skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agriculture takes up the majority of the use of water consumption. (Nearly 70% of all water use - http://www.worldometers.info/water/). Of that consumption, in terms of irrigation, nearly 50% of the water is lost to evaporation (https://water.usgs.gov/edu/wuir.html).

There have been solutions to this problem with urban farming practices with a combination of hydroponics and vermiponics for a number of years which can grow quite a bit of usable produce in a smaller land area using significantly less water.

Also, it could be useful to continue to break down these statistics by crop and water use. For instance, almond farms appear to take up nearly 10% of California's water use (http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...).

Doing so would lend credence to which crop would be most effective for first improving upon. This report appears to suggest that alfalfa is one of the neediest crops grown in California in terms of water consumption. There are obvious other crops as well, in terms of land area (Corn being one of them) but nevertheless it's worth noting.
https://www.arb.ca.gov/fuels/lcfs/workgroups/lcfssustain/han...

Now, you might be asking, what is alfalfa for? Alfalfa is grown as a feed for animals, mainly dairy cows. Dairy cows eat roughly 70% of the alfalfa produced in the US. It's important to note that some alfalfa farmers tend to disagree that solutions like drip irrigation will work effectively enough - as it sometimes depends on the soil type and exposure to critters chewing up the pipes. (http://www.kpbs.org/news/2015/jul/03/how-one-california-alfa...)
Do we know if this surge is because bitcoin is being used to evade currency controls (and quickly converted into another currency) or if it's being used as a store of value?

It'll be interesting to see what happens if China cracks down on BTC while citizens are left with enormous wallets.
It seems like this post is choosing a convenient point in time start its argument from. The reason cheap airlines like Spirit came about was because there was a market for cheaper tickets with less amenities. The post says that the major airlines lowered the prices of their lowest tier seats to match these cheap competitors, but this lowest tier had more amenities. Now the major airlines have come up with a new lowest tier of seats (basic economy) and are setting their old lowest tier (economy) back to the higher price that it used to have.
Maybe not to till the land every year (agreed about your comment of the beneficial organisms), but to do miscellaneous tasks, they are incredibly handy. For instance, in my area, the land is famous for "growing rocks". If you had an acre or two you were going to do any long term farming, the first thing to do is clear all the fist to breadbox size rocks. This is sooooo much easier with a tractor and pull behind trailer, or front end loader. Digging holes, moving dirt, and carting finished produce are also things that a small tractor is very useful for. Is it absolutely necessary? No, but unless farming is the full time occupation, it is very nice for a small 1-2 person operation to have.
Mark Zuckerberg's personal challenge for 2017 is to visit every US state
If politicians were working for the common good and not just for the big transnational companies we will not have this problem. What about fixing that?
No, the reason they sell out in 30 seconds is because of cheating.
> It's not so "simple"; the body fights back. Hunger kicks in overdrive, the body becomes sleepy, lethargic, you get "fog brain" (for programmers this is death).

For about two weeks, maybe. This is all the result of low blood sugar. Your body gets better at using fat to keep blood sugar high, and these symptoms subside.

> Exercise leads to an amplification of these symptoms.

I have literally never heard anyone else claim this, and what little science there is suggests the opposite.

> It's not so easy as to "just put down the fork" or journal your feelings. The body doesn't want to change.

Right, I'm not suggesting it is easy, I'm suggesting it is simple.

> And it's not like the body stops these signals after a while. I have dropped 30+ pounds, always to gain it back.

If you are still having the symptoms of low blood sugar that lasts for a significant period of time (> 2 weeks), this is absolutely something your doctor should look into.

Regardless: the meta point here is that the body is not literally starving, it just feels like it is. Which sounds a lot like addiction: the body doesn't literally need those drugs, but brain chemistry makes it feel like it does.

The study you linked to does not seem like a glowing endorsement for gastric bypass to me.

Also, not that it matters, but you're talking to someone who has lost 35lbs more than a year ago, so I do have direct experience.
Technically I am an optimist. 50 Billion for fission plants and we are done. Socially, I am a pessimist----this is the perfect problem to defeat our institutions.

Problem with the startup crowd is they tend to get the former better than the latter.
I've found this too. I've been using Kaspersky for a few years (most of the contracts I've had for contract work have specified they want an AV program running), and I have to say it's been much less painful than the McAfee and Norton shit I used as a FTE.

If anything, it seems to go nuts a bit less often than the Windows 10 AV, which will quite often sit there occupying 100% of 1 core for a while... though Kaspersky is so invasive that (even ignoring issues like the one the link...) I'm still happier without it.
What's your editor? For me it's emacs (w/o X) so I"m inside iterm2 for the entirety of my Linux work.
maybe I'll wait another year before I push my backups in to the cloud...

I wonder when we will know just how huseful they will be.
I have this giant text file of things I come across that triggered a line of thinking. Mostly the purpose is for me to revisit it from time to time to remind myself of ideas worth considering a bit more.

Anyway, one of the entries I come back to a lot is this one:

"Zuckerberg says he is passionate about connecting people because connected people do great things. But Facebook doesn’t really promote doing great things with connected people. Where is Facebook falling short?"
You mean it's prototypal, like Self, IO, Javascript?
What's the first reference to bloom filters where the number of hash fns vary?
Concocting theories as to intended malice based on this bug alone would be ridiculous. But it isn't dificult to imagine malice if you frame this with the history Kaspersky has

Particularly when they have a history of remote access "bugs"[1], insecure broadcasting of user-agent info[2], and a cozy relationship with the Kremlin[3].

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/flaw-found-in-kaspersky-antivir...

[2] https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/nsa-gchq-targeted-kasper...

[3]https://www.wired.com/2012/07/ff_kaspersky/
You don't have a choice? I've never used Ticketmaster. You can too.
I tried to disable it altogether, but couldn't.
Politicians and spokespeople linking the California drought with climate change has damaged the credibility of these reports. I'm inclined to believe MIT researchers' climate models but I think this should have been addressed in this press release.
Go also does this as of version 1.7:

http://www.tapirgames.com/blog/golang-1.7-bce
> You argument with me was that I don't adequately read sources and that I made an untrue statement, which was in fact not untrue, and was merely open to adjustment - which all summaries are.

The statement in question:

> He pestered and temporarily disabled a medical company website to highlight the maltreatment of a patient, now he is facing many years in prison for the protest.

Mr. Gottesfeld's own statement:

> Almost unbelievably, they kept their donation page on the same public network as the rest of their stuff. Rookie mistake. To take it down, I’d have to knock the whole hospital off the Internet.

Christ, if that's "not untrue" in your judgment, then I won't hold out hope that you care enough about basic facts to see that even in the many words I've spent in this thread bickering about the topic, I've never stated that I support the prosecution or alleged mistreatment of Mr. Gottesfeld. My opinion has been: I am more ambivalent about this case than I was about what happened to Aaron Swartz [0]. Given how angry Swartz's case made me, me not feeling strongly about Mr. Gottesfeld by comparison does not equate to me supporting his prosecution.

But I'm not surprised you aren't able to see the distinction, if you don't see the difference between a website and the Internet.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13306401
Ah, but that's only a concern if microsoft has serious marketshare in the market of antivirus.
Do they?
I've always thought it really cool how we can collapse the water problem into the energy problem. (And, to be clear, I agree with your solution to the energy problem.)
> Even a 2014 macbook pro with amd graphics is sluggish on 4k.

I have a late 2013 MBPR (NVIDIA GT750M) with an external 4K monitor in portrait mode connected via DisplayPort, plus the laptop's display. Both are running at 60Hz. I don't see any sluggishness or mouse lag at all; everything is very smooth.

I mostly run Windows 10 on this machine, but it also works fine when I boot in to OSX.
It looks like the design goal was "How can I turn a traditional mousetrap into a humane mousetrap?" There would be more efficient ways to build the same product from scratch, but it's a fun thought experiment.
It wasn't, but I am apparently naive.
Large MMO binary game patches complete faster on my Intel 750 NVMe drive. This is a lot of small random access reads and writes. So that is one real world gain.
If you are knowledgable enough to MITM SSL then you should definitely be knowledgable enough to know how stupid this is, and - frankly - knowledgable enough not to fucking MITM SSL. I would attribute it to malice, assume it's malice, fire the developer, and contact the authorities. Of course, that's moot if the authorities are the ones who asked for the bug.
C is the new "goto".

Y'all please, please note that dreta said "... an array implementation that prevents that from ever happening..."
Too old for any one language to have lasted my entire career. But:

C for (embedded(embedded))* audio DSP engine, with hardware specific intrinsics and occasional drops into inline ASM when those fail. When every cycle counts and Hard Real Time contracts must be met, to me it is anathema for any invisible compiler-generated code to exist - such breaks the required determinism. So no C++. Would write in pure ASM in the old days. Still want to - most times the C preamble/postamble is not needed in event handler functions. But TPTB dictate otherwise. Small talent pool and they want Jr progs to take it over.

FORTH as the most useful interactive hardware/low level software debugging tool for behavioral debugging (vs post mortem breakpoint debugging, which loses the behavioral context). Used to use hardware logic analysers for this but system complexity out-grew them. I should note I am not using a commercial FORTH, rather a freeware core greatly extended and modified by me for this purpose. Used it in several projects with different CPUs and architectures over the years. Can feed it C headers for readable dumps too (translator written in PERL). Key point: does this while the target continues executing. Caveat: do NOT use unless you know and understand every line of code in the engine and its implications for the target system. Given that, it's the sharpest double-edged handle-less debugging tool I've ever found.

* the DSP engine is embedded inside a larger embedded system. All inside the same chip. Makes for interesting times when one cannot touch it directly in main OS land.
Or look into actual scientific studies on the issue, as opposed to the latest X fad person of the day?

Even if they used to be "ex scientists" themselves (lots of people that oversell some cure without verification usually are -- Heck, Linus Pauling had 2 Nobels).
> Never say never. :) There are wifi, ethernet, and clock shields for Arduino, all of which are running microcontrollers, and many applications which would benefit from using NTP.

FYI: Microcontrollers really ought to just be interpreting the WWVB radio signal (aka: the 60,000 Hz Atomic Clock radio signal throughout the entire continental USA). Alternatively, Microcontrollers easily connect up to GPS modules for an alternative radio signal / alternative time source.

If anything, Microcontrollers are a great interface to the 60kHz Atomic Clock signal and are therefore would probably be the best NTP-server.

In any case, the "real" best architecture is probably a microcontroller doing Radio Logic / digital signal processing for WWVB, and that is connected through a simple connection (ex: I2C that says the last announced time from the WWVB signal) helping a "bigger" Raspberry Pi. And the Raspberry Pi can handle the ethernet / server stuff
safeioctl may have to contain a redundant switch (or more OOP-style dipatch across multiple functions) on the command code in order to convert the safe style arguments to each specific low level ioctl call. That sort of thing can easily explode in line count. I can see exactly what geofft is talking about.
I cannot trust people to correctly iterate in order through an array in C, and thus must resort to bounds checking them.
It also allows larger companies to sit back, and wait out small inventors to "give up" on a patent (due to it becoming too expensive to renew) that they are trying to sell to these same companies

This does not seem realistic. If you can't afford the $900 to renew a patent after 3 years, you likely can't afford to produce the patented device either.

Further, your example doesn't hold water. If I'm (an executive at) Toyota, and someone offers to license or sell outright a patent for $X, I stand to make $ZX if I agree to it, or $0 for 20 years if I don't.

So either $ZX isn't enough profit to move my needle, or I flat out just don't care about the product. Either way, I have no interest in pursuing it. It's not about "saving money:" even in the most old-school of industries, I can't imagine that waiting 20 years for an unrealized patent to expire makes any sense if it would be profitable to license it.

It's far more likely that either (a) the patent isn't particularly useful or (b) the owner is asking too high a license fee.
The Black Hole of Finance (2013)
It reminds me of how the Nag Hammadi texts were found by some local farmers in Egypt who wound up burning a few of the texts for a cooking fire without knowing that they contained the work of Gnostic Christians. I wonder how much has been lost by such careless thought.
How do you suppose runtime bounds checks are done in Rust? They certainly also incur a performance penalty in not-trivial cases.

Also, "safe by grep audit" means "safe according to a human." The argument of course is that it lowers the surface area of what a human must be trusted to verify. I'm still not convinced by that argument, because human error is a thing. And for actual systems programming, "very rare" may not be true.
>They probably get the least cold exposure naturally.

You seem to have never visited warm and cold climates...
I have been hearing and reading that from C advocates since 1993.

It only got worse.
Is the use of the unsafe keyword a default? I don't know Rust, but from a user interface perspective, it sounds like it has an affordance of "Hey! Pay particular attention to this bit because it is risky!"
Dragon Realms is definitely my favorite: https://www.play.net/dr/
There would seem to be significant benefits to maintaining a white hat presence while gaining access to thousands of machines and maintaining a body knowledge about the latest threats/techniques.

Do you have any thoughts on the validity of the speculation?
Based on what you have said here I feel like technology such as iPhones and IoT networks is not what these people need. Would it help to provide some kind of farming manual with instructions on how to build and maintain farm equipment, how to create a co-op to sell locally, etc? Has it been done? What about providing a printing press to publish pricing data on a daily/weekly basis to try and make that information available to more people? These seem like problems that must have existed in the US in the last 100-150 years, what did we do?
Cutting a defence budget is never going to be helpful especially by such a large amount - you're going to lose jobs, lives, security, and given how widely US troops are deployed you're going to lose even more stability in many parts of the world.
It was a really noble effort on their part. They were arguably one of the biggest bands in the world at that time and sadly they failed to make any impact on this issue.

Since then Ticketmaster has only grown more powerful.

It's interesting to read this article in from that time in NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/15/arts/pearl-jam-bows-to-tic...
Speaking of...

I started my Surface 4 running Windows 10 up last night. The batter applet in the task tray reported, once I started up Chrome:

____________________

"Chrome is is draining your battery faster

Switch to Microsoft Edge for up to %%% more browsing time"

____________________

(Evidently, this was first reported in July 2016 http://www.nextpowerup.com/news/29282/windows-10-warns-about... )
If your country restricted the way you could use your money, would it be corruption to get around it?
WaPo peddles fake news, and this is how the sausage is made and "fact checked": publish first based on "trusted" gov't sources, then re-write the story bit by bit instead of developing and publishing real news http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/02/how-the-...
I'm not sure I understand how fantasy sports sites or anything like that are anymore "skill-based" than say poker or blackjack, I guess those are legal under this definition as well?
Also elaborating on VCQ's point: I was trained that when citing cases to a court:

(1) The best case to cite is one where the previous trial judge ruled in favor of the position that's being taken on an issue by your opponent, but the trial judge was reversed on appeal on that issue;

(2) Next-best is one where the previous trial judge ruled in favor of the position that you're now taking and was affirmed on appeal; and

(3) The worst of all cases to cite is one where the previous trial judge ruled against the position you're taking and was affirmed on appeal; if you're going to cite that kind of case, you must find some way to distinguish your facts from those of the previous case.

It's great fun when your opponent cites a case in support of a position, and then upon reading the case you discover that the case went against the party that took your opponent's position.

EDIT: Which reminds me of a related story: My late senior partner, mentor, and friend, Tom Arnold, was once arguing a point before a judge. His opponent, seeking to discredit Tom's argument, cited a law-review article that Tom had recently published, where Tom had argued the exact opposite of the position he was taking before the judge. Tom didn't miss a beat: He responded, in effect: Your Honor, my friend is correct: My article does take exactly the opposite position from what I argue here today. I still hold to the view expressed in that article. What my friend hasn't told you is that my article criticized a recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States. No matter what my personal view of the Court's decision might be, it's the law of the land unless and until the Court changes its mind or Congress changes the statute. And under the Court's decision, my client is entitled to prevail.

Tom won the argument, of course.
The loss of net neutrality: Say goodbye to a free and open internet
Totally. But in the case of rust your vulnerabilities are grep'able. For all of the code you have in a project you only have to search for the unsafe keyword when you want to audit it.

I think that makes a very significant difference.
First started programming in MIIS (relative to MUMPS) in late 1981. And have continued to use MUMPS/M/MSM/DSM/Cache for most of the intervening years with 4 years off for Fortran and a year or two for COBOL.

Most of the work has been with medical information systems, although the first job entailed a library information system. One of the few languages I knew of which could make a PC-AT into a multi-user machine. It also enabled a clinic to move from a PDP to a 386 and to no longer have to relegate financial batch jobs to off hours.

Will probably also continue to use AWK this year.
> they are attempting to create a business where there is no need.

As 99% of startups :-)
LLVM's biggest weakness right now is micro controller support like PIC/AVR. But its getting better:
http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-November/10717...

That should hit most of the chips most people would care about. I presume rust would gain from the upstream LLVM support?
It takes minute to download and install all the default plugins. So it takes a few minutes after the first launch to start working.
Yes. It's trivial in Rust to write unsafe code. It's less trivial to mask the unsafe code and the (unproven, in my opinion) argument is that the explicit "unsafe" keyword makes it prohibitively difficult.
Antivirus are just another attack vector - and due to their often escalated privileges running on a machine, they are a very attractive attack vector.

Not to mention the pitiful detection rate (<50%~ for nearly any antivirus software) makes them nearly useless: once you're pwned, you're pwned.
Where do you live in Colorado? I've had good luck gardening in both Boulder and Denver.

High altitude gardening (e.g., in the mountains) is difficult, but that is more due to the short growing season than the soil.
Some people don't believe in tweaking GC's. I've heard horror stories from people who tried it on the JVM.

(And I have made terrible experiences with JVM's GC, but never tried tuning).

Some people don't believe that extremist functional languages are needed (depending on the domain).

Validation. Oh, well.

I think you propose Haskell, and it might disqualify for an NTP daemon, for example in terms of debuggability (stack traces?).
Tesla announces Q4 deliveries; full year delivery slightly below expectations
I see that you know the future. How much money do you have on a short position?
Because the fact that you have to write that secure abstraction means the majority of people won't do it

What's your point? My only argument has been that it's very easy and achievable to avoid buffer overruns in C. The fact that you assert most people won't do it is completely orthogonal to that.

And how did you implement this? Are you stitching together chunks of memory, or are you reallocating and copying? If you are reallocating and copying, what do you do when you have a point to the old address space that still exists? Now instead of manually updating memory and knowing you have to take care of pointers, your dynamic implementation might change stuff from underneath you without you noticing.

I use the standard library function realloc. The dynamic array is written in a fairly standard way, IE, I am not returning pointers to the allocated memory of the internal array. I access values inside the dynamic array by value (eg they are copied), not as a raw pointer to a slice of memory that could be realloc'd. It would never even occur to me to do that, so your example seems strange and far fetched.
Well, you should move out of the country. Here, in France, we have Ticketmaster, but also Fnac Spectacles, Digitick and many others. It's less awful.
But clearing the field in the most fun part of starting a new game of Harvest Moon! (:P)

Yeah I can imagine at least having a truck to cart away all those rocks would be pretty handy. But once you're established you won't have to do it again, right? Could just rent it when you need it.