skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This might sound like a small thing but the .NET image processing stuff has traditionally depended a lot on Windows builtins. Mono shipped an entire mediocre rewrite of GDI (the graphics layer that's been Windows since the early nineties) just to support the .NET Framework image processing stuff. Note: not for image display (which is what GDI is mainly for) - even for headless image processing.

In practice this meant that if you were cropping an image server-side in C# code on a Linux server, a C-rewrite of a Windows UI layer would kick in and do the work for you. Amazing work from the Mono team, because it worked, but also pretty nuts.

If there's one place I remember having stuff that "just worked" on Windows and had weird subtle quirks on Mono, it's image processing (I'm talking a few years ago). So IMO it's pretty awesome that they're replacing all that legacy with a decent 100% .NET image processing library.

(Sidenote: this was also the only real problem we faced developing a C# backend with a team on Windows, Linux and OSX computers, and running it all on Mono on Docker on Linux - all well before .NET Core. Mono really is/was that good)
I had the same argument with the Stanford Pascal Verifier people around 1980. They were using the SAIL PDP-10, with keyboards with extra characters and extra shift keys TOP and META. Assertions were written with mathematical notation but code was written in ASCII. We stuck to ASCII and Pascal operators for Pascal-F.

Today, everybody has Unicode output, and all the math symbols are potentially typeable, but it drives programmers nuts if they have to enter them. If you're going to do a verification system, you have to design it for programmers, not mathematicians, or it won't be used. This is a serious problem with formal methods. The formalism is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end goal is bug-free code.

Dafny for Rust has potential. One big problem is where to put the assertions inside terse functional notation. This is word wrap in Rust:

s.lines()
.map(|bline| UnicodeSegmentation::graphemes(bline, true)
.collect::<Vec<&str>>())
.map(|line| wordwrapline(&line, maxline, maxword))
.collect::<Vec<String>>()
.join("\n")

OK, where would we put assertions? Maybe intersperse

.assert(|arg| assertionexpression)

which is just a passthrough that returns its value but allows
making assertions about what's going through it.
Actually, trials are sometimes stopped early for "efficacy." This is done on the grounds that--past some point--incremental gains in statistical certainty are not worth depriving the subjects in the control arms of the drugs' benefits. For example, this happened in the PARADIGM-HF trial in 2014: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryhusten/2014/03/31/novartis-...

This isn't totally uncontroversial (e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18226746 ) but it's not obvious to me how to balance statistical and ethical concerns.

As for the animal studies, it sometimes happens. Someone up-thread mentioned SuperMAB, a potential drug which seemed safe in monkeys. However, when first tested in humans (using a dose 500x lower than the one administered to the monkeys), it generated a cytokine storm that put all six test subjects in the ICU. Here's a fairly decent summary: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964774/
Original post is from 2013.

It's a good article, but it is a few years old.
وظائف الأهرام الجمعة 20/1/2017
Sorry for the confusion ; by Elixir process I meant a "unix Elixir process" (aka one command you run), not the lightweight Elixir "Process". The unix Elixir process uses multiple CPUs.
DeepWeb Guides Now Available to Buy on Clearnet with Bitcoin
Yes, there is not question about the price difference.
The thing is that my setup has rudder pedals; I wanted something where everything is mounted on and I can just move away, without having to crawl under the desk to take the pedals.
The first GMO non-browning apples will go on sale in the US next month
I have a pretty low-end, old laptop and I play FSX (Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition). My frame rate is pretty low (around 4 FPS) but it's still quite playable, if you can believe that.
No Ansible? In an older (2014) Ansible video they claim Twitter is using Ansible but I only see Puppet mentioned.
Presenting Is Like Kissing with Confidence: there are some do’s and don’ts
Underfilled pooling is not a great example though-- filling in load shortfall on pooling is a very efficient way to spend money, because you need to build the load, uber needs to only profit on average, and even if there was no subsidy at all there would occasionally be underfilled cars.

For all you know they did five other trips like yours but with three passengers and your "subsidy" was paid by them; and in exchange uber got a happy passenger and driver which will continue to support their business in the future.
Automatically Convert ES5 and CoffeeScript to ES6 with Aligned StandardJS Style
Update if exists, otherwise insert.
I couldn't disagree more - the visuals in Overwatch are in fact the main reason I left it after the open beta.

Overwatch is very pretty (both games are in my opinion), however it is so busy. There are no visual cues in the design - characters and scenery share the same palette, important elements (like payloads, turrets, etc) don't stand out. No way of knowing where the important flow points are other than to play the game a lot (no indication of where the playload will go). Having had such a great example in TF2 that did all this so well it was just sad trying to get to grips with Overwatch.

League of Legends on the other hand had an amazing visual update a year or two ago and they explicitly addressed all these kind of issues. Making sure the map doesn't distract from the important in game information.

Both games have a lot of characters and a lot of knowledge burden for the players, so anything they can pull off the player makes a big difference when first starting.
If you ever have a post-Communicating Sequential Processes journey at GitHub, please do write a post! Most people I know are moving to something CSP based (say, Go channels) so it would be very cool to understand why someone would consciously decide to ditch the concept again, after a serious engineering effort.
I agree. If I no longer had any enjoyment or feeling of improvement in gaming I'd probably find something else too.
Cassandra has a snapshat command that creates a directory by symlinking files that hold data (this is safe cause Cassandra files are immutable). Then you just upload them to your backup storage. This is obviously for recovery scenarios that are catastrophic.

Normally though since the data is replicated on 3 nodes, you can technically loose a node completely and rebuild it from the other nodes.
The game-changing Blockchain news & articles from last week
Some advice : if you want to have people trust and thus use this feature, you should make this kind of talk :

https://youtu.be/4fFDFbi3toc
This is probably the most hot topic for database service providers. Operating hundreds of thousands and millions of databases yields a valuable collateral: operational data (what users are doing, metadata, table shapes, query patterns, application behavior, reasons for blocking, IO patterns, memory patterns, everything). Take the tuning wizards of 5 years ago, add machine learning on vast amounts of operational data, add 'shadow' A/B testing (run a secondary instance shadowing the same workload, on a copy of the database, but, say, apply an index recommendation to the shadow instance and measure the impact). When I left Microsoft one year ago, this whole area was seen as a gold mine and there was massive investment into it. You can already see such offerings as Azure SQL Database Advisor[1]. I'm convinced Amazon is doing its own research in this space, specially for Aurora.

We're talking much more than just index optimizations. Think automatic OLTP vs. OLAP pattern detection and migration of data into columnstores or in-memory tables. Automatic detection of cold vs. hot data and migration to-from expensive fast near storage (SSD) vs. cheap remote storage (S3 like). Automatic resizing of instance size. Materialized views. On-the-fly query rewrite. The field is wide open. And you have the best experts in the field looking at your database.

By contrast, the traditional on-premise auto-tuning did not made much progress over the past 10-15 years. There are reasons for this: small operational dataset (one site only), high risk of regression (difficult to do A/B testing), scarcity of experts. The best avenue for on-premise I predict will be the trickle-down effect of migrating service know-how and technologies to on-premise offerings. We're also going to see a push up the stack of the know-how and experience from operating the service making its way into the app stack (think EntityFramework v. 2018?) and helping developers avoid the common pitfalls.

BTW, only 3 days ago Adrian Coyler's morning paper discussion was Self-driving database management systems [2]

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sql-database/sql-data...
[2] https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/01/17/self-driving-database-ma...
Michael Moorcock on Arthur C Clarke, Stanley Kubrick, and 2001: A Space ­Odyssey
But that is not the issue. I think the speed of docker under the os hypervisor is fine. The bug is in in osxfs https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/77
Probably? Why do you think it likely that driver error would go down more than 40%?
Mono shipped a reimplementation of the types in the System.Drawing namespace which uses GDI+ (note the +) on Windows. This reimplementation is also what CoreCompat.System.Drawing is based on. To my knowledge Mono did shim a few Windows APIs, mostly related to window messages so WndProc can be overridden in a useful manner, but not actually GDI, as far as I know.
Just wondering, how would you respond when being asked about your previous salary? I'm asking because I'm currently in negotiation with some companies, and being asked for your previous salary seems to be common practice.
LOL, "niche", says the english native.

Plus, 25% of performance, while nice, is not really something that would matter for most Ruby projects. They are web projects, and their bottleneck is not Ruby. Same for Python. While I'm telling you, good unicode support in most european countries is a HUGE deal.

But that's not all. Often People thinking about Python 3 think unicode, but for me there are 2 other things that made my life much nicer:

- better debugging. Error handling is a hell lot better, with better and messages, greater granularity, more safety nets... E.g: you can't compare some objects anymore, you have several exceptions to handle file opening, imports are absolute by default, division is what you expects, a lot more operations are lazy, the stdlib has been cleaned manu redundancies, encoding parameters everywhere, etc.
- less verbosity. Writting is consistently reduced. You get finner file boilerplate, shortcuts for OO, unpacking generalization, yield from, f-strings, etc.

Now those are things that are not easy to sell. You don't see them as a reason to migrate when you hear about it. But once you used to them, going back to Python 2.7 feels so bad.
> greedy optimization that gets stuck in local minima

I think you wanted to say local maxima, but yes I agree.
I'm happy to hear you dropped it for non-technical reasons, since I'm asking because I've chosen Datastore for an app because I care less about vendor lock-in than ease of operation, and it fits my pricing model perfectly, due to the app in question receiving (Bitcoin) payments that are charged a fee on a per-request/payment basis.

Hint: if you have technical reasons for avoiding GCP Datastore I'd be very interested in hearing about them
tl;dr: If the design philosophies for Alexa, IFTTT, Siri, and Google all came together in one beautiful, open platform, I would be so happy. I hate apps so much, and voice assistants offer amazing convenience and better interaction. I don't need the extra fluff with a huge app.

Once Apple opens Siri to a greater extent, we'll have even more flexibility & power. I could delete so many apps if Siri could handle the few, basic functions that I actually need. Currently, SiriKit is limited to particular domains, like messaging, payments, or reservations, so it's not capable of a whole lot [1]. The Alexa Skills Kit [2] is ahead of Siri at this point, only because it's more open to developers.

One day, this is what Siri will do:

Siri takes a photo of my checks, handles my banking logins, and submits the photos for deposit processing. I delete my banking app.

Siri records my voice, sends it to Google Translate, and returns the appropriate translation. Then I delete Google Translate.

With the IntentsUI Framework, apps could include a visual experience, too. There's plenty of room for growth and customization.

Siri even lets you activate Google Now, Alexa, or a different voice assistant that is more intelligent. Sorry Siri, but you just aren't as good :(

Siri would handle security and API stuff. It would store my logins and account information, and then it would appropriately handle my Intents. I could download particular functions and increase the capabilities of Siri, like how iMessages has its own App Store.

One selling point with Firefox OS was the Adaptive App Search, where relevant apps would be available as you needed them. Searching for coffee? A Starbucks web app would appear, and you could use it on the fly, similar to the Progressive Web Apps with Android. In either case, the purpose was to limit installed software and prioritize what was actually needed at the time [3].

But Siri, or Alexa, or any voice assistant will push this further when all of the APIs Just Work™. I don't know how soon this day will come, but I could delete so many apps if Siri could process my data and communicate with 3rd parties.

[1] SiriKit: https://developer.apple.com/sirikit/

[2] Alexa Skills Kit: https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit

[3] Firefox Adaptive App Search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9zwf0VMVDI
Ask HN: Integrate with legacy back office?
A lot of "traditional" companies want to develop modern solutions (mobile apps and web applications) because they are seeing all kind of tech startups entering their business domain with very user friendly user interfaces.

But these fresh startups don't have any back office applications that were implemented 20 years ago. They also don't need to support a current customer base etc. Actually, a lot of these startups have the dream to be in that position one day.

The dilemma that these "traditional" companies face is: should these new solutions be integrated with the legacy back offices or should they be stand alone?

Both choices have big advantages and disadvantages, for example if chosen for legacy system integration:
- It will probably slow down the development of the new solution significantly, because these legacy systems don't have proper APIs,
- No knowledge about the systems because people that built the system are gone,
- Are monoliths and is difficult (impossible) to change something
- Based on old fashioned business process
- Performance issues
- Will maybe not feel like really a coherent solution (integration will leak)

+ Don't need to build all kind of functionality like generating an invoice or managing, inventory. The new devs can focus only on a small scope,
+ No need for training people to work with new back office applications,
+ The concerns are separated, everyone can focus on a defined area

Should these companies start creating a new fresh stack because it will never work with the old stuff? Or should it be a more phased transition per application? Or there aren't any general patterns, and should it be analyzed always per case? What are your experiences and thoughts?
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I'd say a leader's responsibility involves finding people who's life goals align with the goals of the organization. If this happens, then it is easier to show good judgement, easier to build trust, and communication is clearer because everyone is on the same page.
> much more intuitive than Coq

Is there software that is less intuitive than Coq?
If you like combat flight sims I suggest the DCS Series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Combat_Simulator

If you want small planes or airliners then you might look into the new X-Plane 11, it has very realistic physics and looks really good even in the basic configuration, i.e. without add-ons, thanks to its last-generation graphics engine.

If, on the other hand, you plan on buying many add-ons (e.g. because you want to fly specific planes or fly to/from specific airports) then I suggest Prepar3d or FSX Steam Edition which are both based on Microsoft Flight Simulator X, which means they are compatible with a large number of add-ons.

Their graphics are not on par with X-Plane 11 though (unless you install scenery add-ons), since they are based on a 10-year-old graphics engine; you can see a comparison here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUtEqgDjjJU
Just FYI, if you're on NVIDIA hardware you also have these tools available:

NVIDIA Nsight (GPU tracer/profiler/debugger, integrates with visual studio)
https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-nsight-visual-studio-edi...

Tegra System Profiler (GPU tracer/profiler/debugger) for Android on Tegra
https://developer.nvidia.com/tegra-system-profiler
We have a real time distribution system written in Erlang/Elixir that keeps the clients in sync. We do not poll for messages. That wouldn't work at our scale :)
The Many, the Humble, the Ubuntu Users
JDK 9 is feature extension complete
RT banned from posting media, hyperlinks on Facebook over Trump Inauguration
That is not the intended use of Option/Maybe, the whole point of an `Option[A]` is to be different from `A`.
It's not as simple as that. E.g a lot of the clearing is for trades that actually transacted in e.g Rome, Paris, Frankfurt, etc. Those contracts are covered by EU law and therefore the EU wants clearing of those contracts to be conducted under EU law. Especially since the ECB is backing those trades.

Here's the tricky bit though. If London does keep this clearing business, it will almost certainly be on the basis of aligning relevant U.K. Law with EU law. But that will mean the U.K. Having to rubber stamp any changes in those laws directly into our law books, without having any say in drafting them as we won't have any representation in Brussels. There are loads of other examples of this sort of thing. So much for Brexit winning back more sovereignty to the UK Parliament!

Fair disclosure, I'm going to be working for LSEG from week after next.
Great article! Could be worthwhile to provide a reference to the 'Cloud-Based Enterprise Pub-Sub Messaging' element of SNS? It does a bit more than just 'Send mobile notifications, emails and/or SMS messages'
Current value: 'Should have been called Amazon Messenger' / Potential replacement: 'Should have been called Amazon Message Delivery Service'
Current value: 'Use this to send mobile notifications, emails and/or SMS messages' / Potential replacement: 'Use this to send mobile notifications, emails and/or SMS messages or notifications to other web applications'
...Increase prices?
I have received a lot of job offers through LinkedIn, but none of them ever appealed to me, so as far as my career prospects go it doesn't add much value. But it's nice to keep in touch with former colleagues, and to be able to see at a glance what your network is up to professionally.
> The tombstone problem described is due to misuse.

My concerns with Cassandra are precisely here: this is easy to misuse it.

There are a lot of constraints on the schema (more specifically on the design of partition & clustering keys).
Each choice leads to many restrictions on what can be requested/updated/removed;
and to different issues with tombstones and GC.

The Discord's story is exactly what I experimented: a series of surprises, and even really bad surprises in production.
In both cases, the story ended with an efficient system, but with by far more engineering work and rework than initially planned.
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On the space side of things the two big games now are called Elite:Dangerous and Star Citizen.

Elite:Dangerous is the newest installment of the same series as the C64 game, and is a sandboxy-sort of online multiplayer thing.

Star Citizen is another (in dev; currently you can buy into the public alpha-sort-of thing) one, produced by Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame. It's being sold as a "first-person universe", because you can also leave the cockpit of the space ship and run around places, optionally shooting things in an FPS sort of manner.

Of the two E:D can be played on slightly lower-end PCs, but SC is pretty demanding of a computer, especially in its current mostly-unoptimised alpha state.

Both of the games are pretty fun, but have their problems too.

E:D can be a lot of fun in small doses once you get your feet wet, but can be pretty grindy to start out with and gets kind of shallow and repetitive later. Also it's super-amazing to play in VR, if your computer can handle it.

SC is looking hugely promising and the current alpha gameplay is a lot of fun if you can deal with the bugs, but has a lot internet drama surrounding it. Said drama is mostly related to the game taking forever to develop, and the fact that you can currently pay (sometimes rather insane sums of) real money for getting your hands on the space ships currently available. The devs are insisting the buy-ships-for-money thing is only happening during development to help fund the process and will no longer be possible after proper launch, but we'll see how that works out in practise.
Your last sentence is telling.

A Bayesian analysis tells you Bayesian things: specifically, this is the most reasonable conclusion one can draw from this data, right now. A frequentist analysis also tells you things, but they are different things. Specifically, frequentists are concerned with...frequencies: if we were to run this procedure many times, here's what we can say about the possible outcomes.

There's this persistent meme that all Bayesian methods protect you from multiple comparisons/multiple looks problems. That's not really true. Bayesian methods don't offer any Type I/Type II error control--and why would they, when the notion of these errors doesn't make much sense in a Bayesian framework?

You can certainly use Bayesian methods to estimate a parameter's value. However this you cannot repeatedly test your estimates--Bayesian or otherwise--in a NHST-like framework and expect things to work out correctly.
Python 2.8 - make Python great again! (sigh)
> While Cassandra has schemas not unlike a relational database, they are cheap to alter and do not impose any temporary performance impact

in most relational databases, the schema is cheap to alter and does not impose a temporary performance impact.

In-fact, all of their requirements (aside of linear scalability) could also be met with a relational database. Doing so would gain you much more flexible access to querying for various reports and it would reduce the engineering effort required for retrieval of data as they add more features (relational databases are really good at being queried for arbitrary constraints).

I think people tend to dismiss relational databases a bit too quickly these days.
Except for telemetry - I think after using Linux, Windows is confusing to you, because I don't have Cortana and still can search for files, don't see ads.

Understandable, as Windows is not *nix, you should just RTFM.
I love it when people make stuff like this.
What about CNN, BBC and Western propaganda channels? Are you The Ministry of Truth?
JavaScript in a smartwatch