Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective - <AUTHOR> http://www.insatiablefox.com/blog/2016/4/21/the-bill-and-melinda-gates-foundation-is-really-big <comment><USER2> If you put aside the "M$ was evil and he is just atoning" arguments, Gates is a huge inspiration, at least for me. This guy finds problems that he's passionate about and attacks them with such ferocity that it is truly awe inspiring.

I'm mildly embarrassed to admit it, but he was my childhood hero through the 90's. Even later when everyone thought Jobs was the bee's knees, I wanted to be as effective as Gates.

<comment><USER3> Also worth mentioning is that, over the years, Microsoft has published an impressive amount of research, whereas (e.g.) Apple has always been disappointingly closed.

<comment><USER4> I think Apple revolutionized HCI with the Mac and then with the iPod and now with iOS. They continue to push the bar in industrial design. They're contributing in different ways. I'd not belittle their achievements. Design principles that Apple has long been following are the norm today. Every tech company has done their part. I don't like this constant bickering, I wish people were more accepting and just saw the positive side of things more often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The size of the Gates Foundation is only impressive if you believe public policy should be disproportionately influenced by the whims of a few rich individuals. Philanthropists may not be motivated by profit like lobbyists, but that doesn't mean they understand the needs of the people any better. For issues related to relatively concrete sciences like medicine this matters less. But in areas such as education for example, the role of the Gates foundation has been disastrous.

[https://theintercept.com/2015/11/25/how-the-gates- foundation...](https://theintercept.com/2015/11/25/how-the-gates-foundation- reflects-the-good-and-the-bad-of-hacker-philanthropy/)

<comment><USER6> Disastrous? Isn't that a bit hyperbolic? Reading the article, perhaps "ineffective" could be argued. Maybe their support of Common Core and such did more harm than good, but they've pivoted based on evidence.

They're trying their best to do good with their money. This is more than can be said for most billionaires. Are you suggesting it would be better if all billionaires simply kept their money in the family and didn't try to help others?

Any bold investment carries a risk of failure. Does that mean no one should make bold investments, to you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Amen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bill Gates was a tough competitor, to be sure, and you had to bring your A game when dealing with Microsoft. But the complaints that he was 'evil', when you drill down to see what the actual complaint is, just seem to fade away. Most of it seems to be simply envy.

See "In Search of Stupidity" by Chapman.

P.S. I was in the industry throughout that era, and competed directly against Microsoft in programming languages.

<comment><USER8> Sure, it was just smart business plays in the tech industry, not really "evil" like physically harming people or stealing stuff from them.

But as an engineer (well, at that time, a tinkerer in high school), it was very frustrating how they had their own flawed formats and protocols. They made it as difficult as possible to interoperate in order to entrench their dominant position. I guess it's what all the biggest tech businesses did in their day.

Networking sucked, filesystems sucked, windows updates sucked. There were arbitrary limitations on "home" and "pro" versions (like number of concurrent connections). And it was all closed, so third party fixes were brittle binary patches.

And then there was OOXML, microsoft's "hey, we have an open XML format too! we named it so common people would confuse it with openoffice, and we had to whip it up quick so we just gave the ambiguous binary bit flags names and put them in xml tags!"

Surely you recall this memo about ACPI, and how unfortunate it would be if linux worked great with it: [http://edge- op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000...](http://edge- op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03020.pdf)

So yeah, Microsoft wasn't an african warlord conscripting children or anything like that. They weren't dumping toxic chemicals into the environment. They were just offering software, and people more or less did fine with it. And these days they're doing practically everything differently than they used to. But a software engineer hating microsoft in the early 2000s was completely justified. It wasn't personal, just business, but they went out of their way to make my life worse, over and over again.

<comment><USER9> You might think the technology sucked, but all the competition sucked worse, much worse. Nobody else could be bothered maintaining so much backward compatibility. Apple kept changing their CPU architecture and resetting the clock on developing apps. Other platforms like Amiga also pursued their own platform blind to the fact that their products couldn't interoperate with the most popular and cheap software and hardware. There was OS/2 Warp which for some reason failed in the market. Probably more of the same incompatibility problems.

It's hard to see that the world would have been better without MS. It could very well have been more fractured with people having to buy two computers because they would never know which one would run the software or hardware they might want to use. Or it could have been like the disaster we have today with native mobile development - you have to program everything twice, for two different platforms! What a waste of developer time.

The gist of what you say about MS now applies to Apple today. It keeps a similar grip over iPhones, and people love them for it. It's that grip that makes Apple successful, just as Microsoft's grip over PCs made them successful. The smartphone world would surely be worse off today without Apple too.

<comment><USER7> I bought an early Amiga in order to port the compiler to it. It irritated me that they used standard connectors, but changed one pin in order to force people to buy peripherals from them. I thought that strategy would doom Amiga, and decided not to expend my dev time on it.

DEC did the same stupid move with their Rainbow PC (in this case requiring special floppy disks), with the same results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey there, data geeks!

I am doing research on the rise of social entrepreneurship and got sidetracked by what a badass Bill Gates is. I found out that his foundation is 4x larger than the next largest private foundation in the US. And if you add up the wealth pledged as a part of The Giving Pledge it is 10x larger than that.

I compiled The Giving Pledge data on my own by researching net worths of each pledgee. Planning to put the data on the Wikipedia page shortly.

I found the other data from the following sources (see direct links in article):

Foundation Center The Giving Pledge NP Trust GBD Compare AVAC

Happy to answer any questions and would love feedback.

<comment><USER10> How about a comparison with historical philanthropists like Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie in constant currency?

<comment><USER11> Or as ratio of nominal GDP at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was surprised to not find a comparison between those private charitable contributions and the money spent by nations all over the world on similar programs. Unless I am missing something, it would look to me like the Giving Pledge, all together, spent more money on the fight against AIDS in the last 10 years than the U.S. government did [0]. If that is true, then there are still the questions left of who spent money more efficiently, whether and which other uses of taxes are more important than the fight against AIDS, as well as the general philosophical question of whether we should allow a few individuals to control how a huge proportion of the resources of the world are used, and under which circumstances. But beyond all those delta-from-the- ideal-world questions, it is indeed a pretty huge amount of good likely being done there.

[0] [http://kff.org/global-health-policy/fact-sheet/u-s- federal-f...](http://kff.org/global-health-policy/fact-sheet/u-s-federal- funding-for-hivaids-the-presidents-fy-2016-budget-request/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Website needs some work for mobile view:

[http://i.imgur.com/vlwi2hh.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/vlwi2hh.jpg)

<comment><USER14> Yes, and the Subscribe popup breaks it on mobile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> More and more I feel the best data visualization for most scenario is just bar, line, and pie charts. They need no explanation and communicate information effectively.

Too many visualizations that are fun and fancy but convey ideas poorly.

<comment><USER16> Pie Charts are the Worst [1]. In this context, a single pie chart is OK. I agree bar and line charts should usually be sufficient.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-charts-are-the- worst-2013...](http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-charts-are-the-worst-2013-6)

<comment><USER11> Scatter plots can be decent, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was expecting to see a comparison to public sector development programs in countries with bigger government.

For example USA does only 0.22% of GNI in foreign aid compared to the 0.7% target and 0.3-0.5% realized in its cohort of industrialized countries. ([http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/press/07.htm](http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/press/07.htm))

</comment><comment><USER18> Don't you find very suspicous that since the past year, we get regularly those stories comming up in reddit, imgur, hacker news, etc ?

Think about it: there are a ton of nice people doing nice things around. Even tech people. But you hear only about Bill.

The Gate Foundation existed for a long time. It actually paid my bills 7 years ago (wasting half of the money before reaching me, BTW), and we didn't have this incredible "yeah, best man ever" crazy minset going around.

It smells a lot like well done PR, with a lot of money behind to give a better image of the man, targetting social networks by subtils channels.

And if you need PR and pays to much for it, you probably DON'T deserve the praises.

<comment><USER19> > _It actually paid my bills 7 years ago (wasting half of the money before > reaching me, BTW)_

Maybe you should have taken the moral high ground and _declined the money_ , rather than taking it, criticizing how much was "wasted", then bad-mouthing it on a public forum.

Talk about a sense of entitlement.

<comment><USER18> Yes, I made a bad decision. I don't pretend to be a wonderful person. However, I can see people are trying very hard to make sure people think Gate is. And he is not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was just pondering Gate's legacy the other day. While I was blowing away another copy of Windows that I paid for but never booted.

</comment><comment><USER21> i'm curious as to whether it is more effective for an individual to hold a contribute-as-you go style to philantrophy vs a make-money-first-then-donate strategy like gates did. Given that most people aren't going to be billionaires, I would guess the former but maybe someone who has looked at the data can provide some insight.

<comment><USER22> Donating money if you are not (filthy) rich is foolish. Those money would be MUCH better spent on you. If you want to help, do it with personal efforts.

<comment><USER11> What makes you think so?

<comment><USER22> Because your money would not be spent efficiently.

<comment><USER11> I don't get it. If you are looking for pure efficiency, most people on here are much better working in IT and giving money to efficient charities.

If by personal efforts you mean helping out in a soup kitchen or flying to Detroit to help struggling kids---that's pretty inefficient.

Or did you mean something else?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Before you lionize a convicted monopolist ...

1) The USA tax code encourages wealthy people to create foundations. The money in the foundation is still controlled by them and has tax benefits.

2) In other countries, wealthy people are taxed to provide social services like education and healthcare. In the USA, they're not - the capital gains rate of 15% is basically a round-off error compared to 90% last century.

3) Foundations work very well for tax planning. Who knows what their efficiency is as charity?

<comment><USER24> People fail to understand the difference between innovation driven monopoly and government enforced monopoly.

The former is commendable, indicating that a company has developed a product so useful that it becomes so widely adopted as to become a monopoly. Nobody is forced to buy the product - people just find it so useful that the it dominates in the marketplace. And there is nothing preventing the rise of a competitor other than the monopolist's success. Got enough smarts and money to beat them? Then go for it.

That's quite different than when a company uses regulatory capture to get regulations passed that maintain their monopoly and block competitors.

<comment><USER25> I understand that, and I like the label of Corporatism when it is a big company colluding with the state, as opposed to Capitalism, which is for all its good and bad, better than the alternatives right now.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, I guess those are pretty good labels. I looked for a succinct definition of Corporatism: "the control of a state or organization by large interest groups." That happens in every economic system, not just capitalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'd request Gates to contribute to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals)

<comment><USER27> They're on it.

[http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media- Center/Speeches/2013/03...](http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media- Center/Speeches/2013/03/High-Level-Dialogue-on-Health-in-the- Post-2015-Development-Agenda)</comment></comment>


Chuck Moore on push-down stacks - <AUTHOR> http://www.colorforth.com/stack.htm

<comment> daniel-cussen I've taken a good luck at the hardware he's talking about, the GreenArrays 144-processor chip, and I'm amazed at a number of things about it. Mostly, that it's cheap, both in hardware costs and in energy costs.

The way I compared its costs to those of other hardware was to say that this chip has 144 cores running at approx 1.5 GHz each (depends on the instructions you run). That comes to 144 _1.5_ 10^9 = 216*10^9 instructions per second. The more convenient way I found to gauge it was to measure it in cGHz, pronounced "coughs", and it stands for co-GHz, core-gigahertz. An L5240 Xeon, for instance, has 4 cores running at 2.5 GHz each, which comes to 10 cGHz, compared to the GA144A's 216 cGHz.

The prices are comparable: in bulk, a GA144 is about $20 apiece, while a Xeon L5240 is $23. Granted, the Xeon has many more features and can do many things the GA144 cannot. It works great with existing compilers. It can do floating point. It's much better at I/O, has an L1 cache, and has all the niceties we've become accustomed to get from X86 processors. If you are still in the X86 mindset, a GA144 will hurt pretty badly.

At the same time, on a per-cGHz basis, it costs $5 where the GA144 is ~$0.10. In terms of electrical costs, a Xeon L5240 is 50W, or 12.5 Watts per cGHz, whereas a GA144 is .006 Watts per cGHz. Imagine: it's one-fiftieth the up- front cost and one-two-thousandth the energy cost of one of the best deals you can get for X86-64 processors.

But if you are doing high-performance computing and just need the horsepower without all those niceties, you can win big with this chip. It's really exciting.

<comment><AUTHOR> _if you are doing high-performance computing and just need the horsepower without all those niceties, you can win big with this chip_

So did you get a sense of what applications would be a good fit to program for it? The fact that it doesn't "work great with existing compilers" seems to be the stumbling-block.

<comment> daniel-cussen So, because your processor can only fit 512 instructions, and because it's a RISC processor, it's feasible to either write your own compiler, use colorforth, write it in straight assembly, or some combination thereof. Compilers are pretty bad at generating succinct code, and OK at generating fast code, and a RISC processor might just fit inside your head.

So, I really see two applications for this product: first, to create a supercomputer for fixed-point uses (maybe crypto) with 1 "petaFLOP" (I know, we're not actually talking floating-point multiplications here) for a fraction of the price and much greater energy efficiency. It'd be a world-class supercomputer for $200,000.

The other application would be to embed it in mobile devices to take advantage of its energy efficiency.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you imagine the language would be to program that supercomputer?

<comment> daniel-cussen A Lisp that goes straight to asm. Oh yeah.

<comment><AUTHOR> What Lisp do you have in mind? Presumably you mean something more specific by "goes straight to asm" than just "is compiled".

If I were going to do this I would build a Lisp bottom-up from the instruction set and my goal would be to find the most interesting language could emerge that way. On the other hand, that's so similar to what Forth already does that it might be better just to treat the hardware as the Forth machine it already is and do what it wants.

<comment> daniel-cussen You'd take the Richard Gabriel approach, in which you do all kinds of tricks by playing around with macros and types.

Of course you'd probably run it in X86 and let that compile to a binary you propagate through your supercomputer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Moore said: "GreenArrays' computers have a unique mechanism for implementing stacks with hardware: a stack is a set of registers with a pointer to the one currently on top. The pointer is moved up or down as required. The data is not moved, merely a pointer to the register in which the data is stored. This saves energy. "

Unique? I've been doing ASIC design for more than 20 years and that is how it has always been done.</comment>


JOLLA: How To ACCESS GOOGLE PLAY - <AUTHOR> http://www.jollatides.com/2013/11/29/jolla-how-to-access-google-play/

<comment><USER2> This demonstrates nicely that the Android ecosystem isn't _free_. There is no technical reason why the Google Play store isn't available for Jolla phones, it's a business decision.

Please don't reply to tell me that Google can do whatever they want with their products ;-)</comment>


"Prestudy": Learning Chinese Through Reading - <AUTHOR> http://www.kerrickstaley.com/2018/09/04/chinese-prestudy <comment><USER2> I am reading novels in Japanese. My method is similar but without the flashcards.

I read a page at a time, looking up and writing all unknown vocabulary in a notebook. There could be dozens of new words on the page. I then reread the same page. Usually I can read the entire page through quickly the second time, because it's fresh in my memory. However, when the same words come up again later I may have forgotten the reading or meaning, so it gets another entry in the notebook (even if I recognize it). After noting the same word a few times, I may start to remember it.

The advantage of reading books, in my opinion, is that they tend to use the same vocabulary over and over. You'll eventually remember the most frequently used words naturally. The other advantage is that vocabulary appears in context. This is better for both remembering and for understanding. This is why I don't use flashcards, and just let the book be my study tool.

It's much easier to use this method if the book is selected carefully. It should be relatively easy, but still interesting. Something that might be assigned reading in middle school or high school, I feel, are often good examples.

<comment><USER3> Do you have any suggestions for a first novel in Japanese? I am already reading slice-of-life manga, but the pictures and furigana are a crutch, and the vocab is pretty much limited to everyday life.

<comment><USER4> I would look into graded readers.

Related : Do 20 pages of a book give you 90% of its words?

Link: [https://blog.vocapouch.com/do-20-pages-of-a-book-gives- you-9...](https://blog.vocapouch.com/do-20-pages-of-a-book-gives-you-90-of- its-words-795a405afe70)

HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14673229](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14673229)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> After using what was essentially this technique to learn to read Japanese I'm not entirely convinced it is actually all that useful compared to just reading. I found myself spending so much time in anki that sometimes I wouldn't do real reading at all... And for what? So I would have a chance at being sort of familiar with a character when I came across it? So called "flashcard blindness" is also a real thing. Context is so important when learning, sometimes it was like I had to learn two words, the word I 'learned' in anki and the word in the wild. Even though they were obstinsably the same word somehow they couldn't connect.

If this technique did help at all I think the effect was mainly psychological. Looking at a page with a bunch of words you don't know is stressful and demoralizing. Even being able to think that you have seen a character somewhere without knowing what it means can be comforting. It sounds silly but any amount of stress can severely inhibit language acquisition. You might be better off meditating for 15 minutes... Or taking drugs

The only thing that seemed to be 100% effective was readimg content that I was completely engaged in. It didn't matter if said content was close to my skill level or way beyond my skill level. As long as I am sufficiently engaged it doesn't matter how many times I have to reference the dictionary or comb google for grammar explanations.

<comment><USER6> I had never heard the term "flashcard blindness." But, wow -- it fits my experience.

I think any time I mistakenly use SRS expecting that it _represents_ the learning process rather than it _facilitates_ learning, I'm prone to this syndrome. More explicitly, the learning process involves active use and problem solving, creating a web of connections _between_ concepts. SRS merely changes conceptual _recall_ times. For a CS analogy, it moves the memorized concept to main memory instead of residing on a slow disk or over the network. Cumulative slow seeks frustrates learning, so this is useful. But, having something in fast memory isn't useful if you don't have an index to it -- the absence of which (contextually) is flashcard blindness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One summer I was running a month long simulation for my PhD and decided to learn Chinese using an undergrad text I found. It had about 17 chapters with 50 new characters per chapter. Normally this would be a two semester course. Using spaced repetition, some books that helped to show the pictographic evolution, and color coding the tones, I was able to go through a chapter a day—granted it took about 14 hours a day. After a few weeks I could read write and speak about 1300 words/850 characters. Reading was the easiest, then, writing, then speaking. Listening was the hardest and one I always struggled with. I don't have a great memory, but if you have the time, tools, and will it's very manageable. Usually we lack the time for such an indulgence.

<comment><USER8> Which text was this?

<comment><USER9> Sounds like this is Integrated Chinese. A very popular undergraduate text in the US for teaching Chinese language skills.

<comment><USER7> Can't recall. It was Yale's undergrad text circa 2007. Looked old but was very good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just a word of warning to all HN readers who plan to follow the author's method. It is a quite painful way to learn a language, especially Chinese. I have learned a language (not Chinese) in this way, but I doubt that it is more efficient than following a decent language course (which are, unfortunately, very rare for Chinese. That could explain why the author did what he did).

First of all: Don't start reading a real book from a too low level. It's absolutely fantastic that the author has the energy and perseverance to attack a real book, but it can quickly end in frustration for most people. The author says he passed HSK4. Let's assume that his Chinese was actually a little bit better than HSK4 which would correspond to a vocabulary of around 1800 words. This sounds a lot but it's actually...nothing. I can only assume that his real level was significantly higher than HSK4, otherwise he would have seen many more than 5-10 new words per page (20 or 30 per page would be more realistic for the first 50 pages in my opinion).

Second, in my experience, even if you know all words of a Chinese text, you are still very far from understanding it. The grammar is a bitch. What will probably happen is that you will stare at what you assume is a sentence and wonder whether you accidentally got some old edition where the characters are printed from right to left or vertically. It's a pity that the author has solely focused on vocabulary acquisition in his article. That could give readers who only know Indo-European languages the impression that Chinese is somehow like Spanish (or even Farsi) where the sentence structure is similar enough to English and where just knowing the words can be already enough to enjoy a book.

(Edit: language)

<comment><USER11> And Chinese vocabulary is rather small and extremely systematic, so those 1000 or so characters form a solid base for understanding. Far from looking up every other character or so. Only a few % of encountered characters are not among the first 2000.

I thought of trying to read the three body problem along the audiobook, however the one I found online doesn't seem to contain all the chapters.

<comment><USER12> > And Chinese vocabulary is rather small and extremely systematic, so those > 1000 or so characters form a solid base for understanding.

Learning Chinese based on characters is going to be very frustrating. Most words have two characters and knowing their meaning only helps slightly with guessing the meaning of the word.

In the SUBTLEX-CH frequency data, 94% of characters are among the top 1000, but only 82% of words. So it's quite common to see a sentence where you know all the characters, but don't understand it because you don't know how they group into words.

<comment><USER10> > Most words have two characters and knowing their meaning only helps slightly > with guessing the meaning of the word.

It's really infuriating how many two-character words contain an extremely frequent character (like 要 yào) and you have still no idea what the word means.

<comment><USER13> As someone that knows a bit of Russian and French Chinese seems like a language almost invented to be hard. Let me get this right; Chinese:

1\. Has different character sets, including traditional and simplified.

2\. Has tens of thousands of different characters.

3\. Has both conjugates and homophones.

4\. Makes new words by combining characters.

5\. Has completely different ways of speaking; none of which are easy.

6\. Generally assumes that the other communicator can use the context to denote the tense.

Like. Guys. Common.

If you were combining characters to make words why bother with tens of thousands of characters in the first place?

<comment><USER14> 1\. "Simplified" is technically a script variant of traditional developed in the last half century or so, only in the PRC - but they are ultimately still the same system. Those who can read traditional chinese script can read simplified with ease.

2\. Only ~2000 needed for normal vocab. Compare this with 10000+ for english.

3\. Mandarin in particular has a lot of homophones but it's practically not a problem since terms are comprised of one or more sound and thus easily disambiguate.

4\. This is a good thing, vocab is much lower (see point 2)

5\. Same with any language?

6\. All humans use context

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is neat!

Also useful for this kind of analysis: [https://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/](https://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/)

I'm doing something similar but instead of reading native books I'm still sticking to readers with increasing difficulty so that I don't have to look too many words up while reading. Since the readers also include word lists I can learn almost all of the words beforehand.

My reading list (traditional characters) is here: [https://www.chinese- forums.com/forums/topic/44336-graded-rea...](https://www.chinese- forums.com/forums/topic/44336-graded-readers-by-the-numbers-characterswords- page-count/?do=findComment&comment=438883)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the links! Really interesting to see other projects working in this direction. I'll try picking up some of those readers too :) I'm trying to learn both simplified and traditional (but my simplified is pulling ahead right now because of all the work I'm putting in on The Three Body Problem).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> people need to go massive input either in country or online

having actually learnt to the point of watching news tv shows and reading chinese forums i can say that going the classroom or exam route is a waste of time and money

learn the top 50 to 70 chars then start watching dual subtitled programs like cctv4

do it actively meaning pausing rewinding attempting to read subtitles before the speaker etc but never touch a dictionary in flow only much later if you couldnt figure from context repeatedly ie greater than 6 7 context attempts fail

1.5 years and you will be much ahead of anyone else

<comment><USER17> Hi, that cctv4 looks like a great resource; thanks! Can you recommend any others? Are there archives of cctv4?

<comment><USER16> youtube has cctv4 shows going back years and also livestreams

[https://m.youtube.com/user/cctvch](https://m.youtube.com/user/cctvch)

i learnt chinese pretty much just watching Homeland Dreamland 远方的家 and Across China 走遍中国 from about 2016 to mid 2017 after which i was able to watch purely chinese shows without english subtitles

these are travel and tech shows so you learn about people places and lot more than just the language

also keeps it fresh and never boring so you never lose motivation for long

100s of hours of content all dual subtitled

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wrote [https://pingtype.github.io](https://pingtype.github.io) to add spaces between words, pinyin, the literal translation for each word, and a parallel English translation when available.

It also has support for simplified/traditional conversion, bopomofo, Taiwanese and Cantonese, and typing from pictures.

The most useful texts are bilingual. For me, I was reading the Bible, song lyrics, comics, and subtitles. I want to upload those, but I've been threatened with copyright issues.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think prestudying vocab before doing more extensive reading is a great technique and I haven't seen it mentioned much.

I've got a rough prototype of a tool for finding unknown words in text with european languages, but you've gotta mark them as known rather than integrating with anki: [https://words.sh/](https://words.sh/)

<comment><USER20> A bit of a late answer, but your idea is pretty cool, definitely something I could see myself using if it were integrated in an ebook reader or something similar. For German (and a few other languages, actually), a very good website to fetch sentences and translations from is Linguee. I might implement something similar on top of epubjs-reader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't believe it's a very good idea to start reading "god-mode" texts in a foreign language until you can get to something resembling a smooth reading flow. A couple of new words per page is ok, a couple of new words per sentence isn't. One of the keys is to NOT look up every unknown word. You'll figure out which ones you need and which ones you don't. Next important secret: Don't write down the words. Instead, reread the pages a while later, and see if you can remember it from the context. If not, look it up again.

Anyway, until that stage flashcard based methods are faster and I find it easier to stick with that.

I recommend "Decipher Chinese" for beginning to advanced Chinese learners. Also Duolingo has a nice conversational-based course, though I recommend using something else to get a grasp of the first maybe 400 characters. You need to know how characters work. You really need to write them with your hands, either with pen and paper or on a tablet/phone. My theory is that this is necessary for an efficient "neural encoding" of Chinese characters. They are designed to be written in a certain way, as if you had a wet brush in your right hand.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm unsure how this works, because this technique wont teach you what the English equiv is when 2 (or more) words are next to each other are.

For example, COW + MEAT = BEEF.

牛肉

牛 = Cow

肉 = Meat

This is a very simple example but there are more complicated words such as Divorce.

In Chinese this is 離婚 which is 離 (from or without) and 婚 (marriage) but it's hard to learn that this is actually Divorce in English.

Edit: Wife is Taiwanese and I'm trying to learn Chinese.

<comment><USER23> Both your examples seem to be a problem for someone learning english (i.e. there's a specific word for cow meat), but not a problem for someone learning Chinese. Perhaps I'm missing your point, but if I come across a word that translates to "cow meat", I also know that as "beef" in english, but it's perfectly understandable to me as "cow meat".

But going the other way, for someone learning english though, this is a problem. They may very well understand and know "cow meat", but have no idea about the word "beef" if they have not encountered it before.

<comment><USER24> Exactly.

Just like 对不起人 translates to "Canadians"

;)

<comment><USER25> this was good :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For any one learning Mandarin, the best advice I have is: don't start with reading, start with speaking.

The Michel Thomas method has worked pretty well, much better than Pimsleur, for me:

[https://www.michelthomas.com/](https://www.michelthomas.com/)

And the Yale "Speak Mandarin" series with romanized Chinese is also really helpful.

[https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300000849/speak- mandarin...](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300000849/speak-mandarin- textbook)

Learning Mandarin, overall, carries a much higher cognitive load than, say, Spanish, because the sounds don't map to 26 letters. They map to 1000s of characters that must be memorized. This makes reading a much less useful way for a beginner to approach a language.

</comment><comment><USER27> I estimate I'm currently at HSK3, but I have not read any Chinese books or novels except childrens books. I would imagine that an adult Chinese novel probably contains a lot of idioms (成语)and these have to be recognized 4 characters at a time, the meaning won't come from just knowing the meaning of the individual characters. Think of an intermediate English reader encountering the phrase "piece of cake", or "cakewalk", or a phrase like "bite the bullet"

Part of my difficulty learning Chinese is I taught myself, primarily by studying vocabulary, and learning characters, not practicing conversation with other people and I think this is a bad way to start. It's much better to put in far far more speaking and listening practice than reading/writing. I didn't do so, and now I can read Chinese text and communicate in chat, but have difficulty listening. And that's a shame, because I think once your listening skills gets reasonable good, you can start watching Chinese TV and Movies, and bootstrap a lot faster -- and in an entertaining way that seems less like mentally taxing work.

<comment> oh-kumudo Reading novel is always difficult. Having lived in an English-speaking country for many years, and communicated fluently with locals, even in certain cases passing their radar without being identified as foreigner, it is still pretty hard to read a reasonably popular English novel. The words they use, the rhetorics are all so different from everyday spoken language.

In case of Chinese novel, depending on author's style, if you are not reading those period novels, the idioms will not be a huge problem. Although I do see that since the flexibility of the Chinese language, author tend to create new combinations of characters into their own vocabulary to keep the their language fresh, which might be low-effort to the local readers but might present great challenges to language learners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> >It also only supports texts with simplified characters. I'll eventually add support for traditional characters. The silver lining is that when you add a flashcard for a simplified character, you'll also get a flashcard for the traditional character. It'll be suspended by default so you'll have to unsuspend if you want to study it.

This goal is difficult the way you put it. In Chinese, besides reduction in strokes, a number of traditional characters (of different or similar meanings but mostly pronounced the same) are converted into one simplified character. In other words, traditional character set has a n-to-1 relationship with simplified character set. For most characters this n=1, but you would also see n=2,3... quite often.

For this reason, you would often see articles awkwardly converted from simplified characters into traditional characters when it's done automatically. The other direction--traditional character to simplified character conversion--has no such problem.

</comment><comment><USER29> I use Pleco dictionary for reading Chinese books (read 20% of 三体 so far). There is a built-in copy-paste reader in the app. You copy-paste any book (it's just text) you want and it's possible to look up any word and add it to flashcards, pronounce it, etc. Minimum effort and preparation.

<comment><USER30> This is what I do too. In the iOS version, you can directly open epubs. It's great

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nice tool. I'm interested in Chinese websites primarily so here is some code I wrote to dump text from a Chinese website.

        import re
        import requests
        from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
        url='http://www.36kr.com'
        r=requests.get(url)
        soup= BeautifulSoup(r.text, 'lxml')
        RE = re.compile(u'[^⺀-⺙⺛-⻳⼀-⿕々〇〡-〩〸-〺〻㐀-䶵一-鿃豈-鶴侮-頻並-龎]', re.UNICODE)
        # txt = soup.find_all(string=RE)
        txt = re.sub(RE, '', soup.get_text())
        print(txt)

</comment><comment><USER32> Sounds like a good technique.

Get a book that is written in conversional language and learn the vocabulary of a page before reading it. This probably neither gets you speaking and writing in that language, but being able to read it is a good start.

</comment><comment><USER33> Very interesting article. I'm trying to learn Mandarin with a focus on speaking and conversating (using Memrise 2x per day for 15min). Would this help as well? Reading seems to me like a much more difficult project to tackle.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've always been a visual learner and listening and speaking never really did it for me. Reading, though harder because of the character system, has helped cement vocabulary and grammar in a way that speaking and listening didn't. My speaking and listening are getting better by osmosis too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Author, since you're commenting: you have the pinyin for San Ti wrong in the first line of your first major subsection. San is first tone, but it's marked in your post as 4th. (you have Ti correctly in 4th)

</comment><comment><USER35> I've been trying this technique via two apps:

* duchinese

* wordswing

I tried also:

* special books: but it's impractical as they usually translate not enough words at my level

* webpages with perapera plugin: font is too small, translation is unaware of context and the texts I found were not easy to read

</comment><comment><USER36> That is _awesome_. I've been wanting to do exactly this for Thai Wikipedia for quite a while, but you have some serious issues with identifying words in Thai.

<comment><USER12> When I want to segment words in some language, I usually check what Apache Lucene does. In this case, the Thai tokenizer [1] simply uses java.text.BreakIterator [2] and hopes that Thai is supported.

[1] [https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=lucene- solr.git;a=...](https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=lucene- solr.git;a=blob;f=lucene/analysis/common/src/java/org/apache/lucene/analysis/th/ThaiTokenizer.java;h=53f71699f2f9041bbdaab2d450e9315a6545cce9;hb=HEAD)

[2] [https://docs.oracle.com/javase/10/docs/api/java/text/BreakIt...](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/10/docs/api/java/text/BreakIterator.html)

<comment><USER36> Fantastic tip, thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Kerrick what are your thoughts on the Pleco flashcards instead of Anki for iPhone Chinese flashcards?

<comment><USER15> The big advantage of flashcards in Pleco is the integration with the whole app. If you use the Pleco Reader, you can add new cards directly from the Reader. You can also create cards from dictionary entries and during studying check other dictionaries for each card, play the audio etc.. Some people prefer Anki, but personally I would recommend the Pleco Flashcards for learning Chinese.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Software developers should be more efficient with symbols. This approach may actually work better.

</comment><comment><USER39> Does anyone have experience with methods like Michel Thomas or Rosetta stone learning Mandarin?

</comment><comment><USER40> I wonder if the author's tool can be generalized to be used for other languages.

</comment><comment><USER41> Very nice!</comment>


SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket seems to be a hit with satellite companies - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/spacexs-falcon-heavy-rocket-seems-to-be-a-hit-with-satellite-companies/ <comment><USER2> What's amazing to me is when companies do things like this that, for the general public, make perfect sense only in retrospect.

Most seemly well-run companies are a total shit-show from the inside. Stupid projects with features that no one wants, that engineering can't build, destined to never sell.

It's just plain refreshing when you see a company firing on all cylinders (sorry, couldn't help myself) to the point where a shrewd move that helps capture the market only becomes apparent, even to industry insiders, months or years later.

It's particularly satisfying when the CEO maps it all out in public years ahead of time and then executes on that vision relentlessly for a decade, despite the constant hate and doubt.

</Fanboy>

<comment><USER3> I don't think I had an opinion beforehand or anything. I mean I was always down with the idea. But I think the problem is that it's such a long process to get from point A to B, and then the market for putting things into orbit is pretty niche that most people just can't see the potential. And lot of people are living from paycheck to paycheck aren't really planning years down the road. It's completely out of their realm of experience or expertise in every possible way. And they would never attempt it so that's get projected onto the world as, "Anyone who attempts this is foolish."

Hindsight is 20/20 after all. And vision is only lauded in hindsight. Because a vision that ends in failure gets a big "I told you so." from people who usually have none.

<comment><USER4> > the market for putting things into orbit is pretty niche

It's only niche until the price comes down, like for computers, cars, air travel, aluminum, coffee, etc.

<comment><USER5> Two things:

1\. Things can be niche because there just aren't that many people who want them, rather than because you couldn't make them cheaply if there was demand. A good quality Videodisc player for example costs far more now than it did at the height of the format, because only weird retro collectors want one so there's no reason to mass produce them. Videodisc players are niche.

2\. We're talking about literal space, it can actually fill up. Some orbits are either so low that everything de-orbits soon enough anyway and needs replacing, or so high that we'd never conceivably fill them, but in between are plenty of useful orbits that are finite, so filling them up with more crap doesn't make any sense even if you could do it for free.

<comment><USER2> It's not so much that there's not enough room up there, but rather if any odd piece of shit decides to disintegrate the debris field will make a large swath of orbit uninhabitable until the debris falls back to Earth.

So even if getting up there gets cheap the things we put up there will still need to be expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a really good comment about why reigniting an engine after a long time in space is difficult.

I hadn't even considered that the fuel will just be floating in the tank with no forwards pressure

#ThingsKSPdoesn'tTeachYou

<comment><USER7> If you're interested in learning more about this kind of thing, you want to look stuff related to "ullage".

Fun fact: it doesn't actually take that much time without forwards acceleration for ullage to become an issue. For example, the Saturn V included solid-fuel rockets on the interstage between the first and second stages to provide enough forwards acceleration for the second stage engines to ignite, even though the gap between the first stage engines shutting down and the second stage engines igniting wasn't more than several seconds [0, page 14]. You can see the exhaust from those motors on the outside of this video of the Apollo 4 first stage separation [1].

Another fun fact: instead of using smaller motors to provide acceleration between stages, (some?) Soviet rockets ignited upper-stage engines _while the lower-stage engines were still firing_ ("hot-staging"). This is why some soviet rockets had a lattice (or lattices) between stages instead of solid metal.

Yet another fun fact: it doesn't take much acceleration to sufficiently settle the fuel for ignition. The Saturn V's S-IVB stage used its equivalent of its RCS system, which is normally used for attitude control, to settle its fuel prior to firing for trans-lunar injection.

If you're interested in installing KSP mods, RealFuels includes ullage simulation, so you'll need to have some method of providing acceleration to get larger rocket motors to ignite reliably.

[0]: [http://web.mit.edu/digitalapollo/Documents/Chapter5/saturnas...](http://web.mit.edu/digitalapollo/Documents/Chapter5/saturnas501.pdf) [1]: [https://youtu.be/iJIY4n5oXjc?t=8](https://youtu.be/iJIY4n5oXjc?t=8)

Edit: Fix description of hot-staging for Soviet rockets. Some Soviet rockets hot-staged their third stage and not their second stage, making the description incorrect.

<comment><USER8> One thing I don't know if it is correct is that, on KSP, I've managed to deal with ullage using the overpowered reaction wheels (essentially using centripetal force). Pretty sure that would not work properly in real life, with real materials...

<comment><USER7> It's physically possible, but it almost certainly wouldn't be practical. The mass needed for a reaction wheel of the right size would probably make it too expensive, never mind the control and mechanical issues of dealing with an accelerating spinning rocket.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I don't think a rocket would like this lateral acceleration at all, even if we replaced the reaction wheels with something less far-fetched.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone else enjoy the PDF-like presentation of the webpage? This design is so clean. I initially thought OP submitted a document.

<comment><USER10> > This design is so clean.

Does that include the giant video ad at the top? [https://imgur.com/a/4QvQO3W](https://imgur.com/a/4QvQO3W)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That is a pretty big advantage if you save all of that fuel on the satellite. It translates directly into extra years on station and so longer payoff period.

<comment><USER12> Sure, if you have already built the satellite, and it shares fuel between orbit raising and station keeping, it can be a big win. ULA convinced the US to do that with GOES-16, recently.

But if you're designing from scratch, building a bigger satellite and staging earlier gets more mass to GEO. That's called a "subsync" orbit and SpaceX has talked 2 customers into doing that with 3 satellites so far: Telstar 19V, Telstar 18V, and Hispasat 30W-6.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/launches/gto_performanc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/launches/gto_performance)

In these latter 3 examples, the customer saved ~ $30mm on the launch by staying within the reusable F9 mass limit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Elon Musk's biography is no less than a thriller :)

Short Story :

He once took Tesla Model S (not fully developed) to his home from tesla HQ. The next morning, he came back with more 40 changes to be made. And yes, he remembered all those changes after more than 12+ hrs.</comment>


Ask HN: List must watch documentary and movies for hacker - <AUTHOR>
 Making a list for something like documentary of the network world and hacking stuff that all levels of computer engineers and hackers cannot miss to watch <comment><USER2> Takedown (2000) [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/)

Antitrust (2001) [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/)

<comment><USER3> Second the motion for _Antitrust_. It wasn't a big commercial hit, but it's fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dr. Strangelove. There are at least a couple incidents in the movie where mundane technical failure contributes to catastrophe, and where technical safeguards that rely on "human in the loop" fail because of humans.

The wikipedia article is itself as worth reading as watching the film. Bait: it mentions John von Neumann. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove)</comment>


Understanding Bert Transformer: Is Attention All You Need? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/synapse-dev/understanding-bert-transformer-attention-isnt-all-you-need-5839ebd396db <comment><USER2> Attention is not quite all you need: [https://medium.com/octavian- ai/attention-is-not-quite-all-yo...](https://medium.com/octavian-ai/attention- is-not-quite-all-you-need-cb605ef3aff6)</comment>


DeepstreamHub: a faster Firebase with an open core - <AUTHOR> https://deepstreamhub.com/#main <comment><USER2> I don't see any benchmarks showing this as "faster." Seems like a pretty serious claim.

From the Firebase JavaScript SDK, I can do one thousand individual gets with a 3.4k payload at 1-2ms each. [http://jsfiddle.net/katowulf/8wkon62c/](http://jsfiddle.net/katowulf/8wkon62c/)

Mileage varies, of course, but I'd love to see a benchmark I can run side by side that can beat those numbers. I can't even get close with a simple GET, which returns in 86ms.

<comment><USER3> also: [https://deepstream.io/info/performance/four-billion- messages...](https://deepstream.io/info/performance/four-billion-messages-per- hour/)

direct benchmarks are something that Firebase' Terms and Conditions make hard to do

<comment><USER4> Benches just aren't meant for this type of analysis.

Two different engines doing two different things.

Benches are for recording "personal best" stats, not "laps at the public pool". I.e. Testing against self and not others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not exactly Firebase in that it doesn't provide an arbitrarily nested JSON structure as a datastore but more of a document-based approach. Overall a pretty good alternative to Firebase but there is no security rules, no default data store or auth so you need a lot more work. Lists are not very good being just a record with an array of record keys and not the actual data. I use the self-hosted version (deepstream.io) at work where we can't use Firebase because of company policy and regulations.

<comment><USER6> We switched from firebase to deepstream, and are hosting it ourselves.

With firebase since we were not running a node or java app, we ended up relying heavily on the rest interface. Which was sort of the not well taken care of. We would see crazy spikes and we could not get support to fix it. Multi tenancy would occasionally cause other performance issues.

We eneded up running a bit of a monkey patched system for awhile using kineses to pipe updates to a java/node app which then would write updates via the web socket interface.

Firebase also lacked support for pub/sub events, which can be sort of faked, but not entirely reliably.

Deepstream model is a bit different as you said, and it does have some weaknesses. I have submitted a number of patches already to fix some of the edge cases i've run into and will likely submit more.

Unlike firebase, we can actually directly improve the deepstream application core as well as build options into the platform that better support our use cases.

<comment><USER5> Yes. Firebase needs your apps to written in JS or Java. The lack of support for pub/sub was never a problem for me though since the channelRef.push(msg).remove() works 100% reliably.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like deepstream.io.

We use it in production. The use case is actually Server <-> Server communication and so far it works good.

</comment><comment><USER8> What exactly can be replaced with DeepstreamHub if your are using Firebase right now?

<comment><USER3> deepstreamHub's records can be used instead of Firebase's realtime db/data- sync part, deepstream's events are a replacement for their lately added PubSub capabilities. deepstreamHub does request response as well while Firebase offers integration with numerous Google services.

The core differences are in the way deepstreamHub structures its data (small, related documents with independent lifecycles rather than one big data tree), its speed and open core

<comment><USER8> Ok, so this is really a replacement for Firebase realtime database, which is 1 of >25 services that Firebase offer nowadays. Right?

<comment><USER3> that's true - Firebase is pretty much a Gateway to google's cloud and add- platform. deepstreamHub is an alternative to Firebase core (or what Firebase used to be pre Google acquisition)

<comment><USER8> Thanks.

(Still looks good!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very interesting, I like that it's open. PubNub was on my mind, but I would need to look into this. If anyone has any experiences with PubNub vs DeepstreamHub, I'd love to know.

</comment><comment><USER10> So, is this equivalent of Realm Mobile Platform[1]? I found realm to be convenient to use in mobile apps. Haven't tried the mobile platform yet. Anyone here can give a quick comparison of RMP and DeepstreamHub?

[1]: [https://realm.io/products/realm-mobile- platform/](https://realm.io/products/realm-mobile-platform/)

<comment><USER11> They're quite different. In particular, the Realm Mobile Platform is built on a full-blown database running on the user's device. One of Realm's biggest selling points is offline-first applications. As far as I can tell, this is not the case with Deepstream.

<comment><USER12> Just to build on what mwcampbell said (and in full disclosure, I'm on the team at Realm).

Architecturally, Realm and DeepstreamHub are quite different. Realm at its core is a distributed object database that updates changes to objects in realtime. DeepstreamHub, as far as I can tell, relies on a pub/sub and request/response architecture. They are two fundamentally different approaches to the challenge of realtime.

One of the biggest advantages with Realm is that you work with your objects in your native programming language, there's no JSON or ORMs to deal with, just your live objects that update automatically in the local datastore as changes are made on another sync'd client or on the server.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the explanation. I should try out both with this understanding to see which approach is more suitable for different situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's great to see so many choices for IoT infrastructure.

<comment><USER14> co-founder/techie @ deepstreamHub

I completely agree! One of the reasons we started is because we believe we have an interesting way of getting devices of all types ( IoT / browsers / phones.. etc ) talking together to generate new ways of displaying and moving data.

At the end of the day the selection of choices such as the eclipse iot project [https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/iot](https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/iot), [https://relayr.io/](https://relayr.io/), aws IoT gateways, (shameless plug) deepstream.io and many others allow developers to stop having to think about how to get devices to communicate, but instead think about what they want it to do. I'm slightly overly passionate about this because my bachelor project a decade ago was around smart homes and I spent the majority of the time trying to get protocols to collaborate happily, where now that's just considered part of boiler plate setup! Really excited to see the potential outcome due to this general movement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How does this compare with [https://horizon.io/](https://horizon.io/)?

<comment><USER16> Interesting, I though horizon is dead (because Rethink went down). Last news I heard was them going with LF but haven't seen much updates after that

<comment><USER17> Give it some time.

<comment><USER18> Can you provide more information regarding this reply? My opinion is if a service goes dark, I probably shouldn't consider using it.

<comment><USER19> Recently we had a meeting about the next phase of the project now that Horizon and RethinkDB are owned by the linux foundation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG0aucGzJE8&t=279s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG0aucGzJE8&t=279s)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Competitor here, please don't become an "open core" company - "Open Core" = "Crippleware".

Here is my thoughts/arguments around it, dealing with the RethinkDB and Parse shut down as well: [https://hackernoon.com/the-implications-of-rethinkdb-and- par...](https://hackernoon.com/the-implications-of-rethinkdb-and-parse- shutdowns-c076460058f7)

Plus, was invited to speak about it on the Changelog Podcast: [https://changelog.com/podcast/236](https://changelog.com/podcast/236)

Please stay truly open :) that way we can still compete. ;) Or else we'll be the only company that is fully Open Source (replication, auto failover, etc.)!

<comment><USER21> Leaving aside how odd it is to see a "competitor" give business model advice, open core is a perfectly fine open-source business model. Pure support based models, with very few exceptions, leave too much % of value on the table to make a strong business. Purely closed models take away too many freedoms from the customer (but can be very successful nonetheless.) Open core is a very reasonable compromise. The problem with InfluxDB is that they pulled a bait and switch - they launched looking like they were going to be fully open, and then went back on that later.

But at the end of the day any compromising on open-source ideals is going to piss someone off - heck even just choosing one OS license over another is going to piss people off. It doesn't matter. In business you need to have a thick skin to stick to your conviction about what is best for both customers and the company - whatever that may be.

<comment><USER22> I tend to agree with the OP and think very similarly along these lines:

[https://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/19/rotten-to-the- open-...](https://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/19/rotten-to-the-open-core/)

A purely services based model is difficult, but so is open core. With open core you compete against yourself. Look no further than Nginx as an example and how lousy it is to do things like say a http healthcheck of HEAD /status. In haproxy it is trivial, it can be done in nginx plus, but not the oss version (at least it wasn't supported in any of the versions I tried a year ago sans the commercial version). When you compete against yourself you get put in a difficult situation "Does this valuable user contribution to my OSS project compete with my commercial fork?" and that is just all around a bad situation to be in for the community and for the company.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Tomato-Pie – A New UI for Pomodoro Technique - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/t9tio/tomato-pie <comment><USER2> There's a typo on your alert.

"You are doing an tomato now, if you start a new one, the urrent one will be abandoned."

It should be "a tomato" and "current"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing it out</comment></comment>


Is Android Forking from Linux? - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/open-source/95221/is-android-forking-linux <comment><USER2> Android has never been recognizably Linux -- their systems code is almost entirely written as if it were running on an early 80s UNIX and they had to invent all their own modern facilities. Not surprising considering that it was all done by the crew that developed the Sidekick, which was based on a heavily hacked NetBSD.

See Matthew Garret's appraisal of it: <http://mjg59.livejournal.com/100221.html> \-- especially in contrast to his review of WebOS: <http://mjg59.livejournal.com/111453.html>

<comment><USER3> At the time that any of the Android people were at Danger, the Sidekick had its own custom OS written from the ground up. There was talk of switching to NetBSD in the distant future but it hadn't happened yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems to be only speaking of drivers (the _/drivers/android_ directory, to be specific), which by nature don't need to be part of the kernel itself, hence there is no apparent fork. That's my understanding, anyway.

Not that a fork is really a bad thing, the term has gotten a bad reputation for undeserved reasons.

At any rate, gaining acceptance into the main kernel tree can be a big deal for a driver project, but I don't think this is a problem for Android.

[edit: looks like I may have read just enough to be dangerous]

<comment><USER5> If you read Greg's blog, linked in the article, you can see that this isn't just about the drivers.

Android has introduced big new pieces of code into the Kernel including a security model called OpenBinder, a power management system called "wake locks" and a new framebuffer system. The trouble is Linux already had a security model, power management APIs and framebuffers before Android came along. So, it is alot of work to get all of this code into a shape that will mesh with what already exists in Kernel.org.

It is a fork of the Kernel at a very core level.

Getting the drivers in is just a small part of the work since it is nearly pointless getting drivers without merging in all of the things above that make Android, well, Android.

But, Google hasn't shown much resolve in fixing up its code and working with upstream.

<comment><USER6> While true, Google engineers have stated that they want the android source to be in the mainstream kernel "in a long term" and i happen to believe that.

It's just not on top of their priority list, which is fine for me. I'd rather have bugfixes and things like that as a focus before kernel inclusion. Eventually Google should hire a developer dedicated to that task. Plus, it's not like they are developing in the dark, everyone has access to <http://android.git.kernel.org/> and is free to use it.

Also, we can hardly speak of a fork, as new android versions are based on newer kernel versions, which means their work has to be somewhat flexible and compatible enough to catch up with newer kernels, anyway.

Also, as i tend to think google engineers are not _that_ dumb, there may be very good reasons to write a specialized security model or framebuffer system. They probably didn't rewrite that stuff just because of the fun of it.

<comment><USER5> Having a public git tree and rebasing to new versions doesn't make it less of a fork.

When I have forked projects to customize them for my own use I make the git tree public and rebase on top of the origin project to get bug fixes. Just as Android is. That doesn't mean upstream will ever take my code or that they should.

What are the good reasons for binder and wake locks? I have followed LKML discussions about them and no one has a great argument for them. If you are interested there are a great many thoughtful discussions about them e.g. [http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.power- management.general...](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.power- management.general/13016)

And I haven't seen the statements from Google that they want to merge with the Kernel long term either.

<comment><USER6> "We (Google) definitely want to get back in sync with mainline (as I've mentioned earlier in this or a related thread), and we're planning on snapping up our kernel trees to 2.6.32+ once we get past various deadlines in the near future."

yep, LKML is they place they talk about it ;) -> [http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/905490/focus=9073...](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/905490/focus=907382)

As for the wakelock: I'm clearly not that deep into kernel development, but the thread looks like there is also no real point against wakelocks and the android developer seems to have points as to why he did what he did. In the end, we will see if their next attempt to kernel inclusion is sane and has good points to it.

Thanks for the interesting link, though! I guess i'll read up a bit on that. :)

<comment><USER6> Linus from [http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2010/02/happy- camper.htm...](http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2010/02/happy-camper.html):

I don't worry about out-of-tree development for odd devices too much. I wish we could merge android, but I also accept it likely being a few years away. We had similar out-of-tree issues with the SGI extreme scalability stuff, and it took quite a while before the standard kernel merged all of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While it's not exactly related to the kernel, Matt Porter's presentation slides about Android and the discussion that followed in lwn raise some good points about the state of Android in the linux development community: <http://lwn.net/Articles/360343/>

</comment><comment><USER8> Why is this a big deal?

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure if you know much about linux kernel development, but it always was centralized, dividing efforts would be awful to linux kernel developers that works in the embedded devices market.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Google Analytics Realtime reviews? - <AUTHOR>

Have you gotten access to google realtime analytics yet? If so, how is it and how does it compare to other products (woopra, chartbeat)? <comment><USER2> I just wrote this, [http://text.krona.tm/post/11195455994/realtime-stats-with- go...](http://text.krona.tm/post/11195455994/realtime-stats-with-google- analytics)

Its cool, but it needs more work.</comment>


Why manufacturing jobs are coming back to the U.S. as companies buy more robots - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/5/26/15656120/manufacturing-jobs-automation-ai-us-increase-robot-sales-reshoring-offshoring <comment><AUTHOR> Title edited for space.</comment>


Why your previous developer was terrible - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/506a06ae35ea

<comment><USER2> Sometimes the previous developer really is that bad.

I inherited a colleagues work after she left. One cron Job to launch a Python script - auto-everything.py. Which in turn spawned new shells to launch a load more scripts. One script even launched itself with new arguments. So trying to work out where stuff was failing was a nightmare, before I even got to look at the code.

Then the fun really began. Functions within functions, not to anything smart - just because she hadn't bothered to work out how the module system works. Few comments which were fairly useless "#Open file" above an open file statement (what the hell is contained in the file??? Add that to your comment). 'Indexes' and 'indexes' used as variable names in that function. Big nested hash structures with no explanation to its structure, or what it was for.

</comment><comment><USER3> I often find that even when looking back on my own projects from just a few months ago - projects that are 100% my own creations - I'm often horrified at design decisions I made.

There really is something to be said for the advantage of having the complete picture laid out in a working implementation over crafting something from scratch with only abstractions to work with.

I've grown to greatly respect projects that do what they're supposed to do regardless of their whacky and inelegant implementations. Sure I could rewrite it to cut out half the bloat, but so could the guy who wrote this version.

<comment><USER2> I find the same thing sometimes. Though I usually use that as an opportunity to ask, why it is so bad, and what it would look like if it was done properly. Refactor from there if I have the time. If I don't have the time to refactor, at least write a comment explaining the nasty part - that way it should be easier to comprehend the next time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I skimmed it honestly, it didn't hold my attention long enough but your opening paragraphs were good and I definitely agree with what the article was saying.

Also the current dev has no idea what the old dev's payment was like either and I feel like this could be a huge deciding factor in the quality of work provided by the old dev.

</comment><comment><USER5> The thought expressed in the post reminds me of Norman Kerth's Retrospective Prime Directive [1], [2]:

"Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand. At the end of a project everyone knows so much more. Naturally we will discover decisions and actions we wish we could do over. This is wisdom to be celebrated, not judgement used to embarrass."

[1] 'Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews', Norman Kerth

[2] [http://www.retrospectives.com/pages/retroPrimeDirective.html](http://www.retrospectives.com/pages/retroPrimeDirective.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> At my last company, I was working on a Java EE Struts app. After a few months of despairing over how bad it was, I realized that it was built by database people. That's why most of the logic was in sprocs, and they had no clue of what thread safety was, or how to build a HTML widget and menu system that consistently worked. Thank goodness that they knew about parametrized SQL.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've found that no matter how good you were, as soon as you're gone you're fair game for being scapegoated.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Would love any feedback

<comment><USER8> I really enjoyed this article, thanks.

As you point out, we're all guilty of being on both sides of this. Just recently I took ownership of a project for a couple of months while it was transitioned between companies. I found myself in the curious position of being aware of being the scapegoat. It made me really aware of defending the previous team as I knew full well there would be code I'd written that would get bad mouthed if that culture was created. It was suitably humbling.</comment></comment>


A Small Look into the GameCube's Copy Filter - <AUTHOR> https://ppltoast.wordpress.com/2018/05/11/a-small-look-into-the-gamecubes-copy-filter/ <comment><USER2> I'm interested to know how others feel about browsing through random issues on some open-source project like this out of boredom. As someone who struggles finding the time to commit to entire features in my spare time, knowing there are lurkers who could piece together a PR from commits to abandoned forks or getting intouch with developers on discord (for example) is quite inspiring!

</comment><comment><USER3> If anyone wants to submit a GameCube PR, it would be awesome to get 8-cube Mario Kart: Double Dash working on the Wii!

[https://github.com/FIX94/Nintendont/issues/144](https://github.com/FIX94/Nintendont/issues/144)

<comment><USER4> Posting that issue into an unrelated thread is not the way to get it done.

I'm not sure how you're involved in that project but that issue thread is absolutely not how to run an open source project, or even how to get an issue fixed.

You've got people offering to help and then a tonne of hangers-on. The issue needs to be split into very defined tasks and worked on methodically - otherwise it's just going to sit there and accumulate more noise for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Man, this was so cool.</comment>


Cable modem hacker faces up to 40 years in prison - <AUTHOR> http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/21489.cfm

<comment><USER2> This isn't someone who modded cable modems for the joy of exploration. He tried to build a business on devices that stole service from Comcast.

<comment><USER3> Assuming Comcast has a bandwidth cap, by spoofing real MAC addresses he's basically stealing other users' bandwidth.

But then again, people steal wifi all the time.

<comment><USER4> There's also no reason to spoof the MAC addresses of real subscribers.

If your modem's external MAC isn't in Comcast's (global!) subscriber table, they give your modem a "walledgarden" default configuration file that causes it to reset frequently, and a poisoned DHCP DNS that directs all queries to their "Subscribe Now!" webserver.

Some of the European ISPs have countermeasures that rotate the names of the configs frequently, but Comcast doesn't do that -- if you've modified your modem, all you have to do is have your modem ask for a different config file (the names of which it will sniff from your neighbors), and set a different DNS server on the modem's immediate clients.</comment></comment></comment>


One Island Grows 80% of the World's Vanilla - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/where-is-vanilla-grown <comment><USER2> And it's even grown only in 2 very specific regions in the north of the island (where most of the cocoa production also come from). There's still huge opportunities if you have enough money and appetite for adventure to start a trading or setting up a plantation. 1ha yields on average 300-400 kg of dried vanilla, a process that takes on average 6-8 months from manual pollination to end of drying. Madagascar is quite strict on land property though, and it's one of the hot topics on the political landscape right now, foreign investors most of the time work with trusted local proxy to set up the business. I myself plan to trip to the vanilla producing region in the following months to see how it works, would be so cool to run a vanilla startup. One more thing, vanilla extract and vanilla caviar are even more valuable than the dried vanilla, and still at the hands of very few businesses. P.S. I live in Madagascar

<comment><USER3> A "vanilla startup" is perhaps one of the most interesting ideas I've read in HN comments these past few weeks.

If I may ask, are you from Madagascar or an expat? This is all quite new information to me so I am fascinated to learn more. Are there any sources you would recommend?

<comment><USER4> OT, but why are immigrants called expats when they're from anglophone nations?

<comment><USER5> This might get me some flak, but IMHO it's an unconscious double standard for many people and it's also not exclusive to the English language.

Germans do something similar, a German who moves to another country, even if it's Thailand for retirement or because life in Germany supposedly doesn't work for them, is called an "Auswanderer" and usually has a rather positive connotation of being "worldly" and well traveled.

Guess how many people call immigrants "Einwanderer" with a positive connotation? Pretty much nobody.

Some might argue there's an economic dimension to this, like German pensioners bringing their money to the other country, but that also doesn't always apply: There are plenty of Germans who are migrating because they have economic troubles in Germany and think they could work it better elsewhere.

As unbelievable as that might sound to most people outside of Germany, there are so many of them that VOX Germany has a whole Docu-Soap about Germans migrating to other countries, and it's been running for nearly 12 years with great success [0].

[0] [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodbye_Deutschland!_Die_Auswa...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodbye_Deutschland!_Die_Auswanderer)

<comment><USER6> I don't think it matters what they are called. The connotations are attached to the people, not the word. Change the words and it becomes a euphemism treadmill.

<comment><USER5> > The connotations are attached to the people, not the word.

Language is a living thing.

If you reserve usage of certain terminology to specific people, then negative connotations can easily attach themselves to both of them in combination, thus fundamentally changing how positive/negative certain terminology is perceived by the general population.

We've been witnessing this live, in reality, for these past years: If you talk about "immigrant crime" often enough many people will see most, if not all, crime in the context of supposedly increasing immigration.

Completely ignoring any other contributing factors to crime, completely ignoring actual crime statistics and trends. [0]

[0] [https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and- analysis/statistics/...](https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and- analysis/statistics/reports-on-world-crime-trends.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A slightly more up-beat version: A single county in Pennsylvania grows 50% of the mushrooms in the United States.

[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/this-small- pennsylvania-...](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/this-small-pennsylvania- region-produces-half-the-mushroom-crop-in-the-u-s)

<comment><USER8> Another interesting geographically focused product is rhubarb and the 9 square mile Rhubarb Triangle: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhubarb_Triangle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhubarb_Triangle)

At one point they grew 90% of the worlds forced rhubarb (a special kind of rhubarb grown indoors).

<comment><USER9> Weird that rhubarb is native to Russia and yet I've never seen it commercially grown there. My folks had a few plants grown in our _ogorod_ , and made a delicious drink out of it. But now that I live in the city, I don't see any rhubarb jelly or drinks in the supermarkets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > it's one of the few regions with the right climate that is also poor enough > to make laborious hand-pollination affordable

It's not like I didn't know that this is how the world works, but this specific case is even more of a slap in the face. It's kinda fucked up to think that in the local specialty store merely a couple pods of vanilla (a few grams each) go for 6-7 dollars, but these folks live in poverty. But more fucked up is the implication that to keep vanilla prices down we specifically maintain these conditions, because of cheap labor.

Oh well, the artificial stuff for me from now on.

<comment><USER11> Just because there is cheap labor here does not mean they live in poverty; in fact they do not. The cost and standard of living is much lower so the wage is not as bad as you think. Sure they don't drive BMWs and don't get their coffee at Starbucks or have a $1000 iphone but they are far from living in "poverty"; since the definition of "poverty" is poorly constructed. In any case lets say we accept they live in poverty - the agricultural sales of this product and other such products are all they have to hope for. The main problem is with the years if government/military corruption and strife. If that was rid of the country would be wealthy. By not buying their products you help to worsen the poverty; if you do buy, there is hope that the money will eventually improve things. But if they have no money - things will not be improved and this market will shift elsewhere eventually.

[http://www.borgenmagazine.com/why-is-madagascar- poor/](http://www.borgenmagazine.com/why-is-madagascar-poor/)

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure if you're trying to argue whether or not many Malagasy people live in poverty, but assuming you are: have you been to Madagascar?

Much of the island's vanilla is grown in the northeast region of the country, called the SAVA region, named after the towns of Sambava, Andapa, Vohemar, and Anthala. The sole overland connection to the rest of the island is a dirt road that goes through desert and is nearly impassable during the rainy season; during the dry season, it can take 6-8 hours to traverse. Other options are either lengthy boat trips or flights. Many of the Malagasy people live in huts that are either bamboo or corrugated metal, with little or no indoor plumbing and small solar panels for electricity. Over 100 people died last year from an out break of the bubonic plague due to very poor healthcare. If that is not poverty, what is?

That said, many of the Malagasy people do seem quite happy despite the living conditions.

<comment><USER13> Maybe if GP had said "extreme poverty" it would have been more true.

The world has lots of poverty, but we are on track to rid ourselves of extreme poverty. Hopefully, it'll keep going up from there...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Growing your own vanilla isn't difficult, but it requires more greenhouse space than you might imagine. The plant grows like a vine, and it'll need to reach about 20' with multiple points of ground contact before producing pods.

 _(as explained to me by an orchid enthusiast)_

<comment><USER15> AS someone _with_ vanilla, I'm gonna disagree with you a bit here.

Growing your own vanilla is very difficult ( __assuming you 're not in a place where it grows outside naturally). Not only do you need a significant amount of greenhouse space (you're right--20' minimum to flower, but the vines can grow up to 120'), you also need all the very specific orchid growing conditions--low water/nutrient, high drainage soil (or bark or similar medium), high brightness (but medium direct sun--can't let 'em burn), along with a very high humidity (vanilla orchids grow best ~80-90% humidity) and high heat (ideally not dipping any lower than 15 C, but with a bit of wiggle room). They have aerial roots, so you also need to mist with diluted nutrient mix (preferably an x-x-x fertilizer (eg: 20-20-20)) for them to get any particular growth benefit.

Assuming you can provide these conditions, you'll have to continue to provide these conditions for ~5-7 years, which is how long vanilla takes to grow from seed. Most people, however, take clippings from already healthy plants. Clippings need all the same care and effort of growing from seed, but won't flower 'til they're established and ~20 feet long (and the temperature controls are on-point for flowering), so how long they take depends on a bunch of factors, but even for a 3' clipping, you're looking at ~5 years.

So, let's say you have flowering-capable vines, at least 20', properly cared for with appropriate temperature controls to compel flowering. The vanilla flowers for _one day_. Furthermore, the pollination of the one-day flower must occur by hand (you _cannot_ use natural pollinators--there's only one species of bee capable of pollinating this thing and they're not only isolated to a very specific geographic location, but they're also rather rare).

Presuming your pollination is successful it still takes, at this about, about 9-10 months for the vanilla pods to form. You'll get long green-bean lookin' things. You have to pick them as they begin to turn yellow--kinda like bananas. But the fun doesn't stop here. At this point you _still_ have to blanche the yellowing beans, then let them sweat in a container for several weeks until you _finally_ end up with usable vanilla pods that you might find in a store.

The process is extremely involved, incredibly time consuming and each step has a number of 'gotchas' that will ruin your vine/flowering/pollination/beans. The big effort is literally just keeping up with the very specific humidity/light/temperature/nutrient requirements for so long to even get it _to be_ flowering capable.

<comment><USER16> Wow, that is insane. I wonder if there is some kind of opportunity here for automation and vertical farming to create economies of scale for the mass production of vanilla?

<comment><USER15> The big problem is the manual pollination and harvesting. Growing the vanilla can be done with a suitable climate in many tropical locales, but pollination requires a lot of care--you need to balance getting deep enough to actually pollinate the plant with being gentle enough to not destroy the plant. Most vanilla farmers have special tools they use to cut away parts of the flower and quickly pollinate it.

<comment><USER17> For pollination, a hummingbird-sized drone is not as far-fetched as it might sound.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I paid $32 for a 32oz jug of vanilla extract off Amazon back in 2015.

I just checked and the same container is now $140! [1]

I'm going to have to start rationing!

Check out the price graph:

[https://camelcamelcamel.com/Nielsen-Massey-Madagascar- Bourbo...](https://camelcamelcamel.com/Nielsen-Massey-Madagascar-Bourbon- Vanilla-Extract/product/B001GE8N4Y)

[1] - [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001GE8N4Y/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_qJtl...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001GE8N4Y/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_qJtlBbV1156XV)

<comment><USER19> Why so much? Do you own a bakery or something?

<comment><USER18> Haha. No, but it never goes bad and I really liked paying $1/oz instead of more like $4/oz for the tiny bottles at the supermarket.

I do tend to make French toast for the kids a couple times a week, so we do use quite a bit. I usually just kinda splash it in the bowl, I guess I have to start measuring now!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is that really a problem if you can supply the world's needs with 5 plants?

One of the older "life hacks" is to put a teaspoon of vanilla extract in the oven to make the house smell better. Speaking from experience: don't use more than that or you will regret it. I couldn't visit their house for a week.

<comment><USER21> Which 5 plants are you referring to?

<comment><USER22> Probably: rice, wheat, cassava, potato, banana?

You obviously need to eat some other stuff occasionally, but those plants are the staple diet for a large chunk of the world population.

<comment><USER23> It is old, but potato alone will get you pretty far: [https://www.livescience.com/10163-man-eating- potatoes-2-mont...](https://www.livescience.com/10163-man-eating- potatoes-2-months.html)

I'd need some variety just so I didn't go insane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> One island the size of France.

<comment><USER25> Ya exactly. It might technically be an island, but calling it that makes it sound way smaller than it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> To save you a click, that island is Madagascar.

<comment><USER27> Ok, thanks, but there's more to the article than what island it is.

<comment><USER26> I agree the article is interesting in itself, however the title is needlessly clickbaity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Keep in mind that 5/6ths of the vanillin used for flavoring is synthetic.

<comment><USER29> Imitation vanilla extract is also better in many cases as it can tolerate the high heat of baking where natural vanilla doesn't do as well.

<comment><USER30> Although technically correct, imitation is a deceptive term. Vanillin is the key flavoring agent found in vanilla. Synthesizing vanillin is not creating an imitation, it is synthesizing the exact same compound that exists in nature.

There is literally no point in growing vanilla to extract vanillin if vanillin can be synthesized artificially for much cheaper. Though if you're going for compounds other than vanillin that exist within the vanilla plant itself... that's a different story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've found fake vanilla extract to be indistinguishable in all cooking, and far cheaper. I'm far more worried about the world's coffee supplies. :/

<comment><USER32> Madagascar provides 0.3% of the world's coffee-- you'll be fine :-) [http://www.ico.org/prices/po-production.pdf](http://www.ico.org/prices/po- production.pdf)

Artificial vanilla flavoring (vanillin) is actually preferred for many applications where the alcohol in true vanilla extract can't evaporate off and will harm the flavor more than the extra aromatic compounds will help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> There are tons of plants that have the same flavor profile as vanilla, just not ones that retain their flavor when dried for years on end. But if you're just making ice cream, you could just as easily use black locust flowers or whatever and no one would know the difference.

<comment><USER34> Sure, most natural flavorings have artificial substitutes, but there is a market for the natural products even if nobody could really distinguish them by taste alone.

<comment><USER35> This comment reads a bit like a non-sequitur, given Alex was talking about natural substitutes for vanilla, and not artificial ones.

<comment><USER34> Good point, hastily written and deserves the down votes :). I really meant to say that some people want natural vanilla, and will pay for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is any one else going to call bull on Madagascar being described as "One Island" It's the size of the entire North East. It's twice the size of Britain.

The rest of the article's fine, but, really, click-bait much.

</comment><comment> huy-nguyen You can dive into more details about world trade in vanilla (who export/import it and to whom, how has the composition of exporters/importers changed over time etc) with this app:

[http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/?country=undefined&part...](http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/?country=undefined&partner=undefined&product=730&productClass=HS&startYear=undefined&target=Product&year=2016)

Disclaimer: I'm part of the team that made the app.

</comment><comment><USER37> Pro tip: if you're near the border or a Mexican grocery store, Mexican Vanilla is _absurdly_ cheaper!

<comment><USER38> And right now, if you're anywhere else, you can't get Mexican vanilla at all. Last year I got a half a pound for $55, today the usual dealers are all out. What vanilla they have is going for $300 or more per pound. Back in 2005, when there was a similar shortage, the market collapsed almost literally overnight when there was a better harvest in Madagascar, but there's really high demand now. A few years ago you could get PNG vanilla for $20 per pound.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> > In 1841, one young innovator figured out an unlikely solution. Edmond Albius > was a 12-year-old slave on the French-controlled island of Réunion, in the > Indian Ocean. Using a stick and his thumb, Albius pushed together the male > anthers and female stigma of the vanilla flower, pollinating it efficiently.

Did nobody think of this until years after vanilla was discovered? Really?

What's really interesting is how comparative advantage takes shape. There's several everyday products that originate in just one or a few places. Additional question: why isn't Mexico the main producer?

<comment><USER40> Because every single vanilla pod needs to be hand pollinated, and the labor in Mexico is too expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> *One island roughly the size of Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois combined.

</comment><comment><USER42> It's quite delicate work to hand pollinate vanilla orchids this guy tried it [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_Pguwl9c1Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_Pguwl9c1Q)

</comment><comment><USER43> Why they don't they grow it in Mexico? I'm missing something I know. It would seem that having bees pollinate the vanilla flowers in Mexico would be cheaper than having people do it in Madagascar. Thoughts?

<comment><USER44> It's like this with almost all crops. In their natural habitat there are also pests which has evolved to parasite the plant. This usually makes large scale agriculture difficult or even impossible. By moving a crop to some place far away you remove the natural enemies of the crop, which makes growing the crop much easier, at least for a grace period of a few decades, or even a few centuries.

<comment><USER43> Thanks! Learned something new today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The silver:vanilla ratio really drove home that it's not just "location, location, location" but the rise in global population _and_ global incomes drives the value of 'location'.

</comment><comment><USER46> Madagascar isn't the smallest island on Earth, you know.

<comment><USER47> Indeed, Madagascar is larger than many nations. It's not surprising that a single nation should dominate trade in a particular good. About 60% of the world's cork comes from the Spain and Portugal which together have about the same landmass as Madagascar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I wonder why they can't import the necessary bees and eliminate most of the manual labor from the process?

<comment><USER49> An interesting challenge: build a small tree/pole-climbing robot that would methodically pollinate all flowers (manipulators, image recognition).

<comment><USER50> See my reply to a comment with the same great grand parent. It's suprisingly complicated and seems tricky for even skilled humans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Isn't the real question, whether or not we can cultivate the Melipona bee in greenhouses?

</comment><comment><USER52> Something similar is the case with Maple syrup.

<comment><USER53> The island of Canada.

<comment><USER52> Not really. A very large %age of Canadian Maple syrup comes from St. Josephs Island in Ontario.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> One island grows 99% of the world's kangaroos.

</comment><comment><USER55> So, I assume everyone else's first thought after reading this was: Let's build a vanilla flower pollination robot using deep learning to process RGB camera images and help guide the robot actuators. Startup, anyone?

Edit: turns out this is, in fact, not a unique thought:

"Implementation of Automated Vanilla Pollination Robotic Crane Prototype, 2017":

[https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1109/SYSOSE.2017.79949...](https://sci- hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1109/SYSOSE.2017.7994929)

(No deep learning, but I guess these people weren't desperate for funding.)

<comment><USER56> I think if you could work a blockchain in there somewhere you might have an idea worth funding. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Bill Penzey likes to send out political emails to his customers as well. He requested that Trump voters apologize. It's hard to take anything he says seriously because of his poor business acumen.

</comment><comment><USER58> One island contains 100% of the world's Mongolians — Eurasia.

<comment><USER59> I'm sure there are Mongolians living in the United States and elsewhere.</comment></comment>


People Are Walking Architecture, or making NearlyNets with MujiComp - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/doc/31533915/People-Are-Walking-Architecture-or-making-NearlyNets-with-MujiComp-January-2010 <comment><USER2> If any of the scribd guys are about, you might get some good beta-testing action out of automatically redirecting iPhones to the html5 version ;)</comment>


Go 1.10 is released - <AUTHOR> https://blog.golang.org/go1.10 <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16395242](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16395242).

</comment><comment><USER3> Release notes link is here [https://golang.org/doc/go1.10](https://golang.org/doc/go1.10), it's in the blog post linked as well but I think it's definitely worth reading through the notes.

I always enjoy reading the release notes for a Go version bump.</comment>