skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is this the right trade? When a restaurant goes out of business, we do lose a kind of stock of wealth. It's a tuned machine (suppliers, cooks, customers, an evolving menu maybe) and now we're starting over from scratch with an untuned machine. That's a real cost to everyone.
The most powerful programming tool – flow control
Why should they reduce their guard when there are many scams and abusive apps being created to take advantage of the panic?

There's another half to the story.
Reflecting on building my side-project for the past two years
The thing there is: I'm split on that.

I know plenty of small businesses and their owners. Bars, local cafes, all kinds of little startups, small construction companies, small companies in manufacturing. These businesses had no chance to prepare for a multi-month shutdown with zero income. For those guys, I'm perfectly fine to throw down my tax dollars without interest. This is a sufficient mess, just take it.

That's a situation we need our societies safety net in.

However, I'm concerned that larger corporations will throw more money than all of the small business I know make in a month at legal and siphon that money away. That'd be bullshit.

I hope governments can sort that shit out, at least in europe.
I've used CSound for a university project some years ago, to manipulate a bunch of files to play together - adjust volumes, modify speed of playing without modifying tonality, etc.
I then wrote a GUI to manage CSound. After 8 years, here's what I remember:

- It was very complicated to wrap a C library in Java, at least for a new graduate like me.

- There was no learning material for the kind of things I needed to do (manipulating wav files). learing CSound at the time was a mess - no blog posts in 2010.

- If I read the CSound source file I wrote in 2010 I'm sure I would not understand a single line.

Some years later, when Coursera was just starting to offer free courses to the world, I encountered another musical programming language called ChucK (https://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/). The course was very well done and ChucK too, was so simple that I almost decided to rewrite the whole project with it. I wrote some very nice pieces of music while studying ChucK.

Good luck to all the musicians out there!
Parachutes solve a simple to model physics problem with few variables.

Vaccines or drugs are injected into an incredibly complicated biological system and interact with the immune system, cell signalling pathways, gene expression, thousands of different receptor bindings, and more.

For vaccines, the immune system itself is immeasurably complex. You can teach it the wrong things and be stuck with that lesson for life.

Interfering with signalling pathways can give you incurable cancer ten years down the line, or leave you with terrible disorders that ruin your quality of life.

How many times have drugs interfered with pregnancy and caused children to be born with birth defects and learning disorders? There's a reason we study these things.

This analogy is a very poor fit.

Edit: why is this being downvoted? Are people really eager to try the new prophylactics? While designing a fix for Coronavirus is incredibly important, we can't throw out all we know about safety. Why don't you offer a counter argument so we can discuss?

Intervention in cases where it is obvious the patient won't survive is worth considering, but we shouldn't proactively give healthy people something we aren't sure is safe.
Yes, so far as we know.
There are occasional scenarios where this doesn't work out. The data mapping tool we use (MapStruct) doesn't automatically rebuild with changes in IntelliJ which means I have to manually kick off a compile step any time I have changes in the mapper. Worse still, that compilation doesn't always register in the build as seen by the in-IDE JUnit runner so I sometimes have to run all the tests from maven instead of just the one I care about through the IDE. Fortunately, this isn't a big part of my workflow, but wait times aren't always avoidable.
Ok, name one such company, read its Annual Report, and present your evidence.

> depreciation

Depreciation allowances are based on what was paid for the item, not its value. If it is sold for more than was paid for it, the difference is taxable income.

Value not realized is also not taxable income.

I took a class in basic business accounting one summer. It was time well invested. I recommend it. (Though that doesn't make me a qualified accountant, I still use a CPA for the company books and rely on his advice. I pay no attention to what journalists say about accounting, they know as much about it as about Quantum Mechanics.)
skycfg is doing this: https://skycfg.fun

I'm not convinced - the ergonomics aren't great, it does not support CRDs, is mostly untyped, and you end up unnecessarily encapsulating everything with dozens of function parameters since you cannot easily merge nested data.

Starlark is great for configuring an imperative tool like Bazel which is only declarative at the top level, but is impractical for pure configuration data. Having the full power of a general purpose language isn't great for configuration - it quickly leads to lots of complexity at the wrong layer.

Cue has a radically different approach[1] that works very well in practice. The author of Cue, mplv, wrote the first version of bcl/gcl and Cue is the spiritual successor of sorts :-)

It's still early, but many people (including me) already use it in production. Their Slack is very friendly and helpful!

[1]: https://cuelang.org/docs/usecases/configuration/
Does it matter that much who is 'more able' to absorb costs? The original question of who takes the rent etc. is more likely relevant.

It's hard to know who is profiting more, but it's a side question.

Normally - the restaurants would declare bankruptcy, the landlords would follow suit, and due to the pervasive nature of this pandemic ... so would the banks who can't absorb that much loss. The dominos would come down and take the entire economy with it.

BUT

'Real Estate' is not a productive game!

This is one of the weirdest things about our economy - so much is based on rent-extraction, not productive investment.

This is why the central bank can take all the 'worthless investments' off of the bank's balance sheets and give them cash at face value and 'poof' the economy can move on.

2008 was not an implosion of productive assets - it's was a major accounting realignment ... which caused productive parts of the economy to suffer as a result of calamity. But at its core, just a big rebalancing of the balancesheet.

Put another way - what if all real-estate were socialized: it's all free, you just have use it, and everyone is 'allocated' some kind of limit or whatever by whatever rules. Those rules may not be perfectly fair but it could be done.

Then nobody has to pay rent. Then, when restaurants 'pause' operations, they don't go out of business.

Because we are not an agrarian society wherein any specific bit of land is really about its industrial value ... this could actually work. We do it in a fancy way today by having people speculate with huge mortgages, only to sell them later.

I'm only making a rhetorical point here, but if we are going to 'socialize the risky parts of the real-estate economy via central banks' because they need to be unfairly bailed out every 10 years, then there is no 'free market' in such things anyhow. The 'unfair socialization' is happening at the central bank.

In Canada, the average home price increased last year more than the average annual wage (before taxes!). This is insane and untenable. It means the real #1 driver of inequality is simply homeownership: the more you can leverage, the more you are leveraging over others. A $200K income becomes a means to buy a $2M home that increases in value as much as your income. While the flat owners and renters are left with no capital gains there.

This aspect of our economy might essentially be the most truly fragile because.
Moa probably has a lot of fans, left. He killed the rest. 9-10x of Hitler.
I tried reading the other threads but they are not very information-dense. It's mostly people arguing about whether governments are good employers.

Would you mind sharing a quick summary if you've synthesized the position?
It's probably a bad example. If Musk had won and they used Windows it probably doesn't kill PayPal. Likely either

a) They figure out how to get it to scale well enough to succeed.
b) Musk learns he was wrong and they lose only a few cycles.
The majority of publications and articles did not got it fundamentally wrong. There is subset on right wing that is popular and got it wrong intentionally. But mainstream had bad article here and there while majority being not fundamentally wrong.
Yes, it's a cost. But so is bailing out the shareholders of businesses, who (by nature) are holding a supposedly risky asset.
Definitely this. Configs reflect the architecture, of there is a lot of complexity that means the architecture is overly complex and can likely be cleaned up.
Lots of things don't have a 1:1 match. For example Cobol has a PICTURE clause for describing a record. It uses 1 character symbols like in fscanf() but there are different options. Like binary coded decimal.
I wanted a different approach for this project when I started it, so what I knew was that I wanted to create a very narrow scoped Kubernetes as a service, that users can run on their infrastructure as easily as possible.

One thing that I knew oneinfra wouldn't do, funnily enough, was to create or manage infrastructure itself.
I’ve been doing the same in fact. I’ve always had a soft spot for Erlang (and now Elixir). I wrote a pretty large Erlang app back in college for a distributed system in a Biology research project.

I’ve been enjoying working with it - taking a little break but definitely enjoying Phoenix as well. It’s been refreshing to work through a “big” web framework that feels straightforward to reason about.
> Journalists should report what is true, not what Tom, Dick or Harry said.

Especially they should not give 33% plausibility to Tom, 33% to Dick and 33% to Harry. Which is what they typically do, and call that "professional journalism."

If Tom represents 95% of scientists and Dick and Harry the fringe 5% also financed by (let say) tobacco industry or oil corporations, or Boeing, or those paid by the CIA, they should not even mention Dick and Harry in the same article (or TV a show), especially not in anything worth a major headline. They should appear with the smallest possible note in some smallest possible corner and with the title like "oil corporations paid these persons to support them again."

Sadly, but that sounds like a dream. The world would be very different then.
Show HN: Turnip Trader – Animal Crossing Turnip Exchange and Community Site
> restaurant fails => no food; landlord goes bankrupt => house remains, it's just gonna be owned by someone else.

Restaurant fails => someone else will occupy that space and be productive. landlord fails => that new building will not get built.

Calculating economic effects is not simple. Landlord fails => doesn't make bank payment => bank fails => people don't get their deposits => government has to make up the difference.

At the end of the day we are all poorer, and we will all have higher taxes and less money because of it.

There is not any one entity that should be singled out as having to shoulder the cost. We all will.
It's super confusing.

The easiest way I've found to understand it is to think of 12 as being zero, so the times go 11am (11) -> 00pm (12) -> 1pm (13) -> 11pm (23) -> 00am (24) -> 1am (25).
Bose is not an advertising company. They have (had?) less incentive to collect my data. Amazon on the other hand peppers the market with tons of low cost shitware devices that have Alexa integrated in for no reason other than to harvest ambient sound data for Advertising purposes. The fact that Bose is partnered with Amazon makes it less likely I'll buy any of their products now, even without the Alexa since I now know they're cool selling user data (or at least cool accepting money to add Amazon/Google's crapware apps in their otherwise nice hardware).
This is the worst way to learn RF physics.
Every international spec I've read contains should and may, but also includes must here and there.
For some reason, though, the oil industry is one of the most technologically advanced sectors that exist, and employs some dominating fraction of all PhDs in geology and related fields. Even though they’re just “pumping oil from holes in the ground.” I guess they just really like their toys. :)

Most easily accessible oil resources are long gone. What we could get to if we were reduced to 1800s technology is extremely limited.
If it’s anything like legacy public service code in my country it’s not just that, it’s also dealing with terrible organisational culture, d-grade devs, c-grade contractors and corrupt management that let it get that way (as millions are dumped on the contractors, as it turns out).

Some days I wish an ultra virus would take out computers as we know it so we’d be forced to start again with what we know now, namely not creating these monolithic nasty monsters.
Just to add to what saagarjha said; there's large parts of the article that just don't seem to make sense on their own. I only have a Master's degree in Physics, and haven't specialized in general relativity - nevertheless I usually have enough background to at least follow along with Wikipedia.

In particular, the "Overturning of absolute time in general relativity" section is very hard to follow, and I suspect would only make passing sense to a reader already very familiar with the subject matter. It has a very stream-of-consciousness feel to it, it doesn't introduce concepts as it moves along, and it makes unexplained logical leaps from one idea to another.

I'm glad someone took the time to start the article and it sounds like an interesting subject; but it could certainly see improvement from someone with the right knowledge.
Depends on the country and the age pyramid. IFR in Italy is 1% fir the flu as well as for C0VID-19, so just 1x, not 6x higher. For Germany I got to 2x.

Lung damage is of course a serious issue, yes. And ICU overload which does not happen with the normal flu.
FYI Cluster API is now at v1alpha3!

Quickstart now has 7 target provider examples: https://cluster-api.sigs.k8s.io/user/quick-start.html
That depends of the scale.

See ansible and the YAML config files.

In this case, a real language would have been a better choice.

Also, sometimes you need to generate config files. In that case, templating is not always a good choice.
This. HN and other places love to regurgitate this was the reason people didn't learn cobol.

The real reason is that most companies that don't bother to move away from either physical or emulated cobol systems just do not care.

They certainly do not care enough to pay market wages.
Could you elaborate as to why?
Speaking of older games, are there any (other) active communities these days that still play competitive capture-the-flag style games? CTF seemingly died years and years ago and most games these days are sort of regressing to various spins on deathmatch style modes.

Miss TFC/Unreal Tournament style CTF communities, but I'm not sure there's anything left aside from obscure discord communities that occasionally throw together a few matches.
I've been enjoying playing Animal Crossing over the last week so I spent a few hours and put together a site for players to coordinate and visit one another. It's pretty basic right now, but I hope to add some extra features in the future!
That's particularly true because HN threads usually have high search ranking. Anyone personally connected to a theme can easily get directed to an HN thread on that topic. That includes authors and project creators. It also includes family members of people being discussed.

There was a horrible case yesterday where someone died and the thread filled up with generic dross. People weren't being malicious. It's just what happens when internet commenters aren't familiar with the specifics of a topic (more about that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027453). But we ended up getting an anguished email from someone close to the person who had just died.

This is a systemic problem and I wish we knew what to do about it.
> I wish an IDEA subscription entitled you to all other versions of the editor.

They do offer that; it's called the All Tools subscription. It costs more than the IntelliJ subscription, but you get all the IDEs, ReSharper, etc.
It’s not like COBOL is some indecipherable language that requires a Rosetta Stone to translate. If there is a market for it and someone is willing to pay enough, people will learn it.

But didn’t IBM have a system to convert COBOL to Java that the federal government was using?
Check out https://cuelang.org

Created by people who have dealt with this problem at scale for many years. Picked it up a month ago, absolutely amazing.
Had similar intentions half a year ago, it really clicked for me after watching the linear dynamical systems lecture by Boyd. How rank of a matrix, matrix norm and singular values relate was an eye opener. Thereafter it was easy to connect singular values and the stability/robustness of a system intuitively. Great teacher, I can only recommend :)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL06960BA52D0DB32B
So much to relate to in this article. If I'm cycling through stackoverflow for answers, it's because I've convinced myself I'm in over my head. Depending on the day this is either laziness or imposter syndrome. There's always a better resource out there, and better to find out what that is now because very rarely am I just one answer away from completing anything.
Limited FreeMarker SSTI to Arbitrary LiQL Query and Manage Lithium CMS
Commenting in complex configs is actually a highly compressed signal for communicating a lot of information without a lot of unwieldy external documentation. INI files support comments. apache.conf or any number of Linux config file support comments.

Also, executable configurations are not uncommon. Consider .bashrc or .vimrc. And they're usually loaded with multi-line comments.

Embedding comments in JSON fields gets unwieldy really quick for long configs. Compare:

{
"generalcomment": "the quick brown fox\njumps over the lazy dog",
"setting1" : {},
"setting1comment" : "this is setting1",
"setting2tree": {
"setting2a": {},
"setting2acomment: "this is supposed to do this",
"setting2b": {},
"setting2bcomment: "this is supposed to do this"

},
"setting3": [1,2,3]
"setting3comment": "to use this setting, do this"
}

To:

// The quick brown fox
// jumps over the lazy dog.
{
"setting1" : {}, // this is setting1
"setting2tree": {
"setting2a": {}, // this is supposed to do this
"setting2b": {}, // this is supposed to do this
},
"setting3": [1,2,3] // to use this setting, do this
}
Then why can't you find a great free VNC app?
That's right, they shouldn't. Instead we need to structure the economy so that they automatically act in a way that benefits society as a whole.

And it's not corporations either - individuals are perfectly capable of being amoral, and we want to structure things so that they have no desire to.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson admitted to hospital over virus symptoms
Imo this article points out legitimate problems, but downplays the downsides. The real solution is to combine both:

1. Use a general purpose language (or ideally a very dumb subset like Starlark) to generate the configs. You get all the reusability, type safety, comments etc.
2. Have #1 output a deterministic config like json/yaml/etc, so you can always refer to what the config actually looks like without needing to debug the code in your head. Check that in and whoever uses the config only uses the static output, they shouldn’t care how it came to life.

This way a config is easy to reason about both on the author and consumer side.
This is a good example of a structured approach, with the caveat that there are multiple phases.

With gradle, there's three big phases: initialization, configuration, then execution. (See https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/build_lifecycle.ht...). I'd think you'd need to do something similar with any structured configuration DSL - have distinct phases where you may "init, plan, apply", etc.

This, it's a pretty complex problem to have. But that complexity may be worth it as part of a "developer productivity engineering" effort, where you're really looking to use data to minimize the time between a configuration change, and the time it's applied in a runtime environment. Doing that is a hard problem.
We've got 1000's of virtual tours of mountains / rivers / reefs / etc. in our library. Drop me an email if you do decide to expand the content (https://www.trekview.org/contact)
Agreed, but the best combination is type-safe and non-turing complete, ideally with restricted effects. [Dhall](https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang) gets this so right that I'm increasingly shocked that people never seem to have heard of it.
Ask HN: What have you built with no-code tools?
I've tried using services like Airtable and Retool but I haven't been able to put anything in production yet. The ideas I want to build are either too simple (so I can develop the whole thing in 100-200 lines without a 3rd party) or too complicated (the tool doesn't have all the components required, so I have to "outsource" to custom code).

I'm curious what sorts of things people have built with this genre of technology.
Yes and no remote work as far as I am aware of these things. It just sucks. If it wouldn't suck, I would've went into it: I like retro and COBOL is not a hard language to learn, really, it is not.
“Not paying”

Again, you’re fixated on a single dimension.

Keeping people employed with quality jobs is a hard problem to solve.

People demand jobs. And demand them from elected officials to “fix this”, even though they have little to do with creating efficient, viable businesses.

So lost tax revenue from the business. Balanced against a larger, working class that pays taxes.

Depending on the terms and needs of the community, there’s a threshold where the deal will always make sense.
Could someone explain, preferably in English, why keyboard is so strange? Is this an art piece?
What about .bashrc, .vimrc or Makefiles?
You act as if having a smart phone with data that can run apps is for the privilege few. Smartphones are ubiquitous in the poorest countries.
Are you hosting your own Postgres, or using a db-as-a-service? If so, which one?
If your config files contain anything that could not be expressed as an OS variable, that's a maintenance nightmare right there. Eventually some user somewhere is going to jam entire mini programs in there and then complain when his castle of cards implodes.

Consider, if possible, the chance that if your program needs a subprogram for configuring itself, then maybe a bootstrap event hook or some tap into the bootstrap process like a plugin or something is a better fit for what you are trying to do. Actual managed extension points instead of ad-hoc ones will make your program much more useful in the long run.
Wasn't ot explicitely worst case? No measures taken and so on? The imperial articles are free to download and all I have read had assumptions stated very clearly.
I don’t have a direct link for you, but this topic has popped up several times in the past few days and you might find something more substantive.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
It can be automatically translated. But then all you've done is convert a bunch of IF A < B THEN GO TO STEPTWO into if (a < b) { goto steptwo; }

And with a lot of extra unreadable stuff to support things COBOL does but the target language doesn't.

The biggest problem with COBOL codebases is that COBOL (at least back in the day) doesn't offer much in the way of structured programming or standard libraries. Horrifying spaghetti code with one-off local solutions for common tasks is the norm, especially on some ancient endlessly patched code.