Obama administration urges FCC to require carriers to unlock mobile devices - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/obama-administration-urges-fcc-to-require-carriers-to-unlock-mobile-devices/2013/09/17/17b4917e-1fd4-11e3-b7d1-7153ad47b549_print.html <comment><USER2> So, just a quick bit of context here. While the NTIA ask for a rulemaking from the FCC is awesome, we'll see whether the FCC actually act upon it. Based on the most recent statement from the FCC, they're still trying to get carriers to come to a voluntary agreement (i.e. regulate themselves) which would mean less work for the FCC.

Either way, the real issue at the heart of unlocking is fixing the anti- circumvention provisions of the DMCA, which would open up the market so that private parties can freely develop and distribute unlocking software. We've been lobbying for this in DC making some degree of progress, but even the best legislation out there right now is quite far from perfect.

<comment><USER3> They are not going to change anything related to the DMCA as part of this. It is totally just posturing, and get ready for more of it- they need a lot of PR for people to forget that Putin made Obama, winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, look like a warmongering asshole. That and the naval base shooting has made for a rough past 2 weeks on the administration.

But I think that everyone should seize this opportunity to make them put their money where their mouth is. Demand to your senators and the administration that not only allow device unlocking, but allow choosing cable channels we want to pay for, get rid of all unwarranted software and tech patents, make digital rights management uncovered under the law, and stay the heck away from the internet except to enforce the protection of children from predators, but in a way that doesn't involve nonsensical dns hijinks- just track them down and jail them or remove their sex organs.

<comment><USER4> As a general supporter of Obama, I still don't understand him being awarded that prize...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey White House, can I have my privacy back? I'll settle for a locked cell phone if I can call friends without it being reported back to you.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I have to wonder if their renewed interest in this is a PR move to distract from more serious tech issues.

<comment><USER7> Because you can't care about one tech issue without marching in intellectual lockstep with the nerderatti on all tech issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For what it's worth, as someone who does not unlock, I see this as potentially negative. Why? Because the so-called "Unlocking Technology Act", among other initiatives, has been using the clout of the unlocking issue to promote essentially a wholesale repeal of the DMCA anticircumvention, citing its interference with exploit-based software unlocks as a core justification. This recommendation would require carriers to provide unlocks themselves rather than making hackers do it, which would be much better for unlockers, but obviate the need for circumvention. Yet all the other other use cases harmed by anticircumvention would remain, many of which affect me personally (and probably many HN users), but which might not gather as broad public understanding and support as unlocking currently does.

<comment><USER9> The anticircumvention requirement is one of the worst parts of the DMCA. If that was repealed as a result of this, I'd be _thrilled_.

Can you elaborate on how this eviscerates anticircumvention?

<comment><USER8> What my comment says is that this (the NTIA recommendation that is the subject of the article) might obviate part of the impetus for a pre-existing initiative ([http://fixthedmca.org/unlocking-technology- act.html](http://fixthedmca.org/unlocking-technology-act.html)) that would essentially repeal anticircumvention, and thus could be a bad thing.

Edit: If you want to know what the Unlocking Technology Act would do, see [http://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th/house- bill/1892/text](http://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th/house-bill/1892/text), it's pretty short.

<comment><USER10> That seems to be the same POV that the Librarian took in not renewing the exemption (link from elsewhere in thread): [http://www.eweek.com/mobile/fcc- suggests-congress-create-a-b...](http://www.eweek.com/mobile/fcc-suggests- congress-create-a-bill-to-make-cell-phone-unlocking-legal/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I no longer think "hey! awesome the government is trying to help us out" anymore when I read articles like this. I only think "I wonder what sort of benefits the government and associated business get because of this."

<comment><USER12> Funny... i'm also thinking "What is he about to try to ream us from behind with now, that he's trying to make us look the other way for".

Yeah.. I admit, I voted for him in 2008..

<comment><USER13> You think the other presidential choice would have been better?

You really only have a choice between two identical assholes. There's no point in voting unless America drastically changes its voting system to something more democratic.

<comment><USER14> > You really only have a choice between two identical assholes. There's no > point in voting unless America drastically changes its voting system to > something more democratic.

Some people insist that the entire point of democracy is to restrain power. In that sense, voting for the lesser of two evils is a _perfect_ representation of democracy: you're voting for which set of restraints to put on, not what kind of future you want.

<comment><USER15> I've definitely heard that argument before. I always conclude with the person that our definitions of democracy are not similar.

<comment><USER14> Have you ever tried explicitly defining democracy as part of your conversation? I find it usually helps. Or at least makes them very quiet as they realize they have no idea what they're talking about beyond parroting something they heard once that sounded good as a teenager.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Some argue that making it legal to unlock cellphones could make it too easy for consumers to take copyrighted software between carriers

Eh, like what exactly? AT&T's crappy map software?

<comment><USER17> Yeah great point. They are worried about the crap we wish didn't even come on the phones to begin with.

<comment><USER18> So true, eventually I could see a suit being filed that removing some crappy software is creating a derivative work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The consumer side of me likes this...the libertarian side of me laments it. Why not just go ahead and force Gilette to make their razor's handles fit Schick blades, or have Macs come pre-installed with Windows too, etc? Maybe not 100% perfect analogies, but you get the drift. It's hard to root for the carriers but I dont see how phone locking is entirely unreasonable, and I struggle to see how it's worthy of legislation that outright bans it.

<comment><USER20> It's a little bit different, though, because the government is already enforcing spectrum controls. It's not like you can go out and start your own wireless network on in Verizon's band - the government won't allow it.

<comment><USER19> Except that spectrum has been deemed a public good. The phones that utilize that spectrum are not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Personally, a bigger deal for me would be if they required the carriers to go to move to a "pay to send" for text messages. I hate it that someone else can force me to incur a charge for unwanted text messages.

<comment><USER22> Which carrier does this? I literally cannot think of one, even down to the bare-minimum $15/mo plans from, say, Virgin Mobile. It strikes me as one of those situations that screams "You're being scammed." Is this some flyover local carrier that I'm not aware of (I hear it complained about all the time), or is it some archaic and masochistic plan that people bend themselves over backward to whip themselves with?

Or is it simply that those are the plans that don't offer text messaging? In which case, situations like spamming black pages at remote fax machines come to mind. And all the legal ramifications involved.

<comment><USER23> Yes, you are being scammed, and all US carriers charge for incoming text messages.

AT&T: $0.20 per SMS or $0.30 per MMS, both ways. or text plan for unlimited messages for an additional $20/month

[http://www.att.com/esupport/article.jsp?sid=52588&cv=820#fbi...](http://www.att.com/esupport/article.jsp?sid=52588&cv=820#fbid=R58fP1M93Bv)

Verizon: $0.20 per SMS or $0.25 per MMS, both ways. or text plans an additional $5-$20/month, no unlimited option.

[http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/planMessagingOverla...](http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/planMessagingOverlay.jsp)

Sprint: $0.20 per SMS or $0.25 per MMS, both ways. or text plans an additional $5-$20/month, with $20/month being unlimited.

[http://www.sprint.com/landings/attachables/](http://www.sprint.com/landings/attachables/)

T-Mobile: $0.20 per SMS or MMS, both ways. I think all current plans have unlimited text though, not sure.

[http://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-2825](http://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-2825)

<comment><USER24> I remember getting unlimited texting for $5 a month from Verizon circa 2005, and it was $0.10 per text without the plan. Why are phone plans just getting worse...

<comment><USER23> Here's Consumer Reports complaining about this in 2008:

[http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/aboutus/mission/viewpoint...](http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/aboutus/mission/viewpoint/why- text-messaging-is-too-expensive/overview/text-messaging-ov.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I was completely unaware of the legal issues surrounding cell phone network unlocking. I remember that, in the past, all you had to do was ask your cell carrier to unlock your device and they would comply.

That the present legislation has been enacted shows how some of the people involved in enacting this travesty are as clueless as I am.

[http://www.eweek.com/mobile/fcc-suggests-congress-create- a-b...](http://www.eweek.com/mobile/fcc-suggests-congress-create-a-bill-to- make-cell-phone-unlocking-legal/)

[http://www.ibtimes.com/phone-unlocking-more-popular-ever- bec...](http://www.ibtimes.com/phone-unlocking-more-popular-ever-becoming- illegal-january-1383147)

<comment><USER26> Yeah, it was weird that the Copyright Office declined to renew the exemption for phone unlocking. Yes, Congress created the problem with the DMCA, but they did specifically set up the Librarian with the power to fix oversights like this. (And I do personally think it was at least initially an oversight and not intentional.)

<comment><USER6> They did renew the exemption, but they limited it to only apply to devices purchased before January 2013. Their mandate is to only provide exemptions for cases that really really need it, and their reasoning for limiting the exemption was that carriers had relaxed their policies for officially unlocking phones (such as AT&T starting to unlock out-of-contract phones).

Here's the statement that the Copyright Office published: [http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2012/2012-26308_PI.pdf](http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2012/2012-26308_PI.pdf) \- the unlocking exemption is discussed on pages 16-20.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Am I the only one that is glad to read this news?

<comment><USER28> I think people are glad, sure. It's just that their highly skeptical of anything the government does anymore. With good reason.

<comment><USER28> It's just that _they 're_... (god, that's embarrassing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Instead of requiring carriers to unlock devices, he could just announce that the DOJ would fail to prosecute anyone who does choose to do it. It's possible to right a wrong _without_ asserting additional executive powers.

<comment><USER30> Selective enforcement of laws is trouble in the long term. It transfers power from the legislature to the executive, and tends to yield situations in which everyone is guilty of something.

<comment><USER29> it already happens. Drug laws, etc. I'm sorry, but you have your causality backwards. Official (or unofficial) selective enforcement of the laws is a symptom of questionable laws, not a cause.

<comment><USER30> I disagree with respect to causality. If selective enforcement were not possible, then it couldn't happen. Imagine a (flawed, but fair) system in which, if an executive selectively failed to prosecute anyone for violating a law, then the law is nullified, just as (approximately) in the arena of trademark. An executive bound to enforce the law would result in more citizen/legislative/lobbying effort directed toward implementing better laws and fixing those that were broken or out of date.

In practice, executive (and judicial (and in general!)) discretion is important. As an example, mandatory minimum sentencing has attracted criticism. An adaptive front-line response is a good thing, but only to a point. Leaving vague or unenforced laws on the books has the potential for both abuse and compassion (see national monuments and the Antiquities act, for a non-judicial example).

<comment><USER29> >An executive bound to enforce the law would result in more citizen/legislative/lobbying effort directed toward implementing better laws and fixing those that were broken or out of date.

Or, the executive could choose not to enforce those laws (and screw people's lives over in the process) _and_ take the initiative to scrub them from the books by introducing bills, etc. But you're right. Politicians are not usually decent people, and it's unreasonable to expect them to not play politics with people's lives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >Some argue that making it legal to unlock cellphones could make it too easy for consumers to take copyrighted software between carriers.

My carrier does not have code on my phone, and my carrier does not need code on my phone.

<comment><USER27> Locked bloatware it's code for them and they need it to increase their profit margin, that's the ugly part of this story :(

<comment><USER31> how does bloatware exactly increase the profit margin?

<comment><USER32> For those of us without smartphones, they increase the profit margin by tricking users into buying things. All of the software on my gophone is trial only, and it is extremely easy to extend the trial by accident. Why on earth would anyone want to spend $3.99 to have an extra 10 days to 'evaluate' the shitty software on the phone? And WHY would this purchase be recurring?

And no, you can't remove the trials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What about repealing the whole DMCA 1201? It's not FCC's job to fix crooked laws. There is a Congress for this.

</comment><comment><USER34> You can already buy unlocked cell phones on Amazon and elsewhere, if you pay the full price of the phone. For example, Amazon sells an unlocked iPhone 5 (16GB) for $665.55. If a carrier gives you hundreds of dollars of subsidies for a phone, they should only be required to unlock it after your contract has terminated.

<comment><USER35> The subsidy is recovered over the term of the contract. What does carrier unlocking has to do with it? Even if I unlock my subsidized phone outside of official methods, I still have to fulfill my end of the contract.

<comment><USER34> The carrier might not be able to charge a large enough early-termination fee on the contract to fully reimburse them for the cost of an expensive phone.

<comment><USER9> Then they should charge an ETF that will allow them to recoup their costs and not trump up some imaginary "copyright violation" boogeyman that stops me from using my phone as I see fit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think they'll need to work on their definition and enforcement actions if this is to become a reality.

Verizon are already supposed to unlock their LTE devices in exchange for the use of their LTE bands, but many Verizon LTE devices are crippled in software when unlocked (with the notable exception of iPhones where Apple control the software).

As an example, the Verizon HTC 8X does not allow the user to alter the MMS gateway or roaming options and Verizon Samsung Galaxy phones used to need to be rooted to change the APN for data.

Sadly the mobile phone market is enough of a cabal at this point that more and more specific regulation might be the only way to make competitive consumer- friendly measures like this work.

<comment><USER37> Why not just define that the phone must allow the user to change provider settings that might otherwise be specific to one carrier?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Well, that's the end of $1 phones. The carriers will raise handset prices.

<comment><USER39> More correctly, they cannot ammortize the price of the phone indefinately anymore.

$1 phones are cheap upfront but you pay far more in the long run via lockin.

<comment><USER38> I think it's hard to say. Depends on the phone, the plan, and so on. Not a lot of transparency in the process -- An unlocked iPhone is $650, or $27/month over the life of the contract. That would likely make up a big portion of the monthly bill, were it to be broken out separately in the statement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> How does this make it easier for the NSA to track US Citizens down? I mean would meta-data or meta-data collection be any different if the phones were locked?</comment>


Prime Numbers and the Benford's Law  - <AUTHOR> http://pyevolve.sourceforge.net/wordpress/?p=527

<comment><AUTHOR> Original news article: "New Pattern Found in Prime Numbers" - <http://www.physorg.com/news160994102.html>

Paper: <http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0811/0811.3302v1.pdf></comment>


Ask HN: Next step after bootstrap land? - <AUTHOR> Maybe this is a story you've heard before?
Yes? Awesome. Help me figure out the next step :)
Worked at a startup right after college. Awesome team. Stayed for 3 years: was the goto hard-tech person.
Joined another startup. Not so awesome team. Left again after 3 years of trying to build a team. The last 2-3 years, I've been doing contract work/bootstrapping my own startup.
But, now I find myself questioning whether my current situation makes sense.
I'm hesitant to interview for a vanilla software dev position. It feels like a step back and I'm not as quick on my feet with interview questions: the last few years have been more about business knowledge growth, rather than core tech skills. I could brush up interview problems, but that seems like such a ritualistic waste of time.
Is there a position, other than being a vanilla SDE, that's better suited to a bootstrapper? <comment><USER2> I would say consuming but you are already on there.Given that were are already part of couple of startups, you should be able to network your way to a consulting gig</comment>


Most used UI Components – of web applications - <AUTHOR>

Almost most of the UI components you use in your web applications as a collection.
Why name UI Components?
There is a misleading word used in the industry. Let's say you need a image carousel.
You search in google and find out one which fits your needs & the name of it is jQuery Carousel you call it a jQuery plugin to your web application. It's not just jQuery, its a combination of HTML, CSS and JS.
It's just a UI Component Plugin which uses jQuery instead of javascript, and that's where the idea of creating a repo for UI components arise. <comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/logeshpaul/UI- Components](https://github.com/logeshpaul/UI-Components)

<comment><USER2> Wouldn't it be nice if you could've provided the licenses accordingly. eg: iCheck (MIT license)

<comment><AUTHOR> @beyti: Agree, Added now!

<comment><USER2> Actually I was asking if you could've provided the licenses for the listed UI components foreach, not a license to your list (:

Since you've created a nice list, it would be lovely if one can tell which ones he can use by the licenses at first glance.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


JavaScript Time Zone Conversion with Walltime - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.sproutsocial.com/2013/02/javascript-time-zone-conversion-with-walltime/

<comment><USER2> _Could not embed GitHub Gist 4091298: API Rate Limit Exceeded for 18.104.22.168_

A good example of why using gist for your corporate blog may not be such a good idea. Right when you are getting a lot of attention your post becomes a lot less useful.

Its too bad because I was interested to read the article

<comment><USER3> Visit the Github directly <https://github.com/sproutsocial/walltime-js>.

<comment><USER2> You signed up on HN to give the worst company response ever in a HN thread? Is "visit the github" a new brocode meme?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm interested in why you think this comment you made contributed anything to the discussion here. I'd encourage someone who _can_ downvote, to downvote you, since I can't.

<comment><USER2> You forgot to sign your post: _"Senior Front End Developer at Sprout Social"_

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, you're a winner. Have a good day dude, time to go back to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This post is dated, but describes some of the challenges with detecting timezones using JavaScript:

[http://www.onlineaspect.com/2007/06/08/auto-detect-a-time- zo...](http://www.onlineaspect.com/2007/06/08/auto-detect-a-time-zone-with- javascript/)

My code has since been adapted and lives on as jstz.min.js. This is the best library I know for handling this sort of stuff: <https://bitbucket.org/pellepim/jstimezonedetect>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting post, and an equally interesting library. However, Walltime is more concerned with the displaying of dates than the detection of timezones.

The example I give from the post explains it like this "... if I'm a user in Australia, and I want to post something at 3:00 AM Chicago time, where the majority of my followers are, how do I calculate that accurately with JavaScript and send it up to the server?". Or, if I'm a user in Australia, but I want to display all my dates on the site like I'm a user in Chicago, how would I do that?

Take a look at the github page description for more info about the type of problems it can help with: <http://sproutsocial.github.com/walltime-js/>

<comment><USER4> Ah, skimmed too fast. Thanks for the clarification. I just happened to notice that some of the DST detection logic seemed similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> +1 for being a quality software solution.</comment>


Show HN: PassCollect – quickly export passwords saved on your desktop - <AUTHOR> https://www.passcollect.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello! I've been a longtime lurker here on HN and finally decided to make a post for an app I've been creating. This app will be a part of a larger project that is currently in the works.

I created this portion with JavaFX, although I've thought about writing it with native technologies (i.e. SwiftUI). If you all have any questions or suggestions for me, feel free to let me know.

Thank you!</comment>


Can Python replace PHP as a server side language? - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/106072126438891541517/posts/HJ568qwxMcp

<comment><USER2> What's the point of this post? It's a link to a forum discussion that's been gone over a million times, 10 years ago, let alone now.

Both python and PHP are very mature, backend languages for web development. This subject might have been debatable in 2003, but for heaven's sake it's 2013, the fact that this is on HN is beyond me. A better question would be something like "what is the future replacement for RoR/node in 10 years"

</comment><comment><USER3> Not if you're stuck using Windows as a server.</comment>


Online Age Quiz Is a Window for Drug Makers  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/technology/internet/26privacy.html <comment><USER2> Evil</comment>


Brushing your teeth: no longer the best thing for your teeth? - <AUTHOR> http://bio230fall2010.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/brushing-your-teeth-no-longer-the-best-thing-for-your-teeth/ <comment><USER3> I would guess that the wrinkle is that one's mouth would still be chock-full of bacteria, lending the breath a fœtid odour.

<comment><USER4> Interesting assertion. You're undoubtedly right, of course, but it just reminds me of the ideals promoted by the deodorant companies.

Once upon a time, everybody smelled like everybody smells, which is to say, probably not quite as pleasant as people smell now -- arguably. Then somebody came along and invented deodorant, began marketing it to women to give them a competitive dating advantage -- "Smell better than the next woman and get more men" \-- which they (historically obviously) fell for, and now deodorant is considered necessary... but for what purpose?

People are very adaptive to smell, and beyond the same statistical outliers we have now, generally speaking, people would have smelled about the same. Now though, the bar has been arbitrarily raised, and the result is that everybody not wearing deodorant is a grotesquely smelling freak, where the only outcome is that, once again, we all smell the same, but slightly different -- and of course, we're now all spending an extra $10 a month on a product that nobody really needs, but that was marketed well enough initially that it's become a staple.

<comment><USER5> actually, there is a related phenomenon called "Beyond Shampoo" or "nopoo" (the website seems to be down). There is a huge movement around giving up soap and shampoo permanently to avoid and cure stuff like dandruff, acne, etc.

I personally had HUGE successes with it in improving my overall hygiene - <USER2> be warned that it takes upto six months for your body to "reboot". during that time, your hygiene grows worse - before getting extremely better. I suspect it is the same case with the brushing thing : it will take quite some time before the flora and fauna of your mouth reboots.

[1] [http://freetheanimal.com/2010/12/a-most-successful-self- expe...](http://freetheanimal.com/2010/12/a-most-successful-self-experiement- over-18-months-soap-and-shampoo-free.html) [2] [http://paleohacks.com/questions/17060/no-poo-and- dandruff.ht...](http://paleohacks.com/questions/17060/no-poo-and- dandruff.html#axzz2mCPzOIdR)

<comment><USER6> I tried the no shampoo thing for a month. The result was extremely scaly, itchy scalp. So I used Ketoconazole + shampoo once. (Ketoconazole can cause dryness, flakes and hairfall; so I used very little of it). Had some dryness and some hairfall following the wash. The next two weeks were without shampoo. Now I intermittently use a "mild" shampoo like Johnsons baby shampoo every week or so and my seborrheic dermatitis is much better. So the nopoo thing is not so bad.

<comment><USER7> My sister and I both suffered from dandruff while living near Santa Cruz, California. And we both found that it magically went away when we moved.

When I grow out facial hair, there's a particular spot on my upper lip that starts to flake, which I also think of as "dandruff". Kept shaven, it's asymptomatic.

Basically, there seem to be many mysterious causes and effects involved.

<comment><USER8> I'm curious: was your residence in Santa Cruz a misty/mold-conducive environment? What's the climate and household like where you moved to?

<comment><USER7> Foggy, yes.

We moved to various places -- Philadelphia, Shanghai, Costa Rica, Brazil. I can only really speak for Shanghai, which is incredibly hot with about 100% humidity in the summer (I have seen water pool on the floor of my building, just because there was so much in the air) and 1-4 degrees centigrade in the winter. I've never thought of it as misty.

Don't move to Shanghai for the weather.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Obligatory mention of Betteridge's law of headlines: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

<comment><USER10> It's not really obligatory, and it would be nice if you guys just stopped posting that, especially on science articles since asking questions is what science does.

<comment><USER9> Fair enough. However, it's hoped that this might encourage less linkbait-y titles, especially for overviews of new science research. A headline like "Biofilm-inhibiting bacteria may provide an alternative to brushing your teeth" conveys much more information about the content _(and doesn 't break that "law", either)_.

<comment><USER11> Most of the time the people writing these articles have never even heard of Hacker News; this is just a more socially acceptable way to flaunt trivia in front of people to feel smarter while at the same time being able to call "first!".

<comment><USER9> Not having heard of Hacker News is irrelevant to writing better headlines. The "law" is hardly trivia; it's a great way to shed light on lazy writing and introduce people to simple manipulative tricks of journalism.

<comment><USER11> The headlines are not written by the people on Hacker News: they are written by people on websites other than Hacker News, and then posted verbatim here. If 100% of people on Hacker News read these comments and would never write an article with a question as the title, it would not change the fact that articles with questions as the title would occasionally get posted to Hacker News.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Excessive brushing has always been detrimental to the enamel.

<comment><USER12> This is why the ADA recommends brushing your teeth only twice a day, rather than after every meal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why is it snowing?

<comment><USER14> Urgh.

Ctrl+A Ctrl+C Ctrl+L data:text/html, <html contenteditable> <ENTER> Ctrl+V

 _phew_

<comment><USER15> Thank you. I couldn't read it - the snow kept triggering my orienting reflex and making it harder than necessary to simply read the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Might be worth mentioning Weston Price, an early 20th century dentist "known primarily for his theories on the relationship between nutrition, dental health, and physical health. He founded the research institute of the National Dental Association, which later became the research section of the American Dental Association, and served as its chair from 1914–1928." (Wikipedia)

In particular, he drew a _lot_ of relationships between diet and not only dental but general health. Some of which sounds a bit kooky but a lot of which seems to be getting confirmed, especially regards the role of sugar and processed carbohydrates.

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

<comment><USER17> That is in no way relevant to this article, it's enough to have people promoting fad diets on articles where it is actually relevant, without this too.

<comment><USER18> It isn't exactly controversial that frequent sugar consumption exacerbates oral microbial growth. My mouth health got drastically better after giving up soda, and more so again after giving up grains.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, let's not be too fast about throwing away a well known solution because one research shows that there might be (better?) alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER20> Possibly, maybe will no longer best the best thing for your teeth.

Seems very interesting, but very early stage.

</comment><comment><USER21> neat snowing background, loved the fall direction controlled by the mouse motion.

<comment><USER22> It would be neater if it piled up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Probiotics will form the future of medical and dental preventative care. That and Epigenetics.

<comment><USER24> And most likely nutrition. It appears that your weight is determined by your gut bacteria: [https://www.google.com/search?q=gut+bacteria+obesity](https://www.google.com/search?q=gut+bacteria+obesity)

<comment><USER25> "Your weight is determined" No. If at all, they are only a part of the problem and you have the chicken - egg problem. Do you have different bacteria because you are fat or are you fat because you have different bacteria?

Causes are: -genetic -epigenetic -life style -nutrition (cabrs!) -viruses (no kidding, obesity may be infectious) etc.

<comment><USER26> I think the jury is still out on that. Metagenomic studies have only become possible in the past decade, and consequently there haven't been any long tern studies in humans. Studies in mice have show that the normal microbiota is rather static throughout the full life of the host. If this extends to humans, then the microbes are the "egg" in the equation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Minus - Drag n Drop now on Desktop and Mobile - <AUTHOR> http://min.us/pages/extras

<comment><AUTHOR> We've worked very hard over the past few months to release many new features, bug fixes and updates. Read them all on <http://blog.min.us>

Any comments & suggestions are welcome.

Thanks everyone :)</comment>


Building an infinitely scalable cloud host for less than $5/mo - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/levinunnink/building-an-infinitely-scalable-cloud-host-for-less-than-5-mo-1nkl <comment><USER2> serving files is literally the oldest thing in the www, it's literally what the www was born for.

weird how this guy managed to make it complex for serving just html and css (and possibly images).

I would go with aws' elastic filesystem and a bunch of auto-scaled nginx machines with caching enabled mounting efs in read only. Dns-level load balancing, cloudfront. efs is pay as you go, the nginx are auto-scalable (and you can get spot instances too).

the signup/login webservice can be served via lambda, with static content being served off S3 (and again, cloudfront).

a simple ftp or sftp-enabled ftp server with a database auth backend could let users work on their stuff (again, autoscalable)

<comment><AUTHOR> The goal of the article was to do it for cheap. How expensive would your proposed architecture be? Auto-scalable nginx instances do not equate to cheap, especially when you're starting out.</comment></comment>


Boost Your Bike - Flywheel Hybrid Bike - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencefriday.com/videos/watch/10400

<comment><USER2> That's very cool, I always (always = 2 weeks, since I bought my new bike) about if there was a way to reuse the energy wasted during breaking, this is a very cool solution, although it makes the bike extremely heavy :S

</comment><comment><USER3> I kept chuckling at the 'random shot of a machine tool doing some random thing' more of an advertisement for what Cooper Union has in its shop for students to use :-).

That being said, the weight is the lose element here (and why bikes don't generally have flywheels) Also you need to be careful about braking hard and then turning :-) The depending on the energy in the wheel the gyroscopic moment on the middle of the frame which will try to twist the frame about its longitudinal axis when the wheel changes orientation in the vertical access, could be extreme.

</comment><comment><USER4> Also, the reason these are not in cars, is that when scaled up, you're talking about a much heavier flywheel which is then spinning much faster. That can be very dangerous in a crash. Heavy steel disks spinning very quickly.

</comment><comment><USER5> How does he steer? There must be a lot of angular momentum stored in that flywheel, making turning a non-trivial exercise in managing angular momentum.</comment>


News.YC meetup: San Francisco, Saturday, November 10, 2007 - <AUTHOR>

So how about another unofficial News YC entrepreneurial meetup in San Francisco?
This time we'll piggy back on SuperHappyDevHouse. The organizers were nice enough to accommodate a sub-meeting for startup founders. So you get two-in-one: attend SHDH and at the same time have a dedicated room for startup entrepreneurs.
 SHDH is the most awesomest developer meetup in the Bay Area (http://superhappydevhouse.org/SuperHappyDevHouse21). And with more than 150 developers attending every month, the spectrum of interests is very wide. By singing up to the sub-meeting you reserve a spot in the cool entrepreneurs section :)  And, it's easier to find people doing the startup thing like you.
At SHDH you get a really nice environment, free wifi, free snacks and drinks, and even a free dinner. It's simply a wonderful day to meet people. They do accept donations, though, to cover some of their costs.
 If you're NOT doing a startup but still want to attend, SHDH is open for all. More info here: http://superhappydevhouse.org/SuperHappyDevHouse21
 However, if:
1. You eat ramen at least twice a week :)
2. Your startup is everything you do. Or you're in the process of making it so.
3. You have a product already or at least a demo.
Then:
1. Sign up here so I can send you updates.
  http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=20982002600
2. On the event page post your news.yc username and a link to your startup (optional).
3. On the event day bring your laptop and be ready to show your product and get feedback.

<comment><USER2> Hey guys, this looks great but how about a YC-only meetup?

I wish there were some way to coordinate these things. I was planning a Friday meetup and wouldn't mind going through with it if I get a decent response.

Waleedka, feel free to drop me a line (email in profile) if you'd like to work together to merge plans.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just sent you an email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Damn, I'm going to be in Seattle this time around. But I'm sure my co-founder will jaunt up. Roll, YC start-upper dudes!

</comment><comment><USER4> Count me in :)

</comment><comment><USER5> is this all day?</comment>


FB said adding a phone number for 2FA was for security, now it can't be disabled - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/jeremyburge/status/1101402001907372032 <comment><USER2> The junk calls, and spam emails we have been getting are all linked to this...

It has been going on for a long time. I was working on testing MFA on Microsoft Azure with a brand new phone number I registered, was not getting any junk calls at all before I started testing. The minute I submitted my phone number to the authentication app for Azure, I started getting random calls on my phone. The minute I submitted my email address for verification I started getting junk mail.

Many of these companies are using 3rd party libraries that snag your number and store it insecurely and/or even sell it to spammers. Companies should be held accountable for it, and customers should be able to opt out. Not everyone can simply change their phone number.

Google (Android) and Apple should also be required to provide better ways of blocking unwanted calls, like being able to use wild cards e.g. (301)299-* to block all numbers within a range.

I think the biggest problems preventing this issue from being resolved is that mobile carriers are profiting from the surging airtime fees, and that most people don't really know that this is all happening behind the scenes.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is annoying.

I deleted my facebook account years ago and only created a new one last year for the purposes of having access to my companies facebook page.

Obviously, to secure that, I added a phone number for 2FA. Now, I've started to get annoying, sometimes daily, SMS from Facebook about how "my friends are looking for me." Really discourages me from properly securing my account.

</comment><comment><USER4> This seemed like the inevitable outcome back when FB first started asking for phone numbers, which is why I've never given them my number. It wouldn't surprise me if they've sussed it out some other way, though - raiding the address books belonging to friends who were trusting enough to install the Messenger app, perhaps.</comment>


Lessons from being sexually harassed at Google - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@juliachou/it-s-not-your-fault-3e5ad1ccb95c#.4y3a3ov71 <comment><USER2> I've see so much of this first-hand that it was a major reason why I left my previous job (I'm male). My manager was constantly touching female coworkers (back rubs, hugs) and he would always bring up his and their sex lives. One time during our standup, he talked about how much alcohol a female coworker drank with him when they were out of town on company business together -- it was pretty clear that he was implying he slept with her. He's also cornered women at an after work social and asked her how she would like to feel his beard between her legs while another team member kept grabbing her waist.

No one will speak up because he's too important and most of the women need the jobs (single mothers or primary bread winners). He gets away with most of this stuff in full view of the company.

<comment><USER3> This is a toxic work environment. Harassment happens so frequently that it has become the norm.

Wait a few months and write an anonymous review on glassdoor or publish something somewhere. Things don't get better until we name names.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are a lot of reasons for the persistent sexual harassment and sexism in Silicon Valley. A narrow and self-reinforcing culture, complacency stemming from the misconception that it is a meritocracy, and the relative immaturity of a lot of employees. But as I see more and more talented women at good companies opt out in one way or another, more serious measures need to be taken. More training that is not seen as a joke, and just a lot more large and small ways to show that women will have a safe and supportive workplace. I'm hopeful that that ultimately the selfish demand for good engineers from this immensely talented group will drive change.

<comment><USER5> Sexual harassment is hardly the province of technology focused companies. Its reasons are varied and at times culture affects perception (compare behavior and acceptance in France, Mexico, and the US) not saying one or the other is worse, just different.

Never the less, sexual harassment is an issue, it's an issue in tech, but it's an issue in the workplace in general. I think one difference is the willingness to report sexual or any harassment tends to be higher where the workforce is more economically secure as well as better educated. I other words a server at McDs might not be willing to be as jeopardize a job as someone with alternatives, access to attorneys and support network.

So, it will seem like the problem is more problematic in tech, finance, etc, whereas in actuality the problem may be much bigger in other areas of the economy.

The point is this tech isn't an incubator for harassment, it's present everywhere in perhaps greater degree, so addressing it as such (a big issue) rather than that thing that happens in tech, would better serve American society.

<comment><USER3> If you look at EEOC cases, most of them are from less prestigious industries. However, of all the elite professionals, tech workers seem the most immature. I think it's a combination of gender ratio and less developed soft skills.

Though my friends have horror stories from law, finance, and consulting too.

Link: [http://www.eeoc.gov/search/search?access=p&entqr=0&output=xm...](http://www.eeoc.gov/search/search?access=p&entqr=0&output=xml_no_dtd&ie=UTF-8&btnG=Search&client=press_frontend&q=sexual&filter=0&ud=1&site=PressReleases&oe=UTF-8&proxystylesheet=press_frontend&ip=10.5.0.19&sort=date%3AD%3AS%3Ad1)

<comment><USER6> And, possibly, the youth fetish. When the portrait of the ideal is a 19-year- old guy who dropped out of an elite school, it's not surprising to see the ethics of the over-entitled rich boy everywhere you turn.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure that assumption works out. Yes, there are frat boys, but I've also stood in many bus stops and taken many buses in not yet gentrified neighborhoods and highschool drop outs can also be quite aggressive in approaching strangers and chatting them up all the while their target is trying hard to get out of any interaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Honestly, what's described in this article seems to cross into sexual assault rather than just harassment. Moving into blatant physical contact, such as kissing, is escalation beyond suggestion and inappropriate comments.

<comment><USER8> It doesn't sound good, but it depends a lot on the context, I have a lot of friends who are European, and they greet men and women by kissing them on the cheek.

However if she's just sitting in his office and out of no where he lays one on her cheek? Yeah that's weird. Again, context.

<comment><USER9> > but it depends a lot on the context

No. It was unwanted contact. It is, at a minimum harassment, and at worst assault.

Arguing context about one bit of behavior in the context of a pattern of harassment is insulting to a victim of harassment.

<comment><USER10> No. Context matters.

Jumping to conclusions without understanding the context is an insult to those falsely accused of harassment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm glad that going to HR actually worked for her. Most people (i.e. anyone that's not employed by the company) would tell you to never go to HR.

<comment><USER12> It's certainly something to consider; HR exists to protect the company. I suspect it depends on ensuring that the harasser is portrayed as the person threatening the company, rather than the complainant.

<comment><USER13> Indeed. Going to HR when the harasser has high value to the company might work differently...

[http://www.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2015/03/07/former- google-e...](http://www.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2015/03/07/former-google- engineer-claims-she-was-sexually-harassed-google-did-nothing-about-it)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find the switch in culture between companies and even internal departments to be almost frightening. One place you go has competent, adult, respectful individuals, and then you just move down the hall to a different department and it's immature, angry, inappropriate pranksters who never grew up. If anything proves to me that a culture of sexual harassment can survive in this day and age, it's the weird inconsistency of what people think is acceptable behavior, combined with a lack of strong positive leadership.

</comment><comment><USER15> Would it help to teach on the new employee on-boarding one official way how to tell co-worker, even (especially?) superior one, to f*ck off, that everyone could use as a clear message in case somebody loses his/her mind and attempts to make unwanted personal advances?

It would save HR a lot of work and many young employees a lot of confusion and stress.

<comment><USER16> What's to teach? Everyone knows how to say "stop it." The hard part is feeling safe saying it.

<comment><USER15> They could teach to literally say "f_ck off" to your manager in such cases (provided that that's not something employees say to each other casually). I'm thinking of kind of "safe word" that doesn't require thinking or sugaring the pill that you can utter with shocking effect that clearly communicates you don't want to play.

What I mean is that this teaching should instill in employees the confidence that it's totally ok and safe and even advised practice to say "f_ck off" to your manager if s/he makes unwanted personal advances and to report them to HR if they don't.

If the only way to deal with harassment is to report it to HR people will hesitate because it's severe, it's process, it involves other people (and HR is not your friend).

It is all the things that you might want to save the person that might honestly misread you because he's a dumbass.

Companies should kind of own up to the fact that their employees are not asexual and that some people make some misguided attempts to flirt with co- workers and some accept the flirt and reciprocate.

Female colleague from the story who thought she was blowing the situation out of proportion probably had way more liberal opinion of office mating games.

Instead of outright banning this they should just discourage it (because it breeds conflict) and create obvious way for employees to clearly opt-out from this office activity (because those that don't want to play are horrified by human mating rituals, myself included).

I think in old days simple slap in the face had this role (totally unacceptable today, today's men can grow up without being slapped even once so they wouldn't think it's an assault or some SM sh_t). Not sure though what were men doing 50 years ago to fend off female advances apart from wearing a ring and acting completely disinterested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It takes time to choose the appropriate action because harassment can be traumatizing. But people should always document what happened and decide later. Make a timeline. Record on pen and paper the day and time, exact quotes, behaviors, and people around.

<comment><USER17> You mean collecting actual evidence so it doesn't end up being he said she said?

Isn't that victim blaming? Sorry about the manquestioning and the use of micro-aggressive gendered pronouns.

<comment><USER3> This is not a legal advice.

Yes, the first piece of legal advice people receive is make a timeline on pen and paper. When you report something to HR, they also write everything down on pen and paper. I don't know why. I'm not a lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > In that week, I was kissed on the cheek

Yea, that sounds inappropriate, though it'd be nice to get context.

> asked to sit on my manager's lap

Wtf? Yea, that's messed up. Again, it'd be nice to get some context.

> told about my manager's sex life and virility

Inappropriate work conversation sure, but not necessarily "sexual harassment".

> told that "all men go through an Asian fetish at some time,"

Again that might be inappropriate work conversation, but I wouldn't necessarily deem that sexual harassment. Definitely depends on the context.

Why wasn't the manager fired?

My one gripe with these kinds of articles is that context is generally ignored. We've seen enough false accusations (eg. Adria Richards) that I think it's important for real victims who're going to write articles on these topics accusing others of wrongdoing to be more detailed in their accounts if they want to be taken more seriously. (Remember the fiasco with the Google employee who claimed that she was sexually harassed because somebody she looked good in a bathing suit at a work retreat?)

</comment><comment><USER18> Being sexually harassed is neither acceptable nor funny. I don't want to relativize the real cases.

But being too thin-skinned in the office is also bad. In many european countries it is expected for new people to be (politely) kissed in the cheek as salute when introduced to coworkers of the opposite sex in the team. This is the common salute and social rule and is not seen as harassment at all. This can be a little shocking for people from other cultures; but most fully grown people should be able to fine tune quickly their expectations; and safely navigate around the most common social conflicts.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's a joke that her manager was allowed to stay and even continue to be her manager and have a hand in her promotion. From several stories I've heard about Google HR, I can't say I'm surprised.

</comment><comment><USER20> Yeah and also some people like to use the f word liberally in office to prove a point or speak some American slang to sound cool. I don't like it and I send memo to HR on each one of them.

<comment><USER21> I wholly disagree with the use of that word as being offensive.

That said, you should talk to the person in question if you are uncomfortable so they have a chance to "correct" their behavior when around you. That's the generally accepted best practice.

<comment><USER3> I think f-word sensitivity may be a generational or regional thing. People outside of tech think its horrendous.

<comment><USER22> Working in technology is neither generational nor regional.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Brad Gobright: Free solo climber falls to his death - bra-ket https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50592646 <comment><AUTHOR> Risking your life as a policeman or fireman or soldier to serve your community or country I understand. What's the point of risking your life with free solo climbing?

<comment><USER2> They weren't free-soloing. They were sloppy with their rappelling procedures and fell off the rope.</comment></comment>


Big data approach to Porn studies - <AUTHOR> http://sexualitics.github.io/

<comment><USER2> It would be very interesting to see the relation between people uploading to porn sites and uploading torrents (movies etc. I wonder if they follow the same pattern.

Also some geographical studies about what countries like what tags would be very interesting as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> The geolocalisation of most frequent tags was already done by pornmd : <http://www.pornmd.com/sex-search></comment></comment>


How we found a million style and grammar errors in the English Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> https://fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/how_we_found_600000_grammar_errors/

<comment><USER2> The slug in the url is how_we_found_600000_grammar_errors. Did they not get enough attention at first? How many style and grammar errors did they really find?

> So we manually looked at 200 of the errors, finding that 29 of the 200 > errors were real errors. Projected to the whole Wikipedia (currently at 4.3 > million articles), that's about 1.1 million real errors

Projections are fine, but maybe the title should be something like "How we found (probably) a million style and grammar errors in the English Wikipedia".

<comment><USER3> > "How we found (probably) a million style and grammar errors in the English > Wikipedia".

Would you have clicked if that were the title?

Sad part is that I suspect many people upvoted based on the title alone, without reading the article

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hope these are not "errors" like splitting infinitives, using conjunctions at the beginning of sentences, or putting prepositions at the end of sentences. Because those aren't real errors in English grammar.

</comment><comment><USER5> To all the other commentators, this isn't about wikipedia, this is about a tool that can be used by copyeditors to help them enforce house style and grammar rules.

If you work for a magazine publisher, it's likely you have 2 lines, a web line and a published line. The web line might not go through the copyeditors/production/subeditors before it goes online whereas the published line will likely go through those people/departments. By adding this into the web line, it can help enfore the rules of the publication so that web and magazine both match up nicely.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here are the rules this system checks: [https://github.com/languagetool- org/languagetool/tree/master...](https://github.com/languagetool- org/languagetool/tree/master/languagetool- core/src/main/java/org/languagetool/rules)

Imagine a pre-commit hook for writing quality test ;)

Here are some other scripts (much more basic) for "automated language tests": [https://github.com/ivanistheone/writing_scripts](https://github.com/ivanistheone/writing_scripts)

</comment><comment><USER7> The false positive rate seems high enough to make this effectively useless. I wonder if they have a strategy for reducing it?

</comment><comment><USER8> Is this even news? Pick any Wikipedia article at random that has more than one author. It isn't hard to find run on sentences and verb tense mismatches.

</comment><comment><USER9> It would be more interesting to know how that compares, perhaps per hundred words, with other bodies of text, professionaly edited and not.

And, for an article on finding grammatical errors, there were a surprising number of grammatical errors.

</comment><comment><USER10> How I found a million style and grammar errors in the English Wikipedia: by browsing it.

</comment><comment><USER11> So what! Grammatical and style errors are only important when it impacts the meaning. The majority of pages I read that contain poor grammar are still perfectly understandable. I correct many that I see, but you don't have to look far to find more.

I'll take a wikipedia that has these kinds of errors over a time before wikipedia. As a boy going to the library and immersing myself in encyclopedias and world maps I am gobsmacked at how wonderful great resources like wikipedia, freebase and google maps are.</comment>


What Event Sourcing is not - <AUTHOR> https://www.hugopicado.com/2017/05/06/what-event-sourcing-is-not.html <comment><USER2> The claims here are factually accurate and helpful for people new to using event sourcing as a pattern. The pattern does lend itself very neatly to command query responsibility segregation with eventually consistent reads (except when reading just the last or all events). In addition, while the pattern itself wouldn't qualify as a systems or platform architecture, if the API for the system is designed to capture customer intent on the write side and read its side-effects on the read side, you can see how it all comes together in a neat architecture that not only allows the ability to reason about the system, it also mirrors and meets the needs of its callers/customers automatically because the API is simply a capture of customer's intent. And because the customer's intent (commands) and its outcomes (events) are immutable, you also get automatic change management even if the code continues to evolve and new features added.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article resonated with me. We are going through a large platform re- launch, and using Kafka and events as a big part of the architecture. After much discussion, we decided against storing events, eventual consistency, or CQRS and so on. Instead, we use events to simply de-couple services. We have strong domain APIs and workers that respond to creates/updates/deletes. We use Kafka to partition things where it makes sense. Just stop there, and there's a ton of benefit. Things get simpler to reason about, easier to test, and result in less dependencies between teams.

<comment><USER2> We are going through a similar exercise but we avoided the approach of event driven CRUD and stuck to capturing customer's intent and an ability to read its side-effects as our de-facto API.

Consider for instance an API to create and account. Now let's say we want ability to update address. One approach would be an API that changes the address by updating the account but the customer never asked to update the account. The customer wants to change the address. How about we give them the API with change of address request/semantics? This way, no matter what happens, the API and the events remain in sync and you don't expose internal data storage semantics to customers that have no interest in them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _The core idea of event sourcing is that whenever we make a change to the state of a system, we record that state change as an event, and we can confidently rebuild the system state by reprocessing the events at any time in the future. The event store becomes the principal source of truth, and the system state is purely derived from it._

I think this can be easily misunderstood to describe an unnecessarily strict view of how event sourcing can work. To use the most common example, a bidding system, someone might see the _state_ as the record of accepted offers, bids, and sales, and the _events_ as recording changes to that state. That would be one way to design the system. However, that means events can only be issued _after_ state changes are decided. That means after synchronization and business logic have been applied. Suppose a user submits a bid that is rejected by the system because it does not meet the rules, comes after bidding is closed, or because the system rejecting the bid does not recognize the item id. That bid does not get recorded as an event and cannot be replayed, so if it was rejected in error, the erroneous action is not recorded and can never be reconstructed. This kind of event-based system amounts to little more than capturing a database commit log. Actions taken by users and peripheral parts of the system are obscured, leaving a very subjective account of what happened.

If you enlarge the concept of state to include more of the distributed state of the application, then this description can yield a larger and potentially more useful set of events. The user submitted a bid — that's an event. The system rejected the bid — that's an event. The system closed bidding — that's an event. Then you can replay bugs. Was the bid incorrectly rejected as invalid? Did the system close bidding prematurely? If I fix a bug in a system and replay events to it, does it do the same thing or something different? You can also discover performance problems. If a bid event is relayed through the system before it is processed, you might see that the difference in timestamps between the bid being placed and the bid being rejected is higher than expected.

 _A simple example of this trap is when an event is used as a passive- aggressive command. This happens when the source system expects the recipient to carry out an action, and ought to use a command message to show that intention, but styles the message as an event instead._

I think this is another part that can be misunderstood, or perhaps I disagree with it altogether. Commands can be significant events that are helpful for event sourcing. Ask yourself, if you exclude them from the event log, are you still able to reconstruct what happened to the degree necessary for debugging? Capturing commands as events might allow replay with only a subset of the system running, which can be helpful. Also, computers are more precise than humans. If I tell my girlfriend, "There is someone at the front door," there may or may not be an implied request. There is no reason to design computer systems with that kind of ambiguity, so there is no need to create a separate category of "commands." "System A has scheduled task 23 to execute next on executor Z" is an event that we can program executor Z to respond to in a certain way. The behavior can be specified and tested.

Commands have their own problems. I have seen too many systems that report spurious errors because a programmer did not want to report "success" unless a "command" was carried out. "Command" evokes a human relationship that applies to a small subset of interactions between computer systems. When you change the shipping address on an Amazon order, your browser does not say, "Change the shipping address on the damned order!" It says, "The buyer requested to change the shipping address on the order." Now, that kind of message is sometimes modeled as a "command" by sloppy programmers, but really it reports a fact, an event. The browser does not take a position on what the right action to be taken is; that is the responsibility of the server. If you call it a "command" then the server should respond with a 4xx client error or a 5xx server error if it receives the request a nanosecond after the order shipped, when in reality neither the client nor the server did anything wrong. The client correctly reported a fact, and the server responded correctly as well. To call it a command is to imagine the browser client deciding on a state change and attempting to command the change on its own authority, which would be an absurd division of responsibility. The browser client merely reports the intentions of the user.

Commands also make systems hard to understand as they evolve, because the "command" issued by a system often stays the same while the correct action taken by the recipient system changes over time. Eventually what the "command" asks the recipient to do can bear little resemblance to what the recipient actually does. The code (and the state of the system) is supposed to be designed to make sense to humans, so the system issuing the command should be changed to make the command accurate, but that rarely happens, and it shouldn't be necessary in the first place. The message issued by the first system should not be modeled in a way that encroaches on the responsibilities of the recipient system.

</comment><comment><USER5> Apache Kafka isn't an event storage system. The author must mean Akka.

<comment><USER6> [http://stackoverflow.com/a/22597637](http://stackoverflow.com/a/22597637)

<comment><USER7> That blog post linked at the end of the answer is gold. I think I've read it over 10 times, and I always learn something new every time!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am glad DDD is not mentioned in this article, could have been called out though.</comment>


Git is ignorant by design - <AUTHOR> http://www.expressionsofchange.org/git-is-ignorant-by-design/ <comment><USER2> > Instead, the source of confusion lies in the way git works.

No, the source of confusion lies in the way _diff algorithm_ works. And it works like this for thirty years, and it works this way in virtually all the other version control systems.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is correct that no VCS that operates on plain text can do better than Git, as is in fact pointed out in the article.

The point is rather to [1] make it explicit that the assumption that everything is text is in fact a choice and [2] show some examples of consequences of this choice.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Just bought my first Mac. What should I know? - <AUTHOR>

Today is the first time I get to touch a MacOSX machine, on top of that I get to do it on a wonderful newly purchased Macbook Air. This after using Linux for the past 10 years. The world is shining with glowish colors of joy today.<p>What should I know, both practical and ethical/cultural about my newly chosen eco/techo system? <comment><USER2> I never really used a tool like it when I was on Windows or Linux but I find Alfred really useful, where I can press Alt + Space that brings up a simple dialog where I can type:

      app name
      find filename
      open filename

Just typing an app name will allow you to open it on pressing enter. Find will reveal the file or folder in Finder. Open will open the file.

If it doesn't recognise a name or command, it'll default to giving options to search in Google and other search engines.

Another really useful feature is typing an arithmetic expression and it being calculated for, which can then be copied to keyboard by pressing enter. I use this feature a lot.

I think there are a lot of other things I could learn about Alfred myself but it's probably my most used tool! There's also a premium version with more features but I haven't looked into it much.

I know there's Quicksilver and spotlight but Alfred is much quicker and smoother for me.

<comment><USER3> +1 on Alfred. It's such a freakin' time-saver.

However I still miss the sexiness of Quicksilvers UI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Homebrew - a package manager for OSX to install all those incredibly useful applications you've been using for the past 10 years.

<http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/>

<comment><USER5> Before you do this.

Make sure to install XCode from the App Store and then goto XCode->Preferences->Downloads and install the "Command Line Tools".

<comment><AUTHOR> I did it, but I can't find anywhere what tools are being installed.

Is this documented somewhere or alternatively how can I inspect the downloaded archive to learn about its content?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know that as programmers/hackers, we're supposed to never use the mouse, but the biggest thing that I've recently started to appreciate with macs is how good the drag and drop system is.

Some examples:

\- If you want to open a file with a certain application, drag it to that application in the dock.

\- If you want to send a url to your friend, drag the url onto the mail app.

\- If you want to get a folders path in the terminal, drag the folder into the terminal window.

\- If you want to move a file into a folder in finder, hover over that folder for a few seconds, and you'll see a new window spring up with the contents. You can navigate deep trees quite quickly, without needing to know where you're going at the outset (did I want to put this in Personal/ or in Vacation Photos/?)

This behavior has really spoiled me, and is probably the thing I miss the most when I need to use Windows for more than a few hours.

</comment><comment><USER7> Was in the same place a month ago, here is what I wish someone told me.

\- You can move a file, just "copy" and then press option when "pasting"

\- Command + Delete is deleting a file (del on windows)

\- Rename file is Enter (f2 on windows)

\- Command + tab actually works as intended

\- Fn + Delete = del key

\- Home, End, Pg Up, Pg Dn - different, you'll get used to it

\- Learn Vim and Linux, as you'll use the terminal a lot

\- Installing stuff is a bit weird - dragging the icon to the Applications shortcut, dmg files basically look like a virtual "drive" that you can eject

\- No easy way to maximize a window, really, you need a 3rd party app

After getting used to the little quirks, you'll get used to the stability, and speed. Windows 7 is not a bad OS, but for some reason me and my wife fight over the MacBook Air more than on my Lenovo Thinkpad...

<comment><USER8> You can use Home, End, Pg Up, Pg Dn by holding fn while using the arrow keys.

<comment><USER9> Yes, that's how you use them on a laptop or Apple bluetooth keyboard.

But the point is, on Windows or Linux, they move the cursor, but on the Mac, they scroll the view but don't move the cursor. Home scrolls to the beginning and End scrolls to the end.

On the Mac, to move the cursor by larger amounts, you combine command or option with an arrow key.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I use Vagrant (<http://www.vagrantup.com>) as a development environment, so I don't have to pollute my OSX installation with dozens of server packages, environments etc.

Other programs I use every day:

1) Sublime Text 2 - great editor

2) caffeine - prevents your mac from dimming or going to sleep when watching a screencast/movie/etc

3) f.lux - Warmer color temperatures and lower brightness as the day progresses, nice for working evenings

4) Alfred - program launcher.

5) BetterTouchTool - extra gestures for your trackpad or magic mouse. I use this all the time.

</comment><comment><USER11> Often I need to create user guides and demo videos for products, and the screen capture features help a lot.

To capture:

\- the entire desktop: Command-Shift-3. (Automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop)

\- part of the desktop: Command-Shift-4

\- specific application window: Command-Shift-4

Add Control to these shortcuts to place the screenshot on the clipboard. Also try the bundled Grab utility for more related features.

</comment><comment><USER12> Page up/down and home/end don't work in Safari. You need to use Command+up/down and option +up/down, respectively. Ridiculous.

<comment><USER13> They work fine for me.

Edit: are you using a real Apple keyboard?

<comment><USER12> I guess it's been fixed. It drove me nuts last time I had to use a Macbook, about a year ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You should know that ever since the departure of SJ, Apple has been determined to emulate MS software quality assurance principles

First things first - Upgrade to Snow Leopard from Mountain Lion.

Then set up Bootcamp to install a decent OS like Win7

;-)

<comment><USER14> OK, only halfish-joking But "It just works" isn't so true anymore. Mac apps - Safari, iLife, iWorks - are mostly weak or broken. Updates are like Windows - in the Gb's and constant.

Also, I'm embittered as the demise of the 17" MBP leaves me nowhere to go in Apple's future portable line-up. (Dont get me started on MacPro!)

For dev work: as others have said sort out XCode, grab Homebrew, iterm/dterm/total terminal

For web stuff look at Bitnami stacks/vm's. Aslo tools like sublime, Fake, codekit, charles http

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> While many popular FOSS packages have been completely ported to the Mac's UI, there are still some packages that require X11. You can get it here:

<http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/>

</comment><comment><USER15> Install iTerm2.

It's a much better terminal emulator that Terminal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for this wonderful tip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Watch this: [http://www.nevblog.com/mac-shortcuts-watch-this-if-you- use-a...](http://www.nevblog.com/mac-shortcuts-watch-this-if-you-use-a-mac/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Hotcorners for "Show Desktop" and "All Windows Exposé"

</comment><comment><USER18> Install Linux on it. That's want Linus did to his.

</comment><comment><USER19> F12 / F11 All day.

</comment><comment><USER20> prt scrn = shift+command+3

<comment><USER2> To print screen using a selector, CMD + Ctrl + Shift + 4

<comment><USER21> To print screen a specific window, CMD+Ctrl+Shift+4+Space

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 1) Install the Homebrew package manager for your simple OSS needs (wget, haskell, ..., whatever).

2) For more involved OSS needs, instead of messing the system with tons of Pythons, Rubies, RDBMSs, etc, or using MacPorts, I would suggest running those environments in a VM (VMWare Fusion or Parallels) running Linux. It could even be headless, and you could connect to it through the Terminal. You get a development environment similar to your production setup, snapshots, etc AND a clean base system.

3) For video watching: install some "codec pack" for Quicktime (it has few built-in codecs). Also install VLC and MPlayerX. For audio, use iTunes and pay some attention to proper tagging (if your mp3s don't have it already).

4) If you start buying programs now, use the Mac App Store. You get to install the bought programs in all your Macs (if you have more than one Mac at some point), and when you clean-install your OS or get a new Mac you'll be able to download and have them installed automatically from one place.

5) Download and install XCode (this is also used by Homebrew [1]), but it will be useful for you in general if you do any programming, as it has the C compilers, headers, etc. Also install the "Command line tools" (see comment below).

6) When looking for a solution for a OS X problem, a lot of people in forums will suggest "fixing permissions" and "zapping the PRAM". Those are, 99% of the time, BS cargo-cult non solutions.

7) You DON'T need an antivirus. Just exercise common caution. It's nothing like Windows XP of times past.

8) You really DON'T need to shutdown your OS X. Maybe once in a blue moon. Just close the lid and let it sleep.

9) All OSs have problems. Especially when you include the userland programs in the possible bug space. If CPU is pegged at 100%, open "Activity Monitor" and find the culprit program and kill it. More often than not, it's Flash.

10) Check the Applications/Utilities folder. Lots of useful stuff in there.

11) Learn about the "defaults" command. You can use it to enable many hidden options and customizations from the command line.

12) If you like fine-tuning and customizing, get familiar with the /Library and ~/Library folders. It's where a lot of programs keep plugins, themes, settings, etc. There is a defaults [11] command to make the ~/Library folder visible in the Finder (normally it's hidden from the average user).

13) Check the Automator for application automation (also: Applescript). You can a lot of stuff with it, if you like these kind of things.

14) Read Siracussa's Ars Technica Mountain Lion review. All of it. And maybe a book, like Mountain Lion, the Missing Manual. You'll learn a lot of things that you will otherwise pick up randomly after months of using OS X.

15) Some apps to check: Alfred (must have: launcher), Evernote (note taking), iA Writer (distraction free writing), Skitch (image capture / annotations, though current version is botched), Fission (barebones audio editing), Pixelmator (bitmap image editor), Reeder (RSS reader), Little Snitch (must have: application firewall), Tunnelblick (VPN), Transmit (FTP/SFTP/S3 etc), Unarchiver (compression archive handler), VMWare Fusion (virtual machine host), Sublime Text 2 (programmers' editor, if you're not into Emacs/Vim/IDEs). For simple multimedia needs, check the iLife programs. For work needs, iWork programs are quite capable, though not as much as MS Office. Adobe home user programs (Photoshop and Premier Elements) are available for the Mac too.

16) Avoid HAXIEs and APE (cross-OS hijacking system used to attach extension functionality to applications). Not very stable, and not really needed. ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haxie> ).

17) If you go with Apple's way, you get more integration between your OS X programs.

E.g. if you're using Mail.app instead of Thunderbird and iPhoto instead of some third party photo manager, then, while you write a new email, you can select pictures in your iPhoto library to attach, from a built-in image picker in Mail.app. Same for iLife and iWork apps. E.g you can select, through Keynote, a song from your iTunes library to be use in your presentation. Personally, I use mostly Apple's apps, but prefer Chrome to Safari and Lightroom to iPhoto/Aperture.

18) Some things that might give you problems, from time to time: \- Spotlight indexing (when you add lots of new stuff from an external disk to your primary disk, or when it's stuck on a corrupted file, etc). You can turn it off and on for specific disks and folders. \- Flash using 100% of the CPU. Kill it from activity monitor, or kill the tab.

19) I personally tend to prefer installing new major OS X versions from scratch. It's easy to port over your old files, mails, and settings from a backup. That said, updating also works fine. YMMV.

20) Use something like Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper! for bootable, incremental, backups of your startup disk. Time Machine backups are handy too, but not bootable.

21) Have fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> Highly useful. Many thanks.

Writing this response is the first productive thing I do with a Macintosh. To me it's somewhat inspiring and sad that my virgin user experience on a Mac, having clicked on Safari because it's the only thing that looked familiar, was the memorial video being shown today[1] on apple.com for 1 year since Steve Jobs death.

This feeling of sheer admiration is greatly reinforced by the pushback of a thought that a past generation of great man (Being 29 myself) was here to creatively pioneer the core culture values for us to build upon. I have just recently learned about Apple and Steve, reading Walter Issacson point of view. I found that honestly understanding how and mostly why Apple was build is an easily traceable path to enable one to learn to admire the actions and mostly the philosophy behind the company and behind Steve Jobs. Reading <http://www.folklore.org> also gives it's magical touch of a time that once was.

So thank you for your wonderful experience tips. Your assumption for this macbook is correct it will be used as a tool to making software, I hope to build something useful and fun for the world.

Will Have Fun, thank you for the suggestion :)

Maxim.

[1] [http://movies.apple.com/media/us/stevejobs/stevejobs- memoria...](http://movies.apple.com/media/us/stevejobs/stevejobs-memorial- us-20121005_r848-9dwc.mov)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I highly recommend iStat Menus / MenuMeters for monitoring.

Also if you run "sudo fs_usage" in the Terminal you can see what is accessing the disk. This can easily show what new app you've installed is causing problems. Likewise learn about launchctl/LaunchAgents/LaunchDaemons so you can disable startup daemons.

Big tip: Make sure to add to the Spotlight->Privacy section any folders that you don't want indexed e.g. Downloads, Bittorrent Folders, External Drives.

</comment><comment><USER23> Only that you made a horrible mistake.

<comment><USER24> I got my first Mac about 1 year and 4 months ago. I've been pretty happy with it. My fallback plan was just to install Windows or Linux on it. To me, the worst case scenario was that I was over-paying for some decent hardware. As it turns out, I never needed to exercise the backup plan.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can a blockchain do this? - <AUTHOR> I'm checking if a blockchain is applicable to our project.
In our requirement, a supplier and a buyer get into a work agreement. Later, supplier could claim that they have delivered according to the contract. But buyer could say that the delivery did not meet the quality norms as per the agreement.
I guess such situations are taken to court if big money is involved. Instead, can a technical solution such as blockchain resolve such issues? How can a blockchain verify if the quality of the delivered goods or work meets the terms in a smart contract? If not, what good can we expect from a smart contract and blockchain for this context?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Let's suppose that A has to deliver chocolate icecream to B. How can a blockchain verify if the quality of the delivered icecream??? Is the chocolate concentration right? Is the quality of the chocolate good? More difficult, did it arrive melted or too frozen?

I think it's possible to use multisignature transactions to implement an escrow service that can arbitrate in case of a dispute an send forward or backwards the money. (If the buyer and seller agree, they can complete the transaction automatically.) But you are changing a court in the real word by some arbiter in the real word.

Anyway, I'm not sure if someone has a good working scheme like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr:

* A blockchain is never the answer in the general case.

* smart contracts require programmers to not only write bug-free code the first time (c.f. The DAO), not only make sure bugs in the underlying platform don't bite them (c.f. The DAO), but make sure the circumstances the contract runs in never change.

* even Vitalik Buterin notes that smart contracts are an equivalent problem to strong AI in the general case [https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/19/thinking-smart-contract...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/19/thinking-smart-contract-security/)

* the actual problem you state here is entirely to do with human perceptions and how they feel about the quality of the work. I assume you're looking for a cheaper alternative to argument and disagreement. But ultimately you're looking at lawyers, courts and/or some sort of human-mediated arbitration just from your problem as stated.

</comment><comment><USER4> You may want to look into the 2-of-3 escrow with timeout defined in BIP 112.

[https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0112.mediawi...](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0112.mediawiki)

You want 'the blockchain' to verify payment between parties; these parties will be in charge of verifying satisfactory delivery and releasing funds.</comment>


The Open Source Seed Initiative - <AUTHOR> https://osseeds.org/ <comment><USER2> For those in Europe, I've had good success growing seeds ordered from the Kokopelli association, which has been doing this for 20 years.

The trick is to find varieties adapted to the local climate, for example ancient varieties from your region no longer commercialized.

[http://kokopelli-semences.fr/](http://kokopelli-semences.fr/)

<comment><USER3> In the Uk there's the Heritage Seed Library.

[https://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/hsl](https://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/hsl)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this currently "only" a legal problem, or are the GMO crop companies able to produce seeds that produce sterile crops?

I'm sure this has already been done to death, but... Cheesy sci-fi plot where genetically engineered crops crowd out all the reproducing ones, and then humanity starves to death when evilcorp loses their ability to produce the seeds?

Could we maybe not go down this route, please?

<comment><USER5> It's not about GMO, but about conventional breeding.

There is a concept called hybrid breeding, both for animals and plants. The "final" product, the seed for the farmer, the piglet raised for mass production, is bred from two parent lines, one for the male part, one for the female. Both are relatively inbred so they are mostly homocygotic. Their offspring, because of Mendelian genetics, is mostly heterocygotic, but very homegeneous, which is a great thing, industrially speaking.

However, a farmer can't just raise those piglets and breed them on his own. Not because of patents or licenses, but just because the offspring would be all over the map, genetically. And probably less profitable. The breeding companies need a complicated system to develop these lines and provide their customers with the best seed/livestock. That takes a lot of money and effort.

<comment><USER6> Hybrid vigour, right?

[https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_vigour](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_vigour)

<comment><USER5> Hybrid vigor/vigour is part of it, yes.

Another factor is homogeneity of the offspring: parent lines are very much homozygous. If one parent line is AA at one locus, and the other line is aa at the same locus, the children will all have Aa. Meaning they have both versions of the gene (which is usually good, especially in immunity and health) and all have the same status. This means you can produce a couple of hundred piglets grow to the same size in the same time which makes processing and marketing them easier and cheaper.

Another factor is that some breeding goals are mutually exclusive. Piglets for example drink milk from the mother, which means she must have good milk production and other fertility related features, whereas the father can be bred more for muscle growth.

And then there are other weird tricks breeders can pull. I believe in chicken there are experiments with hybrids that hatch in different colors relating to their sex, or don't hatch at all if they are the "wrong" sex.

<comment><USER7> Yep - "sex-link" chicks are one color for male and one color for female, at time of hatching: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex- link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-link)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Breeders have "the power" to do all these licensing and patenting shenanigans because they are creating superior seeds. Farmers choose to use these restricted seeds because they make more money that way.

This effort of "open source seeds" is comparable to communal breeding, which hasn't been competitive to these breeding companies. It takes time and effort to develop these breeds, and an Open Source Seed Initiative would have to somehow replicate this advantage, probably by individual farmers taking a hit on returns from not using the most marketable seedstock in order to work on those lines.

<comment><USER8> >Breeders have "the power" to do all these licensing and patenting shenanigans because they are creating superior seeds.

'the power' also comes from lobbying and gaming the political system; it's not just product efficacy.

That's like saying John Deere has 'the power' to restrict right-to-repair because they make such a superior product, which is demonstrably false. They spend a large effort on securing their products' place in the market via legislation, propaganda, and the threat of discontinuation of service to the lower rung purchasers of their products. All of which are tactics which are effective for profiteering, but not that great morally or ethically -- especially given that we're talking about an industry that is attempting to feed the world with regards to this threads' discussion.

<comment><USER5> Do you have any idea about agricultural breeding?

There are some fundamental factors which are hard to overcome. Mendelian genetics more or less dictates that hybrid breeding schemes are superior, in the big picture, to line breeding. But those schemes require long term organizing and capital investment.

Which is why companies have any say in breeding at all. The Open Source Seed Initiative would need to replicate this through cooperation in a community.

Farmers don't have big margins. They can't afford to waste money on crops that underperform, for whatever reasons. They can't afford to lose money on produce that isn't marketable for whatever reason.

<comment><USER9> Companies don't eat food and don't starve if they go without it so their opinions as corporate entities are moot as far as I am concerned. If it is more profitable to let people die they will do so.

<comment><USER5> Companies are owned, operated and regulated by Human beings.

I'm not saying "companies" have never done wrong, but I think your attitude is way over the top. And there is no way an agricultural company will benefit by tanking production.

What the OSSI wants to do is to put more power into the hands of farmers, and thus avoid the farmers being squeezed by a near-monopoly of certain breeding companies. It's really about prizes and margins, not about total agricultural output.

Come to think of it, I guess the whole world has to be starving before there is a large-scale food shortage in the US of A.

<comment><USER9> Sure they are, but distributed consciousness and individual consciousness isn't the same thing. A corporation doesn't have a body and that dichotomy is often used by individuals to dissociate themselves from things they would not be willing to do on an interpersonal level. This is a general issue with organizations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems interesting. It's a shame that it has to come to this. Government regulation should be focused on the safety and well being of the majority of producers and consumers, it should not focus on how to help a small number of corporations to capture value from the system; that is not the job of the government.

</comment><comment><USER11> Very good, related, article in the New York Times: [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/07/opinion/sunda...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/07/opinion/sunday/dan- barber-seed-companies.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage)

</comment><comment><USER12> Is this some US specific problem? At least in EU we don't have this kind of lock down problems for seeds.

<comment><USER13> Actually we do have odd laws. You can circumvent them, as some sellers do, but they exist nonetheless.

Real seeds is a British company that sells exclusively non hybrid heirloom seeds. Good stuff and loads of weird crosses. However, they're not allowed to sell them to the public because they're not on an approved list of varieties. s So you pay a penny to join their seed club and essentially agree that you won't start a business selling crops.

[http://www.realseeds.co.uk/terms.html](http://www.realseeds.co.uk/terms.html)

> In the EU, there is actually a list of 'official' vegetable varieties. And a > law governing seed sellers, which states that if a variety isn't on the > official list, then seed companies cannot 'market' the seed to anyone. In an > immediate sense, this law only affects us, not you - because there are no > laws at all governing the buying of seed or what vegetables anyone can grow. > Selling unlisted seed? - that's against the law. Buying unlisted seed? - > that's completely fine! So we should stress that for you it's perfectly > legal to buy any seed you like, plant it, grow it, and do whatever you want > with it.

<comment><USER7> Do you know the history of the "allowed seeds" law? I assume greed is in there somewhere, but there's usually some other bizarre or novel justification for that sort of law.

<comment><USER13> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Union_for_the_Pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Union_for_the_Protection_of_New_Varieties_of_Plants)

[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/gardening- blog/2013...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/gardening- blog/2013/sep/26/eu-regulation-garden-plants)

[https://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/plant_propagation_material/p...](https://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/plant_propagation_material/plant_variety_catalogues_databases_en)

Some of the justification I can see is environmental/economical. As per my sibling post - it's there to make sure that a rogue seller doesn't accidentally or intentionally cripple national food production by introducing a crop that is prone to disease and infects/crosses with everything.

However there is also "breeder's right" which is more debatable.

I'm not sure what actually happened (IANAL), the original proposal came under a lot of fire from retailers and gardeners: [http://www.realseeds.co.uk/seedlaw2.html](http://www.realseeds.co.uk/seedlaw2.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is really cool! I hope this will happen with medicine at some point in life...

<comment><USER15> Most medicines are already "open source" in the sense that their patents have expired, the details are known, and any chemistry lab can make them. The problem is selling them legally as medicine! A generic medicine needs FDA approval confirming that it is biologically equivalent to an already-approved drug, which requires a human trial. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviated_New_Drug_Applicati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviated_New_Drug_Application)

This process is apparently easier in the EU, but both systems are so complex that it's hard to tell exactly what makes it easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I never have been big on planting, and didn't really know theee was an issue with companies holding large amounts of seeds...

</comment><comment><USER17> Sooo am I the only one who thinks if you spend millions on creating a special breed you should be able to control who gets to use it? Otherwise where's the incentive for me to spend the money?

<comment><USER18> Of course you should be able to patent it. You should also be able to give it away for free. You should not be allowed to ask the government to prevent other people from doing what they want with their seeds.</comment></comment>


Anatomy of a Feature - <AUTHOR> http://inessential.com/2009/07/30/anatomy_of_a_feature

<comment><USER2> I wish this article'd gotten a little more love around here. "I could write a script to do it in like 20 seconds" is a common thematic refrain around these parts when talking about adding new functionality or launching a site, and this article does a great job of breaking down most of the arguments for that sort of "I'll just..." thinking.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well written. It shows well how difficult it can get to respond to user feedback: some suggestions sound super simple but the implications, the "what if"'s and the special cases add up very fast.

We had this exact issue this week and I'm not sure we found the best solution still.

</comment><comment><USER4> great post, it takes courage and restraint to not gold-plate a feature, but instead to just do what is needed to make most of the people happy and get the feature out there and see what your customers really want with real user testing.</comment>