skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You make several outdated assumptions about farming in the USA that are based in 20th century models of agriculture. The entire sector is incredibly fragile in its present form, because every method is unsustainable.

Industrial agriculture is depleting soil fertility faster than it can be replaced. Topsoil has been decimated in the past 100 years. This is primarily due to tractor tillage and herbicides.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...

Correlation between monoculture field crops and bee colony collapse
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/honey-bees-a...

Monoculture field crops are 100% dependent on chemical nitrogen fertilizer, the supply of which is finite
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1247398/

This is nothing to say about the ethics of undocumented indentured servitude of migrant labor, which floats the entire California farm sector
AWS also stopped to drop instance price periodically. Sadly Moore law has stopped some time ago affecting everyone.
A friend of mine is an MD at a major hospital in the midwest. As I've understood it this is standard practice for them. Their computers freeze up, and the message - my friend has sent me screen shots - will say something like "Hi <hospital name>, the computer is encrypted, please contact the IT department", IT department pays the ransom and the computers kick back on.

From a financial POV, as long as the ransom costs per year is lower than the cost to replace their Cerner systems, it makes sense to simply see it as the cost of operations I guess?
> The problem is there's no additional investment into the system to make it attractive to riders.

It seems to me that public transit probably follows the law of demand fairly strongly, and reducing the price will almost certainly make it more attractive to riders. Of course this won't fix all problems with public transit, and I don't think that's the goal. It sounds like the goal is to increase ridership (and specifically to increase access to people who cannot easily afford the fares).

> Better to keep charging the fare and use the revenue to improve service

Or...use tax revenue to improve the service. That's the point, and is exactly what happens with most public roads.
I think it was a logistical nightmare, because you had to pay your fare entering before the free ride zone, and exiting leaving the free ride zone. Unless you were transferring. And not all lines ran through it.

I wish we'd gone the other way and just made the whole thing free ride.
Why would you ever go to CNN? Its total garbage!
> They all still, to this day, insist that they were real.

This is, itself, "fake news". I can't find any indication that other mainstream media outlets defend the documents "to this day". The reporting largely seems to be "certainly smells like bullshit, and we can point to specific issues with them that seem to support that".

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/13/opinion/those-discredited... cites a wide variety of news organizations looking into them and finding problems, stating "When the mainstream press checked the sources mentioned or ignored by '60 Minutes II,' the story came apart." and noting Newsweek specifically calling them "discredited".
It's confusing to say it receives updates for 7 years when what they mean is 7 years from launch and not 7 years from sale (of a new device).
An active project that supports no hardware is still a dead project. If you want to run LineageOS, that's not a realistic goal. It's a pipe dream.
This is an excellent point. There must also be some right and/or control for the owner generating this data, so that they can access it independently, at least in some raw form.

I wonder if this qualifies under GDPR like law. If my cookie is private data, why can't the movement of my truck be?
You want to manage a mailing list from a phone?
>I've had some utterly ridiculous situations, like having an CCTV capture a package being delivered, the driver taking a picture of the delivered package for tracking, and then the driver leaving with it.

Same exact thing happened to me! Locals have also complained about the haphazard parking jobs and throw-your-package-at-your-door method that amazon's drivers do (to be fair on that last point, I regularly have the same experience with UPS).
ITER is taking the safest approach, and being a giant international cooperation makes them probably as flexible and nimble as a boulder. A startup betting on a novel, cheaper approach could beat them as long as they accept a much higher risk of failure. And while a government wouldn't invest $100M in something with say 10% chance of success, compared to $6B for ITER that's a worthwile bet for everyone else
Think on this topic long enough, and you'll find yourself starting a vegetable garden in the spring.
Worth mentioning that FedEx isn't horrible everywhere, in Canada they are pretty good and my preferred delivery method - really really good customer service. Purolator and UPS (most of the time) are terrible and even if you're home they won't even try and deliver to you instead just leaving a slip.
Ah I see. Just my two cents, but doing a MVP for a journaling app as website only seems very strange. The times I like to reflect on my day are evening and morning, both of which are usually when I am wrapping up for the night and have put away my computer.

I've been looking for something like this on mobile and would sign up in an instant if it was something I could use everyday.

Good luck with the project!
Oh, Amazon does not own all of the delivery infrastructure, though they certainly own some of it.

https://logistics.amazon.com - you too can work 7 days a week for whatever peanuts Amazon decides to throw at you, all while 'owning your own business' that is totally and completely dependent on Amazon and the success of Amazon.
Worked for me. Turned on my T-Mobile hotspot in Santa Monica, CA, connected to it, and ran `npm -g outdated` as suggested. It ran successfully.
Last week the USPS driver was clearly running behind on his route (which is fine), but then decided to mark my package as "could not access delivery location". Which is funny because:

1. USPS is the only carrier that has direct access into my building (because that's where the mailboxes are)

2. I was home all day and there was definitely no delivery attempt

I'm guessing they have SLAs in place with Amazon that penalizes them for late delivery, so they have to resort to such tactics.
I just finished building a DIY word clock (https://bitbucket.org/sjoerdtimmer/wordclock/), which indicates time by lighting LEDs behind a laser cut stencil with letters, producing text like "IT IS A QUARTER PAST SIX". The display only updates every five minutes, calmly fading between word combinations. It is one of the least obtrusive technologies that I have!
An edge case, with ~0 financial impact, and a functional workaround?

They could fix it, but I'd be surprised if anyone decided it was worth allocating any resources towards.
A look back to my 2010 predictions for 2020
In Baltimore, the Charm City Circulator (bus) is free.

https://www.charmcitycirculator.com/
That is terrible. So they'll never create a device that is good enough that they'll sell for for 6 years unless they sell something they don't support.
>Could they just fix that?

In my experience the zip code is built into the gas pump machines for 2 reasons: a) provide a least a modicum of security at the pumps the card user is an authorized user; and b) more importantly there is a good chance the manual input of the confirmed zip code provides a slight discount to the gas station with respect to their merchant services contract (which is probably pretty important on low margin purchases of gas).
Several thoughts after reading this :

- it looks like a massive ad for the presented tools (look at all the "?utm_source=amontalenti" in all the links)

- if you receive 100s of mail/day, you are doing something wrong. Many of them are spam or automated notifications. The first step is to unsubscribe to some of them

- having 50 rules and google app script is a maintenance hell, it can break or be deprecated at anytime

- if you use gmail, gmail's filters and native update/main/priority/spam boxes does 80% of the job

- by treating everything as a computer queue, you are trying to behave like a computer, but you are not one

- it seems the author spend more time at creating kanban cards and to-do lists than actually doing the work

- the point of todo list and kanban is to eventually delegate the work or share it with coworkers. Any private form of organization of your work makes it unobservable, unshareable and unreviewable to your teammates

- if you are an executive/founder, your role is to lead and delegate work. if you have a manager, you role is to simply listen to the priorities given by the manager. If you are an independent worker, you will probably focus on one client at a time
This is awesome.

And also in stark contrast with progressive Portland, which recently hired a gaggle of new fare-enforcement workers:
https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2019/10/trimet-beefing-...
I understand the value they add, but medium.com and Pinterest should really be banned by google and HN due to their efforts in making the flow of useful information harder. On medium for example, one has to pay to be able to read the article. I was considering taking my blog to medium.com but given how they basically own the article I would never do that.
> single-handedly

There are many people in the R community working on this together (e.g. Jenny Bryan, Charlotte, etc).

> lapply(), sapply(), tapply(), vapply() each does something different.

The apply situation has been standardized through the purrr lib and dplyr for a long time. They are base library functions that aren't mandatory.

> two kinds of assignment operators even

Consider the custom of using <-. It reduces the kinds of assignment operators to 1. Similar to avoiding from lib import * in python. You can do it, but there are community standards against it.
That was my point. From a psychiatrist's perspective, "change things" means reduce/eliminate symptoms. From a psychologists perspective, however, the goal is to manage symptoms rather than reduce symptoms. This distinction is often lost in resources that are not aimed at the clinical audience.
The article was interesting an informative, but it's really surprising to me that all humans have the same sized eyeballs. I would never have guessed that!
Ask HN: What tech stack would you choose for building your next app?
Hi all,

I feel like I'm behind the trends in building apps. I see lots of new stuff-as-a-service, and need to refresh my knowledge.

Could you tell what would you choose for your next app ?

Backend / frontend does not matter.

Thanks in advance.
Decoupling, Or: Where's My Data?
It seems that this quote predates Yogi, with a known usage in 1882: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/04/14/theory
Great to visualize, even if it is not entirely successful.

Seems like this needs to happen.
Yeah, working for me too.
Because they test on a large scale, not an individual scale
FWIW, on _German_ T-Mobile access to npmjs.com works just fine.
But you would run expensive machine learning jobs on them, and these (GPU instances) tend to offer more significant absolute savings when they're pre-emptible.
Meltdown and Spectre did a real number on the c5 and m5 instance types.

Amazon's original fix reduced performance substantially, which lot's of people noticed, but no one knew why till the vulnerabilities were announced.

Meanwhile Google built a clever workaround which minimized the pain. It was really a mic-drop moment from Google and I wish someone would dig in deep and tell the whole story.

At this point I'm sure AWS has merged Google's patches, but it showed how much Google was investing in their GCP offerings.
Cool looking project.. I like..
Show HN: Record and replay graphically executions of Java applications
Boeing 737 Max grounding dries up China’s demand for $300k expat pilots
Rambler retracts lawsuit against Nginx (Russian)
I think that with low power LED lighting, as well as all rechargeable devices, there is a case for some (not all) 12VDC sockets around the house (and cars/vans/RVs). Actually, I think mobile applications will be first: in an RV, it makes no sense to have a big inverter to take your 12V batteries to 120V AC, just to plug in wall warts to charge to camera, phone, etc.

I have a friend who installed 12V in parts of his house, backed by a solar charged battery system. See my previous comment for some details:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21109247

Talking to this friend, we discussed the same problem as the OP. In RVs that are wired for battery power, they use wall-mounted cigarette lighter plugs, and you can buy some small appliances that use them. They are ugly and take up too much space, it would be so much better to have a plug of a regular shape and size. Of course it has to be polarized for DC, so something like ( - | ).

There is also the problem of breaking the arc in DC, so one prong needs to be longer and making contact further in so it can't arc outside the plug. Or maybe it needs some internal mechanism such as plastic slot covers that close and break the ark (like child-protected sockets have now). Anyway it definitely needs some research and design, but I think it would be cool to have a new 12VDC standard plug, then people could start designing products that use it to get the whole ecosystem started.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the article

I'm sorry to hear that you didn't like the article.
I believe there is a fundamental difference between data centers and other electrical appliances because data centers consume energy 24/7/365, while electrical appliances do not.

It is a well known fact that electricity consumption from other sources, like heating or cooling buildings is much larger in comparison. Or even data networks and internet traffic in general; https://www.iea.org/reports/tracking-buildings/data-centres-... And there is a lot to do in those fields as well.

Unfortunately, renewables to overtake fossile are far away. Even with the development the last decade, wind and solar still count for only a fraction of world production; https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-2019) Until then, we as developers can actually make a small contribution by offsetting getting the consumption from this particular source higher than it is today, even if number of data centers is exponentially increasing.

Hope you found some of the other articles insightful.
Unfortunately, I think this is a step backwards. According to the US Census, about 1% of commuters in Kansas City use public transportation.

https://censusreporter.org/profiles/31000US28140-kansas-city...

It's hardly "public" transportation at all, if it's only useful to 1% of residents.

If public transportation is going to make any impact on the lives of Kansas City residents, it first has to be providing a useful service to them. That probably means expanding its reach, and putting more vehicles on existing lines. Making it free means that any expansion has become more expensive, and is now less likely to happen.
Yeah, I remember when they were just a bookstore. My account is older than some kids I know.

When you read their story though, what it is today was always the plan. Bezos just thought books was a good place to start.

It's really odd seeing Amazon brick and mortar books store now, lol.
>Achaogen ($AKAO) and Paratek ($PRTK) both had NDAs approved for novel antibiotics and saw their stock prices drop sharply in response to the news, as investors anticipated all those pesky expenses related to commercialization.

I was around for most of Achaogen's implosion. Some key points not mentioned in this blog post:

1.) In the ~12 months leading up to FDA approval, Achaogen started burning their capital at a rate that was, frankly, insane. Financial decision-makers were definitely counting their chickens before they hatched, and this ultimately seems to have resulted in massive cuts to opex (e.g. sales positions) that snowballed into abysmal revenue once Zemdri hit the market.

2.) The FDA approved Achaogen's product, Zemdri, indication for complex UTIs (cUTI), but not for bloodstream infections (BSI). The latter indication is much more lucrative. My personal opinion is that this factor alone wasn't responsible for the poor sales numbers, but it was certainly a huge contributor to the problem.
There's no guarantee that there even are further broad spectrum antibiotics possible.

As far as I understand, what's needed here is (first) fundamental research, then discussion of promising ideas, then maybe you can rely on private companies to perfect and bring to market new molecules.

Thats a far cry from other drugs for other diseases where there is a futile set of fundamentals to pick over and small research groups spinning off from universities regulatly.

Every time I've heard of new prospects, it's either been reexamining old methods (like plagues) or new fundamental work (sampling and sequencing new bacteria, studies on fungi).

So instead of "incentives", we should just man up and fund some biology and stop wasting what we have already on farm animal fattening programs and the worried well etc.
Disable javascript or use a browser that doesn't run it. I am an emacs user so its browser, eww, works for me.
Doesn't literal "no cost" public transportation lead to issues with folks abusing the service as a place to hang out? Also, does the service never get congested in other ways? I'd argue that public transportation should be paid for when congested, so that users are incented to shift their use to other times.
WSJ reported on Amazon's expanding delivery ambitions 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12600094
> Impressively, the Patreon for the project just hit $8k/mo.

Costing him $10k/day to run though.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21739879
> And while a government wouldn't invest $100M in something with say 10% chance of success, compared to $6B for ITER that's a worthwile bet for everyone else

Maybe governments should. That’s doesn’t seem like a large amount of money in the scheme of things and I’d rather the tech not belong to a startup.
This is so cool! Congratulations!!!

For durable items will the battery be rechargeable somehow?
www.figma.com is built on WebAssembly (C/C++ language) and written a great deal of content on blog
I'm pretty sure the farmers know very well the lifecycle costs of their heavy machinery, the problem isn't ill-informed consumers. The problem is the time as well as expense of repairs is controlled by the manufacturers.

The razor example isn't analogous here, you can pretty much plan for when you need new blades. A farmer can't predict when the equipment will break down.
People take antibiotics prophylactically all the time even here in the US. They'll do so in the developing world too unless stopped with regulation restricting use of antibiotics to cases where they'll be effective.
s/John Deere/Every company ever
Isn't it disingenuous to say that an election which proceeded according to the laws of the country, without any vote-counting scandal, is a "distortion"? This from the same people who like to say that the Electoral College is a distortion, as well?

If you don't like the result, it doesn't mean the system is broken. It might even mean that the system is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Based of this thread it looks like people were a lot more hopeful about the future 10 years ago than they are today. Back then smart phones were new, the AI winter looked like it was over, Google had just started testing self driving cars etc.

But today, Google is still working on the same self driving cars, we are still using smart phones as our main handheld device, and while the AI breakthroughs gave us chatbots and face recognition it hasn't made much progress since.

So to me it seems like the exciting years are over as the last decade was probably the least exciting technology wise for a very long time. I'd say we'll need a huge fundamental breakthrough for the next decade to not become even less exciting.
$1000, as seen in terms of security is not much to spend on something "perishable". Fixing your secure phone takes more than knowing how to RTFM.....

Which means bringing it to repair shop.... which means evil maid or whatever mix of flavor of vulns that creates
AI Tech That Are Reshaping Social Infrastructure
Lots of companies are backed by billionaires and still have many investors.
agreed. But when they purchased the machines, they should have looked at the services terms and taken that into account when making their purchases. If there's competition in the market (no idea) then presumably someone would try to beat its competitors by offering a better service option (such as unlocked diagnostics).

This issue went to the supreme court on the question of whether a manufacturer could "monopolize" its aftermarket. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Kodak_Co._v._Image_Tec....
How long does your robot take to do the hair cut. I never wait more than 10 min for a haircut. Currently if you do the appt. online, you can go around that time and they will take you right away. Your concept is good but may be you need to pivot.
Some highlights of the year:

Children of Time - (Tchaikovsky)

Steve Jobs (Isaacson) - as an aside, I've started reading his daughters (Lisa) book Small Fry

The Colour out of Space - (Lovecraft)

iWoz (Wozniak)

The Design of Everyday Things (Norman)
Show HN: Color Stacks – Color palette generator for design systems
The FBI has struggled to get a workable computer systems for their own internal use. Presumably, even some fairly modest technical problems may be beyond their capabilities.

They also have a heavy focus on counterterrorism these days, which likely makes everything else lower priority by default.
The Valve Index has an IPD adjustment slider on the bottom. I can tell that it does...something...but, with very wide margins, I can't tell what the right setting actually is for my eyes. Anything +/- a hell of a lot all just looks fine. So maybe it doesn't actually matter that much.
Ian Piumarta – To trap a better mouse [YouTube]
Good exercise away from the computer, and nice fresh food too. Makes a lot of sense.
That's one problem with relying on automatically extracted information - sometimes it's not really what you want. In this case that's just what GitHub puts in the og:description tag for large? repos, probably to make it appear that way on Google. Of course I could fix it for this instance but then it wouldn't really accurately represent what you can expect...

The relevant code to extract that is a Zotero Translator [1] so that's what would have to be changed for this.

[1]: https://github.com/zotero/translators/blob/master/GitHub.js
Compare this to Intercity Transit in Olympia, WA, which is going fare-free mostly because it needs to replace the fare collection system on older buses and install them on new ones, but

- the regional pass is on a path of deprecation in favor of a new system. So they'd need to buy two sets of fare collection systems in the span of a few years

- the cost to install these fare collection systems even once is more than what the agency currently collects in fares

- the fares only make up 1.5% of revenue anyways, so the impact is not as large as it would be in, say, New York where fares are north of 40% of revenue

https://www.intercitytransit.com/zerofare
Considering the domain is amazonaws.com, it is only fair they keep it with themselves. They can't be in the business of providing arbitrary subdomains under their parent domain just to have it point to some other external IP.