skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is "blockchain" singular, plural, or some kind of lowercase Proper Noun?

> Blockchains fall

Okay, blockchain is singular, so it always refers to a single object.

There is a universe U of objects, and "Blockchain" is a predicate on U. So for any given x in U, "Blockchain(x)" is a proposition. In other words, we can ask whether something is a blockchain or not.

> Step one is to figure out a framework for analyzing blockchain

Here it's being used as a plural, like you might study a herd of blockchain. That's okay in principle - some words are their own plurals, like "sheep" or "fish". But above, it had an "s" at the end, so it can't be plural.

Another possibility is that "blockchain" is the name of some specific object. "Fred went to the store" -> "I asked blockchain for some money".

That's no problem: Your name can be "Archer" and you can study Archery.

There is a constant c in U such that Blockchain(c). Something somewhere is named "blockchain".

> blockchain does not have the capability to support

> For everything Blockchain does worse than other databases

More evidence that he's talking about some specific blockchain. Christians capitalize God in every sentence to show reverence, while Atheists tend to leave it as a lowercase god.

Is something similar happening here? Which blockchain are people even talking about?
This would be great if it means we can run the C portions of Python in threads without performance hits. I recently started a little project that is a cross-platform GUI for batch bzip2 compression, and Python did it quite well with its built-in bzip2 module. But, once I tried to do it parallel, the performance impacts of GIL were obvious. Yes, you can work around that with multi-process, but I'd rather not be spamming the running processes list and have to actually handle seperate processes that should be threads.

In the end I settled for C++ and QT with the native bzip2 library with a few modifications.
> C_major D_minor E_minor F_major G_major A_minor B_diminished C_major

A good way to see where this comes from is to note that the major scale with C as the tonic ("root") note is

C D E F G A B

(the white keys on a piano), and starting at any note in the sequence and taking every other note (for a total of three) gives you three-note chords called "triads":

C = C E G (skip D, take E, skip F, take G)
Dm = D F A
Em = E G B
F = F A C
G = G B D
Am = A C E
Bdim = B D F

The intervals between successive notes are (major or minor) thirds, hence these chords are constructed by ascending (moving up the scale) in thirds. The Wikipedia page does a good job of explaining how you can construct chords like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triad_(music)

You can take four notes at a time instead of three to get seventh chords.

I've been playing for quite some time, and have also known bits and pieces of theory for about the same amount of time, but I've never really applied the latter to my playing until recently. I'm getting into playing Bach and so on and find that I'd really like to understand, e.g. Roman numeral analyses, and being fluent in basic theory and how it "looks" on your instrument is key to this.
Some of this will depend on what kind of regulation exists/has been purchased in your area. If you're not dumping excess power back to the grid it should just be a low usage connection, but in some places I believe if you have solar things get more complicated no matter your connection type.
The Uber Dilemma
Amazon kills its European DVD rental biz, Lovefilm
I used to be fairly neutral regarding AV's.
Then I saw all the really stupid and really serious vulnerabilities Tavis Ormandy dug up in pretty much all the AV products, including the Symantec Endpoint Protection (https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2016/06/how-to-compro...).

The sheer amount of incompetence and neglect displayed by AV vendors has made me strongly question third-party AV's being a net positive.
Ah, ok. So this approach doesn't completely remove the GIL, but removes it as a barrier for pure python code running in PyPy?

Or does it break the current support for porting cpython extensions?
Sure. Free 2-5x speedup. pypy + pypy's pip generally works as a transparent drop-in replacement to python + python's pip, so it's free speed.

It doesn't (or didn't) work when you need to rely on an extension that uses Python's C API. I haven't followed the scene in awhile so maybe that's changed. pypy's pip has so many libraries that I hardly notice, so maybe they solved that.

Unfortunately python is fundamentally slower than lua or JS, possibly due to the object model. Python traps all method calls, but even integer addition, comparisons, and so on are treated as metamethods. That's the case for Lua too, but e.g. it's absurdly easy to make a Python object have a custom length, whereas Lua didn't have a __len__ metamethod until after 5.1. I'm not sure it even works on LuaJIT either. Probably in the newer versions.
I only think this applies if you start playing at social gatherings unprompted.
This is in the cards for Ruby 3. The plan is to migrate away from a global interpreter lock to "guilds" which are akin to execution contexts. These guilds also have a locking mechanism that allows for parallelism which they call the "global guild lock."

You can learn more about concurrency in Ruby 3 at this wonderful blog post: http://olivierlacan.com/posts/concurrency-in-ruby-3-with-gui...
Ben Lerner did a great job writing notes [0] for his version, which are super helpful if you prefer reading to videos.

[0] https://course.ccs.neu.edu/cs4410/#%28part._lectures%29
Oh, tsk. I read that carelessly as one list and missed that period after "linux."
The other major issue with Blockchain is that "all nodes can see everything". This is theoretically a problem with distributed databases as well. However, in the case of distributed databases, the database nodes that can "see everything" are not the end user, whereas, in Blockchain because the nodes are untrusted, one must assume that the end user can see the entire Blockchain state.

This limits the number of use-cases tremendously to those where "everyone-can-see-everything" is an acceptable tradeoff.

There are several ways around this.

1) Zero Knowledge Proofs. But these are highly specialized and resource intensive. To my knowledge we don't have these for generalized Smart Contracts.

2) Split the overall state into Channels, Subledgers etc. with narrower "viewing rights". But again this typically involves an application compromise.

3) Encrypt or cryptographically hash portions of the state. But by definition, this portion of the state cannot be acted upon by smart contracts.

4) Use frameworks like Microsoft's recently released CoCo Framework which relies on Hardware Trusted Execution Environments (TEE). The issue here is that a compromise of a single TEE negates the whole scheme.

In my opinion the privacy characteristics of Blockchain are a critical factor that needs to be taken into account while deciding on the suitability of Blockchai for an application.
The Mongols would have had a much more difficult time than people assume, and probably would have failed in their attempt to conquer Europe.

See https://www.quora.com/Did-the-Mongols-have-a-reasonable-chan... especially the answer by Tim ONeil.
I like writing in a Jupyter notebook. You can use Markdown, write equations with Python and use a module like SymPy to transform to LaTeX, create graphs, etc.
Great job! Here are some other great books for you:
J.S. Bach - Six Cello Suites (transcribed for guitar)
Jim Hall - Exploring Jazz Guitar
Joe Pass - Virtuoso (find transcription(s) or do it yourself)
Gene Bertoncini - Approaching the Guitar
Fine, but then how do you suggest one should write floating point literal values?

PS. I guess there is the "f" suffix as in C++. Well, for some reason that's not what Perl 6 decided. I, for one, think it's simple enough to use the "e" notation. If you want to write a Rat with a power of ten, you can always literally write say

1.2*10**3
I feel the best example of an 'adventure game of the modern era' is Broken Age (by Tim Schafer with Doublefine). It's a very modern take on the whole genre, and not a 'choose your own adventure' type of thing
Google adds 30 languages Google Speech Recognition
There are many cases where the objects are too big to be passed around. Python is used a huge amount in Machine learning and datascience, where being able to do parallel work on stuff already in memory would be great.
Using multiprocessing is a pain to use, and it's slow.
If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

I am curious about the nature of the "partner" relationships Happi lists on its site. It's a lot of logos of many well known companies...for me, more than would inspire confidence.

Good luck.
I think Apple says 11 TFLOPS Single Precision and 22 TFLOPS Half-Precision, which puts the GPU at a Vega 56 I think? I don't think Apple has said how many possible GPU configurations there are, so you could be able to bump it to a 64.
Most likely from his friends contact lists, which Facebook imported when they installed the app on their phone.
Unless you want to totally eliminate counter party risk or execute an unstoppable transaction. Most use cases do not require these benefits.
In America, You Are What You Eat
Reader.CSS – Minimal article styling using CSS
Thanks for the summary and links. You seem very familiar with the topic, are there any books you recommend on this?
May I suggest concentrating on playing scales first, your fingers have to get used to putting enough pressure on the strings that the notes are not muted and you can slowly build that strength by playing individual notes first :)

Also the perspective that helps me learn an instrument is that it's like you are developing a friendship with your instrument. One day you will be so comfortable that playing an instrument would feel like talking to a friend but making a friend takes time :) You have to have some awkward conversations first, feel like this is going nowhere and someday it won't feel awkward anymore and you would pick up your instrument and it would understand you like a friend does :)

I used to play a guitar and now often spend my time playing the mandolin so this perspective has definitely helped me, maybe it would be of some help to you too :)
Well, I present to you "D", the language impossible to find anything about on the Intarwebz.
Text Is Keeping Kids from Coding
in what was is it a pain that threading is not?
I learned to play guitar as a kid, played some classical and jazz as a teenager and in my twenties, then put it down. I have a nice classical guitar sitting in my closet for a decade.

My problem is that although I can read music, understand some theory, can play chords and even some can play a little bit of complex music like Villa Lobos, I have absolutely no "ear". I can't even tune the guitar without help.

So this means I basically need to memorize or play from sheet music, which kind of got boring after a while.
Can't you ditch all of that and use one of these cool new programs where they show you where to play on the guitar, you play in there, and the mic detects if you played correctly then proceeding with the next note?

I think RockSmith is one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaHsqGSetVo

I think there are others that might look more pedagogical.
I feel the other way, I want power users to buy these in bulk and dump them for cheap on ebay once they are no longer powerful enough for mining.

Of course, many factors affect the final price on eBay and it's also about whether you need one today.
Was horrible?

Are you forgetting about modern western imperialist adventures such as Iraq and Afghanistan, entering their 16th year? Where millions of civilians were and are still being killed, injured, displaced, tortured and all around stomped on in terms of human rights, led by some of the most powerful western nations in the world. These wars were cheered on by a good chunk of US and UK citizenry for years before they conveniently faded into the background.

http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/body-count.pdf

That's even ignoring the direct relations of these invasions to the more recent conflicts in Libya, Syria, and ISIS, the boogeymen armed and created by the same people who started these wars not long ago.

Western imperialism is alive and well.
Throw Visual Studio Code in and you can both develop and deploy/run your entire web app on linux using Microsoft tools now, tools that are actually good and pleasant to use.

Predict that fifteen years ago on slashdot and you would probably be "-42 ridiculous" back then.
Andrew Ng's Machine Learning at Coursera is probably the place to start.
You can use any stack you want. But people mostly prefer node because of api.ai's documentation in node and online help from forum,stackoverflow questions of api.ai using node.js
Super glad they're going to try using mutexes and not that STM approach which was looking to be immensely complicated. Was not looking forward to the kinds of interpreter bugs that was going to produce.
I played the piano growing up, but pretty much stopped when I was 16 - i discovered sports, computers, girls

When I was 30, I decided to pick up the guitar.

Knowing how to read music was certainly a jump start, but it's certainly doable.

JustinGuitar.com is a fantastic resource, but finding a teacher is the best.
> So depending on the rejection rate, which I think is ~95% in the case of Nature, you're paying for those other 19 papers to be checked.

Yes, the other 95% need to be checked, but reviewers are recruited from academics and typically do this task for free. The contribution that the publisher does at the stage of manuscript evaluation is marginal.
Completely depends on if these are actual "worker threads" or just dumb threads which have been over scheduled.

If these are "worker threads", new workers are scheduled when all other workers are blocked and work is available. This guarantees that idle CPU will always be scheduled with work. When workers unblock, they continue execution on their work and start picking up new work. The worker scheduler will stop scheduling new workers and the extra workers will go back to the pool of inactive workers. This is the idea behind a worker or thread pool, they get scheduled when its possible to do more work.

A poor implementation of this idea will just hand work off to threads and then expect them to all execute in parallel, which will lead to negative performance impact.

The problem with (some implementations of) async workers is that just scheduling more will result in the latter problem, work split across too many workers. This is especially true for workers implemented as entire processes. The problem this post brings up is that 1 to 1 mapping of workers to cores suffers from idle CPU due to unanticipated blocking. The general solution is to smartly distribute work over a pool of workers, and not blindly schedule a fixed number workers.
AI artist conjures up convincing fake worlds from memories
Here's a tip for learning hard-to-reach chords: Hold the guitar like a classical guitarist. You'll have just a little bit more leverage to give your hand/wrist/muscles a chance to get used to the new position.
Can you clarify the disadvantages of the application compromises required for option 2?

I'm currently looking at Hyperledger Fabric and it falls into that category.
Think about a recursive function whose implementation is changed while it is running. The replacement might have an entirely different algorithm. Which version finishes the stack call?
I always though this was the impact factor of a journal.
However, according to [1] that is not the case. [2] Mentions the 'eigenfactor' which seems to be closer to emulating page-rank. I haven't read much about it though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
[2] http://researchguides.uic.edu/if/impact
sounds like a hardware wallet...
Show HN: Get free, personalised personal financial advice on SMS
Say you're running CPU-bound workers that need to load significant data into RAM - say, a machine learning or NLP model. The most cost-effective theoretical approach would be to have that in shared memory, so you're not paying for that RAM multiple times in order to fully utilize all cores. Even if you need multiple boxes, the cost savings per core would be substantial. My understanding is that multiprocessing makes you jump through hoops to set up that shared memory; this would make it largely transparent to the user while remaining performant. I haven't used multiprocessing in production, though, so I could be wildly off base there.
"f" on the end, like floats in C?
It's too late to be the sexy rock god, but playing is doable.

The best advice I ever heard about learning guitar was from Eddie Vanhalen to Wolfgang. Wolfgang was getting discouraged. Being a good father, Eddie spilled the beans.

He told his son it's basically about 10 cords. Don't try to learn them all.

I wanted to learn to play at least one Johnny Cash song. So many of his songs use just a few chords. A, E, and B7 come up so often, with a Capo on the second fret.

I would never even think about playing in front of anyone though, but then again never wanted to be "A sexy guy". Content with Begging.
Are those applications often bottlenecked by the CPU, as opposed to GPU or data transfer?
The "launch price" of $499 (or £450) for the basic model was only for a very limited number of cards with a few vendors AFAICT. The prices immediately jumped £100 when they had sold (under an hour).

So the "MSRP" of $499 is effectively a lie at this point. What they will sell for when the crazy market forces we are experiencing right now kick in ... who knows. I suspect that depends on the hash rate people can force out of them.

-- edit -- am actually tempted to leave the one I've ordered boxed for now, just to see what happens to the market over the next week or so.
You can't just use functions defined in your tool, you need to create a faux-cli interface in order to run each parallel worker. Also, copying large datasets between processes is not efficient. And also, there are cases where the fan-out approach is not the best way of parallelizing a task, and passing information back up to a parent task is more complicated than necessary.
Honestly, I think if you're looking for popularity, you won't keep up with guitar. It is too hard for that. I think the main motivator needs to be an inherent interest in guitar.

If you're worried about being unpopular at all, my advice would be to not start trying to learn.
Why the new Vivaldi icon? Here’s why
Onavo is similar, but more comprehensive than the now "fixed" css history leak.

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2010/03/31/plugging-the-cs...
Agree, Fallout is too slow for today's standards, the same way old movies are slow
Unstoppable transaction is not a benefit.
> Don't try to learn on a crap guitar! If it has high action and truly hurts to play, or if it has bad tone, it'll drive you away. Learn on a good instrument.

This x1000

Far too often I've seen people try to learn on a ghastly cheap acoustic because they were "building up to" an electric, the thing they wanted to play in the first place.

There's a weird kind of asceticism around the notion of paying-ones-dues on an acoustic first, which ends up just discouraging the learner and preventing them from actually enjoying the instrument.
Right now it looks like the RX 480s and 580s get dumped for MSRP. After being abused like that.
This is unfortunately very disappointing. It practically can't even compete with a 1080 at the same price, and that card has been out for a year now.

Really goes to show how far ahead Nvidia is.
I probably should not be capitalizing it ever and using it as singular everywhere. Thanks for pointing that out
It's about balance. Some companies will pretend they care about your career but at the same time string you along with the least valuable work in terms of building your skills, or alternately dump unachievable tasks with vertical learning curves and no proper training. Sadly I'm facing the latter right now. Either of them is a sign of cynical or clueless management, and both are in the end toxic for your career IMHO. I'm currently building my skills like mad in order to give myself an exit.
To Feed the World, Improve Photosynthesis
This is one of the serious problems with FBA and serious problems with FBA's co-mingled inventory.

When I was selling inventory on Amazon, I actually paid the extra cash to have my inventory placed in a separate location so that I didn't have to deal with other seller's stock/quality issues. It was worth the additional cost (from my point of view) and it worked quite well in ensuring that Amazon's customers who sourced from my stock got the correct product and that I didn't have to deal with angry customers or unexplained returns.
Blockchain should be singular - "blockchains" should be used when referring to the technology in general. Getting this wrong is the #1 indicator that an article on blockchains isn't worth reading.
The other issue is that your pupils are dilating with the darkness, allowing way more UV into the eye.
So then if my application logic catches a thrown exception because I don't want my app to crash every time a server bug is exposed, I should be returning a 200 OK response rather than a 500 Internal Server Error, because the app logic accounts for handling exceptions and returns a response.

I can't disagree more. It just seems like clients would have a nightmare of a time debugging client-side code against such a system.
it's 2d. imagine if your imagination was only 2d
Can I use this to make CRUD apps with .NET on a MacBook?
This is why the "London reeling from ..." headlines in the US were viewed with contempt in Britain. Most people just want to get on with their lives. Carrying on with as little disruption as possible is seen as part of the national character.
So work on data that can not be broken down into smaller chunks? That makes sense, and is something I never come across.
Electric Triangle
That's possible in a few exceptional cases, but at least in CS, you can see a very visible quality drop as you go from the top conferences to the second-tier conferences.
"miss out on the unusual tuning quirk present 6-stringed instruments tuned to thirds"

A ukulele is tuned to thirds as well. It is basically the same as a four string guitar with a capo on 5th fret (with the typical quirk of having the lowest string being an octave higher)

"I'd also say go with 6 strings because the typical chords can have more than 4 notes."

Typical chords for a beginner are minor and major chords which uses only 3 notes.
And the augmented 7th have 4 notes which leaves you with quite some chords to play.

You will be limited by extended dominant 9th,11th and 13th but I wouldn't call those typical.

I think a ukulele can be fine to start as you'll get some very quick progress, but its limitations will come very quick as well.
Then perhaps like me, that ad will mean he actively avoids that product and brand out of ad-fatigue and simple spite rather than the intended effect, which is to attract people to them.
I tried. My company has a python API that we run on our machines, we sell the machines to businesses and don't manage them ourselves. We wanted to see if we could get some easy performance increases without too much investment.

At the time (a year ago) there wasn't a way to precompile using pypy, which meant shipping pypy along with gcc and a bunch of development headers for JIT-ing. Additionally a one of the extensions we used for request validation wasn't supported so we'd be forced to rewrite it. I also found that the warmup time was too much for my liking, it was several times longer than CPython's and it became a nuisance for development. I guess I could've pre-warmed it up automatically, but at that point I had better things to worry about and abandoned trying to switch.

I'm sure, given enough resources, it would be a lot better. But it's not quite as simple as switching over and realizing the performance increases without some initial investment.