skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to admit that I don’t fully understand why COBOL is so difficult to replace. If the systems are so vital surely there is a detailed specification and writing in an easier to maintain language would repay the effort?

Is it just that there is so much COBOL and it’s not worth the effort?

Edit : thanks for all the great replies - HN at its best!
Interesting point on lawsuits! I never thought this way (maybe because lawsuits sounds like a very American thing, and I'm in EU)
We also came out of a World War mostly untouched (infrastructure) and victorious.
Corded headphones are arguably better if your commute involves a bike ride or crowded subway. They also feel more secure when face masks are involved.

Airpods 1 and 2 have long stems, and can fall off when wearing certain accessories like scarves, earmuffs, and face masks (when wearing or removing masks that use ear loops). This is not an issue with Airpods 3 or Airpods Pro which have shorter stems.

Tip for people who find the connection unreliable - I have noticed that having Bluetooth 5.0 on both the source device (iPhone X or later) and the earbuds (Airpods 2 or later) resolved most connection issues. It is miles better than Bluetooth 4.2 in my experience.

My complaint with wired headphones (not all of them, notably not the Lightning EarPods) is that the wire itself creates sounds while it's moving.
I thought he was saying that it was a systemic issue that people were irresponsible with money.
People in middle age have quite high IFR (>0.23% at 45) and significant amounts of western population are in risky groups because they are in bad health in general. The vaccines reduce both individual risk and spread. Overall, they work well.

For the most part, side effects of the vaccines are also side effects of the disease, but with a reduced likelihood. You're almost guaranteed to get the disease in the upcoming years.

The vaccines are not an untested therapy. You wouldn't think coercion wouldn't be necessary given a sufficiently deadly disease, but evidently it would be if you wanted very high adherence. (For the record, I don't think we should literally force-administer the vaccine.)

Cost-benefit analysis reports exist that confirm whatever conclusion you desire, presumably if the conclusion is not the one you want the source is not sufficiently independent enough for you.

Epidemiologists prior to 2019 suggested lockdowns for infectious diseases and they were in fact implemented, it took me all of 5 seconds to google that, as if there was any doubt.
I've never gotten planes. Buses and boats are very rare (for me).

I mostly get crosswalks and traffic lights. I occasionally get mountains, motorcycles, and bicycles.
> Seems to me that YAML just needs type/schema support to be less of a hurdle.

Unfortunately YAML already got type support, which made it easier to roundtrip, but also insecure. Creating a type calls constructors with possible insecure side effects. Which was eg used to hack Movable Type.
The Bad Guys are Winning
And I think your attitude generalizes too much and glosses over way too many things.

We should operate with what can we do realistically . Not what can we do hypothetically.

Hypothetically I can stop working now and have money for 3 months ahead. Realistically, I won't be able to pay rent afterwards, or even have food on the table. So I seriously disagree with your stance -- but I don't expect you to change it.

Modern times are a hamster wheel grind. At one point you just get too tired and die, and then the system yells: "NEXT!"

That's the reality in most of the world. Likely not where you live though.
dead-middle millennial here. Many of my friends been buying house circa 2016-2018 back when you can still get a 5-10k euro discount, even in Randstad/Eindhoven area. Not anymore. I was just start looking to buy a house and I was just giving up after 4 months and several attempts at bidding with crazy competitors.

I think most people were simply owning 1 house and doesn't benefit much from this housing crisis. Like you said, people who want to go out can't get in to a new house either. We're at the lowest point in NL history with fewest vacant properties available. So taxing all the property owner wouldn't do justice. However, I hope the government start to impose a progressive tax on entities owning multiple properties (hello Chinese/Prince/BlackRock investors?). They're the ones who benefitted the most from this situation. Though realistically, seeing how the current government track records, I kinda feel helpless that they'll help the younger generation. I even feel bad for Gen Z whose racking up student debt on top of it.
Works on my M1 Air.
CNN, Feynman and the Challenger Disaster
If you use a custom domain name it’s not really an issue
It always surprises me how little companies think this through. They're willing to lose all your knowledge and damage morale over a trifling 8 weeks? Talk about penny wise and pound foolish.

Never mind that in this labor market an open role might sit unfilled for more than 8 weeks!
To Be Energy-Efficient, Brains Predict Their Perceptions
> But I think they're being pretty up front and clear about what they're saying. And it seems like they do similar testing every year, at a fairly regular interval. I see no evidence that they're doing anything wrong here.

Is this a failed attempt at sarcasm?

Apple takes the small print to an art, in addition to being several pages of scrolling away from the actual claim. Even presented with normal typography here on HN, the text is so unreadable that my eyes try to glance off of it, and I'm a technical users that knows what the text means!

If you want to publish this kind of "snapshot" information, either publish somewhere where that is clear from context (like a blog), or at the very least make sure that the inline content makes it very clear! For example: "In October 2020, we found that Safari caused the battery to last 10% longer the then-latest version of Chrome".

Publishing this kind of claim as evergreen and then pointing at the small print when anyone complains (as if anyone in the actual target group actually read that) is effectively fraud.
> So, as a PoC, I decided to try rewriting one of our services in Python.

Not to your main point - but this line threw me off. I really thought you were discussing this as a "person of color", and I was so confused as the relationship of persons of color and Python. ^_^
Maybe just encode it as a bitmap, and then use other types of compression like RLE. Dithering reduces the color palette, so in combination with a bitmap it would reduce the memory footprint of each pixel.
Show HN: Language Models API via the Cohere Platform
Hey HN,

Today we're announcing the general availability of Cohere’s natural language processing platform, a powerful, easy-to-deploy collection of APIs and tools designed for developers who want to build experiences that allow humans and machines to interact using natural language.

Our goal at Cohere is to make it easy for developers to build products and applications that can classify, summarize and generate text. We're trying to make it as easy as possible for a dev (with or without ML expertise) to build products/features/systems powered by large language models that require a comically expensive supercomputer to train. It's still early for the product and we have a lot to build, but it would mean the world if you'd give it a try, give us your feedback, and help us build!

You can get immediate access to Cohere’s NLP platform by visiting https://os.cohere.ai. We are currently offering everyone free credits for up to 6 million characters from our largest model, usable over their first three months on the Cohere platform. Once you're in, you can apply for full access to get more models, finetuning, and reduced rate-limiting.

All my best,
Aidan
> I mostly meant the post-WW2 generation. It's well-documented (but I don't keep link because why would I) that their social upwards mobility actually did exist.

A short period of the modern era in which the US was pretty much the only nation with it's manufacturing capability completely intact after the destruction of WWII. The US also realized that funding education was important for a time after the war to retrain veterans. It's how so many people were able to get college degrees essentially for free which helped boost the economy for a generation.

> at least you weren't always in debt like most of the people nowadays are

Since it sounds like you're limiting the modern era to after 2000, it seems we can stretch things a bit and look at the era of The Great Depression as being pre-modern by that definition (I think The Depression falls squarely in Modernity, but for the sake of argument...). Mortgage debt increased 8X from 1920 to 1929. Installment debt increased at similar rates. This is far from the first generation that's taken on a lot of debt.

Yes, I agree that there are forces at work which conspire to keep people in debt, however those forces are not new. Things are made worse by the high cost of housing which is caused by constrained supply (and a greater population now putting more demand on housing), but again, I'm not sure we haven't been here before. Pendulums swing. And why are houses so much bigger now than they were in that postwar era when families were larger? That also leads to higher housing costs (some of it is demand and some of it is perverse incentives for builders to build bigger houses).
It's just a matter of maths. If sapiens were migrating from a warmer climate, they were probably also more numerous due to having evolved in a more advantageous climate. Obviously Neanderthals were more suited to a glacial period, as evidenced by their lack of competition during that era.
The dotnet CLI has the means for creating and maintaining solution files as well, for example:

`dotnet new sln

dotnet new console --output folder1/folder2/myapp

dotnet sln add folder1/folder2/myapp`

will result in something more like the new project experience from Visual Studio.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/dotnet-sl...
I own a late 40s Italian bicycle equipped with Cambio Corsa. It's now a display piece because I don't want to maintain the glued on tubular tires or risk breaking something irreplaceable. However in the past I have taken it out on a couple short, flat rides to test the system, enough to make a couple observations about using it.

When changing gears, it doesn't feel like there is much risk of the wheel slipping forward out of the dropouts. The dropouts themselves are angled up and back, which helps prevent that. Also, when changing gears you are sitting back, putting weight on the seat and changing the weight distribution of the bike to favor the rear. This also counteracts the tendency of the wheel to come forward. The action of the chain only pulls the axle forward in the dropouts when shifting to a lower gear (higher tooth count cog on the freewheel, closer to the wheel spokes). There isn't much risk of "overshifting" the chain to a point where it will pull the axle out of the dropouts, simply because the chain would just contact the spokes or a spoke protector and slide back down into gear (unless something is really broken).

Also, you can see from the photos in the article how differently the dimensions of racing bicycle frames were fitted to riders back then. Modern racing bikes tend to have a lot of seatpost extension and longer handlebar stems, which shift the rider's weight forward on the bike. A simplified explanation is that this improves aerodynamics and certain handling characteristics, at the cost of requiring the rider have better core strength and flexibility. In contrast, the photos in the article show typical mid-20th century bicycle fit, with much less seatpost extension and shorter stems. Compared to modern racers, Coppi and Bartali sit father back, with their butt closer to the top tube. This puts the Cambio Corsa system in closer reach and the weight distribution has a more stable, rearward bias. The action of reaching back to change gears would feel treacherous and destabilizing on a modern racing bike, but would be a bit more comfortable on the bikes of the time.

This is all said with the big caveat that I have never ridden my Cambio Corsa bike in a long distance or competitive scenario. Undoubtedly it's still a challenging system to master. I can imagine the extreme difficulty of operating it on the unpaved, bumpy climbs typical of that era.

Edit: Here is a link to scans of the original patent drawings for the Cambio Corsa. It shows the mechanical details- click on the "Pages" tab to see all the scanned pages of the patent.

https://www.disraeligears.co.uk/site/french_patent_899402_-_...
I have been using serverless for only last 3 months and experience is plain simple, tooling is not ready to build complex mainstream apps.
Trump provided an exceptional case, and this was published following the January 6th insurrection at the US Capitol, which GitHub had responded to by firing a Jewish employee for decrying white supremacy. It was under these conditions that this post was originally written, and these are the issues it addressed.

To be clear, I think that Obama's actions were also horrible. We're not here to take sides, on the left or right or anywhere else, but instead to address problematic behaviors.

Like I said earlier, I think enough has been said on this subject. Let's avoid derailing this thread any further with a laundry list of all of the bad things the powers that be are doing around us and what we ought to think and do about it. The practical questions of what behavior is not considered acceptable, and how we'll respond to such behavior, were answered in the email thread linked to above. I hope that sufficiently addresses your concerns. Cheers!
When Gnome stops being hostile to people who want to modify it in the original spirit -- not necessarily just letter, but SPIRIT -- of free/open source, I'll stop being hostile.

I'm not trying to "fix issues." I'm trying to point out that, sure, Gnome may be technically following the rules, but the entire project is being a collective jerk about it.

Now, we can go deeper on why -- I have no reason to believe individual developers are jerks. I understand there there's money and influence and (cargo-culting) pressure from large companies involved.

But presently - Gnome is a collective putting out a product that is harmful to the environment -- not in an ecological way, but one that reinforces bad ideas about how to make software, aka "only do the bare minimum to comply with the license, otherwise try to dominate via whatever means possible."
Databaseless: Building stateless web services by storing state in external APIs
mentioning the release version that a walkthrough was written for is not a perfect solution, but it saves a lot of time when trying to figure out why a certain step does not work anymore

if the source is available, hardlinks to specific lines in a specific version would be pretty good
There is a BT cassette adapter, believe it or not. Tried it an old Audi we had that still had a deck in it. It worked but the charging cable couldn’t stay plugged in while cassette was loaded, and if you left it in car in cold temps of course battery would turn to rubbish pretty quickly. However, it’s awesome that this exist[s/ed]. I thought there must be a way for some bright engineer to get the thing to gen power from the rotation of the tape reels and just dump the need to charge as often or at all.
> Helping kids understand the different between gut-rot crap on youtube vs. some educational game is very important.

I've had a lot of frustration in this department because most of the quality edutainment games are from 15-20 years ago. We've just stopped making progress here and just gone backwards by saying 'screen time is inherently bad, limit it as much as possible'. It's harder for parents to make good choices when it's all Caillou and no Daniel Tiger for options.
Did I get banned for testing post titles?
I've recently started a startup blog and been using HN to test post titles.

1. Is that inappropriate to do? My thought was that the ranking system would take care of that

2. Does HN have some kind of shadow banning? Either for users or my sites?

Thanks!
And yet sommeliers can be regularly fooled in blind taste tests.
The use cases described are niche enough that iOS users can buy a second Android phone to use it with.
Ignorance and skepticism are completely different things.
He made the comment a few times, apparently, in the context of GOTO it was this:

> Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

From: "Structured Programming with Goto Statements", emphasis mine.

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20131023061601/http://cs.sjsu.ed... (I haven't read it in a while, and it's 41 pages, so I probably won't get to it today.)
That’s basically why I went full Apple. I value my time.
Just write in the header of the script: "This script requires Fedora Linux 33 or higher" and forget about outdated OS'es, unless it's your paid job to supported them.

If you OS vendor refuses to supply you with appropriate tools to do your job, then just chose another vendor. Vote with your foots.
If anyone is looking to procrastinate, Onur Multu's keynote at HiPEAC 2021 Secure Hardware, Architectures, and Operating Systems [1] is very good.

[1] https://youtu.be/sgd7PHQQ1AI
That's the point isn't it? e.g. you might say "I would rather stub my toe 1000 times than run COBOL once". The comparison only makes sense if it's something you consider to be bad.
Thank you for posting. I was hoping to see more commenting from people closer to the matter.

India is such a large, geographically diverse nation. How do you think that plays into local policy development + enforcement?
There is no logout because the login isn't really a login. All this is doing is using the user's permission to submit their email (registered on the OAuth service) to subscribe to the newsletter. Nothing in the browser is changing that could compromise your details.
You mentioned NumPy. NumPy is great, and there is basically no Java equivalent. So if you are doing the kind of work which NumPy can help with, it's going to be very hard work to beat it with Java, either in development speed or execution speed.

To put it another way, perhaps what you tested here was having a great array library vs not having a great array library! It would be interesting to test Python vs Java on a more generic task, where there isn't a huge advantage from a particular library or set of libraries.

It would also be great if someone would write a NumPy-style library for Java. My team would use that a lot!
Try minimal apis. Is not nancyfx archived?
My favorite aspect of Knuth's take, is that he definitely concerns himself with the low level aspects of programming when writing things.

I don't mean that as a criticism, either. I keep meaning to strive to having the level of cognizance to memory usage that he just drips into his software.
If NATO wishes for Ukraine to join and Ukraine wishes to join NATO it is them and them alone who need to act.

NATO/Zelensky are of course reluctant to go ahead because an application to join would reinvigorate the civil war. They know the cost of giving the middle finger to Ukraine's ethnic Russians and would prefer to wear them down gradually while blaming the whole shitstorm on Russia.

Russia (and ethnic Russians within Ukraine's borders) would prefer Zelensky was kicked out and replaced with another Yanukovych who would kickstart the process of deintegrating from the European/American sphere of influence and reintegrating into the Russian sphere of influence.

Ukraine could do a better job of playing the two great powers off against one another a la Tito/Yugoslavia, but instead it swings violently between being ruled by a bunch of corrupt Russian-aligned oligarchs to being ruled by a bunch of equally corrupt European/American-aligned oligarchs.
> Saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer. There's no clear solutions

Ah, the dark side of American exceptionalism. "Other countries do it" is absolutely an answer. We could, if we wanted to, peruse our way through the policies used in other countries and pick the one that best fits Americas needs and demographic situation. But that isn't possible if we put blinders on and pretend that the experience of other countries doesn’t matter.
Based on the comments and not reading the article everyone seems to have missed the more important point.

Images on a webpage will be scaled to devicePixelRatio. Common devices have non integer devicePixelRatios so dithered images are going to fail
Sorry, does not compute. Feel free to do whatever triage you want for the scarce ICU resource. Banning large numbers healthy people form society, of which the vast majority (>99%) will never need an ICU, is something else entirely.
Slow kids

-- assembler
Does Quantitative Easing Cause Income Inequality?
Sometimes dithering is the right option depending on your use case. If it’s purely getting the smallest size, for example, go into Adobe Photoshop “save for web” and mess around with the various algorithms, formats, and dithering settings. Photoshop has a live preview with live updating file size. I’ve always found limited palette pngs and gifs with dithering tended to be the smallest. It also depends on the contents of your image and all of that. And there are many cases for complex images where a jpeg will be able to represent the image at a smaller size with greater clarity.
> There was no significant change in memory used by WindowServer (3.37 GB)

Isn't that high for WindowServer? I haven't seen mine over 1GB.
I have. With no problems. At Heathrow.
Yeah I heard US telecoms were insanely draconic (why were they allowed to act like that though? lobbying?)

In Europe they weren't saints either but they weren't as bad when locking down your phone and mostly just resorted to SIM-lock, instead of locking other features as well.
I mean this list seems obvious but its incredible how few people do it.

Intermittent fasting is the only way I have been able to control my weight as an adult.

Exercising makes you feel better and live longer.

Alcohol is a poison that offers short term fun for long term sadness and pain.

Sleep makes an immediately and daily impact on your life.

Meditation (I don't do it anymore) is like cleaning for your brain and short amounts can be very helpful.
What issues are people actually facing in regards to browser compatibility on evergreen browsers in 2021? I keep hearing people complaining about Safari but no one has explained what issues they actually face.

The article mentions CSS but I've not encountered any incompatibilities so far. I've made SPAs, normal sites, used CSS Grid, some simple animations, all been fine across browsers.
> Language aside, I could argue that VB6 was the closest the industry has gotten to low/no code for complex CRUD apps.

Access (with integrated VBA for what code is needed, and the whole market of similar desktop databases Access ended up dominating and eating, like FoxPro, Paradox, etc., each usually with their own proprietary language) is and were much closer to low-code/no-code for that than VB6; you could generally do simple CRUD completely no-code and complex CRUD much lower-code than with VB6 (since they generally included not only code-free UI design tools but also code-free and low-code DB modeling tools).