skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> TLA+ wasn't the first (Z was earlier)

Was Z ever used outside high-assurance software (or the classroom)? BTW, while Z certainly employs a formal logic, I don't think it is a formal logic itself -- unlike TLA+ -- at least not in the common usage of the term.

> TLA+'s success has much less to do with anything especially accessible about it and more because a high profile company wrote about it.

But for a high-profile company to write about it, it first had to be used at that high-profile company for some mainstream software. My point is that being an accessible logic may not be a sufficient condition for adoption, but it is certainly a necessary one, and an extraordinary accomplishment. Both Isabelle and Coq have had some significant exposure, and yet they are still virtually unused by non-researchers or former researchers.

> When I asked "what would make TLA+ easier to use", tons of people mentioned better CLI tooling.You told them all that they don't actually need that and they are thinking about TLA+ wrong. Maybe you aren't actually listening to the feedback.

Maybe, but "listening to feedback" is not the same as accepting it at face value. The vast majority of those people were either relative beginners or not even that. To understand the feedback I need to first make sure they understand what TLA+ is and how it's supposed to be used, or else their very expectations could be misplaced. I've written my thoughts on why I thought the answer to that question is negative here: https://old.reddit.com/r/tlaplus/comments/edqf6j/an_interest... I don't make any decisions whatsoever on TLA+'s development, so I'm not the one who needs convincing, but as far as forming my personal opinion on the feedback, what I wrote there is my response to it. It's certainly possible that either my premise or my conclusion is wrong, or both. It's also possible that both are right, and still better CLI support should be a top priority. That is why I would very much like to understand the feedback in more depth. If you like, we could continue it on /r/tlaplus (or the mailing list), where it will be more easily discoverable.

> I've also heard it from tons of experienced TLA+ users that they'd like better CLI tooling.

Sure, but the question is, is that the most important thing to focus efforts on? Anyway, I'm sure that any contribution that makes any part of the TLA+ toolset more friendly, even if for a subset of users, would be welcomed and appreciated by the maintainers, as long as it doesn't interfere with what they consider more important goals.
Can it be open sourced?
How much plastic does an iPhone really have though?
I feel an artist should be able to make a good living from their work.

Should they make 10s of millions, while LunchBox Joe gets sued into bankruptcy if he shares a few songs electronically? No, I don't think that's right, either.

It's time we re-thought artists rights in the electronic age.
Experimental versus Formal Mathematics
2019-nCoV outbreak Q&A [video]
Does it support values with newlines?
I wonder if more speculation around the stock is driven by not reporting iDevice sales numbers each quarter.

Speculation aside, Airpods really have taken off, at least as a status symbol. So much so that I know a kid who has airpods but (until he got his dad's old 6s) was without a device he could use them with. He would just flick the case open and closed like a fidget spinner.
ETL workers themselves are typically ephemeral, plumbing batches between remote storage systems like Postgres, S3, and Hive. You might use local disk as scratch space during the batch, but not as a sink.
> If this gets downvoted a lot then I do think that people stating to stay away from sarcasm are right ;-)

Or people don't find anything wrong with sarcasm, it's just your comment that is a low effort one.
> $259.99

It sucks from a price perspective too.
> Tangentially related, does anyone know if there is a DisplayPort-to-USB-C/Thunderbolt cable one could use to connect a GPU (DisplayPort) to a monitor (USB-C/Thunderbolt)?

Edit: See other comment. Looks like someone actually did manage to create a cheap adapter, and was able to power it from DisplayPort as well. I'd love to hear if anyone knows how well this works.

I think this would be quite hard to do inexpensively, as USB-C hosts have to be configured by the client to send Display Port signals on the SuperSpeed lanes. [1] If the monitor (client) doesn't detect a host, it's probably not going to try to interpret the SuperSpeed signals as DP. It seems to me that an adapter would likely have to emulate a USB-C host supporting DP alt mode. This would at least require external power (unless your monitor's USB-C port is powered), and would more likely require the adapter to use one of your USB 3 ports so that it can also support devices on any monitor USB hubs.

[1] https://www.totalphase.com/blog/2019/11/how-displayport-alt-...
So what I don't understand about recutils is in what category of problems does it really excel at over other solutions?

If I want human readable files I think I would opt for just a bunch of markdown files in a directory structure before I go the recutils route. If I want a lightweight database I think I would go for SQLite like others have already mentioned. In what situation do you really run into that you need human readable/editable referential integrity?
Instead, you should netboot them, and run nfsroot; works with irix so I suspect it will work with linux; dhcpd will inform of the tftp location of the kernel and pass the right parameters, should be doable and faster, more reliable. Now what I wonder is if X11/Xorg supports any of these framebuffers.
This AI learned to paint from the greatest artist. Now it creates its own art
Fake food is not the answer: Rewilding food, rewilding farming
Wanted it to be open, no strings attached. The business comes from providing high-quality hosting and (eventually) pro services (support for accepting payments, etc).
Zeus is amazing, and the brothers one is pretty impressive! Interesting to play around with different sizes at the transition points!
FirebirdSQL is pretty close to what you're talking about... it's library can do either embedded or you can run a shared server instance. It's really pretty neat, but on the one side, PostgreSQL is probably better, and on the other SQLite is nicer.

I worked on a project a few years ago, where I chose Firebird so I could use literally the same database on potentially offline sites that regularly sync up to a main office (shared) deployment. I worked pretty well and was still a lot of work.
That algorithm - for what it is, namely pretty basic tree construction - is absurdly complicated. Did you actually read and grok all that stuff about the stack of open elements, and how all kinds of elements have special gotcha clauses? How you can't nest stuff like `<div>`s in `<p>`s, even in descendants - except in those weird corner cases where you can? And let's not forget that the page you linked to is only one of a few pages you need to parse html; stuff like tokenization also has a bunch of weird, legacy modes, and so on. It's pretty crazy; worse than quite a few programming languages, and they have a conceptually much, much more complex domain. Worst perhaps isn't just the sheer size, it's the haphazard inconsistency. If you don't know all the exceptions, it's hard to predict which part will be exceptional.

Seriously, XML is arguably bad, but html5 is absurdly horrible. The only reason it's acceptable is because it's so widely used that parsers are huge shared projects and most bugs are shallow.

I guess it's all a matter of perspective: sure, you might argue, hey, the spec isn't hundreds of pages, so it's humanly comprehensible. But from my perspective that's a really low bar, and it clears it just barely.

It matters too, because these weird quirks have often hidden things like performance issues, misparses, and security issues due to incorrect normalization.
> All it takes is a single generation to have 50% less children to cut the world population (and therefore carbon emissions) in half.

This is not how demography works. Even an instant and global halving of the birthrate, holding all else equal, would not even begin to reduce total population. In 2016, global birthrate exceeded deathrate by a factor of ~2.4 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthrate).

There is also serious inertia involved when reducing natality to balance mortality. Exponential population growth has momentum. Population leveling could take decades to manifest.

"...there is a large time lag between the point at which the fertility rate falls to the replacement level and the point at which the population stops rising." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_population_growth)

And in any case, it's by no means obvious that population and total carbon emissions are directly proportional.

I don't disagree that population reduction will likely be forced upon us by ecological and concomitant socio-political crises: e.g., water/food shortages, extreme weather, war, etc. Does that really deserve to be called a solution, though?
Why are nuclear reactors expensive?
All other RDBMS products also store their information inside files. I can take a mdb file from SQL Server and copy it to another server and attach it there.

SQLite is obviously a library that stores it's data to a file like millions of other libraries. SQLite is to it's data file the way LAME is to MP3. LAME is not the file format, it's the library.
Except lately the economy has been getting much worse.

This is a regular pattern with right-wing populist governments. When they get into power they institute a set of economic policies that lead to wide-spread prosperity in the short term, but in the long-term are a disaster.

As far as elections go, the government pretends to be in favor of free and fair elections, but its political philosophy is a set of arguments as to why they are a terrible idea and ought to be eliminated. Which is just what the Ergogan goverment has been attempting to do in a step-by-step fashion.
Our world-spanning civilization confronts an existential crisis, threatening collapse and radical depopulation, and they worry about protecting privileged whisky producers.

This is not actually different from what almost all of us are doing. It makes me ashamed.
Redisql looks pretty sweet! To be frank, and this is only my personal opinion, I don't think I would want to pay for an api, but rather run my own. The business model of providing everything OSS but sending telemetry seems rather intriguing; as a hobbyist user I am ok with such telemetry being collected. If I were to run it in production for a business app though, I wouldn't even bother considering the unpaid version for the following reasons:

1. I do not want my production instance to shut down for WHATEVER reason. This is just not an acceptable risk for most businesses. The only time a DB can go down is something goes wrong.

2. As an engineer, I understand that 3 counters that are not accurate aren't a big deal. I can even look into the source and see that they really do as you say. Justifying this to a security org will be a complete nightmare, as most security orgs in enterprises are staffed with barely technical folks masquerading as "security".

So, it seems like a pretty good way to coerce enterprises to pay up while letting hobbyists continue using it. Very smart, I wish you the very best!
SQLite is a a library the implements an embedded database engine. The file that it stores this data in is an artifact, not the interface.
> The group interviewed 18 subjects, some of whom were contributors and others not, and came up with five archetypes to describe them:

> Leaders, like "Rory", who are active in their communities; their activity is generally supported at work. Rory's biggest need is usually help in growing the community.

> "Avery", who is convinced about open source, but whose participation is held back. Avery knows the value of contributing and feels safe in the community, but is unable to fully participate, perhaps because of a lack of support at work.

> Competent people like "Taylor", who are not yet convinced of the value of participating in the community. Taylor does contribute, generally in the form of bug fixes, but doesn't see the point of doing more. Taylor may be skeptical about the owners of a project and is not sure what benefit would be gained from participating more fully.

> Curious people like "Parker" who do not yet contribute — we all began as Parker, she said. Parker is curious about how to get involved but faces a number of barriers. They may not be technically advanced or understand how open-source development works; they almost certainly do not have support.

> Lurkers; MacNamara didn't really talk about this unnamed group at all.

Or instead just use the idiot color archetypes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064530
> SQLite is a file format with a nice API that uses SQL as the paradigm for reading/writing to the file.

<insert-your-favourite-relational-database-management-system-here> is a collection of bits with a nice interface that uses a query language as the paradigm for reading/writing data.
The Truth About Poland's Role in the Holocaust (2018)
I don't think you can be legally bound not to discuss the existence of an agreement. Your employment contract can say things like confirming the existence of this agreement can be grounds for dismissal, and that might hold up, but if it said something like you can be sued for confirming the existence of this agreement I think the courts would consider that non-binding.

However as I am not a lawyer, any lawyers here can comment on that?
Nära skjuter ingen hare!

Inga ordvitspoäng för mig idag då.
Varken särskrivningspoäng eller ordvitspoäng :P
I have one of these, and it is a great piece of kit - but it is not a USB hub of any kind: it only provides power.
You should edit the title to Show HN: instead on [ShowHN]. I don't know if the forum software recognizes your variation (for putting it into https://news.ycombinator.com/show).
The company manufacturing Teflon has been disposing of chemicals used during the manufacture of Teflon in such a way that those chemicals end up in the drinking water supply of communities surrounding factories.
One way to make elections less free and fair is to cut off access to information from the opposition, and one way of doing this is to cut off access to Wikipedia.

Is it your opinion that the government was right to do this?
The way I see it, they're a tool, part of a bigger picture that aids in security and safety. The issue it seems is that there isn't a proper follow up once the perpetrator gets identified and caught. There doesn't seem to be strict enough punishment for people who get caught to deter them. Or you have ridiculous laws where the thief can sue the owner of the house they broke into because they got hurt or "excessive force" was used to contain them until the police arrive.
Code-only purists are still prominent in the iOS community. Yeah, there’s definitely baggage one must take on when using IB but the ease of being able to instantly preview your layout in different sizes is the big seller for me.
Any chance of a link? I'm looking good something to power a Pi4 cluster. Thanks
Very helpful advice coming from a country that has run its whole economy off its oil reserves since the 80s.
Source? I know plenty of people working at Apple that are the core contributors to FOSS projects.

The only thing I can find is this, from the Apple developer agreement (for using their SDK and publishing on their platform, not working there):

> 3.3.22 If Your Application includes any FOSS, You agree to comply with all applicable FOSS licensing terms. You also agree not to use any FOSS in the development of Your Application in such a way that would cause the non-FOSS portions of the Apple Software to be subject to any FOSS licensing terms or obligations.
That's interesting! What about calls? You never have work calls with collegues / other people?
Too much of this is a simple retelling of haidt's book and Malcolm. Read the original sources and skip the self-promoting dross of the 'intellectually humble'.
The horror stories about compilers optimizing away code based on statically detected UB are frightening, and largely the compiler vendors seem to be to blame.

But there's also a good amount of FUD in the play. Personally I'm not sure I've ever encountered any problems with UB. Sure, I've had my share of NULL dereferences, but in practice they manifest as segfaults, which are akin to exceptions in other languages.

And while the list of UBs in C can still be considered a weakness, the fact that compilers usually don't issue a warning is not, because UB is a runtime thing, so compilers cannot do anything about it (in general, and typically). That is something that seems to be not well understood. And it was the point I was making.
There isn't much to share. We made numerous attempts to reach out to the customer but never got a response, so we don't know exactly what they were doing.

We don't know for sure it was a 28.8K modem, it just appeared to be, given the speed they uploaded and the slight variances we saw in the speed (if it was a throttled upload, they tend to be pretty rigid in performance).

One of the main things it exposed was that certain libraries we used had buffers in them. We'd proxy the data from the customer to another back end service. By default the library would open the connection to the back end, and wait for the small buffer to fill before sending the data. The back end service would terminate a connection if the connection was open but idle for $x number of seconds.
The user was on the threshold of that timeout. Probably half the time they PUT, they'd be slow enough to trigger that back-end timeout, resulting in them getting a 500. I believe eventually they put a small buffer on the ingestion path too before pushing along to the back end, but given those PUTs could get really large, we couldn't buffer the entire content before sending along.
> I've had to counsel people before who were scared to commit code until it was perfect

This is a better problem to have than coworkers who push code that literally doesn't run, e.g. has syntax errors. /rant
Nassim Taleb: How to React to Pandemics (Coronavirus)
you can have a nondisclosure agreement about a business relationship. that's pretty common.

nondisclosure is not the same as denying it exists -- you just can't volunteer the topic / information.
Relevant comment/thread from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22117840

Huffington Post article: https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-b...

Dark Waters film on the topic: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/

DuPont was the entity responsible for the pollution and coverup.
Kobe Bryant dead: NBA star tragically dies in California helicopter crash at 41
The issue that I frequently run into is not that I'm looking for a fancy distributed/sharded database because of reasons of performance, but because I need to store large amounts of data in a way that allows me to grow this datastore by "just adding boxes" while still retaining a few useful database features. I'd love to use Postgres but eventually my single server will run out of disk space.

Now, one approach is to just dismiss this use-case by pointing at DynamoDB and similar offerings. But if for some reason you can't use these hosted platforms, what do you use instead?

For search, ElasticSearch fortunately fits the bill, the "just keep adding boxes" concept works flawlessly, operating it is a breeze. But you probably don't want to use ElasticSearch as your primary datastore, so what do you use there? I had terrible experiences operating a sharded MongoDB cluster and my next attempt will be using something like ScyllaDB/Cassandra instead since operations seem to require much less work and planning. What other databases would offer that no-advance-planning scaling capability?

Somewhat unrelated, by I often wonder what one were to use for a sharded/distributed blob store that offers basic operations like "grep across all blobs" with different query-performance than a real-time search index like ElasticSearch. Would one have to use Hadoop or are there any alternatives which require little operational effort?
"So the biggest change is that Oil will be based on strings (and arrays of strings) like shell"

I would advise the author have a look at the internals of Tcl, not because you should copy all the sophisticated features immediately, but because it demonstrates a way to have both "everything is a string" and "advanced data structures" in a relatively principled manner. You don't have to start out with all the optimizations from day one but I always find it helpful to have a look down the road in cases like this, and make sure that if this sort of thing interests you that you don't accidentally make it impossible later.
Selling a Charismatic Technology
U.S. Working to Evacuate American Citizens from Epidemic-Stricken Chinese City
Apple is a bad actor in contributing back to free software; however, they do contribute back. Granted, it's by throwing things over the wall in a way that's usually after upstream and it have diverged so much it can no longer be upstreamed, but still under free licenses.
I don’t know about employment contracts, but Google around for info about National Security Letters and gag orders. It’s certainly a thing, at least when the other party is the federal government.
Data Incident at H&M in Germany
> I’m not sure what distinguishes NHS England or the CCG’s from “the government” other than semantics, but sure.

They're not run by a government minister; they're not staffed by civil servants; they're not a government department.

> This is still more administrative overhead than other “universal” systems

It really isn't though. Of course some management exists, it's a budget of over £100bn. But compared to other healthcare systems the NHS is relatively efficient. "The NHS is over-managed" is a persistent myth. See for example chapter 2 of this study: https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/files/2018-06/the-nhs-at-70... (This study does contain a lot of stuff that the NHS is poor at).

>> They found that the NHS spends relatively little on overseeing and planning care, relative to other comparable systems. In 2014, the UK, Portugal and Ireland all devoted 1.5% or less of their government or compulsory health care expenditure to administration. This compares with an average of 3.1%, with 4.1% in France, and 7.9% in the United States.

> "procedures of limited effectiveness"

They're not going to fund things that don't work. Why is that a bad thing?

But, again, I've said that there are problems caused by the choice to de-fund the NHS and that if we had comparable funding as other nations we'd start seeing better outcomes.
Yes, you can do \n, or a literal newline and start the next line with a +. The second technique is wonderfully readable.
edit - removed
A crucial difference is that, ultimately, 777X is a much smaller plane with easier operations compared to huge A380.

It needs no new special handling compared to the existing 777, which already had a higher amount of airports available as destinations, if only because it didn't need two-level tunnels for speedy embarkation/disembarkation.

Also, 777 has always served the long distance market, and this plane is essentially an extension for it without many of the downsides of both A380 and 747
Ah, thanks for the link. Let me correct the record: Delaware North held the trademarks, Aramark was the new concessionaire that had to rename the Ahwanee Hotel, etc.
You mean grid? I'm suspect you can emulate most if not all of flexbox in grid, but definitely not vice-versa.
I think we can draw some interesting parallels with the first colonists on Mars and what they may experience.
Unless something furthers the development of their ecosystem, eg all the llvm contributions.