skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gosh. Any bound particle has discrete energy levels. It can be as small as a single nucleus (as in the case of a single isolated atom), or it can be large as in an electron in a real-life material you see around. The mathematics is more complicated because the potential the electron is subject to is more complicated, but its essentially the same thing.

An electron in a gold atom is identical to an electron in hydrogen atom and has no intrinsic property of color. Be it an electron in a populated conduction band, Cooper pair in a superconductor or an isolated electron, the wavelength of the radiation is still a collective behavior of the total system determined by the effective Hamiltonian particles see, not its constituent parts.

An isolated atom is, albeit small, a composite system (with many energy levels corresponding to different internal degrees of freedom, meaning it can emit photons at many many different wavelengths which means electrons in atoms have an associated energy spectrum, not some particular color), and if you're looking at its physics are high energies sufficient enough to excite the nucleus too, a quite complicated one too.

I should also add that as much as it is tempting to think that once you understand how a single isolated gold atom works you can understand the behavior of electrons in bulk gold, that's just not how it works, and is a subject of condensed matter physics.
The background is light colored and the foreground is 100% black, and the text is full width and large on my phone. What would mobile support mean, a hamburger menu and no zooming? No thanks.
> It's really important to know what the most difficult problem you will encounter when solving a problem. If you can't solve the most difficult problem you'll be stuck when you get to it.

That is very true and is hard to do. I have seen people (including me in the past) pick fun, easy to understnad, easy to iterate on pieces first. And often push the harder things further down the road.

> The problem with this method is that you probably don't know what the most difficult problem is when you start.

Often in distributed systems it is fault scenarios, how it handles partitioning, network errors and other funkiness like that.

Security is like that as well. Bolting those on at the end / later often doesn't work very well.

> Erlang was designed for building fault-tolerant systems

I like to often say that highly concurrent and distributed systems without fault tolerance become useless as the concurrency or scale increases.

If some service segfaults and if it handles millions of transaction now all those transactions stop and service become unavailable. Don't need Erlang for that of course, can use containers, monitoring systems, consistent key-value stores and such.

The use case for Erlang is also a business use case -- it means saving money on having a smaller ops team and having a smaller development team. Developers are expensive, 24/7 ops are expensive. If your code is lines and lines of low level code, in language not designed for fault tolerance -- means weeks and months debugging and developing issues where in Erlang the problems can be expressed a lot more concisely.

I have seen subsystems crash and restart without affecting the core of the service. Nobody had to get up at 4am, can wait till morning.

Hot code updates may sound like a gimmick but combined with dynamic tracing it can save the day, helps find and fix problem quickers with often 0 downtime (I have seen it happen).
Making bikes in Detroit is an uphill ride
JSON was fixed in 2014:

http://blog.cognitect.com/blog/2014/7/22/transit

https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format
This is incorrect. You seem to be saying that the writing system is responsible for the fact that English is hard to learn for Chinese speakers because the phonetics are different? Many languages have phonetics very different from English and so are at a "disadvantage" when learning English as a second language -- this is orthogonal to the choice of writing system.

Chinese speakers learn Pinyin from primary school and so know exactly how an alphabetic writing system works. Indeed, many Chinese who are not fully literate in Hanzi know how to read Pinyin.

Furthermore, Japanese children in the fifth grade can already read about 850 characters -- this is not as difficult a feat as I think you imagine.
No way to add/override driver on pre-install stage ? (memories of 2K era setups)
Wefunder released all its data on $5M raised with equity crowdfunding
I was doing that too, until I tried lbzip2 ( http://lbzip2.org/). Does basically the same, also a drop-in replacement, but is even faster by a noticeable amount!
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Actually I'm a little more annoyed by the Rust and Elixir people. At least the Go stuff is "Hey I did something in Go". The Rust and Elixir stuff is almost always as a response to something someone did in Go, C, C++, Java or some other language, and almost always in the form of: "You might like Rust", "You should check out Elixir".

At least Go can generate it's own hype, and doesn't need to piggyback on others.
IANA botanist, but I think this method doesn't work on some trees (i.e. millennia-old olive trees) because old tissue is not there anymore, or because they have messed up rings, or on trees that have multiple trunks.

So IIUC they integrate carbon dating, ratio between total size and growth rate and other things.
> It does, actually, if the integer is large enough: (snippet)

Wow, this is even more broken than I previously thought.

> Lisp is not Haskell.

Haskell is broken too, only in a different way: Since when does it make sense to have a value that's simultaneously a number, a string, a function and pretty much anything else imaginable? (`undefined`)

> But again, in practice, it's not as much of a deficiency as you seem to think.

It causes difficulties when you want to reason rigorously about your code.
Lyft claims their cash on hand is around 1.4B so Uber just said the business (tech, staff, brand, and infrastructure) itself is about $600M or about 1% of its own valuation.

I'd say that's pretty devastating.
swap! in Clojure is analogous to callf.

(swap! x + 5) atomically increments x by 5.

(swap! x concat [3 4]) atomically concats the seq x and the vector [3 4].
I don't know who the OP is but I'll assume he's an authority in JSON since he talks about how he wrote some RFCs and stuff.

Anyway this is why I think there should be a better way to move tech standards forward than leaving it up to some small number of people who are way too ahead of the curve that they think everyone else has the same problem they do.

In my opinion there is nothing wrong with commas. I am sure the OP had his own issues while working too much with JSON, but for the 90% of the population it's not a problem and even a better way to represent data.

As an example, [116, 943, 234, 38793] is 100% clear and intuitive. Anyone who has seen any array representation will get what this means. But change it to [116 943 234 38793]? There are so many ways you can interpret this. I guess the only people who would think this is better than the 100% intuitive [116, 943, 234, 38793] option are JSON nerds who think too much about this (and when I say JSON nerds I don't mean JSON "users", but people who try to come up with the standard)

As someone who really hates what's going on with javascript (with all the new syntax that needlessly sacrifices simplicity and intuitive nature for the sake of making things shorter), I can't really think nicely about these opinions.

I think these standards that are used by a huge population should move forward in a more democratic way. Or at least let more "normal" people make the decision.
am saying it's an open question now.

so people can, and will, and should, ask

this also calls into question the general practice of "forfeit right X to get benefit Y" that appears common

In cases where "benefit Y" is actually "right Y", then it raises the question of whether these agreements are valid.

I don't know if that's actually happening, but probabilistically would not be surprised if it were - just given the legal complexity involved in these documents.
FWIW, my neurosurgeon wife says this is already a relatively routine procedure in the US.
The word "limited liability" refers to the fact that the owners are liability only for an amount up to their investment, within the scope of the corporation. The limit refers to the investment, not the fact that criminal activity is still legal exposure. Obviously an owner cannot sign away liability for individual criminal activity, same as with any corporation.
People might be interested to know that Egyptian Hieroglyphics, despite looking even more like pictograms are actually an alphabet.

Another cool fact, in hieroglyphics there is more than one way to write a word, because, unlike most alphabetic systems, some characters are multi syllabic and can represent two or more syllables.
We did tell them, and they went and started to reinvent everything every 3 months.
Looks fine on mobile, header picture could be a bit thinner but other than that it's basically perfectly responsive.
You can't travel as fast as you want because it will take ever larger amounts of energy to accelerate each fraction of a percent closer to the speed of light. You're effectively bounded above by the speed of light.
Sounds good to me; I don't see the problem.

If you want to redistribute, then you need to use the old buggy version. I don't really see a problem here.

If you want to use the latest-and-greatest in a non-commercial capacity, you can do just that. And it's open-source, so you can modify it all you want and use it. You just can't distribute it.

What's the problem?

No, it's not as Free as GPLed software, nor is it meant to be. It's meant to allow a company to make a profit on software licensed to other businesses or for commercial use, while still allowing it to be open-source, and allowing private individuals to use it without paying a license fee. (At least, that's how I read it from the article.) It sounds like a great way to balance the competing interests of a commercial software company, the users (both non-commercial and commercial), and the community at large. It would be a terrible license for basic infrastructure software like OpenSSH or PostgreSQL, but for business-oriented application software, it sounds absolutely perfect.

(Note, again, what I've written above about the way the BSL works is what I've gleaned from reading the article; if I'm incorrect, someone please feel free to correct me.)
This is something of a strawman tbh. The computing equivalent of implying anyone who has ever taken their cloths off and had sex must be addicted to pornography.

Just because people use some software or websites that publicly display themselves, does not mean they would ever be willing to accept everything they do on their computer being visible to random strangers.

Kids on the other hand...
Stripping away privacy has them so unihibited the average not-even-teenagers-yet cyberkids are sexting friends and total strangers alike instead of drinking an old fashioned beer.

And I used to worry they would never learn to write by hand :(
> Then Lisp doesn't have functional data structures. That's no surprise, Lisp has no more compound values than Python or Ruby do - that is, none.

Ah, the arrogance of youth.
One of the commenters on that article said:

"just for the pleasure, anyone want to try a simple

rm -rf --no-preserve-root /"

I don't have a Windows 10 computer, so I can't test this myself. I would love to know what happens though. Does this subsystem have Windows' typical self-preservation mindset, or is it full-on UNIX style?
I read the whole thing on a mobile and had no problem whatsoever.
While Microsoft has been trying to push for being able to run 64-bit Windows without the 32-bit parts installed (starting with 2008 R2, the WoW64 bits are optional for Server Core), I'm pretty certain that you can't (yet) get a complete interactive environment using only 64-bit mode.

Just looking at the list of Microsoft applications currently running on my 64-bit Win10 desktop, there's still at least a half-dozen different Windows desktop services that are running in 32-bit mode - including the "Microsoft Bing Service".

I'm sure they'll eventually want to reach a point where they can cut that off, presuming that a hybrid approach like x32 doesn't turn out to have phenomenal benefits, but it's not yet here.
Exactly, that's why engineered auxiliary languages have always seemed like such a great idea to me (like esperanto or Novial). But, none of the offerings ever appealed to a critical mass of people. And, if I understand the history correctly, not-invented-here syndrome caused most moderate successes to splinter when people decided they could come up with something better.
The author, Tim Bray, is one of the co-authors of the XML specification; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray
You have a more complicated data storage, or an established one that you don't wanna change, or a mandate from on high that all data must be put in X due to auditing or whatever - and a program that wants to talk to Redis.
>For any globalisation / unification force there is an equal and opposite force pulling towards autonomy / authenticity / diversity.

I think it might be more correct to say that for every globalisation / unification force, there is an equal and opposite teapot in free orbit around the sun.
> So eliminating it from the New World can't do that much damage given that the ecosystem got along fine before it arrived.

I wonder what kind of South American bug pollinates Cherimoya blooms? The Cherimoya fruit is exceptional, but producing it in California requires hand pollination since some bug that lives in the Andes isn't in California.

Hopefully whatever man dumps into the environment won't create some new nasty... flesh-eating locusts perhaps?
There's also Carp: https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp
"In theory", there's nothing special about the motor nerves in your limbs, so you could induct on something like this to transition being able to control some muscle in your core to a limb, and so on.

I'm wondering if this isn't a less drastic version of the way patients with limb transplants regain some degree of control over the limb when their own nerves grow into the foreign limb.
I've read NASA tech reports for years too; seems like one of those things that's "always" been online, though I don't know when precisely it went online. It's been online long enough, at least, to have even accumulated some episodes of backlash. In 2013, it was forced offline for a few months, because Congresspeople claimed that it might include content The Chinese could use to reconstruct national-security-sensitive information, so demanded that reports undergo a security audit: http://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2013/03/ntrs_dark/
Flagging is done by the HN community as a kind of self-policing. Some of us are more aware of and sensitive to the guidelines[0] (and more likely to enforce them) than others. So a post can be popular, but also violate guidelines blatantly enough that folks flag it. I think your question gets more interesting if a submission violates guidelines, but the readers who choose to flag it are actually the ones also opposed to the content on its own merits, and use their flagging rights to jettison the post.

I've seen the same situation where posts get several up-votes shortly after posting and land on the front page before disappearing suddenly. It made me curious whether up-votes can override flags in some ratio, or, whether there is a fixed trigger count that drives [flagged], or, if flagging simply gets the attention of moderators who make the call whether to [flagged] a post or not.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The best observation from the article is that payment system complexities are not entirely technical. Some that we experience:

The domain is really complex - credit card transactions have many variables that can make endpoints unhappy, add internet payments to the mix (like PayPal) and you are in for a madhouse

External systems are full of surprises - you get an error response to your payment request, but then money suddenly appear on the merchant account. Or API changes without notice. Or test environment behavior is different from production. Or any other surprise that can come up from integrating to third party service.

Every transaction counts - you need to carefully consider which errors you ignore and move on, for which you try to cancel the transaction and which are just fatal failures.

Logging, logging, logging - having good information in logs is half the battle in disputes (which come up regardless of how fault tolerant your system is).

Your clients come from all walks of life - you don't have any guarantees about the user agents - IE8 support anyone? Odd mobile browsers? Paranoid browser settings? All of that can cause havoc in your presentation layer and cause endless mysteries.

I am not sure if Erlang (or any platform for that matter) could help with such issues. The key is having development team of technically competent people who care about the project. The rest is implementation details.
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Hi there. I'm completely unfamiliar with CNN. Do they relate to Cellular Autonoma in any way other than sharing part of a name? And of course the fact that they communicate only with neighbors. Are there patterns of emergent behavior in the classical sense, or is it more closely related to a neural networks?
I think that added restriction actually makes it GPL incompatible, and disqualifies it from being an actual open source license.

I can't see any way that this license could be considered Open Source by the Open Source Definition[1], as that benchmarking clause is almost certainly going to trip over the "no field of use restrictions" bit.

[1]: https://opensource.org/osd-annotated
http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/support/

Scroll down to the Donate section.
That's silly. "Simple" in this context is an entirely human construct. Matter and energy just are. They have no sense of their own complexity. If quantum effects exist, they are equally as accessible as macro-classical effects to biology even if not human understanding.
I understand that there is a desire to make things as efficient as possible, especially in our group. Diversity for a large part, stems from different experiences, especially experiences that stem from diverse society values, though.

I don't see an easy way to get many growing and living cultures, and everyone sharing one language, cultural content, goals, etc. A society can't be homogene and diverse at the same time.
This would be great if it had any content for most of the languages. I like the idea, but Go/Haskell/Clojure (the ones I'd be interested in) didn't have any content to display.
Funny to see that 'Latin' is not in the list. Sure there are plant names with names in 'latin' but not the same Latin as the Romans used. Does anyone actually converse in Latin outside of the classroom?

Until the Industrial Revolution came along most people identified themselves as from the town or county where they lived rather than a given nation. People rarely travelled further than the next village and language was extremely regional. Same in France, until Napoleon came along France had hundreds of languages/dialects rather than an identifiable 'French' that everyone knew. In the UK, before television, it really was not that easy to be understood in places like Liverpool if you were from a place like Bristol - accents were too different to make that easy in everyday conversation even if written words were the same everywhere. The railways were the start of this process of making English universally understood amongst the English, before that there really wasn't much need to bother to read unless you were a book-reading academic type.

I am pleased that English is lingua-franca(!) for planet earth when it comes to computer stuff, science and little things like air traffic control. English may not be 'strongly typed Esperanto' but it does not have to be. It is considered courtesy to try and speak in native languages for Brits abroad, however, beyond 'please and thankyou' I think it is much better to stick to English and, in the process, help others that want to learn English. Just speak s-l-o-w-l-y and remember that something like 90% of communication is body language when face-to-face.

I do a fair amount of translation in the day job, and, amongst the foreign-language speakers that I pester for words 'n' phrases, I frequently find people preferring English as they can express so much more in it than their native tongue. As far as my Italian friends are concerned, Italian might as well be FORTRAN or COBOL, i.e. not as good. Consequently I look forward to a world that speaks English, that English being British English, of course!!!
Yeah, that will give a lower, better estimate.

My point was just to clarify that the arbitrary range from time dilation doesn't really start to kick in until you approach c. The simpler, coarser calculation still shows that quite well.
> they're struggling with deflation

Because their products are wanted internationally, their elderly generation is parsimonious and has an almost religious belief in the state and all it stands for, and everyone buys domestic because it's basically the best quality around.

How is their economy in the toilet again?

To counter deflation (how many other countries have a deflation problem again?) you can just print money, free money. The only reason Japan can't print free money is because its citizens have so heavily invested in the state that it would be a political problem if you were to devalue their holdings on purpose.

Alternatively they could just collectively chill and simply not work so hard, but yeah, Japan.

Currency deflation is a First World+1 problem. It means your currency is harder than you'd like it to be. To even have that problem means your economy is stronger than any one economy that works on the basis of inflation.
Dete.js – Node.js library for detecting files
The idea is that it helps keep your local government in check.
Extinct doesn't mean the language becomes indecipherable, just it has no more native speakers. I'm not sure machine translation would help.
I'm guessing it was flagged because there was nothing of substance in the article. The author provided no evidence that systemd is malware or that the NSA was involved in its writing. So it's just idle speculation with a click-bait title. If I would have seen the article, I would have flagged it for those reasons.

Also, the "[flagged]" prefix indicates that it was killed by user flags, and several users would have had to flag a 19-point article to kill it. I'd hardly call that "censorship" (unless you think that multiple HN users are acting on behalf of the government).

Finally, the HN Guidelines say that if you have questions about moderation, you should e-mail the moderators rather than posting. So don't be surprised if this post also gets flagged.
https://xkcd.com/1709/
Astroturfing doesn't suit you Akhil.
It did not have enough time to become profitable. Sun bought Mysql in 2008, they were looking to sell to IBM in late 2008/early 2009, and by April 2009 had a tentative deal with Oracle...
And it's exactly as fallacious.
> It causes difficulties when you want to reason rigorously about your code

That's what he said. In practice it doesn't matter.