skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While accurate on many of the recent developments, this article missed (as many precision ag/genetics editorials do) some of the key drawbacks to industrialized agriculture:

1. Herbicide resistance. We now have weeds that are simultaneously resistant to many different modes of action. Even if one were able to eliminate the impact of pesticides on the environment, it is impossible to develop new chemicals and stacked herbicides faster than evolution can find ways to work around them.

2. There are other drawbacks to monoculture ag, namely soil loss, lower quality of soil structure/microbiota, loss of ecosystem services such as habitat, etc. Increasing our yields per acre is great but we need to factor in all of the externalities. I was glad to see mention of finding new ways to associate rhizobia with cereals, but that's a long way off and for the time being no one has figured out how to have agriculture avoid massive imports (even in organic ag) of nutrients into the system.

3. Exclusive focus on the biggest staple crops, with far more emphasis on quantity than quality and producing food that is necessary for a well-rounded diet.

4. Nearly all of these solutions ignore the possibility of using ecological interactions, unique spatial designs, intercropping, perennials and other agroecological strategies to reduce weed pressure, increase nitrogen fixation etc. These other techniques are far harder and are more difficult to commercialize, but if one wants to tackle "hard" problems in agriculture, those would be the ones to address.

Just to be clear, much good will come out of the technological developments, but for the moment they're primarily tinkering around the edges when really we need a whole-systems redesign for agriculture. I recently finished a PhD focused on optimizing decisions given all of the uncertainty/variability in precision ag systems, and what I ultimately concluded (at least for row crops) is we still have a long way to go.
I'm not using any libraries. All hand coded to just get the bits it needs in the html using lots of indexOf.

With regards to the anti-bot problem, this isn't running on any server, it's running on the user's computer. The number of requests they make per second doesn't seem to trigger any anti-bot measures. I'm just using plain Java URLConnections.
Which begs the question how much do we spend now on programs for the poor? I'm surprised that the journalist didn't try to answer the question, as that would have provided the context to know if a minincome program is a small stretch or a massive undertaking.
I would completely agree with you if this weren't a C compiler project. In this case, the advantage of having a self-hosting compiler is huge! Among other things, you can use the compiler source itself to test the compiler, which is pretty cool.

I have worked on projects that were essentially "C with classes," and it was fine. I'm not saying every C++ project needs to go all out using every feature from C++ 11, but I didn't even see much beyond use of the string class here. It seems not worth giving up self-hosting to me.
Box has a negative P/E, so I'll assume you're talking about P/S here.

You seem to be suggesting that companies within an industry should all have the same price-to-sales multiple. (Or at least they'd "better have" the same multiple. Or else?) This is because, while all the companies have different quantitative and qualitative aspects, the mutual competition "effectively cancels out" those differences when it comes to valuation.

Snark aside, here are things that actually matter for valuing these sorts of companies:

* cost to acquire a customer (Box's S-1 notoriously had sales+marketing which was greater than their revenue)

* customer churn, or relatedly, lifetime value per customer

* subscriber growth

* margins (i.e. storage costs)

Perhaps your conclusion about the relative values of these companies is correct, but the fact that you're not mentioning any of the points above means that it's very difficult to give any credibility to your argument.
That's only true if Dropbox is really growing revenues at a fast pace.

If they're growing revenues at a slow pace – or have a low profit margin – it's more like looking in through an opaque window at bankers doing less with your money than other bankers could. You'd much rather withdraw that money and invest it nextdoor.
It might be the particular OOP languages you're used to. Ruby, PHP and Python all have pretty strong cultures of relying on mutation and side effects. Part of this might be that the languages are so focused on dynamicism that you really have to go out of your way to even suggest that a type should be immutable. And even then it's only a matter of time until someone mucks it up by applying a mutable mixin to the type.

In other languages, though, it's perfectly possible to create immutable classes that can only be interacted with using pure functions. You could argue that it's questionable that these do anything you can't do better with records and algebraic data types, and there's something to that. But there's also something to taking the pragmatic approach and not letting the (presumably) remote odds of your employer adopting a niche language prevent you from writing better code.
These tests only cover the type space, which is trivial. And doesn't vary at run time. Even under dynamic typing, it's by large immutable: short of special tricks like change-class in Common Lisp, objects are immutable, and most data flow paths carry the same types all the time.

For instance, consider a function which calculates the GCD of two integers. Everything in that function is an integer. Your compiler tests it for you: nope, no strings or floats in there: nothing but integers, check!

It's basically one test, and it has nothing to do with whether that function calculates the GCD correctly. It will pass even if that function calculates the LCM due to misunderstood requirements.
I disagree, I think most people don't like trade deals because of the trade part of them.
A possibility for it's use is directly in a application then.

For very high performance packet generation and processing the Linux kernel is sub-par because it's extremely complex and general purpose. There is just too much going on.

example:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/kernel-bypass/
I find this incredibly disturbing.

Facebook's entire business model is built around manipulation and control. They do psychological experiments on their users and skew their news feeds to influence their political opinions.

And now Facebook wants me to tag my emotionally vulnerable friends, possibly for further abuse, surveillance and manipulation? For profit? For the good of the state? How much will insurance companies and my future employers need to pay Facebook for the improved psychological profile they're building?

No. If I see anything on Facebook that makes it seem as if someone I know is depressed or needs help, the last thing I'm going to do is make Facebook aware of it.
The statement I was responding to was, "This has far more about cultural friction than the people involved."

Your reply supports this: whether they do or don't (and to what degree) is an individual matter. I wasn't disputing that experience can change a person's attachment to racism.
Walmart doesn't care about your happiness. They only care the labor as a percentage of hourly sales.

They figure once you invested an hour marching around a football field sized store you'll happily wait 45 minutes to check out.
The US is waging war all over the damned world but its paying little attention to it. I think it's fair to say that at least 300 million Americans' lives would be the same whether that was happening rt not, except their taxes could be about 10% lower (defense budget is about 16% of the federal budget -- it couldn't be completely eliminated).

You're more likely to be killed by someone behind the wheel but looking at their phone than you are by some loony trying to tie the US's external activities to something he or she was going to do anyway. The country faces no existential threat, which is why people have time to argue about picayune crap like ISIL.

You want existential threat? People in Syria are facing existential threats (and yet the US has its oar in there too). My parents grew up in towns bombed by invading forces while they were kids (on different continents); my mum's family had to flee into the jungle. My in laws' town (in yet another continent) was bombed flat while they were kids too. Even the attacks of September 2001 did not threaten the existence of the republic or the country, despite the massive and expensive thrashing of the subsequent "immune response."
I think it would take a lot of other reforms to make UBI possible. I'm in favor of the idea as part of tax reforms, and a flat tax (even as high as 50%), in order to reduce complexity and corruption and offer UBI. Benefits to adult citizens only, the tax rate would apply to all workers/residents/minors though.

It would be far simpler than what we have and allow for the elimination of huge swaths of government and misguided programs.

I'm pretty libertarian minded, and would rather have neither, but the pragmatist in my feels that something evenly handed, that everyone gets the same share of, while still allowing for individual income above and beyond would work better.
As a person that is not a native english speaker I find english extremely powerful language, with hundreds of nuanced words that convey different aspects and facets of seemingly same ideas - like emotions! Thesaurus raids can be fun! As well as reading well written, witty prose (#Fuck poetry)
I also love how it can compress complex ideas into one word - it actually makes speaking in my native tongue hard, because a lot of such words siply do not have translations (or just are translated into way more general ones)
And thank you for the reference!

Like I said, not quite my use case, but I may find a use for it yet. :)
Contributory negligence at the very least. They gave a portal to let pretty much any tom dick and harry throw whatever content they want on their site. The only way this will get better is if content providers start owning up to /all/ their content, including the stuff in between script tags.
Hmm, I agree. This app is actually pretty good. The iOS version even has brushing capabilities. I wonder if the only way to get exposure nowadays is via paid acquisition. There are literally thousands of excellent apps that you just never hear about.
Hi, maker of Polarr Photo Editor on Chrome here. We spent a lot of time fighting different browsers x GPU x OSs. FF once reached out to us to have our app made for FF but after we published the app, the FF store was gone.
Admittedly off topic, but can we stop using the made-up word "learnings" when "lessons" will do?
PGP and Nylas
"..have to borrow before every planting"
This is not limited to just small farms. In Western Australia, farm debt has been growing 8% per annum since 2000. The average farm size here is ~3500ha (8650acres).
The Olympics Are Turning Rio into a Military State
I don't know the answer to 1 or 3 because I'm not a FB insider, but I can answer #2 for you:

> 2) Where do these click/like farms come from, and what's in it for them?

All you have to do is go on Fiverr and see people advertising Facebook likes for $5. The bots like a bunch of other pages and posts to simulate "real human activity", then the sellers direct all the bots to "like" a page that their client paid them to like. Rinse and repeat.
As soon as you create a class you're binding data and methods inside a black box. It's the very antithesis of FP. Of course you can freeze and fiddle with your class to make it "more functional" but it doesn't wash because in FP functions are supposed to be "free", ie. unboxed.
I presume it'd be faster, since only remote data is MySQL data, as opposed to web server/PHP rendering.
The New Made in Japan
The Forgotten Revolution by Russo blames the establishment of the Roman empire instead -- or rather all the troubles in the couple centuries before. For example, he showed a timeline of astronomical observations used by Ptolemy: it had bars over the centuries from around 700 BC (iirc) down to Hipparchus in the 100s BC, then nothing until Ptolemy's era around 100 AD (which Russo thought a weak revival with people like Ptolemy more mining the libraries than really reestablishing scientific and technical progress).

The author is more of a physicist than a historian, fwiw.
Genuine question - can you post some more information?
The current stuff is just some bullshit elitism.

Someone at work literally gave me a speech about the health evils of my egg mcmuffin while drinking a 24 oz Starbucks milkshake^H "frap" and getting ready to crack open some frozen sausage egg and cheese sandwich from Starbucks.
Most UK supermarkets are shrinkng space after scan to near Aldi levels. A couple will ask if you want help packing (which unless you're elderly and infirm will slow things considerably)

it's quite common to see a set of 4 trolley bags (£1 from pound shop, much more from TM holder) which are designed to fill a standard trolley and dump stuff in those to drop in car boot. Of course you'll barely be able to move the one with all the tins and bottles without ripping the handles off, but...
This is kinda funny given this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11906170
Oops. You are right. Thanks!
Sequel Pro (free open source, despite name) is a native application which is much nicer to use than phpMyAdmin. So, yes there's benefits other than security.
The article is specifically addressing the US's status as a significant outlier WRT gun homicide. The article addresses your point that homicide represents only a fraction of total gun deaths.
> Yes I agree that the Redemption Clause does not align with entrepreneurs' interest, but I understand the reason behind it.

I don't think the parent was questioning the reasoning behind, he/she was just saying it's a bad deal, and entrepreneurs should actively avoid it. It's good advice and a good strategy for a founder.

Let's turn your statement around a bit. You can probably see how there really isn't an equally fair way to play this game:

I somewhat emphasize with founders who don't understand such clauses in the term sheet, as founders themselves make huge sacrifices and are constantly under pressure to perform for their investors (VCs), which likely can only happen when their company has a big liquidation event (IPO or acquisition).
It's basically free advertising for them, this account has 0 comments and has submitted 100% from risingstack.com -- 12 posts in 2 months. It's obvious they're just trying to drum up traffic (i.e. business).
Good correction -- shame on me for not looking up the exact times that copyright terms were extended. For some reason, I thought most of them happened in the past 20 years :P

I agree, extending copyright another 20 years is a marginal, if not a more theoretical benefit. I doubt any company thinks 50, let alone 95 years ahead.
Let me outline briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health -- his land's health, his own, his family's, his community's, his country's. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order -- a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, "hard facts"; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.

This is a passage from Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America. His premise is that viewing agriculture as an equation to be solved is fundamentally incompatible with maintaining the land's carrying capacity.

akiselev said in another comment, "How would you propose we study an ecosystem where we can't even isolate and analyze the majority of bacterial, fungal, and viral species let alone study or simulate their interactions with each other and crops at the scale of even a square meter plot?"

We already have the knowledge of how to sustainably farm land without irreparably damaging the ecosystem (although it is dying fast); we are simply unwilling to work as hard as it would take to do it and are hoping for a technological breakthrough from an expert to solve problems we can't even verbalize.
I'd love to read some excerpts of the translations. I'm tempted to buy some of the papers but it's hard to justify sight unseen - I don't know how much detail they contain.
I made the third Jewish Temple.

I am more famous than jesus Christ.

The CIA will surrender to the IRA within 6 months.

God says...
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We have a real duty to maintain engineering excellence, before all our tech is spaghetti. What happens once the MegaBytes don't count anymore?
is people buying likes not a sufficient answer?
Whoops, you're right! I was too hasty.
5 Mistakes to Avoid When Drawing a Soccer Ball
Indeed, especially in this age when even authentic likes are arguably almost useless - any post on Facebook nowadays seems to need boosting to reach more than a negligible fraction of a page's likes.

But it's definitely worse when the likes aren't even authentic. Boosting posts to reach fake likes is a total waste of money, on top of the original waste to procure such likes.
> Do we know if this sort of message causes a person to be more or less likely to take their lives? How can you A-B test that?

Actually... you probably could train a model to detect suicidal posts. I had a friend who committed suicide a few months ago, and I didn't see it coming. But looking back, there were signs in his facebook posts (in line with this article's example of thanking everyone), but our conversations were normal. It is at the very least a wishful line of thinking for me that ML can recognize this type of pattern.
Doesn't Facebook allow you to "target" to whom your ads go to? Doesn't this basically solve the problem, because you should be going for a narrow market anyway?
Sure, the country can defend itself all it wants, but this is war, not Queensbury rules boxing.

So, yeah, if we're pummelling the snot out of some small country (Grenada, Venezuela, ???) and they get off a lucky shot with a missile or torpedo that manages to sink one carrier, then a nuclear response would be unwarranted and unlikely, and we'd just see continued conventional operations by the rest of the fleet.

But that scenario is so unlikely. But we're realistically talking about an all-out attack on a carrier group with ballistic missiles or nuclear subs, possibly with nuclear warheads. This would only be mounted by a Russia or China. Or possibly Iran trying a swarm attack with thousands of small suicide-boats. This would be in the context of a much larger war and operations.

Attacking a carrier group is an undertaking of huge magnitude - a huge escalation in itself, and anyone should expect a serious response from a successful attack. And, keeping open the question of whether that retaliation might be nuclear is also an important deterrent.

The context would certainly determine whether or not it actually goes nuclear. E.g., what other resources can be brought to bear, under what threat is the rest of the fleet? E.g., if it was the Chinese ballistic anti-carrier missiles, and we knew exactly where they were and could target them conventionally, we probably would, but if they threatened the rest of the fleet, and the only way to neutralize them was nukes, ... watch out.

So, overall, I'm not saying it would necessarily be nuclear, but it certainly wouldn't be surprising if it were. And, if it were, I'd expect that it would be seen as not un-reasonable, because if the US follows its own history, we're very reluctant to launch them.
A few days ago, I was blown away by kids at the Starbucks probably around aged 10 (give or take a few years) teaching one another how to pay their Starbucks balance with their iPhone. In my youth I never had such an expensive piece of hardware in my pocket, nor the cash to spend on $4 drinks.
Particularly since if you spoof the UA in F12 the site works perfectly fine as far as I can tell, although I haven't exercised the entire site. (Disclaimer - on latest public Win 10 build, 14361)
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Thanks - I do believe it made good strides elsewhere, in spite of whatever one might deem it commercially. :)
I've spent a good amount of money on Facebook ads in Asia (>$300k) and while there may be some fraud, there's definitely a completely different pattern of Facebook use in some countries. I think what you're observing is cultural differences in Facebook use, not fraud.

It's incredibly hard to get people to like or engage with your posts in Korea/Japan unless you have a ton of social proof already. This is definitely a cultural aspect as no one wants to be the first or one of just a few to engage with the post. In general, I've found these two countries to be more expensive than the US for getting likes even though it's about 1/3 the cost for getting post clicks.

Meanwhile, in Indonesia/Vietnam/Philippines it's incredibly easy as many people just "Like" everything in their feed as they scroll down. I've talked to several people from these countries about Facebook usage and they say it's their way of marking that they've seen a post. It's funny but I frequently get more likes than clicks on my posts that I run in these countries. Some may be fraud, but after seeing how people actually use Facebook in these countries I'm inclined to believe it's legit.

One of the hacks that works well for me is to take something I want to run as an ad in Korea or Japan and run it in Indonesia first. $2 for a post engagement campaign will get me around 500 likes. That seems to be enough to tip the scale in Korea/Japan and get them to start liking it en masse as well. It's crazy but my like rate goes up around 30x in Korea when I use this strategy of pre-seeding likes.

Anyways, going back to this author's post, the Facebook algorithm seems to be trained to follow what works and gets you the cheapest engagement rate. This is why I never ever run a single ad set with multiple countries and interests as it will just all end up saturated on the one that starts out working best. You should be running separate ad-sets for each country/interest, doing it any other way is a COMPLETE WASTE. Do not run Facebook ads like this.

Furthermore, these really don't look like spam accounts. These look like real Southeast Asian FB accounts. Most of my friends in that part of the world have very similar looking Facebook accounts with a shit ton of random friends/likes.