skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
so what would this rube goldbergian harvester machine look like that could be capable of efficiently farming such a dynamic landscape as a multistory(already sounding like we got some marketing terms in the works here) farm... my guess is about 5'10", over worked and from some economically depressed country. yay organic
> The problem is that those laws are not modifiable because you need the unanimity of all the countries in the EU. Which is extremely difficult because, again, all the 28 countries have different interests in all areas of the treaty. It's basically stuck.

This is inaccurate. Most of the laws are produced in an ordinary way. The unanimity (of the Council) is required only in some cases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_the_Council_of_the_E...

> As far as you saying that every member state can have its own set of rules, no. We had this issue multiple times and found ourselves having to pay insane amount of penalties because we were not, for example, accepting to grow GMO in France. If the EU says "You guys should do this and that in that matter", we can't have a rule that goes against that. That is the real problem, I think that the people of each individual country do not decide anymore, and the people in charge have no power, since they cannot take their own decisions.

That 'problem' is the same for every modern democracy. We continuously have to accept decisions that are made democratically, but they are just stupid (e.g. Brexit).
Today, Sweden is much more diverse that most people from other countries imagine (the percentage of the population that is born in foreign countries is higher in Sweden than the US, for instance). A walk down any street in Stockholm would disabuse you of the notion that there is no diversity here.

However, it is fair to say that when the system was "designed", (largely in the early and mid 20th century), Sweden was much more ethnically homogeneous than it is today. There might be something to the notion that people are much more willing to accept a generous welfare state if they know the beneficiaries are from the same ethnic group. It's shameful, but that's humanity for you.
Despite revoked CA’s, StartCom and WoSign continue to sell certificates
The good thing about rankings is that you have many to choose from.
I expect we'd be perfectly happy, not realising that we are the pet. Cats and dogs seem to be.

Of course that's my human arrogance, assuming the cats and dogs don't know.
I am not the original poster but I understand it to be about bragging (and thus showing pride) about being plain (not showing pride). As in, "well, we sure did show them how much humbler we are than all of them".
Ask HN: Why do people become freelancers?Why organizations use freelancers?
> we should be TERRIFIED that fewer than 1 in 100 Americans actually knows how to grow enough food to feed a family or more

Am I the only one that found this to be high, and comforting?

I looked up how many software engineers there are in the US, it's also around 1% (3.6m) [1]

About 0.5% of us are lawyers [2]

Double-checking the farmers stat, it seems there are 2.1m farms [3], each must be manned by at least several people that know stuff. This does not count casual horticulturists. I'd guess that at least over 10% of the population would know how to grow food to feed a family.

1. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2483690/it-careers/indi...

2. https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/05/09/the-lawyer-bu...

3. https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Preliminary_...
yes, but for those yields, you need to increase the use of herbicides.

Which has unintended consequences.

GMOs are currently faster horses.
What is the advantage of larger and younger teams in regards to staying up to date?
I'd really appreciate more detail, here.
Ask HN: What is the point of “hands off” managers?
I've seen adverts for extremely well paid "hands off" lead manager roles. What is the point of these kind of roles? They seem largely like a glorified technical secretary who provides occasional opinions and administers a kanban/agile board - so I can see they deserve secretarial level pay. Why one earth do companies pay top dollar for such roles?
Your comment about Greece can easily be turned around: ask the British how voluntary the EU is.
"It's because they're optimised to withstand heavy pesticide use"

Actually, GMOs need less pesticides than non GMO crop. Some of them produce their own pesticide (BT corn and BT cotton).

"Pesticides are bad."

Thats kind of the point, they are bad to pests that try to eat the crop

"GMO are generally sterile"

You are confusing GMO with hybrids and no they are not sterile, the just lose vigour after a few generations, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_hybrid

", so you have to buy seeds every year from Monsanto. Great business model for Monsanto, not so much for the farmer."

Most farmers in the developed world buy new seed every year because of the hybrid thing, and do so because its convenient. At the end of the day its a choice the farmer makes: they could re use their own seeds and hybridise them, but for most its not worth the hassle.
OctoPrint: The snappy web interface for your 3D printer
The internet is a utility. Legislate it as such. Which you think would be obvious, considering the much less utilized telephone line is considered a utility.
Show HN: ExcelJSON – Convert JSON To/from CSV, TSV Easily
Yes there are:

https://scan.coverity.com/projects/linux
Yes?

As a king, what would you prefer - to defend against one big kingdom that wants all of your land, or to defend against three big kingdoms that each want a third of your land?

When number of points of failure trade off against your attack surface, you can't just say "more PoFs is better".
New gTLDs at Namescon
iOS and Mac App Store prices to rise 25% following Brexit vote
Automating Your CI/CD Pipeline from GitHub to Amazon ECS
Dell 1110 Driver Download
You are right, I did not expand on that. Larger teams bring in a potentially wider set of skills, and your "next" is probably some younger developer's "current" already.
> > "GMO are generally sterile"

> You are confusing GMO with hybrids and no they are not sterile

Monsanto did have the (terribly named) "terminator gene". They said this was to protect the environment from spilled seed.
Silently downvote me all you like, but only in the last month have I seen code I wrote before we even used CVS (remember that?) for source control still being used daily.

18 months ago I submitted a proposal for some software I had ready to go, happy to discuss costs but suggested a small amount (£10/user/month IIRC) with a costed business plan showing the savings it could make. They declined it, fine, but then gave the proposal document to an in house developer who's been working full time on it since and still hasn't even shown a line of code to anyone.

I'd tried to get national level innovation funding for that so the local organisation wouldn't have to pay for it. NHS innovation money is only available for proven software. By which I mean having a full system tested by clinicians and ready to go isn't enough; it has to already be in production use to be innovation!

The last couple of months a marketing agency have been trying to sell some software I've written across the NHS to help people collaborate, but they just can't do it. They've concluded it has to be sold to one small area at a time, literally starting in a GP surgery for something that makes most sense rolled out across the organisation. Before I approached the marketing agency I'd contacted the front door email of about 5 NHS IT organisations claiming to help suppliers improve the NHS about how to start the ball rolling; none of them got back to me.

There's a clue to the fractured nature of the NHS in the article linked elsewhere in the comments about Google getting AI data; they've only been able to get the data for 1.6 million patients. The NHS deal with that many patients in 2-3 days.

A month or two ago their email hit national headlines for going into meltdown after someone spammed most of the staff with the mailing list in CC and they all ended up replying to all to ask to be removed from the list.

I could drone on. But maybe you get the point.
As opposed to the 5'10" rube goldbergian harvester machine that selects your products at the grocery store, moves them around in a cart for 20 minutes, then stands in line to purchase them?

Somewhere along the line, you as a person will always walk around and pick up your own food. (Unless you pay someone to do that for you, too.) Doing it direct from a local food forest, or a farmers market, will always involve less transportation and labor cost than a grocery store.
I think the British are about to find out. I am glad I am not British.
It is ludicrous to think that there is a chance that the 'local/organic' movement will ever...

Why are you conflating local and organic? Neither implies the other and they're two entirely different questions.

(local && organic) may never capture a huge share of the market, but that is an entirely unrelated question to organic farming
"fossil-fuel intensive synthetic fertilizers" or "inorganic synthetic fertilizers"

NH3 in particular is commonly synthesized by combining N2 from the atmosphere with H2 extracted from CH4 (natural gas).
You're right, but that point isn't relevant.

What you're giving is an explanation, not an excuse. Nobody is incredulous at Google's motivations (money). We're just not satisfied with it.

Before you can solve a problem, you must identify it clearly. That's what we're doing here. Saying "yeah but it's only logical" isn't the point. Look:

> It's up to us to find a way to kill google and take back our internet.

You mean, like discussing why AMP is bad and why we shouldn't use it?
5.3% of Germany is 4 million people. And a wealthy 4 million people at that. Organic food is not going to feed China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, etc.
It's a lot more complicated than that. There isn't one single 'farming lobby'. France, to take your example, has a highly inefficient agricultural system, heavily dependent on CAP subsidies. There has been massive pressure the last two decades to reduce that, but it hasn't happened yet and probably won't for years to come. This is a form of 'lobbying' (those farmers get benefits from those subsidies), even if those farmers didn't have the clout to set higher milk price floors (a weird concept in the first place, since this is a very basic supply/demand thing - the reason they don't make enough is because their per-liter cost is too high compared to the competition; sure you can say that that's because extra-EU farmers don't have to internalize environmental costs to the same degree the EU ones have to, but then it's a matter of setting import restrictions, not having an artificial price floor enforced. But I digress.)

Of course fertilizers and pesticide produces are an aspect of the abstract concept of 'the Ag lobby', but it's much more nuanced than that.
I would love this too
The "soil" is more complex than its mineral characterization. Depth, texture, organic components, life, elasticity ... The more we study it, the more amazing it gets.
> having a user base that is more art centered than programming centered

Sorry but I think it's more likely the opposite and the user base is more developer centered than artist centered. How are devs supposed to understand how to move this app forward if no one even uses it to it's full potential.

Getting tired of technies pointing fingers at the artists when they fail to understand how to make great creative tools.
Yes. If a recruiter has an offer for me, then she should send the offer for me
to evaluate. I hate talking to random strangers on the phone and much prefer
e-mail communication, especially that recruiters don't have the tendency to
call when people are out of their offices.
I hope that the solution is applicable, as I hope that the policy can be changed. But that's something on the long term.
What happens when you eat this BT corn?
That's in python (web is preferred) but yeah it seems fitting.
When joining EU, Czech Republic had to raise 5x nitrate limits in drinking water. Mainly for pollution in germany. Now water for toddlers is not safe for some aquarium fish.
Dynamical bias in the coin toss [pdf]
No Prohibition of the National Democratic Party of Germany
The current definition of what "organic farming" is has been obviously corrupted by the current farming industry. In the end it's just a label.

But the question remains: how can we do sustainable farming, without polluting the soil and the water and without poisoning humans?

If we can't find a way to make that work, then we are all heading towards an apocalypse, because what we are doing currently isn't sustainable.

And no, GMOs are not an answer because efficiency is not our current problem. Pesticides are only needed because of mono-cultures, a problem that is only relevant in the context of current industrial farming practices. Even more aggravating is that we live in the information age, we can now build the proper tools to do industrial-scale farming without making use of mono-cultures or pesticides. We can have robots to do all the hard work, we can use AI for rotating crops in order to keep the soil healthy, etc. And GMOs would not help much, because you're not addressing the problem of raising mono-cultures and for example it will not lead to much healthier soils and would do nothing to help the bees.

Sadly, even though mother nature is proving how extremely dumb and primitive we are, we are still not learning ;-)
Future is heading day by day more towards internet ghetto's direction.

People's freedom of speech is controlled by Google, facebook or some other corporation.

By keepining very limited development requirements these "instant" ghettos also can fully controll all content.

People please, do not use these ghettos. Don't loose rights to have own pages or technology.
I'm sure static site in good cdn is almost instant also.

Why to limit your content only for google also ??

I'm more and more against these major corporations daily.
Gonna have to agree with this, very few Mac users are going to use your application (assuming they have other options) if it looks blocky next to all their other apps. This goes for absolutely everything but especially so for creative tools.

2X displays might seem frivolous to non-Mac developers but they've been the norm on OS X for several years now.
I wonder how much different Windows 10 for enterprises is. Many annoying things (reporting to MSFT, automatic restarts you cannot disable in obvious ways, ad tiles by default, one drive integration showing up constantly) are features where I'm sure enterprises can deactivate them.

For large companies, I think Windows 10 could actually be really nice and efficient to use. It's faster and has some important new features (the new task manager is way better, especially for developers). It's just the retail version which includes a lot of garbage to compensate for the lower revenue.
No, everyone on here shouldn't need explanation on why amp is bad.

Especially when its a closed system that Google insists serving to your customers from Google's private servers. No technologist or business person would/should ever stand for that. Yet we are forced to.

The discussion should really be, how do we dislodge Google from its current entrenched position.
If everyone is using Conversations as their client, group chats work fine. Issues arrise when you introduce other clients into the mix ...
> Then again, at the same time, look at all the food we throw away in the western world. Do we actually need to increase crop yield in the developed world?

This is equivalent to asking if we actually need for food to be cheap / cheaper. I'd say "yes". Unfortunately, food waste is simply a side effect of it being easily and cheaply available. You can't eliminate food waste - you can't create a perfectly efficient system in a real world - but if you want a shot at reducing it, ban catering companies.

(More generally, if you want people to stop doing stupid things with product X, the market solution would be to increase the price of product X to such a level that almost no one would dare waste it; in case of necessities like food or water, I'd really prefer the regulatory solution of taxing/fining the stupid thing itself.)

> You may call it a luxury product, but I will personally pick true organic food any day of the week. Pesticides are bad and unhealthy. Organic food is even already somewhat being exposed to pesticides through historical pollution. I only have one life.

For the very same reason I'll pick industrial, preferably GMO food, any day of the week. As you wrote, pesticides are bad and unhealthy. They're also - from what I hear - happily used by organic farming industry as a replacement for the 'bad', 'unnatural' methods of conventional agriculture. So this way, organic food gets exposed to poisons more.

> Just look at the whole Monsanto / glyphosate / roundup discussion.

Oh yeah, I remember it turning out to be mostly harmless and a much better alternative to what your typical organic farm would use. Saying "it's bad" is easy, but what's often missing is the "compared to what?" part.
The Best Medical Apps Released in 2015 for iPhone Android
> Almost all really new technologies come out of the US.

I would add: Almost all really new technologies in the market come out of the US.

US is the best at transforming research in $.
Cadmium is a chemical (I just worked with some watercolors, that's why it comes to mind). Do you want that in your water table just because 'it's a chemical, like water'? How about lead?
most subsistence farmers will never be able to use GMOs. It requires capital outlay that is just not possible.

> For instance, organic farming thinks GMO's are bad

No, I think modern GMOs are going in the wrong direction. Modern wheat varieties have shrunk from being ~1.2 meters to not very high, through the use of selection, as has herbicide/pesticide tolerance. GMOs just make it faster.

All of this means that you don't have to look after the soil. Which is great, but then you have to irrigate it. but then that become expensive. Then you have to fertilise it, and that become increasingly expensive.

> some hilly permaculture farm in Austria

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

> impoverishing a large part of the population by doing manual labor on farms.

Thats what subsistence farming does. They can't afford mechanisation, so have to manually plough and weed.

Ofcourse weeding is greatly simplified if you grow your seeds in rows. We've known that since jethro tull's days.

GMOs are basically a sticky plaster. Yes, they can be more drought resistant, but why are there droughts? perhaps, just perhaps removing the spongy organic layer of soil that trapped the water might be the answer. increasing drainage so that floods dont happen, might also be a cause.

Farming is fucking complex, I'd suggest you go and work on a permaculture and "modern" farm, to see just what's required.
Imagine you think on that worksheet and...
"What is a fulfilling career to you" -> "I don't know..."
"What is your most valuable career capital right now?" -> "No idea, if I knew how to turn something I have/can do into capital I wouldn't be planning things on that level would I?"
"What global problems do you think are most pressing" -> How the hell should I know? this is only based on what I read in the media, I have no exposure to those problems.
"Which of your options are best?" -> "What? I don't even know which of the options might be worthwhile, let alone having criteria and confidence to judge them in the absolute..."

Etc. Etc. You get my point: based on my observations of decision making of people around me, our real difficulty is not in asking those questions, rather it's that we simply do not know what the answers might be. We have no insight. We don't know our greatest strengths (or weaknesses), we don't know what's our biggest career capital, we have no idea what the ideal career for us would look like etc.

We have little way of knowing other than trying things out and seeing how they work out. It's easy to say "ask yourself question X", but the problem for people is that they simply do not have answers to those kinds of questions.

So what can be done about this? Maybe if you get an experienced mentor who will guide you through answering those questions, that would be progress. I would love to see tools for that kind of thinking.
Recognise the Risk
IMHO it's simple: current farming depends on oil. Oil will, sooner or later, be very expensive. If nothing changes, food will by extension become very expensive too: sooner or later we will need to grow food without the use of oil.

Now the question is:

* should we learn how to do this now, at a comfortable pace while we still have oil-based food as a backup, where wealthy individuals can opt to support this essential research by buying organic food,

* or should we wait until the oil's all but gone and there's a Malthusian event looming?

To me the choice is easy. At worst I'm paying more than "needed" to eat, at best we're able to phase out another reliance on oil in an orderly manner.
That everyone working on it are unpaid volunteers is not a valid reason?
That analogy isn't correct. You've made it 1 thing against 1 versus 1 against 3.

If we were to use that analogy, a more accurate metric would be either having 1 large centralized kingdom or 100 small, autonomous, independent kingdoms that each have fundamentally different weaknesses. If one fails, you still have 99.

But even that fails to understand the dynamic of biological systems. There's mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationships between crops and many creatures (bees, worms, etc).

Presenting it as always in conflict is inaccurate.

The fundamentally different approach is to not look at pest solutions through a genocidal chemical warfare lens but instead to figure out how to maintain a sustainable relationship and have all of nature working for you instead of setting most of it as against you.
Please note: ℅ is not %
So the money either goes to government or the telcos' employees and shareholders. It's a valid goal for the government to attempt not to undersell the asset, but as you say it's primarily a transfer. If you want an example that changes more than market prices, have a look at Roth's work on matching for hospitals, schools and organs:

https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http:...
CPP (Content Performance Policy) is an open, standardized alternative to AMP, that may need help to finish it:

Draft: http://wicg.github.io/ContentPerformancePolicy/
Github: https://github.com/wicg/ContentPerformancePolicy/
Launch article: https://timkadlec.com/2016/02/a-standardized-alternative-to-...
HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12787462
It somehow shows that what we see at the moment isn't new at all. Yes, there is a different scale of information gathering, but that's just because there's more information flowing. 100 years ago it was very hard to communicate over a distance without traffic being intercepted, and the same is true today.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to make communication more secure, but it indicates that we are not heading towards an ever worse surveillance state.
> For instance, organic farming thinks GMO's are bad, but is just fine with irradiating large fields full of plants to accomplish random mutations through radiation breeding.

Radiation induces single-nucleotide mutations that need to get past some cellular defence mechanisms before becoming viable. Those are much easier to test and debug than shooting DNA-covered heavy metal particles with a gene gun into target cells so random genetic material can be inserted at random places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_gun
The uptake on this will be dependent on how comfortable developers feel about building completely off AWS's infra.

I'm optimistic about such an approach -- a lot of infra effort (maintaining servers & service/marketing) is expended innumerable times across all SaaS services/APIs.