onetwotree

> From a technical standpoint, Eve is a variant of Datalog

This is what I needed to understand what you're up to here, oddly enough.

From http://programming.witheve.com/deepdives/whateveis.html (which might not be up to date?).

If it's as easy and reliable as it is with Postgres (and I'd suspect it is), the answer is in my experience yes.

> Maybe we have different definitions of the word compromise.

Well if yours is to ask for measures so extreme that I've never even heard of them, then yes, we do.

You make responsible gun owners look like nuts. But thanks, you've done a wonderful job of illustrating the problem I was commenting on.

Well, I'm going to replace my comment.

I'll just let yours stand as evidence of the kind of thing that happens when you ask for compromise on such a strange issue.

> People don't become alcoholic

Perhaps you're right, and we need to treat our countries addiction to guns instead of trying to reduce the supply.

What do you want?

It's an honest question, but I think that part of the problem is that gun rights are at a sort of apogee in this country - I don't really have much more to give.

This is the kind of thing that deserves study and debate. But when study is cut off from federal funding, and debate constantly suffers from a lack of trust, we're really screwed.

That's awfully euphemistic language for a huge fireball.

From the other side, I also feel like the adversarial nature of the debate has gotten completely out of hand. Democracy is all about compromise, but when it comes to guns people just go off the rails.

Here's how it feels from my point of view: I'd like it if the police could really just run a serial number (perhaps with judicial oversight, warrants, etc.), like they do on T.V.

But the right takes my genuine desire to take some sensible measures to reduce violent crime and turns it into a desire to take away all of the guns and commit some atrocity.

It's like I'm asking you if I could use your cellphone for a second to call for a ride, and you treat me like I'm definitely planning to steal it. Perhaps a sensible measure in some contexts, but it is always a fundamental statement about how little you trust me, and frankly insulting.

Many on the left, of course, do the same thing, although obviously I'm not in as good of a position to describe it.

Somehow we need to restore our trust in one another's shared values. It seems to me that a heavily partisan media has done the most to erode this trust (for example, the vicious attacks on the fundamental values of Bush and Obama), but there might be more too it.

The obvious difference is that the gun industry is opposed to making it easy to track down guns. There are no powerful financial interests fighting for our data privacy.

I worked on a PDF text extraction project once, with scientific articles as the primary target.

That stuff is really hard, even when the text is ostensibly present in the PDF (as opposed to the PDF being an image of text). Thing is, it's all just "draw text" commands in the content streams (basically postscript programs). The text commands appear in no particular order and you generally have to compute the layout to see even where the spaces are (which is still a guessing game, because the PDF generator will vary the space width to achieve a visually pleasing format).

OCR is an approach that wasn't quite ready for prime time back then, so it's cool to see people working on it!

The problem with limiting monkey-patching is that it's used extensively and with great variety in Rails (and other popular Ruby projects).

Monkey patching, done correctly, will "settle" over time. That is, once your rails app has called all the dynamic finder methods it's ever going to use, and `require`d all of the `active_support` extensions it'll need, it's done monkey patching. Of course, there are programming mistakes that can open a huge bag of worms, such as using `OpenStruct`s. Generally, anything that will smash the global method cache[1] is also going to require the kind of `iseq` deoptimization that this pull is about (in fact, smashing the global method cache is a simple case of deoptimization).

This is why deoptimization is so useful - it's almost never going to happen after your app has settled, but it's necessary to maintain correctness while `active_support` is being loaded and adding all of those yummy methods to core classes.

`call_cc` can go to hell though - I've never seen a program that uses it ;-)

[1] https://github.com/charliesome/charlie.bz/blob/master/posts/...

Hmm, perhaps useful for a teaching tool.

If used as such, it'd be really nice to be able to go the other way - a regex explainer if you will.

Yes of course people are wired (if you mean influenced by genes and environment) to seek out and use substances that fulfill a psychological need.

Not only is this the dominant view in the various recovery communities, it's supported by considerable scientific evidence - for example, addiction is well known to be inheritable, and childhood trauma is very strongly established as being predictive of addiction in later life.

I take it you don't know many addicts, especially former addicts with a mature perspective on their own addiction. There are some really good books written by folks who've been addicted and gotten over it that could clue you in on how addiction works.

> you're not seriously comparing the Desoxyn dosage

Most meth addicts start with a dose that helps them, emotionally or as a performance enhancer for work, school, sex, etc. These doses are roughly the same as those prescribed for ADHD and narcolepsy. Eventually, meth stops helping and takes control - this is the hallmark of addiction.

Heroin use is absolutely self medication - it relieves emotional pain as well or better as it does physical pain.

There's no black market for cigarettes or alcohol though. Tax heroin at 50% and it'll still be cheaper than it is on the street. The fact that these goods are cheap to produce but highly inelastic means that the government can make a killing taxing them without introducing a black market.

The fact that many people are prescribed highly addictive drugs (adderall, opiates, and even in some cases, methamphetamine (under the name Desoxyn) without becoming addicts gives the lie to the second statement. In fact, merely using drugs doesn't lead to addiction - it requires the use combined with underlying environmental and genetic factors.

As for preventing use, good luck!

People often confuse addicts who refer to themselves as addicts for life, which is a useful psychological technique to avoid thinking that can lead to relapse, with the idea that addicts are incurable. It's unfortunate, but a bit of education (like your comment) goes a long way toward solving the problem.

If you're on a bike or in a car, you can often home in on pokemon based on them appearing and disappearing on the nearby list, along with some knowledge of areas where pokemon tend to spawn. My SO and I have caught a couple of rare ones like this (one person drives, and the other operates both phones).

But I agree completely that it's more fun when you have a map or the long lost footprints to be able to zero in on foot.

Sadly you're probably right. But you can always hope to have planted a seed.

It's just a book review.

You're really missing the point.

Count me in as well. I'm freshly unemployed and looking for fun projects, preferably with a side of fighting for great good!

jonathan [dot] j [dot] mason [at] gmail

Isn't it unreal that there are people who spend millions of dollars to figure out if 200 year old bottles of booze are really 200 years old?

I don't normally rage against the rich, but reading this article made me fantasize about locking a couple dozen raging alcoholics in Bill Koch's wine cellar for a week.

I'm surprised that color factors had greater predictive power than presence of human faces.

I'd really like to see this kind of analysis applied to a larger sample.

If someone were to put together a little app to make this sort of data collection trivial and upload it to a central (preferably cheap) repository, would people be interested in contributing their data in exchange for analysis?

Also, since this is HN, is anyone interested in building something like this? I've got an hour or two a week of spare time to chip in.

Unrelated question, mostly for OP: do you know of any publicly available databases of GI/GL info? It's really important for people with type 1 diabetes (a subject rather dear to my heart), and could also be useful for OpenAPS stuff (https://github.com/openaps).

Plea bargains are pure coercion. The ability of a prosecutor to threaten you with almost arbitrarily severe punishment means that a plea bargain is a much better option than rolling the dice with a jury trial. Whether or not you committed the crime is irrelevant. You are looking at say 5 years with a plea bargain vs. either life or nothing without one, 10 years is simply the rational choice. Once you've accepted the plea bargain, by the way, you can't challenge the sentence if new evidence comes up.

What's perhaps more appalling is confessions made to police and prosecutors without an attorney present. The police and prosecutors can lie about the potential sentence, even threatening the suspect's life (we'll go death penalty!), drawing out a confession, and then be under no obligation to uphold their end of the "bargain".

The bottom line is that 95% of people in our prisons did not have a trial before a jury of their peers. Some of these people are very likely innocent, but because of the nature of plea bargains, they cannot challenge their sentences.

I think that ageism might be less of a problem than you think. While it certainly exists at companies that have a certain culture, I've generally worked for companies that explicitly reject "Valley Culture" and we often try to hire older engineers. The difference in experience, work ethic, and overall attitude is huge and positive. I'm the second youngest engineer at my current (small) company at 31, and it's great.

Your main barrier is experience, but if you're willing to go for a junior level position, that shouldn't be an issue.

So generally, look for companies with a more mature culture - avoid buzzwords like "rockstar" and "ninja" (secretly, everyone should do this), steer clear of "unicorns", and read the bios on a companies website, and you should be able to find a good fit.

Here's a real gem, from an FTC official:

> There’s a fine line between shutting down the Internet and policing it

Straight out of a lobbyists mouth, I'd imagine. It has the classic "true, but only in certain contexts" thing going on - sure, it's a great argument against, say, SOPA, but as an argument against a simple legal requirement that big internet players do their part to reign obviously malicious advertising, it's pretty bogus.

How does wordpress.com deal with plugins? Do they have managed/curated distribution systems? The more I learn about this, the more I feel like core wordpress is reasonably sound, and the problems mostly arise from plugins.