skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can you please try to add sources? The majority of what you're arguing goes against everything I've learned. Also, saying tilling alone turned the Fertile Crescent into Iraqi deserts is absurd. There is myriad evidence of climate change playing a big part in that over the last few thousand years. I'm not saying it didn't perhaps contribute, but stating it's the direct cause is ridiculous. Also, not for nothing, but you're comparing soil recovery times in Saskatchewan (far from ideal growing conditions) to anywhere else as though the less than ideal growing conditions there are a representative sample of conditions worldwide, which is misleading at best.
Air hostess fired for eating a sandwich meant for customers
The Real Bubble Is in the Heartland
> the american state, which distributes the federal taxes somewhat more "evently", and there's no "Us vs Them" mentality.

The level of naïveté displayed in this comment is shocking.
"control the borders!!!11" are one of the catch-phrases that make absolutely no sense for people with only a modest understanding of how it actually works

But I'm sure to some Brexiters brown people at the streets is the fault of the EU somehow
the veto's power has grossly exaggerated, since the Treaty of Lisbon most decisions are now made using Qualified Majority Voting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_the_Council_of_the_E...

this is how the spectacularly unpopular migrant relocation was forced through against Eastern Europe's objections
Where do you draw the line for a common monetary policy?

Would regions like Madrid or Barcelona, easily at e.g. Dutch level, have to share monetary policy with Andalucia or Extremadura - two of the poorer regions in Europe?

Are there studies pointing to when or where a common monetary policy stops making sense?
Noah Kagan is launching a new podcast in the Management and Marketing category
6 tips for successful inbound calls
I couldn't agree more, and I wonder why you're being downvoted so hard.

Particularly given that 52% of the voters voted for Leave, not for a hard Brexit. Those are two very different propositions and a significant chunk of the 52% didn't want a hard Brexit.
Context https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37iHSwA1SwE
That's often the case with an early release, but later releases can have enough debt that bugs multiply and changes take longer no matter what you do.
ITA software is a good example of a company that succeeded due to the collective technical debt across their competitors.

Though they only really succeeded on the shopping part. They didn't ever get to a credible booking engine that anyone would buy. Which may point to something other than tech debt being the biggest barrier to modernizing an airline reservation system.
OpenCodeCollab
I think this is a bias because we only read American media and are flooded by American influence. Countries like Sweden, Switzerland have innovative universities highly ranked. A huge density of startups close to them. High technologies and services available to citizens (for example bank system, rail system, fiber to the home...). And of course a social and retirement system that gives the whole population a really high power of consumption. They are small countries that are easier to manage. But they definitely deserve their rank in my own humble opinion.
Stop losing leads at your presnetation
They are intrinsically linked. The Euro is another tool to get to the endgame - a United States of Europe, controlled and dominated by Germany.

The EU was never about trade. It's about power, control and globalization. Removing democracy from the peoples of Europe.
Yes, and it's something the Brexit crowd are relying upon in their visions of our prosperity after leaving the EU.

I happen to think it's a load of hogwash, but I really don't want to see them proven wrong because I'll still have to live through it.
It happened to me twice. The first time was in a start-up at the beginning of the century, we were developing an electronic health record and we had outsourced the database abstraction layer to a company in Greece. In the beginning things went fine but after a while the development of the DAL went slower and slower and it became unstable as well.
Eventually the word came out: the main developer of the DAL framework had left the company and, according to the Greek CEO, she had been 'too smart' which meant that nobody understood her code. They had tried adding features but that had made things only worse and the DAL had started to crash randomly.
We tried to take over the framework by ourselves but it was written in Eiffel and the code was a horrible entangled mess. Eventually we rewrote it in Java but, being a start-up, we lost too much precious time already and eventually went almost bankrupt and were bought up by a competitor.

The second time was in a small company whose product was a search engine for consumers. The web layer was written in a mixture of JSF, JQuery and Ajax. While that combination already slowed down development on the front end, the main problem was the performance of JSF on the server. Because JSF is rendered on the backend, it placed a massive load on our server for certain heavily used pages and we just couldn't scale any further. Skipping JSF for a framework that was rendered on the front-end would be the solution but that was a massive refactor for which the company just didn't have enough resources. Eventually the company had to skip their search product and change their business model to a more community based website.
> I don't know how that would translate to a Segway, though - maybe something that made motion feel more immediate than just leaning.

South Park had a design idea for revolutionary transportation that had a more "direct human interface"[1].

1. The IT Bike. NSFW: http://southpark.wikia.com/wiki/IT
While I agree with your overall point I unfortunately don't think your characterization of Sweden is true anymore.

Your education prospects now depend on which school you go to, especially with blatant grade inflation. My friends are putting their kids in queue for elite elementary school the day after they are born. Even if you can make it to college the traditional route you'll have trouble finding an apartment and keeping your student benefits.

Healthcare is a complicated system of public funded private institutions that regularly and willingly violate the law on things like time before you get to see a specialist. I always used to like the Swedish healthcare system until I realized I've always visited the same doctors that I knew.

Unemployment benefits doesn't apply (or atleast appeal) to former students or short contract workers these days. You have to go the welfare office and even they have no problem denying you means. You'll probably won't have much job security anyways since you'll be hired as a contractor.

Housing, especially in Stockholm, is a mess that won't be solved anytime soon. It makes the effects of everything worse. Commute time, work-life balance, even the weather.

I honestly think Sweden is one of the best countries in the world, but it's not a good deal anymore. If you got established ten years ago and could go to school before rampant youth unemployment, got an apartment before housing prices skyrocketed, know which doctors to go to, get a stable job where it makes sense to join the union etc. then it's great. You can study at university for seven years, some of them abroad, work for a few years, go on paternity leave for the better part of a year, move abroad for some time, then come back to your stable job again, leave your employer and get hired back as a consultant and if you don't find work go on unemployment. All this while you make a workers salary in housing appreciation, take vacations three times a year and get to use your parent country house in the summers.

Bottom line is that increasingly only the rich can afford to take advantage of the social safety net these days and I think it's starting to show even with things like startups. It was apparent very early that companies like Spotify, Klarna, Mojang etc. would be successful. I don't see many of these types of early successes anymore (but that might be my own ignorance of course).

There's increasingly nothing special about Sweden.
> GMOs just make it faster.

No, GMOs will inherently change the game in the long term. We'll be able to truly engineer life to be an optimal food supply, e.g. there's no inherent reason there can't be a plant that can sit in your window, withstand freezing temperatures, and grow both tomatoes, avocados and bananas.

Some versions of this are already happening with GMO food, they're surgically introducing features to these plants that wouldn't be doable with just mutation farming.

> I can't see a combine getting up there, can you?

No, but that was my point. The author of the article is railing against industrialized farming and then producing a counterexample of some farm in Austria that clearly isn't and can't be mechanized easily. That's clearly not something you can use as a rebuke to current industrialized farming, one feeds the world, another is a backyard hobby project.

> They can't afford mechanisation, so have to manually plough and weed[...]

Yes, and the solution to this is to enrich their societies, starting with the introduction of modern farming practices. No need to start doing something revolutionary we haven't tried in the west, just introduce them to mechanized farming.

> Yes, they can be more drought resistant, but why are there droughts? [...]

Even if we perfectly manage everything else GMOs would still be a great tool to expand the use of our land for farming. E.g. you could grow some cactus in the middle of the Sahara that was easily edible.

> Farming is fucking complex, I'd suggest you go and work on a permaculture and "modern" farm, to see just what's required.

And I suggest that if you're trying to make some point here about some hidden knowledge I'm obviously missing and could only acquire through hands-on experience you just come out and point that out, rather than effectively make an ad-hominem argument by proxy.
Yeah, we're not communicating well: I'm sorry. I'm making an effort.

I don't remember anywhere suggesting that _I_ was talking about tattoo ink. Context suggests that I meant the toxic heavy metal… and while I obviously am not petrified with fear of cadmium if I keep Cadmium Yellow around, I don't propose to lick it even if your context suggests it's effectively as harmless as Burnt Sienna (iron oxide-based).

And this is the point: 'organic' farming doesn't typically consist of salting one's fields, but ultra-modern high efficiency farming is based on extremely complicated chemistry and people not in the industry cannot hope to even guess at what's being done out there. Non-farmers probably don't know what crop rotation is either (an anachronism in synthetic farming) but ultra-modern farming has a nasty way of dumping LOTS of very strange chemistry into people's diets.

Trust is the issue, not 'referencing chemistry accurately' because it's not my job as a food-eater to analyze chemical compounds and reference chemistry appropriately. Try to look at the organic farming movement as a trust issue: a vote of no confidence in current and future inventions for increasing crop efficiency.

In that light, 'water is a chemical' is not an effective counter, and pouncing on cadmium in the water table (known for kidney damage) and talking of tattoo ink which is cadmium sulfide, cadmium sulfoselenide or zinc cadmium sulfide, is more behavior that tends to erode trust.
Not yet, anyway. There's still a lot of talk about it. I'm particularly interested in the ongoing talk about a single market for digital goods.
The problem is, you can't harmonise VAT without harmonising the tax bases. And if you don't harmonise the tax bases, companies will try to set up mechanisms to avoid tax.
But how do you know you have a great product before you ship? Until you have paying customers, you don't have a real feedback loop.

If you need customer feedback in order for you to know what to build, what business do you have building anything? How could you ever hope to innovate?
Opera 12.15 source code
The golden age of reality TV is already here
Check out Aubagne, it is too freaking nice there. But yeah, as far as work goes, make sure you are doing remote stuff or willing to sell something to traditional companies.
These informal systems are nice and all, but one problem in charity in general is the judgment involved. A welfare state has the ability to provide for the unpleasant people as well, whereas charity often requires you to match the expectations as a person in need.

Think about people with substance abuse or other psychological problems - these kind of people might have hard time getting help from a charity. It doesn't feel charitable to help drunken, angry or otherwise distasteful people, yet they deserve help.
I like how it's so much clearer and easier to read than, say, the NYT's website with its horrible plain black and white tiny font. Is there a reason why it looks (IMO) so bad?
* The only real requirement for markets to maximize the total value created by private goods and services is freedom of entry and exit.

* The local water company may actually turn a profit if it could charge market prices. If the local water company is so great, why is there "Fiji Water"?

* "Rational" only means that 1) Given any two alternatives, people can state which one they prefer; and 2) Given three alternatives, they don't get so confused they can't choose one. True, in real life, we can look at others' choices and criticize them from the point of view of our perspectives as "irrational", but that is irrelevant.

* Where markets may fail to achieve first best, it may be possible for some government action to move things in the right direction. That does not mean every time there is a theoretical market failure, any and all government action is justified. Government interventions tend to fail harder and longer than markets (e.g. Venezuela, USSR, EU, Kenya, Zimbabwe).

etc etc etc.
صور+مضحكه+رائعة
>The Russians can any day drop their margins and put SpaceX out of business.

This is an argument I haven't heard before. Any sources I can read up on to learn more?
On the other hand, on Amazon scale you cat probably get pretty good idea about trending API services by just looking at the AWS DNS statistics (and/or some network level metrics) and Amazon Alexa stats.
That's hardly an argument. Sounds more like 'lalala' hands in the ears denial. Germany has been pushing peripheral countries around and controlling central aspects of European policy for decades, even bullying France into compliance.

And, of course, containing Germany, which brought war upon Europe twice in the 20th century, was a stated goal of the 1950s European politicians and diplomats that designed EU and its early precursors (E.g. "The ECSC was first proposed by French foreign minister Robert Schuman on 9 May 1950 as a way to prevent further war between France and Germany.").
> Europe is not a single market at all.

Oh, it’s already a lot better than it was before. But you are right, a fuckton of work is required to make it even slightly competitive with the US, China, or India.

But we should work towards that – and not split it up even further.
Open Data Shows Chicago’s Taxi Industry Shrinking Faster Than NYC’s
Indeed it would be. I had stopped with it when 10.7 came out, just continuing the Windows and Linux version.
Not sure if it's true, but that's a common complaint with 3rd party sellers on Amazon. Once AMZN spots a winner, they sell direct.
Oh god this. And the inconsistent ability to ctrl-click a link in a new tab (works in EC2, not in RDS for example)
I'm not sure that is quite correct ( http://www.businessinsider.com/the-states-the-most-and-least... , http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/03/27/which-states-take-... ) are just a few of many references that show where the tax dollars are distributed in the United States. Here, states that tend to be more fortunate/productive subsidize the other ones (note: most of the charts specify return on their own tax dollars, and are likely sourced from same data). This has come up in several recent elections, blogs, etc. Not to the point of the EU debates, however it is definitely a source of animosity to some. I don't have data to back up why each state is the way it is (a very complex web to unravel). We can speculate all we want (I'd rather not since political ideology invariably trumps factual discourse, pun intended)...however, if somebody has a definitive answer, they should definitely write a paper :).
"Ideas are cheap, execution is what matters" is a standard startup advice. I think it is even more relevant to politics and in terms of execution the EU did not do too well. My 2c.
Further proof many, many people don't understand democracy and think you're not allowed a voice.

People, democracy is not the tyranny of the majority. Quite the opposite actually.
Ask HN: What is the best online resource to learn advanced SQL?
I too often find myself getting stuck when it comes to more advanced SQL queries. I have never actively learnt SQL and realise that I don't have a great mental model of how it works. I would like to improve this as it is killing my productivity from time to time.
I've worked somewhere that died for a combination of reasons, one of which was an effect of technical debt and inappropriate outsourcing.

I don't think technical debt alone will kill you. But it may render you unable to cope with another problem, which will then kill you.
I'm biased (Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud), but having a single GPU in your local machine for testing and then doing real training on a cloud provider seems best.

If you load your workstation at home with the best GPUs money can buy today, you've spent a big pile of cash and in six-to-twelve months it's no longer the best (see our announcement about bringing P100s to Compute Engine in the next few months). Moreover, your single awesome machine can only train one thing at a time. By renting several such VMs (on us or other providers), you can use distributed training to iterate more quickly on your models or explore totally different problems in parallel.

Doing so at home multiplies your cost for each machine. With the pay as you go model, if you were going to compute the answer, it costs the same (roughly) to do it all at once versus serially. So why wait?

Again, big disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, and have ML Services and GPUs to sell you.
Even though some of these are pretty old, they look fascinating. The human imagination is really something. That skyscraper bridge would look so badass in real life!
The point is there WAS a vote. A democratic vote. I'm looking at it from the outside and don't care either way - except that the way some very vocal ones of the so-called "remainers" dislike democracy and voting as soon as they don't get what they want disgusts me. Remember your attitude when some day - inevitably - it will be the other way around, you won a vote and the other side comes up with the same arguments.
Just FYI, Amazon.de introduced English interface and customer support some while back (most product listings are still only German of course).
I'm from one of those "lesser" countries - Greece. I can assure you that nobody "stepped on our throat". For years we thrived as part of the EU, until the economic crisis hit and messed it all up. The Germans actually tried to help, in the way they thought was best, and despite appearances of heavy-handedness, nobody tried to force us to leave, which would have been the end of us.

If you remember what happened a couple of years ago, when Syriza came to power, and Yiannis Varoufakis became finance minister, we threatened to leave the EU if our (vague and silly) terms were not accepted. The rest of the EU refused steadfastly, but nobody ever voiced any desire to make us leave the union.

You can contrast this with what is happening right now. When the UK voted for Brexit, the rest of the EU breathed a collective sigh of relief and wished them good riddance. In Brussels they could hardly keep themselves from laughing and dancing a jig, that the great European troublemaker had finally decided to jump over a cliff, feet-first, entirely of its own volition.

Nothing like that happened when Grexit was afoot. Nobody was laughing, everyone was waiting patiently for our national tantrum to abate. Angela Merkel, that evil ogre of a woman who wanted to roast our babies over an open fire [1], waited patiently for our juvenile prime minister to get his shit together and learn how to rule a country.

Nobody wanted to harm the Geeks and nobody tried to harm the Greeks- all harm that came to us we did to ourselves, or it was a result of the economic crisis. Your comment is blaming the wrong people for our woes.

___________

[1] cf. all of the Greek press at the time.
Leaving the single market doesn't mean no access at all, it's just tariffs and some bureaucracy. Not that I support all this, but the Govt. seems to be hoping that becoming a tax haven will compensate all that.
This is an interesting aspect. I guess transnational enforcement of contracts is a thorny issue.

Not sure how easy would that be in the USA or Canada (transprovincial) as well
The EU is not "a single country", obviously. I have no trouble imagining a close EU-like relationship between the US and Canada; until recently, you didn't even need a passport to travel between the two. They're very similar countries which could work together on almost everything.
Thanks for sharing!

Some might argue that lessens small countries' power to streamline the decision making. Those would be the same that criticised the EU during the CETA negotiations and the whole Wallonia potential veto.

Nothing is black or white indeed.
> Supposedly there had been fishing expeditions to the new world coast for a long time prior to Columbus. The fishermen didn't want anyone to know where they were finding such good fishing grounds so never told where they had traveled.

I've never heard of such an expedition. How did they transport fish that were worth consuming without refrigeration?
Scraping for Craft Beers
Why the downvote?

With the exception of the Eurotunnel route, customs checks remain unaffected by juxtaposed immigration controls and continue to take place upon arrival after disembarkation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juxtaposed_controls
If you enter an English query, it will translate to German, though
Noah Kagan was #30 at Facebook, #4 at Mint and Co-Founder of AppSumo and SumoMe.com (both 8-figure businesses). He has also launched a nice contest where you can win a bunch of great stuff.
I assume you mean you mistakenly expect baz to equal:

{
bar: "qux"
}

?

Don't you use syntax highlighting? I can't imagine this ever being an issue...
The banks are already making their plans to relocate into other EU cities prior to Brexit. Hard Brexit is inevitable, unless we just don't leave.

But May won't do that, because she's decided it's the unanimous will of the people that we storm out and slam the doors closed behind us and then barricade them and lay some mines just for good measure.
This is the second time in this thread you've dismissed others' arguments in abrupt emotional fashion. Please let us see your work.
> Incidentally, the Korean term for these large conglomerates, chaebol, is cognate with the Japanese term zaibatsu

Also, cabal.
Yes. Technical debt rendered it difficult to create features, and difficult to hire. The project dragged on as engineers came, tried to refactor and then left. I didn't stay.

My understanding is that it was never released, so all of the money the company put into the project was wasted.

This is maybe different from what people normally consider 'technical debt'. I don't mean just code aesthetics but also bugs, redundant code, and bad abstractions.
There's a difference between a free trade area and a political union.

Thatcher was thoroughly against the centralisation of power and monetary policy in Europe, but all for free trade.