I'm a member of the Illinois Mycological Association, where we do occasional surveys accompanied by biologists. They frequently take back tens of items for DNA sequencing.
If you're out there looking at a mushroom and think you know what it is, but aren't exactly 100% confident - remember that researchers who dedicate their academic career to fungi are frequently stymied by things found in a 2 hour walk with a few handfuls of volunteers: it might not be what you expect!
First, be cock-sure in your own ability to do something as simple and straightforward as identifying mushroom species because of your innate ability to recall every minutia of the field guides and your astonishing powers of perception and attention to detail. Then analyze closely the cap shape, scales, the gill/teeth/ridges/pore patterns in the cap underside including shape, width, spacing, depth, and color, the ridges, and the stalk, including a partial veil and/or annulus. Proclaim confidently when you have determined with 100% assurance that you know precisely what species of mushroom you have in your hand, because you are a mushroom genius.
At that point you can take a few bites. If you end up needing a liver transplant, then you know it was toxic.
Spore prints can be a huge help in identifying also!
There are some mushrooms that have very few known lookalikes (varies by geo/region), which have a handful of strong identifying factors. Morels, oysters, and a few others come to mind, where if you can confidently confirm these factors, you can be reasonably sure that you’ve identified them correctly.
That said, people sometimes convince themselves of these factors, especially when they haven’t had much experience identifying them before.
I do know a number of members of the IMA that have been there longer than me, and don’t forage at all!
I’m not an expert in the bio/chem side or really anything to do with mushrooms/fungi, but some families of mushrooms have commonly associated toxins. None of the below should be considered advice or recommendation or relied on in any way.
Amanitas often have a deadly toxin known as Amatoxin, for example.
Some others are sometimes reclassified from toxic to “sort-of-toxic” or “unknown.”
Common mushrooms like Morels can have their toxins cooked out (throw out the cooking water!), while others like Amatoxins will persist.
Still others affect some people, but not others - and some toxins induce negative effects in the presence of other chemicals in the system, like Inky Caps and Alcohol - the combination of which can be deadly, or not, depending on a number of factors.
My understanding of the situation overall is: it’s complicated.
Slices are structures that hold a pointer to the array, a length, and a capacity!
So, when you slice a slice, if you perform an array operation like “append” while there is existing capacity, it will use that array space for the new value.
When the sliced value is assigned to another variable, it’s not a pointer that’s copied, it’s a new slice value (with the old length). So, this new value thinks it has capacity to overwrite that last array value - and it does.
So, that also overwrites the other slice’s last value.
If you append again, though, you get a (new) expanded array. It’s easier to see with more variables as demonstrated here: https://go.dev/play/p/AZR5E5ALnLR
(Sorry for formatting issues in that link, on phone)
Hey, neat - clicked around a little bit! Bug report: the contact page had some comments related to an article that definitely weren't related to the contact page.
I’m anti-spam myself, but I wouldn’t draw that conclusion from this post. It’s a post that links to a blog post on the YC primary domain site (that is, their company site), and we are on a YC forum hosted on a subdomain of the parent YC domain.
I wouldn’t visit Reddit’s blog and interpret talk about their successes there as indicating that the entire forum(s?) exist for marketing the parent.
And although, the HN forum itself definitely is great marketing, I mean to say that not all the content is marketing for YC.
I also wouldn’t draw that conclusion if someone who worked at Reddit submitted the blog post to a subreddit and it got upvoted there.
Unless it was boosted here, it’s only on the front page because of others voting it up. It’s more likely that it’s the PG effect!
Startups literally "launch" on here whether they're Y Combinator affiliates or not.
The content of any forum cannot be mostly marketing, because that literally means there's a lack of organic impressions and the money / time /effort is better spent elsewhere.
Those patches are unlikely to be officially supported, though. I really support this mode of monetization, because community/free users get something, well, free, while others get something more for a bit more. It’s [hopefully] sustainable for the engineers and team behind the product, too!
While the underlying idea that selling services on open source products is not sustainable from a purely business perspective may be true, the linked article is not particularly convincing to me, it doesn't provide strong evidences and it's based on an embarrassingly small sample size. Besides, maybe we should start to consider also other metrics when we evaluate a Business success, not only the mere economic profit: there are externalized societal benefits (and damages) that are very important and nonetheless poorly accounted for.
It only looks at one open source company, that could not have closed source its product (because it was not the original developer) so it could only exist at all as an (at least mostly) open source business and compares it to companies in entirely different lines of business.
It was also badly outdated a few years after the article was written when the said business was acquired for several times the market cap at the time the article was written.
If you want to compare it to businesses offering a similar product into a similar market you should compare it to other OS vendors founded in the 90s targetting desktops and servers. Any more successful proprietary examples around?
Most of all the article only looks at one, open source business. Not exactly a meaningful sample.
It is probably very difficult to rely on that model if a single company is the original developer and the main developer - so you have all the costs but share the benefits. It is not true if you fork code that already exists, or if you have a bazaar development mode.
[0]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/07/26/why-russia...