skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the key quote:

> It's important to recognise that the skills crisis is not simply about a shortage of people who understand how to code in the COBOL language. The deeper issue is the lack of application knowledge. Being able to code in COBOL is the first step. The really hard part is understanding what an application does.

We techies - programmers as well as business folks in tech - love to think that a programmer's most valuable skills are their knowledge of programming languages. It isn't, and never was. You can learn a programming language from a book, and practice it virtually anywhere. Domain knowledge, such as understanding the rules of a bureaucracy or a regulatory regime, can usually only be acquired through years of on-the-job training.

If there's a COBOL angle to this, it's what they highlight in the next paragraph: Tight coupling within COBOL monoliths, which is probably more a result of their age than their implementation language, has made it impossible for someone with less-than-extensive knowledge of the system they're working in to be able to work efficiently and effectively. I'm not sure what the solution to that problem is, but I don't think it's ever going to be a programming language.
From the introduction:

> The act of controlling one’s breath for the purpose of restoring or enhancing one’s health has been practiced for thousands of years amongst Eastern cultures. For example, yogic breathing (pranayama) is a well-known ancient practice of controlled breathing, often performed in conjunction with meditation or yoga, for its spiritual and perceived health-enhancing effects.
What is the evidence that a small group of companies has the superiority wisdom to determine who aught to be allowed to speak to the masses?

We elect government democratically, and through that create laws and police. If the internet is full of criminals flaunting laws then the problem is right there in the lack of laws and police, not in the lack of control from a small group of companies.
They aren't invasive physiological analyzers, and they aren't assessing honesty, they are detecting behaviors, so no.
I'm not advocating one way or the other
To be precise, the AGPL requires that, if such a link is present, you may not remove it. And yes, this is precisely why AGPL exists and GPL is not always sufficient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction

Auto-correct, thinko, or something I'm missing?
Kicked off Weibo? Here’s what happens next
It was stupid back then still stupid now.
Google AI Tech Will Be Used for Virtual Border Wall, CBP Contract Shows
I can tell you from first-hand experience people expected the systems would be gradually migrated to new languages (and out of mainframes) at some point in the 1990's.

A lot of those migrations failed miserably. Others failed spectacularly.
Finally making use of Internet Archive service for downtime saver
This rings true from the article. Note that one the biggest users stated are governments, not exactly known as bastions for valuing IT and being ahead of the curve. I have no issues with COBOL, but I’d like to know the why behind its continued use before joining that org.

After working for a couple organizations that had extremely old code infrastructure, there’s world of difference between “we maintain it because it’s the right technological risk” vs “we’re too lazy/scared/incompetent to move away from it”
Well I don't think you are being honest. You didn't address the other extreme which is the whole sourcing of chocolate by Nestle.

The point i am trying to flesh out is how much one can be blamed for a big picture. One cannot change the world only affect it in a tiniest way. But when a majority of a group/class are pushing same way they can affect history.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political)
To be fair, "this is nothing but [ancient spiritual practice] but with science backing up the claims" is more valuable than this comment might imply. There's an awful lot of ancient spiritual practices that have no benefit and lots of harm and are still practiced today in the name of ancient spiritual practices (stuff like rhino horns). So having some science behind it is worth a lot more than "packaged in a fancy journal paper".
The users don't pay. The overlords pay to inflict it on the users, like law enforcement.
Out of curiosity, why is adaptive bitrate something you want for video playback outside of streaming? Personally I prefer having to buffer a bit but getting the video at the desired minimum quality. E.g. having to seek back because text suddenly became unintelligible, only to realize that the quality then isn't increased so I have to refresh... argh, very upsetting!
Air Force seeks computer-brain interface
I was experiencing muscle knots between my shoulder blades and back of my neck since March (working from home), so I decided to get an ergonomic chair to replace my IKEA chair.

My chair at work was a Herman Miller Celle, which was decent, but I kept hearing good things about the Herman Miller Aeron -- the so-called dotcom boom chair -- and supposedly the most ergonomic chair ever invented. I started doing my research.

Buying one was a more complicated matter. New ones cost north of $1000, which is ok for VC-funded startups but entirely too much for an individual to spend on a chair. Fortunately there are refurbs on Craigslist and such, usually for $400-$600 (avg price is $450). You have to be careful to get the right one though -- there are 3 sizes (picking the right size for your body/height matters), various levels of accessories, generations, etc. (see this video).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-aeDaHIEbY

I looked for a while and in the process learned that a tricked out used/refurb Aeron was rarer and more expensive than I thought. On Reddit however, folks were talking about an alternative -- the Steelcase Leap V2 -- so I pivoted and went to my local office furniture refurbishers, sat on a few, and decided to get a Leap V2 ($300). I've had mine since July, and paired with a footrest (Amazon), I felt a palpable improvement in my back within days.

My understanding is that the Leap V2 is likely not the most ergonomic Steelcase chair out there (I believe the Gesture is), but I will say it is a great chair at its price point.

I would advise you try out as many chairs as you can before buying -- body shapes are such that the best chair for someone else might not be the best for you. That said, you probably can't go wrong with either Herman Miller or Steelcase.
Forza to the poor soul navigating this (not an insurmountable problem, especially on 2020's scale, but annoying for sure.)

Anecdotally, it seems to me like this kind of horror stories only happens with ISP/Telco (to the point were I dread switching ISP for years)

Is that just an impression ? Was there an industry as prone to mishandle basic customer service like this in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, etc... Before ISP came to basically ruin our lives once every few years (and provide access to the greatest source of info in between ?)

I conjectures that the industry is so new that there has never been a "decent ISP" to set a gold standard, and that everyone is just operating into a "well, we shitty but so is everyone else" mindset. Is that accurate ?
Recommendations for books on the French Revolution? I know very little about it.
>I don't know if it's just Baader-Meinhof at work

A bit off topic but I was wondering what you mean with Baader-Meinhof - don’t see the obvious link and curious if there’s an expression / connection linked to RAF
“Serious novel-reading has become little more than a hobby.”
I would turn this around and say:

Find a list of:

- consumer and commercial insurance companies

- healthcare insurance companies

- retail banks

- any industry that has been doing high thoroughput, large value, and large volume sales in a very constrained environment for more than 30 years: oil and gas, ocean and rail cargo shipping, commodity sales brokers

- every major government with a digital infrastructure older than 30 years (this brings us back to pre-1990, mainframe was the only real option back then)

I would posit that in each of these areas you will find very well paying jobs, very demanding and interesting work that's critical, and some extremely smart coworkers.

I would go further to say that if you showed up unannounced with a security clearance, history, resume, and credible reference checks, that you could have a letter of offer (as quickly as the wheels of bureaucracy spin) and salary you could negotiate on.
Yep, similar issues with my provider moving in August, took 6 weeks to get a proper connection. Took a well-mannered engineer to basically press on while his boss was telling him to give up. From what I was able to get from my ISP (who also use Openreach for install) - it's a massively common issue and most of the lines have delays on them.
> GDPR makes it illegal, but that's wrong.

Where does the GDPR make that illegal?
Quad GeForce RTX 3090 in a desktop – Does it work?
The problem is finding the middle ground. There's only so much I can learn, and only so much time to learn it. I don't want to spend my time spinning my wheels learning $NEXT_BIG_THING only for it to be superseded by $NEXT_BIG_THING+1 by the time I master it.
Seems to be seeded with a timestamp (loading the page with small time intervals yields similar images)
>Read really good writing

Any favorites? I like the writing style of some authors in your study books (Pinker, Le Guin, Zinsser) but what books really inspire you in terms of sheer writing genius? (in both fiction and non-fiction)
Level 5 ???.
I am not too concerned. I think Mozilla will simply have to switch to a donation based system (like Wikimedia Foundation), with relevant restructuring to a non-profit. And I think they will be able to raise 10s of millions of dollars.
Wave wasnt small ancillary, Google+ wasnt small ancillary. Google Hangouts wasnt small ancillary, reader wasnt small ancillary.

By that bar GCP is in the same boat. Good luck with that!
How many of those transactions were with buyers who if PayPal were not available would have used their credit card directly instead?
IRS details strategy for replacing its most ancient computer code
You misunderstand, these are not failed logins.

These are web scanners trying to find common vulnerabilities in typical web software (phpMyAdmin, Wordpress, Rails, etc). But also potentially exploits in nginx or other parts of the stack for all I know.

And they send requests by the hundreds, which pollutes my logs and my logwatch emails.

I have automatic security updates turned on for my server, but it's not my full-time job to manage it, so I want to maximize the return on the time I do spend managing it.

And since there is zero value/reason in allowing access to my server by anyone in those countries, why not just block it all and have one less thing to worry about, since 99% of that automated traffic comes from there?
I can recommend the Challenger and Guardian series. The website is terrible but the chairs are incredible. https://pulselabz.com/shop/

Just very comfortable if you are sitting for long periods of time.
A quick dictionary definition of "ecclesiology" describes it as

>theological doctrine relating to the church

And the few other things I checked also considered it part of the greater theology.
I was not saying it might be, I was stating the premises on which it would be, while also stating that, since we can't claim it either way we should refrain from speculation.

GP then suggested we could claim something, and I pointed out the requirements for that, thus putting the onus on them for making the suggestion we could.
Literally anything in space almost by definition is a weapon. Blame physics.
My personal fantasy tech for subspace is that it functions as an absolute zero heat sink. So heat engines can use absolute zero as the ultimate heat sink to build a Carnot contradiction: They don't actually sink any heat at all, and can extract all of the heat energy as work. Quantum mechanics forces them to actually sink a tiny amount of heat proportional to process entropy. Those tiny fluctuations are the "subspace signatures" that get detected anyway.

Its still more fantasy than science, but hey, so are warp drive, hyperspace, and all that jazz :)
Trending of Free CDN Services
Stop sending every link in duplicates, triplicates or more...
Someone on one of the youtube channels pulled up a web page and all the ads around the edges were handguns, handguns, handguns. It was kind of funny. heh.
And if they didn't excessively pay their high execs stupid amount of money.
Everything is currently rendered using OpenGL ES 2.0 (WebGL 1). What's currently called a "Qt Backend" uses QStyle to produce textures of the individual controls.

We use the excellent winit crate at the moment for input handling, so that abstracts it away for us.
If it's taken to the extreme: Are there then even more health benefits for long breath holds? Or is it the breathing that's the clue? I've been practicing holding my breath for freediving earlier, and got to 5 minutes. It's very relaxing, until it's not.
Luckily, I don’t think Red Hat would let Firefox die because it’s the default browser they ship for RHEL and Fedora. I imagine development would slow to a crawl but it would still be around.
whatabout systemd and FF is bankrolled by the googs as well
> Is that so? Last time I checked you had to choose between 3 installation approaches and then choose a 3rd party installer (all of which have bad UX) and set that up.

Due to the convention of not relying on fixed-paths in Windows software, as well as Windows providing a stable base platform of common libraries, pretty much anyone can just compile a program and put it and its resources into a zip file. The vast majority of the software I install is distributed this way.

> Fragmentation exists on Windows too, it's just internal.

The fragmentation of Windows is orders of magnitude less than Linux. I can write software today that will work without modification even on versions of windows from 15 years ago without recompilation[0]. Occasionally there are minor incompatibilities between Windows versions and editions, but it isn't that way for most software.

> You're probably taking about Flatpak and Snap. One has great marketing but is not usable for ethical/practical concerns while I haven't had a very good experience with with Flatpak (its "runtimes" are basically extra Linux distributions).

No, I'm not. In my opinion Flatpak and Snap combine the worst of both worlds in that they still require repos and a special tool to manage them. I meant exactly what I said: AppDirs with default sandboxing.

[0] Hell, thanks to WINE it will probably even work on Linux without recompilation.
> Have you set up client side certs? I'd love to hear your experience if so.

Entire Estonia and a few other countries use them daily. For logging into banks, Craigslist-equivalents, online stores, service providers etc. etc.
Hey David, I'm the founder and CEO of Forest Admin (https://www.forestadmin.com). Thanks for mentioning us! First of all, I wanted to congratulate you for this fund raising. I'm a big fan of what you're building. For Retool, Internal, Forest Admin or any others... I think it's great to create this new SaaS product category and to design this new market all together! That's exciting!

From my point of view, Retool helps you build any internal tools using a frontend builder where you can build your UI from scratch or from templates after connecting any type of data sources.

With Forest Admin, we decided to focus on the administration panel of any webapps. From the ground up, we've designed our solution accordingly by providing a fullstack framework using an on-premise backend/API (open-source) connected to the application's database(s) and an off-the-self SaaS frontend (learn more about architecture here: https://medium.com/forest-admin/a-deep-dive-into-forest-admi...).

The reason behind having such an architecture is to let our users to keep full control of their data and to be able to access the code locally to extend the API without any restriction. That's why I don't agree when you say "Forest Admin is good if you want something quickly but have no intention of customizing it later". Our mission is to do the exact the opposite.

To be fully convinced, I think examples are always better than words. We spent time with some of our customers to demonstrate how Forest Admin can be adapted to handle complex workflows: https://www.forestadmin.com/customers. To react on your example about the KYC stuff, approval workflows, etc. This is something that some of our Fintech/Banking system customers are doing with Forest Admin.
The Network: How a Secretive Phone Company Helped the Crime World Go Dark
I appreciate you calling attention to a somewhat neglected retelling of the Pacific Theatre, but I was only referring to the US propaganda posters against Japan during the Second World War, not the wider context. It served as a decent example, and something with which I expected a lot of people being familiar. Like the British guerilla propaganda posters against the Germans during the First World War.

Neither, however, is an attempt to excuse what either the Japanese nor the Germans did in either war. I am very familiar with the events you describe, but please don't read anything broader into my example than merely that; an example of making your enemies cartoonish.
> they need to preserve the static public IP that was used on the NLB for the incoming request

Even if they did that, to determine which outgoing public IP the packet should go to, they would need to guess based on segment numbers and ack offsets. This would still be a guessing game
> Before Chrome, all popular web browsers had a user interface for installing client side HTTPS certificates for user authentication

Chrome has an interface for it.
Jeffrey Epstein Update: The Deposition That Ghislaine Maxwell Fought to Hide
Is Cobol used as much outside of the U.S? Most of the articles are U.S. centric and don't really metnion the global perspective.
Nope - that just supposes that 5000 years of practise was done for fun and had no health benefits. And, now it is upto a few scientists to discover what 5000 years of sustained practise could not. They could have just referred to Sushruta Samhita or patanjali's yoga-sutras where praNayama and its benefits are dicussed in detail.
> Fourth, we document a gradual but continuous decrease in respondents’ overall willingness to sacrifice rights and freedom, throughout March to mid-June of 2020 ... Such declines are
accompanied by a decrease in expressed worries on health and economic conditions

I wonder if this is simply because there is a mismatch between what people are being told and what people are observing with their own eyes.

If, instead of covid, it were a plague with 50% death rate... I doubt people would be having as much "lockdown fatigue" since they would literally see the bodies piling up in their communities. Instead you have a disease that only mildly affects the majority, putting only small minorities in real danger, which doesn't jive with the "sky is falling" stories the media/government peddles.

One parallel to this finding would be climate change, of course. There's a danger in preaching that the sky is falling in that if people can't see the sky falling with their own eyes, they are going to get "climate fatigue" followed by "a decrease in expressed worries on [climate] conditions".
But the long-term plan is, that the attacks become more expensive, because it would cause companies to stop having insecure systems (and up the product chain, e.g. Microsoft would have to patch Windows or suffer losses).

Same as with spam - the simple solution is that spam (mail/email/calls) are charged to the operator/provider - I can assure you that a solution would instantly appear whereby the providers would take great care about blocking spam at its source.

The status quo in both cases is just to "solve" (but not really) the problem with the cheapest, shittiest possible solution.
They are not.

Gitea, GitLab, GitHub, Bitbucket, Discourse literally everything else similar to those is more usable than the pieces of turd that mailing lists are. I instantly assign a negative score in my mind to all projects that still find them in any way usable.
This is exactly how TLS client certificates work - except that instead of the server storing the public keys of clients, the clients present a cryptographic proof generated by the server/CA that they represent some identity (ie., a certificate).
Could you expand on this please. Like the technique, duration and how long have you been doing it.
Take a look into the latest news about those topics. The sats are in a low enough orbit that they'll de-orbit pretty quickly if they stop boosting themselves, they shouldn't really be a space-junk issue. They should be pretty invisible almost all of the time, especially with the changes they're working on. Those pictures you see if a string of bright lights close together are only for a short while during launch, that's not the entire sky of the future.

Definitely issues worth being worried about, but it does appear that SpaceX is taking them seriously! And you have to admit that the potential good that a truly global high speed network is capable of is worth considering.
You should specify where.

For example in Germany you can get a colonoscopy paid by the health insurance without any specific reason every 5 years from the age of 50. You can always get one at any age for no reason if you simply pay yourself.
While it’s true in practice for most companies, I’ve always had the suspicion that if it takes years to learn a process, it often indicates a bad process full of tribal knowledge and loosely defined informal heuristics. I’d like to think competent people shouldn’t need years to understand a well-defined process
The news here is probably more about the decline in aircraft ticket prices than some surprising change in India iPhone costs.
You are two clicks away from the correct answer :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...
It started when vendor lock-in began, which was the late 90's/early 2000's when dial-up died and broadband took over.

Before that the phone company was the one with the poor customer service, but nothing at this level that I recall.

Dial-up days were the golden years for the ISP business. When every marginal NFL city had 30+ ISPs to choose from, and switching was simply changing a dial-in number you actually had decent competition. You had any choice you could think of - want a high quality ISP catering to highly technical users? Done. Want an uber-cheap ISP catering to the masses? Got you.

This all went away and service went greatly downhill once you had 1 or 2 options to choose from in the DSL/cable/fiber era.
Detecting behaviors to assess what though? Isn't that exactly what a lie detector does? It claims to detect electrical signals of behaviors (stress) and then that goes to determine if the person is honest.
I wish the article went into the cause of the price difference. Is it high import taxes/sales taxes/etc., restrictions that make the phone harder to produce or sell for the Indian market, or just Apple deciding to charge a sizably higher markup in India than elsewhere?
That would be easy to duplicate, wouldn't it? Train GPT-2 (because no API key required) to just repeat the sentence correctly, feed the output of the transcription through.

I'm not sure if these models do that.
Just like sitting vs standing, it seems to me that the real key is to change things up throughout the day.
Lying is a behavior, and cheating is dishonest.
Eat shit loser the pros far outweigh the cons
AFAIK, all the major tcp/ip stacks do round robin port assignment. Given relatively short, and relatively few, connections you should not have any collisions.
Python is 30 years old, SQL is ~45 years old, Java is 30 years old, C is 50 years old. There are newer developments obviously but 60 years is not really all that much of an outlier for a programming language.