Around the World in Rare and Beautiful Apples - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/unusual-apples <comment><USER2> I bought a house with apple trees last year. One of them makes little red apples where the color of the flesh has red streaks, like someone dripped stain on to it or something.

They're _wonderful_. The closest I can describe it (and my wife agrees) is that it's like if watermelon jolly rancher actually was a natural flavour. But if you wait more than a day or two after picking they're not particularly good at all.

Maybe a John Gidley's Pearmain? ( [https://www.fruitid.com/#view/1012](https://www.fruitid.com/#view/1012) ) - but really don't know. Fruitid is great for fruit identification.

Grow an apple tree (several, actually, to pollinate each other) is what I'm saying I guess.

<comment><USER3> You should check Adam's blog and see if they are already there! [http://adamapples.blogspot.com/](http://adamapples.blogspot.com/)

<comment><USER2> Thanks! It's hard to pick a type for sure though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This chap's YouTube channel has a good number of videos about growing apples that are less well known:

[https://www.youtube.com/user/1sustainablehedonist/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/1sustainablehedonist/videos)

If you're based in the the UK, the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale grow quite a few different varieties of apple seedlings (and other fruits) and has a reasonable sized seed stock I think you can order from.

[https://brogdaleonline.co.uk/](https://brogdaleonline.co.uk/)

[http://www.nationalfruitcollection.org.uk/index.php](http://www.nationalfruitcollection.org.uk/index.php)

<comment><USER5> For what its worth these are unlikely to be from seed, as apples are very unlikely to produce fruit which matches the variety of the parent.

<comment><USER4> You're right, what's for sale are are rootstock trees. But I believe you can get access to seed stock as well.

<comment><USER6> Apples trees grown from seed actually do not match their parent - they are a genetic mix (just like us). What's more, they will most likely bear fruit that isn't pleasant to eat.

All the apple varieties you eat have been cultivated from a single original specimen, via cuttings or (more likely) grafting onto a convenient root stock.

<comment><USER4> So does that mean if you only have the seeds available you've effectively lost that variety? i.e. it's now extinct?

I feel this warrants more research for me.

<comment><USER6> Yes, essentially, if it hasn't otherwise been propagated. Also, the process for creating a new edible variety is fairly time and resource intensive, since it involves planting a lot of seeds and waiting a couple years to see if you get something worthwhile.

The story is also similar for rootstock. Apples are naturally a fairly large tree, which isn't convenient for harvesting. The rootstocks that apples are typically grafted onto are genetic variants that don't grow as large.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the education :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Used to live in the middle of town. On a walk with the kids, down 3 blocks and left at the little market onto a dead-end street, at the end was a little hayfield with a pond and an apple tree.

The apples on this tree were like cannon-balls. Someone had stacked the fallen ones this way, in little tetrahedral piles of 4. Bigger - not quite soccer balls but impractically, ludicrously large dark apples. Never heard of them, never seen them pictured anywhere.

The tree is gone now, the entire meadow and pond turned into condominiums.

<comment><USER8> One of the weird things about apples is that every seed contains very different DNA than whatever it came from.

It sounds like that was just a random variation that someone planted. Did the apples taste any good? If they had, you might have been able to sell them. It's very possible that particular variety of apple will never exist again.

<comment><USER9> How is this unique to Apples? Most fruit trees come from clones. If you buy local the clones will be grafted onto a rootstock that matches your zone. A lot of vegetable seeds are unlikely to produce identical plants from seeds, especially if you have multiple squashes. Hass avocados are clones from the original tress a farmer found in the early 1900s.

<comment><USER7> Yeah in our garden we plant chili peppers, Anaheim, jalapeno etc. Tried replanting seeds one year, and while the fruit looked (mostly) like the parent plant, the heat was all over the map. It was chili roulette!

<comment><USER9> I had a few Franken-squash take over my garden one year. They even seeded themselves. The place I order seeds from will even warn you if the peppers can be cross pollinated easily.

<comment><USER10> Yeah...I've had some really odd 'volunteers' come up the year after planting mixes of squashes. Melons are are apparently notorious for crossing as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Braddick's Non-pareil

That's my favourite apple ever, and I may well have tasted it from one of the only two trees remaining -- at Faversham, Kent, UK.

Quite possibly I got them on a _really_ good day, or they just spoke to my taste buds.

Either way there's a few thousand apple varieties we know about, yet most people have tried a few dozen. Similarly cherries, and pears.

They don't have to look great (TFA images _look_ spectacular) to taste great -- the Braddock is visually unassuming and unappealing

</comment><comment><USER12> I live in Sweden which has an abundance of apples. All year round there are only two or three Apple varieties in the stores: Royal Gala, Golden, Pink Lady. Same goes for pears.

Where are the rest of Apple varieties? No one knows.

Well, some people do [1] Profits, economics, transportation.

[1] [https://pitjournal.unc.edu/article/where-have-all-apples- gon...](https://pitjournal.unc.edu/article/where-have-all-apples-gone- investigation-disappearance-apple-varieties-and-detectives-who)

<comment><USER4> > Where are the rest of Apple varieties? No one knows.

From the article:

 _Due to the demands of industrial farming, only a handful of apple varieties make it to stores, and even of those, only the most uniform specimens sit on the shelves. Growers have abandoned many delicious or beautiful varieties that have delicate skin, lower-yield trees, or greater susceptibility to disease._

Then there's the wholesale destruction of old and disease free orchards which has seen the availability of once popular cultivars vanish. It's a crime really.

<comment> yoz-y > delicate skin, lower-yield trees, or greater susceptibility to disease

All of these are very valid reasons to not try to mass produce them. Even if they would be available from some person's orchard, they would still not be available in the shops or markets.

<comment><USER13> It was all lead by the supermarkets, in the UK at least.

The two or three favourite varieties in the seventies and eighties have all disappeared. Not because customers no longer like them, but because the supermarkets wanted high yield, large size, taste free apples. More profit, and vast suppliers who'd supply a trillion tonnes at a time.

In the space of a decade the entire stock of trees for the UK's number one and two were grubbed up. The customers still wanted them, still asked for them, the supermarket response was "fuck you".

Now it's all Royal Gala, Golden Revolting^W Delicious, Pink Lady, Braeburn. All bland balls of taste free sugar.

<comment><USER14> > Golden Revolting^W Delicious

The proper term is "Yellowish Horrible". A completely pointless apple.

Not sure if they do it in the UK, but Tesco, of all places, sometimes sells nice local apples when they're in season in Ireland.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The temperate orchard conservancy is an awesome non-profit, preserving many rare varieties and distributing scions for grafting onto rootstock.

They only take orders from December through January (i.e. until the end of this month).

[http://www.temperateorchardconservancy.org/](http://www.temperateorchardconservancy.org/)

</comment><comment><USER15> One correction, Al Bean took the seeds to the moon, not around them.

I can forgive Atlas Obscura for it, however, since the USDA page(1) has it wrong as well...which severely irks me as it's a government website. It says "carried around the moon in the early 1970's by Astronaut Bean on Apollo 13 Flight."

Al bean was on Apollo 12, which was in the 1960's, and he walked on the surface. I submitted a ticket to the site linked in (1) to correct it.

1: [https://npgsweb.ars- grin.gov/gringlobal/accessiondetail.aspx...](https://npgsweb.ars- grin.gov/gringlobal/accessiondetail.aspx?id=1013751)

<comment><USER16> It now says:

 _Supposedly, seeds were carried by Alan Bean on Apollo 12 (no citation provided)._

Do you have a citation for this?

<comment><USER17> I also read this Atlas Obscura article-Alan Bean did not carry apple seeds to the moon. All Astronauts have a list of what they personally took on the mission (flags, jewelry, military insignia). Apple seeds was not part of Alan Bean's list. In addition I am unaware of any apple seeds carried as part of an Apollo 12 NASA experiment. ALSEP, Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package contained the Apollo 12 science experiments. There is a chance Alan Bean conducted an experiment with apple seeds on board Skylab, although I do not remember one. There were many Skylab experiments and apple seeds could have been part of one of those experiments. That fact could be verified using the Skylab II mission documentation. Amy Bean

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I assume this was written in response to the gentleman whose hobby was collecting heritage apples (and moonshine stories) in the quite amazing photo -

[https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/eiyy2u/t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/eiyy2u/this_mans_collection_of_lost_apple_varieties/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I never thought apples could be so different... I understand the _black swan_ feeling a lot more now...

<comment><USER20> What's even more interesting is that the fact that we don't see these is a consequence of the economics surrounding apples, drive by what people _perceive_ and as such _want_ an apple to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you like in-depth apple reviews, I highly recommend Adam's Apples: [http://adamapples.blogspot.com/](http://adamapples.blogspot.com/)

It's especially fun to learn the jargon (lenticels, calyx, etc).

</comment><comment><USER21> From what I've heard from people who've travelled, apples from the Pamir mountains area are closest to wild apples and have some great varieties with great flavor.</comment>


Ask HN: What 3rd party APIs do you wish your company wasn't using? - <AUTHOR> What tools do you use that you wish your company wasn't using for strategic reasons and/or out of existential fear to your business if this tool disappeared tomorrow?<p>For example, we are interested in building out some custom user tracking and currently use Google Analytics (GA). We're grabbing some stats from GA API but because user behavior on our site is key to our business, I'm wondering about the downsides of this type of dependency. Obviously, Google is a strong, stable company, but so is Facebook. You hear all the time about companies, e.g., Zynga, who have relied on FB (and Google and you name it...) APIs getting burned, so we'd like to make good long-term decisions. I'd be interested in people's thoughts on how to benefit from the richness of tools and APIs out there while still building a moat around your company core assets. <comment><USER2> Google Analytics is particularly bad because if you are planning to make money by making web sites, Google has to eat your lunch if it is going to keep putting up numbers to keep investors happy.

If you use GA, Google will eventually use your usage statistics to make its own content, and there will come a day when people do a Google search and there are no organic results above the fold, on the first page, and eventually at all.</comment>


These Guys Are Selling Their App Divvy From The Back Of A VW Bus - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/26/these-guys-are-selling-their-private-photo-sharing-app-divvy-from-the-back-of-a-vw-bus/ <comment> mh- Hmm. There's already a desktop app called Divvy that's been around for quite awhile.

<http://mizage.com/divvy/></comment>


Show HN: LinkedIn Lens – Extension to replace 500+ with the # of connections - <AUTHOR> https://linkedinlens.com/ <comment> _</comment><comment></comment><comment>_ Nice, now wait for the cease and desist email to come from LinkedIn/Microsoft, just like they did for my extension.</comment>


JQuery's API documentation gets a redesign - <AUTHOR> http://api.jquery.com/#redesign

<comment><USER2> Not a fan of this redesign.

-What happened to the comments? That was one of the most useful features of the old documentation, and I constantly relied on them to find examples or clarify edge cases.

-The code samples are on opposite colored backgrounds, which makes the whole page extremely painful to read. Can you imagine reading paper book that had code samples written in white text on a black background? How is that a good idea on the web?

-The huge blue border around the edge adds even more visual noise.

-Why is so much stuff laid out inside of boxes, starting with the list of functions? Developers are experts at reading raw blocks of text, so minimal formatting is needed.

-Finally, where did the old documentation go? The content has been changed, but where can we find it? There doesn't seem to be any links.

The old documentation definitely needed some work, but these improvements have brought with them new problems, and overall I find it harder to use than before.

Edit:

Compare Google's documentation: [https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/tutorial)

While not perfect, it does a lot of things right: no extraneous formatting around the page edges, solid background, clean code examples, and importantly, access to old versions of the documentation.

<comment><USER3> After experiencing the wall of well-intentioned garbage that is php.net I no longer like comments in docs. Those examples and clarifications of edge cases should be in the documentation itself.

<comment><USER4> And how do you discover these edge cases if you don't have comments? The point of the comments is to point out common issues, use cases and potentially, common misunderstandings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FYI, I am working on a revamp of jQAPI, a alternative browser for the documentation. Should be released pretty soon.

<http://pre.jqapi.com/> <https://github.com/jqapi/jqapi>

<comment><USER6> So you're the guy! Thanks for the site, I use it every time I'm using jQuery.

<comment><USER5> Glad you like it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would have liked it the jQuery API documentation would be closer to the PHP.net documentation. For instance, I want to know the options for $.post - going to <http://api.jquery.com/post/> would sure be nice (and even if it didn't exist, it could do a search for "you might have meant...")

For people unfamiliar with PHP.net's configuration, going to php.net/<function or whatever name> will go to the function if its known or search if it isn't (like <http://php.net/strapos>)

<comment><USER8> Another feature of php.net I wish this had: a "Related functions" or "See also" section.

<comment><USER9> This would be useful actually. I wrote "if !hasClass addClass, else removeClass" countless times until I figured, hey, maybe jQuery has a toggleClass function, I should look it up. These situations could be avoided if a "related functions" section was there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like the idea, but it's far more spread out than the previous design, and it's a bit much for me. I wish there was a google-like 'cosy' setting allowing me to compress things back a bit.

</comment><comment><USER11> _Every_ redesign on the web boils down to having less information on the viewport, requiring more scrolling, thanks to bigger font and wasted "Comfortable" spaces. It drives me crazy.

At least Google offers you a "Condensed" layout.

</comment><comment><USER12> Man, how about finishing that jQuery plugins site instead of a redesign? :)

<comment><USER13> I would imagine the new plugins site would integrate with this Documentation site, or at least follow a similar design pattern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice update! Much appreciated improvements.

The only thing I noticed that was weird is the search box seems to have different behavior between the instant results and the results you receive when you hit <enter>. Not sure if this is intended, but the instant results seem to be limited to whatever categorical scope you're in.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is still slow as shit, why? It seems to be running under php when the whole thing could've been generated with jekyll and maybe even pjax'd to make navigation even quicker.

<comment><USER16> Any website "could be generated with jekyll" but you're totally ignoring the benefits of maintaining content with a dynamic site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I might not be in the majority here, but I like the redesign. Some of the entries might not be as complete, but I'm glad the comments section is gone because lets face it rarely was there anything useful in the comments, this isn't php.net.

</comment><comment><USER18> Overall, this is a great update for the jQuery docs! It feels much more clean, and is a lot easier to navigate. My only complaint would be the dark code blocks, does it bother anyone else's eyes?

<comment><USER19> I personally like the dark code blocks. It's the blue they chose for the background that bothers me a bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you ask me, making the old one faster would have been much better; I don't go there for the nice design, I go because I have stuff to get done, and I'd rather get that stuff done fast.

</comment><comment><USER21> This was so needed, don't know why people are hating, it's much easier to read and browse through. Thanks for the update.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't know if I am alone, but having no global view of methods in a category without scrolling down is a noticeable loss of productivity for me. I, too, would prefer a "cosy" setting of some sort.

When people start to make cheatsheets then it means your documentation lacks some bird's eye view...

</comment><comment><USER23> The logo does not waste enough screen estate.

</comment><comment><USER24> Were comments removed or is it just me that can't see them?

<comment><USER25> I am hoping they come back, but guessing they were intentionally removed. I found the answers to many edge-case problems in the comments, and some might be hard to include in the docs specifically because they were version dependent or just not as intended. I agree that ideally those answers would be in the docs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sorely needs a bit more line height on the doc content. Terribly unreadable all bunched together.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is a nice looking redesign but I think I'll probably stick to jqapi.com for quick reference. It's fast, I can find methods by URL (eg. jqapi.com/#p=get), and search auto-completes.

</comment><comment><USER28> It looks nice, but the previous design was excellent. It had more examples, more detailed explanations, and lots of comments. I'll just have to get use to this.

</comment><comment><USER29> Has been in development for awhile so I'm glad to see the team finally got it live. Although the jQuery UI docs page is still pretty ugly.

</comment><comment><USER30> Neat!

How about adding a link which will let you experiment using jsbin (or sth similar) with the code examples?

</comment><comment><USER31> This is what I use: <http://oscarotero.com/jquery/>

<comment><USER32> I prefer the "jQuery API Browser" which is available on the chrome web store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> $(".post").css("background-color","inherit").css("border",0);

</comment><comment><USER34> The code-examples look awful in Chrome on Windows... :-[

<comment><USER35> Can you expand on that? I'm using Chrome 23.0.1271.97 m on Windows 7 Pro and it looks fine to me. The visual display is legible and very clear.</comment></comment>


Listen to your community, but don't let them tell you what to do - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/listen-to-your-community-but-dont-let-them-tell-you-what-to-do.html

<comment><USER2> Also, not all community members are created equal.

I used to be a mod/product lead for a major IT community forum. We had a group of 300 or so hardcore posters (which the ad team referred to as "inventory builders") who we took behind the curtain and showed our prototypes before we released them. They often had some interesting feedback, but we quickly fell into a strange trap:

The changes the hardcore users wanted didn't drive usage -- posting or reading -- when we implemented them.

These guys were already spending every damn spare moment posting in our forum, so they had no more to give and all the esoteric bells and whistles (segmented follow lists, advanced karma scoring, multi-tiered private messaging) they wanted were completely irrelevant to the casual user.

When we shifted to testing changes that drove casual usage, we saw much better results. The hardcore group wasn't against it, generally, except for those petty few who saw the forum as their private playground and didn't like the riff raff wandering in to post. They were just dumbfounded as to why we were wasting time on these "beginner" features.

You don't want to alienate the devoted userbase, but data -- not anecdotal feedback -- is what should guide your decisions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Recently I deployed a new design for my web app that I thought was much better than the previous.

A few of my users complained and I decided to rollback the changes. Nobody has complained about the rollback but I still believe the new design was better.

I find it hard to know how to decide when to push further against the community sentiment. Facebook has done that countless times and it has worked for them.

I guess this is where the founder's vision comes into play.

How do you decide what to keep and what to ignore?

<comment><USER4> Show us the redesign vs original design. The best way to tell if a design is "better" than the original is to put both version in front of brand new users who haven't developed usability habits yet.

Sometimes when you make an app the first time, it's badly designed but people get used to the bad design. Then when you improve it they have to relearn everything and that's why they're pissed off.

Another thing you can do is "incremental design". Change things little by little over time.

<comment><USER5> ^ This! My company had a website that predated Google (seriously) when we updated it you can imagine the shock people had after using the same site for like 14 years.Incremental design in this case was out of the question it had to be forced. They will get used to it soon enough.

Remember the famous quote from Henry Ford: 'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.'

Change for changes sake is not good however there are times where you NEED to change and you have to face the criticism and stand your ground. The trick is to know the difference.

<comment><USER6> FYI - Henry Ford likely didn't say that (although I love the phrase): [http://www.quora.com/Quotations/Did-Henry-Ford-actually- say-...](http://www.quora.com/Quotations/Did-Henry-Ford-actually-say-If-Id- asked-my-customers-what-they-wanted-theyd-have-said-a-faster-horse)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I believe this is quite true. I also believe that the loudest members of the community (or work, family, politics etc) are the ones you should never, ever listen to. The loudest people tend to get the attention, but I firmly believe you should not indulge them and create a broken system where the loudest, most obnoxious people start calling the shots.

This is particularly why I like Ubuntu these days. It seems they have a vision and are sticking to it. Most current Ubuntu users are going to be quite happy, but there will be a few very vocal community members who are essentially caught in a "who moved my cheese" scenario and they will be quite loud. Unity is turning out to be the best DE in all of Linux and they are doing something different, bold and it is clear there is a unified vision there. Had they listened to the community, they would still be doing GNOME2 for the next 10 years and the status quo would remain...no movement, no growth, no real innovation.

Another community that seems to get it right, as much as I am not a fan of the whole community, is Rails. DHH made some tough calls (Coffescript and not going to HAML and Rspec) and there were quite a few people who hated those decisions, but DHH either had a vision or made a random call (hard to tell in his case) and stuck with it. Seems to be working out for them.

And, lastly, Apple. I really, really dislike Apple these days. I think they are going Evil pretty quickly. BUT, they stick to their guns when everyone else tells them they should be doing something different. Let other people build mac hardware? Open up iPhone/iPad development off Macs? Flash on the iPhone/iPad? App store taking 30% from in app purchases?

Overall, I think the message is this: Have a vision, understand what you are doing and execute to your vision. You might be right, you might be wrong, but you can't please everyone so know what you are trying to do and do it. Hot or cold but not lukewarm.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is especially important in the era of MVP where you are showing the public the absolute bear minimum and all further progress is done in the public's eye.</comment>


Yahoo, Apple, Adobe, others named in Eolas patent lawsuit blitz - <AUTHOR> http://www.betanews.com/article/Yahoo-Apple-Adobe-others-named-in-Eolas-patent-lawsuit-blitz/1254842259 <comment><USER2> Flash websites are one of our main products ... after the Eolas/MS thing happened back in '05/'06, we had to update tons of sites because the Flash ActiveX control no longer auto-started.

Wonder how this one will play out ... patent trolls FTL

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if they're trying to squeeze out some settlements before the Bilski case is decided.</comment>


Lenia – Biology of Artificial Life - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.05433 <comment><USER2> Hm, sounds like mathematician giving fancy biological-sounding names to some procedurally generated abstract art forms.

Frankly, I had hoped for more, given the title. There's some really cool work that has been done with digital artificial life that has real biological significance. For example, Richard Lenski's group at Michigan State University developed a platform called AVIDA ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida)) that has been used for evolutionary biology research. Slightly different, 2012 saw the publication of the first whole-cell computational model ([https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286741...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867412007763)). And in the past 30 years, computer simulations of ecosystems have slowly been gaining momentum and acceptance as a tool for addressing ecological questions that are very hard to study in real life (this happens to be the field I work in).

Lenia, on the other hand, is nothing more than an abstraction of Conway's Game of Life. A pretty mathematical pastime that is fun to play around with and gives you some interesting patterns - but nothing that merits the description "biology". The whole paper just reeks with misapplied terms: from "taxonomy" to "ecology" and even "physiology". (They don't have anything to do with their real counterparts.) In short, I fail to find any significance for our knowledge of life on earth, or any other life, for that matter.

Pretty graphs, though.

<comment><USER3> Molecular biology: [https://youtu.be/_SGoDIkscXg?t=39](https://youtu.be/_SGoDIkscXg?t=39)

Game of Life: [https://youtu.be/xP5-iIeKXE8](https://youtu.be/xP5-iIeKXE8)

Sure, one is 2D and discrete, the other is 3D and continuous... oh wait, Lenia is 2D and continuous. That's interesting.

<comment><USER2> My comment had nothing to do with the number of dimensions or whether the world is continuous or discrete. (AVIDA and many other biological models are both 2D and discrete.)

The two core characteristics of life are metabolism and reproduction. Metabolism requires some kind of input, a resource, that is somehow consumed or transformed as the organism grows or is active. Reproduction places an organism in a long line of descent, possibly with mutation and evolution, akin to what we like to call Life.

Sure, living organisms show (symmetrical) organisation - but that is because this morphological organisation enables metabolic functions and reproductions. The morphology does not arise because of some random mathematical rules, but because it fulfills a specific need. It is not an end in itself. This teleological perspective is completely lacking in cellular automata such as Lenia.

 _(edited for clarity)_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Youtube video showing some of the persistent life forms: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE46jKYcI4Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE46jKYcI4Y)

</comment><comment><USER5> Here is an implementation: [https://chakazul.github.io/Lenia/JavaScript/Lenia.html](https://chakazul.github.io/Lenia/JavaScript/Lenia.html)

Here is the github: [https://github.com/Chakazul/Lenia](https://github.com/Chakazul/Lenia)

</comment><comment><USER6> Strange and fascinating. It raises interesting questions about we consider "life". The implementation [0] contains a whole taxonomy tree of variations, of which Conway's Game of Life is but a branch. It's certainly an ecosystem of mathematical "life" forms.

Reminds me of one of my favorite books, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology [0].

[0] [https://chakazul.github.io/Lenia/JavaScript/Lenia.html](https://chakazul.github.io/Lenia/JavaScript/Lenia.html)

[1] [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vehicles](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vehicles)

</comment><comment><USER7> The title reminds me of the work done by Karl Simms and published in SIGGRAPH94

[http://www.karlsims.com/papers/alife94.pdf](http://www.karlsims.com/papers/alife94.pdf)

[http://www.karlsims.com/papers/siggraph94.pdf](http://www.karlsims.com/papers/siggraph94.pdf)

(video here: [https://archive.org/details/sims_evolved_virtual_creatures_1...](https://archive.org/details/sims_evolved_virtual_creatures_1994))

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if cellullar automata could exhibit at least some approximation of classical mechanics, i.e. mass, inertia, forces etc.? From my understanding, motion as seen here is purely due to the structure of the objects.

<comment><USER9> Yes. See here:

[https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.56.1505](https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.56.1505) Frisch, Hasslacher, Pomeau - Lattice Gas Automata for the Navier-Stokes Equation (1986)

Citations (5k+) here:

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=5993777633272177716](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=5993777633272177716)

See also my other comment here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18757946](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18757946)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Huh, they extend the Game of Life with a complex neighbor kernel, and get more complex patterns emerging. This is a cool experiment, but hardly "biology of artificial life".

<comment><USER2> A short, sweet summary of my opinion :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _We describe the methods of constructing and studying Lenia, including its > mathematical definition, in silico simulation [...]_

It's funny how different fields of science have all invented their own names for "computer program." Physicists and many engineers call them "codes," and biologists love fitting in the buzzword "in silico."

<comment><USER11> I would guess it's a play on in situ.

<comment><USER12> Or 'in vitro' ('in glass' ie. 'in a test tube'), as opposed to 'in vivo' ('in life').

<comment><USER2> Yes, in biology we use _in silico_ to extend this previous distinction between _in vivo_ and _in vitro_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I honestly don't know if this a simulation of life or an example of it. Or if those are mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER12> From the video, they seem to be more like stable moving patterns than life. They don't appear to self-reproduce or have behaviours.

<comment><USER14> That is in the future works section in the pdf.

 _8\. Do self-replicating or pattern-emitting lifeforms exist in Lenia?_

<comment><USER12> It seems kind of a stretch to call it "biology" then.

"I designed a new life form! _points to lego brick_ It exists and you can move it! Future work will involve making it self-replicate and have artificial intelligence."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Figure 20 from the paper is particularly interesting. Life solves multiple problems, and for unicellular life, one of them is the problem of locomotion. At least here Lenia and real world biology seems to have some amount of overlap.

<comment><USER16> If there's any overlap at such a simplified model then the simplified model just might be a good place to start figuring out the actual system.

<comment><USER2> All due respect - I think that for pretty much any simple shape you'll find an actual organism that "looks just like it".

<comment><USER15> I do tend to agree that unicellular life has a mind boggling diversity of forms and you can find similarities to most things, simple or not-simple :)

That said, humans have a very specific notion of "simple shape", intuitively incorporating symmetry into it. Symmetry is far from guaranteed in mathematics (although mathematicians, being human, also tend to search and study symmetric things). Even in the most symmetric objets - let's say groups, there are many more non-abelian (i.e. not commutative a _b != b_ a) groups than there are commutative groups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pet Peeve Rant:

Just like in the case of SmoothLife (which Lenia generalizes), the square grid used for this implies a lack of isotropy(we could also say that it "introduces anisotropy"; but that makes it sounds like a good thing), EVEN IF you turn the entire thing continuous like done here and use . This last fact becomes relatively obvious if you mash the "random" button in the demo, you'll see 'square' noise.

This really ought to use a triangular grid (or the dual of it, a hexagonal one) to ensure isotropy; Frisch, Hasslacher & Pomeau showed this in 1986 while working on two dimensional Navier-Stokes equations:

[https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.56.1505](https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.56.1505) (Ctrl+F isotropy)

Section 4.4.4 of the OP paper DOES acknowledges that one could generalize this further (which includes generalizing to a hexagonal grid, doesn't mention a triangular grid however), but unfortunately it doesn't mention isotropy even once, anywhere, not even in section 3.1.1 on Spatial invariance (albeit, I suppose, the section does semi-address it indirectly, but what's described there to address it seems like a hack, and the 'empirical' evidence from the random button would seem to agree with it.).

Having said all that:

I still consider Lenia DAMN impressive, and I think other people have pointed out this lack of isotropy to the author before. I suspect he'll follow up with more generalizations, but, based on the Github activity (See here: [https://github.com/Chakazul/Lenia](https://github.com/Chakazul/Lenia) \- last commit in July, long open & relatively trivial pull requests, etc.) and when the OP paper got published to arXiv, I suspect he's been busy writing the paper & with other academic duties and that he could almost certainly use a lot of help with this project. I lack the time (and admittedly, skills) to do so, but I figure if I point this out here, maybe some people might want to pick up on it, especially since, as the author points out, Lenia & further generalizations of it could serve as a great benchmark for various machine learning related matters, which Hacker News users seem to have a great interest in.

Edit: I've decided to us this opportunity to do some renewed literature research:

1.

A:

If you want to read more about Euclidean automatONS beyond the citation #27 from the OP paper, you might want to check here (I suspect the author of the OP paper either overlooked the existence of this book chapter, or hasn't had time to study it yet):

[https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-84996-217-9_...](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-84996-217-9_12) Pivato, Marcus - RealLife (Chapter from "Game of Life Cellular Automata" edited by Andrew Adamatzky)

Which seems like a follow up work to: [https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0503504](https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0503504) Pivato, Marcus - RealLife: the continuum limit of Larger Than Life cellular automata

B: There also seems to exist a separate idea ALSO called Euclidean AutomatA, first described here:

[https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/SSS/SSS14/paper/viewFile/...](https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/SSS/SSS14/paper/viewFile/7696/7742) Kornai, András - Euclidean Automata

Citations here: [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2906127536931309801](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2906127536931309801)

The author of this seems unaware of the works by Pivato, the same applies to this follow up work:

[https://ruj.uj.edu.pl/xmlui/bitstream/handle/item/51661/EA01...](https://ruj.uj.edu.pl/xmlui/bitstream/handle/item/51661/EA01.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y) Gyenis, Zálan - Skeleton in the Euclidean closet

2\. More on Triangular & Hexagonal automata:

A:

Research by Carter Bays:

[https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1...](https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4939-8700-9_58) Cellular Automata in Triangular, Pentagonal, and Hexagonal Tessellations

"First Online: 28 November 2018" \- but this is basically a republication of a 2009 version of an expanded & updated version of [http://wpmedia.wolfram.com/uploads/sites/13/2018/02/15-3-4.p...](http://wpmedia.wolfram.com/uploads/sites/13/2018/02/15-3-4.pdf), which stems from 2005!

Citations of the 2005 version (doesn't seem directly listed in Google Scholar):

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22A+Note+on+the+Game+o...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22A+Note+on+the+Game+of+Life+in+Hexagonal+and+Pentagonal+Tessellations%22)

Citations of the 2009 version:

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1062581570709413178...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1062581570709413178&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en)

And there's also an even older version from 1994, only addressing triangular tesselations:

[http://wpmedia.wolfram.com/uploads/sites/13/2018/02/08-2-4.p...](http://wpmedia.wolfram.com/uploads/sites/13/2018/02/08-2-4.pdf)

Citations here: [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9274761406110052964](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9274761406110052964)

B:

Research by Andrew Wuensche:

[http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~andywu/downloads/papers/self_rep....](http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~andywu/downloads/papers/self_rep.pdf) Self-reproduction by glider collisions: the beehive rule

Citations here:

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1226081815033511695...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=12260818150335116959)

On an off-topic side note: Navigating citation space is an absolute mess, as the above shows. Researchers constantly have to cut corners when it comes to studying the literature because it's too damn hard to navigate, which leads to constant overlooking of convergently evolved research. A Peter Landin quote comes to mind:

"Most papers in computer science describe how their author learned what someone else already knew."

If this bothers you even nearly as much as it bothers me, I suggest you see how you can help the Initiative for Open Citations:

[https://i4oc.org/](https://i4oc.org/)

So tools like [http://citationgecko.com/](http://citationgecko.com/) & [http://cluster.cis.drexel.edu/~cchen/citespace/](http://cluster.cis.drexel.edu/~cchen/citespace/) can actually help put an end to this mess.

<comment><USER17> Great comments! Thanks for posting. I've written a hex grid automata for wolfram simulations in java, js & dart before.. maybe I can get it contributed to the Lenia guys.

[https://github.com/pablo- mayrgundter/freality/tree/master/ph...](https://github.com/pablo- mayrgundter/freality/tree/master/phys/fluid)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> TLDR; "Artificial life" is a misnomer for efforts like this which are simply play on cellular autometa type variations. This phrase is extensively used by biologist to constructing actual living physical cells using non-living material. This paper is not about that and I hope folks stop calling this "artificial life".

Important bit:

 _Life can be defined as the capabilities of self-organizing (morphogenesis), selfregulating (homeostasis), self-directing (motility), self-replicating (reproduction), entropy reduction (metabolism), growth (development), response to stimuli (sensitivity), response to environment (adaptability), and evolving through mutation and selection (evolvability). Lenia, the subject of this paper, is able to achieve many of them, except self-replication that is yet to be discovered._

Above definition wouldn't be agreed upon by many biologist because the entire concept of _environment_ that is as complex as universe is missing. It's easy to create something that can "thrive" in 2D grids with bunch of simple rules but quite another thing that can thrive in a computer called _universe_ which is simulating 10^80 atoms at once where all quantum and space-time rules aren't even known to us.

<comment> dj-wonk However you would prefer the term be defined and used, for decades, people have used the term "artificial life" to include cellular automata.

Sources:

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

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

<comment><USER16> Further, the study of how life arises has to start somewhere very simple, like drastically simple/simplified 2D rule systems.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to record a terminal session? - <AUTHOR> I am writing some documentation for our product. In it, we need to document several terminal command sequences, like what you see on this Cypress guide - https://docs.cypress.io/guides/getting-started/installing-cypress.html#npm-install
Whilst I can record it all in video, the problem I find is that you get several steps in, then make a minor typo which is in your video unless you re-record or do a bunch of editing.
It made me wonder if there are any tools that allow you to easily 'fake' the process (e.g. a web app that lets you type in the commands you want to emulate, then have those print out one after the other)?
If anyone knows of something, or can think of a better solution, that would be great! <comment><USER2> You could try using asciinema[1].

[1] - [https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema](https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure if it affects your specific situation, but I'll share that mistakes in CLI demos have never bothered me. They always make me feel better about the everyday typos I make, and they make me feel like I'm watching a human interact with a system. I wouldn't want to watch a distracting number of typos when I'm learning how to use a system, but a few are perfectly acceptable.

It reminds me of listening to podcasts. The podcasts with huge budgets are sometimes overproduced. The pauses all feel dramatic and acted, and everything feels well-rehearsed. My favorite podcasts are ones that have received light editing for content, but leave in the natural flow of human conversation.

</comment><comment><USER4> the commands: script / scriptreplay are the ones you are looking for.

Now if you also would like to reproduce the video experience you coul use: [https://asciinema.org/](https://asciinema.org/)

Wich records a your terminal session, looks like a video but is in fact text characters.

</comment><comment><USER5> Approaching from another angle: develop/debug a simple script containing your setup commands, possibly using Vagrant (or similar) in your cycle to test.

Then later you can make a video, perhaps using the software you've already tried (or recommended in other replies), by pasting the commands one by one from the script into the terminal.

</comment><comment><USER6> Simple Screen Recorder is pretty good.</comment>


Continuous Integration with Travis CI – Josh Kalderimis (PTP014) - <AUTHOR> http://pythontesting.net/podcast/travis-ci-josh-kalderimis/ <comment><AUTHOR> Interview with Josh Kalderimis from Travis CI. Josh is a co-founder and Chief Post-It Officer at Travis CI.

But be sure to listen to the last 5 minutes. I've got some bonus audio that didn't quite fit into the rest of the interview that I tacked on at the end.</comment>


An update on Google Fiber - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/update-on-google-fiber.html <comment><USER2> I'm moving from California out to Austin, Texas, and the one thing that I am dismayed over is the lack of FIOS in a tech community like Austin.

It comes as little surprise that Austin is pretty much smack dab in the center of the biggest "responses" circle on Google Fiber's response map: [http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/static/images/map.pn...](http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/static/images/map.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's too bad that none of the stimulus spending over the last couple years went to infrastructure that could actually give this country a future, like community fiber networks. Maybe some more competition from companies like Google can spur the telcos to get moving, but I highly doubt it.

<comment><USER4> Here is a list of Broadband Initiatives Program grants from USDA, the folks with oversight of the rural grants:

<http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/Reports/RBB_report_v16.pdf>

Here's one of the groups that is now building out middle-mile optical, as well as two FTTH projects:

<http://www.newhampshirefastroads.net/>

Now you could certainly seek to make your case for where the country's spending priorities might be improved. You'd not be the first to seek that, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Milo Medin was involved early on in the @Home Network -- a profile: <http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1999/01/17425>

</comment><comment><USER6> An update to say there's no update?</comment>


Ask HN: Recs for a lightweight bug reporting tool that also supports video? - <AUTHOR> Like the title says. I've been using local tools like Quicktime and Screencastomatic to debug with screen recordings, but then I have to deal with converting it into a gif and then uploading the gif. Any recommendations for something quick and lightweight? <comment><USER2> We've built a tool for this use case. It's called Outclip -- [https://checkoutclip.com](https://checkoutclip.com). You'll need to install the Outclip chrome extension (click on 'get chrome extension' on the above webpage) and after that it's a couple of clicks to start a screen recording. After you stop recording, within a few moments you'll have a link (e.g. [https://video.checkoutclip.com/-LDQ5TtL_yywYCgUNb6K](https://video.checkoutclip.com/-LDQ5TtL_yywYCgUNb6K)) you can share with others or use in a bug report. People can click the link to view the video.

We don't support gif creation, to do that you can download the video file (.mp4) from Outclip and use a service like [https:///cloudconvert.com](https:///cloudconvert.com) to convert to gif.</comment>


Neoliberalism and the End of Democracy [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59bc0e610abd04bd1e067ccc/t/5cb6ddc015fcc00dbe496d9d/1555488196539/Hickel+-+Neoliberalism+and+the+End+of+Democracy+(Chapter+only).pdf <comment><USER2> Is this an academic paper? Telling a story the way the author sees it, causal relationships established as if they are obvious, no need to actually show they exist. This is indoctrination, not analysis.

<comment><USER3> The author is a contributor to Jacobin Magazine which according to Wikipedia "has been variously described as democratic socialist, socialist and Marxist" so it would seem you're spot on.

As far as a critique of the actual paper, it seems to be predicated on the idea that democracy and freedom are synonymous when in fact they're orthogonal concepts. You can have tyrannical democratic structures, in fact that's what the founding fathers sought to combat in the original system they laid out which was less democratic than it is now (e.g. only land owners, people who have skin in the game, can vote).

"When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic." – Benjamin Franklin

<comment><USER4> You cannot have freedom without democracy (unless of course you're part of the ruling class). When someone else rules over you, you aren't free.

Democracy does not guarantee freedom but it greatly increases the chances and distributes it more equally. Your chance of being "tyrannized" by the majority is less than 50%. A ruling class you aren't part of _will_ tyrannize you.

<comment><USER5> > When someone else rules over you, you aren't free.

That is the case in today's so called democracies. Just because you pick your ruler doesn't mean you have any say in the fate of society.

check the video for actual democracy: [https://youtu.be/qH43YHaUGyQ](https://youtu.be/qH43YHaUGyQ)

<comment><USER6> See the difference between saying democracy is necessary for freedom and saying that democracy obviates freedom. Parent comment only made claim to the former.

<comment><USER4> Nor did I make any claim about our current democracies being democracies (though "no say" is an exaggeration).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why is it necessary to dig so far to understand the decay of American democracy? Today's problems are impossible without simple gerrymandering and the idiosyncrasies of the electoral college. It's not a deep problem.

<comment><USER6> What exactly are you saying is the problem? Even if it's as simple as you claim, those "simple" problems are apparently not subject to repair. So long as that is the case, I recommend considering that the problem does in-fact have a bit more depth to it.

<comment><USER7> The problem is that the USG isn't responsive to the well being of it's people because it doesn't need to be. The reasons are mostly abuses of technicalities which are different in our present time than they were in Rome ~yr0 ce.

They are subject to repair.

Our nation's brightest political theorists such as Lawrence Lessig have put forth simple solutions to their credit. Theres the majority vote interstate compact which has been ratified by many states already. Simple vornoi redistricting would solve the gerrymandering problem.

Ideologies and philosophies don't build civilizations. They distract otherwise capable people. Practical circumstances shape civilizations. That's really the major lesson of the classics if you read them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Neoliberalism as practiced in the United States isn't a good idea. In other countries it's had much more success. For instance, Denmark doesn't have a minimum wage, and has very high labour mobility. A generous social safety net and strong trade unions enables this.

<comment><USER9> Then is it really neoliberalism in Denmark? It seems strong social safety net and trade unions are somehow anathema to neoliberalism.

Sure they could participate in the global economies and reap rewards from the globalization but they're also a smaller player w/ less power on the world stage.

American neoliberalism has been a bad idea not just for us, but maybe for the whole world. It's all gonna come to a head though if they really do evict 40 million people this year.</comment></comment>


"So, I just erased our JIRA database" - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/aglvqr/so_i_just_erased_our_jira_database/ <comment><USER2> No backup? That's living on the edge!!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nqcL0mjMjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nqcL0mjMjw)</comment>


How Chromium validates email addresses entered in input fields with type="email" - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/components/autofill/core/browser/validation.cc&q=email%20validation&sq=package:chromium&type=cs&l=130

<comment><USER2> why do they use "k" as prefix for the _kEmailPattern_ variable?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. I'm not sure. Seems like there is already a constant called emailPattern. Don't know enough C++ to know if they would be conflicting though: [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#search/&q=Emai...](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#search/&q=EmailPattern&sq=package:chromium&type=cs)</comment></comment>


GigaOm Show#12 - Google's Marissa Mayer (mp3|4) - <AUTHOR> http://revision3.com/gigaom/mmayer

<comment><USER2> A fairly boring interview, almost every answer was just the standard PR blurb. It's such a shame Larry/Sergey follow the Willy Wonka style of reclusive genius. It would be really interesting to know what they're thinking.

I am loving the new GigaOM show. It's helping to make up for the total lack of new VentureVoice interviews. Hopefully they'll extend the time to a full hour and do more in depth interviews.

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... A fairly boring interview, almost every answer was just the standard PR blurb ..."_

Damn. Haven't listened to it yet. Hoped it might have been similiar to _"Nine Lessons Learned about Creativity at Google, 21Mb 47Min" ~[http://edcorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=155...](http://edcorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1554)

_"... I am loving the new GigaOM show. It's helping to make up for the total lack of new VentureVoice interviews ..."*

Stanford has a good selection of tech/entrepreneur pod/vidcasts ~ <http://edcorner.stanford.edu/></comment></comment>


Unlocking Fingerprint-Protected Phones with a Regular Inkjet Printer - <AUTHOR> http://news.softpedia.com/news/you-can-unlock-fingerprint-protected-phones-with-a-regular-inkjet-printer-501392.shtml <comment><USER2> Nobody expects finger-print readers to stop someone who really wants to get into your phone. It is really just meant to stop the average low-level thief/snooper.

<comment><USER3> If I turn my phone off, even though I have it set to unlock with my finger, it still asks for my password twice, so good luck with that. Galaxy S5 with that selinux garbage.</comment></comment>


Orbit of the Moon around the Sun - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/teaching/convex.html <comment><USER2>
      It is locally convex in the sense that it has no loops

Of _course_ it has loops. But _in the scale of the drawing_ , the loops are lost due to the vast distance from Earth/Moon system to Sun.

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't have any "lost" loops.

<comment><USER2> Dude. You _downvoted_ me for pointing that out? Seriously?

A more thorough explanation was posted by somebody else here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611002)

<comment><USER3> anvay could not have downvoted you, as your comment was a reply to them, so no, they didn't downvote you for that.

And then in reply to what you said:

      >> It is locally convex in the sense
      >> that it has no loops

      > Of course it has loops. But in the
      > scale of the drawing, the loops are
      > lost due to the vast distance from
      > Earth/Moon system to Sun.

By my way of thinking, this is wrong. Looking at this from the Sun-centric point of view, thinking of the Moon's path in space in the Sun's frame of reference, the path is convex. Take any finite straight line (no, I'm not going to go into General Relativity) whose endpoints are both, at some point, between the Moon and the Sun, then _every_ point on that line is such that it is at some point between the Moon and the Sun.

In other words, the path of the Moon is convex. By any common usage of the language, that means it has no loops.

<comment><USER2> Are you saying that retrograde motion would not be observed from the Sun's perspective?

<comment><USER3> Speed of Earth in orbit ~ 150 * 10^9 * 2 * pi / 365.25 / 86400 ~ 30 km/sec

Speed of Moon in orbit ~ 400 * 10^6 * 2 * pi / 27.32 / 86400 ~ 1 km/sec.

Yes, I'm saying that retrograde motion would not be observed from the Sun's perspective.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


GNUnet - <AUTHOR> https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Gnunet <comment><USER2> Does anyone know how this compares to Freenet? The FAQ talks about it a bit [ <https://gnunet.org/faq/10> ] but for example, I don't understand what "Economics" means in this context?

<comment><USER3> With Freenet, you allocate storage, and content gets distributed throughout the network based on popularity. It's designed so that it is impossible to know what is in even your own store. Files must be "inserted". You can't really perform a search.

If GNUnet is like other file sharing, you share files while you are online, responding to searches and transferring files that are requested.

<comment><USER4> Yes. It is also worth mentioning that GNUnet is designed to be a secure framework, making it more than just the core of another P2P program. For instance it potentially might be used as the basis for other functions such as chat or VoIP without reinventing all of the low-level transport stuff. With GPL licensing it is likely to evolve as people imagine new enhancements.

Short and giving a clue as to function and freedom the name seems a good choice to me. The (GNU) GPL insures that the users and community will not be restricted from making their own fixes or enhancements. I think it is misleading when some refer to a permissive license as restrictive. You're given permission to do practically anything to the code for your own use, and basically have permission to distribute it to others too as long as you DON'T impose new restrictions on them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone else feel repulsed by the name itself? Every time I see GNU something, I think "extreme ideology with an ugly name". Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for what GNU did in the 80s and 90s, and I think it still has value (albeit, I think middle way approaches such as creative commons, MIT, Apache License, and others have won the popular geek mind for now). But IMHO, they need to rebrand.

<comment><USER6> No.

The right way to do things is not a popularity contest. Nor should it ever be. Nor should you put pressure on someone trying to do right via an appeal to popularity.

<comment><USER7> When success depends on gaining mindshare, branding and perception is important. A straight popularity contest is, indeed, not the right way to do things, but popularity is a factor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You might also want to check out Mute, which uses ant based routing-

<http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/>

</comment><comment><USER9> If only some social replacement for FB could be layered on this, it would be great for privacy.

</comment><comment><USER10> <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Gnunet> \-- why such an ugly URL?

Bad enough that the less ugly style of URL has the unnecessary /wiki/ in it.

<comment><USER11> Why focus on the least relevant aspect of the whole thing? Did you even read what this is about? What it does, how and why?

<comment><USER10> Yes.</comment></comment></comment>


Intent to deprecate and remove: JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-dev/6mfrkTkw808 <comment><USER2> God, if only.

<comment><AUTHOR> what would you replace it with if you had your druthers?

<comment><USER2> Good question.

I guess... for the job it does, the core of the language isn't bad, it's just encrusted with a whole lot of awful crap.

I wish the Internet were still a land of fat clients and decentralized services.</comment></comment></comment>


Bay Area cities are cracking down on free food at Facebook and other tech cos - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-free-cafeteria-food-facebook-ban-2018-7 <comment><USER2> Non-amp link: [https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-free- cafeteria...](https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-free-cafeteria- food-facebook-ban-2018-7)

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Changed from [https://amp-businessinsider- com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.b...](https://amp-businessinsider- com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-free- cafeteria-food-facebook-ban-2018-7)

Edit: looks like it's a dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17619658](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17619658).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From twitter:

SAN FRANCISCANS: my studio costs $2700 and I stepped on human feces & 1 used syringe on my morning commute

CITY: we hear you, action must and will be taken. Scooters are now illegal

SF-ANS: what

CITY: no more delivery robots

SF-ANS: but

CITY: workplace cafeterias are forbidden

[https://twitter.com/Altimor/status/1021973421046022145](https://twitter.com/Altimor/status/1021973421046022145)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This can definitely help support local business. But seems unfair to lower- salary employees. As an employee who used to have free lunch and now doesn't, I have felt the financial effects.

Dining out truly can make a big impact on the wallet- $10 dollars per meal (unlikely in Mountain View unless fast food) x 5 meals a week x 48 weeks a year (let's be generous and assume you get that much PTO) = $2,400 annually

Company-provided meals also tend to provide healthy options which can be expensive to purchase outside of work- and tend to contain less sodium and sugar than restaurant foods.

I can see this potentially benefitting the local business of 'Amazon WholeFoods' and Costco as people buy more groceries to bring lunch to work with them and eat at their desks. Eating out every day is expensive.

<comment><USER5> Everywhere I've ever worked, >90% of people bring their meals to work >90% of the time.

This sounds like another of those special microcosm "problems".

<comment><AUTHOR> Where have you worked?

<comment><USER5> I've worked at over 10 companies in my life so far.

I've also done locum work in more than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm sorry but this is so f*cking stupid.

As a Bay Area resident my priorities are the cost of housing, cleaning our dirty streets and alleviating traffic congestion.

This is an example of progressivism gone awry. Solving the basics is incredibly important. Our quality of life is in decline (in the bay area) and this is the best our politicians can do?

I'm enraged.

<comment><USER7> Your municipality does not have the legal or financial mechanisms to solve homelessness, housing, and traffic congestion. They are all natural consequences of economic and political decisions made higher up the food chain.

<comment><USER6> Sum that point of view across an entire population and we have the problems we have today.

Your perspective bores me.

<comment><USER7> What baffles me is the perspective that: "Because <city> can't fix these problems, everything that <city> does is stupid and useless."

<comment><USER8> Also get your data: if you don't have free meal, you bring from home. This is what the vast majority does. And at the end of the day, this is a matter of freedom: if company X decides to offers free meal, what's the problem? It creates jobs and attract people! Is this the country of freedom or this place incompetent administration wants to control what companies and people should do?

<comment><USER9> No the vast majority of workers targeted by this do not - even in developing countries like India "tiffin wallas" bring food to office workers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This might be a great idea in theory, but terrible execution. By having this only apply prospectively, it makes every new business have to compete with businesses that can offer free meals on campus.

<comment><USER11> I think it's a terrible idea in theory. In practice it probably won't be as bad as companies find loopholes and exceptions. (For example, is having food delivered a cafeteria?)

Still, companies should be able to decide what they want to offer their workers.

</comment></comment><comment> nikki-9696 This seems silly. My company doesn't pay for food (chicago), we're right next to tons of options, but food is expensive. Most of us bring lunch from home. We live in the burbs and commute in. I don't see why workers would pay to eat out every day instead of bringing lunch. Maybe it's a SF thing that folks would be willing to waste that much money every day?

</comment><comment><USER12> What's stopping companies from charging a cent per meal?

<comment><USER13> This is a good question. What stops companies from asking $100 per meal, and charge it on an employee account then reimburse the same amount every month to clear any tab? The free meals are taxable income anyway.

The ban on "company cafeterias" cannot possibly work, they will be simply replaced by separated business entities that happen to share the same building and have a financial arrangement like the one described. Pretty soon you will go full retard trying to stop this.

<comment><USER9> Tax mate its all about the $

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does this seem a little like bit of gov't overreach? They're saying a business can't provide food to their employees?

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER7> You are missing something.

This restriction was made, in exchange for letting the office be built.

They could have asked the Zuckerberg to do the chicken dance, for 10 minutes, in exchange for letting the office be built, if they wanted to.

<comment><USER14> Ah. So the headline is misrepresenting what's going on. These people signed contracts stating they are ok with these restrictions to allow the offices to be built.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I live about 10 minutes from this location, and often frequent the restaurants there. It's smack dab in a high-traffic area (San Antonio+El Camino) and judging from the crowds, I can assure you that they get plenty of business already from the local community, even without Facebook.

That said, I would still have no problem if it was the landlord (WeWork) making this restriction, instead of the MTV government. This is a private business-to-business matter, and shouldn't be the domain of government.

</comment><comment><USER16> They could offer meal tickets similar to Vivint: [https://savvorysoles.wordpress.com/2016/04/02/vivint-food- ti...](https://savvorysoles.wordpress.com/2016/04/02/vivint-food-tickets/)

It's a free meal at the office, but if you want to go out they made deals with most of the local restaurants where it gives the employee $5 off

</comment><comment><USER17> The editorialized title submitted by the OP is incorrect (and probably in bad faith). Free food is banned at one complex in MTV called the village ("That's because the city prohibits companies from fully subsidizing meals in the Village,"), not all over mountain view.

</comment><comment><USER18> What stops them from paying a "mtv location bonus" of $30~ish dollars a month and charging a dollar a meal?

Edit: it sounds like this is actually a rider on some kind of zoning exception being made for a new development called the Village? Article isn't terribly clear here

</comment><comment><USER19> As long as they have them I would hope they begin to pay a livable wage to the people they employ at them

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17612190](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17612190)

</comment><comment><USER20> Besides, it is also healthy to really get out of the office for an hour or two.

<comment><USER21> It's also healthy to spend an extra hour a day with your friends and family _after_ work.</comment></comment>