Ask HN: Please review my startup (sunshines)  - <AUTHOR>

Hi Everybody,
This is actually my first time submitting but have been a reader for some time now. Me and my girlfriend just started a website for online photo sharing.
Now I know what you're thinking: That's been done before. Yes, but there's a twist. We like the sun, and pictures of the sun are rare so we dedicated this website to share photographs of sunshine with eachother, obviously with social media linkup and everything.
As for now we are still in Beta but it would be very helpful if some of you could drop in and tell me what you think, where's improvement.
Some notes:
-What do you think about the UI? -How would you rate navigating the site (1-10)? -Would you use it? -Would you recommend us to a friend? (1-10)
I've made two beta accounts so you can pick which one you want to use. They're accesible at: www.sunshin.es/wp-admin
Usr: Star Pass: Star
Usr: Night pass: Night
For some more info on the site and the concept visit the blog section. (sunshin.es/blog)
Let me know what you think! :D Thank you very much for reading
Alex <comment><USER2> Put some pictures on the front page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good advice! did you mean the temporary splash page or the actual homepage? (<http://sunshin.es/sunshin.es>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Supplied usernames and passwords should be all lowercase, ie:

user: star pass: star

user: night pass: night

<comment><AUTHOR> .....Stupid habit of me...sorry..</comment></comment>


QuantQuest: Data Science Comp to spot next corona virus inspired market meltdown - <AUTHOR> https://links.quant-quest.com/text <comment><AUTHOR> QuantQuest is a data science competition platform similar to Kaggle but for time series and financial problems.

We're currently hosting a competition where you have to use news articles to predict a price feature of 5 stock indexes.

Unlike most data science competitions, where the aim is to xgboost your light gbmboost, this competition is looking at the real-world applicable skill of feature engineering with text data. Participants will have to create features to extract semantic information to predict global events, such as war, financial crises, or even (near) pandemics.</comment>


Google Glass #ifihadglass Winners - <AUTHOR> http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/glass/?c424bb45=t

<comment><USER2> Quite a few of these winners, particularly the ones who are 'normal' that Google wanted to have as non-tech nerds, aren't actually going to fork over the $1000 for the glasses though. A friend of mine, a normal college girl, won 'the right to purchase a pair of Google Glasses', but says that she probably won't buy them since she can't justify the cost.

The ones who are most likely to fork over the $1000 are the tech nerds who place comparatively greater value on having early access to such gadgets. Google is probably going to see a strong skew towards tech nerds greater than the initial distribution of contest winner backgrounds.

I wonder what's going to happen with the left over Glasses.

<comment><USER3> Quick. There's a clear opportunity for the derivative market of winning Glass tickets, to buy and sell rights to buy Glass.

<comment><USER4> I checked (had a friend who can't afford it but won)... it's non-transferable and you need to show up with a credit card and matching id. Sure I could have them pick up the glasses then use them myself, but Google owns the right to everything you do with them and can take them back at any time evidently.

<comment><USER5> _"Google owns the right to everything you do with them and can take them back at any time evidently."_

Could you elaborate? (a source would be helpful) If I understand correctly, Google retains ownership of the equipment and everything you record is owned by them?

<comment><USER4> That's what he told me from reading the terms sent. Since this is secondhand, I don't have the exact quote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some of these are kind of funny:

 _"I would feel a lot safer walking around at night knowing I could get directions or a cab without pulling out my phone"_

Putting aside the fact that it isn't really any kind of proactive suggestion, the idea that you're _less_ likely to be mugged wearing a $1500 pair of glasses on your face is patently ridiculous. And:

 _"Life is pretty beautiful, isn't it? >> <http://t.co/yWCDnsvIJ6> #ifihadglass"_

I'm assuming that a certain number were just selected at random...

<comment><USER7> There was a story a couple of days ago that google had rescinded some selections, including "#ifihadglass I'd cut a bitch" and "#ifihadglass I'd throw it in your face". So yes, some of their selections were definitely made randomly (or else by looking at nothing other than the number of twitter followers somebody has)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hey everyone, I put this site together. It looks like the traffic managed to crash the entire cs.stanford.edu . (I hope I'm not in too much trouble...)

At least for now though, I've put up a mirror here: <http://badmephisto.com/glass/>

please do not share this link too widely.

EDIT: web cache works too! (but no pretty pictures) [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=ca...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fcs.stanford.edu%2Fpeople%2Fkarpathy%2Fglass%2F%3Fc424bb45%3Dt) (thanks codesuela)

<comment><USER9> You can spread this link too, it has images :) <http://badmephisto.com.nyud.net/glass/> (<http://www.coralcdn.org/>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Also, almost 2,000 people misread or misspelled the tag, their contest entries contained "#ifihadaglass instead of #ifihadglass. It seems Google skipped those completely, which is too bad, because there were legitimate ideas there.

Earlier visualization of misspelled entries:

[http://blogdotitrendcorporationdotcom.files.wordpress.com/20...](http://blogdotitrendcorporationdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/screen- shot-2013-03-28-at-11-35-20-pm.png)

</comment><comment><USER10> Great analysis. The selection does seem random, considering all the "winning" entries that were clearly making fun of Google Glass or the contest itself. There were some blank winning entries too (just the hashtag, with no explanation). Which is disappointing, because Google was making it sound as though they would actually read people's entries, and pick ideas:

"We have been overwhelmed, entertained and inspired by your responses."

I also did some analysis of the original contest entries, now trying to think of a good way to visualize all of them. You can see my early N-grams here:

[http://blog.itrendcorporation.com/2013/03/12/revisiting- goog...](http://blog.itrendcorporation.com/2013/03/12/revisiting-googles- ifihadglass-contest-what-do-people-want-to-do-with-glass/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I would have been so pissed if I won and found out I still had to pay $1500!

Don't they also have to fly to New York? I think I heard Chris Pirillo mention something like that.

$1500 + Round Trip Plane Tickets = Early Access to a device that they may not like at all? Sure makes me glad I didn't win.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you have paid $1500 to have an iPhone a year earlier than anyone else in the world?

<comment> B-Con Absolutely not. It'll still be there next year.

<comment><USER12> Many of the big market opportunities that result won't be.

<comment><USER13> Big market opportunities _might_ result. You're effectively investing in an unproven platform with high risk/return.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Webcache: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=ca...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fcs.stanford.edu%2Fpeople%2Fkarpathy%2Fglass%2F%3Fc424bb45%3Dt)

Edit: Oh mirror below <http://badmephisto.com/glass/> On CoralCDN in case it goes down: <http://badmephisto.com.nyud.net/glass/>

</comment><comment><USER14> LeVar Burton @levarburton #ifihadglass It would be a downgrade. -Geordi La Forge

Funny guy. :P

</comment><comment><USER15> That's quite an interesting mix of people, it's not all "geeks and nerds"

<comment><USER16> No doubt quite intentional. Google needs some "brand ambassadors" to make Glass look hip, rather than something that only nerds wear. They definitely need it, seeing as people wearing Google Glass just look _weird_.

<comment><USER17> About looking _weird_ : people will get over it. Five years into being the local Segway guy, nobody in my community gives me a second glance anymore. Early on I got lots of hoots and hollers, but the novelty has long since worn off and nowadays I'm just part of the landscape. Glass will be accepted the same way.

<comment><USER18> I know where you're coming from, but a lot of the weirdness of glass is what it actually does. I keep imagining somebody walking around recording everyday people for no good reason, and find it hard to imagine that being accepted. The 'novelty' of constantly being recorded by strangers might not wear off.

<comment><USER19> It's not constantly recording, it's recording when you decide to start recording. In the same way that anybody sitting down holding their phone could actually be recording you.

I swear, Glass gets more FUD on this site than any other product.

<comment><USER18> I'm aware of that, but it is much less obvious whether glass is recording or not than whether a phone is. If somebody is pointing their phone's camera at you, they could be recording you - that's quite noticeable. Glass won't necessarily have any visible signs that it is recording.

<comment><USER20> It's been confirmed that it has a blinking red light when it enters record mode. Doesn't make your point any less valid though since its the _perception_ that counts. It'll be interesting to see if it can get over that wall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> These are the winners? Seems like a big list of twitter celebrities

</comment><comment><USER22> The ideas from people with fewer followers seem better.

</comment><comment><USER23> How did "If I had glass, I'd cut a bitch" beat my entry?

<https://twitter.com/GregMozart/status/304338422951206912>

<comment><USER7> Probably because you said the same thing that a guy with 400k followers said, and google would rather reach 400k people than 90.

<comment><USER23> But that still doesn't explain why "I would cut a bitch" won while mine didn't.

<comment><USER24> The explanation is that it doesn't matter what you said. Google cares more about who you are[1] than what you say you're going to do[2]. Nearly all of the responses were going to be some variation on the core functions of Glass anyway, so really they were fishing for cool people, not ideas.

[1]: quoth the word cloud: "social", "media", "marketing", etc. [2]: quoth the word cloud: "use", "share", "show", etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Extinct tech you forgot existed - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/gallery/20180816-do-you-recognise-these-obsolete-technologies <comment><USER2> An iPad or PowerPoint may be more "sophisticated" than an overhead projector and dry wipe pen, but I'm not certain they are better.

(Actually now I wonder if there is a tablet application which faithfully replicates the overhead projector and roll of acetate experience?)

<comment><USER3> The best lectures I had at uni were some math lectures where the professor had an overhead with a transparency roll. He'd write on the transparency as if it was a blackboard, and could roll up and down as needed to review older equations or make room for new.

Blackboard worked well too, but not as good, since the professor could sit in front of the overhead so things lined up better, and the transparency pens had much better visibility than chalk on a (green) blackboard.

Most other lectures used PowerPoint, due to the professors being forced by the uni administration, but for me a PowerPoint lecture was barely worth the time. The information just wouldn't stick, since the PowerPoint format doesn't lend itself well to writing notes from, and without writing notes I hardly remembered anything.

<comment><USER4> The other factor is the pacing. If the lecturer is writing, on a transparency or blackboard, you can take notes at the same pace. PowerPoint allows stupid amounts of information to be delivered, which just washes over you--it's too much to transcribe, and too much to digest on the fly. Writing constrains the lecturer to delivering a reasonable amount of material, so that the participants can actually focus on it and retain it.

PowerPoint might be good for business proposals, sales and marketing, etc. But I personally think it's a travesty for educational use; there are few lectures I've attended which I found better for the unnecessary use of technology.

<comment><USER5> I has a number of faculty who would print "slides" on acetate sheets to display using an overhead projector, they had the same potential for being overloaded.

<comment><USER4> It's possible to be a bad lecturer and use acetates. But physical constraints still act against it: they are bulky, you can't easily manage a lecture with 100 acetates, they have a tendency to slide onto the floor and make a jumbled mess, and they also cost money to make and take up physical space to store and move around.

While you can still abuse them, these factors limit how far you can take that abuse. PowerPoint knows no bounds.

I only used to print diagrams and figures onto acetates, leaving writing for the blackboard/whiteboard/blank acetates. You would use one or two for an entire session. I try to do the same with PowerPoint (well, Beamer), but some organisations increasingly mandate the whole thing be word for word on slides and stored in Blackboard for students to get. I find this wholly detrimental to the purpose of giving and attending a lecture, since it constrains the lecturer to this terrible presentation style.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is the first site I've noticed using a 302 redirect to force people to use unencrypted connections:

curl -v [https://www.bbc.com/future/gallery/20180816-do-you- recognise...](https://www.bbc.com/future/gallery/20180816-do-you-recognise- these-obsolete-technologies) .. * Connected to www.bbc.com (188.8.131.52) port 443 (#0) .. * SSL certificate verify ok. .. > GET /future/gallery/20180816-do-you-recognise-these-obsolete-technologies HTTP/1.1 > Host: www.bbc.com .. < HTTP/2 302 < content-type: text/html < date: Mon, 20 Aug 2018 10:44:09 GMT < location: [http://www.bbc.com/future/gallery/20180816-do-you- recognise-...](http://www.bbc.com/future/gallery/20180816-do-you-recognise- these-obsolete-technologies) < content-length: 0

<comment><USER7> I wonder if they got the redirect configuration backwards...

<comment><USER6> It seems to be specific to certain pages. See here for one which redirects the other (normal) way: [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45098190](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45098190)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The cassette tapes are still relatively popular in Germany. In my last trip into Saturn (a large retailer here in Germany), there had a good range of up- to-date music and audio books still for sale. However, most of titles are targeted towards to younger kids.

<comment><USER9> Do you have any idea what drives their enduring popularity in Germany in particular?

<comment><USER10> I think the main driver is the selection for kids.

Cassette players are quite sturdy things. Even if cassettes themselves are not as good as the players, they are still better than CDs.

Kids like to handle things, the haptic sensation is important, so you can't give them something with a touch screen early on (although that changes quickly with age).

I would be surprised if this is specific to Germany.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was about to say "Teletext is not extinct!" which is true but then I pondered when I last time used it?

I was an avid user of Teletext in my teenage years and later on, using it daily to catch the news and look at the TV programme listing.

And that's why I use it much rarely nowadays. I don't watch regular TV anymore and thus have much less opportunities to quickly start up Teletext.

</comment><comment><USER11> I read about a singer who still uses a childs cassette player to do their vocal warmups for the simple reason that it is bombproof: suitable for the mechanical demands of being on the road.

[https://goo.gl/images/ZEoG6M](https://goo.gl/images/ZEoG6M)</comment>


Are Robots Coming for Your Job? Eventually, Yes - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/technology/artificial-intelligence-jobs.html <comment><USER2> Hopefully, they will start with the job of writing "robots will take your job" articles because they seem to be exactly the kind of boring task best suited for robots. Rewording McKinsey's content marketing should be possible even today.

<comment><USER3> Even if we take the source as completely trustworthy, the estimate is one- third of jobs -- a lot, but not the totally jobless world the headline suggets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Honestly, I think the worries about AI taking jobs are overblown. Will AI get better? Yes. Will some jobs be doable by AI? Yes. May that eventually end up being all jobs? Guess so.

But that doesn't mean people won't be able to find work or make money. I mean, you don't have to be the 'best' at something to get rich off of it, nor to even simply earn a living at it. I mean, think about it. Objectively the majority of products, services and businesses out there now are worse than at least one competitor. If people were always rational about what they were buying, said businesses/products/services would go broke.

But they're not rational. People buy things and use products because of many things, whether that's convenience, location, price, name recognition/branding, marketing, word of mouth type marketing, social proof, quality of service/employees/whatever, pure luck or heck, without even thinking at all.

So even if every market in existence gets AI involved in, it still won't necessarily mean old fashioned human run businesses can't compete and win customers.

There's also the additional effect of branding that people never really think about here too. People don't just watch 'a' TV show or film or what not, they watch Star Wars or Game of Thrones or what not. Same with music, games, books, art, internet media and basically anything celebrity related in general. Eventually, the greats sell on their name alone, and that's one barrier that even the best use of AI may not compete with. Just look at a popular book for example, in some cases the author's name is literally more than double the size of the title!

So that may also be another area where robots won't eventually come for jobs/take all the jobs. Perhaps we'll end up in a world where the 'Patreon' style model is the norm and the standards for success are how well you market your own brand rather than the exact quality of what you do...

</comment><comment><USER5> Is it just me or did the article not offer much in the way of how or why said robots would take our jobs?

The article only seemed to say that it would happen eventually and, as a result, the labor force of the future will require more software engineering skills.

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe I am just an idiot...but I don't understand what the fuss is. Through 1870-90, the economy went through a similar phase and the world didn't end...and this was with no unemployment protection. If anything that period was more severe than anything that can happen next: productivity in some industries went up more than ten times pretty much overnight (cigarette production is the archetypal example).

The only thing that doesn't appear to function well now is education, which appears to be stuck in the post-WW2 mentality of a job for life and which the author does identify as a problem. That doesn't seem like a particularly big deal however (at least half of the problem is convincing people that they need to keep learning).

The real concern for me is people constantly predicting the end of the world. Politicians are taking it seriously and they will inevitably fuck it up. Also, the world that journalists seem to live in has pretty much never existed. The only reason a "job for life" occurred after WW2 was because of the huge barriers on trade/capital that were put in place around this period. No competition, high prices...yes, the true glory days.

<comment><USER7> My theory is that writing articles about "the robots commin' to get ya" is someone's business model. Exactly how that works I can't fathom. But there have been so many articles like this in the past couple of years (vs the actual probability that robots are really coming -- which is pretty low) that I have to believe there's a command center somewhere where someone is running some kind of disinformation operation against us..

<comment><USER6> ...we are talking so maybe that it is proof that the business works...maybe the author is a robot preying on human weakness...is this how they get us?

Srs though, ppl aren't particularly interested in being told that stuff is okay or even learning from past experience. The present is always extremely unique and very dangerous.

For example, I am not from the US but follow US politics...as far as I can tell, every election over the past ten years has been "the most important election there has ever been". I remember 2012 specifically: it was hyped into oblivion but was totally inconsequential.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is the intended effect of articles like this? Motivate people to work harder a la John Henry? Motivate people to learn technical skills despite the negative net job creation of automation? Would having a more widely educated workforce even help?

<comment><USER9>
        > What is the intended effect of articles like this?

How about just promoting an understanding of changes which will happen between now and the next couple decades.

Or should we just give up and accept our fate? :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder when this will become a major issue in a US presidential election. Also I wonder what the major parties' stances will be on how to deal with the effects of automation.

<comment><USER11> It will be a big deal once we have a robotic presidential candidate :)

<comment><USER12> As long as he likes blackjack and hookers I'm sure the electorate will be just fine with him (:

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When a job disappears due to automation, it's bad for the person losing their job, but it seems to be good for everybody else.

Is this always the case? Is there a tipping point where automation becomes _not_ good for everyone else?

<comment><USER14> I think the world probably took a turn for the worse when surveillance became automated.

Stasi were evil people but could only do what was humanly possible. Now look at what NSA can do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if the saboteur will also make a comeback then.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's almost the end of 2018 — have you raised alarms bells yet for this years most hyped tech bogeymen?

\- deepface will change laws.

\- killing robots.

\- blockchains will make X obsolete.

\- AI will take your job.

Am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER17> I see a lot of news stories and anecdotes about automation via robots. Are there any statistics that describe this trend?

<comment><USER18> You must be new here

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> tl;dr:

(Not a typo, it's just that if you summarize this article, there's nothing left. No point, no insight, no argument, just some rambling, a submarine, and some links to other headlines)

</comment><comment><USER20> Are Robots Coming for Your Job? Eventually, Yes

Is The Bull Market Coming to an End? Eventually, Yes

Does my cat like Sushi rolls? Eventually, Yes

Does Titles like these bother You? Eventually, Yes

<comment><USER21> Your cat might (and probably will) die before they like sushi roles, so your understanding of eventually might not be canonical.

<comment><USER22> > Your cat might (and probably will) die before they like sushi roles, so your > understanding of eventually might not be canonical.

Do you... have a cat? It's harder to get them _not_ to eat the fish you _don 't_ want them to have.

<comment><USER21> As far as I know, most cats won't eat rice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Suppose, for the sake of argument, that "coming for your jobs " is completely overblown and no different than automation throughout the previous decades.

Isn't there a separate shadow issue of lack of diversity in the market? I mean, we can't all be app developers, web designers, and project managers.

Sure, you say, there will always be non-tech jobs. Ok, like lawyers? That will be decimated by strong AI-as-a-service eDisocvery and legal analysis bots that replace paralegals and associates. So now the firm is a partner or two, and a $14/hr runner who drives to court and files motions.

Doctors? Ok they read their FDA-certified AI and make sure it's sane and send you to the ePharmacy where biometric auth and videos replace the pharmacist.

The cleaning staff at both offices are replaced by smart-bots that auto mop and empty trash. So each building has a security/facilities person.

Restaurants? Most have kiosks and a chef-bot. Just a hostess and manager to make sure the fryer doesn't burn the building down. Uber has long been automated.

So again, what's left? Government jobs most likely. And going back to my original supposition, let's ignore how people make their money. Can we all be "data scientists" using AI to analyze customer behavior at restaurant kiosks to apply predictive suggestions for their dessert? Can we all write websites for the small businesses (that don't exist because they can't afford the AI services that BigCorp has)? What happens when Google computes every last datapoint about us? Facebook has reached complete saturation and there's no new info to sell to advertisers. How would our economy function if there's basically one industry left? You can't compute analytics about yourself or sell website services to website service people.

<comment><USER24> You left out the entire entertainment industry. I imagine that many people will end up doing creative endeavors, including art, engineering, philosophy, and science. Also, people (being more flexible than robots) could be the main actors behind space exploration.</comment></comment>


Notifications in iOS 12 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/13/17453924/apple-notifications-ios-12-attitude <comment><USER2> My solution for notifications, was disabling all of them, including noises. Keep the little badge icon that you can only see when logged in. Quality of life went up.

<comment><USER3> The article starts out by saying that Android is much better at notification and that Apple is slowly catching up, however, what you describe is what I want on my Samsung S7 and can't have.

So maybe Apple isn't as bad at notifications as some would say ...

<comment><USER4> I just discovered that the unread message count badges were a Touchwiz only feature that went away with the Oreo update on my S7. The default Android Oreo way (which is now the only way) is awful; the count is just the number of undismissed notifications.

It amazes me that iOS has had this from day one, third party Android vendors including Samsung, Sony, and HTC have all created they own solutions, and yet Android made it to the letter "P" still without this feature.

I just upgraded to Oreo this week it remains to be seen just how many emails and messages I'm going to miss now that I can't see whether or not I have anything unread in these applications. It's frustrating.

<comment><USER5> The current belief is that constantly engaging with our smartphones has damaged our lives. We're unable to focus because we allow constant interruptions and we habitually check our phones instead of being present.

The current trend is to do away with these distractions and allow people to focus.

What you're arguing for is the exact opposite. You're asking for the distraction. Persistent reminders that you are neglecting a particular App.

<comment><USER4> You have it backwards. A badge on an icon is a passive indicator not a notification! _When_ I look at my phone, I want to see if I have an unread message.

The Oreo model means I either have to have notifications (which are actual distractions) or I simply have no clue if something needs to be dealt with. For a device designed for communication, this is important. It's not a distraction, it's literally the reason I have the device.

<comment><USER6> While I like badge notification, they can be distracting. I sometimes find myself opening apps just to remove the badge icon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Would be nice if there was a long-press option that allowed me to either mute all notifications from an app for a given amount of time or mute all but the app in question for a given amount of time.

<comment><USER7> They've added that in iOS 12.

(Not sure about 'for an amount of time', but you can mute or disable from a notification.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Haven't gotten a whole lot of proactive Siri suggestions yet, but the grouped notifications are really great. Quick replies have gotten a bit odd, though, because now all notifications also support ignoring them as an action so there's more context actions to everything.

</comment><comment><USER9> I would already be happy with a "Clear all" notifications button on my iPad Pro.

<comment> yoz-y Press and hold on the x on the top right of notifications does not work? (on iPhone it is done via 3d touch)

<comment><USER10> On my iPad pro, the X button only clears one days worth, so if I ignored them for a few days, I have to clear each day separately. Usually not a big deal since I do it every few days, but sometimes it can add up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hopefully at some point they'll get background safari notification, even at a very low "sampling" rate, e.g. check only once in ten minutes. Until then, there's no hope for web apps compared to native apps.

<comment><USER7> Allowing websites to harass me about notifications is one of the stupidest standards I've seen.

No, I DONT want the latest news from X. If I did I'd use your RSS feed or Twitter or FV or something else.

<comment><USER12> Those notifications work for normal people, and there're services that will send them for free and with no limits. No wonder lots of sites use them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even with grouping (FIANLLY) and granular DnD and priority settings, iOS notifications still seem stuck in the Stone Age compared with Android P.

<comment><USER14> It really is astonishing that they've gone all these years without copying the best parts of the clearly-more-beloved android notification tray.

<comment><USER15> It's a point of constant frustration for me when on call—i actually want three levels of notifications (most notifications show without alert, some vibrate, and pagerduty rings). When awake, i want more notifications to vibrate, but i want all phone calls to ring.

Thankfully the apple watch has addressed this by actually waking me up when i get a call, so i can just turn vibrate + Do Not Disturb on, but it's so confusing how they market their mobile devices as being for professionals when their notifications settings feel like they haven't been updated since they were introduced. The resulting notification system (especially Do Not Disturb and the vibrate physical switch) feels like a toy.

<comment><USER6> > pagerduty rings

iOS has the option to whitelist DnD phone calls. I have Pager Duty on it, my boss, as well as a few trusted colleagues that know to only call if something _needs_ my immediate attention. In addition my family knows that my phone will always ring if you call me twice in a row, and that they can always do this if they need me.

There are times when I do not want to pick up a phone calls. We use to just be able to pretend to not be at home, or to actually leave home to not receive calls. I want DnD to filter out the calls that I would previously screen with an answering machine when avoiding people.

<comment><USER15> How do you set DND to apply on the phone only?

Regardless, it's frustrating Apple prioritizes a simple interface over usage. Not terribly surprising for a phone, but again, it's much less a useful tool for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's a pity I still coulnd't testdrive Siri Shortcuts. That app is coming much later apparently.

<comment><USER17> You can see a fairly large subset of what Siri Shortcuts appears to be by checking out the (now free) Workflow app: [https://www.workflow.is](https://www.workflow.is)

Apple bought it last spring, and based on the imagery from the WWDC keynote on Siri Shortcuts, SS is the same Workflow app with deeper system integration.

<comment><USER16> I have it actually and I like it. But I was looking forward to all the system integrated functions. They're partially there like I can create a workflow from the visited websites in Settings but it's not editable without the Shortcuts app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a really funny one. I opened The Verge and got the usual GDPR popup, I followed (pretty well hidden) links to the form where you can set your ad preferences and guess what they told me:

You are using Safari which blocks third party tracking cookies. You have to enable third party tracking cookies to be able to disable our tracking cookies.

No shit, Verge. No I won't. I'd rather not read the article.

<comment><USER18> Say, anyone can recommend a good Safari extension that blocks all the tracking stuff? I don't mean only ad blocking here... all the ad network data that isn't visible as an annoying video or so.

<comment><USER19> [https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari](https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari) -> uBlock Origin for Safari. It's quite good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> New notifications are nice, but I would honestly prefer no new features and instead focus on bugs and performance.

<comment><USER21> I don't know if you missed it...but that is the focus of iOS 12. Performance is improved even on older devices and all devices that can install iOS 11 can install 12.

There are barely any new features other than some small quality of life improvements, like these changes to notifications.

<comment><USER20> Yes, I missed it indeed, that's great news! I wish I had asked for a million dollars in my post :D</comment></comment></comment>


Visual Dataflow for Observable Notebooks - <AUTHOR> https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/introducing-visual-dataflow <comment><USER2> This is excellent; big UI/UX win. Just surfacing the dependency graph that was already there in the background makes a huge difference to my mental model of a notebook.</comment>


Russian archeologists have found an exceptionally rare 'beard kopek' - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6095311/Priceless-300-year-old-coin-men-buy-avoid-Russian-Beard-Tax-Pskov.html <comment><USER3> \- The wealthy had to fork out high sums but peasants paid one kopek - <USER2> lowest coin of the realm.

wow, not only a beard tax, but a _progressive_ beard tax! :D

<comment><USER4> You can only get slightly more money from a peasant than a stone so why bother trying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >'Priceless' 300-year-old coin that men had to buy to avoid Peter the Great's 'Beard Tax'

How on earth does paying the tax to receive the token proving you have paid your tax amount to "avoiding Peter the Great's 'Beard Tax'"?

Maybe modern-day tax dodgers should try this clever scheme too. Avoiding tax by paying the tax they are trying to avoid.

<comment><USER6> Bad wording (surprise surprise, it's the Daily Mail), but they clearly mean that if you wanted to avoid having your beard forcibly shaved off, you had to pay the Beard Tax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I highly recommend Robert Massie's book Peter the Great, a truly fantastic read that goes in depth on the origin of the beard tax (modernization program) and associated kopek.

<comment><USER8> I'm not finding any good rationale for the beard tax. Does the book say why he thought this would be a good idea?

<comment> orbital-decay I haven't read the book, but one explanation is a power grab from the Church. Prior to Peter's reforms, the beard was essential to orthodox christian tradition and culture, walking around "barefaced" ("босое рыло") was considered a sin. Forcing people to cut the beard was a strong indication of his authoritarian ambitions, and a step to make Russia a more secular state according to his vision of a modern country. The tax was extremely unpopular and led to occasional riots and even suicides (as a form of protest particularly popular among Old Believers half a century before Peter I during Raskol), but in the end he succeeded in changing the culture - the ban was partially lifted a century after that, but it was considered inappropriate to wear a beard since then, unless you was a priest or an elderly person.

He did plenty of similar things, for example ordering the Boyars to cut their long sleeves (a traditional status symbol of a feudal who doesn't need to work) which was a thinly veiled message for them that the old power structure was obsolete and new institutions were coming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> See [https://journals.urfu.ru/index.php/QR/article/download/270/2...](https://journals.urfu.ru/index.php/QR/article/download/270/2372) for a scholarly discussion of what is known of the history. It is reported the 15,903 copies of the original 1698/9 beard tax token were ordered, but unclear if that number were actually produced. Previously only one example was known. Little documentary evidence remains to suggest the beard tax was imposed prior to 1705. The later 1705 and 1725 versions of the beard tax token are rare, but numerous examples exist. And records show the rule was promulgated and tax collected starting in 1705.

</comment><comment><USER10> It is priceless indeed. I am a Russian, and the picture of only other coin like this in existence was in all of our history textbooks.

<comment><USER11> There is an endless amount of old Roman coin. You can buy bags of them. Why are these so rare?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pretty funny typo in the header.

Dubbed the 'beard kopek, the coin was part of Peter the Great's 1987 'beard tax'.

Was there also a record player and suspender tax?

<comment> jake-low What typo? "Beard tax" is indeed correct; it was a tax on those who wore facial hair, as part of Peter the Great's plan to 'westernize' Russia.

Edit: I see now; it's the year (1987). D'oh!

<comment><USER13> I wonder how they got from ~1697 to 1987.

<comment><USER14> Because it's the Daily Mail, and I wouldn't believe _anything_ you see in it. They run articles on whether wife-swapping yetis are parking their UFOs properly, and if not, why not. They make the National Enquirer look deadly serious.

Here are some better resources on the topic.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beard_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beard_tax)

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-tsar-peter- gre...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-tsar-peter-great- established-beard-tax-180964693/)

[https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/a-beard-tax-is- being-p...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/a-beard-tax-is-being- proposed-in-england-and-its-not-the-first)

<comment><USER15> > Because it's the Daily Mail, and I wouldn't believe anything you see in it. > They run articles on whether wife-swapping yetis are parking their UFOs > properly, and if not, why not. They make the National Enquirer look deadly > serious.

I am not a fan of the Daily Mail. Having said that, can you provide a reference for your claim that they run articles "on whether wife-swapping yetis are parking their UFOs properly, and if not, why not."?

<comment><USER16> [https://www.google.com/amp/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...](https://www.google.com/amp/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6035613/amp/Discovery- Channel-treasure-hunter-claims-hes-evidence-extra-terrestrial-visit.html)

Not exactly but...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Study: Google Glass Is a Driving Distraction, but Still Better Than Smartphones - <AUTHOR> http://today.ucf.edu/drivers-dont-trade-smartphone-google-glass-yet/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been lurking here for years, but I finally have something worth sharing! Our laboratory was lucky enough to partner with the Air Force (a very early recipient of Glass), and we have run the first driving distraction study with the wearable. Tell me what you think!

I'm also here for advice. Aside from my university's press release, how do I get the word out about this?

If anyone want's the full article, hit me up at my website: bendsawyer.com.

<comment><USER2> I just stumbled across this on Jalopnik. Sorry you didn't get more attention!

What are your thoughts on the advancing HUDs for cars like Navdy? [https://www.navdy.com/](https://www.navdy.com/)</comment></comment>


Electric car company Better Place shuts down after burning through $850M - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/26/electric-car-company-better-place-shuts-down-after-burning-through-850m/ <comment><USER2> As I write this, discussion is currently split between:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5770316> (18 comments)

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5771413> (13 comments)

Alternate source: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5770284></comment>


China Expands Surveillance of Sewage to Police Illegal Drug Use - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-expands-surveillance-of-sewage-to-police-illegal-drug-use/ <comment><USER2> Dupe, discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17546979](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17546979)</comment>


Node + Redis = Fun - <AUTHOR> http://howtonode.org/node-redis-fun

<comment><USER2> 'How to Node' is quickly becoming my favorite new blog. I still don't totally grok Node's flow so I read every article these guys publish as I try to brute force it in to my brain.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm also trying to get my head around it. But I guess the only way to learn is: Write an app myself using the available tools - and maybe create something for everyone else in the process.</comment></comment>


As California's labor shortage grows, farmers replace workers with robots - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farm-mechanization/?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark <comment><USER3> I've mentioned those machines before. They're still prototypes, nowhere near rugged enough for field use.

Agrobot: [1] Too many parts, too many places that can catch dirt, too slow. If they can solve the sensor problem, they need to do a complete mechanical redesign to make it field-ready.

Abundant Robotics: [2] Too slow, too fragile. For comparison, here's a Festo vision-guided robot picking up randomly oriented objects. Agricultural robotics needs that kind of speed.

This is going to be solved soon, but probably not by those startups.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0coCmXiYU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0coCmXiYU) [3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH_t_1-tl40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH_t_1-tl40)

<comment><USER4> While I agree with your conclusion in the small, Who else is working on it to take up the slack?

<comment><USER3> Don't know. Doing good mechanical design requires an organization that's good at making machinery. Not that many people are really good at mechanical design. I occasionally mention that I'm into restoring antique Teletype machines. All the good Teletype machines were designed by two people - <USER2> Krum and Ed Klienschmidt. Competitors mostly copied them, or produced unreliable machinery.

(I once worked at a hydraulics R&D facility for a big machinery company. They had that capability, and it took several acres of plant, with everything from overhead cranes to machine shops to scanning electron microscopes. It also took hundreds of people who've done it before. You need that kind of industrial backup. A laptop in a Starbucks is not enough. That gets you a design like Jucero, way overdesigned and overpriced.)

<comment><USER5> AVE (a youtube channel) pulled a Juicero apart and looked at it, and came to that same conclusion. Way overdesigned, but really nice guts in the thing.

He thought they were losing money on the hardware, fwiw.

It's a fun watch, if you're into that kind of thing. Warning, he probably uses NSFW language, he does frequently in most videos: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp- BGQfpHQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone know of any groups or hacker like groups working on these types of problems? I own a small farm and for the life of me I cant find workers even at $25/hr. I have so far bought several tractors and implements and I am planning to semi-automate as much as possible. But that is not ready this year and I am basically by myself with a shovel... I would like to fully automate as much as possible, and I have zero skills in this area. To increase my chance of success I have bought several machines, such as 3d printers, a lathe, a milling machine, plasma cutter, welders (MIG and arc), and other tools, and I am building a shop right now. I have also worked with Ardunio, raspberry pi, ... basically I am going all out and want to go all the way to success. There are several machines I would like to build that I would like powered by the tractor´s PTO and hydraulic. The most important machine would be a planter that would plant solo-cup sized plant starts, and lay down drip irrigation. If I can build or buy that, that would save a lot of my time.

<comment><USER7> I can't magic you up any workers but here's a hint:

You'd be astonished at how quickly and accurately a large air compressor with a small amount of water added to the flow can dig a shallow trench or small hole.

<comment><USER6> I actually have a backhoe, but the diesel injector pump is broken. Its a rosa master rotary injection pump. They go for $800 on ebay rebuilt. Project for the winter in my new shop. Thanks for your advice on the water injector. Do you have any design for injecting the water into the air line? How much water like in GPM or CFS per PSI?

<comment><USER7> I spent a summer as "that guy who digs with the compressor" on a maintenance crew at a summer camp.

I discovered it when I accidebtly blew a hole in an asphalt parking lot trying to use the compressor to clear sand.

Compressor was a little 50hp Rand diesel tow behind. 120psi 180cfm. In soft soil no water is even needed. A little water (like 2-5 gpm makes everything nicer). I started by making a little brass siphon fitting and then upped it to a garden hose fitting by the end.

Layed miles of sprinkler pipes with it. Always figured it would make a fantastic automatic digger for something or other.

<comment><USER6> Well you might be on to something. An air compressor with a venturi device, which is a simple device. I have a few for gold dredging and another one a fertilizer mixer. One could be made fairly easy with a pipe bender, welder, and fittings could be made on a lathe. However, a 50 HP air compressor is huge. I don't know much about air compressors besides my pancake compressor (barely runs my CUT50 plasma cutter), but 50 HP is tremendous. A lathe I am looking at to buy runs on 30 amps 220, and its only 5hp. 50 HP would be 50 *750 37,500 or 37kw.. or 170 amps at 220v if my math is correct! However, one of my tractor has 19 HP PTO at 540 rpm (Ford 2N) and another tractor of mine (Ford 4000) has a 50 HP PTO that could power a air compressor that size. So yeah that could be powered by one of my tractors and fit on a 3 point hitch. I like your idea and will look for a large air compressor motor somewhere to see if I can retro fit it to a PTO and build a venturi to try your idea out.

<comment><USER7> The one I used was a little diesel powered thing that the camp bought for $1900 (used) to run a jack-hammer. (Ended up cheaper than renting) then it just sat around until I had the bright idea of blowing off the parking lots with it.

It looked like a tiny little trailer that you pulled behind a jeep or something. It ran all day on a few gallons of diesel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8>
       That's because immigrant farmworkers in California's
       agricultural heartlands are getting older and not being
       replaced.

As others have mentioned it's all to do with the wages that the fruit growers are willing to pay, and Driscoll's (mentioned in the article) have been at the center of controversy about their wages for some time for their practices in Mexico and elsewhere: [https://boycott-driscolls.org/](https://boycott- driscolls.org/)

       The Union of Independent, National and Democratic
       Farmworkers (SINDJA) calls for all independent and
       autonomous boycott committees to unite for a global
       day of action on November 19th. We invite all families
       to support the International Boycott against
       Driscoll's in solidarity with farmworkers in San
       Quintín, Mexico. In the US, when you sit down at
       your tables on Thanksgiving Day, we're asking you
       to please think of the farmworkers in San Quintín,
       who work 12 to 15 hours a day for as little as 6
       US dollars in take-home pay. Meanwhile, Driscoll's
       is making multiple millions in profits.

Robots for labor are coming, and when they do it is time to take agriculturally productive land away from the profiteers. They serve no rational function in the economy and are merely monopolizing a resource.

<comment><USER9> > Robots for labor are coming, and when they do it is time to take > agriculturally productive land away from the profiteers. They serve no > rational function in the economy and are merely monopolizing a resource.

This is one of the big questions we'll have to ask in the next 20 or so years, and it just isn't farms. We are going to have to deal with plenty of industries that will merely consume resources and produce without providing any other benefits to society.

<comment><USER10> A value added tax could raise revenue from robot farms and factories, there is no need to seize them.

<comment><USER9> I didn't agree with seizing them, just that we have to figure out what to do. A VAT could definitely help, but consumers will still need jobs to consume, and if they can't find any in production...well...can we live on doing services alone?

I don't know. Hopefully people smarter than me are thinking about this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Farms have been replacing people with technology for at least 200 years.

<comment><USER12> 200? Try 6000: [http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/plaintexthistories.asp?h...](http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/plaintexthistories.asp?historyid=ab57)

>From about 4000 BC oxen are harnessed and put to work. They drag sledges and, somewhat later, ploughs and wheeled wagons (an almost simultaneous innovation in the Middle East and in Europe). The plough immeasurably increases the crop of wheat or rice. The wagon enables it to be brought home from more distant fields.

<comment><USER13> Not sure why you'd be downvoted, but was about to post the same: the whole history of agriculture is about improving the technology.

One could add that development has been particularly rapid over the past 50 years or so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They could also, which is notably mentioned no where in the article, pay more?

In a market driven economy...which companies want...employees have market power as well when their is a shortage.

<comment><USER15> > They could also, which is notably mentioned no where in the article, pay > more?

From the article:

> And native-born Americans aren't interested in the job, even at wages that > have soared at higher than average rates.

> Not surprisingly, wages for crop production have climbed 13% from 2010 to > 2015 — a higher rate than the state average, according to a Los Angeles > Times analysis of Labor Department data.

> Growers who can afford it have begun offering savings and health plans more > commonly found in white collar jobs.

Margins are thin, though, and the article makes it sound like it is more efficient to grow less labor-intensive crops and import the other crops.

<comment><USER16> > And native-born Americans aren't interested in the job, even at wages that > have soared at higher than average rates.

Conspicuously absent in every single article claiming that Americans "aren't interested" in farm work is exactly what constitutes "higher than average rates". You _will_ find Americans interested in this work at some rate, but it's going to be higher than what you think it "should" be. In a country where a $15 minimum wage is expected for relatively comfy fast food work, back- breaking outdoor labor is going to be significantly more expensive. But you will find takers at some price.

<comment><USER17> In another comment on this thread, a farmer said he couldn't hire people at $25 / hour. If a machine can do it, then a machine should do it. Especially work that's difficult and can be dangerous - like farm work.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but farm workers only work part of the year, and only work on each farm for a few weeks.. then move onto another farm.

So having 1 farm paying $25/hr, does not change much for the worker.. after they finish at that farm, they'll need to go to another that's paying near minimum wage (the average for a farm worker).. and the result is that they are still in poverty (the average farm worker lives below the poverty line).

The result is that no one is going to move from even a minimum wage job to farm work unless the pay is even higher and/or other farms get onboard with the higher wages.

<comment><USER19> This basically requires the worker to be either homeless or that they can leave a house somewhere else empty while they are working on a farm.

How does welfare in the US cover housing costs ?

<comment><USER18> They dont get welfare.

Farms are heavily dependent on immigrants, mostly illegal immigrants from mexico (90% are foreign born) for crop workers. They work on our farms for very little pay (but probably more than they would have in mexico), work here for 10 years or so saving as much as possible, then go back to mexico. They may travel from CA > WA through the season; or on the east: FL > OH > ME (this prolongs their work season). They're on average very poor, with little education (6th grade is the average).

With the more recent restrictions on the flow of illegal migrants, many are finding it's impossible to come back to the us (or they choose not to come back). Disrupting the flow of illegal migrants that the farms depend on.

That is the source of the labor shortage that the farms are now complaining about.

Essentially for years they have taken advantage of illegal immigrants to depress wages in their industry. And now they have been cut off, and theyre finding it difficult to adjust their wages to appropriate levels so they can compete in the domestic labor market.

Farmers deserve no sympathy for the labor shortage.. it's an exploitative arrangement. They should automate as much as possible, and for everything else they should pay market rates (whatever those may be... even if it's $100/hr or more (remember its short term hard labor, 2nd most dangerous work in the US)).

This shortage is actually a great thing, if it lasts. Whatever workers are left, might finally get paid a livable reasonable wage.

Edit: if your curious about their conditions, here's the National Agriculture Workers Survey that covers all of this: [https://www.doleta.gov/agworker/pdf/NAWS_Research_Report_12_...](https://www.doleta.gov/agworker/pdf/NAWS_Research_Report_12_Final_508_Compliant.pdf)

It's currently "offline for maintenance", so here's google's cache: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HiRr7h...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HiRr7h03zkcJ:https://www.doleta.gov/agworker/pdf/NAWS_Research_Report_12_Final_508_Compliant.pdf+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER19> I realize that most farm workers up to now have been immigrants.

I was trying to find out how things would work if a legal worker alternated between working on farms and living on welfare somewhere out of any work season.

The UK is starting a similar shakeup, most seasonal agricultural work is done by workers from poorer countries in the EU who go back home once the work is done.

I feel that it will be hard to find the market rate for this kind of work in the short term.

<comment><USER18> There's no welfare program like that. You cant work a seasonal job and live off welfare the rest of the year.. you're going to be homeless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's too late. 90% of Americans used to work back-breaking farm jobs for 12 hours a day. Now almost all of those jobs have disappeared.

</comment><comment><USER21> "As California's slave labor shortage grows..."

The awful conditions and pay and protections result in people not wanting to do the work, since it's not even a livable wage. Might as well be begging (or move to somewhere else to beg), which is the easier and ultimately healthier choice.

<comment><USER22> Relative to what? Humans have been farming for thousands of years under worse condition and worse pay, yet humans still did it. In fact, even more humans used to do it. So awful pay and conditions are not a showstopper.

<comment><USER23> Do you have citations most farming (historically) was done for worse pay under worse conditions?

<comment><USER24> Before the industrial revolution, most people worked in agriculture. If you look at life expectancy in those ages it's pretty grim. Usually no one would live to be 45.

I can't vouch for the following, but it seems like something a reasonable person would write: [http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/life-expectancy-in-the- middle-a...](http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/life-expectancy-in-the-middle-ages/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Necessity is the Mother of Invention" \- how many of us here only program when we have an itch to scratch? Human ingenuity will prevail.

<comment><USER26> Necessity is also an agent of destruction... how many people here have projects that failed because the necessary resources (capital,resources,time) far exceeded what could be viably sourced?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Stated bluntly, there aren't enough new immigrants for the state's nearly > half-million farm labor jobs

That's why we need a "farmworker" visa system, which lets workers come when required and go back as needed. Millions of people work on such visas all over the world; I don't see why it won't work in the US.

<comment><USER28> > go back as needed.

The problem is, many people dont go back.

<comment><USER27> Because they have no choice. It's so hard to cross the border, that once you're in, you have no choice but to stay in. They also bring their families in, because otherwise they would not see them.

Implement a farmworker visa that lets these workers go back and forth as needed, and suddenly they don't have to bring their families here; they can go back for events and festivals, maintaining a healthy social life. They can't be blackmailed by criminals, because they're here legally. You can even charge them a little bit for catastrophic health insurance.

<comment><USER28> > suddenly they don't have to bring their families here

How can you claim this? Why not bring your family over and let them enjoy the good life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Nobody worries about labor automation in the context of raising min wages. But when it comes to immigration...

</comment><comment><USER30> Or they could, you know, offer higher wages.

<comment><USER31> Picking fruit and vegetables has always been peasant and serf work. The market has never once said, 'you should be paid more,' because there always is an underclass and even if you paid triple what you pay now it'd be the same class of people working the job. The problem is every American thinks he's too good to be at the bottom of the barrel these days.

<comment><USER32> If it's a comparison between getting crap pay at McDonalds and getting crap pay in the hot sun all day, then there is no comparison.

<comment><USER33> I've never worked at a McDonalds, but I've done my time out in the hot sun and honestly when I look at these poor bastards standing in front of a pot of boiling grease all day I wonder if I wouldn't go back to the farm.

Unless the work was picking onions or strawberries or some other crop which involves spending all day in a terrible bent-over posture. If the pay was the same, though, I'd rather spend the day harvesting apples than spend it making burgers for assholes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wonder when it will be considered unethical to eat food harvested by back- breaking stoop labor?

<comment><USER35> Yeah... then the flip: When will it be unethical to eat food harvested by companies that don't employ people?

You can spin it in both directions... on one side, those poor people who do back breaking labor... on the other side, those poor people who can't get jobs that are done by robots.

Interesting time we live in.

<comment><USER36> I'm imagining a "Made by Humans" sticker on products

<comment><USER37> "Hand Made" has already been a thing for a while. "Made by Humans" sounds like a good rebranding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It seems like picking a lot of fruits are easily in the realm of what computer vision is capable of these days.

What would be the first steps to doing a start up in this space? Anyone interested?

<comment><USER39> A lot of the issues currently are related to the mechanical handling of the fruit. It's very important not to bruise or damage the product. Buyers generally have strict rules on exactly how the fruit is picked, e.g., how much stem is still attached to the fruit, for both weight and quality reasons.

Other issues arise if the orchard is on uneven ground, or their are irrigation lines in the way.

Certainly not insurmountable, but not easy. Then there's the distinct problem of adoption.

<comment><USER40> potentially robotics could increase your yields by making uneven plots of land more viable for planting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Curious if California can incentivize farmers to train and hire capable homeless individuals to mitigate the labor shortage issue.

<comment><USER42> Theoretically yes. Practically, no. Homelessness in rich countries is largely a result of substance abuse and underlying personality disorders (which are often the reason the substance abuse starts).

Modern governments don't have the political will to break the social taboos necessary to instill discipline and personal responsibility in the homeless population, especially when there are large interest groups in the public sector who stand to lose financially from any serious effort to address the underlying causes of homelessness, especially if that effort rejects their ideological assumptions about the causes of homelessness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Yes, likely this will be the AI revolution: humans will only do jobs where robots are more expensive.

These will 99.999999% be McJobs.

</comment><comment><USER44> This would be a good time to implement regulations and taxes on all robots to diminish all margins gained from automation.

<comment><USER45> Would this tax be on all labor-saving devices, like kitchen appliances? Washing machines? Oxen-powered plows?

<comment><USER46> Looms possibly?

<comment><USER47> How about the Wheel? Wheels deprive millions of jobs for people to carry stuff.

<comment><USER44> I didn't realize this would prompt so much emotion. I only said it as a consideration. As a reminder this is a quote from Bill Gates ""If a human worker does $50,000 of work in a factory, that income is taxed," Gates said in an interview with Quartz. "If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you'd think we'd tax the robot at a similar level." < Google it.

<comment><USER48> If the robot's owner gets an extra $50k income from this, we're actually getting more in tax because their marginal income is higher.

<comment><USER49> > If the robot's owner gets an extra $50k income from this, we're actually > getting more in tax because their marginal income is higher.

If the robot is owned by an individual taxpayer paying personal income tax on the income, and if you ignore taxes other than income tax that levied on labor income, and if you ignore accounting tricks, etc., this is fairly obviously true from the way progressive tax rates work.

OTOH, it becomes less obviously true when you consider how the robots are likely to be owned in the real world, the full set of taxes on income in the real world, and the greater practical ability of the rich to avoid taxation in the current system.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why is Mail Online going after the fact checkers? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/dec/23/why-is-mail-online-going-after-fact-checkers-snopes <comment><USER2> Applying the idea of "fact checking" to politically charged topics inherently raises problems. Snopes was a good site to find out if there were really alligators in the sewers. The Forbes article cited by rokosbasilisk here seems to demand a high standard of quality from fact checkers - but who is to pay for it?

Now, The Guardian chose some headlines to illustrate this story with. Presumably the Guardian considers them good examples of "fake news". One of them is about the Clintons "stealing $200K worth of furniture" etc. Politifact has a surprisingly detailed page on this allegation. The result is, typically, gray. It wasn't $200K (suspiciously round number); closer to $190K. And the Clintons paid for or returned the "stolen" items; which either makes them "not stolen" or "stolen and returned".

But the whole claim of "theft" rests on the items' designation as national property, which may not have been clear at the time.

Given that this headline is an example of what the media (including Facebook) wants to shield the masses from - what then do they want the masses to hear? Is it (a) nothing, (b) inoculation/discrediting by labelling the meme as "fake news"; (c) a less sensationalized headlines?

<comment><USER3> Some political activists have no choice but to yell "Fake News!" to rationalize censorship now, because they basically used "Racist!" to censor views they didn't like so much that the word no longer has meaning. It makes you wonder what will come next.

The funny (or sad) part is that silencing dissenting opinions via means like this is the very definition of fascism, but the people so quick to yell "fake news!" now are the same ones who were calling their friends fascist on social media 2 months ago just for supporting a different presidential candidate than they were.

<comment><USER4> It is less a question of censorship and more a question of removing egregiously bad "news" that is explicitly written to collect views.

If you believe flagging false headlines like

"Michelle Obama DEMANDS Americans PAY UP To Give Her Mom A Cushy $160k Pension"

is fascism, and that advocating war-crimes and bringing back libel laws like Trump did is not, I don't know what to say.

There is a whole industry set up to profit from making fake news that they know is false: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/in-macedonias- fa...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/in-macedonias-fake-news- hub-teen-shows-ap-how-its- done/2016/12/02/98bce38e-b88d-11e6-939c-91749443c5e5_story.html?utm_term=.f80a4c745b5a)

If you think any attempt to reduce profiteering by knowingly generating fake news that gets millions of shares is fascism, I'm not sure what isn't.

I'm not sure if there has been any 'transition' from accusations of racism to fake news. The "birther" controversy, especially the way it treated by places like Brietbart was both racist and fake, I doubt that you dispute that. Trump retweeting Stormfront infographics that claim ridiculous stuff like 90% of white murder victims were killed by black people is both racist and fake. This is hardly a "liberal" or globalist position, even Fox news called out Trump on that.

Regardless of political orientation, objective facts do exist. I don't believe in censorship, but I think if a site wants to flag a post saying "reasons why the moon landing is a globalist conspiracy" as false, I'm not going to cry that it's literally fascism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's poor form for the guardian to not link the original article, at [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4042194/Facebook- fac...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4042194/Facebook-fact-checker- arbitrate-fake-news-accused-defrauding-website-pay-prostitutes-staff-includes- escort-porn-star-Vice-Vixen-domme.html)

The guardian article is a hit piece, and a poorly written one at that. It gives very little information and a lot of vague or indirect criticism. (Makes you think how much more effective hit pieces can be when the writer actually has something to work with: even this will probably convince a lot of people that critiques of snopes are invalid.)

On priors I'd expect there to be issues with the mail article, but the guardian doesn't tell me what they are.

<comment><USER6> It's a hit piece, but then so is the Daily Mail article, and the DM has been a scandal sheet for most of its history.

<comment><USER5> Yeah but I have higher expectations from the guardian.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would have agreed with this article until the forbes story broke.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the- dail...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-daily-mail- snopes-story-and-fact-checking-the-fact-checkers/#33d2e4cc1e02)

It makes snopes look worse run than a college newspaper.

I also agree with the forbes article in that we need much much tranparency and openess from our fact checkers.

<comment><USER8> There's a lawyer's saying that when the facts are against you, you pound on the table. The Guardian won't even repeat, let alone attempt to refute, anything published in the Daily Mail.

Just let that sink in for a moment: the _Guardian_ is unable to dispute the _Daily Mail_ on a factual level on this one. Instead they talk about everything and anything else rather than discuss the actual subject matter in the reports. "Nothing to see here, move along!" But even a stopped clock can be right twice a day. And this would hardly be the first real news broken by a tabloid.

We live in interesting times. I just hope they're not the "interesting times" from that fictitious Chinese curse.

<comment><USER9> > There's a lawyer's saying that when the facts are against you, you pound on > the table.

The usual saying is, "When the law is on your side, argue the law; when the facts are on your side, argue the law; when neither is on your side, pound the table."

<comment><USER10> The quote appears to be from Carl Sandburg[1]

The variant I've heard is: "When the facts are against you, argue the law; when the law is against you, argue the facts; if both the facts and the law are against you, get a new client."

[1] [http://able2know.org/topic/98689-1](http://able2know.org/topic/98689-1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I learnt from Popper that the facts are theory - laden and from Feynman that science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

This whole attempt to control the discourse is doomed. There's no such thing as objectivity - ones understanding of the world is shaped by one's experiences and who one is, and that's true for institutions too.

Character matters for an editorial institution, as does form. Snopes built its reputation one way, and became something quite different. And yet they have been granted a role of high influence by Facebook and thus it's in the spirit of good journalism to look into the extent to which they deserve this influence, and the character of the people involved does matter.

One could say that the Mail also isn't a globalist paper and so that naturally sets their perspective against Snopes.

<comment><USER4> >There's no such thing as objectivity

Obama being born in Kenya is objectively false.

Podesta running a child-trafficking ring in pizza places around Chicago is objectively false.

Moon landing and flat earth conspiracies are objectively false.

Thinking that Global warming is a hoax created by China is objectively false.

I hate to bring up the cliché of "post-truth" but when you say things like "there is no such thing as objectivity" it is difficult not to do so.

I'm not directing this at you in particular, but it's a common line of argument. Say Snopes write that the claim that Global Warming is a hoax is false, or that Obama isn't a secret Islamic radical. When they dispute something that many people believe in, the argument from a depressingly high number of people is not to scrutinise the facts that Snopes used and come up with flaws in their reasoning.

It is to vaguely accuse them of being "globalist", say that their argument is not valid because their founder did something, and that there is no objective truth.

Reality is complex, but the problem arises when people use this complexity to mean that any belief they hold, however unsubstantiated, cannot be falsified because everyone has an (((agenda))), which is defined as holding any view, on any subject, slightly different from their own.

Sure, I think Snopes should be looked into, like any institution with influence. But I am far more interested in journalism that extensively rebuts many of _their arguments_ \- and they have made _a lot_ of arguments, rather than providing fodder for the inevitable future ad-hominem rebuttals.

</comment></comment><comment> alex- I guess a publication like the mail has two big reasons to feel threatened by a rise of fact checking sites.

1\. It inhibits their ability to embellish stories and thus could effect revenue.

2\. If you need to goto some trust worthy organisation to fact check. Why do you need to visit the publisher first?

<comment><USER10> It's part of the "fake news" nihilism. You attack everything and anything that can limit the scope of the deceit you're creating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I regularly read Breitbart and Alex Jones (the ideological yangs to my yin), and they are apoplectic about this push towards fact checking.

It's unsettling how readily their audience accepts their claims that snopes et al are liberal rags. I've done some due diligence in the past on snopes, and afaik any bias is well within the margin of error from zero.

The narrative is that fact checking is a "globalist"-orchestrated move to suppress what they call the "independent media" in favor of the "MSM" (mainstream media).

I argue that whenever someone spends more time defaming their critics than defending their stances and claims, readers ought to run away. But following these news sources, it seems like most readers are completely trapped in an unfalsifiable narrative. It's really disheartening to think that our current best weapon against this sort of charlatinism is screening content thru fact- checkers. But I do think these platforms are obligated here, and indeed long overdue.

Tom Friedman makes a compelling argument about platforms' responsibilities here: 'Facebook et al want the NYT readership, the NYT page views, but none of the NYT overhead that comes with being accountable for the information they share. And that's bullshit.'

</comment><comment><USER13> How does the saying go? The victors write the history books - the rest is just fake news.</comment>


A rare positive change to a Terms of Service (GitHub) - <AUTHOR> http://www.docracy.com/doc/diff?originalId=0rv0oo2i2au&revisedId=0ybwk151gi7

<comment><USER2> I think this change is because the clause removed made the agreement unenforceable.

"[business name] reserves the right to update and change the Terms of Service from time to time without notice. "

That is a poison pill.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think sadly that changing without notice is the standard language, but I'll check against some other TOS on the site to be sure.</comment></comment>


Group Theory via Rubik's Cube - <AUTHOR> http://www.geometer.org/rubik/group.pdf

<comment><USER2> I downloaded this, and went out and bought a Rubik's cube. I'll report back if Group Theory suddenly becomes clear to me...</comment>


Why You Won't Be the Person You Expect to Be - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/science/study-in-science-shows-end-of-history-illusion.html

<comment><USER2> This phenomenon has been consistently thrown at me by my parents as a good reason not to get tattoos.

As someone who currently likes the aesthetic of tattoos, I've been trying to follow my '5 year rule' for a tattoo, which means I must consistently want said tattoo for five years before getting it inked on my body. So far, I don't have any tattoos.

One of my friends puts his reasoning for getting tattoos a little differently: "I want these to be a big middle-finger from young, cool Danny to older, conservative Danny"

It is very hard to think about not liking something that I currently like, whether it be food, music, or activities.</comment>


Poachers kill rhino for his horn at French zoo - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-39194844 <comment><USER2> Has anyone tried flooding the market for rhino horns with counterfeits?

edit: just searched, yes [http://www.snopes.com/3d-printed-rhino-horn- developed/](http://www.snopes.com/3d-printed-rhino-horn-developed/)

<comment><USER3> I'm the CEO of Pembient, one of the companies working on this problem [1]. I would be happy to answer questions on what we're doing. Additionally, it is worth pointing out that a lot of the initial research done on rhino horn usage by conservation NGOs has been debunked by Yufang Gao, Karl Ammann, the Wildlife Justice Commission [2], and others. That is, the use of rhino horn as medicine is not what drives poaching.

[1] [https://sosv.com/why-pembient-is-confident-in-synthetic- rhin...](https://sosv.com/why-pembient-is-confident-in-synthetic-rhino-horn/)

[2] [https://wildlifejustice.org/cn/overlooked-rhino-horn- demand-...](https://wildlifejustice.org/cn/overlooked-rhino-horn-demand- decorative-purposes-china/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm really sorry to hear this side of the problem.

I truly hope that bioengineering the rhino horn will be successful in preventing more damage.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for your positive thoughts.

Despite this awful incident in France, there has been some good news on the rhino front. In the five years before our announcement in 2015, rhino poaching was growing an average of 49% or so year-over-year, significantly more than the approximately 1% or less year-over-year growth it has experienced since then. Obviously, correlation doesn't imply causation, but whatever brought about the anomaly has bought the rhinos some time. In fact, South Africa, home to the majority of African rhinos, recently announced its second year of absolute declines in rhino poaching [1]. Hopefully, this trend will continue!

[1] [http://www.traffic.org/home/2017/2/27/south-africa-annual- rh...](http://www.traffic.org/home/2017/2/27/south-africa-annual-rhino- poaching-toll-falls-for-second-yea.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It takes a special kind of asshole to do this to an animal in a western zoo. I expect the culprits to pay a very steep price for their crime.

<comment><USER5> The assholes who do this in Africa are equally bad. Nothing special about them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wouldnt be surprised if the zoo had terrible security and no cameras. The poachers left a second horn behind because they were supposedly scared off.

</comment><comment><USER7> This isn't ever going to stop until the ignorant stop believing in magical potions to "cure" ailments.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps somebody should initiate a randomized clinical trial to find out the obvious, publish the results, and then it will stop.

<comment><USER7> I don't think you understand the mentality of people who believe in these practices. That's like providing a mountain of scientific evidence against religions, to a devout follower.

<comment><USER9> I think parent was sarcastic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just can't believe this! Even zoos in a country like France aren't safe anymore.

1Kg fetches $60K?!? Not only the ignorance part that drives me mad, but how come so many men can be extremely obsessed about sexual performance?

I lose all hope in humanity in moments like these.

<comment><USER10> Wtf? Why even go to the trouble of killing a rhino for that price? Here, take some ground up chicken bone, you won't know the difference.

<comment><USER11> I imagine the people who are willing to pay so much money DO actually care about buying a real rhino horn. Ground up chicken bones might be identical, but a mobster will pay for a real horn, not a bag of white powder that might or might not be a real horn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If the demand is so high, how about farming? Or are there restrictions on the kind of animals may be breed in farms?

Also, poaching can (and should, if you ask me) be addressed in a more serious manner. How about starting at the buyer's market with enticing cash offers and then hunt up the source of the illegal merchandise?

<comment><USER13> > How about starting at the buyer's market with enticing cash offers and then > hunt up the source of the illegal merchandise?

You're describing a basic sting which is far from a new idea and the poachers aren't idiots when it comes to avoiding them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can't they get Viagra or Cialis in Vietnam? And that's not a joke question. And if they can get it, why isn't there a huge marketing campaign to make people aware that Rhino horn doesn't do crap, but these drugs actually work.

<comment><USER15> The belief that they're using rhino horn as an aphrodisiac is made up by western culture. The people consuming it do not believe this.

[https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/threats_to_rhino/poa...](https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/threats_to_rhino/poaching_for_rhino_horn)

<comment><USER16> Then why are they consuming rhino horns? Actually curious.

<comment><USER17> Excerpt from abstract of the paper[0] linked elsewhere in this thread:

>A media content analysis of Chinese (n = 332) and western newspapers (n = 166) from 2000 to 2014 revealed significant differences between perceptions of rhino horn consumption. In Chinese media, rhino horn product acquisition was most frequently reported for investment and collectible value (75%), artistic value (40%), and medical value (29%). In contrast, western media alleged consumption of rhino horn in China was mostly for their medical value (84%)

[0]: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320716...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320716303044)

<comment><USER18> This is an inaccurate understanding. The main difference between western and Asian societies is the belief in medical value - about 0% in the west vs 29% as documented here. It's not that the western media believes most Asian consumers are desperate for medical ingredients, but that it is focused on this point of difference.

That ivory has an aesthetic value is not in dispute; it has an aesthetic value here int eh west too. People are fine with paying extra for antiques made with the product of endangered species, and I'm to sure there's anything you can do about that unless you try banning or heavily regulating the trad in antiques, so that people aren't allowed to buy items made out of mahogany or ivory because allowing such items to be the subject of commerce would drive demand for those commodities now, as we are seeing. We don't talk about this because we don't want to ban antiques and we don't have a good idea about how to deal with the fact that their ongoing commercial existence creates demand for rare goods.

Likewise critiquing investment and collectibility seems almost superfluous to western media because such speculation is a basic mode of capitalism; it is so natural to observe that the existence of human desire will lead to the establishment of a market for the satisfaction of that desire that we take it for granted, even when the market's demand for something with high profit potential significantly outweighs consumers' demand for a particular good. As with drugs and other contraband, you can have many intermediaries trading in and pushing up the price proportionate to the distance consumers wish to put between themselves and the suppliers (both to lessen criminal responsibility and as a sort of Veblen good whose primary purpose is social signaling about the owner's economic ability to waste money on it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> First we need mandatory life sentences for poachers of endangered animals. Secondly poachers caught in the act should be shot on site -- just like we would if someone was caught in the middle of murdering other humans.

<comment><USER19> I know it's insane to equate a human life to an animal's but this makes me so furious I want to agree. At the very least it seems we need to have repercussions in place that are so grave that these people stop trying to drive animals to extinction for their own stupid gains.

<comment><USER18> It's not insane. Other animals aren't as intelligent as human animals* but they're sentient and have personality. It's perfectly OK to treat such people who abuse or kill animals with the same disregard they show for others.

* the word animal derives from the same root as 'animated' \- we are animals because we can control our movements, n contrast to rooted entities like plants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> if there a way we could make poachers more valuable that the rhino horn?

</comment><comment><USER21> If those rhinos would be eating a arsenic rich diet- and arsenic would aggregate in there horns.. would poachers check for that?

</comment><comment><USER22> Fucking awful.</comment>


Forensic Experts trace many virus's and attacks caused by USA Gov with Marble Tool - a-smith https://www.rt.com/news/382940-wikileaks-vault7-marble-framework/ <comment><AUTHOR> Isn't RT basically Russian propaganda? I haven't actually read the article, I just wanted to point that out.

<comment><USER2> Perhaps you _should_ read the article? It's almost entirely quotes from Wikileaks and a former CIA employee. I'm not sure where the "propaganda" is in this article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So where is the list of viruses previously attributed to a third party that was crafted by the CIA ?

</comment><comment><USER4> Your news are american propaganda to them so I guess it's fair.</comment>