skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Good resources to learn COBOL?
I recently saw a thread that advocated for COBOL as a programming language. I have a lot of opinions about it, but they are all very very biased. I've never seen a line of COBOL and I already think the language is bad.

It's time to change that and ask myself the uncomfortable question what are good resources to learn COBOL? Some systems still use it, better get good at our legacy systems. Also, it might be fun as a language to play with. If one person is willing to advocate for it, it might have merit.

I wouldn't know if it does, all I know is that there are wonderful resources for a lot of programming languages on HN to find, but not for COBOL. So does anyone know good learning resources?
An empty rocket can’t fire the engines. And even an empty rocket is heavy so you need a significant amounts of fuel to slow down from orbital velocity, but you need even more fuel to lift what amounts to cargo aka the fuel used to slow down into orbit. Or, you can just use a heat shield which is really light weight when you are only returning an empty rocket.

PS: Compare the amount lifted to LEO with the weight of an empty rocket. You find the weight of the rocket is significant which is why they use multi stage rockets even though this means lifting multiple sets of engines.
You can always disable the mitigations or even just stay on old kernels.
PyCon Balkan 2018 Live from Belgrade, Serbia
Hi all,

PyCon Balkan 2018 is live on Twitch, Youtube and Facebook!

Questions can be asked to the live speakers from Slido: https://sli.do/pyconbalkan2018

Stream links are below:

Twitch -> https://www.twitch.tv/pyconbalkan2018

Youtube -> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4Zfal_sduHM2sIT5Mm9cJA/live

Facebook -> https://www.facebook.com/pyconblkn/

----

In the entire Balkan Peninsula there wasn’t any PyCon conference by now, so we decided to give people the opportunity to hear big and important names and see quality content, without having to travel around Europe.

First PyCon Balkan is being held on November 16-18, 2018.

Our goal is to bring quality lecturers not only from Serbia and Balkan region, but from abroad as well. We would like to give attendees the opportunity to learn something new, given that they hadn’t had the chance to attend the event like this anywhere in Serbia or in the region.

Belgrade, Serbia, even the whole Balkans deserve to be on the map of this kind of events!
I wish the "evil" advertisers and social media would ban all those news groups so they would shut their traps.
Whatever the merits of your proposition, using a pejorative nickname for someone in your argument instantly diminishes it.
But are’t you describing familiarity rather than readability? Ask a non programmer if he thinks the syntax of c code feels logical and natural.
How to do generic type transferring with jsx in TypeScript
How to reduce time spent on incidents that were somewhat similar when managing an SRE team. It took seven months of full-time work writing documentation to get off the ground.

I wrote about it here:

https://zwischenzugs.com/2017/04/04/things-i-learned-managin...

The hard bit of it was the leap of faith - I had to stop working on live issues to invest the time in getting the documentation to critical mass. Then we had to get the process right to maintain their usefulness. It resulted in _massive_ savings.

It also inspired this, which I've just started (so very early stages):

https://therunbooks.com/doku.php

eg

https://therunbooks.com/doku.php?id=networking:dns-lookup-fa...
> So Silicon Valley’s version of the CDO

Not really.

If by “CDO” you mean “multiple assets in another asset,” then every company is a CDO. If by CDO you mean “tranching,” then pref stacks create (or for that matter, any company that issues debt is) a CDO. CDOs are differentiated by the kind of debt they buy and their tendency for having a tiny senior tranche and leveraged buyers of their riskiest tranches. That doesn’t apply here.

(The latter might apply, since the loss-making unicorns buying start-ups’ equity need to raise new money to stay alive, but that’s just classic leveraged buying.)
The High Priestess of Posterity (2011)
But what qualifies as fascism and who decides and how (and definitely not buy constantly repeating the same points) is definitely up for a debate
Not only that, AdBlock Plus blocked 51 tracker cookies on that page.

Y'know, maybe I'm better off without VICE in my life. This one is going into my hosts file.
>"The idea isn't to put them off, that seems like a mindlessly cynical goal. Build the infrastructure to support the larger numbers."

Except in many places there is no room to build that infrastructure to support larger numbers of tourists - Venice, NYC and Amsterdam being examples. Nor do many of the people living in places that are over-touristed want infrastructure built to support yet more tourists. "Putting them off" is exactly the point in the tax.
I did similar exploration of generating PETSCII from images recently on a Jupyter notebook: https://github.com/amb/Image-to-PETSCII/blob/master/Picture%...

No colors though. Might have to continue the project as the colors look really nice on the examples.
Oh the hypocrisy. Reading about how bad ad targeting and tracking is, while being welcomed by a huge, annoying modal, covering up half of the text I’m eager to read, with a large ACCEPT button, or the opt-out button hidden behind a link on an external page.
It’s like sharing those “Delete Facebook” posts, on Facebook.
Hey, I think it's cool. Would like to try.
I think that's the craziest one I've heard so far. I can't imagine trying to reproduce a hardware bug in an FPGA with a logic analyzer.

How much time did you spend on the bug? Was it something that you ignored for a long time, and then you decided to dive in and spend a couple of weeks on it?
The problem is these prices are trap. I think its a big risk since the car is not covered - if anything happens to it (somebody crashes into you or even malfunction) then you pay for it.
I rather think Math is a good counter example. Or physics rather. There aren’t enough greek letters in the alphabet to satisfy the average academic paper. You first have to load in your memory the meaning of 20 different symbols then decypher a formula before you can process it.

Now people who read lots of papers are probably used to this exercise but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing (you can get used to running on one leg, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t better ways to run!). I am of the opinion that initials, or full words should be used in formula.
Oroville Dam Reservoir Baselines
Significant bed tax in Venice leads to people staying in Mestre or further afield and commuting in. From your post it sounds like cruise ships are the main problem. Why not increase the cost for them to dock?

A tourist tax doesn’t really increase the cost of staying somewhere - if I’m willing g to spend $200 on a hotel in Venice it doesn’t matter if it’s $190 for the hotel and $10 for the tax, or $100 each.

On the other hand if the hotel could get customers willing to pay $300, they would charge that anyway.

A tourist tax shifts the money away from the hotel owner to the local government to pay for the externalities the hotel owner doesn’t. By targeting tourists rather than beds it also means that people on a business trip pay less, helping diversify the economy.

The problem with charging a tourist tax is of course defining what a tourist is, ensuring that Airbnb hosts pass on the tax, and ensuring it’s leveed on day trippers
Does this handle languages like Icon or Unicon in which the concept of "failure is always an option"?
This Entrepreneur Went from Selling Firecrackers to Landing $70M
OpenZFS vs. Btrfs and other file systems (2017)
This will probably be a trend for the years to come.

Completely embracing the "you are the product" approach by giving you a service for free while openly selling your data, and giving you a share of the money they make off your data, plus control as to who it is sold to.

Some potential issues: it could backfire if your data gets in the hands of the wrong company (health insurance) or the wrong people (targeted biological attack), and how to trust the data broker in not selling your data behind your back.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_Elements
They’re tourists, so they pay the tax
6 reasons for GPL lovers/haters/exploiters to enjoy and support GPL enforcement
Ask me if I think that the syntax of Chinese language feels..., well, like anything at all (punctuation marks are western influence).
Ground principle with coffee is to increase amount of coffee and water. Do not increase immersion time, as that will only make it bitter. If the press is too small to add enough water, then just dilute as needed after brewing.

But "never" increase the immersion to make stronger coffee.
also see the Hawthorne Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
Hurts so good: spicy foods and the compelling chemistry of chemesthesis
I think sometimes they get spun into their own legal entity, I'm thinking about Yahoo's and Naspers. In Naspers case their investment in Tencent is worth so much that actually Tencent's value is what drives most of Naspers stock price

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naspers
Nobody. Not because of quality here but because I've already followed them on Twitter, GitHub, their RSS or ....

Not really looking to follow anyone on yet-another "social"
Look in the window of any luxury sedan, Mercedes, BMW 7 series or similar, and you'll almost certainly see an automatic gearshift.
Bernstein.io [1] is using it for patent and trade secrets verification. I've also seen an internal system with Merkle-tree-structures to verify digital safety inspections (e.g. that all devices can check the integretity of those checks and no supervisor can "modify" the database)
Four ways your people may be your biggest liability
The misleading part is the word "smallest". For me that means he has proven that there exists no smaller cover.
In the article, it means "smallest known".
Yeah. But if you ask a VB or python programmer who never wrote in a c-style syntax, you will probably get the opposite opinion.
Most of the United States doesn't have climate that falls within 0..100 F. There are plenty of places that are more like 30..90 F etc. And I don't see how that's any different from, say, 0..30 C.

OTOH, as far as weather goes, C has the nice property that anything below zero is freezing temperature. In any locale where snow and ice is a thing, that's handy to know.
The falcon 9 first stage is not just suborbital, it’s vastly slower than LEO at just Mach 10. It’s also still in very thin atmosphere at 80 km, it’s also spending more time in very thin air as it’s sperates while going up, which is why they don’t need heat shields.

It’s true they fire the engines briefly at the top, but doing so to slow slightly from Mach 10 is very different vs slowing from Mach 10 to zero or Mach 22.7 to Mach 10. And this still significantly reduces the cargo they can take to LEO.

PS: Remeber kenetic energy is velocity ^ 2 so your bleeding off 1/5 the energy. Further, adiabatic heating is from the compression of gas, lower speeds means lower compression.
What I learned from these comments: Never hide essential parts of an article behind a button. People don't click it and miss your point.
What city has a high tourist tax that’s even 30% of the total cost of a typical hotel. I just checked in Rome. I can get a room for €88 for two, €8, or 9%, of which is the city tax.
> An issue that can still happen with python's string formatting is that you can get the number of arguments/`{}` wrong.

Easily avoided by using the latest Python feature, added in 3.6: Formatted string literals, a.k.a. f-strings¹. Instead of using

"foo {} baz".format(bar)

you use

f"foo {bar} baz"

1. https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0498
Finding a solvable hard problem is itself very difficult. If the problem is within your confort zone, you will never feel that is an hard problem. If it is too far from your confort zone you will not be able to solve it.
Easy Timezone Converter for Gmail and Inbox by Gmail
> Travel is so expensive it's almost crazy NOT to make the most out of your trip.

And you’re worried about an extra $5 a night to pay for tourist infrastructure?
Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2018?
Any side projects, Game, OSS, Hacks.
You can be part of a something and still realize that it is a problem.
Reminds me of: http://www.inp.nsk.su/~bolkhov/files/fonts/univga/index.html though this one is based on Fixedsys instead of VGA.

I used VGA16 for years, until LCDs, subpixel rendering, and Unicode programming fonts became ubiquitous.
"Adblock Plus"
The reason that they have time limits is to prevent what just happened. After the time limit was over, candidate A had more votes. The people in charge of the polling stations were supporters of B (is this information important?). After the time limit they "found" more uncounted votes. However since the time limit was up, something illegal happened. Should we let the organizers "find" more votes (possibly illegally, possibly due to incompetence). Should we invalidate legal votes because the people in charge of the polls are incompetent?

The current solution is to have an elected official appoint the overseers of the polls. If the overseers do something that could make election fraud easier (like "finding" votes after counting some of them), then the people in charge are fired.
To pile on here on a (vaugely) related tangent, Common Voice (from Mozilla) needs our help to build a public speech corpus for training speech recognition software and Text to Speech: https://voice.mozilla.org/

Mozilla is currently hard at work on DeepSpeech for transcription and Text to Speech, which could be huge for accessibility. I hope it continues to improve :P
It's interesting how little known this exception handling mechanism is: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51761688/linux-driver-tr...
> The interesting point is that electric cars don't reduce oil consumption by ~20%, they reduce it by ~100% (or ~99.5% since 0.5% of US electricity comes from oil).

In aggregate, oil consumption may drop, but it doesn't account for the possibility that fossil fuel consumption (natural gas, coal) in the energy mix of power generation will rise to meet the increased electricity demands from charging electric cars at home and workplaces. At least, until we completely figure out an efficient way to harness renewable energy like solar inside (swappable) batteries.
Math and Music: The Deeper Links (1982)
> I think that'd be useful for commenting but nothing else.

But isn’t that a good enough use case?

Almost nobody bothers to put proper formatting, diagrams, tables, formulas, references etc in their source code. At best we get ASCII approximations.

To see some examples of what it could be like look at Mathematica, Jupyter, literate programming, and org-babel.
To disgusting statist who posted this link: shame on you!
Not to mention the clickbait/hyperbole in the title. I strongly believe that targeted advertising has negative effects on society, but "breaking the world" screams "we want to grab and monetize your attention by activating your stress response, just like advertisers do."

Do they not see the irony? Vice sucks
Oh! nice =)
With exceptions being classes, a library designer can vastly simplify it for the users by creating useful class hierarchies for the exceptions, allowing the user to be as specific or generic as they wish or need.
The driving age for cars is 17 in the UK.

I also disagree that anywhere in London requires a car. And doubly that anyone from the perimeter requires a car early on. I know many people who lived in these areas and did not learn to drive.

Smaller towns and rural areas in the UK do require having a car to live effectively in.
Python's way is a good compromise IMHO:

with open("/tmp/test.txt", "w+") as test_file:
do_something_with(test_file)

And you get test_file closed for free at the end of the block.
Bill Gates speaks about 21st century sanitation [video]
Toolpath equidistant to mill around an object designed with a CAD system. Math is not my strength and it took forever to come up with a way of doing it that would not amplify subtle errors t in the underlying model. The basic idea is that you have an outline of what you want to make, then you have to offset that outline by your tool radius. And preferably offset it to the outside otherwise you end up destroying the workpiece. Now anywhere your original input has overshoot (which is easy enough with a CAD package, too small to see without zooming in in extreme detail) the direction will reverse and your outside suddenly becomes insides.

Correcting that properly took me a long time.
I seem to recall that my father once had trouble installing MS Windows due to key validation. He was able to contact a MS representative who spoke his language, and the issue was sorted out quickly.

If Microsoft can do it, why can't Google?
Reading the article made me think that this is how medical doctors work. All diseases are codified and symptoms are errors. Doctors try to match the error to the error code and take action by prescribing codified medications.
It’s not. It takes two to get in debt, the borrower and the lender. Lenders are lending money and don’t see a problem, and it’s their money at risk.

As millennials get more power and reach a majority, entering their 40s with no monetary assets to speak of, many debts, but still have income, they’ll push for policies to increase inflation and keep interest rates low. This means the debt they owe reduces, their salaries increase, cost of living increases, but only those with cash investments lose out.

This is a failure of the previous generations to ensure that the wealth is spread widely.

When you’re dribbling in a nursing home the millions of dollars you’ve saved aren’t going to wipe your ass, it’s the downtrodden youth.
20k support employees sound eminently reasonable for a billion users. If not a bit low. Having worked a bit with support I think 10 minutes is a gross overestimate for average issue resolution time, perhaps even an order of magnitude off. However, an analysis like this is probably best served by a probably distribution of solve times (50% of issues take 1 minute, 20% of issues take 5 minutes...) instead of a point estimate, and that’s where things have the potential to go off the rails. Your really gnarly support issues are (a) where the customer can’t articulate the problem coherently, (b) where there is undefined/unexpected product behavior or (c) both. A is astonishingly common and unfortunately b isn’t too rare either (bugs, undocumented features, ill communicated launches). A seems to be essentially intractable (teaching your customers how to communicate better is probably the responsibility of the public school system) but I’ve seen some novel attempts at solutions. I’ve personally used a tool called FullStory to replay a customer session to understand what’s going on but that solution probably doesn’t scale well and there may be privacy concerns based on the product area. B isn’t a tech problem at all. It is best solved by better internal processes around catching bugs and communicating product changes to users.
I got the impression that overly simplified was sort of the goal. They don't seem like genuine suggestions for alternative names; the column might have been better named "Think of it as sort of like."

S3 has nothing to do with the FTP protocol, but if someone completely new to AWS and similar platforms asked "What's this S3 thing?", you might say "Think of it as sort of like an unlimited FTP server." You can connect to it through programs like CrossFTP, browse a folder hierarchy, upload files, link those files from a website, and in general do all the things people commonly use (S)FTP for, with the same tools they use for (S)FTP stuff. It's similar enough that it makes a good starting analogy.

App Scripts is another description I think is reasonable. Personally, I don't think manual invocation or modification of a stateful resource is key to the term 'script.' I think of a script as a relatively simple program that is invoked, accomplishes one task, and then ends without interaction. "Erase duplicate files in folder X" and "send me an email listing all files added today" are examples of scripts you might run as a cron job or in response to an event (like free space dropping below some level). Lambda is close enough to this that I think "Lambda's where you store scripts and define when they get run" is a reasonable explanation.
Sometimes you have to play by the rules even if these happen to be the rules you criticize. Yeah, they could strive for ideological purity by publishing the opinion piece in a self-printed paper magazine but this would not be a very effective way to reach people.
Πόσο Σεξ Χρειαζόμαστε; – ESCORTS ATHENS – CALL GIRLS – GREEK ESCORTS GDE
Thanks. That does make sense.
How AQI is calculated [pdf]
I also don't appreciate auto playing video wasting all my data and battery when I'm reading on mobile.

Why can't sites just emulate newspapers of old and statically embed non tracking ads on their pages? I'll whitelist the site on my ad blocker straight away.

This shit also causes no end of hassle to those who use screen readers or who have other accessibility problems.
Thanks for all the comments. Very helpful.
That's quite impressive setup. I've used programmable calculator with text storage capability for my chemistry exam. I was correct that I will not need chemistry knowledge in all my life.
Thing is, for the particular example of Maps, data really is king, and both Apple and Google haven't figured out that whole data importation problem. Hence why Google Maps blows outside major cities (roads are missing, horribly out of date, etc) except for businesses, where Google Scouts (aka random android users) generate somewhat accurate data for Google.

Meanwhile, Apple has no scouts, a bad geocoder from OSM (compared to Google's), but notably better maps (on average) from all the footwork OSM does to import maps regularly from each of the thousanda of counties across the US.

Outside the US, countries like Germany literally use OSM as their offical map for plotting land ownership, utilities and numerous other functions.

Where Apple is dying is the lack of an Apple Scouts program and having massive teams in India essentially importing data from OSM, one other sketchy map vendor that is a decade out of date and user reports. The former should be automated, as Apple Maps India literally does not comply with the standards defined by Apple stateside, and there is no value being added in this process of manually importing map data.
Buy MSFT...
> third, monetize that information by performing big data analytics in order to show users advertising that is narrowly tailored to their demographics and revealed interests

No. Big data analytics allows advertisers to target users. The "targeting' is for the benefit of the advertisers, not the users.
6 core falsehoods about the digital sphere
Sure, it's just that the radius of the target's boolseye has shrunk to the point of constituting a qualitative change.
It's a valid comment. Most of the 'replacement for macOS' comments here essentially pre-suppose that people only use macOS because it looks pretty and...? What? That people just play with Finder and TextEdit all day?

If I can't run Lightroom or Affinity Photo on ElementaryOS (hint: I can't) then it isn't a replacement for macOS.

I know I can use DarkTable or GIMP, but I don't want to because they are lacking in various ways that make them less useful, to me, than the apps I named above.

(I've been using Linux as a daily driver for two years now, have been administrating Linux servers for nearly two decades - I know Linux).
The English name is "gas syringe".