skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I enjoy learning, so I try to learn new things as part of my day to day routine to keep things interesting.

I just started following OCW's Finance Theory class and I'm starting to read the text book on corporate finance and watching a lecture a day during lunch. I've always been interested in economics, so this is just learning for learning's sake. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-40...

I'm just about done reading "A Look at Boulder: From Settlement to City," about the history of Boulder County, CO. Again, in this case I'm interested in local history, so I'm just reading it before bed for fun.

Two weeks ago I installed FreeBSD on a spare hard drive, and I've been reading through the handbook and learning how to do various tasks as they come up.

I'm writing a Spotify client in Common Lisp, so I'm learning about the Spotify API and architecture. The beginnings of the library are on Github, but right now it's really just a utility library for making API calls, and not much of a client. This started as the thought, "It'd be neat to have a library to control Spotify from the REPL," and is turning into a full client because spotify-tui is the only client I can find on FreeBSD. https://github.com/jl2/cl-spotify/

At work I've been helping the test team write functional tests for some Windows software, which I haven't used in years, so the past week I was re-learning "just enough" about Windows and Python's win32com library, and learning about AutoIt for the first time.

I've been learning to track stand on my bike - it's something to do during stoplights.

And I impulse bought a pot roast on Friday, so today or tomorrow I'm going to learn how to cook one.
Thanks Simon. I'd originally written this script to export my DVD ratings from Netflix, since there's no API for that either. It was easy to adapt it to HN.

I wanted to show people that it's possible (and easy) to get to your own data!
“I’m shaking hands continuously. I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know. I continue to shake hands.“

Guess who said that a couple of weeks ago.

I really hope this doesn’t kill him.
Flamebait? Lol.

Communist China. Full stop.

If it's necessary to say any more than that feel free to order a history book. It's ironic that naivete is allowed, but the obvious is not.
Just scan receipts that will tell you what’s in stock as the user bought it
Not sure I understand the first question, but if the topic itself contains "!", that's fine by the app, as long as it doesn't use the characters that the OS doesn't allow (like slashes).

The vertical bar syntax is also supported, so you can write [[Topic|display name]] and "display name" will show.

I usually leave punctuation out of the link, like `[[name]]'s`.

> Also do both types of links provide the same affordances? If I write [[Topic]] vs [Topic](topic.md) is there any semantic difference?

No semantic different.

UX-wise, right now [[ auto-completes from the list of files in your folder, whereas [Topic]( doesn't.
Screensharing your talk slides is skeuomorphic
I guess it depends on how you look at it, but if the plugin is a self-contained module that can be managed independently from the app it's configuring, I wouldn't really say it's code that's "in" the configuration.

> ... but ad-hoc logic do exist.

True. I don't disagree, no tool is right for every job.
US state governors don't have the authority to pull medical licenses.
> Having a programmable config is how you end up with horrible interdependencies where function f() does foo, and you can't figure out why it's not blowing up, until you realize the only caller is dynamically configured in staging_env_4.json which is emitted by config_generator.py which always ensures the precondition for foo, but only if it's also generating prod_env.json at the same time, but it's OK because we always do that anyway, and you're not sure if you need another cup of coffee or whiskey.

That sounds like the opposite of what the article describes. The point of having configuration as code is having all code related to config in a single file. There is no config generation, nor config loading.
I am ignorant of this. Why an MRI?
I have, at [1], though this is literally the first time I dabble in android apps, so quality is alpha at best. I use it frequently ant works for me though.

[1] https://github.com/DavidVentura/Bose_QC35_Android
That looks like a fairly straightforward case of private equity company buys struggling retail business, tries to turn it around, fails and company declares bankruptcy.

They bought Toys R Us for a price of 6.6 billion and had 5 billion in debt after the sale. So PE borrowed 5 billion against Toys R Us and invested 1.6 billion in cash.

There is no way an institutional investor let them pay themselves 1.6 billions in dividends while the company struggled.

Here's an article that basically says all the PE companies lost all their money on the investment.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2017/09/19/the-big-...
Every company uses JavaScript too but let’s not pretend like it’s a top-tier programming language.
Yeah, I wonder why they decided on that as well.

The first time I learned about this syntax is from MediaWiki's internal link syntax [1], I wonder if there are any predecessors before them.

[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Links
I'll probably get a lot of shit for this, but LeetCode.

I've recently been furloughed, and I think that redundancies aren't too far away. There aren't many companies hiring in my area at the moment, and if I'm going to move it's going to be for a big company, so I'm dusting off the CV and am applying to some Big N companies.

A recruiter recently reached out to me, and I've got an interview with one Big N company coming up soon, so am using my new-found free time to study and, at the very least, be a bit more employable at the end of this pandemic.
I am involuntarily howling internally in anguish, and if the feeling could speak, it would be screaming "parse, don't validate" (https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-va...).

If some config values are valid when X is true, and other config values are valid when X is false, then use a different schema for the two cases. This is what discriminated unions are for: for representing conditionals statically, inspectably, serialisably!

If some config values are valid when X is 0.339, and some are valid when X is 0.340, and some are valid when X is 0.341, and so on, then… I don't know how to help, and maybe I must just avert my eyes in shame as I implement the dynamic logic. (But in that case it seems a bit odd to say you're "telling the program what to do" with this configuration; I'd say you're bolting on a little extra program at the start.)
Rust did have [] at some point. It was switched well before 1.0.
so, what's the difference with Zim which also stores your information on a wiki written with Markdown-ish syntax on your hard drive and is also extensible with plug-ins ? https://zim-wiki.org/
Personally, I group these use cases under "infrastructure provisioning". The use case here is completely different - for example, you won't have a non-developer modifying the configs. So in this case, automation is a good idea.
Groovy solves this really nice https://mrhaki.blogspot.com/2009/10/groovy-goodness-using-co...
I too have an interest in OSINT. Inspired by the work of Bellingcat [1] (who have uncovered some serious warcrimes through their OSINT work).

[1] https://www.bellingcat.com/
I used to be a Org-mode evil user and still have my ~/.deft accessible as a VimWiki directory. They are all just plain text and accessible from vim or emacs or any other plain text editor so I do not see any lock in.

While VimWiki is great with backlinks and would have better adoption with a rename to the current hotness: VimRoam or VimWhateverSaasNotetaker, linking is trumped by Ripgrep/Fzf/Ag/Ack functionality.

I think the take home is stated in LONGEVITY of https://org-roam.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
I started hacking on a browser extension to inject source-maps into requests using HTTP headers this week. It's a dev tools extension which should allow full source-maps to be used in production sites without the usual comment at the end of the file. I've never done dev tools browser extensions before so it's fun to learn about.
> "Communist China" intends to evoke specific emotion.

As. It. Should.

China IS a communist based country. That is 100% fact. If the phrase evokes anything, it's a reminded for those who have forgotten.

Thank you for proving my point. The naive are many. They need to be reminded.
Design User Interface
I don't think that's the point. Whether the machine is small or big, the physical presence is the pain point
Thank you so much!

Data Compression:

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1991-03/page/n375/...

Taos: (the article seems to only have been in the international edition of Byte)

https://sites.google.com/site/dicknewsite/home/computing/byt...

Taos discussed previously on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15527936

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607
Need to think about charge displacement and fields rather than electrons. The electrons moving in wire (direct current) circuit only move, on average, a few cm/sec. Now the charge displacement moves at the speed of light.

Think of a tube stuffed tightly with marbles. Push the marbles at one end, and they move near instantly at the other end. The force transfers instantly, but the marbles may hardly move.

Now imagine the marbles connected with stiff, little springs. Push on one end, and the compression wave moves through the charges quickly (the speed depends on the spring constant). It hits the other end, yielding a little more charge accumulation, then bounces back, yielding a little less charge. Do that a 2.5 billion times a second and you have a WiFi antenna. The charges don’t move much all; it’s the charge displacement that moves, which is the E and H field. The key is also that the displacement must have acceleration (harmonic motion) to have a derivative. Accelerating charges radiate; constant velocity charges (direct current) don’t.

The jist of it is that all the energy is contained in the fields. That metal rod has charge that is easily displaced.

Now as to how an accelerating charge radiates; I can’t remember, but Feynman covers it in his 3 volume lectures.
Learning some Vue.js - struggled a bit to get into React (nothing against React, might try it again later), but I find Vue+Typescript with class components works well for me as a .NET dev.

Web dev tooling really has come a long way in the past few years!
Optimization · Crafting Interpreters
There's no sync right now, the source of truth is your local folder.

P.S. When I read bidirectional sync I misread it as bidirectional links, which is something we're working on as well!
I once wrote yet another JS static website generator. It incorporated exactly what you mention: powerful configuration. It was pretty awesome, each website could write their own extension functions and really enhance the way the generated HTML was formed.

In 8 months I couldn't understand head nor tails of the configuration, where and when certain functions were used, etc.

It was (and is) my greatest disaster in writing a static website generator. (And I'd written 3 pretty decent ones before that). FWIW here's the code: https://github.com/ergo-cms
The irony on this one is pretty strong. I bet that merely a few weeks ago, he and his government were planning to find ways to dismantle the NHS, and now here we are.

Poetic justice? Karma?
Haha, thanks, it's not directly based on a particular bug, but the way configs are managed did push me several times to wonder "If I walk out, buy a bottle of whiskey, come back and start drinking it, will I get fired?"

To be fair, I didn't do it... yet. I have family, I need salary. -_-
This is pretty much my experience with stored proc codebases too. I do consider SQL to be a very simple language, but store proc codebases tend to become incredibly complex. Finding an engineer that can maintain SQL code is very easy. Finding one that can maintain a particular maze of 1000+ stored procedures, views, functions, table triggers... is a completely different question.
US Pneumonia Deaths – Dropoff
Crafting Interpreters Is Complete
But I read in several places that smaller banks had 0% reserve requirements. Also since covid-19 liquidity crisis, the Fed lowered it to 0% for all banks. So this ratio of 9 to 1 is outdated and the liquidity crisis proved to us that this 9 to 1 ratio was not sustainable to begin with.

The small banks were the ones printing money out of thin air. A lot of that newly printed money just happened to find its way back to the big banks due to corporate centralization of capital but it wasn't enough.

You can't understand how the financial system works just by looking at the biggest banks... You have to look at all the banks in aggregate and see how the new money flows into the system.

The fact is that new money which was printed and loaned out of thin air enters the financial system faster than interest accrues on all the old loans which were themselves printed out of thin air at an earlier date.

If you're a central bank and you created your own unique currency out of nothing (which is precisely what they did) and loaned 100 units of it to some people at 10% interest over a 1 year term... How will they be able to repay you back 110 units of the same currency considering that there are only 100 units in existence? Not possible. The only way it can happen is if you keep constantly injecting new loans into the system and the credit from the new loans ends up paying for the debt and interest of the old loans.
Multiplying backward for profit – Daniel Lemire's blog
Crafting “Crafting Interpreters”
There is an Anki Deck for the words / meaning / pictographs... [1] I am fascinated that this is a 14 character alphabet. I imagine if a CS major or mathematician made this they would have been strongly inclined to base 16 for instance.
This feels a lot like a language version of lisp...

[1]: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1548566798
Unfortunately I agree. It would have been interesting.
If you think about it, configuration is a form of scripting.
Hey Zel! Congrats to you and all involved for keeping this historic game alive.
Gulp 4 because, grr, excessive breaking changes from 3.9.1.

Also how to fix my car. I'm currently refreshing all the coolant pipes since once ruptured the other day. It's not that hard, but some of the pipes are difficult to get to, and I'm procrastinating about disassembling essentially the entire front end of the vehicle in order to be able to access the radiator and replace pipes attached to it. I've already replaced the ruptured pipe no problem but, since all the pipes are the same age, I figure it's only a matter of time before another splits.
> If you feel the need to put code in your runtime config, that means your design sucks.

Hello from every plugin system ever. True fact: not all configuration is basic.
Refactoring Ruby

I am a UX person, but often dabbled in Ruby on Rails. Currently for the the first time working on a more serious app and now reading the book refactoring ruby, is very illuminating, going through my code again and rereading makes me see many mistakes and possible improvements.
Sponge 1.43: A website crawler and links downloader command line tool [Kotlin]
I agree, and there are the same politician leanings in climate change non-profits and think tanks as with anything else. Sometimes they may justify sightly more alarming views of data to gain more funding; justifying it with, "Well, it's going to be bad anyway"
Saltstack is an interesting compromise... states can be described in a serialization format or in Python. I used Saltstack a lot at my last company and really liked it because for most cases, you could just use YAML... but when that didn't work, you could bring in a "real" programming language (python).
Well, also as a journalist you can not get away with making up stories. There was a recent case of a high class journalist, who did that and was caught.

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

But he did so very brutal so to say. The problem with journalism is mostly not straight lying, but missleading and bending the truth until it fits the agenda. So a classic journalist should not have another agenda than the truth. But this type seems to be very rare today.
I'm sure that Tata/Infosys/Cognizant will be happy to supply you with dozens of CVs claiming COBOL experience and then give crash courses to any candidates selected.
Part of the issue with meth specifically is that there are legal 'cousins', although the expected levels of prescriptions differing could tell.

Really the sewage issue is just proof that the system is broken on multiple layers. First off is sticking with the war on drugs when it is clear that fighting abstract concepts or inanimate objects is like getting drunk and boxing with a lamppost - you just look stupid and hurt yourself. Second the precedents and doctrines of 'in plain view' of discards including what is essentially legally required. They were done in an era where the data would be useless to the police even if they could process it. Third, for all of their new data the process isn't actually improving things on any level. Fourth they are running on tautologies enforcing because they must enforce not because they have any vision for an outcome or a connection between their actions and results beyond 'because it is their job'.
I would recommend just going to a site like themeforest.net and buying a theme you like. I did that, searched for “bootstrap 4” under their landing page, and quickly built a site that would look better than anything I could ever do.
I have to integrate a UI into our application that allows people to design any kind of directed acyclic queue they want. This might be a great candidate for that.
Bloomberg publishes an article celebrating China’s wet markets
Sure, Python is dynamically typed, but it supports type hints and avoids implicit type conversions. I'm sure that quote is aimed squarely at YAML, it is an absolute nightmare by comparison.
Audio programming and all jungles surrounding it - C++, plugin frameworks, Fourier transform, filters design etc. Step by step, often hard but also rewarding.
How to Open a GTFS Bus Feed in the Browser
It could not only be because of treatment but because of diagnostics, eg taking a CT if his chest. I am not sure if it’s feasible to do CT Scans at home
Excerpt:

"The saga began when Mochizuki, a respected number theorist quietly posted his preprints on 30 August 2012 — not on arXiv.org, mathematicians’ preferred repository, but on his own webpage at RIMS. Written in an impenetrable, idiosyncratic style, the papers seemed to entirely consist of mathematical concepts that were completely unfamiliar to the rest of the community —

“like you might be reading a paper from the future, or from outer space”,

wrote Jordan Ellenberg, a number theorist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, on his blog soon after the papers appeared."

...Which makes it all the more a subject of curiousity -- and worth looking at...
VST/AUs are more likely to be written from scratch, often inside a wrapper like JUCE to abstract away the OS-specific details.

CSound is a grab-bag of mediocre DSP algos hacked together from various sources by academics who have no interest in professional production values.

While you can build your own synths with Csound, they don't usually sound very good.

Games are actually more likely to use PDLib, although there's also a lot of custom C++ in some games.

There's a significant difference in sophistication between the crude algos in Csound and the algos in successful commercial VSTs like Serum, Uhe's synths, the Roland Cloud collection, SoftTube, UAD, and FabFilter mixing tools, and so on.
Preparedness for a High-Impact Respiratory Pathogen Pandemic [pdf]
Well, for simple enough protocols and bored enough amateurs
My wishlist for a perfect declarative language (configs being one primary use) is something like:

* Not turing complete.

* Imports/exports

* Comments

* Variables

* Statically typed (amongst other benefits, allows you to use it for RPC, like protobuf)

I've started implementing such a language 2 or 3 times, but JSON is just barely good enough that I haven't been able to justify the effort to flesh it out. Taking JSON and adding types (inline in the grammar; schemas aren't good enough) and comments would get us 80% of the way there.
What are you using to create a customer facing UI/frontend? It sounds like Hasura is just for backend
This is a very hard problem. Not a silver bullet but I’ve often found that metrics are the best way (again not guaranteed) to get the money (wo)men on board. If you can demonstrate concretely how the legacy code affects your operational readiness or agility, it might make it a better sell to invest in refactoring. However the lack of standard tools to do this is a problem.

The problem with code is that most non technical companies don’t have a clue how this thing works. They use analogies. And for most folks the analogy is that of a machine that once built never breaks down. If you can demonstrate viscerally how bad the system is, it can help get better support.
Lisps are great as embedded scripting and configuration languages! Lisp is XML done right.
Same. Do you know where I can find notes on the course? I took some notes but I would like to have a summary of everything so I can remember it every once in a while.

Amazing course btw.
X (x.org) xlib xcb running on Void Linux (development.) Also reading The Animators Survival Kit.
https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/master/HOCON.md#hoc...
I agree. This had the style of a "Things I won't Work With" column, except that those generally describe experiments done for pure research (or possibly military/rocketry applications).

It's interesting that chemistry for pharmaceutical purposes can involve similarly nasty substances.

The article also does a great job conveying how much of a frustration minuscule yields must be.
This is true. You can do good journalism and lose money (or have a wealthy backer who funds your loss-making newspaper) or you can make a profit by getting your "journalists" to publish lots of sensationalist stories. Y'know, Clickbait. (source: I ran a newspaper).
Interesting, I did _not_ know the reference (I'm a SWE, not in scientific community), and I thought it was a clickbait headline. Obviously this differs from the person above me ^ who clicked the link _because_ of the reference.

Just perspective, and I'm very happy to know the reference now.
If you use Selenium & Chrome WebDriver you can disable loading images by : AddUserProfilePreference("profile.default_content_setting_values.images", 2)
Covid-19 Safety Guide – share the card, not the virus
Maybe, it’s an open question whether or not what you are calling time is a useful way to look at the problem the article is talking about. The article wants to know if time is a universal constant (as in quantum mechanics) or if it’s malleable and relative (as in general relativity). It’s not clear to me if viewing time as a history is useful here.
Huge thanks to Mr. Nystrom for writing this. It's been very useful and I've learned a ton reading/working through it.
This is smart. I'm adding this to my HN favorites.
will our clouds be running in 30-40 years? will they expose the same APIs?. There is a hidden pro that there will be a maximum "unnattended" lifetime to a lot of todays software.
Looks like Dhall would be a perfect fit for you.

> Dhall is a programmable configuration language that you can think of as: JSON + functions + types + imports

https://dhall-lang.org
My takeaway from the comments is that software development is not monolithic and what's appropriate for your application may be anything from a couple lines in a text file to literal python.