skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You fail to realize that the agro business model does achieve higher yields in the short term at the cost of soil damaging in the long term. As the natural biodiversity in both soils and seeds decrease, the risk of catastrophic pest swapping large number of crops grows and over-reliance on chemicals becomes a given.

We certainly need modern agriculture as a transitional technology to keep feeding the 7+ billion people on Earth today, but if this does not come hand in hand with measures to drastically reduce fertility rates (and per capita consumption, but that's another story) it means little more than kicking the can down the road. After all, the most important reason we are facing this dilemma today is that our parents' generation faced the same challenge when we were 4+ billion and decided to pretend there's nothing wrong with it.

Your choice of labeling alternative agro proponents as "radicals" because they cannot avoid calling a spade a spade tells more about the willful ignorance of society on these matters than about any objective measure of character of the label's subjects. And you surely know that problems cannot be made to go away by shutting eyes and ears, do you?
And, strangely, I didn't say otherwise.

The part that 'nailer' is correcting is your statement that "There is absolutely and unequivocally either brigading Microsoft fans, or paid shills, hitting HN hard.". You accused him (and me, and others who voted up this story) of being either a "brigading Microsoft fan" or a "paid shill". Your comments are being downvoted because individual users think that they are rude and false, not because of an organized pro-Microsoft movement.
Not just karma, too many lazy engineers choose their stack almost solely on a quick scan on HN to see what's cool.

You can date many startups by first looking at their stack, and then checking when that stack was cool here.
I came across this a while back and is what I tell all the newer people that I mentor: https://blogs.akamai.com/2013/10/you-must-try-and-then-you-m...

Some people tend to miss the "You MUST try" part. I am more than happy to take a million questions of the "I tried x, y, z and saw a, b, and c; what's up?" variety. Where it gets frustrating are questions like "I haven't really tried to hunt this down yet, but how do I do <thing>?"
They do this, sort of. It's called base isolation, and essentially, they put the whole structure on sliding bearings. (They don't do the vertical component, but that's typically not as big of a deal as the shear forces.) It takes some care dealing with utilities and connections to non-base isolated things, but it's quite effective.

It's done for high value structures that have to be functioning through emergencies, like emergency management centers and hospitals.

[edit I can't find documentation for this: I believe that the Bay Bridge has some of the biggest ones ever made, at roughly 9 feet of travel. (Though that was 20 years ago, and may not be current)]
Not asking for help / debugging yourself helps you make a leap to a better understanding of the language. You will certainly remember the next time you see that bug and over time, you build up your own knowledge so you have ask for help less. Asking for help is just short-term greedy: solves things now but doesn't help you (or your company) in the long-term.
And HSMs since their merger with SafeNet.
http://thecodelesscode.com/case/100
The idea he presented previously is that you'd be able to go in to Apple and upgrade the tech innards of your fancy gold iWatch when new, faster, more awesome bits are released.
You didn't get a promotion because one guy said something bad?

That doesn't sound right... I mean sure not everyone is going to like you at a large company like Google.

Ignoring that fact, this article is actually really good.

This is not always correct. if you are stuck on something, you should always ask people even if it is just describing the problem to them and then you usually have a solution before you finish the description, but if you don't. They may be able to lead you in the right direction.
Microsoft Releases Azure Machine Learning
This is abysmal and unfortunately, it is far more widespread than people like to believe, particularly in supposedly advanced countries.

I've worked with programmers who could not do proportions, compounded with designers, managers etc. who were in the same boat, I'd hear conversations along the lines of:

"This is terrible, X is 3/4 of Y!"
"I don't think you got it right, I got 75%, which isn't that bad"

The conversations and quarrels would go on forever, no joke.

Sadly, basic Maths isn't the only thing an alarming proportion of people do not seem to understand properly. I constantly see people with Masters, PhDs and whatnot, in various subjects (from Sciences to Journalism, Economics, etc.), who can't read and write properly. Not only do I wonder how they got where they are in the first place, but what worries me most is that there's clearly no fundamental understanding of the underlying, simple logic. Not meaning to offend anyone here, but simply looking at the comments on HN, a lot of people are guilty of bad spelling and questionable grammar, and I'd argue most people here are supposedly more educated than the average person.

I see schools competing on how they're teaching four year old kids additional languages, ten year olds how to make mobile apps, and the list goes on, but I'm yet to see a single school that advocates teaching simple logic. For instance, how about teaching grammar again? Most of my friends can't tell the difference between a noun, a proverb, a verb and so on. Not that the nomenclature matters, but I do think the intrinsic logic of a sentence does.

I'm not blaming anyone in particular, I'm really putting everyone at fault here. School systems largely aim to satisfy stats as opposed to humanely helping students, supported by politicians who like to give out numbers, whatever they mean, so that disgruntled parents may assign blame where they see fit (which is very rarely themselves), and on and on. Add to that a toxic culture of anti-intellectualism and the cycle repeats itself.

People like touting the Education system for all, but I doubt that the huge machinery we created really works for anybody, or at least everybody.
An Ideal Conversation
Eww, that just reminds me of the fact that some people are wealthy enough to spend 20K for some status symbol, a sum of money I would try to build awesome stuff with. At the same time, I realize that those who can't afford a MacBook might think in similar terms about me, so thank you Apple for making me feel bad and to remind us once again how fucked up everything is.
Are you suggesting that you never do business with people who wear Rolex?

I don't know how that makes sense. I would never pay 5k for a watch but I do wear shoes which costs 1300$. That doesn't make me a bad person, just that I like to spend money on shoes. I can completely understand that someone may want to spend 5k on Apple Watch.
Reminds me of a story.

One of my local universities (top 3 in the country) had a chemistry lab competition and invited high schools from local cities to participate. My younger sister was selected to be part of her school's team.

So she went and won the competition. The deen of science was so impressed by her performance that after the reward ceremony he invited her to enrol in the science program. She replied no and that she was already accepted into the university's school of business (like most of her overachieving classmates).

According to my sister, the deen was both taken aback and looked sad at the same time. So here's an anecdote to you.
Adjust those for cost of living and the US would be even more competitive.
Fragmented – A Podcast for Android Developers
Well, if you make loads of money in Finland, the taxman will take a significant part of it. That decreases the incentives to work in industry.

And yes, making lots of money indeed matters less in this culture than (it seems, I don't know for sure) in America.

But I wouldn't say that teachers are paid that well in Finland. It's just that the expresssion (Finland.compare_compensation(teacher, engineer) > US.compare_compensation(teacher, engineer)) evals to 1.

Overall, the current Finnish political climate seems to be hostile to industry, and I see no signs of improvement. Elections in a few months, and everyone is a friend of the public sector employees, because they are such a significant part of the workforce and voting base.
The solution of using old rotor blades as structural material seems not badly suited to the scale of the problem. The global market for cheap lightweight and strong structural elements is far larger than the amount of rotor blades needing recycled. Just working out a nice design for an agricultural barn would probably cover it.

Also, modification for re-use is generally far less energy intensive than full recycling, even if it were currently available.
And then follows the "search the title on google", and so on and so on.

It's from the Wall Street Journal, of course it's paywalled. Can we just have a macro that auto-pastes the same conversation thread for each wsj.com article, and save us all a lot of typing?
> microsoft is still the evil corp it used to be but has to fight other evil corps to keep a share of a market it once dominated. Microsoft had too much money to burn to die quickly, its agony will take quite some time.

I don't buy it. I think Microsoft seems to have actually made real changes. If you want an example of what a giant evil tech corporation dying slowly looks like, take a look at Oracle. Their core business is basically obsolete, but they'll go on killing open-source projects and squeezing their locked-in enterprise customers for many years.
I generally agree with the sentiment you express, but I think you're not really addressing the issue at hand. People moving in to finance does not seem likely to reduce our environmental impact.

Even so, you are right that western economies don't really have a shortage of goods, per se. The idea that low birth rates are a bad thing or that houses should go up in price, etc. are lunacy. Why do we want it to be hard to afford a secure home? Why do we need even more than 7 billion people? Maybe someday I'd like to not have to rent, but I won't be able to because houses will be $3 million by the time I can afford to buy what's out there now.
Brains are part of the real economy. Money is just money, and large amounts of it flows through institutions of various brain quality without being "eaten".
The fact that they're "flying desks" instead of airplanes does not make them any less menacing to everyone's privacy and security that they're invading.
Racism is not apparent unless you are good at picking up subtle/subconscious racism. Meaning overt racism or hostility is very rare.

Essentially it's a non-issue, come enjoy all the good things about the city!
Microsoft actually lets you download install media for Windows 7 and Windows 8 these days. You just need the license key. I haven't tried that for OEM, though.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/windows-usb-dvd-down...
It's unfortunate this isn't getting more traction on HN. I found this kickstarter through another friend of mine who pointed me to it and I had to see if someone had submitted it here yet. What an amazing project! Projectors are such a bane. If these work half as well as they claim they will be amazing. I wonder how they handle the heat issue that currently causes projectors problems.
Portland is light years ahead of Los Angeles in that regard.
Same thing basically happened to me - I just bought a new rMBP in lieu of throwing good money after bad on a logic board repair. Literally, I'm days out of the return period.

Thankfully I still have the bricked 2011 MBP, so I'll get it fixed and keep it as a backup machine I guess.
> "Moving quickly in software generally means less stability over time..."

Rather broad statement, that. Care to qualify it?
It doesn't seem to be abnormal.

I visited Tokyo last year and booked a few days' stay on one of these converted apartment-building hotels. I assumed it would be staffed all the time like a hotel in the US, and was pretty surprised when I showed up Saturday evening to find that there was nobody behind the front desk. What I found instead was a little envelope with my name on it, containing a room key and a polite note asking me to check in first thing Monday morning. It was a little surreal.
Better images out of cell phones and SLRs, or is that not a logical application of this technology?
What I feel like programming with other people's libraries sometimes
You're getting downvoted for tone because of your repeated accusations of shilling.

In general any post that accuses other people of being a fanboy or a shill will attract rapid heavy downvotes, regardless of which company is criticised or which company is accused of shilling. This is probably a good thing.

There is plenty of anti-MS sentiment on HN that doesn't get downvoted.
Another piece of this puzzle might be shenanigans early on in the history of MtGox. There's been some speculation that something happened early on and MtGox lost a lot of BTC (either a hack, a glitch, or possibly a HD failed with a wallet that didn't have a backup). From that point on they basically scrambled to make up the deficit in BTC through various shady means, one of which might be this bot. There's an oblique reference to that theory early on in the report when they mention trading a BTC deficit for a fiat deficit. Basically they traded cash they didn't have for BTC they didn't have but needed in order to prop up the orders they had outstanding.
Tip for NYT tech: try the page on rotated monitors. The notes and the picture don't match — people are cut off left and right.
I somewhat disagree. I rode around it on a motorcycle from the bay last year. It was my first time seeing it. I hate crowds just like everyone else, and there was a crap ton of buses with even more people there, but I have to say -- I didn't expect much... "big whoop, grand canyon..." but when I walked up to the side in person, the shear size and strange 3d illusion the sight put on my brain, I just couldn't comprehend. I was put in awe and literally couldn't turn away for 10 minutes... the people around hadn't detracted from that. But everyones different... the southside will always be crowded, if you want it to be remote, just plan a trip to the north side.
There is speculation in some circles that Apple will offer a servicing program, in which the S1 could be removed and replaced with the next generation SoC for the Apple watches.

Also just me speculating here: For the high end watches, it might be reasonable for Apple to include some number of SoC upgrades as part of their package.
Would you pay $5k-20k for a gold-plated version of those shoes?

Regarding Rolex (which I also feel are also overpriced antiques) they at least have a lasting value. They're often heirlooms passed down to children, partners, etc.

A 100 year old watch is awesome. A 200 year old Rolex will be amazing, but possible. But I just can't imagine Apple supporting a first-gen iWatch 50-200 years after release.
Do you have a particular timeframe on that? I'm in the market for a new laptop, and considering just getting an XPS 13 tonight. However, the advent of skylake has me considering waiting (but who knows if that'll be out in the next 6 months), as does your comment.
> "What does take control even mean? Public school teachers have no control."

If they already had control, then they wouldn't need to take it, would they?
Not asking for help / debugging yourself helps you make a leap to a better understanding of the language

Or it'll mean that you repeat the same mistake over and over because you wrongly believe that you understand something.

If you don't check with a third party you have no way to know if you're doing things the best possible way. Or even the right way.
I feel that when he makes the claim of "never" is where you are having a problem. You really should try to figure things out on your own because that is the only way to are going to permanently attach the solution to the problem. When others help you, the solution doesn't always stick and you are left coming back when you run into something similar months down the line.

Now if you are banging your head into the desk for multiple hours, then maybe you should have asked for help. But as he points out, there are situations where (as a tech lead for a startup) you aren't going to be able to ask for help.

You are taking what he says as "I'm so smart I don't need help" instead of seeing it as "I may not know how to fix this now, but I am determined to figure out a way". You are attaching a very negative view instead of seeing it as resilience in the face of a problem.
Nodever – a minimalistic node version manager
I was just thinking about that article having read this blog. It's a much better rule of thumb than what is being advocated in the title post
Apple provides Recovery Disk Assistant, which is more or less the same thing.

Also, when the SSD in my Macbook Air failed, I was able to netboot their internet recovery thing, which let me install OS X on a USB3 hard drive. Pretty cool.
Finally someone laid this out simply.
The NSA Reportedly Stole Millions of SIM Encryption Keys to Gather Private Data
If the output isn't coherent or fails to articulate such that the listener doesn't understand the message, then it's hardly adaptive. And I think either definition above speaks to the incomprehensibility of mumbling. If I tell someone something and they grunt in acknowledgement because they're busy rather than enunciating a clear response, that's easy enough to understand. But when someone mumbles, it usually isn't comprehensible and they are just shifting the cognitive burden of guessing what was meant onto the listener. Most often I've come across this when people are not sure how to pronounce a word properly and mumble in embarrassment instead. I'd much rather someone say 'I'm not sure how to pronounce this...'; trying to figure out what they mean when they mumble is exasperating.
This is such a bad piece of advice and his story just frames it to make it look sensible.

As "buckbloa" mentioned, "> Spend more time trying to figure things out for yourself before asking for help.
Isn't this obvious and don't most developers want to do this?"

The author paints it as if it is a categorical thing but it really isn't. You need to spend time understanding your problem and trying to figure things out. When you go to ask someone for help, it is important to demonstrate that you've at least put some effort into understanding the issues involved. It saves the other person time and effort when you do that and make you not look like a total slacker.

"wyc"'s mantra is good rule of thumb. I'm totally with him on not wanting to work with "rockstars" and other egotistical people. People work in teams for good reasons. This isn't elementary school where they make you work on a team just for the sake for being on a team.
I do not consider myself a rockstar anything. But I like to figure things out, sometimes by reading the man pages (what a concept!), or consulting the Google, or a modest amount of trial and error, er, iteration. If none of these work, then I will ask.

As much as I like teamwork, my team is entitled to a certain level of effort by me to strengthen my skills, which seems best satisfied by a little non-intrusive research on my part.
> Nothing about programming is intuitive.

> The problem here is that you've adopted ideas and notions from another language and are bringing that baggage to Common Lisp. If you learned Common Lisp first you might not have this very issue you describe.

Indeed, very little about programming is intuitive to a non-programmer. You're also right about me bringing in baggage from other languages. Those are valid points, yet I would still like to see CL become more appealing to programmers from other languages, whose baggage becomes relevant to their intuitions.

> Those are higher-order functions for operating on linked list and are in the Common Lisp specification anyway.

This Common Lisp reference [1] equates "cdr" with "rest". I am not familiar with the source, so is this a good reference? If so, then I must still argue that "rest" returning the cdr of a list instead of all the elements except the first is not intuitive to me. Or maybe I am misunderstanding something. My familiarity is with Clojure, not Common Lisp, so that might be interfering with my ability to understand what you mean here.

> Suggesting that Common Lisp should remove them is like saying you should remove pointers from C.

That is an interesting point. I am not very familiar with the organization of data structures in Common Lisp.

[1]: http://clqr.boundp.org/clqr-a4-consec.pdf
I think knowing if 1 is prime is almost trivia compared to knowing how to calculate an average. The latter is incomprehensible to me. What age are the students in this anecdote?
No, a large financial sector is an indicator of inefficiencies elsewhere. Else, there wouldn't be a reason to pay middlemen to solve said inefficiencies.
The $20k estimate is for an edition watch with a gold link bracelet, which would presumably outlive the watch itself. Without the gold bracelet his estimate is a $10k starting point, which seems crazy but China.

I'd also expect one of two things to surface here - either the watch forever remains so incredibly lightweight in what it can do without the phone that upgrades are less necessary, or there will be an upgrade program for the expensive watches.

If there's an upgrade program (i.e. replace the S1 with S2/3/4 and upgrade the battery yearly) then I'd actually expect these gen1 edition watches to become quite the collector's items - especially a few years from now when there are only a handful of gen1s around but far more gen2/3/4 watches.
Show HN: Polygon Match, a tiny puzzle game(Android)
Lenovo Under Sustained Man in Middle Management Attack
I don't have a report to link to, but experience certainly says so. I'll make another broad statement: I don't think most experienced engineers would argue with me that the more quickly changes are made to software (which implies a large volume of changes as well) introduces less stability over time. Or certainly greater risk.

I would also point out that the parent thread is good evidence. My point was that SemVer didn't save them from making a mistake, nor did the lack of SemVer save Underscore the other night. Volatility is what bit people.
>I'd rather have a UI that just does what it should without having to wait through all the fanciness.

Well, you would rather have it, just like some would rather have a Lynx-like interface. This doesn't address the point, which is users go to native because web just can't bring native-like experience.
Sounds like that would be a breeze for melting through ice, like on Europa.
> But honestly, if the big reason nobody wants to do mobile web is because it doesn't support copious animations, I see that as a positive. I'd rather have a UI that just does what it should without having to wait through all the fanciness.

Well, except native apps let you have those animations without waiting, is the thing.
You can you know? Just upvote it, you'll find it in your profile next to saved stories.
Did you find that out by circumventing the pay wall? Perhaps I missed it but it wasn't clear from the stub.
Well, CLT does guarantee that most means will follow a gaussian distribution if you repeatedly sample from the same distribution. Also, if you're relying on a single statistic to characterize a distribution, you've got another thing coming buddy. ;) Always report first and second moments, range and/or outliers. Histograms are even better tho binning is tricky. You're right to fear distortion, but changing your one statistic isn't gonna save you.
Super interesting, Portland has always seemed fairly diverse, when I have visited (mostly crashing with friends in NE Portland). N Mississippi seems relatively diverse, just walking around and taking the bus and stuff.