skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“Is the main problem simply the reduced price of output (due to competition with large scale industrial agriculture), rather than other factors (such as potential increased costs of inputs, degraded soil quality, access to water).”

It's mostly the market price of outputs. As was stated in the OP, producing a gallon of milk costs $1.90 or thereabouts. The cost in the grocery store is $2.59 in my area this week. This price has to cover not just the farmr's costs, but the shipping, packaging, and grocery store overhead. The farmer is lucky to break even, and often doesn't. I've read elsewhere that to guarantee a dairy farmer a living wage, without government subsidies, a gallon of milk would have to go for closer to $5. If you want organic, non-feedlot milk, that cost is even higher.

In my sister's case, our 300 acre farm can support around 75 breed cows, which means you could expect about 65 heifers and steers born every spring and sold every fall. These will be around 1200 pounds, at a “dressing percent” of 63% which means you get a 750 pound carcass. 490 pounds of this will be meat - let's call it 500 as a round figure. So she could produce 32,500 pounds of beef a year. The vast majority of this, over 75%, is going to be ground beef. A small fraction of it will be filet mignon.

If you figure that her business expenses are going to be in the neighborhood of $150,000, which is going to include equipment upkeep, fuel, fertilizer, seed, feed milling costs, farm maintenance costs, vet fees, medication per animal, and so on. She is going to need $50,000 in income to support her family, so that means her price per pound of beef would have to be about $6.15. Not including the cost of butchering, transport, auction fees, and all of the upstream costs (packaging, grocery store overhead and profits, etc). Now if you walk into your grocery store you will find ground beef commonly going for $5 a pound or less.

The 4-H says it costs about $7 a pound to produce beef, so that's a pretty good estimate.

And note that this does not include buying new equipment. A new tractor of a size that would let her bale hay starts at $50,000. Paying to have the farm re-fenced would be somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 depending on specifics. It also does not count all of the horrible things that can and do go wrong farming. If she cuts hay and it gets rained on before it dries, she loses that crop. You get three hay cuttings a year. That's a third of your hay crop gone, which means you have to buy hay. If there's a drought, you might have to buy water by the ton and have it trucked. If you get an outbreak of hoof rot, you lose a significant number of your animals and a significant amount of your pasture has to lay fallow for years until the pathogen dies. The number of horrible things that can go wrong that are beyond your control means that the above prices don't provide enough financial cushion to make it through a bad year or two.
Sixense STEM Tracker for Programming Robots
I would also suggest Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg as a kind-of sequel to this documentary. In the early 2000s, a lot of Netscape people (including a lot of people depicted here like Michael Toy, but notably not JWZ) joined the Open Source Applications Foundation, and the book is essentially about their attempts to build the Chandler information organizer.
Not quite; the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced is upon us. Trickles down into farming, and everything else. We are just getting started.
I firmly believe the notch wouldn’t have made it if Steve Jobs was still the CEO. It kinda goes against some of his ocd-ness

I refuse to buy a botched notched phone.
I'm respectful and polite in this forum. I've been blocked simply for saying things with which some largish group of down voters don't agree. I am trying to leave this site but boredom always pulls me back :) That and I really do like to browse the posts and comment, engage with, and challenge people. Here's one such arbitrarily blocked comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17517643

You can't read it but I screenshotted it for you. Dang calls me a troll simply for asking him to clarify and tells me to leave the site. "Legalistic Gambit of the troll," as if I'm trying to win some game. All I want is to be treated fairly on this site. It was very hurtful.

https://ibb.co/hoSMHK
Did you consider Google cloud, and reject it because you don;t trust Google? that's different from not considering gcp at all :)
HiQ Solar | Full stack database/web for internet-of-things | Sunnyvale, CA | Onsite or Remote | Full-time

== Internet-of-things Full-stack Engineer Wanted ==

THE COMPANY AND THE PRODUCT

HiQ Solar, Inc. designs and manufactures internet-connected AC/DC inverters for solar power and electrical storage solutions, in commercial and utility settings. The market for solar storage is hot, and we need our Internet-of-Things (IoT) database, customer web portal, and data mining systems, to scale up along with our surging sales volumes. If you have skills in building scalable databases for hardware IoT applications, keep reading.

THE POSITION

We are looking for a self-driven full-stack (database and web layer) software engineer for a redesign and re-implementation of our cloud database and data mining systems. All of our solar installations connect to the internet via our custom power-line communication gateway. You will be designing and implementing a scalable cloud database system that can handle connections from 30,000 gateways, which report their operational data (inverter status, power production, temperature, etc.) at one-minute intervals. Total data uploads will reach 150M records/day.

In addition, you will redesign our external customer web portal, an internal support web portal, and automated systems for predictive maintenance of customer devices; these must run efficiently, reliably, and maintainably.

The goals for your design will be scalability, operational fault-tolerance, and software maintainability (modern unit testing is a must).

Management skills are a plus, as the software team is likely to grow in the future as our revenue grows.

We are agnostic as to the "technology stack" you select. Whatever you have used to handle similar data volumes successfully in the past would be great. Let's discuss.

THE LOCATION

HiQ is in located in the heart of Silicon Valley, in Sunnyvale, CA right near the 101 freeway... we would consider remote work if you are experienced and can come to the office periodically.

APPLY TO HIQ

HiQ today is twelve employees delivering cutting-edge, efficient, connected devices for solar and battery storage applications. The company has just completed a $6m+ funding round, and we offer competitive salaries and stock options. Please send your resume and cover letter to: michael.palmer@hiqsolar.com. Tell us about your previous experience building IoT data systems on a similar scale to ours. Include your github / stackoverflow. What technology stack would you propose?
Perhaps it depends on the connotation they were going for or the one it developed. Like Ivan the Terrible. A more accurate translation to the current connotations would be "Ivan the Terrifying".
Pretty cool. Another example of how single cell transcriptomic techniques allow for the identification of cell type signatures in a way that was impossible or very difficult previously.
I love it! Will include it soon.
> He raises specialty row crops and runs an agricultural co-op, the kind where you pay a certain amount a month and get a box of fresh vegetables every week. But hobby farmers can't feed the country. We can't even feed ourselves, if it comes to that.

Is this actually true that small farmers can't feed the country? Farming productivity even on small farms is at an all time high. It's probably higher than the 1970's.

Gas will likely flatline as electricity takes over more and more. Health care is an issue for everybody that needs to get taken care of.

My math on farms always seems to tell me that labor is the primary problem. Why work on a farm which is really hard work when just about any job will pay better?

How far do food prices have to rise to reverse this?

> Or what happens if we encounter this generation's version of potato blight on corn or wheat? This is not just a human tragedy. It's a huge national security issue, and it looks like nobody is paying attention.

Maximally efficient is minimally robust. We learn that, painfully, over and over and over ....
I don't think is fair to compare Go to Erlang. Erlang is really designed to do 4 things: concurrency, low latency, fault tolerance and distributed systems and it shines there. Go is indeed a general purpose language to me.
Microsoft have done a few of their own u-turns on developers.

The most recent that springs to mind is the ditching of ADO in favour of ODBC which pissed a lot of developers off. There are plenty of other examples.
Yes, you're absolutely right: 2FA makes things harder for the attacker but doesn't really solve the problem. But in practice, at least circa 2018, most phishing sites are very primitive. Attackers do OK victimizing people without 2FA, so they don't generally do what you describe ("transparently relay both factors").
This reminds me of the brontotherium (thunder beast), a giant prehistoric mammal similar to a rhinoceros, but much larger. The Sioux sometimes found fossilized brontotherium bones after heavy rainstorms. They believed them to be the bones of creatures that ran over the clouds and caused thunder. One of my children's books about prehistoric creatures said the brontotherium was named by a paleontologist who was familiar with the Sioux myth.
That's inaccurate. Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314.

It's also inaccurate about deletion. We're happy to delete or redact older comments when users ask us to, and we do this all the time. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. What we don't allow is wholesale deletion.

I was talking mostly about users who create throwaway accounts for everything, including uncontroversial stuff, so I don't see the relevance of the culture wars here.

As for Eternal September, people have been saying these things for almost as long as HN has existed. If you want a plus-ça-change moment, take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646871 from eight years ago (edit: or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926604, from nine).
I have been involved with csas as both a consumer and a promoter. I see turnover but I also see csas succeeding. I think that farms are bifurcating into mega farms and local farms of under 10 acres close to cities and their markets that are willing to support local produce (truck farms).

This means that rural areas will continue to depopulate and that farming will either be industrial or bespoke.
All of the massive 'at scale' operations are going to turn into dust bowls. 'Small operations' will mean those people do not starve to death. Vegetable prices will make gold look cheap. Grow food anywhere you can, we all have to become farmers now to avoid a very bad situation, where the only thing to eat is other people.
Uses, or should use? On an Android device (S5) I've found the battery usage from music playing not-insignificant - perhaps it prevents the phone from fully entering standby, or something? At a very rough estimate, I'd say it uses 20% as much power to play music as active usage requires, though this is very much anecdata.

Either way, I'll second the recommendation to get an external battery pack - a high-quality one will give more audio playback time than a media player, with much more utility and convenience.
I thought the panic was because 3d printed guns are untraceable and can be made from materials that don't show up on airport scanners, etc.

(Yes, you can buy a bunch of parts off the internet and build your own untraceable gun today, or so I've read.)
That comment was flagged to death. Members can flag. Blaming the mods suggests that, at best, you don't actually understand how the forum works.
I have a personal anecdote about your statement here.

I was at a launch event for 'Create Your Own Economy' in Washington DC. It was a small event, at least small enough I had a chance to talk with Mr. Cowen uninterrupted for five or ten minutes while I bought a copy of his book.

Having read Satoshi's whitepaper a month or so prior, and being pretty excited about it, I attempted to describe the idea of a currency without a central authority to Mr. Cowen. I don't remember his exact words, but his basic sentiment was 'That's not possible, and even if it is, nobody would value it'.

The conversation made enough of an impression on him he signed my book 'To Tim - To the Idea of Fantasy'.

So I 100% agree, there's no way he would have funded Satoshi.

https://imgur.com/a/fsSMiB1
Hi William! I'm a paying customer at CoCalc, and I'm grateful for the amazing tools, great community and amazing team you have built! Keep up the great work!
The Nintendo Switch Pro Controller also includes a small hidden message just above the right analog stick, "THX 2 ALL GAME FANS". [0]

[0] http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/03/have_you_seen_the_h...
I was a fanboy too and feel the same.

The things that rub me the most seem to be problems I think from the way the hire people. The average stay at google is like 2.5 years, so most of the things I loved were created by people who are no longer there ( I am sure there are some staples that stay there, but ... )

They tend to higher young and fresh out of school people who know algorithms but seem to lack a strong foundation in computer history. Not just normal computer history (the why things are the way they are) but they lack even the historical history with the products they are working on. You can see this in the way their products have changed and either lost features, or changed features in a fundamental way that break them.

I think many of the problems created area also created from the altitude that "they are the best and brightest so whatever they think must be right". I know this generalization does not hold true in all cases. This sort of attitude can be seen most recently in the way they are handling "www" and "m" domains, and then even suggesting that they would somehow just make the change and then assume they could push a standard on the rest of the internet. There are other cases but don't have the time or will to detail every one of them.

The google today is not the google many of us fell in love with.
Kip Thorne (pretty famous physicist) uses Mathematica for his work almost exclusively if i understand an interview they did with him correctly.
Google in China censors results for democracy, human rights, or free speech
Of course, the plastic guns are practically useless:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/10/oh_no_its_the_plast...
Aren't warrant canaries valid until removed? Dates on them don't matter.
There is already a sunset guarantee for GCP: https://cloud.google.com/terms/

Section 7:

7.2 Deprecation Policy. Google will announce if it intends to discontinue or make backwards incompatible changes to the Services specified at the URL in the next sentence. Google will use commercially reasonable efforts to continue to operate those Services versions and features identified at https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation without these changes for at least one year after that announcement, unless (as Google determines in its reasonable good faith judgment):

(i) required by law or third party relationship (including if there is a change in applicable law or relationship), or

(ii) doing so could create a security risk or substantial economic or material technical burden.
I've heard about these $100,000 on a quarter acre claims, but I just can't see how they could possibly be true. Even pot farmers don't make that much, do they?

The guy across the road from me, the “real” farmer, has 90 acres. He seems to do ok. He runs old tractors, and he lives in a simple one story brick house, so he isn't living large. His land was placed in the local agricultural preservation program, which means it can't legally be developed, and hence cost him a lot less than what would otherwise have been the going price in this area.

He makes money by raising hyper-local, organic specialty row crops on a subscription basis to extremely wealthy households in the Washington DC suburbs. That's a sustainable business plan, but only for a very small number of farmers. It's only possible because he was able to buy a farm at an extreme discount in a rapidly gentrifying area that is now one of the wealthiest counties in America and is getting wealthier by the year. If he was in Iowa that whole business plan falls apart.
Exactly, we are eating oil and gas. Once the spigot slows down, things get ugly real fast. This is going to make the great depression and ww2 look small in comparison. Buckle your seat belt, and grow unusual edible species. I don't even eat grains, humans aren't equipped to eat that.
Web-scale identity – FREE (as in beer)
Not really.

If they had stuck with trying to move people into just cheap tickets up front, nobody would have complained and they might have been able to reach critical mass. The problem is that the VC's wanted to cash out in 18 months or go broke--well they're getting what they wanted.

Movie theatres have a lot of unsold inventory on off times. They probably would have been willing to cut all manner of deals for those times.

However, they were never going to give you chunks of primetime unless you had a huge cudgel.
Sort of. Apatosaurus was first, so Brontosaurus lost out as a junior synonym (first to name the things get to name the things, which gives us a silly name meaning "hyrax-like beast" - hyracotherium - for something that's obviously the dawn horse - eohippus)... except that there's very good reason now to believe that they weren't the same species.
Not from the light. It’s always instantaneous
> I wouldn't worry about this one -- unless foreign investors have a means to enforce physical security of their ownership claims, there's always the option of the government with control over the physical assets to expropriate them

That isn't a good scenario. Foreign? There were no white men in america, no black men either, so everyone is a foreigner, and the natives should expropriate them all? Dangerous ideas. That's how a war turns into a nightmare.
Which is why I feel telling kids not to share things online is like abstinence-only sex ed. As an adult, you have the wisdom and self-restraint to practice abstinence. Teenagers have neither of those. But they do have brains and bodies that put them at risk for STDs or pregnancy. It's foolish to make them take a gamble that their physiology has stacked the deck against them.

Socializing with your peers is as natural as sex. We grew up where online communication was either non-existent or niche enough that we don't feel it's necessary for socialization. But teenagers today have been exposed to the internet since birth. To them not participating in social networks is as absurd as being constantly online is uncomfortable to the older generation. Or it's like telling a teenager to ignore their sexual desire. It's not going to happen.

So teaching kids how to be safe online while still participating is the practical thing to do. And it's important to give them tools and knowledge that makes it possible for them succeed in protecting themselves.

When I think about it that way, I question my own standing in the privacy debate. I often point out how older people seem out-of-touch with how technology works. Well I don't participate in a lot of social platforms. Why should I be listened to about what is appropriate for those companies? I can say what I want for myself, but that isn't necessarily helpful for people who have a different lifestyle than I do. Does being too severe an advocate for privacy, and demonizing social media companies make me like to the old church lady saying that giving out condoms in school is evil?
Planet money did a piece the "government cheese" program during the Carter and Reagan administrations that was supposed to help dairy farmers

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/31/643486297/epis...
These comments were flagged by users and they can be seen. And you seem to want to engage in a 'debate' that is offtopic for the site. The mods are telling you you can't. Users, with their votes and flags, are telling you the same thing.
Google themselves has actually built very few successful products outside of search. Half of what they build internally they kill and the other half is acquisitions, many of which they also kill.

Sometimes I even wonder about things like GSuite. When does the 2-year sunset period start?
I think the corporate culture of Google does not allow for continued support of 'non core' projects. It's so much cooler to work on new stuff, supporting a chrome plugging that was written eight years ago probably doesn't get you anywhere within Google.

Also they don't have any feedback / bug report channels - these are also important if you plan to support your own stuff (I know you can monitor a lot but it's still not the same level of customer support)
Where should I post my video tutorials though? vimeo?
Sunspot observatory: Unexplained FBI raid sparks conspiracy theories
FBI, New Mexico ... better call Saul!
It's not really all that simple, my only relationship with Uber, Netflix and Spotify is one of a regular paying customer and they've all been caught out doing insidious things with my personal data from their apps.

Meanwhile I've flashed the foss LinageOS that doesn't phonehome every hour.

I find this meme silly, no one is claiming they are the "product" after installing Ubuntu.
I thought that ISIL is more an artifact of the power vacuum brought about by the 2nd US invasion of Iraq. Admittedly, I'm not an expert in these matters, but wasn't the void in Iraq a factor in ISIS's uprising?
Admittedly I'm not an expert on the censorship rules of the site but I was under the impression that the mods had the ability to unflag comments. It was never made clear to me why that comment was flagged or why it was considered "flamebait" and that's why I consider HN's censorship rules arbitrary. There was nothing rude or personally antagonistic or unscientific about that post.
for text, language models
On the one hand, I can't really comment specifically on the soil quality. I don't have first hand scientific knowledge.

On the other hand, it's certainly true that these producers are not implementing anything like a closed-loop nutrient plan. They're absolutely trucking in fertilizer from somewhere else to keep yields high. And they're producing monocultures, enforced with chemical pesticides and herbicides, to keep expenses low. Neither of those things strikes me as good in any possible way other than cost efficiency.
You are wrong. Unfortunately I know how opaque it is and can not use another word, which I would prefer, to describe the process. I can not, will not, must not give more information to protect myself and others.

Trust me, the mathematical chance of approximately 10% has nothing to do with your real chances which could be much lower, or much higher.
Quite a bit of US food production is going to produce animal feed, and some is exported. It'd take an amazing blow to cause actual starvation, given that could be diverted to feeding the population.

The main threat to agriculture in time of war used to be dependence on foreign oil, but the US has largely solved that.
Those comments cannot be seen, they are marked as "[flagged]" if you browse with cookies off, at least. I disagree that it was off topic, it was directly related to the post I was replying to. I understand that people might disagree with the content of the post but that shouldn't be cause to censor it on a forum for civil discussion, should it?