skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If a farm can't afford water for crops, the crops weren't profitable enough to grow anyway.

I suppose you're trying to be sarcastic but this is the plain truth. Government should make some effort to help people prosper. It shouldn't be propping up unsustainable business because of short term economic benefits.
That's a valid concern, but what does a non-disclosure agreement have to do with that? If they don't want people to use their API, can't they just not authorize them to use the API? I don't see how a full NDA is necessary for that.
Come on, you're not even trying to engage in a rational discussion. I've seen figures that put 1,000 gallons of water at around $1.50, so even doubling the price leaves water at a fraction of a penny per gallon. At ordinary levels of consumption, nobody is getting priced out of drinking water. What starts to get expensive is washing your car, doing many loads of laundry, watering that thirsty lawn every day, taking long showers, and various other activities that use large volumes of water.
It's already happening, but they're expensive and slow to come online:

http://www.noozhawk.com/article/santa_barbara_desalination_p...

http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_25859513/nations-large...
YC couldn't care less about the Kirchners...

The goal is to build a governemnt for the internet society, a government for the world.

We have lived in an infrastructure that basically consists of corporations and the nation state. The internet is an emergent superstructure that makes such infrastructure obsolete.

That's the world we are looking at and hopefully aiming to provide governance to with free software.
Graphs in data modeling - is the emperor naked?
the windows browser on MS Surface Pro is also good, fast responsive, and the only one with that quality of behavior on a touch device.
How feasible is desalination? If they can make that work on a large scale, then there's quite literally an ocean of water available to California.
> The whole state of California has always been on water welfare

You're right, it has always been stupid to farm in California. Now it's coming back to bit people in the ass.
That's incorrect:

> The first bank contacted almost immediately with me and I respect National Bank of Greece for that.
I think it's important to consider that desktops and laptops now make up a minority of personal computers on the internet. Including smartphones and tablets MS OS share is closer to 15%.
> If you really think "OK, so what? People can move." You are totally detached from reality. That's not what would happen. There would be riots.

So, there isn't enough water, people don't want to move to where there is water, what's your solution?

Water costs, whether thats to pump it out of the ground, import it from places that do have water, or desalinate it. Someone has to pay for that. Would it not be those who use the water?
Everywhere except California apparantly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9198260
I don't think Comcast should be obligated to connect to any particular ISP. But every ISP along the chain needs to provision enough capacity that there isn't congestion.
> Are the dissenting opinions available?

Yes, as well as the text of the order, all 5 commissioners statements are available at the link provided.

> It pains me greatly knowing that Google worked hard to get a piece of this document dropped. Alas due to a lack of transparency and openness among the FCC and Google's discussion, we'll never have more than faint rumormongering to do here, but in tandem to "Broadband Internet Access Services" it seemed like there was to be another leg of openness, "Broadband Subscriber Access Services."

Google's (and others') objections to what was openly stated in earlier FCC communications about the rules under development -- that they would classify both retail service provided to consumers and the "service" provided by broadband operators to edge providers (content/service providers that are not their direct customers, like Google, etc.) as separate Title II services were made public. Wheeler openly stated that this was done to provide the strongest possible basis for preventing ISPs from actions like discrimination among edge providers.

The basis for the objections -- from Google, but also from others, IIRC, including other big "edge providers" -- was that classifying a "service" provided by ISPs to edge providers as a "service" might provided a basis for ISPs to charge edge providers for that service, and that classifying retail service as a Title II service provided a strong-enough basis for neutrality regulations without additionally finding the existence of a Title II service provided to "edge providers".

All of this played out in public, was widely reported, and was commented on here on HN.
I consider that an argument in favor of proportionality, not against. It illustrates how legal systems can be abused.

The Al Capone case is ultimately a failure in rule of law, of sorts. If he was indeed the gangster that Al Capone the pop character was, the police failed to catch and prosecute him for those crimes. In light of that failure, they basically abused laws (and maximum sentences) to convict him for a different crime.

We are open to that sort of abuse so long as prosecutors and police have big discretionary powers. If the average jail term for crime X is 1 year on parole, but the maximum sentence is 10 years in prison and the prosecutor plays a big role in determining which one it will be… that's open to abuse. If a prosecutor really wants you but can't prove your guilt, she can get you for something small and push for an oversized sentence. This basically bypasses the rule of law.

In any case, I don't think the Al Capone investigation would have violated the proportionality principle. He was being investigated (I assume) for murder, racketeering and the like. That merits a big investigation. It failed, but it wasn't disproportionate. The only thing that was disproportionate was the sentence relative to the (proven) crime. Maybe the scale of the prosecution itself too. Police were investigating a major criminal. That investigation should be (and will be) well resourced.
It is a text message service that purports to handle just about any request you make (food delivery, whatever), they just tack on a fee to the price. They had to limit to a wait list, as the demand exploded.

Site: http://getmagicnow.com

HN Dicussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819
Thanks for sharing! This is awesome!!
I think in the long-term California needs to consider desalinization but that hardly seems like something that could happen in the next year.
Having the government pay is regulation. It effectively sets the price of water.
iOS 9 jailbreak untetherediOS jailbreak tools and guide
My other personal analysis, from looking at banks in a third world county, is that you can't easily get away with enough to make it worthwhile. Sure, it'd probably be trivial to get money moved around inside the bank's own system. But getting it out from there seems to involve actual competent actors that aren't third world. Getting it out directly from the bank also seemed unlikely, because they manually check things for such low amounts.
Only on HackerNews are people silly enough to think you have the scalability of virtual infrastructure in the physical world. Farms measure lead times in years.

EDIT: I help my uncle manage a farm in Florida. The startup times are seriously ridiculous.
Hi! Firstly: not sure how aware you are of Argentina's working class, but the subte is a huge issue. Folks working late hours, doing night shifts, students that attend night uni because they work during the days have to get the bus back home, which not only takes longer but it's very dangerous. The PDR doesn't cater to middle classes. Actually the project that was pushed through congress because of DemocracyOS was the Worker's Party (PO) project to make better conditions for nurses in public hospitals.

That said, YC is not funding the net party, they are backing a non for profit that develops DemocracyOS the software the party (and many other organisations around the world use). The title is click-bait and misleading.

Finally, please do produce evidence that the US is actively trying to oust Kirchner.
No, that's not the correct conclusion. It used to be cheap enough to send water there that once you did that the sunny climate made it ideal for a lot of crops.

It just so happens that climate change and population explosion has made it uneconomical now.

Here's a pro tip, if you think complex issues like water distribution for an entire state have easy, trite answers you're missing something.
I'm also surprised that Amazon has such a poor handle on their product reviews. Obviously fake reviews absolutely litter the site. Speaking as only a consumer, it makes the process of purchasing much more cumbersome than it ought to be.

It's not reasonable to expect Amazon (or anyone, really) to detect fraudulent behavior with perfect accuracy. I have to agree with the OP, though, in that they should be able to do a lot better. Many fake reviews are blatantly fake, and could easily be flagged by a relatively naive set of heuristics.
Desalination is pricy for agriculture because it's a long distance to transport the water. Because of recent technological advances, they are completely reasonable for the coastal cities though. The only reason they don't get built, is to justify the huge capital expenditure, they need 25 year guaranteed contracts, and even though the cost isn't that much ($500/acre foot, $0.45/m^3 or 1000 liters), it's still more than what water costs when it rains.

So, what tends to happen in areas with variable rain, is that when a drought hits, they get constructed, and then it starts raining, there is no reason to use the $500/acre foot water from the Desalination plant, instead of the $10-$125/acre foot [1] from rain. The only places that it is economical to build them is where we are guaranteed that they will be required.

If we could be certain the drought would continue, then yes, we would have desalination plants being built all along the coast (as they are in Singapore, Dubai, etc...). Alternatively, we could just bite the bullet and say we need this type of reliability of water supply and just build them. At that point, we could end all the nonsense about "conservation" in residential areas when there is an agricultural water supply issue. None of the conservation that people are doing in residential areas is going to make a spit of difference to the California water shortage situation - it's purely political posturing.

[1] http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/r_1112ehr.pdf pg 24, footnote. ".... In 2005, under a similar deal, MWDSC did not exercise the options to purchase nearly 130,000 af because there was ample rain, and growers again received just the installment ($10 per af, versus a final purchase price for the water of $125 per af)"
You're conflating light sarcastic teasing with pissing and moaning.

Anyway, I'd still complain if someone tried to serve me free food on a dirty plate.
Cofounder Breakups: It is already too late if you have been thinking about it
Which is why I specifically said desktop + laptop. The parent was clearly referring to developer work occurring on Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux.

I'm willing to wager the radical majority of developer work occurs not on a smartphone, but on a desktop or laptop. Whether we're talking coding, design or otherwise. Even the work for smartphone software occurs almost entirely off of a smartphone (with the phone mostly used for testing).
There isn't an easy solution that I can write up in a short paragraph in the HN comments. That's the point. It's a complex issue.
The amount of water used for drinking is minuscule. Even for residential use, it's basically irrelevant. How high would prices hive to rise before the cost of water would cause people to literally go thirsty? Long before that point, people would cut down on showers, laundry, car washes, pools, and all the other uses of water, and prices would stabilize.

You say "If a farm can't afford water for crops, the crops weren't profitable enough to grow anyway." From context, I gather you intended this to be ironic. But I don't see why! That's a totally true and justifiable statement. There's plenty of farmland in wetter areas of the country to take up the slack. We won't starve if we decide to stop subsidizing crops in inappropriate climates by providing artificially cheap water.
They probably already have this, to be honest. Some of the fake reviews used keywords from the book title, probably in a learned attempt to game the classification.
In all seriousness, if California's water problems really did get to Arrakis levels of expensive where some set of people could not even afford to drink, then "they move to somewhere where water is cheaper" would actually be a good outcome. It would relieve an incredibly overloaded infrastructure. (If there was going to be nowhere to move those people, that would be a different problem, but that's not the current problem. There are many places with enough water to drink.)

I mean, this is just the "planetary carrying capacity" issue applied to a smaller area. The argument still holds, so if you accept the idea that the planet has a certain carrying capacity for a certain level of lifestyle, the idea that maybe California can not support necessarily arbitrarily large numbers of people in a given lifestyle is just the same idea. Which idea is going to win out if they conflict?
Any business with "private registration" is suspicious. As a business, you are NOT entitled to anonymity. See California Business and Professions Code section 17538[1] and the European Directive on Electronic Commerce.[2]. Even if you're operating as a sole proprietor, if you're not a scumbag, it shouldn't be a problem. If you're a company, the company's business address should be listed.

There are legal ways to deal with this. There are D/B/A names and corporations. But hiding under a rock is not a valid option.

I have my name and address on all my domain registrations. It's not much of a problem. I've had two threats of litigation. One is now out of business and the other backed down. I get occasional phone calls. I may be getting spam, but my spam filters are dumping it before I see it.

[1] http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/californiabpcode17538.html
[2] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...
Wondering what your book was! I'm writing Linux for Hobbyists right now and wondering if it's a bit too niche.
How is a one-time pseudonym any different than being anonymous?

Unless you mean a 4chan-style "Anon" checkbox for ease of use?
We are very concerned to make the app not just about polls. That's why we are developing support for the blockchain: every vote must be counted independently of the application.

Accountability is a fundamental aspect of this technology. That's why its also free software.
I just moved to Austin, TX 1.5 years ago. We've got our own severe drought here, and I wonder what's going to happen in the long term. Was it a mistake to move here?

At least in TX, there are a couple of ways in which it's clear we're doing it to ourselves.

First, we can't keep the reservoirs full because a significant amount of water flow is earmarked for rice farmers down at the mouth of the river. That's right: rice farmers. It's clearly not a good idea to be supporting a water-intensive crop in this geography.

Second, Texas has a "right of capture" in its laws. That basically means that whatever water you can capture, you can have. There's a controversy near my town where a private company wants to drill well into the deep aquifer to pump and sell huge amounts of water, such that local homeowners are afraid their less-deep wells will run dry. And there's little one can do to insulate oneself: there's no way to stake claim to the part of the aquifer under your house, other than to be the first person to pump it all out.

I wonder how much of this stupidity is also driving CA's problems.
In college we had a freshman writing seminar requirement, which were encouraged to be broadly interpreted. I took a Math course, of all things. We learned Euclidean geometry, proved the Pythagorean theorem through construction, calculated ancient dates, and wrote about it all.

My final paper was a 15-20 page paper on Zero, and, despite cringing at my own writing, is still probably my favorite thing I've ever written. Zero has a fascinating history, from being outlawed in a few European countries, to being associated with the Mayan King of Death. One great little piece is the following poem:

>U 0 a 0, but I 0 thee

>O 0 no 0, but O 0 me.

>O let not my 0 a mere 0 go,

>But 0 my 0 I 0 thee so.

The word "cipher" used to be another name for zero/0, so the above reads as:

>You sigh for a cipher, but I sigh for thee

>O sigh for no cipher, but O sigh for me.

>O let not my sigh for a mere cipher go

>But sigh for my sigh, for I sigh for thee so.

Which, of course, explains why Neo, The One from the Matrix, had an enemy named Cypher.
This didn't work for me. I clicked on the part where I share my friends list (which is public anyways), and got a heroku 500 error.
@glesica I'm not sure I understand the putative difference. Can you explain more?
I would. I installed IE7 thought wine. Partly because masochism, partly because if I could make my website look good in IE7 running through wine then it would look good on any browser.
>and it would do nothing to solve the shortage

Sure it would, it would decrease usage. You can easily subsidize poor people's water if that's a serious problem. It's a tiny amount anyway as the overwhelming majority of water usage is agricultural.
There are hybrid systems. To pick one off the top of my head, you could have market-priced water generally, but then every household gets the first N gallons of water usage at a state-subsidized rate. It's a kind of regulation in the sense of the state mucking with the water-delivery system, but some kinds of regulation have more room for price signals than others. It does require the political decision to not subsidize agricultural usage, though (only household usage).
Spark 1.3 released
I know you're being facetious to make a point (and it's a good point), but "the crops aren't profitable enough to grow" is a major debate in this country. Especially around crops that take a lot of resources to grow for a relatively small amount of return (like corn).

There's a huge campaign against things like growing crops in California to export to other, far away states. The main gist of the argument is that it is unsustainable in the long run. Articles like this just goes to show how accurate that is.

Again, I know you're being facetious, but again, other farms could be more productive. The US government sometimes pays farmers to not plant crops, and quite often pays farmers to plant corn instead of other, easier to grow, more productive crops. The US doesn't have to depend on California, there is a lot of fertile land not being used to its full potential right now.
I'm basically arguing that any such line is arbitrary.

The distinction between science fiction and fantasy is probably a useful one for helping readers find books they like. Going further than that seems like it is going to almost always involve a lot of personal preference.
Hi! Please read beyond the title that is simply clickbait. YC is not funding a party, they are backing a non for profit that develops democracyOS the software the party (as well as other parties around the world) uses.
Perhaps you should crack open that Econ 101 textbook first, because that same Econ 101 textbook would likely have water as the canonical example used to explain elasticity of demand. Demand for water is inelastic, both for agriculture and home use, so letting the "supply and demand curve" take care of it would likely cause a sharp increase in price in a very short period of time, which, from a policy perspective, seems like a terrible idea that would cause panic and economic instability.
Guess who uses 80% of the water in CA? It's not the poor and middle class, it's agriculture, typically run by large corporations. Guess how much agriculture contributes to CA's GDP? 2%.

It's possible to alter the way water is used in the state in ways that benefit the residents and don't screw the poor and middle class.
Well I can't argue with that and I do consider myself quite conscious of the environment in general. Even though I said I won't actually use the disks I do love the extra packaging and treat them like collector's items.

But your point is well taken... I will think twice next time!

Edit: fixed typo.
No it doesn't. The government pays market prices for lots of things.
agree, but also people prosper better if they dont have to worry about how to feed themselves.
I would, if only for testing. I regularly cycle browsers to gain familiarity with them.
From my perspective the problem with water in the US is that no one is charged for the actual water. You are only charged for the processing costs. This means that the market never acts to regulate how much water you use. People will use less water if it costs them more.

However, changing to a market system for water would never happen overnight. People are not used to paying for water and cannot move on a dime. However, long term I think it is our only solution. The midwest, who many on HN seem to have a bad impression of, has the world's largest fresh water reserve in the world (the great lakes). Meanwhile, the plain states and California will have continuing water difficulties moving forward. Long term, people are going to need to move to where there is abundant water. It is not sustainable for so many people to live in marginal areas.

One way to encourage people to move is by having market forces act. If the price of water is cheaper in the great lakes region there will be a slow but steady migration there over time. This will in turn ease the brewing crisis in the west. This isn't the only action which should be taken but we should consider (from a policy perspective) the idea of allowing market forces to act in the water market.
Along the same line, there are currently around 4,000 sites in Alexa's top 1 million that only support RC4. Nothing else.

Some of these sites have large user bases too, and it's making it hard to disable RC4 in Firefox. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1138101
Suddenly, it seems water is everwhere...

... except California.
Why not? Prices would rise, producers in wetter areas would produce more to take advantage, and everyone eats. We'd pay more for food, but we're already paying it, just indirectly and in a more damaging fashion with subsidized water.