skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
faq in the documentation is mostly useless. but the wikipedia entry on it is quite succinct and good. but still after reading that wikipedia article and skimming through the website, i, as a typical average code monkey with a some grasp of python/js/whateva else among these lines, have no clear idea what and where mercurylang is useful for. can someone eli5-explain that to me in a few sentences?
Our perception of reality is just a bunch of hacks, God is a programmer with a deadline confirmed.

In all seriousness, it's interesting to think about the design tradeoffs evolution came up with for humans, and how those tradeoffs may no longer be the right tradeoffs given our radically changed lifestyles. If only we could flick focus mode like a switch when sitting at a computer, that would be nifty.
pretty sure public service bands don't overlap with ham bands so a ham license wouldn't help even _if_ a license was required for this
The e-mail client I use (bower) is written in mercury.
Even a dead pimp and brothel owner can win us elections with enough facebook sponsoring support. Imagine doing the same for presidency! Oh wait...
Yeah, but when your child dies, it won't matter to them anymore either.

You can't bet just 50% on nihilism. Either go all in or acknowledge that people want to have as many positive experiences as they can, no matter how much time they have left.
Solomonoff induction can be computed in the limit.
During round i, simulate your chosen UTM on each valid input string (note: assuming that the valid input strings are prefix free, which iirc is the standard for solomonoff induction) of length at most i, until you have simulated it for i steps total, or until it halts (whichever comes first).

When doing so, for any string, the proportion of the inputs (with respect to the coin flip measure thing) to the UTM that eventually halt with whatever particular output, which will have been found to halt , will approach "all of them".

Now, you can't quite say "run as long as you need to in order to get answer within this epsilon of correct answer", because you don't have a way of determining whether something hasn't halted yet but will, or if it never will, but, it is still computable in the limit. If you use absurdly (possibly quite absurdly) large but finite amounts of computational resources, it should give you a good enough approximation.

Humans make mental errors often enough. I don't see why one would think that, because solomonoff induction is only approximable, that that suggests human intelligence is uncomputable. Why not suppose that humans just have a very close approximation to the uncomputable thing, rather than the noncomputable thing itself?

Why believe that human intelligence is computable? Well, for me it is more of a "choosing not to believe that it is uncomputable". If I believed it uncomputable, I might hang too much of my philosophy/worldview on that assumption, and then if I turned out to be incorrect on that, too much might come crashing down.

Edit: note: I mean "not believing", not "disbelieving". Not(believe(p)) rather than believe(not(p)) .
Oktoberfest in Winchester (2016)
FWIW I just filed a bug report with Apple requesting that Files support USB mass storage drives (rdar://problem/45899522). If you want to see this supported, I suggest you file your own report requesting this.
Rather like back in the day people like Jefferson would keep a daily journal. Hand-written in a paper notebook of course, and still available 250 years later, without worrying about hardware and data conversion issues.
I'm not a kernel programmer, and I haven't used Rust before, so take that into consideration.

Some of my favourite things about Ada is it's approach to concurrency, which (I think) is far superior to other imperative concurrent languages like Go. We should never have to deal with low-level primitives like semaphores and mutexes - it's 2018! Why are we stuck in the 80s?

I've heard that concurrency is difficult in Rust, but I've never used it, so I can't comment. I plan on learning very soon!
Could this be in any way related to the strobing effects (and afterimages / discrete tracers) of LSD and other psychedelics?

(see also http://psychedelic-information-theory.com/The-Control-Interr... - not sure how much of it is just pseudoscience nonsense though)
We were moving towards an open, inclusive society pretty much since the Berlin wall fell and germany reunited. 9/11 inverted the progress we were making, and now we’re slowly sliding away towards facism again.

That’s how it feels to me anyway. Europe certainly has it’s growing share of racists.
This is awesome. I wonder how much the Enterprise Graphql Gateway is, our app is under a million queries a month, but right now I instantiate multiple apollo clients which point to different Graphql endpoints because we do not have a gateway. I would love this but I am not sure if it makes sense for our case from a cost perspective.
On a "DoThingsThatDontScale" mode now for https://nodablock.com . Customers contact me by email or I find them via conferences. They tell me the plan they want or their usecase. I then deploy manually the blockchain node they want, send them by email the API key and endpoint and invoice.
Didn't automate yet until I figure out what most of the people want.
(Happy to get any feedbacks too)
Where does it say that?

Unless I'm mistaken, the actual book itself is free too, which is generous.
I'm just gonna say it.

We don't need another "lightweight, responsive, modern" CSS framework.

It's a solved problem.
I wonder what the biggest deployment of Phoenix is at this point.

I've written a few cowboy apps, but my professional Erlang experience has only been with chat servers that do not use HTTP. I'm not sure if I'd choose Erlang to build web services in. Cowboy is a single maintainer project, and Go has had HTTP2 support for ages now.
much more useful for automated building and testing in a mac environment remotely. Would be much less useful if it were straightforward to run macOS under virtualization.
It’s lightweight and usable but far less complete than other options. How are people picking one framework another?
What I really need is a setup like this with some automated “restore to snapshot” functionality. We use a remote mac mini to do CI on our development environment for new team members. That would be the best.
> Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society.

I'm not usually one to say this, but this is a very high-and-mighty way of looking at your society. In Australia, voting is mandatory for every citizen. We have just as many misinformed people, but voting is seen as a civic duty in the same way that jury duty is. If you don't show up, you get fined (though skipping jury duty has a much higher fine).

I think the jury duty comparison is quite apt, actually -- in the case of voting (depending on your voting system), most individuals have very little individual power over which way an election will go. But as a member of a jury, you have a very large amount of power over how someone else's life will go. My point is that if you believe in mandatory jury duty (which I do) then you should also view mandatory voting as being no more insane than mandatory jury duty.

I agree with the rest of what you said, but I disagree that only well-informed people should be pushed to go and vote. It should be the duty of everyone to vote, because if you don't uniformly push even misinformed or disinterested people to vote then you are providing a gap for particular parties to push their supporters to out-vote you -- which is a ridiculous problem to have in my view.

> These are not the bottleneck.

As an outsider, it seems to me that the bottleneck in the US is laws being passed to explicitly make it more onerous to vote and other various organisational aspects (difficult to do early or postal voting, election day is on a Tuesday, bosses are allowed to fire employees for going to vote, really long lines at polling places, etc).

I'll never understand why so many politicians and citizens in the US view making voting more difficult as being anything other than a move away from a democratically elected representative government.

(As an aside, in Australia we don't have any form of voter ID. You just say your name and address and whether you've voted before and then you get a ballot.)
I totally believe this.

When we first met, my wife was still in school, and I had been working in computer stuff for about 10 years. I had good benefits, and thought that medical insurance was a solution to a big problem.

Then watched as my wife tried to get treated for some routine stuff. Not available via the campus clinic, and yet her student "insurance" was not accepted anywhere else within 150 miles without a "co-pay" that was larger than the cost for uninsured patients.

The situation only got worse when we were married later that year. My insurance would only apply after she had sought coverage through her school plan.

We called it "anti-insurance": a form of coverage that, when encountering actual insurance, annihilates it in a violent explosion of virtual particles and real paperwork.

Yeah. The system is fucked.

I believe you.
FYI, there are a few issues with the copy on the homepage:

- "Mac Mini's" should be "Mac Minis", or "Mac minis" if you want to follow the official capitalization.

- "We only offer genuine, dedicated Apple machines running MacOS" is missing a period.

- "MacOS" should be "macOS".

- "pre installed" should be "pre-installed" or "preinstalled".

- "all your developer needs" should probably be "all a developer's needs" or "all your development needs".
Mercury is the love child of Haskell and Prolog: that is, a very strongly typed logic language. However, it's not quite as flexible a logic language as Prolog (owing mostly to its strong typechecking and modality system), so in practice it's closer to a Haskell with a different I/O containment mechanism (uniqueness types instead of monads) and the ability to sometimes write reversible functions if you bang your head against the modality system hard enough.

Its compiler is impressive, and is capable of acts such as compiling certain non-tail-recursive functions in a tail-recursive manner, or even transforming them into tail-recursive equivalents, given the right hints.

All this capability comes at a cost. At least as of ~4 years ago, the error messages the compiler can spit out over modality errors dwarf even those from C++ templates. And compiler bugs/unimplemented features are not unheard of.
Details https://github.com/WhitewaterFoundry/WLinux
For me the most severe lacking feature of Zulip vs Slack is that you cannot mark messages as unread.
awesome :) do you take payment in crypto currency?
Some of those we’ve looked at before and decided not to go with because of unknown observability, high operational requirements, or cost. But yeah, no real problems with data models or queries.

I think Druid has come the closest to the most ideal system for the requirements I’ve had to deal with, but haven’t used it yet.

Thanks, by the way! This helps a lot.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18403497
Compared to what? Economically viable is very vague and relative. Columnar storage can easily reach 90% compression levels, is faster to read, and vectorized processing beats per-row/record iteration, so there's a reason it's the best for OLAP currently.

Why not benchmark IronDB against Clickhouse and post the results?
absolute unit

This is terrific work!!!
That was a joke
Just to point out that "early voting" can take several forms, since I believe in the US many states combine (erroneously) mail-in voting with early voting.

In Australia, early voting can be done at polling places for several weeks before the election (though there's less polling places open obviously). Mail voting is also provided, but I agree with you that it really is something that has questionable merit -- when you're overseas you can vote at the Australian embassy. The only real use-case it serves is people who live in the outback or are worried about personal safety (who are "silent electors" -- where your address is not posted on the public voter roll), and I think that mail voting should only be provided to those people.
Coke is still the only major soft drink to use coca leaves (with the psychoactive components chemically removed).
Although I found it interesting, I never planned on getting a license until recently... I was looking at POV racing drones and one particular model required a HAM license for the video transmitter.
> Could a system be designed to be relient against this threat, at scale?

It's a problem that ethereum.org is working on. They have an mvp, but not yet ready to scale.

But one can argue that the internet has enabled some of that utopia. And the printing press from the point of view of those who weren't allowed to read. Yes the Church didn't want people to learn how to read, but humans have prevailed. Hopefully we can solve current problems before the Doomsday clock reaches midnight.
The legacy of loading programs from audio sources can be seen in the PS/2 keyboard connector. The 6-pin Mini-DIN was chosen as a more compact alternative to the 5/180 DIN used for the PC-AT keyboard. There was another of the same type of connector on that computer for hooking up a cassette recorder as it was a standard for audio equipment going back to the 60's. It was also re-purposed as the standard MIDI connector.
awesome! i need to get my butt up some of the summits around me and do some SOTA work myself. I've got all the stuff, just need to do it!
As a professional front-end engineer I thank you. The old system was a constant pain point for me. Every time I started a new Phoenix project I agonized over how to integrate the front-end workflow I liked with Phoenix. This will be a big productivity win for me.
IMHO Everyone should write at least one framework of some kind. Bonus if it's open source.

It's a huge learning experience. Gives you a deeper understanding of how other other frameworks work. Helps you understand user and customer support. How to write documentation. Great for your resume. Etc.

In other words, if you only ever consume frameworks it makes it difficult to know what to do or how to approach solving some of the lower level issues a framework may present.
>>> Of course, exercising, eating organic food, and pushing children to use their spare time usefully are not inherently bad things. However, they become markers of bourgeois values when they are marshaled to assert one class’s moral superiority over another and to justify social inequality.<<<

Is this really happening? I mean: "marshaled to assert one class’s moral superiority" is this really going on?

I do know middle-class Americans from, let's call it bluntly, both the "red" and the "blue" side of the country and I don't observe this behaviour there at all.

Sure, people can be proud, but trumpeting "moral superiority" because of class?

Can't remember having ever seen that.
We use Mercury at YesLogic to write Prince, our HTML to PDF formatter! [1]

We chose it because logic/functional languages are great for tree processing, Mercury was designed for large projects, and because in 2002 there really weren't many other options around.

Its syntax and semantics are derived from Prolog, it borrows a lot from Haskell (types, type classes), in spirit it's reminiscent of OCaml (niche, little weird) and with support for unique modes there is some interesting overlap with Rust, although this aspect of the language still needs more compiler support.

All in all, definitely worth checking out.

[1] https://www.princexml.com/
It helps that tape drives were really low-speed/low-density, which makes things more robust. See this RFC on Ultra Low-Speed Networking: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1217
Single maintainer in the sense of ownership, not in PRs. Look at github; 101 contributors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_frequency_alloca...

notably:
13 centimeters – 2300–2310 MHz (lower segment), 2390–2450 MHz (upper segment)
Kinda sorta related: Novena, since it has a on-board FPGA: https://kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena_Main_Page
Does anyone have a pdf copy of the book? I see that it is released for free, I just would prefer not to sign up for another service.
Same question: I am not sure go has solved the dependency problem at all.
Recursive law-breaking. Using the scanner while breaking the law is breaking the law, so by breaking the law while using the scanner, you're also breaking the law...while using the scanner.

Kinda like using a gun in the commission of a felony...is a felony.

Or being arrested and the only charge is resisting arrest.
part of why i'm a fan of digital modes, short message ones like FT8 in particular. plus i've been getting lots of dx too! i really need to learn CW.
You don't need to add new columns.

CREATE TABLE metrics (metric_name text, ts timestamp, properties json, key(metric_name, ts))

OLAP queries with SQL are very good at handling whatever dimensions you want.
> Time-series is just data with time as a primary component.

Doesn't it have a special feature that data comes in a linearly increasing time dimension.
Why Sevilla’s Lightning Bike Network Is Successful
Yeah, same here

Glad it's not just me, i thought my mouse was being buggy

OSX Mojave, Latest Chrome
Why am I seeing ads on their github.io documentation and example pages?

Is the point to show something cool to devs or pick up pageview pennies?

I'm out!
I don't see why that's so special. Other data can have incrementing IDs or some other value. In fact all data can be considered to have a timestamp, at the very minimum being when it was inserted into the database, so it's a rather vague definition overall.
This is a must-view. It has the largest complement of incomprehensible physics diagrams I've ever seen in a single article! 7/7, would boggle again.
>> Is this really happening?

No, of course not.

Jacobin is a hard-line socialist publication. They want readers to view every aspect of life, no matter how minuscule, through the dim lens of class, gender, and race struggles.
Look at that I completely used the wrong starting figure...

On $3.99, this is $0.37 - $0.42, or 9.27% - 10.51%
I happen to already be using that one, nice to see they've added Facebook tracking removal to it as well!
Nah, we'll have more interesting Github projects if we stop writing the same software over and over again.

People will do creative things.

Ambition will exist even if the useless work we do today (getting clients richer with more software).

Related - Interview of Noam Chomsky regarding Work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcBLCBxq1k8
I pitched a local language startup idea to a few companies. I was summarily tolf that it didn't have any "zing" to it. So I added "AI" in all my pitches and got a lot of interest.

Didn't pursue the idea further because I didn't really believe in it, but it just proved to me that investors often chase buzzwords instead of ideas
"Don't do it because it's hard! And you should listen to us because we have the meta-knowledge and experience (now) to know everything there is to know about this topic, plus the bravery to admit in public that we are only human and we make mistakes."

Isn't this the mantra of all of these types of articles?

OK, yes, it usually makes sense. Especially in the case where you are like these guys and experienced enough in some relevant area to know just how difficult it can be. These are perfectly good reasons from technical, business, and project planning perspectives.

Isn't there a TLDR where they mentioned when it does make sense to build your own TSBD? Presumably in some case where you have a team of serious, high-grade experts who know exactly what they are doing; have requirements that cannot be met by any of the other offerings out there; and where the whole thing has been specced out and deemed reasonable?
By online communities do you mean hacker news/reddit, places like that?
I've been using this for years. Did something significant happen with it?
> To me, "maximum data for the hell of it" isn't about generating insight by looking at trends, it's about generating insight during incident analysis.

Agree 100%.
Yeah, correct grammar affects credibility.
'Oldest animal painting' discovered in Borneo
All I want is a 65-75" 4K panel with 1 HDMI in and that's it. I'll handle the sources and switching and audio myself.

We've had Sony, Samsung, and LG Smart TVs over the last few years and all were slow, annoying, and all round shitty experiences. I barely use my TV now because I hate waiting for it to "start up" (Sony with Android TV.. "Please Wait" for what seems like forever before you can do ANYTHING on it).
Show HN: Habitify – Form habits from any device (iOS,macOS,WatchOS,Android)
I found this fascinating.

I too believed /bin and /usr/bin were discrete because /bin was for system stuff and /usr/bin was for user stuff. This post indicates it was due to disk limitations, leading to /bin being placed on the same disk as /usr, thus /usr/bin.
As Mike says in a sibling comment, we use it quite heavily for implementing our HTML-to-PDF browser engine, https://www.princexml.com

It's a pretty handy general purpose language, kind of a combination of Prolog and Haskell. It's much easier to maintain a long-lived project in Mercury than one in Prolog due to the static typing, and it also generates much more efficient code. That said, it doesn't have the greatest documentation, so you might have to reach out on IRC, or the mailing list if you run into some challenges with it.
Data transfer from the host CPU to the GPU card can kill the performance of offloading. You need a hefty data-parallel kernel, with a high-ish work-per-element, to get speedup that's worth the data transfer costs.
Cowboy maintainership has not been an issue, but there are other options in the Erlang and Elixir ecosystem for webservers, ie elli, chatterbox, and Ace. And to be fair, chatterbox is an Erlang http2 server that has been around for 3 years now. Also please consider blatantly discounting the ecosystem and casting doubt on well-maintained projects isn't a very high value-add to this discussion :)

For other readers: you might choose Erlang or Elixir for web services if you want high scalability with distributed communication for free, which is super important for example when building any real-time web service. It's what allows Phoenix to support millions of channel connections on a single server:
https://phoenixframework.org/blog/the-road-to-2-million-webs...

Erlang and Elixir's concurrency model is also unique from what Go offers out of the box in that the way you build applications is via supervised processes with built-in failure recovery.
there's some js too. and scss to compile css.

I just threw one on github if you want to take a look here: https://github.com/adamlaz/temp-Ava
I've always been curious about this hobby but never jumped in. The technology is an interesting curiosity to me but speaking bluntly what would probably give me the impetus to really spend time on it would be tapping into any kind of underground content or social experience that exists. For instance I read that Art Bell got started by broadcasting his show over shortwave bands, what a fascinating experience it would have been to be hanging out with those guys and listening to their conversations through amateur radio.

What is the easiest way for me to start listening in and discovering what's out there on the airwaves? Do I have to buy hardware or are there purely software/online options? Also I live in Thailand so most of the local chatter would probably be in Thai which is hard for me to follow.
I believe these two things are orthogonal. Take Steve Jobs for example, generalist but a perfectionist, too
I find this funny. Most Indian kids are mentally harassed while American parents don't even hit their kids. I remember being hit until I stopped crying. And that's considered normal