Ask HN: What's a reasonable salary at a Berlin startup? - <AUTHOR>

I'm preparing for some interviews. Being a freelancer I don't have many data points. If you ask people directly no one tells you anything. Glassdoor doesn't have enough information about startup companies.<p>So what is a reasonable salary for a backend engineer with 5+ years experience at a Berlin startup? Minimum, maximum, median? <comment><USER2> A friend of mine has started working three months ago in Berlin at a StartUp as a backend engineer and has 5+ years experience.

He is doing 40k € + relocation (around 2-3k) + bonus.

Bonus depends on the startup.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just aim for similar to non-startup companies, unless there's huge relative career value in working at the particular startup.

Europe employee options won't be worth jack. The liquidation preferences are worse than is typical in the US. Your options will be totally wiped out. Don't be fooled by comparisons to US startups, in this respect.

</comment><comment><USER4> After 5 years of J2EE in the ERP space I was making EUR 52k. But that was 6 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER5> 5 7.5 10 K Euros

<comment><USER6> Are these monthly or annual figures?

If monthly, that sounds insanely high for Europe.

If annual, that sounds insanely low for Europe.

<comment><USER7> well not high for europe, maybe berlin but in hamburg 5 years of expertise could very well get you 60k+

<comment><USER6> Quite possibly but there is no way 60k is the minimum as stated above.

<comment><USER7> no ... i have no clue but i dont think i know anyone seriously making 10k as a software developer ... i think i dont know anyone making above 5k in a real startup (and that includes various technologies and experience levels)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An R programmer looks at Julia  - <AUTHOR> http://www.r-bloggers.com/an-r-programmer-looks-at-julia/

<comment><USER2> If you read the original blog post, you won't get a headache from the hundreds of missing spaces in the r-bloggers version: [http://dmbates.blogspot.com/2012/04/r-programmer-looks-at- ju...](http://dmbates.blogspot.com/2012/04/r-programmer-looks-at-julia.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've written a few hundred lines of R sporadically over the last several years. The absolute worst thing about it in my opinion is the type system. It does not matter how many times I use R, I cannot for the life of me remember or understand the difference between vectors, arrays, lists, data frames, and matrices. A list is sort of like a mix between an array and a map, a matrix is sorta like a 2d vector but can have row/column names, an array is like a matrix but different, and data frame is like a heterogenous matrix. And converting between them is always tricky.

As much as R may be capable of, I just can't get past how inconsistent and complicated its basic types are.

<comment><USER4> The terminology is weird. I'm not an R expert, but here's how I think of it:

vector: this one is clear based on the name; it's a homogeneous sequence (with very aggressive type conversion). A sequence of strings, a sequence of numerics, etc. One thing worth knowing is that there are no atomic types, so c(1) == 1. That is, the value 1 is identical to the singleton vector containing 1. Also the empty vector c() is identical to NULL! is.null(c()) == TRUE. Weird.

list: the name is confusing, but I think of it basically like a dict in Python. And the syntax is the same: list(a=1, b=2) vs dict(a=1, b=2). I think you can use it like a sequence as you are saying, but I never use them that way. Lists are for ad hoc composite types -- if I want to return 2 values from a function, I return a list() of them. I think you can convert lists to environments easily, or they are the same -- also similar to Python's dicts.

data frame: This is the core type AFAICT, it is basically a collection of named column vectors of the same length. e.g. data.frame(name=c("a", "b", "c"), value=c(1,2,3)). This seems pretty intuitive. A row has different types (like a DB relation) but the columns have the same type since a column is vector.

matrix: I don't use these too much, but it basically seems like a homogeneous type like vector, except you specify the dimensions.

array: I don't use this, but the R documentation says "A 2-dimensional array is the same thing as a matrix". So I think I am confused and what I typed above is an "array", and matrix is the special 2D case. Yes the names are bad. I think of a matrix as having arbitrary number of dimensions (e.g. in matlab).

I think where it gets confusing is that there are all these arbitary conversions. And you can use things more than the prescribed ways, so you might stumble across code that uses them wrong. But after a fair amount of R programming, there is my mental model, whether right or wrong :)

I think a lot of the mess comes from the fact that dealing with real data is just messy. R takes the mess and makes the common case convenient, and people like that. But it's like Perl in that it's a "Do what I mean" language and tries to guess a lot, rather than "Do what I say" like Python. And when it's guessing your intent wrong it can leave you very frustrated, as with Perl.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi chubot,

Two things:

1) A data.frame is in fact a list of vectors of the same length "compacted" together.

2) I find the types very "sensible" for a person doing statistics. But I guess (almost) everything makes sense once you get used to it...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have to come to love R (for what I use it it for), but reading this makes me realize how unusual my R-workflow must be, because most of the 'advantages' of Julia over R don't really come up in my daily workflow anymore - it seems that's likely because I've adapted to the shortcomings of R and have twisted other tools to my needs. I'll add Julia to my list of languages to check out in more detail, because perhaps Julia could replace my need for this rather esoteric workflow that I've developed out of sheer necessity.

I use Python (NumPy/SciPy) for most of the data preprocessing, and perhaps that's why. I used to do this in R, and I realized that it's just a lot easier to get done in Python (and it ends up being faster anyway). The problem is that Python/NumPy/SciPy still doesn't lend itself _quite_ as well as R does to certain aspects of the statistician's use case. It's possible that things have changed since the last time I evaluated the two, but I still find it easier to prototype various _models_ in R, even if I do all of the preqrequisite data munging in a different environment.

I understand that R, like Perl, is 'blessed' (pun intended) with two different, incompatible type systems - in fact, this is the reason I avoid using R's type system, and whenever I'm advising newcomers, I always recommend the same. I don't write statistical packages, so this doesn't come up, but when I find myself needing to write a method in R, I ask myself if this would actually be done more easily another way instead. Generally, I find the answer is 'yes, yes it would'.

I really do think the problem is the type system. The kind of type system that lends itself well to data manipulation is not the same type system that lends itself well to model manipulation - when I think about it, I've unconsciously segregated my workflow into two parts, doing everything naturally done with Python's type system in Python, and likewise for R. Maybe that's just the way that I happen to approach data manipulation, but I think it's non- coincidental. R's relative homoiconicity (compared to Python) makes it really nice for some things, but there are other warts with its typing that are just too annoying to work around, when a python shell is just a few keystrokes away.

I guess the answer is (as always!) to use a purely homoiconic Lisp dialect, so you get the best of both worlds but that's asking a lot of statisticians.

I really have come love R for what it does do, though. Of all all the statistical software packages I've seen (comparable: SAS, SPSS, Stata, MATLAB), it's far and away the best (and the GNU license makes it very, _very_ attractive to broke students looking to avoid the still-absurdly-priced student licenses for the alternatives). That said, I still sigh every time I realize that I'm essentially gluing together two separate runtime environments for something that should really be easily integrated. I do what I do now because it ends up being faster than using either Python or R for everything, but it still strikes me as weird that a language so perfect for munging data (Python) can still be so awkward for analyzing it, and vice versa.

<comment><USER6> That is very interesting. I use Python to pre-process data for Matlab, and have been giving serious thought lately to learning R for its free license and easy(?) integration with Hadoop. Can you briefly comment on the advantages or R over Matlab aside from licensing?

<comment><USER5> If you're already used to Matlab, then you may not find my comments as relevant. _If_ you were already proficient in both, then they're both interchangeable for many tasks (which is in fact why I always recommend learning R over learning Matlab).

Licensing isn't just a minor thing - getting Matlab to run on non-Debian Linux is a painful ordeal. I never actually got it working, because I never bothered to debug its cryptic error messages, and since it's distributed as a precompiled binary, I wasn't going to sit around trying to patch it. A corollary is that R is easier to integrate into other toolkits, and there are a _ridiculous_ number of freely available R libraries that make your life easier.

My issues with Matlab may be things that someone familiar with the language would care less about. That said, I find Matlab to be incredibly, incredibly irritating, and I think that's because it's design is tailored towards people with minimal experience with other programming languages (like research scientists), whereas R's design is simply based off of S - so I find it violates the Principle of Least Surprise less. Matlab is not like Lisp or Haskell (where the journey of understanding the language is valuable in itself) - it's really just a means to an end (number crunching), so the POLS is _especally_ important.

R, unlike Matlab, imposes almost no restrictions on the structure of a program. The way I see it, Matlab makes Java's broken one-class-per-file model even worse, by imposing _more_ filesystem-level restrictions on my program.

R, unlike Matlab, uses a type system that's more familiar to someone used to programming with multiple datatypes, as opposed to someone used to thinking in terms of strictly numerical structures. I never got the hang of when I should index with () or {} or [] Matlab ... I'd have to look it up to tell you. R, on the other hand, is more like Python in this regard - even if it's not _quite_ as clean as Python, it makes basic things like importing/maniplating CSVs much easier than Python (or even Excel, which is even designed around that exact purpose).

R, unlike Matlab, returns the last value computed, not the last values with the same local names as the return value names.

R, unlike Matlab, uses a more intuitive (to me) definition of dimensions (and of row- vs. column-vectors). I spent 80% of my time in Matlab figuring out how to get dimensions to match in a robust manner, and I've never had to do that in R.

You get the idea - my frustrations with the language itself are mostly with the fact that it's so unlike most other languages, and it's too much of a hassle to learn. My frustrations with the language environment is that the free alternative (R) is much easier to work with, and much more cross- platform.

<comment><USER6> Thank you, that's a good list! Dealing with cell arrays and text vs. numerics is why I do my pre-processing in Python. Matlab's job is to read in the data, run it through various algorithms, collect accuracy statistics, and show plots.

For us the issue is not so much Matlab as a programming language, but rather availability of new algorithms and ease of parallel processing. The licensing issues involved in getting the parallel toolbox running on multiple workstations seems like a headache, which is part of what is motivating us to look at R.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if anyone has written up a comparison on R and J.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is now: [http://www.r-bloggers.com/comparing-julia- and-r%E2%80%99s-vo...](http://www.r-bloggers.com/comparing-julia- and-r%E2%80%99s-vocabularies/)

<comment><USER7> That's comparing R and Julia, not R and J.</comment></comment></comment>


'Universal memory' research passes new milestone - <AUTHOR> https://techxplore.com/news/2020-01-universal-memory-milestone.html <comment><USER2> This is probably a little better: "Lancaster University shows how InAs/AlSb resonant-tunnelling non-volatile memory consumes 100 times less switching energy than DRAM " [http://www.semiconductor- today.com/news_items/2020/jan/lanca...](http://www.semiconductor- today.com/news_items/2020/jan/lancaster-170120.shtml)

Sigh, it's a III-V semiconductor. We've been here before--and failed before. I'll believe it when someone actually coughs up an array of these that can hold at least a couple of bytes.

However, to be fair, we might actually start getting some progress outside of silicon now that Moore's Law has broken. If silicon is at a standstill, other technologies may actually be able to catch up for once.

</comment><comment><USER3> Original paper (Abstract): [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8948343](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8948343)

I don't have access to the full paper, but I note this sentence of the abstract: "Simulations show that the device consumes very little power, with 100 times lower switching energy per unit area than DRAM, but with similar operating speeds."

So perhaps no actual devices exist, only concept and simulations?

Edit: I am reading the original via sci-hub and yes, all conclusions are based on (quite elaborate) device models.

<comment><USER4> Is this not typically (read: always) the case with new technologies though? Before any production or engineering could be done, a model must be created. The fact that a model exists strongly implies that it is physically possible.

<comment><USER5> No, as a matter of fact it's extremely rare a model precedes something physical that makes it to the corporeal world. Especially in device physics land.

<comment><USER6> My pcbs existed in design software before they were manufactured. I expect that is the more common case today.

I ran my code against a dev database before it went to prod.

<comment><USER7> The GP isn't talking about products but about exploitation of physical phenomena. The first PCB was etched with the ancestor of our modern fab process long before CAD software. Although the hydrogen theory for acid and bases was discovered a few decades before, AFAIK there still isn't a unified model of acid-metal interactions for different copper alloys, let alone all metals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm skeptical of any 'best of all worlds' claim for a nascent technology. In this case, durability and read/write speed in one device would indeed be revolutionary, but at what cost? If I were to guess I'd say it would be around data integrity. If it works using resonance, could neighborhood bits be flipped sympathetically under certain circumstances? Would it have the same durability guarantees from server to mobile device? In environs with high EM radiation? Over millions of writes?

If there are indeed no trade offs, hooray! Even if there are, it will still have use cases for many scenarios, albeit not 'universal'.

More generally I wish sci/tech reporters would ask these kinds of open questions, or lead their readers into doing so. Otherwise it feels like vaporware as they presented it, even if the work is valuable and credible.

<comment><USER9> > Otherwise it feels like vaporware as they presented it, even if the work is > valuable and credible.

Whatever happened to all the graphene hype from 5 years ago? For a while, graphene was the wonder material that was going to cure cancer, give us fusion and make us immortal. Everything was supposed to be made of graphene material by now. And suddenly people/media stopped talking about graphene.

<comment><USER10> That progress is happening and I see it every day around the academic labs I work at. There are improvements in manufacturing larger sheets, it is used as an important step of various nanofabrication protocols, and it inspired a whole family of more interesting 2D materials.

I suspect the hype died for the same reason it happens with any important new discovery - it is overhyped in the beginning by excited scientist because they love what they are working on, then mostly silently the work continues for decades, and then people just do not notice when it is part of the everyday tech we use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Aren't we already at the point where a sufficiently large amount of RAM with a UPS just enough to save everything to SSD in case of power loss is a sufficiently close approximation to universal memory?

<comment><USER12> Yes and there's few computers sold that don't have either a battery (phones and laptops) or UPS and on site generation (servers). Only desktops are affected and they are the smallest segment by far.

What the world needs is cheaper DRAM, not non-volatile DRAM.

<comment><USER13> DRAM costs less than 4€ per GB. It's extremely cheap right now. I remember seeing prices above 7€ per GB a few years ago.

<comment><USER14> Explains why new phone have as much RAM (8GB) as macbook pro laptops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The largest memory technology breakthrough in memory technology I can imagine would be to the ability to cost effectively combine high density RAM and logic in the same chip.

Bandwidth intensive operations could happen inside single RAM chip or between two of them. CPU would just send instructions with parameters and no data.

<comment><USER16> I just find it strange that they haven't put CPU and memory on the same die, is there a specific reason for that? I mean over the years more and more components have been integrated into the CPU - north / southbridge (I forgot what those were for), GPUs, etc. Why not RAM? There's L1/2/3 cache on there as well.

<comment><USER17> Different, incompatible Fab processes (diffusion, temperature) are needed for logic and Dram cells (capacitors)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> ULTRARAM

Sounds like something decided by committee.

<comment><USER19> Everybody would call it _URAM_ which is kinda okay

<comment><USER20> Which will inevitably be confused with _UDIMM_</comment></comment></comment>


I learned to stop worrying and love SecOps - <AUTHOR> https://www.anup.io/2020/07/24/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-secops/ <comment><USER2> "start with the culture" second bullet point. Looks like you have a typo?</comment>


Show HN: Elf powered gift suggestions. - <AUTHOR> http://elfpowered.com

<comment><USER2> I would be much more likely to hit submit if I didnt have to put my email address in for unknown items

<comment><AUTHOR> How would we notify you of your results?</comment></comment>


His Master's Voice: Scruton on Wagner - <AUTHOR> http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/6596/full <comment><USER2> Interesting, thanks. I've read some Nietzche and some Shaw on Wagner; I don't know whether I'll get around to Scruton or not.</comment>


Employee Representation at N26 - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/employee-representation-n26-valentin-stalf <comment><AUTHOR> N26 CEO's response regarding Work Council.

Previous, related discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24155507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24155507)

Also, interestingly the article appeared on the same day that the Work Council was formally set up (Electoral Board was selected): [https://twitter.com/worker291/](https://twitter.com/worker291/) \- I guess the management realized they can't prevent it and decided to go into damage control?</comment>


Contagious cancer cells are 'widespread phenomenon' in sea - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/cancer-contagious-infectious-sea-shellfish-a7095736.html <comment><USER2> "the new study, published in the journal Nature, suggests that infectious cancer is common among three different kinds of shellfish"

So no risk to human beings, but the implications are that infection is a common vector for other forms of life. I'm not aware of any (known) forms of infections that cause cancer in humans, but it appears possible.

<comment><USER3> There has been research on the theory that at least some cancers have a viral cause. I don't know what the current thinking is on that idea however.</comment></comment>


How Statistician Nate Silver Threw A Wrench Into Traditional Election Metrics - <AUTHOR> http://readwrite.com/2012/11/05/how-statistician-nate-silver-has-thrown-a-wrench-into-tradtional-election-metrics <comment><USER2> Who is doing this guys PR? clearly a series of nearly "ghostwritten" "stories"... this is about the 10th "version" with the same headline. Ranging from US tech blogs to UK newspapers... The guy is writing a book and a democratic partisan -- says even...the New York Times.

For reference:

_____________

Why political journalists can't stand Nate Silver |

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4736736>

Nate Silver Took A Huge Shot Against Mainstream Political Pundits In His Latest Election Forecast

[http://www.businessinsider.com/nate-silver-on-who- political-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/nate-silver-on-who-political- pundits-who-are-mostly-entertainers-2012-11)

Pundits versus probabilities: The misguided backlash against Nate Silver

[http://www.cjr.org/swing_states_project/pundits_versus_proba...](http://www.cjr.org/swing_states_project/pundits_versus_probabilities.php)

how-statistician-nate-silver-has-thrown-a-wrench-into-tradtional-election- metrics

[http://readwrite.com/2012/11/05/how-statistician-nate- silver...](http://readwrite.com/2012/11/05/how-statistician-nate-silver-has- thrown-a-wrench-into-tradtional-election-metrics)

People Who Can't Do Math Are So Mad At Nate Silver

[http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/10/people- who-c...](http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/10/people-who-cant-do- math-are-so-mad-nate-silver/58460/)

________________

but then something different?

NY Times public editor: Silver has Dubious Judgement

[http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/under- attac...](http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/under-attack-nate- silver-picks-the-wrong-defense/?smid=tw-share)

 _He has been out there promoting his book...which has increased his visibility further....In short, he's everywhere..._

UK Telegraph: Nate Silver is partisan and wrong.

[http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100186850/romne...](http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100186850/romney- obama-nate-silver-new-york-times/)

 _We've witnessed the evolution of polling from an objective gauge of the public mood to a propaganda tool: partisan and inaccurate._

<comment> mkr-hn It's hard to create a dramatic image of a close race when someone crunches numbers, says "nah," and convinces a lot of people. Attempts to discredit him were were bound to happen as the election got closer, along with inevitable defenses.

I think you're so eager to unearth a PR conspiracy that you ignore the more plausible explanation: lazy media.

edit: Check 001sky's submission history.

<comment><USER2> No, this is not an exercise in statistics (which I understand, trust me). The NY times public editor article clearly articulates he's promoting his book.

Articles don't get written by people who wake up and all write the same headline, even lazy journalists do better than that, unless they are being fed information from PRs.

<comment> mkr-hn So what? HN is full of obvious PR. PG even has an essay on it (<http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>). That doesn't discredit him. You say you know statistics. Take a crack at his methodology if you think it's flawed: <http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/>

I'm sure it would make a great blog post.

<comment><USER2> I don't need to argue with him. Its the amusing narrative that using statistics somehow original or new that's interesting. I've even said here on HN some of the data visualizations they do are great.

But the storylines or headlines are clearly cynical, PR driven linkbait. Just look at them. They all say the same thing, just slightly disquised like an undergrad trying to hide his plagiarism.

Its just self-awareness that is missing. That's why i posted links: so people can see the patterns.

<comment> mkr-hn It seems like you're trying to discredit Nate Silver by how bad his PR people are. I assume everything is PR so I can focus on merits. Are you interested in merits or taking shots at something you've (apparently) given no thought to?

It's not like 2012 is the first time he's used this methodology. I've been following 538 since it launched in 2008 and generally find it to be insightful and informative. And more right than wrong. And when he's wrong, he usually has a good post to talk about how he got it wrong, and how the miss will factor into future projections.

<comment><USER2> Whatever. _Ad hominem_ attacks are actually useful when people try to dress up their politics as "science" or "objectivity". Try reading Nietzche. Nothing is new here. The purpose of his analytics are propoganda, plain and simple. The notion that an election will be an "independent test" of a pollster's predictions the goal they are all <trying to be avoid>. That is why campaigns employ them, to test their messages, react, change message (as appropriate) and influence the public mood, etc.

<comment> mkr-hn What you're saying is you don't care. You can just say that. "I don't care to look further to see if this person's work has merit." That's ok. But don't try to dress it up as some kind of cynical enlightenment.

<comment><USER2> No, i don't care to argue with you.

<comment> mkr-hn This string of posts says otherwise. I think it annoys you that I won't go along with your desired narrative. Your submission history combined with the rapid rise in karma makes me think you're the one doing thinly-veiled PR.

edit: One of your first submissions is from Andrew Breitbart's site. And you're calling others partisan. Who are you working for?

<comment><USER2> Nah. You're not adding any information or insight with your back and forth. That's what you miss.

You might also be more interested in the PhD thesis I submitted on multi-touch user interfaces, adjacent.

or: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4707742>

[http://flowingdata.com/2009/02/25/googles-chief-economist- ha...](http://flowingdata.com/2009/02/25/googles-chief-economist-hal-varian- on-statistics-and-data/)

But nice try at the smear.

Orthogonal Datapoint:

 _S &P guilty of misleading investors

Landmark ruling by Australian court could pave way for flood of cases against ratings agencies_

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/nov/05/standard- poor...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/nov/05/standard-poors-guilty- misleading-investors)

[http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/05/business/sp-guilt- misleading-i...](http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/05/business/sp-guilt-misleading- investors/)

Dressing up ideas with statistics is not new, original, or scientific, etc.

Its just an informed, iterative marketing strategy.

In business or politics.

The level (AAA!) and quality of the "analysis" notwithstanding.[1]

_______

[1] Its worth noting the ~epistemological assymetry of ratings. They are so "objective" and "reliable" that their use is legally mandated, in the US and the EU. But the providers ratings themselves issue them as "non-expert" "public opinions". Thus, they cannot be sued if you rely on them. We'll see how far the Australian precedent goes, internationally. Until then, _Caveat Emptor_.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Valve's Steam Box is a Console Killer  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/why-valves-steam-box-is-a-console-killer-1124160?src=rss&attr=all <comment><USER2> I love it how the article complains that consoles are 6 year old hardware and all of the screenshots in the article are from Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2. Neither of those are remotely current games.

</comment><comment><USER3> So its basically just a low end PC, I don't get why this is different from the XBox or a low end PC in a neat case...

<comment><USER4> Compared to a "low-end" PC, it's the much better marketability of such an "integrated" product under one brand name. From that point of view it's no different than a console.

Compared to a console, though, it should be a lot more open for developers and users alike. They'll allow other stores in there, games will probably be a lot cheaper for developers to put on their platform, and they will be a lot cheaper for users, too. If they combine it with Oculus Rift somehow, it will make for some great value proposition.</comment></comment>


Gamification = b*llsh$t - <AUTHOR> http://www.gravitybear.com/blog/archives/243

<comment><USER2> The author has a legitimate beef. "Game mechanics" is the new "Web 2.0" as far as misapplied buzzwords go, but "gamification" still comes out of "video games" and "psychology," both of which have been around longer than the web, and the web likes slapping a new term on something and thinking it invented it.

To truly take advantage of game mechanics properly, you really need to know a lot about both video games and psychology. Like anything else, you may have to design with gamification in mind from the get-go, and you'll probably get it wrong the first few times out, which means you'll need to practice (or have betas).

Instead of completely retooling your software or process or "healthcare issue," perhaps instead you can add a meta-game on top: Office Hero was a game added atop Microsoft Word by Lost Garden writer danc: <http://www.officelabs.com/ribbonhero> && [http://www.lostgarden.com/2010/01/ribbon-hero-turns- learning...](http://www.lostgarden.com/2010/01/ribbon-hero-turns-learning- office-into.html)

You'll never be able to "let's just add badges!" just like you can't "let's use gradients and glossy buttons!" to move the needle.

There's even the notion that video games and traditional UI interaction design are incompatible: IxD is about making things easy, but video games are about intentionally challenging the user. If your users aren't expecting a game, they may end up incredibly frustrated instead.

I did a workshop on adding game mechanics to an existing product (a calendar/dayplanner) and the results varied wildly. One group (Ray and Nicole) integrated social game mechanics into the application really well. Another group (Cecy and Brody) treated each mechanic as a feature, and by the end of the discussion I felt like it was "missing something." You can read the write- up of the workshop here: <http://vi.to/workshop/20100426/>

My notes include a lot of references, as well as images of the handouts and my own distillation of these principles: <http://vi.to/gmnotes>

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been looking at gamification for my startup & I feel ambiguous about it at best. Especially when applied to healthcare issues. There are plenty of simpler things you can do that will have a better impact long-term. One thing gamification seems to be really good at though is driving up traffic in the short term & I guess _that_ is the reason why VCs are swooning with joy over these types of startups.

Question: does anyone have references to controlled studies proving the effects of gamification?

</comment><comment><USER4> I quit reading at:

"Scrum is definitely "gamification" (they even have planning poker!), "

... Seriously? Does he even know what 'planning poker' is? Hint: It's not a game.

If you can implement some game mechanics in your site and drive up sales and usage, do so. But don't stretch the site for it. Most people won't care or will be annoyed if it's done wrong.</comment>


Conservative Party rebrand their official Twitter as "factcheckUK" during debate - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/19/tories-tweet-anti-labour-posts-under-factcheckuk-brand <comment><USER2> The worst part is that they'll get away with it too, since any kind of accountability in politics seems to have caught a cold and died.</comment>


RE:DOM – Tiny turboboosted JavaScript library for creating user interfaces - <AUTHOR> https://redom.js.org/ <comment><USER2> Not having a VDOM is only a pro if your library maintains feature parity with libraries that have a VOM. Otherwise, you just lack whatever it is that VDOMs enable. This library seems to forget why view libraries use a VDOM. In this library, you have to write imperative update logic, which the VDOM specifically allows you to avoid. The VDOM is a slight performance hit most people accept in order to be able to write declarative code.

In this case, I find it a bit misleading to pass off not having a VDOM as a pro. It's a bit like building a social media site with no users and claiming everyone should join because it doesn't have spam.

<comment><USER3> In my opinion the benefits of declarative GUI are vastly overstated for the average web app. Given that your application is appropriately componentized, it rarely makes things much clearer.

<comment><USER4> Agreed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We're actually using this. Re-dom is a very thin layer on top of the DOM. Basically all it does is hide some of the weirdness of that.

The best way of using it is simply emulating what you would do in react (without jsx) in terms of design patterns. So you have component classes, with state, and a render method. Half of the success is just using good patterns like that. All redom does is allow you to create trees of elements and manage those.

It has a few simple primitives for that. The main thing is a an el method that takes 3 parametes (maximum). The first is the element name, classes and id as a string. ".foo.bar" means a div with class foo and bar. "span.foo" means a span with class foo, and so on. The second (optional) one is an object with attributes. So if you have an a tag, you might want to pass in an object with an href, title, target, etc. The last parameter is either a string for text nodes, another element, or a list of elements. There are setAttr, setChildren, etc. methods you can call on elements. There are mount/unmount methods and there is some syntactic sugar for managing lists. That's about it.

You can shoot yourself in the foot (just like with other frameworks) but otherwise this works as advertised. Mostly there is not a lot of magic happening in terms of expensive stuff.

</comment><comment><USER6> Try my new lib... here it is right here!

        document.createElement("div");

<comment><USER7> What's your library licensed as?

<comment><USER8> Surely you'd have to pick SSPL, to avoid the risk of Amazon getting rich off this innovative technology without contributing back to the community???

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Huh, one day I forked a part of RE:DOM called nodom[1], to use it in my library for rendering D3 charts in the background worker. I'd been extending nodom, and finally got working D3 in worker[2], sorry the pun. As I recall, nodom was pretty straightforwardly coded w/o magic and easy to extend, a nice library if you need to play with lightweight vdom.

[1] [https://github.com/ptytb/nodom](https://github.com/ptytb/nodom) [2] [https://github.com/ptytb/d3-worker](https://github.com/ptytb/d3-worker)

</comment><comment><USER10> This idea of creating DOM with some API is not new and never really understood it. Just look at the login class, it's way more complex than plain HTML, hard to read and messes with .this.

If you want DOM in your code, JSX is the way to go.

<comment><USER4> With more complex project there's benefits of having purely updatable components, the support of just native JS without quirks and knowing exactly what's happening and when without black magic.

But if course it always depends on the project which way is better.

<comment><USER2> With more complex projects, anything that isn't a declarative becomes painful to manage. In complex web-apps, the benefits of using a VDOM over imperative libraries like this far outweigh the extra O(N) memory consumption.

<comment><USER11> > this far outweigh the extra O(N) memory consumption.

Calculating memory overhead for vdom is actually pretty hard. With imperative code there will be several different code paths for initial rendering, updates and removal, and depending on the ratio of component instances per component type in the application, vdom can consume less memory because there will be less code and less code means that there will be less internal data for JIT.

Also, if it is a highly dynamic application with high ratio of dynamic bindings per DOM element, and imperative library will wire all dependencies with direct DOM bindings in a huge dependency graph, it is much more likely that this graph will consume more memory, especially in use cases like filtering large lists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If manipulating the DOM directly is so much faster than using a virtual DOM, then why do libraries like React or Ember use a virtual DOM in the first place? I honestly though it was for speed.

<comment><USER13> It depends what you mean by "faster". In some cases you'll be better off with something lighter and accessing the DOM directly.

If you need to do something at scale, then you may choose React. The benefit here isn't from just something as simple as changing the items in a list or the text in a header, but when you need to have large amounts of state in an app that is represented by a complex DOM tree.

The benefits of React here are that the virtual DOM can prevent unnecessary updates to the rest of the tree when your state change should only affect a nested element, for example.

<comment><USER12> That makes sense. Thanks for explaining :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seems similar to Backbone.js which was popular a looong time ago. Well, in fact, it's probably 4 to 6 years but it's a really long time for the front-end world. :)

<comment><USER4> Not much, really..

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For those in the know on the internals of the topic library: is this like hyperHTML or lit-html in the way that it remembers the "holes" in the html so every update is just the update of live DOM at the right place?

<comment><USER4> Check out my talk if you're interested in internals: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nh2EK1xveg&t=410s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nh2EK1xveg&t=410s) ;)

<comment><USER15> Hi and thanks for the link!

I will definitely watch it, but may I ask if you know how the lit-html or hyper work? Reason I was asking was that all the vdom libraries maintain a virtual dom (behind the live dom) that they _always_ recreate when the data changes (but this is cheap, since it's only a data structure), then they compare reconstructed virtual dom to the live dom and swap out only the new parts. And this way the browser only needs to re-render the new parts -- since the old ones didn't change.

But the two other libraries I mentioned remember the "holes" in the html templates directly. So when the component gets new data, then the updated content is simply set as the value of these direct references into the live dom. This way (1) only the new parts are updated and thus re-rendered, but also (2) no virtual dom needs to be reconstructed. And this is why they are faster than the vdom libraries.

So my question basically was, do you reconstruct the entire component tree too or not. But I guess I need to watch the video and read some code :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This sounds kinda like my little DOM component library: [https://github.com/guscost/protozoa](https://github.com/guscost/protozoa)

It's a cool approach, and this one looks more fleshed out. But I'd still think in 2018 it's almost always a premature/inappropriate optimization to forgo a virtual DOM, unless you're doing something pretty far out there.

<comment><USER17> That just sounds so... backwards to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It looks like the Element.update function is more or less the equivalent of setState in React. So the UI does seem to be declarative (you may want to emphasize this, at first it looked like a jQuery-like library). How does the declarative aspect of this work without a virtual dom?

<comment><USER18> Answering my own question here: It's not the equivalent of setState as it doesn't set in memory state, but edits the dom directly when called.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can anyone explain why you'd use this over just writing the HTML? This reminds me of the days when there were similar libraries in PHP and I could never find a use for them. It was easier and faster to just write the HTML.

</comment><comment><USER20> Loving it, built something similar a long time ago. Can you use it the other way around tho? Like, take an HTML string and return its RE:DOM representation.

</comment><comment><USER21> > Because RE:DOM is so close to the metal and doesn't use virtual dom, it's > actually faster and uses less memory than almost all virtual dom based > libraries, including React (benchmark).

Very well said. Author of "one very popular library" is plainly lying claiming that "Virtual DOM" was somehow faster than real DOM.

That was never the case, even back in IE6 era, aside from very few and well known edge cases.

Switch to Virtual DOM led to one of the biggest slowdowns in website performance.

<comment><USER22> IIRC the performance gain is when doing things like updating the state of a deep component tree, where react and others diff on the vdom to see what elements need to be re-rendered and then only so actual dom manipulation on those, rather than clear and re-render the entire tree.

I'll be honest, though, it feels to me like a solution to a hard problem you inflict on yourself by first committing to have the giant component tree rather than questioning if that was a great idea.

<comment><USER2> I think he's comparing VDOM to the equivalent imperative instructions, which !== re-rendering the entire tree.

For example we want to turn the prev tree into the next tree:

Prev:

1

Next:

1

2

A VDOM would have a representation of prev and next in objects, diff them, and then decide to do something like

      parent.appendChild(makeLiWithText("2"))

OP is saying that this is less efficient than just manually executing the above line. Obviously, it's less efficient because the latter solution skips the entire diffing process.

I do think OP is missing the point of VDOMs. "Figuring out" the resulting imperative instructions for a given prev -> next is not easy (the above example, however, it trivial), and is very error prone, which is why the VDOM diffing solution is motivated in the first place.

<comment><USER21> > I think he's comparing VDOM to the equivalent imperative instructions, which > !== re-rendering the entire tree.

You don't have to have tons of handcoded input handling or tree merging code. As I said in another post, the approach with some structured getters and setters was known since time immemorial. S.js, I think, is the best modern iteration of the approach. There are a lot of different ways of handling that, just google.

> "Figuring out" the resulting imperative instructions for a given prev -> > next is not easy (the above example, however, it trivial), and is very error > prone, which is why the VDOM diffing solution is motivated in the first > place.

Yes, you very much get that. For that reason, when someone is faced with handling frequent and complex page structure manipulation, he is better to apply some actual computer science knowledge, and algorithmics to the task, than to use half-baked solutions. This is exactly because the gain from doing things properly in such case is great.

From utility standpoint, VDOM has its use, but its advertisement as a somehow superior and more performant approach is a disingenuous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can't comment on the quality of the library, but I did get a quick chuckle from the term "close to the metal" being used to describe a Javascript browser library.

<comment><USER24> I think very soon, "low-level programming" will mean writing JavaScript directly without a transpiler.

<comment><USER25> Soon? I've already seen that described as low level JS

<comment><USER26> Obligatory XKCD (albeit about editors)

[https://www.xkcd.com/378](https://www.xkcd.com/378)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> >closer to the metal

Lol. Sure! Just like how I get closer to the Earth's core if I'm sitting on the floor instead of my chair.

<comment><USER4> It's a bit of a joke.. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> i dont want to convert HTML into any other format...its like coffeescript. somebody is gonna pick up your code and they see all these el('h1','OMFG HN SUX'); instead of normal sane HTML.

don't reinvent the wheel man.

<comment><USER29> This..._isn't_ converting HTML into any other format. It's providing an ergonomic way to generate elements in javascript. The alternative is directly using `myEl = document.createElement(...)` and `myEl.appendChild(...)`. and `myEl.src = 'whatever'`. You're comparing apples and dumptrucks here.

<comment><USER28> thats pretty much converting javascript into html and vice versa</comment></comment></comment>


Game makers says Amazon's Android appstore terms are greedy - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/14/game-makers-says-amazons-android-appstore-terms-are-greedy/

<comment><USER2> It would be interesting if app stores worked like retail stores. Developers sell apps to the store at their desired price, and the app store sells it to a customer, usually with an added markup of 30%. If Amazon wants to sell a popular app as a loss leader Walmart style, they are free to do that without screwing the developer.

<comment><USER3> That would leave app makers susceptible to a major player with large amounts of capital that can sell at a loss until all other players are driven from the market and then raise its prices once it has gained pricing power.

Book publishers appear to have wizened to Amazon's game here and have refused to allow Amazon to use discounts to drive other sellers out of business. Many publishers have moved to an agency model where Amazon takes 30% _and_ the publishers set the retail price of the books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Something I'm missing here:

Amazon will either pay the developer 70% of the actual purchase price (which is set by Amazon) or 20% of the listed price (set by the developer), whichever is _higher_.

So what's to stop a developer from listing the game at $100 and letting Amazon figure out for itself, what a more sensible price should be (and then collecting $20 which would be higher than 0.7*whatever_price_amazon_finally_sets)?

Will Amazon reject apps on the basis of the listed price?

<comment><USER5> I believe that is allowed, but:

\- You can't sell it anywhere else. Amazon requires that you give them the best pricing on the app, ever. Per the article, if you even list it for a day on sale for $0.99, you have to price it in Amazon for that amount forever.

\- Pricing is at amazon's discretion. So they'll price it at $28.57, you'll get $20 when your mom buys it, and nobody else will.

\- The big win is if you get offered for free, since then a ton of people download you and you still get 20% of your purchase price. That will never happen to you, since the "who gets featured" algorithm appears to be people- making-decisions based.

Side note: this model is excruciatingly bad for apps that have per-user costs to the developer. If, for example, you plan for the average $0.99 user to use $0.25 of server storage and CPU, and amazon decides to give your app away, you may wind up in the hole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Build your own App store?

</comment><comment><USER7> Given how well the Humble indie Bundles have done in the past (and how the current one is doing), I think their concerns over pricing are a bit overblown.

<comment><USER8> you're going to have to spell this thought out for me. i don't see how some middleman taking 80% is redeemed by the success of "humble indie bundles".

<comment><USER9> What middleman is taking 80%?</comment></comment></comment>


Why Twitter's Co-Founders Are Betting Big On A Vegan Meat Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680007/biz-stone-explains-why-twitters-co-founders-are-betting-big-on-a-vegan-meat-startup#1 <comment><USER2> Multiple people are asking why vegetarians would even want this, so let me list a few reasons:

* There are ethical vegetarians (like me) who like the taste of meat well enough, but dislike the baggage that comes with it. If "fake meat" actually tasted like meat then I would eat it occasionally. Generally speaking other fake meats do not taste like meat.

* People who converted to vegetarianism can have cravings for what they grew up with. For me, the main thing I miss is buffalo wings.

All of that said, I think part of the point of this startup is to convert some meat eaters into accepting fake meat as an occasional substitute.

<comment><USER3> >but dislike the baggage that comes with it.

Is it the way some animals are treated, or the killing altogether? If the former, why not buy your meat from more "humane" sources like free range farmers etc. ?

<comment><USER4> the most convincing ethical argument i've heard for vegetarianism has nothing to do with the treatment/killing of animals, it is that eating vegetables is a much more efficient use of resources than eating meat. The amount of energy it takes to grow 500 Calories worth of broccoli is an order of magnitude less than the energy it takes to raise 500 Calories worth of beef. If all the resources currently used to raise animals for meat were used to grow vegetables instead, there would be plenty of food to spare for the whole planet. I'm curious as to the energy consumption it takes to grow synthetic meat.

(edit: to be clear, this argument has failed to sway me, i still love eating meat. It's just something interesting that i've heard before and thought was worth sharing. There may or may not be actual statistics to back this argument up.)

<comment><USER5> 500 calories of broccoli takes far more energy to produce than 500 calories of meat. Broccoli is bulky, it's mostly air & water and indigestible starch. It takes many pounds of broccoli to get 500 calories, whereas 500 calories of steak is only a few ounces. So unless that broccoli is hyper-local, transportation costs alone may make it worse. Even if it is hyper-local, I still suspect that broccoli is a worse way of converting solar energy into human energy than cows are.

Environmentalists usually compare meat to calorie dense vegetable sources, like grains & legumes. That's fair because it's impossible for a human to eat enough broccoli to stay alive -- it takes about the same amount of energy just to digest the broccoli as you get from it.

The "standard" metric for meat conversion is that it takes 12 pounds of wheat to make 1 pound of beef. But that's very misleading. Cows generally don't eat wheat. Naturally raised cows eat grass. Cows eating grass in midwestern North America is probably the closest we can get to its natural ecosystem, which used to be dominated by mammoths eating grass until they were killed off, then by bison eating grass until they were killed off. But humans can't eat grass. Cows have four stomachs and a rumination habit that ensure that it is efficiently digested.

Even feedlot cattle are much more efficient than the 12-1 metric would have you believe. The feed barley and feed corn varieties that are grown to feed cattle yield at rates 2-8 times better than the high-protein wheat varieties fed to humans. Not too mention the fact that when you feed corn to cattle you feed them the entire plant. Humans just eat the seeds.

<comment><USER6> Regardless of the broccoli vs wheat or what have you, something your parent said was striking--namely, that there would be enough food for the world. Here's the rub: We don't have a food shortage problem. We have a food distribution problem. I mean, eat whatever the hell you like--I don't particularly care, but understand that logistics is the major problem in third world food supplies today, not supply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "have a better nutrition profile (no cholesterol, no saturated fat, but lots of protein)"

That's probably a worse nutritional profile. Naturally raised meats are rich in the healthy saturated fats, such as stearic acid.

And I thought the cholesterol boogy-man had been thoroughly debunked by now.

Please link a properly conducted study that shows that naturally grown meat is unhealthy, or that the saturated fat from naturally grown meat is unhealthy. Most fat studies don't differentiate plant based saturated fats with meat based ones or with trans-fats. Most meat studies don't differentiate between red meat and processed meat. It's not the meat in the hot dog that makes the hot dog unhealthy.

<comment><USER7> >That's probably a worse nutritional profile.

That doesn't seem to be the consensus. There are many studies that meat is unhealthy (I'm not sure what you mean by naturally grown, perhaps hormones?). Red meat in particular is considered to be very unhealthy. Also you can get stearic acid from other sources that don't have that much saturated fat and cholesterol.

<comment><USER5> Naturally grown for cows means grass-fed. It has other meanings for different animals, but it generally means a diet & lifestyle comparable to what their wild cousins have.

Red meat studies generally consider hot dogs to be red meat. The very few studies that separate unprocessed red meat from processed red meat find that unprocessed red meat is just as healthy or even healthier than poultry meat.

<comment><USER7> I see. Well there is this study that concludes that meat from grass-fed cows is healthier than their grain-fed counterparts [1] but I'm not sure if you can still consider either healthy and I think you can find other foods that are much healthier.

>Red meat studies generally consider hot dogs to be red meat.

I don't think that is generally the case. There is this study that differentiated between the two [2] and the conclusion was that there was an increase in health risks for unprocessed, but the processed variety was worse.

I understand that it's not good to use one study as proof (or for that matter any number of studies) but there seem to be more than just this one.

[1] [http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/switching-to- grass-...](http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/switching-to-grass-fed- beef/)

[2] [http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=11348...](http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1134845)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Part of the excitement of eating a steak is exploring the different flavors that come with each individual piece.

Yes, meat might be "bad" for you. Meat might be an ineffective use of resources. Killing animals may be wrong. But, for meat eaters, part of the enjoyment is the hedonistic pursuit.

Lots of vegetarians and vegans have expressed their opinions, so let me weigh in as someone who hasn't eaten a single vegetable for over 12 years: I love meat, and to many people like myself, these alternative meats are about as much a replacement as aspartame is for sugar.

<comment><USER9> You haven't eaten a single vegetable in 12 years? That's weird.

<comment><USER8> Whether psychological or physiological, the majority of vegetables make me throw up almost instantly.

I'm perfectly healthy though. 20/20 vision, competitive for several sports, can code/sleep/socialize, and I don't really get sick anymore either.

I'll take a vitamin supplement when I remember, which usually ends up being 2-3 times a month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The main thrust of the argument has little to do with dietary choice, and far more to do with the negative footprint of factory farming.

Factory farming is a significant contributor to many negatives in the environment. Methane, fertilizers and hormones/chemicals that seep into groundwater, fresh water usage, and transportation are massive contributors to environmental damage.

Disclaimer: I'm a chef, I love meat, and I'm descended from farmers. I still believe this is the future, once someone nails the texture/flavour issue. I've been looking into in-vitro meat, but it still looks a ways off <http://new- harvest.org/substitutes.htm>

Being able to manipulate the fat content and marbling, re-introduce heirloom breeds, and all produced with a fraction of the footprint makes this a delicious opportunity.

The real question is the length of the roadmap, it's been decades that people have been working on this.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am vegan, have been for five years, I don't eat faux meat and never would.

However, good for them. Meat is environmentally unsustainable and is unhealthy (for both givers and receivers).

<comment><USER12> "Meat is environmentally unsustainable and is unhealthy." Citation needed.

Soy/Tofu, on the other hand, IS unhealthy - particularly for men.[1][2]

[1] - <http://www.menshealth.com/nutrition/soys-negative-effects> [2] - <http://www.healthiertalk.com/why-tofu-wrecks-your-brain-0246>

<comment><USER13> WTF, Men's Health magazine and some health forum article (whose author believes water fluoridation is an industrial conspiracy) are considered reliable sources now?

By these standards, the case for the unsustainable and unhealthy nature of meat is airtight. But if you want a more reliable source, seek out the UNEP report on sustainable resource management.

<comment><USER14> A better reference for tofu would be <http://www.jacn.org/content/19/2/242.full>

<comment><USER13> Yes the JACN article is at least a scientific study. It is one data point however, and AFAIK the only study to find a link between soy intake and decreased cognition -- compared with a large body of research that has associated intake of soy isoflavones with better health, including better cognition. These include studies of typical Asian diets, which are known to be higher in soy than Western diets.

If one was to look at the entire scientific literature honestly and soberly, I think the evidence would overwhelmingly support the claim for soy health benefits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> i don't understand vegan meat. if you are vegan why would you want to eat stuff that resembles meat? there are plenty of amazing vegan dishes that look and taste amazing. it feels like a cop out to be vegan yet eat stuff that looks like meat. if you want to eat meat, just eat meat! there are plenty of places to buy meat that are raised by farmers that take care of their animals. it just costs significantly more than cheap meat.

<comment><USER16> _it feels like a cop out to be vegan yet eat stuff that looks like meat._

Vegan isn't just about meat, it also proscribes eggs and milk. There are a lot of foods that are better if you have some decent egg and milk analogs.

But mainly, people eat vegan for ethical or health reasons. So maybe they still really like meat-like textures and flavors, but have strong reasons for not eating actual meat.

<comment><USER17> _So maybe they still really like meat-like textures and flavors_

Almost as if evolution had bred them into meat-eating animals!

Nah, that's crazy talk.

<comment><USER18> Humans are omnivores, not carnivores. We can sustain on a remarkable variety of diets. Evolution isn't really part of the picture, or even necessarily some ideal to follow without deviating. After all, the internet and factory farms aren't part of evolution either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting. Cheaper meat, I think, is a pretty great thing. I mean, you can be quite healthy as a vegitarian, but it's a lot of work; I was a vegitarian growing up, and switched to meat shortly after I moved out of my parents house, mostly because I wasn't willing to put the culinary effort into eating a balanced vegitarian diet. You feel better eating nothing but fast food hamburgers than eating a vegitarian diet that doesn't have enough complete protien.

I mean, the ethics of eating animals aside (obviously, I don't feel very strongly about that, I mean, if i was willing to eat meat to save another hour a night of effort) plant-based protien has the potential to be vastly more efficent... read: cheaper, read: could feed vastly more humans, or the same number of humans with fewer resources input.

Seems to me like a great thing with a whole lot of potential to change the world in a very real and positive way just from a food efficency standpoint. A real meat substitute could have the effect of another 'green revolution'

</comment><comment><USER20> I was one of those meat lovers that stayed away from meat after watching one of those videos that shows you how we get our meat (slaughter houses, systematic butchering of animals etc)…for a week.

I'll gladly gobble up any meat/vegan replacement that offers the same texture and 'chew-ability' as chicken (I've weaned off beef and pork best as I can, and try to limit myself to just fish and chicken for my inner carnivore). Not just for environment's sake but also I can sleep just a bit better at night.

We all have our vices – meat's one of mine. I look forward to the day when I no longer crave meat!

</comment><comment><USER5> You can eat healthy as a vegetarian, you can eat healthy as an omnivore, but I highly doubt that this faux meat is going to be healthier than eating plain foods. Humans evolved to eat certain types of food, and this faux meat is far from natural. It's made in a factory, and the nutritional proportions are going to be all out of whack. It breaks Michael Pollan's first two rules: "Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." and "Don't eat anything with more than 5 ingredients or ingredients you cannot pronounce."

</comment><comment><USER21> I frequently eat chicken and I've tried Beyond Meat. It's very difficult to distinguish from real chicken (unless you char it). It feels juicy, it pulls apart just like real chicken, and the flavour is very similar too. I was really impressed, it definitely lives up to the hype. I can't imagine a better analogue for chicken.

</comment><comment><USER13> Has anyone tried this? How does it compare to, say, Gardein? (the stuff they serve at Lyfe Kitchen)

<comment><USER22> People who don't eat meat say it's indistinguishable from meat.

I've never understood the fake meat thing, I eat alot of meat but don't go around looking for fake vegetables. Even when I go to a vegetarian/vegan restaurant rarely do I find the imitation dishes to be anywhere near as good as the originals, however, there are a lot of great vegan/vegetarian dishes that are much better than any of the faux dishes.

<comment><USER23> Are you serious? People don't eat real meat generally because they don't like the fact that they're killing a live animal do so. I quit eating meat 5-6 years ago for this reason, yet when I visit restaurants and my friends order meat I wish I could taste what they're eating.

Meat substitutes currently are terrible, the textures and flavors are completely off. BeyondMeat supposedly creates a chicken strip that takes like the real thing, and has the same cooking properties which is extremely exciting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Any food that, when people see the making of it they cry, is cruel and I personally won't eat it.</comment>


Me and a friend just created an ETH betting platform called bething.io - <AUTHOR> Me and a friend just created an ETH betting platform called bething. We are aiming to test it at the WC 2018. We have a 5% fee (1% to charity and 4% to us). Currently it is a pot betting system and our long term goal is to replicate what betfair does with buying and selling odds. https://bething.io <comment><USER2> Betting requires a license in many countries to be legal, apart from the requirement for age verification.

As your site is now, this is basically calling for a lawsuit.

<comment><USER3> Like the EU GPDR, or every weird country laws, it is better not to care too much.

Just be legal in the place of incorporation, where you live and where you run your business, then let it go.

Lawsuits? If Europeans do not like that US sites do not respect the GPDR or have no license for something, yes, they can sue.

But given the 1st amendment, I don't think anyone is going to be extradited for free speach!

<comment><USER2> Is everything these days about GDPR?

Betting laws are not just a EU thing.</comment></comment></comment>


GNU Taler - <AUTHOR> https://taler.net/en/index.html <comment><USER2> I was at the presentation at SHA 2017.

The demo was nice, even though i did not understand any of the crypto. Although, to be fair, i didn't even try :-)

One important take away for me was that this project aims to replace paypal, not bitcoin. Its target is to establish an open source payment infrastructure that is better than paying with credit cards, paypal, etc...

<comment><USER3> I keep hearing about Taler from a friend of mine, but there hasn't been much adoption among banks or credit unions, limiting its usefulness.

The banking sector in the US is a mosaic of banks and credit unions running a wide variety of debit networks, with ACH vaguely tying them all together. I wish it was easier to move money between banks here, seems like the quickest way is to write a check!

<comment><USER4> SEPA, guaranteed wire transfers over night and in November this year a payment under 15000€ will happen in 10s (ten seconds!). Not even Bitcoin can do that anymore with transactions taking more and more time (or fees).

If the US gov would put some weight behind it, the US could easily catch up.

<comment><USER5> I think your 10s transaction is about equivalent to an unconfirmed bitcoin transaction or credit card authorization. How often is the actual bank-to-bank transfer?

The fact that there is an arbitrary money amount shows it's more of a fraud cutoff than a real limit.

<comment><USER6> It depends. The banks nets the transactions a number of times during the day, normally using a central bank.

In the mean time the credit on your account is debited a 'float' account that accumulates any debt to other banks or third party payment system. Each fast payment system also typically have a reserved amount deposited as a guarantee in the event that a bank runs out of money.

It's a real cost to reserve money so there is a restriction on the sums.

Can the central banks speed up the settlement? Yes probably, but it's a lot of work to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Neat! I'm of the opinion that journalism, open source development, etc. would be much closer to self-sustaining if only users had the option of dropping a quarter in the hat — performing a one-click micropayment — when visiting a webpage. I'm not likely to subscribe to the NYT, but I'd gladly pay 25 cents after reading a great article if it didn't require entering CC info and bouncing between three different webpages. Unfortunately, this would require immense coordination between web standards, browsers, OS vendors, and banks to implement. Taler sounds like it's targeting a similar use case; I hope it sees wide adoption so that at least the idea could be tested at scale!

(Sadly, with most traffic coming from mobile these days, I'm not sure how well the wallet concept would play with iOS's closed ecosystem. Is it against the App Store guidelines to release a wallet-type extension? Sigh, I miss the days when hacky tech like Napster and BitTorrent would set the world on fire without anyone having to gatekeep...)

<comment><USER8> _> but I'd gladly pay 25 cents after reading a great article if it didn't require entering CC info and bouncing between three different webpages... Unfortunately, this would require immense coordination between web standards, browsers, OS vendors, and banks to implement_

If you're okay with customers choosing to make piece-work payments _after consuming the material_ , the problem becomes much easier because micro- payments don't have to be instantaneous or binding.

All you need is a not-terribly-insecure ledger that the consumer has full read/write access to, and approves of every month (perhaps implicitly for bills under $X). This removes a lot of the security/trust/coordination issues -- an 90% solution is good enough if you just double-check with the consumer before doing anything actually important. Similar to the proposal here: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/17/the-learned- helplessness-o...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/17/the-learned-helplessness- of-equifax/) Micro-payments made by browser software (sim. SSNs) become spam- reducing mechanisms rather than trusted tokens.

Of course, this doesn't work if you want true micro-payments; i.e., where the consumer pays for access to the material, instead of making a piece-work contribution after having already consumed the material.

<comment><USER9> And american signature-less swipe transactions and now the contactless sub-30-quid payment thing in .uk seem to make it pretty clear that below a certain amount, consumers really don't give a shit about explicitly approving things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's would be an awesome alternative to PayPal. I wish them luck.

Edit: btw, we really need a public and free payment system, why are we giving to paypal and credit cards this incredible privilege? Paying with digital cash should be as inexpensive as paying with real cash.

<comment><USER11> Are you serious? Do you think "we should", really? Have you ever considered the problems and probably impossibility in achieving what you want?

<comment><USER2> On the other hand, it's not like handling physical cash is free, really.

Think about time spent counting, ensuring that there are no falsified notes, bringing excess notes to the bank and making sure there is change, etc.

I think it is quite feasible to create an electronic payment system that has comparable overhead.

Consider that there are existing electronic payment systems, e.g. electronic cash in europe, that already work and are quite secure (being smartcard-based)

<comment><USER11> I didn't say that. I've just said that it is not possible to have an "open" web payments standard. Someone has to maintain it and link it to the real world money.

The only way besides having centralized for-profit organizations maintaining the payments infrastructure is to use cryptocurrencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Private When you pay with Taler, your identity does not have to be revealed. > Just like payments in cash, nobody else can track how you spent your > electronic money. However, you obtain a legally valid proof of payment.

> The exact details of the underlying contract that was signed between > customer and merchant. However, this information would typically not include > the identity of the customer.

IRS: The term "money laundering" refers to the activities and financial transactions that are undertaken specifically to hide the true source of the money.

[https://www.irs.gov/compliance/criminal- investigation/overvi...](https://www.irs.gov/compliance/criminal- investigation/overview-money-laundering)

Am I missing something?

[I see by the downvotes this is an unpopular perspective, but I can't see how Taler's claims "Taler is not suitable for illegal activities" and "Taler prevents tax evasion and money laundering" are justifiable. It seems ideally designed for money laundering as defined by the IRS - "hiding the source of the money". Please explain it to me (ELI5)]

<comment><USER13> How is this different from cash? Money laundering is about intent, not means of payment.

<comment><USER12> It is very similar to cash in that it is an anonymous means of payment. However, Taler tries to legitimize the transfer and explicitly claims "Taler is not suitable for illegal activities." [https://taler.net/en/index.html](https://taler.net/en/index.html)

But by hiding the source of funds, it seems eminently suitable for illegal activities. Putting a (partially) legitimate business as front to process illegal profits is a textbook money laundering structure.

<comment><USER13> > Putting a (partially) legitimate business as front to process illegal > profits is a textbook money laundering structure.

Yes, but how does Taler equate to doing this? Again, how is it any different than cash? Money Laundering is about intent, not instrument.

<comment><USER12> The primary uses of Taler will likely be legitimate - I never equated it to money laundering, just expressed my doubt for the assertion that it cannot be used for money laundering.

I can't tell you how Taler differs from cash with respect to money laundering. That's why I asked the question.

Can you tell me why Taler cannot be used for money laundering?

<comment><USER14> I think you're reading the "Taler is not suitable for illegal activities." wrong. They're not saying you _can 't_ (as like you said, of course you _could_ ), they're saying you _shouldn 't_

I guess what they're saying is, "we don't want you to doing anything illegal on our service, but we can't really stop you easily if you were to do that".

<comment><USER12> "Taler prevents tax evasion and money laundering." [https://taler.net/en/merchants.html](https://taler.net/en/merchants.html)

<comment><USER15> Perhaps it is private between transacting parties but still trackable per account (in line with know your customer laws).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I seem to remember that the Cannabis industry in the US was having difficulty establishing banking relations with reputable firms. They could be a good start for this project to see usage given the open source philosophy that might resonate with some dispensaries and the friction with traditional payment processors.

Users of those commerces wouldn't be too hostile to the alternative payment option I'd imagine, and maybe with the combination of INRIA & GNU pedigree, backend relations would be less risky for the "real finance" interface.

</comment><comment><USER17> In EU it is really trivial and very cheap, fast and safe to transfer payments between individual bank accounts and business bank accounts. It would be really hard to further simplify it.

<comment><USER18> 10x times better than the US? Maybe yes - but not cheap and fast enough for micropayments.

<comment><USER19> I mean, I have used Giropay and SOFORT, both of which have been always confirmed instantly with relatively low fees (about 2% for my purchases, tho I'm not certain how that scales for sub-10€ purchases).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Success of payment system is extremely dependent on the network effect.

The value for users comes from the ubiquity of the payment system. Nobody wants to transfer money into the wallet for infrequent or one time buys.

They seem to have the right idea and might get the implementation just right, but if they can't get the momentum, it's all for nothing. I really hope this takes off.

<comment><USER21> That's what I don't get. Publishers have all the incentive to get behind a solution like this, but somehow I never see a "send a tip" or Flattr button anywhere (maybe I'm not looking?).

I just wish a bunch of well-known publishers would get together and agree on _one_ solution that they'd all add to their site.

It's just a matter of adding a widget on their article pages. They already have large readership. It could kick things off and maybe get over that network effect cold-start issue.

They could add a nice bounty like "make a first payment and don't see ads on our site for a month". Or similar.

A solution like this could be a good candidate because it's neutral. With Flattr or similar you're encouraging that particular middleman. However I think to inspire confidence in publishers they'd need to prove that this solution will have strong support for years to come (which is always unsure with open source projects).

EDIT: To be clear I'm mostly thinking of micropayments to news sites. The strategy is less clear when talking about electronic commerce in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Once the wallet is charged, payments on websites take only one click, are never falsely rejected by fraud detection and do not pose any risk of phishing or identity theft."

Pretty bold claims. Anyone can give ELI5 how it works? Merchant needs a bank account, customer needs to load funds to the wallet... Sounds quite traditional to me. Either these people are geniuses or they don't know what they are doing.

</comment><comment><USER23> GNU are quite famous for their graphic design skills.

<comment><USER24> I hate to admit it, but I do think their ideas and projects would gain wider adoption if they packaged them in a more visually appealing way. I do like the minimalist style, however the logo could use some work.

PS: I am a programmer, not a designer.

<comment><USER7> Open source software needs to find a way to fund designers. There's not nearly as many "hobbyist UX designers" as there are programmers, unfortunately.

<comment> yoz-y There are a lot of hobbyist UX designers out there, judging by the amount of unsolicited redesigns and blogs about what could have been if...

The problem is that when you do something as a hobby, you usually want full control. This puts the developer/designer duo at odds. I think this is why we have many non-functional pretty designs and functional ugly applications/sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> How does this compare to the upcoming Payment Request API?

<comment><USER26> As I understand it, PR-API is a glue for current payment methods. So your browser would simply contain a hash that is connected to a payment method (i.e. a credit card). It's effectively like Stripe built in to your browser. Before you use it you need to put in a payment method.

GNU Taler, however, is a payment method. It federates with other financial institutions to allow you to make online purchases without using credit cards. In the SHA2017 demo, they keep saying "it's like cash" and that's very close to accurate. The one difference is that payment recipients are forced to keep a paper trail of what money they've received (not from whom, but just that it was received). So in that sense it's almost better than cash in that it's more transparent for tax purposes, but maintains the anonymity of cash for the buyer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27>
      with extremely low transaction costs

Does anyone here happen to know what the pricing structure is?

<comment><USER28> The system is open, thus payment processors are in competition to provide the lowest fees possible. This is, in my opinion, one of the important reasons why a payment system needs to be open: competition forces fees to be as low as realistically possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This sounds a lot like the Ripple network. Or is there a substantial technological difference?

<comment><USER30> Agreed. The architecture diagram [1] describes a flow that is identical to how a user on Ripple buys IOUs from a gateway, trades or spends them with other users, and how a receiver redeems them with the gateway for the original currency.

Ripple captured my attention for years, but its backing company has taken it in a direction of commercial adoption which is good for them, but antithetical to the applications I was excited about.

If GNU Taler is going to revive that vision, then that's really exciting!

[1] [https://taler.net/en/architecture.html](https://taler.net/en/architecture.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think this suffers from the same issue that I have with a lot of crypto/magic currencies.

It isn't immediately clear to me why I'd want to use it. They could advertise it as: 'Pay online, without Paypal!' and a big 'Sign Up' button, and it would do more for me than anything their current page does.

Having GNU in the name doesn't really help either, as I associate it with nobody adopting the thing whatsoever.

<comment><USER32> > They could advertise it as: 'Pay online, without Paypal!' and a big 'Sign > Up' button, and it would do more for me than anything their current page > does.

Taler requires banks to cooperate, so "signing up" doesn't make any sense in this context. Taler support would have to be offered by the bank; a user doesn't sign up for Taler --- they just need to use the Taler wallet extension.

> Having GNU in the name doesn't really help either, as I associate it with > nobody adopting the thing whatsoever.

Now you're just insulting. (I'm also a GNU hacker.)

<comment><USER31> >> Having GNU in the name doesn't really help either, as I associate it with nobody adopting the thing whatsoever. >Now you're just insulting. (I'm also a GNU hacker.)

I see how it can be taken that way. But I can't really help my impression of the name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is this an official GNU project?

<comment><USER34> I think the official terminology is that there is only one GNU project with many GNU packages, of which Taler, gcc, and Gnome are: just a package.

<comment><USER35> That terminology doesn't seem to be used very consistently, even by project maintainers:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q="is+an+official+gnu+project"](https://duckduckgo.com/?q="is+an+official+gnu+project")

<comment><USER36> Yeah, typically "part of the GNU project"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> In the future, perhaps it would be useful to put what the thing actually is in the title. Just "GNU Taler" doesn't tell me anything about what something is, other than it's a GNU project.

<comment><USER38> Usually if you editorialize the title of the link submission the mods will reset it to the title of the page.

<comment><USER37> I can understand why, but would saying "GNU Taler is blah blah" really editorializing? As long as you aren't embellishing?

<comment><USER39> Yes, the mods have been known to reset it anyway. It's too bad, really.

<comment><USER9> I would hope "GNU Taler (one-click cash payments)" would've survived because it took a subtitle from the page rather than editorialising.

I sincerely doubt you can draw an accurate line for what's editorialising and what isn't though and I think I'd prefer the mods to continue to err on the side of "nope" simply because I think the failure modes are less annoying overall. But it's always going to be a trade-off.

<comment><USER37> I think a blanket "nope" stance is too harsh, and leaves no room for nuance. It also assumes that the mods are not intelligent people.

<comment><USER38> The nice thing about bureaucracy is that it doesn't leave any room for debate. Not everything needs to be debated. If you're on HN, you're here to waste time. The click is free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "the wallet's balance must be charged in the desired currency"

I wonder if this was written by someone from Central Europe. This use of the word _charge_ is no good in English because it's a heteronym - it can mean to add money or take it!

<comment><USER41> What would be the correct word for only adding?

<comment><USER42> "Add" itself is acceptable: "the desired currency must be added to the wallet's balance"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Next: GNU Privacy Guard implements the Clipper Chip algorithm.

Why did GNU accept this state surveillance system as a project?</comment>


The Internet will fail and the TV will never compete with radio (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/291152 <comment><USER2> > "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." — Lord Kelvin,

I wonder what was the reasoning behind this. It's impossible to believe that he meant that heavier than air fight is impossible. He knew about birds.</comment>


Therac-25 - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 <comment><USER2> Way too many dupes to list manually:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=therac-25&sort=byPopularity&pr...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=therac-25&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)</comment>


What would you answer? - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/a/YFA1a

<comment><AUTHOR> To those wondering, these questions were given by the cicada 3301 organisation to the few participants remaining after a long search for people "good" enough to join said organisation.

More Info: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada_3301](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada_3301)</comment>


Letter of Recommendation: Bamba - <AUTHOR> http://nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-bamba.html <comment><USER2> Evolution of parents:

1\. first kid - sterilize baby bottle nipples

2\. second kid - run nipples through the dishwasher

3\. third kid - rinse nipples under the faucet

4\. fourth kid - hold out nipples for dog to lick clean

<comment><USER3> First kid - "be careful he doesn't trip and fall"

Second kid - "Oh, he tripped and fell. are you ok?"

Third kid - (BAM CRASH Cry from upstairs) - "oh, he's fine. crying means he's fine."

<comment><USER4> "Crying means he's alive. I only worry when there's silence."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yup, makes total sense. Let your kids eat a bug or two, play in the dirt, sneeze on each other. Unless you are statistically unlucky, they'll be fine, and they'll build up stronger immune systems, so they won't be as fragile later on. Unless your child is Bubble Boy, there's no need for OCD antiseptic cleanliness.

<comment><USER5> One comment on the article cites a recommendation that young children not consume honey because it might possibly cause 90 cases of botulism a year. 90 cases out of several million is not really a significant thing to worry about. Sucks if it happens, but it is really unlikely.

<comment><USER6> Just to set the record straight, part of the reason we have so few cases of infant botulism each year is that pediatricians actively recommend against feeding honey to kids under 1 year old. There aren't really any immunological benefits to early honey, so it really is an unnecessary risk. Please don't recommend people disregard medical advice that is there for good reasons.

[http://kidshealth.org/parent/infections/bacterial_viral/botu...](http://kidshealth.org/parent/infections/bacterial_viral/botulism.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am Israeli, lived in America for 1/2 my childhood. My nephew grew up entirely in Israel, and has peanut allergies. Ironically in the context of this article, we didn't find this out until he first had bamba and my sister had to rush him to the hospital. There have been a number of his classmates with the same allergy. Only going by his classmates from nursery school until 8th grade now, the stats don't look so great.

Obviously this is anecdotal, but like all things, nothing is 100%. I am not sure what sample size or data was used in these studies, but in just my circle the number of people with peanut allergies that are Israeli is decently large compared to many other people I know. Unfortunately peanut allergies can be pretty annoying, serious, and hard to deal with, so it ends up a big topic of discussion a few times a year in our social circles.

</comment><comment><USER8> For those that have never had bamba, it truly is a peanut butter cheese doodle that will melt in your mouth. That allows Israeli kids to eat them at a really young age.

</comment><comment><USER9> Allergies are mostly a North American and European thing aren't they? I had never heard of allergies until I came to the US from my slice of third world hell.

<comment><USER10> There is a hypothesis[1] that it's a developed, hygienic world thing.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a young child at home. He eats bamba, peanut butter, and a worrying amount of New York City dirt.

That said, this is such a dangerous article, and I'm honestly surprised the NYT published it. It's written by a non-scientist making a "common sense" claim, and it even closes with a paragraph-long variation on the "how much can we really trust science anyways?" claim.

My understanding is that there has been a single study, done among a largely homogenous population, that has indicated Bamba's benefit. Maybe Bamba does help inoculate against peanut allergies -- I think it's plausible, even likely. But it's certainly not anything approaching scientific consensus, the author is not a scientist of any variety, and I think this article has a real danger to mislead.

<comment><USER12> I don't think its particularly dangerous. While its less detailed and formal, its not particularly out of line from common medical guidance on the issue. [0] Certainly, major publications -- including the Times -- _frequently_ print pop-health advice that is more at odds with medical science than this piece.

[0] E.g., this, from the American Academy of Pediatrics, [https://www.healthychildren.org/English/health- issues/condit...](https://www.healthychildren.org/English/health- issues/conditions/allergies-asthma/Pages/Peanut-Allergies-What-You-Should- Know-About-the-Latest-Research.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Surprised no one posted this: [https://xkcd.com/531/](https://xkcd.com/531/)

</comment><comment><USER14> What about Vietnamese kids -- who have lots of peanuts in their main diets.

What about US kids that eat a lots of PB&J?

<comment><USER15> If kids are already eating lots of nuts it's likely they're not going to be allergic to that type of nut/legume (however they can be allergic to other nuts in the same tree nut family).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is this the future of advertising, a whole 'article' dedicated to a peanut butter coated roasted corn snack, Apple, Amazon, the Jackson Five, talk about product placement. I would have really liked to read an article on the causes of childhood allergies ...

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't know anyone in Poland that have peanut allergies. Peanuts are only used for a few cakes (walnut).

<comment><USER4> Hmm, so _walnuts_ are used, but not _peanuts_. From friends here with allergies, they're specifically allergic to _peanuts_ and not nuts in general (though they avoid most because they're often processed in the same facilities). Depending on the severity of their allergy that avoidance will be greater or lesser, a couple will eat brownies or cookies made with walnuts, or a pecan pie, but won't eat from a can of mixed nuts even if it doesn't (by the label) contain peanuts.

<comment><USER15> Peanuts are legumes, and walnuts are tree nuts. People can be allergic to just legumes, or just tree nuts or both.

Within the tree nut family, some people can be allergic to just certain types such as cashew nuts because the proteins they're allergic differ to other tree nuts.

<comment><USER4> My first sentence was meant to be a question. OP seemed to be using peanuts as a generic term for nuts and I wanted clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Offtopic: Those mamba things sound delicious. I wish I could taste them in Mexico.

</comment><comment><USER19> Never seen a French kid with a peanut allergy; they probably exist since most processed foods now have warnings about possible allergens, but they must be quite rare. In France "Nutella" is found in most homes; it's an Italian-made (and quite unhealthy) thick mixture of chocolate paste and crushed peanuts. Kids love it.

Also, this formulation is weird:

> _Nothing is more unnerving than exposing your child to danger for his > benefit, be it germs, shots, strangers, allergens or gravity._

There are things that can kill young kids, they should be avoided at all costs (of course!); these include: guns, swimming pools (being alone at a ~), and, first and foremost, moving cars.

But the rest of the "dangers" are GOOD for kids: "germs" are good (let them play in sandpits!), gravity (climbing trees or other structures) is good, being able to talk to strangers IS VERY GOOD because almost all strangers are not rapists and will not harm your kid in any way -- they may save her life!

<comment><USER20> Nutella is generally made of hazelnuts here, is the stuff in France made of peanuts?

<comment><USER19> No, I don't think so; I mixed up peanuts and hazelnuts. Sorry about that.</comment></comment></comment>


Forgotten passwords are bane of the Internet. Facebook wants to fix that - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/01/forgotten-passwords-are-bane-of-the-internet-facebook-wants-to-fix-that/ <comment><USER2> Click here to login with Facebook.</comment>