MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Grace – Orchestrate Hybrid Mainframe and Cloud Workflows with YAML
by arnavsurve | 2025-05-19 01:53:40+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm a CS student and intern at the California DMV. I’ve spent the last few months migrating mainframe datasets (mainly VSAM KSDS) into cloud systems like RDS/Postgres — and I kept running into the same problem: there's no sane way to orchestrate workflows across mainframe and cloud systems.

Everything is fragmented:

- Mainframe teams write JCL and use job schedulers

- Cloud/data teams build Python ETL scripts and Airflow DAGs

- Integration is slow and manual, often extensive email threads and handoffs between siloed teams

So I built Grace, a declarative orchestration toolchain that lets you define end-to-end workflows in YAML, from COBOL batch jobs to S3 uploads or shell scripts.

https://github.com/graceinfra/grace

Grace handles job orchestration across environments, including JCL templating and submission, dataset transfer, inter-job data handoff, and structured logging for each step. The goal is to expose mainframe logic in atomic, reusable steps that can be integrated into modern infrastructure pipelines.

Mainframes will be around for decades to come. I don’t think rewriting millions of lines of COBOL is a good use of time or money; the real need is tooling that allows cloud-native systems to hook cleanly into legacy logic. Grace aims to be that bridge: a shared control plane for orchestrating hybrid infrastructure, without the glue code.

Would love feedback from anyone working in legacy modernization, DevOps, or infra.
by TheFreim | 2025-05-19 01:53:41+00:00
> How can you organize stuff in obsidian? You have folders and search and that's it.

You can use folders, tags, properties, links between notes (exporable through the links panel per file or the graph view), and there are extensions that let you add more advanced functionality. In the end, any system will require you to come up with your own system of organization.
by SideQuark | 2025-05-19 01:54:38+00:00
https://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx-status.html

GCC rarely, like never, supports the complete standards. Every release improves conformance, fixes errors, sometimes drops support for targets, perhaps changes how poorly defined areas work.

As a result, likely no version compiles code the same as a previous version across all possible code.

You’ll also note GCC doesn’t likely compile the variants of C++ it did before the 1998 version.

And this type of page is just the tip of the iceberg https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-13/porting_to.html. You’ll note changes made that can render previously compilable code no longer compilable.

So no, you cannot naively think a new compiler version will simply run all your old code. On big projects upgrading is a huge endeavor to minimize problems.

We could do every supported language the same way.
by ggm | 2025-05-19 01:55:13+00:00
This would not have been kind to any RF/EMF systems, be they GEO, LEO or terrestrial.

We'd have been walking around marvelling at st elmo's fire coming off any point-contact junction between metal or exposed metal structure, with the most fantastic skies at night.

On the other hand, would allergy sufferers be marvelling at the removal of all the dust and pollen? This would be like the outdoors becoming a giant anti-static dust remover.

Primitive man wakes up, discovers can breathe through both nostrils...
by MikeHalloween | 2025-05-19 01:55:26+00:00
I often spend hours trying to nail down a protagonist’s backstory and quirks—then I found Character Headcanon Generator. Just enter a name, pick a genre and role, and in under five seconds it returns base info, personality traits, goals, flaws, backstory and even a tagline (exportable as JSON/PDF). No signup, totally free—just enough spark to get a scene written at 2 AM. Might help anyone facing blank-page paralysis.
by DennisP | 2025-05-19 01:55:46+00:00
I've read Attia's book, and all he said there about diet was that it was really hard to study, but the best study he knew of made the Mediterranean diet look pretty good.

He went into quite a bit of detail on exercise though, focusing on the predictable ways you'll lose capability as you age, if you don't work really hard on avoiding that.
by fennecbutt | 2025-05-19 01:55:56+00:00
Where was I arguing that human output is not creative at all?

Human creativity is for the most part derivative in some way, that is the nature of it and my point. I was contrasting it to illustrate why I think the idea that machines cannot be creative is wrong. Especially given that current models will only get more complex and nuanced in the future.

I never said that humans cannot be creative because creativity is derivative at any point. We are engaging in another human pastime; tribalism.
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-19 01:58:07+00:00
AFAK each agency/entity manages its staff and can hire accordingly.

For the big project, my mental image is a public call for proposal, followed by one of the bigger groups (e.g. Cap Gemini) coming up with an initial solution that gets deployed. From there it becomes a mix of the public agency staff doing the day to day operation and maintenance, potentially including small bug fixes and updates, and external contracting again for wider range feature additions or changes like system wide security compliance.
by tomhow | 2025-05-19 01:58:28+00:00
Looking over the comment histories of your multiple accounts over multiple years, your activity mostly involves political/ideological battle. That is, you comment mostly in politics and culture-wars-related threads. It's not wrong to have strong feelings about politics and other important issues in the world; that's normal and understandable, and we all do.

What is wrong is to repeatedly use this website for a purpose other than its stated purpose and in breach of the guidelines, then when engaging in discussion with the moderators about the site's purpose and moderation approach, poison the discussion with these kinds of accusations and barbs.

The topic of biases and agendas has been raised countless times here over the years [1]. We're routinely accused of being biased in favour of one side or the other, or when that won't stick, of being "status-quo-ist" or some similar kind of “centrism” neg, none of which we can defend ourselves against without fuelling someone else's accusation of some other form of bias.

All we can do is keep explaining and demonstrating that the one thing we're trying to optimise for is intellectual curiosity. And in a world where it seems every major media outlet, social media platform and political actor trades on getting everyone riled up every day, we think it's important that there can be one corner of the web that isn't all about getting people riled up all the time.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870
by krick | 2025-05-19 01:59:10+00:00
There are community plugins to self-host the sync-server though.

Anyway, I hate the fact I'm using closed-source editor, because it kinda is a sensitive thing, but the more I'm using Obsidian, the more unlikely the switch seems. I was kinda stingy with installing new plugins too, but, well, you cannot just ignore the productivity benefits. It doesn't seem feasible to build something like than on my own (for multiple platforms too!), and nobody brave enough seems to have made it so far.
by dlubarov | 2025-05-19 02:00:02+00:00
He wasn't ignoring anything, he was pointing out that that criticism is based on outdated information. Almost all modern blockchain designs (from the past ~10 years) do not promote energy waste via PoW.

It's fine to point out the energy waste of more traditional PoW chains (particularly Bitcoin, which accounts for the bulk of PoW), but to frame that as a problem with blockchains in general is misguided.
by sneak | 2025-05-19 02:01:01+00:00
> The findings revise our understanding of solar physics and space weather extremes. "This event establishes a new worst-case scenario," Golubenko notes. "Understanding its scale is critical for evaluating the risks posed by future solar storms to modern infrastructure like satellites, power grids, and communication systems."

…then proceeds to not explain anything about what that new, data-supported worst case scenario is.

The whole article is light on quantitative data, it’s a shame.
by alisonatwork | 2025-05-19 02:01:38+00:00
I am sure the language is capable, but if you search "mojo python" then the top hit is https://www.modular.com/mojo where the first line on the page talks about AI inference and the first code example seems to be referencing ML models or something completely unrelated to the everyday Python programming that people outside of the data science field do.

Alternatively if you try to search for the Github repo for Mojo, you end up here: https://github.com/modular/modular Which is all about control planes and k8s and AI something something. Sure, it seems this is just a monorepo under which one of the folders actually is Mojo itself, but this packaging does not inspire confidence that the creators of the language are interested in building a language that exists outside of their ecosystem.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-05-19 02:02:27+00:00
> Apple may be behaving badly, but Epic broke the terms they agreed to, tried to use the courts to force Apple to change their App Store business model, and even kicked off a public PR campaign trashing Apple... and now they're whining because Apple is not treating them nicely after all that?

> You went nuclear on Apple, Epic. That's not going to make them interested in having you as a business partner.

this is unfortunately the same language abusers use when their victims try to gain support (pr campaign), seek help (use the courts), or fight back (violate unfair terms)

maybe epic just wants apple to stop abusing them and leave them alone while they interact with their customers on a platform that apple has been ordered several times to open up

not being abused shouldn't require you to "be nice" to your abuser, or to want to be their "business partner"
by domenicd | 2025-05-19 02:02:57+00:00
> I also used the little google collab notebook to custom fit it to my learning patterns - I'm not sure if that's in the version that was merged into the main version.

It was! There's a little "Optimize" button in the deck settings that you're supposed to click once a month or so, which does what the old colab would do for you.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-05-19 02:03:42+00:00
I'm not sure what they are using on Android, but crostini on ChromeOS is an LXC container. They call the LXC container a VM in their help and doco.

As for "different Windowing systems", what they describe:

Instead, Google envisions Linux apps living side-by-side with native Android apps in Android’s desktop mode.

is what corstini does now. It mostly works. For example, it works well enough that Mozilla's recommends you install Firefox on ChromeOS using .deb's into the crostini VM. But there are lots of UI paper cuts - for example model dialogue boxes often come up a few pixels high and wide. Because they are modal the app appears to freeze, and because they are tiny you don't always see them so you don't know why the app has frozen.

If they fixed all that, all we have left is the horsepower issue. Debian programs need at least 8GB, preferably 16GB. Current ARM offerings feel distinctly under powered, but I suspect Debian running on Snapdragon-X under Android would be very usable.
by ranger_danger | 2025-05-19 02:06:20+00:00
> enabling large scale co-operation

This has been proven over and over not to work. Humans are inherently competitive, and so corruption ALWAYS takes over.

Even if you make everything and everyone equal, they eventually get bored and start trying to one-up each other and push the limits of what's allowed, which is just another way to say corruption.

Small government, big government, socialism, communism, capitalism, everything the world has tried has ended in mass corruption.

> It's possible to design systems that do not force people to compete

I have yet to see any real evidence of this working on a societal level.
by fennecbutt | 2025-05-19 02:06:42+00:00
I am also gay, but not overly feminine at all. Just a gentle nerd lmao.

And I think there's the possibility that those signals are there early on in our brains. If not race cars, then it was swords and bows that were lying around and were appealing. We are products of evolution.

But as to OP's insistence that behaviors innate to our brains as not being derivative. I think in order to qualify, it must be a conscious behaviour. And even so, innate behaviours are derivative in that they came in response directly to our environs. Were they not, those traits would not have been selected as a response to environmental pressure.
by kev009 | 2025-05-19 02:06:51+00:00
Most people of any significant wealth would have made the delegation long ago to private client banking where a team of people overlook all aspects of the accounts. So yes, you are a fool not to if you have the level of wealth proportional to having it beaten out of you in your geopolitical region.

A custodial service is a bank that operates on a different network and is not FDIC insured (which only covers $250k). It could be insured privately. The interest on an FDIC deposit account is well below true inflation of fiat currencies.
by woah | 2025-05-19 02:06:56+00:00
I've seen Go codebases where serialization was used as a way to generics... ugly.

The generic code would take a string of the serialized struct, which could be passed through (the code was operating on an outer structure) then be deserialized at the other end, preserving the type information. Maybe it could have been handled by some kind of typecasting plus an enum containing the name of the type (don't remember the specifics of Go right now), but the devs had halfway convinced themselves that the serialization served another purpose.
by theamk | 2025-05-19 02:07:24+00:00
depends... I remember seeing my professor painstakingly write formulas on the blackboard - it was such a waste of time. I'd normally have the textbook open on the page with the same formulas and I'd entertain myself by trying to find any mistakes professor might have made.

You can have dull professors with either blackboard or with projector. But professors who care can do significantly more with computer vs blackboard, especially with disciplines where videos might be useful.
by Waterluvian | 2025-05-19 02:07:53+00:00
> UPE varied depending on exposure to stress factors like temperature changes, injury and chemical treatments

I haven’t read the study but I studied remote sensing in undergrad and one thing we worked on was how to detect the stress of an agricultural crop from multispectral satellite data. You can quite clearly detect how plants are handling temperature, pest damage, drought conditions, largely based on their near- and middle-infrared responses. On the surface this sounds a lot like that, which I think is neat.
by platevoltage | 2025-05-19 02:10:37+00:00
>You can luck out and land the 1 in 10 who just gets it and has the knack and has been coding since they were 12. But 9/10 times you end up with someone who has trouble even making a commit or with writing basic syntax, who just "picked" software as a career at some point in college for the salary. This has been my experience anywhere that doesnt have FAANG level cash to be hiring the top graduates at 150k+.

This is crazy to hear as someone who has been coding in one form or another since 14, and was driven into becoming a scrappy freelancer because no one would give me the time of day. Where are these kids who can't make a commit, or know basic syntax even coming from?
by gthompson512 | 2025-05-19 02:10:58+00:00
How does it handle documents longer than the context length of the model? Sorry there are a ton of these regularly and they don't usually think about this.

Edit: it seems like it just splits in to sentences which is a weird thing to do given in English only 95%ish percent agreement is even possible on what a sentence is. ``` // Process in batches for batch in sentences.chunks(batch_size) { // Truncate each sentence to max_length * median_token_length chars let truncated: Vec<&str> = batch .iter() .map(|text| { if let Some(max_tok) = max_length { Self::truncate_str(text, max_tok, self.median_token_length) } else { text.as_str() } }) .collect(); ```
by aurizon | 2025-05-19 02:11:16+00:00
Yes, these oligarchs got into conspicuous consumption oligarchic competitions on art, yachts etc. Most of this $$ was looted by resource fraud and military procurement fraud that pretty much ruined their military. I recall reading about supposed military encrypted radio the Kremlin paid $10,000 each for were common radios(Walky-Talky types) that were worth under $100 as well as Chinese tires - Ukraine heard every word.
by HungSu | 2025-05-19 02:11:34+00:00
The author began to realise the truth: that the quality of his writing is very low on average. Then he moved away from that realisation to the thought that Roam or some other kind of automation could somehow save him.

Perhaps what he needs is for the tool to automatically ask him "Is it okay to delete this note from 60 days ago?" That should be long enough for him to lose any attachment to what he wrote and a lot of the time he should say yes, and delete the crap.
by throw__away7391 | 2025-05-19 02:12:15+00:00
This comes across as more than a little bit fanciful, nevertheless I agree with the sentiment. There's an awful lot of people on the sidelines with their eyes on gaining control over software with intentions that are not at all reflected by what they state publicly. We do not need some political body to come "help", they have no understanding of what makes this work in the first place and nothing of value to contribute.
by fennecbutt | 2025-05-19 02:12:16+00:00
No my post reeks of my thinking that machines are or will be capable of the same creativity that we attribute to ourselves.

I never said that creative thought mostly being derivative means it's not creative, or that it's a bad thing.

I merely made a point as we see a machine, pointing and laughing at it, that we shouldn't throw stones when we live in glass houses.

But the reaction is certainly interesting. I wonder how many of you believe that humans are magical and that it's impossible to create a sentient machine, even given millenia, or infinite time. I believe it's possible. I don't believe that we're any more magic than a plant, there are many species with much more to their DNA than we have.
by userbinator | 2025-05-19 02:13:03+00:00
UPE, also known as biophoton emission, is a spontaneous release of extremely low-intensity light that is invisible to the human eye and falls within the spectral range of 200–1,000 nm

Part of that is in the infrared spectrum, and the other end in UV (including A, B, and C). Isn't this just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation that everything with a non-zero absolute temperature emits? Dead beings would obviously cool down and reduce the amount of radiation they emit.
by krick | 2025-05-19 02:14:10+00:00
Should I be paranoid? I never tried Tailscale, and the idea of trusting 3rd party with managing access to my network does give me chills. But IDK, honestly, maybe it's silly? Is it in all honesty less likely that I'll fuck things up setting my own Headscale server, than that Tailscale™ will (consciously or otherwise) fuck me up?
by throwaway17_17 | 2025-05-19 02:15:05+00:00
Chapel and Lustre (a parallel, distributed file system) from Cray were funded by DARPA’s High Productivity Computing Systems program. This work, along with Fortress, from Sun, were developed explicitly to enable and ‘simplify’ the programming of distributed “supercomputers”. The work and artifacts, along with the published documentation and research is of particularly high quality.

Even if you aren’t involved in HPC I’d say the concepts transfer or provide a great basis for parallel and distributed idioms and methodologies that can be adapted to existing languages or used in development of new languages.

TL;DR - Chapel is cool and if you are interested in the general subject matter (despite a different focus) Fortress, which is discontinued, should also be checked out.
by nine_k | 2025-05-19 02:16:09+00:00
What makes Tailscale more secure, or more reliable, than just a direct Wireguard tunnel?

Tailscale's complexity and features make sense when you have 200 nodes, or maybe 20 nodes at least. When you have 3-5 nodes, I think it's overkill, and a bunch of extra dependencies which may fail, and lock you out of your private nodes when you need it most.
by jjani | 2025-05-19 02:17:33+00:00
> This belief that they can write JavaScript that outperforms decades of bare-metal executed optimisations in mainstream database engines is just astonishing.

In my first job fresh out of uni, I worked with a "senior" backend developer who believed this. He advocated for crusty, bug-ridden ORMs like Sequelize and Prisma (still very early stage back then, so lots more issues than now though I'd still steer well clear of it). Claiming they did "query optimizations". I knew it made zero sense, but also that I wasn't going to be able to convince him.
by singhrac | 2025-05-19 02:18:06+00:00
I think you have 2 issues with content based systems: you have ambiguity (in archiving and retrieval) and you have to use mental effort to resolve that ambiguity.

The Dewey decimal system has less ambiguity in both, and an alphabetical system would be unambiguous for archiving (if not retrieval).

I prefer to organize my notes functionally (eg internal emails, blog posts, links to read, reading notes) and then rely on search for retrieval. It’s not perfect but it lowers the friction, which I think is very important.
by gthompson512 | 2025-05-19 02:18:25+00:00
Sorry, looking more, it doesn't seem like you are doing what you are saying. This is just poorly breaking text into bad chunks with no regard for semantics and is like ~200 lines of actual code. What is this for? Most models can handle fairly large contexts.

Edit: That wasn't intended to be mean, although it may come off that way, but what is this supposed to be for? Myself I have text >8k tokens that need to be embedded and test things regularly.
by singhrac | 2025-05-19 02:21:03+00:00
Sure, I agree. I’m just saying that most of their defacto disagreements are because of ambiguity in the specs, not because one of them is (intentionally) choosing to fork.

Fwiw I think performance and features are kind of intertwined here, since Pyright’s extra speed makes it possible to infer more things that are not easy for mypy, especially in an LSP implementation.

Pyright is very impressive in that second link (conformance check), very much a product of Eric Traut & others dedicating a lot of energy to this single problem.
by philistine | 2025-05-19 02:21:35+00:00
With how undecipherable the manuscript is, my personal theory is that it's the work of a naive artist and that there's no language behind it. Just someone aping language without knowing the rules about language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naïve_art

It's not a mental issue, it's just a rare thing that happens. Voynich fits the whole bill for the work of a naive artist.
by IMTDb | 2025-05-19 02:22:23+00:00
This is the GH for the official LibreOffice project: https://github.com/LibreOffice

Notice how they say “No PR” on every single repo ? So for sure no PR was open.

Putting a bit more energy, you are redirected to a whole other system which I have never seen anywhere else (and in this case; unique doesn’t mean good). After 5 minutes of trying to navigate what is probably the least intuitive software forge I ever had the displeasure to witness, you understand that clearly these guys live in a different UI/UX bubble than the rest of us.