skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Much more transparency about what the phone is doing

This is a curious point, especially considering the recent FB Android app revelations about lots and lots of things the phone was doing that nobody realised, things that cannot happen on iOS due to stricter privacy enforcement.

I suppose no month is complete without an iOS/Android flame war, but hopefully that won't happen here. For what it's worth, smart phones are all pretty darn awesome and if there is one key distinguishing factor that seems to persist across generations of devices, it's privacy and security, of which Apple is far different. If that doesn't matter to you, pick a year, any year, and you will find one or the other platform to offer features that the other lacks.
Stanley Kubrick: Before He Wrote Scripts, He Took Photos
I worked in insurance so much time ago, in a COBOL shop (I was doing web-services on top, so I'm not a COBOL programmer myself). A few things come to my mind:

- COBOL has no stack and no dynamic memory allocation. The memory cost of a procedure is known in advance and you cannot leak memory. There is not much room to be smart, and in the long run it's likely a reason for success. You would not want people with a three month training editing 20-yr old C code.

- COBOL procedures are damn CPU-efficient at what they do

- COBOL works in symbiotic relationship with DB2. A lot of things that are complex/tiring to do in COBOL (like e.g. working with strings...) can be done in SQL. And when you have SQL you can do pretty powerful things.

- COBOL procedures do not usually sent SQL queries as strings to the database. They compile down to a procedure that does physical, low-level handling of database tables. If you change a table, you have to recompile all procedures that depend on it (and it may take hours to days....) but again is damn efficient in production.

- mainframes run constantly at a CPU usage of over 90-95%. There is a huge amount of procedures constantly running to maximise the return on the system.
https://archive.org/stream/irshistoricalfac00unit/irshistori... a bit broken up but it says clearly:

> January 1962 Automated data processing was officially put into operation in the IRS.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/62dbfullar.pdf says

> --Dn September 19, 1961, less than a year following its establishment as a separate division, the Automatic Data Processing Division...

So the division was likely established in 1960. This https://books.google.ca/books?id=x1YESXanrgQC&pg=PA119&lpg=P... history corroborates by saying the treasury authorized the IRS to computerize fully in 1959.

They were 7074, we know that from http://blog.modernmechanix.com/big-brother-7074-is-watching-... Popular Science but also that some docs from 2016 says https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/scap-pia.pdf

> SCAP downloads Corporate Files On-Line (CFOL) data from the IBM mainframe at the Enterprise Computing Center, Martinsburg. The CFOL data resides in a variety of formats
(packed decimal, 7074, DB2, etc.).

> That might be some of the oldest running code in the world.

https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/dpd50/dpd50_chro... says The IBM 9090 SABRE airline reservation system begins to be installed by American Airlines in 1961. That makes SABRE contemporaneous with the IRS Master Files or slightly older. I do not know, however, how much of that code is running today.
If you're happy with working with something that destroys your brain and makes you useless to any other software technology developed in the last 20 years be my guest.
> People learn from conversation and Google can’t have one. It can pretend to have one using Siri but really those conversations tend to get tiresome when you are past asking about where to eat.

At first blush he sounds like my technologically semi-literate grandma who would definitely conflate Siri and Google as being part of the same grand internet program. I had to read this twice to understand that in saying "it can pretend to have one using Siri", he meant that asking Siri a question sometimes redirects to a Google search, but wrote it in a way that personified Google as the actor with intent in that transaction. What an odd and paradigm-breaking way to look at that.
What were some of the things that made you switch back?
I've actually programmed in COBOL and fundamentally the problem is all this technology is OLD. Crazy OLD. COBOL has more in common with old-school line numbered BASIC than it does almost any other technology.

It will literally take you months to do something in COBOL on the mainframe that would normally take you a week in anything else. Trust me, you take for granted all the conveniences of modern programming environments. COBOL is very much a product of it's time and it's time was decades ago. The success of these old environments rests entirely on extremely well defined (and tedious) processes, not the technology.

No matter how much they pay you, you probably still won't want to do it -- it's just not intellectually stimulating enough and you will constantly be frustrated.
> I pessimistically assume, however, is that assuming the A/B fight is a lost battle for gig economy companies, the next step is to limit these employees to being part-time with some kind of <20 hours per week or something rule.

How does 20 hrs/week factor in here? I didn't see a reference in the Bloomberg article. Though this is actually a good point — if time spent working isn't a factor, then someone who works for Uber, Lyft, Grubhub, and Google Express could end up as en employee of all of these companies. That seems like kind of a weird result.
>ever bothered to confirm the certificate for the end to end encryption.

Wait, you need to do that manually? Most of times whatsapp just tells me that somebody's keys has changed and that's all.
Proposed EU rules could allow small businesses to sue tech giants
I entered a pun contest once, much like the one in the video embedded in the article. I had ten puns prepared, hoping one of them would win. Unfortunately... no pun in ten did.
Thanks. Unfortunately, though, I'm fully aware of this, it's the people around me however who seem to be unable to accept this fact.
Except when you hit denormals or underflow.
Or accidentally lose precision ending up with a wrong result.

If I could get a cent for every money transaction done on floats and incorrectly rounded, I'd be a billionaire.
the Pixel 2 swipe down on the fingerprint sensor gesture to open the notifications panel trick is pretty cool
If the computer you're on is completely locked down, there really isn't.
He's totally serious. [0]

[0] Balzano, V. and Zak, D., “Event-driven James
Webb Space Telescope Operations using on-board
JavaScripts”, SPIE Conference Proceedings, Vol.
6274, 2006.
> COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language)

You can't compare the languages like that, they were created to fill very different roles, and both were very successful at what they did.
>But university departments frequently hold specific viewpoints.

It's assumed that they became dominant somehow, usually by being convincing. It's almost tautological.

>If your criteria for valid university disciplines was limited to their developing new lab or field research, multiple departments are impacted.

Well, classicists do sometimes dig in to new documents, although rarely. Likewise, literature has a constant stream of new material, if they ended up with a model that perfectly predicted everything that was said about the human condition before 1980, it'd be falsified in a few days by some new paperback on the self-help shelf. Evidence doesn't necessarily have to come from experiments, only observations. see: astronomy.

However, those fields (not astronomy, but English and Classics) in my exposure have, like philosophy, mainly have been run on the convincingness of arguments. So, one side of the divide has evidence, and the other side primarily relies on writing convincing arguments.

>Links about scienceism.

Truthfully, I never said evidence was better than convincingness (although I do think it is), but decades of hardline scienceists have trained everyone to think that saying "evidence" means you don't value philosophy. It would be a bit funny if I didn't, because I don't think any "evidence" has come up once in this entire discussion. How could it? We're on the convincingness side of the branch right now.
One thing often I ignored is the learning by example of valve fame. In a complex situation avscripted ai actor will do something stupid to explain the new rules. Stay of the sand.
This breaks the site guidelines. We don't want ideological, religious, or national flamewar on HN.

Could you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not post like this again?
> COBOL has no stack...

So no function calls?
It's 2018 and I still have many dropped calls and other weird stuff when I talk with people on my mobile. FaceTime Audio is often a good alternative but still not perfect. So, I really hope the audio version of this will be commercialized soon.
COBOL is easy enough to pick up for a seasoned Java developer in a week.

The banking processes and environment are not though.
Ok, let me just say at work I’ve spent the last 4 years working on a product that interfaces with COBOL. In-house we:

- Generate native windows interfaces with COBOL, to the point where only a few lines of code create a control like a data grid, button or text entry with rich functionality. You’d never know these snappy native apps, with features like visual data validation and asynchronous menus/context popups, are COBOL.

- Render rich web pages with COBOL using a in-house DSL that automatically become somewhat responsive between devices. The presentation information streams over a web socket so it’s snappy and as responsive as the above desktop application

- Perform complex queries and rich data validation. A few lines of code can automatically be linked to grid view that has HEAPS of built-in functionality like export or data side-view (link applications/side panels to the currently selected row), app row highlighting and styling, auto pagination with range expand, column sorting, reorder, filtering, conditional highlight and more.

So yeah, COBOL isn’t dead. It’s actually the coolest damn thing Ive seen in a while. Because it’s pretty high-level we can build whatever we need on top as a runtime and the same apps can run on the web, native desktop, handheld tablet or on an old VT100 over SSH.
>The way Whatsapp encryption works, they don't have the keys to hand over.

Is this by design or can they be forced by fb to give up the keys which gets stored in the server and still keep functioning? As far as I am aware its the phones which generate and maintain the keys.
Need feedback on this game concept
I switched to iPhone for a few months after being on Android since the Motorola Droid. All of Android's little annoyances and failed promises to fix problems for years finally annoyed me into trying out an iPhone (6s). Apple's build quality and UX were a welcome improvement, but after a while I found some different issues that were equally annoying. I think iOS is still better overall, but not better enough to justify the cost for me. Both have their drawbacks and both are good enough.

The 6s's crappy camera made me decide it was time to upgrade to something with a good camera, and I was able to get a Pixel 2 for way less than an iPhone 8 so that's the route I took. If the cost was around the same I would have stuck with iPhone for the wireless charging.
Android was a breath of fresh air after using the original iPhone and every generation all the way up to the 4S..... for the first 2 months.

Then it just got progressively slower with crappier battery life. Switched to a different Android phone (from a Galaxy to an Xperia, and then a newer generation Galaxy).

Back to iPhone now. Will probably never get Android again.
I'm suddenly reminded of the car that Homer built:

http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/The_Homer

I suspect there is a lesson there about using aggregate feedback, rather than listening to single individuals.
I have a friend in NYC who makes a VERY nice living maintaining COBOL on mainframes. It's a niche market, so very few guys around who not only can read and write COBOL but also work on the mainframe.

I pretty much do what he does except with xbase (dbase, foxbase/pro and clipper) on PC's. There are millions of lines of code written in the 90's still happily running.

In fact, the only "tech" I see from the 90's that's pretty much dead and buried is Netware and Vines.

Damn shame too, cause I loved Netware. Ol'well. :)

We're both old farts, compared to most of you guys. He's 64 and I'm 55.
Just got a iPhone 8 at the beginning of the year after probably 7 years of Android, mostly Samsung devices.

Can’t wait to go back to be honest. Part of the problem was that iOS 11 was super buggy at the beginning. That really soured me to start and I haven’t found anything particularly worth changing my mind over since.
> billions more being written each year for maintenance and new features

This is funny to me, because the where I'm working right now, they have teams building entirely new projects in COBOL. The reason is that it's a company with a very high average age and incredible secondary benefits for baby boomers (old contracts, young people get ripped off), so they have an army of COBOL developers while there's a shortage for pretty much every other type of dev.
Can you give an example? The standard seems to be a bit more complex than the three statements they present, so those gigs might still be excluded.
T-Mobile aims for the Walmart positioning and Verizon the Neiman Marcus positioning.
Not a lawyer, but I would think they could require drivers follow a reasonably direct route but not require the specific route offered by the driver’s app.

And in general quality issues can be handled by ratings. If a driver takes bad routes or has a dirty car they’re going to get complaints / bad ratings.

I’d be surprised if they couldn’t offer drivers “suggestions” on how to receive good ratings.
Really interesting. Even as an enthusiast photographer it's easy to overlook the amount of skill and work that goes into shots like this.

For anyone interested, Dustin Dolby's (aka Workphlo) YouTube channel provides lots of information on product photography on a budget

https://www.youtube.com/user/DustinDolby
Is there any app which matches users based on personality/behaviour?
An app which matches its users based on their answers about some psychological questions.
Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry, David Attenborough and Others Read Moby Dick
Bat: A cat clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration
Shows you the difference in opportunities for a smart kid in Bumblefuck vs. a smart kid living in a $5 million house in Silicon Valley and having transportation to Stanford.
I've switched for a month while traveling and I agree with the author, some additional points:

- The phone is too smart. E.g. it transforms your voice messages into text messages which is magic but also pings you after you visit something "Hey, wanna rate the store you just visited?" "Hey, you took pictures of this place today, wanna share them?".

- The pictures are outstanding, particularly in low light. The portrait mode works much better than on the iPhone X.

- Third-party apps are not as polished, e.g. Instagram Stories do not work well.

- The design is good but placement of the buttons is awful. After a month I was still shutting down my phone while taking a picture because you can press on the volume button to shoot which is right next to the power button.

- Project Fi is perfect (the price is the only downside I've found and it is a subjective argument) and should have an Apple counterpart, not only Apple SIM on the iPad.

All in all I liked it and it was great to go back to Android for a month, but I went back to the iPhone. I have an Apple ecosystem and the iPhone is just too well integrated to leave it. It feels like the Pixel is one of the few Google hardware devices that is not an experiment but Apple offers me an entire ecosystem that is coherent and enjoyable for my daily life.
Ask HN: Whats the oldest file you created still in regular use?
Bonus question, the oldest file you created still in regular use which gets updated from time to time?
WhatsApp Co-Founder Leaving Facebook Amid User Data Disputes
Linux Kernel Defence Map
> Universal back function: It’s great having a global “affordance” for the super-common thing that people want to do. It works well, too: its meaning subtly changing in the right way, depending what you’re going back from.

Funny, I always hated this. I could never figure out just where the back button would take me.
you need to read better books
After 7 years Android user across three phones, I decided to try iPhone. Now 2 years in, on my 2nd, and never going back. Android tends to slowly slide into glitch land and demands you throw away your phone far more aggressively than iPhones do. The 911-crash on Android was the last straw. That's when you call 911, and the phone crashes instead of, you know, calling for help.

iPhone might not be latest and greatest. But the overall package is better. Definitely not perfect - I've experienced a disabled Phone app on iPhone where I would not have been able to call 911 had I needed it - but all my i-devices have been glitch resistant in a way none of my Android devices ever were.
You could write a Snapchat “clone” but not with anything close to its performance. Snapchat has to be the most performant app I have ever seen.
But it runs, and it shows stuff on screen, and it saves stuff in the hard-drive!

I'm not saying I'll do things the conventional way. Once you give up the conventional way, it becomes a different ball-game.
This is not quite an exclusive or.

The service is not outside of business standard variety.
Other cab companies have client driven matchmaking systems too now... They also employ office workers. The workplace for a cab driver is his car.

Therefore, what Uber does would make them a cab company that abuses contractors instead of employing employees.

However, the key point here is the test A. If Uber is specifically telling the drivers to pick up specific fares or otherwise forcing them to pick up fares beyond the number and/or time, they are actually employees not contractors.
Fudging with scoring system to fire those who do not follow such orders indirectly could be construed as such as well.
This is the crux of the issue for me:

> it's privacy and security, of which Apple is far different

I simply don't trust Google to act in my interests when it comes to use of very private data by them or how their operating system permits use of that data.

Frankly, I think Android is great. I love myriad things about it:

- Set a default e-mail app

- Set a default browser that isn't Safari (my kingdom to use Firefox Mobile with all of its attendant add-ins on my iPhone)

- Put icons wherever I want, like the author mentions

- A WILDLY better--in my opinion--notification system, again like the author mentions

- Themes, widgets, and other customizations

- Automation with things like Tasker

- Background tasks

I'm gonna stop here because I could keep going for much longer. But the point remains that my iPhone and iPad do 90% of what I want on a day-to-day basis and I'm used to the quirks and, more importantly, Apple has shown a propensity to keep what it knows about me primarily on my own devices or, when actually transmitted to Apple, under much more restrictive policies than Google has.

I'd love it of Apple could do both, the astounding customization of Android with the privacy and security features of iOS. But maybe you don't get one with the other for some inherent reason. I'm not sure, so I stick with the one in which I'm more confident.
We create external camera pods for aircraft, which themselves can't fly. So we name them after flightless birds.

Tomorrow I'll be flying 'Takahe':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Island_takah%C4%93
I debugged many a COBOL pragram by running down the stack. In fact, I wrote a COBOL debugger for Sperry/Univac 1100's running HVTIP transactions.
• availability of related URL

• availability of a short name on twitter

• the name should describe the benefit of your product, not aspects of how it works. I made this mistake with my startup, which was originally named "Read The Rainbow" because it uses color gradients to make reading on-screen easier. But to someone who has never heard of our technology, hearing "rainbow" doesn't evince speed. We changed the name to "BeeLine Reader" to fix this and have gotten mostly positive feedback.
> The placement of the buttons is awful, after a month I was still shutting down my phone . . .

Lol, yeah, that's taken some getting used to. I bet they did that so that the phone would work smoothly in the VR headset. It is supported on the left side edge, and doesn't work the other way around because the buttons get pressed.
Intro to Programming in C Specialization
I'm crossing my fingers that "the time is right" for Android, especially on a Google device.
Carmakers and big tech struggle to keep batteries free from child labor
Although I am not familiar with COBOL I am assuming this means you have to indicate where the control returns to after a function ends
Maybe they've improved their OS and features, but as far as I know their revenue model is still advertising based.
The reason T-Mobile looks so bad is because the T-Mobile trace was from a 3G network with very poor conditions, while the others (AT&T and Verizon) were from LTE networks under relatively good conditions. You shouldn't compare the quality of the carriers from our results.
Would you be willing to give any details about what you were doing as an employee earning that much outside the Bay Area etc? What sort of skills were you using, what were you hired for, was it remote/contracting etc?
I have a Pixel 2 XL, alas the USB-C headphone adaptor died.

There's a request a support call button in settings, I pressed it and 2 mins later a native english speaker called me back, 12 minutes later (which included getting my address details), Google was express shipping a replacement from part which arrived 42 hours later (HK - Melbourne, Australia).
> This is a curious point, especially considering the recent FB Android app revelations about lots and lots of things the phone was doing that nobody realised, things that cannot happen on iOS due to stricter privacy enforcement. . .

Yep, I'm definitely being careful. E.g., not installing Facebook or Messenger. I guess I _do_ have more confidence in Apple's dedication to privacy and security. Even with their recent security lapses in MacOS.

My experience with Chromebooks gave me a lot of confidence in Google's understanding of security and privacy.
Smart contracts used in court cases?
Could this be a solution for those of us trying to run a big databases on a small VPS?
Handpicked tools and resources to launch your startup without writing code
No, if all the data you keep around from EU visitors is strictly for the conduction of business or a legal requirement (taxes for example) then you don't need to do anything (maybe add a text that you do save these things for business purposes). Once the data is no longer needed you should delete it within a certain timeframe (a month or so).

If you save data beyond what is strictly necessary to conduct business, like doing analytics, then you will need to ask your EU users if they are OK with that. If you don't want to do that you can simply exclude EU users from any analytics.
Yeah, but what will they do in 10-15 years? Those people aren’t immortal and newcomers will have to be:

* persuaded to come: tough sell for Cobol

* 99% internally trained cause the pool of Cobol devs is probably similar to that of Elm devs :)