skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In Postgres, sequences are guaranteed to be monotonically increasing even in the presence of failed transactions.

Well, I was talking about what happens in case of failure; not the chances of a failure to begin with. If, hypothetically, Postgres forgot to update a sequence number, then a collision would be guaranteed, since that's a property of sequential numbering: all updates are contending for the same "next" number, and must be managed in some way. Random numbers spread across a large range, so work even without management.

Even if we ignore the possibility of bugs in Postgres, or cosmic rays flipping bits in RAM (which may have a similar probability to a random ID scheme colliding), etc. that's still only true inside the confines of Postgres.

Once data starts working its way through layer after layer of shell scripts, caches, proxies, etc. there's a lot of scope for things to go awry. Plus, since we're talking about longevity, there's no guarantee that we'll still be using Postgres in 20 years' time, or maybe we need to migrate or integrate with some other system, etc.

I'm reminded of the "one in a billion" chances that used to be claimed for DNA evidence in court. It is certainly true that the probability of two non-twins having identical DNA is that low, but that doesn't really mean much; even if the probability of identical DNA were zero, that doesn't tell us anything about the collison rate of the sub-set of bases which were used, or the error rate of the sampling process, or the mislabelling rate of the lab, or the corruption rate of the evidence handlers, etc. :)
I think to some degree this is influenced by norms of publishing, some by the constraints of the medium (you have very limited horizontal space), and some by the authors (often) already using italics and bolding within the code for emphasis (such as in your second reference).
Actually I used Netscape and many of its derivatives. That doesn't grant Microsoft a pass.
> 1. Conservation of energy.

This is not a problem for MWI.

> 2. Relativistic observers seeing multiple decoherence events in different orders

There is no decoherence in MWI.
My thought when I read that in the article was "Physical Work -> Cognitive Work -> Creative work". So I think the third kind of work humans will move to is creative(Since AI are so far incapable of being actually creative). After that though, I don't know of another.
Have you seen the "TV Tropes" website?
(Josh from RethinkDB here)

The sibling comment by ubercore has the right link. And your concern is important, since without security, why not just expose your db to the frontend directly?

At a high level, the permission system:

1. Is a whitelist approach (you can't do anything by default)

2. Allows you to specify query shapes that are allowed to be run by the current user. This prevents queries of the wrong shape from ever hitting the database, helping with scalability.

3. Has a fallback to full javascript rules which can depend on the data on disk. A little slower than the query rules, but allows much more flexibility where you need it. And you can combine them with a query rule to do a rough first pass of what is acceptable.

Ultimately, the permissions system is designed to prevent unfettered database access, but it also has an eye towards performance in the case of DOS attacks. Horizon overall attempts to use only indexed queries, low resource usage operations etc, so you don't accidentally invite DOS attacks .

Now, I'm not claiming we're DOS proof or anything, but I just intend to mention we have an eye towards it when we talk about security.
music already is.
It’s no different than having to know the associativity of an operator. Does “a - b - c” mean “(a - b) - c” or “a - (b - c)”? The former, for no reason other than a long history of convention. Same goes for function application. And you could make the same argument about languages that require parentheses for function calls: what does “a(b)(c)” mean? “(a(b))(c)” or “a((b)(c))”?

What’s gained is that the syntax mirrors the semantics. If you have a function “f : int -> bool -> int”, then “f 5” has type “bool -> int” and “f 5 true” has type “int”. It’s not like in Forth where you can’t tell from the syntax how many arguments a function takes.

That said, I do think right-associative function application may be more intuitive—I like having it in Perl, for example.
I'm not even talking about tricks. IE comes pre-installed on all PCs, obviously, except for Europeans, and that only for a few years. But users generally do not bother performing in-depth research on the software they install, be it a browser some other piece of software. They use what that one technical friend keeps blabbering on about, or what their sysadmin installs on their work PC, or whatever comes up as #1 Google result when they search for 'open PDF file'. They intentionally install Firefox, true, but I am not convinced that decision is informed.
Great thinking from the RethinkDB side. One answer I couldn't find on their website is about the offline and optimistic update. It's really tricky to get right. Having a feed of changes is just a small part of having a robust solution.
ميك اب
Futile? Not really -- we have wind and neighboring fields. And sure, some weeds pop in, so you still do have to weed gardens, and do the culling of flowering weeds each year. But their numbers do decrease each year.
This is one story I always enjoy when it is brought up.
In my experience it is the exact opposite. My Linux computers are always able to quickly connect and print to any printer I point them towards. I have never had as many problems as I have had when using Windows or OS X.
A pet peeve of mine is when mathematics itself is described as a language, instead of distinguishing mathematics from mathematical language. It's like saying Neuromancer is just a language, that Neuromancer is just English.

There is content in mathematics that is independent of the language used to express it. Mathematical notation is also incidental. It is not mathematics itself.
Up next, on 11'o'clock news:

"JavaScript developer breaks all mainframes on the planet by withholding LEFTPAD.CBL"
Take a look at this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11716145. TL;DR: currently not optimistic but will be soon; it's fairly simple to do because RethinkDB core has built in support for it. Once the feature lands in Horizon we'll talk about the implementation in detail.
Judges are not elected in my country, so can't comment on that.
In the limit, the sole shareholder may simply be the AI.
+1 for Input font from Font Bureau but with anti-aliasing enabled.
I've been happy with Monaco without anti-aliasing enabled.
It's worth noting that's from 2013; in my understanding, things have changed in LLVM since then, which was another big blocker.
Sounds dangerous. Later commits on master might actually add more if(feature-flag) statements, so if you then just mindlessly merge the cleanup branch, you'll miss the added ifs.

I'd prefer to create a cleanup branch like any other feature branch only when actually going to clean up, and spend the extra cost getting back in context, studying all the if(feature-flags) from master. Otherwise you might miss some, or you might forget some interaction that you learned after feature deploy.
Abstaining is a form of voting, regardless of whether you consider it "some BS idea."
> Not democrats

I'm pretty sure it favors Democrats.The GOP long has tried to suppress votes; what other motive would they have?
AI techniques don't require acres of developers writing acres of if/thens (traditional software development is just that).

The Deepmind Atari player is only 1500 lines of code.
Making a delayed eraser would be neat, but it's just a matter of having the signal particle bias the eraser particle. It doesn't require non-local interactions (thanks to the delay).

The actually difficult task, the one protected by mathematical theorems that should apply to oil droplets bouncing on water, is passing Bell tests.
2 Nci Levent Boya Badana-
Without knowing which part you don't get, there is a risk I just repeat everything in a scrambled order!

The highlights are:

We have software (a programming language and its library) that is versioned in a simple, linear way: it goes from version N, to N+1, to N+2 and so on.

Users who are using version K now depend on some features. Suppose the behavior in version K+1 changes some of the features. The users will be rightfully unhappy; they upgrade to K+1 and things work differently, breaking their code.

To anticipate this, we can have a command line switch or environment variable whereby users can request "please emulate version K". Then version K+1 (and K+2, K+3 ...) will restore those behaviors which were altered starting in K+1.

This does not disable purely new features that don't break existing behaviors. For instance, if a two-argument function can now take an optional third argument, such that a two-argument call behaves exactly the same way as before, that won't be subject to emulation. A whole new function that didn't exist in version K is not going to disappear under K emulation.

This isn't a perfect strategy. Things can go wrong. But it's fairly decent.
My company is of the mind that many ed tech products are not impactful because they don't take a rigorous approach to curriculum (notwithstanding the absolute buzzword status of "rigor" in K12 education). Our approach is to use tech as a lever to transplant a successful curriculum into areas that otherwise wouldn't have this curriculum.[0]

SRI reviewed the research on our impact with fairly positive findings.[1]

[0] - detail on the approach in the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education: http://ijaied.org/pub/1368/

[1] - https://www.sri.com/work/publications/strength-research-reas...
> Interpreting quantum mechanics is often like this: you can preserve locality or convenience, but usually not both.

Indeed, John Bell of Bell's theorem said that non-locality was THE big problem of quantum mechanics. He was a fan of Bohmian mechanics/pilot waves because it places what he considered the central problem front-and-center.
> It’s all the newcomers, some say. They’re driving prices up and they’re pushing long-time residents out.

Well, there has been a massive influx of investment [1] in the Portland housing market, driving up overall prices. While this wouldn't be happening if people didn't want to move to Portland, simply blaming it on 'Californians' seems to be a bit naive.

[1] http://invw.org/2015/04/17/portland-cash-housing/
"Additionally, the "closed" primaries vs "open" primaries are bullshit. As a citizen I should be able to go to a polling place, choose a candidate and get out."

Depending on the state, though, it's the party choosing who the candidate they want to put forward is. So it should be that party's right to decide who gets to partake in that decision. I mean, would it make sense for a whole bunch of Republicans to come and vote in the Democratic primary?
In my experience printing in Linux has been pretty solid for at least the last 5 years or so. CUPS is CUPS, drivers are plentiful and one apt-get away, UIs get better.

Of course I'm limited to occassional document or a few tickets.
Nginx and other servers handle both automatically no?
We put them back when there's a case to be made.
"But there has been pushback on these efforts, too. Many Portlanders say they don’t want more density in their neighborhoods, that they oppose big housing complexes and in-law units in neighbors’ backyards. (There is a similar attitude evident in some San Francisco residents’ responses to that city’s housing crisis.) Some neighborhoods are actually trying to downzone to decrease density."

Good economy, affordable housing, NIMBYism: pick two.
Until code is written that automates its own evolution, there will still be humans programming computers that are trained like dogs.
The Atom Reason plugin uses Nuclide's system for error rendering (in the diagnostics bar), and type hints. But the actual logic for integrating with Merlin has been completely rewritten in Reason itself, and compiled from Reason into JS to run as an Atom plugin. So there are still merlin features missing because the Atom plugin is relatively young, but if you want to help us implement the missing features, it can be a fun way to try Reason itself (compiling to JS).
I can't say it's been any "easier" to connect to my Brother MFC-J4420DW on Fedora as it is on Windows, but it's no harder. Download the installation script from Brother, run it, it asks me for the hostname of my printer and I'm up and running.
It would be interesting to see more information breaking down the increases there to compare to the causes at public universities. I saw an article the other day that stated that private colleges have also been increasing their financial aid or scholarships per student. Maybe that eliminates any of the difference in price changes between the two.
Parent might be saying the media supports this fallacy by the amount of coverage given.

With the huge number of resources available online for information, I would suggest that the perception of media as only covering presidential elections means that you need to work a little harder and find news sources that give you more valuable content. And if your desired news source doesn't exist, think about making it. For example, my hometown is a town of 20,000 people in a beautiful part of the country, but it suffers from being, at best, a bedroom community for nearby hospitals and colleges since 2008 finally ended the industrial presence. There's a guy there who has decided that he's going to give the town news, and he does fantastically well. He has a facebook page with 10000 followers (remember, the town is only 20000) and summarized positions of all the candidates for the recent city council and school board elections. All his posts have substantial discussions in the comments. In recent months I've had great discussions with high school classmates about where the town is headed, which wouldn't have happened before this facebook page (because we didn't have the information.) We also take a pretty active interest in the town, despite the fact that we all live 500-3000 miles away these days.

That turned into a bit of show and tell. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are people interested in local coverage if it's substantial.
So humans will be useless, AI will be better. Let's say this happend. Would you want your child's first girlfriend/boyfriend to be a robot ? Would you want some robot to comfort you at the hospice while you die of cancer, or would you prefer a good caring nurse ? Or a side question - would you want a psychopath, who don't care even a little bit, with great acting abilities to comfort you at that hospice ?

Maybe for some things we will prefer caring humans, because they're not just faking it, and this has value. And maybe we could create an economy built around deep human relationships.
This is on our list : https://github.com/rethinkdb/horizon/issues/23

The big piece remaining that will help is write timestamps in the database, which we're going to try to land in RethinkDB 2.4. If we were controlling a traditional MVC frontend model and had control over the objects themselves, it would be easier to do optimistic updates. Since we're aiming to be compatible with a lot of frontend frameworks where immutability of the model is important, we have to carefully consider how to do it.

That being said, it's super important, so it's near the top of our priorities
Does that same logic apply to Safari?
I have a fundamental disagreement with the notion that we're using our intellectual capital well today. I think that the modern education system fails nearly every student, and some more than others.

If we pushed towards educating people in practical skills, like tractor design, do you really think that it would be a large number of people who are incapable of grasping the concepts? Especially if we used the modern research we have into how people learn effectively?

Education as an industry and cultural norm needs to grow -- and not in the abominable way that it is now, with us glorifying education for the sake of education -- but a push towards valuing people who have learned specialized skills, regardless of what they are.

There's a reason that we have a dearth of mechanics in the U.S., and it's not because being a mechanic is an unattainable goal, but rather because the social norms around specialized blue collar work are ridiculous in the U.S.
You can, using openssl on the commandline, retrieve the certificate details for every site you suspect is MITMed.

If there is any evidence of MITM, go to the ACLU or EFF.
> Large companies and large departments need large workforces.

yet, google, Apple, Facebook etc all have non-unionized employees.

A large work force does not necessitate a union. What a silly argument to make.
This thread is so pedantic it hurts
TV has lots of formerly-white-trash consumers to sell to ( I mean LOTS ) , and nothing excites us* like an appeal to our superiority.

*not really.... right next to it, though. Of course I grew up "middle class" like everyone else, right?
Indeed, I checked it out today. Way cool.
Url changed from http://kottke.org/16/05/the-demon-in-the-freezer, which points to this.
You are truly living up to your username! :)
That sounds insanely illegal as well. I don't know about the US, but I think in most places in the EU it's illegal to even post videos of people driving dangerously or way too fast online.
That's why we have taxes so people who do not receive enough compensation for working have enough to live too.

I think it's important to keep in mind money isn't the end goal when we go to work. We work to live. And if we can live without working, it is a choice we can take.
In some areas of the app at least, it looks like a basic re-skinning: http://imgur.com/a/2SKMV
I wonder if the author has similar views about C, which doesn't have many of the problems that he's talking about.

Furthermore, many of his arguments seem to be statements about all high level languages.
And the opt_compat has C integer/boolean semantics in this case, so the test

if (opt_compat) ...

tests whether the option has a nonzero value (has been specified).

And so

if (opt_compat && opt_compat <= 130)

means "user has requested compatibility, with a value of
130 or less".

By the way -C 0, which would look as a Booealn false, as if -C were not specified, is not allowed. If the user specifies -C N such that N is lower than the oldest version that we emulate, the implementation terminates with an error message like "sorry, compatibility with versions less than 70 is not supported by version 140".
Informed on what, though? Which candidate will be better for getting things like mandatory sick days passed, or which candidate will be better for business?
I completely agree. Like I said, they handled it very poorly. But OP made it sound like they shouldn't have even been involved and I don't know that part is true.
Interop with OCaml is perfect and should remain so. ppx should work (modulo issues that we're not aware of).

You can even upgrade your existing OCaml source code to be in the Reason style by using the versatile `refmt` program that is included.
No that isn't a solution or comprimise I'm comfortable with. I'm not saying itst my responsibility to cut losses and do what's best for everyone. I'm saying this system is broken and I won't be a part of it.
How the Australian Government Uses NATS in Their Microservices Architecture
Fixed, thank you @konschubert.
What if we don't think we could make an unbiased solution? What if the best solution is to simply get everyone to vote?
> This is false, and a common misinterpretation of QM. We do not have any evidence of information travelling faster than the speed of light.

It's actually not false as stated. The author didn't say information travels FTL. Copenhagen gives up realism to satisfy Bell's theorem, but is still non-local.
Does Horizon handle using npm packages, requires or imports on the front end?
Dogs can be made to learn things - doesn't mean we allow them do surgery.

Whoever wrote this article has negative knowledge about the state of AI.

edit:

Its also slightly insulting that this person thinks that the modern programmer spends all their time writing if/else/then statement.
I don't like the assumption that the only faculties humans have are cognitive or physical. There's another: the ability to desire. It's what's driven all of our achievement, and it's not something even a highly sophisticated AI could manage: it has to have a sense of its own mortality or need for perpetuation, which are not things I can imagine us finding a valuable purpose for in giving them.
Writing a Rustc plugin to instrument code
If you had an OBDII adapter and a camera this should be possible! I'm not sure if there is OBDII communication code for RPI, though
tl;dr Moxie threatened to sue. They actually sued. Result: Wire's impl is fine.

> Proteus is published as open-source under GPLv3 and we will continue to work with the community to make it available under less restrictive licensing conditions.

This is the curious part of the post to me. libsodium is ISC. What work do they need to do?
Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
Software quickly gets outdated and re-written all the time. Sometimes the whole product is shutdown. I was just curious about products/modules that you had coded that has stood the test of time!
iTunes has become so horrible over the years that on my list of products I want to launch in my lifetime is a music player / manager. Every one I've ever seen is horrendous. None of them allow me to manage music in anything approaching a sane fashion. None of them allow me to add music from multiple sources, forcing me to deal with multiple entries in a dumb library.

My music library is huge, but I have no desire to listen to every single song on it. My shuffle pool is a hand-curated selection of some 500 tracks out of perhaps 10,000. I can recreate the pool when I have to but it's a phenomenal pain in the ass.

I used to do okay with the checked song feature in iTunes. But the checks are not respected by the software and there's no easy way to back them up and restore. After enough times syncing my phone to find songs that I'd unchecked magically got checked again, I switched to manual management.

I hate keeping state on my laptop but I've had to learn to put up with keeping it on my phone because Apple is just horrible at it. More than once I've lost all that state and had to recreate it. It's a skill I don't want to have to be good at.

Fucking Apple. If they can't figure this shit out, then one day I'm going to eat their lunch. It would not be hard at all to make a music app that's 10x better than their tripe.
Thanks for that - the tradeoff between performance and complexity in this case is clearer now.

It's interesting how many different approaches there are when stepping back and using some of the OS - for example where does MySQL/InnoDB fit in this?

It seems they are intending you to use their buffer pool rather than the OS's disk cache (as they advise to make the buffer pool take large percentage of RAM), as opposed to Postgres where they recommend having shared_buffers as ~20% of RAM and leaving the rest for the OS to use. Is InnoDB doing something different here or is it just because they have a better cache implementation?
> In most places in the US, there are plenty of downballot elections, many of which are nonpartisan

I'll add that your vote has much more power in these elections. Usually very few others vote, and the districts are much smaller (your local city council member might have hundreds or thousands of constituents, compared with the President who has 310 million); you vote might be one of several hundred.
How does Horizon handle offline network conditions? Are there network + app states (e.g., cold boot, refresh) under which users might not have access to data?