skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really love the jq language but I totally agree that the complexity skyrockets once you peek at the 'advanced' features because this neat little query language turns into a full programming language with io, variables, modules, functions. Very similar to AWK.

If you want something that is just a good query language then I would highly recommend JMESPath. It's a little harder to grok initially but the spec is extremely detailed, comes with examples, and there's libraries for all the 'popular' programming languages.

A good CLI tool that wraps the Go library is https://github.com/jmespath/jp
For processing large amounts of structured data using decimal arithmetic to do exact monetary calculations.
Well, there’s already a lot of evidence about that, so there’s no need. Asking for evidence is absolutely essential to the progress of knowledge and truth.
Here's the clip: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqrvzb
Why is RAM not put on the CPU chip?
I work for a bank. We use mainframes, but not for building new systems - just for keeping the legacy core running. “Just”. Eventually that core will move to other platforms as product cycles come and go, but there’s no active migrate-off-mainframe project. It will probably be 20 years before we’ve fully replaced them.
He Built a $600M Business by Preventing Fraud in Calls
High-IO jobs, where a single system-image (read "os") is important. Most of banking and alike problems.

The main three benefits of the mainframes (as a non-mainframer):

- crazy amounts of caches

- crazy amounts of pcie-slots (and sufficient internal io and processing power to make it balanced)

- production environment mentality for everyone involved, incl. extremely engineered (and redundant) hardware

I think new customers are likely to run Linux on such a box in the future... The main cost-problem for mainframe customers is software cost (esp. z/OS, cobol etc..).

I have heard stories (from actual mainframers) about the sql-performance and key-value performance (read like mongodb) on these boxes that are eye-watering..
...and a photo of him accepting an award from Vint Cerf.

inadequacy intensifies
I still prefer the much simpler FreeOTP+. Just start, tap and go. Can be easily backed up and restored: either via Import/Export or plain Titanium Backup.
The Kuai Kuai Culture
I think Texas market seems to offer the best of both world for software developers. Higher salary, slightly cheaper housing and cost of living. Also no state tax.
That's because, ultimately, mainframes and embedded computers are the only natural computer platforms. I expounded on this at length (yes, this is a self-plug).

http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h...

Long story, short: We will really have to watch out for our privacy because those two remaining platforms give The Management(tm) an irresistible temptation to stomp on us.
The Myth of the Autistic Jerk
I had access to AS/400, nowadays known as IBM i, back in the early 90's.

Had to perform regular backups on the system as part of my internship.

Nowadays kids are all up with WebAssembly and WASI, well that is just how OS/400 works during the last 30+ years.

Originally designed in a mix of PL/S and Assembly, everything else (RPG, Cobol, PL/I, C, C++) compiled into ILE (Intermediate Language Environment) and cross language calls are relatively easy to do.

ILE applications are AOT compiled either at installation time, or anytime some critical hardware has changed or the application themselves have been updated.

Nowadays there is also Metal C (real native not ILE), Java via IBM's own JVM (which in early versions converted JVM bytecodes into ILE ones), and the C and C++ compilers are also to target actual native code besides ILE.

The database backed filesystem took some time getting used to, coming from Amiga/MS-DOS/Windows 3.x/Xenix experience, and the command line felt more cryptic those OSes, given the use of special characters as part of the name.

The company I did my internship was using them for their accounting, everything else were MS-DOS/Windows computers connected via Novel Netware, zero UNIX flavour in sight.

IBM z and Unisys ClearPath are two other mainframe models that also follow similar bytecode based deployment formats.

So in a sense you can say that on every Android phone, watchOS or Windows PC lives a little mainframe.
Unfortunately I think that's backwards on both sides.

Conditional moves create a data dependency, and thus do not involve speculative execution. While the program can explicitly try to preload both possible values (and can benefit from doing so) the processor doesn't ever do this automatically. Other instructions can still be executed (out-of-order) but the path of execution does not change.

With a branch, rather than waiting for the results of the comparison to be known, the processor guesses at the result and chooses a path of execution. It thus executes the fetch immediately, but (about) half the time it's the wrong fetch. If after the original load completes it realizes that it guessed the wrong side of the branch, an 'exception' occurs, the speculative work is thrown away, and the execution begins again with the correct branch.
Can confirm. A lot of it's welcome and overdue, but there is also at least the potential for the kind of chilling effects the OP describes.
> Wait what? If you are a senior software engineer at a good company in Banglore you can easily make 40k - 60k USD an year. After taxes and expenses it becames equalent or better than salaries in most places except for San Francisco(USA), London and Singapore. USA is super hard for an Indian software engineer to immigrate. London is doable but for most of them it's not worth all the travel and staying away from family. People immigrate only if they makes way too much salary abroad compared to India which is hardly the case. Nobody is going to immigrate if they will save a few hundred dollars more a month. So good software engineers mostly immigrate for reasons other than salary (Like living in Europe etc).

That's not how salaries in a career path work -- you want to have the largest base to start. In a worst case scenario ( no job hopping for massive increases ) the salaries increase based on percentage of the salary, not a percentage of what is left.
Teenagers also tend to have all the time in the world for hobbies, relative to working adults.

I'm a firm believer that in order to reach virtuous levels in anything, you really need to take advantage of your teenage years to nail down the fundamentals.

I'm a musician myself, and spent almost every day between ages 13 to 20, often up to 6 hours a day, practicing and playing my instrument. Way more often than not, when I meet very talented people in different walks of life (music, tech, sports, etc.), it's the same story.

Teens also tend to have a very naive optimism and ambition / drive. Nothing is impossible, and no-ones gonna stop them. I think you need that no-breaks mentality to succeed.

And lastly, people naturally root for young people. The next hope, and all that.
Sure, managed services make things easier, but they also make your sysadmin muscles weak.

I want my sysadmin muscles to be weak. I’m not saying that sysadmin isn’t important, but why spend time managing servers and doing the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” instead of adding value and dealing more with strategy?
Xkcd's map of online communities (2010)
I don't think saying anything negative about test driven development is a positive contribution. Our industry should practice it more instead of less. I do it almost all the time. Sure, there are a few exceptions. It is quite unneeded for at throw-away script, obviously. If something is in a user interface and it is purely visual it may be better to write the code first because the browser in your head might not be good enough to write a correct test beforehand. Those are the exceptions, though. For any program containing somewhat complex logic TDD is king. There is nothing that beats it in terms of reliability and after some time also regarding speed because in the end nothing costs more time than something that keeps breaking in production. Thorough manual testing is also quite expensive in terms of time.

I note some people here are talking about things that require exploration and research as a counter-inducation. Well, maybe in some cases but certainly not in all. One could also start with a test at a relatively high level and then do the exploration while writing code to make it pass. In that case one would write more code to make it pass than would be normal but it still benefits from being in the TDD cycle. After having it basically working one does additional TDD cycles to iron out the cases where it would go wrong.

The main benefits of starting out with a test is that: 1) tests do cost time so you need to recoup that by going faster in other parts of development. If you start out with the test it immediately starts paying back when it flags your first attempt at an implementation as either passing or failing. 2) The fact that the test first should fail and fail in a particular way tells you whether your thinking about how the system works is actually correct. It is like bringing the scientific method to programming. People in practice very often have just the wrong idea of how something works in the first place.

People are also talking about TDD being a strange order to think about programming. This is also my experience. It requires some getting used to. It is quite good though. The point being that it enables one to not need to think about everything at the same time. When writing a test you think about the functionality you need. When writing an implementation you think about algorithms and when refactoring you think about code quality. In traditional development this gets rolled up in one big ball of mud which makes the thinking about either of these three aspects of lower quality.

One thing that people get into trouble with is trying to write test for functionality that is too low level and therefore very much implementation defined and therefore subject to change. I think one should generally work at a level where one tests the behavior of a cluster of a few classes. This problem also leads to tests that are too trivial. If one has a method that adds n to m and one writes a test for that one is testing that the processor really can add numbers and that is not very interesting.
Additionally, the posted article is a watered down version of this one; the journalist just rewrote paragraph by paragraph but in less detail.
WiFi channels can also be 80MHz (which my laptop is currently connected at) and 160MHz (which is still a bit rarely supported), but your point still stands.
That's one of the most frighteningly accurate descriptions of modern US politics that I've seen, especially since it works regardless of who "they" are.
I have used this for years. I don't know a better solution.
Are you replacing the HP48’s display w/e-ink?

I have used quite a few cd-rom drive audio cables to make serial cables for those calculators.

Such a great calculator.
Watching movies makes people want to be like what they see, why isn't it true for video games? Because it is. Obviously not everyone is going to become violent just because they play realistic violent games but it certainly inspires a subset of people to do so. It puts the idea in their head and they begin to imagine doing it. From thoughts, to words, to action.
Negative, Spock.

The ability to shape conversations or to compete is not the same as making war (or you are relying on an idiosyncratic definition of "war").
Interesting essay. Personally, I think AWS might be the new mainframe. You're guided to a specific set of proprietary services to build solutions, not terribly unlike the heyday of CICS, VSAM, JCL, MQ, RACF, etc. The playbook of Lambda, Fargate, AWS Batch, DynamoDB, IAM/Cognito, SQS, CloudFormation, etc, looks pretty similar.
A little bit ago in another HN article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232164) where AndOTP popped up, a link was shared with a nice discourse between the AndOTP author and a newer one, Aegis:

https://old.reddit.com/r/androidapps/comments/b45zrj/dev_aeg...

AndOTP isn't seeing a lot of development, but Aegis is moving like gangbusters and recently passed the 1.0 mark. Thanks to that HN trail of info, I've switched from AndOTP to Aegis:

https://github.com/beemdevelopment/Aegis

The Aegis devs have been doing a bang up job and the app is worth a look, it can import your AndOTP (and other apps) data. This is not a slight against AndOTP, just what I personally see as a natural progression based on that reddit thread above.
Does L1-L3 cache can be considered as a sort of bistable RAM?
`67 "protests"? You must be kidding me. The series of events, known as the "1967 riots" in history, weren't really just protests or riots, but also a series of indiscriminate terrorist attacks against Hongkongers. Over a thousand bombs --- yes, a thousand, no kidding --- were planted, among them about a hundred were real. Most westerners may not know this, but this series of so-called "riots" is actually one of the largest-scaled terrorist attack in modern history.

And you said that the British had killed over 50 Hong Kong "protesters"? I don't know how many Chinese terrorists were killed, but I am sure that tens of Hongkongers had been murdered by the Chinese terrorists. Some were killed by the bombs planted by the terrorists. Some were killed by Chinese militants (equipped with firearms) near the border. A famous broadcaster, Lam Bun, who criticised the Chinese terrorists, was even burnt to death inside his car.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lam_Bun
Bill Gates had the room activating thing back in the 90s. He talked about it in his book The Road Ahead.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/the-awesome-technology-in...
IBM z15 (8561) Technical Guide - https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/pdfs/sg248851.pdf

IBM Newsroom - https://newsroom.ibm.com/2019-09-12-IBM-Unveils-z15-With-Ind...
Interesting. If true, this (and maybe to a lesser degree games developers) is a micro example of the macro job market. Akin to minor league baseball players, entry-level news reporters, bloggers, etc.
Here are some alternatives:

* FreeOTP https://github.com/freeotp/freeotp-android

* FreeOTP+ https://github.com/helloworld1/FreeOTPPlus

* Password Store[3] (pass[4]) supports pass-otp[5]

3: https://github.com/zeapo/Android-Password-Store

4: https://www.passwordstore.org/

5: https://github.com/tadfisher/pass-otp
That particular mosquito (Aedes aegypti) isn’t native to Brazil. It’s only ecological importance has been getting humans and small primates sick.
I wonder how nany security vulnerabilities persist in the mainframe ecosystem simply because the the skillset and platform accessibility is relatively rare.
Piketty looked at like ~200 years of econ data (wages, asset values, rents) and allowed for inflation and even depreciation.

His thesis is actually that r > g, wherein r = ROI of capital and g = the rate of economic growth (gdp).

This has to be true, because rich people exist and we can measure that they get richer and richer faster than others. You can gauge faith in the likelihood that it will continue to work that way given that funds like Y Combinator exist and are successful, and because activities like buying and maintaining rental properties "works" in terms of creating personal wealth faster than the rate of economic growth.
Electric eel produces highest voltage discharge of any known animal
Not compared to Europe I suppose?
Don't spoil it for me, I had visions of a landing platform on their humps (would split in two, and fold down each side for ease of transport), and a little spinning radar dish. Obviously you'd still have the tasselled rug underneath, can I coin the name Bedouin Punk?
Medical Terms – and How to Memorize Them
Except that the "dumbed down" phone most likely has a whole lot more computing power than any of the big mainframes you might have used in college.
The only possible thing I see of practical value in this solution is that it might (might, not sure I understood well) reduce the amount of moving parts and gears. Essentially the entire motion would be controller electronically, no gears or motors.
ElectronMail v3.8.0
A mainframe is not a supercomputer. Science is done on clusters of x86 chips and Nvidia gpus with custom interconnect and Linux.

A system that runs a bank or an insurance company and wants good availability can be built in one of two ways: you either spend money on software that deals with the hardware being unreliable and save money on software (pioneered by Google) or you spend money on hardware that promises to be highly reliable and save on software.

No new player believes mainframe (extremely expensive hardware) is cost effective, they all use commodity hardware.

A bank that needs to run binaries from the 70s for which they don't have the source code can keep paying IBM and not investing in reverse engineering the binary and implementing it in Java.

A bank that has a billion lines of code in Cobol can compile it to run on jvm on commodity hardware and run it in parallel with the mainframe for a year to validate and then switch over to the new system and stop overpaying for hardware, but that sounds risky, so they keep paying a million dollars for a system with the same performance as a 50 thousand dollar server.
What does this language do differently from others? AFAICT it's a vanity project.
Even if these IBM mainframes are $10 million each, its such a rounding error in terms of cost that I can’t think of a good reason to migrate off of them. What does commodity hardware add other than complexity?
"Because in reality the teenager's mental output isn't higher than a random adult engineer."

This is why I think more companies should embrace skunkworks projects/time. Imagine if some of the best engineers around the world were given time during the day to work on some hard problems they wouldn't necessarily be thinking about. I'm sure we'd solve some problems pretty quickly. Instead engineers are working on extracting more eye time for ads.
UNIX was initially designed in Assembly, C came later after the couple of BCPL and B interations.

LiveScript came after Web as platform was being adopted.

.NET was created to replace COM (did not went accordingly as planned), with VB, Java and C++ on board, with support for multiple languages. C# came later given the outcome of the Sun process.

Using Ruby outside Rails development is not so common.

Younger Python developers might not be aware of this, but there were only two reasons to pick Python on the late 90's, either one disliked Perl and wanted something else, or had to deliver Web applications in Zope.
My favorite extensions for web development
“Performance Matters” by Emery Berger (Strange Loop 2019)
Is the common problem. Put a man in front of a clift and say "jump it". He can refuse. Now throw 200 millions in that clift. Eventually somebody will need to jump the clift to try to recover the money, and will do it

At some point there was so many money spent that thinking "this was a bad idea, lets close the project and go home", is not an option over the table anymore, not unless the project is done by a government or so.
Yes, but dumbed down probably refers more to the capabilities rather than the computing power. Phones are great, but aren't really for real work.
I think AMD already has that covered with Epyc 2 (Rome) processors.

POWER is also known for being highly SMT, which could lead to them being even more prone to the issues that plagued Intel's implementation of hyperthreading. A single POWER9 core has 4 to 8 threads.
Question: does anyone know if this can be used to run chrome / Netflix on a raspberry pi?
Mostly a platform you can find programmers for. I believe that's really the main driver. If you have business logic in TPF, you need TPF literate 360 Assembler developers. Technically, you can program in C, but legacy integration and performance issues make that of limited use.

People moving away usually tried to extract the business logic such that the TPF layer was mostly a distributed NoSQL store. That bought a lot of time, but it seems like the skill shortage is now hitting that layer.
TDD doesn't make that claim, because TDD is not a thing which can make claims. Some people make that claim about TDD. Those people are indeed mistaken.

As someone who thinks TDD is useful, i find those people particularly infuritating, because such an obviously silly and easily disproven claim turns the programming public off TDD for no good reason.
Extremely well written. The Mega_Man_X#Copy_Protection[0] is very interesting. I admire (total understatement) the R&D and sheer passion that goes in to preservation / emulation.

[0] https://tcrf.net/Mega_Man_X#Copy_Protection
HN loves shallow opinion pieces, especially when they're contrarian. They give us a chance to wade into the comments and demonstrate how smart we are, either by agreeing or disagreeing!
He's pretty driven all right. Good luck to him. Actually it says on a youtube video that he is half German and half Portuguese though his parents gave him an Irish forename!
Fargate provisioning is tied to AWS, unlike Kubernetes or other systems that aren't Cloud Vendor specific. If I build tooling around Kubernetes, I can move from Google to EKS without needing to change it. However, if I build tooling around Fargate, it's useless outside of AWS.

Keep in mind, this doesn't make it bad or impossible to move out. Just more work. That all being said, I still like Fargate even with it tying me to using AWS. I think the pros out-weight the cons.
In the old days of lower power alternators (or really old days of generators), and lower power engines, the revs would drop noticeably, and the note change, when you turned dip lights on, aircon or even occasionally - in smaller cars - the heated rear demister! Made it very obvious the engine was working harder.

Now that tickover and fuel injection is computer controlled or we have EVs, and there's a far heavier electrical load in all cars all the time, you never notice any more. They all take power, and decrease fuel efficiency.
I would have asked the opposite question: what does mainframe add other than complexity?

It's a lot easier to find good engineers to write and maintain software for Linux on x86-64 than it is to find mainframe engineers, which makes things simpler, arguably.
consumers instead of people ️ i guess it's true for many other aspects of life. but it's a bit worse.
> the side-effects of complexity are costly code bases defended by programmers who's actual talent is politics

Spot on. That describes a majority of mainstream libraries in JS today.
The author of the story, Ian Urbina, has just published an eminently readable book (Outlaw Ocean, from which this story is an edited excerpt) on the vagaries of law on the high seas; embedding with fishermen, repossessors, fishery authorities and environmentalists he paints a rather grim picture of how you can get away with just about any kind of ruthlessness, cruelty or pollution as long as you do so in international waters.

I picked it up at JFK the day before yesterday, planning on reading a chapter before going to sleep on my flight to Heathrow. Next thing I knew, the flight attendant asked me to prepare for landing.