jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
>> I wonder... is it still justified to learn Prolog now?

Unfortunately no. There was a great push to develop the theory of logic programming, based on resolution theorem proving, back in the '70s and '80s. This effort culminated in the design of Prolog, a general-purpose logic programming language with a resolution theorem-prover. Shortly after the AI winter of the '80s hit and research in logic programming was severely disrupted. Research and progress continued but at a much slower pace and the earlier heights have never been reached again since. Consequently, we don't have a "better Prolog" because there are very few people who can even imagine what such a "better Prolog" would look like, let alone design and implement it. Alas, we have ran out of Robinsons, Kowalskis, Colmerauers, and so on.

Another reason of course is that Prolog is a very fine-tuned language that gets many things right because its design makes very sensible trade-offs. For example, the much-maligned depth-first search and the consequent clause ordering, absence of an occurs check, negation-as-failure, extra-logical features such as the dynamic program database, etc, are all pragmatic choices that balance the need for a general-purpose language that works, with aspirations of theoretical purity. That is to say, there is nothing fundamentally broken about Prolog, it's acutally a very good logic programming language and it's just not that easy to design a radically better logic progamming language, especially one based on resolution.

Regarding minikanren, my understanding is that it's not meant as a "better Prolog", rather it's meant as a small, embedded Prolog (and here by "Prolog" I mean a logic programming language based on resolution, in the same sense that Scheme is "a Lisp"). It's meant for programmers of imperative languages who would like to integrate logic programing functionality in their applications. Minikanrens (there are many) can essentially be imported as libraries that allow logic programming in a syntax closer to the embedding language. The alternative would be either to switch entirely to Prolog (which of course is a huge decision), or to write a buggy, slow version of Prolog in the programmer's preferred imperative language.

Minikanrens have various differences with Prolog, such as absence of side-effects and a dynamic database, a different search strategy, occurs check, etc. but these are not unmitigated improvements. They are different trade-offs than the ones chosen by Prolog.

Note however that resolution-based languages like Prolog are not the only logic programming languages. For two prominent examples of alternative approaches, see Datalog and Answer Set Progamming. Both sacrifice Turing-completeness but offer, e.g. decidability, the ability to benefit from the power of modern SAT solvers, classical negation, etc.

Again, there are trade-offs. The thing to understand is that theorem proving -proving the truth or falsehood of statements in a formal language- is damn hard, even with computers, and there are always going to be trade-offs when the purpose is to have a real-world application.
> Right now most tests are using over 40 cycles

This is misleading. The number of cycles used is irrelevant. Reference: https://virologydownunder.com/the-false-positive-pcr-problem... (from someone who has actually used PCR in research, as neither you nor I have).

> and it's causing a lot of false positives.

We can get an upper bound on false positives from ONS surveys over the summer, by assuming all their positives were false (prevelance was low then). At https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... the ONS says "We know the specificity of our test must be very close to 100% as the low number of positive tests in our study means that specificity would be very high even if all positives were false. For example, in the most recent six-week period (31 July to 10 September), 159 of the 208,730 total samples tested positive. Even if all these positives were false, specificity would still be 99.92%." (The false positive rate would then be 100% - 99.92% = 0.08 %). The ONS prevelance surveys are processed at a couple of the Lighthouse Labs which also do the Pillar 2 testing in the UK.

Can you explain why "false positives" go down among vaccinated patients?

> fatalities should (and even then many people get marked for COVID deaths because they test positive yet die of something unrelated)

Evidence for "many"? We have a couple of metrics for UK deaths from COVID: deaths within 28 days of a positive test, and root cause / contributing causes ("of" vs "with") on death certificates. These are imperfect in both directions (for example, some patients who die spend more than 28 days in hospital with COVID, meaning the 28 day metric undercounts them) but agree that the UK has seen around 70000 deaths of COVID.
Same for me, I read it in my native language and find it hard to find his prose top quality and I found his story a mediocre quality (and for me story is the La raison d'être of a book).
we are fixing, it's a translation. Thanks so much for your help!
You're being a little dramatic. "People who do not believe in evolution are holding back progress" ... Honestly... The cool thing about science is that whether you think gravity is real or not you will still fall. Progress will always be made in due time..
We are fixing, it's a translation. Thanks so much for your help!
What proof is there that creativity, adaptability, tenacity are better skills to have than the ones tested in the article? Or that the skills you mentioned are not consequences of the ones mentioned in the article?
Serving live video over the internet

The Cam.ly security camera and interface system is super
simple to set up. Plug power into the camera and connect
it to the internet. Point and shoot. We slightly changed
the interface for the pinata buster. We won’t talk more
about this part because how it works exactly is a trade
secret.

It's seriously disappointing that they refuse to talk about the streaming code. Last year I tried to build a web-enabled robot. I never found a way to stream the live video from the web-cam to a flash widget. There were lots of online services and commercial products, but no open-source stack.

It looks like Cam.ly will become unusable when the manufacturer's online web service goes down.
I'm not scoffing at a lack of progress.

This thread started with some one asking whether Tech had played a role in the decline of street gangs.

I am making the case that outside of the smartphone, and faster wireless networks, nothing fundamentally changed between 2008 and now.

So, did the rise in smartphones lead to the decline of street gangs?

Causation vs Correlation.
Are you from Finland perhaps? I did read somewhere that they considered making 40km/h the default speed in all Finnish cities.
Once there is sufficient liquidity you will see options market makers as you do with other ETFs.

Additionally, margin is only strictly constrained under reg-t for accounts under $100k or so. Above that level you can request portfolio margin.
Link is down, cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:75RHpg6...
Would you happen to know if the speed decreases "gracefully"? As in for a SAT/SMT problem, would Coq be at least as fast as z3?
Packaging and inter-connect are definitely going to become more and more important.

Pushing silicon fabrication is becoming a real limit for hardware, smart packaging\stacking will play a big role in the following years.

AMD\Apple already proved how valuable it is.
Sure, you can get a roof that last for 120 - 150 years, but the cost means that many opted for cheaper solutions. My house was built with an asbestos roof, those last forever, almost. If a tile broke I would get asbestos particles in my yard.
The delivery platforms have a near-monopoly and are equally scummy, so unless you’re a household name customers will jump through extra hoops to order from (like going direct to your website), you have no choice but to accept this if you want to compete.
> Is a 70 year going to be lugging propane tanks around and doing odd jobs for food?

Good question. That’s a thing. People have this grey nomad ideal and when they reach that age they sell up everything and buy a big rig, only to find that at age 70, it’s difficult to drive such a thing. Particularly if they’ve never reversed a trailer before.

This is why you can buy second hand rigs that are 12 months old that are hardly used, cheap.
Thanks for the share. Very interesting video!
You should check out sasyLF. It has a eclipse plugin as well. If you are interested in learning about proof checkers it's a good starting point. My PhD advisor is it's maintainer.
Yeah, I was disappointed when your comment history wasn't just a bunch of Postgres recommendations
a certificate of authenticity could be destroyed.

the money in the bank could disappear (physically they don't exist anymore)

a blockchain could become unaccessible

blockchain doesn't guarantee eternity (for example no electricity or no internet connection, no blockchain)
Be very careful. Digital cameras have a lot of noise that has nothing to do with the actual reality. Using that as your barometer is likely to mislead unless you’ve got a very good camera (or just use a microscope).
How would that script have ended? With humans required for computing power there's no way the machines give up their existence to release the humans.

At least I can imagine them using alternate power sources with collaboration for the humans. Cleaning the sky for example.
I also live in Australia, and am an avid cyclist - I ride to work every day, and I'm sorry but no, I strongly disagree.

There is nothing wrong with wearing a helmet - I've come off my bike before and its made a potentially very bad situation painful rather than life-threatening - and really look, on the list of worries of cyclist, having to wear a helmet is the least of our worries.

(The law about "not riding on a footpath" is probably more annoying - occasionally, you need to, when its the only safe option).

However, what is an issue in Australia with cyclist is attitude particularly with car drivers. Until that changes, it will always discourage potential cyclists.

Whether it's cars who will literally chase you down and scream about how they "deserve to be on the road and you don't", or people who open doors into the bike lane without checking for cyclist etc.

Ironically, I find it actually tends to be the lower socio-economic areas that find the concept of cycling most puzzling.

In the more expensive areas, cycling seems to be more of a thing - sadly, road cycling is a rich man's hobby here - when you have groups of Cervelo and Bianchi's out on weekends, those people often tend to be a bit more considerate when you're on the road yourself during the week.

I do wish cycling was more mainstream, or at least car drivers better educated - but I don't think that removing helmets is the way to do that.
> Even if China simply demanded the SSL keys from Baidu, they'd have to decrypt every single connection on the fly and significantly upgrade their infrastructure.

Umm... not really. All you'd have to do is select whatever subset of connections you want to inject code in to, and then terminate them with your own web server that has Baidu's SSL keys, then let the rest of the connections go through transparently to Baidu.
If we're talking about low-power mcu, here's something that might interest the the hacker community:

A new API,to be released in april, that enables programming mcu's to very low power,easily(versus very high complexity of currently needed to achieve low power). It uses the mbed, which is of similar complexity to the arduino:

http://community.arm.com/groups/internet-of-things/blog/2015...
May be, but as far as I'm concerned those 300Ds can't rust away fast enough.
At the same P/E that Apple currently holds, and assuming a 15% net margin for Tesla, Elon needs to sell 5x the cars he sold in 2020 to yield today's price. Current auto capacity is 2x units sold in 2020 (Fremont + Shanghai). By the end of 2021, will be 3x (+Berlin). By the end of 2022, should be 4-5x with Texas and expansions at the earlier factories. Tesla will be producing the Cyber Truck, Semi tractor and updated Roadster, though the unit leader should be Model Y(?).

Historic sales growth is somewhat behind capacity growth. 2017 ended at about $12B. 2020 is tracking to maybe $32B. That's around 40% annual sales growth. Let's call 2.5 million cars $125B in sales. At 40%, Tesla needs around 4 years to get to the $125B level. Essentially, the back of my envelope says long buyers today will need to hold for 4 years to see a profit based on some semblance of fundamentals.

Stock prices for high-growth companies can be fluffy for a long time. I absolutely agree that current levels are in the realm of absurdly ridiculous, but as long as the underlying economy doesn't crater, the exuberants can be irrational for quite a long time. Can they hold out for 4 years?
Very poor read on the room from where I'm standing, people are complaining precisely that the responses weren't symmetrical, which would be the definition of white privledge in this country.
> at the current rate Tesla will soon be worth more than every...

company on earth put together. Just a few more x10 away.
Right, but if an individual spreads misinformation, child pornography, piracy, threats, harassment, defamation, etc they are liable. Social networks are uniquely not responsible for the content that they curate--they enjoy the best of both worlds, and they oughtn't. If their curation is "speech" they should be legally accountable to for their speech like the rest of us are. There's precedent here with telecoms--they're free from scrutiny because they're just dumb pipes.

This is one conceivable kind of legislation that doesn't run afoul of the first amendment. Another approach might be to require social networks to interoperate so consumers can choose between different networks. I should be able to leave Twitter without leaving my network. In this way, Twitter (et al) loses a lot of its power and thus its ability to threaten democracy.

There's more than one way to skin a cat.
The Z80 has a 4-bit ALU but no one calls it a 4-bit CPU.
Your words are true, but it's not mere "trespassing" when the building is full of workers and people are bringing guns.
In case buying a new keyboard is a step too far, there is bucklespring available for Linux that emulates the sound of an IBM Model M keyboard.

Demo here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7dKyGoqn9w
> I'm not buying it. Look at Matrix and tell me it's holding them back.

The main argument against federated protocols playing well with security is that they have a harder time evolving. The example always given is email. Once Matrix has reached 500M users and several server implementations with less than 20% market share each, how can you be sure that it will keep improving contrary to email protocols? WhatsApp switched to E2EE in a matter of months, but most of our emails are still plaintext on the servers.

I like and use Matrix as a replacement for IRC, but I don't think they will catch up in terms of security with Signal in most practical situations (meaning, I want to send a message to a non-technical person). Both because of the fossilization associated with federated protocol (see above), and simply because developing a federated protocol is way harder and less forgiving than a centralized one.

Your argument about the "99% use" means that first that you don't need centralization if it's already centralized in practice, and second that it brings very little benefit (benefits only 1% of users). At that point, the (possibly low) costs of decentralization are not worth it.
This reminds me of the recent New Yorker article debating the social value of Wall St.:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/29/101129fa_fact_...
"Also, flickr has a 200 photo limit on free accounts that makes project 365 impossible unless you upgrade, and even less so if you use flickr for something else."

Incorrect.

From http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/

"When you have a free Flickr account, you can upload 2 videos and 300MB worth of photos each calendar month....Your upload limits are reset to zero at midnight in Pacific Time Zone (Flickr headquarters time) on the first of each calendar month."
What is Mail Merge?
There is a meaningful distinction between a server that serves 1% of requests and server that is down.

I assume that overloaded server still serves some requests. But my assumption could be wrong, so if you have experience with that -- please share your knowledge.

Another thing that baffles me: if I introduce new supernode that is sitting on new IP address -- why would all the traffic suddenly hit that node?

Shouldn't it be just gradual increase in requests while more and more Skype clients discover that new supernode?
Recently bought my dad a Blu-ray player and some of the disks have a firmware upgrade warning at the start of the disk. WTF is my dad supposed to do when he eventually gets one of these disks?
Preventing WebM to become dominant has the exact same outcome of more license income ;)

Also, why shouldn't they care about license fees? Think about all encoders/decoders, all producers, all receivers, home cinema players. With more and more videos (VOD) moving into the web, this is only at the beginning. Once H.264 is established enough it's income for free!
I tend to disagree. Error handling exactly in such cases where you have to bring the network online from a complete halt or other catastrophe is at the very heart of the architecture of these systems. These scenarios should and are at the minds of the architects and coders.
How do you know there isn't a manufacturing error with the disc, or that your dvd player hasn't gone bad? If you're really talking about a DVD and not a bluray I'm surprised there is actually a way to add "new drm" to a disc. Googling salt+drm only finds your blog discussing that movie - are you sure this passes occam's razor?
Looks good. It ran my old virtualbox 3.2 guest machines without any problems.
There's an important lesson here for P2P system design.

As in all systems, things will go wrong, whether it's your own bug or someone else's. Your system needs to not only be stable in the steady state, but to be able to return to the steady state when something interrupts it.
That still requires someone to do the migration. Don't forget that aside from VCS, this system also integrates with their bugtracker, wiki, etc.
I think you'll find that the internet is a few decades older than ICANN.

But in ICANN's defence most people who participate in ICANN (remember it is a self selecting body) aren't happy about all the seizures either. I'm sure the mailing lists are going "full tilt" (pun intended) as we type.
I went through the online H&R free tax thing because I made less than $50,000 in 2010, and the entire way through I am looking for a place to add up my receipts and pay my state tax on them, nowhere to be found. I have no way of calculating what else needs to be withheld, I don't have the money to go to a tax person to get it done there.

Tax law has become so complex that a lay person can't get the job done without either paying someone to do it, or having to use software that may not include all of the options required...
I think tying bonuses to social is a great idea (more at http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=2374&cpage=1#comment-... ) but getting people focused on key corporate goals is important for any CEO, wartime or peacetime.
Better than waste: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1945073/
Looks like you'd have to invent another name for that, because it wouldn't be a community anymore.
i need to spend more time in seattle!
Ehhh... that won't pay (don't you thin it would've been too easy?).

The problem is like the other person said - there are two blinds that travel around so in every cycle you get to pay 1.5 minimum bet (thus ensuring that you loose money if you don't play). As for the rakeback... you only qualify for return of the rake that you "contributed" by winning a pot. So for example, you win a pot of 1000$ and the casino takes 100$ in rake from that. After rakeback you receive 30$ of that original rake.

So many (most?) players rely on playing a break-even game and doing profit on rakeback. I read somewhere that pro's only win 7 big blinds per 100 hands (thats long term ofc). Thats little, very little.

Rake is something that people often underestimate - its the same mechanism casinos use with green pocket on roulette etc... Its used to give casino an edge. Rake ensures that if you keep playing long enough you will run out of money - now matter how well you play.
The espresso cup illustration is delicious! Looking forward to giving this a try. Mostly Python web development, so don't know how helpful some of these features are.
Meta-fanboy = a fan of "meta"?
Meta-fanboy = a fan of fanboys?

Meta-feta fanboy = those who admire the processing of Mediterranean cheese.
>>You're running into a "good is the enemy of the great" issue here.

Perl, as opposed to e.g. Java, has a tradition of being extensible; Moose is not the only example.

Common Lisp wasn't OO in the first silver book either.

>>counter the oft claimed "CPAN has more libraries than any other language!". It's not true, though the libraries it has might be easier to find than some.

Not what I wrote; I wrote "The Perl feature is that it is flexible. You'll get more library and language capabilities with CPAN than using anything else I know of."

You needed to go to Lisp (which sadly isn't really commercial today) for flexibility -- and Java for libraries. (And as you note -- I'm willing to believe there is more open source for Java, but finding it...?)

Re linguists -- you need to give exact examples of your claims for me to understand what you talk about. Compare with e.g. German, as you claimed there were some difference?

Etc.
I agree; the scammer/malware heuristics of regular internet users are likely going to treat fb.com as a false positive. Consider the fact that Facebook's hundred-million demographic comprises people like these: https://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_y....

Good point.

They can always use it for URL shortening.
i agree with all that you say

and i did get a haircut yesterday :)
i accept your point that talent may be finally getting valued fairly. i stated as much in my post

but i don't think you can call what i did "complaining"
Why is there no browser engine? It would seem like your method of "writing my own of everything I need" doesn't really scale well to something like the entire browser stack. And it appears that WebKit should not be that hard to integrate (in the general case, not sure about this kind of authoring app).

You may have a good reason, I just can't think of it off the top of my head.
Had $100,000 in liquid assets and a revenue-generating startup by my 22nd birthday a few days ago. Pretty much what I set out to achieve.
In all fairness, hg serve is much easier to use than git daemon. It works on windows, for once, and you don't have to be aware of all kind of border cases w.r.t. aliases, etc... Still recently, I got issues accessing a git repo in which I did "git daemon --export-all" - I ended up making it work by executing git daemon outside the repo, which is a bit weird.
Yeah, tell me about it. You'd think in a country that's as high-tech as Korea they'd find a better way. Some banks even require you to install Windows desktop software to generate keys for login.
> It has been reproduced and journallized by Sharif University in Iran.

I see. Well I'll just wait for additional confirmation from the Great Leader's University of North Korea.