skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
COBOL programs are divided into paragraphs that start with a paragraph name and have a group of statements within the paragraph. A program starts at the first paragraph and continues sequentially through multiple paragraphs until a STOP RUN statement is executed or it executes the last statement in the last paragraph. Easy peasy.

Well, not so fast. If you PERFORM a paragraph, then it's like a BASIC GOSUB statement, or "jump and store" in assembly language. Sort of like a function call, but with no local variables.

Or you can do PERFORM A THRU B to jump to paragraph A, continuing sequentially until the end of paragraph B.

Or you can do PERFORM A THRU B VARYING X FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL C, which is sort of like a for loop.

The nasty thing about all this is that looking at a paragraph (block of code), you can't tell shit about how it gets executed. Does it fall through to the next paragraph? You can't tell: that's determined dynamically at runtime. Is it a loop? Can't tell. That's one of the things that makes large COBOL programs really hard to understand.

Another fun COBOL statement is ALTER:

https://riptutorial.com/cobol/example/19820/a-contrived-exam...

If you think GOTO is bad, it's a walk in the park compared to the lethal combination of ALTER + GOTO. Basically, when you say GO TO A, it can go to some other place based on a previous ALTER statement. Now we're having fun!
The Incorrect Assumption Behind Sweden's Covid-19 Strategy
"I really like ad-hoc networks like this."

As one who got my license and call sign decades ago when I was at school (but which I've long since let lapse), I'm very familiar with ad-hoc networks of this type. My past AR experience also made me a great believer in mesh networks for similar reasons.

Both have one great virtue and that is that they're essentially independent from infrastructure that one doesn't own or control directly. When corporations, authoritarian states, dictatorships and or natural disasters get in one's way it's very comforting to know that one can always fallback upon some pretty low tech kit to communicate across the world.

Under reasonable conditions, an old telegraph pounder, an 807 beam power tube designed in the late 1930s and a little help from the ionosphere will still easily get you across the planet. ;-)
> The dig at JS developers is completely uncalled-for.

Oh, no, as a developer who dealt with web front-ends for a long time, I can attest - it is totally justified.

Modern Javascript, in just a matter of a few years from being a small, simple language with a few quirks has blown into this colossal monstrosity. ECMAScript specification today is almost as big as Java's. There are tons of things that were added ( and still being added ) without careful thinking and upfront design. And that not to mention things that break all the time in the ecosystem of any JS framework. Have you ever tried updating dependencies in a nodejs project that is just a few months old? It rarely is simple and straightforward. Things break left and right. It feels there's no stability at all, compared to Clojure(script) projects. You can pretty much pick any Clojure project (that is a few years old) and update its dependencies, and most of the time, you can expect things not to break.

People got excited about React hooks, and Clojurescript people were like: "folks, we've had a better way of dealing with stateful components for a few years now."

JS devs got excited about destructuring (which looks like a weak attempt to borrow it from Clojure), without even slightest hint of how much more straightforward and cooler destructuring actually looks and works in Clojure.

They say they love JSX, which, compared to Clojure's Hiccup, is just a total and absolute crap.

JS devs are eager to use nulish coalescing and optional chaining and write unreadable crap like: `input ?? obj?.key ? 'yes' : 'no'``. And they dare to say that Lisps are not readable? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Honestly, after years of dealing with it, my take on it is this: Javascript is a morally outdated programming language. And Typescript is somewhat not the best attempt to fix its issues.
Under Our Noses
> If your Postgres JSON schema modified for new application requirements, the table is locked until existing data is copied into the new schema, requiring applications to be quiesced during schema migration.

Are you saying that if you INSERT a row with a new JSONB property that wasn't previously included in any of the rows of that table, then the entire table gets locked while all rows are copied. And if so, do you have a source for that? I can't find anything through google.
I met Alex once in some online chats during startup school a couple of years back where he was working on a universal basic income system. Very smart and interesting guy. Very disappointed that somebody like him has to deal with this, it’s probably a major blow to his project
Discrimination means recognizing the difference between things. You're insisting that discrimination is required to be non-discriminatory.
I think people may be rushing to judgment, as a snapshot in time right now may not tell you where things will end up in each country.

I was looking at a chart of the trajectory of the epidemic in different countries, and it was interesting because there were at least three qualitatively different types of curves.

South Korea and China are notable for nearly completely flattening out after a certain point. The former might tend to undermine conspiracy theories about China, I don't know. On the other hand, why have no other countries had the same experience? Could it be the response, or characteristics of data gathering and reporting?

Japan and Singapore have risen much more slowly than the US and hard-hit European countries, but do not seem to be flattening which is surprising and seems ominous.

The western countries that have a lot of cases seem to have a characteristic sort of gradual curve, that rose faster early on, gradually is leveling out, but not completely (yet). The US looks similar to the others, except it is larger and continuing to suggest a higher peak.

I am wondering if Japan, and maybe the US states that are not initially seeing a lot of cases, will end up being a second wave after things seem to be under control in a lot of places.
See also reddit programming buddies [0], though it's usually beginners

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingBuddies/
Very likely you meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRACTRAN. Agree this is a clever beast.
TBH i don't know. I was playing video and computer games since a very young age, so it might have to do with this but at the same time i know i wasn't paying much attention to latency until my late 20s. Even at 25 i'd be running Beryl (one of the first compositors) with its massive latency and i'd be writing games with software rendered mouse cursors, both being incredibly poor in terms of latency and i'd just not notice it.

So perhaps it can be learned?
A drive thru food bank in Texas
> Is there any sweeter recompose? I'm a huge Waits fan, huge Seinfeld fan. I have never imagined a connection before now, but my God.

What's the connection to Waits? As far as I know, the Tom of Tom's Diner (and Tom's Essay) isn't Tom Waits, and I don't think he covered the song.
> A decentralized website makes both parts censorship-resistant: it uses IPFS (a distributed file storage network) for storage

This is a bit over-prescriptive: there are other distributed file storage networks out there. For example, Sia's Skynet. (Disclaimer: I maintain a Skynet portal)
Yeah, there were some hacky things you could do, e.g. using software from Quarterdeck? Don't remember. I'd have to go back and look at docs I wrote from a program I wrote t the time. I seem to remember supporting some alternative screen resolutions in a an MS-DOS directory manager I sold.
You can't. It's fairly obvious they expect the publishers to come back and claim Google is being unfair and have the courts make up a rate.
> accidentally

Google don't accidentally terminate accounts or remove/block videos.

They intentionally left that job to AlGoRiThMs instead of using actual people capable of reason/thought. That's no "accident".
It’s not about penalizing humility. I think you missed the point I’m making. It’s that there's a human factor to interviews, and part of that is presenting yourself in the best light.

It’s a subconscious thing, but you really don’t want people to start thinking negatively about you, because it can cause that negativity to linger and affect your assessment. You especially don’t want someone to end an interview on the negative note. Do it in the middle if you have to but make sure you start and end positively

Again, there’s a fine line between too much humility and too much hubris. Humility is fine in moderation , but you have to keep from being excessive or you do a disservice to yourself as much as overselling yourself.
Oh wow, I think I learned Pascal via Turbo Pascal. When I was 14 in 1984 I went to a Computer Camp at Virginia Tech and we used Pascal in this monolithic IDE sort of thing. Maybe it was actually UCSD Pascal.... We made a simple 16 room 4x4 dungeon with keys and doors. Each group writing the code for one room and them tying them all together. It came out not bad for a bunch of kids.

When I got my Amiga a year later I was happy that there was a Pascal compiler, then saddened that it only had stdio sort of interface. No way to open windows and draw things or the like. Luckily I found a FORTH that not only had a 68k assembler but also all of the constants and things you needed to write graphics and the bonus of making that single executable file.

Sorta sad I never really got to use Pascal after that. By university time it was all Assembly, FORTRAN and C for the CS classes.
How Trump Is Fueling a Corona Disaster
A related idea that I’m interested in but find a bit hard to articulate is to describe “simple” Turing complete languages, where simplicity is defined more by ease of reasoning for a human than by any objective metric.

Basically, if I wanted to provide someone with a Turing complete language, what’s the simplest/easiest thing I could provide, that would still be useful?
That could be the effect of conserving ventilators for the most seriously ill, in a C19 hotspot. That is, selection bias caused by a tight supply of ventilators.
If you think of it in terms of the words "need" and "alternative" then you will find a reason not to use Scala. Personally, I have found it painful to watch Java tack on Scala features years late and in awkward and clumsy ways. Encountering ideas first in Scala and then in Java is too often like learning math from a modern textbook and then looking at the same math in a textbook from a hundred years ago. You appreciate how decades of small improvements have made the subject less intellectually taxing despite the fundamental content not changing at all. For Java to end up on the wrong side of this comparison even when it implements features years later, to me marks it as a language in terminal decline, no matter if its popularity has begun to reflect it yet.
Good. Here I was thinking Java 17 to be released in 2021 will be competitor to Go 1.0 when it finally have value types.
For Chrome/ium (very similar for Firefox)

- Ctrl+Shift+D (bookmark all), optionally type name, press Enter

- Ctrl+Shift+O [Cmd+Shift+ B on Mac IIRC] (open bookmarks), click on the folder or navigate to it with Tab and arrows

- Important: press Tab to select the contents rather than the folder

- Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C
Causal's a bit like a spreadsheet and a bit like programming — you can use it to construct arbitrary models by creating "variables" and linking them together with "formulas".

Compared to Crystal Ball, it can do all the distribution stuff — variables can take on any kind of distribution you define. But we (try to) make it trivial to use these — you can write formulas like "5 to 10", and we map that onto a sensible distribution for you, so you don't need any probability/stats knowledge, whereas CB is a lot more technical. The CB suite also now includes some other tools that can do things like optimisation, which Causal doesn't do yet.

Causal works in most modern browsers, and we're working on handling non-Chrome browsers better :) Not sure what you mean by "coupled to the google ecosystem"!
Oddly, I've gotten bitten by code indexing tools so many times, I like that it is not part of my editor. I sometimes think of seeing up autocorrect. But I find I prefer a greppable codebase over an autocorrect one.

That said, plenty of starting packages that do have this setup. I think doom Emacs is the popular one nowadays.
I consent this argument. Unfortunately there are parts of human nature that imo require checks and balances also with help in these circumstances. Any help money that goes to an actually unneedy person or business or is spent in unresponsible ways takes unnecessarily from others, either now or in the future. It‘s a fine line that shifts depending on the trust the acting parties have in each other.
However, these bad actors are everywhere, even in Germany are apparently cases like public servants sent home with full pay claiming help money or people making up fake lost businesses. So also there checks are increasing
That does appear to be the crowd consensus. However I have recently witnessed, on IRC, someone who was genuinely entering a schizophrenic episode be brought to reality and convinced to seek help by a kindly and understanding channel. Knowing that this is possible, I find it difficult to remain silent if I think there's even a small chance my words might actually make a difference for someone, and the harm inflicted seems to me to be relatively minor; I seem to have upset the crowd here considerably more than the person I was actually addressing.

However, the overwhelming negative feedback suggests there might be a flaw in my logic. So I would appreciate some feedback - why is this so very objectionable?
> one can still say that in syntax similarity, Crystal is a 'faster and memory efficient Ruby with static types'

Actually they don't even share the same syntax for declaring getters and setters. Honestly speaking I think people really only think of Crystal as "faster Ruby with static types" because they've mostly been exposed to C-style languages so anything that doesn't look like C just blurs together as "the same".

(Obviously Crystal is heavily inspired by Ruby, but there's a huge difference between "heavily inspired by" and "an implementation of".)
It would be cool if anybody else could make a real competitor to youtube then Google would have to actually cater more to content creators. However, sadly I think youtube is just too far ahead and google has way to many resources and time spent in the space for any competitor to even be able to make a dent into youtube's market.
Some of them didn't break any more, they were always broken. Or, some of them were purely additive. We added mitigations against https://blog.qualys.com/securitylabs/2017/06/19/the-stack-cl..., that was categorized as one.
I have always used this mode when running TP, without any difficulties. I think it was enabled by a simple key when launching .exe, but I don't remember exactly, which means it was something simple and inconsequential.
How many people are actively backing up their email on their own? Backing up email seems much simpler than running your own email server, but it's still going to require some technical know how.

To me, the comment that you can just manage your own backups suggests that the service isn't right for anyone nontechnical or technical people who are too busy to backup a hosted service.
Liberalism in a nutshell:

Majority rule is tyrannical when they are the minority.

But when they are the majority they are all for it.

Keep the Senate. The House of Representatives is crazily radical regardless of who’s in charge. Liberals advocating for this just think what the Republican house would have done under Obama.
I mean, I get what you are saying. But the extensible nature of Emacs is years beyond what other editors typically offer. Can offer?

Elisp is not the best lisp out there, but it is still a really powerful language. And that the editor doesn't have any tricks/parts that you can't use as a user is huge.
Hi! I am the "Scott" from Purelymail in question. In the hopefully unlikely event I'm hit by a bus, I do have friends who could step in to keep it running for a while. One of my infrastructural goals is also to have it run itself without manual intervention, where feasible. It's not 100% there yet, though. (Hence the beta.)

As to the terms of service, as far as I know the clause you quoted is fairly standard cover-your-ass. I've probably seen it in a few other service terms. Presumably, Fastmail words it as they do because they've covered all the reasons they might want to do so in their terms already, and have decades of legal experience.
The doctor who has been most in the news about this in the US is Cameron Kyle-Sidell

https://twitter.com/cameronks

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNgMagm3-NwKdfGiXp8WILg

https://thinkingcriticalcare.com/2020/03/28/covid-clinical-d...

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/928156

* * *

Here’s a preprint from Italian doctors Gattinoni & al. in the journal Intensive Care Medicine https://www.esicm.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/684_author-...
It was my first program in Turbo Pascal. Until then I'd been a BASICA programmer and opposed to "structured programming," which I thought would stifle my creativity. I'd spend long days with code printouts all over the floor, tracing through GOTOs to find my bugs.

Then dad brought home Turbo and I tried it out with the GoL. It worked correctly the first time it ran. That had never happened to me before. I never touched BASICA again.

Sad to see Conway go. He was born the same year as my dad, who died several months ago.
Could that not be because of shortages? If there's a shortage of ventilators then only the very sickest patients will get them. Don't see how it's valid to compare numbers against disease in "peacetime".
Amazon has a new plan for drone home delivery: Radar landing pads
Do we know if US doctors are making much use of ECMO (machines that put oxygen in blood directly) for COVID patients? I read that the FDA just approved emergency usage a few days ago, but keep seeing it mentioned in reports from China. If ventilators alone aren't effective, maybe ECMO machines are the piece we really need to be ramping up production on.
Twitter Down
https://api.twitterstat.us/
Showing green
It really saddens me when I see topics like this and just doing it yourself doesn't come up as an option.

Running a mail server is not difficult, and I firmly believe that deliverability is quite solvable. This was basic sysadmin 101 about a decade ago, one skill of many that's getting lost in the S/I/PaaS ecosystem.
That could be the case in Italy, but New York has not run out of ventilators, and I have not seen any reports of pre-emptive rationing.
I love this guy's videos, I've been watching them for a year or so now.

He also made a series [0] where he built the CPU, microcode and all using logic gates and components. As a pure software guy I found it very enlightening.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyznrdDSSGM
I _really_ felt that in JavaScript, especially es2015. So many updates came out at once, that people didn't realize many of the benefits they received from new features were now much less important because of other features that were included around the same time.

There was a huge rush to use classes, which was sugar around the prototype system, but happened when we also got spread operators, Object.assign, and property name shorthand. We could already easily express the concept of a class far more easily than we were doing before, but because it all came out at the same time it didn't really click for the community at large and a lot of what became idiomatic didn't really feel important enough for a language update.

Ditto with generators and async functions, which while merely a very specific application of a generator is far better known. Again, not sure we needed all this extra syntax so you can say `async function foo() { await bar()`, when `co(function* foo() { yield bar()` was already available (if co were simply added to the Promise object). We're also now tying the language to a very specific implementation, when the co approach is explicit about saying what's responsible for taking control from the yielded function (a Promise).
It was caused mostly by the way MSOffice access was delivered to VBA at that time. And maybe also by VBA itself. Cannot remember. Anywho. VB standalone was pretty decent. Nice you have the library. Its part of the history
(Full disclosure: FB Engineer, not in HR) - last I checked the standard thing for engineers was to be hired for a very generic role (eg “software engineer”); being interviewed by people with the same role. No aiming for (or trying to avoid) any specific team (of the ~20 people who I’ve interviewed who ended up getting hired, I think 3 of them ended up choosing to join my team?)

Once hired, there’s 6 weeks of training on all the internal tools / architecture / how things fit together. During the final two weeks of training (and a week after if you’re still trying to decide), you’d pick a few teams who look like they match your interests and skills, spend a few days with each, then decide which to join.

> Right, because I'll suddenly decide my passion isn't the interactive stuff that I have the terminal degree in my field in, I'm going to want to do backend Go stuff all of a sudden /s

I mean, that can (and does) happen… I’ve had teammates decide they’d had enough of fighting buggy closed-source BIOS firmware so they go spend a year working on live video streaming, then get into AI to learn something completely new. I’ve no idea what percentage of people make large switches like that, but it’s common enough that the process is well known and supported.
I'm intrigued by McTaggart's theory that time is unreal. However, try as I may, I cannot understand A-series and B-series.

I think that time does not exist, it is merely an abstraction that measures the relative rate of movement of matter. Everything we use to "measure" time is based on the physical movement of matter: pendulum, hourglass, rotation of Earth, watch balance wheel, even electronic crystal vibrations.

When we say that something took an hour, we mean that it elapsed while the Earth spun 15 degrees. Or traveled 0.041 degrees around the sun. The passage of time is simply the collective movement of all the matter in the Universe. We cannot travel back in time because entropy has scattered everything.

The past is how matter was arranged before. The future is how it will be after.
Sonja: The Code
The phones made cool sounding tones when you pushed the buttons.
Altmark Incident(WW2)
What you say is correct, but note that I was talking about direct connection to a specific person.

BT is great for "giving out to the world", but if you want to send a file to a friend, using an email, a cloud drive link or Skype/whatever is more practical. Intermediary storage is required for asynchronous transmission, and even if both you and your friend are online, you still need to take an extra steps of creating the metainfo file and sending it or a magnet link first and then wait for the DHT announce and lookup procedures to execute, which can take quite some time.
And how many programmers are paid to write anything anyone has heard of? And how many new well-known not-de elopement-related tools have been written in the last few years?
I recommend Ben Eater's other videos -- his content is clean, understandable, and kind of meditative introduction to the "meat" of how computers and digital electronics in general work. Kind of like Bob Ross of computer electronics -- you can probably follow along and get a lot of this to work on your own! A good start is the 555 timer tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRlSFm519Bo