skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an interesting thing. Fish are over fished, stocks decline, the price goes up, fishing companies go out of business. The response has been sustainably farmed fish, that market is up hugely of course (its worth investing in if you are a futurist) There are also indications that changes in the ocean temperature and acidity are moving fish populations around such that a 'fishery collapse' might also be 'they went somewhere else'.

The last few years the salmon season was halted in California. Between low water for spawning and lots of fishing the catches were going down and few fish were returning to spawn. Now they have recovered somewhat and California is getting a better idea of what the population can support. Meanwhile it gets very expensive to eat fish.

Its for this reason I doubt that fish stocks will go completely extinct. Unlike land stocks where it 'cost' zero to wait for game to go by, fish require that you be in a boat to go get them. That costs money. If the return becomes so uncertain that you don't know if you will make or lose money on the outing, rational actors will stop playing.

Most of the mass extinction / exhaustion theories I've read are based on predicting a systemic collapse rather than the last fish of a particular type is removed manually. What is not clear is whether or not these systemic collapses actually occur. Localized food chains have some great examples (like coral reefs dying due to trawling and then losing the entire ecosystem sort of like the rain forest becoming farmland) but the deep sea stocks are much more difficult to kill off in that way.
Many thanks paul. It took us a while to realize that showcasing our experts' work is the best way to get the word out. Much better than static ads, at least at this stage.
> a "space race" which makes a grand project of developing substantive improvements to medical care and quality of life.

How about a "space race" to destroy destructive nonsense like homeopathy, anti-vaccine idiocy, reiki, and all of the other non-scientific crap people try to use instead of real medicine.

Getting rid of quackademic medicine would be a good first step.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quackademic_medicine

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/quackademic-me...
It's definitely not easy to do at scale, if possible at all. I'm still in the early stages with the product, so at this point (and with this particular type of product) the personal, un-scalable approach makes sense.
The style of email that I sent to Ryan, and the one that I describe in the post that he links to, is only for people that are arriving through 'warm' connections (e.g. a colleague told them about the site), versus arriving through twitter, search, etc. For completely cold connections, I use a slightly less personal approach. I shared a post about that here last week, and there were some great comments - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4527094. That method still requires some effort from a real person, but doesn't include any actual 'research'.
Putting aside the libertarian party I think FA Hayek is as libertarian as anyone in history and he supported right to work laws. Such laws make some contracts invalid and that's the extent to how they really operate.
I'm pretty sure that wishing a beating upon me is not a statement which PG would condone, especially given that you work for him.

I don't work for PG and I don't understand why you take offense.

You said: "low-IQ humans require brutality to understand when they've done wrong".

Your IQ is low in relation to the HN average and the majority of HN has agreed that you're doing wrong (see votes on your comments).

Do you practice what you preach or does your "logic" only apply to people of a different skin color?
Technology cannot solve the problems of the world, because the real problem is human nature. Machiavelli got it right when he said that history repeats because man's passion never changes. The world is nonlinear, everything is cyclical. When history stops repeating, progress will have been made.
Not talking about tablets and mobile devices. I'm talking about the way they bundle their PC hardware and software. And specifically about the way their TOS forbids installing OSX on non-Apple hardware.
This was exactly my question/concern in posing the link. And, of course, I'd love to understand what the consequences of such a failure would be.
> What an interesting way to put it, I have to admit. Talk about lives when you consider entire economies and ultimately people as resources to sustain your own standard of living.

That's how it works. Charity certainly hasn't solved the problem.

> commercially optimal energy sources(e.g. fossil fuels)

Interesting argument, that. Do you consider how many would die from spending more on energy by shifting to commercially sub-optimal energy sources? All of the money has to come from somewhere, after all, and foreign investment is usually easy to cut. So's charity.

> If only workers quality of life and working conditions would have been given more value, dozens of suicides

Recheck the statistics about suicides at Foxconn plants:

"The suicide rate at Foxconn during the suicide spate remained lower than that of the general Chinese population, as well as all 50 states in the United States."

http://www.economist.com/node/16231588

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-05-26/tech/30097107...

> Ultimately the problem itself is in relying on growth which then requires more resources than there are available to sustain the growth.

Malthusianism never stops to consider that one of the main ways to make advances is to make processes more efficient, which is the primary way to sustain growth. Compare how many people farm now to how many people farmed in 1900.
>Personally I think NYC is far more attractive than the Bay Area in all ways but two: the weather and the inertia of existing tech companies. You can live 5 minutes walk from work in NYC. There are very few places you could do that (or would want to) in SF.

Interesting. Can you tell me what kind of cycling routes compare to what's available in the bay area in NYC? As someone who's lived in both places, there's no comparison, but since those are the only two things you can think of...
The US has basically the worst cost of healthcare to life expectancy rate out of all the first world countries. They're going to have to improve either of those statistics to even contend with socialized medicine.
There's no cycling routes because within Manhattan it's far easier to just take the subway or bus. Cycling has largely arisen in the Bay because public transit is so god awful.
Wow, I'd love to see some of your citations for (1). If anything, their aggressive supply chain management has helped drive down prices for things like capacitative touch screens, NAND flash, hi-dpi LCDs, etc.

Last week, I ordered some parts for a new workstation - a high-end Ivy Bridge i5, 256gig SSD, 16GB RAM, etc for ~600. How much did I overpay because Apple "reversed the commoditization" of PC hardware?
If we weren't in all of these wars, we could afford to cut your tax rate in half (and every other federal tax rate) without changing anything else. That's equivalent at least an instant 10% raise, maybe more depending on your tax bracket.
I didn't take offense, but I haven't wished a beating on anyone here, not even on the people whose skin color is not the same as mine, and not even to prove a point, as you tried to do. A few downvotes does not a majority make. I agree that my IQ is very likely lower than the HN average, but that is not the same as being a low-IQ human, which is generally at the level of actual retardation. Race is not only about skin color.
Amazon Cloud Drive has recently launched in UK, DE, FR, IT, ES (and Cloud Player is available in UK, DE, FR). It's certainly not just in US.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me feel awkward any time I use my Air in public. Business practices like this make me feel guilty for purchasing Apple products.
3. http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/20...

4. Yes, I qualified this with a "possibly". Their public statements have seemed to indicate that they are willing to change. But progress has been "mixed": http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57516945-37/watchdog-group... Then, there is the question of why they only seemed to realize there was a problem after a NPR expose.

5. Yes, "nothing" was hyperbole. But they lag companies of similar size: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/03/apple-charity-donat... When Exxon is giving more than you on a per-market-cap basis, you might have a problem.

Overall, I think Tim Cook is moving the company in a better direction. But they have a long way to go.
Ask HN: I made a list of Ruby / Rails learning resources, should I open it up?
I made a list of Ruby and Rails resources - http://www.learnrubyandrails.com and it has gotten good traction.<p>I am thinking to open up the repo and accept contribution by pull requests, or I should keep it as very moderated as it is now - I am the only one adding resources. My concern is that if I totally open it up there may be too much spam or people promoting their own mini-tutorial or ebooks, and it could out of control.<p>I also thought about putting up / down votes like HN does, but again there is concern of spamming.<p>what do you think?
Nice! Thanks for the tip:

dfc@ronin:~$ apt-cache search redshift
gtk-redshift - Adjusts the color temperature of your screen with GTK+ integration
redshift - Adjusts the color temperature of your screen
It's trivial to filter out of office messages if you use a decent email program. The false positive rate should be as close to zero as you can get.

Reading every feedback email from every real user teaches you how to create better products. If you make it clear users can provide feedback, there's an opportunity from them.

I ask every single real person who leaves my service why they left, which translates to about 12 emails from me per week. Most of the time, the feedback isn't actionable, but 2-3 of every 50 emails translate to something I can use to make my product better.
Yes, but that decision in itself doesn't "drive up prices." They offer a product that consumers are willing to pay more for. They aren't a monopoly and don't have pricing power.
Industry level unions are essentially no better than the lobbyists used by multinational corporations - both attempt to enforce cartel pricing in the markets of their paying constituents via political action. Regulation must allow entry of new entrants if safe to do so for both consumers and drivers - competition is good if regulated correctly.
I'm all for that. The key problem is defining it. There exist historical examples of quackery which wasn't, e.g. hand washing.

Stricter rules about null hypothesis testing would be a start, but the bigger problem is one of education. We're still plagued by government that gives the nod to creationism and horrifically distorted sex ed in public schools.

I'd like to say we've become empirical enough about what practices we place belief in that we could just treat all cases of quackery as malicious fraud - but the very prevalence of such issues tends to support the opposite conclusion.
This article is interesting to me because it highlights a symptom of a more commonly occurring problem, even here in the US. Drought or the dwindling supply of cheap drinking water is yet another problem we need to solve.
And before you tackle those other sources, make sure to go on a week-long bender. This will hopefully kill enough brain cells that you might stand a chance of forgetting most of this post's mischaracterizations.

I can condone running through the math behind various primitives, to wet someone's whistle and give them a bit of an appreciation. To someone unfamiliar with the concept of one-way functions, seeing a run through of Diffie-Hellman is pretty neat. "What do you mean I can't figure out the secret, the numbers are right here in front of me..."

But one of the major things that makes crypto so damn hard is that the devil is in the details, and this article misleads much more than it informs. Linear analogies like paint-mixing and XOR (!?) are anti-enlightening to the feat that DH actually accomplishes. Never mind the blatantly incorrect summaries of the properties of each primitive, which were clearly driven more by the limited understanding of the author than any kind of real-world usage.
People don't want to all live in the same place, but you can accommodate them! Just have a high-density commercial business district and sensible long and short range transit. Here in Chicago, within half an hour or so on the El or the Metra, I can live in a downtown high-rise, a condo in a family-friendly in-town neighborhood, a single family home in a family-friendly in-town neighborhood, or a full blown grass and trees suburb, and still never get in a car as part of my commute.

The problem in SF isn't that people want to live in different areas. The same is true in NYC or Chicago. The problem is that there isn't proper zoning. To make transit feasible, you need an extremely dense central business district with a ton of office space. You need employers to be mostly in the same core area. Then, you need to zone things and lay out transit stations so they're approachable for pedestrians. Too many systems make transit stations into these isolated intimidating affairs.

This is a neighborhood in Chicago with a lot of young families: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Paulina,+Chicago,+IL&hl=en...

Tree lined streets and small yards. Just a couple of minutes walk from the train stations. Just pan around and you can see the train tracks passing right through.

Train stations in Chicago are extremely easily accessed from street level. No parking lots, no elaborate station house, just stairs and a platform: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Sedgwick,+Chicago,+IL&hl=e...
Can I buy one?
> . However, it had the opposite effect on me as it became more and more difficult to go "back" to sleep in the afternoon unless I waited until the evening.

8 here for me is 8pm. So I'll sleep 8pm until somewhere between 10 and 11.30pm depending on how rough the day was, and then get up and stay up anywhere until around 1.30am to 3.30am and go to bed and sleep until 6am.

I don't think I could deal with sleeping in the afternoon - it has to be when it's reasonably dark out, and it definitively helps to have a rough enough schedule and short enough total amount of sleep to be properly tired by the time I go down for the first round.

I rarely sleep more than 6 hour total during the evening/night, but will often catch up with a nap during the day on weekends.
DATA-COLUMNS, an alternative to jQuery Masonry
Bucket 3 actually conflates public health and industrial safety. But one wonders where he got that idea from. There is ample research in public health, although perhaps not so much in the US, as a hospital or pharmco you cannot make money from it, and there is ample research on industrial safety as well. Airlines know a hell of the last thing - cockpit management, checklists, the works. I seem to remember Atul Gawande discussing this last item.
I removed the disgusting symbol stacks from Fexl.
"There exist historical examples of quackery which wasn't, e.g. hand washing."

And homeopathy, which even James Randi admits was more effective than western medicine in the 1800s. (In the video that was submitted to HN recently.)
The other insight Bezos had about books was that the extent of the market was limited by a physical constraint in how big a store could get. It was a perfect product to exploit unmet demand for long tail titles. Groceries don't seem to suffer this problem to such a degree. Most of what people want to eat is available in local stores.
And I'm a psychopath because I don't care!
That would be a neat experiment.
Pretty much. (Incidentally, I used to work in the building right across the street from Ogilvie.)
The hardware market is a competitive market, but the OS market is an oligopoly. I think it would be fair to say that most consumers want the OSX and care less about the hardware. Indeed, you could build a PC with equivalent hardware to a Mac Pro for 60% of the price.

But Apple won't sell the OS separately from the hardware. This is bundling/tying and can be grounds for an antitrust suit. The bundling of the OS (which they do have pricing power over) with hardware (which they normally wouldn't) allows them to overcharge for hardware:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
Real data and informed consumers are a very valid way to promote improvement through "competition".

Often times though, that's not enough as is the case in LA right now where patients are being prevented from using the best doctors:

Two of the most prestigious names in Southern California healthcare — Cedars-Sinai and UCLA — are getting shut out of a major insurance plan for being too expensive.

In a bold cost-cutting move, Anthem Blue Cross has eliminated doctors affiliated with the hospitals from a health plan offered to about 60,000 employees and dependents at the cash-strapped city of Los Angeles.

The city opted for Anthem's plan because it will save $7.6 million in annual premiums next year by excluding physicians from the two institutions known for tending to the Southland's rich and famous. About 2,200 city workers and family members are expected to lose access to their doctors under the plan.

This dramatic step shows that even some of the most-respected names in medicine can't get by on reputation alone at a time when the U.S. is grappling with a $2.6-trillion healthcare bill annually. Major hospitals and medical groups face growing pressure to justify their charges. And employers increasingly are willing to risk the ire of workers by cutting popular providers to clamp down on costs.

- http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hospital-costs-2012092...
An interesting approach. I wonder how much regularity he gets out of his brews, given that everything's so tightly controlled.

Personally, I think part of the fun of homebrewing is coming up with your own unique take on a recipe. The mishaps that create something weird in your beer make for a good story.
Take a look at this map:

http://www.nycbikemaps.com/maps/manhattan-bike-map/

There are actually a lot of bike lanes and trails (trails are generally along the Hudson or East River).

Some of this is relatively recent thanks to the controversial transportation commissioner:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/top_right/2011/08/j...

who has, amongst other things, closed off Times Square to traffic and added bike lanes to 8th (and other) avenues.

I'm not an avid cyclist but I have done some limited cycling in the Valley and it's frigging dangerous. I simply won't go on anything other than back roads and even there you're in constant danger of being wiped out by a car pulling out of a parking lot of a car turning right at a red light (worst road rule ever; it's illegal in the the five boroughs but some people are ignorant of this).

I know someone who bikes in most days from Brooklyn but I think you need to be attentive. Then again, as a cyclist on roads, I think that is universally true.

In Norcal you can probably bike almost year round. In NYC less so. In winter you do get issues with snow and ice. Overall it probably rains more in NYC than in the Bay Area but I'm just guessing there.
I'm a huge fan of System76, in case you are unfamiliar: https://www.system76.com/
We are absolutely about to see it all pay off.

Let's not discount universal access to information, first of all. I'm 28 and when I was in high school 10 years ago, it was right about the time you could now find the quadratic formula by searching the Web, but before you could Google how to write a resume, find a good doctor in your area, or read blogs about developing better study habits. I think the world must have been a little darker before the Google age.

Then there's universal distribution of software (the web, mobile devices) and the relative ease of developing niche apps today. The transformation of the world by (good) software is just beginning.
> Public transit just doesn't work at low population density;

This is a poor excuse. The Bay Area has a population density many times larger than a long list of places with vastly better public transit. Both San Mateo and Santa Clara counties have populations that put them in the same ballpark as the metro area of Oslo for example, yet have population densities that are several times higher. Somehow it works well in places with substantially lower density than Oslo too.
>>>> Why Rob Pike wouldn't fork over $80 for Aperture and save himself the hassle is beyond me. You can say "it's the principle of the thing; I've already paid for it!" but really? What is your time worth?

Well, the trouble with that approach is that money votes.
When you pay this extra $80 you reinforce the behavior.
The US is way-off-the-chart bad actually:

http://andrewgelman.com/2009/12/healthcare_spen/
IPhone 5 shows mobile web 2-3 generations from matching desktop web performance.
Interesting in that when it comes to computers, he [Rob Pike] knows what he's doing.

Clearly not. For one thing you just don't erase a working drive with your data on it until the repair is successful. If it's some warranty thing and they are going to take the drive then you at least make a 1:1 image of it using dd or equivalent block copy first. If they are replacing it with the same size just dd the image back for that matter.

The worst part is this repair is trivial for anybody that knows what he's doing. You just order a replacement drive from newegg (or wherever), mount the new and old drives using target disk mode or external enclosure, and copy the disk. Then you swap the drives. This wasn't an Air or something difficult, just unscrew the case and replace the drive. Or if you really don't want to take it apart yourself have the repairman do the swap.

It's really easy, especially with a second Apple available. I did it just a few weeks ago for a family member, the only actual time investment is opening the case to swap the drives.
My understanding is that most water pumping and sewage systems are vacuum and pressure driven and reversible -- ie there aren't closing one-way valves between your toilet and the sewer pipe; it's more a system where the 'pressure in' provides the 'pressure out'. Isn't it possible that this could lead to reversal or other catastrophic events -- like in the sense of sewage backing up into freshwater supplies, or massively out some exits in the system (ie some people's toilets)?
When you say subpoena the FDA, do you mean that you need to get a court order compelling the FDA to show you the results?
Basing teachers' pay and job security on surveys from students seems like a good idea, especially given the numbers mentioned in the article. One problem is that it might give too much power to students.

I was a dick back in high school. The hacker I was back then would have figured out exactly how the testing and metrics were set up (public information) and organized a union of students to manipulate it. I can't do much with standarized test scores, they reflect on me. But a teacher quality survey? That's just a weapon.

Things like this make me wish that we had some kind of Hacker in Chief, to figure out how to circumvent new systems before they get implemented.
The bullet trains make it ~40 min SF->PA, ~45 to mountain view. There's lots of companies in downtown PA and MTV, making it just a 5 minute walk on that end. You also might have an easier time if you live near BART (say, in the Mission) and thus can take that to Millbrae instead of taking a slow bus to 4th/King.

So you're probably still looking at an hour and a half, but maybe not quite as bad as you describe.

Of course, this isn't a problem if you just work in SF too, and there's more and more great companies in the city. As awful as Muni is, it should offer you a <= half hour commute in most cases.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/20/wikimedia_uk_scandal...