skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
land that currently provides enough rice to feed 27 people will need to support 43 by 2050

Honest question: can't we assume that, as population grows, people will just plant more rice?

Sure this cannot be done everywhere, but there's surely some arable land somewhere that can grow, and maybe technology can help in other ways than by manipulating the genome of plants.

For instance, if we had cheap energy or a very efficient desalinating tech, we could desalinate ocean water and cultivate normal rice where there are deserts now...

In France farmers are complaining that the prices of farm products are too low and it sounds like there are many places where we produce way too much for too few consumers.

Instead of playing god to reduce a risk in 2050, can't we try right now to find economical, political, or technical ways to take the surplus from one place and bring it to places where food is already dramatically lacking?

EDIT: formatting
I found this guide to be pretty comprehensive: https://www.esev.com/blog/post/2015-01-pgp-ssh-key-on-yubike...
Ask HN: What is that one deciding factor that makes a website successful?
I have known a lot of people who have ventured into the 'website' business and found the initial success and disappeared after a while.

I'm curious about what makes the successful ones successful .
I've seen beautifully designed, high quality content sites fail.

so I've come to the conclusion that the key factor is scaling. even if you've programmed your site to scale, unless you pour in the dough to scale your servers and allow more people to come in you're gonna fail.
Is this the deciding factor?
what according to you is that one deciding factor?
Williams X-Jet
What about between North Korea (US lost) and South Korea (USSR lost)?

You can't compare different cultures like that
Between 1960 and 2007, the share of disposable personal income spent on total food by Americans, on average, fell from 17.5 to 9.6 percent

http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/detail.a...
It's pretty likely that "automation won't simply wipe out any need for human labor" (or at least not for a long time.)

The problem is that we seem set on using the minimum wage to ensure a basic level of income. This means that we HAVE to make sure we have enough jobs for everyone, and that all of those jobs HAVE to produce enough economic value for the employer for them to provide that basic level of income.

The result is that we end up effectively paying people to do nothing, while effectively prohibiting jobs that don't produce enough value to justify the minimum wage. This seems blatantly inefficient and idiotic to me.
>There was a time in this country for nearly 40 years where the top tax bracket was above 75%, and for quite a while it was 91%, and for a short while it was 94%.

When we were at war. There was also a longer time when there were no taxes.
Like you say, stop signs are everywhere in the US. They are the default traffic control. In my view, they provide three functions:

1. Providing a simple, general purpose traffic control. Going through every town and re-thinking every intersection on a case by case basis would be quite costly, and the amount of public controversy might make it prohibitive.

2. Limiting speed. My house is on a stretch of street that has no stop signs for a few blocks, and cars get going pretty fast, typically 10 to 20 mph above the speed limit of 30 mph.

3. Encouraging drivers to use the main roads instead of neighborhood streets.
> Your choices are: answer a trivial JavaScript question and get a million points, or spend an hour painstakingly explaining a hard problem for maybe one point (where, half the time, the original submitter doesn’t even bother to “accept” your answer so you lose even that small point boost).

I don't agree with this, there are long winded answers with a massive amount of points and/or bounty awarded to them. The problem you describe exists in any market, majority of an audience will always go for a low hanging fruit. That's why the few who answer those complicated questions are usually subject matter experts and sit in the >1% of SO.
Your point about consumer spending is spot on. The five day week is only 100 years old, and it was none other than Henry Ford who was partly responsible, so that his own staff (who happened to be some of his best customers) could take time off to drive their cars.
Interactive insight discovery from 1.2B NYC taxi rides
> why does SO allow it?

If you know the right incantation you can bring it up on meta and maybe they'll filter it out.

Or maybe people will downvote you and yell at you.

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/172758/what-have-you...
True, but stopping and then starting again doesn't make the other drivers any more predictable.
The truth is that you've managed to piss off and alienate a lot of people in pursuit of... something, and when a new community platform gains critical mass, we will take the content and jump ship happily.

To change this, you could try publicly acknowledging the issues, encouraging people (especially moderators) to be less pedantic and nicer, and rolling back some of the most egregious abuse by the little Q&A tyrants.
The error here is to assume an isolated development of one trend. If AI becomes as sophisticated as imagined, it will make most (if not all) other technologies evolve with it. When talking about manufacturing/production, better tech correlates to lower production costs, lower prices. If you still pay $500 for a mobile phone then, it is more a subject of brandwashing than economics. Same thing with services, medicines, food, etc. In sum: we'll need less money. If that money comes from universal min wage, or from working less hours, or from working more hours at lower wages, seems irrelevant next to this question: who will own AI?
Novel solution to classic decision-theory problem
> Don't see how it could happen in Iran, much less how post-communist Iran would be worse these days than jihadist nuclear Iran you now have.

Not necessarily. The Soviet Union sponsored plenty "nationalist" movements which are only superficially different from religious.
I always have a question about this stuff: when the robots take all of our jobs (or the jobs of a critical mass of the human population), who is going to buy all this stuff the robots make if the humans who are supposed to buy the stuff are broke because they lost their job to a robot?

Has anybody tried to do some kind of study/educated guess about this impact?

At the end of the day, while robots can do our jobs better than we do, they can't consume stuff better than we do, and ultimately our consumption of stuff is what creates the jobs the robots are taking over.

With jobs even as "safe" as surgeons potentially under threat, how long before everyone is in trouble?
I now try to see if Stack Overflow has an answer and if I am not able to really understand what is going on, I don't bother to post a question because I hate how the 'keepers' pounce on you. Instead I find an SME by networking within my org and get it answered
This is such an important point. And it is exactly why, when we launched Project Galileo, CloudFlare's initiative to protect politically or artistically important work online, we decided it was critical that CloudFlare wasn't the one deciding what was "politically or artistically important." Instead we rely on the input of civil society organizations like the EFF, CDT, ACLU, Access, etc. If one of the partner organizations says something meets the criteria then we have committed to protecting it, for free and no questions asked.

https://www.cloudflare.com/galileo/

We offered to protect Brian's site under Galileo for free. Had he taken us up on our offer, which remains open, I would hope he would continue to be as critical of CloudFlare as he always has been.

And I hope we've established some credibility in not abusing the position of trust we occupy. For instance, when we protected Spamhaus from a large DDoS attack years ago we specifically made it clear we'd never ask them to treat us any differently than any other organization they monitor. And we haven't. And, to this day, Spamhaus remains one of our biggest critics. And they remain a CloudFlare customer.

Here's a talk I gave last year at Blackhat about the risks of ideas being suppressed on an Internet that is increasingly controlled by a small handful of providers:

https://youtu.be/V-Pj0lrr168

It's something we worry about all the time and I'm glad more people are beginning to discuss the risks it poses.
A list with the most popular “queueing” tools and solutions
Some LEDs have phosphors which almost entirely absorb the light from the diode.
Given that white LEDs rely on blue LED components, and blue LEDs are the most expensive and most delicate parts in these lights, one would think lowering the blue content should be a no brainer. More comfortable and cheaper all around.
Hi all! I built this app originally to help myself memorize japanese vocabulary through bruteforcing my mind as I can't find any other japanese quiz app with a UI like this on the web.

Feedback and criticism are much appreciated, thanks for trying this!
signatures are hard to fake. virtual logs, not so much. Planting evidence in there is so easy it hurts. And people might not know how easy it is to fake that evidence, whereas it's pretty obvious to anyone that a witness can lie...

I'm not saying we should disregard those kind of virtual evidence, I'm just saying we might need to educate more about the risks of falsifications more.
Reminds me of the guy who set up an automated voice script on his landline to thwart telemarketers:

http://jollyrogertelephone.com/about/
I think the article helped me realize that Ebay is a better match for me philosophically. Ebay is incentivized to provide a fair and transparent marketplace that empowers anyone. Their product is really the marketplace.
You can ascertain information pointing towards specific IoT devices from things like HTTP header information. I saw an blogpost a couple months ago detailing how the author ID'd an IoT DDOS botnet, which I can't find now, but here is a similar one: https://blog.sucuri.net/2016/06/large-cctv-botnet-leveraged-...
Big point #1 was federal subsidies and big new contracts for lighting vendors.

Big point #2 (an actual advantage now) is reduced maintenance cost because the lamps (theoretically) last longer between replacements.

The energy efficiency claims were always a red herring.
> This guy built a million dollar business in a year providing a service that people want to pay for... I say "Congrats!"

More like, this guy built a million dollar business that arbitrages the DNS renewal system by squatting desirable names that he has no plans to use, then rent-seeking from those who do want to use the names. This is not a value-creating enterprise, but a zero-sum trader making money by taking it from other people.

I say "why don't you take that ingenuity and use it for something productive."
The obvious missed answer to the question posed is "talented poet-musicians scale much better than corporate lawyers." It's like asking why we produce more coffee machines than mobile operating systems -- it's not because 1% of the population wants more coffee machines.
Squatters are the ultimate douchebags of the Internet era. I there should be some sort of tax for squatting a domain name. I.e first 10 domains names are cheap then they get expensive.
> ... evolved with a 4100K light source at night

As others have noted, we sleep poorly under strong moonlight.

I live in a very rural wooded area, and I can leave my blinds open except when the moon is at its brightest -- I sleep very poorly if I don't use blackout curtains.

Perhaps the fittest humans were the ones who stayed the most awake and aware of nocturnal predators during the brightest nights of the month?
There are obvious exceptions however I have come to understand the greatness that is SO. All that is needed is a well-thought question with a little bit of work to show on the side.

I have a theory about why many complain about SO (please don't comment about this line, there are obviously exceptions):

There has been a ridiculous sense of entitlement with the growth and recent appeal of tech jobs in the past 5 years.

All this crap about "trolling" getting out of hand, not enough diversity (THE FIELD WAS PRIMARILY FILLED WITH NERDS OFTEN LACKING ANY SOCIAL SKILLS, no one else wanted to look or hang out with "that guy who is good with computers") etc.

It's a field that was mainly driven out of the desire and enjoyment that would be had messing around on CPU's. Therefore most of the good ones (among the diluted masses of "experts" nowadays) spent a great deal of time on these things. I'm not surprised that somebody would get pissed off if another came around and started asking for the answers to things without any real effort or drive being shown.

SO will forever be a poor resource for the huge incoming population of coders.
Please, put in blinds. If you have blinds, put in curtains to catch the light that spills around the blinds. If too much light goes through the blinds, upgrade to window shades. If that isn't enough (or you don't want to spend any money on interior decorating), get an eyemask. If $2 for an eyemask is too much, drape a t-shirt over your eyes.

Moving is a comically inappropriate response.
Tons of people are misunderstanding the likely order of events that would decrease shipping costs related to automated long-haul trucking. It'd go like this:

1) One company develops and ships a working autonomous truck. They start selling to shipping companies, or roll their own.
2) The truck client/shipping company starts competing with other shipping companies by offering vastly lower prices on the same shipping.
3) Retailers flock to the automated shipping company because they're vastly cheaper. The first retailer to move and contract with them enjoys a brief competitive advantage over other companies by cutting retail prices slightly and gaining a market advantage. Eventually, other shipping firms pop up to service the other retailers' need for competitively priced trucking.
4) Supply of automated trucking catches up with retailer demand. Retailers are forced to, again, compete directly with one another on price for the same goods, but now the overhead of paying humans to manage shipping is gone.

The doom and gloom comments about overcharging for products is a little ridiculous, IMO. Uber, Apple, Amazon, and Google are at each other's fucking throats for market share in this space. You bet your ass they'd fight tooth and nail with one another on price.
From what I've observed of my own behavior, the way to get me to consistently check back on a blog is to let me know the blog exists, be in my general category of interest, and then consistently update with impressively good content.

I first got hooked on slatestarcodex (http://slatestarcodex.com/) when the author hit a five post homerun streak and he was just too good to not check in with.

When I'm evaluating whether to follow a tumblr I can see the process unfold in real time, where I scroll down and finally think to follow after I see several really good posts at once. The moment I stopped and saw myself doing that I realized if I ever wanted to get followers on tumblr my blog would probably need to have the same kind of five-post punch to get people interested.

So.

1. Update often.

2. Make it easy to find your new stuff, or display your archive proudly and live off the interest.

3. Keep a high quality bar. It might even be useful to take your absolute best and put it in one place so you can show people your better side.

4. Market aggressively or be prepared to wait a while.
Startup founders share their stories - Startup Boston Podcast –
> If the barriers to entry are low because you can buy self-driving software off-the-shelf for $20,000 then profits will be low

In the beginning. Then due to economy of scale (and government regulations), it will be controlled by two huge companies, owning all IP, making any inroads close to impossible.

Think of when the newest major computer manufacturer was founded.
Funny thing: finger and .plans were what you are doing.
Twitter is what you are doing.

Even more apropos was finger's .project file: it was meant to be a single-line status update about your current project.
Any other reasons for separate keys, if I don't use ssh -A?
It doesnt have cargo there, only rustc. cargo still doesnt build on FreeBSD platforms.
Correct. While producers of the raw materials (corn, wheat, rice) have seen prices decline when adjusted for inflation, the producers of finished products (Corn Flakes, Wheaties, etc.) have seen prices rise even when adjusted for inflation. But there are only four or five big middlemen, so it's a lot easier for them to capture the increased margins than the tens of thousands of farmers who produce the raw materials.

Similarly, if Apple could reduce its shipping costs to near zero by teleporting the raw materials to Foxconn and then teleporting the finished goods directly to retail outlets, they'd still charge $600 per iPhone, even though they have competition from other phone makers in the form of Android.

The Invisible Hand doesn't always work the way it did in Adam Smith's time.
It's too wild for my tastes. I'm always worried about the seller, genuine brand, shipping .. Amazon built a reputation of good enough customer service I believe.
What I'm calling a rant is making grand statements on inflammatory topics that come from a place of resentment.

On HN, we're hoping for thoughtful statements that come from a place of curiosity. Those aren't just two different kinds of discourse, they're incompatible, like forest fires are incompatible with forests.

Edit: one privilege of HN moderation is getting devastating critiques of one's analogies from emailers. Ok, forest fires don't really make my point here. But there is an article called "When Analogies Fail" on the front page right now, so I'll leave it.
Totally agree, also The making of Karateka is worth a read
Ask HN: How hard would it be to make a cheap, hackable phone?
What I've wanted for years is something less extravagant and more mass market than the Neo900. The Greenphone was a reasonable example of this in its day, but nobody seems to be producing anything like it now for a price that is even slightly reasonable.

What I really want to see are mobile devices which can competently run vanilla Linux with a minimum of blobs, where no major company dominates the ecosystem the way that Google does with android.

Hardware like the raspberry pi, CHIP, etc is all dirt cheap, so I'd be surprised if this couldn't be done for (at a guess) $75 with a soc, screen and case if volume was sufficient and specs weren't significantly higher than those devices.

Perhaps I am naive and this can't be done, but I increasingly see no reason why not. Am I missing something? Is this a real, unfilled niche?
One spammer realised that he is talking to a bot and asks the bot about the three laws.

http://www.mlooper.com/conversations/3072
You do realize one can live an hour drive from Palo Alto and have a place than the 25% of the price in Palo Also? And the commute time is much shorter than from France. It is just that people want to be close as possible to work.
Since WW2 most basic research has been funded by governments, but prior to WW2, the industrial revolution happened without state funding. Varoufakis' argument is that since the state has been taxing the productive to fund research, that gives it a moral right to tax the productive some more.

Paris Hilton obviously didn't earn her money, but her parents chose to give it to her, and millions of people chose to stay at Hilton hotels. If you assume ordinary citizens have a right to the money they earn, you have to grant Paris the same right to her trust fund. (Which is going to be invested or spent anyway). There's no consistent way to assert the right to violate property rights, without abolishing property altogether.
> No human alive has the self-awareness to write about themselves objectively.

I would argue that no human alive has the self-awareness to write about anything objectively. Does that make all writing useless? Of course not. Same with (auto)biographies. You don't read them (or anything, really) because you think you're going to get an objective account. You read non-fiction for perspectives, points of view, and information you didn't have before. You need to read with a skeptical eye, no matter what you're reading.
My intuition is that (1) unemployment will indeed continue to rise due to automation, (2) the world will not become a crime-ridden dystopian place, and (3) Guaranteed basic income will probably happen, in one form or another. I posted about this here, if you care to take a look: https://blog.foretellix.com/2016/05/10/the-next-20-years-of-...
I feel your discontent about non-fiction. I have a saying about fiction, "at least you know for sure the author is lying."
the problem with every single pandora-spin off is this: they try to do a full product and sell it like a finished product (mostly to game pirates)

What they should do: work on the case, and do something like the ergo-dox cases[0], where the case walls are a pile of 0.5" planes, so you can have as much space inside for your additions as you want. And then on the top of the case include the LCD clamshell and the keyboard/joypad. Because, honestly, that is the ONLY good thing on the pandora-clones.

Then let the insides of the machine be whatever the user/kit-vendor wants. Raspi, android all-in-one, etc.

that way you don't get outdated inputs (compact flash in 2013!) or crappy cpus (EU$300 for a celeron in 2014). The keyboard and the screen will mostly stand the test of time better, for example, 720p for 90s game emulation is almost overkill.

[0] http://adereth.github.io/images/case.jpg
US Pols are responsible for the government setup and administrated by Iranians. Do tell.
I wish someone would build an open-hardware unlocked-boot loader phone that could run any old Linux distribution I choose on it. It would be great to have real choice and a hardwarm that could support more than just a manufacturer approved Android version.
park.io is not at all a domain squatter. Read the other comments on this page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12575992

EDIT: Or just ignore the facts and downvote emotionally.
Those decisions are documented in "The Design and Evolution of C++".
C# changed a decent amount since 3.5 to dotnet core, similar to python 2 to 3 which also changed a lot of stuff.

And C++11 is practically a new backwards compatible language compared to legacy C++.

Java is more stable but at the same time it's also the slowest to evolve which is why many developers prefer C# even if it wasn't cross platform in the past - the language was just superior because of how fast it is evolving, considering that at 1.0 they were basically equivalent.
Then again, Linux started with a newsgroup post that read:

"I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."

If there was a "student ghetto" for open source, it might even be more harmful in net: overly humble creators would feel their good projects belong there, while the self-promotional extroverts would focus on getting their crap among the "real projects" just for personal fame.
I've found that if I acknowledge the duplicate (which is very easy considering when you post a new question it shows you similar posts) and state a reason it doesn't work any more (even if that is just, "has anything changed?") it rarely gets flagged as a dupe.
what's the difference between an exo-suit and puppet?