"Pay What You Want" Experiment Results for Mattermark Startup Traction Report - <AUTHOR> http://mattermark.com/results-from-our-pay-what-you-want-experiment-for-the-mattermark-startup-traction-report/

<comment><USER2> Chart axes are labeled extremely poorly. I have literally no idea what the X axis is supposed to be.</comment>


Show HN: my Django+Stripe powered e-commerce site for beer art, Hoppy Press - <AUTHOR> https://hoppypress.com/beer-art

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to hear any advice regarding improvements to site & page structure for SEO and marketing purposes. To give something back to the community that has taught me so much, use coupon code "HACKER" when you checkout.</comment>


Autonomous Audi TTS Ascends Pikes Peak - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2009-11/autonomous-audi-tts-will-ascend-pikes-peak-course-race-speeds

<comment><AUTHOR> The linked article is from 2009, but apparently they actually performed the test last Friday (September 17, 2010). They had a helicopter filming it, but the helicopter crashed.. while filming the autonomous car ascending Pikes Peak! See [http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gRMF4BctY0...](http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gRMF4BctY0YWdm8GTLVG3bAv4XaQD9I9SQP00) for details.</comment>


The 11 Most Mystifying Things the Tsarnaev Brothers Did - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/04/eleven-most-mystifying-things-tsarnaev-brothers-did <comment><USER2> Those do not include the most ridiculous thing they've done.

The absolutely most bizarre thing is that, being "Chechnyan separatists", they attacked the US, _precisely the one country they shouldn't have_. An attack of Russia, while stupid in its unlikelihood to mobilize popular support for their country, would be at least understandable. Russia is, after all, raping their country every fucking hour. An attack of revenge, maybe against the military or police forces, would be what's expected.

Instead, they attacked the country which they should have tried to ally with, the US. With United-Statesian support, at least they could have a shot at independence, or at least some favourable publicity. There are plenty of reasons for that to happen [1]. The ironic thing is that, even though it was a passional, senseless move, the kind that no serious terrorist planner would consider, it could bring a better understanding, and better publicity for Chechnya in the West. I hope. Or maybe they just ripped to shreds the only good card their country had.

Every terror attack that is attempted, the more convinced I am of Bruce Schneier's views on terrorism: terrorist are fundamentally stupid, emotionally fragile, intellectually lazy people [2].

[1] [http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/04/wha...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/04/what- you-should-know-about-chechnya-as-the-boston-story-unfolds/275156/)

[2] <https://www.schneier.com/essay-242.html>

<comment><USER3> Schneier definitely has a point.

But these particular two guys were attending a top university in the United States so they can't have been too deficient in the IQ department. Why they would attack the country that gave them shelter is beyond me.

For run-of-the-mill suicide bombers I think that fewer brains is actually preferable from the perspective of their higher ups. The less they think things through and the more impressionable they are the bigger the chance they will go through with whatever stupidity they are being tasked with.

Essentially this is an education problem, if you'd manage to get people to think for themselves early enough then you might be able to head off a lot of misery before it gets off the ground.

<comment><USER4> Top university in the United States? Suspect #1 had been sporadically attending classes at a community college. Suspect #2 had been attending UMass Dartmouth, a state school. No offense to either, but top universities they are not.

Unless you meant Cambridge Rindge and Latin, which, while a decent urban public high school, is not to be confused with the prestigious Boston Latin, which is also public but requires admission by way of a highly competitive exam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suppose we should be glad that most of these "terrorists" are incompetent fools, that means that the competent people of even the die-hard radicals have decided that there are better things to do than blow people up; hopefully something a bit more productive.

<comment><USER6> Humans are nearly universally bad at doing things they've never done before and never seen someone do before. Experience and institutional experience are _really_ important in doing anything effectively, and tacit knowledge is often hard to convey in training videos. The perpetrators here don't seem to be particularly smart or brave, but I don't see any reason to think they were particularly dumb either.

<comment><USER5> I didn't say that they were dumb, I said that they were incompetent fools. Incompetent for not managing to cause more destruction, fools for not escaping when they had the chance.

It's quite likely that I would be a bad terrorist too, but I would at least study the effects of explosives and explosions and how to maximize the result before trying to use them. It's not like there's not a lot of research in the area, given that it's been a priority for the world's armed forces since forever.

<comment><USER6> They did study the effects of explosives and explosions and they did pretty well given the constraints they were working under. It's very hard to get access to high explosives without the FBI nabbing you, and trying to make them from scratch without a chemistry degree is a recipe for blowing yourself up or having them fizzle like the Time Square Bomber's. The US isn't like Iraq where you can buy an artillery shell from a looted depot for $5.

<comment><USER5> I was actually thinking of the placement of the bombs. Putting them on the ground in a crowd means that the people nearest the explosion will act as shields for those further away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anybody else think it was odd they mentioned WMD? Didn't realize the definition of WMD was extended to stuff people make at home.

<comment><USER7> Its interesting. When the US + UK went into Iraq looking for WMD's I imagined they were after something more menacing than something a kid knocked up in his apartment.

If that is a WMD then what classification do we give the bombs that level buildings that have frequently been used in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan?

The most troubling thing I find about the prosecution is how they listed damaging interstate trade, presumably to keep the death sentence open. Massachusetts doesn't have the death penalty.

Perhaps the most troubling thing about the bombings is how two people apparently so disorganized successfully carried out a double bombing..

<comment><USER8> > If that is a WMD then what classification do we give the bombs that level > buildings that have frequently been used in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan?

"Conventional ordnance". Military materiel has long been treated separately from civilian scope though. Just try to buy a gun in Europe if you don't believe me, and then compare and contrast with a German Army armory. Military and civilian are two different worlds.

> The most troubling thing I find about the prosecution is how they listed > damaging interstate trade, presumably to keep the death sentence open.

A Chinese national _died_ due to this. That's not only interstate in scope, it's international in scope. "Damaging interstate trade" is the Feds piling on, they could probably easily come up with 14 other ways to ensure jurisdiction remained at the Federal level if they felt like it. Even as much as buying a pressure cooker online and having it shipped from out-of-state would be sufficient to allow Federal jurisdiction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The only mystifying thing they did is getting up in the morning and decide that they want to kill innocent people. They've done it in a country that gave them citizenship and great possible future. That's the only question we should ask here.

<comment><USER10> _That's the only question we should ask here._

Who made you "the only question we should ask" police?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> None of this is mystifying if you realize one fact; they are idiots.

Also the whole "Numbered List of Things" article format is a cancer on the internet and has been for a long time. It's unworthy of Mother Jones and it's unworthy of this subject.

<comment><USER10> _None of this is mystifying if you realize one fact; they are idiots._

So much hand-waving in here, and I think that in itself tells the biggest story. We don't know if what this was; but IF it was a false flag thingy, it could and would be explained away in the same fashion. When something bad is done and the media rub it in deeply enough, anything you can say about the hated villain will be accepted as long as it makes them look even worse, and makes yourself feel superior. When worse things happen and the crickets chirp, well, let's go ride bikes.

You can rationalize it however you want, you can moderate, flag and pout all you want; you've been trained well, and your comment is projection. You project your own irrelevance.

 _Also the whole "Numbered List of Things" article format is a cancer on the internet and has been for a long time. It's unworthy of Mother Jones and it's unworthy of this subject._

Your response is unworthy of that article _and_ the subject. It's not even a padded list, so wtf do you think you're spouting other than sophistry?

<comment><USER11> Tinfoil hat, condescension and faux intellectualism. Impressive. You should get some kind of award.

<comment><USER10> Sure, why not shoot an own goal instead of addressing any of what I actually _did_ say ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The assumption is that the Mother Jones list is accurate (and other 'official reports' for that matter). I would like to see more people express a broader view about what's possible regarding the Boston circumstances.

I hope that there are people here that do not completely trust law enforcement/FBI and realize that there are shady ties between persons of violent means and the "intelligence" world + power-mad elitists.

I recently found a site called TragedyandHope.net which has some useful info that covers topics from the history of compulsory schooling to "black ops."

These kinds of incidents create a lot of messy unquestioned details that replace knowing with belief, no?

<comment><USER12> Examples of Boston story changes:

[http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/the_changing_facts_in_the_bo...](http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/the_changing_facts_in_the_boston_investigation/)

(Didn't there used to be a comment edit feature?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have a weapon of mass destruction at my home! Just chill guys, I use a pressure cooker to boil potatoes sometimes. Actually I have another one as well, a BB gun. I don't really know which one is the government referring to as a WMD.

<comment><USER14> Military definition is what we think of as WMD. The FBI definition of WMD, though, is any improvised explosive device with more than 1/4 ounce of explosive.

(Used to be able to buy firecrackers stronger than that so it seems like a trivializing definition to me.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> [http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2013/04/the- official-...](http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2013/04/the-official- tsarnaev-story-makes-no-sense/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Obviously they did not care if the got caught or not, similar in a way to Anders Breivik.

<comment><USER17> Oh they did care, that's why they hide and fight back. they are probably just morons filled with hatred and no plan other than "bomb this people". they just assumed that they won't be caught, didn't consider the possibility that they would be identified.

<comment><USER18> Backwards cap? No sunglasses?

<comment><USER17> actually attempt to hide identity in the crowd would look more suspicious. the idea of hiding in the crowd requires to blend in, not look like you are hiding something.

ah, and sorry for the typos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If I could add a 12th item to this list, it would be that one brother accidentally killed the other by running him over with the stolen car while trying to get away.

<comment><USER20> I don't see that as very mystifying. He was escaping in the middle of a death- defying gun battle and staying alive was literally the only thing on his mind. He panicked, and possibly thought his brother was already dead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Difficult subject. But it seems save to suspect that there are "some" inconsistencies in the story.

Debka had another take on the situation:

[http://debka.com/article/22914/The-Tsarnaev-brothers-were- do...](http://debka.com/article/22914/The-Tsarnaev-brothers-were-double- agents-who-decoyed-US-into-terror-trap)

<comment><USER22> So frustrating. When I click te article on my phone, I get redirected to this page <http://app.debka.com/n/> It's going out of its way to make it more difficult to use the site.

<comment><USER23> The old server attention span problem...

<http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/server_attention_span.png></comment></comment></comment>


The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals - <AUTHOR> http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/the-omnivore2019s-delusion-against-the-agri-intellectuals

<comment><USER2> Lets design a system for creating dangerous diseases. We'll take millions of some species we know tend to pass viruses to and from people, say poultry and pigs. Now, lets pack as many together as we possibly can, to the point that they are incredibly stressed, and bonus points if they are physically rubbing against each other all the time, and exposed to each others feces. Now, we need to keep the sick ones alive as long as possible. Let's pump them full of antibiotics, steroids, or whatever else might keep them ambulatory. It's important that any sick animals stay with the rest, so that any disease microbe with a mutation that makes the disease more easily spread are captured in the population, and not left to die in some barn where the animal is quarantined, say. Now, make sure that you keep animals in each location at all times, any gaps where there are no animals in a facility (or merely too few to act as a reservoir) would destroy any mutations unique to that population. Finally, have lots of discrete locations with just a little transfer between them. This way, a successful new disease will have to be virulent enough to invade other locations. This means it will have to either spread to wild birds or other animals, or humans. Finally it also means that it will have the chance to evolve in an environment where the hosts have minimal natural immunity to it. Now you just have to sit back and wait, sooner or later something truly deadly will pop out.

To address the article directly: only factory farming has animals penned so tightly they can't even stand up. Only factory farming makes the air so foul that you still can't breath on the next farm over. Only factory farming requires the air in the barns to be completely turned over every 20 minutes to prevent the animals inside from suffocating on fumes from decomposing feces.

<comment><USER3> Wait... so creating scenarios where the chances of getting diseases is bad? So cities are bad? Hospitals? MRSA was produced in hospitals, are all these ideas bad?

I believe these ideas need work. The human race tends to blindly run in a direction until it hits a wall, so our current wall is bird flu and swine flu. Sure, we need to improve our course of direction or find ways to mitigate against these diseases but I don't think it helps trying to paint this "running" as being more "immoral", "wrong" or "greedy" than it would otherwise be.

<comment><USER4> Really? You think cities are the equivalent of industrial farms? That the human experience is exactly like cows huddled in their own shit with no room to turn around? Like pigs forced into quarters where they go crazy and eat the tails of the pigs in front of them? Really?

<comment><USER3> No. Cities are more likely to breed human disease than lots of small hamlets. That's all.

The argument being put forward is that anything that creates disease is bad. My argument is that a lot of what we already have is built with that trade-off against us.

<comment><USER4> That wasn't the argument at all, that was your absurdist disingenuous interpretation of the argument. _Anything_ that creates disease is a pretty wide net. He was specifically talking about industrial farms, because they seem to have _particularly_ dangerous conditions in this regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are a couple different things going on here.

First, the author makes some good points that without modern tools, some of the things we ask of modern farms would be impossible. There's a limit to the natural productivity of an acre of land.

Second, though, he doesn't address a) whether we're asking too much of one acre of land, or b) whether the things that farmers have to do in order to be productive enough to survive are things that are good to be doing to land, long-term.

The author is essentially saying, "If this is what you ask of me, don't complain about the things I _have_ to do to deliver." And that's a fair point. But let's think more about what we should and shouldn't be asking of him and his land.

Additionally, the author makes a well-argued takedown of some of Michael Pollan's points from _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ , but Joel Salatin — the man whose farming methods are the centerpiece of the book — is conspicuously absent from the critique. Salatin's farm is extremely productive, and sustainably so. That's accomplished by embracing technology (like electric fences that take ten minutes to set up), not by throwing it out and reverting to Depression-era methods.

Salatin's work is more hands-on than that of most farmers, and that's necessary for the type of farm he runs. But it's a model that we'd do well to see spread. (Again, though, it cannot spread widely without some significant changes in what farmers are and are not incentivized to do.)

<comment><USER3> "10 minutes to setup". Is that like creating a stackoverflow clone in a weekend?

<comment><USER5> It's something out of _The Omnivore's Dilemma_. Joel Salatin pens his cows with a mobile electric fence that's basically a wire, a bunch of stakes, and a car battery. Michael Pollan notes that it took him and Salatin ten minutes to set it up or tear it down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These counterpoints to avant-garde farming sensibilities bear repeating: no- till requires herbicides, but is potentially better for the environment than organic; there is not enough animal waste in all the land to fertilize all the crops in the land; monoculture is efficient; etc. Indeed it would be intellectual complacency to demand organic food without acknowledging these things.

On the other hand, there are hints of complacency in the author's arguments as well. To say that gestation crates protect piglets does not end the argument -- it should cause us to ask whether pigs should be bred that are capable of destroying their own young. To say that fossil fuels cause farmland to be more productive does not end the argument either -- it should cause us to ask whether food is too cheap, which is to say, whether all the external costs of food have been adequately priced in. This is not precious high-mindedness, but sober reasoning in light of the fact that catastrophic environmental damage may result from burning fossil fuels, or that serious infectious diseases may result from intensive animal husbandry.

As for farmers being portrayed as helpless, I would say that they largely are. A farmer can hardly avoid the worst practices of the trade if he is to be competitive; which is why it is only reasonable for the worst practices to be prohibited by law, or driven to extinction by public opinion. Certainly law and public opinion can be incredibly ham-fisted, which is why, I suppose, there's value in articles like this.

<comment><USER7> _it should cause us to ask whether food is too cheap, which is to say, whether all the external costs of food have been adequately priced in_

This is spot on. Our economy does not price externalities well.

<comment><USER8> I get what you mean, but if they were priced correctly, they'd just be internalities. Internalities?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Exactly the expected response. Industrial food is cheap if you don't think damaging the earth has a cost. Poor people _need_ their high-fructose corn syrup! (And of course, it's OK for the government to heavily subsidize corn production, but when they try to buy poor people whole meals then we hear the conservatives whine about a "nanny state" and how irresponsible people are. "What a waste of tax dollars!")

He also seems to have missed the part of the book where they compare Earthbound Farms(an organic industrial farm) to conventional farms. Same processes, same labor, same yields. Higher profit margin. The difference is in a few details.

(He also specifically mentions the costs of tilling the field before planting, to kill the weeds. "Omnivore's Dilemma" agrees that this is a bad thing. But it's likely that this has less environmental impact than dumping your herbicides in the river. Industrial organic farming is very far from perfect. But conventional industrial farming is farther.)

Finally, what we see here is another example of the tragedy of the commons in action. Is it okay for one farmer to use lots of chemicals on his crops? Sure, they get diluted heavily by the time they run off into the nearby river. No big deal. But when everyone for thousands of miles around does it, then you have a problem. It's not one person's fault, it's the collective's fault. I don't think the author quite grasps this point.

</comment><comment><USER9> Disclaimer: I grew up on a farm. I have personally slaughtered many animals including pigs, chickens, ducks, and fish. I am now a vegetarian.

This article is 90% correct. I agree on most topics. A main thread here is sustainable farming. However 2 key points are intentionally confusing.

1\. "Paul Johnson is forecasting a move toward vegetarianism. But if we assume, at least for the present, that most of us will continue to eat meat, let me dive in where most fear to tread."

2\. "the amount of nitrogen available naturally would only support a worldwide population of 4 billion souls or so."

Point #1, he quickly skips over possibly the most important way out of this mess. If people were to eat less meat this entire article would be useless. From another article: "According to the journal Soil and Water, one acre of land could produce 50,000 pounds of tomatoes, 40,000 pounds of potatoes, 30,000 pounds of carrots or just 250 pounds of beef."

Point #2, when he says we can only feed 4 billion, he is talking about on a typical meat centered western diet. On a vegetarian diet, this world could feed well 10s of billions.

<comment><USER10> _Point #1, he quickly skips over possibly the most important way out of this mess. If people were to eat less meat this entire article would be useless. From another article: "According to the journal Soil and Water, one acre of land could produce 50,000 pounds of tomatoes, 40,000 pounds of potatoes, 30,000 pounds of carrots or just 250 pounds of beef."_

I often see vegetarians make the argument that one acre of land can grow far more vegetables, but you're completely ignoring the fact that the calorie content of beef is far higher than the calorie content of vegetables. I work out and pay a lot of attention to my diet and calorie intake, and a large portion of my diet consists of vegetables and beans. One of the first things you realize on a diet like this is that you have to eat a _serious_ amount of vegetables to take in the same amount of calories as you get from beef or chicken — like, an entire dinner-plateful with each meal.

100 grams of beef has approximately 330 calories, while the same amount of tomatoes has approximately 18 calories. That works out to about 20 times more calories in beef. So, 250 pounds of beef is actually equivalent to 4,500 pounds of tomatoes. It's still an order of magnitude off, but it's certainly not two orders of magnitude as it would at first seem. (All numbers are approximate as a result of some quick Googling.)

Furthermore, the fact that other useful products are produced from cattle is ignored: leather, gelatin, glue, tallow, bone meal for fertilizer, etc. Literally every part of the cow is used.

<comment><USER9> Its convenient that you picked tomatoes, try potatoes:

colories per gram pototatoes = 0.7866

colories per gram ground beef = 2.59

therefore colories per acre:

potatoes = 31,466

beef = 647.5

There we go, back to 2 orders of magnitude.

<comment><USER10> Sure — does that mean then that you're in favor of halting production of tomatoes? Potatoes are a more efficient use of the land, after all.

<comment><USER9> Nope... if we all give up meat, there will be so much land, we wont even know what to do with it all:

From this aritcle:

[http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/03/vegetarian-diet- coul...](http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/03/vegetarian-diet-could-cut- climate-change-mitigation-costs-by-70-percent.php)

"An area the size of Russia and Canada combined could be freed from use as pasture or cropland used to grow animal feed, if people switched from current levels of meat consumption common in Europe and the United States to a diet based on plant-based protein."

<comment><USER10> OK, then why are you drawing the line arbitrarily between cattle and tomatoes, when both are less efficient than potatoes? I posed that as question, but I don't think there's an answer, because, indeed, I think precisely the problem is that you're making an arbitrary distinction.

My entire point is that, sure, it's less efficient, but that doesn't mean there's not reasons for raising cattle.

<comment><USER9> I think that's a great point.

The world as it is now is tight for resources. We are tight for land, oil, energy, and water. Globally we are trying to use less of all 4 to move towards a sustainable future. Farming uses up quite a large part of all 4 of those (meat farming creates some nasty byproducts along the way as well like water polution, air polution, steroids in our food, etc). We need to make some cut backs right now. Because meat is 10 (sometimes 50) times less effeceint, it's a good candidate for cutbacks. Maybe we can bring it back when we learn how to manage our resources better, but for now, I think it needs to be scaled way back.

You can bet your ass that if producing some vegetable like rice used as many resources as beef did, it would be gone in a heartbeat!

I suppose in the very distant future there could be a day where we have to choose between potatoes and tomatoes... I hope that day never comes.

<comment><USER11> Among nasty byproducts of high density meat production: Multi drug resistant bacteria. New strains of the flu.

I love meat. I'm not giving it up, but I moderate my consumption due, in part, to stuff like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As the son of a dryland wheat farmer, I have been concerned about the amount of fertilizer and pesticides put into the soil.

The author has a very good basic point. Farmers and the agribusiness industry do what they do not because they are evil but because customers want what they produce. This is often overlooked by those of us who criticize the current system of production. So we need to keep in mind that it is a system, and we all consume what this vast system produces, and we don't show any slackening of demand in the stuff we buy, particularly in the corn economy.

But the author's self interest gets a little heated, and he misses many of the points made in Omnivore's Dilemma (note the second word of the title and who it belongs to). There is a lot of exposition about the current financial structure of the industry with subsidies going to the small and huge family farms that actually provide significant benefit to the agribusiness and reduces the flexibility that the farmer might otherwise have regarding what to grow.

It is not useful, in my mind, to demonize the critics of our current way of business, nor is it useful to demonize the industry. This is a pretty complex problem.

As a former farmboy and current tech guy I found Omnivore's Dilemma to be quite evenhanded. This article is not. Both have good points worth contemplation.

Food is a huge ethical dilemma, and things are more interrelated than one might first think.

<comment><USER13> _As a former farmboy and current tech guy I found Omnivore's Dilemma to be quite evenhanded. This article is not. Both have good points worth contemplation._

This often gets lost in the shuffle. Pollan investigated four different modes of food production, and followed the trail from farm to table for each. Certainly, he made some judgments about what he saw (and what he saw affected how he eats), but he gave each mode its due.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I call BS on this guy. Maybe he should contact Snopes about his 'turkeys drowning in the rain' bit:

       http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/turkey.asp

I was ready to accept what this guy was saying until I got to that point. Then I stopped reading. I now view this entire article as a rebellion of agribusiness to the fact that people are starting to become more interested in _how_ their food gets to the table and don't like what they see.

{edit} Even if that story is true, it's a poor justification for caging all animals. "All animals need to be bred in cages and indoors because one particular animal can't survive outdoors." <sarcasm> Seems like sound enough logic to me </sarcasm> {/edit}

<comment><USER7> Thanks for this. I have been trying to say this:

 _I now view this entire article as a rebellion of agribusiness to the fact that people are starting to become more interested in how their food gets to the table and don't like what they see._

in all my comments below, but I couldn't quite put it this eloquently.

I think you are exactly right; he is arguing that his way is best for his fields, his profit margin, and for getting low prices at the store. "The Omnivore's Dilemma" takes a more holistic approach and argues how this approach is worse for the planet as a whole (and how it's just plain wasteful). It's good to hear both sides of the story, but I can't help but feel that the "organic" way is closer to what's best for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the author's point here is that most people just don't want to let go of the _idea_ of the american farmer. Culturally, we want a farmer to be a guy riding a tractor or milking a cow, not some guy who puts animals into boxes and then churns them out factory style. The image of a farm that contains happy animals in a field has been put into all of our heads at a very young age (remember "Old McDonald"?). The practice of industrial farming isn't only distasteful to think about, but it goes against some of our strongest cultural archetypes.

I think that's why the author used so many examples of unpleasant things that he saw as a farmer growing up. He was trying to say that no matter how it's done, farming is a dirty and bloody business. It's nice to picture farming like it was in re-runs of Lassie, but that doesn't mean we should expect him to run his business based on outdated ideas.

I think that this is a case of technology progressing faster than society is comfortable with. Whatever problems are created by industrial farming (environmental damage or harm to the animals) will be corrected by some ambitious startup founders who come up with clever solutions. The idea of industrial farming is relatively new, especially when compared to the thousands of years put into mastering regular farming. I don't think it's wise to stand in the way of progress just because we find certain elements of it to be distasteful (but not harmful).

<comment><USER13> _I think that this is a case of technology progressing faster than society is comfortable with. Whatever problems are created by industrial farming (environmental damage or harm to the animals) will be corrected by some ambitious startup founders who come up with clever solutions._

I find this attitude to be a bit dangerous. Sitting around waiting for some entrepreneur to save the world doesn't strike me as the best solution.

Regarding the bloodiness of farming, Pollan, in _The Omnivore's Dilemma_, doesn't shield the reader from this. In fact, you get a very detailed view of what chicken farming and processing looks like on a sustainable farm. What's most interesting about it is how human Salatin and his family are about it-- they understand they are killing things, and that if they don't give themselves some respite from it, they will change for the worse.

The biggest issue I have with technology and farming (particularly the use of chemicals and hormones, not as much with machinery) is that we don't understand the ramifications of what we are doing yet. Consider that at one point in time, we thought it was smart to spray ourselves with DDT. We may not learn what the various herbicides and antibiotics and hormones are doing to us for years to come. One of Pollan's primary points in his writing is that food is too important for us to hand over to technocrats and big business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Never trust a publisher who is willing to offer direct attack on an authors assertions, but refuses to offer the ability for readers to leave comments on said attack.

The lack of (and then rapid increase in cost of) water will end up pushing this farmer out.

Bottom line, his way of life, like most of America's is becoming increasingly hard to sustain. Attacking deep ecology and the Organic movement is the wrong tack.

<comment><USER7> I think you can write a letter to the editor.

The article has a conservative slant, anyway, which likely means that they don't want to let facts get in the way of their beliefs. I wish it was not this simple, but it seems to be...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a typical analysis of our food system. This would be like if we had a discussion on American energy usage and talked all about how coal verse solar or about unplugging unused devices and nobody said a single thing about oil consumption the entire time. We can dance around with the little stuff all we want but the real issue is meat consumption. Organic farming is plenty sustainable if we all stopped eating meat so much. It uses more land, more food, and is far worse for the environment. If American's stopped eating meat 3 times a day and started eating it once or twice a week, it would solve a lot of problems. I just can't take articles like this seriously because he does nothing to address how poorly the status quo is and the real reasons behind it. You can scream about organic or conventional until you're blue in the face but it won't mean anything if you don't address the _real_ problem.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wish the article had more facts and was more scientific. Blanket assertions like "we'll need 5 billion more cows" do not convince me.

Anybody read about John Jeavon's work? I just bought his book (How to Grow More Vegetables) a couple of days ago. He claims that we have the technology to create self-sustaining farms which can feed a person on about 4000 sqft. Present day agriculture requires between 9000 and 30,000 sqft per person.

So it's entirely unclear to me that industrial agriculture is the only way to feed the planet.

Certainly his method is human-intensive (by design), so you can't have situations like a family of 2 adults farming 1000 acres of corn. So it's unlikely to be adopted in the US.

Web sites: www.growbiointensive.org

And they have a store in Palo Alto: www.bountifulgardens.org

</comment><comment><USER19> Go see Food Inc.

<http://www.foodincmovie.com/>

Unsettling.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why do we see IT people telling farmers how to farm, and not for example farmers teaching programmers to program?

<comment><USER7> Because programming best practices don't really affect farmers, but not having food or a planet to live on does affect programmers.

<comment><USER21> What about GPS and other devices used directly by farmers. Do you have any idea how much hardware/software goes into modern ag equipment?</comment></comment></comment>


Tesla's SA big battery just got 50% bigger after goals thanks to Autobidder - <AUTHOR> https://techau.com.au/teslas-big-battery-in-sa-just-got-50-bigger-after-kicking-goals-thanks-to-autobidder/ <comment><USER2> South Australia participates in Australia's National Energy Market (NEM): [https://aemo.com.au/en/energy- systems/electricity/national-e...](https://aemo.com.au/en/energy- systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/about-the-national- electricity-market-nem)

The market operator, AEMO, hosts a NEM dashboard here - pretty interesting. The first tab of the dashboard is showing the supply and demand in each australian state that participates in the market. It also shows the flow between the different states via interconnectors, highlighting which interconnectors are at capacity. Some of the other tabs show the electricity price & the fuel mix for each state: [https://aemo.com.au/en/energy- systems/electricity/national-e...](https://aemo.com.au/en/energy- systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard- nem)

<comment><USER3> Why is Vic so expensive?

<comment><USER4> It's markedly higher today than usual (unsure why).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> SA = South Australia for the rest of the world.

<comment><USER6> I've seen RSA in hockey and ZA elsewhere but never SA.

<comment><USER7> SA is the norm in Sporting organisations SA Rugby or Cricket SA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Neoen, who owns the Hornsdale Power Reserve, are close finalising testing > that will increase the capacity of the battery from 100MW to 150MW.

Surely the battery capacity is measured in joules or at least megawatt hours, not watts?

<comment><USER9> This is my pet peeve as well. But not being a native English speaker I figured I won't try to lecture people on this - not my language after all.

<comment><USER10> Those are not English units.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> wow, the video says it saved $150M, and they are only investing another $15M? amazing nonetheless, what other car company has market trading software as part of its energy division?

<comment><USER12> Maybe diminishing returns?

<comment><USER13> This is likely it, though I don't know the particulars of this grid. In most grids, there's a small amount of super profitable frequency regulation to be performed. However, there's very limited capacity needed for that. Doing energy arbitrage over time is much more difficult to make profitable, usually. A huge amount of new solar and wind in the US will be built with batteries attached in the next five years, because it's easier to make energy arbitrage work when you're an energy producer (and also make the tax credits for storage work, which typically require that the batter is only charged from zero carbon electricity).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm curious what the lifetime of the batteries is and whether that is being fully incorporated into the evaluation of their cost effectiveness? Of course, given they have already apparently recouped more than their entire cost before even getting fully out of testing phase, it seems like this is not going to be an issue. But I still always do wonder how well this is accounted for with battery tech.

<comment><USER15> 100%. Nobody makes that kind of asset purchase without lifecycle analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Could somebody translate this into English?

> Autobidder is a real-time trading and control platform that provides value- > based asset management and portfolio optimization, enabling owners and > operators to configure operational strategies that maximize revenue based on > their business objectives and risk preferences.

Is it that other power providers can bid for some big-battery output?

<comment><USER17> Autobidder uses ML and other signals to maximize the revenue for asset owners based on electric market data (real time and historical). It has a rough idea when the grid will be demanding power, how fast the storage project can charge and discharge, what the minimum aggregate state of charge should be, etc.

Not affiliated with Tesla except as an investor, have gotten to test drive Autobidder as part of an engineering/procurement/construction storage project.

<comment><USER18> What are the industry incentives for Tesla to do this, instead of utilities?

It just seems kind of weird for Tesla to be saying "We'll sell you this thing you tell me you need" and also "Here's us building a thing to help you tell what you need."

<comment><USER19> > What are the industry incentives for Tesla to do this, instead of utilities?

1\. Most utilities operate power plants, they don't operate power storage facilities. From a capital efficiency standpoint, power plants want to be run all the time, so there's not much that they can do that's particularly fancy.

In contrast, Tesla both buys and sells electricity, so they have the opportunity to arbitrage across time. This is especially true in places where the cost of electricity dips below 0.

2\. There are some utilities that have stored power (e.g. hydro dams). I suspect that they don't employ the engineering talent to pull off something like Autobidder.

<comment><USER20> But those energy providers ("utilities") have the necessary political and budget power to pull off something like Autobidder. In many countries they are controlling local governments. Buying such a logistical solution is peanuts for them, automation is everything.

They are already doing better things than just dumb ML, they have proper models and constraint and planning software.

<comment><USER17> If they had the will and resources to do it, they would've done it. Having been in both engineering first and engineering last orgs, it's clear they cannot execute in this regard (like a tech company).

<comment><USER21> Right. Because these utilities have, as Ruban says, "political and budget power" they are fat and happy, and don't bother with engineering innovation.

<comment><USER18> To be fair, in many cases markets are explicitly set up to preclude innovation.

Monopoly grants with rate caps don't afford much aspirational budget for SV- wage engineers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Jesus... is there any news websites nowadays without hundreds of scripts doing botnet shit in the background?

<comment><USER23> Yes actually, lite.cnn.com.

It looks like the only scripts it loads are scripts to set up a single analytics provider. F5 results in only 6 network requests, the page, the favicon, a stylesheet, two js requests for the previously mentioned analytics provider, and a request for a tracking pixel for the previously mentioned analytics provider.

<comment><USER24> text.npr.org is excellent as well.

<comment><USER25> A true inspiration for web design.

This is what every news site should strive towards. Instead of getting clunkier like Reddit.

<comment><USER26> I'll forever use old.reddit.com

Between that subdomain, RES and a custom userstyle, Reddit is quite a pleasant experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is Autobidder a bug or a feature?

It's something Enron would have done. Get some energy storage, and then use it to speculate in electricity futures. Buy low and charge, and sell high and discharge later. Maybe hold back energy on hot days until the peak is reached, then put it on the market.

A battery operator has more flexibility than most generators - they can sell, but not buy. We'll know this is a problem when Goldman Sachs Renewable Power LLC buys a big battery.

<comment><USER28> It's a feature.

Adding a market participant with the motive and means to buy when the price is low and sell when the price is high reduces the price volatility.

<comment><USER27> That's not clear. California briefly had total deregulation with a power auction ever half hour, and volatility increased so much that there were blackouts. Expecting markets to produce stability is naive. Markets don't typically converge on some equilibrium, they oscillate around it.

<comment><USER29> This is true, and one of the reasons the Telsa battery was able to make so much profit was because it took the peaks off the very high peak prices that other market participants were happy to allow to occur before.

There is a market regulator that stops most of the worst of the manipulation that happened with Enron, but it is an imperfect system.

Large parts of Australia are on a single market, but with separate quasi-state based pricing sections. South Australia had a difficult market, with large amounts of renewable power (mostly wind and roof-top solar) and a single interconnector to coal-fired stations in another state.

That left it very vulnerable to price spikes, especially at ~17:30 during summer when people would get home from office and turn on their air- conditioners. That would case huge price spikes.

The big battery is able to supply enough to get over much of that peak load spike, and an additional gas generation peaker plant along with even more geographically diverse renewables has fixed the rest of that problem. There is a second interstate interconnect being built too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


PigPaxos: Removing the Scalability Bottlenecks in Paxos - <AUTHOR> https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2020/03/pigpaxos-devouring-communication_18.html <comment><USER2> Interesting idea moving the reception of messages to other nodes and getting back smaller set of messages. Not only that but distributing the reception responsibility into relay groups where it can be load balanced among peers.

The leader using relay nodes reminds me of how humans organize into boss and worker groups and the boss shouts out orders to group leaders.

I would like to see how dynamic relay groups will perform under stress and I wonder who would communicate new relay groups. Choice of leader imposing relay group structure or groups self organizing.

<comment><USER3> I use Raft for the same reason I use Ethernet. As my distributed computing teacher said, it's a terrible protocol but the best one we have.

Raft, and I believe Panos, contain some of the 8 Fallacies of Distributed Computing. The most unavoidable being assuming the network is heterogenous. I won't say this keeps me up at night, but it distracts me when I'm eating lunch.

Mere mortals don't have all identical hardware or all equidistant network ping times. And even if you start that way, upgrades will at least temporarily change that dynamic. Geographical redundancy will _really_ change that dynamic. And often it's when we are changing things that they break. So it's all fine until you get new customers and have to upgrade and then all of your new customers get to watch you crash and burn during an upgrade.

Rabbit and Consul reduce this surface area by having two classes of users. I've heard of Raft variants with three (pure consumers, full voting members, and new or returning members who are still catching up) so that you can use machines unprepared for leadership and they will never try to elect themselves leader.

Right now we are still in a weird era where networking is so stupid fast that it's faster to get data from another machine than from your own storage, but that can't last forever. Berkeley did some really crazy things when this inversion of costs happened in the 80's, but by the time I learned about it less than 10 years later, we were already tut tutting about how foolish that was.

I think the big thing I've been waiting for from a relay group type solution is for the participants to discover the network topology and elect a local representative to receive and rebroadcast the inbound stream of updates.

I don't know that you have to funnel all traffic through that intermediary, the way statsd does. Just the cumulative event stream could represent an order of magnitude decrease in packets with only a slight increase in latency.

<comment><USER4> > Raft, and I believe Panos, contain some of the 8 Fallacies of Distributed > Computing. The most unavoidable being assuming the network is heterogenous.

Did you mean homogeneous?

Also, Raft doesn't assume the network is homogeneous.

> I've heard of Raft variants with three (pure consumers, full voting members, > and new or returning members who are still catching up) so that you can use > machines unprepared for leadership and they will never try to elect > themselves leader.

What's the purpose of these non-leader-competent nodes? Is it merely to increase the quorum membership and make consistency more difficult? Why wouldn't you architect this as a client/server relationship?

<comment><USER5> Regarding the other types of nodes, pure consumers are useful as "standby" nodes. They are ready to be swapped in when another host fails, but don't participate in voting until they are swapped in. Swapping them in still requires a quorum of the previous nodes, so they are only useful in small numbers to be swapped in when another node fails. Nodes that are catching up are just a special case of this pure consumer type that shouldn't be promoted to be a full voting member until they are fully caught up.

I'll add another type of node that sometimes comes in handy in certain network topologies. I've typically heard this called a "witness" \- it is a voting member but doesn't store any actual data (just metadata) so it can't be a leader. The typical use for this is if you have a data center cluster with only two DCs.

In that scenario you can make the number of nodes in each DC unbalanced so if the minority DC goes down you still have a quorum. But you can't make it so that if either DC goes down you can still have a quorum. So you add a third DC over a WAN that acts as an arbitrator between the two. Because it's far away, you don't want it to store all the data - keeping it in sync would be expensive. You only need it to know enough metadata to vote correctly.

This obviously changes the failure characteristics quite a bit vs having 3 DCs in the cluster like normal. Such as how many real nodes and witness nodes you can tolerate failing. Latency while one of your your main DCs are down is much higher than normal (because you now need acks from the witnesses) but you at least keep running.

<comment><USER4> Do these alternative topologies still have the proven guarantees that raft has?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [edit: comparative performance to epaxos is noted in OP - a x10 improvement is claimed.]

Egalitarian Paxos (2013): [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/papers/epaxos- sosp2013.pdf](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/papers/epaxos-sosp2013.pdf)

code: [https://github.com/efficient/epaxos](https://github.com/efficient/epaxos)

</comment><comment><USER7> Great idea and great work!

A couple nitpicks: it would be nice to see what happens when the leader fails. Optimizing for the case of a stable leader might have impact on recovery time.

Another important aspect for fault-tolerance is whether you can really survive any minority crashing. For example, if only the strictly necessary number of nodes keep up with the leader, then if most of those crash the system will have a really hard time recovering due to the backlog accumulated at slow nodes which now need to catch up for the system to continue operating.

A performance number that does not take those things into account may not be very realistic. Nevertheless the idea is pretty good.

<comment><USER8> Doesn't Multi-Paxos already have stable leaders? My understanding was that the innovation here was to relay prepare/promise/accept/accepted across a random relay network.

<comment><USER7> Yes, it's a nitpick. The comparison to Multi-Paxos seems fair because it makes similar assumptions (unless re-configuring the relay network after a leader failure is somehow difficult, but I wouldn't expect that).

My point is that it would be nice to benchmark protocols that take into account the issues I brought up, and measure what happens in the worst failure scenarios they are supposed to tolerate. Otherwise we get a false sense of what performance can be achieved if one really cares about fault-tolerance.

This small issue does not diminish the main contribution of the paper in any way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this a similar concept to compartmentalized consensus? [https://mwhittaker.github.io/publications/compartmentalized_...](https://mwhittaker.github.io/publications/compartmentalized_consensus.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> The compartmentalized consensus separates follower as acceptor and replica, and divorces command-log replication from data replication. It also seems to use two acceptors group as in horizontal scaling.

The compartmentalized consensus does not have relay nodes that do relay/aggregation. The idea in PigPaxos is simply that using randomized relay/aggregators have surprising power for vertically scaling Paxos.

The bipartisan Paxos, seems to apply the compartmentalized consensus idea to EPaxos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting that there is another Paxos variant that was published to arxiv around february called BipartisanPaxos [https://mwhittaker.github.io/publications/bipartisan_paxos.p...](https://mwhittaker.github.io/publications/bipartisan_paxos.pdf). It too aims at removing bottlenecks.

<comment><AUTHOR> The compartmentalized consensus separates follower as acceptor and replica, and divorces command-log replication from data replication. It also seems to use two acceptors group as in horizontal scaling.

The compartmentalized consensus does not have relay nodes that do relay/aggregation. The idea in PigPaxos is simply that using randomized relay/aggregators have surprising power for vertically scaling Paxos.

The bipartisan Paxos, seems to apply the compartmentalized consensus idea to EPaxos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You can achieve constant write throughput and read latency and linearly scalable read throughput (at the cost of write latency) with LCR, a criminally unknown uniform total order broadcast protocol.</comment>


MyGengo lands $5.25M for online translation that really works - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2011/09/26/mygengo/

<comment><USER2> Congratulations to the entire myGengo team. Go Global, Go Big or Go Home!</comment>


JavaScript Closures Explained - <AUTHOR> http://lostechies.com/derekgreer/2012/02/17/javascript-closures-explained/ <comment><USER2> For an interactive, less technical explanation, I've found Natjan's JS Lessons to be one of the best examples to pass around:

<http://nathansjslessons.appspot.com/lesson?id=1000></comment>


Malware Injecting BitTorrent Mirrors - <AUTHOR> https://blog.gaborszathmari.me/2015/08/05/malware-injecting-torrent-mirrors/

<comment><USER2> If only there was a way to browse with NoScripts...</comment>


Useful APIs that you probably don't notice - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/n0ruSh/the-art-of-reading/issues/7 <comment><USER2> That's quite a unique way to use github repositories, though very informative!

</comment><comment><USER3> Just wasted 3 seconds of my live reading an article about _Javascript_ APIs.</comment>


What you need to know about A/B testing and conversion optimization (audio) - <AUTHOR> http://techzinglive.com/page/606/98-tz-interview-lance-jones-conversion-optimization

<comment><AUTHOR> Justin (me) and Jason speak with conversion expert Lance Jones about the three fundamental questions that need to be asked to optimize conversion and the tools required to answer those questions.

</comment><comment><USER2> Tech zing is probably one of the best podcasts currently out there. It's a staple in our coworking space.</comment>


[haskell] Why we don't chuck our readers into web apps - <AUTHOR> http://bitemyapp.com/posts/2015-08-23-why-we-dont-chuck-readers-into-web-apps.html <comment><USER2> > The key issue is that upgrading is almost always a manual process that is > likely beyond the skill level of a home-user.

Seriously? Beyond the skill level? All I need to do is login and click the check for updates button, then click apply. In fact, that's as complex as it has ever been for all any of my routers for going on 10-15 years.

IMHO, if a home user can't manage that much, chances are slim they could even drive a browser.

<comment><USER3> Was this intended for another thread?

<comment><USER2> You know, maybe I need a large print edition. I'd blame the mouse, but I know that no one will buy that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ad-hominem It's not any harder to learn than any other language, it just takes a lot longer to learn what you need to know to get anything done in it.</comment>