skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some forests are self-regulating when it comes to fire. Some forests are not. What defines forest is actually pretty complicated, even for Federal and state agencies. Controlled burns work in conjunction with thinning practices and bone-piling (stacking big burns away from other areas).

The root of the problem has been and continue to be that structurally we separate "fuels" and "prevention" teams in the forest service. Where Fuels deals with assessing when and how to burn, and Prevention operationalizes it and also does fire fighting.

Lastly, fire management suffers from a lack of talent and shared learning as fire career paths involve people moving to different regions which are geographically incredibly diverse. You don't fight fire in the east side of Oregon like you do in Florida.

The lack of cohesion, mixed with a serious lack of funding, and a lot of common misconceptions publicly leads to a mishmash of fire management across the country.

source - was a firefighter. left because of all these issues.
Such stories always remind me of that one:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
Apparently it doesn't. When I click to download - it's .exe and .dmg files. That this application is build with electron is beside the point.
I agree, but I want to break it down a little more:

Effort ->

You do a lot of hashing to try and win the 10 minute lottery by finding the magic hash that lets you make the next block.

Rewards ->

You win a block reward (or portion of one if you're pooling work with others) that has economic value.

You win transaction fees for the transaction included in the winning block.

Profitability ->

If you are generating enough hash power per your operational expenses, these rewards are profitable, even though you don't win every block.

Some may mine unprofitably because they are speculating on the future value of those rewards rather than the immediate value.

Side Effects ->

This scheme increases the security of the global ledger. Making it more viable and bolstering the value of the rewards you're getting above.

If the overall system is valuable to society, that also bolsters the value of the rewards, but also has a value to society approximately equivalent to the value of the system.

Thus, bitcoin, which does consume energy, is currently, in my opinion providing a better monetary solution at lower cost than the system it is disrupting (banks use power, employ people, etc. etc.)

The perception that it is wasteful could only come, to my mind, if one thought bitcoin was not providing value to society, or that bitcoins were going to zero in economic value.
I don't really fault people for taking decisions this way, but isn't this the opposite of how the decision should be made? I have a feeling that people would feel feel like they didn't really choose their partner if the main reason they decided to get married was to raise children.
You would be interested in Byteball. See https://byteball.org/

Secure distributed ledger, without PoW, without PoS.

The bad side? Not 100% trust-less like blockchains, instead (number chosen by no real reason) only has to trust that majority of 12 witnesses does not collude. The witnesses should have real world identities.

Basically transforming what bitcoin has become, with few mining pools/operators deciding its fate and whom users anyway have to trust - into witnesses which can be replaced.
Catamorphism, anamorphism, hylopmorphism, as opposed to something like fold/unfold, foldAndUnfold. There are of course, many more[1]. Meijer et al just chose a goofy name for their paper.

[1] - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/slamdata/matryoshka/master...
This is something a blockchain is actually good for. Just submitting a hash of the work into a block proves you wrote it before a hash in a later block.
Anyone using DNS search lists to have localhost resolve to e.g. localhost.example.com would potentially have problems. Obviously this is a pretty weird thing to intentionally do, but it currently gives you a quick way to get around certain issues. Obviously this is ugly, but in some ways that actually makes breaking it more problematic: Things which this breaks are likely to be things that are difficult to fix.
Every early startup should have an unpaid senior team
im in the honeymoon phase right now. sometimes i get sad thinking about the transience of this phase of the relationship. obviously i shouldn't fixate on that, but it's like this creeping twilight that i wish i could just stave off forever. anyone have tips on doing this?
How many tech companies are started by women?
In case you, like me, doubted the use of the word "pure" in the headline:

> The team found life in a pool where the acidity was measured as zero pH.

Cool!

EDIT: Nevermind, someone with a better understanding of pH chimed in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14951312
I'm also working on my own cryptocurrency implementation forked from known basiccoin of Zack Hess. Simply I'm trying to make the code more readable, fix bugs and provide better API. Currently I do not have a fine README that explains my intentions but going through the whole code and rewriting most parts made me realize how simple actually blockchain is. Thinking about fine details like how synchronization of blockchain should work is really inspiring. If you want to take a look at the code it is on https://github.com/halilozercan/halocoin
> Grass fires can move even faster than forest fires, given a wind to push it along.

In earlier times, farm fields actually were separated by bushes, patches of rocks, tiny rivers, whatever. Humans have flattened all of this, in order to make really huge strips of farmland that can be worked on really, really efficiently by machines. Not only has this practice destroyed the living space of small animals like rabbits or birds, but it also contributes massively to this problem as there's nothing left to stop or slow down winds :(
The fundamental problem, it seems to me, is an academic culture where an advisor doesn't get kudos for an idea that their student came up with. This (again AFAICT) is unique to the humanities. In technical fields, an advisor gets points when their students succeed, to the point where if a student fails a Ph.D. defense it reflects badly on everyone on the committee. Because of that, by the time you get to your defense, it is a foregone conclusion that you will pass unless you screw it up badly. If that is not the case, your committee won't let you defend. (That leads to its own set of dysfunctional dynamics, but it's nowhere near as dramatic or emotionally taxing as what happened here.)

I think the real problem is that a huge proportion of academic research in the humanities is bullshit and deep down the practitioners know it. They survive, then, by insuring that only those willing to Play The Game rise through the ranks. Any hint of dissent is brutally crushed.
No one who is serious about this doubts that there are women who are interested in tech and able to acquire the skills. The key question is how many women have this interest, absent any worries about matching the number to men perfectly. Even asking that question apparently causes a very interesting reaction.
This could also be used when looking for an Airbnb. You could use it to get a rough price estimate in an area near your destination.
Hashing needs to be asymmetric-- expensive to produce a hash that fits the criteria but very cheap to validate that the hash fits the criteria.

This is why attempts to make scientific computation into a proof of work have been difficult-- often the validation cost is equal to the work itself.
> Why are you mentioning these particular eminent people?

They were the first two Islamic scholars who came into my head. I actually can't name many more.

I'm not commenting on the Elements; I'm commenting on your weird comment that "Islamic" scholarship would be better referred to as "Arabian". That isn't so.
Wouldn't you only need to verify proof-of-work on the largest chain? Largest meaning the highest cumulative difficulty rather than number of blocks.

If you include a timestamp in each block, just have each node simply reject times that are out of order or too far from the current time, which will prevent people from mining on an invalid chain. "Current time" meaning nothing more than a few minutes in the future of now. Yes, even when dealing with an old chain.

Here is how it works:

If an invalid or malicious person spends hashrate to mine a block with a bad date, all the nodes in the network will see it and reject the block.

Because the block is rejected, everyone else keeps attempting to mine the same block, but with the correct timestamp. The window is: greater than the last block, less than a couple minutes from now.

Because most miners are on non-malicious nodes, they eventually produce a longer chain than the chain with the bad timestamp.

Because this good chain is longer, new nodes that sync the blockchain from scratch would simply pick the longest of the available chains (which is the good one).

This could still go wrong if the attacker has a large amount of hashrate (or luck) for an extended period of time, but this gets very expensive very fast. This is why it is sometimes good to wait a few blocks before assuming consensus.
A block's timestamp is frozen in its hash, which is validated by any node receiving a block (whether during initial block download or otherwise). Bitcoin and tinychain don't accept blocks with a timestamp in the future beyond some threshold (in both cases 2 hours).
Program approved to give free bus passes to Downtown workers
Oh okay. The video on the site implied they'd be taking the devices into deep sea environments. I guess there's still restrictions on where they can be used.
My immediate reaction to this was, "hey, this is awesome," and actually it really is. I think it's an interesting and creative solution to a problem a lot of us share - admittedly whilst recognising that for large swathes of the world's population this would be a great problem to have.

Still, there's that nagging little voice in the back of my head: part of me can't help wondering what will happen, and how people will come to view it, if/when his apps catch on (as I suspect they will).
You're making several deep errors regarding what I'm saying.

Firstly you're responding as though, at some mysterious date in the future, all people are getting fired and replaced with a robot. It's not going to happen that way, it's going to be a gradual process but I think not as gradual as a lot of people want to think, and I think once it begins it will accelerate exponentially as the technology matures.

Not to mention:

> So you think things like artistic creativity, service work, craftsmanship, etc. are going to be automated soon? That there will literally be no productive things that humans can do, sometime in the not too distant future?

You're still hung up on this idea that productive things are all people can do. The whole point as pointed out by another poster is that people were supposed to not work anymore, at least in the traditional sense: that humans would give the work to the robots, and then go find other, more enriching things to do, maybe something with art or just really learning a shitload about medieval poetry. The fact that someone chooses something that isn't necessarily productive doesn't matter in the world I'm envisioning, where scarcity is no longer a thing.

> But that's not what you're talking about. You're not just talking about homeless people. You're talking about, eventually, all people. You're saying that there will come a time in the not too distant future where every single human on the planet has effectively zero productivity. And your way of preparing for this is to put a rule in place that says that humans don't have to produce anything in order to get a basic living.

I wouldn't say it's going to hit zero. There will always be something for us to do, even if it's just to hit the stars and go find new things (ala Star Trek's utopian future).

What I am saying is: We already are seeing the beginnings of a population that can't really produce anything, and we're seeing a new phenomenon; we don't really need them to. How much of the population will end up like that isn't the point; the point is that some of them are, and some are already, and we have no mechanisms to deal with that other than starving people to death which I think is not a long term solution.

> But if you have automated dealing with change, then you're up against a bigger problem: you have basically invented AI, and there is no guarantee that the AI will care about humans. We will be at the mercy of the AI, just as other life forms on Earth today are at the mercy of humans. We will basically be zoo animals, preserved only at the sufferance of the AI. And in that situation, humanity is doomed.

This is a whole different discussion but this doomsday view also relies on the AI being entirely unaware of empathy, which as a core component of humanity, would likely make its way into the artificial minds humanity creates. It's a base function of animal and human brains, it's what stops us from killing each other over basic impulses.
Always know what 'DONE' looks like.

Reminding ourselves of what the done state of project looks like helps us stay on track, from developers to the leads.
> Application software MUST NOT use a searchlist to resolve a localhost name.
Serverless on Google with Cloud Functions and React
Byteball is such a cryptocurrency. There is no Proof-of-Work, or Proof-of-Stake.
Oh, yeah, none of those committees would have cared, let alone known what git was to begin with. It's not about the truth, it's about the posturing.
Rather than looking at the math ability distribution as a proxy, why not look at coding competition ability? They are pretty objective since an autograder doesn't know your gender and they are predictive of whether you can pass a tech interview since it's the same format.

In that case, even at the IOI level (high school, so 14-18 year old kids) women are already severely underrepresented: https://www.quora.com/How-has-female-students-participation-...

You see the same thing at the college level too (for example topcoder where they isn't even any possibility for a sexist team selection bias since anyone can just register and compete).

In some sense, it makes it not tech industry's fault. It's a failure of our education/training pipeline where we are not training competitive women even from an early age.
Looks great. Consider adding dishwasher and washer/dryer as factors too — I found those made a big difference (20%+) when doing my own comps research.
same, and whoah.
In humanities? We barely have them in Bio outside of CRISPR stuff.
Libre Graphics Magazine ends its run (2016)
Ask HN: GitHub or GitLab for sharing open source projects
And when you choose a life partner, you’re choosing a lot of things, including your parenting partner and someone who will deeply influence your children...

It actually really bugged me how having children was a forgone conclusion in this article.
If you fell into 100C hot and extremely acidic water it would be a big problem – Barbara Cavalazzi, University of Bologna
Airbnb already supports this https://www.airbnb.com/host/homes
Why do you call Cultural Marxism a conspiracy theory? Have you actually read through any of the papers being pumped out by humanities departments in academia? Not only is marxism on full display, it's actively promoted. Hell, it's one of the foundational elements of Critical Theory.
She also mentioned that she would have been elated if Dr. Mao had just credited her in a footnote when he published her work. I imagine that this is shitty, but common in student-adviser relationships.
August Startup Sprint
I was reading this post (https://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-weeks-how-we-did-it) from the founder of Buffer the other day and noticed Buffer was started as part of a Hacker News startup sprint. I was wondering if anyone in the community would be interested in bringing this back for August or September. What do y'all think?
No, I was taught almost no grammar, but whilst you can couch it as stylistic I was taught it was wrong to start a sentence with "I" (as a word). And also never to start a sentence with a preposition ...
You can't discuss anything on the Internet anymore, everything is politicized ax-grinding by dishonest people fishing for clicks, personal celebrity, and Patreon money who just ruin the discussion.

Do real journalists still exist that can actually interview some of the parties involved, cut through the tweets and personality, and get both sides of this?
Solving the Search Management Minefield in Open Source Search
One possibility is that a massive number of men picked up coding in the 80's.

Anyone have a graph that shows absolute numbers rather than percentage points?
Your cynical view is very old [1]:

>Predictions that automation will make humans redundant have been made before, however, going back to the Industrial Revolution, when textile workers, most famously the Luddites, protested that machines and steam engines would destroy their livelihoods. “Never until now did human invention devise such expedients for dispensing with the labour of the poor,” said a pamphlet at the time. Subsequent outbreaks of concern occurred in the 1920s (“March of the machine makes idle hands”, declared a New York Times headline in 1928), the 1930s (when John Maynard Keynes coined the term “technological unemployment”) and 1940s, when the New York Times referred to the revival of such worries as the renewal of an “old argument”.

>As computers began to appear in offices and robots on factory floors, President John F. Kennedy declared that the major domestic challenge of the 1960s was to “maintain full employment at a time when automation…is replacing men”. In 1964 a group of Nobel prizewinners, known as the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, sent President Lyndon Johnson a memo alerting him to the danger of a revolution triggered by “the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine”. This, they said, was leading to a new era of production “which requires progressively less human labour” and threatened to divide society into a skilled elite and an unskilled underclass. The advent of personal computers in the 1980s provoked further hand-wringing over potential job losses.

and based on a simplistic understanding of how automation impacts the demand for labour.

Automation reduces costs, and this increases consumer spending on more difficult to automate goods/services. [2]

That has been the pattern for 200 years, and why wages today are 20X what they were in 1800.

Unfortunately, ideas like yours are very common [3] and lead to terrible government policy.

[1] https://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21700758-will-...

[2] https://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/10/24/13327014/productivi...

[3] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2006/11/the_big_four_ec.html
Sounds great if you have lots of options. Some of us are getting older and haven't made it past anyone else's filter. At some point your will to just try and make it work regardless of the match.
>Because that's how you transform a recursive call into an iterative one, not nested for loops.

I came to understand recursion through nested for-loops, though, but that might just be a historical accident. In the summer of 1988 I had written a Mastermind solver in Microsoft Quickbasic[1] for the specific case of 4 "pegs". At each guess, I used for-loops nested 4 deep to build a structure representing the possible remaining solutions (for all possibilities of the first peg, check all for the second peg, etc.) Then I wanted to extend it to work with variable numbers of pegs; after spending most of that summer trying to figure out a loop-based solution, I discovered that subroutines could call themselves and it hit me that I could have a function that took the possibilities already computed for a peg, and then called itself with those applied to the next peg.

So I've always thought of recursion as a way to have arbitrarily deeply nested loops.

[1] Believe it or not, it did support recursive functions!
That falls under "proved it cannot happen with a formal proof". If you didn't actually prove it you're playing with fire.

Funny thing is that proofs over recursive functions are either very easy or terribly involved.

Also it is a false dichotomy. Nested loops are not the only option.
I didn't "blame the victim". How dare you. Your accusation is defamatory, shameless and totally baseless. Good luck with using this hate ideology to gain sympathy.
Hi dang. I don't understand why this post is considered off-topic if the post it replied to is considered on-topic.

The post that this responds to asked if prostitution would be a viable career post forty, and my response is directly on-point. I certainly respect your right to moderate, but I'm trying to understand why this was unacceptable and their post was.

Thanks.
How does pytorch compare to dynet (formerly CNN, or pyCNN)?

It's been my choice for dynamic NN for a while.
Banning anything that has a high demand mainly gives criminals control of the market. It has little impact on demand but is an abrogation of any responsibility to regulate.

The same was true of the US 18th Amendment, of the "War on Drugs" in the US now, of the banning of sex work, or most anything else. When the government decides to just ban something, others step in to control the market without any rule of law or responsibility to the public.
Or in zones where there are catastrophic earthquakes on a regular basis. Or hurricanes. Or tornadoes. Or blizzards.

> we often still let people build their houses in flood planes

The best farmland is on flood plains; good luck with holding them back.

Let's be honest for a moment: there's no place in America which is safe from every regularly occurring natural disaster. Yet we still live here.
First off, don't fall into a pattern. The whole courtship, engagement, marriage, honeymoon route is full of constantly changing things. The rest of your relationship will likely be the hum-drum boringness of daily life. As a practical tip, maybe challenge yourself as a couple to do at least one new thing a quarter: say for example rock climbing where you can split of belaying duties with climbing.
What does "bear at least a passing resemblance to some wholly discredited arguments" mean? Is this the same sort of thinking that has people rabidly ferreting out "dogwhistles" in normal speech?
What happens when: there is no wind, a flock of geese crash into it, the cable snaps, etc? Better keep these things away from buildings or it will be like 9/11 all over again from multiple angles.
Sounds a bit like "The Paradox of Choice".
That's because Toyota really does not want an electric vehicle. It wants the Mirai to take off, so that it can have dedicated customers for the fuel.

https://ssl.toyota.com/mirai/fcv.html

Just a more expensive version of a Razor and Blades scenario.
Unfortunately most people are still stuck in the mindset that everyone who isn't broken inside wants children. I've never wanted children at any point in my life, but I'm wrong apparently.
Wow, I didn't think of either of those problems, but that would be a very rough position to occupy.