skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>We're in the midst of launching a multi-year, billion dollar program to replace that mainframe. We've been talking about doing this for years and are just now pulling the trigger on it. There's still time to tell whether we actually go through with it or not, or get $100 million into the project and realize we're looking at a $1.5 billion - $2 billion effort and abandon the project.

So, you're looking at a high risk, multi-year, multi-billion dollar project to remove your own mainframe dependency. And the business isn't fully committed to it.

> Most CIOs are looking for a means for retiring those assets.

And finding extremely expensive, high risk, long duration software projects are the usual alternative, per your own experience. Why waste prestige and budget on that when you can keep all the critical LOB software running exactly as it is (or faster) forever? Mainframes are the OG backward compatibility and virtualization platforms.

Given that, why do you think the mainframe business isn't thriving, especially given the billions in revenue that the companies you list in your post undoubtedly bring in for IBM? It's not sexy, and they're probably not winning new customers. But they're making a shit ton of money on a long lived, successful product and continuing to fund research and development on the platform.
There is hundreds of millions of dollars funding available at the DOE for quantum computing research, but that is spread over all aspects of quantum computing, so
it’s not really enough to make significant headway anytime soon. Maybe at the $5-10B mark we could see rapid progress and start to think about scientific computing in a production context
Look into vendors of "security software" for schools. I had to lawyer up at the beginning of the school year to get securely.com (edited) (government has no business deploying this kind of spyware against children) removed from my children's chrome accounts. I ended up having to pull my kids out of the school system as two of the three started to have mental health issues.
Our idea was poorly timed and we lost passion for it. We were focused on making lectures better for the remote school environment. Unfortunately colleges have a hard time justifying a tuition's worth of value for online videos, so it was a tough sell, especially with the end of the pandemic around the corner.
> I don't think the programming language makes that big of a difference, ultimately

I mean, it should be clear Julia is a much higher-performance method of crunching data than Python, which is unquestionably the king of the data science pile, and therefore it factors into performance & cost.
There's one in Ithaca, NY (home of Cornell univ) as well. It's spread over 1.2 km, and is just a fun walk. [1]

Ithaca is just such a wonderful place to live, winters included!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_Planet_Walk
Hey, I said it's oversimplified. Don't get hung up on trying to categorize yourself as one or the other. You CAN get into another stack or another company if you really want to.
Some doing Technology abuse, some doing just for social image
I just saw your comment (but I will still keep my other comment for people to see).

Basically, AFTER you get caught, you delete the evidence and leave a 404? How about edit/censor to write: "we do not condone these actions - bypassing school security, and thus we remove this harmful content"?
This issue always come up with those discussions indeed. Probably to be safe you could just come up with plausible unique non-random name, and still store it in keepass.

> What's your cat's name?

Site X: Kareem Abdul-Jabaar

Site Y: Cassius Clay

Site Z: Franz Beckenbauer
Let's use Deno and the Slack API to pick random winners from our community
House Passes Gun Control Bill
It's time to start shooting some politicians.
> Wood works well in earthquakes - when you design for it.

I highly doubt that "designing for it" really beats inherently stronger building materials to specifically choose wood with its many, many other disadvantages over something else.
It’s Time to Start Paying Attention to Vector Databases
> Normally mono blue languages allow you to "emulate" red contexts using callback's, listeners and similar. So some would argue there are no mono blue languages.

well, that's exactly what is done in traditional C, C++, Java...
I’d suggest that when you have paying customers, and your duck tape deploy process is starting to feel risky to run during business hours, that’s a good time to do your first taking of stock. Before that point it should be the fastest thing you can wire up given your own personal tooling expertise.

(I’d argue that k8s is actually lean enough to be a competitor here if you’re already an expert and you use a managed service like GKE).

Your infra should be in service to some uptime/performance/DX goals. Define those (honestly!) and then you can figure out what you need to improve.

In particular if no customer has ever noticed downtime, and you don’t think you’d lose business if someone hit a 30-min outage, then you probably don’t need to upgrade. Twitter was notoriously unreliable in the early days and they made it, for example.
Nokia smartphones had http+html browsers back in 2001. I don't know how many mobile optimized sites were there, but the browser on my 9210 was pretty usable (though not everything worked, of course). I used to save full pages on my desktop and copy it on the 9210 to read while on the go. (Well, we didn't have Pocket back then, and while I definitely wanted to develop something similar, I just couldn't make myself do it in Symbian's C++ dialect.)
Your ability to turn the smallest of technical hurdles into an insurmountable problem is truly impressive.
Having worked in a school system, I can imagine the explanation went something like this:

Some kid finds boobs in a google image search, outrage ensues.

Administrators task IT to block it.

IT responds that it cannot, as sometimes boobs are available even in Google safe search. There are no 100% solutions.

Administrators order IT to do something about it anyway, so IT decides to disable Google image search entirely.

IT discovers that Google image search doesn't use its own domain, so they have no choice but to block all of Google.

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensues.

Administrators quickly reverse the decision to block Google.

In a 4 hour meeting, IT is eventually able to explain to Administrators why what they want is not possible. Maybe.
So, instead of fixing the security issue, we're just going to make learning computers and programming off-limits? Silly.
the TLDR is that for a lot of high dimensional PDE models, you get a better trade off of speed vs accuracy by using a NN for part of the model that is inefficient to calculate the full physics for. This is already having a lot of success in climate modeling, where NN based solutions do a better job of dealing with some atmospheric effects than previous efforts.
That's a good question!

The reason given is it's getting difficult to find COBOL programmers and the platform isn't as agile as other platforms. I have to admit that IBM is working to make the platform more agile and you can do more than run COBOL - you can run Java and Linux on Z. I've been in IBM training sessions where I've been running Linux on Z and then running Docker on top of that and unless you had told me otherwise the experience was normal: you're running bash, running Docker and everything runs as you'd expect.

BUT - the problem is the core of our system is written in COBOL. There's still CICS, JCL, Copybooks and DB/2 and those who can work with those technologies are now within 10 years of retiring and the new generation doesn't know them or have much of a desire to learn them. Heck, I'm part of the first generation of PC developers from the mid-1980's and I've never done any mainframe development!

The thinking then is we'd better jump off before all these people retire and you end up having to pay $300+/hr for resources capable of working with these legacy technologies. Pay now and buy yourself a new technology set and new capabilities or pay later and just keep the system running.
Out of genuine curiosity, would you quit a job if the equipment they gave you was locked down to meet enterprise requirements?

It's a school issued computer. I think it is more than reasonable for the school to lock down their own property as they see fit for security, and likely for liability, reasons.

I'm not saying kids shouldn't be able to learn programming, obviously they should be able to, but we have to stay in touch with reality.
There was a reddit thread from a guest lecture a few years ago that said that around T-1 they turn off all receivers on Falcon 9.

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/lw6yk1/notes_from_a...
the article say “ Want to call a sync function from an async function? -> Either just call in normally, or if it would block your async function spawn it as a blocking task”

What “spawn it as a blocking task” mean?
Is it ok to create a task using blocking non-async function?
If your professional environment is windows then yes it is in a bad state, otherwise the tooling is pretty good.
"Right side of history" is a powerful motivator, for better or worse. How did you get the first customer?
Sequential testing will never be truly random, unless you can guarantee that your traffic is uniform across time.

Imagine you're running an AB test on a website, where the number of customers you get increases linearly over time. If you test two features sequentially, there is no duration you could pick that is small enough to where you would not expect the second option to win.
Even worse, nuclear very clearly gets more expensive the more if it we build, not less expensive.
You misapprehend the statistics I feel. — this is the number of deaths per trillion kWh generated, not absolute number of deaths. You cite it in a way that implies that Nuclear is to be multiplied with 5.5 to offer a fair comparison with wind.
This is very closed minded perspective; having a distributed ledger of digital collectable assets that you can trade without being tied to one exchange or marketplace is powerful and the beginning of the end of institutional gate keeping.
I was actually looking for something just like this since I won't have access to my Jellyfin server for a while. This looks perfect.
> I wonder how much benefit there was from open sourcing the project: in other words, how many contributors helped out, or how many customers would refuse to buy it when it's not open source.

Contributors is easy to judge, but the second bit is not. It includes people you'll never even hear from.

For me, the big question I ask is basically "What are the chances this software becomes unavailable in the future and what's my escape plan?" These two weigh against each other -- if it's a non-critical tool and the plan is "go back to doing it the old way, with near zero business impact" then I don't really care about the chances it disappears a whole lot. If it's "Start a several-months migration effort while the business is crippled" then suddenly that first bit becomes incredibly important.

I consider chances a small (especially one-person) company disappears is fairly high. Same for a VC-funded startup (along with the chances they kill or pivot away from the product, which is effectively the same thing).

Open source means it never really becomes "unavailable": It might be costly (eg if I have to fund maintenance on my own) but it still provides low risk of crippling my business.

When I'm considering new software, the non-OSS stuff run by small companies just naturally goes to the bottom of the list for exactly this reason. If I go with something higher up on that list, that company won't even know they were being considered, let alone why I didn't pick them.
Why isn't Rust top at modeling and simulation yet?
One bank of mine has "first job" as a security question. If I put the real one, you could easily get it from my LinkedIn.
Huh, did not expect our press release to end up on HN, but I'm the PI on this project, so AMA, I guess. Will jump into the questions already asked here and provide some context.
> Mk 1 eyeball

I giggled.
>>Meanwhile, the artwork hangs in a museum and you have no control over it.

One can most certainly remove their artwork from museums pretty much as they please or at the very least according to terms of a loan contract. Not to mention special access and privileges loaned artwork bestows upon the owner...
Quite true! I thought about saying “kg of positrons and kg of electrons” or such so that the mass/charge ratio would be more equivalent.
Fix the headline - it should say "Julia Computing Receives DARPA Award to Accelerate Electronics Simulation by 1,000x"

The money is going to a company.
Yes, it's called the GPL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License

Under the GPL, a competitor can certainly take the code, rebrand it, and sell it as their own but they are required to provide the full source code of whatever "borrowed" GPL code they distribute to the end user. This ensures that the source (and whatever changes/additions are made) cannot be taken and locked up by someone else, which is possible with more permissive licenses like the BSD and MIT licenses.
There are ways to surrogatize portions of a simulation, replacing large portions with ML-trained surrogates. There are already demonstrations in different domains (on highly stiff differential-algebraic equations) showing that you can get these kinds of speedups at around 99% accuracy.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.04004

https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.05244
Mimetic Desire 101
I have a very short .co - gets 'em every time.
Tracking is only useful for advertising. I figure a subscription would mean advertising-less search.
There is a similar in purpose Punjabi food called pinni made from flour, sugar, ghee and nuts. They also provide a lot of energy and last a long time.

I have thought of those as lembas.

Ingredients:

• 1 kg atta (wheat flour)

• 500 gm chinni (white granulated sugar)

• 500 gm ghee (clarified butter) or olive oil

• 250 gm khoya (congealed sweet cream)

• Mewa (to taste): badam (almonds), piste (pistachios), kishmish (raisins)

http://www.indoamerican-news.com/mamas-punjabi-recipes-atte-...
Is an Android version planned? What about web?
I'll take "things you can do when you're single"... can't quite imagine sidling up to significant other with the gambit "Darling, would you mind terribly if I spent £1000 on Kazakhstani emoji domains?"
That linked survey didn't include their definition. But young children are one big group that comes to mind.
Congrats. Intriguing, obviously.

Fwiw, in the Getting Started I noticed "Our Philosophy". I'd move that to the home page. It's essential context (imho). Otherwise the home page seems too featured focus and too lite on benefits. I read that bullet list in Philosophy as benefits (in a way). That is when I sat up.
It's bragging rights like owning a original painting when copies/replicas exist.

Real question is how mucg is preventing a second competing NFT from existing for the same item via and alternative design or chain or currency?
If you type "caff" into the search, it doesn't find it... weird.
I ported a large Python codebase from sync to async. There's a temptation to partially move and keep a mixed async/sync structure. That temptation is wrong though.

There's a worse secondary effect of mixing async and sync code by using executors (async->sync) or posting to the async loop (sync->async). The first effect: it means that your sync functions that were previously non-blocking are now blocking, so all async callers are now forced to make calls into them with executors.

Even worse, if you have chains of async -> executor -> sync -> post -> async -> executor -> sync (as you might do by mechanically converting sync code), each executor call takes up an entire worker in the pool, and the Python thread pool has a maximum number of workers. You need as many workers as the sum of the maximum number of outstanding async->sync transition stacks in all of your async tasks. The penalty for underestimating this is deadlock.
Do you think it's technically sounds to migrate ? or is it just a trend to get away from old tech ?
> Sure, I get it, everyone needs to prioritize. But if you are ignoring interactions on your OSS project, you can expect more, oh, I'll call it 'heat'. I have seen those github issue threads, where people get frustrated because someone hasn't engaged.

Companies selling non-OSS products get slammed with requests on a large scale and they have to deal with them somehow. Todoist immediately comes to mind. I mean, sure, it's possible that some users of a paid product will conclude you don't know what you're doing and take their business elsewhere, but that's kind of like boasting about fixing your broken finger by cutting off your arm.
Globen just means literally "the globe".
I'm horrified by the notion of banks in particular storing their data where "those datasets are not well governed, no-one knows the schemas". This is people's money you're talking about.

A lot of applications can fail with an "eh, whatcha gonna do?" shrug when records fall out because their schemas drifted or two different developers interpreted them differently. So somebody's preferences stop working or their early "likes" get forgotten; so what? Move fast, break stuff, etc.

But when your data actually matters, I'd much rather pay the expense of having some discipline about it. The idea that my money might become the stuff that gets "broken" is kinda terrifying.
This is about Julia Computing, the company, not Julia the language.
Yeah android is definitely gonna be worked on, we wanted to get iOS right first. We were thinking about web but aren't sure about it just yet!
Is My Home Is Safe with Smoke Detectors and CO Alarms?
Doesn't Kant then go on to explain, in which phenomenal objects are said to conform to the mind of the subject and, in turn, become products of human cognition.

(Kantian noumena) of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects. The article, as it appears, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal footing with one another.
Yeah, I think most people on this site are going to first assume the language.
But tax avoidance isn't illegal, this has been tested many times in the US courts.
dune, opam, VS Code Ocaml Platform are pretty solid trifecta tooling wise. dune confuses me, but what build tool doesn't?

Library-wise we use bap and core as our main things. The documentation of both is rather hard to traverse through in my opinion, but I get by.

Otherwise depends on what your domain is. The owl ecosystem looks fun https://ocaml.xyz/book/ .
> Nim implements just about every paradigm it can think of, and if there are multiple ways to implement a paradigm, it implements them all.

any examples?
Sounds similar to what stockfish (leading chess computer engine) does. In newer versions, position evaluation comes at least in part from a NN, which lead to an improvement in playing strength.

edit:
similar in approach, not as a 1:1 mapping. Replace a deterministic model with a faster, slightly fuzzy one.
Sure, but then I think mooreds comment is a convincing rebuttal of

> Sounds like he was too focused in one area of his project, and needed to take a step back to get a broader view of the state of things. I'm not convinced the closed/open source nature of his code is responsible for that.

It's not that the author was overly focused on one thing. It was just that he didn't want to pay the cost.
The norm used to be never to post personal info online. Yes, some things could still be found out, and there were still attack vectors, but typing your real name in a web form, except maybe (and only fairly late in the time period I'm talking about) to pay with a CC on a well-known site? LOL no. Posting photos of yourself, and with your name and maybe even a location attached? Madness! Are you nuts!?

I'm convinced Zuckerberg's infamous "dumb fucks" comment was made in a state of puzzlement that all these n00bs just had no idea they shouldn't be giving him that info, and indeed, the dawn of Facebook and all the people it added to the set of folks posting information online ended the previous "no-one knows you're a dog" set of norms of the Web.

Now there's money tied up in it, so of course people insist they must be able to post all kinds of things under their real names so they can market themselves. Never mind that it remains a terrible idea.

This is the source of conflict, I think, between people who want more real names online and those who want none. The former are the new folks who think posting personal info online is normal, or even necessary (see again: personal brand-building and marketing) and believe that we need to be able to ID everyone to prevent abuse (i.e. be able to find abusers to punish them), and the latter are the old-school Web users (post-Eternal-September, pre-Facebook) who don't get why all these idiots are making themselves easy to abuse in the first place, who see more anonymity as the obvious cure.
What we think is real is just how we perceive it. So what was Real and what is Perception ?
Awesome! This is a good lead. I think you meant securly.com. Will reach out.
Not the original poster but I think the best answer to that would be from a talk DHH (the guy who made rails) gave about language choice.

He pointed out out that when he started his company there was no rails, or any great support for writing a server in ruby. He pointed out that it's actually surprisingly simple to get a barebones version of whatever library you like done in your preferred language. The original working version of rails was less than 2000 lines of code. Sure, there are no bells and whistles, but that's how rails started, and look where it is right now.

Compared to the ruby ecosystem in 2004, the Ocaml ecosystem actually pretty full of great libraries. Yeah, it's still tiny in comparison to the big server languages, but it's more than enough to build reliable systems on top of.
South Africia is really pretty this time of year!
I think you are correct. But then you risk data as you would with the unclean shutdown.
I much prefer to have a known clean state which all things considered should be a safer bet.
Just like some are OK running without fsync.
I certainly question the orthodox view that software should be fault-tolerant and horizontally-scalable. If programmer time is more valuable than machine time, then why can't my team get a single server with a few TiB of RAM and a few hundred cores and forget all the gnarly problems of distributed computing? Why do we accept that our hardware is unrelaible and then spend so much effort making our software tolerate failure?

I do not know whether or not mainframes are the right solution, though. I don't really know anything about them. I don't know whether or not the architecture is the correct approach.

>IBM has grown usage as measured by MIPS, a method of calculating the raw speed used, by 350% over the past ten years.

That's an awful metric. MIPS isn't even a good way of measuring aggregate performance and aggregate performance is a terrible way of measuring adoption.