skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I might have been concerned about this at one point in time, emacs and gcc are some of the most ported pieces of software in existence. That said, there have been some discussions about trying to work toward a specification for how things like org-babel should work so that other platforms can replicate the behavior inside of emacs. However, as others have stated elsewhere in the comments, once you accept emacs into your life there isn't really much incentive to spend time standardizing interfaces for things that can be handled more informally and as needed by the users. As a result those efforts need some internal incentive (like better or clearer documentation) to have development time allocated to them.
I didn't know what they were but now I see that they're those little green things that remind me of square ladybugs. I had one tag along on my bike ride today.
> No one will ever convince me

Well for anyone else listening, a RESTful design would help you know whether you're creating or updating a user. You would know if you're allowed to repeat the request without side effects. That's useful in a distributed api where half open requests are inevitable.
Ask HN: Recommendations for applied engineering and math books for programmers?
I enjoy reading about engineering and math. Unfortunately, I always make simple arithmetic errors, so I never had the courage to take anything beyond calculus and linear algebra in college. (Decades ago, we had to calculate everything by hand.)

Over the last few months, I noticed people on HN mentioning books and articles that introduce engineering methods, e.g., control systems, to programmers. This approach works well for me because IDEs and debuggers eagerly notify me about errors in my code.

Can you recommend any good self-study books that:

- introduce methods and concepts from engineering and math,

- show you how to code them,

- equip you with just enough intuition to let you apply the methods and to follow more advanced, traditional textbooks?

Ideally, the books would:

- be applied,

- use free software,

- not rely on custom packages written by the author,

- not focus on data science and statistics, because I have a pretty good understanding of these areas.

I am particularly interested in signal processing, control systems, simulations, and difference equations, but I am really open to any recommendations.

Thanks!
This is very cool...

I wish there was a better explanation of the formula for defining your own pattern (the last example).
Not great for the climate, unfortunately. If fossil fuel companies can just go bankrupt and clear all their debt while continuing to operate without skipping a beat, it's nigh impossible for something like renewable energy to compete.
The tragedy is that the wild muscadines don't seem to produce a sweet fruit.
> If I gave you three APIs that all claimed to be REST, could you make more than a few definitive claims on how they're to be consumed? The article calls it out, but let's take something common like what HTTP verb to use when updating a resource.

That is a fair request. Btw let's call this RESTful for clarity.

Let me attempt to put it in my own words. I (and I think many others) would expect a RESTful interface to be:

- oriented around a set of resources

- each resource has a unique name, typically a URL.

- Resources can be either collections or individual items

- there is a small fixed set of operations that can be performed on the resources, in particular, get, post, put, delete.

- get returns a collection on a collection resource, and a specific item on a specific item resource.

- post on a collection creates a new resource item within the collection

- put or patch rewrites the item or collection

- delete obviously deletes the item more collection

- the server does not need to record state to order to be able to serve the request, other than perhaps just enough to do authorization and Authentication.

This means that if you give me the name of a resource, I mainly know how to perform common actions upon it. Note that HATEOAS is not listed as a requirement.

I think the real problem is an overloading of terms. What many people mean by a RESTful interface is what I just listed above, which is not what Fielding had in mind with the term REST.

I think the term "misappropriation" is excessively harsh; Fielding does not own a trademark on the term REST. I would agree that clarity is very important, so I think it's better to use another term instead of rest when you mean something not precisely confined to Fielding's definition. I'm happy to use RESTful, but if there's a more common term that's fine.

If you want to specify a RESTful interface, there is OpenAPI, which will give you that information in a formalized way.
The problem with this, for me, is that almost anything I want to do can either be accomplished with existing tools or is too complex for a doable side project.
So much more is going on.

Sand storms so large they are blocking the sun in the US.

Radiation forest fires in Russia.

Ufo's existance were confirmed by US navy.

Stock market crash / rapid recovery

What's next...
Learn Piano Online
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Then you’ll just have a bunch of indie hackers following you. Not the actual customers?
Real customers only care about your journey in hindsight. People want to know how Apple etc started, not many will care for journey of a new tech until it’s released.
Ok. But the thing I am going for is the pattern where we think of descendants of the word having /r/. colos does fit the pattern. As would flos.
Thanks for your comment, it led me to read the article and I also came away extremely impressed.
Many of us (I'm among them) who check far enough back into their ancestry will find that their 'race' is far from a given. Given our recent knowledge of genetic bottlenecks thousands of years ago, the whole notion dissolves into a mere question of self-serving bunkum.
It's not so much serving a piece of chocolate cake as spending $10,000,000,000 every year on highly sophisticated psychologically fine-tuned mental bombardment to get to serve you a piece of chocolate cake.

The constant fight for your attention. Billboards, storefronts, internet, tv, radio, everywhere you go you have highly researched pictures and sounds that try to manipulate your feeble mammal brain to purchase their products.

Your first paragraph suggests you regard advertising as something far more benign that it is.
Honestly at this point it is usually easier for me to read the raw org-mode source file in an emacs buffer than to wade through whatever random web rendering and author has picked when they export to html.
Engine market share doesn't matter much if you're just going by games released.

Steam (the video game marketplace) gets hundreds of releases each day (seriously), and the vast majority of them are bad, and make no money.

I think if you're looking at serious money-making studios that put out good games (whether they are indie or AAA), I bet the engine distribution would look different than your numbers.

But that's my best guess..
4) payment for illegal goods/services
Sorry to criticize, but as a daily maintainer/writer of COBOL, your characterization is a bit off. Besides technical inaccuracies (PIC 9 is for numerics, 88 is a conditional value in a field) you don't seem to grasp what's truly right or wrong with COBOL. Nor does the article. For example, ime no-one uses 66 levels, as the REDEFINES clause achieves the same result. While there _can_ be issues with maintaining code with overlapping definitions, _their use is deliberate_. For example, data read from a file could have two or more different record structures. It is read into one place in memory and the redefinition applies different formats/views to the same memory. The correct one is used as needed. There is no problem. You might be right that there are some anti-features, but like GOTO they simply aren't used in real codebases.

The real problem with COBOL imo, is that the language hasn't much improved since it's creation. While there have been some useful tweaks and changes, it has missed out on major items such as variable scoping/user-defined functions (all variables are global - the workaround is to use sub-programs and pass data in the call). Even "object-oriented" functionality as mentioned in the article was badly tacked on to the language and only complicates it without really adding much in terms of capability. Also, the language doesn't really have strings as in other languages, and consequently lacks the applicable functions.

Another major point that the article misses is that mainframe COBOL (most COBOL is/was mainframe and that means IBM) which does anything more than straightforward "read file,process contents,generate report" is inextricably linked to its environment. The article talks about poor form handling. COBOL doesn't do form handling. That would be CICS or IMS/DC software which the COBOL interfaces with. There is heavy integration in the code, but this is like confusing Java with Websphere or Tomcat. This is why it is so difficult to port COBOL systems to another language/environment. The COBOL code can be mechanically converted. But any complex system has calls to databases, transaction processing, and is built with batch jobs relying on JCL and system utilities. Replacing the environment while retaining the integration and reproducing the functionality is the hard part.
Motivation = what you think about in the shower http://paulgraham.com/top.html

The question seems to be how to keep your project top of mind. Once you're forced to stop working on your project, the context file this post mentions acts like a save point to return your project to top of mind.

I'm sure there are other similar hacks. Maybe review your context file before showering each day?
That’s one of those things I’ve pondered but don’t think I’ve seen it discussed by the two you mention, both of whom I respect deeply- got any good links?
"A related note is that not every individual thrives at all of these stages. You don't need to "constantly scale yourself" if that isn't what you want to do. Move on when the time is right or join companies at the level of maturity that you prefer."

OP here, agreed on that. Another interesting thing I've noticed is that some people thrive at several different stages – e.g. great at ideation in the early scrappy days, and also great when you need new ideas during later growth stages, but less likely to thrive in between. There aren't really black and white answers.

Thanks for reading!
Very nice. What I liked about it is that thumbnails to the article allows readers to skim through the list more quickly and still understand more clearly what they are about.
Thanks for your reply -- Ill be honest - I evaluated my statement based on your response, and the only thing I can come up with WRT what I am basing it on is actually a bias to my understanding of how corrupt those regimes are.... now, thats not to say that the US doesnt have a problem with corruption (its getting worse, here in the US, whereby politicians are enriching themselves at the expense of others -- see "politicians made millions from stock trade before the pandemic information was released" type stories)
To a certain extent the MIC as you define it would explain the erosion of the market wouldn't it?

Also I've read your comments a few times now and I'm not sure if I'm completely understanding your view of what is becoming more "trust-based". Are you saying that DARPA is more trusted by the consumer (the federal government) than the market entities (the contractors)? If so, isn't that exactly what government entities of all types are created for? These agencies exist as part of the government working for the government because it's difficult to have an effective private market created for these similar purposes.

I think it makes the question about "what makes DARPA successful" so much more interesting from if we acknowledge the limitations of the sector. Many agencies, entities, or initiatives of various types have failed when given similar mandates and similar market conditions. That's even if you believe DARPA is truly as effective as is claimed at achieving it's mandate of innovation in the Defense and National Security sector...
The U.S. can now set its own rates for mail from China and other countries
Bravo! Such a refreshing take, and may yet become my preferred way of browsing HN.
Most credit unions are part of the shared branch program. Assuming yours is, it's pretty easy to find one near you that is and you should be able to get a cashier's check there. I've only done a cash withdrawl though (craigslist buy was over the daily atm limit)
That has not been my experience.

I've always found that early adopters and innovators are very interested in being first customers and following your journey.

It also depends on what side project you pick. So, there is some nuance for sure.

[edit removed link]
Longtime (two-decade-ish) previous emacs user. I lived in it. I used it for literally everything - web browsing, mail, mp3 playing, etc.

> I am afraid I'm missing something.

You are not.

Nowadays I just use crappy little text editors for small notes and JetBrains IDEs for dev work.
The general idea is that if you have multiple things you care about (objectives) it's generally not possible to optimize them all at once (e.g. in computer science you often can't minimize runtime and memory usage in the same algorithm). However, there are some objectively bad answers. If you have an algorithm running in O(n) time and O(n) space (assuming no other objectives of interest), one running in O(n) time and O(n^2) space is worse.

The Pareto front is a formalization of that idea. It's a collection of all "non-dominated" points. A point is dominated if there is some other point that's at least as good in all dimensions and better in at least one. A point is "non-dominated" if there are no points that dominate it.

Going back to the [O(n), O(n)] example, this would not be dominated by, e.g., an [O(1), O(n^2)] algorithm since even though the time complexity is better, the space complexity is worse. Out of the three examples I've given, those two would be in the pareto front.

I haven't read through the whole library yet, but it looks like the way this works is it finds the pareto front (all non-empty, finite collections have a non-empty sub-collection of non-dominated points), finds the pareto front of the remainder, and so on till it's exhausted the input. Your output is a collection of "waves" of the original data.

Edit: I used algorithmic complexity just because it would be serve as a familiar example to Hacker News. In general you just need a comparison function in each dimension (and often you'll make a choice for each dimension as to whether you care about maximums or minimums -- they're directly interchangeable, so that's just for end user convenience). E.g., you might want to maximize crop yield and minimize input costs, or in a dimensionality reduction algorithm you might want to maximize separation while minimizing how different your reduction is from the original data by some metric. It's an extremely general purpose paradigm that sidesteps some of the issues that arise when you have multiple things you care about that can't be cleanly converted into a single cost function (all the hyperparameters in a machine learning model come to mind as well). You still need a mechanism for choosing things from the Pareto front, and there are whole fields of study in how people interact with a Pareto solver, but being able to restrict your inputs to _just_ the Pareto front is still a big win.
I find it shocking that people do not understand why developer tools run in the browser. Seems like such very basic education. Why all are not extensions might be a question, but other than view source all are also extensions.
I vaguely recall having used one once, but I don't remember what it was for. Practically everything I've ever purchased has been via check, ACH, or debit/credit (with the largest purchases, like my home down payment, happening via cashier's check).

I've had a checking account my whole adult life (and then some), though. Some 22% of US households are either unbanked or underbanked (have a bank account but still have to use alternatives like check cashing services or payday loans in order to make ends meet)-- those are the people who are most likely to need to use money orders, even for routine payments like utility bills or rent.
If A and B are a solution, then A+B is also a solution. For a constant r, if C is a solution, r*C is also solution.

That's it. The nice closed form of exponentials as solutions is just for linear difference equations with constant coefficients. In that case, you can always find a solution by trying λ^n and seeing what that forces λ to be -- it'll be a root of some polynomial.
That's exactly the reason why the indiehackers website is going circles publishing products which are used within their own audience. If you are building something not targeting this demographic, that's not going to help you get more customers.
Legible might be a better word? The giant, viewport spanning, line-width mixed with dense line-height makes it harder on eye for some people, myself included.
Actually, can I just highly recommend going into the Northeast Kingdom Tasting Center in Newport, VT for all of the Jasper Hill aficionados coming out of the woodwork in this thread?

It's hilariously out of the way, but it seems that the Northeast Kingdom region of Vermont is cranking out some seriously good food and spirits. Caledonia Spirits makes two extremely solid gins, and the aperitif ciders from Eden Ciders have to be tasted to be believed.
Christians Hacked to Death by Nigerian Jihadists in 4 Mo and 15 Days of 2020
Lots of money laundering it sounds like.
What about it? Are those applicable to my reply at all?so worst case scenario Microsoft took the scamiest approach to it possible but it still defeats something. Vs no protection at all because Linux users blatantly ignore apts

Those are the options. Head completely in sand or get some sand in your eyes
I have no clue what you're trying to say with your first paragraph, and your second paragraph is a massive [citation needed]. I've never even heard anyone say Japanese has a close Indo-European cousin. I've never heard anyone say Japanese has any cousin. Only strictly the opposite.
If you want your software to last remember that you also have to have a working and upto date development environment, ie your code may still work fine but if you cannot compile it to the correct target it is useless.

I found this out the hard way when I had to recompile some fpga firmware for a $100K piece of equipment which used a programmer not supported by windows, a chip and code not supported by the current IDE and a binary blob which we did not have the source code for and would not link, luckily we winged it by replacing the FPGA with a hardware compatible replacement... We now preserve the whole development environment on a VM and save it with the source code.
This seems pretty cool, and something I might use.

Echoing another commenter: can you add a brief intro to what's meant by a Pareto front? A picture would do wonders.
Many events in the US since 1980 are certainly laughable from a foreign perspective, and to many of us, more than painful from a native one. But watch as the pendulum swings.

(I'm not in a position to understand what 'all for free' means, but I've learned to be skeptical about that assertion. 'Until when?' for example.)
Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC is about 150,000 MB.

I have a little bit of difficulty justifying that on my SSD main drive.

114 MB for what is effectively an IDE for the long tail of programming languages is very easy to justify.
Why does it not timeout?
At such a high and serious rate?
> something so quirky and archaic
Try APL. It's the 1960s equivalent of 05AB1E.
Splitting into small chunks is the biggest (ironic) help for me honestly. With kids now, I only have a half hour or so every few weeks I can work on something so I try to make it a nice achievable task I can actually accomplish! Otherwise I seem to just pick up a movie or just read online...
The Masks Masquerade – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
As a side note, he's at University of Delaware not University of Maryland.
For Android, I've found using termux to install Emacs, and then keeping a Bluetooth keyboard in my car has come in useful for impromptu note taking sessions. Or knock out a quick blog post. I keep my org folder source controlled in a private repo in Azure DevOps, which makes syncing between my devices easy enough, and have it set up to continously deploy my blog to an AWS S3 bucket.
Ironic, considering that his new Netflix special is mostly material he's been doing for years, but this does sound kind of cool:

> He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker. He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."

Sounds like the visual commit history on github, now that I think of it. My side project is on a local git, and that's the only thing I miss - the calendar.
This was worth the rather long read. Thank you for sharing.
Most of the traits noted above were applicable to SARS as well.
It's Sunday, for whatever reason deaths / day are down 50% on weekends. N new cases per day fairly consistently lead to >= 5% of N dying a bit over a week later, so with 40k new cases a day at the moment that's 2k death/day. That's over 10k / week. Even compared to the number of natural deaths (320M replaced over 80 years => 77k / week), that's a pretty sizable figure -- 13% higher mortality than normal.
> They'd behave more like doctors who order hugely expensive tests, procedures, and medicine they know patients don't need for the purpose of indemnity.

Good. It's gone far too much in the opposite direction.

> They'd never admit to mistakes which could be used against them in the court of law.

Already the case.

> when successful suits impugn the integrity of officers' statements in criminal court (even after the fact)

As it should.

> The policy holders would settle to save money because court is more expensive on average.

Already the case. https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2019/09/04/police-lawsuit-settl...

> In other words, we'd expect them to stop policing in general.

Given current policing, that might be a positive.
What is covid toes/fingers?
Develop a point-to-point data exchange function
I read that the T2 chip really messed with some audio hardware by saturating the USB 2.0 hub. That might be one thing?

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/02/19/pro-audio-glitch-...
He mentions it's based on the NandGame, so it's theoretical, but somewhat well defined. Some background here: https://www.hackster.io/news/learn-how-to-build-a-simple-cpu...
I think that might be a generalization and likely provably not true (in the larger context of the site).

https://www.indiehackers.com/products?sorting=highest-revenu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_skin_in_Japanese_culture

> In Japan the preference for skin that is white and free of blemishes has been documented since at least the Heian period (794–1185), as in books like The Pillow Book and The Tale of Genji.[1] There is an old proverb "white skin covers the seven flaws" (色の白いは七難隠す, iro no shiroi wa shichinan kakusu) which refers to a white-skinned woman being beautiful even if her features are not attractive.
Flu vaccine was disappointing vs. some strains last season
A great chasm yawns between what they call themselves, and what they are in fact.