skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article linked from the OP:

"Researchers Detect a Global Drop in Fires"

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/90493/researchers-d...

> Across the grasslands of Asia, the tropical forests of South America, and the savannas of Africa, shifting livelihoods are leading to a significant decline in burned area. Using NASA satellites to detect fires and burn scars from space, researchers have found that an ongoing transition from nomadic cultures to settled lifestyles and intensifying agriculture has led to a steep drop in the use of fire for land clearing and an overall drop in natural and human-caused fires worldwide.

> Globally, the total acreage burned by fires declined 24 percent between 1998 and 2015, according to a new paper published in Science. Scientists determined that the decline in burned area was greatest in savannas and grasslands, where fires are essential for maintaining healthy ecosystems and habitat conservation.

> The map above, based on data from the international research team, shows annual trends in burned area over the study period. Blues represent areas where the trend was toward less burning, whether natural or human-caused, while red areas had more burning. The line plot shows the annual fluctuations in global burned area and the overall downward trend. The research team, led by Niels Andela of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, analyzed fire data derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. They then compared these data sets with regional and global trends in agriculture and socio-economic development.

I'm a doom-and-gloom type myself, but this seems like good news, eh?
Survey and Benchmarking of Machine Learning Accelerators
Drank tap water in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Turkey, China, Egypt, Sri Lanka even the US and I am still here. I think it's more that you can't automatically assume if it comes out of tap it's safe. I was in Bulgaria this year and looked into it: there were like three villages with not safe water in the whole country. A lot better than the lead problem in the US. Ask people around, google and smell the water. It's probably fine.
Proof of work proves not to work (2004)

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork.pdf
In this day and age, how could people use desktop reader without syncing feeds when they're on their phones? I don't get it.

NetNewsWire on Mac is pretty good looking and fast software. But it is useless without its counterpart on iPhone.

When it comes to RSS feeds, it is an either/or scenario. You either have RSS wherever and whenever you want (and it has to be synced up and up to date), or you don't.
You can install full-text RSS yourself at the URL below. They also offer a hosted solution for €4 per month.

https://fivefilters.org/content-only/

I personally pay for and recommend a hosted RSS service called Bazqux, and they host the FiveFilters full-text RSS service for their customers.

https://bazqux.com/

https://ftr.bazqux.com/
> Although many would disagree, there's way less to appreciate in beer and vodka than it is in wine. Beer doesn't even have distinct recognised regions

I know that this is an extremely subjective point of opinion, but haven't you met anyone who insists that all wine comes in two flavours, red and white? Do you really think it's fair to group beer with vodka?
Do you want read receipts or delivery receipts? Both versions exist.
Picking the right data structure in Swift
Ask HN: Bullet-proof vests for everyday use?
How much of a challenge is it to manufacture low-profile, inexpensive and comfortable for daily use bullet-proof vests?

I am curious about the materials challenge involved or if there are people invested into solving this. The world really could use this right now when laws haven't been able to eradicate gun violence.
The hospital in the rural area I grew up in closed it's doors two years ago.

The tribal politics in the comments here are obnoxious and myopic.

Rural hospitals are receiving the majority of their money from Medicare and Medicaid. They don't pay enough. There was a great NPR show on this a few weeks ago.

Hospitals in the US overcharge (cost shifting is the technical term) patients with private insurance to offset losses from offering services at below cost to Medicare/Medicaid patients.

Too few private insurance patients means they close their doors.
What is the value of a low could-vote:did-vote ratio in the absence of informed voters?

I can see why keeping this ratio high appeals to governments and politicians. It grants them more legitimacy, even if the votes are entirely uninformed. I also see why motivating particular demographics to vote appeals to certain candidates: voters in particular demographics tend to vote for particular candidates/causes/parties. But as an informed voter I'm better off if there are fewer uniformed voters, because my vote becomes more powerful. And as a citizen, I'm probably better off if the majority of voters are informed, even if they don't always vote in my personal best interests.
No, actually it isn't straightforward. There a lot of artificial dependencies that you can't break. I mean, conceptually it's not difficult, but in practice it is.

See also:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/433346/34868
This analogy applies to everything and the answer is always the same: if we centralize then we are vulnerable to tyranny. It seems inevitable that we do this though. Human history is a cycle of people investing more and more trust in an authority, then being abused by that authority, followed by a revolt and the installation of a new authority.
>If you’re a full-time employee who must go to the office, you have to dress the part. If you look different than your peers, you look ridiculous and out of place.

I have been full time employee in my whole career, no one had really told me what to wear. I have been to office in sportswear and no one seems to mind that. I don't think this point is necessarily true at least in tech.
This is semi off topic, but why (from a mainstream Chinese perspective) is China targeting Uyghur Muslims? Is there just a general ideology of enforced conformity or is this a special case?
"Who watches the watchers?"

Civilian space nerds!
Well here is the well-documented YouTube slowness with Firefox: https://fortune.com/2018/07/25/youtube-slow-mozilla-firefox-...
My favorite part about the presentation was the correlations between the DOM tree and a supervision tree. If you've looked into the Scenic project (https://github.com/boydm/scenic) you know how this Process & Supervision model shows real promise for client-side UI concurrency. As your states are changing you don't want one bad state to crash and cascade elsewhere - supervision trees lets you contain and recover from failures gracefully.

I'll be honest I didn't think it would be possible to implement something like the BEAM's preemptive scheduler in WebAssembly until I saw the presentation. Turns out it's very doable with continuations. The timing should be right in the next couple years as both Lumen and some of the bigger components of WebAssembly maturity kick into gear. Similar high level language/runtime -> WebAssembly projects like Blazor(C#) are also pending features like more native control over the DOM without going through JS interfaces (see here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/interface-types/blob/master/p... for more technical details).

Even if client-side UI frameworks don't pan out for Lumen, I can see Lumen being valuable for edge-computation especially where concurrency and fault-tolerance are important.
> This is a great analogy. Why do more work when you can get the same result with less effort?

If you wake up one day and the only email you can use is the one you can get from a major provider, you have just become a consumer.
It's complicated. Here is a bit background:

I have been working as a data analyst for a few years but I feel an inclination towards programming. Programming is, however, a huge field and I'm interested to many of its sub-fields. Thus the reason that I opened a lot of projects. For example taught myself C++, did a half-project about a crude tile map editor with SDL2, and then went down another route with Python, etc, etc. And now I'm learning C trying to do some parser stuffs.

So the thing is I can never drill deep in any of them, which is really bad. But the root of it is that I changed my TOOLS too often but never learned enough PROGRAMMING. I recognize that I have a weak will and whence the topic went deeper I tended to drop it. The other reason is that I never got a full-time programming job so I don't have to focus.

I have been going on like this since high school (back then I was interested in other fields). I could grasp the easy part of any tool pretty quickly, but do not have a focus/objective so I never truly learned anything.
Because unless a party at someones house,a business provides goods and services to the public and is subject to the public's approval to operate.

Forexample, a restaurant needs to meet public health standards but a private party's kitchen doesn't. You can discriminate based on age and race who enters yout private party but you can't refuse business based on that criteria if you offer services to the public.

If you think that's crazy then you'd be stoked to hear I think moderation in for profit sites that ban user generated content (twitter,reddit,news comments,youtube,facebook,etc...) Should also be subject to similar requirements.

Your ability to profit from doing business with the public is a privilege not a right. Your ability to peacefully assemble in private with no economic profit or with profit between prople you have an exisiting well established relationship with (without a public place of business or advertisent) is private activity and should not be subject to public approval.
What Trump leaked about billion dollar spy satellites...
Yeah agreed. Victories are very important, and a completed project, however crude or badly organized, is better than anything else.
> I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues.

I don't know if meeting online counts: I'm bothered by Mozilla having a partnership with Google. I'm bothered by the fact that Mozilla maintains an official Facebook container but the Google equivalent is left to the community, I can't help but think that the reason why there isn't an official Google container by Mozilla is that Mozilla and Google have a commercial partnership which apparently provides most of Mozilla's income (as per link provided in the article).
>There are also different sets of features people want, some are actually pretty difficult to set up.

That's true but I think if we analyze discussions (see this thread and old threads I cited) of one group of HN experts (email is "not hard") debating other HN experts (email is "hard"), the most contested issue isn't the difficulty of advanced SMTP features and enhancements -- it's about outgoing sent emails being reliably accepted.
I've done quite a bit and have never had any difficulty sniffing out "gloss" with just a few minutes of questions over the phone using the applicant's resume as a starting point for the conversation.

When you're focused on system implementation, delivery and maintenance you can pick one of the past projects listed and start probing. It's not hard to quickly get a picture of what the candidate did and didn't do on the project and whether or not they're blowing smoke.
I just think you should know that "hick" is an offensive slur.
Interview with Michael Lopp (VP Slack) [audio]
A text file on a computer satisfies most of those constraints as well.
Learning is the foundation of an artificial intelligence machine. In this article, you'll find out how machines are able to learn like humans.
Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey's Account Hijacked
Q. Why might a single agent stuck in a sub-optimal Nash equilibrium, along with 100s of millions of others, not make a different choice that might cost them more?

A. Ideology. If the agent wants a different global equilibrium, they might decide that them choosing differently, (1) calms their conscience and/or (2) actually make a material different in the choices of others.
> or give me capabilities that I don’t have by paying someone else?

The same can be said "why should I grow my own veggies when I can buy them from the supermarket?" - The point is always, always, about Freedom.
Two things I got from the video:

1) The videos of the launches are scary, especially the launches with the "A" rockets, and the fireball surrounding the rocket at the beginning of the launch.

2) It's a shame the patch with the Klingon text never made it out into the wild.
China squandered its chance to build a home-grown semiconductor industry
The Brain, the Criminal and the Courts
The top left would have been information about the picture. Time/Date and source.
Debin: Predicting Debug Information in Stripped Binaries
29% might be enough to float the cliche.
The same article also contains this:

> For the last 35 years, the world has been re-foresting, meaning new tree growth has exceeded deforestation. The area of the Earth covered with forest has increased by an area the size of Texas and Alaska combined.

So, at least globally in aggregate, deforestration concern doesn't seem like a unmitigated disaster anymore. Of course, we still need to continue on reforestration / conservation as well as fighting more localized deforestration like in Amazon. But it's not all gloom and doom.

EDIT: Deforestration is still a serious concern.
I wrote a whole blog post about that:

https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2018/09/24/learning-to-re...

Tldr:

* Do a high level scan

* Dive deep on one part

* Use the scientific method. Create small experiments to help you build your intuition about the system.
That’s a weird baatardization of the maxim though.

I guess they didn’t want to use ‘however improbable’ in connection to god?

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
> This is probably the biggest weakness of the system, and the part that’s driving the “backdoor’ concerns above. You see, the HSMs Apple uses are programmable. This means that — as long as Apple still has the code signing keys — the company can potentially update the custom code it includes onto the HSM to do all sort sorts of things.

> To remove these keys as a concern, once Apple is done programming the HSM, they run these cards through a process that they call a “physical one-way hash function”

> To make sure all admin cards are destroyed, the company has developed a complex ceremony for controlling the cards prior to their destruction.

> This mostly involves people making assertions that they haven’t made copies of the code signing key — which isn’t quite foolproof. But overall it’s pretty impressive.

The problem is that with this kind of implementation governments can forbidden key destruction.

Now, I don't know how to protect users with encryption without users owning master/private key. But that's not my point.

My point is that saying that there is no backdoor is misleading because although there is no backdoor today it's not immune to backdoors

Edit: typing
You have completely misunderstood the UK market - note that the OP talked about London. Perhaps as a way to get past the recruiting problem, UK corporates pay a premium for exerienced programmers on the basis that if they cannot do the job, they are let go immediately without severance. Most contractors are 30+, don't want to be 'in charge' (at meetings, giving interviews, being trained in the latest corporate 'values') and are happy to be given a product to build or maintain.

Every contractor I know resigned from a permanent position in their early thirties to go contracting and make 1.5x-2x as much money as a contractor. Businesses regularly offer contractors full-time positions and are regularly turned down.

Contractors may not be particularly special technically, but they will focus on doing what they're told in the team and not attending training, seminars, workshops or HR meetings. I'd much rather build a product with a team of suitably incentivised and managed contractors than a team of permies.
Here's another super specific request: are there any RSS readers that

1) Support both Windows and macOS

2) Can import a Fever database

Moving from Fever is a pain which keeps me on my usual host, but it'd be great to migrate it somewhere else, preferable something self-hosted. I also think my license is tied to a specific domain to make matters even more annoying.
It's a bit of a black box, but how do you get around this? Is it a matter of domain age? IP trustworthiness? Or do a lot of people have to categorize it as "Not spam" first?
> Why would I want to start working on software I don't use or need? Why do systemd advocates always insist that every implementation must include the features they think are important?

If you don't care about multi-user session management, sure, but considering practically every window manager/DE relied on consolekit and now logind to provide that functionality, I find it hard to believe it's not desirable by a large majority of users, some of which would belong to the group I was talking about.

I love how people who are obliviously not the target audience feel the need to chime in.

> Yes, we had strong things to say about software requiring logind, because it is a terrible (and poorly documented, at least at the time) design.

I agree about the lacking documentation, but in terms of design it seems quite solid. Any technical specifics as to why it is terrible? It's interesting that systemd's detractors always seem to be rather vague in this regard, makes me suspicious as to whether they did more than have a knee-jerk reaction to a tool that is different than what they used before.

> because it's easier and has fewer problems, at least in some situations

Am going to need specifics, because in my experience, the bash scripts always ended up being a hot mess of variable quality as per the individual author's scripting skills with inconsistent behavior across scripts.

Not to mention that none of the alternatives give me the functionality I want, because their authors strictly focus on the init part, whereas systemd's much more useful even after the system is up and running due to its event driven nature.

Now I realize that not everybody needs some of the extra features, but for those of us that do, (like container management), s6, openRC etc. is even less of an alternative in a real sense.

> nothing is stopping you from replacing the bash init scripts with another language

The init system needs to be designed to support declarative services from the get go, am not simply talking about using Perl instead of bash here, am talking more along the lines of the Nix vs apt paradigm.

> or replacing the entire init subsystem with something else

And is something stooping you? This is my biggest gripe with the anti-systemd crowd, am personally happy with systemd, so it's not me who needs to look for alternatives. It's you. And there are plenty, so please pick one that suits you. The constant anti-systemd bashing every time the name is mentioned from people who seem to barely know much about what it's trying, (rather successfully), to do is rather annoying.
I always like to ask: "so, what do you do... For fun". Talking to someone about their hobbies is, I find, disarming. Doesn't get you as much information as talking shop, but builds the connection.
"Today, Assange sits behind bars in a London prison under shocking conditions even a murderer wouldn’t expect. Renowned filmmaker and journalist John Pilger visited him there and fears for Assange’s life, noting he is held in isolation, heavily medicated and denied the basic tools needed to fight his charge of extradition to the United States"

https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-blackout-imprisonment-es...
see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20802150
And they should offer Arts, Social Studies, and History (ASH!?) in response.
Been there, self-hosted my email for more than half a decade, gave up on it a few years ago for a couple for reasons:

If you are self-hosting the most important authentication fallback for your online identity, an ill-timed downtime or deliverability problem really hurts.

Your reputation can be affected by neighboring bad actors you have no control over. For example, SpamRATS punishes full subnets without an actual appeals process.

From the point of view of a major provider, the same email from your tiny server is going to have a lower score than one from their system. Encountered this a lot against Gmail.

And it's a commitment. If you go the self-hosted route, you will need need to keep up on new security and filtering practices, even if you use a turnkey solution. You might get bored with this after a while.
I would also recommend setting up a dmarc record so you can monitor your deliverability.

Spam however is still a hassle and you're never going to match Gmail or Outlook when you're small. Say it takes a few hundred identical spammy emails to trigger a filter. For Gmail it means the chance of receiving that spam is less than 1 in a million. If you're small and managing say a 1000 users - a large percentage will end up with receiving the spam.
The Amiga Smart File System
I'm either stupid too, or it's hard, or both.
Then you don't want those others. I know it is hard to turn down work when you are getting a consulting business going, but there are "good" clients, and "bad" clients. You are not doing your future self any favors by rewarding bad clients with free work.
How about you spare us and just google it?
Heya, as someone who hasn't seriously touched a mobile app codebase in years, I am not your target market :). Maybe there's a subreddit on mobile development where you can get informed feedback.
I doubt it. My grandparents and inlaws both live in rural towns, and I think they'd rather have the hospital close down than have to pay more taxes. I know the news likes to show people from rural towns that want the government to provide urban ammenities in areas that can't financially support it, but in my experience, those people are in the minority. Most rural people I've met know the risks of living far from government services, and they think the benefits outweigh the risks.
Maybe it's not the best term, but it's pretty widely used. Either you're a "full-time employee" or you're a temp or contractor. Certain perks or systems are described as "FTE-only".
Pretty much nothing about devops is testable.

Development for devops is based on write code, run it ,see if it works, move on.
> it manages the system

It manages the system in a way that not everybody needs or even likes. To the people who hate it, it solves problems that other people have but brings new problems that they now have. It's not so much about if it's good or bad but more about whom it was made for.
We have neighbours with twins aged 7 who raise their kids at home on a raw food diet. They eat lots of nuts, fresh fruit, fermented beans and garden vegetables. They conserve vegetables and fruit using lacto-fermentation.

The kids are much smaller and thinner than normal kids their age. Up until recently I used to pity these poor, starving kids. I compared them to our kids, who are athletic, tanned, well built.

But recently I started asking myself if this is not the other way around. Maybe if we didn't have the luxury of cooking, transformed food and western supermarkets we'd have been much smaller. Maybe this means that we all in the 1st world eat too much.

I'm starting to think that maybe we're not really better off having our stomachs full basically the whole day long, especially if you consider that most of us do very little physical activity if at all...