skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After twenty years of professional Python (mostly) development I have suddenly and recently become a neophyte Prolog programmer.

Bottom line: If you're not using Prolog you are almost certainly wasting your time.

Almost all PLs you're likely to be acquainted with can be thought of as syntactic sugar over Lambda Abstraction. Prolog, from this POV, is syntactic sugar over Predicate Logic. It's actually a fantastically simple language, both in syntax and in its underlying operation, which could be summarized as Logical Unification with chronological backtracking.

I have been working with Prolog for only about two months but I am already way more productive. Typically a piece of code that might have been five pages of Python will amount to a page or less of Prolog. I hasten to point out that 1/5 code means 1/5 of the bugs, but it is also much more difficult to introduce bugs into Prolog code, so the total ratio of bugs per unit of functionality is much lower. Further, Prolog code typically operates in several "directions", e.g. the Prolog append() relation (not function) will append two lists to make a third, but can also be used to extract all prefixes (or suffixes) of a list, etc.; a Prolog Sudoku program will solve, validate, and generate puzzles from one problem description.[1] So you get more functionality with less code and many fewer bugs. It's also very easy to debug Prolog code when you do encounter errors. I'm spending fewer hours typing in code, fewer hours debugging, and I'm still more productive than I was. Looking back, I estimate that as much as half of my career was wasted effort due to not using Prolog.

I'm implementing a sort of compiler in Prolog and I am impressed with the amount of work I haven't had to do. I'm beginning to suspect that most high-level languages are actually a dead-end. For efficient, provably-correct software generated by an efficient development process, I think we should be using Prolog with automatic machine-code generators.

Last but not least, Prolog is old. It's older than many of the folks reading this. Almost everything has been done, years ago, often by researchers in universities. Symbolic math? Differentiation? Partial evaluation? Code generators? Hardware modeling? Reactive extensions? Constraint propagation? Done and done. You probably can't name something that hasn't been explored yet.

[1] https://swish.swi-prolog.org/p/Boring%20Sudoku.swinb
The book Fluent Python is a good book that goes beyond the introduction to python books
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032519.do

Here's an interview with the author in 2015
https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/24/fluent-python
so why is it so expensive in the us? I'm guessing middlemen between the farmer drive up prices and soak up profits, but I don't really know.
It looks cool, but those curly lowercase i's and l's really confuse my brain. I find myself parsing them both as uppercase L's...
I almost added a bit about the > 40 hr/week problem. I can only speak for myself but out of the 3 software jobs I've had none of them regularly required more than 40 hours/week. That's a privilege for sure, but those jobs do exist. Probably not at most startups, and probably not at most sexy well-known companies... but it's a tradeoff (like everything, it seems) -- the shiny line on your resume from AmaGooFaceSoft, Inc. or the tiny chance at a big payout vs. making a decent salary and being able to forget about work outside the hours of 9 to 5.

It probably varies by area of the world/country as well. I imagine the long hours are more the norm in the middle of a startup hub city vs. out in the suburbs.
> there are plenty of consensus-oriented protocols already in existence that could accomplish the same goal without relying on a blockchain

Assume:

1. a distributed system where the consensus algorithm is state-dependent (in the sense that an SQL RDBMS that exposes the ability to insert rules/triggers has state-dependent consensus—different MVCC states will see different transactions as valid/invalid);

2. malicious machine-agents (bot oracles) supplying arbitrary input into the distributed system;

3. the distributed system being open-membership, such that malicious people are running auditing nodes (and so you can't really do Raft consensus);

4. the distributed system being large enough that you can't really do Paxos consensus in any efficient way.

Is there any other solution to this problem, than to use the consensus algorithm of:

1. have many nodes redundantly, eagerly audit a block of new inputs;

2. on each step, choose of those blocks essentially by lottery (specifically, a lottery no individual node on the distributed system can predict or cheaply craft an input to win);

3. allow anyone who wants to, to configure their node to fully verify past blocks, such that enough nodes doing this will create "herd immunity", diverging the system away from maliciously-crafted blocks.

Step 2 of the algorithm requires Proof-of-Work (so far as we know); step 3 of the algorithm requires an accessible chain of signed proofs to audit. Together, those spell "blockchain."
A old term used by traffic engineers...
Paint is the cheapest form of traffic management.
They should be classified as common carriers.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/202
There is a large difference in Europe between the taxation rate and what is paid in practice by corporations. In several EU countries the 'real' taxation for industry is close to 0%. Why do you think companies like Google, Skype, Apple etc slush all their profits through EU subsidiaries?
With the ACA's pre-existing condition guarantees under threat, it is in every individual's interest to keep as much of their medical information private as possible. The way insurance companies make money is by avoiding elevated risk, after all.

On a related subject, I wonder whether ISPs are selling browsing history to insurance companies.
If we extrapolate what you're saying, no one visiting their website would mean all the bandwidth saving, but no income at all. So it doesn't hold good.
I think the problem with what you're saying is the ambiguous use of the word 'cash'. Deposits, reserves, and physical currency are all 'cash' in some sense, but here it helps to be precise.

Banks don't 'lend out cash', they create deposits. Deposits are liabilities for banks. When a bank takes on a deposit, it also takes on a corresponding asset: either a loan in its books, or an increase in its reserve account.

In practice the reserve ratio is unimportant for a bank: in Canada and the UK the ratio is 0%. The real constraint on a banks ability to create money is it's leverage ratio, i.e. (assets - liabilities)/assets. In reality the formula is more complicated and uses risk weighting by asset class, but that's the crux of it.
Right, but it seems like almost everybody who cares about this would just enable third-party cookie blocking.

Put another way, what problem is this new policy solving, and how big a problem is it?
My friend makes a living writing these kinds of papers, primarily for Chinese students in Australian universities. He’s brilliant and can write on any subject (often the students provide notes / data, so it’s more about writing than topic knowledge).

What annoys me is that this is rampant, and universities know it (or they’re intentionally being naive). But rather than crack down on those who are paying course fees, plus paying someone else to do their work. It would be nice if they put some effort into finding those who are actually writing all these papers and enabling them.

Make them tutors, professors, ‘student assistants’, what ever. Some people will always cheat, who cares. In the end they cheat themselves, and it’s up to companies to screen people to ensure they actually have the capabilities they require. Rather than spend on removing the cheaters, spend on enabling the honest. Or even better, transfer directly from the cheaters to the honest, which is effectively what happens, but in the shadows.

But for my friend, who is a perfect match for academia, this is his funding model.

I hope one day he can be credited with all the papers he’s actually written.
Tech is like being a football player or an exotic dancer: you have a shelf life. Some people can make it a life long career, I haven't seen that to be the case though. Get in, make as much as you can, get out into a sane industry. Plumbers, carpenters, electricians, electrical linemen, welders, lots of trades make similar to what you'd make in tech, the jobs can't be outsourced, and you deal with a lot less day to day bullshit (and you usually have a union protecting your wages and benefits, as well as no such thing as unpaid overtime).
There is also NCTUE

Freeze page -
http://www.nctue.com/Consumers
I was just thinking the other day of writing a small utility to download a YouTube video and metadata, stuff the metadata in a database, and be able to have a local, searchable copy of videos and channels I'd like to have for a while -- I don't trust they'll be around forever.

I was thinking it could be better if the utility would be more useful if it integrated with mythtv, but I might start as a standalone.
That clause describes the power of the individual states, not the federal government. And unless you've seen Oklahoma trying to pay their debts in OK Bucks I think it holds true today.

The federal government is allowed to use whatever means they legislate to pay their debts.
Instagram denies it’s building Regramming. Here’s why it’d be a disaster
No. It'll never leave the Solar System unless it happens to surpass the escape velocity of the Solar System. Then, it'll never leave the galaxy unless it surpasses the Milky Way's escape velocity. That would require a tremendous amount of energy. IIRC the Milky Way's orbital escape velocity is something between 300-500km/s (depending on whether you leave the Solar System in a way to take advantage of its forward velocity through the Milky Way or not..)
People make the same argument against having dozens of Linux distributions and dozens of window managers. Having a lot of choice doesn't hurt anything, and benefits everybody in the long run.

> I wish the world would get behind a couple well thought out languages that cover most programming needs (functional, systems/bare metal, scripting) and stick with those.

For the most part, "the world" has got behind a small handful of languages. Java, C++, Python, Javascript and maybe a half dozen others make up the majority of real world projects.

> With a small number of languages, work can be put into serious tooling, and fixing compiler bugs, rather than a few devs spread thin trying to keep up with the bugs in their hobby language.

That assumption probably doesn't hold. If the authors of Nim weren't working on Nim, there's no guarantee they'd go work on tooling for some other language. Furthermore, who would decide which small group of languages people can work on?

With the exceptions of Java and Javascript, almost all of today's popular languages started off as somebody's small pet project. The good ones (by some metric, anyway) grew and their usage spread and the not so good ones died out. The best way to make forward progress is to try new things and see what works and what doesn't.
A billion Euros. Wasn't that the acquisition price of Whats-app when they had 8 employees?
I think with current law, the platform bias claim is a stretch --unless these platforms are recategorized and regulated as utilities like a telecoms provider. T-Mobile can't just say, we'll ID all atheists and kick them off the service (or anyone who isn't a Mormon, for example) Currently, it looks like Google could simply say, we'll de-emphasize all Atheist or Mormon topics and it would be permissible.
Decentralised systems on the Internet – the broad overview
Software dev has many aspects that have different analogies.

The first is requirement gathering. This is essential to know what you are doing, be it from an internal customer or your boss. Best analogy I can think of is ask a 3 year old to describe in detail the house they live in. Enough that you can draw a picture of it and provide a fairly accurate floor plan. Floor plan good enough to use to order furniture against.

Design and coding others have covered.

Testing - ok inspect a car you want to buy ... in extreme detail. Write down the results.

Documentation - write a diary, detailed that if someone who read it they could impersonate you.
At the end of the article
Free speech works both ways - you have a right to say whatever you want, and everybody else has a right to tell you to STFU. Being silenced by anybody other than the government is just other people exercising their right to free speech.

Your right to free speech does to convey a responsibility for me to amplify your voice.
How much of the work which made those people famous was actually made in the UK? If a UK citizen is working and/or living abroad, can the work they do really be “credited”, so to speak, to the UK?

Conversely, should not UK get the credit, if non-UK citizens have immigrated to the UK and do their work at UK institutions?
When people talk about free speech outside of government affairs, they are generally referring to an idealized universal human right or ideal, rather* than the US constitutional right.
Living in Switzerland is much more expensive than living in Italy (housing especially), so salaries are more or less adjusted accordingly to the cost of living. Then, there are also some top Universities in Switzerland.

When I was doing my postdoc ~ 7-10 years ago, I was making 1500 euros after taxes.
Watching IT mature over the last 25+ years has for me been extremely sad to watch. What was once a vibrant dynamic discipline, full of great minds and ideas, is now a grey suited sea of processes and meetings with no real purpose to them at all. IT is/was my vocation, and has been since I was a small child, however now I can't wait to get out of the industry and do something else.
Sure, of course. That's a philosophical position known as Dualism[0].

The trouble is that what the author has done is base their argument on an assumption of dualism, but not made that assumption explicit. If made more explicit, the question-begging becomes more obvious: "If we assume there is something special and meta-physical about the human mind which is not replicable anywhere else, then artificial intelligence is impossible". Well, yeah. But putting it that way doesn't make for a very dramatic article...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism
Probably because they think the satellite is more capable of doing cool things than their PC, which is just displaying HN and (presumably) nothing more for them.
Reminds me of the font used in the Tron remake on the command line consoles actually
> An introduction to dependent types, demonstrating the most beautiful aspects, one step at a time.

Is there a companion book detailing the ugly downsides of dependent types and how to avoid them, one step at a time?
Ask HN: What is a good OSS license to release a dev/test tool?
Mission Impossible Fallout (2018) – HD Full Movie
Taxes in USA are not meaningfully lower, except for state-local sales taxes vs. European VAT.

But the thing about VAT is that it’s unimportant for most businesses. When selling B2B you just subtract all the VAT you paid from the VAT you owe. The only kind of business that is seriously affected by VAT is highly price-sensitive B2C, and technology startups usually aren’t that.
Germany will be good while Eastern Europe have brains willing to relocate, and US have H-1B quotes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6648443
A lot of trades people also have a shelf life. It's hard work and you may not be able to work as carpenter or welder after 50.

I agree about unions. The older I get the more they make sense to me. The tech industry is living off exploiting young people's enthusiasm with the promise of a big payoff that materializes only for a few.
Support for Firefox is more important than ever.

Agreed.

I had always been a FF user, but switched to chrome about a year ago because it was faster. The latest version of Chrome pushed me back to Firefox, as it's WAY slower and not particularly friendly to tracking, even with Ghostery/uBlock etc... installed
So Apple is saying one thing to the media and another thing in their legally binding customer agreement.

Someone should ask Apple which one it is, because these statements seem completely irreconcilable to me.
Read latency doesn't have to be impacted by linearizibility. Write latency is higher, but we have to do a fair comparison. If a non-consistent database acknowledges a write it doesn't have to have made that write visible, so comparing that latency to a linearizable DB write is apples to oranges. If we compare latency until the write is globally visible, the non-consistent DB can still do better, so it is definitely possible to imagine scenarios in which such a DB is better.

However, for what percentage of use cases does a reduction in write latency weigh up against the disadvantages? I think that's a very small percentage. Heck, the vast majority of companies that are using a hip highly available NoSQL database cluster would probably be fine running a DB on a single server with a hot standby.

You could image a system that gives you a bit of both. When you do a write, there are several points in time that you may care about, e.g. "the write has entered the system, and will eventually be visible to all clients" and "the write is visible to all clients". The database could communicate that information (asynchronously) to the client that's doing the write, so that this client can update the UI appropriately. When a client does a read, it could specify what level of guarantee it wants for the read: "give me the most recent data, regardless of whether the write has been committed" or "only give me data that is guaranteed to have been committed". Such a system could theoretically give you low latency or consistency on a case by case basis.
Can you elaborate? Do you have war stories?
Random thought: alternatively, could we fast-forward to a day and age where everyone can find "teen foolishness" photos on everyone else, and thus nobody is blackmailable? Sanity through MADness, not unlike the current geopolitical situation.
So do those who win state contracts get paid in gold and silver?
Monochromatic interfaces can be so beautiful.

I'd love to use a modern GUI that adopted this aesthetic. Even though the content of documents would be in color, having the UI itself restrained to a simple monochrome palette would be very enjoyable to use.
s/irregardless/regardless/

No need to double-negate this word.
> The third is tricky - key red flag to watch for "the laws of programming" or "you don't have enough education" or similar put downs.

I think the third was an attempt at some humorous self-deprecation.
TensorFlow.js Crash Course–Machine Learning for the Web–Handwriting Recognition
What benchmark would convince you? It's easy to dismiss any evidence as a very-specific micro benchmark.
Fidelity, Vanguard, and spreadsheet.

Typically I have found that Mutual funds work best for me. When I buy individual things, I tend to run afoul of setting a point to sell. So I end up selling when it is worthless.

Also I do not have the free time to watch this stuff every day. Daily tracking just gives me daily worry.
I'm assuming live telemetry from a satellite. The part I was curious about is, in the message emulator, sending the message seems to take a really long time for a round trip. So it looks like it must be pretty far away from Earth.

Little search shows that that it's a probe sent to an asteroid to collect samples and bring them back to Earth. It was sent in 2014, arrived this year, and will fly back in 2019 and arrive in 2020.

EDIT: Looks like it just landed on the asteroid, hence this being posted [0]

[0] https://www.space.com/41912-japanese-hopping-rovers-land-on-...
>"Platform bias" isn't an antitrust concern, and, in fact, the President has no authority to "de-bias" private companies.

This is a very common refrain and I would agree completely with this if we didn't live in a society where Facebook, Twitter and YouTube dominated the our communication channels. I wish that we had a neutral way (like email) to reach a large audience and that it wasn't owned by three or four private companies.
Regardless of the official reasoning behind it, this kind of legislation is essential to the continued functioning of our democracies.

Every company has a culture, and that culture by definition has biases, and can't help but leak those biases in everything they do and produce. When a company controls what people see (and search results are a form of control), they affect perception, which in turn affects judgment.

We saw firsthand the insidiousness of this when a bunch of googlers succumbed to savior syndrome, discussing their desire to use the powers of the company to counter "badness" and foster "goodness". Regardless of your own personal views on the political issues discussed, they can very easily end up biased against your personal views, marking yours as "bad" against their "good", while hiding behind a (self-believed) objectivity. Even when they are 100% morally/ethically correct, the very act of unconsciously biasing the majority of people undermines democracy.

Diversity of thought is WHY democracy works. The less diverse peoples' sources of information are, the less accurate they become as collective judges of a republic. We've been seeing a trend towards homogeneous thought with the advent of mass-media, but with those you could at least choose which poison to drink. With invisible biases in search, you completely lose sight of alternative viewpoints because they are suppressed at the source. A monopoly (or oligopoly) here would be disastrous. These really are the final days where we decide who will be the architects of our minds.
> I agree about unions. The older I get the more they make sense to me. The tech industry is living off exploiting young people's enthusiasm with the promise of a big payoff that materializes only for a few.

Can't agree more with this. When I rail against the tech industry, it isn't as a Luddite, but as someone rallying against exploitation and subjugation.
How could it not be? You "download" the stream every time you watch it. It's to everyone's benefit to cache it if you want to watch it more than once. That way you don't use that much bandwidth. You might be served less ads, but you shouldn't be watching them anyway.
That’s a fair point. From a utilitarian perspective, I think you’re probably right. Unfortunately, the public will not follow this dispassionate line of reasoning if AI drivers start killing people in “large” numbers, even if there’s strong evidence to support its soundness. It might therefore be best to be just a little less aggressive than would otherwise be optimal, to avoid a public backlash that could—despite being irrational—delay the arrival of competent AI drivers.
Or take the stefan-boltzmann law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law

In what sense is it "an application running on the quantum mechanics operating system".
Nevermind I misread.
You just described two errors that do actually happen and in the next sentence say those errors can't happen anymore. What am I missing here?
> an idealized universal human right or ideal

There is no such thing. Implementing/requiring 'free speech' for consumers of a service (e.g. facebook) means that now suddenly the service and its employees lose their right to free speech. If the service's management wants to be biased towards one political 'party', they have a right to do that, but if they suddenly are forced to be unbiased then they have effectively lost that right. See how you cannot have 'universal free speech'?
:)
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