skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Joseph Stalin had the perfect response ...

That's not a perfect response to people's attitude toward population control by mass death, which is what I'm describing -- it's exactly the same argument that's offered in the linked article: "In moving toward a better Anthropocene, the environment will be what we make it." Indeed it will.

> What a myopic view.

It's myopia to imagine, as the linked article does, that we can force the earth to provide sustenance regardless of our numbers. That's a fantasy.
Have you ever actually heard someone use the expression "boys will be boys" when talking about Sandy Hook or Columbine? That's just not credible.
I curse you to live in a country like India or Bangladesh for rest of your life. I hope you survive that environment and die a natural death.These are the places where population increase is severely under-checked due to various political,religious and plain-old(which are not any of the former) dumb reasons. I am not going to predict anything but I believe these two countries will be the example of hazards of overpopulation in the 21st century.(If Humanity survives ,we might see some awesome horror movies(or something of that sort) based on early-mid to 21st century Indian sub-continent in 22nd century)
Has anyone found a way to find series ids? I keep getting "message":["Invalid Series for Series xyz1234"]
You'd think but the two penalties I've been issued by the police which were speeding and talking on a phone whilst driving were wrong. I wasn't doing either. The first one was trickery by the officer who persuaded me to admit to it as it's be easier. The second, i was actually scratching my head after chicken pox.

Both of those i had to appeal and won instantly when talking to the magistrate.

Allowing these morons to issue fines and penalties for more complicated issues such as in this case is a very bad idea.
we are already taxing the Earth far beyond its carrying capacity

And your evidence for this is?

To continue supporting even our current population will force us to devastate our planet

And your evidence for this is?

What about raising the standard of living of all those who are already on the planet

As the article clearly states, the obstacles to doing this are social and political, not environmental or technological. People are starving or living at bare subsistence level, to put it bluntly, because our social systems suck at empowering people to make a better life. We allow predatory individuals, whether they are tinpot dictators or investment bankers, to siphon off resources they don't need and will squander anyway at the expense of others. That is what we need to fix.

Should we live in a world void of natural beauty?

No, and we don't.

before we poisoned the seas, melted the ice caps and drained the soil of its nutrients.

And your evidence that this is happening is? More precisely, your evidence that all these things are worse than they were, say, 1000 years ago, is?
"Instead, OJ could allow a simple line like showAwesomeTweet('2131221121'), which would be guaranteed to work everywhere, simply."

Ah, but you are sacrificing uniformity of design there. What if I would like the style of the tweet to be consistent with the overall style of my app? And this style is managed by a separate designer not a programmer?

Modularity works fine for behaviour, because it is better to abstract and encapsulate behaviour. But modularity doesn't necessarily work great for looks and feels.
It's a typo I reckon, but the original point seems valid to me. It would be better to hire one person for 40 hrs than 2 for 20 hours each because of the overhead.
The question of what to do is not science. And it seems silly to assume that we're starting at an optimal temperature considering the wild swings the planet has had in the past.
"Who knows what will be possible with the technologies of the future? "

This entire argument is based on the idea that we should be able to continually expand carrying capacity by our inventiveness. Stating for example increased farming yield with technology.

Not only is there a likely limit to our ability to squeeze more and more out of finite resources, but the author completely ignores the subtle long term damage that our technology creates. Our current food production systems are highly toxic to the environment and are a major source of CO2 output. So while we increased food carrying capacity we did so by reducing long term habitability of the planet.

Personally, I'd like to see populatin growth reduced by a global increase in quality of live. But not western culture consumption obsessed quality of life. That would need to change. As would the growth based financial system. Those two go hand in hand so this could all gradually happen at the same time. In theory.
What a compromise.
The limitations seem pretty high. Why would I use this when I could run something like Docker on bare metal?
I think his point is 'Some people like wars and spying, some people like welfare.'
I had no idea this had been posted already. I happened to watch it last night, and wasn't recommended it by anyone in the tech community - it had been on my watchlist for a while because I like Gene Hackman.

Sorry about the double post, but try to remember not everyone is glued to the HN front page or only doing things on recommendation from others :)

The best solution to prevent this from happening may be Stack Overflow style: suggest to the OP while posting the link that it has already been posted fairly recently and perhaps their comments would be better off in that thread.
facebook is blocked in china
It seems there are three different use cases. 1) Typing and storing words as plain-text. Two spaces seem unnecessary. 2) Writing a file for pretty printing. LaTeX is an excellect choice, and will probably make a pretty PDF. 3) Display as an HTML webpage. Currently there aren't any good solutions for this, and generally we're trying to make something that either just defaults to 1, or else creates a poor emulation of 2.
http://sweetjs.org/
I wonder if they know that "Standing on the shoulders of giants" was probably an insult to Robert Hooke
What rights should be given just because people work in a corporation? Flawed argument. Personhood is quite important in our Republic. Only living and breathing humans that are American citizens should be allowed to take part in our politics. Giving corporations a seat at the table is just reinforcing a class-based system like you have in Britain but without hereditary titles. Wealth is power in a market based society. The other is influence and military might. Corporatons have two inhierently because there first use was to concentrate capital (wealth) and limit liability.
Demand for labour is decreasing while the supply of labour is fixed (or increasing) - everyone needs to work, because everyone needs to eat. Like others I think a basic income would go a long way towards mitigating this problem. Imagine a world where pretty much everything we need is automated - what do we do then? In the long term some form of basic income is inevitable.
Yes. I'm 100% sure. If you don't believe me go and look at how we are capable of managing our resources in Sahelin region.
The reality is that the best way to control population expansion is by bringing good healthcare to a region. People in the third world have huge families for a number of reasons - a few of them include the reality that:

1) Many children will die young, so in order to have at least a few that survive they need to have a large number of them

2) They have no form of birth control available available to them, so even if they wanted to they could not control the population

To go along with this, in societies that lack a social safety net / old age pensions, your children are your retirement fund, so you tend to have many of them.

It's a multi-faceted problem, but there are humane, concrete solutions that don't involve acts of god.
Libuv which node.js uses has threads to do non blocking file IO. Haven't looked at the code for ages though so not sure exactly what it needs.
Will this be misused. Will sites have tons of rotating images. The new blink?
If that's the best you got, you've proved my point. Square I address below. Vinod gave the best valuation exactly because it was Jack. That's hardly founder friendly when you have no choice.

Jawbone is another fun data point. Yes, he bailed them out when they were going under. But all that did was give Vinod insane positioning. You care to share how much he owns? It's private equity, not VC.

Juniper is a perfect example of Bad Vinod. How long after founding did Pradeep last as CEO? and relative to Kriens, how we'll did he end up?

Lookout I don't know enough to comment on, but it looks like they were smart enough to get a second firm in to keep Vinod from his worst tendencies.
Okay, that's cool, but I still think a lot of the explanations wouldn't make sense with code translated to JS, because of the lack of homoiconicity.
This makes me want to run to Solaris. How disgustingly fragmented, mostly unusable piece of crap Linux performance and profiling tools are. As someone who has seem even top break due to kernel changes, seen perf segfault time to time and seen that the dtrace ports (or SystemTap for that matter) most of the times lock up/panic the system - Solaris (or any other modern UNIX variant like HP-UX) feel so much more reliable, cohesive and just a better overall experience in profiling and performance analysis departments.

Well at least perf works most of the time on Linux.
> Modern history is increasingly an account of population control by mass death.

I get that this is your claim, but I don't understand your argument that it's increasing when compared to WW1 and WW2.
In what possible way can freeing fossilized carbon back (where it came from) into the carbon cycle "reduce long term habitability of the planet"?. It may make it awkward for some low lying cities in the short term, but long term it guarantees a warmer, moister, more bountiful planet if anything.
> Fixed ideas being challenged is exactly what science - not superstition - is all about.

Science isn't a political movement. Science can produce very reliable results if conducted efficiently, but it cannot get people to listen. That's the divide between science and politics.

> The same area of land, supporting increasingly larger and larger populations, demonstrates that in fact we can manage our population growth ...

Nonsense. It shows how biological colonies adopt increasingly clever ways to squeeze more sustenance out of the environment. All such efforts eventually collide with the real carrying capacity of the environment, a fact that we ignore at our peril.

> But what does your superstition have to do with this?

Biology is science, not superstition. The logistic function is science, not superstition. All these scientific results show the peril of ignoring the role of environment in survival.

> ... but the archeological record demonstrates that we are capable, as a species of dealing with this.

It does nothing of the kind. The archaeological record shows any number of examples of species being wiped out by changes in their environments. In one case, an environmental change wiped out 90% of all species on earth. Apparently those species weren't aware of your blithe dismissal of the role of environment in the equation of life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/science/meteorite-that-kil...
The rate of both mass killings and individual killings is WAY down from what it's been historically. One interesting thing about news coverage is it covers NEWS - stuff that is new or that happens rarely. Once you've seen something happen a thousand times before, it stops being news. Auto accidents, being common, don't get national news coverage. High-profile kidnappings and large-bodycount school shootings, being much more rare, do.

The fact that news has this dynamic means you can't take the amount of news coverage as an indication of how serious or common a problem is. We DO do that due to a cognitive error called "availability bias", but if anything, the reverse strategy would be more sensible.

In short: if you see a threat in the newspapers, you should assume it's news because it happens so rarely that it isn't worth your worrying about anymore (if it ever was).
I'm not saying there's a solution to this problem -- there isn't

It seems to me that you actually agree with the article's claim that the primary problem is social. You just don't agree with the article's claim that the problem can be solved; basically you don't think humans will be able to come to grips with the social changes that would be required to manage ourselves as a species responsibly. Is that a fair statement of your position?
yes it's not like it has citations and quotes and everything.
It's all just lies!
Preferably classic Visual Basic, not the .NET edition :-)
Yeah, sorry, it's a typo. Will fix.
I think we are seeing evolution and natural selection in action right in front of our eyes here. Nature produces stupid people like this are in influential position and most of our species has this mentality and we will reach a point where it is truly unsustainable and nature has it's way in form mass extinction events, even if we survive that, our species is way more violent and a civil/traditional war will obliterate most of humanity.
What's the point of reading a refutation if you haven't read the original? You don't even know what you're reading.
A majority of what you said is true and needs to be openly discussed with the long term goal of equal and abundant opportunity for all.

I caution the definition of feminism is "to become superior to everyone else" as it is just plain untrue. A feminist advocates or supports the rights and equality of women.[1] It's not about superiority, simply equality.

I, as a male, have yet to read a piece of scholarly feminist literature that was based purely on misandry. In fact almost all of the literature I've read argues against the conditions and cultural values that both men and women are exposed to that allow them to identify and carry out sexist behavior in a justified manner rather than simply blaming the individuals. Instead most asks that we all think critically of our own responsibility to others, what we value culturally and why we value it.

The "rope ladder" example you mention can be related to a "BARGAINING WITH PATRIARCHY"[2] where women who are invested in a patriarchal system and receive some benefits are less likely to give up those benefits even if it improves their own situation in the long term.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism
[2]: http://www.smi.uib.no/seminars/Pensum/kandiyoti,%20Deniz.pdf
I recommend HTDPv2[0] together with the beginner-friendly IDE Dr. Racket. It let you get started quickly and give you a good foundation to learn your next language. The choice of Scheme is also excellent from a beginners perspective since there's no syntax to learn really.

0. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/
California school district hires firm to monitor students' social media
> they currently trying to get Grooveshark blocked from popular UK ISPs. The BPI only exists to monopolize the music industry.

Grooveshark is a company that profits off of content that they have no rights to. They hide behind the DMCA and are complete scumbags who pretend to engage in fair business practices and then turn around and renege on agreements, all the while people defend them as if they're making some form of moral stand against the oppressive music industry, when in reality they're choosing to make money on the back of the hard work of others.

Spotify is a fantastic alternative to Grooveshark that has a wealth of music in their library, they're compliant with labels and the law and have millions of users, I don't see the BPI trying to shut them down. Maybe, just maybe, there can be an instance where the "music industry" is in the right. Grooveshark is a shameful business.

I look forward to the day that Grooveshark shuts down. I'm all for revolutionising the music industry and changing the world, but there is a serious line crossed when a company consistently uses others work to profit, without permission. Spotify is doing it legally.

http://www.theverge.com/policy/2013/8/6/4592346/grooveshark-...
A larger space (em-quad) is not the same as two spaces.
> I'm not sure that the past situations and solutions will be the same as the future situation and non-/solutions.

The future will be completely different than the past, but in the same way -- consistent with the Logistic function and its description of the relation between species and environment.

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

There are any number of unpredictable aspects to how events unfold, but physical laws remain the same.
Yup, without a doubt. The amount of engineering that Google has put into it is hard to compete with.
I nominate you for HN Comment of the Year!
I'm not against proportional representation, in fact I know very few people in Germany that are against that system. What I'm criticising is the selection of a politically expedient mechanism, when others - which wouldn't as likely lead to an increase in the overall size of the parliament - are available.

cf. http://dipbt.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/17/118/1711821.pdf
"“Don’t ignore your kids,” Ms. Norman said, “even if they seem fine.”"

That seems like the best piece of advice in the article.
Surprised not to see KidsRuby on the list. It's Ruby, packaged up with a kid-friendly interface and turtle graphics support. http://www.kidsruby.com/
> there are no environmental reasons, at all, why we couldn't manage to sustain life on Earth, indefinitely.

The linked article doesn't say we can sustain our numbers indefinitely, It argues that we can grow our numbers indefinitely. Grow != sustain.
Can we all agree that the amount of humans which the Earth's (mass/surface area/volume/energy/environment/resources/what-have-you) can support is finite? Can we also agree that the ideal number of humans on Earth is somewhere between 0 and this finite limit?

In this case, I would simply argue that the ideal amount is somewhat lower than the amount of humans which would necessitate covering the entire Earth's landmass and oceans with a planet-sized city, obliterating all natural landforms and all species except those found in factory farms and zoos.

I guess what I am trying to say is, if we consider overpopulation not to be a problem, then we must believe that humans are wise enough to stop multiplying before Earth becomes a monoculture. This is the argument that I find hard to believe.
Depends on what you mean by "thrive." Many of them will "thrive" in conditions that it would be illegal to put a human into. I'm not sure if I call that "thriving."
CO2 levels are increasing ... that's science. The question of whether we can actually stop the trend, much less reverse it is both science and debate. The question of what each person, company and country should do is purely debate. Those of us in rich industrialize countries will not want to give up our way of life. Those burning the rain-forests are (from what I remember) doing it to subsist.

I'm also a steam-locomotive buff (install sl on all your Linux machines), and it's interesting to follow their decline in the US and other first world countries. China used steam power longer than most (http://www.david-longman.com/China.html), since they had vast reserves of coal and other more important infrastructure to build. But it appears China is just now recognizing the types of pollution that led to the 1970s/1980s "super-fund" sites in the US. I suspect that countries that want to join the ranks of the financial superpower will progress through similar stages where they won't be inclined to agree to pollution limits.
True. Added a link :)
No rights should be given nor taken away by virtue of organizing in any way.
No that is the problem right there. The advent of good(pretty good for a 3rd world country) health care in India ensured explosive growth of population. The only humane way to control population is extensive education of the masses,strongly backed by government(military can be engaged, if required) It means breaking away from religious factions and beliefs. It is impossible in India where minority politics is very important and in an Islamic country like Bangladesh it would be difficult.
Giving is the best communication
.. okay, fine: then you go and see how we've managed our resources in .. oh, lets just take - The Whole of Europe - and compare.

Just because some humans 'are stupid' doesn't mean all humans are. There is a lot of evidence that we, who choose to manage, will outlive those who choose to be stupid. 200,000 years of it, in fact.

(Stupidity might be contagious; the point is though: so is intelligence.)
Chef to waiter isn't a good analogy in terms of skills. I was trying to highlight how different the roles were and not the skillset disparity.

Hell, I'm one of them...my job title is application/solution architect and I spend most of my time doing exactly what you said above.

I agree with what you're saying. My main point is that what I've seen (and even heard from people I'm interviewing) is that they want to become an architect to move away from code and graduate into another position. I think your point of needing a broader skill set is important because in my mind, architects are excellent at their old job, continue to do portions of that job and also gain the other skills (communication, change management, evangelizing)...but I don't see everyone understanding that.
Latency is going to the hurdle there. You can have the fastest connection in the world but if it takes 400ms to pull up someone's contact info, no one is going to give a fuck.
The population density of Fremont, CA is about the same as the population density of Bangladesh, and it's not a bad place to live.

The population density of Hong Kong is much higher still, and it's also a pretty nice place to live. In short, the countries you name have a poverty problem, NOT a population problem. And the poverty problem is generally declining, last I checked.
I'm willing to bet that a lot of your arguments trigger infinite recursion.
I could imagine hardware built to grab public keys, and I could imagine such in a general purpose computer. However in the end there are a large number of problems so this is not a scenario to worry about. Yea, just generate the key and be done with it.

But the problems include:

1. So suppose you build into a computer an effort to recognize some public key generation routines and intercept the key from memory. This could be done, but updating the firmware code (since it is hidden from the user of the computer) is pretty hard so it only works on versions current at the time of manufacture. If you have had the computer for a few years, such recognition would seem iffy. Additionally this gets more complex when supporting more implementations....

2. Ok, so the computer malhardware has got the key, so what can it do with it? If you send the key over the internet, someone at some point may detect it. Likely the best scenario would be to store it and wait for some attempted handshake on, say, a firewire port, and then send it out then. Or one could wait for an SSH connection to an NSA-used cert for something like Google, but certs expire so that attack won't be worth it.

Tinfoil mode is interesting but part of the benefits are thinking through the possible exposure of something like a compromised piece of hardware.

Again, suppose the RNG is compromised. usually this means one can guess future values based on past values. An attack without past values is worthless, so it is unlikely to be helpful with regard to public key encryption as you point out.
What an abomination.
So, don't trust spy agencies?
To continue supporting even 1/10 of our current population will force us to devastate our planet eventually, if we don't change the way we support it.

More people means more science and better ways of sustaining population.

And we are not stuck on our planet forever, there are more planets nearby waiting to be 'devastated'.