There very well might be better solutions, but I think at the very least a blockchain presents an interesting or novel solution.

 __Just thinking through, you could also create a sort of "doubly linked list" and include who custody was given to as part of each block, so a farmer is signing a claim of who they gave their produce to. {Farm A produced unit of Lettuce X, Given to Shipper B, <no previous>}[Farm A signed]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think it is important to remember this is not any blockchain, it is IBM Blockchain For Business. I found a great overview page:

[https://www.ibm.com/blogs/blockchain/2017/05/the- difference-...](https://www.ibm.com/blogs/blockchain/2017/05/the-difference- between-bitcoin-and-blockchain-for-business/)

> Consensus in a blockchain for business is not achieved through mining but > through a process called "selective endorsement." It is about being able to > control exactly who verifies transactions, much in the same way that > business happens today. [...] This is different from Bitcoin, where the > whole network has to work to verify transactions.

> Bitcoin thrives due to anonymity. [...] On the other hand, businesses have > KYC (know your customer) and AML (anti-money laundering) compliance > requirements that require them to know exactly who they are dealing with. > Participants in business networks require the polar opposite of anonymity: > privacy.

So I actually think this is not such a bad idea. I mean, it allows IBM to take all the money from people who want to buy blockchain, but does not produce negative effects, like energy waste. Sure, I would call it "distributed event sourcing database", but if it has to be renamed for marketing reasons, this is OK too.

</comment><comment><USER27> (Image) Do I need a blockchain?

[https://i1.wp.com/potdar.info/wp- content/uploads/2018/07/ima...](https://i1.wp.com/potdar.info/wp- content/uploads/2018/07/image_e8795092-8d69-408a-ac77-3fcdce87ca5e20180721_1650214228857716902582941.jpg)

<comment><USER28> Eh, I think it's more like "Do you need a decentralized write-once database where you trust none of the writers? Then yes. Otherwise, no."

<comment><USER29> Yeah, that's a dumb slide. It's true that _most_ people don't need a blockchain, but most is not all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Walmart requires lettuce, spinach suppliers to submit information to a database.

<comment><USER31> Your version does not have the same punch as the buzzwordful headline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> _" As a tech person, the word 'blockchaing' is triggering, but the real story here is IBM and WalMart moving more surveillance and monitoring further down the food supply chain, to squeeze more out of farmers at the expense of everyone but them"_

[https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1044926267521486848](https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1044926267521486848)

</comment><comment><USER33> Why is a blockchain required for this? Why can't a single party keep this information?

<comment><USER34> Probably for the marketing.

The link to the actual description is behind a register wall, but there is a bunch of marketing gibberish at:

[https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions/food- trust](https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions/food-trust)

There's no proof of work or similar and participants can limit who has access to the data they contribute, so it basically is just a data sharing system run by a central party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Can't one solve the problem of tracking food contamination with a simple key value store that tracks supplier id and the food batch information? Whats the advantage of using blockchain here?

<comment><USER36> It's about tracking all steps, all parts that were used, whether all companies involved in the processing chain had appropriate ISO certificates, if sourcing didn't originate from sanctioned countries or countries with bad working practices etc. in order to "select" ones that fulfill given criteria, possibly marketing them in multiple layers with certificates (this one is pure Swiss, cows were fed grass 100% from Glarus canton, operated 100% German machinery, food assembled by a Dutch factory implementing ISO blahblah, so here you pay 175% price; or you can get a budget version containing traces of ground fingers of children from Uganda forced to work in a processing factory with high contamination of environment etc.)

<comment><USER15> Yes but how does a blockchain do anything that a database doesn't in this instance?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Notice how this article never clearly states specifically _how_ a block chain solves the supply chain problem, nor does it even clearly state the problem in the first place.

A very common response to these block chain/supply chain stories is that "a block chain is just a database."

But even that statement is overly optimistic.

A block chain is a log file. It keeps a record of a sequence of state changes. All of the tamper-resistant properties we associate with Bitcoin come, not from the log file it uses, but from the economic incentives around changing the file.

So the choice isn't between a block chain and a database for these non- economically incentivized use cases such as IBM's supply chain projects. Rather, the choice is between a block chain and a dumb log file.

<comment><USER38> > Notice how this article never clearly states specifically how a block chain > solves the supply chain problem

Oh, I noticed. In fact it's the first thing I go looking for in these articles about "blockchain solves problem X".

And then I read the words "IBM Hyperledger". I've tried to find out what Hyperledger is, but penetrating IBM's blizzard of marketing bullshit about it has so far proved beyond me. All I know it has some relationship to a think called a "permissioned blockchain".

From what I can gather (as it is also surrounded by a cloud of marketing hype) a permissioned blockchain doesn't use proof of work, proof of stake or anything related. Nor is there a race to append the block. (Thus is it prompted as solving bitcoin's energy "problem", and because it doesn't need time to accumulate the proof of work it's not limited in the number of transactions it can process). Instead a permissioned blockchain appoints (ie, gives permission to) some miners to process the blocks. I have no idea what happens next, but I'm guessing in practice there is only one miner who checks the incoming transactions and assembles then into a block, signs the block using a public key, and publishes it by appending it to the database where it remains unchanged forever more.

To me the word blockchain doesn't just mean "append only published database". If that was true every log file would qualify as a blockchain. It also involves a clever set of rules for appending to that database that have one clear goal: they ensure the log is append only by making alterations computationally expensive.

In doing that a blockchain makes the "trust" quantifiable, eg to rewrite an entry 24 hours old in the log you are going to have to expend roughly 100 G Watt hours. Then by using more magic (the consistency checks aren't just rules, they are computer programs that can include assertions on future events, and thus control what happens in the future), the assertions can extended into "I promise to do X in the future, and if I don't I loose Y", and the only way to undo that promise is to expend that 100 G Watt hours.

A permissioned blockchain shares none of those properties, so to me it isn't a blockchain name notwithstanding. What it does look like is the old fashioned titles office - if I want to transfer my house title I have to give a notice to the Titles Office, and when they give it their official stamp of approval and append it to their records, and it's done. In that case the currency is property, the transactions are record of change of ownership of that property (which always originate with the state owning the land), the blockchain database is the records of all changes of ownership (which happens to be public in this case), the single miner is the Titles Office.

The amount of trust you have in the system boils down to much you trust the Titles Office to do its job (are they easily fooled, can someone be bribed, could a fire destroy the chain, and so on). This is not easily quantifiable. As an example I live in Australia whose civil systems are about as strong as you can get, yet every few years we have a new headline of someones house being sold from under them (usually while they were on an extended overseas holiday) due to title fraud. There is no recourse when this happens - <USER2> transaction is as irreversible as a bitcoin transaction and the state have legislated to ensure they are not responsible for any losses. However unlike bitcoin, it's impossible to extend the trust you put in the Titles Office to other applications. Or to put it another way: they are not going to look after your Ethereum ICO's for you, whereas Ethereum could do a very good job of looking after titles.

So it isn't a blockchain. It looks to me like IBM is selling "Titles Office" software for other applications, given it the fancy name "Hyperledger" and added blockchain to marketing blurb for extra pizzazz. 10 points for marketing prowess I guess.

It does however sound like a reasonable way to track food supplies. The currency is the food with some certifications. The transaction are changes of ownership, the miner is someone appointed to collects the sad transactions, stamp them as official, and append them to the log, the database is public so everyone (including the state and consumers) can verify everyone has made the right promises on that strawberry they are eating so they can sue there arses off if it contains needles. And the entity doing the certification (IBM?) gets to make a bit of money for their efforts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> There are two reasons to use a blockchain: to avoid double spending in an adversarial environment, and to avoid central control of a database.

This application requires neither, and this implementation accomplishes neither.

<comment><USER40> I'm aware of the latter justification, but can you elaborate further how a blockchain is more effective at preventing double spending than a centralized system?

<comment><USER39> An adversarial environment kinda rules out control by one of the adversaries (ie, whoever is running the centralized system)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Without focusing on the relevance of whether Blockchain is required in this situation, the thing that I find interesting is that this is Walmart and this news source is the WSJ.

That means executives from the world's largest companies are all reading this article and many will be having discussions with their management teams about blockchain.

Technology relevance discussions aside, moves like this are what turn fads and buzzwords into funded projects and business models.

And when a big company like Walmart makes a move like this, others follow ...

</comment><comment><USER42> I guess they're using hyperledger?

<comment><USER43> Yeah, Hyperledger Fabric.

[https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions/food- trust#1225961](https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions/food-trust#1225961)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I feel like I'm yelling into the wind, the only time a blockchain is it all relevant is if you cannot trust a single party. You can trust IBM in this case, and are, which makes this just a database but harder.

</comment><comment><USER45> To me great business innovations needs 2 equal forces: 1) The marketing and customer oriented drive 2) The scientific, technological and engineering side.

If you only have one of each, any success is surely fickle and will quickly dissolve.

If one force (Marketing in this case) overwhelms the other, then of course you have 'Blockchains' to track food. Not saying that there isn't a need for this, but it smells funny. I'm surprised there isn't a 'Deep Neural Network' used also to make things look even more 'cutting edge' ....

</comment><comment><USER4> We need a block chain in the fridge to know who ate what.

</comment><comment><USER46> I can only imagine how terrible it must have felt to work on this project as an engineer. So your manager tells you 'ok, we are gonna make distributed, blockchain enabled, smart contracts based system" and then you end up building your run-of-the-mill centralized database app. It really saddens me that we have to put up with this kind of BS to just make a living.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm surprised that Walmart is wasting time on this. They are both cheap, and very good with traditional databases.

</comment><comment><USER48> This essentially just feels like a PR push so that Walmart can claim 'better than the competition' food regulation, without actually opening up the system to be....regulated.

There's no wider benefit to the public from this unless the chain is publicly verifiable, imo.

</comment><comment><USER49> We lack a good hash function for lettuce that allows one to eat it afterwards. This will limit the efficacy of blockchains in the supply chain space, but perhaps not their adoption...

</comment><comment><USER50> There is no reason for a blockchain here. A database would suffice just fine. It's not even decentralized so what's the point?

</comment><comment><USER51> Archived/paywall-free version:

[http://archive.is/RSoqh](http://archive.is/RSoqh)

</comment><comment><USER52> Of course this was bound to happen, the entire point of a blockchain is supposed to be that joining it is voluntary based on a set of shared values that you wish to support by contributing resources to sustain the blockchain. Forcing someone to join the blockchain is nothing less than forcing them into a commercial racket, and completely renders irrelevant the fundamental value proposition of decentralization.

</comment><comment><USER53> Many comments are saying here "it's just a database, you don't need blockchain for the public events log". Private blockchain become more understandable when you dive into the level of corruption and data manipulation happening within big corporations. It's just much more complex to change a row in blockchain than in good old SQL database, that's it.

</comment><comment><USER54> Can someone explain why you would want to use a block chain here and not just a "database"?

</comment><comment><USER55> This just goes to show how ignorant people can be when trying to solve problems with technology.

</comment><comment><USER56> the comments here remind of the dropbox thread as well, people here can be so shortsighted.

</comment><comment><USER57> Does WSJ have an editing staff? The copy reads like it was written by a bored intern.

</comment><comment><USER58> had some thoughts: [https://twitter.com/rambossa/status/1044975293109358592](https://twitter.com/rambossa/status/1044975293109358592)

</comment><comment><USER59> Will this idiotic mind-virus never die?

<comment><USER60> Of course it will. Fads come and go. Remember when everything was going to be CORBA? Or when all user interfaces were done in Flash?

And right now AI/ML is taking over from blockchain, and lots of it will be written by people who don't know what a linear regression is and once heard of p-hacking but couldn't make up an example of it.

<comment><USER61> >Or when all user interfaces were done in Flash?

Or in JS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> This seems like a cool, real-world use of the technology.

<comment><USER63> The problem is that people don't see a problem and go looking for solutions.

People see a technology and go looking for ways to apply it.

Sure, a blockchain _can_ be used to solve this problem. But _should_ it? Probably not. It's hard to find technical information but it seems like the same could have been accomplished with an easier solution.</comment></comment>


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