skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Small farmers are always just on the edge of poverty. I know this first hand since my parents own a farm (~3 acres and not in the US) and don't generate enough revenue to even get to a point of breaking even. The equipment, water, fertilizers, pesticides always have to be paid for regardless of whether you get a good crop or not. Add nature's whim on top of that too and you will see why small farmers are disappearing from the map.
The problem with this is that there are often more disabled people in an area than there are ground floor units.

I absolutely loathe staircase elevators although in 2015 they proved more reliable than the standard elevators I had to use.
I don't see why we should pay website owners through Google, who will presumably take a cut of the money, when decentralized digital currency exists. I'd like to see a Bitcoin based system in the form of a browser plugin.
Correspondingly, if there were no ads there would be many fewer small websites.
Ten acres? Has anyone ever made a living off ten acres? Where I come from (Midwestern U. S.), that's a hobby farm.

And that assumes the person running the place is even a decent business person. Some won't succeed whether they own ten acres or a nail salon.
> How to completely rob an ecosystem of its momentum in one fell swoop.

I suspect your perception depends a lot on which part of the community you are observing. As far as I can tell, the Python community is as vibrant and fast-growing as ever, with continuing huge crowds at Pycon, brisk sales in Python books, active meetup groups around the world, hundreds of python bloggers, several very active mailing lists, etc.

Most of the change I’ve seen is the rise in other language communities (Clojure, node / server-side Javascript, Go, Swift, ...) which share certain cultural priorities or programming niches with python, and have caused some number of Pythonistas to switch to something else. I suspect this would have happened about as much with or without the Python 3 project though.
Show HN: GPU text rendering with vector textures
Philosophically, I agree with you.

The problem is, you cannot do it any more, at least not without significant expenses.

Problem 1: either you choose a provider to handle incoming email for you (basically you want Google Apps, which costs $$$) or you end up with your inbox filled with spam, viruses and bullshit.

Problem 2: Unless your email address ends in Google, Yahoo or one of the other big companies, chances are high that other servers will just dispose of emails you wrote. Especially true if you self-host your server (e.g. an AWS virtual machine, or a rootserver with an IP range of your mass-hoster), because other people's hacked servers will put the entire IP range on public blacklists due to spam originating from these.

Problem 3: you will, if you self-host, have at least three servers to control: your DNS server, your SMTP server and your IMAP server. In addition, you will need to take care of your SSL certificate. All three not easy to do and people will try to hack you all day and night. And you will need at least three machines (two DNS, at distinct providers, and a SMTP/IMAP server). Your DNS must not go down in any case, but your SMTP server isn't as critical because SMTP allows for outages as long as the domain name can be resolved.
Do you want people to click to donate every time they show up on a page? People will never click that button.

This system is great because it's a) seamless (you just get one bill a month), b) based on usage (you visited these pages) and c) is a market (the price you pay is based on competitive rates that advertisers would otherwise be willing to pay).
I'm far more likely to find a library I need in a Python 3 version than in an Erlang version.

Take a look at the PyPI stats for Python3 packages vs. the Hex stats for Erlang packages:

https://python3wos.appspot.com/

https://hex.pm/

The vast majority of common packages are compatible with Python3. Moreover, a common Python package gets about 100x the downloads of a common Erlang package. Even with only 20% of Python users on Python3, that's still about 20x the users that Erlang has.

Python3 adoption only sucks compared to the installed base of Python2. Compared to any niche language - Haskell, Erlang, Rust, Swift - it's massive, and you're much more likely to find a battle-tested library in Python3 than in your niche language.

(The bulk of my work is actually in Node and Swift these days. Node has a mammoth package library, but that's because its culture encourages many small modules and lots of code re-use. In my experience, I've found that the chance of finding a robust, well-supported Node module is roughly equal to the chance of finding a robust, well-supported Python2 library, and is maybe 20-30% greater than the chance of finding a robust, well-supported Python3 library. The Swift library situation is much, much worse than Python3.)
App Makers Reach Out to the Teenager on Mobile
I have often wondered - why can't there be a subscription model where Google says: Pay us $5 a month and you will not be 'tracked'. If all I want is to not see ads, why will I not just use an ad blocker?
Even in my younger decades, I was unable to have the kind of recall that you talk about here. I'm no dullard, and I've been doing well as a technical person since the beginning.

Many of my friends used to remember numbers and such random data quite well.

There are different kinds of brains. Some of us are fundamentally no good at remembering 'random' data.

Your fundamental point, though, is well taken, though it might be an inevitable byproduct of...progress?
> Almost nobody uses trackbacks.

No one sane allows trackbacks on his blog any more. Too abused and spam-ridden.
...we gained no equity because we didn’t own the land...

Farming on rented land seems like the original Uber. You're workers, with no guarantee of even minimum wage.

A couple of friends in the restaurant business have told me: Never open a restaurant if you don't own the building.
I buy apps so I don't see ads in them all the time. This is the web equivalent of that. Why is that complicated?
What do you mean by "modeling 3D orbits"? Because that's not what the periodic table is doing. It's telling you which quantum numbers are in use. The rectangle is extremely good at that (with a couple minor simplifications). The problem with the spiral is that it will have the same discontinuities as the rectangle, because each angular momentum number has two more magnetic quantum numbers than the previous.

Or, in other words, the disadvantage of putting more space farther out is that you lose the most important property of the periodic table, which is the groups.
>> huge number of users that will never switch to Python 3

I don't believe this assertion.

All companies, projects, and developers have to move to the current version of Python eventually. Python 2 eventually is no longer supported. Python libraries will start to drop support for Python 2. Developers will see that for their career they need to have Python 3 skills. Jobs ads will require Python 3. Linux distros will drop Python 2. New libraries will start to appear that are only Python 3.

Don't know when, but Python 2 will suddenly look very old.
The other useful short cuts include "call mom". Siri will ask who your mom is and if you want her to remember that in the future. Also read my "text messages", or "text my sister ..." These are great on a winters day when I want to walk but don't want to take off my gloves, or when I'm biking and don't want to take out my phone.
My impression of you: Being dehumanized, threatened with death, rape, is a totally subjective experience and vaguely defined, so we shouldn't stop those things. I offered my conditional support to you people, but now I'm revoking it because I want people to be able to dehumanize and threaten you and ultimately do not care what happens to anyone else. BTW, being picked on and trolling cis men poses the exact scenario as threatening women, minorities, with death, rape, etc.

FreeBSD is, frankly, better off making these people feel threatened and dehumanized.
Those Demanding Free Speech Limits to Fight ISIS Pose a Greater Threat Than ISIS
Five clicks to see I'm not eligible. Google, I'm disappointed.
You choose how much you're willing to pay per month. The non deterministic part is what percentage of advertising will be blocked (either due to not being on Google's ad network or because you ran out of spend in your monthly payment).
"large farms are favored (through subsidies, tax breaks, regulation, etc.)"

Can you share any examples of these things that specifically favour large farms? The two books you mention seem to be focused mainly on different issues (corn subsidies, large scale feeding, food labelling, ethics, ...).
And if you can make back the costs of the equipment, own the land, and create enough food for your family, what value does money have?
> What's needed is a Spotify premium-style model, where a monthly subscription is paid by the user, which is distributed to the content producers.

Remember flattr? IIRC it failed because a lack of adoption and because micropayments are expensive (fuck banks for this one).
Thanks for establishing a naming standard that I will never be able to live up to.
Campaign A: Show 10,000 random people ads for espresso grinders.

Campaign B: Show 10,000 people who recently looked at espresso grinders some ads for them.

95% of the first group didn't know espresso grinders were a thing people bought. The remainder probably aren't actively shopping for one.

In the second group, some portion of the audience has already bought an espresso grinder, or decided they don't want one right now after all. But it's also guaranteed to include thousands of people actively shopping for one right now.

Which campaign do you think is going to result in more espresso grinders sold? The one that doesn't include you, or the one that does?
No `robots.txt` indeed means weapons free, but crawler gleans useful info from it, e.g. which areas of the site are dynamically generated.

More likely the site is trying to serve custom versions of `robots.txt` to different bots, with good intentions, and the code is buggy.
Yes right now the website will serve a script from a third party ad network, which itself serves a script from a fourth party ad network, etc, etc. When you visit a US website you would be lucky that all the companies that help themselves on your browser are all US based.
To quote Jerry Seinfeld, "I didn't know it was possible to not know that."
At this point, #2 almost certainly won't help, but merely draw population from parasitical cities where jobs far exceed housing (mountain view, palo alto, menlo park, etc.) In this way, housing activists in SF are right to fight private buses: they enable companies located on the peninsula to dump their housing problem on SF.

I also think this is part of the reason people in SF (rationally, in a purely self-interested sense) oppose building: the amount of increased housing on offer won't help them. So they bear the costs of living in a construction zone with zero benefits.

Building 200k homes over the next 5 years would help, but no-one is in any way contemplating that. And even beyond the housing fight itself, the infrastructure here can't handle it.
Agreed on the library part, that's my biggest hang-up in making more (and faster) progress with Erlang projects. Sometimes I even end up rolling my own and coming from languages with substantial 'batteries included' library systems this is a real drawback.

On the other hand, when it finally works it is absolutely bullet proof and that's a feeling I have with very few other languages and eco systems.

The degree of isolation between subsystems and the reliability are absolutely un-matched. Neither is the learning curve :(
Your anecdote is not emblematic of the whole. Many people do not immediately buy big ticket items they look at online; but there is data that shows repeated marketing of a product works, and works especially well when the merchant already knows you were looking at a specific product.

Yes, this means they end up wasting ads on people who already purchased, but that is outweighed by the other portion of people who didnt already purchase the product.
Happy new year from Paraguay
I suspect that is temporary. The bureaucracy is already very large in the pot industry, and will grow with time...the big players will guarantee regulators stack the deck in their favor. As legalization spreads across the country, growing will be concentrated in a few areas where it grows most easily and with the cheapest labor and most favorable legal climate (just as tobacco is concentrated in a few places). The big players may be new ones, but agricultural history in the US indicates the small players will get pushed out as the market matures.
Exactly, which emphasizes why instagram only looks inwards.

In effect it's an isolated web. A web of images.
> At least 1 commit / hour

I can do one per day [1] am I good enough? (sarcasm)

[1] https://github.com/cixtor
Celebrating James Maxwell, the Father of Light
What is the eligibility criteria anyways?
The Rise of Return-Anything Culture
AgWorld Apple Watch App
I don't think that small-scale farming can regain its position of a significant contributor to the food production. And even if it could, I'm not sure that it should.

Food production scales up nicely, and it has many other potential benefits than just being cheaper. Say we fixed incentives that promote low-quality food (we have to do it either way, since small farmers are as much incentivized to sell crap as big ones; a big part of "organic food" industry seems to be about that). The big AgriCorp, if incentivized to make good food, can actually care about it better. They have more money to get top-of-the-line tools, or build their own. They can use them more efficiently. They have enough resources to monitor and control the farm in much greater detail. They have more expertise on hands. Am I seriously supposed to trust a Joe Random Farmer more than a professional biotechnologist or agriculturist from Monsanto or DuPont? If so, why bother with this whole thing called "science" at all?

It seems to me that the work needed to restore the quality of our food makes big farms an even better option than they're now. The issues are, ultimately, with economic incentives that promote everything but health aspects of food.
I don't think Google licensing an ad blocker for ad networks that won't sign a contract with them would have gone over well with, say, the Department of Justice.
It is good advice, because it works. You can give reasonable explanations for Python 3, involving politics, the future, and dead languages, while still having your students be confused when Google releases TensorFlow with only 2.7 support. Hard language is his style. He loathes anything that gets in the way of being a productive programmer. See: http://programming-motherfucker.com/
The Haptoclone
You're effectively bidding on our own ads. If you outbid the advertiser that would have otherwise won, the ad is removed
MyPoints+Web+Search
Building a Node.js-powered Distributed Supercomputer
2n^2, that the underlying reason for that equation is a quantum effect is not required for the basic understanding that 'further out' means 'more room'. That in the end the equations are about energy levels rather than space does not matter when you're trying to remember what the periodic table looks like, it's a useful mental construct, even if it is fundamentally in-accurate.
Heh, can you imagine the uproar over Google selling an adblocker that blocks competitors' ads?

I imagine the FTC/DOJ might have something to say about that too.
through subsidies, tax breaks, regulation, etc

I'm genuinely curious whether this is actually the case. Can you cite some examples? My google-skills don't seem to be adequate.
Well, YouTube was the same way. Video creators being paid by advertisers. Then YouTube Red came along - pay a free, see no ads, and your money goes to the video creators.

But under YouTube Red, revenue for creators went up. I would imagine the same thing would happen here.
Backspace doesn't work from a Linux box SSHing into Windows (strange world we live in), but otherwise it's great.
I'm starting to come to the conclusion that users actually sort of like this sort of thing, and that it fuels a lot of the social dynamic on the internet. What I'm seeing is that groups of friends congregate in group chats, and a lot of the activity there is sharing links into these silos, freeing content and showing it to friends. If no one was (practically, by lack of motivation to join/engage) excluded by each silo there would be less of an opportunity to introduce things to people that they don't or can't find on their own, and less social activity. Perhaps social is in the gutters between the silos?
I think the Python core team is very aware that there are some users that will never switch to Python 3. It's just not relevant to them. If you're never going to switch, and all future development is going to be on the Python 3 branch, they should just accept that you're not a Python 3 user, and can continue using the stable Python 2.6 deployments you already are.

In the very long term, it's likely that your industry will be replaced. It's unlikely that this will be because of Python, though. Rather, technological change will continue to outpace bureaucracy and eventually the gap will become so big that some startup comes up with a new way of doing things and uses whatever the technologies of the future are to build their system.
What you're describing is typically considered publisher fraud and not unique to this situation. Ad networks will revoke that website or any of the parties in between that serves their ads fraudulently.
So true!!

I would pay Google to use search, if it came to this, because I find immense and irreplaceable value in Google Search that no other company seems to be able to replicate.

But paying anyone to not see ads on websites? That's absurd. I'll use adblocking while I can, and when/if those websites find a way to reliably block adblocking-using visitors, I'll just stop visiting.
Was that something that the article author managed to do?
If you want to do any high-volume mail output and you're not already using Google Apps infrastructure, you must use Mailgun or another service provider to avoid blacklisting your domain...
Hadn't heard of them before to be honest. With a quick look on their Wikipedia page, perhaps they were too early for post-Wikileaks concern around privacy?

Bank payments may be better now too, with more competition and greater use of non-traditional currency (ie Bitcoin).
Don't forget that Google is a billion-dollar company primarily because they sell a lot of ads. Why do you think Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, etc. are free to use? Because they make a lot of money (from ads), so they can hire the best developers to build awesome tools that (almost) everybody loves. They could stop doing ads altogether and instead just ask money for using all Google products directly, but it'd just be really expensive, and people usually don't like to pay for stuff they think should be free.
A credit card registered in the US.
Hobby farming can make sense if you want to own a lot of land as an investment. If you don't farm it, in most states it gets assessed at a much higher residential rate for tax purposes. So it pays to farm, even if the business is break-even.
People who purchase something online are magnitudes more likely to purchase it again than someone who hasn't made the purchase.
Criteo told in an interview that the click rate was 500% better with their tracking.
10 acres is microscopic. The average small family farm is over 220 acres.
I agree completely and your Zappos example is spot on.

A few months ago, I was thinking about buying a new truck. I was sitting out on the deck with my iPad and Google'd the name of the local Dodge dealership, found a truck I liked, then Google'd some specs on it. A bit later, the girlfriend and I drove over to the dealership and I ended up driving a new truck home that day.

For roughly six weeks afterwards, everywhere I went on the web (on the iPad) I saw presented with ads about new trucks. The majority of the ads were for the specific dealership that I bought it from (that I had Google'd) and the others were mostly for other dealerships in the area. I got to where I'd click on them every time I saw them just because they annoyed me so much. At some point, the ads stopped because I haven't seen one in a while.
> The cold reality is that most open source projects aren't really TRYING to attract contributors. Small-time hobbyists often don't want to play with others in their personal project sandboxes, and big-time projects with high profile usually put up high barriers to contribution.

I'd say there is a large amount of projects between these two extremes, and Github makes it relatively easy to get contributors "accidentally", by making it trivially easy to contribute. And a small percentage of those will probably stick around.

For small contributions (e.g. bugs due to different configuration of my system that are trivial to recognize and catch, errors in the documentation, properly describing a bug or crash I see) GitHub is really quick. With other projects, figuring out how to get post access to the bug tracker and how to check that the bug hasn't been reported yet, or reading up on where and how to submit code changes probably takes more time then dealing with the issue itself, and I'm not going to bother.

Not saying that other places can't be similarly quick (I'd say Bitbucket and GitLab probably are), but many projects hosted on their own infrastructure are worse about that.
> I suspect this would have happened about as much with or without the Python 3 project though.

That could be, of course for me the lens I'm looking through is very much a personal one. Backwards compatibility is a very important concept to me and I really dislike breaking changes, especially when there is no graceful intermediate phase with deprecation and warnings and ample time to move. It's what completely turned me off drupal and python more or less did the exact same thing. I'm sure that for newcomers to python the result is a much improved experience but from my point of view this was an un-necessary hardship.
That won't happen (and is one of the issues with Contributor) because of antitrust issues. Google already has too much power in the ad ecosystem.
I just got bitten by not having an ad blocker installed on the current browser.

You know what this[0] looks like? That nice "You may also like" box? Like a fucking end of the article. Except it isn't. It's only a half of it. Seriously, fuck you Salon. I guess you don't care if people actually read the stuff you post.

EDIT Oh, I know why it tricked me. Because the rest of the article only loads when you scroll past that ad. What the fuck.

[0] - http://imgur.com/SMBtRkO
Google and many websites wouldn't exist in the first place if it wasn't for ads.
> Their massive spending on luxuries distorts economies, diverting producers from providing goods and services for the more needy.

The article rather trivially omits the product adoption curve that in some markets is heavily subsidized by luxury spenders. A bunch of car safety features, for example, are offered at a high markup in luxury vehicles, like Lexus or Infiniti, and with gradual adoption and diminished cost are passed on to Toyota and Nissan models.

On a global scale a two-year upgrade cycle for smartphones in the US made previous-generation smartphones affordable at many poorer markets.

Even common household goods and fixtures like LED lighting or dishwasher machines first were considered luxuries, priced as luxuries, and eventually became commoditized.
Google is not a disinterested party here, of course. A better solution for the non-Google stakeholders would be to do this through a neutral third party organization where publisher lockin to an ad platform would not be an issue.