12 ms·

Threads like these reminds me that HN is an overwhelmingly urban community with almost zero exposure to the agriculture sector

mateo1 4y ago
Not only that, but most of HN, even the professional programmers who've been here for a decade, have absolutely no clue about anything regarding the physical world. Chemical equilibriums, enthalpy of formation, basic irradiance calculations etc. That's perfectly fine, as long as you don't make really bold statements about things you don't understand. This thread reminds me of reddit. A ton of highly upvoted comments that are completely wrong. You don't need to live in the countryside to understand the basic economics surrounding agriculture, and no, "artificial" fertilizers aren't a scam nor a big corp trick. If you think you can replace them with fungi, good luck.
kickout 4y ago
It's ok though. I like these threads on HN. Hopefully helps educate people. People on HN have a lot of skills to offer agriculture they likely aren't even aware of. Every article/discussion helps spread the message, hopefully. ETA: Most people don't understand agriculture or where their food comes from--HN no different. Only small % of people involved in agriculture _directly_
- jiveturkey42 4y ago
  Alternatively, I would argue that much harm has been done to agriculture by the 'information' sector in general. Commoditizing and industrializing food production (a reduction to data and numbers) has caused most of the issues collectively known as the 'modern American diet'
  - kickout 4y ago
    Kind of agree. I don't think ag was malicious in that regard. No different than any business trying to maximize profits by any* means necessary (tm). Just so happens it affects human health.
  - true_religion 4y ago
    Okay, but I don't think anyone of us are part of the information sector that's commoditizing food production. OP said we are unaware of agriculture, and I mostly agree unless you're in an agrarian area or country, you simply won't learn about these things. Additionally what you're talking about sounds more like actions prompted by business 'leaders' and not IT staff making databases.
    - jiveturkey42 4y ago
      I don't blame the individual IT staff or engineers for being foot soldiers of corporate mandate. I do blame the mindset of 'every problem can be solved with enough data'
      - cinntaile 4y ago
        If you have the right data, I don't see why not?
        onemoresoop 4y ago
        In theory yes but.. How do you know when you have the right data and how do you know you're solving the right problem and not causing others? So far confidence and hubris came with myopia.
        cinntaile 4y ago
        That's a problem you have even when not relying on "enough" right data to base your decisions off of. With data you can at least have a more scientific approach to it all. It is correct that science and data gets hijacked for political goals as well, so it's not necessarily a road to success.
        salawat 4y ago
        What heppens when you think you have the right data but don't? How about when everyone else thinks they have the right data, but don't, you do, but can't scale because of institutional inertia and risk? Q.E.D. Farming and logistics are infuriatingly hard problems, toghtly coupled with the fundamental problems of signaling and distributed systems.
- phil21 4y ago
  So far at posting time I don't see a whole lot of signal to gain from the noise here if I were legitimately someone who had zero agriculture experience and was trying to gain understanding. This is the blind leading the blind, and if you gleaned much from the top comments you'd be worse informed than not reading this entire thread. Half of the posts are just political using couched language to pretend they aren't. Ag is definitely one of HNs blind spots, usually the topics are simply amusing (e.g. urban food production startups burning millions of VC) - but this is the first actually "substantive to humanity topic" I've read through and the results are a little scary. And heck, I'm probably contributing to this noise since I also haven't stepped foot on a farm or market garden in well over a decade.
  - tagami 4y ago
    for the hardware/software interest, the signal is precision agriculture. Using sensors and data to optimize yields.
  - kickout 4y ago
    Usually I shill my blog (in bio) where I _hope_ i'm sharing signal. In a weird type of way, there's little we can do immediately. Almost like a solar flare type of event. Ag and food production systems are so massively scaled, even if we WANTED to change everything for the better, it would likely take years, if not decades. Not like software where any bug can be fixed in a week or so. Human population numbers have exploded on the back of cheap, abundant food. If anything seriously disturbed that, yikes.
  - jiveturkey42 4y ago
    Perhaps these issues cannot be solved from a desk and computer. HN might bristle at the idea the Farmer Joe has a more sophisticated mental model of an extremely complex and multivariate system (a field of corn or soy) which evades reduction to a dataset. The solutions I've seen on this board is typically "well let's reduce the variables and grow lettuce in warehouses!" Or trying to build a robot that can pick strawberries. Neither of these solves food scarcity issues. If people reading this wanted to pursue a meaningful solution via data, my advise is to look at the scaling of the farm-to-consumer market, and how to enable larger distributed networks of small independent farms to sell to customers. The food supply will be more resilient when farming gets smaller, simpler, and more distributed
refurb 4y ago
As someone who works in healthcare, it must be like a healthcare/medicine/biology thread popping up for me. You'll never see so many people so certain they were right despite lacking the most basic knowledge on the topic.
- jiveturkey42 4y ago
  It conflating data with knowledge. "Because I deal with X industry data, I understand X industry"
  - hef19898 4y ago
    That attitude is the main beef I have with highly qualified, up to PhD level, data scientists. they could bring so much to the table, in any domain, by working with the domain experts. Instead of doing that, and trying to learn, most (basically all I encountered so far) try to understand any domain they encounter based on their data sets and some first principle. Kind of re-discovering gravity, and then expecting praise for being geniuses for doing so. A shame, really. Because my skill in big data analysis stops at what Excel can do without macros. I'd love to get more data insight, simply turned out that it is hard to get.
- ziml77 4y ago
  I've found that you need come into HN comments with a baseline amount of skepticism and then increase skepticism the further the topic strays from being purely about software development.
  - agentultra 4y ago
    Even then, the things software developers believe about their own profession should be taken with a grain of salt.
    - ziml77 4y ago
      Hence the baseline skepticism :)
incomingpain 4y ago
- jiveturkey42 4y ago
  What in tarnation are you rambling about?
  - incomingpain 4y ago
    >What in tarnation are you rambling about? I apologize for my poor reply, I am being downvoted even got flagged, which I don't feel is fair. https://imgur.com/Fsz6rdb https://imgur.com/Fsz6rdb I was trying to explain that it's not about expertise on the subject. It's about finding a mind to change. What if perhaps there's some HN user who reads this and is like screw it I'm going into industrial scale fully automated aquaponics. They become huge and we feed the world.
throwaway894345 4y ago
My favorite are the threads about how we need to get rid of cars and switch everyone to public transit and cycling. :)
- jiveturkey42 4y ago
  A sure-fire indicator that someone exists in a purely urban mental-model of reality
  - krzyk 4y ago
    The alernative view is also freqently purely US-centric suburban/rural one. In many densely populated countries, rural areas have quite good public transport.
    - cortesoft 4y ago
      Yeah, but the US isn't one of those densely populated countries.
- leokennis 4y ago
  Two counter points. - Where I live (The Netherlands) you don’t have to live in a city to have good PT. There are places that you cannot reach by train or bus but they are few. - While sometimes a car is necessary, the cars many people prefer (insanely oversized “trucks”) are hardly ever necessary.
  - User23 4y ago
    It always amuses me when Europeans are confused by the lack of good public transit in much of the USA. Come visit here and use our public transit and you'll see why we like cars.
  - wincy 4y ago
    The United States is 200x larger in size (excluding Alaska) but has only 20x as many people as the Netherlands.
MangoCoffee 4y ago
HN is a bubble like Reddit, Twitter...etc. all are Bigly disconnected from the real world

mateo1 4y ago

Not only that, but most of HN, even the professional programmers who've been here for a decade, have absolutely no clue about anything regarding the physical world. Chemical equilibriums, enthalpy of formation, basic irradiance calculations etc. That's perfectly fine, as long as you don't make really bold statements about things you don't understand. This thread reminds me of reddit. A ton of highly upvoted comments that are completely wrong. You don't need to live in the countryside to understand the basic economics surrounding agriculture, and no, "artificial" fertilizers aren't a scam nor a big corp trick. If you think you can replace them with fungi, good luck.

kickout 4y ago

It's ok though. I like these threads on HN. Hopefully helps educate people. People on HN have a lot of skills to offer agriculture they likely aren't even aware of. Every article/discussion helps spread the message, hopefully. ETA: Most people don't understand agriculture or where their food comes from--HN no different. Only small % of people involved in agriculture _directly_

jiveturkey42 4y ago
Alternatively, I would argue that much harm has been done to agriculture by the 'information' sector in general. Commoditizing and industrializing food production (a reduction to data and numbers) has caused most of the issues collectively known as the 'modern American diet'
- kickout 4y ago
  Kind of agree. I don't think ag was malicious in that regard. No different than any business trying to maximize profits by any* means necessary (tm). Just so happens it affects human health.
- true_religion 4y ago
  Okay, but I don't think anyone of us are part of the information sector that's commoditizing food production. OP said we are unaware of agriculture, and I mostly agree unless you're in an agrarian area or country, you simply won't learn about these things. Additionally what you're talking about sounds more like actions prompted by business 'leaders' and not IT staff making databases.
  - jiveturkey42 4y ago
    I don't blame the individual IT staff or engineers for being foot soldiers of corporate mandate. I do blame the mindset of 'every problem can be solved with enough data'
    - cinntaile 4y ago
      If you have the right data, I don't see why not?
      - onemoresoop 4y ago
        In theory yes but.. How do you know when you have the right data and how do you know you're solving the right problem and not causing others? So far confidence and hubris came with myopia.
        cinntaile 4y ago
        That's a problem you have even when not relying on "enough" right data to base your decisions off of. With data you can at least have a more scientific approach to it all. It is correct that science and data gets hijacked for political goals as well, so it's not necessarily a road to success.
      - salawat 4y ago
        What heppens when you think you have the right data but don't? How about when everyone else thinks they have the right data, but don't, you do, but can't scale because of institutional inertia and risk? Q.E.D. Farming and logistics are infuriatingly hard problems, toghtly coupled with the fundamental problems of signaling and distributed systems.
phil21 4y ago
So far at posting time I don't see a whole lot of signal to gain from the noise here if I were legitimately someone who had zero agriculture experience and was trying to gain understanding. This is the blind leading the blind, and if you gleaned much from the top comments you'd be worse informed than not reading this entire thread. Half of the posts are just political using couched language to pretend they aren't. Ag is definitely one of HNs blind spots, usually the topics are simply amusing (e.g. urban food production startups burning millions of VC) - but this is the first actually "substantive to humanity topic" I've read through and the results are a little scary. And heck, I'm probably contributing to this noise since I also haven't stepped foot on a farm or market garden in well over a decade.
- tagami 4y ago
  for the hardware/software interest, the signal is precision agriculture. Using sensors and data to optimize yields.
- kickout 4y ago
  Usually I shill my blog (in bio) where I _hope_ i'm sharing signal. In a weird type of way, there's little we can do immediately. Almost like a solar flare type of event. Ag and food production systems are so massively scaled, even if we WANTED to change everything for the better, it would likely take years, if not decades. Not like software where any bug can be fixed in a week or so. Human population numbers have exploded on the back of cheap, abundant food. If anything seriously disturbed that, yikes.
- jiveturkey42 4y ago
  Perhaps these issues cannot be solved from a desk and computer. HN might bristle at the idea the Farmer Joe has a more sophisticated mental model of an extremely complex and multivariate system (a field of corn or soy) which evades reduction to a dataset. The solutions I've seen on this board is typically "well let's reduce the variables and grow lettuce in warehouses!" Or trying to build a robot that can pick strawberries. Neither of these solves food scarcity issues. If people reading this wanted to pursue a meaningful solution via data, my advise is to look at the scaling of the farm-to-consumer market, and how to enable larger distributed networks of small independent farms to sell to customers. The food supply will be more resilient when farming gets smaller, simpler, and more distributed

refurb 4y ago

As someone who works in healthcare, it must be like a healthcare/medicine/biology thread popping up for me. You'll never see so many people so certain they were right despite lacking the most basic knowledge on the topic.

jiveturkey42 4y ago
It conflating data with knowledge. "Because I deal with X industry data, I understand X industry"
- hef19898 4y ago
  That attitude is the main beef I have with highly qualified, up to PhD level, data scientists. they could bring so much to the table, in any domain, by working with the domain experts. Instead of doing that, and trying to learn, most (basically all I encountered so far) try to understand any domain they encounter based on their data sets and some first principle. Kind of re-discovering gravity, and then expecting praise for being geniuses for doing so. A shame, really. Because my skill in big data analysis stops at what Excel can do without macros. I'd love to get more data insight, simply turned out that it is hard to get.
ziml77 4y ago
I've found that you need come into HN comments with a baseline amount of skepticism and then increase skepticism the further the topic strays from being purely about software development.
- agentultra 4y ago
  Even then, the things software developers believe about their own profession should be taken with a grain of salt.
  - ziml77 4y ago
    Hence the baseline skepticism :)

incomingpain 4y ago

jiveturkey42 4y ago
What in tarnation are you rambling about?
- incomingpain 4y ago
  >What in tarnation are you rambling about? I apologize for my poor reply, I am being downvoted even got flagged, which I don't feel is fair. https://imgur.com/Fsz6rdb https://imgur.com/Fsz6rdb I was trying to explain that it's not about expertise on the subject. It's about finding a mind to change. What if perhaps there's some HN user who reads this and is like screw it I'm going into industrial scale fully automated aquaponics. They become huge and we feed the world.

throwaway894345 4y ago

My favorite are the threads about how we need to get rid of cars and switch everyone to public transit and cycling. :)

jiveturkey42 4y ago
A sure-fire indicator that someone exists in a purely urban mental-model of reality
- krzyk 4y ago
  The alernative view is also freqently purely US-centric suburban/rural one. In many densely populated countries, rural areas have quite good public transport.
  - cortesoft 4y ago
    Yeah, but the US isn't one of those densely populated countries.
leokennis 4y ago
Two counter points. - Where I live (The Netherlands) you don’t have to live in a city to have good PT. There are places that you cannot reach by train or bus but they are few. - While sometimes a car is necessary, the cars many people prefer (insanely oversized “trucks”) are hardly ever necessary.
- User23 4y ago
  It always amuses me when Europeans are confused by the lack of good public transit in much of the USA. Come visit here and use our public transit and you'll see why we like cars.
- wincy 4y ago
  The United States is 200x larger in size (excluding Alaska) but has only 20x as many people as the Netherlands.

MangoCoffee 4y ago

HN is a bubble like Reddit, Twitter...etc. all are Bigly disconnected from the real world