skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a good line of questioning for almost any legality argument. (It's used more often on weapons: if people can agree that pocket doomsday devices should be regulated, there's at least some common starting point for discussion.) After all, we can imagine plants far more dangerous than poppies, too. Opium is a precursor to much stronger opioids, and ergot contains hallucinogenic lysergic acid, a precursor to LSD. Even nutmeg contains low doses of a psychedelic precursor to MDMA analogues.

If we discovered a strain of plant which produced current synthetics like heroin or LSD, would that change one's answer? What if it produced fentanyl, or something else potent enough to blur the line between drug and poison?

"Plants are wrong to regulate" and "plants are too hard to regulate" still seem like possible answers there; after all we don't regulate straightforwardly highly poisonous plants. But it's an instructive starting point for how much weight we're actually giving to natural origins, as opposed to safety or difficulty of regulation.
I don’t think this is universally a reasonable outlook. For example, I’ve become vegan in the last year. It is extremely politically infeasible to legally force a vegan diet on everyone, so individual action is the only way to participate in veganism. However now that I am vegan I can legitimately tell you this: being vegan is super awesome. I no longer contribute to the insane environmental destruction of the beef industry nor do I contribute (with my diet) to animal suffering on the same scale as before.

Individuals deciding to be vegan is a kind of voluntary collective action that should not be forced by the state. I would imagine it is not the only kind.

Realistically an entire change in our culture to reduce consumption is needed. Some of that can come from above (government decision) and some of that must come from below (genuine cultural support).
This announcement just means they'll call the next version of .NET Core .NET 5 and kill the original Framework for good. They are not abandoning .NET Core, just changing the branding.
If you inferring that you are going to throw me into active volcano, then I see few issue with that solution :

- I don't live near active volcano

- I am going to fight back

- Even, when I fail to fight back, you might be living
the rest of your live in prison. Which I think it going to be suck.
Noticing and remembering people's faces, clothes, tics, etc. when they walk up to you and interact is not stalking.
Lets see..
Good. It's so confusing right now.
I don't know about that. I thought I kind of understood the mess of the .net framework until now but now I am really lost.

Like asp.net core was meant to be incompatible with .net full framework because of inconsistent featureset, is that going away? For applications, .Net core binaries are different from .net full binaries, they compile to a .dll, not an executable .exe, you have to run them with a command line (and if you choose the option to create an exe it comes with lots of additional binaries that aren't required in full .net framework, plus I understand some additional problems of version compatibility with the installed .net framework). So is .net 5 going to be one or the other? Or is .net 5 just another way of saying that they are discontinuing the full .net framework and that now everything will have to be .net core? But then is a simple full .net framework 4.7.1 .exe run on .net 5?
Japanese startup funding surges 8-fold over 5 years
Gerrymandering, preference distortion through no proportional voting systems, Duverger's Law. I mean, I'm glad people are working on the problem-space of democracy, but I'd guess that other issues more greatly effect voter disenfranchisement and apathy.
I figure the reason the proposed syntax looks gross is because other languages have been using a prefixed await for many years. The Rust decision seems well thought out though, enough to make me wonder if perhaps other languages have been doing it wrong.

My first experience with futures was in the form of QFuture (https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qfuture.html), and there you call .result() to block and wait for the result. This postfixing is intuitive.

Rust's "?" operator is neat. I don't know if I've seen a postfix operator anywhere else yet. It's certainly possible Rust got this language aspect wrong, but as a user it feels pretty right.

Given the existence of the "?" operator, and the fact that futures resolution via postfix is intuitive (and not a new thing either), IMHO the best course of action probably is postfix. I'm not sure if literally ".await" is the best, but it's in the ballpark.
Dumb question - how automated is an automated solution that 'refactors COBOL to java' in 18 months? Impressed with the solution / outcome.
What brand was the charger, for reference?
Show HN: Touch Bar Keyboard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwTWhMbnq9g
From this biography of John D. Rockerfeller:

> In 1870, he established Standard Oil, which by the early 1880s controlled some 90 percent of U.S. refineries and pipelines. Critics accused Rockefeller of engaging in unethical practices, such as predatory pricing and colluding with railroads to eliminate his competitors, in order to gain a monopoly in the industry.

So what? Those competitors have become redundant so they are going extinct? What's the problem with progress?

Even if you give Amazon every benefit of the doubt regarding the ethicalness of its business practices, the fact remains that monopolies, and near-monopolies, are dangerous. We know what happens. We have hundreds of years of history to look back on to see what happens.
Apparently in Greece they dig the bodies up after three years and put the bones in an ossuary.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34920068
How do you solve the issue of a tech-illiterate government throwing bundles of cash at the first company that sets the most unrealistic expectation at a cost that still seems 'valid'?

Half the stuff a government has contracted out for mils or bils could have been mostly implemented by small shops charging a few hundred K tops.

Unless you still believe a glorified CMS/ERP takes billions to write.
Everything you're saying here is true, but I think you're forgetting something incredibly important that isn't easily representable on a Turing machine at all: equivalences of the terms and their rewrite rules.

Lambda calculus provides you with a set of ways in which you could rewrite your program and get an equivalent one (by the definition of lambda calculus), or how to execute the program itself. It means that most of the functionality for deciding when the code should be executed (by the compiler or at run time) is already in the compiler.

It's something that imperative languages struggle with.
> what's Amazon's benefit?

Packaging? As in neither your neighbor nor the delivery guy know there is a $500 SSD in that little package. What other company is able / willing to pack such a huge variety of products into its own branded boxes?
> an operating system that's COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT for office users

Arguably a large part of the reason that Linux isn't used in offices is because MS Office isn't available. Of course it's in Microsoft's interest to keep it that way.
Because when you're caught between those who manage the hardware and those who manage the K8s cluster, you get ping-ponged between them in the blame shifting. It's very annoying.
There are not really any yet. We intend to take the Java interop that Mono already supports, improve it as needed, and make it available to other scenarios beyond just Android. If there are certain things you would like to see, I'd love to know.
I appreciate someone taking a principled stand with regard to closed ecosystems / file formats. It's weird that the future turned out this way...
When did you suggest that?

I'm not saying we specifically poo-poo'd you, I think we more have been trying to subtly avoid the topic, because this has been a pretty long term goal of our's we've been working on for a while now.

The main difference here is that now that we have ConPTY, we can build a _new_ terminal application that supports all the legacy applications, but that we can also add features to without breaking backwards compatibility. The old console was very hard to add new features to without breaking back-compat, but the new Terminal won't have that problem.
I'm happy to be wrong.
Unless I misunderstood the article is it not the case that this is just .NET Core 5 (we're currently on/near .NET Core 3)?

This announcement sounded more like unifying the various different bits of. NET on 5 in future rather than yet another breaking change?
Remote code execution through type confusion in Ghostscript
I think the ?? can be already used for Result<Result<_,_>,_>.

I agree that the syntax should have `await' somewhere, and the observation that it "clearly" is not a field access is actually credible to me. This also open the possibility to have other kinds of postfix keyword e.g. .try or .match
https://community.spiceworks.com/scripts/show/4378-windows-1...

Bloatware, begone!
You are thinking of dl.google.com. It was a Go program that replaced a very old single-threaded C++ server (using the ancient SelectServer C++ core, deprecated at that time). The thing you have to realize about Google infrastructure is it does not require vertical scalability of its service backends. It is very typical to write a program and deploy it with 100 replicas having one CPU each on 100 different machines. A variety of load balancers (all written in C++, naturally) papers over the complexity. Nobody at Google expects a Go program to occupy an entire machine because Borg packs hundreds of services onto a single machine. The question is for _you_ do _you_ have Borg or another workload coordinator that allows you to do this? Or do you have "the database machine" and "the server" where you expect individual processes to scale up to many cores?

BTW the reason dl.google.com rewrite was faster was not because it was in Go, it was because the C++ server was serving off its local disk and the rewrite was serving off a cluster file system with ~infinite I/O capabilities. Apples and oranges.
They will just usually say "let the others do it". Game theory says that all parties could be better off by co-operating but if you get benefit if you defect while others co-operate then everyone would end up defecting. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma#Internation... for an example.
Could this eventually, perhaps on webassembly, be an android, iOS and Web solution?
Depending on what syntax constructs are available, it's possible to achieve clarity without the verbosity or "line noise factor." For example, in Rust you could write that same code as:

match a.cmp(&b) {
Ordering::Equal => 0,
Ordering::Greater => 1,
Ordering::Less => -1
}

It's easy to see what the possible outputs are and what is produced in each case. The compiler even checks it to make sure you didn't forget any situations.

The clarity comes at the cost of some verbosity, but there's only 4 lines of functional code (not counting the closing brace) here compared to the article's 10. You'd get around the same number if you added line breaks to make the ternary example more readable.
This is basically .NET Core + stuff, hard to believe they'll relicense it. The Windows-only add-ons might have different licenses but I think they've Open Sourced even those bits.
And the only way to build market share is through cannibalization of windows licenses. Not in microsoft's interest. If you hae a proper office for windows, I bet many companies would consider seriously switching to Linux.
It's a terrible idea. Paper-only elections are easily corrupted. The right answer is combining paper & electronic.
Rust has some existing postifx syntax (shouldn’t it be called suffix?). And to be honest it didn’t threw me of in the slightest when I started with Rust. Using a questionmark at the end to let an error bubble up seems quite intuitive.

The most scary thing that threw me off the most were lifetimes (which for beginners sake are gladly not needed all that often).

I have trust in the Rust developers and the community that they will choose something very well thought out, because for now the whole language feels incredibly well considered.
Can 3-D Printing Produce Lung and Liver Tissue for Transplants?
High performance is a very vague terms now days, there are company that have Google scale problems that don't use C++ as main language ( Nerflix Uber ect ) any modern runtime can do "high performance" especially for backend applications. YouTube primary language is Python for instance.
We haven't made a decision on .NET Standard yet, in terms of what its role will be going forward. Major point is that its forward-looking role will be significantly diminished with this plan.
Sunscreen Innovation Act
Is it also cruel to let one unvaccinated child endanger the lives of thousands?

I'm also fine with sequestering unvaccinated children and adults, but given Germany's history, that might not go over very well.

There isn't a good solution here that satisfies all parties and science is on the side of the vaccinated. Sometimes you just have to make hard choices and stick with them.
Even that involves basic blocks.
Seems like it will be at https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal
based on the blog post at https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2019/05/06/developing...
Thanks, I'd read the intro but missed that.

I don't really see how they refute this argument though? Clearly they state arguments both in favor of postfix and prefix but it feels like some framework for weighing the arguments is missing, otherwise it just comes down to how individuals weigh the arguments.
It can be, especially in bullet form, especially when you move those little lumps of lead very fast in various directions.
But circling back to the point from above in the conversation: a broad index fund is still delegating moral authority to the index. How do you lodge a complaint with any company in that index? Do you have any power to voice an opinion against a leveraged buyout? You are not a shareholder of that company, you are a shareholder in an index fund that holds that company. You've delegated whatever possible votes you may have to Fidelity or Vanguard. Do they really have your moral and ethical priorities at heart? Can they?
It will be interesting to see how this works out, but
I doubt we will hear much publically about it again.

I have been involved in a somwhat similar project where
we had a large system written in an obsolete language.
It was HUGE. And it ran fine. With millions of transaction.
But it required expensive hardware to run it.

The decision was made to convert it to Java.
The effort took years, and the rend result was not
impressive I thought.

In a lot of ways Java was a step down in abstraction
from the more DSL original langauge.
Implementing new rules took more time, and
running it took a lot more orchtecstration.

I am not convinced that it would have been better
to hire and train a few devs in the old system
and let it keep doing its thing for a few decades more.
In other news, college students don't answer polls honestly, polling finds.
He understand that Microsoft is a software company, and makes money selling software and software services. Steve Ballmer, for all his good attributes, was stuck seeing Microsoft as a Windows company, thinking everything had to relate back to Windows. Nadella understand that companies change or die. Ballmer just thought that meant finding new places to shove Windows.
Hilarious. I've had a macbook with this issue and it drove me crazy. If the one I have develops it, I will try this out for sure!
They should at least give the subject area related to the violation.

> We’ve reviewed and confirmed this association.

Such a detail...
I mean, I live in Russia and I ask myself the same question about our "president". And the North Korea, that's a nightmare on a country scale. It seems, once you get up there, your humanity somehow gets abstracted away by either power or groups with interests...
Oh, you want an actual right-click menu? I honestly don't think I've ever heard that _specific_ request before.

Fortunately, the Windows Terminal doesn't have any existing back-compat we have to support, so that's definitely a setting we can add to it :)
The Volcano That Shrouded the Earth and Gave Birth to a Monster (2015)
Ok, let's put this a more complex way. There are problems caused by drug prohibition that have nothing to do with addiction - namely, the black market. Prohibition creates a market where courts and the legal system cannot be used to settle disputes. Hence, drive-by shootings, money laundering, and a host of other ills.

And the more you crack down, the more valuable this market becomes. Market forces don't care that something is illegal. Supply and demand.

So here's the question for you... even accepting your premise that some portion of the population is kept from using drugs simply because they are illegal, does that justify the social cost incurred by the creation of the black market?
Considering amazon did all the I feel like the AWS target is reasonable. I suspect that the next time this sort of works needs to be done it will be easier than this round was.
True, we should be striving to create synthetic apples
Matured rather than 'dead' - that cycle is now mostly complete
Ok here are some of the areas where we are better off than ever looking at humanity as a whole:

* Infant mortality
* Life expectancy
* Maternal mortality
* Global poverty
* Opportunities for women
* Global literacy
* Ability to control pain
* Knowledge

Here is a more concrete example. Imagine you are going to be born as a baby girl in a random family on earth. In what other time would you have a better chance of having a decent life?
>Should you roll your own servers?

If you are not certain, the answer is most likely “no”. The staggering growth of AWS happened for a reason.

Funny how for many decades companies and people were running their own servers. The hardware was getting cheaper each year. More software became available via open source. Then several ubecorporations entered the hosting/cloud business, and suddenly no one seems to be able to afford their own infrastructure.
Why Agile is so misunderstood and what is the problem?
Well, you might be biased by the fact that you are fluent in emacs and/or vim. 90+% of modern programmers use heavier IDE's in their work.
we’re an asteroid strike away from perma death. single planet is not sustainable.
I don’t think consistency is a hobgoblin (I hope I understand the meaning correctly). When you are new to a project you should follow the style of what’s already there and not do something completely different. Obviously there may be good reason but that should be discussed and you also should ask yourself if you are just not willing to adapt or if you are actually making things better.
The 'Blue Supergiant' Revealed
It would be kind of dumb on their part. They're competing with Java, Golang, a reborn C++, Python, Swift, Rust, etc.

They badly need .NET to get adoption outside of Windows, which is a stagnant platform regarding dev adoption.
It's a full time job if you want moral/ethical responsibility and/or voting power, for instance to voice an opinion on something like leveraged buy out. Index funds are great, but you are delegating all moral/ethical responsibility and voting power to Vanguard (or Fidelity or whoever else runs the fund).
It will be possible to use ElectionGuard as the core of optical scan systems. This will give end to end verifiability properties on the recording and counting mechanisms.
> Wang was working under streamlined critical pay authority the agency has had since its landmark 1998 restructuring. It gave the IRS 40 slots under which it could pay temporary, full-time employees higher than GS rates. Former Commissioner John Koskinen pointed out Congress did not re-up this authority in 2013...

> [Wang] says he applied to become a GS-15 or Senior Executive Service member so he could see through the assembler-to-Java project. But his approval didn’t come through until a week before his employment authority expired.

They lost a guy responsible for software that could save taxpayers how much -- tens of millions of dollars? More? All because they couldn't pay a guy a GS-15 salary, which translates to $100k-140k.

Man, people are really dumb about paying programmers well. They'd rather see a project go off the rails than pay someone (still slightly below) market rates.

Also:

> In many ways, assembler is still excellent for this application. Milholland said of the code, “The assembler is well written. It’s incredibly efficient and effective.” But a shrinking number of people understand it. And it’s not optimized for the online, transaction mode to which the IRS needs to keep moving. Java, relatively inefficient as it may be, is the current standard and has legions of people who know it.

That's like arguing mixing concrete by hand is "more efficient" because doing so allows you to be more frugal with concrete.
Boeing Plans Layoff of 900 quality inspectors
Thanks for linking. I was hoping it had some kind of sea urchin-style mouth that ate up the roots of the weeds, but it's just a tiny weed wacker underneath. Still cute
> When you break a method in three or four without adding REAL abstractions (a.k.a. "things you don't have to follow with the debugger to understand"), you're not making it easier to read, in fact you're making it harder because the reader has to jump around your code.

Yeah, there's competing forces involved. If you push too many things together that do not belong together, then you end up with code that is hard to comprehend. Additionally, if you spread too many things apart that should otherwise be together, then you end up with code that is hard to comprehend (your point). Finally, what things belong together and what things ought to be separated will depend on the domain and even the specific constraints within the domain.

In order to objectively determine when things have gone poorly you have to factor in a lot of external details.

For example, manual memory management is a detail that should almost always be someplace else because it isn't relevant to solving the problem at hand. So we did this with garbage collectors. However, sometimes we need this detail present (high performance computing and/or constrained hardware ie video games etc).
> WSL fails in a lot of use cases due to the NT kernel's poor performance when creating processes, slowness in the translation layer when accessing files, and the like.

But it's still the NT kernel either way, right? How does having binaries compiled with cygwin or MinGW improve upon what WSL offers here?
good catch! Tnx
> you could have pushed solution a bit more to create the github issue when creating blog posts

I guess, if my solution were a "product", as opposed to a one-off.
We're talking about the federal income tax, which is the example given in that article of a progressive tax. The net result of our particular progressive income tax system is nearly half the country pays no income tax. I don't have a problem with that. I believe every reasonable voter understands that when a tax cut comes, it doesn't really benefit the people who aren't paying the tax to begin with.
This seems like it would be a prime opportunity to introduce UWP applications to macOS and Linux. That would be a welcome alternative for developers looking to develop high quality native + cross platform applications.
All good points. I'd like to see a study on estimated emissions by income quintile, as I would suspect strong correlation.

edit: I mean in the US. Global income vs carbon footprint is easy to find: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/10/CO2-emissions-by-...
we should not even consider taking any animals to space. let them be where they developed naturally.
humans, on the other hand...