skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all, avoid the term "senior dev". That means 5 to 7 years of experience. You're way past that.

Next: Web programming is something junior devs can do. (Maybe not as well, but they can do it, and for less money.) You need to move on to harder things, where your experience is worth more money.

What harder things? You mentioned SQL Server. You say it's "losing relevance with the ORMs/EFs of the world", but there's more to the world than that, and I strongly doubt SQL Server is going away. Find places where it is in use, and go there.

Alternately, you can try to move up to architect of someplace with a big web presence, but I'm less clear on how you make that shift.
I agree, which is why I said I was overly idealistic. But we are at (or approaching) a point where wholesale changes in human behavior are needed. We've spent the last 100 years getting more and more obsessed with TV, movies, and pop culture. It is time to swing our culture back the other way. And to start those changes, you need to ask questions and build up new (or old) ideas..

So I ask the question. Thinking about making large societal changes is a first step towards actually making a change.
I used to work for a company with a very mechanical system similar to Sky Greens (City-Hydroponics) and the costs end up being transferred into maintenance. All those moving parts cause a lot of problems.
Lavaboom Encrypted Email Startup Declares Bankruptcy
Why do you need to "convince" anybody? If companies want to build urban farms, let them compete and we'll see what happens.

My money says that if you are really hung up about the energy transport costs of food, you should just build an electric transport system into the city, from the farm outside the city.

A lot of this research is very interesting for things like space colonies, so I pay attention, but on earth it's a solution in search of a problem.
Why do I not “talk myself out of” my bipolar moods?
Scaling Mapbox Infrastructure with DynamoDB Streams
This is why you'll notice most existing vertical farms don't grow things like corn or soybeans. They grow microgreens. Organic-foodie pricing aside, I think it's largely because that's the only crop that really takes to this style of farming and can still make money. The aforementioned crops just need too much space and energy to work commercially.
Electricity prices have been rising steadily for years.

And this is before any serious attempts to reduce carbon emissions, which is expensive.

Source: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=20372

For vertical farms that only use natural light, they only collect light equal to the building surface area (actually it's a bit worse on the sides). So, it would work fine for just the top story of the building plus a few crops on the sides.
Long term unemployment in the contemporary USA means

- Enormous stigma

- Being a powerless pawn of Kafkaesque bureaucracy

- Poor nutrition, distracting hunger, nagging uncured illness

- Pressure, stress, fear and suffering

- Low access to anything not in walking distance, or which costs money to get in

- Easy access to distracting pop culture and particularly TV

It's basically unsurprising that a person here and now who's unemployed DOESN'T behave like a person in a society that distributes Basic Income without stigma.

If you want to look at a group which might make a better comparison, look at retirees, or lottery winners.
Using functions in R
There is something to be said about esthetics. Cities make a point to keep open space, and pay a high price to do so, because open spaces are psychologically valuable for people who live in cities.

NB: I'm still skeptical about urban farming, and too much urban farming completely destroys the "open space" aspect.
I feel like that article was unnecessarily complex to simply say that your body can metabolize a set amount of alcohol per hour and given a reasonable drinking rate, the 5% beers are over that and the 4% beers are not.

I mean, how many different units of measurement did the article go through? ounces, pints, units-of-alcohol, percent, "standard drinks", yadda yadda yadda.
Thanks for sparking this discussion!

I'm a senior dev, but still relatively early in my career (~8 years). I've been thinking about your exact situation a lot lately as I have interviewed several candidates from various backgrounds. I see a lot of people with lots of experience, but they didn't make the cut after taking our coding tests and technical interviews that younger less experienced devs breezed through. I wonder if I will be in the same boat in 5-10 years myself because I haven't kept up with the newest technology. Like you, I have no desire to become a manager and I'm quite happy being an individual contributor.

Also being a relatively new Dad (toddler and a newborn on the way) only makes it that much harder to keep up!
I don't think the timeline of that narrative makes sense. There were two major sets of milestones in the drug war: most drugs were heavily regulated or made illegal in the 1920's and 1930's. And modern drug law and the drug war was put into place in the 1970's. But crime started going up in 1960, decades after drugs were made illegal and a decade before the drug war. So how does "drugs" explain the rise in crime rates at that time?

Much has been written on the subject, but I don't think the drug war is a cause so much as it is a symptom of what happened. There was so much else happening that better fits the timeline. Steve Pinker, for example, blames rock & roll and young people: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0002.206/--deciv....
The alternative is natural nutrients from plants rather than lab created Burien which are essential chemicals. If you try a synthetic nutrient plant by itself you probably won't think anything is wrong. But if you taste it side by side from a natural source like nutrients from fish then the difference is mind blowing. The synthetic nutrients really do change taste for the worse and it makes me wonder if it has any affects on the body.
That's not really correct. EBITDA is not earnings before bad stuff - that stuff is all % of your income and/or write downs that have no impact to the business, so financial folks like to exclude it as noise (since all it really does is reduce your taxes). Examples:

- You bought a company and now it's worthless
- You made money and now you have to pay taxes on it
- You bought a bunch of computers and now they're three years old and worth less than when you bought them
- You bought something 10 years ago, and, instead of paying for it all up front, you paid over time
Covered at least in part in http://ericdodds.com/research-and-the-realities-of-time-work... - including perception vs reality of productivity in crunch time. He has a graph on that:

http://ericdodds.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/graphing-per...

It's possible that some special individuals can work longer hours than average without productivity loss. However, without hard data to prove you're one of those individuals, given the above, it may be inadvisable to simply assume you are...
Who is this written for? Where are these people that are unaware alcohol gets you drunk?
Right now business is under heavy pressure to "create jobs" - that is, make busywork for humans.

If that pressure went away, a lot of automation would arrive very suddenly.
We Are Not Thinking Big Enough
Well, that is already tax fraud correct? Someone already has to check for that. The savings come from all the additional checks you would no longer need to do to see if people are really disabled, what their marital situation is, where they live, etc.
Years ago I worked at a financial that had a large tech staff but we only had one full-time DBA. He was a really young, sharp guy and he got to work with basically every department in the company helping them out with stuff. He had his own office, nobody ever disturbed him, he only had to report to one person (rarely) and he got paid fantastically well.

Looked like a sweet deal.
Leaded gasoline
VMware supports "parent" vmdk files. The leaf-node "child" vmdk will diff based on the ancestors. VMware Player does support this. The VMware implementation of XPMode uses it. You can use vdiskmanager to convert the root vmdk to sparse files, which leaves the main vmdk file with just the configuration in it. This makes it much easier to set up the parent-child relationship than monolithic vmdk.
In that case, proposing indoor farming is equivalent to asking people to give up precious urban space for gardening... and then plastering walls around it so that we can have indoor farming.

I'm not sure we actually gain anything by this.
I had no clue the etymology of session was a drinking session, kinda interesting
Did anyone else observer the JS in the iframe footer? I'm just curios why it's obfuscated and what's its purpose (see surce of https://1153288396.rsc.cdn77.org/http2/http1.html)
Exactly. So that is the one thing a government should care about: keeping entry levels low.

However, politicians talk (!) to the public only just before elections. After that they listen (!) to the big guys because that is good for their ego and maybe future career.
Porting Mesos to Windows
Do you guys have any plans of hiring experienced remote PM's in a similar way that you hire freelance devs?
How do you expect fruit to fly?
> If solar and battery tech were strong enough, could people have shipping containers buried underground and dedicated to growing using artificial lights?

Aye, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon. -- Capt. Montgomery "Scotty" Scott
That's true. Cross like corn and tomatoes already grow vertically so there's not as much that can be done about that as opposed to a leafy gran that is growing a foot or so in a 20ft room. It only makes sense to layer it there.
Transportation of food doesn't take much energy. A UK national study found only 12% of the energy cost for all food production is needed for transportation [1].

Water conservation could be a benefit. But why not use the same techniques on flat ground instead of in a building?

[1] (couldn't get the original source but it's referenced in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_miles#Energy_used_in_prod...)
Zapier started at my hometown Startup Weekend! Stoked these dudes are getting the attention they deserve. They're great guys.
Inside the 5G Smartphone
A blog post introducing the project: https://medium.com/@ramangupta/a-new-rich-text-editor-for-th...
Move Over, Siri – The Next Generation of Virtual Assistants Is Almost Here
Alchemist-Server separated from Alchemist now [BETA]
Show HN: Slurv – Reinventing the messaging app for fantasy sports
Slurv is reinventing the messaging app for fantasy sports. Chat with fellow fantasy players worldwide at the "Tailgate", a public environment where you can find or start discussion threads on any topic of your choice. Set up your private fantasy league in Slurv and start talking trash or discussing potential trades with other owners. Within both the Tailgate and your private league, instantly integrate your favorite news sources and twitter feeds to stay on top of the latest sports news and a step ahead of your competition. With Slurv, win your fantasy league and let your talking do the talking.
I don't know and I don't think so. I'm pretty sure HN keeps their cards close to their chest with respect to stats. I hope to be proven wrong, though! It would be neat to peruse.
Check out Slurv at http://slurv.com!
Are Lawyers Getting Dumber?
No discussion of CPU design is complete without trying to run your design as fast as possible. That's how people discovered that pipelining is good, and a flat implementation (such as the one in that code) is slow.
This is why there were a number of glass towers in the article.

Indoor farming is really farming in a greenhouse with multiple levels of plants inside for most plants, only a few are actually grown with artificial lights.
How about a demo that doesn't require javascript to be enabled to work? Or is javascript a hard requirement for HTTP/2?
Cognitive biases that screw up your decisions
Very cool, I've been using tig all this time and never even bothered to realize it was customizable.
Zapier really does have great support.

When you use them for something, and then a direct integration becomes available you actually feel bad about stopping using Zapier. I think this is largely because of the quality of their support.

If you are a startup and you don't have your founders and engineers doing support, I guarantee you - you are pissing off your customers. And are missing an opportunity to understand what these customers actually want.

I am looking at you FullContact, my current favorite offender here.
sure. more than half the data used in their models is fake made up numbers. Can't trust anything noaa has to say. using non made up temperature data shows we're actually very slightly cooling.
Since 1880

Edit: I normally don't react to downvotes but this is a direct quote. Larger context: this was also the all-time highest monthly temperature in the 1880–2015 record, at 61.86°F (16.61°C), surpassing the previous record set in 1998 by 0.14°F (0.08°C)
They didn't buy doubleclick until 2008. AdWords (search ads) is still the big money maker too.
I'm a huge fan of spaced repetition and a regular Anki user. I think the value proposition is a little too vague here. It seems like your target market is people that don't already know about or use spaced repetition. In order to win them over, I think you need a more specific reason to use the product.

I saw another YC company recently that is using spaced repetition as a means for corporate training. I'm not saying it's the best or correct market, but that strategy seems plausible to me.

Good luck!
I used Zapier to set up an automatic reminder on Hipchat for developers to shut down unused AWS machines. It was dead simple, took about 5 minutes, and has worked flawlessly ever since.
That's not the point of the article. It's saying that because of the rate your body processes alcohol, seemingly small differences in ABV can leave much more unprocessed alcohol in your body than you'd expect.

Are you saying that the answer to the question in the article was obvious to you?
Simpson's Paradox
Ask HN: Do B2B startups follow the “build something for yourself” principle?
> Let’s say you’re drinking only one beer per hour—you’re probably not, but for simplicity, let’s say you are.

The problem with that is you don't really get to make an assumption "for simplicity" if the assumption makes your result stronger. And that's exactly what happens here. If your argument is in favor of "much more than 25%", your simplifying assumption needs to work against that argument.

As intake interval approaches 0, the BAC difference between the two beers approaches 25%. As the interval approaches 1.4 hours, the difference factor approaches infinity (0 units from the 4%, 0.4 units from the 5%).

So if you're going to make an honest simplifying assumption for this argument, you have to pick a shorter interval than you expect is realistic.
> Not to say that vertical farming is cost-free; it's most definitely not. It does avoid that major (hidden) cost, though.

Does it? By competing with existing urban land uses, if adopted any substantial scale it forces the existing uses to spread out over larger areas, increasing the energy costs of transportation associated with those uses, while also creating a major new demand for energy in food production which replaces some of the use of energy in food transportation.

Seems to me your are shifting around the fossil-fuel related energy use externalities, but I haven't seen any analysis showing it to be a net win even in that narrow regard.
I'm convinced after reading that. I knew about NASA researchers trying to grow lettuce crops with LEDs to support long missions in space even in the 80s. LEDs have come a long ways since then. I'm glad to see it happening today commercially. Quick and low growing plants like lettuce and greens are well suited for vertical farming. I haven't read specifically about it but I'm not as convinced something with a long growing cycle and tall plant such as corn or sugarcane is as feasible, so it will continue to be a regional crop where it's naturally supported. I'm just happy to see the innovation and full scale use of LED indoor growing!
Wonderful website design. There's a giant overlay preventing me from reading the article that redirects me to the main page when I click the close button.

Is there a better source for this?
I don't like low alcohol beers. I want to experience all aspects of the beer right away, including the alcohol. Imagine if someone asked how a beer tasted, and you answered "I don't know yet, I'll tell you after a few more".

Really into the Belgian trippels these days.

Edit: Wow. People really like low alcohol beers.
Climate Change Intensifies California Drought, Scientists Say
You'll notice I left out an exception for revolution / rebelling against the government. If you get to the point you need vigilantes to fight the government, well, yeah.

In the context of a private company, yes, its never acceptable.
Really, we all know we're going to see the movie, to see what creative hacks he comes up with to survive. Doesn't really matter how it starts or ends, right?
do you have any reference?
When is it not cool to try to look cool on Facebook?
With some very quick searching, I'm seeing a few references suggesting an average of between 10-15%, and an average distance of some 1500 miles from farm to plate. In actuality, those probably vary widely, though.
It looks like it could also be useful for seasteading but maybe you feel the same way about that.
Peter Watts and p-zombies
So instead of less expensive land outside cities, we should grow food on expensive land inside them. Ok.

And instead of less expensive nonpotable water supplies, we should use expensive potable urban water supplies to irrigate it. Ok.

And instead of 100% efficient sunlight to drive photosynthesis, we should use either 40% efficient fossil fuel derived electricity or 16% efficient PV derived electricity to do it. Ok.

Also, instead of polluting creeks and rivers with agricultural runoff from farms, we should pollute creeks and rivers with agricultural runoff mixed in with urban sewage (sorry, there's no such thing as a "closed system"). Ok.

And finally, instead of paying $2 for an organically-grown, sustainably-farmed head of lettuce at the farmers' market, we should pay $12 for a hydroponically-grown head of lettuce.

This article contained zero analysis of economics. Comparisons made were with "other indoor growing methods", not with outdoor sunlight-powered methods. No analysis was undertaken to show that transportation costs make up the difference. No explanation was provided for the added burden on urban (potable!) water supplies. The electricity demands made by this method are obviously unmanageable, yet no solution to this problem was offered (I guess instead of polluting the planet with industrial ag, we pollute it by burning 10x as much coal?). The problem of waste is hand-waved away by calling the operation a "closed system"; nothing lasts forever, and eventually the materials used will have to be discarded, along with residues from the inorganic inputs. "Weather-related crop failures" are dismissed; one wonders where the author thinks urban water supplies and electricity for climate control come from (hint: outdoors!).

If you want to improve the efficiency of farming, I'm all for it. You've got a scalable, sustainable way to use less water? Great, go implement it on an existing farm and put your competition out of business. But this is not that. It's a gimmick that is at best marginally economical in places with the world's highest real estate costs and customers willing to pay far above the market rate for gimmicky products. That is not a situation that describes most people on this planet. It's one thing to sell a few thousand heads of lettuce to stockbrokers in Singapore; it's another thing entirely to convince a billion Chinese people to leave their entire country fallow so that they can pay a month's income for one of those heads of lettuce while breathing air so heavily polluted by coal smoke that they drop dead at 25. Good luck with that.
What's your source on this? As someone who doesn't normally follow these kinds of reports, does NOAA have a history of falsifying data?

Further, what's your source on your last statement, that global temperatures are dropping?
Modeling Queries in a GraphQL Like Way
Light requirements for crops are proportional to the volume of the vertical farm. Light input is proportional to the surface area (actually a little). So vertical farm light requirements are much bigger than the amount of light hitting the building.
I think its not telling you that alcohol gets you drunk but showing how quickly a 5% beer can get you drunker than a 4% beer over the course of a few beers. People may think that its just 1% extra, it can't be that much more but when you factor in the alcohol metabolization speed, that extra 1% adds up. The extra alcohol in the bloodstream will make the buzz last longer.

In short, you might be ok to drive an hour after a couple 4% beers but not ok an hour after a couple 5% beers despite just the perceived slight increase in alcohol percentage.
Nice, to finally see a membership site to buy app templates. I have just became a member and the free source code for signing up was the icing on the cake.
Why do you believe this? One making an accusation of that nature should cite sources.
yeah, that's the case, everything is lowercased, so it could not give proper results.

Thanks for feedback.
I wish I had the link on hand but there was a study not to long ago that being surrounded by more plants dramatically increases well being and relieves stress. I wouldn't be surprised if it plays an equal or greater roll in mental health than spacial openess.
Completely missing from the article is an estimate of the coupling between drug and non-drug crime (e.g. prostitution or robbery to finance a drug habit, violent conflict vertically and horizontally along the supply chain, tax avoidance, and corruption of police and other government employees). There are also tertiary effects, like drug gangs engaging in additional illegal activities supported by the core competencies of trafficking and violence. This merits an additional study.
Lots of numbers there. Compute power: I've heard for years that we're always just 10X away from useful AI. Any evidence its finally true? Why not cloud compute and have your bot just communicate, which means we have enough compute power in an Atom right now?
The story of Mel: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
How exactly does functional programming help here?
I don't see why using inferred/model data is a bad thing. It is simply not feasible to measure the temperature at every location in the world. Satellite data, combined with in-situ and model calculations can very accurately fill in for missing data. The only other option here is to sit on our hands and say "oh well, I guess we can't predict the weather because we don't have perfect data", which is completely unreasonable.
The incentive is how much your utility increases - between state B and state A, that's u(B)-u(A) = u'(h)(B-A). Take limits and you get to u'(x) for marginal estimates.

Inequality is most definitely NOT defined by ratios of a utility function. The convexity of the OP was in the utility function; he seemed to believe that convexity of reward (and hence of utility, assuming u(reward) is monotonic) would only increase the reward for those at the top.
Some of the latest PV is getting pretty good [1].

How much better is the light from LEDs than sunlight?

[1] http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/372352/22413458/136558...
the 14MB HTTP/1 demo ran significantly faster than the HTTP/2 demo... re-ran many times with same result.