A Japanese inn owned by the same family for 1,300 years [video] - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/114879061 <comment><USER2> I'm the guy who made this video, so I want adress some questions from this thread. Really interesting discussion by the way, I'm happy so many people take an interest in this film!

Not really family/adoption:

To be honest, the whole history of the Houshi family is kind of a mistery. There was no real documentation in paper back then. No photos, and paintings or such were only for rich people. Yet, the whole town kinda grew around the hot springs and this one hotel in particular. So the history of the hotel and the family is very much connected with the history of the town. That's also where the proof for the Guinness Bureau came from. They wouldn't just accept them saying "yea, we old."

What changed in 2011: An even older hotel submitted their application.

Also: as far as I found out, that older hotel is not a straight "same-family" business, or at least not anymore. I'm a bit sceptical of that posted source below. There's an association for family businesses older than 200 years AND still running, and that hotel is not part of that, Houshi is.

The daughters motivation: I shot this film over the course of six days, in April and in June. When I was doing the interviews in April, the daughter didn't actually know that her father decided that she should take over. I was the one who told her during the interview (assuming then she was aware of it of course). She officially started in May, and when I came back in June, she was much more adjusted. She's actually doing pretty well. There's also a second son, even working in the hotel, longer than the daughter. but according to the father, he's not smart enough to manage the inn. The daughter is actually much stronger and smarter than she thinks she is. That's why the father chose her. In 1,300 years, no woman was the official owner of the inn. However, they were allowed to be "temporary owners" until the son came of age or someone was adopted. Yet, the father considers giving the daughter now the title of Zengoro. She would be the first woman in 1,300 years to wear that title. But it's not final yet. I consider going back there in a couple of years to see what's changed.

The first born son gets trained from day one to become the owner. The daughter wasn't properly prepared. Yet, she loves her family dearly and is caught between her love, obligation and duty. For someone carrying the weight of 1,300 years and 46 generations, she is doing remarkably well.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the additional info, be great to see those on the page as I had the exact same questions.

Really like the movie - amazing photography, especially how the hot springs became like their own character through the sublime water shots.

I'd be really curious to hear more about how the hotel has changed over time and endured. I'd also be very interested to hear more about the daughter taking over as this is a microcosm of a lot of tradition bending taking place in the country.

<comment><USER2> I want to write an extended story about the whole thing and offer that to several media along with the video, just like I did previously with another short doc from Japan. So I kinda can't and won't give everything away under the video. However, I try to answer questions or join a discussion when I can. This thread in particular seemed very interesting, whereas other comments elsewhere don't really make me join the discussion.

There's only so much you can tell with a short video on the internet. Everything can only be a glimpse into a 1,300 year old legacy, and into the mentality of three humans behind it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not actually the same family, typically the new owners will "adopt" a son, who is just the highest ranking manager: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_adult_adoption](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_adult_adoption)

<comment><USER5> How is that not actually the same family?

<comment><USER6> AS a father of three adopted children I ask the same. Adoption is family even if they look different then your own skin they are family.

<comment><USER7> Nobody's disputing that, but the Japanese custom for adult adoption is something else entirely: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_adult_adoption](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_adult_adoption)

So if you adopt a child and raise it as your own and that child takes over your business, is it still a "family business? Yes.

But can you say it's still a "family" business if it's gone through the Japanese custom of adult adoption? Arguably yes, because that person was brought into their family as a legitimate heir.

On the other hand you could argue that it's no different than a family business being sold in the western sense, it's just that in ancient Japan you couldn't really buy and sell businesses, they were owned by clans, so this was their mechanism for ensuring business continuity when there was no suitable male heir.

I'm not taking a stance on whether it's still a "real" family business, but it's important to understand that what the Japanese mean by "adoption" in this sense is not at all what westerners mean when they use that word.

<comment><USER8> Another reminder that Japan extended their feudal period longer than most.

Then again, the west took on the practice of putting the founders name on a corporations...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very interesting.

I always wondered what would be morally just position on such long standing establishments when it comes to inheritance of responsibility.

On the one hand kids of such family shouldn't be tied to the family business if they don't find it fulfilling. On the other hand if they won't continue the line traditions might die and with them such old an interesting places as this one or any other.

But as datamatt writes, I guess adult adoption does help with that. If kids in such family feel that they are not up to the task, their parents can adopt a person (a man in this case) who will continue with this tradition.

<comment><USER10> Happens with farm kids all the time. If no kids want to continue the land is often sold or just rented out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the "world's oldest continuously ongoing independent company" [0] also hails from Japan, although it became a subsidiary of another company awhile back

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi)

<comment><USER12> It is simply amazing that a company has survived for so long. How have they managed to maintain revenue, maintain a culture, manage tremendous social and political change for centuries??

<comment><USER13> They were a temple repair company. It's steady work that hasn't changed a lot (everyone respects the temples - there are monasteries in Europe of comparable age to this company, but they were maintained by monks or "ordinary" builders), and not an easy market for outsiders to break into.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Until 2011, it held the record for being the oldest hotel in the world."

I wondered what happened in 2011

<comment><USER15> This confused me, too. The record officials must have discovered an older hotel?

<comment><USER16> Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan hotel somehow proved they were older. (Founded in 705, run by the same family for 52 generations.)

Tofugu has a nice article about the centuries old establishments in Japan: [http://www.tofugu.com/2014/10/28/over-a-thousand-years-of- se...](http://www.tofugu.com/2014/10/28/over-a-thousand-years-of-service- japans-oldest-businesses-reign-supremely-old/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The daughter seems to be very depressed and clearly isn't intending on continuing this tradition.

<comment><USER18> There is an anime about her very situation. It's called 花咲くいろは (Hanasaku Iroha). It's pretty interesting if you don't have any familiarity with traditional Japanese inns. Be warned: PA Works (the studio that created it) likes drama!

<comment><USER19> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanasaku_Iroha](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanasaku_Iroha)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The inn's English homepage: [http://www.ho- shi.co.jp/jiten/Houshi_E/home.htm](http://www.ho- shi.co.jp/jiten/Houshi_E/home.htm)

Rates start from Y9900/person (~US$83) for a midweek stay with two meals, although better rooms and meals can cost considerably more.

Reviews seem a bit mediocre though: this is a large ryokan geared for large groups, and not particularly luxurious as far as these things go.

<comment><USER21>
        Please use Netscape Navigator and the Shockwave plug-in to see this site in its full majesty

Ancient, indeed.

<comment><USER22> Realize you're talking about a 15 year span on a 1,300 year one. The changes we're seeing in media technology are a distraction for this company. It may well long outlast the Web.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Until 19th century promulgation of corporations mainly families, governments and religions could own property. The corporation allowed large groups of unrelated people to own property and pass it it on to new managers and owners. This filled the gap of having organization between the size of a small[family]business and a local government.

Of course there are isolated examples of corporations before the 19th century, but they tended to be the exception until the legal system got the property rights thing down. Governments were stingy granting corporate charters or long lifetimes.

</comment><comment><USER24> Genuinely curious:

Why did you choose to show a negative angle? For example, without context: 1) the father sounds macho, 2) the wife appears to have never been in love, 3) the girl is entirely unhappy.

Did they approve this final version?

<comment><USER2> I honestly didn't want to be it negative, but here's the thing:

the story is what it is.

I would loved for it to be more positive, but the state I interviewed them in, everything seemed gloomy. There's even a line from the father, which I cut, where he says it like: "For Houshi, there has never been a worse time than this". this includes the many natural disasters they faced, when the entire ryokan went up in flames or when half the family went to war and they became some sort of hospital for the army's soldiers instead of a hotel.

This particular moment I captured now is indeed quite negative, hence the story feels like that. But it is the Houshi of that moment. If I would make it more positive with the material I got, I would feel that I betray them or fake the story. And going from the interviews, there are rarely any positive statements. I even ended my last interview with the daughter saying: "everything you told me was so negative... I want the film to end on a positive note. Can you tell me something positive?" She contemplated for a while and then said two funny things. How she practices the Shamisen with her mother and feels like she is much better than her but would never say that. And also how she likes western style hotels much more than japanese style ryokan. But for several reasons, I couldn't use those lines.

1) the father's not macho, it's actually quite complex. as I said before, the family, and him in particular, have a very different understanding of what "family" is. There's no difference between family and business to him. Both are the same thing. It's easy for us to judge that, but it's how he was raised and his father before him. It's the way they walk. It's a cultural difference.

It took me a while to understand that and to accept his way. I tried to show and explain his situation in the film, why he's doing what he's doing, so others might understand. His only purpose in life is to keep the ryokan. Or else he alone would fuck up the entire history of the family. It's a big weight to carry, most of us can't even begin to comprehend.

that being said, he really was unbelievable sad when his son died. He is also a father, and not a monster. He's more a dutiful samurai.

2) yes and she never expected it. the wife is really obedient, she accepted her fate a long time ago and never asked for more. we might not like it, but that's how she is.

3) not entirely unhappy. the interview with her was her first chance to vent and to talk about some issues that she couldn't talk about with her parents or her friends in a long time. she is indeed quite lonely, so it was very emotional. She cried several times during the interview but I didn't want to embarass her like that by actually showing it. However, there are things she enjoys and finds happiness in. She travels to Tokyo once a month to visit friends, she also loves her small dog. There's also a second daughter, who's married with kids, and she enjoys spending time with them. And despite all, she loves and admires her parents dearly. Or else she wouldn't have come back. And as I said above, the interview was made in April and she is doing much better now.

a big theme of the film is the flow of time and the changes they bring. Houshi is always in motion. This film shows also just a moment in their long history, and it happens to be a very decisive one. When I traveled there, I didn't know about the whole situation. The film as it is, was the story unfolding to me.

Let me end with a quote from Zengoro:

"It's not about choosing family or this ryokan. The most important thing is, to keep this 1300 years old family business. You would say we are in the bottom of the situation but some ancestors also thought their ages were in the bottom. So people don't notice when things are going well, then there is already some sign of going downhill. And when you noticed that it's going worse, things are already working towards a good way again."

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Of course this is helped by the Asian valuing of ancestry. A families can be traced back two thousand years to when Chinese states were being established. (And some of these records were destroyed forever by communist excesses that did not value them.) Europe went through a period (400AD-800AD) were ancestry record keeping was not valued or done and continuity was lost.

</comment><comment><USER25> I hope they find someone to adopt or marry who will care for this hotel.

As someone else pointed out, the daughter seems to be sad. I hope she is able to find someone to make her happy and is able to let her do what makes her happy.

</comment><comment><USER26> Anyone having good luck watching the video? I have tried all 3 major browsers and none are buffering and playing the media seamlessly. Maybe it's Vimeo's player that is bad.

<comment><USER22> youtube-dl FTFW.

<comment><USER2> I'd rather you not.

<comment><USER22> Then remove your video. If you're posting content to the Web, it's inherently downloadable. Most of us see that as a benefit.

1\. I don't really care what you think.

2\. You're not going to stop the vast majority of downloaders. Go study King Canute.

3\. Video playback is vastly superior under local clients than in a Web app.

Controls are uniform, I don't have to deal with buffering, I can start/stop/pause without hunting for controls in different places in different GUIs, I can vary playback speed, have pitch adjust to speed, mute audio, etc., I can queue up several videos without hassling with browser tabs, and I don't have the problem of trying to track down which browser tab, in which window, on which desktop, is playing and/or making noise (it's far easier to find and track down my video player(s)).

While the Vimeo Web player is decent, it does a miserable job at starting/stopping and repositioning playback.

Most of what I download I delete immediately on viewing (or after a few seconds of playing). Some, yes, I keep. Most of it's for research purposes.

As it turns out, I skimmed through your video rather quickly with the sound off. Pretty, but frankly not all that interesting.

And you're pegging yourself as another creative who 1) I'd never have heard of before but 2) has identified himself as really not constitutionally suited to online realities.

<comment><USER27> If 1. is true the rest of your post is redundant

<comment><USER22> The audience is, implicitly and deliberately, more than just him.

Hence: an online public forum.

But thank you for your kind words.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


China's Coronavirus Count Excluded Infected People with No Symptoms - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-coronavirus-count-excluded-infected-people-with-no-symptoms-11585650226 <comment><USER2> The Dutch Coronavirus count excludes even infected people with mild symptoms, because only people with symptoms so severe that they need to be admitted to the hospital get tested at all.

My ex-brother-in-law has pretty serious symptoms and was certain he had Corona. He went to the hospital, they measured his blood and discovered he has diabetes, and declared he didn't need to get tested for Corona.

I'm sure that not a single country except those that test absolutely everybody, has any idea how many people carry the virus.

<comment><USER3> Yes. Even counting the deaths is tricky. Here's something from the UK explaining how the UK's Office for National Statistics counts deaths differently to the UK's Public Health England. (Both of them are counting deaths across the whole UK, despite the name of PHE).

[https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2020/03/31/counting-deaths- involving...](https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2020/03/31/counting-deaths-involving- the-coronavirus-covid-19/)

<comment><USER2> I've also heard of one country counting unrelated heart attacks in people who happened to carry the Corona virus as Corona deaths, while another country (the US I think) often has no idea how to test Corona deaths and therefore doesn't count many deaths that may well have been caused by Corona.

Comparisons between countries are utterly meaningless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In Belgium you could only get tested if you were already to be admitted to hospital for urgent serious care AND only if it was for a respiratory affliction.</comment>


Why Ford and Other American Cars Don't Sell in Japan [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9FELWSDYPk <comment><USER3> American cars don't sell well on any market outside the US domestic one. If you need a tough vehicle for the desert, you buy a Toyota Land Cruiser, not a Chevy pickup truck. If you need a well-built, well-handling sports car you buy a Porsche Cayman and not a Ford Mustang. Comfy long-distance cruiser - <USER2> Mercedes E-class over a Cadillac CTS by a huge margin.

The decision to buy an American car outside the US is completely irrational and emotional. In Europe it's mostly the posers who want to look rich to the untrained eye, by owning something rare that has a less advanced drivetrain and worse build quality than the comparable European and Japanese offerings.

<comment><USER4> "The decision to buy an American car outside the US is completely irrational and emotional"

To be fair, its also 'irrational and emotional' for most people in the US also.

Patriotism isn't really 'rational'[1], and while keeping jobs in America is rational, unless you work in the car industry, the benefits of buying the right car outweigh the job/tax loss.

This would apply to any country and any car industry BTW, I'm not having a dig at the US.

[1] theres probably many books on this subject, and there are a great many rational elements to patriotism. Buying a car, just because it says 'made in X', I would contend isn't one of them.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it has anything to do with patriotism in and of itself as this applies to most of everything. This $100 phone will cover literally 100% of my use cases in a 100% satisfactory fashion. This $200 (let alone $1000) phone will do the same. Let me think, I'll get the $1000 one!

Companies have convinced people, particularly in the US, that products are reflections of themselves. In doing so they've convinced people to engage in completely irrational consumer behavior on a very wide scale. $1000 phones for one group of people is the same as $300 sneakers for another group -- wasting money to try to convey an image. That $1000 phone has parts worth a few hundred bucks, the sneakers are made for about $15. It's only with extreme irrationality that these would ever be viable business models.

This is one of the big reasons I go out of my way to block any and all advertising. People don't think they're susceptible to advertising, yet look at society and people have become completely and absolutely irrational in their purchasing. I think it's clearly marketing and advertising driving this - patriotism is just one small subset of domains that is effectively targeted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The issues mentioned in the video is not new, and has been the case for decades, yet AFAIK there doesn't seem to have been much effort on the US side to adapt at all. The resulting perception is that US automakers don't really want to sell to Japan in the first place; well, that's fine if they don't, but then bringing it up as if it's a problem is baffling. You either adapt or you don't.

<comment><USER7> These companies dug their own graves in the early aughts and then the American government used taxpayer money to dig them back out again. They never learned to adapt because they can count on the government to be their nursemaid and their attack dog, in the form of tariffs and laws against upstarts like Tesla.

<comment><USER8> Well, GM held quite a few jobs (and industries) hostage. They had little IP worth buying, as they were already re-badging Australian and European cars. The latest Saturn's were Opel's. Pontiac's were Holden's. Down economy made it seem like no one would ever buy a truck again and Toyota had already proven their trucks were as good or better.

If GM wasn't bailed out, they would have failed HARD. Like, plant closes, which means in that town restaurants close, doctors offices close, tax revenue drops so public sector jobs suffer, suppliers no longer have someone to supply, so they cut back. There would have been a massive ripple effect in an already awful time. Don't forget about the rampant middle class foreclosures, middle class homelessness, college savings lost, etc. 2008-2010 was really bad.

Also, it was a loan that GM was able to repay and gov't made money on the deal on top of continued income tax payments from all the people who remained employed and off unemployment.

<comment><USER7> That outcome was not guaranteed. They could have failed anyway and it would have been twice as bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> To be fair, it's really rare to see any foreign cars here in Japan. However whereas i can spot maybe two or three european cars a day i think i've seen less than 10 American cars during my time here.

</comment><comment><USER10> There's a measure of truth in what the video says. But explain for me why Tesla is only able to sell less than 300 cars a year in Japan? I know they just introduced the Model 3 there which should help.

Or do the Japanese view the Tesla as just another big car American company?

[https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/how-many-tesla-s- and...](https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/how-many-tesla-s-and-x-in- japan.91834/)

<comment><USER11> Teslas are very big cars by Japanese and European standards. I suspect that is one of the main factors in American cars not generally selling well internationally.

<comment><USER12> Tesla are big by Japanese standards. They're not big by European standards.

They are expensive ($50k+) and unavailable, though.

<comment><USER13> I guess it depends on how you count "big". They're not exceptionally big, but clearly more in the size league of big Mercedes/BMW/..., which all are "big" compared to common "sensible" cars.

Model X and Model S and other cars in that class are wider than the current models of the VW Transporter van, and even longer than the short wheelbase model.

<comment><USER12> Tesla Model 3: 4690 mm.

Skoda Octavia: 4670 mm.

Skoda Octavia is far from an exotic car in Europe.

The real problem is this:

Tesla Model 3: starting price €46k.

Skoda Octavia: starting price €22k.

<comment><USER13> True, for some reason I was thinking more about the two larger models (probably because I've seen more of them around?) - and I have a very city- dwelling perspective on small being important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does Japan have custom duties for imported cars? (I don't watch videos.)

I'm European and in market for buying an American car. It came as surprise for me that the price of Tesla includes several thousands euros of extra import tax, compared to European manufactured cars. This feels wrong, i.e. I'm being punished as customer/citizen because no European car manufacturer make attractive alternative for Teslas.

<comment><USER15> No they don't. They say so in the first few seconds of the video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Buick sells between 1 and 1.2 million cars in China the last 4 years.

Who knew Buick would be made cool again by Chinese consumers?

</comment><comment><USER17> Can someone with more time on their hands provide an TLDR?

[thanks for all the answers, it's super helpful :D )

<comment><USER18> \- Image of American cars being unreliable gas guzzlers.

\- Can't meet the Japanese buying experience.

\- Vehicle size.

\- No American kei cars.

However, US is arguing that removing some market barriers would help them increase their market share.

<comment><USER4> Chevrolet bought out Daewoo, and in a stunning display of branding prowess[0], in the UK at least, the daewoo Matiz is now the Chevrolet Matiz.

So that's a small 'American' car, small enough to be a Kei car

According to this there's also Pontiac and Holden branding :sigh: [1]

[0] when I think about Chevrolet, I think Chevvy V8s, 'Vettes, El Caminos, Camaros, big (1970s big) American pickups, and just general Americana, car culture, etc. NONE of those things are embodied in the Matiz.

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

<comment><USER19> > Chevrolet bought out Daewoo, and in a stunning display of branding > prowess[0], in the UK at least, the daewoo Matiz is now the Chevrolet Matiz.

> So that's a small 'American' car, small enough to be a Kei car

Nope, that's history for some years now. Chevrolet decided late 2013 to cut the mentioned small car business with former Daewoo in Europe and leave this field to their older (and now also sold) brands Opel and Vauxhall.

The only Chevrolets now sold in Europe are their so called "Iconic Cars" Camaro and Corvette.

<comment><USER4> Check the Wikipedia page I linked to, it's still being made, so if they wanted to they could ship them to Japan.

If your objection is to my use of the present tense, maybe? The Daewoo Matiz is no more, and is now currently known as the Chevrolet Matiz? I'm starting to talk myself out if it now though :)

I did try and send them a bill for my armchair strategising back when the change was announced, they never got back to me though.....

<comment><USER20> The only thing harder to sell in Japan than an American car is a Korean car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well said and if you are wondering the top three Japanese automobile brands have plants in the United States Indiana and Kentucky Toyota automobiles Columbus Ohio area Honda and Smyrna Tennessee Nissan. Also Indiana is home to a Subaru plant which makes the Subaru Impreza for sales here in the United States and exports them to Western Europe via a rail shipment from Indiana to Port Newark Port Elizabeth, NJ. Kei Cars if Euro NCAP tested 4 stars just look at Mitsubishi i-MiEV.</comment>


Earth is a 'dwarf planet' because it has not cleared its orbit - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mtanne/turns-out-earth-isnt-a-planet-c06f5208d36e <comment><USER2> This is very misleading, and it looks to be intentionally so. The author pretends that "cleared its orbit" means "cannot share its orbit with any sort of rock". But that's not at all how "cleared its orbit" is defined.

The excellent Wikipedia page [1] on what "cleared its orbit" really means should tell you enough. Firstly, this asteroid would be several magnitudes below the amount of mass necessary to strip Earth from its status. Secondly, due to this body being in orbital resonance with Earth its mass would not even count towards the mass that Earth has not cleared out of its orbit. This also counts for 3753 Cruithne, one of Earth's other known co-orbitals [2] which we've known about for _years_ without making a fuzz, also because it has insignificant mass and is in orbital resonance.

Given the tone of the article and how easily it can be falsified, it seems to me the author is deliberately misleading his audience to push his nostalgia for Pluto's planethood.

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

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi- satellite#Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-satellite#Earth)

<comment><USER3> Regardless of the validity of the premise, the conclusion—and the point—of the article is valid. Debating over the definition of planets is silly. It feels as if this is done just so school children can pass astronomy tests by residing the names of all 8 planets. Otherwise there is no point in holding this definition, or _any_ definition for that matter.

It is a known problem classifying most natural phenomena is at best difficult—but most likely impossible—to do so under a simple definition. What most naturalists do is to holding a set of common beliefs over what belongs in which category. For example, there is no easy definition of a bird. Rather we have a set of common beliefs over which animals can rightly be called a bird. Worse, the set of "common beliefs" varies depending on field of interests. Some people might talk about viruses as "living" because that servers their purpose (it makes their work easier; it makes more sense) while other wont.

I hope that we soon stop this silly debate. Our definition of a planet will not hold for long. The more planets we discover the weaker the current definition will become (this is the authors point). When that happens I bet people will talk about Pluto (and Eris, Sedna, etc.) as a planet just because it matches peoples idea of what a planet is. Just like people talk about viruses as living organisms just because it fits nicely into what we think life is.

\---

edit: grammar

<comment><USER4> There are a multitude of objective measures that can be applied to planet classification. In almost all of them, Pluto is an obvious outlier. The controversy hype was manufactured by the press looking for a sensation.

<comment><USER3> The same can be said about birds. You can say that for an animal to be considered a bird it: a) has to have feathers, b) has to have warm blood, c) cannot have claws on its wings, d) cannot have teeth. But than you find one animals that we can all agree is a bird that has claws on its wings while still a chick (will it grow up to become a bird?).

So you use a new definition. Bird are evolutionary descendant some reptiles had contained feathers and warm blood. This will (mostly) hold out until we discover some extinct groups of reptiles that had feathers and warm blood.

Note though how vague the latter definition is. It has to be. Because we cannot derive at a solid definition of a bird that encapsulates all animals that we can consent on calling a bird.

<comment><USER5> Except bird is not the scientific name it's Ornithurae which nobody cares about. Planet on the other hand is from Astronomy (asteres planetai), so just as Ornithurae means what scientists agree it means so does Planet. Electron and planet are both in common useage, but nobody gets in a tizzy about it.

PS: This is just pure bike-shedding by people who only care about the trivia and don't really use it for anything meaningful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > [...] _and the intuition we all have that Pluto, is in fact, a planet._

It's not intuition, it's rote learning. Nobody cares if Eris is a planet or not, because nobody memorized a list of planets that include Eris.

Eris is (apparently) slightly smaller than Pluto, but (apparently) the mass is slightly bigger. So in any sane classification both are planets or neither.

The problem is that we don't know how many other object of similar size and mass are out there. They are very difficult to detect, so probably there are a few more to be discovered.

<comment><USER7> Eris is slightly smaller but more massive than Pluto. The discovery of Eris lead to the reconsideration of the definition of a planet.

There's a choice to be made, either Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Makemake and Ceres are all planets or none of them are. And any new discoveries will be planets too. Or we come up with some kind of non-scientific arbitrary choice that Pluto is a planet because people on the internet got mad when it was changed to a dwarf planet.

Out of the dwarf planets, Ceres is my favorite because of the ingenious mathematics that lead to the determination of its orbit and thus verified that it's a planet. There was only a week's worth of observations before the planet went behind the sun and Carl Friedrich Gauss invented a method for initial orbit determination from three observations and pioneered the method of least squares to further refine the orbit to match the rest of the observations and the planet appeared where predicted a year later.

At the time of discovery in 1801, Ceres was considered to be the 8th planet (Neptune wouldn't be discovered for another 70 years). I don't know what eventually caused Ceres to be demoted from its planet status (perhaps because it's in the middle of the asteroid belt).

I think that dwarf planet is a suitable label to give Pluto. It's an insignificant blot of dirt in the outer solar system, and there are probably dozens like it waiting to be discovered.

<comment><USER8> The first four asteroids, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta, were considered planets until the 1850s when lots more asteroids were discovered. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)#Classific...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_\(dwarf_planet\)#Classification)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> First they came for the Kuiper belt objects, and I said nothing because I do not live on a Kuiper belt object...

</comment><comment><USER10> This reads like an impassioned argument made by someone who doesn't really know what he's talking about.

Scientists need to come up with terms for groups of things to help the process of understanding them and communicating about them. If you're not a scientist and want to call Pluto a planet or Earth a moon or the Moon a star or Uranus a black hole -- I guess go for it, but recognize that it'll make having conversations with learned people about those things more difficult.

It's like getting into an argument about whether an iPhone becomes a desktop computer when you use it while it sits on your desk. Fine. Call it a desktop computer, but you're just going to confuse everyone. "Yeah, you can only use [Software X] on your desktop computer." "I tried but it totally didn't work!" "What's your operating system?" "iOS." "That's not a desktop computer." "But it's right here on my desk."

And scene.

</comment><comment><USER11> I love how the author accuses the IAU of an agenda, but then clearly has his own--which doesn't seem to be nearly as grounded in taxonomic consistency.

<comment><USER12> I think part of the author's goal is pointing out that taxonomic consistency is useless if you're using stupid criteria, and then arguing that the criteria are stupid.

The second point is arguable, the first is not.

<comment><USER13> > I think part of the author's goal is pointing out that taxonomic consistency > is useless if you're using stupid criteria

Of course that falls down when the author is either misunderstanding or misrepresenting the criteria.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is only even a theoretical issue if 2016 H03 is both in a long term Earth grazing orbit and is not gravitationally bound to it.

If it's only in a temporary orbital relationship with Earth on a geological timescale, then it will eventually be cleared. If it's gravitationally bound to Earth then it's just in an odd kind of orbit.

<comment><USER15> Using this article's logic, Jupiter is not a planet either (it has two swarms of asteroids hanging out around its L4 and L5 lagrange points).

<comment><USER14> Theyre gravitationally bound to Jupiter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py If pluto becomes a planet again michael brown gets to write a new book called 'If I _had_ killed pluto this is how I would have done it'

</comment><comment> charles-salvia This is kind of silly... this is really a problem with the human obsession with creating taxonomies and classifications of natural phenomena, when natural phenomena are basically collections of atoms that have very fuzzy boundaries. Clustering algorithms are, in general, very subjective, and it's no surprise that our scientific efforts to "cluster" everything often produce counter-intuitive or undesirable results at certain boundary cases.

It's the same problem with biological taxonomies - is a lungfish a fish or an amphibian? The reality is it doesn't matter apart from the artificial taxonomy we impose on it so that our brains can better cope with the complexity of the Universe.

Perhaps a better (but more annoying) way of classifying everything would be to use hierarchically clustered taxonomies for everything, so that we could make statements like "Earth is considered a planet if we cut the dendrogram at level 5, but a dwarf planet if we cut at level 4, etc".

<comment><USER16> I completely agree. It's so silly that I chuckle every time this argument comes up. Then again, people are so attached to their definitions and classifications in a way that it becomes part of how they define themselves, and therefore any suggested change is considered a personal threat. This of course is not limited to planets...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This was interesting. If I am understanding correctly by the same "rules" pluto was determined to not be a planet it now would apply to earth.

Quote from article "Asteroid 2016 H03 is proof that Earth has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. Therefore, under the definition of a planet vigorously defended by the IAU since the adoption of Resolution 5A on August 24, 2006, Earth is a 'dwarf planet' because it has not cleared its orbit, which is the only criteria of their definition that Pluto fails."

"what planet are you on?.....trick question,you are not on a planet, youre on a dwarf planet:)"

<comment><USER18> No, this was written by someone who is sad about the redefinition of planet, and so wrote this mis-leading piece about what constitutes clearing an orbit. Jupiter, for example, has 100,000 trojan asteroids in it's orbit.

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

I don't think the definition is clear, but one asteroid ain't it. I do like the idea of uberplanets.

<comment><USER19> How is he even pretending? The definition (as I recall and on wiki) is clearly about comparable sized objects, and 100m vs 13,000,000m isn't very comparable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'll never not be amused by how salty people get over Pluto being stripped of its planet-hood.

</comment><comment><USER21> "Planet" is a word. I have no intuition for what a "planet" is because I was not born knowing English.

However, it seems intuitively true to me that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are different sorts of things, whatever you want to call them, than Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars; that our moon is a different sort of thing from all of those (and more like the moons of all of those); and that Pluto is _probably_ closer to Mercury-Mars than to the moon, or Eris, or Ceres, or anything else.

If you tell me that the appropriate label for Jupiter-Neptune is "planet" and for Mercury-Mars, Pluto, and Eris is "dwarf planet," I'll accept that; those sound like good categories. If you tell me that the appropriate label for Mercury-Neptune is "orbinaut" and the appropriate label for Pluto and Eris is "astrolith," I'll accept that too, those also sound like good categories. I have no intuitive objection to either of those categorizations, and both seem like they could be supported by evidence.

If you tell me that Mercury, Earth, Jupiter, Uranus, and Pluto are "oddballs" and the rest are "evenballs," that seems intuitively wrong. But I don't think anyone's proposing that!

<comment><USER22> The terms are gas giant and terrestrial (or rocky) planet. They're already there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The point about extrasolar planets is great. Technically we can't say we discovered an extrasolar planet because it's impossible to ascertain it has cleared its neighborhood. It could easily be a dwarf planet.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Planet" refers to points of light that have complex motion in the night sky throughout the year. Earth is below the sky, therefore Earth cannot possibly be a planet. This is just common sense people.

</comment><comment><USER25> I am absolutely amazed by how many people have such a strong sentimental attachment to Pluto. Forget about the clearing orbit requirement, even though this article puts up very fallacious arguments, and instead considered that Pluto is smaller than Mercury. Pluto is smaller than our moon. Pluto is not even as wide as Asia. Pluto and Charon orbit a point outside Pluto's surface.

Oh, and then there's the thousands of Kupier Belt objects larger than Pluto.

Be true to something so Frozen, and let it go.

<comment><USER26> Why are you amazed?

These sort of taxonomical debates are exceedingly coming in biology (eg "is this a new species or just another variant?", "how many base pair differences are required to be a species?", Etc).

Taxonomy for planets and other celestial bodies is increasingly important as we discover more and more exoplanets. And it turns out that writing a good definition is hard... especially when we have so few exemplars in our own solar system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Fake news! The most obvious give aways in the title being planet and orbits. Earth is not a planet but a plane and it doesn't orbit anything as it is stationary.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I would prefer a definition based on how round the object is. If it's round or a rotational ellipsoid close enough to a sphere, it's a planet.

<comment><USER28> Is the Moon a planet?

<comment><USER29> I was wondering before if it would count as a planet if it wasn't bound to Earth. It is around 6 times more massive than Pluto. There are also other, bigger moons in our solar system, such as Ganymede, which has about half the mass of Mercury (but also has a bigger diameter, due to being significantly less dense).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If Earth and Pluto were planets, clearly Gustav Holst would have written movements for them as part of his Planets suite, but he did not.

Ergo, they are not planets.

</comment><comment><USER31> Earth is a 'dwarf planet' because taxonomists are better at making useless headlines than doing actual work.

</comment><comment><USER32> What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

<comment><USER33> "A blegg by any other name..."</comment></comment>


Wehrum, Pennsylvania: A coal mining ghost town hidden in the woods - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/wehrum <comment><USER2> I grew up exploring stuff like this on dirt bikes in eastern and central Pennsylvania with my friends.

If you like this you'll definitely love Centralia

[https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/centralia- pennsylvania...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/centralia- pennsylvania-2014)

Fires under the town have been burning for decades.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, I think some people said this was an inspiration for Silent Hill.

Looking at the map, the closest distance to a water source is the Susquehanna River which is about 15 miles away. Would it be feasible to pump water from all that way to build a geothermal plant? It seems like it's an awful waste of energy.

<comment><USER2> The issue is that the fire constantly moving around the area. By the time you build something it would not be burning there anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is about 10-15 miles from where I grew up. There are several of these ghost towns that dot the area where mining, iron furnaces, or coke ovens once existed. There is one town not too far from this one that is now under 10-20 feet of water as it was flooded when the Conemagh dam was built.

<comment><USER2> For the curious [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livermore,_Pennsylvania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livermore,_Pennsylvania)</comment></comment>


Project 5050 [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.project5050.org/ <comment><USER2> Woohoo!

I once heard a metaphor on HN for the growth of software products. Building technology as War.

Start-up: Your initial core of members make up the ELITE team. They are the ones that storm the enemy lines, cutting the throats of the enemy generals, and bombing key strategic targets. Only the best, of the best, of the best, need apply. There is glory to be had.

Fledgling: Next, come the infantry. The boat is full to storm the beaches. It is gruelling work; support queries, scalability issues: bring the people, bring the degrees, bring the money!

Business: Finally, once the beaches have been stormed, its time to initiate the systemic takeover. Secret police and politics; restructure, assimilate, grow, grow, grow.

I do not repeat it because I like it. It stuck out to be because I felt it was accurate. It bothered me. Working in this industry for 10++ years has been psychologically bizarre. It is time to turn the page on this energy.

Tech no longer needs "War". It needs teachers, Moms, spirits, love, and patience.

Good luck, Project 5050!

<comment><USER3> The "Commandos, Infantry, and Police" metaphor is from t Robert X. Cringely: [https://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and- police/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and-police/)

It's a good description of any high-risk human endeavour like a startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The initial video doesn't tell me anything about what project5050 is about. The following text was below the fold for me:

> Join CS50's own Hailey James '19 as she meets with CS50 alumni to talk about > struggles they faced in Computer Science.

Seems important to mention in the video.

<comment><USER5> Where did you find that text? I wasn't about to watch a bunch of videos to figure out what a thing is and was hunting desperately for a tagline.

How hard is it to just have a single line of text at the top of a website (or under the banner, whatever) describing what the company/organization/project does? I can't believe how often I come across the website of startups, non- profits, and (shockingly often) libraries/packages/node modules that just kinda assume you know what they're about, or hide it all behind videos or something.

I'm not a greybeard here with my javascript turned off. I just don't like watching videos to gain information.

EDIT: Just thought of another - kickstarters are a HUGE offender.

<comment><USER6> > Where did you find that text?

It's underneath the first video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice! Creating things using programmable logic is something that can and should be extremely accessible these days, with all the tools and communities available.

But people still seem to have difficulty getting started; computing is a bewilderingly large field of study, and it's distressingly common to see people write it off as something "for experts". Efforts like these CS50 MOOCs seem to do a great job of providing people with the basic language that they need to learn more about the particular areas which they are interested in, which is hugely encouraging.

</comment><comment><USER8> It would be nice if the site had some text describing what it is.

</comment><comment><USER9> I clicked this thinking it be would something related to the 5050 LED RGB chip. I feel cheated.

<comment><USER10> There are millions of things called 5050 or 50/50.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's the deal with the shaky camera? It makes it effectively unwatchable.

</comment><comment><USER12> Post seems to be encountering manipulation. Very little content on the site beyond a couple of youtube videos and zero interest in the comments, yet 4th place on the frontpage.</comment>


Startup idea: Amazon S3 / CloudFront cost distributor - <AUTHOR>

This seems too simple, so I may be missing something but here goes.
Right now Amazon charges $0.15 / GB of Amazon CloudFront data transfer.  However, if you do a higher volume, it gets progressively cheaper, until at over 1000 TB, you are only charged $0.03 / GB.
Someone should create a competitive CDN that sells premium bandwidth for say, $0.05 / GB, dramatically undercutting everyone in the business by a huge margin.
How would one or two co-founders possibly compete with Amazon CloudFront in quality and price?  The backend would actually be Amazon CloudFront!  Since you would rapidly exceed the 1000 TB amount, you'd be able to pass the savings onto your customers.
To be 100% sure that you make a profit, you could wait until you get enough people to pledge to switch to your service before launching for it to become profitable from day 1.
Sign me up for 10 TB of usage. <comment><USER2> This is essentially what EngineYard does with their Cloud offering and how they've been able to reduce prices recently:

 _We're able to provide this new lower pricing because of a new capability from Amazon Web Services that allows us to group all our customer accounts into a single billing entity with Amazon. So, we're now able to use a single virtual pool of reserved instance capacity from Amazon, and pass along these savings to customers. This means all of our customers get to reap the benefits of reserved instances without the need to pay the reserved instance costs up front. No other cloud platform provider has been as aggressive as us in slashing prices as our cost goes down._

FROM: [http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/announcement-engine- yard...](http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/announcement-engine-yard-cloud- price-reductions/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Ah, arbitrage. I have long wondered what Amazon's justification is for this tiered pricing; _their_ cost per GB should be the same for all customers.

Also see previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=960123>

<comment><USER4> My assumption is that they're working to recover fixed per-account costs, and anticipated support costs.

When I've done tiered pricing, that was my logic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's stopping you from doing this? If you can get enough people to sign to be profitable from the start it seems like you don't have much to lose.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm busy with my own startup. :D If I had more time, I'd like to though.

I already do this to some extent, on a small scale, e.g. I share a dedicated server with several other people, so it is much cheaper, but it would be great to commoditize raw bandwidth on a larger scale.</comment></comment>


The Swiss Cheese Union (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://readthink.com/the-swiss-cheese-mafia-1dd096425f0d#.e7yh3p7ye <comment><USER2> Many aspects of Swiss economic activities used to be highly regulated, from cheese exports to car imports, even book prices. Even today, many international brands force Swiss retailers to get their products at inflated prices from a Swiss subsidiary.

Today, there is indeed a much greater variety of cheeses in Switzerland. In addition to the very restricted number of cheeses supported by the Cheese Union, a big problem was that it forced the production of enormous quantities of Emmental Cheese, which has a rather peculiar flavor which was increasingly out of favor with customers.

<comment><USER3> Enlightening!</comment></comment>


Building a remote-native company or dev team? Keep these 3 points in mind - <AUTHOR> https://fourthact.co/big3/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing and some good insights in there.

I actually had never heard of thehtime.com - so this was definitely a new discovery for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't either - came across it randomly on Twitter and then saw it a few months later on Product Hunt - coordinating time zones with a remote team can be a huge challenge!</comment></comment>


Introducing Swift Service Lifecycle - <AUTHOR> https://swift.org/blog/swift-service-lifecycle/ <comment><USER2> Swift as a language/ecosystem does seem to check all the boxes in contrast to other modern, mainstream languages; it looks, to me at least, like a much more ergonomic alternative for building applications compared to Rust and Go. It's considerably faster and more type-safe than Python and Ruby. And it has a drama- and shenanigans-free licensing model that I personally am much more comfortable with as opposed to the shitshow that is Java (and, to a lesser extent, .Net).

I've been reading lots of Swift docs/articles, and made quite a few book purchases from raywenderlich.com and hackingwithswift.com. My "gut feeling" tells me making the investments to become proficient in Swift, and eventually mastering it, will pay off big time.

As a web-focused developer, I must admit I found Objective-C and UIKit intimidating, but with SwiftUI, Apple seems to be lowering barriers to entry; if you know something like Ember, Vue, React, or Angular, you won't struggle too much trying to grok SwiftUI.

With Vapor becoming a mature framework, and Apple giving its official blessing for the development of server-side Swift libraries and tools, it does seem like we may soon reach critical mass on the server, and there is a lot of appeal in being able to consolidate and develop with one language across the stack.

If we can get a Swift-to-Kotlin compiler and a Swift-to-JS compiler (there are already Swift-to-HTML DSLs, and I have been experimenting with a Swift-to-CSS DSL - with my limited proficiency in the language - and it does not seem totally impractical), it's not unreasonable to imagine Swift becoming a "rule them all" language (I remember reading somewhere that Chris Lattner said his goal with Swift was "Total World Domination" and didn't think it was that far off, but can't find the source now).

<comment><USER3> Swift started out as a pretty nice language, but in my opinion there are some major problems:

The combination of ubiquitous closures and reference counting is dangerous. Avoiding circular references is not nearly as easy as you might think and reference counting is slow (low memory usage is an upside though).

And lately, the language has become rather convoluted. They have added features that make Swift code hard to read. Function builders in particular are a terrible idea. I know many people like internal DSLs. I don't.

I think it's a big mistake to overload the syntax of a language to such a degree that reading a piece of code in isolation tells you very little about what it does, because somewhere far away there may be a mode switch that completely changes the semantics of that piece of code.

Consistency is more important than "looking clean" at all cost.

<comment><USER2> I agree function builders have a lot of potential for abuse. But I prefer to take a "with great power comes great responsibility" approach over saying a feature should _never_ be allowed in a language.

If I'm promoting a DSL that makes heavy use of something like function builders, I should provide robust documentation so other developers know what to expect. And those developers should, on the other hand, at least skim the docs in order to get a basic understanding of how the DSL works. If someone goes through the trouble of providing docs to accompany a DSL, and a downstream developer doesn't bother to read them, is that really the original developer's fault?

<comment><USER3> Consistency is a good thing, because it allows you to infer how something works based on what you already know. If you can't infer it then you have to go read the docs. That's more work you have to do.

There's clearly a trade-off between expressing a specific task as succinctly as possible and for our knowledge to be transferable between different tasks.

It is the job of a programming language to guarantee a minimum level of transferability while allowing maximum expressivity. To do that, it has to put restrictions on how the semantics of syntax can be redefined.

It's clearly an art to get that balance right. In my view, Swift hasn't got it right and is moving in the wrong direction.

<comment><USER2> I sympathize with your concern. I actually chose Python/Django over Ruby/Rails because I found it almost impossible to understand how Rails really works. The biggest offenders in my book are Rails doing auto-import and (at least when I was learning it) lots of reopening of classes. Even if a person wanted to read the docs to understand where a piece of functionality came from, it was very easy to get lost.

Swift does risk getting carried away and becoming just a safer and faster version of Ruby, but I still think it's too early to write it off just because they introduced some syntactic sugar.

I've said before that writing an import statement never killed anyone. If Swift were to make something like auto-imports mainstream, I would definitely take it as an indication they were going in the wrong direction. But so far that doesn't seem to be the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe if swift had something like rustup, people would consider it more when developing for Linux. Also other popular languages like Rust and Go work well even on weird architectures and little known operating systems, while Swift does not even properly support Windows or FreeBSD. It always felt to me that Apple doesn't really care that much about making the language popular outside of the Darwin family.

Swift is not even in the default repositories of most distributions, for instance.

<comment><USER5> > Also other popular languages like Rust and Go work well even on weird > architectures and little known operating systems

As someone working on porting "everything" to a decidedly not weird architecture and a very well known operating system, I chuckle a bit because neither language works right now. Not even their dependencies work. It'll be a while before they will be supported.

(Swift works perfectly, but it would be unfair to compare it because it had a strong investment made in it to work…)

<comment><USER6> I've been running production grade Go apps[1] on aarch64 servers for ~ a year, written on macOS(x86_64), tested on aarch64 before deployment and never faced a single instance where something didn't work because of the architecture.

These are the benchmarks for different ARM platforms[2], where I had submitted one for Jetson Nano a year back and now it seems there's one for Apple Silicon.

I'm not telling, no one would ever find cross platform issues with Go; I'm just curious to know what issues you have faced and whether it's because of Apple's extension of ARM instructions.

[1][https://needgap.com](https://needgap.com)

[2][https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/GoArm#jetson- nano](https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/GoArm#jetson-nano)

<comment><USER5> The comment wasn't really an attack on the languages being unportable itself but more that their toolchains are complicated and not very flexible, requiring a decent amount of additional work for new architectures, whereas a lot of the "./configure && make" style projects already work.

Apple's proprietary extensions don't really affect porting efforts except in one specific case when writing high-performance JITs for language runtimes. (And there is a fairly simple patch to disable this entirely.)

<comment><USER6> >chuckle a bit because neither language works right now. Not even their dependencies work. It'll be a while before they will be supported.

I'm not sure what's preventing you from giving a direct & specific answer. As it would be useful to know where Rust/Go's toolchains fail for using the code for cross - platform applications.

<comment><USER5> Rust is blocked on libffi, as are most things using Python (which includes cmake, and that precludes all of LLVM). I downloaded the Go bootstrap and it tried to link against crt0 directly and it's either looking up the wrong one or there is none for aarch64. It's also looking for a file called defs_darwin_arm.h which I don't have. Some warnings that will probably be problematic at the future related to the ABI defining char to be signed.

<comment><USER6> >I downloaded the Go bootstrap and it tried to link against crt0 directly and it's either looking up the wrong one or there is none for aarch64.

Go team was already working on getting the toolchain to work on darwin/macOS before Apple announcement[1] because GOOS=darwin meant iOS(gomobile) and there are instructions available now[2] to build it successfully before the official patches. Your test results there would be a valuable contribution.

>Some warnings that will probably be problematic at the future related to the ABI defining char to be signed

You mean unsigned char? that's a common hurdle while porting x86 code to ARM.

[1][https://github.com/golang/go/issues/38485](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/38485)

[2][https://gist.github.com/tonistiigi/290d2e7118fe6f581e336bf35...](https://gist.github.com/tonistiigi/290d2e7118fe6f581e336bf3553b4501)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's a neat idea, thanks to named parameters and an expressive type system, I can see how Swift could be a good fit for tasks typically handled by config files. Also having a turing complete language available to customize behavior could have some interesting use cases.

</comment><comment><USER8> >Shutdown sequences include freeing up resources that hold on to file descriptors or other system resources that may leak if not cleared correctly.

Startup workflow is important, and it is nice to have an abstraction that makes it easier.

I am less convinced that shutdown workflow is important, and may be more trouble than it is worth. On modern operating systems, the OS will handle process shutdown and clean up system resources such as file descriptors etc. In addition, with things like the OOM killer, etc, the process may not have a chance to actually clean up. Trying to engineer graceful shutdowns is extra code with subtle edge cases (like circular dependencies), and generally, less well tested and exercised. Finally, the operating system needs to be robust against leaking resources due to processes crashing, anyway. So on the balance, I think it is worthwhile to do a startup workflow and engineer your service so that you can always crash safely without messing up your system or leaking resources.

<comment><USER9> If your code is crashing more often than it is gracefully shutting down, you have a problem.

Yes, you need to engineer for the crash scenario, but you shouldn't be relying on that in the same way you shouldn't tell users the only way to stop your software is to `kill -9 [PID]`.

In a normal deployment it might be useful to use shutdown parts of code to signal to orchestrators that the operation has been completed successfully so they can take further steps, for example.

Everybody's circumstance is different, but I definitely recommend thinking more about shutdown workflows.

<comment><USER10> > If your code is crashing more often than it is gracefully shutting down, you > have a problem.

You have this exactly backwards. If your software crashes rarely, you have a problem - when it _does_ crash. Because then it's doing something you aren't routinely and thoroughly testing by doing it all the time.

This is an old, counter-intuitive, but powerful idea - if you're not familiar with it, start with this paper:

[https://dslab.epfl.ch/pubs/crashonly.pdf](https://dslab.epfl.ch/pubs/crashonly.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The first thing that caught my attention;

 _Tom Doron is a member of the Swift Core Team and the Swift Server Work Group. He manages a team working on server-side Swift libraries at Apple._

Server Side Swift ? At Apple?

I thought IBM gave up on working Server Side Swift and that was it.

<comment> trevor-e I think Apple is pushing for the same thing that helped NodeJS get really popular: using the same language across your entire stack. In a perfect world Apple can have their devs use Swift to build an iOS/macOS app or help out with server-side code also written in Swift. For a company their size it could really pay off. I think Google had the same vision with Go but ultimately failed (imo).

As an iOS developer I'm really excited to use Swift more and more outside of app development.

edit: to clarify a bit more, I think Apple's vision is a lot more than just being able to build a small web app in Swift. They really want to build _everything_ with it.

<comment><USER12> Google had no vision with Go, it was just a group of well known developers in the UNIX world that got fed up waiting for their C++ compile times, with a supporting manager that decided to fund their work.

Google is pretty much Java and C++ alongside their infrastructure, and OSes.

K8s prototype was started in Java and migrated to Go after some Go aficionados joined the team.

Besides k8s, you have Google download service (because someone from Go team bothered to port the service to Go), gVisor, parts of Android GAPI, the new internal Android build system, gVisor, and Fuchsia TCP/IP stack that apparently should be rewritten in C++/Rust.

And that is about it, as much as it comes outside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting that this gets an official blessing. It isn't something integrated with the Swift language, just a bit of code that could be a regular package.

<comment><USER14> I think they are trying to establish a common approach to foundational concerns.

That makes sense to me, though I see the risk. There's a big benefit to the community as a whole if standard concerns are handled in a common: developers will become experienced with them and understand them in deep ways. Tooling can target them. Documentation and other learning materials can become wide and deep.

The risk is that potentially better approaches have a very high hurdle to overcome the "official blessing" to become more than a niche option. That's good and fine for alternatives that are only incrementally better or better in some ways worse in others. But sometimes a significantly lacking "official" approach holds back an overwhelmingly superior non-official approach. Hopefully the Swift Server Work Group will keep that from happening or at least not for too long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's the kind of language integrated cross-cutting DI that I always wanted.</comment>


Police Partner with License Plate Readers - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-03-03-license-plate-cameras_N.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> I was with a team spec'ing out a system ten years ago and we were already talking about this.

I'm guessing, but I'd think they're probably piloting automatic facial recognition right now in various cities. That's from a moving car, not from CCTV (I know that the CCTV guys have been working with live systems for many years now)</comment>


Ask HN: Office arrangement - <AUTHOR>

I work for a company trying to regain the feeling of community and camaraderie we had when the company was smaller. We are thinking of redoing our seating arrangement in an attempt to promote more intermingling and sharing amongst departments. Is this a good idea? Is a purely random placement something that works for other companies that have designers, developers, pms, and sales?<p>Any ideas/links would be welcome <comment><USER2> I think truly random seating could be a nightmare.

This is not a hard rule but I believe that each field should be fairly well grouped together. Just enough to keep them quiet as a group, but not close enough to make each group feel segregated. So for example, designers often like to bounce ideas off each other while they work throughout the day. QA/Support often times need to verbally regurgitate things to new employees and/or over tech support calls, managers like to verbally remind people of things.

Remove your engineers from the trajectory line of small-talk, get them away from the door, away from the coffee refueling station, etc...

Not that anybody in the office should have to deal with distractions but it's particularly dangerous when you subject your engineers to those circumstances. One thing I also liked is that in our office we seemed to have a small barricade blocking our senior engineers from the small-talk questions that the designers would often have. For example when our designers and UI/UX people would have questions about how expensive of a task it would be to resize assets/how to handle img aspect ratios, our senior devs were at the very back of the office as a last resort. This gave our junior devs/front-end guys a chance to answer any small questions before senior engineers were distracted. (which also made them feel extremely proud and gave them some respect in the office)

Just my opinion. It really depends on how many employees and what kind of atmosphere you already have/want to create. Sometimes in building a community, it's more about finding that one individual with the right personality and letting them shine. The right person can bring together your whole office if you give them the opportunity.

good luck!

 __edit __

I also think it 's extremely important to have your engineers facing AWAY from the middle of the office. Personally I think one of the most distracting things while I'm coding is seeing things move around in my peripheral vision.</comment>


How to use Lean Startup approach in Yoga app? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> Tested such approach on commercial app. Here is a story about it:

[https://www.urlaunched.com/blog/yb-lean-startup- launch](https://www.urlaunched.com/blog/yb-lean-startup-launch)</comment>


Did Hacker News just gain image emoticons? - <AUTHOR>

In Mobile Safari on iOS 6, a reply to one of my comments contains a graphical emoticon, where it didn't a couple of hours a go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5867697<p>Does anyone else see this? (Please mention browser+version and OS) <comment><USER2> I believe those are emoji emoticons. The reason you see them is because you are on iPhone. I'm on Chrome on Windows 8 and I only see a square 😓.

<comment><AUTHOR> I usually use Chrome on OS X, where I didn't see the emoticon. I was reviewing the replies to my comments on my iPhone when I noticed it, and I'm delighted. Another thing to thank the Japanese for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I see a 😓 (which is Unicode, not a graphic).

(Firefox 21.0, Ubuntu Precise 12.04.)</comment>


Beyoncé and Jay-Z Set to Trademark Baby Blue Ivy's Name - <AUTHOR> http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/02/10/beyonce-and-jay-z-set-to-trademark-baby-blue-ivys-name/ <comment><USER2> Wouldn't you _copyright_ a name (not patent it)?

</comment><comment><USER3> Blue Ivy perfume anyone?</comment>


Ask HN: Have you raised money from your friends for your startup?  - <AUTHOR>

If yes, how did you approach your friends about it? I'm thinking of asking my friends to invest $1000 each (max) for my startup. <comment><USER2> I did both times. The first time was a big risk because it was my first startup. I don't have advice on the best way to do it, but I can tell you this: If you're anything like me, then taking money from your friends and family will insure you keep the startup going no matter how bad things get. There's almost no greater motivator not to give up than taking money from your friends' savings accounts. I should have given up several times before we were acquired. I had to ask all the companies interested in acquiring us for a small amount of money if they were serious about entering into 'strategic relationship' discussions -- the money was used to keep the power on, the net connected, and to keep my team from being evicted from their apartments. Honestly, I would have shut the company down six months prior had it not been for the fact that some of my best friends had provided capital. It paid off financially, but took a big toll psychologically.

<comment><USER3> What are/were your startups? I find this and some of your other comments interesting and would like to hear more about your path.

<comment><USER2> My first company was started back in 1996 and was acquired in 1998. It seems commonplace now, but we were the first company to create a service for web- based closed membership communities. The service we were developing had photo albums, calendaring, really advanced messaging boards, an app store, etc. The company (founded in Seattle) was called "Throw," but, most likely, you wouldn't have heard of it because it was acquired before we launched our service. We were one of the five on-stage companies at the Demo conference back in '98 and within days of being on-stage, after years of not being able to get anyone's attention, we (there were six of us) were suddenly being courted by both top-tier VCs and the top three search engines/portals at the time. We chose to be acquired by Excite.com (which is no longer the company that it was). Even though it was only two years from start to finish, it was a long psychological slog and the reason we made it through was because the team was 100% dedicated to our success no matter what the cost. One member of the team had over ten maxxed-out credit cards on the day we were acquired (I didn't find that out until afterwards -- no one ever complained about not getting paid). Before the Demo conference, I had to ask one of my very best friends for a substantial loan to keep the company afloat until the conference. He lent me the money without question. When we were acquired a couple of months later, I gave him double what I borrowed because, without that money, we would have shut down. There are dozens of war stories, but I won't bore you with the details.

The second company, NeoMeo, was also acquired before it launched. I co-founded that company back in 2000 (in New York City). It was doing Xobni-type things, but revolved more around making sense of message content. Our service could do things like recognize dates in emails (expressed in various ways), recognize phone numbers, create photo albums from your inbox, etc. We eventually sold the company to Postini which was eventually acquired by Google (for cash), so my friends who made investments in that company also did okay from a return- on-investment perspective.

What am I doing now? To be honest, I'm having issues locking onto a single idea. The fluid nature of the economy has given me pause and caused me to second-guess myself more often than I normally would. I have a few solid ideas but haven't committed to one of them yet. So, for now, I've become an architecture astronaut of sorts ( <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html> ) and I'm just enjoying the thing I love to do the most: designing and implementing an architecture to keep my skills sharp.

For some reason, I'm reminded of the old joke which I will no-doubt butcher: Did you hear about the programmer who was found dead in the shower? He was holding a shampoo bottle that read "Wash. Rinse. Repeat."

<comment><USER4> Twice acquired before launched, wow. To what do you attribute this? Were you targeting recognized problems in those industries?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dont ask for what they cant give. $1000 is reasonable. If you ask for large amounts and fail, you could be sued and you will loose because you will have violated securities laws.

If I were you, I would draft a short letter stating what you were going to do with the money and state that the venture is highly speculative and likely to fail. This doesnt protect you but sets the right level of expectations. I think you need to state what the expected results are. I suggest a non- recourse personal loan with an understanding that this turns into stock. I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant. If you want legal advice see one of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. I think $1000 is reasonable. I'm basically making a list of about 20 friends to get a loan from. I still have the intention of paying the loan though at some point even if my startup fails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You will have to research the law yourself, but there is a limit to how many people can invest in a business before you cross a line into "selling securities" and have to formally be a real corporation with stock. Not that you can't do it, you just want to be aware of this and do it correctly. I think the Nolo books on incorporation should have the information.</comment>