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such people are trained in identifying opportunities and turning that into money or power. they are not giving their stuff away without a strategy.

do you think the chinese government will allow them to spill the secret sauce? the secret sauce to what is eventually going to be weapon? clear no.

that's a Milchmädchenrechnung. if it turns out that you can achieve status quo with 1% of the expected effort then that just mean you can achieve approximately 10 times the status quo (assuming O(exp)) with the established budget! and this race is a race to the sky (as opposed to the bottom) ... he who reaches AGI first takes the cake, buddy.

> The accuracy of the article is a function of the current valuation.

ah ... no ... that's nonsense trying to hide behind stilted math lingo.


do you know what you are writing about? I mean have you actually done something with datalog? and then _which_ datalog? if yes, then you are probably someone working with it academically or the answer is no. because try to even set a toy project up with it (for the purpose of learning how to use it) and you'll quickly run into unmaintained interpreters, discussions of what datalog is and what not and you can choose between difficult to understand academic papers or simplistic introductions that lead you no where.

I have found two somewhat usable (your point still stands): soufflé (high performance but more limited) and DES, which works well for some simple personal data management, after some code massage (it’s written in Prolog). Any other recommendations? And since the prolog experts are here: what do you think about Ciao? Seems quite polished but also adventurous to (non-expert) me

Have you tried Datomic?

no.

https://github.com/Datomic/codeq : last update to that repo was 12 years ago.

it's JDK which I find unappealing.

also, how close is it to Datalog?

https://github.com/gns24/pydatomic : last update 11 years ago.

and that's representative of pretty much anything regarding Datalog.

So, I'll just stick to Prolog then.

---

have you?

would you recommend it?


Ok just to clarify, Datomic is a Clojure thing. It is free to use but closed source. It is an excellent database that is used, owned, and financed by Nubank, the largest and most rapidly growing bank in Brazil.

It is not Datalog syntax but heavily inspired by Datalog.

I'm throwing this in here just for clarification, I don't want to see Datomic as collateral damage in this conversation.


There is Datascript. I am not a Clojure guy, so it is not clear to me if it pulls datomic as a dependency.

Datascript is very similar to Datomic, except that it runs in ClojureScript and is an in-memory datastore with no concept of history or point-in-time queries. The schemas are also much looser than Datomic.

Otherwise, many syntax and semantics are similar.

No dependency on Datomic as Datomic is Java and DataScript is JavaScript.


Ah thank you.

I tried using Datomic Pro for a CMDB. I liked how logical queries were but I ended up going with Neo4j instead because finding paths between two nodes is incredibly useful in IT.

https://central.sonatype.com/artifact/com.datomic/local/1.0....


mhm ... sounds like you don't know what you are talking about if you conflate Neo4j/Cypher with Datalog ... because "in IT".

I'm fully aware they are very different things. I'm just saying I have tried using datomic and I really like it's query language but it cannot find a path between two objects like Neo4j which is a killer feature in a CMDB. My dream DB would be a hybrid of Neo4j and Datomic.

An example of where Neo4j really shines is I found a site with BGP route dumps. The file contains over 57 million very redundant Autonomous System paths that are just sequences of a IP prefix and the AS path it is reachable by. By loading each IP prefix and AS hop as

(Prefix)-[:ANNOUNCED_BY]->[:AS]-[:BGP_NEXT_HOP]->[:AS]

I can easily trace paths from one prefix to another by going

MATCH path = (p1:Prefix)-[:*]->(p2:Prefix) return path

which will return which AS announce the prefixes and all BGP paths between them. It really is very powerful.


The declarative expression of the problem is elegant but even if this toy example is successfully resolved, make it a little more complicated and you'll have the interpreter ping-pong between two states infinitely.

As I see it. Prolog as a language and idea is great but the existing solvers are useless for any real problem ... or you'll have to resort to cuts and memorizing states and at least partially implement an imperative solution that you yourself have to come up with. And that's totally killing the magic.


Well, I mean... Prolog is an implementation of 1st order logic with syntax sugar. So basically, Prolog is incredible if your problem can be expressed within the framework, but less so if it can't. That's pretty much why there were extension attempts such as lambda Prolog.

you're simplifying the practicalities of prolog. there are many problems that you can express declaratively to the t. and yet many (all?) solvers aren't able to reduce it to a solution. the search isn't even successfully brute forcing - it will get stuck in some branch and switch endlessly between its leafs. and then it's up to you to figure that out and help the solver. even then prolog has its value but it fails at delivering the primary promise: you describe the problem, it finds a solution.

That's the oldest complaint in the book about Prolog: "it's not 100% declarative". OK. So use Java. Or C. You think you'll have more declarative fun writing a Zebra Puzzle solver in C, than in Prolog? Be my guest.

No, the truth is that Prolog is a unique language that is almost perfectly poised between the two extremes of beautiful but unusable formal purity and everyday programming utility. Prolog makes pragmatic choices when it has to and chooses to sacrifice declarative purity for the sake of performance and usability, because that's the only thing that makes sense considering that we have to run our programs on real computers, programmed by real programmers.

And then people complain that it's no good because you can't write a solver in a purely declarative form, even though you can't even get close to the declarative features of Prolog in most other languages; except ASP, which is so declaratively pure that it doesn't even have lists.

That's just a very poor criticism, poorly thought out and really meaningless in practice.


my criticism cuts to the chase. that's why you write such a lengthy rebuttal. cause it hurts your feelings.

> So use Java. Or C. You think you'll have more declarative fun writing a Zebra Puzzle solver in C, than in Prolog?

and that, my dear friendo, is _whataboutism_!


I'd say Prolog delivers in a (relatively wide) subset of its domain of application. For instance, I'm writing a solver for some common issues in epidemiology, at the moment. I was able to write a fully declarative (and purely relational) solution! But yes, some applications are better suited than others.

no, i find this subject very interesting. the discussion could be a little more competent and practical.

> Yes, there are buttons. No, it doesn’t support double-tap or long press.

how do you diff between div/mul if not by double tap?


The keyboard on this calculator has the number of keys reduced to the minimum by the use of only three function keys, including a combined "x÷" key.

Here, pressing "x÷" gives the multiplication function if "+=" is subsequently pressed to give the answer, and gives the division function if "-=" is subsequently pressed to give the answer, so:

4 x÷ 2 += gives the answer 8. 4 x÷ 2 -= gives the answer 2.


nice concept but a very bad choice to illustrate good UI. there is enough space to add a few more buttons with dedicated functions.

In 2025, sure. Back when that calculator came out, this kind of saving was probably worth it.

eh why? believe it or not but they had even keyboards back then with many dozens of keys.

And where are the psychedelic graphics now?

Yeah, I did not find anything psychedelic in the article or the pages linked from it.

the OP's YouTube channel is filled with videos made from these techniques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVp8HfqWX9E&list=PLL81xI9jaV...

I've had countless LSD, DMT, and mushroom trips, as well as a few others, and nothing about that video reminds me about anything "psychedelic", not even close. I guess it's subjective but I have to wonder what was going on the their head when they decided "this looks psychedelic, let's call it psychedelic".

also single most irrelevant comment ever

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