Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrey_utkin | Hacker News Reader

This highlights the importance of tradition in modern computing.

You can't and don't "bootstrap" even your bread, which is one of the simplest and oldest human technologies. Bread is said to take flour, yeast, salt and heat. You don't "bootstrap" your yeast culture and your grain culture - you get them from some source. You are handed over the recipe and these living cultures from people who have been doing it before, and you start from that (you can experiment with changes to that of course). Of course the technology changes, but there's still a tradition and will always be.

What matters practically is that we have a variety of living software cultures and traditions to choose from to consume, to conserve and to pass on.

View on HN

It's very common (and easy) to "bootstrap" a sourdough starter; it's made from wild yeast and lactobacillus, which are present both in the environment and in flour.

> You don't "bootstrap" your yeast culture and your grain culture - you get them from some source.

You do not have to buy them. You get them from the grain. But I agree with you though. It's basically bootstrapping, because they are everywhere around us.

The bread analogy is fantastic because it makes people think that they bootstrapped it, when in fact they didn't. Same as people who think they make things from "scratch". And I don't want to diminish the effort, in fact I'd like to promote it. But scratch is relative.

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

-Sagan

When I was little my dad used to tell me how he would get up every day at 5 o'clock and feed scratch to the chickens. So when my mom made something "from scratch", I thought she literally made it out of whatever it is that chickens eat.

Of course it doesn't mean that at all. We often use it to mean "from nothing", but it doesn't mean that either. It means "from the beginning" or "from the starting line" (which might be a scratch in the ground). And of course that starting mark is movable, so one can get closer or further away from the ideal of "from nothing" and still make something "from scratch".

> You don't "bootstrap" your yeast culture and your grain culture - you get them from some source.

Wait, what? It is super simple to bootstrap your own yeast culture. You just need wheat, water, and time. You can easily grow your own wheat. The only way this is not bootstrapping is if I need to create my own water out of hydrogen and oxygen and my own wheat by… actually I’m not sure how one would bootstrap wheat. Find some of the original wild plants that served as the original source of our current domesticated wheat and re-domesticate it? But that would literally be impossible, thus making the term bootstrap meaningless in this case.

How are you growing this wheat? Making the seeds out of clay or something?

Growing from seed. I think growing your own wheat from seed can be considered bootstrapping since it is impossible that anyone could go back to the original wild plants and re-domesticate back to having wheat like we do now. Certainly not within a single person's lifetime. So, I say that growing from seed is realistically the closest we can come to bootstrapping it.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe. — Carl Sagan

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PHO2DZN30k

Note that we haven't even fully understood how humans are bootstrapped in the first place.

Well, you do bootstrap your sourdough bread when using sourdough starter from previous batches...

That seems like just one extra steps in your technology, but not a hermetic bootstrapping.

How do you get your first batch started? Must be you rely on the fact that

> Flour naturally contains a variety of yeasts and bacteria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourdough#Starter

So you either take your starter from somebody else or you fall back to a lower-level prerequisite of dormant living organisms present in your flour, and you hope they are alive and good for your end product.

It's not that hard to imagine that these bacteria are killed by irradiation, or are "compromised by perfectly placed state-level adversary".

Much of the yeast and bacteria come from the air. That is why it tastes different in different cities.

It's mostly from the flour, because the yeast has evolved to eat the wheat. It's most likely to be found where there's food, not in the air.

I think you missed the point. There is no first batch. It's sourdough all the way down.

Didn't Linus Torvalds bootstrap a software culture?

The GNU Project was already an established thing when Torvalds started Linux. I think it would be fair to argue the GNU bootstrapped Linux even if you don't buy into the whole "you must call it GNU/Linux" argument.

And the whole GNU project was bootstrapped by what was going on at the MIT Media labs etc. etc.

the first Linux was written on Minix and used the Minix filesystem and GCC that was available on minix. So built on an established software stack and kernel.

Your bread analogy is really unfortunate because in the case of sourdough you can ( and I did) literally bootstrap the yeast out of thin air.

How you bootstrapped your grain culture?

I think you are confused, I was responding to your comment on yeast culture.

Grain is different.

As I said in another comment branch, in the case of sourdough it seems you just make use of the yeast cultures already present in your flour. So you kinda just get both in one package. Does this make sense to you?

That is not how it works, you literally use the yeast that is in the air to create the "starter".

It's usually on the grain and not from the air. It's where the sour part comes from too, it's not uncommon to use raw unmalted grain to innoculate beer wort to create a sour beer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com