skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fe is a tiny language with only a few forms ie: if, while, do, define a variable, define a function, define a macro etc.. It uses an embedded parenthesis syntax similar to Lisp or Scheme, with prefix functions.

I couldn't see (other than reading the code) if you have an expression (foo bar quux) if foo is first evaluated before
calling the result. I seem to recall Scheme follows this approach.

Alternately, the name foo could be looked up in a global symbol table and the result (presumably a lambda expression) is applied to the list of evaluated arguments (bar quux). I associate this approach with Lisp.

I didn't see any error trapping mentioned in the documentation, so I assume if you try to do something like divide by zero, that Fe will crash. How much work does it take to implement a simple error trap strategy ?

I didn't see if the language supports a fluid let (any variable name is looked up at run time when the reference is encountered thru the stack levels until the name is found. Presumably each time new variables are created with let, they would be added at run-time to the symbol table.

The other choice would be that the variables are lexically scoped. Thus when reading in the code, variables are "found" in the order the program is written on the page, and there is no searching of the run time stack frames to find the "innermost" version of the variable name.

From what I can see, Fe is a good language to use if you are happy with the capabilities the implementor defined initially.
There is a set of functions, named after mathematical operators, like "+", "-", "*" etc. and logical operators like "AND" "NOT" etc. The doc says these functions take a variable number of arguments, evaluate them, and then the operator takes each of the results, and does some operation using them, such as adding them together, or returning false if any of them are false (AND)

I see nothing in the docs suggesting how a programmer would create his own functions that function in this way.

It's not clear if the logical operators "short cut" on evaluation of the arguments. ie: with (or bar quux qide)
does the value of quux even get evaluated if bar is true ?

Is there a short and sweet checklist to help describe a programming language you have never seen so you know how these types of issues are addressed in the implementation?

Thanks for sharing your code. I always learn when I read other people's work.
I'm mixed between nodding my head in this and finding arguments against it. For myself, I would absolutely see your points and agree to them but when I think about the engineers inside the company at scale I'm seeing it's worth. A large part of our company comes from hardware or more traditional console languages like c/c++/c#. Now switching to .net core, typescript and the whole open-source ecosystem is something they just are becoming familiar with. This extension would certainly make them aware of the impact of their choices. Raising awareness about the implications of taking in that third party dependency the moment they do it.
This is why I'm not a huge fan of using Python for this (see my other comment) - and would much rather recommend Dhall/Cue/Jsonnet. And you can (and definitely should) write tests for these, or even just assertions for generated facades. It's much better than the alternative, which is just testing in production/qa/canary.
Show HN: Covid-19 mortality rates per 100k persons
If anyone is interested in how their state or country is doing per capita. These are the latest Covid-19 mortality rates per 100,000 persons. Accurate as of roughly between midday April 4th, to early April 5th (different reporting times for each location).

Spain 26, Italy 25, Belgium 12.5, France 11.2, the Netherlands 10.3,
Switzerland 8, UK 7.6, Sweden 3.9, Denmark 3.1, Portugal 2.9, Ireland
2.8, United States 2.6, Austria 2.3, Germany 1.8, Norway, 1.3, Canada
0.7, Greece 0.68, Israel 0.55, Finland 0.51, South Korea 0.35, Australia 0.14, Japan 0.06, New
Zealand ~0

Wisconsin 0.97, Florida 0.9, Alabama 0.9, Maryland 0.88, Kentucky
0.88, Ohio 0.87, South Carolina 0.78, Maine 0.76, Arizona 0.73, Kansas
0.72, California 0.7, New Hampshire 0.69, Alaska 0.68, Tennessee 0.64,
Oregon 0.62, Virginia 0.61, Idaho 0.58, Montana 0.56, New Mexico 0.52,
Arkansas 0.46, Iowa 0.45, Minnesota 0.43, Nebraska 0.42, Missouri
0.39, North Dakota 0.39, Texas 0.37, Hawaii 0.28, Utah 0.25, North
Carolina 0.23, South Dakota 0.23, West Virginia 0.11

Massachusetts 3.1, Vermont 3.1, Colorado 2.2, Georgia 2, Indiana 1.9,
Illinois 1.9, Rhode Island 1.6, Nevada 1.5, Delaware 1.4, Mississippi
1.2, Pennsylvania 1, Oklahoma 1

New York 21, New Jersey 9.5, Louisiana 8.7, Michigan 5.4, Connecticut
4.5, Washington 4.1
I occasionally do this for python-only projects or for Makefiles, but (especially in the latter case) it's quite fragile.

I usually use libconfig for configuration, which is better than json and yaml and has implementations in many languages (although I'm not aware of any javascript implementation).
We’re not talking about living in the woods. We’re talking about a small segment of developers who feel entitled to benefit from Apple’s products and also set their terms while they are at it. I think people that think this way also ignore complexities at play, which you bring up and I agree exist.

The post that kicked off this chain made the point that you can choose not to develop on Apple platforms. I think it’s a mistake to conflate “first-world” decisions like which platforms or languages to use, or market segmentation or where we can make the most money the quickest with hockey stick growth to please our VC investors, with “third-world” lifestyles or asceticism.

As though if one doesn’t develop on Apple tech, they may as well wander off into the woods? We should check our privilege here.
These days, using a statically typed language for configuration makes a lot of sense. You get stronger typing and with type inference not necessarily a lot more verbosity.

Kotlin and kotlin script seems to work reasonably well for Gradle. Gradle unfortunately has a bit of groovy legacy, which makes it a bit convoluted for some things. But Kotlin DSLs are quite nice for configuring things and it removes a lot of ambiguity when your editor can tell you a property doesn't exist or that a list instead of a string is expected. or help you autocomplete things that are allowed.

Basically the ultimate in configuration languages is something that has a minimal syntax but provides enough structure for tooling to help you validate things, provide autocomplete and other help, etc. There are now several languages emerging that have both static typing and some level of support for internal DSLs. Ruby sort of pioneered a lot of configuration DSLs back in the day but since it was dynamically typed, tool support for these DSLs was a lot harder. With languages like Kotlin, Swift, C#, Rust, etc. you get enough expressiveness that you can do similar internal DSLs but with the advantage of more robust tooling support.
Machine Learning using fast.ai courses i would say they are really good and fast way for programmers to get onboard without going through all those boring statistics classes.
It's very clear that the resistance to these drugs is an intense case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

There's an almost perfect correlation between reaction to these drugs and Trump support.
On the entry level (a simple car wash, a bakery) almost everything is a simple linear thing. There's simply no big benefit to creating a holding/unified company.

M&A helps eliminating inefficiencies in cases where there are huge redundancies and excess capacity. (For example two big multinational conglomerates, both have at least one of eeeeeverything, HR, law, finance (bonds, insurance, stocks, investments, controlling interests), payroll, VAT/CIT/sales tax, supply chain management, operational risk management, security/compliance, IT. Plus all the actual business units, and usually big companies have some competing interests here and there, and simply eliminating one or the other (through unification, acquisition, or just closing the less profitable one) frees up resources and leads to better profitability.
I'm not taking a position on the Imperial College model. I'm explicitly advocating that all models should have their assumptions examined. And that policy makers should use a range of model and not depend on just one.
Open Source iOS Device Farm
The graph seems more like a gimmick, but the automatic backlinks are nice.

Org mode is a really good text-file based solution for notes, especially with tools like org-rifle: https://github.com/alphapapa/org-rifle

The other day people wrote in an other thread they use grep for their text notes. But what if you have notes with longer, multiline texts? With org-rifle the input words can be anywhere in the multiline note and they can be in any order.
>>>>>> "Amazon could sit on a lot of cash and then eventually spend it all down, go bankrupt, and leave the shareholder with nothing."

"On the other hand, if the share price has increased because the company is more valuable, then the government shares have also increased"

These two statements are completely contradictory.

>>>>>>> "The current problem is that, in theory, it is worth it for a company to pay accountants and lawyers $99M to reduce the tax bill $100M. "

This is not remotely true.

First, complicated taxation is the decision of the government, not the industry.

Second, Amazon's low tax burden is not a function of $99M in lawyers, it's a function of the fact they don't make any profits.

"The whole problem is that the public is not getting a "stake" of the income stream."

This is again, is not true. The public is absolutely getting a stake of Amazon's income stream. The problem (as some see it) is that Amazon has very little income.

Amazon, as it stands today is like a non-profit NGO. They make very little money. Their surpluses are given away to some other part of the value chain: suppliers, customers or employees.
Whatabout all those physicists who doubted Einstein, isn't that proof that most physicists are idiots?

The author doesn't understand the process of how private equity is able to use debt in their purchase process. Bankrupting a company you just bought by over leveraging often means you took a massive loss. In the cases where it doesn't, means the business was no longer viable to begin with and a necessary separation of viable assets from a dying business occurred.
I came to a very similar conclusion with a big IF. If your project isn't concerned about security, then yes, Python is a way to go.
> Why spend the money and invest now for the future, when you can lean on people to donate their efforts in times of crisis?

First, no one said anything about donating effort...the scenario was getting paid a decent, if not quite FAANG, salary to work on an older tech stack. And sure, you _could_ take that approach. We tried it with pandemic preparation, let's see how that works out.
> If COVID-19 has shown us anything in the UK, it should be that the BBC is still trusted

Oof, strongly disagree!

I do think the BBC has some great content, but the quality of their news has been going steadily downhill for at least a decade. Much of it appears to be written with the assumption that their average audience member is 7 years old, and they do the same scummy things that many others do now (click bait, fake outrage etc).
> remdesivir, possibly the most promising candidate

Is there any evidence of this? It was a highly anticipated drug, but the first studies it was in showed only slight improvement over expected outcomes, far less than was seen with the chloroquine/zinc/antibiotic combo treatment.

I mean I think it's still interesting as a possible drug to add to the cocktail for maximum effectiveness. But let's not oversell it.
I agree with you. The idea of programmable config languages is really, really misguided. Whenever somebody wants to use something like that, it's a sign for me that they haven't thought out their design properly and are content of letting abstractions leak into the config.
Isolation (physical distancing) would cause this. Flu doesn't have a long incubation, and doesn't survive as well (AFAICT, not a medic) outside bodies.

Isolation should reduce all virus transmission and so reduce incidence of flu, etc.. We'll need 3 weeks minimum of isolation to reduce Covid19 transmissions, assuming everyone is actually doing it.

In the UK (just England I think, might be England & Wales) our Office of National Statistics says there were <500 deaths from flu (ICD codes J10-11, https://bit.ly/39DZPCo) in the most recent year of records (2017; from c.60M population).
Is there a public index of candidate treatments, regional success rates and drug interactions?

Edit: https://covid19-druginteractions.org/

PDF page 9 (April 3rd version) lists green for Metformin with all drugs, including CLQ and HCLQ.
I honestly find it way way easier to do FFTW manually in C and then convert the output with ffmpeg then use supercollider, like by a significant number of orders of magnitude.

I've given sc 5 years, usually I'll try to use it, give it a few days of effort to do what I want, then give up, rewrite what I want in C, and be done with it in an hour

Some people love it. More power to them. I wish I was one of them
Really surprising zwift is on the list, I would expect them to be thriving at this time.
The Elements of Style would implode.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style

Though not the best book on writing in English, not by a long shot, it is a fantastic intro/solution to the question of 'How do I write better?'.
Seconded as well with Nodered.

It is low code AND capable of full serverside JS for handling interesting cases. And it has hundreds of plugins for handling APIs of all sorts.
As someone already put it, 'Bazel is the worst system except all the others'. It has some warts (Python integration, non-hermetic-by-default rules, starlark structure javaesque complexity ...), but I still haven't far a good replacement for my use: a monorepo build system that has to touch a ton of different languages and can be run in CI without having to prebuild tons of fragile builder images.
Steroids are an entire class of chemicals that have a specific pattern in their structure.

Hormones are signalling molecules that get transported throughout your body.

Steroid hormones are chemicals that are both a steroid and a hormone. Not all steroids are hormones (ex cholesterol) and not all hormones are steroids.

A subgroup of steroid hormones is corticosteroids. A subgroup of corticosteroids is glucocorticoids, (most of?) which exhibit strong effects on the immune system (roughly speaking, they suppress the immune system and reduce inflammation).
So now before Google can make any changes to their browser, they should have to wait for a regulatory committee?

This is the same government whose ancient COBOL systems can’t handle the influx of unemployment claims and their is a submission currently on the front page of HN about one agency forcing people to fax a claim in.
The governor of NJ went live on TV to request COBOL programmers
COBOL is operating for a number of practical reasons in the US.

Universities stopped training because it was not—glamorous.

Now NJ needs 100s of programmers—TODAY.
In a startup, you have to make things quickly, and not necessarily well. What you are building today may need to be retired in 3 months, if not earlier.

In a startup, you usually don't have the time or resources to play with tech and learn cool new things. Instead, you're hastily producing another simplest thing that could possibly work, using predictable tools you already know in and out. You're lucky if it's RoR or Node; you could be stuck with Go or PHP.

In an early-stage startup you work long hours, and are preoccupied with two things: how to divinate what the users actually want (usually nebulous and contradictory), and how to quickly make it work this way. You can easily lose track of what's interesting in the broader landscape, instead of enjoying new hotness as it gets released.

If you want some leisure, join a large established company, work efficiently, and you'll have plenty of paid time to fiddle with the cool stuff developed inside it, and elsewhere. Or become so advanced that a large company will task you with solving something actually novel, not amenable to off-the-shelf solutions.
Philosophy and Entrepreneurship: Who Should Build Technology?
the gui is pretty useful though because it allow you to look up help for statements in your code. this is necessary to do anything because everything is completely unintuitive and nonsensical, so you constantly need to be racing through the docs to make anything interesting
ELI5 – What I Learned Teaching Grafana to My Kids
This helps for companies cutting back. Not for companies shutting down.
Any form of profiteering in a crisis such as this should result in massive fines and prison time, in war time I believe firing squads were in order.
I continually find myself amazed with what people can do with Excel.
This feels very much like the situation when a person's job is really no longer necessary but either way they come up with ridiculous scenarios just not to be fired.
I don't know much about this, but sure did like seeing this in the description:

"One of the main principles in Csound development is to guarantee backwards compatibility. You can still render a Csound source file from 1986 on the latest Csound release, and you should be able to render a file written today with the latest Csound in 2036."

I wish more "modern" languages and frameworks put in the effort on this point as well.
Many such 'real' languages have support for some kind of interpreted mode.

For example if you set a path to Stack as a script shebang, you can write interpreted-mode shell scripts in Haskell.
I cannot imagine how handing over a code base with configs that themselves require testing can be smooth.
Would her successor even be elected Speaker?
There was a time when I thought you want a declarative language for your build system. After having used Rust, which allows you to use Rust in your build scripts I think that that is the way forward. You can say generate game assets in your build script, access network, use third party crates etc etc.

Declarative languages are a work around for bad APIs.
I did this with a server-side TypeScript project I built last year. The biggest advantage I noticed (and it's mentioned in the article): validation (i.e. type-safety).

Specifically, the project uses TypeORM and it was nice to be able to import the types for the DB connection options to make sure I had all of the necessary properties.

I was using ts-node to run server-side without compilation, which made importing an `app.config.ts` file quite elegant, IMO.
Can you expand on how is Zapier helping? I am using Airtable + Python because I felt too constrained by Zapier.
I think that describes Scala:

- https://docs.scala-lang.org/overviews/collections/arrays.htm...

- https://docs.scala-lang.org/tour/generic-classes.html

Unfortunately, scala caused parsing problems by allowing alphabetic function names as operators, grabbing implicit arguments from all over the place, and leaving out () in function calls (I think they reversed the latter decision)
Elegant Way to Implement Internationalization(internationalization) in Angular
There was some mention of using Org-roam as an editor in a wiki. What is the process to attach it to the Media-wiki software (used by Wikipedia, etc)

Sorry if it was on the github site and I missed it.

Thanks for the presentation, it looks interesting.
I remember! The FC message board was a riot.
Coyote – A programming framework for building reliable asynchronous software
That's really bad news for diabetic mice that have contracted the COVID-19...

As far as humans are concerned - who knows...
I've got a massive org-mode database, and in 90% of cases I'm using ripgrep (helm-rg) to search over it. In addition it searches in chat logs and other non-org mode files. Remaining 10% of searches is probably org-ql (e.g. tag search). Tried org-rifle too, but also wanted searching within the contents, so ended up using ripgrep.

I describe my setup here: https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html#other
It's an anti-engineering bias.

In the real world, science comes after engineering has succeeded to explain why (and ideally, how) something the engineers are doing successfully actually works.

To validate the "science", you then test what the scientists came up with by taking their "why/how" explanation and doing some new engineering based on it. If the new engineering also works, the science is solid. If it fails, the science is wrong. In both cases though: the original approach is still successful for the engineers.

I wish we had an "I Fucking Love Engineering" crowd. Would solve a lot of problems with how people think about the world, and the advancement of knowledge in general.
Depends. There are many many contractors doing corporate tech stuff but there are also vendors making food and they all have the same bright red badge
their employees are paying plenty though.
Show HN: Play poker with friends. No cards or chips needed
Washing hands
Does somebody have a link that is not behind a paywall?

Tried with archive.org and/or incognito without success.
Hi HN! I love playing social poker with friends, but often find ourselves not having play cards or chips. I've tried quite a few options, including various mobile apps and websites. Didn't like any of them. So I made my own.

I had two main focuses: easy to use (only requires a web browser; no signup; no download) and good UI for face-to-face poker (track player scores; mobile friendly).

I also included a practice feature where you are pitted against an AI in heads-up.

Due to the social distancing situation, I realized it's not the perfect timing for release. But I do want to put this out there and move on. Hopefully it's useful to some people.
Think of a donut. Think of a vertical plane through the donut. The plane has two disconnected circles on it. Imagine trying to move the two circles apart. They resist your effort because they are attached together through their three-dimensional structure.

In one view of time (“eternalism”, roughly speaking) saying “there is no change” or “no interaction” between any particles in the universe would mean that in the fixed structure of the universe of which time is a dimension, everything is constant in the direction of that dimension.

So the two statements become roughly equivalent.
> There is no way to ensure that there are no regressions under different configurations.

No, but static config files won't give you that proof either. Unless I'm misunderstanding your point?

At least if I write build scripts in e.g. ts-node I can use the type system to provide some modicum of safety, which seems like a plus.
Is this Doctorow himself, because none of what you said is accurate in reality. Banks don't create money out of thin air, the fed does. Banks can get loans from the fed, and the vast majority must be paid back, or the bank will go bankrupt itself.

A bank can't survive loaning itself money, that's ridiculous. Every day it's burning cash paying salaries, rent, marketing costs, it has to earn significantly higher returns on money it loans out than it pays depositors and interest to the fed, or it burns through it's capital and dies.
The Standard Model has no known contradictions in the real world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model

In "QED" Feynman states that the predictions are as precise as being able to measure the distance between (points in) New York and Los Angeles accurately to within the width of a human hair.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED:_The_Strange_Theory_of_Lig...
Generate static configuration, effect only what's in the static configuration and persist it to version control. You get the ergonomics of a programming language while getting a diff if anything changes and get it code reviewed. Could even write unit tests if you start to get unintended changes.