skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've heard stdout and stderr are extremely slow on Windows console. If you port Unix-like programs to Windows, lots of fprintf() can even come to be a bottleneck, especially in debugging. Meanwhile macOS and Linux/BSD console can output thousands lines in the blink of an eye. Don't know if the new console is gonna solve that.
Consider the very foreseeable 'unforeseen consequences' of suggestions such as this. Think of all the views you may find undesirable. Now how many of them do you think could round up 3.5% of people to engage in disruptive behavior if they believed it would let them 'win'?

You end up in a situation where you want people you agree with to engage in disruptive behavior, but not people you disagree with. Yet messaging like this would fully motivate everybody. It seems likely to ultimately do little more than encourage fringe extremism because you have to remember everybody always seems themselves as the good guy. Let them think they can win with a negligible minority of disruption, and you're strongly motivating extreme behavior from fringe groups. For that matter you even motivate people who like to play puppeteer. Imagine you're a billionaire and you now believe you can achieve near anything you want if you can just get 3.5% of people to start misbehaving.

Getting your way by misbehavior is exactly what we aimed to move away from with democracy. And I completely agree with you on the failings of democracy which does seem to be trending towards idiocracy. At the same time, I think this is the sort of solution where the cure is far worse than the disease. You keep the same idiocracy, but now you convince them that they can get whatever they want if they start trying to break down normal civil order. And the current establishment in politics would use it, similar to 9/11, as an excuse to greatly expand domestic surveillance and further strip away privacy and various civil rights. You know, for 'your' protection.
I'm afraid that would have the potential to increase the "it's every man for himself" atmosphere...
> "We don't have time in the project timeline for writing tests. There is a QA team that will do that."

What they are really saying is, "Currently if a bug makes it to production I can shift blame onto QA for missing it during testing, but if we start writing tests now I have to completely own it."
Assuming we can artificially enhance our own intelligence to 3x, would you agree that you would then be able to distinguish between a 3x and a 6x? If so, would your soulfulness meter then be recalibrated? And so on for 6x, 9x, nx, and (n+1)x? If our soulfulness meter gets recalibrated as we get intelligent enough to recognise the soulfulness of of more intelligent entities, it seems like we're talking about something super subjective and mushy that will probably change with time. That's what my comment-before-last was getting at: some people try to phrase this in a less subjective, less mushy manner that allows it to scale for arbitrary intelligence. It's all just labels, and I don't really have a dog in this fight, but I do think it's an interesting distinction.
You've never met anyone who won't do something because its illegal? I suppose thats reasonable. In any event, I can assure you they exist.
I thought this seems largely correct: "“Men don’t usually put the effort into maintaining friendships once they’re married,” Johnson says. “The guys at work are the only people other than me that my husband even talks to, so when some of these men retire, they expect their wives to be their source of entertainment and even get jealous that they have a life.”" A variety of posts about loneliness have been popular on HN, so I think this strikes a chord.
Might be transformation rather than collapse, not a done deal
Perhaps they might be persuaded to do other things, whose effects they can see more directly.

Also, encourage children in their activism. They are good at making complacent parents take notice at least, if only for social signalling :-) and hopefully some of it sticks when they grow up.

Voting shouldn't be seen as the basic thing, which people need to do to show they care in the world. Many people see voting as mostly pointless, and they might even be right compared with other things they can do.
The economy already produces "everything people need" using 10% of the labor force in nations with industrialized economies. It's just that the standard of living would be at about 1970's levels.

I know this sounds hard to believe for some. But today, agriculture takes up about 2% of labor, and manufacturing about 10%. And we consume about 2x what we did per person compared to the late 1970's. So, cut back manufacturing to about 4% of the labor force and use another 3% of the labor force for distribution. Voila, 10% of the labor force is used to sustain a 1970's level standard of living. Everyone else can improve their themselves, create arts, study nature or contemplate the nature of existence (that's sarcasm there).
Does anyone else think equal weighting of the 16 countries used despite different size and periods of data availability for the different countries could result in misleading results? The housing returns seemed surprisingly high to me.
Looks like the media embargo ended before this was actually announced. I'm sure we'll hear more about it later in the conference
I use it in our lab, and it works very well. However, there's no multi-user support. So anyone who connects to the server gets served the editor with the same workspace.

That being said, I think they have the multi-user support in the roadmap.
The authors emphasized in multiple places that moving off COBOL was a first-order project requirement.

I did find it interesting that the original system, and delivered overhaul, both ran Oracle databases. Overall transactional volume is low (500k/day). Perhaps the DoD has significant investments in stored procedures? Or perhaps Aurora is not ready for prime time in AWS Gov Cloud? (It’s no secret that AWS really struggles with keeping feature parity between Gov and commercial.)
VMWare Fusion 11 – Guest VM RCE – CVE-2019-5514
"r is bigger than g in every country and every time period that we consider"

I thought Piketty himself conceded that wartime (and, I think, immediate post-war period) was a period where this didn't hold true ...
Visual Studio Futures: Intelligent Productivity and Collaboration from Anywhere
Having done most of my work in C# and TypeScript the Rust syntax felt weird when I read about it, but on the other hand, I always felt bad being unable to readably chain awaits, least they become

var result = (await (await obj.DoSomething()).SomeOperation()).SomeValue;

In the end, all syntax is magic that you need to get used to, I guess.
What of those things are implementation details that don't need a new language to fix though? Jpython has never had the GIL, there is no reason you can't remove it from python without doing a breaking change as well. (it might break buggy programs by python can carefully never promised you can rely on the GIL)

You claim there are language features to remove, if true you are correct they should have done that. That said in my experience most outsiders claiming some "rarely used" feature is the cause of some slowness don't have data to back their claims up. Often the feature is in fact used by some important subset. Often the feature isn't the cause of any slowdown.

Improved unicode support is a very good thing to have. Maybe you don't have to support users outside of Western Europe and the Americas where ascii works well enough. (this also excludes various native languages in the Americas and assumes the non-English marks on various letters can be ignored) Anyone who can't do that is glad to not have to fight Unicode in python.

"print x" is a minor thing, but it makes the language better for the stated goals.
This would also make electric personal transportation like e-scooters and e-bikes a lot more usable. I would love to see Bird and Lime scooters have a place to ride aside from sidewalks with formalized traffic control devices.
Good. Even if there were no benefits at all, there is zero constitutional justification for the government outlawing a private citizen from growing and consuming anything she or he pleases.
The West Finally Has Its Huawei Smoking Gun
Very nice - moves in this direction will give more developers the ability to use lower-end computers like Chromebooks to do just about everything.
"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt."

– Rob Pike
This is the part that piqued my interest. I've seen cobol to java translated source, it looks like java used as an assembler for cobol. Certainly there's a spectrum of cobol-y-ness. One would be hard pressed to go from cobol to even a rudimentary class/domain business/presentation object oriented architecture, for example. Cobol control flow and data representations are simply to different. I'd like to see what they ended up with.

There are many many problems with these types of projects. One thing that often happens is leaving the new application in the hands of the legacy team to manage. They often lack even rudimentary skills in managing java runtimes. I saw one team struggle with performance issues that were easily solvable with a connection pool configuration change.

Maybe the worst case with these types of systems is enhancements going forward. You can guarantee there will be no more money spent on modernization, and any changes will be made to the Frankenstein java/cobol source. Which will continue to accrue technical debt and an even greater rate.

The main project I saw that did this was eventually abandoned, and luckily the cobol application was still running.
Counterpoint: These issues still exist, you just lose visibility into them by putting someone else in between. And usually, the someone else is big enough that you're not a priority.
There have been some good quality of life enhancements over the last few years[1] but this looks like it’ll be a big step in the huge shift required in the ancient “console” subsystem.

I still miss iTerm2 immensely after moving from an all-macOS dev group to an all-Windows group. Hoping this will help me feel less homesick.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/
I should check that out sometime. I've been using the GV one since long before it was offered on iOS.
The question is not 'Is the number of people doing drugs affected by its legality' (though I think its quite likely there is a fairly large effect.

Its 'Are there people who would do drugs (and become addicted) if they were legal but will not currently because they are illegal'.
I've worked on a similar project, we tested two different approaches:

Recompiling the COBOL codebase on Linux and accessing and loading it as shared objects (via JNI for JVM usage)

Running Hercules ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_%28emulator%29 ), an IBM mainframe emulator

The first one has lots of merits, as it allows for a progressive replacement of COBOL functionalities

The second one immediately lowers the TCO for obvious licensing reasons but does not plan for the future, particularly as COBOL developers retire and thus the resources are scarce.

(Anecdotally the customer chose both: recompilation & progressive replacement by Java code for core assets and emulation for "dead", non core, assets dev & staging environments)
I already give money to charity.

The reason why I don't like to put money in open-source work is it attaches a value on something where I would consider the work priceless and personal.

It makes the work feel cold, or transactional. I'm sure others would agree.
Yup, the famous "leaky abstractions"[0]. You can make some reliable assumptions of the data rate of a 40Gbps link in your DC between this and that physical server, and how to get the best out of it. On AWS? Not so much.

0: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...
I think it was a tricky situation where the option with the "fewest/weakest haters" wasn't the same as the option with the "most/strongest likers". I think restricting ourselves to options that don't generate too much hate is one of the reasons why "design by committee" tends to produce disappointing results.
This is great! The article mentions a preview; where is that? In the store?
Locks work for bike rentals, they can also work for scooters.
Doctor's offices will almost always only call you for fear of HIPAA violations.
Have you ever bought a car, even a reasonably priced one that you could well afford? What would have happened to your finances if, eg, you signed a 3 year car note for $800/mo and yet the entire $25k was removed from your accounts all at once?
ElectionGuard – A free open-source voting SDK
"It has also devolved into a situation in which many commenters propose to reverse previous decisions about the design of async/await on which we have already established firm consensus, or otherwise introduced possibilities we have considered and ruled out of scope for now. This has been a major learning experience for us: one of the major goals of the “meta” working group will be to improve the way groups working on long-term design projects communicate the status of the design with everyone else."

I'll be pretty intrigued to see what they come up with for that. I've been up closer to the Go developer's attempt to connect with the community, and while I'm not going to say they've done everything perfectly on their end, I've also been sort of frustrated by the way that they'll put up a request for comments about something in particular, and a good chunk of the community replies basically throw away everything they're talking about and rewrite arbitrary amounts of the language from scratch. By "everything", I don't just mean the direct proposal under discussion, but the goals of the proposal, the discussion of alternatives from other languages and how they are and are not relevant, as alluded to above the things already proposed and rejected for solid reasons, the context around the runtime and how it interacts with that... that is, not just the proposal itself, but all the thought and reasoning around it too. That wasn't really the question, so to speak. This frustrates everyone, on all sides, in various ways.

A lot of the problem is structural to what is being done; there's a lot of impedance mismatch between the core designers and the community at large for any language. It would be interesting to see some explicit thought around how to address that, from a community with Rust's experiences.
Blockchain is in 99.9% of cases a solution looking for a problem

It is hard to grasp for non technical/economics minded folk so it is easy to exploit as a magic snake oil solution for hard problems

I’ve had very painful conversations with people who control very large budgets at companies that are convinced blockchain is the next big thing when they only have a rudimentary concept of what it is and can do, but think it will revolutionize the payments industry or how supply chains are structured

It’s a distributed database that is more expensive and time consuming to maintain than a centralized database but if structured correctly can remove the need for a set of players to trust a central authority or one another (you pay for this in speed of read/write and storage making it nearly useless in payments industry)

There are a lot of solutions looking for problems out there that are getting a lot of funding due to the glut of cash looking to seed the next big thing in tech, and the ease of finding and investing in small companies now

AI is perhaps the best meaningless umbrella term for raising money or generating corporate interest currently

AI safety is a very loosely defined term because of the vague nature of AI

Two welders, accountants, plumbers, farmers are going to have similar jobs, two AI safety engineers could be coding anything from video game algorithms to nuclear plant turbine shutdown code and failsafes

Anything hardware running any code could be broadly considered AI

Combining blockchain and AI safety is just mashing together two buzzwords and hoping something interesting comes out with no seed of true inspiration germinating a fruitful idea
Interesting, I once tried to promote the idea of a new terminal system/app for Windows, but their devs poo-poo'd it on github. Ya know with DirectX and (modern) Unicode front and center. One that bypasses the obsolete design decisions made in the original console, in favor of the Unix design.

Instead they had been shoehorning stuff into the old one, which has been making old legacy users angry due to regressions.

So, what does this announcement mean? They have changed course? Or is it more lipstick on a pig?
Protecting Election Integrity with ElectionGuard
My take is that Windows is the best experience because the unsuitability of the built-in option for every day use drove me to a real solution. (In my case, SecureCRT.)

One of the things I hate is when the default option is "good enough" so you have the danger of living with mediocrity. Or, worse, the platform doesn't spawn a rich ecosystem of competition.

For example, when I was on OSX I couldn't find a music player I liked. iTunes was bad, but the fact that everyone uses it means there aren't as many alternatives as on Windows.
I've read that some of these cases of other drugs laced with fentanyl are due to unintentional cross-contamination, due to people preparing cocaine for sale on the same table or scales that they previously prepared fentanyl on and didn't clean properly, for instance.
For Lion Air, he remedied the symptom; he realized there was some sort of periodic trim runaway, and guided them to remedy it with Stab Trim cutout without having any intrinsic understanding of what the cause or underlying principle of the runaway was.

Big difference. Still didn't do anything for the fellows on the next flight.
But there seems to be no business purpose justifying that requirement. They spent 30 months writing and refining a COBOL-to-Java transpiler instead.

Maybe the business purpose was to waste time and bill clients?
>So at least for me, I don't see reason to not just let bee extinct.

Then I really can see no reason for you not to be forced to spend your entire life pollinating plants by hand with a paintbrush. And this goes even if there are still enough bees. We will let them watch you work while giving them little cups of honey.
Since this article is about biodiversity, the usual advice to address pollution don't fit perfectly. Biodiversity require a multitude of biotope and the preservation of high bio density biotope such as rain forest and corals.

Don't buy beef from places that burn down rain forests in order to raise cattle. Don't buy fish from trawling. Be extra careful with net caught fish and farmed fish, both which has higher risk of causing problem in the eco system.

Similar with vegetables. Oils from rain forest is to be avoided. Food from farms next to lakes that suffer from eutrophication is a major problem. Signs of overpopulation in lakes is a final indication of harm.

Sustainable fishing and wild game is one of few places where I know you can get some advice from governing bodies that tries to manage bio diversity. They are imperfect but at least they discuss the topic. Sadly there isn't much for other kind of food and ecological standards don't cover bio diversity or sustainability as criteria.
Geologist who discovered oldest water on Earth wins top science award
> because everything these days needs to support emojis

Not the onion.
Honestly, I view Google as a large impediment to python3. If they'd bit the bullet and spent 10MM on transitioning over back in 2012 or so, the perception that 2.7 was still 'the real python' wouldn't have persisted nearly as long.

When tensorflow was released (november 2015), it was python2 only!
> too many people have the same fingerprint.

According to whom? My browser is unique according to panopticlick.
Except that, as described in the article, `await` is fundamentally a control flow construct and too magical to be ever considered a ”sort of a method call”. It’s not really a useful mental model. No function is supposed to be able to reach outside its definition and rewrite the control flow of its caller.
I agree that it's an important addition to the language, but I think it will be less impactful for Rust than for JavaScript because server-side JS is almost always in a domain that benefits from async IO, whereas Rust exists in many domains where async IO isn't a performance priority.
> Ultimately, it’s reductive to make the “how can a plant be illegal” argument.

How so? I find that to be a reasonable argument, outside of "invasive species" issues.
How to BYOK (bring your own key) to AWS KMS for less than $15.00 a year
you could have pushed solution a bit more to create the github issue when creating blog posts - like use a github token to generate issue when the issue does not exist for blog posts.. utterances feature that I liked is the bot that creates the issue for you automatically and also scans the github repo for comments based on title..
Thanks for the link! That post explains the broader context of work that our team is working on to improve developer productivity moving forward.
The article said that it wasn't intended to replace VS Code... it was more for quick edits or reviews, for example if you aren't on your main dev machine.
Presenting '{' on newlines feels like a bit of a strawman to me, I'd expect the more verbose styles to still look something like

if (a == b) {
return 0;
} else {
return a < b ? -1 : 1;
}
Amazon has seen an extraordinary increase in counterfeit and defective products. I'm beginning to think of them as eBay with a better return policy.
The artwork on the cards was drawn by Susan Kare, a legend in the industry starting with her work on the original Macintosh.

https://www.aiga.org/medalist-susan-kare

You can buy a set of playing cards with her original Solitaire art on the backs.

https://www.areaware.com/products/solitaire-cards?variant=14...
From what I've seen of Scheme they dont have this problem. Everyone implemented the feature they want or forks an implementation. And no one argues about syntax.
I'm looking forward to The Planetary Society launching its Light Sail II spacecraft on the next Falcon Heavy.

Btw, is there any technology for huge, super lightweight solar panels that could also fullfil the role of a solar sail?
This is really welcome news as getting a decent terminal has been a real sticking point in my move from OS X to Windows. I settled on Terminus [1] (defaulting into WSL) and that works ok, but still not to the level of OSX Terminal or iTerm. Another option people seem to like is Hyper [2], but I had mixed success and it felt sluggish.

1 - https://eugeny.github.io/terminus/

2 - https://hyper.is/
Of course! I love the work the VS team is doing inside of MS Would like to see things like this, remote code, etc. open sourced though :)
Is the editor/IDE really the limitation? If anything web-technology-based IDEs are usually the ones wasting resources nowadays, my long-lived emacs session running the SLIME environment to interact with common lisp uses a meager (by modern standards) 110MB of RAM. I used a very similar setup 15 years ago on a computer with 512MB of RAM and a single-core 1.5GHz CPU.

You can already develop very comfortably on a chromebook if you're willing to forsake the bloat of the web. Actually if I can trust Wikipedia a modern Chromebook outperforms my main desktop machine a decade ago. Putting everything in the cloud doesn't strike me as a great step forward, although it could have its uses.
And yet that doesn't change the point of this thread -- that it's going too far to say all human organizations exert control over their members.