What Amazon Teaches Us About AI and the "Jobless Future" - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-wtf-economy/do-more-what-amazon-teaches-us-about-ai-and-the-jobless-future-8051b19a66af <comment><USER3> This post neglects a lot of externalities. Before, a single kettle could last generations. I'm personally very disturbed by the idea of more and more people getting many deliveries every single day. That kind of consumption is insanity and just think of the carbon footprint.

They mention clothing too. Clothing is an incredibly harmful industry for the environment and don't forget how it affects workers - be they seamstresses in unsafe factories in Bangladesh or inmates in cotton fields in Louisiana. I don't know why we should be happy how many clothes we can all wear now.

The big problem with automation is the trend of who really benefits most. The point is made in the article that the consumer will experience massive benefits. And this is true if you are a first world professional, like people working in silicon valley. But how much of the new employment in Amazon is in fulfilment centres? Those don't sound like the kinds of jobs we should be happy that automation is creating and they are hardly going to last long either.

I'd love if all vehicles became smart electronic driverless miracle machines and getting blood to dying mothers sounds great. I just can't support these shifts if there isn't also a big change in the class structure of the society that these changes are happening in. The wealth this creates should be less concentrated and the benefits and TRUE costs (incl. Environmental) shared more equally.

<comment><USER4> The kind of people who benefit most from being able to buy cheap clothes made in sweatshops is not Silicon Valley professionals, it's poor people.

Get rid of the unsafe factories and poor people won't be able to afford clothes anymore. And the workers of those unsafe factories won't be able to afford anything.

There is no easy answer.

<comment><USER5> "The kind of people who benefit most from being able to buy cheap clothes made in sweatshops is not Silicon Valley professionals, it's poor people."

The benefit they gain through slightly cheaper clothes is more than offset by the benefits from the jobs they could have had if the manufacture of clothing (like everything else) was not offshored.

The real winner is Stefan Persson and the $28 billion he made from H&M's sweatshop labor arbitrage.

"There is no easy answer."

There is. Make trade deals contingent on good labor and environmental conditions and ruthlessly enforce that. That will bring jobs home and improve working conditions in 3rd world countries.

Then, deal with the fact that that new top is going to cost $4 more and Stefan Persson won't be quite so spectacularly wealthy.

<comment><USER6> As long as the people from 3rd world countries can easily relocate to places with better working conditions.

<comment><USER5> To be clear, this usually means poor 3rd world countries pay for the educations of their best and brightest and then see no benefit from doing so.

Most people ignore this subsidy from poor countries to rich.

<comment><USER6> I do mean unrestricted. That includes unlimited immigration of unskilled/lower skilled labour as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Amazon's success is remarkable, and yes it is adding jobs at a high rate, both internally and via contractors, third-party sellers, etc.

But the bigger question is whether the Amazon job increases offset the jobs that are lost elsewhere, as retail outlets close, Amazon's direct competitors fail, etc. Amazon and its satellites are growing, but is the job market as a whole?

I don't know the answer, and it might be hard to estimate. But the optimism of the article requires a leap of faith without that information.

<comment><USER8> Amazon is the next iteration of Walmart

<comment><USER9> In what way?

<comment><USER10> If I were to guess: Wal-Mart has a very bad reputation for sucking the wealth out of a community; money spent at a locally-owned store is more likely to circulate in the community, while with Wal-Mart the money's spent once and no one but the Waltons ever sees it again.

Amazon might be a little bit like that: a fountain of wealth for Seattle (and check out real estate prices there if you think that's an exaggeration), but pumping that wealth out of all the rest of the globe.

But I see a weakness in this argument: Wal-Mart mostly displaced existing chain stores, which had similar wealth-pump effects -- and which had much higher prices than Wal-Mart, partially because they wanted higher prices but mostly because they didn't have Wal-Mart's hyper-efficient supply chain. And the old corner groceries and general stores had supply chains that were even worse than the previous generation of chain stores, and therefore even higher prices and even smaller variety...

So: you hear the wealth-pump argument, wealth pumps do sometimes exist, and I'm pretty sure the previous poster was accusing Amazon and Wal-Mart of both being wealth pumps; but I'm not entirely sure that that's what's going on with either business. If it is going on, of course, it's a problem. (Have there been any studies on Wal-Mart's effect on areas where it opens?)

<comment><USER11> > money spent at a locally-owned store is more likely to circulate in the > community

This has always been a silly argument. Locally-owned businesses tend to be in the service industry. Their primary expenses are wages, paid to people living nearby. This is also true of internationally owned service-industry businesses.

Retail businesses tend to sit at the end of a long supply chain. Their primary expenses are the goods they buy from upstream. Local staff are a minor bit of overheard, like the air conditioning or the internet connection for the credit card terminals. This is true whether the retail business is locally or internationally owned.

<comment><USER12> yes, but where do the profits go in each case?

To the local store owner, or to remote owners/shareholders?

The point of the local argument for me is that local owners are more likely to invest in locally owned businesses and create more local owners, whereas remote super-owners are more likely to create remote super-owners who further create more remote super owners, the net effect being that the ownership within the local community over time erodes.

The concrete facts of walmart et al as an example only support this argument..

<comment><USER11> In many lines of business, retailer profit margins are so thin that it doesn't really matter. But let's suppose it does.

Growing up, we had some family friends who were local business owners, albeit in the service industry.

The first place money will go is the local housing market. As a renter, this is incredibly destructive. If shopping at national chains reduces what my competitors can bid, all the more reason to do it.

The next place it'll go is luxury SUVs. As a (sometimes motor)cyclist, it might help me to get more drivers into Volvos with their safety sensors, though I do prefer to share the road with smaller vehicles. Neutral on this one.

Then it'll go to international travel. None of that money is local.

Then it'll go to investment accounts at national brokerages into multinational stocks on New York-based exchanges.

As far as I know, there is no forum where the local computer parts store proprietor and grocer invest in each other. Maybe some local philanthropy - they might be at Rotary together - but most of the philanthropy around me was driven by the handful of national companies headquartered locally.

<comment><USER8> Are your neighbors automatons? Otherwise, the first place the money will go to is the grocer and restaurants. From your description, I'll extrapolate and predict that it goes to some high end, organic food farmer's market.

Next, it'll go to Geetika Miller, formerly known as Karen, who went to India to study and came back as an enlightened yoga instructor :D

Come on, you're being a bit disingenuous. Keeping money local isn't some BS concept that has no history or evidence of success, it's how certain immigrant communities have thrive in a new country. I've seen this personally in the Detroit with the Chaldean (Iraqi Christians) community but you can also look at the history of Jewish immigrants in the US and Chinese emigrants anywhere really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> O'Reilly confuses Amazon as a single example with the industry in general.

It's the same broken argument that people make all the time by pointing to som factory that automated and had to hire new people.

What people tend to forget here is by automating that company is gaining and advantage over others who aren't and will ultimately drive them out of business. So while the individual company might see an increase in jobs the industry in general doesn't necessarily.

It's way more complex than even this as you can be in industries with growing demand ex due to globalization.

But at the end of the day the same rule always apply. Companies in order to survive need to be more productive than their competitors and so technology will be used more and more until there isn't any jobs or only very few left.

Also another thing that is often missed by those who claim new jobs will be created. Even if that was the case those jobs will be easier and easier to fill by AI. So it's not an argument for anything.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a very pernicious take on AI (and Amazon's usage of said AI). Amazon has hired 300000 professionals wohoo! more jobs!

All those jobs are poorly paid, very labour intensive have almost zero benefits and usually not full time. If AI is giving us these kinds of jobs for the many for the instant gratification of consumers then we are worse off NOT better-off.

Face it - the Advent of better AI (Robots, Driverless cars, etc) will lead to massive job losses and disruption of (currently) well paying jobs - <USER2> technology is advancing much faster than the ability of "blue collar" worker to retrain or adapt.

It is indeed a "massive failure of imagination" \- of the author to understand the real world limitations.

<comment><USER15> If folks are interested in this subject, Kurzgesagt recently put out a great video on this subject: [https://youtu.be/WSKi8HfcxEk](https://youtu.be/WSKi8HfcxEk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article follows a similar line of reasoning as people who go "What global warming, look how cold it is outside!".

The author brushes off the fact that Amazon has caused (is causing) countless retail shops to go out of business all over the world.

As others have noted, 'just-in-time' consumption is insanity - cities are becoming perfectly oiled consumption and garbage making machines. I suspect (just speculating, no numbers) that this efficiency has a huge impact on climate. Similar to cars being 20% more efficient, but increasing number of cars by 50%.

As for the jobs, I wonder how many kids dream of working at Amazon fulfillment centers when they grow up... meaning that it sounds like a pretty bad job - people used as transportation units by the algorithms.

So not everything is rosy and shiny with Amazon. I try to avoid binging on it as much as possible. I applaud the efficiency and the 'You want it, you've got it', but I think the cost of that is hidden somewhere else and we all collectively pay it.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's actually interesting to think about Amazon's platforms. Most often what they do, is take some part of a startup or small business, a part that is relatively safe[1], over the long term for that business, and often serves as a part of moat, and let people do it on their platform, and leaving that business with a much higher ratio of risky-tasks/stable-tasks.

The end result is that businesses are becoming much more risky(over the long term), more hit-driven, and much more hollow(job and knowledge wise).

And it doesn't seem like something good for the economy.

[1]For example, printing a shirt(and owning that printing machine). Or installing servers. Or keeping in-touch with customers and branding.

</comment><comment><USER18> > Amazon expects to hire another 100,000 workers in the next eighteen months, > many of them in its fulfillment centers

Those are all extreme low wage jobs. Nobody can expect them to pay any substantial tax. Also jobs like these require little education, trapping children of these workers to do any better than their parents.

</comment><comment><USER19> Jevons Paradox in action: The more efficiently a resource is used , in this case labor, the higher the demand for it will be. This unfortunately is not something your average arm chair economist will figure out intuitively and leads to the same mistakes in analysis being made over and over again.

<comment><USER20> Sure. Example: 'horsepower'. Our transportation uses more horsepower than anyone could possibly have imagined in 1902.

And no actual horses.

This is exactly the same. In the future, the amount of labor that's done will be staggering, unimaginable, a real Jetsons future. …and no human workers, and no humans being paid to do any of it. Not even management. Think about it: should be equally obvious. Labor == horsepower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> ummm...way to ignore all the retail jobs disappearing from e-commerce.

Don't get me wrong companies do a great job of automating things and growing.

And investors do a great job of betting on the things that have the best odds. I don't have a plausible solution. Besides lottery don't have a fair way to invest irrationally.

But, if society doesn't find a way to retrain(invest in) those people that were replaced we lose all the potential they had to offer.

<comment><USER22> Retail jobs are growing, not disappearing, and they're expected to continue to grow.

[https://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/retail-sales- workers.htm](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/retail-sales-workers.htm)

<comment><USER21> Not sure where their going to be working:

[http://clark.com/shopping-retail/major-retailers- closing-201...](http://clark.com/shopping-retail/major-retailers- closing-2017/)

Maybe Amazon's new retail stores.

<comment><USER4> I'm guessing maybe minor retailers? Some small store close to your house/school/office when you can't be bothered to wait for shipping.

<comment><USER20> I would not dare to try and open some small store and gamble on people not wanting to wait for Amazon. If you think that's still something that can be done, try it.

Better still, get a business loan to launch something like that. I'll wait. It's hard to even think of a thing more self-evidently doomed.

<comment><USER4> The last sentence is just not true. More doomed would be to invest a lot in infrastructure and economies of scale and try to beat Amazon at their own game.

So don't do that, open a small convenience store instead. Where else are all those retail jobs coming from? Not a rhetorical question, I really don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This article is misleading and wrong in some of its ideas. Every company wants to employ as little expensive and unreliable-relative-to-a-machine human labor as possible. Trying to cut down costs is in fact not short-sighted or somehow "wrong", it's efficient and great (as long as you're not treating people unethically or polluting the environment, etc.). Amazon is simply growing tremendously quickly...it's not that they're trying to create jobs.

In the past 200 years there's been a tremendous increase in leisure for most people (except perhaps ironically for the best paid but that's a lot by choice), and also there has to date been no end to human desire. It used to take 80% of the labor force just to create food, now it's around 4%. It used to be 150 years ago the average American had 1 pair of paints and 2 shirts. Today the average American has 20 pairs of blue jeans.

What's creating new jobs is not that a company is trying to create jobs but that human desires keep expanding.

<comment><USER24> _In the past 200 years there 's been a tremendous increase in leisure for most people_

My anecdotal observations don't align with that statement, most people I know work more than ever. It's almost madness. I would love to see some hard evidence to suggest otherwise.

While technology is supposed to be making things more efficient (and sure it can do that), it's also making certain things more complex, and I'm not sure most humans have the desire to cope with the complexity very well (nor should they). This can create a time consuming quagmire of technical debt, I deal with it daily.

A simple example of this growing complexity in society is food and beverage packaging. It's become too complex for most people to know how recycle things properly, and it's not really something people go out of their way to understand so it rarely gets done correctly, thus creating new problems.

<comment><USER25> How many people you know are from third world countries?

<comment><USER24> Funny you should ask because I would say, more than you might imagine. I've actually spent time in third world countries volunteering and travelling and made some longer term friends out of it. The biggest problems they face are fallout from mass manufacturing and consumerism (rubbish dumps literally overflowing with western companies mess), deforestation (for palm oil) and climate change.

Apart from being less materially well off, there are a lot of happy people in the third world who seem to be living a way more relaxing lives then people I know in the developed world who are up to there eyeballs in debt and working for high profile tech companies.

But I think people just see what ever they want to see to justify their views and beliefs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The kind of 'jobs' Amazon is creating in fulfillment are exactly the kind of things that we should have robotized out of existence time ago. It is only because we tolerate modern slavery that these still exist. 'Jobs' are not a good thing. People don't need 'jobs', they need a life.

</comment><comment><USER27> > As long as we use the productivity gains from technology to create value for > society, and ensure that value is widely shared so that customers are able > to afford the cornucopia of goods on offer, we will find new ways to put > people to work.

Mmm, I'm sorry but how is the example of Amazon's productivity gains from technology that uses ROBOTS in a lot of places (and not people), putting people to work?

</comment><comment><USER28> Something a tad irksome in the way a corporate behemoth is praised. We all use Amazon, but we all used to shop at Wal-Mart. Difference seems to be everyone always seemed to at least sligtly detest Wal-Mart, but people talk about Amazon with awe and an almost joy-like appreciation.

Some of my friends worked at fulfillment centers, and if most of these 100,000 new hires mentioned are headed to those places, the author fails to mention a very important part: retention. Since he seems very impressed by wheels, one could also compare the fulfillment centers to a gristmill, where people are ground up and discarded. Ever seen an ad for an Amazon fulfillment center hiring event? It's akin to seasonal hiring, where everyone who shows up at event is hired on the spot, knowing a lot of them will quit early on. If a job isn't retained past a certain point, it can't really be seen as a win. It would be interesting to see data about how long the average fulfillment center worker stays in a fulfillment center position.

Many of us have read about how grueling it is to work in an Amazon fulfillment center, and after hearing my friends' stories I agree.

The good thing for Amazon is that the customer never has to see this. They don't have to feel bad seeing what all went into getting them that tea kettle in under 6 hours. Sure, there is a lot of amazing logisitics and technology involved, but there is also a human element that is hidden. In Wal-Mart, you can walk right into a store and see the effects & signs of mass consumption, cheap products, and cheap labor. I think its visibility has driven a lot of the protests and blowback against Wal-Mart, successful or not.

I think not being able to easily see the dark side of Amazon plays into Amazon's customer satisfaction in some ways. You order something and a box arrives. The only interaction you see is the one you made with your computer.

</comment><comment><USER29> He wouldn't have bough the cattle if it wasn't delivered same day?

And as Amazon grows, percentage of tasks done by humans shrinks. In this case and time amazon grows faster enough to employ more, but with a bit less growth and a bit better AI this caculation might be totally different.

(and as others mentioned, one has to look at the net jobs beyond amazon)

</comment><comment><USER30> These arguments come up a lot when discussing this topic and there's some points that don't really hold, usually because the apologist either doesn't know the world of sweatshops or doesn't want to bring it up.

The people working in sweatshops start as young children, often sold by their parents to pay debts. Often pay is withheld and they just become slaves or they are fed just enough to keep their fingers moving and their brains starved. The sweatshop may provide enough income for that child to grow up to produce more children, who then become sweatshop workers themselves, child prostitutes, or slaves, or they may just die on the job.

Nutrition deficiencies and stress get baked into their genetics: congratulations you now have a permanent underclass living worse than some animals, and similar to livestock, crowded populations, poor medical administration, and hellish living conditions result in festering and evolving pathogens that you and Paul Krugman may soon be more interested in. The result of providing just enough for them to survive to make children is not "less poverty", it's more poverty, more death, more child slavery or prostitution, and if emotional arguments don't register with you, exotic pandemics coupled with antibiotic misuse just might.

Secondly, America does not have a clothes shortage. The unfathomable amount of (often expensive) clothing thrown away by both consumers and suppliers in disgusting. Shrewd families from the lower income to the middle class buy used or keep hand-me-downs. Once or twice during move out season on campus my partner and I raid the rich dormitories and find upwards of thousands of dollars worth of designer clothing among other things. Many stores throw their out of season clothing straight into the dump.

The defense of a situation where hundreds of millions live in hell to produce mountains of goods that end in landfills, on an economic argument, is absurd.

<comment><USER31> And yet, the countries which had sweatshops, like China, India, Vietnam, etc. have had huge success in bringing their population out of poverty. The countries which didn't, like most of Africa, did not. Population growth also tends to go down with industrialization, not up. So you are basically completely wrong when you say that sweatshops trap people in poverty.

Speaking of wrong... Suicide rates per capita are also higher in many rich countries than in many poor ones. It's the "per capita" part that people don't understand. Foxconn literally has 1,300,000 employees. At the standard US rate of 13 suicides per 100,000 people per year, we should expect 169 suicides at Foxconn per year. But people see a headline about a dozen suicides at Foxconn and think it's a crisis, because math is hard.

Despite your disgust with the poor, no major pathogen of the last few decades has been traced back to sweatshops. AIDS and Ebola came from people interacting with apes, not from factory workers. Bird Flu came from birds. So I call bullshit on your claims that the poor are breeding super-diseases.

We can all agree that capitalism has some bad aspects and maybe the governments in these countries should be doing more to help. Spreading a lot of ridiculous nonsense about how these people are worse than animals is just that, ridiculous.

<comment><USER8> > . But people see a headline about a dozen suicides at Foxconn and think it's > a crisis, because math is hard.

Although you're being dismissive, your math and intuition is a bit off. Workplace suicides are rare in places like the US and make up approximately 1% of all suicides. That one company has a number of suicides all at one facility known to have poor working conditions does indicate a trend. So, it's not 13 out of 1.3 million, it's 13 out of 230000-450000 (estimates). Not only that, but the company adapted by implementing suicide prevention measures.

You also neglect to mention that around 150 people at Foxconn threatened to commit mass suicide in protest of the working conditions.

If there were a rash of suicides at Ohio State University and they all were freshmen or transfer students, and they all jumped from buildings, that would indicate an alarming trend, not some statistical anomaly.

Math isn't hard. We would expect the suicides to be more random. Also, and I'm just speculating, it's not crazy to think some others were covered up.

> Spreading a lot of ridiculous nonsense about how these people are worse than > animals is just that, ridiculous.

I'm not the OP and that is a bad comparison. Treated worse than dogs is perhaps a better one.

> So I call bullshit on your claims that the poor are breeding super-diseases.

I wouldn't call it complete bullshit. Poor people in India who bathe in the open sewer known as Ganges, one of the most if not the most heavily polluted waterways, is a recipe for breeding a super disease. Though, this is caused by lack of education, it is not entirely, completely disconnected from poor wages.

> We can all agree that capitalism has some bad aspects and maybe the > governments in these countries should be doing more to help.

Yes, we agree. We tolerate the profit off of human misery and suffering. Progress has almost always been driven by misery and suffering. And we are all responsible for it.

<comment><USER32> > Workplace suicides are rare in places like the US and make up approximately > 1% of all suicides.

This might be true, but Foxconn employees mostly live at their workplace, so all suicides of Foxconn employees are technically «workplace suicides». That doesn't really tell us a whole lot though.

<comment><USER8> I think only 25% live in dormitories where the suicides took place. I seriously have doubts that Foxconn/China aren't playing down and under- reporting this. Also, as mentioned, the company enacted a sweeping suicide prevention program, including taking measures such as installing nets in places to prevent jumpers from killing themselves.

<comment><USER4> How is that a bad thing? Most people who attempt suicide and survive say they regret the attempt.

In the US it's not fashionable to kill yourself at work, but people jump from bridges a lot, so lots of bridges have safety nets. They don't just delay suicides, they outright save lives.

<comment><USER8> It's not a bad thing at all. I'm sorry if I gave that impression, but it's another reason why simply looking at 13 out of 1 million as the suicide rate isn't quite right</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious 'Insurance' File - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/wikileaks-insurance-file/

<comment><USER2> It feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part of a character in a spy novel. Big encrypted files called Insurance, twittering about being followed by government agents, sensationalizing the things they post...

I think they have good reasons for what they're doing (or at least good intentions), and I do like the concept behind WikiLeaks.

I just think they're getting a bit caught up in the whole drama/mystique, and their credibility and ethical standing is suffering as a result, which could be dangerous for the "open leak repository" movement.

<comment><USER3> A couple of years ago Julian and his colleagues released information that swung the national election in Kenya. This must have gotten the attention of every government with something to hide (all of them). Since then, he claims to have released more confidential information than the rest of the worldwide media. Combined. The stakes are enormous. And the reality is that that puts a target on your back.

Go Julian, go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is anyone else getting just a little bit sick of WikiLeaks? The basic concept of providing transparency is good, but I think they are taking things way too far.

I hadn't even thought of the issue of the Taliban being able to read the records themselves to find out who the informants are.

Just because something is a secret doesn't mean it has to be exposed, and I think that is the fundamental problem with Wikileaks. Some things do more harm out in the open than they would locked away.

<comment><USER3> What Julian appears to me to be trying to do is to reduce the ability of large bureaucratic militarized organizations to dominate innocent individuals.

Secrets exist for many purposes, but their primary impact on history is to permit groups of people to organize in order to persecute other less organized groups of people. Ultimately, it was the combination of industrialization and secrets that made it possible for nation states to directly the cause the death of 160 million people in the 20th century. In these situations, the ability of individuals to influence the course of events is essentially nil. That's why you and I have not stopped the millions of murders in Darfur, the same as our parents did not stop them in Rwanda 17 years ago, and so on.

In this context, it really is not reasonable to argue that we would all be much safer if nobody was revealing the secrets of those who have too many secrets.

<comment><USER5> Sixty to seventy years ago, the following information was kept secret by Western governments:

-How to build an atom bomb

-How to build effective radar systems to detect incoming bombers

-The fact that German and Japanese encryption codes had been compromised

-The US Navy's awareness of Japan's intention to attack Midway Island

-The fact that Patton was actually removed from command, and that his travels around Italy and north Africa were a ruse to misdirect German defenses away from Normandy

Need I go on? If some idealist decided to leak these secrets, a lot _more_ innocent individuals would be dominated by certain nation states. State secrets are no different from any other power of the state--they can be used for good or for ill, and it's careful to ensure they're used for good, but it's foolish and suicidal to try and keep them from being used at all.

<comment><USER6> Both Ellsberg and Assange have claimed that they do believe that there are legitimate secrets (e.g., cyphers, nuclear technology, and the like). Your argument is based on the assumption that WL sees all secrets as being born equal, which is utter nonsense. Do you honestly believe that:

\- the Afghan war diaries contain secrets of the same magnitude as, say, U.S. radar tech 70 years ago?

\- Pakistan does not know that the U.S. knows that elements of the Pakistani intelligence are collaborating with the Taliban? (of course they are, they know the Taliban will most likely win, and they want to ensure tranquility after the U.S. gets tired, declares "victory", and leaves)

\- the enemy does not know it's using heat-seeking missiles against U.S. choppers?

\- the enemy does not know the attacks on U.S. forces? They were the ones who carried the attacks out!

Think about it. The release of the documents contains very little the enemy does not know about. Therefore, your entire argument is invalidated. Apples and oranges. The secrets you alluded to do compromise national security. The secrets exposed last weekend by WL only compromise the politicians who lied to the world about how the war was going in order to avoid losing popular support.

<comment><USER7> _the release of the documents contains very little the enemy does not know about_

They didn't know about this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1560565>

<comment><USER6> The burden of proof lies on the accuser's shoulders. How do you know it's not disinformation? From now on, the Pentagon will blame WikiLeaks for every civilian death. WikiLeaks had no incentive to put innocents at risk, but the Pentagon has all the incentives to discredit WikiLeaks.

<comment><USER8> While it may be true that WikiLeaks had no incentive to put innocents at risk, it's also beside the point. It's entirely reasonable to believe that laziness/stupidity/lack of resources caused them to leak informants names even if that wasn't their intention.

<comment><USER9> I accept the concept that Wikileaks puts informants at additional risk. I also accept that the government is lying through their teeth about the activities on the ground in Afghanistan.

Is it more important for a the taxpaying population to be informed of what the military is doing in their name? Or is it more important to hide all information that may have any connection to the activities of informants?

I would suggest, that as an informant you make a direct choice to act, which effectively stakes your claim to a large majority of the repercussions. No such choice is offered to the public, and even if it were, a large heterogeneous group of people cannot be saddled with the same responsibility that an individual chooses for them self.

Additionally, any government that hides non national security type information from their population, puts itself at risk by allowing it's informants to be possibly exposed by leaks. If it wanted to provide protection from possibly damaging leaks, thus ensuring the anonymity of it's informants, it would provide a robust channel of accurate information to the public. Such information would greatly reduce the perceived need for leaks, hold the government and military more accountable, better serve the public good, and provide additional protection for informants.

<comment><USER7> _effectively stakes your claim to a large majority of the repercussions_

So what are you saying, that if Wikileaks got access to the data of the Witness Protection Programme in the US it should publicize that too? Because all government coverups are bad?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Mullen was even more direct and said that WikiLeaks "might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier"_

Oh, and the government doesn't have that blood on their hands already? Brings to mind something about a pot and a kettle.

</comment><comment><USER11> By my understanding there are around 12401769434657526912139264 possibilities, therefore to calculate the time taken in days to brute force a password would be the application of the following formula:

      t = n / m / 86400 / P

      n: search space (no of possible passwords)
      m: amount of random passwords that can be tested a second
      86400: 60*60*24 (converts units to days)
      P: parallelism (number of crackers)

Let

      n = 12401769434657526912139264
      m = 100
      P = 1,000,000

It would only take 143 days to be successful. Is this correct? Second question, how do we carve up the search space and distribute this to the internet?

 _Edit:_ n is generated by limiting the key to be a composition of alphanumeric and related characters. Could be wrong.

<comment><USER12> According to Schneier[1] n should be closer to ~2600000000000000000000000000000000000000. For each single available core, m would be smaller, say 20 wouldn't it? On the other side, consider 8 or more cores a box for the NSA by 500,000 boxes (wildly conservative guess??) for about P = 4,000,000??

NSA probably has much more compute power than this, though: " _With supercomputers measured by the acre_ and estimated $70 million annual electricity bills for its headquarters, the agency has begun browning out, which is the reason for locating its new data centers in Utah and Texas."[2]

1 - [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/new_attack_on_...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/new_attack_on_a.html) 2 - [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/10/james_bamford_...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/10/james_bamford_o.html)

<comment><USER11> Yeah n would be bigger, but if you limit the key to a composition of characters (alphabet, letters, funky characters %^&*, etc), would that drastically reduce the search space?

<comment><USER12> Oh good point. Would it then be 95 printable ASCII characters by 32 (for the effective key size in bytes)? If so, that gives a laughably large number:

1937114844585011541643853683619338993862294591963291168212890625

Another question, and I'm way over my head here (also time for bed), but considering this snippet below, is it possible the NSA or another group would have an undiscovered attack against it?

"NSA was embroiled in some minor controversy concerning its involvement in the creation of the Data Encryption Standard (DES), a standard and public block cipher algorithm used by the U.S. government and banking community. During the development of DES by IBM in the 1970s, NSA recommended changes to some details of the design. There was suspicion that these changes had weakened the algorithm sufficiently to enable the agency to eavesdrop if required, including speculation that a critical component—the so-called S-boxes—had been altered to insert a "backdoor" and that the reduction in key length might have made it feasible for NSA to discover DES keys using massive computing power. It has since been observed that the S-boxes in DES are particularly resilient against differential cryptanalysis, a technique which was not publicly discovered until the late 1980s, but which was known to the IBM DES team. The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reviewed NSA's involvement, and concluded that while the agency had provided some assistance, it had not tampered with the design.[11][12] In late 2009 NSA declassified information stating that NSA worked closely with IBM to strengthen the algorithm against all except brute force attacks and to strengthen substitution tables, called S-boxes. Conversely, NSA tried to convince IBM to reduce the length of the key from 64 to 48 bits. Ultimately they compromised on a 56-bit key.[13]"

Source: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency>

<comment><USER13> I don't think it matters whether the NSA can decrypt it. The 'insurance' is a contingency for releasing information to the general public and mainstream media; there is almost surely nothing of value in it as a weapon against Wikileaks. Any organization or group which will decrypt it but not release it doesn't count.

Random bloggers or citizens, on the other hand, might release it if they decrypted it - but this seems secure against them.

<comment><USER12> No doubt, I'm sure there's something quite damaging to war effort or administration in that archive. My interest in the NSA angle was only due to the technical side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hmm posted this earlier and it got no love. :(

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1562651>

<comment><USER14> haha, and the poster of _this_ one is "mixmax"

Talk about a coincidence ( _or is it??!?_ ).

<comment><USER12> A conspiracy in a thread about conspiracies - I'm hooked. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> it's probably just a video of the wikileaks staff offering the person a job.

</comment><comment><USER16> All institutions are corrupt.</comment>


Inside of a Tractor Cab [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dQItxc5zto <comment><USER2> Hey, I worked on the touchscreen at the end of the armrest. Internally at John Deere it was called GSix (6th generation). Built with Qt, WindRiver Linux, ran on a custom board (that 1"\+ thick display is _just_ the monitor), resistive touch screen, speaks CAN/j1939/etc. One of the things it talked to was a buggy Bosch radio over a home-grown protocol that didn't actually expose the radio's state, so the display was forced to make educated guesses. This was a huge pain, especially WRT bluetooth pairing (at one point we had an error screen that told the user to just power cycle the radio because the display has already tried everything we could think of to get the radio back into a good state).

The contractors for whom I originally took over apparently had a contract to write unit tests, probably for a certain amount of test coverage or something. There was a bunch of dead code buried that was only executed by the tests, apparently to bump up their unit test coverage. This was one of many such horrors. We ultimately told management that it was cheaper to rewrite the thing than it was to fix their backlog of "must have" bugfixes, and it was a huge success. Still didn't fix the radio issues, however.

<comment><USER3> I've done a few projects interfacing embedded devices, and the "I must guess at the device's state because the manufacturer didn't think communicating that was important" scenario fills me with sadness and rage. I'd love to slap around every developer who thought that making such a device was a good idea.

<comment><USER4> Hopefully if you ever end up working on a device with firmware I've written, you'll end up pleasantly surprised. I've worked all over up and down the hardware/software stack from mobile UI down to gate-level design, and one of the biggest principles I've picked up over the years is that observability is absolutely a hard requirement. I've felt your pain myself and refuse to design systems that inflict that pain on others :)

<comment><USER5> You're a gem in the embedded world of almost pure coal and dirt mixture.

I also want to stab embedded developers with a pin header if they ever try to use a touch screen. About the _only_ place a touch screen makes sense and is provably better is your phone. Any other application of a touch screen needs to be eradicated from this planet.

<comment><USER6> Off the top of my head, systems where a touchscreen is probably better than other input:

\- Ticket machines

\- Food machines

\- Informational kiosks

\- Border control machines

Basically whenever you have a public-facing system that's designed to be used for a short period of time, with relatively simple input.

Touchscreens are more accessible than mouse/keyboards, because many people genuinely don't use mouse and keyboards at all. Furthermore, it's a lot easier to keep a touchscreen clean than a mouse and keyboard!

<comment><USER5> I totally disagree - for simple actions there is no need for a touchscreen. Just put a button and a label. And LED to confirm the action, buzzer if sound is needed. That is all you need.

The only advantage of a touchscreen is surprisingly not the ability to touch, but the ability to reconfigure the input interface through software. When you don't need to reconfigure things, encoders, toggles, push buttons, rotary switches, etc. are far superior (with some downsides - cost, reliability).

<comment><USER6> > for simple actions there is no need for a touchscreen.

Ok, here's a simple action, that's often solved by touchscreens - Choose a destination from a ticket machine. Let's start with the button-first approach. Here's what the London Underground ticket machines used to look like:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B96DRJQIIAE_y1n?format=jpg&name=...](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B96DRJQIIAE_y1n?format=jpg&name=small)

Impossible to sort, filter, search, translate, display updates...

Possibly very efficient for people who have memorized the exact locations of their stations. At least, until they have to lookup a new destination.

Virtually unusable for:

* Anyone looking for a new destination (huge search time)

* First time users (huge search time)

* Non-English speakers (Instructions are in English)

And it's:

* Terrifying

* Expensive to design/build

* Expensive to maintain

* Expensive to update

Compare that to the modern interface, and I know which I'd rather use:

[https://cromwell-intl.com/travel/uk/london- underground/pictu...](https://cromwell-intl.com/travel/uk/london- underground/pictures/tube-2014-04-090911.jpg)

Genuine question - Why do you think so many systems like these touchscreens?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> People in Ag love to say that they "built the first self driving vehicles". The auto steers were cutting edge and have been around since the 80s. Those cabs are also air conditioned and usually have a nice comfy leather seat. Once it's all dialed in it's monitoring the screens and browsing HN. A lot of you could be farmers!! /s

<comment><USER8> Worked my way through college in Ag during 70's and early 80's, before self driving anything. I can tell you from experience it's easy to be lulled into a sense of complacency by the boredom. I'm sure the human is still there because things can go wrong in a hurry, and when they do go wrong with a piece of equipment that powerful they go wrong in a big way.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, complacency and heavy machinery are a really bad combination.

Even a smaller CUT can do an incredible amount of damage in a short period of time.

<comment><USER10> How did they solve this for the aviation industry? IIRC they've had autopilot for decades as well. The aviation industry seems (appearances anyway) a lot more diligent and disciplined for things like that, I mean for one they have at least two pilots to monitor things.

<comment><USER11> Considering what happened to AF447, "solved" is perhaps not 100% accurate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Classified Ad Real Soon Now: Farmers wanted, remote ok.

We are approaching the point at which people who like to play farming simulators can be charged a fee for the privilege of actually farming. Using the same app.

Even Tom Sawyer didn't dare to _charge_ Ben Rogers to whitewash Aunt Polly's fence.

<comment><USER10> I think a lot of people wouldn't mind a remote operator job, but it would have to be safe - in the case of tractor driving, you need to look out for other people and nature itself. Over here in the Netherlands anyway, in the US it seems like fields are a lot bigger and more mechanized.

But yeah, what do you do if you have a breakdown or an issue in the machine (like a rock stuck somewhere) that needs fixing? I guess if you look at US large-scale operations (five combines next to one another) you could have one maintenance guy / foreman with five remote operators?

I do think we'll see more of that. I mean there's the jobs depicted on TV (so I don't know if this is actually a thing) of people looking at security cameras, that can be done from home I think. Plenty of FNAF fans that have done that for ages.

But it has to be secure. I mean another remote operator job I can think of is in factories and power plants, but that's really not something you want to be doable over the internet. Even without internet, stuxnet (?) proved you can cause damage in that kind of systems.

<comment><USER13> US large scale is not large in general. Ukraine (or maybe Kazakhstan) are much bigger (the old collective farms from the soviet union, the collective broke up but not the farm). Brazil and Australia both tend to much larger farms than the US as well (but not on the scale of Ukraine). It will be interesting to see what happens in Africa - there are signs that continent is modernizing.

Of course if you are in western Europe US farms are big, but there is more to the world than Europe and the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> At first I thought this was a Tractor Cab in the sense of a Tractor Trailer and I got excited...

But, still similar enough. I run product for a Telematics Platform company that sells into the large enterprise fleets. Have spent a lot of time in cabs of trucks learning about what driver's need and trying to "feel the pains" of being a commercial driver. It's a rough and tough environment, though the new vehicles are pretty damn nice.

Building software systems for things that move and can't really afford any downtime is a great set of challenges that I never would have expected to enjoy. Much less trying to shift paradigms in a legacy-laden industry away from "boxes of software" to a true development platform.

<comment><USER15> I've worked on software projects for safety environments - SIL-4 - as well as telematics, and I share your pain.

But it's always amusing how far telematics folks will go to avoid certification for SIL-4. The whole telematics industry should just bite the bullet and catch up with, for example, the decades of experience the rail transportation guys have in making all those pieces fit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Logitech has controllers: [https://www.logitechg.com/en- us/products/farm.html](https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/products/farm.html)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx3A-zDRTFQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx3A-zDRTFQ)

<comment><USER17> That controller looks like it would be a lot of fun with Kerbal Space Program.

<comment><USER18> You said this and I got so excited. Controller is on the way lol.

<comment><USER17> Nice! Tell us how it works for you when you get it! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you want a more indepth explanation of what is happening in the cab and in the seed planter, check out Dodge Brothers Farm on youtube. He does a really great job of going through the details.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjVZoniN2no](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjVZoniN2no) \- how a modern corn planter works [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxMcl7ktEP0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxMcl7ktEP0) \- inside the cab of the tractor for a planter

<comment><USER20> He is flying across that field

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Agtech is high tech now, especially for the large agribusiness. Without this tech I would think it would be difficult to feed as many people as we do. Does this mean there needs to be more tech hiring in agribusiness?

<comment><USER10> It wouldn't be more difficult to be honest; you can do the exact same work with low-tech tractors and mechanical implements, you'd just need to hire more workers. And honestly, the US is not lacking in workers at the minute.

But the problem the US has is that they just don't want to pay people a living wage or give them any guarantees. You know a farmer or machine operator in agriculture will have a full lifetime of work ahead of them. But in general, US employer culture does not want to commit to anything, they want to be able to fire a tenth of the workforce if there's a pandemic without any consequences.

err. Ranting but I hope you see my point. Automation isn't necessary to maintain production, it's a means to do the same job with less people.

<comment><USER13> Pay isn't the issue, rural areas have low cost of living in general and the pay is actually pretty good. Not SF tech wages good, but still good considering not much education is required for the labor jobs. (the farmers make a ton of money but that requires good management because the one great year makes up for many years of losses)

The real problem is that it is a job where you are along for hours every day, in a rural area where there aren't many options at the end of the day for fun. Cities have some nice points, most people would like farming for a week and then get bored.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's fascinating how many different screens there are for all the different add ons.

I also like the part where she says, "Dad can sit in the office and monitor my planting from there".

Now even the hard working farmer is working in an office!

<comment><USER22> very cool! my first thought was that it looks way more complicated than a simple joystick/steering control.

<comment><USER23> They drive themselves. Tractors have been using autonomous guidance systems for a long time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah the autonomous driving was the least interesting part to me. It was everything _else_ that was running semi-autonomously that I found fascinating, and the fact that they aren't integrated. That every piece of equipment has it's own screen.

<comment><USER13> Not everything has its own screen. The isobus standard has allowed one screen for years. It is easier to create your own screen than to use it. Also there is a lot to watch and so you sometimes want your own screen anyway just to ensure the important stuff is always in eyesight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> To give you some perspective when I left the fertilizer business here in Central Michigan in 1999 the only monitor in most tractor cabs was the seed monitor. In combines maybe 2-3% of farmers had a yield monitor, probably 2-3X that in places like Illinois or Iowa.

I love it how people say farmers don't use technology!

<comment><USER25> who says that?

<comment><USER24> I've read a lot of press where farmers are given as a prime example of people not using or comfortable with tech. The journalists writing it have no idea of what they're talking about. Yet it has become almost a meme.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm guessing that video is taken in the US since she is planting corn. Here is another video from Southern Saskatchewan. People might be interested in the equipment being used. Mike is quite an character. He works on a big operation, I think over 20k acres. The equipment he is using costs a fair bit of cash. The seeding system (para-link hoe drill) and tractor to pull it likely costs between 500k and 1m CAD. They have multiple units like that.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM5ZBNzvKz4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM5ZBNzvKz4)

The video doesn't show too much of it but Mike's equipment a bunch of technology on it as well. Some of the stuff:

\- auto section control: turns off/on seed & fertilizer automatically to minimize overlaps and prevent skips. On large machines (e.g. 80 ft) the cost of overlap is quite significant. The seed and fertilizer is carried by a pneumatic system and optimally tuning the system is a bit tricky (he shows a bit of that)

\- auto rate control/variable rate control: with variable rate, the field is split into many zones and the applied rate of seed and fertilizer is optimized. That's a whole topic into itself, I won't explain here.

\- population/blockage monitoring: this system monitors seed and fertilizer flow in the pneumatic delivery system and will alert the operator is something is wrong (blocked run, rate to high or low). That's the "Agtron" system he is talking about.

\- I don't know if his para-link drill has it but there is a variable packing system available. That will monitor packer (the wheel behind the seed opener) and adjust packing pressure depending on field conditions. Wet areas of the field will need less down pressure compared to dry areas

\- As is typical these days, GPS mapping, guidance. He has two different screens showing the map. The Deere screen doesn't show the individual on/off sections of the drill and so it shows more overlap. The Topcon screen (comes with drill) shows the sections.

\- The system for controlling the metering on the drill is fairly advanced. For planters, it is typically more advanced yet (corn seed is really expensive and so very precisely metering it and placing it is key). On the Bourgault drill he is using, there is a variable speed hydraulic motor on the metering system with a feedback control loop to control the rate. Early in the video he is calibrating those meters so the system knows the mass-flow feedrate of the meter (e.g. RPM of meter -> lbs/min of material). That feedrate will be converted to a per-unit-area application rate. The variable rate prescription map will provide input to the rate controller.

Just some info in case people are interested. Running a profitable farm is a challenge and most farmers are aggressive in adopting any new technology that will help them get an edge.

<comment><USER4> > Here is another video from Southern Saskatchewan

You know he's from Saskatchewan because he pronounces Bourgault correctly! Are you from around here? I'm in Regina with a family farm about an hour north of here.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, I grew up not far from St. Brieux and the Bourgault plant. My father was one of the first farmers in the area to start using a "new fangled" air seeder system. That was back in the early 1980s. The machines have gotten a lot larger, more complicated and way more expensive since then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seems like a big opportunity for improved operator ergonomics would be some kind of open standard bus used for simple commanding - could be either electrical or software. This way, a set of "soft buttons" could be provided on the wheel or front panel which can be mapped to actions on accessory equipment, so that e.g. starting and stopping the seeder (and perhaps seeing its OK/NG status) could be done without having to reach around to its own controller.

This would be fairly simple to implement using a commodity serial bus if everyone could get together and agree on something, but I don't know if agricultural implements have enough of a vendor lock-in paradigm that e.g. the tractor manufacturer would be discouraged from building features to support third-party implements.

<comment><USER13> There is a problem safety. I work for John deere. We have some products that are not being developed because if they were some remote hacker could open the vavles on the anmoina tanks as the farmer is driving by a school and kill all 60 children out at recess. There are real dangers here, and things are going to get more locked down in the protocol over time to ensure that those scenarios don't happen.

The above is not about third parties. If we conclude we can trust you we will even give you a key to our cryptography. However trust will not be easy to establish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The first self-driving tractors were used in research environments in 1996(!)

[1] Automatic steering of farm vehicles using GPS. [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.2134/1996.precisi...](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.2134/1996.precisionagproc3.c91)

[2] First results in vision-based crop line tracking [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/503895](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/503895)

</comment><comment><USER29> Am I reading this correctly?

A five day old account has a video rocketing past 100k views already?

<comment><USER30> She is a cute girl talking about novel shit (as seen from the majority YouTube audience )

I think it is quite explainable.

<comment><USER31> More importantly she is doing real work. She isn't promoting a brand or developing a line of clothes. If COVID has done anything good it has reminded us what matters. Who cares if you have 10 million followers, if all you "do" is promote brands. At least this lady is making food while getting followers because of her looks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It still surprises me that modern agriculture doesn't seem to track each individual plant.

Surely in todays world, it's very cheap to simply have a bunch of cameras looking down at the plants, and track from each seed, to each plant, to each leaf on the plants, to how many cents that plant earned you.

When you have that kind of tracking, you can do things like "If a plant is within 30mm of a neighbour, we will earn more if we kill one plant and let the other grow. Kill whichever is currently smaller".

Or "if a plant is growing within 2 inches of a rock, give it these extra nutrients".

Treating each plant separately should give much higher yields.

Our current system is equivalent to a human medical system which doesn't inspect each patient individually, but instead just prescribes medications to entire towns!

<comment><USER33> I am pretty sure modern agriculture does a lot of this based on keeping track of everything (what's planted, how much fertilizer, weather, soil conditions, etc). I am not sure the last time you have been on a farm, but setting up a system of static cameras to constantly monitor every individual plant would be very expensive and I am doubtful that it would be any better then what is being done now.

<comment><USER32> By "camera rig", I'm talking twenty cameras spaced at 3 foot intervals. Each camera a basic VGA camera at 30 fps, and all hooked up to a cheap computer with a low range GPU to find plants.

Cameras cost: $1 each ($20). Wiring: $2 each ($40). Computer cost: $120 (inc 24v PSU). GPU cost: $60.

That sort of equipment isn't going to be worth stealing.

<comment><USER10> And what would be the benefit? Financially I mean. What's the return on investment? And how does it apply to the thousands of square miles of farmland?

<comment><USER34> There are precision farming systems that (according to their marketing materials) will allow you to precisely spray fertiliser only at plants, and weedkiller only at weeds. This saves money on chemicals, and helps the environment through reduced run-off.

Of course, adoption isn't universal [1] - a large farm will see a much faster payback time for the same bit of equipment, for example. And many farms will have other priorities for their limited capital; tractor auto-steer is much more popular than precision weed control.

[1] [https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/147418633.pdf](https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/147418633.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Looks like a pretty bad user experience. I understand why you'd want that many screens, so all the data is visible, but they all look like they are built by different companies and with different types of screens and different styles of interface. Surely it must be hard to use?

<comment><USER36> How many different screens does the average startup engineer use? github/lab, CI, CRM, analytics, metrics reports, ad portal, etc.

It's all specialized tools for specialized jobs. Not a farmer, but my understanding is tractor supplies torque for whatever tools are being pulled behind it or attached onto it.

<comment><USER37> > How many different screens does the average startup engineer use? > github/lab, CI, CRM, analytics, metrics reports, ad portal, etc.

It would be nice if these things all piped their data into a single consistent interface.

<comment><USER10> IIRC there are / have been attempts to create unified interfaces, since a lot of the services offer APIs as well, but in practice those unified interfaces will never offer all the functionality and information available - you just can't keep up or manage all of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Soybeans, I think (from the same channel): [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PpJ2Xe_cyeU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PpJ2Xe_cyeU)

So likely growing for animal food.

Or possibly the field is corn, for either animal food or ethanol.

Growing human food can be somewhat less complicated ([https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a_7TRko1VwQ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a_7TRko1VwQ)), but can also be backbreaking ([https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O1aHpSu7F4o](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O1aHpSu7F4o))

</comment><comment><USER39> Also, Millennial Farmer has similar videos.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp0rRUsMDlJ1meYAQ6_37Dw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp0rRUsMDlJ1meYAQ6_37Dw)

</comment><comment><USER40> My 9yo daughter just came up behind me and asked: "What are you watching? Is that lady 'driving' an airplane?"

<comment><AUTHOR> My five year old walked up and said "hello!" and waved because she assumed I was in a Zoom meeting with the woman in the video.

<comment><USER40> Haha! brilliant =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> "I could teach anybody, even people in this room, to be a farmer. It's a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn."

-Mike Bloomberg

<comment><USER13> At the end of the year you get a gross profit of $0.016. From there you have to buy your seed ($0.04 each at your local hardware store), shovel, watering can...

Those numbers are only semi realistic. Your local hardware store probably only has sweet corn seed (what I priced) which will not yield as much as field corn, but it is worth more if you sell as sweet corn not field corn as most farmers are selling corn. I have no idea how to account for this important factor.

Mike Bloomberg hasn't heard of fertilizer, so I didn't bother pricing that, but to get the yield I quoted every year you need to replace what the corn takes out of the soil and that means fertilizer of some sort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Welker farms has some good videos about the tech of farming.

</comment><comment><USER43> Very different from the last time I operated a planter. I wonder how much the tech cost in the tractor cab, let alone the tractor and planter.

</comment><comment><USER44> Question from not-a-farmer. Is this all corn and/or wheat? What does such tech look like for non-corn/non-wheat related crops?

<comment><USER4> She has another video with soybeans and it's a pretty similar process. She said they adjusted a couple of things but were using the same tractor and seeder.

<comment><USER45> link for her soybean planting video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpJ2Xe_cyeU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpJ2Xe_cyeU)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It seems the job of driving a tractor involves everything but the one thing I would have guessed, actually driving it!</comment>


Show HN: Recursive Recipes – directions to make food from scratch - <AUTHOR> https://recursive.recipes/ <comment><USER2> The classic book "Joy of Cooking" is kind of recursive like this.

If you want to make a Reuben Sandwich, you turn to p. 272, and describes the bread, meat, cheese, and sauerkraut. Then it says to spread it with Russian Dressing and points you at p. 364 for that.

The Russian Dressing recipe includes horseradish and grated onion. It also includes Mayonnaise, and for that it points you at p. 363. Another ingredient for Russian dressing is either Chili Sauce or Catsup, and for each of those it points you to p. 847.

On p. 363, there are several paragraphs about Mayonnaise, and 3 recipes for hand-beaten, mixer, and blender versions.

On p. 847, neither the Chili Sauce nor Tomato Catsup recipes have any sub- recipes, but both of them point you to p. 841 for information about Pickling Equipment and Ingredients and they also both point you to p. 804 for a procedure for sealing sterile jars in boiling water.

The jar-sealing procedure on p. 804 points you to p. 165 for an illustration of a tool for lifting jars out of boiling water.

The pickling section on p. 841 mentions that water should be soft and refers to p. 519, the About Water section under Know Your Ingredients which discusses filtration among other things. It also mentions you should only use pickling or dairy salt, and refers you to About Salt on p. 568. And finally it mentions when pickling, you might want to used the Spiced Vinegar recipe on p. 527.

<comment><USER3> An Australian equivalent is Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion. Almost every ingredient has a "goes with" list that makes it a great starting point when you have something to use up or that you've picked in the garden.

[https://www.stephaniealexander.com.au/books/the- cook%E2%80%9...](https://www.stephaniealexander.com.au/books/the- cook%E2%80%99s-companion/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love this: [https://recursive.recipes/recipe/refried- beans?amount=10&tim...](https://recursive.recipes/recipe/refried- beans?amount=10&timelimit=1&ingredientsToBuild=refried%20beans,onion,salt,butter,beans,dried%20beans,cow%20milk)

Totally absurd, but fun to play with.

I do find sometimes it says it'll be cheaper to buy it, but in several cases I'm positive it's not, or the price of the product in store vs from the recipe isn't directly comparable.

The example of refried beans is complicated. If you buy a can of refried beans, it won't be as high quality as the recipe provided. The recipe is rich in butter and onions. A can will likely have lard or vegetable oil in it, and very little onion (likely powdered). It also claims it's cheaper to buy the can, but it's because initially the recipe suggests buying cans of beans. If you use dried beans, you're probably spending about the same amount but getting far nicer refried beans.

Anyway, it's a fun project, and the things I noticed aren't really problems and are easy enough to negotiate in the interface. I had fun with it.

<comment><USER5> What about raising the cow from a calf, though?

<comment><USER6> Most constituent lard is made from a pig. And pigs (while quite social) take pretty good care of themselves even if simply/only fed and watered. Depending on your environment, that might well be done by letting the pig go wander about and find feed and water.

<comment><USER5> What does that have to do with the time required?

Also, pretty sure we don't typically get milk from pigs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I made this for fun with React and Go, its open-source if you want to hack it yourself. [1]

I was inspired by the book "Make the Bread, Buy the Butter" by Jennifer Reese. I tried to continue the idea to see how much money+time it costs to continually substitute an ingredient for the recipe of that ingredient.

Sorry for the ads - I use them to make back the $ spent on the domain :). I just toned them down.

Please let me know if there are any other suggestions!

[1]: [https://github.com/schollz/recursive- recipes](https://github.com/schollz/recursive-recipes)

<comment><USER7> Fun, and the absurdity puts things in perspective.

Minor suggestions:

* Allow currency change (e.g. EUR instead of USD)

* Use + and - signs or green and red colors when hovering over the ingredients to show if money can be saved or not. Also put the amount of time in a different font size or color. (Site is very minimalist though which is great).

* Explain sources for price calculation (I'm skeptic about some, and curious who its based for).

<comment><AUTHOR> Great suggestions. There are actually sources for the price calculations but I wasn't sure yet how to display them, or if they were wanted. If you want them then someone else probably does too so I can add that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wife: Can you bring me a glass of water ? Me: sure. One hour later ... Wife: What took you so long ? Me: I couldn't fill the glass because there where dishes, and the dishing machine was full, so I had to empty it, then I couldn't find the dishing tables, so I put the kitchen cabinet's in order, but accidentally spilled some flour, so I cleaned the floor and worktop while I where at it. Next day at work: Boss: Can you implement feature X ? Me: Sure ...

<comment> angus-prune Malcolm in the middle did this very well as oen of their pre-titles bits - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0)

<comment><USER9> I refer to this video sooo many times a year everytime someone tries to understand why some "simple" tasks take so long.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very nice! Suggestions: don't break the back-button; and make it somehow clearer that one can expand the recipes. As others I was also confused about "buy cookies in the store".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I realized I was pushing the history on every React render(). I've fixed that now.

The "buy cookies in the store" basically means that there is not enough time to make them so you should buy them (its a bit tongue in cheek). You can increase the time by using the slider or clicking on the cookies so you can get the actual directions. Also, if you hover your mouse over the "Chocolate Chip Cookies" ingredient you can see how much money you save (or lose!) by making them from scratch.

<comment><USER11> Going to the store takes time as well though. Best thing would be to already have the cookies in the cupboard.

<comment><USER7> Yep, it does take time to go to the store (and heck, which store?). Heck, it might even cost energy (ie. kJ) too. However one can perhaps also order online and then it only costs the time to order the product plus the waiting time. Which is idle time, not active time. There's a nuance difference between that. Consider a gazpacho. It requires the soup to be served cold, so after it is basically prepared you need to put it in the freezer. Or consider you marinade something such as tempeh which you stir fry afterwards (the latter of which is active time, the former idle time). Whereas if you're an hour in the kitchen actively busy preparing things, that's active time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The chicken and the egg dependencies should result in an infinite loop

<comment><USER13> This absolutely made my day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" Carl Sagan (as in the Cosmos remix [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc))

</comment><comment><USER15> For making the vegetables, you should have seeds as an ingredient. Then to make seeds you need the vegetables, so you could have a cycle in your dependency graph.

Also you should keep adding recipes for seawater and soil etc until you have a recipe for creating the universe. And use an apple pie as your example recipe.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha. Yeah this is the chicken-and-egg problem. There are no cycles here since I'm working from the basis of primordial practical ingredients, in that each recipe should ideally boil down to just sun, soil, water, and seeds (be they fungi spores, cow embryo, chicken eggs, vegetable seeds, etc.). It would be neat to expand this to the universe though :)

<comment><USER16> Except when I click "egg" in the recipe it gives me instructions on how to produces eggs from an egg-laying chicken, then how to produce an egg-laying chicken from a chick... "how to incubate a chick from a fertilized egg" doesn't seem too out of scope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would think the ingredients could be processed in parallel.

For example, the Chocolate Chip Cookies recipes quotes a total of 9 years 29 weeks to make everything, but really the longest lead item is the vanilla beans @ 4 years. So really it's a 4 year process isn't it?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. I made the tool so that you could just make each recipe like you would normally do, doing one step at a time. In reality you would try to multitask, but that makes it more complicated to dictate as directions. At that point, I would actually try to generate a Gantt chart [1] which could make it easier to follow how to make things in parallel.

Also, as a sidenote - each recipe actually has its own "parallel" and "serial" time. The parallel time is independent of quantity, and the serial time is dependent on quantity. For example, growing vanilla beans has a parallel time of four years (each plant will grow simultaneously) and then they have a serial time of ~1/2 hr per plant to harvest.

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

<comment><USER18> Checkout this site for a cool recipe 'chart':

\- [Oven Baked Chicken and Rice - Recipe File - Cooking For Engineers]([http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/81/Oven-Baked- Chic...](http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/81/Oven-Baked-Chicken-and- Rice))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is hysterical!

 _Make the vanilla beans (4 years)

Vanilla grows best in warm temperatures, preferably in the 70's to 90's. Cooler temperatures will slow down the growth. Keep temperatures above 60˙F for the most part. Vanilla orchids benefit from regular applications of fertilizer._

It really is good for a laugh, but it's also an interesting way to visualize just how much goes into something as "simple" as a chocolate chip cookie. It's the labor of many people all around the world to grow the wheat, the vanilla, the cacao, process the cacao, raise the cows, churn the butter, etc.

</comment><comment><USER20> That was fun!

I know I'm nitpicking here but I see that some elements have not been broken down ( ex : cocoa powder in cookies) even on absurdly longer time scale. Regardless, good work.

Intuitively, it can serve as a good resource to understand food composition for cooked items.

<comment><USER21> [https://github.com/schollz/recursive- recipes/blob/master/rec...](https://github.com/schollz/recursive- recipes/blob/master/recipes.toml)

The first person I showed it to asked how to make a cow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I always wanted to have something like this for math proofs. Like, when you're reading a complicated derivation, where the author glosses over the details, you could click on the given step and see why it's true. Then repeat it arbitrarily deep.

</comment><comment><USER23> Off the topic but quite annoying to me: moving the slide creates a bunch of URL histories that break the "back" button.

<comment><USER24> I've noticed this happening more and more with js heavy websites lately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Recipe substitutions would be great so you can have multiple ways of making the same thing. Someone else mentioned seawater and soil substitutions until you have a recipe for the universe. Though there are other ways to also grow food without soil (hydroponics).

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't understand the concept. I go the the recipe for pancakes, and it says the ingredients are pancakes? Is there a joke here I'm missing?

<comment><USER27> That tells you how much it costs to buy pancakes. If you click the pancakes box it'll tell you how much you can save by making them from scratch, and give you instructions.

Some things are cheaper and easier to buy; others are cheaper to make yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> That looks really cool, though there is a small bug.

Before I spend 10 years making the olive oil from scratch, I need to know how to make 'soil'

</comment><comment><USER16> This is awesome and surprisingly deep, clearly a lot of work went into this... I'm not entirely sure to what end, but good job!

</comment><comment><USER29> Baking powder should be separable into an acid and a base. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baking_powder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baking_powder)

</comment><comment><USER30> Salt:

Save $.01 by making salt from scratch in 2 weeks, 10 hours

</comment><comment><USER31> When I hear building from scratch , am reminded of this - How I built a toaster from scratch - [https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toas...](https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toaster_from_scratch)

</comment><comment><USER13> You could never get hired as a chef with this approach.

They would reject you for not using dynamic programming recipes instead.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is rubbish. Most of them just say go buy it. I truer refried beans and an English muffin.

Plus it's a slow, crappy website

<comment><USER33> Have you played with the sliders? I don't think so.

<comment><USER32> Oops, my bad. I still feel like the site could use some work, that graph looks pretty pixelated... Great concept though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is very silly. I like it. I kinda compare this to an XKCD "what if" question about cooking. "What if i dont have eggs, but I have a chicken?" And so on...

</comment><comment><USER35> This is a cool concept but this is so meta - it looks like my browser history recursed on itself lol

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, sorry about that! Didn't mean to subvert everyone's back button. I am just learning React and I think I pushed the history too often in the page.

<comment><USER35> No worries! we're all learning here :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Sorry too many obnoxious ads to stay longer than 5 seconds. Maybe put ads after you have a userbase?

<comment><USER37> I like the name and idea, but I agree that the ads are way too big - especially on mobile.

<comment><USER29> I don't see any ads. I'm using Firefox on my Moto G5+.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Making a chicken from scratch -- hilarious. Where do you source those 'recipes' ?

<comment><AUTHOR> The recipes are pretty generic. The data is actually all in a configuration file on Github. [1] Its organized in terms of "reactions" as in, every recipe is a "product" of some process applied to a set of "reactants". This is useful for reactions that have multiple products.

[1]: [https://github.com/schollz/recursive- recipes/blob/master/rec...](https://github.com/schollz/recursive- recipes/blob/master/recipes.toml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I get a 404 every time I click on one of the recipes.

</comment><comment><USER40> Looks like the site is being hugged to death!

</comment><comment><USER41> Where did you generate the directions from?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a list of recipe "reactions" [1] which is compiled into a giant network of recipes. When a recipe is chosen, the directions are generated recursively from this network.

[1]: [https://github.com/schollz/recursive- recipes/blob/master/rec...](https://github.com/schollz/recursive- recipes/blob/master/recipes.toml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Cool idea, but super frustrating that your site breaks my back button. There's basically never a justification for this.

</comment><comment><USER43> > Make the pancakes > Go and buy it.

Would it be too much to add an actual recipe for the pancakes?

<comment><USER44> Increase the amount of time slider to allow for more ways to make it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Your site is broken, does not work without JS.

<comment><USER29> Show us how to make it work without JavaScript then.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Conjure - A launcher for Android - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iojess.conjure

<comment><USER2> I was waiting for something like this (translate, thought about writing, and then realized someone without 2 kids and a mortgage will beat me to it) after getting the infamous dumb search and being forced to install go launcher / use gensture search. This is actually what I was missing for my galaxy s III to save it from being replaced with an iPhone 5 (ok, google maps is an added argument, but this is was beaten to death already). Thank you, and please say no to any acqui hire attempts from Google (and get a good lawyer in case Apple sue you for violating omni search patents).

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to save you from a switch to iPhone! Yeah, the Google offerings just don't do what I want in a launcher app. I feel like I did something right because I ended up using the app all the time; it's pretty much my interface for my phone at this point.

<comment><USER3> Just like ctrl+3 in eclipse, command space in a Mac, win key in Windows. Find stuff by text is by far faster than anything else I can think of

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> No trial? It's not exactly the kind of app I can test in 15 minutes.

<comment><USER5> I would be happy to give it a go as well, a 7 days trial good be a good idea, or a alfred'ish model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This works great. It's fast and responsive. Just one comment/request: Maybe allow the user to position the web searches at the bottom of more relevant items in the result. So for example, if I search gmail, it should be the first item. Right now, the first 4 items are : Search 'gmail' using Browser, Search 'gmail' using Chrome, Search 'gmail' using Dolphin, Search 'gmail' using Firefox. Then gmail shows up. If i had a smaller phone, I'd have to scroll down to see the most relevant item.

<comment><AUTHOR> Conjure actually learns from your selections. So, if you search for gmail & then tap the Gmail app, it should be the first result the next time you make the same search.

<comment><USER7> I think the point is that if those are always the first 4 choices for every new query, it could get annoying quickly. Also, aren't those 4 suggestions redundant? Shouldn't it just have a single "search the web" suggestion, which pops up the standard browser selection dialog and allow the user to choose the default?

<comment><USER8> Exactly, I have about 8 browsers installed and I find this very annoying. Your suggestion fixes this nicely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does this replace the homescreen like Apex Launcher and Nova Launcher? It doesn't seem to be that kind of launcher, from looking at the screenshots.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it doesn't. It's a launcher more in the vein of Alfred for OSX, Gnome-Do for Linux, or Launchy for Windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd love the possibility to add aliases for certain applications.

On my (Danish) Galaxy S3 the calendar is named "S-Planlægger". It would be nice to just be able to type in "cal" for it to start.

Aliases for specific bookmarks would also be nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> I plan on supporting that in the near future. Thanks for checking out the app!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How does this improve on Quickdroid? Can I run scripts with it? tasker integration?

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, I hadn't heard of Quickdroid until now. I just tried it out and it is pretty good, but I still think Conjure is better.

Here are a few things Conjure can do that Quickdroid can't: \- Abbreviations. Searching for "gv" in Conjure produces the google voice app, in Quickdroid nothing \- Toggles, Conjure provides access to a bunch of different toggles \- Volume, Conjure provides access to all the volume controls

There are a few features in Quickdroid that I like which Conjure doesn't have, namely the Quick Launch feature. I'll be adding that ASAP.

<comment><USER11> That's cool. I'll definitely buy your app in the future if you incorporate a Tasker plugin. <http://tasker.dinglisch.net/developers.html>

<comment><USER12> Quickdroid can also search for abbreviations. You just have to enable this in the settings. It is not activated by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> LOL - Was I the only one that read this as Clojure - A Launcher For Android!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A little late, but I made a webpage that goes over the features and provides a pretty comprehensive demo: <http://c.onjure.com></comment>


Hey Twitter, 2007 called. They want their OAuth v1 tokens back - <AUTHOR> https://fusionauth.io/blog/2019/04/02/login-with-twitter-oh-the-humanity <comment><USER2> WHYYYY are they so far behind???</comment>