skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To the lesser question:

> How is privatising/patenting seeds going to change that?

The patent on the first generation of Roundup-Ready soybeans expired last year. A third party immediately produced a generic version of Roundup-Ready soybeans and sold it for half the price of the Monsanto seeds, with no restriction on seed saving. Madness! A company created something new, obtained a patent, and enjoyed a limited monopoly until their patent expired and the free market used the now-public information to undercut them. This is an example of the system working.

Regarding your greater point -- the claim that we are producing many times more food than we need -- the important question isn't how much food we're "wasting" but how much food waste is avoidable, given the constraints we want to live under.

The difficulty in food distribution -- as the article you linked pointed out -- isn't just a matter of warlords hording food or rich westerners cramming their maws with too much food[1]. The larger problem is that food is an organic product (as in, literally, not philosophically) produced in messy conditions with a limited shelf-life. Some food produced will be of substandard quality; some food produced will spoil before reaching a consumer. Agriculture is a leaky pipeline between the farmer and the hungry consumer, and most of the leaks that are left are difficult to plug, or shouldn't be plugged. Consumers shouldn't eat spoiled or fouled food, so if you can't prevent the food from being fouled or spoiling you should let it fall out of the system.

What all this means is that we need to be producing some multiple of the amount of food people consume to actually get that amount to them. We should try to improve distribution as well, of course, but the returns there will be as diminishing as they are everywhere else. By 2050 we'd like 60%-85% more food to be reaching end consumers than is now, to both keep up with population growth and to feed those who are hungry now. Some of that will almost certainly come from improvements in distribution, some of it will probably come from shifting diets away from meat and other inefficient crops, but we'll also need to ultimately produce more food per acre than we are now.

[1]: I found this sentence in the article particularly offensive:

> "And yet more people in the world—1.7 billion—are considered obese or overweight from a daily caloric intake that in some cases is at least six to seven times the minimum."

There may be someone out there eating 6-7 times some minimum (1500 calories?), but that is a weird abnormality and ultimately insignificant in the grand scheme of things. As someone who is mildly overweight, my calorie surplus is about 50-100 calories, about 2% extra, which adds about 5 pounds per year. That is the typical overfed westerner. Adding in the extra calories to support my extra body weight amounts to about 10% more calories than would need at my ideal weight. If 30% of the world consumed 10% fewer calories, it would indeed have a measurable impact on the global food supply, but it is a bit of a red herring.
> LoL. Refcounting can lead to just as long pauses as GC, if your reference is the last reference to a huge object graph.

Laughing out loud is fine I guess but it adds nothing to this discussion as that paragraph would easily stand on its own or even be better without.
"We've been using mutagenesis (through radiation or carcinogens) in food crops to introduce random, unspecific genetic changes for many decades hoping to get lucky and make better crops, with no ill effects."

Ill effects in general have been going up for decades. Isolating what was or wasn't contributing to that is a hard problem. I'd be interested in studies that compared large numbers of people using crops with and without that property. Both should also avoid as many carcinogens as possible and eat healthy in general to reduce those variables. Know any like this which weren't tied to a specific, profit-hungry corporation? I'd be interested in reading it.

"A basic high school understanding of genetics is really all you need to understand that these breeding techniques are largely the same as what happens in the wild"

My info on this subject is way outdated as I studied it around 10 years ago. That's why I'm not talking about the biotech or risks themselves. However, that quote jumped out because they were using retroviruses or something back when I studied it. Not just selective breeding or limited effects of background radiation. The risk analysis is necessarily different. Do you have a list of what methods they use today with descriptions laypersons can follow? Especially how they address any risks in each? I'm long overdue for an update on this topic.
Sad but true :

http://www.indeed.com/job/javascript-nodejs-socketio-ninja-9...

https://www.codeeval.com/company/EmailCherry/
I'm guessing this is one of them:

> Yes you’ll get all the usual benefits, but if you’re really going for perks, Google is your best bet! If you want to make an impact, then please apply.
My guesses (two sentence _pairs_):

> Plan on working ~100+ hours a week during sprints. If that scares you, don’t apply.

> Yes you’ll get all the usual benefits, but if you’re really going for perks, Google is your best bet! If you want to make an impact, then please apply.
> given that the job market is very much on the side of programmers

I think this is seriously oversold. Outside of the Valley, or outside of certain skillsets, the market is not on the side of programmers.
Ah, I see. I think that still counts as work. If you've been saying "I've been off work" in interviews, that might not work, but it would be just as true to say "I've been working for my family."
But what is the paid alternative of all this privacy invasion? Even Apple is doing it now.
>Screw you Amazon!

Don't you mean "Screw you PBS!"?
Being talked to / disciplined for booty shorts and leaking upcoming features seems fairly appropriate.
Intel has always used the x86 to add incremental improvements which are aimed at improving bottlenecks (Pentium 4 not withstanding). The bad side is that x86 is a multilayered blob of random features cobbled together; (I'm glad AMD got to x86-64 first). But it's produced a processor that offers useful things to people along with backwards compatibility. And that seems to be what people want.

I wonder if deprecating and eventually removing the ugly parts of the architecture over time would work for Intel (even if they had to bifurcate the architecture).

What doesn't work for Intel (and its customers) is huge revolutionary new archs with straight-out-of-research advanced features and no compatibility.
CEOs are almost always on the board.

So are founders. They own a huge stake of the company. Board representation is how their interests as owners are maintained.

Why would that be sketchy?
Nicotine is also believed to be an issue with declining bee populations.
RE link, the only thing one should say about a glowing potato is: "fucking awesome".

People won't buy such things for a long time anyway, and that it doesn't occur in nature doesn't matter. Hell, give it a million year and it might start occuring in nature by itself, because why not? Nature does what nature does, it already mixed up a lot of stuff in a weird way (except we don't call them "weird", just "natural").

Few other things that "never happen naturally" - clothes on human beings. Bricks. Steel. Airplanes. Colorful paint on canvas. Should we discourage them all, because they're not "natural"?
You should check out

https://github.com/lodash/babel-plugin-lodash

https://github.com/lodash/lodash-webpack-plugin
I do want accurate food labeling.

In theory, yes. In practice, it's obviously a push by anti-GMO groups in the hope that the labels will irrationally scare customers. It's not unlike the recent Texas law that pretended to be about health and safety standards for abortion clinics, but everyone on both sides knew that the actual goal was to shut them down.

I find the big push by the corporate food producers to make this accurate food labeling illegal to be very disturbing.

Is anyone actually saying that "contains no GMOs" labels should be illegal? Certainly that shouldn't be the case, although when I see a label like that I lower my opinion of the producer on the grounds that they're promoting unfounded fear.

As a tax payer, I am sick and tired of supporting people eating beef - make them pay they actual cost of production.

In principle I agree with this. Do you have a source on the hamburger/shower figure? That's amazing if true, and it would mean that telling people to take shorter showers to conserve water is silly.
I'd say even inside the Valley too, depending on your tech stack, major, university pedigree, or stars on your open source github project.

But then again, the market is not on the side of employees in general - we are many, positions are few. AFAIC, programmers, developers, hackers, etc. still have it pretty good relatively.
This made me smile, and then I felt bad because it's true.
EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration
Well, that is if you study something useless like art history, sociology, media, communications or english literature. I laugh whenever I come across someone who's spent thousands of dollars going to university to study english.

Well, if you studied engineering, science, medicine, accounting or law. You'll eventually probably make good money. If you can't land a job in the US, you can go abroad and your American degree will be valuable in other countries just for the fact that you studied in the US.
Job Ad Title:
Warp Engineer with at least 5years hands-on needed

You should have a solid knowledge of operating Planck length structures.

N-Dimensional and Indeterministic Modelling are mandatory.

Apply fast, ship will leave earth within the next 2 weeks.
I would be down to work on deep house and techno fork with you !
I'm comfortable with the idea that people can distinguish between rules designed to protect society and rules cynically implemented to protect entrenched interests that have cozied up to government. The latter deserve to be flouted. That's how we eventually get rid of them.

There is a reason that pg looks for "naughtiness" in founders.
>Anonymity on the internet is dead

All thanks to advertising companies. What a rotten state of affairs.
Does the idea of beer and video games in the office really bother anyone? Sounds great to me...
Did you read the ruling? Do you have any specific critiques, and do you think the multiple precedents cited are applied incorrectly?

Edit: I've gone through most of the relevant sections. Most of the ruling is reasonable, the section this article and the EFF are complaining about is less supported by precedent.

The actual legal argument says that hacking is common enough that people don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, then there's this paragraph:

>Although this Court recently noted in dicta that the possibility of hacking "is not enough to defeat an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy" because it is illegal, see United States v. Darby, No. 2:16-cr-36, ECF No. 31 at 10-11 (E.D. Va. June 3, 2016), this Court stresses that child pornography often resembles an international crime. Similarly, much hacking occurs by foreign nations where the governments condone or participate in hacking. Child pornography is not just a national issue; it is an international issue, and at least a portion of the pornography in this case arrived from foreign sources through the World Wide Web

This seems to be the weakest part. It's saying that hacking can't be the basis for a lack of expectation of privacy, but that since some countries allow hacking, it's legal there, and if you're accessing stuff from other countries you no longer have the expectation of privacy.
I find it a fallacy with these types of things where it is simply implied very smart people have this opinion and since they are smart, it must be correct.

As an engineer in my field, there are so many specialized skills, even other engineers in the same field often are not qualified to analyze certain technologies without training, experience etc.
In addition to other points listed here, keep in mind that horizontal genetic transfer happens in nature through viral vectors, so pretty much anything we can do genetic modification wise is also possible in nature.
The decision is available here: http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/dc5a3fd3-4b4...

I think it is more likely than not that this case will be granted cert. The Supreme Court has in the past wanted to weigh in on extremely large and consequential class action cases. For example, Wal-Mart v. Dukes, 564 U.S. 338 where the District Court certified a class of 1.6 million people.
I didn't realize MIT was located in a lower-income, minority neighborhood.
Apple patents technology that can block iPhone cameras in sensitive locations
I think "If that scares you, don’t apply. We don’t want people who are scared by silly things like reality." sounds more real than advertising a large variety of alcohol.
That scarily describes a startup I am involved with.
It says this right before the bolded part:

"When you use our services or view content provided by Google, we automatically collect and store certain information in server logs. This includes:"

I am not sure this applies to regular phone calls, no? Can someone explain here because I am certainly not understanding. Is this only for, say, Google Voice or related services that they have?
The decision is contrary to all existing law and will be overturned.
A Gooxit would be in order.

From time to time I wonder why the EU accepts foreign companies stealing so much personal data. China did the right thing. We should learn from them. India, afaik, also has better protection.
Not memory footprints per se, but RubyBench tracks iterations per second and object allocation across a wide selection of common Ruby/Rails programs.

https://rubybench.org/
In this case, dangerous literally equals useful. Anything capable of working with vast amounts of energy is dangerous by the very virtue of humans being very fragile. Whether something is dangerous or useful is a function of how we handle/apply it.

But, generally, that's what we do. With brains, we can do in a few months what would take natural selection millions of years to "discover". Doing that, using our brains, seems kind of like the whole point of being a human.
All thanks to the users of advertising companies who trade privacy for free or cheaper stuff. We used to have paid, more private tech. Still do actually. Almost no money in it with bankruptcies and acquisitions by shady firms more common than getting on Global 2000.
Thank FSM I work at home. I can wear booty shorts that match my beard to work every day.
There is a difference this time. Phoenix and Elixir was created specifically with an eye towards Ruby developers. Jose is working for a Ruby shop from what I understand. Go was C++ ++ or Java++ or Python++, Node was front-end brought to the backend kinds deal (or "you only need to know only language" deal). Clojure is an interesting one, but I haven't gotten much to play with it, so don't have much to say about it.
Sad state of affairs when an article about encroaching users privacy is met with such indifference.
50 Lessons Signing 100 Global Brands
HPE has already largely switched its Itanium-based product lines to x86.
When did we decide productivity is the only important factor in society?
Core build (~4 kB gzipped)

Full build (~22 kB gzipped)
Virtual inheritance means you have a diamond pattern and haven't separated your components properly. It should have never made it into the language as far as I'm concerned.
Good grief, this sounds like something that should have been in The Onion.
This.

I got laid off a few months ago. All in all, I was unemployed for about three months before landing a new position.

Whenever I checked Indeed or Monster, I saw lots of positions that required extensive J2EE or .NET skills, plus a bunch of webdev and a handful of mobile jobs. None of those I have. I have lots of Java experience, sure, but it's all core Java and thoroughly divorced from the web. I was passed up for some jobs I thought I was going to get because the internal recruiters were really excited about me only to get shot down by the hiring manager because I had no webdev background.

My background is half in core Java and half in Linux platform and Python development; almost nobody in Dallas wants either. And, no I'm not interested in leaving Dallas, and even if I was, I certainly wouldn't move to the Valley. If I ever set foot in California at all, it'd be SoCal.

What finally saved me was when an old friend of mine found a position open at his company and put in a good word for me. I got lucky. If not for him, I'd be staring down another two-year period of unemployment like I had in 2010-2012.
I'm happy to see the new way to render views outside the request cycle: http://blog.bigbinary.com/2016/01/08/rendering-views-outside...

This will be great for, eg, creating reports or receipts in background jobs.
>Are people really surprised about this anymore?

There is a significant portion of the population that doesn't know what metadata even is, much less that a company they use collects it and why that might be a problem.
Hardly, it's an unfair advantage. There's a reason it's a prescription drug.
Having trouble locating sources, I heard it from a collage professors. But, from what I recall it works something like this.

Poor students are vastly less likely to have motivated parents that push and pay for activity's to look good on collage applications. If test prep can add 100 points to a standardized test and two students both have the same score but only one did test prep then the other likely has higher innate intelligence.

After the first year innate intelligence makes up a larger role than pre-collage preparations for students motivated enough to get into an Ivy.

After school social networks play a larger roll in success than small gaps in innate intelligence. Richer students tend to form more valuable social networks.
There's an article at http://www.mackungfu.org/LouisRossmanntheguywhorepairsAppleh... as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12016253
That sucks. Is abstaining from Gapps a choice, or is it because of licensing?

You could try this:
http://opengapps.org/
Not even a single mention about security or privacy on their Kickstarter page told me what I wanted to know about a cloud-connected keyboard.

Also found it quite cynical to offer a blinking disco as a device to improve your focus. No thanks. But looking at how much was already raised, I can only guess a lot of people like LED's a LOT.
>You had to take time to look up operator-in because you're not used to using operator-in

I'm using in (`if('age' in value)`), but not for..in. There's a difference. I don't need to use that (you didn't in your example, even though you should have), but then my code would blow up in many of the same cases as yours will.

Anyway, what's wrong with that code is you'll need a hasOwnProperty check, you'll need to break out of the loop when done, it blows up if 'age' isn't a property on one of the objects in the object, it blows up if one of the properties of obj isn't an object, it blows up if obj is null/undefined, and it will deoptimize the entire function it's in in most cases in V8.

To at least fix the bugs that yours has that mine didn't, your code should be:

for (var key in obj) {
if (obj.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
var val = obj[key]
if ('age' in val && val.age === 1) {
// there you go
}
}
}

but again that still needs some undefined/null guards at a few spots, and it needs to be able to handle both an array and an obj at where obj is to really be an equivalent of what i was using _.filter for.

>You default assume other people's code is better than yours.

No, I know the lodash code i'm using is better than mine because i've looked at it, i've looked at it's test coverage, i've looked at it's performance numbers, and i've looked at it's usage.

Also...
>I skipped over it because it's a solution in search of a problem.

Then why did you skip this part in my last comment:

>it's disingenuous at best and borderline lying to say that lodash is 500kb. The DEVELOPER version is 500kb, the production version is 67kb before gzipping, and 22kb after gzipping

You made me curious, so i actually took a look at my current in-development app i'm writing that i include lodash. The grand total from all lodash functions is 22k un-gzipped, and 7k gzipped.

For that i've significantly reduced my code complexity, increased compatibility, reduced the amount of tests i needed to run and maintain, and improved performance in one pretty out-there edge case.

You don't need to use lodash, and in many cases you shouldn't. But don't act like your applications are better than others in any way because you aren't using lodash.
http://www.barenakedislam.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/BAI...

http://thescoopblog.dallasnews.com/2015/11/armed-protesters-...
Thanks, though that doesn't seem to be saying that kudzu being a problem is a myth, but rather that there have been myths exaggerating the problems with kudzu (“I thought the whole world would someday be covered by it, that it would grow as fast as Jack’s beanstalk, and that every person on earth would have to live forever knee-deep in its leaves"). There does seem to be a consensus that kudzu is a problem (you can look at the USDA page about it), and the article doesn't dispute it.
In his On Writing Book, Stephen King has a section or maybe even a chapter on this rejection stuff. I think he said that there was one rejection in particular that made all the difference for him because it came back with ideas and encouragement.I think he also did something where he kept all his rejections as well. It's always interesting to see how famous authors handled being rejected way back when they were getting started.
Being a platform company doesn't necessarily mean you need to do surveillance on everyone who's on your platform! Apple's big move to differential privacy is one example of that.