skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Same here, but stuck with json/yaml, etc. What are you thoughts on starlark for configuration language? Imperative, but with lots of functional/declarative bits - like frozen vars, no recursion, sandboxing, execution in parallel... I've also looked at jsonnet, even contributed one or two patches to speed it up in C++, but still felt the evaluation time was higher (the "go" version is faster than C++, but they (last I've checked) used slightly different evaluation rules, also C++ would get slower in bigger app due to the overuse of dynamic_cast (at least that's what I've found)).

Yeah, I'm also trying to find the magical bcl/gcl - but what was so useful (when I worked at google) was the diff tool (was it written by an intern, it was amazingly useful) - e.g. your presubmit would tell you - how the end (evaluated) result would look like, as one change in one place might have quite the ripple effect.
if your war chest covers 6 months, then at what point do you start chasing the income? do you wait until 6 months are up, or do you begin the process 2-3 months in, in the hope of resolving the situation before you run out of cash?
Modeling in Strolch
> Universities stopped training because it was not—glamorous.

It also doesn't pay very well.
Your "comment" is part of the data so it's not a real comment. I don't understand the resistance against adding comments to JOSN. This seems pretty silly to me.
In that case I consider enabling its members to own a home is one of the proper roles of society. So I would argue that is an example of society doing its job (although indirectly).
How our whole company made a transition into “A New Normal” of fully remote work
close the courts. Granted is their rent but this is an act of god
Businesses exist to serve people—both customers and as employers. In this case the businesses are also the ones being sued, and people only get affected because the business gets sued.
The neat thing about config files is that they’re easily serializable and transferrable over the network, the file system etc..

A programming language can’t do that (or if it could via eval, it would be a bad idea)
XML needs to die
If that seems tautological, you're already bought in. For others it is very much not.
Coronavirus: Queen tells UK 'we will succeed' in fight
Why bother writing a webserver when you can have systemd BE the webserver? I use the SQLite database as a standin for something heavy like Kafka, because I need to guarantee all messages are delivered and uploaded before I stop attempting to upload them again. Currently have this running on a nanode instance and a raspberry Pi 3 running a NextCloud container at home.
Over the past 40 years the West has fallen into a deep capitalist realism which completely erases the contingent nature of our economic system. Debt and property are not basic facts of reality, they require stable, predictable economic relations. Those are all out the window right now.

It may be ideologically impossible for our governments, rentiers and financial institutions to acknowledge that the suspension of daily life means the suspension of business as usual.
We can't rerun the experiment with a control version of the US in which nothing was shut down and we continued to have crowded sports events and night life. So it won't be possible to determine that the 2.2 million deaths scenario is impossible, especially if it's interpreted as 2.2 million extra deaths from either COVID-19 or other causes that could have been treatable by a medical system that wasn't completely overwhelmed.
I'd say a combination of congress and corporations.
that guy works as a school bus driver so, after work he codes all day
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar hell. They don't come back out.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22785907.

Edit: we've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. Please don't create accounts to do that with. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
What fraction of renters (companies or individuals) can afford 6months of rent?...
Iran’s ban on Telegram that was intended to facilitate domestic spying backfired
That's a perfectly reasonable position, please clearly mark your writing as an editorial.
So there you have it. There's no arguing with the monarch, after all. :-)
If society is to underwrite the risk then society should collect when times are good.

If we taxed land, landlords would long get the rent for the building, which would be far, far less, as most of the rent in prominent locations is due to the location.

If we had land value tax the govt could have reduced LVT for the duration of the crisis, leaving businesses only paying for the far smaller amount of the building.
There is merit in the criticism, especially when the "founder" now has a shop to sell items...

https://shop.konmari.com/
Imagine thinking HN is any better than Reddit in 2020
Feynman shared your opinion, so I’d say you’re in good company!
A small (but important) correction: generally, journalists do not write headlines; sub-editors do. Most subs have been journalists but most journalists do not become subs.
> But configuration is a complex task!

Should it be? If an application doesn't have configuration, then the logical thing to do would be hard code all the values it needs in the code itself. This could be done with a number of variables/constants defined in the entrypoint method for each value needed, or defining a data structure that contains all the values needed in the same method.

Reading a config file and serializing it into those variables or data structure shouldn't be a hard problem. Formats like YAML or json allow for deserailizing the string into a data structure (though you have to add your own validation). ini format files can be done the same way in a loop, but still require adding validation.

The validation could be based on data type or allowed values. While that's rather tedious, it's not complex.
That's sure a reasonable and thoughtful idea in industrialized countries where most workers live close to hand-to-mouth.
Ex-Google Engineer Hack Zip File with $300k in Bitcoin
The blog post (and your response) is actually a bit confusing, as we should be seeing inline rules -- at least that's how I've seen it in just about every textbook. The "implication" rule you suggest is actually (technically) called "elimination" (in λ-calculus, we say you eliminate a variable) and should be denoted via →e (sometimes the arrow is omitted). As a more practical example, see proposition (11) in this paper I wrote back in college[1]. There are two elimination rules, both denoted by an inline →e.

[1] https://dvt.name/logic/horse2.pdf
I don’t know why^, but the largest janitorial/cleaning companies that serve ordinary businesses^^ are franchise companies. Local independents just have to compete against branded local companies.

^I suspect it’s because janitors have access so trust of the individuals involved matters more than cost or having access to a pool of interchangeable employees.

^^There are large contractors that serve really large facilities, but that business isn’t necessary to win to be viable.
who pay for a service like what they offer?!

makes no sense. unless they have the best salesman in the universe for a very niche market like legal or health. is that the case?
It's an unprecedented catastrophe, and even if we will weather it, someone (well, many someones) will suffer (we'll all suffer, but some more than others).

Besides solving the crisis (to which most of us cannot meaningfully contribute) the main priority is preserving the rest of the society so that we can go on with as little harm as possible when the immediate crisis (virus) is over.

In this specific situation, it's obviously better to prioritize borrowers/renters over landlords, because the former are actually productive. Restaurant fails => no food; landlord goes bankrupt => house remains, it's just gonna be owned by someone else.

What complicates matters, obviously, is second-order effects; first of all, if some / many landlords are leveraged, them defaulting might impact banks, which is definitely something we don't want; if I were the government, however, I'd be saving banks directly in this situation, not landlords. The other consequence is a crash of the housing market, which IMO isn't that much of a big deal, but it's been politically untenable for a while because too much of ordinary people's wealth is tied in housing. It might be a good opportunity for a reset, though.
Yes because some also explode after treatmenr. Side effects can be serious.
Business interruption insurance is one way, though as with all insurance, the wording is very important to make sure it covers your needs.
So we just don’t have restaurants (or people working there) for a year even after the stay at home orders end? I think people saying we shouldn’t bail out businesses haven’t fully thought these things through.
Exactly. I stated calling systems that work this way "Bad by Design."

Sometimes the design is deliberately setup that way by an individual or group with something to gain, but other times it is just because the system contains different parties with competing interests.

Anytime I see a clearly inefficient or ineffective system the first question I try to figure out is whether it works that way by design. In many cases once I learn more about it, the answer is yes.
Why are taxes too low rather than spending too high? I'm perfectly okay with someone arguing either position as long as it's in the editorial/opinion section and not in economics/politics/etc. It's possible I missed it, but I did not see the original article flagged as editorial. Is "The Conversation" an opinion only source? Or is it supposed to be straight news? I guess that would change my mind.
Of course there is pros and cons in every situation, but if you want to ensure getting paid, you want to be paid upfront.
This was always cool. Wasn’t it released shortly before TF2 and pretty much steamrolled into obscurity after that?
And of you happen to still have a secure income: spend, spend, spend. Keep your income moving so it can be income to others.
We aren't ceasing all economic activity, fortunately.
Sure, but a realistic possibility of a future need for the item is already a pretty strong reason. There are a great many items in America's basements and self-storage units that don't even have that.
Funny how that's never the story when the economy is going up. Then they're suddenly amoral actors that should never have to care about the outside society or the people that they impact.
Maybe, but right now it's too early to tell and a move like that, to take advantage of developers during this time, will hurt them nonetheless. I personally have been keeping track of companies I've applied for to see how they treat people during the worst times, right now, and I won't work for a company like that. I'm sure there are other developers who would do the same.
I don’t think the deficiencies of major news organizations have ever been as blindingly obvious to me as they have been over the past month. I knew it was bad. I didn’t realize exactly how bad it was. For them, even a national crisis is just an occasion to twist against Trump. Yes Trump is far, far, far from perfect, but there’s a huge difference between honest, factual reporting and these transparent efforts to use a tragedy to take him down. Nothing more obvious than the attempt to pit Dr. Fauci as somehow being "against" Trump or being "silenced" only for him to come on national radio and set the record straight.
How are people handling the cpu load of Kubernetes?

I still see cpu burning at around 40% or more with k8s clusters (in a full setup with encryption and service mesh and all things you need for production) without even rendering one useful payload - this seems a totally wrong strategy in a world where we want to reduce energy usage - seriously, how do we accept such an enormous step back?
Then the landlord bear the risk of non payment.
Bazel is the thing that I've missed after leaving Google, (lol "bazel menu"). Back then I was using it on the surface, there were no .bzl files, but internal python rules. I actually hated it when I started, because i was like - WTF is this shit, then I've learned.

My best example would be a CI system, given a CL (changelist) it can tell you exactly what targets need to get built. In our current CI - we have put extreme whitelsits - e.g. if you have touched this folder with C++ files, these are the .sln files to build. But can't move to bazel yet (mostly Windows shop). I actively use it for my home projects (linux + windows), but that's about it.
We used to maintain multi-user machines with useful software preinstalled. It took tremendous post-deployment sneering to get from there to Docker.
I generally don't feel bad about the rich person in this equation taking the hit. 99% of the time that's the landlord.
Yeah, in the last two days there is increasing evidence that there's something else going on in at least some patients beyond "pneumonia resulting in ARDS"

That tweet is interesting. Some folks are starting the theorize that many of the pneumonia (especially, bilateral) diagnoses based on CXR might be mistaken.

The most interesting hypothesis I have encountered (way too little evidence yet to do anything but study it) is that the virus is directly interfering with haemoglobin saturation, and that the abnormal CXR is actually looking at tissue damage caused by haemoglobin degradation somewhat akin to that found in Malaria patients.

That hypothesis intends to explain the apparent efficacy of chloroquine, magnified when taken by patients early in the disease, by hypothesizing a similar mechanism of action in COVID as in Malaria -- not by being antiviral, but by inhibiting heme polymerase.

The apparent antiviral properties of the treatment are then merely keeping the patient healthy and lung-damage-free while the immune system does its thing.

If that were true, then treating COVID patients for pneumonia could be highly counterproductive.

Of course, even if the hypothesis is correct, there might be some COVID patients who do develop a bacterial secondary pneumonia -- that is an uncommon-but-not-rare complication of all respiratory illnesses. That might also explain why Azithromycin seems to make Chloroquine more effective -- each drug helping a different subset of patients, rather than actually as a combined effect.

As I say, though, there is nowhere near enough evidence yet for this hypothesis -- but it is pretty interesting. It is probably worth a study or two to evaluate.

It is a neat hypothesis in that it takes a wide variety of disparate and otherwise apparently contradictory datapoints from clinical experience and weaves them together into a coherent narrative.

Of course, that it makes a good narrative is in no way evidence for it's truth, no matter how much we humans love good narratives.
Average citizens in need should (and are in many places) getting grants instead of loans. If the government lets businesses fail because they won't issue loans, more people lose their jobs and require grants. Much more cost effective to keep businesses alive.
You can use different ways to enter pitch [0].
A common way is to use the "octave.pitch" format, such as 08.04, where 08 is the central octave (if I remember correctly) and 04 is the note E. It's common to use a score generator such as PythonScore [1, 2], and some people (myself included) like to use a regular programming language to generate the scores. I've used Common Lisp, Tcl, and Python in the past. Csound has a few frontends [3] that people may like.
AFAIK, Csound can read notes from a MIDI keyboard as well.

[0] http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/PitchTop.html

[1] http://jacobjoaquin.github.io/csd/pysco.html

[2] http://write.flossmanuals.net/csound/methods-of-writing-csou...

[3] https://csound.com/frontends.html

EDIT: remove some repetition
I don't see how this is even in question. The landlord should always be taking on the risk, that's literally their only job -- they provide nothing of value, besides that one thing. (They often don't even maintain the property or upkeep, in the US that's usually entirely on the tenants, through a third-party management service priced into the rent).

If landlords aren't willing to take the risk of tenant defaults on, then landlording should just be universally-illegal, and let the government directly cut rent-like mortgages and property-management-like upkeep for those properties. If the general public is going to keep bailing out wealthy deadbeat landlords every decade, we better at least get to keep the property.
If you just want to use the type system, why not just deserialize your JSON config into a Plain Old Object? At least in C#, you can mark a property as required and the serialization will fail if a property is missing or the wrong type.
This just sounds like solving a problem at the wrong level and making it worse. If your config is so complicated that it warrants a full-blown language, the logic should go into the main program that reads the config and decides what to do, not left inside config.

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.
In most servers you carry like two or three grenades though, usually not reloadable. It’s doesn’t imbalance that much.
Do you make your mortgage or rent payments 6 months to a year in advance? If not, why do you expect landlords to do the same?
don't count your eggs before they hatch.
I guess like with many job. You can put a little heart into it and care about the customers. This is something that is hard to replicate in scale for big cleaning company.
Not many cleaning companies do that. And those who do are loved deeply by their customers.
Whilst I'm sure landlords are in a tight spot too, what good actually comes from evicting any business right now? It's not like there are any new ones to take their place. Having an existing business with known revenue, waiting to restart once lock down ends seems better than hoping a new one will fare any better.
Strong assumption. "Never ever" is a long time for one of the youngest countries in the world.
> If journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money.

This is clearly true, but I wonder if must always be so.

In academia, lying in a publication can be career-ending, which acts to broadly 'scare them straight'. For academics, it's desirable to be highly read and cited, but to be seen to be dishonest is the end of the road. Could it be possible to create similar incentives for journalists?
I converted PyOxidizer's configuration files from TOML to Starlark because I found it effectively impossible to express complex primitives in a static configuration file and the static nature was constraining end-user utility.

A common solution to this problem is to invent some kind of templating or pre-evaluation of your static config file. But I find these solutions quickly externalize a lot of complexity and are frustrating because it is often difficult to debug their evaluation.

At the point you want to do programming-like things in a config file, you might as well use a "real" programming language. Yes, it is complex in its own way. But if your target audience is programmers, I think it is an easy decision to justify.

I'm extremely happy with Starlark and PyOxidizer's configuration files are vastly more powerful than the TOML ones were.

https://pyoxidizer.readthedocs.io/en/stable/config.html
> What are you thoughts on starlark for configuration language?

I haven't tried that yet. It might work. I mean, I've used starlark as _a_ configuration language (notably, in Bazel, or as a little prolog-standin for defining complex rules), but never really built an entire infrastructure on top of it. I would have to look into how it works my usecase (can't lie that jsonnet having an existing third-party kubernetes library was a big seller for me, even if I end up extending it). I do prefer, however, functional/lazily evaluated/declarative languages for configuration - while starlark has a very imperative taste to it.

> [...] but still felt the evaluation time was higher [...]

Yeah, that can be painful, but has not fully bitten me - my configs rarely get large enough to notice, and even if they do there is a large bottleneck somewhere else (ie. actually applying the config). Definitely also have it on my backlog to look into sending some patches for that.

> was the diff tool

There exists something like this, kind of, for when you're using jsonnet to emit k8s resources: `kubecfg diff`. But that's for diffing against prod, not an evaluation against a previous VCS tip. Definitely a tool that should exist, though :). I do think Dhall is a bit further down the road of having this sort of tooling actually exist upstream.
The way to be economically successful in modern America is to leverage yourself to the hilt to get massive returns during good times (while cautious savers miss out on getting such massive gains), and then turn around and ask for a bailout if things go south and the heavy leverage and lack of rainy day savings pushes you underwater.
All models are wrong, some are deadly.
Subtasks vs. Capabilities
Automated web testing without writing any code
Flamebait like this is not allowed here. If you have substantive concerns about, say, data, it's fine to post about that thoughtfully. "Communist China subverting the West" is the opposite of that, though. Please don't toss bombshell rhetoric into HN threads, it just blows everything up into crap.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Tips para nombrar variables en JavaScript
Is this reasonable to expect from a business where 6 months of cash reserves are not legally required? Can't the restaurant that saves 1 month of reserves instead of 6 months charge lower prices and still turn a profit, thus outcompeting the prudent save-for-6-months restaurant?
Why habits are the “compound interest” of self-improvement
What about writing YAML, parsing it in your preferred programming language, and document what's expected ?
We're doing it with thousands of lines of YAML, it's working great.
> We also start seeing changes in weather patterns that are hard to ignore even for laymen.

Hard to ignore by motivated reasoners! Changes in weather patterns observed by individuals using their own experience are not evidence of global climate change. If there's science showing that, then yes, but personal experience doesn't add any value to the conclusion, it just reinforces whatever the person already wants to believe.
No, I wasn't thinking of "Hollywood accounting". I was thinking of the kinds of ways of "not making money" that truly do result in corporation-wide losses on paper, reliably, year after year, despite the fact that such claims are clearly false on their face because if a company was actually incurring those losses it would go bankrupt instead of expanding (which it is). One good example of such a way to manufacture a paper loss so as to avoid paying taxes, while in actuality the business's value continues to grow, is depreciation.
BTW, I've corresponded with a couple journalists who wrote similar articles. They admitted that they'd never read the Annual Report of the company they were complaining about, and were just repeating what someone else told them. They didn't seem to understand the meaning of common accounting terms, either.