skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Eg have fun implementing an event-driven GUI app

Which leads to the question: why is this harder in COBOL than in Javascript or Java? Is it just the lack of a library? If so, does the lack of libraries make a programming language a DSL? Or is it because it is difficult to create such a library? If so, why is that difficult for COBOL and not for Javascript/Java and what else is difficult to build with COBOL.

> I guess COBOL the language but not necessarily the runtime works well also for writing backend service implementation code

I'm sorry to be picky on words here, but as it is the core of the whole discussion: "works well" is quite meaningless if not put into context. "Works better than X" or "has an advantage over X in some way, for example..." is much more fruitful for a discussion about this topic.

> More seriously, as I recall it, COBOL simply has straightforward idioms for arithmetic, date calculations, statically-typed structured file I/O, ISAM file access (and SQL?) as part of the language rather than Java's BigDecimal and various date libraries that all suck in a different way and at best cause enormous fluent-style expressions with cognitive overhead.

I don't want to be ignorant here... and I'm also not a fan of Java. In fact I dislike Java so much that I declined highly paid jobs. However, is COBOL really better in these things?

So I have seen some production COBOL code at work before and I just looked up some COBOL questions on stackoverflow, e.g.: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48016044/formatting-date...

Sorry, but even Java's horribly verbose syntax looks way better than this. Apart from the annoying verbosity, I think Java's new time library as well as BigDecimal/BigInteger and also its SQL libraries are not too bad anymore. And if one wants nicer syntax - there are enough languages out there that do it better.

Okay, having SQL directly embeddable is nice, I agree. I don't think it is good programming language design to do that, but then again SQL has been very stable over time and it's certainly nice to use it like that.

As for...

> statically-typed structured file I/O

What does that mean? I tried to find it out but didn't really get an idea what you mean by that.

> Plus, COBOL doesn't have reflection and metaprogramming so self-important idiomatic Java code golf is spotted immediately as out of place next to actual business logic.

That's true, but that doesn't make COBOL better - it just makes Java worse. ;)
Show HN: Making Python one-liner-fit with the new pwk (Python With Kurly braces)
Does the car(family) have the gas($$) for the entire trip?
All that is needed is a gas gage...
New lego is expensive. Used lego is ridiculous. I work in the military and thought a lego model of a specific airplane might be a good group christmass present for the boss (inside joke/story). 100ish parts = 2000$ for only 85% of needed parts! I realize some of the parts are rare, but perhaps more biulding guides would be sold if they used parts that were reasonably availible in the market.
Nice. Maybe version 2 can tell me which slice of pie is most tasty per calorie count
Well, this is not completely true. As said, JIT employs absolute addresses a lot, and for instance, you can use `lea` to compute the absolute address of a variable at runtime (with PC-relative addressing mode). Said that, I still see `movabs` of an hardcoded address (not necessarily a hardware register) into a register and then a call to it (and this continues to be position-independent code). Also, if I remember correctly, the __TEXT segment is not randomized by default on Linux.
> Youtube has to share it's revenue with content creators, unlike Netflix.

Depends on the contract. That is why you see more and more content produced by Netflix, where they control the complete chain. However, producing Netflix content has an initial cost, but producing YouTube videos does not (for Google) and the videos are monetized only if the number of viewers are increased. Which also increases ad earning to Google.

Google might be in a much better position here regarding streaming quality (or traffic reduction control). You get YouTube videos for free and even if you request HD content, you don't have to get it every time; no one can complain because it is free. However, for Netflix, you pay for HD quality and you expect that almost always.
The what isn't the question dear friend, the why is. And I'm confused why they'd make an unnecessary choice to decrease readability.
Doing tricks like this over a wireguard network adds to the magic; you get easy nat traversing, encrypted sharing with no intermediary servers.
As non-american... I don't get offended when somebody mentions halloween or that green thing day. If people ask how was the celebration, I've no issues telling that I don't participate in said holidays and maybe introduce to my culture and what we do instead. I'd expect same response from me telling "merry christmas".

As for political donations - one of the best things in my country is that non-personal political donations are banned, period. And personal donations are capped. There're safeguard to prevent bums from suddenly getting lots of money and donating that too.
Oh, I'm sorry you didn't like the format. Thanks for giving it a listen anyhow.
I believe imposter syndrome is rooted in hyper competitiveness. Do house painters have imposter syndrome? :)
Instead of downvoting the parent (who is asking a legitimate question) or getting snarky, maybe the commenters can actually explain how such a donation makes a significant difference to an industry that operates with much larger numbers.

It would be educational to hear from someone who understands this industry (as opposed to speculation) about the economics of such donations. Does this move the needle for a company as large as Moderna? Since this donation was made to Vanderbilt, does it enable multiple streams of research that gets licensed by Moderna? Does it enable the company to try out avenues that they wouldn't have done in the absence of the funding? What does this level of money actually purchase? (grants to individual researchers, equipment etc)
The web becomes very narrow not only there are mostly Chromium based browsers, but also Node based backend technology for rendering HTML (in javascript). Very coupling tech.
Yes, the profs do not want deadheads doing their research...
It’s hard for programmers to understand signatures and law in general, because it is somewhat similar to programming but with very different rules.

The signature is just evidence of an agreement between you and the other party. It is not the only thing that matters. For example, if someone forged your signature on some paper transfer documents, would they then be able to move into your house? No.

In your scenario, it sounds like you’re worried about the third party signature service colluding with the other party and putting some terms in the contract that you didn’t agree to, while displaying the original contract to you when you sign?

If this is a genuine worry, just screenshot the document as you sign it. If the other party then tries to enforce these fraudulent terms, you can use the screenshots as evidence of the fraud. There may then be a criminal investigation, and everyone involved in the fraud may go to jail.
I think choice is always a good thing. no one forces someone to buy these other pianos. There are always pros and cons but almost 100% of the time choice is a better solution.
Baking requires precision, regular cooking really doesn't. It's not an exact science, once you have some experience seasoning things you'll be able to eyeball the quantities as well.

Stuff like the grind size of your salt can affect how much you should use, so just volume or weight won't transfer between kitchens.

Also tasting and adjusting is always preferable to using pre-set amounts.
Is it? It has an api mode and I’ve used it extensively for that at multiple workplaces and projects.
> "cook the onions until they're dark brown - about 15 minutes"

See also https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/05/how-to-cook-onions-...
(Meta, I know ...)

It's tempting to get angry at bad faith arguments, but that's pretty much what "feeding the trolls" means.

This hurts the discussion as well.
That sounds sensible and Scalia in the court said he didn't think such rules would make much difference. Still not happy about his call there.
We have no idea what happens next
Your upcoming flexibility sounds awesome. I assume many people would just mark the entire bucket as “compatible” to support arbitrary renames/mv of directories, but being able to say “keep this directory in compat mode” for people who use a single mega bucket and split into teams / datasets at the top will be nice.

I’m sorry if you’ve tried to talk to us and we’ve been unhelpful. I’d be happy to put you in touch with some GCS people specifically — the Colossus folks are multiple layers below, while the AI folks are multiple layers above. They were probably mostly not sure what to say!

We worked quite openly and frankly with the Twitter folks on our GCS connector [1]. I’d be happy to help support doing the same with you. My contact info is in my profile.

(Though I’d definitely agree that we’ve also been surprisingly reticent to talk about Colossus, until recently the only public talk was some slides at FAST).

[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/new-re...
There is only once sentence in the article that compares Sweden to other countries and it has no comparable data to support the claim. Is Sweden actually seeing worse death rates than other countries? Most websites I’ve seen seem to indicate Sweden’s death rates over time are still lower than countries with the most extreme and lengthy lockdowns. Is this winter bump in deaths for example any greater than other countries? That is really the information that matters.
I still can't figure out how they got lbry to remove the videos.
The answer there seems to be "it's complicated", and some cursory research turns up a whoooooole lot of what I'd characterize as "angry nationalist arguments" that makes it difficult to get a good picture of what might have been going on a thousand years ago.

Majority Arab with a healthy mix of black people seems reasonable, though.
This probably is relatively worth your time if you live in a country where the dollar is worth alot
Navigation isn't highlighted, the bottom border you see is a remnant of the :hover style.
Probably you are right, I was lazy to check it :)
So this is more akin to natural selection? I always thought that the point of reaching "herd immunity" was to do it without (waiting for) a vaccine.
>Facebook was used to illegally influence elections

yes, the electoral commission found that. sadly its only able to issue a tiny fine. Not only that its being eroded by populists from both sides of the political spectrum. Its not really a facebook problem but an EC one.

This transgression was found by going over the accounts, not by leaks.

> A TV ad, by comparison, is aired publically and you can see it and ask who paid for it.

political TV ads are illegal in the UK. Long may it continue.

We are also supposing that facebook adverts are actually effective. They have the power to somehow corrupt a morally "good" person into someone that votes for the "other side". This is plainly nonsense.

The real issue is that facebook is a warped mirror of society. without rules and order, chaos and bad actors reign. This means "censorship" or if it were treated as the press, editorial standards.
I like reading in general on my Macbook, as long as it is short enough. I think my problem with reading a 10 or 20 page paper on the Macbook is that I cannot get into a comfortable position to do it, like I can with paper or a tablet. On my desktop, even if I zoom in or increase the font, when I am reading something intense I tend to end up terribly slouched or with my face too close to the screen.

I can write fine. I can sit upright and ergonomically type. But my reading on a computer/laptop is a mess.

Maybe my chair is insufficient, or whatever I don't know. I just can't do it.
Politics, Science and the Remarkable Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine
It is biting, but very true.

You'd be surprised to experience firsthand how low values like integrity, ownership and shame rank for an overwhelming majority of people. The general rule of thumb is "get by, somehow, anyhow". Another trait is having little to no perspective on what a higher quality of life entails. It is awful, and depressing.

A handful of people who are hurt and frustrated by this, share the same sentiment as the parent comment.
Monocle. Great pics and interesting articles. Also the New Yorker because practically they're the kings of long form articles.
Ought government bodies be allowed to audit code to make sure there's no tampering of rankings ?
because algorithms can't REALLY predict our preferences?
I was interested at first because I built a signature product a few years ago. I find it a bit confusing and had to reread to catch the point.

There are 3 levels defined by the EU. I use these levels everywhere because it's not really a legal thing but increasing levels of technical requirement. The US has many conflicting laws on what signatures are valid.

The lowest level is what you first started out with. The marketing term for this is "E-signature". It's a subtle marketing speak to mean putting an image into a document. Theses are generally accepted for most things. California though has not allowed this in the past. A provider offers signatures at this level (with some nuance).

The second level is a "digital signature" backed up by other details. People think this means like an actual signature. In document contexts it's very confusing. But what they really mean is signing (encrypting with your private key so the public can decrypt it). This can be a verified email, phone, the more the better. What's important is at this level the signer is not actually the person, it's the service. The service has a trusted cert created from the Adobe trust chain and does additional measures to verify the person. The visible signature at this point is just a mock to make people comfortable using it. The signature is really cryptographic. This level is pretty much always court admissible.

The last level is signing the doc with your own trusted cert. You can get these tokens from many providers to do yourself. It's required for typically government things like stamping a document by an actual engineer (ie a PE). To get these certs you need to go to a notary to get verified. This is as legit as it gets. It's almost bulletproof.

Product wise, I am pretty familiar with PKI but am still confused as to what it really does or why I should use it. If this is to get wide adoption, the person using it needs to know nothing about certs and PKI. Additionally, I'm confused if this is using PKI or a web of trust. I'd think it would have to be web of trust to be practical but it seems like the examples allude more to PKI? Best of luck, I look forward to see where it goes.
Adding (very) preliminary support for C++ modules in Meson
while that is ridiculous, I suppose the differences in prep methods (hand chop vs. food processor) could lead to large variance in prep times, though anything is better than assuming no time for the preprocessing.
Migrating Www.forcyclistsbycyclists.com to AWS from Azure
OK, I see. So they were referring to OpenCL 3.x, and Kronos is the organisation that created that standard.
In general, pointer math. When I learned that myArray[10] would produce the exact same result as 10[myArray], it forced me to dig deeper into the whole C pointer model deeper and respect the architecture even more.
> Good code requires discipline, doesn't it?

This is like the most clichéd way of saying “my code has security vulnerabilities” that there is. I have yet to see code that has remained secure solely on the “discipline” of programmers remembering to check things.

> The trick of checking that buffers are zeroed is purely a debugging tool, so it's okay if it doesn't work on some platforms.

Fair.

> And if you allocate with calloc(), the padding will be zeroed for you.

It might get unzeroed if you work with the memory.
Are you kidding? Apple has all but stripped away the ability to make a profit from Apple users as they all identify as the same advertising ID now if you use the safari browser. Facebook stock took a huge hit right after that update.
> NULL is not guaranteed to be the stored as zeros

Is that a real issue, though?

> padding is going to make your life annoying

Just memset?
National IDs have a pretty bleak history - from being initially used to keep tabs on criminals to Jews under Nazi occupation. This is why they often are not mandatory.

As a curious factoid, in-between the world wars, it was popular for workers to have their ID number tatooed on their arm.
"...Based on this, if you are at risk for Alzheimers (your 23andme report shows this), then one of the most important things you can do today is to religiously track your sleep and make sure you get enough deep sleep daily."

Getting enough deep sleep is probably good general advice anyway, but it's as-yet unclear if Alzheimer's or amyloid-β plaque buildup is caused by poor sleep; or if a third condition causes both poor sleep and amyloid-β buildup, in which case addressing the underlying cause is what will help, not religiously tracking sleep. Not enough information to say, yet.

But, yes, everyone get a good night's sleep!
Untrue, you can also buy another device. This was also a solution posed to me by Apple.
Yeah, svelte is cool.

I build apps for living and hiring a svelte dev is not going to happen. Stick to react and go hiking on the weekends with the guys in your svelte meetup.
Code being public doesn't mean its secure. See php, django, gnupgp, openssl etc etc etc.

Again, the issue isn't the collection, its the storage, processing and disposal that really matters here.
Intel announced for next year the first Atoms that would fit in a small board since 2016. I don't think they would have anything that competes with the rk3399 on price/performance.
Changelog #33:Live Q and A, Full Site Editing, Gutenberg 9.4 and the Customizer
Many Services, One Cloudflared
Stretch Buffers in the stb header-only library:

https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stretchy_buffer....

This basically allows you to use std::vector<T> like vectors in C, but with an added benefit that you can subscript the vector like arr[3] rather than using unwieldly functions like vector_get(arr, 3) or vector_put(arr, 3, value).
politics goes beyond the presidential election every four years
Considerations Before Graduating as an Engineer
The technical focus, taught in technical programs such as my engineering school, has led me to some small surprises during my first steps in the business world. The following list outlines what I would have liked to have learned before graduation.
I made a site for some Thanksgiving themed jokes a few years ago. Just pass the phone around after dinner and take turns telling jokes.

https://immannino.github.io/turkey-jokes/
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.

-- Anatole France
Flash abandoned their own product only after it wasn't allowed on iPhones anymore.
The same reason that all new C projects aren’t being written in rust.

There is a lot of expertise floating around in the ~30ish years of netfilter so that is a ton of momentum in terms of the personal expertise of more experienced devs as well as the blogs/tutorials available when you search for “network filtering Linux”.

The default of kubernetes is still huge iptables chains and the only realistic ebpf alternative is mainly driven by a currently unsustainable startup (Cilium). The maturity just isn’t there yet.
Not my experience. Collaborative filtering makes it that it recommends what other users are watching (primarily based on location). Let's say that it reminds me that I have almost absolutely nothing in common with my "compatriots".
I think fire would be the most direct concern. IIRC, a lot of things become flammable in a high or pure O2 atmosphere that aren't normally considered flammable.
You should use more salt. :)
> there is nothing left to be desired

Pretty much every time I’m working with vectors, my shapes have borders, and I want to control whether the borders are inside, on top of, or outside the shape (similar to eg box-sizing in CSS terms). As far as I can tell, inkscape still doesn’t support that :(
Just do the right thing. If the thing happens to be heavily politicized, don’t try to defend yourself. Just say you’re trying to do the
right thing.
it's the most upvoted comment of the thread
Blockland[0] is basically this, minus VR. I would probably recommend staying away from the community, though..

[0]: http://blockland.us/
Banning commercial donations is a good idea, but difficult in reality. How do you handle commercial speech? What if a corporation wants to express its opinion using its own money? That is common in the US. Can a company come out for/against a new law, a proposed project, a pipeline?
please keep comments civil
I think the frustrating thing about this article is that every single observation has obvious exceptions. The thesis "mammals are unique" could just as easily be antithesized by the chosen evidence.

This taxonomical difficulty has always fascinated me. I give biologists the benefit of the doubt that they have solid evidence for their categorization but in the back of my mind I've always been curious about this. Why would these unique features exist in other lineages? Perhaps the space of diversity in behaviors is smallish to the point that random overlap occurs? Maybe it's purely definitional and the actual behaviors are distinct between say mammals and birds?

Or maybe my problem is that I failed my 7th grade taxonomy exam catastrophically and have never quite gotten over that :)
Some ideas:

- A musical instrument

- Something with your hands

- Something that teaches self-control and patience, maybe try intermittent fasting, or a martial art

- A lazy and zen activity, maybe fishing
Why doesn't everyone pay sales this way? If you can easily incentivize the thing you care about, you do it.
Oh! I had your repo starred already!
You're diving of some deep ends and speaking concretely as if you have the answer about what the future humans will be thinking. Pretty sure I'm being Poe'd here.
How to learn and master a new skill [video]
Also, in terms of chemistry, measuring the volume of components (e.g. of powdery substances like flour) rather than their mass is really not a good way to determine the exact amount.
Fender sales boom as guitar playing surges during the pandemic
Apple's marketing approach is primarily to view hardware and software as inseparable parts of the same product. Their main differentiator in the market is their ability to control the end-user experience to a greater degree than their competitors.

They are probably of the opinion that opening up software would decrease their target customer satisfaction and subsequently decrease sales.
"I would be interested to see where exactly you believe the above to be commonly experienced."

In the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Czech, I've found it to be pretty common. It could have been other countries as well, as I traveled relatively widely, mostly in Northern and Eastern Europe myself. But unfortunately I didn't keep a log of exactly where this happened. Just noticed it happened a lot, and was more the rule rather than the exception.
I thought a business couldn't legally refuse checks, except for some places like supermarkets where there is a high risk of fraud?
Ah yes, the opposite of "totalitarian" is "no questioning how society works at any level other than the political parties".

Makes sense, the totalitarians are always lax about having rules about what you can talk about. It was so much better when there was just "how things are done" and talk that was "unamerican", so much less political.