skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Most native RPA automation is GUI based. But let us take a moment so that this sinks in. GUI based automation involves instructing a bot to communicate with another program via the UI. This is analogous to forcing two native speakers to communicate via charades. GUI based automation is always a compromise because there is invariably a more efficient way to perform the same task under the hood. This brings me to my second reason."

The author isn't very clear here and seems to be themselves unclear on how these RPA technologies actually "see" an application.

Every Robotic Operating Model I've ever seen or worked on has always held firm that "surface automation" (think Citrix Receivers and applications built in Silverlight or Flash) should be outside the scope of any RPA solution.

What's left are browser or desktop based "physical" applications that actually have an underlying model used to describe and render a GUI. This is actually what is being utilized by (most) RPA clients.

While correct that the clients do interact with the UI of a program, depending on the application they actually interpret (or "see" it) via the application COM (component object model), or in the case of a webpage, the DOM (document object model). Since these are essentially used to describe what is rendered on screen -usually in a more detailed way then what is actually rendered on screen- the RPA client is able to efficiently and confidently interact with the application.

Take a webpage with a red button to click for example:

Automating purely via UI/surface automation:
- Capture 150px by 150px at screen coordinates x and y
- Is captured image red with the words "Click me" on it?
- Go to x coordinates on screen
- Go to y coordinates on screen
- Send key 'Right mouse button click"
- Pray

Automating via DOM:
- Attach to process `Chrome titled "My webpage"`
- Is element `<button enabled=true id="superUnique_superDependable" class="clickMe" onClick="navigate(MyOtherWebpage)">Click me</button>` present?
- (to browser client) Send key `Right mouse button click` to element id = "superUnique_superDependable"
- Wait for process `Chrome titled "My other webpage"`

OR

Automating via DOM:
- Attach to process `Chrome titled "My webpage"`
- Run function `navigate(MyOtherWebpage)`
- Wait for process `Chrome titled "My other webpage"`
That makes sense. My immediate reaction is:

1) focus on business logic: is your code "about" sorting and allocation, or could you treat those as built-ins?

2) It's OK if a function is calling other functions. The point is that it's a business-logic-level unit of functionality, which is smaller than a module or so.

Ymmv. Maybe we should read the scriptures.
Chelsea has been out of prison for quite some time. If you can't do the time don't do the crime.
How to set up Germans for a bloody revolution and make them pro-Russian in three easy steps.

1) Make fuel extremely expensive.
2) Quickly massively lower standard of living, e.g. by turning off heating in winter/early spring
3) Purposefully crash the economy, leading to mass unemployment.
> He was a prolific writer on social and political issues, while Tolkien, bless him, was deep down the rabbit hole of Middle Earth (as demonstrated by his writings and letters).

Tolkien was a social/political writer and lord of the rings was a social/politic text. One of the central themes of LoTR revolved around the central social/political question of the fate of the british empire in the first half of the 20th century. Namely that as transportation improved, it wouldn't be just the colonizers striving outward, but the colonized striving in and overruning the idyllic and white shire. The ring stood for the british empire - something that was attained that conferred immense power to its holder but also corrupted the holder and drew "monsters" to the holder. It is no secret that tolkien based his "dark and swarthy" monsters on the colonized blacks, indians, chinese, etc. It could be read as a call to relinquish the "ring" ( aka british empire ) in order to save "the shire" lest it be overrun by blacks, indians, chinese, etc. It also touched upon nature, environment, religion, etc, but the central theme was the uncomfortable socio-political racial issues of the british empire. To say tolkien was only about Middle Earth is like saying Melville was only about whales. You are missing a lot if you think Tolkien and LoTR didn't delve into social and political issues. It was primarily about social and political issues of that day.

> I like and admire both authors.

Both are great writers though Tolkien is a bit overrated. If you want to read a genuinely great book, read Moby Dick. When I was a teenager, I hated moby dick and loved LoTR. After all, who cares about baleen and whale anatomy? But as you grow older and wiser it flips. Moby Dick gains in esteem and LoTR reads like childish fantasy in comparison. It's like Star Wars and Dune. In 200 years, nobody is going to care about LoTR or Star Wars. People will still read Moby Dick and Dune.
Not sure how realistic it is to access the resources in such a short time frame.
MobX from a quick Google seems to resemble the old Knockout.js

We use Relay to define our state management, trigger global updates across many components, and also query/mutate our data.

Does MobX have a way to do the global state management that Relay does?

I’m curious because after using Relay, I’ve found most other types of state management to feel extremely heavy with boiler plate code.

Thoughts?
RMS has been known to make the odd comment (once or twice) where raising awareness of an important idea takes priority over immediate convenience. That doesn't mean he unsympathetic to challenges of foreign languages.
Also using Digital Ocean App Platform. It's good once you understand it and get up-and-running, but their documentation and interface isn't good (yet). I would recommend trying to use Dockerfiles and their doctl CLI tool, as the web interface is confusing and limited.
Additional stats: the US and allies directly killed ~ 13 000 civilians during the occupation of Iraq.

It's likely the Russians have exceeded that number in Mariupol alone in just a few weeks.

The difference in these numbers reflects that Russia is deliberately targeting civilians.

I condemn the occupation of Iraq, but agree it is exceptionally obvious that the two situations are in no way equivalent.
I've found the Chef project (https://github.com/chef/chef) to be high quality and easily readable but I've been working with Chef for like 8 years at this point which might be influencing how I view it.

Hashicorp projects also seem very well done too especially given how extensible they are.
It could be DNS. I had to disable DNSSEC for the `.apple.com` zone to even work.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane
Sorry dealing with a lot of stress related to what is happening.
A year or so ago my son tried to activate his Minecraft account. He gave up. Said it was days and days of hell and he was really upset.

EDIT:

Reminds me of what happened years earlier when we turned on our XBOX and had to update. Basically, it took an entire day of logic loops in the login/verification system, which required several hours of being on the phone with MS.

It was a forced upgrade, so otherwise we would have ignored it.

So, this Minecraft stuff is nothing new for MS.
Show HN: I wrote a book to teach doctors about AI
I'm not attempting to back-seat drive the third reich here -- I make software, not war. I'm just interested in gleaning design insight from history.

In any case... I do think that, ultimately, the Jerrycan was more useful to the allied forces. The copycat designs were instrumental in the invasion of Europe, which pushed supply logistics far harder than the blitz ever did.
> Why did Germany put itself into this strange Russian dependency is also very strange.

For the same reason, the US has long been dependent on Russia for space travel and is still dependent for the ISS: It worked for a long time quite well, was cheaper and more secure than the alternatives, and that Putin running amok was a scenario that most people did not think was likely, if they have imagined it at all. Recall that until recently the US was more concerned about China than Russia.
I don't think "enforce" means what you think it means. If you are contacted about a GDPR matter usually you have time to fix it before it's "a violation" that incurs penalties.
This isn't just a problem for ancient languages and modern foreign languages. It's a problem for languages you speak fluently. And the implications are a lot bigger than understanding a joke.

Consdier a sentence like "Tim just squealed like a pig low key, actual" [1]. Throw in a few more choice phrases like "L plus ratio", "copium" and "dead ass" and someone from a few yers ago will have issues decoding all that. Many current people will be lost.

Words also disappear (eg [2]). Old English is essentially a different language. Middle English can be hars to parse.

~230 years ago the Bill of Rights became part of the US Constitution. The Firs Amendment [3] includes this text:

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion ...

"Establish" here at that time had a very specific meaning that differs from the current vernacular. This sprung from Britain where the Anglican Church was the Established church. That means it was responsible for registering births, deaths and marriages. Catholics, for example, would often get married twice: once in a Catholic church and a second time in an Anglican ceremony so it was official.

The framers here wanted to guard against there being an "official" religion in the nascent United States. All such official institutions were to be civil not religious.

Knowing this history makes this language more understandable yet an established religion is not something we in the West have dealt with in some time so the meaning has changed to the more general sense.

You can also have this discussion about the phrase "well-regulated militia" with respect to the Second Amendment too but that's a whole other topic.

The point remains: language drift has and will affect legal meanings and interpretations.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DrDisrespectLive/comments/sy26j7/ti...

[2]: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-30-lost-english-...

[3]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment
>money-making juju rituals - where human body parts mixed with charms makes money spew out of a pot

Rituals like this never really existed pre 1600s. They are relatively modern and came with west africa's foreign relations. No serious indigenous spiritualist believes this. It may exist but it's most certainly not indigenous. That lecturer's a joke.
1. I don't see why this is a problem. I don't need to know how my car works. I don't need to know how Google works. I just need it to work. Lets assume they do all of bad things you mentioned. I still don't care as long as Google returns the search results that answer my question and isn't filled with spam that games the transparency.

2. Your statements are conflicting. Currently, {social media / search} gives user the content they are most interested in quickly and as much of it as they want. The alternative is what? Showing them less of the content they want? Showing them content they don't want (so they leave)?

In the ideal world, {social media}'s algorithm perfectly aligns with human interests, delivering exactly the content the human wants and as much of this content as the human wants.
While I'd already done real research in high school in a NSF Summer Science Training Program, the UROP work I did was as you describe. We didn't actually solve the problem, it was hard enough it took academia and industry another half a decade, but the process under the direct face to face supervision and participation of a professor was fantastic. The background to the specific problems I learned in both research experiences help me to this day.
I mean if you're going to do a proper analysis of someone's contribution to human misery you're going to probably need to start counting how many dead children each of the contestants has been responsible for and the number for Larry Summers is definitely not zero.
maybe their dns expired?
Vitalik Buterin can't solve societal problems with blockchain
demand for gasoline is fairly inelastic.
It's a partial outage for me. I was just able to send an iMessage, but directions on Maps are not working. I live in central Texas.
> Do people really choose between Android and iOS based on the camera?

Kinda. I have a 4a because of the camera more or less. It was between that and the iPhone SE 2020.

I did kinda wanna switch up to Android (I've gone back and forth over the years. I don't lock myself into any one company's eco.)
As they said, they collect phone numbers and this feature was the excuse.
ethbr0 provided valuable perspective, but just to respond:

1. I've updated my post to make it more clear how change management is involved: Using native tools we would be, literally, "changing the application". RPA is not changing application; it is automating what people already do in application. It can get philosophical whether this is a real difference or semantic one; but in corporate world, it's real :). And ultimately in techie world too: ERP is not touched or customized by the RPA (which would have had meaningful and permanent repercussions for troubleshooting, vendor support, upgrades, retrofitting,etc). On Ops side too, we use same process and tools to troubleshoot an error in our application whether a human or RPA bot did it.

RPA bots still go through change management as such; but their risk, cost, implementation time and other profiles are simply vastly different than actually touching the COTS ERP application code. I would not necessarily use RPA to change most of the applications internally made by a company; but they're a valid choice for automating a externally sourced software.

2. I have limited experience with Selenium but I would agree that there are broad similarities. They even remind me of old Mercury/HP LoadRunner or SQA Robot. Just, couple of decades of advancement and different focus.

3. I feel "Clearly intended for a Microsoft focused audience" is some kind of insult, and somewhat uncalled for; but note our application runs on AIX on p-Series, FWIW.
>GDPR itself offers a guideline that many seem to misunderstand... you don't need a popup for every kind of cookie.

Cookie banners predate the GDPR, most of them are from the "cookie law"[1] that predates it. They're two entirely separate laws that don't supercede each other.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_and_Electronic_Communi...
Yeah, for me the CNAME chain ends with apple-lr.g.aaplimg.com, which doesn't resolve to anything
Most business software can be installed by the network admins, software that can't doesn't matter for a lot of these companies and just won't be used. Even in my smaller but rapidly growing company they are doing more to restrict what software can be installed. Easy install of packages isn't what a large company wants
Any recommendations for resources on learning to makes things like this in general?
Looking at what happened in the past weeks, I don’t think it would need a quarter.

https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing.php says both Spain and Italy have a better army than the Ukraine. If that’s correct, it seems to me those two combined could beat Russia is a conventional war. Of course, that ranking now seems way off for Russia, so it may be way off for other countries, too.

Looking at https://www.visualcapitalist.com/this-is-how-much-nato-count..., the USA does about ⅔ of all NATO military spending and (Spain+Italy) about 4%.

That doesn’t necessarily make their army 4% of the full the power of NATO, but I don’t see it getting up to 25%.

Things might change if the fighting took place in Russia. Its military probably would be more motivated, would have fewer logistics issues, etc.
> Russia has a minority living parts of ukraine, and the ukranian neonazis (which became a part of the official national guard in 2014) have been attacking them for years now.

Azov is smaller, both absolutely and as a share of the forces on the relative side, than the neonazis among the separatist forces it operated against even before the full-scale direct genocidal invasion by the militarily aggressive totalitarian corporatist ethnonationalist (or, more succinctly, fascist) Russian regime that had both invaded parts of Ukraine in 2014 and sponsored (and in some cases covertly supplied) the separatist forces.
If Solid or Svelte had a way to import React components (for 3rd party code) and a documented migration path for 1st party code I'd be interested in switching.
Probably some people are not heavily plugged into an ecosystem, they need at max 3-5 apps to work and that is enough for them. other sure have laptops,watches, TVs already in the ecosystem, tons of money already spent into apps and media so they are prisoners.
Those I can understand. It doesn't really take magical thinking, some viruses perform better at colder temperatures.

Things like magnetic bangles, crystals and other stuff does appear in the west. I can't say how prevalent. Anecdotally it wasn't common amongst western researchers I've known, at least not outwardly.
Mac Studio Storage Not User-Upgradeable Due to Software Block
you can also buy a hunsaker jug... they don't pack as nicely as jerrycans, but they're US legal, have a vent, and i can't recommend them enough. i use them for fueling a 24 hours of lemons race car, and they make my least favorite thing in the world relatively safe and drama free. they dump 5gal in ~20sec or so.

https://hunsakerusa.com/collections/5-gallon-quikfill-jugs

now, if you illegally modify one by adding a legit breather tube... you can dump 5g in ~10 sec or less. :)
Strongly agreed.

WSL – both versions – are MS attempting its age-old "embrace & extend" move.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all.

Which makes me wonder: why? Do MS not have enough top-flight kernel engineers any more to do an in-kernel version of gvisor?
https://github.com/google/gvisor

Others have done it.

Joyent enhanced the old Solaris `lxrun` environment to bring it to 64-bit and kernel 3.x or even 4.x:
https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx

The FreeBSD Linuxulator does much the same:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Linuxulator
Out of curiosity, is this issue particularly personal for you, or is just a principled stand against a nation that is doing bad things? I find it curious how China has been involved in an ongoing genocide for years now and we don't see this sort of move to boycott their shit. It's a curious thing to behold.
The story is entirely plausible. The man was mauled by an ordinary wolf by coincidence; everything else was just bullshit talk.

Long ago, some man who had some dispute with a village and was mauled by a wolf, and the story was invented and embellished from there as it was handed down.
On my side in France apple Map only partially work. Basemap are displaying correctly but query and routing function are unreachables. "Domain name not found" (translated from french). So it could be a DNS meltdown?

Usually basemap because they are heavy are served through a separate CDN.
>Or on batteries, or on liquid salt thermal storage upgrades for old fossil plants, or on hydro storage, or on salt cavern pneumatic pressure, or on hydrogen, or on regenerative iron dust cycles, or...

None of those are actual options. Pumped hydro is pretty much the only viable option but you need the geography for it. Germany does not have the geography to roll out pumped hydro at enough of a scale to bridge the intermittency issues with renewables.

But don't believe me, look at the present reality - there is no nation on earth that is able to power it's economy with renewables (+batteries). The only viable option is hydro-electric and unfortunately, we've pretty much ran out of places to dam.

>Solar is currently the cheapest source of energy with a margin.

Again, there is no battery technology that is able to store enough excess energy to power a modern economy (or even a mid-size city).

>The german failure to finish the "energiewende" is a political one

The sad part is that it isn't. Material science is hard and you can't just will non-existent technology into existence ... as the Germans found out. That's why Germany was signing multi-billion/multi-decade deals with Russia to import their natural gas.
Right, I think "metaphysical" sounds too mystical for most people. A better word is "abstract". Numbers are abstract things. You don't have to believe in them because in a sense they don't exist, they exist only as a definition.

Anybody can come up with a definition but the usefulness of doing so is based on whether the definition is self-contradictory or not and whether there are useful rules of deriving more abstract things out of them. 1 + 2 = 3.

Fortunately abstract things like numbers can be made semi-concrete by representing them in a physical medium such as pen and paper or computer-memory. Then we can observe how they behave and verify event by observation the soundness of our rules for manipulating them. 1 + 2 seems to always be 3.
See "Test Induced Design Damage" by David Heinemeier Hanson.
Germany just today cut a NatGas deal with Qatar to reduce RUS dependence [0]. They are certainly looking, as they should.

I'd say the biggest issue with the local fields is that they are likely undeveloped, and that takes time before the oil flows. Ironically, from what I've gathered watching the US fields, the fracking wells take less time to turn on/off vs the more ordinary wells.

If Germany can turn on any local wells, especially quickly, it should help significantly, since the big issue is to buy time - time to switch to new sources of NatGas/Oil, and time to replace sinks with renewables.

Also to consider is the relative harm from some short-term drilling & fracking, vs the damage if RUS has the funds to expand their aggression into more of the EU.

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/20/germany-seals-gas-d...
> The presence of a hook is the indicator that something impure is happening.

Yes. And that's my whole point.

React was very powerful when care was taken to place impure code into a single class based component, that then passes state down to pure components as props.

React is a lot less powerful when developers scatter hooks everywhere.

New developers no longer have to go out of their way to understand the render lifecycles of a class based components, and feel the pain of writing componentDidMount or componentWillMount or componentWillUnmount or shouldComponentUpdate functions. Instead they just throw a hook in. Which is mostly ok - but it's hiding that you do actually still have to care about how this whole shindig works (and opens up a whole new world of pain around identity and equality checking, re-render cycles, dependency passing, etc)

I'm not saying hooks don't have an upside (ex: I'm right there with you, I mostly prefer a hook to an HoC from a reusability stand point) but hooks let developers shove their head into the sand and mostly pretend that they're writing a pure function - and they're ABSOLUTELY NOT.
I’m sure it’s happens more than I’m aware but i have to say that i can’t recall an App Store outage since i got back in the platform 3-4 years ago. Not bad!