skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Don't we generally know that we need to do more prescribed fire burning?

Yes, everyone generally agrees we need to do more prescribed burns, but it's easier said than done. The three main impediments (at least in CA) seem to be: [0]

1. tight environmental regulations

2. limited resources

3. concerns about negative public opinion.

I think the biggest problem is there is a patchwork of air quality regulations in CA plus federal regulations like the Clean Air Act which makes it very difficult to do prescribed burns.[1] So this bill might help with the federal regulations but I'm not sure how it would impact local regs.

[0] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Top-scientist-knew-Bi...

[1] https://reason.com/2020/09/14/western-wildfires-can-be-preve...
Yeah, it's sweet. "1976" keycaps.
https://drop.com/buy/nineteenseventysix-sa-keycap-set
Maxim 3. An ordnance technician at a dead run outranks everybody
Oh yeah, definitely that big bad organized crime. Evil people just being evil because they are evil, probably cackling right now, too.

Or maybe it's a moderately-skilled person in an underdeveloped country, who, despite being moderately skilled, has no legitimate opportunities. Maybe the person responsible even has mixed feelings about it. Who knows?

That poor US hospital, I'm sure it is a bastion of fairness and equality for all. I'm sure this wasn't facilitated by their own greed and negligence.

Save your pearl clutching for nextdoor. Here we like to understand the factors that lead to a particular outcome, rather than moralizing hysteria.
How often is there excess power? To be economic there will likely be purpose built to run on wind whenever the wind blows, not just when the wind blows AND there is excess power. The capital cost of electrolyzers is substantial and will need to run a lot to pencil out.
Solar being preferred energy source from what I heard. All you need after that is some access to ports and the hydrogen can be shipped wherever you want. Nice idea actually.
If by "translation" you mean Mutual Language Translation (turns text into blocks, and blocks back into text, as you type/drag blocks) then yes. If you mean "translation between human languages" then less so. It supports whatever you can do with Blockly, minus whatever things I broke adding the MLT support. I'd love a PR to handle other languages, but again... time.
Ask HN: Are app catalog apps allowed on the Google Play Store?
I have an idea of making an app which is a catalog of android apps that you can get by sideloading.

This means that this app catalog only links to where the app is downloadable. (e.g A link to the developer's website)

This app would only be a store front with reviews screenshots and ratings. Is this in violation of the Google Play policies? Would this be great for people wanting to make android sideloading more mainstream?
No - it’s not the timber industry. Fires are bad fire them. Environmental interests are the main issue. There is always some “compelling” interest that manages to block a planned burn, no matter how niche or how much it might actually help their concern long term.
> Two photons going the same direction have no mass, but two photons in different directions do have mass.

This is not limited to photons, although the first part, "no mass" is due to the rest mass of photons being zero.

Two objects of any kind whatsoever have more mass going in different directions than going in the same direction.
imagine a very thin and very short wire - just for one electron to move a bit left and a bit right. The surrounding environment - in particular Brownian motion molecules, especially the ones with large dipole moment, and the background EM radiation - will cause the electron to move left-right. Thus we have electric current generation. Now diode-terminate the wire to allow aggregating of many of such wires without mutual cancellation of the current generated by those wires. Well, meet the Maxwell's Daemon remote cousin - Maxwell's Diode.

Basically, there are always local micro gradients even though the macro integration of those gradients gives 0. It may as well happen that graphene being few atoms thick and thus dipping into the local scale properties may bridge and aggregate without [total] mutual cancellation those properties into the macro scale (graphehe sheet vibrations may happen be [one of] such a filter, kind of piezoelectric effect). There is no violation of the 2nd law as extracted work/energy wouldn't be larger than the entropy increase resulting from the smoothing of the micro gradients (bringing the Universe's heat death closer).

Or even imagine a pond with no visible movement of water and place over it a myriad of very very small water mill wheels - they will be rotating chaotically back and forward due to small perturbances in the water (and the smaller a giving wheel the larger share of local gradient it will be extracting as the smaller share of it will be mutually cancelling with the neighboring gradients under the wheel). That chaotic rotation of that myriad of wheels can be aggregated into usable work/energy.
In 2020 normal existence is rogue like
A number of smaller dishes can be made that will robotically unfurl. With the ability to drop a number of them on a flat maria. They will be made with as large as possible self levelling/rotating ability. They can be each driven with their own solar array and will have optical data links so they can work as a large array. They will need an optically linked set of orbiters - which is doable, that can report sequentially. This is a fairly complex task, but once the design is settled and works well, it can be tested and then it can be replicated and an array gradually built with successor dishes. The dishes can be improved as flaws emerge. Being mainly made of aluminum, with vaccuum/dust proof bearings with solar shades it will need to tolerate the temperature range. I think this is a good idea as the other side of the moon is indeed a quiet zone. The lunar lagrange point is also a good place, however the lagrange point will be a hard place for a number of dishes to be sited apart while maintaining precision array positioning.
That's nifty. I've seen the "drag text code" a few times, and I think it's an interesting model. Certainly helps with the discoverability problem. I actually had that feature in BlockPy at one point, but I believe my collaborators said it was too confusing for the students.
Maintenance and Care
This is what happens when almost every public co. becomes a growth company—the consolidation is inevitable. They are just buying revenue.
I have two copies of a product I need feedback on
First two people to respond to my demo with a mailing address gets a copy of my new product "Linux Mint OEM Studio 128gb". The only thing I ask in return is your comments on it, product quality or other concerns. This is a prelaunch product. Go! Respond here after you've tried it.
I would say that the government is not the right institution to take this up. They should support secondary app stores, or legislate to force Apple and Google to make their stores more developer friendly. Getting involved in this business, goes against their own narrative. On one hand, we are privatizing state owned companies and on the other, we are taking up vanity projects which the tax payer has to fund. Do check up on our new government building, that no one apart from the powers that be asked for.
Also, this announcement very much coincided with an attempt from some of the major apps in introducing a form of sports betting (see IPL), which was thwarted by the very same Google and Apple, in line with the laws of our country. All over, it seems like American tech. giants are more pro-indian-consumer than our own government, which is tremendously dissappointing in and of itself.
All issues that have been solved in existing implementations of this that have been going around for decades.
I'd say you misunderstood, since the game was developed in The Netherlands.

> The game considered in this post is based on a Chinese version of a popular Android game developed in the Netherlands

Here's their website: https://www.sparklingsociety.net/sparkling-games/city-buildi...

It's not that unusual for Dutch developers to use English variable names in code.
Unsafe blocks are not needed.
Rc<RefCell<Node<T>>> is what I used.
Six ancient galaxies found in the web of a supermassive black hole
I have the Sceptre 65" "dumb" TV recommended in this article and have been really happy with it. I also got it on sale last year so paid only ~$350 for it-- wait until Black Friday/Cyber Monday if you're looking to get one. I got a Roku to stream with and have been pretty happy.

Meanwhile my family members all have Smart TVs, and have dealt with terrible firmware that makes streaming a real pain and slow boot/startup times, not being able to stream Disney+ for a while because the manufacturer wouldn't update their firmware for a long time, of course the general privacy/spyware, and I think even ads pushed through onto their TVs.

I hope dumb TVs continue, otherwise I fear I'll be forced to "upgrade" to a Smart TV once this one needs to be replaced.
So basically even in the DPRK you can't escape the microtransaction economy.
"If you work in tech, you probably have a YubiKey". I stopped reading here.
Definitely true, not everyone is willing to pay the price for privacy in the first price.
It doesn't specify either way, that's the problem. It's not a modern legal document with precise terms defined, it's written in sometimes intentionally vague 18th century prose, so either interpretation is equally valid as far as the text alone is concerned.
I would love if this can be extended to laptops. I have no need for apps like Safari, Apple TV, Podcasts and Music. Apple doesn't give an option in Launchpad for this. I would prefer to rather not force delete application contents from terminal.

With each OS update, I keep finding new annoying apps like Apple TV which seem to pop up at screen without me launching them.
>[TV manufacturer] should just sell me a smart tv without customer hostile "features".

The price will be much higher then. Right now, you're sold the tv at a discount (at a loss, I'm pretty sure) because the manufacturer will make money off you down the road by stealing and selling your data to advertisers. It's kind of like with social media (though to a lesser degree) - don't make the mistake of thinking of yourself exclusively as a customer. You're a product, too. Their advertising partners are the true customers.
Best Postman Alternatives: Fastest API Testing Tools
Oh thank you, thank you.

I just installed that and do not know why I never tried to find something like this.

I am not sure how setting the kind of color blindness helps but having the color names displayed is wonderful.
Solenoids are too abrupt for a "finger-push" actuation. The rack-and-pinion is a very good approximation
I Have the Logo Tatooed on My ARM
We need to start thinking about what happens when those people die and our incredibly permissive inheritance laws allow them to pass down literal trillions to... basically a bunch of 50, 60, and 70 year olds.

Especially since a lot of that inheritance is going to be stakes in critical businesses that the heirs are in no way, shape, or form qualified to run.
Exactly, and Intel has been all about peak/short-burst performance over the past 5-6 generations, if not longer, just so it can keep winning benchmarks.

Now that led them to a new microarchitecture that will likely suck on servers and laptops, due to the high power usage, and might not even win on the desktop compared to Zen 4 CPUs (Alder Lake will mostly compete with Zen 4, not Zen 3).
I did thank you!
What Google’s “Quantum Supremacy” Means for the Future of Cryptocurrency
It is by no means settled that "the people of the United States" is explicitly and specifically citizenry and not aliens currently in the country for clauses not so specifying "citizens".
right, that was around the time that everyone using the BSD network stack became a thing.

Did you mean to say thrashy (not that it's wasn't also trashy)? Because IIRC that was the main problem. There were issues with, for example, the memory mapped area leaving the caches of the resident core that the process lived on; and also generally BeOS was terrible at pinning processes to CPU cores. And I recall that the sentiment was also that the network stack needed low latency in general and that it was rather difficult to get a good implementation of a userland network for these reasons.

I imagine that at least some of these concerns may play out in more contemporary userland network stacks. Possibly, worse so if you don't know what is going on with noisy neighbors in containerized or even vm-ized deployments (though I would guess that Amazon/GCP but maybe not Azure does a good job of quotaing/throttling vms)
What exactly do you do day to day as district councilor? Is your life mostly reacting to issues, or can you design/institute new programs/change?
The more modern medication for me was modafinil but I had to beg for it. My psychiatrist made me go through the stringer of usual suspects before she allowed me moda: first adderall, then ritalin, then straterra (this one actually gave me acute psychopathy and constantly leak semen). All three caused profound personality shifts.

Moda doesn't touch my affect and it's wonderful.
I understand your point of view. I use Firefox exclusively in private. But I need to support Chrome in development, and Ungoogled Chromium is a good alternative for me - it's neither Google nor Microsoft. Most of us do live in capitalist societies, and therefore, I think, we have no other choice than to have to use it's tools to try to improve them.
I've had really good interactions with ETrade phone support (working with them on employee stock plan related requests). It has been absolutely refreshingly good customer service -- they know their product so well and know exactly how to offer advice about how to use it.
How could anyone know? Google is vast and has many kinds of jobs, and so there simply isn't enough information to say.

There is cutting-edge research and also pretty boring business app development. Also, some jobs are pretty specialized and not the sort of thing you can get as a generic software engineer.
Out of all non-landlocked countries, only two do not belong to, and therefore are not technically regulated by, the International Maritime Organization: Micronesia and Taiwan. So unless they are registering your ships in those countries (most cruise ships use flags of convenience for tax reasons, not regulatory reasons), they are playing by those rules, even while in international waters. And by doing so, the NOx and SOx are cut drastically.

I don't think cruise ships are great. Even if they were fueled by pure renewable or nuclear energy, there are still problems, ranging from invasive species taking trips across the world in bilges, nutrient-concentrations from black water dumps leading to overgrowth zones of marine plants, destroyed coral reefs from massive anchor chains, and garbage pollution that makes its way off of poorly contained balconies. But again, this is a problem of regulation. They are all fixable problems.

I also should mention that I find most arguments about cruise industry labor policies to be extremely hypocritical and elitist. People will complain about how they make their workers work long hours for little pay, but won't lift a finger to change it. Open up our borders, give them an option to work somewhere that has actual labor laws. Hell, when these cruise ships come into US ports, we don't even let the workers off the boat, for fear that they might illegally stay permanently and have a better life with labor laws and living wages inside our borders. We take away all their better options, but then complain that unethical companies take advantage of it?

Basically, I agree that the cruise industry is dirty, unethical, and run by despicable people. But the actual problems they present to the world are also fixable by the world, and cruises don't necessarily need to be banned to do so. I'd prefer they fix their problems, but I still want them around so that the high school dropout machinist with 4 kids can go on regular vacations with his family and realize his dream of visiting 30 countries before he dies.
I'm more familiar with a different "i-gel" (which does a similar thing for emergency airway management as this does for ML, allowing less trained users to still achieve "advanced" results)

https://www.intersurgical.com/info/igel
We can look at the genetic changes and timeframe of them, and how certain mutations have spread - novel changes in our species are not that frequent on the historical timescale. People 3000 years ago are the same with respect to their biology, so they have to be "just as smart"; hominids 300,000 years ago are different in some aspects so for them we can't really know how "smart" they were, perhaps they were as smart, perhaps they were not.
As someone with ADHD I was once prescribed the lowest dose of adderall (5 mg?) and I found it was so much like being high it genuinely scared me

I was working from home and the second it kicked in I started getting literal chills down my spine.

I ended up messaging a bunch of people on Facebook I haven’t talked to in years but felt a sudden affinity and empathy for.

I got distracted by a part of my apartment that I hadn’t cleaned in a while and missed a meeting because I ended up cleaning the whole place, including weird things like dusting the sides of books.

When I finally got to coding, it was like I was in the matrix. Hyper focused (and fwiw getting a lot done) but in a weird euphoric high feeling way.

I guess what I’m asking is is that how everyone feels the first time they take it?

And how long does it take to just feel normal on it, but like able to focus?

I want to try it again, because I need help focusing and know I can do better, but I’m genuinely afraid of the person I was on that stuff.
I never found railways or roads ugly. But find them extremely polluting for the environment in loud sound(trains are terrible at this), toxic chemicals (volatile asphalt compounds, wheel dust, fumes and specially petrol oils in the case of trains), lights and so on.

It is also very bad for the environment because it divides the territory in two and animals and humans could not cross easily like they did in the past for millions of years. You can not cross or it is extremely inconvenient crossing whole cities because of trains.

On the other hand, trains make transportation way cheaper and territories to prosper.

I also find electrical posts ugly and dangerous stuff.
You just have to get over the curve of about a week of regular dosage then you can sleep at a normal hour. But it should be the first thing you do in the morning.

Modafinil was The Answer for me after trying everything else. I don't know why psychiatrists always insist on a battery of other drugs first, which can cause everything from aggression to obvious personality shifts to mania to damage to the dopaminergic axons of the brain.
Baking won’t get me through a Covid winter but a bossy Melvyn Bragg just might
Hussein Nasser uploads frequent high quality content about backend engineering. I wouldn't call it advanced but he covers a wide range of technologies and concepts.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HusseinNasser-software-engineering
Apple haven't ever been really interested in or committed to non-consumer markets.
-At a former employer, I volunteered - as in, bullied my way into - the test group for our SCADA GUI front-ends.

This resulted in palettes for both deuteranopes and tritanopes; our support staff on occasion had calls from customers who had inadvertently activated one of the color schemes for the chromatographically challenged - they typically went along the lines of 'Did you nincompoops have some colorblind sod do your GUIs?'

-'Matter of fact, we did. Would you like me to put you through to him?'
Just want to say check out Life Itself, the biography film about Roger Ebert. It bring me to tears everytime but is also filled with so much joy.
Right - we currently have a quasi duopoly which frankly won’t last a decade if people are willing to compete with it. Both companies are showing signs of ossification.

If governments get involved, we’ll have a government monopoly and government regulated software sales forever.
The President Is Not Well
They could have a very bare bone macOS based server operating system specialised for running virtual machines. Dont they have their own xhyve virtualisation layer?
Glad I bought AMD years ago at $7 once they had a solid CEO like Su who can execute well.

I have hopes that Swan can kick out the dilletantes. Too much engineering going on at Intel that doesn't translate to actual progress.
Lol, some people complain about too many dependencies, some people complain about dependencies being shit, you can never win
Thanks for saving my time.
EU already has this, one thing they did was reduce credit card fees by an order of magnitude. This has greatly sped up the move to cashless payments since now the fees are so small that you don't have to bother.

Companies working to create bottlenecks in society instead of removing them really is bad for everyone, so governments needs to step in to fix that.

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-budget/26214...
A colleague has a chain made of paperclips dangling from the back of his screen. For auth just poke the chain, looks cool and works great.
In Our Time Podcast Archive:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl/episodes/downloads
> Long story short, yeah, there's a lot of crates.

And I'd add one more to the pile: my [SNAFU] crate. It actually does what the author says they do by hand:

> So, I just write the boilerplate and make my errors descriptive enough I don’t need a backtrace. When I want to get fancy I implement the built-in `Error` trait, which used to be kinda useless but is now more helpful. And in another five years it’ll still work just fine.

SNAFU is all about creating enums for each error case so that the hierarchy of types tells you exactly what and where the error came from. In my ideal usage, you don't need a stacktrace or even origin line number / file name because each specific combination of error is used only once.

The nesting of types within specific contexts gives what I like to call a "semantic backtrace"

Example usage:

#[derive(Debug, Snafu)]
enum Error {
#[snafu(display("Unable to read configuration from {}: {}", path.display(), source))]
ReadConfiguration { source: io::Error, path: PathBuf },

#[snafu(display("Unable to write configuration to {}: {}", path.display(), source))]
WriteConfiguration { source: io::Error, path: PathBuf },
}

type Result<T, E = Error> = std::result::Result<T, E>;

fn example(path: &Path) -> Result<()> {
let data = fs::read_to_string(path).context(ReadConfiguration { path })?;
fs::write(data, path).context(WriteConfiguration { path })?;
Ok(())
}

This creates the `Error` enum and implements `std::error::Error` for it, plus what I call context selectors to easily add on to fallible calls to help group them. Note that both SNAFU errors are caused by an `io::Error`, but the context in which the `io::Error` is created is vastly different.

> for applications and libraries, respectively

I've yet to understand why people want to draw a line between these two cases. For me, the only difference is that the error type in a library needs to be conscious that it's part of the public API. That's why SNAFU can generate [opaque] error types

---

Other bonuses:

- Doesn't require heap allocation (but can make of use it)

- Works in no-std environments

- Comes with extension traits for `Result` and `Option`, and feature flagged ones for `Future` and `Stream`

- Supports generic errors (types and lifetimes)

- Can create backtraces (either from the backtrace crate or the unstable `Backtrace` type in the standard library)

[SNAFU]: https://crates.io/crates/snafu

[opaque]: https://docs.rs/snafu/0.6.9/snafu/guide/opaque/index.html