HN user
I think the "fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003" is referring to this:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/90493/researchers-d...
It's till 2015, not till 2020, and the explanation for the fall is 4 paragraphs in. It seems to be a move away from slash and burn agriculture and towards more modern, permanent farming.
3. A neural network can solve problems that a human can solve with small-sized datapoints and little to no context
I like this rule, because it is actionable. Its easy to take a sample of your data, (in the case of images) lower the quality to 20x20 pixels and get see if you, or another person can do the classification task. Audio could be handled similarly.
I definitely agree. Companies should be allowed to go bust more! Especially if they're in trouble because they didn't maintain a safety net of capital.
Unfortunately companies are often able to convince politicians, and the public that they're critically important, or too big to fail. They say that many other companies depend on them, and if they're allowed to go bust they will be "the next lehman brothers" with many other companies cascading and failing.
So I think bailouts are going to continue be a thing indefinitely. And if we can't stop bailouts from happening, making them come with conditions - like safer capital ratios - that make bailouts less likely in the future would be a good thing.
Perhaps a better approach would be to require these companies to maintain capital ratios like we do for banks. They could be forced to raise more equity if their debt becomes too large. After all the point should be to prevent them from needing future bailouts.
I mean there are other ways to extract money from a company than paying dividends or doing share buy backs.
Are they also going to cap salaries for employees? Are they also going to stop companies paying out large fees to related companies? What about investing in expensive but highly speculative projects?
Linear time O(n) means that as you keep adding numbers to sort, the time taken is bounded by a linear function of how many numbers you have. Since there is an upper bound on the number of spaghetti strands you can hold in your hand, eventually you need to "Slam their lower sides on the table" in batches, and then merge sort the results. However because unlike in merge sort there is an upper bound on the size of the sub lists you use spaghetti sort will actually be O(n^2) instead of O(n log(n)).
If you ignore the usual meaning of linear time and restrict yourself to sorting lists of numbers that will fit in your hand, then spaghetti sort always runs in less time that however long it takes to sort the maximum amount of spaghetti you can hold in your hand. i.e. constant time.