skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In general, Brazil has been quite strict with controlling pesticides because we depend a lot on the rich countries to want to buy our products.

The current government, not so much. The president has appointed a Minister of Agriculture that is known as the "Poison Muse". We shall see how that goes but there's a tendency of conflating liberalism with not having any rules that is getting scary with the current administration (e.g. taxes are the system crushing entrepreneurs, traffic laws are a "fee industry", everybody should have a gun, etc)
Square recently released an infographic that supports this:

https://squareup.com/us/en/making-change

(I work for square but wasn’t involved with this project)
Was completely with you until the last paragraph. As the poster above me says, the more you regulate hiring, the more reluctant companies are to do so. You can look at the entire continent of Europe for a 500 million person example of this- sclerotic uber-regulated hiring markets with intense bureaucratic rules around who can be hired or fired, who can be laid off, under what circumstances, etc. The end result of this regulation is dramatically higher unemployment rates and companies that are terrified to hire FTEs because it's so hard to get rid of a bad one.

Hiring needs to be less regulated, not more so
There has to be a website or record somewhere of someone doing the polar opposite of everything Krugman says and making money.
>Cracks in the core of a Scottish nuclear reactor could signal that most of Britain’s ageing plants will not be able to supply the country with much needed power for as long as predicted.

>Nuclear reactors generate just over 20 percent of Britain’s electricity and even before EDF Energy said last week it would need to shut down one of two reactors at the Hunterston B plant, almost half of that capacity was scheduled to go offline by 2025.

>“These reactors are over 40 years old. This is a generic defect which cannot be fixed so it would not surprise me if the older plants would all need to close within the next few years,” said John Large, an independent nuclear engineering consultant.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-nuclear-edf-analys...

He was the consulting engineer on the raising of the Kursk submarine - https://www.theengineer.co.uk/british-led-team-gains-access-...

Here's his obituary, he died recently.

John Large, nuclear scientist who oversaw the raising of the Russian ‘Kursk’ submarine from the seabed – obituary - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2018/12/06/john-large...
Dictatorships aren't stable, dictatorship is stable. Dictatorships involve bloody power strugges that ruin the country and kill people. Dictatorship usually remains, though, because the replacement government is usually another dictatorship - ensuring that when it in turn falls, even more people will die.
I liked most of their rules. I can only hope my spouse will go along with it, when I introduce the same rules.
Advertising for me measures on 3 orthogonal axes

1) Telling me stuff I didn't know about a company or a product, how it's better, or how it's suited to a particular niche.

2) Branding, logos, cutesy characters, etc.

3) Trying to hack my brain with dirty tricks, lying-with-technical-truth, pseudo-enthusiastic actors, psychology grads thinking they are clever. Worse if they actually are being clever.

Any advertising that mostly extends along axis 1 is actively useful. 2, is kind of harmless but much overdone.

Axis 3, I believe, should be globally banned and considered as an attempted mind attack. I don't care if it's useful to the company. If they can't make money with axes 1 and 2, they don't deserve to.
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge" - Stephen Hawking
I am too lazy I’d just use sendgrid which lets me send emails via an api, which is the simple thing I want. This is a bit confusing. And when I see cloud pricing schemes I just get scared of a big bill if I make a mistake.
Not only that, but I don't want to be hired to fix some old VB6 app or write Crystal Reports. If I'm ever desperate for a job I would change my tune, but that's a different situation.
nothing does; no images and non functional links.

looks like firefox' content blocking prevents some resources from loading, basically disabling your site.

apart from the obvious google tag blockage this one pops up in the console:

Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://www.reddit.com/r/EarthPorn/hot.json. (Reason: CORS request did not succeed).
Innovative businesses are a small part of the market.

Most(90%+) of businesses sell commodities, or near-commodities, or products that could be compared by a spec.

Marketplaces and parametric search seem like a fair way for them to get customers.
Ads are still often:

- attention-stealing (not just sound, but animation, flashing, etc)

- heavy (many of us can only afford mobile plans with small caps)

- misleading (e.g. fake download buttons near the real one)

- manipulative (using clickbait and divisive politics to get you to click)

- encourage censorship (since there's always the fear that advertisers will pull out if you show controversial stuff)

But personally, I could live with non-tracking web ads. Street ads are worse, in my opinion.
The situation is actually quite a bit more subtle. The most "lawful" periods in the Soviet Union were during the Khrushchev and Andropov times. Brezhnev's period (esp. th last days of it) was a a complete mess, when the Soviet police acquired enormous power and felt hey can do anything the want, especially in Moscow. Yet KGB was indeed quite bit less dirty than FSB.
Not saying he's been successful, but he has tried repeatedly.

I'm also trying to set aside whether I agree with these policies. Failure to do so is part of the reason so many Democrats have been so utterly ineffective against this president.

Oddly enough, the latest iteration (threatening new tariffs on Mexico) appears to have lead to a concession by Mexico to station 6,000 of its national guard units at the border to prevent emigration to the US.

I'd say this more than demonstrates that this president will take things to extremes few thought possible in an effort to make good on his campaign promises.

I even suspect a large number of Mexican national guard troop stationed at the border might even qualify as a "wall" that was "paid for" by Mexico. It also hints that further concessions by Mexico to fund a constructed wall might be forthcoming by making the same threat again.
Is it me, or all these efforts seem like they are by definition always going to be insufficient.

It's just a matter of time for algorithm written text to actually be similar to some human written text. At that point, there is no longer a way to distinguish them, no matter how smart. If the texts are actually written the same way, there's no secret pattern that can be picked up on, and the fight is over.

I think to combat fake news, especially algorithmic one, we'll need to innovate around authentication mechanism that can effectively prove who you are and how much effort you put into writing something. Digital signatures or things like that.
Love your attitude. I'm of the opinion that grinding through leetcode/hacker rank type exercises does improve your coding skills so I have no issue brushing up every time I'm on the market.

To that end, I'm 43 and last on the market a few months back, accepted an offer within a week of looking, had 3 pending final/onsites (including Amazon Seattle) and at least another half dozen in earlier stages that I shut down.

I do nothing to hide my age on my resume. Since turning 40 I've been on the market 3 times now, each time interviewing w/ 10-20 companies, and only once did I get the sense that agism was at play.
Maybe Bay Area companies are demonstrating that there indeed is age-bias as suggested by TFA by not hiring older devs?
"One study found that not using pesticides reduced crop yields by about 10%"[0]

That's not terribly bad. There are also communities of organic farmers working on methods to improve yields without pesticides. There is a lot still to be learned (and re-learned) about crop cycling, for example. Other ideas are mixed fields with different crops, new tilling protocols etc.

Some pesticides are also legal under different certification schemes. Sulfur, for example, is the most used pesticide in the EU. Pyrethroid is allowed under some schemes, and it's actually a drug approved for human use (lice), and therefore (and because it's rather old) thought to be safe at the far lower doses one is exposed to via the food chain.

The chart https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pflanzenschutzmittel#/media/Da... is also rather interesting, in that it shows highly diverging use of pesticides and fertilizers across EU countries. There is no definitive pattern here, with Sweden and the Netherlands as the extremes on opposite sides, two countries that are rather similar both in economics as well as climate. Spain/Italy/Portugal might be high because they have much larger shares of multi-year crops such as wine and olive trees, while yearly crops such as corn and wheat are less susceptible because the diseases die with the plants every year. OTOH, at least olives aren't fertilized I believe.

What's also interesting is the positive correlation between pesticide use and fertilizer use. I expected the opposite, i. e. farmers compensating for expected losses to disease with increased fertilizer and vice versa. This not happening may point at a cultural issue at play here, with some farmers choosing these tools excessively, or maybe a lack of knowledge of alternatives.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesticide#Benefits
It's similar to facial recognition.

It's not about the ability to look at something, face image or DNA. It's about ability to remember that information and use it.

Some argue that they want ownership of information that concern themselves, and right to deny others from handling that without explicit consent. Others argue that collection is alright but sharing (with or without exceptions) isn't. Others disagree completely and say that information belongs to whoever holds it, as it's immoral to deprive person of rights to have memories. It's also arguable that privacy laws may apply differently between persons and companies. Or between natural and artificial memory banks. Or that different rules should apply based on volume of data stored, like number of persons involved. I've read many different opinions on this matter. Lean towards some, but haven't firmly decided on any.

I don't think this will be fully resolved until someone would invent eidetic memory drugs or implants or something like that, and we'll have to erase the current boundary between humans and machines.
It was just decriminalized in Oakland.
Find identifying information from a phone number using OSINT tools
I'm not sure all these needs require advertisement in the socially detrimental sense that the article talks about. If we simply want information about services to go to users we have discovery platforms for plumbers were people can search and find them, see them rated by customers and evaluated in an objective fashion and so on.

Advertisements don't fill the niche any more of informing people in factual manner about products. The modern advertisement is the 'axe effect' or instagram influencing, which is purely emotional, tying personal success or celebrity culture to products in an attempt to manipulate audiences. Creating 'stories' about products that personalise them or as the article points out, signal social status and class segregation.
> "you know, here I have dozens of resumes of people 10 years younger than you, who have lots of experience in managing team

So they are 23 year olds write lots of managing experience? Sometimes I just dislike this industry with its title inflation. I am 33 having been a recruiter for a short stint, I can tell you most of them just checkbox candidates because they have no idea what they are hiring. As they say, no one ever got fired buying an ibm.
It's interesting that corporate diversity reports provide population breakdowns for demographic categories involved in heated political debates but seldom (never, in my experience) provide breakdowns according to other categories that might be just as important for diversity of thought, e.g. age and political affiliation.
Swift makes me feel jealous. What a cool language.
Age is not a problem, just avoid companies younger than yourself and I think you’ll do just fine.
I get why companies want to use Leetcode for evaluation. It basically quantifies an applicant down to a number which makes hiring easier and more scalable. There's a lot less room for bias if every candidate can be boiled down to pass or fail by a single test.

That being said, I was on the hiring committee at my last job and personally, I found the best way to hire engineers is to just chat with them about previous projects. I'd usually run through one or two, "just confirming you can code" whiteboard questions and then ask them to tell me about a project they are proud of that they had a large part in. If you ask questions that dig into the project ("How did you do X?", "Why did you do Y?", "Now that it's over, what would you change?") you can usually get a pretty good idea of their skill level and knowledge as a developer as well as some great insights into their personality.

Obviously, that's much harder to scale and more subject to bias, but it worked for me.
> ...an AI could make a viable presidential candidate.

You wouldn‘t even need what is hyperbolically called AI. A Markov chain would be fully sufficient.
I used Apache Jackrabbit (a JCR) at a previous job to store PDFs of insurance rate manuals. We could tag them by province, line of business, whatever, and then query it quickly. Jackrabbit is a fantastic piece of software.
"The attack was carried out by using a pattern that is becoming more and more popular; publishing a ‘useful’ package (electron-native-notify) to npm, waiting until it was in use by the target, and then updating it to include a malicious payload."

Gary Bernhardt has an interesting comment: https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/1137459482135416832
Hmm, news to me. In any case the point still stands that you can do SNP sequencing without being CLIA certified.
US lags behind rest of world in X, due to political inertia.

Don’t wake me up please.
It's already a trend. The fault, IMHO, lies with browser vendors making it possible for sites to detect private browsing mode in the first place. That should be a privacy but and prioritized accordingly.
>PG once said that he was always interested in hacking politics, and as someone who's amusedly been watching the Gravel teens, I have a feeling they'll go pretty far.

Hacking politics has already been done, and more successfully. If you are interested in seeing someone "hack" politics, then Trump's election has been the best case study by far.
Cognitive Computing Systems: Their Potential and the Future
Why is it that when it comes to nonhuman beings we turn to violence first? Then there's the hiding of the violence behind scientized euphemisms for bonus points.
They’ll go up to make up for loss in profits.
Checkmarks verify that the post is not made by someone claiming to represent a person, who does not actually represent that person. It solves the issue of fake accounts, which is a very real problem. For politicians, it doesn't really make much of a difference anyway whether they are the person physically typing the message. When a politician gives a speech, that speech will be written by a team of people working for the campaign. Even when answering questions at a town hall, the answers will just be talking points decided by the campaign, and I think that's common knowledge. Even if Twitter could verify 100% that a certain person typed the characters what would that get us? Gravel would just ask these kids what he should type, or they would send him the text directly. You could argue that this would at least guarantee he's seen the posts and that he therefore approves them, but don't we know that already? If he doesn't approve the posts he can either change his password or ask Twitter to remove the accounts verification.
The meat and potatoes of this are at the end. To make any headway with this there needs to be some legislation that gives more rights to consumers.

As a simple example of there adversarial interoperability used to work well (so much so that we had an ecosystem of interacting technologies), look at chat. First, before there was much encryption we had AIM and ICQ (and then AID/ICQ), and then an open standard in XMPP, and then Gchat used XMPP, and people used aggregating chat clients to handle all their chat needs in one application. There was no real downside to another account on another service, you could just add it to your chat handler and you were good to go.

Then we started seeing proprietary forays into this space with enough clout and lock-in to actually change the status quo. I might be wrong, but I've always attributed this primarily to Apple. When Apple provided a Mac only chat protocol and then used it to extend standard messaging but only for their platforms (SMS/iMessage interoperability), that was the beginning of the end. This was embrace, extend and extinguish as seen by Microsoft applied to a new medium, and with a slightly different strategy (instead of overall market dominance driving the change, it was vendor lock-in). Other big players followed suit in the next few years (I assume because otherwise they would be at a disadvantage). Gchat was superseded by Hangouts which was closed, and Facebook closed off their XMPP support around the same time. The excuses never held water to me. XMPP was extensible, and if it wasn't, it's not like companies like Google and Facebook (and Apple, as iChat was XMPP based as well) could not push forward whatever changes were needed for the advanced features they wanted.

We had a wonderful world of interoperating competing chat networks, a protocol that embraced this and even allowed federation, which a bunch of what are now some of the biggest companies in the world embraced, and then once everyone had an account, they revealed the extent of their bait-and-switch.

There's a lesson to be learned in there about commercial companies taking advantage of open source and open standards for their own profit (which is to be expected) but at the expense of their customers (which is unfortunate).
> Imagine that almost everything made by a new company never existed. That would be a problem.

Yeah, I'm not sure. Very little new stuff is actually better, and the constant churn has problems of its own. I'd need some evidence to show this would actually be a problem.
>My resume has always been one page. I hate looking over 3 page resumes. I don’t care what you did in the 90s.

This is very culture specific.

Example: Like you, I usually keep a revolving ~10 years history on my CV. As the years progress, I drop anything > 10 years, as it's really no longer relevant.

Anyways, I was pointedly asked one time during an interview, recently, for a company in a different country, "Where's the rest of your work history since university?"

That was almost 20 years ago, now. You have any idea just how long my CV would be, now, with all of that information?

/tableflip.gif
If you are giving your tech info away you are not competing with anybody.
> I hated the industries that placed him

People need to take responsibility at some point. All of us enable these industries. Without consumers purchasing their product directly, or indirectly (for example, via electric cars that use electricity derived from fossil fuels), these companies would not be in business. They started their businesses because there was demand for their product; industries do not create demand. They can augment it, certainly, but some level of demand must exist.

Moreover, half of these environmental disasters are driven by directly by people wanting to purchase more stuff for less money.
Some time ago a friend who works at a biotech startup in the DNA sequencing space told me there’s no way 23andMe’s price covers the sequencing cost and that they must be subsidizing the kits so they can sell the mined data later.
On-demand social media graphics design outsourcing service
If 70 year olds really are less productive software engineers than single Red Bull-fueled 22 year olds (on average), and you thus end up hiring less 70 year olds, is that really discrimination? I get the article has stories from older people that seem to suggest they are well-qualified for the job and literally just their age number seems to lose them the job, which of course would be discriminatory.

But the law suits of companies based on statistical analyses of the number of older people in the company made it seem like a company can be sued for not having an expected distribution of ages but it’s not clear what assumptions are baked into these analyses (ie is it assumed a priori that all ages are equally productive). Certainly older people are more productive in certain contexts than others (eg I’ll take an older more experienced surgeon over the new junior attending any day, but I’ll bet on the young person in a football match or tasks that require a lot of cognitive flexibility).
Why in the world is Philip DeFranco in that collage?
> 20 years ago, a typical team was mostly CS majors [...] Today however, especially in fields like frontend development, its extremely likely ZERO person in the team has a CS background

A commercially successful frontend development requires visual design skills much more than anything else, or no-one will visit the site if it looks bad. I disagree with you about software development teams in other fields having no CS background. The CS majors write backend code and frameworks for frontend developers to use.
> There is a small, but devoted community of people who use their machine shops to build modern versions of the antique hand-cranked knitting machines used to makes socks.

Whoa, what? Okay, super interested in this. Especially after seeing so many local schools and universities auction off or scrap what probably amounts to tons of old-iron textile processing machinery.

Please let me know if you have any relevant links! Would appreciate muchly.
How to make the thinnest possible free-standing sheets of perovskite materials
we need more articles like this !
Especially if it appears on the same day with articles like that one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20133308 :) ;)
Pretty much all beauty products as well as fashion and luxury product advertising's first order of battle is to make the recipient feel miserable, and to position the goods advertised as the solution for that misery.
You know what I find really ironic?

The successes of startups in Silicon Valley really drove up the compensation of programmers. But these same startups have founders/managers who openly state they prefer younger programmers, and direct their HR/recruiters to act accordingly. And now, we have whole classes of programmers who can't get a job at all.

It's pretty obvious no recruiter lost his/her job for passing on resumes of younger programmers.

Also, the SV is really the bastion of anti discrimination. Which is great. But they replaced it with something else, ageism.

Just my 2 cents.
Minnesota's supreme court shot down such cameras years ago and as far as I know it didn't turn into mad Max on the roads compared to other states.

It doesn't seem like there is a great deal of benefit.
Google LGBTQ Employees Upset about YouTube Policy
My biggest gripe with how modern html is written is not using <a> tags for link-like things. I often center click to open links in new tabs (Chrome and Firefox support this), but the way links have changed to <spans> with a listener attached that navigates to a new page--sometimes in a new window--really annoys me.