skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Still don't get the hang up about comments with JSON. I'd find it strange to encounter a config file with lots of internal documentation. They should be small with well named, descriptive settings.

These are config files. A comment is something that gets ignored, this "comment" will be ignored by whatever ingests this JSON. If not, there are other problems. If you have to write a treatise here, there are other problems.

{
"comment": "This is a comment",
"dev": { ... },
"stage": { ... },
"prod": { ... }
}

Oh no, that line doesn't start with a # or //, whatever will we do!
Turing completeness in config files is a proven bad idea.

If it is truly needed, use/write a config generator instead. We have so many tools in the build chain now that config generation can be easily automated into the deployment process.

See m4, BPF, PDF, etc...
Just competition is not enough on the long term, some technological change is needed too to push prices down. (If there are a lot of small vendors all just on the verge of bankruptcy that doesn't really help anyone.)

The typical case is small shops in all the cities around the world that are in very efficient markets. For example here anyone can start a hairdressing salon and can employ anyone. No qualifications needed at all. Only the venue has to pass some basic cleanness inspection. Consequently there is no big hairdressing chain, there's not much going on in hairdressing for the past decades. There's not an Amazon of hairdressing, and no one is investing billions into hairdressing R&D to become more profitable. It might change if automation reaches that level.
BCL is something that's new to me. Anyone know what it stands for?
Sure. I’ll HTTP POST you a picture of the kids.
Except we don't need to "solve the problem of high taxes on small business". We need to solve the problem of low taxes on big business.
I've been working on something that might be interesting to you [1]. It gives you the full flexibility of a programming language while removing all the boilerplate surrounding your business logic through static analysis.

Have a look at the Encore Playground [2] to see a real-world example.

[1] https://encore.dev

[2] https://play.encore.dev/vHZHuXf2zca3dg
setuptools doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same capacity as bazel/nix/dhall.

Having the entire python language (specifically the ability to inspect the local system) available BEFORE you declare your package (as a side effect!) means you cannot reliably learn anything about a package without having an entire operating system with python and all package dependencies pre-installed. It can lead to scenarios where you cannot automatically query a packages dependencies without having those dependencies already pre-installed. Or when installing packages in different order yields totally different results.

On the data <-> code spectrum, configuration should be closer to data than to code, perhaps a pure function that takes a high level config to a lower level config.
Discussed at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22782097
Hey, it's clear that you've got a lot of experience with this and related tools. But discussion on HN requires comments to be more substantive than this comment (not to mention "csound is trash", which was correctly flagged upthread). Since you know more than others, please make sure that each of your posts shares some of what you know, so that the rest of us can learn. If a comment only contains putdowns and no solid information, please edit it to take out the putdowns and add solid information; or delete it; or simply don't post it to begin with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The combination with met form in suggests this has little relevance to the Covid-19 discussion?

The drugs are very old and very well understood and have very modest safety profiles.
Why is it inherently a good thing that a larger company survives the pandemic and a smaller one doesn’t? That seems like a negative to me. And in part it may only happen because of the $4 Trillion fire hose of cash pointed at large companies. Something smaller companies can’t access.

The negatives of consolidation aren’t relating to being in a pandemic situation but the before and after, normal times. Things such as reduced labor choices, killing cheaper products and your competitors that would supply them, etc. that’s what’s been bad about the consolidation. (See that great example about how Covidian killed the cheaper ventilator.)

If Starbucks survives and local stores close and all we have in 5 years are Starbucks everywhere why is that good? Why is it good that Starbucks benefits from the pandemic this way? Why isn’t it better if there is no behemoth Starbucks to crowd out those local stores, so that they end up being able to be reborn in the aftermath of this as more new local stores? Or why isn’t it better to just have lots of local stores and if them closing and having to reopen is a problem you point the $4 trillion fire hose at your small businesses instead of large businesses? Such as how some other countries have done by backstopping payroll and other things.
But haven't the reserves been built up over many decades? The reasoning behind the reserve probably long predates the current administration.
about 5 minutes after you start using xml for configuration, you want to reference a bit of global information (environment variable, port, ....) and add variable substitution ${foo} as an extra feature.
The correct answer is, it’s complicated. (Of course) It depends greatly on the definition of the output, for example, which can vary by application.

Easy answer is, for a fixed load (I.e. a resistor) and frequency, one varies amplitude with power. (perhaps absolute value of area under the curve might be a better description)

For more information see here:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Waves/powstr.html
This is for a physical string, which I think is easier to wrap your head around. The math is very similar for electrical waves.
Imagine Jsonnet, but internal to Google, old and quirky. It's not public, but the name has been leaked for a while now.

Edit: here's a thesis that works with a related language, GCL, with code samples: https://pure.tue.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/46927079/638953-1....
Seems like the config language would benefit from being functional. I've actually sort of seen an example of this: in GCL/BCL (Google/Borg configuration language). I used to joke that it's essentially a FP language with all the good features removed. All the alternatives I have seen outside Google are much worse, however.

See here for more details: https://pure.tue.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/46927079/638953-1....

It ticks off most of the author's boxes, but it's so woefully underspecified and so horrifyingly complex, that Google has been trying to replace it with something else for the past decade, unsuccessfully (at least as of a few years ago, don't know about now).

But you get to provide external parameters, compute values, use some rudimentary logic, inherit configs, reuse configs in larger configs, and so on and so forth. You can also spend a couple of weeks trying to understand the config structure of something like an ads backend.

You do get some niceties though: even fairly large services, consisting of dozens of different backends/mixers/frontends can be brought up/upgraded/shut down/reconfigured with a single CLI invocation, soup to nuts, including things like monitoring and load balancing.
Configuration is complex if you use it for complex things. That's just one way of designing software, it's not necessary to make software so extremely configurable that you need a DSL to configure it. Even if you really feel you need that level of configurability, then the software could be designed as a library instead and users could consume it with whatever language they prefer (where bindings are available). That would basically be the same amount of complexity as a configuration DSL, except you could use all your standard project management tooling to manage it.
Ouch... Nasty stuff. I had no idea. Thanks for explaining all this in plain English because that paper is Chinese to me :)
I write a ton of config in a bespoke python config language and FAANG and there are definitely downsides to having logic in your configs. Config is supposed to be explicit and when you start iterating over lists and parsing conditionals, those layers of abstraction can make reading a simple config quite cumbersome. Additionally, each team will often write their own libraries which diverge from the standard practices furthering the stratification.

That being said, these config can get very complex and I can’t imagine expressing them in something even relatively friendly like yaml
Live performance of the same, complete with referee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzXoVo16pTg
It seems like you're making the parent point for him/her. Yes, governments should support 100% access. Requiring a fax machine for anything, as in this case, goes against that. (Great that the UK doesn't force this on people though!)

Edit: one line I like to use when asked to fax something is, "Oh, sure thing, I know there's a museum right nearby!"
It's not an issue with the theoretical concept of private equity, it's an issue with what these vehicles are being used to do in the real world.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/03/hospital-bailouts-be...

https://www.bing.com/search?form=MOZLBR&pc=MOZI&q=private+eq...

Outside of a your theoretical framework that is not what creating new wealth means to any normal person. If some businesses fail then so be it. You are trying to conflate that with what is being discussed by @doctorow. How about this. In turn, explain to me how these three activities create wealth instead of just redistribute it upwards:

- government bailouts

- selling off assets whose long-term value PE doesn't understand or care about

- defaulting on pensions

Those are the points I'm making, if you want to discuss something else, go ahead.

>PE firms are good at separating productive assets from failing businesses

Good for whom, and no, many of these businesses are not failing when PE sells off all their assets. Boeing did the same thing with much of the 787 production line and weren't in any financial trouble at all. EBITDA is just a short sighted power grab by finance capital.

>provide very important liquidity

The banks are just middle men for the Fed at this point, and stingy ones at that. The banks are so bad, it would be better for the Fed to just give the money to businesses directly.

>funding good businesses that need scale

This is more a critique of leverage in general, but this is how amazon put profitable competitors out of business by not turning a profit and is now cranking up profits probably beyond the point of sustainability. Also see
https://qz.com/1250772/didi-vs-meituan-vs-ele-me-chinas-food...
and
https://supchina.com/2018/01/09/didis-war-century/
By "brain dead", I meant that I had difficulty focusing, and felt somewhat sedated. But then, I take so many drugs now that it's hard to really know which are doing what.

I mean, I could have increased the modafinil dose. But it was easy enough to take hydroxychloroquin at night, and naproxen in the morning. And hopefully my kidneys will be happier, even if my retinas etc are more at risk.
I've had great success with the Go Starlark interpreter. Very easy to get started with. I map some of my internal structs to its dictionary type and let CLI callers filter my collections by providing predicates as Starlark expressions.

The mapping to and from Go types is a bit obtuse and could probably be smoothed over by reflection or an intermediate representation like JSON in many cases. It's not just data though: you can also send functions in both directions.

Embedding an interpreter for filtering vs. trying to compile all possible filtering needs into the binary greatly improved my program's power and shrunk the volume of application code. I recommend it.

Don't be alarmed by the Bazel connection: it's much easier to use and understand (and better documented) than Bazel itself. Although I am a lot better at Bazel now for having taken the time to understand Starlark.

All that said: if you find yourself needing to support logic and behavior in your configuration language, you may not actually have a good enough abstraction to justify a config-driven system. Take a hard look at whether it might be cleaner to write plain old code, or APIs for other people's code. A significant number of internal platforms at my company are unnecessarily obtuse because they try to put everything in boxes like this vs. being legitimately composable/programmable through ordinary software engineering tools and processes.
It's remarkably difficult to avoid "should" and "may" in any decently sized spec. I count 11 "shoulds" in [1] and 7 in [2], and I tried REALLY hard to keep them to a minimum :/

[1] https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

[2] https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/cb...
The camera, blue bubbles, and FaceTime (audio as well as video). Brand and ecosystem are secondary, UI/UX are fleeting, and there seem early indications that iPhones may become seen as "grandma's phone" like Macs in the mid '90s. Scale effects and supply chain are contingent on demand.

So brand and ecosystem are “fleeting”. When are you predicting that the iPhone - which has been around and profitable since 2007 will fail? Better example is the Mac, while all other non Microsoft compatible operating systems have died, the Mac has been around for 35 years.

So you think all of the cool kids are going to use crappy $300 Android phones?

Grandma only knows how to use FaceTime.

So from what I see most older people are using cheap Android phones. Unless you believe that Apple’s 13% worldwide market share is only made up of grandma. If Google can’t make a decent video app after four failed attempts, whose fault is that? I thought Google was made up of all these “smart people” (tm).

Yeah, in 2016. We were contending with iPhone 4s and the first generation of Android phones that could reasonably perform browser-based video calls and overheating handsets and draining batteries after 20+ min video surveys and no WebRTC support from Apple yet and a bunch of 3G.

By 2016, the iPhone 4s was 5 years old. But you said you were forced to make an app for Android anyway. Also, 4G was ubiquitous on even low end phones by then. But as far as performance, even today most Android phones are crappy prepaid phones sold by second rate carriers like MetroPCS and Boost Mobile.

I specifically said funnel, not force. The strategy is to get developers into the sale pipeline and on the radar for competitive analysis. Zoom has considered handling payments through the App Store, but decided against it because they support multiple platforms and have the resources to build their own subscription infrastructure.

Do you realize how easy it is to build your own subscription infrastructure? ACloudGuru is definitely not a multi-billion dollar company and they have their own subscription infrastructure that you have to use - as does LinuxAcademy (now owned by ACG)

So you mean companies want to do things to funnel companies into their sales pipeline - I’m shocked - a customer acquisition strategy? How novel.

Hah, yes—but now you can delete it!

Just like you can “delete” Safari on iOS but the underlying rendering engine is still embedded in the OS - just like IE.

It was just a huge distraction to need to build an iOS app, go through the App Store, etc., but we wouldn't have been able to get traction without it.

But it wasn’t a huge distraction to build the Android app....
Power roughly correlates to amplitude.

On the transmitter side keeping the signal linear means you generally don't see great efficiency in terms of power in -> power radiated.
Low hanging fruit is a point in time tactic, not a generalized recommendation
This has got to be one of the sickest burns I've ever seen.
Ask HN: What is job interview according to you?
When I see some of the job interview process of some companies through candidates feedback on Glassdoor I am having an assumption that people have misunderstood what job interview is.

I do not want to bias your views by posting my assumption here right now. That being said I will post my thoughts after I get an enough comments.

Thanks for your time
This is one of the reasons why many of us in this field have moved on to SuperCollider[0] since the late 90s.

[0] https://supercollider.github.io/
Maybe I’m not smart enough to find time as confusing as these things try to point out:

Time is the sequence of states every time the rules are applied, or am I missing something?
This reminds me of Proxy Auto Configs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_auto-config). PAC files are Proxy configs that are programmed in JavaScript. To do this devices usually embed a JavaScript runtime in the operating system to parse proxy files. This introduces a lot more attack surface than a standard config file would and has resulted in remote code execution vulnerabilities in android and windows

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/chromium-...

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2017/12/apacolypse-no...
borg config language, IIRC.
Must not be willing to pay enough or be hard to work with. At the right price, 100 people should not be hard to find. Of course, they probably would not be in this position if they were willing to put money into the system or keep people on retainer at least.
I agree, that YAML is usually a mistake.

In your scenario, it's more like provisioning of infrastructure and in that case - configuration is the code, so I can see where you are coming from.

I mostly write financial software so the use case is usually closer to classical single machine applications. And in that case, I prefer simple TOML.
I find this question hard to think about. Who exactly should be pricing in the risk of something like this happening? On both sides there are agents who have taken on risk. Some of the agents paying rent overextended themselves even before the crisis. Some of the agents renting space did the same. So who should take the hit? Nobody (i.e., the government)? Even that solution seems wrong -- do we really want to incentivize agents that leverage their property holdings to the hilt?

My naive reaction is that the agents renting space are somehow "more able" to absorb the costs. Maybe it's because I think banks seem to be doing ok, and in my head banks are the people who lend things to people and charge fees, whereas my friendly neighborhood restaurant seems to be scrabbling harder to make ends meet. Or maybe it's because I think people who own resources are just always doing better than the people who rent them. But that's not a very convincing argument.
The main reason I'm not using XML seriously is that it only really has a single native, scalar type: string. Sure, you can schema validate away a large part of this problem, but it's still somewhat of a wart.
I mean specifically with regards to treating covid-19, not for other purposes. Sorry if that wasn’t clear. I didn’t say there’s a study that says hydroxychloroquine combined with arithromycin is an ineffective combination, but that unless there’s a scientific reason to assume something will increase the effectiveness of such a possibly lethal drug without exacerbating its negative side effects then there is no reason to start with the assumption that it is safe.

Keep in mind that the lack of rigor in the current pre-peer review literature coming out means that you have to take everything into account and with a grain of salt. For example, a drug showing effectiveness might have been with a mild case that started with a low viral load and wouldn’t have progressed any way (this is just an example, I’m not saying that is the case). Since the therapeutic index is so low, you can’t just dial up the dosage to treat severe cases that actually require pharmaceutical intervention, because it’s a non-starter.
The attitude that a company shouldn’t actually build features that are better for the consumer and instead are better for the developer is how we end up with crappy resource intensive, battery draining electron apps. If you can’t make an app that is in the best interest of the customer, maybe your product doesn’t deserve to exist.
>It only takes 10% of defectors to create a similar catastrophic result as with 50% defectors.

Do you have math to back that up? Clearly R_0 would be lower in the first case than in the second. I think significantly lower due to both less infectors and less opportunities to infect.
New study estimates that 78% of Covid-19 cases are asymptomatic
Wouldn't the 'pre wiring' in this instance be the code and hardware that the algorithm was running on?
It seems worse to me to treat them like they can't learn a programming language.
So much effort is going in to the propaganda war against Hydroxychloroquine, it's really terrifying to watch.
If you want to use a full-fledged flowchart diagramming tool that uses this library - checkout https://excalidraw.com/
Render image of LG V60 ThinQ smartphone model leaked
No. It is worth holding the bad boss accountable and firing the bad boss who put them in this situation in the first place.
This approach seems to have served emacs quite well; the config is just some elisp. It’s weird more programmers don’t copy this approach, given how many of them use emacs.

Of course, you start out just cargo culting emacs config, so many may not even realize emacs is configured via code. You can also get pretty far with setq functions, essentially just assigning values to variables.

But learning to grok and code elisp is when you start to really see emacs’ power.
> The FT chose to run with an inflammatory headline, assuming an extreme value of ρ that most researchers consider highly implausible.

The headline "Coronavirus may have infected half of UK population — Oxford study” is not really out of line with the preprint the article talks about. What's questionable is that it was a good idea to write about the preprint at all.

"Importantly, the results we present here suggest the ongoing epidemics in the UK and Italy started at least a month before the first reported death and have already led to the accumulation of significant levels of herd immunity in both countries."

"Our overall approach rests on the assumption that only a very small proportion of the population is at risk of hospitalisable illness. [...] Three different scenarios under which the model closely reproduces the reported death counts in the UK up to 19/03/2020 are presented in Figure 1 . [...] [In two of those scenearios] By 19/03/2020, approximately 36% (R 0 =2.25) and 40% (R 0 =2.75) of the population would have already been exposed to SARS-CoV-2. [...] [The third scenario] suggests that 68% would have been infected by 19/03/2020."

The secondary headline “New epidemiological model shows vast majority of people suffer little or no illness” was much worse as that's the assumption in the model and not the result. It was changed to "New epidemiological model shows urgent need for large-scale testing" in the amended article.

> Since its publication, hundreds of scientists have attacked the work, forcing the original authors to state publicly that they were not trying to make a forecast at all.

"Attacked" sounds as if the criticism was unwarranted.