skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) No offense intended and nothing against the quality of the writing in the comment here, but I can't quite tell if your comment is written by a bot because it just seems to default to such generic phrases.

2) Please note that I didn't suggest selling a loved one's body for experimentation: I suggested that an individual has the right to choose what happens with their own body. That is an extremely important distinction in this matter.

3) I don't see how a poor family having the option of a financial windfall when they're losing their family breadwinner does anything but alleviate whatever "systemic inequalities" might exist. If somebody is dying either way, isn't their family having some money putting them in a better situation for their future than having no money? You can still disagree with the ethics of this of course, but just as far as the financial situation, I cannot understand any logic that says that a family is financially better off with no money rather than money.
Canadian here, and of Nordic heritage. So I know the struggle of cultural coldness of which you speak.

Unless your coworkers are just heartless, the most likely thing going on here is a concern about not wanting to make it appear a big deal. Perhaps the person who had the heart attack, does not want to have everyone know about it. Some people wish to keep it quiet; they feel embarrassed. (My mother tried to dissuade me from informing even her closest friends!) And so dramatically highlighting their recent heart attack could be terribly distressing and awkward.

But don't get carried away. This is more of a thing for in conversation. Should they recover and return to the office, I would not bring it up beyond a simple "so happy to see you here and looking well". I wouldn't try to discuss it with them unless they bring it up first.

If the simple fact of the heart attack is in the open, then it is hard to imagine how someone could be insulted or distressed by a card, or flowers or similar note of well-wishes.
Fair enough. I generally agree.
I know I’ve considered this, and though it’s at times felt irresponsible or impulsive, I can’t help but come back to this Emerson quote from Self Reliance:

> the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession,' for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.
Ask HN: What are people skeptical about when it comes to synthetic data?
Cannot work, my organoid got the flue...

:)
Mississippi passes bill to stop EV dealers
Why not just set a centralized repository of "industry best practices" and have the law require programmers follow it. If they codify the best practices into law, then they have to change and update the law every time there is an update to the best practices.
Human beings have a weird and wide range of empathy, being capable of not treating humans as humans, while also having great sentimental attachment to stuffed animals, marrying anime characters, or having pet rocks.

In the nearer term, it seems plausible that AI personhood may seem compelling to splinter groups, not to a critical mass of people. The more fringe elements advocate for the "personhood" of what people generally find to be implausible bullshit generators, the greater disrepute they may bring to the concept of AI personhood in the broader culture. Which isn't to say that at some point, and AI might be broadly appealing--just speculating this might potentially be delayed because of earlier failed attempts by advocates.
More useless bureaucracy that will harm start-ups (and side-projects becoming proto-startups).

I don't understand why people want more bureaucracy, it never works out well. Now the established companies like SAP will just pay expensive lawyers to check boxes for the certification, and European startups will face another massive obstacle (just like the GDPR, Cookie law, etc.)

A better law would be pushing for repairability - ban locked down bootloaders and closed firmware, force published schematics, component lists and replacements, open bootloaders, etc. - this would help solve a lot of electronic waste and also drive a new sector for startups.
>> If you need Linux, create a Linux LPAR on your mainframe.

Or use the super secret hidden unix mode.

(and get stuck in an ed prompt. Fun times ?).
Road bikes are twitchier because they have less trail. Even 25 year old MTBs are twitchy compared to modern equivalents succumbed to the fashion for negative stem lengths and slack head tubes trying to imitate DH bikes.
What do you call a group of Jews though? If Jews is off the table?

I totally hear what you are saying though and I know you are coming from a good place. The Jewish race/religion thing is an odd one. Ive always considered myself Jewish by race, 99% Ashkenazi but not religion, I have no religious beliefs.

Conversation reminds me of the infamous lunar new year invite.

https://www.reddit.com/r/wholesomememes/comments/ap6022/man_...
Young people and enthusiast cars are saving manual transmissions
Creating a new venv, installing a few needed libraries that you know the names of with a simple command and writing a quick low-ceremony script that uses those libraries is frictionless in Python. Doing that repeatedly in nearly every other major language is not as easy.

Some languages have a good integrated tool chain (Rust, Go) but are not as approachable and forgiving.

Some are approachable but lack the friction-free story for locating and installing 3rd party dependencies.
Academic Publishing as Exploitation
The trick is to identify what will change and what won't.
I have a family, so my days are full of social interaction whether I want it or not.
If you know COBOL and know other languages and are fluent in "current" tech, then I see nothing wrong with consulting for $300 an hour doing some COBOL.

Company I work for still uses AS400, which has been released in 1988 just after I was born. We have a dev who supports it. This isn't a small company either.

COSTCO is still using and a lot of huge organizations.

I'm focused on newer tech C#, .NET, Blazor but I do interact with DB2 database which is the backbone of that old system.

At one of my interviews somewhere I mentioned that a lot of apps I'm writing are just extending AS400 and the dude interviewing me was really hyped up. He has spent a lot of time with the green screen in his younger years. The job had nothing to do with AS400, but that conversation got me an easy offer.
I took classes, not the fancy 6 months full time course, but a part time 6 or 8 (can't remember) weeks course that showed me the basics. I like to drive so this was not a hardship for me. Did not buy my own rig. I just got out of self employment and did not want to go back to that.

Finding a job as a newbie was not easy at the time (because of the insurance they were saying) so I went the agency route and they found me work right away. Worked there for 2 years then found a job closer to home. Been doing that for about 15 years already.
Learning How to Learn (and 20 Studies)
> When I had that injury, and was kind of crip-walking, people would intuitively stare at me for a second, then -very obviously- force themselves to look away.

> The injury wasn't that bad and went away after a week or two. But the way people forced themselves to look away, was much worse. I can't imagine dealing with that every day.

Having experienced this, I personally find that what's worse is the way people look at me in the first place. It's not as simple as someone looking at me, I can _see_ on their face or in their eyes or ... what's going through their mind, before they reassert control and hide it again.
IT would seem that this author and those who have decided that a good use of their time is to argue about the gender of God have little in the way of understanding around the nature of God.

I would highly recommend the reading of what are referred to as the three Ecumenical Creeds which break into some detail the nature of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit (in particular the third creed, the Athanasian).

https://wels.net/about-wels/what-we-believe/creeds/#toggle-i...

This is a deep subject, and these creeds pointedly do not include any reference to a discussion on gender because, besides being a massive distraction to the actual point of the Scriptures, it is not relevant. If one is so focused on the need to assign appropriate gender to everything and anything including God then one has drifted seriously off topic.

I would encourage anyone to find a pastor near you [1] and take the time to have a serious discussion, and hopefully series of discussions, with said pastor.

In any case, this seems to have seriously wandered off the topic of what kind of news should end up on HN.

[1]https://yearbook.wels.net/unitsearch
You mean the bit about frustration?

It's just an application of the Pareto principle. That last 20% of work to make perfect software costs a lot of time. Customers (and by extension, management) do not care how pretty your code is, how perfect your test coverage is (unless your manager is a former developer, then they might have more of an opinion), they care most that you ship it. Bugs are a minor irritation compared to sitting around waiting for functionality they need, as long as you're responsive in fixing the bugs that do come up.
I thought this line near the end was interesting:

> These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

As if the purposes and principles of the United Nations will always be aligned with transcendent human rights. It almost brings high aim of the whole document down a little.
Can confirm. In a past life I had the pleasure of auditing the COBOL code of a major US insurer. They had a separate program for every line of service (Auto/GL/etc.) that would read every claim record and produce their actuarial tables.

It was pretty fascinating to see how it all came together. Also despite the languages age after analyzing it for a length of time it was clearly elegant for that type of financial processing.
Weird interpretation. I didn’t flag it but I’d assume people did because the article is kinda pointless.
no but it is a fair question

we are in no way compensated by anyone. it was an honest answer to the question.
I think there's a version of this that could actually be beneficial for open-source software

Many large companies are dependent on open-source libraries. With these regulations they now have (more) incentive to get bugs and vulnerabilities in their dependencies fixed

They can't ship with known vulnerabilities, so if a project is suffering from a vulnerability, they might realise they need to provide a financial incentive to maintainers so issues are fixed quickly

Of course there's also a lot of other ways it could play out, but I don't think it's necessarily a given the result will be negative
As long as an electronic prototype can be made digital, things improved a lot with wide availability of Arduino, RPi, and ESP32 boards, and very accessible development tools for them.

Many analog things can be modeled and evaluated using a fast enough CPU, which are cheaply available; see software-defined radios, for instance.
So they decided to clamp down one of the last fields of business where there still is some dynamism left. This will probably turn out to be the same well-intended but ultimately stupid thing they did with the GDPR, giving more power to big corporations and adding yet another bureaucratic hoop to jump through for small companies. Tired of clicking those cookie consent banners yet? The UK was right to exit the EU.
Another -1 for MongoDB here. It's a newbie trap in general.

However is is probably easier to get started with for someone who is already learning Python, because its data structures closely resemble Python data structures, the query language can be expressed directly in Python object literals. This makes MongoDB a very gentle introduction the basic usage of databases for storing data (as opposed to e.g. dumping JSON to a file).

Starting with Mongo might make it easier to graduate to relational databases & SQL later.

Arguably TinyDB might be a better choice than MongoDB, but at least Mongo does get used in industry once in a while.
They can't censor other people's instances. Advertisers would advertise per-instance.
Interesting read but this has happened before and is another case of technological innovation and lack of adaptability. I am a library enthusiast. I advocate for personal/private library of your own and public libraries of your community. I also like the larger private libraries of individuals/organizations who open up to the public and wish more people took advantage of these.

I think libraries are and will always be an integral part of daily life. Right now, the issues seem to be stemmed from the failure of maintenance. And I mean the whole system itself and all related systems. Libraries themselves continue to lower their threshold for what maintenance is upheld- book maintenance, infrastructure maintenance (the handling, filing, recordkeeping, etc.), technological maintenance (many libraries have digitization efforts that have spanned decades but most I've encountered seem to disregard redigitization which is important to gain better quality, OCR capability, and future proofing for better systemization), organizational maintenance (libraries' administrative, legal, etc.)-- since there are a lot of layers and abstractions to these libraries. They are their own ecosystems. Some have become very complicated and hence their organizations have grown. A part of this failure of maintenance is the lack in advocation of stewardship. Libraries should have long-term outlooks and goals and a lot of controversies and issues of recent years seem to really highlight this lack of long-term ability of maintenance with stewardship.

I may be rambling and have shared concerns with my local librarians and IT individuals involved with libraries. I'm curious if anyone else has had similar conclusions.
> Hello world is just `print "Hello, world!"`

SyntaxError: Missing parentheses in call to 'print'. Did you mean print("Hello, world!")?
"3/ Quizlet provide an AI study coach as a global learning platform

When an AI study coach is just a “Join the waitlist” button away, I can’t help but get great vibes around AI democratisation and benefits for all. Rather than just providing info to answer student questions, Q-chat by Quizlet uses the Socratic method to encourage critical thinking and deepen understanding of the topics at hand. You can learn languages, opt to get quizzed on material you’ve learnt, and interact with the bot like it’s your very own teacher. I’ve got a huge passion when it comes to accessible education, so I love tools like this. A star!"

I would love to hear others thoughts on this. We've been working with GPT and before that transformer models like BERT/T5 since 2019 to accomplish this goal - do you think AI will finally change education? Our own tool is optimised for accuracy(citing all AI-generated flashcards), but we understand the benefits of coached/open-ended socratic style learning too.. It just seems to move so fast...
Not just that, zero tailpipe emissions has a lot of public health benefits in urban areas at the least
A collection of government __enforced__ libraries does not sound good to me, for obvious reasons, unless I misunderstood your idea.
What exactly would you package manage if you had a package manager for COBOL? You will never get paid to work on any COBOL code that isn't proprietary, and sealed with the blood of innocent victims. You are not going to be installing the latest hot js framework on a mainframe.
Rob Graham on the National Cybersecurity Strategy: https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1631368039668252672
There are companies that specialize in this area such as Microfocus and Fujitsu.

A long time ago, I wrote a Tandem COBOL to C# and WPF translator (https://github.com/GartzenDeHaes/cobol2cs). The key bits are:

- COBOL UI's run in a customer written environment that provides security, navigation, and session data. In the system that I wrote, there's a WPF application that provides these services.

- Convert SCREEN COBOL to C#. The Tandem uses a VT6530 that is similar to an extended IBM 3270. There are client-side protected fields and scrollable areas that need to be emulated in WPF.

- Convert COBOL servers to C#. The Tandem has a 3-tier architecture where the screen programs talk to services running in a middle tier through an network layer called PATHWAY. These can be converted to classes and be created on demand in C#.

- Remote access to SQL/MP databases. Tandem has a Java Servlet environment that can be used as a data access layer. The transpiler generates these Servlets and the C# data access layer.
Even important people aren’t compensated based on their importance but their marketability. Also, pay is usually just enough to prevent employees from leaving to a competing jobs. Too much institutional knowledge can ironically leave an employee uncompetitive in the market.
Yes ,
Sandberg is very powerful.
She is associated with Brookings Institute.
My circle is 99.9% perfect, can you beat that? https://neal.fun/perfect-circle/
It was more like "If you want to participate in this obviously PC online community, here's how we talk." They didn't ban me or even threaten to.
> There’s a rather deep rabbit hole really about figuring out what the best beginner curriculum should look like, because if the diversity of the applicability of Python.

So true.

I really like that 1 day is devoted to:

* PyPI

* virtual environments

Those feel super useful in all the roles you've listed.

I'm also not convinced that MongoDB is the most practical choice.
On the other hand, it might be more intuitive to learn on 1 day than the relational database modelling. (Especially if we assume that the student has already learned about various data structures during week 1.)
Yes. I know of companies that run mainframe emulators purely to keep using the existing COBOL codebase that was written for them.

They go to that level of weirdness because replacing the existing codebase would not only be much more expensive, but would introduce a great deal of risk that they aren't willing to take on.

A transpiler would not really address the needs of that sort of company.
I've met many who did:

One guy who was so into classical piano that he went back to grad school and got his degree in music. Now he gives lessons, last I heard.

Another guy who became a piano tuner. There's good steady, if not spectacular money in that.

Two people who became teachers or teachers' aides. The teacher had a fairly unhappy experience, while the teachers' aide said it was the best job he ever had.

One of the Xerox Star 6-person functional spec team (the one who's completely disappeared and no one knows where he is) became a homeopathic doctor.

Edit: another guy became a kitchen cabinet installer.
The problem is certifications, standards, reviews are strong barriers to entry and destroy competition and startup opportunities. EU already lacks big tech compared to US, China and Russia. EU can easily regulate that to write software one needs to have a masters degree in CS.
How would one even go about finding opportunities to program COBOL professionally? I feel like I'd actually go for it if I was able to do it remote, but mainframes conjure up this image for me of sitting next to a tiny green terminal somewhere deep underground, leashed to The Beast or Blue Giant or some other whimsically-named thing.
As I recall, early mouse prototypes involved foot pedals, but businessmen didn’t want to look like they were using a sewing machine.
I think I write this under every article about DuckDB, but it's become an indispensable tool for me. I used to abuse Excel because going from Excel to a script to process some data was too much friction, but with DuckDB the friction is gone: loading CSV and Parquet (and now JSON) files is a snap, you can create and persist any tables you want, the SQL dialect has lots of useful sugar.
> Someday, I’d like to see some sort of AI platform that can gauge a users intuition about the concepts on the whiteboard and tailor lessons to be impressed upon that user the best way. I’d teach a 30yo with ten years of Excel munging experience different than I’d teach a 20yo with no CS education at all besides video games. That could be automated to great benefit, imo.

That's an intriguing idea!!
Agreed. Money buys choices, simple as. What you do with those choices, and how much meaning they bring to your life, is entirely up to you.
This exact same sentiment came through in the National Cyber Security Strategy the US released. It describes a minimum acceptable level of software development, called safe harbours, based on e.g. the NIST Secure Development Standards.

Whether we like it or not, it seems legislation is forming on how to code and ship software.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
Arm swans off to Nasdaq despite UK gov pleas to IPO in London
Interesting they are using tsdb for storing the time series. I thought it was out of favor and fashion. Clearly it is serviceable.
This would never happen in the US currently. Between the privacy conscious, paranoid, tech illiterate, luddites, and of course lobbying force of current payment processors.
I have seen the COBOL issue come up a number of times, and I just don't get it. Am I thinking about this wrong?

COBOL seems to be a straightforward language by modern standards. Any programmer with experience with imperative languages should be able to pick it up. Learning the language itself cannot be a real barrier.

The barrier seems to be the enormous amount of legacy code that has to be digested and understood. But wouldn't that barrier be pretty much the same regardless of the programming language. I mean, if it were 800 billion lines of Perl code, would that make the problem any easier?

So isn't the real problem that we have 800 billion lines of legacy code that needs to be understood and maintained; it just happens to be written in COBOL?
It might also be regional. The USA is large, and Seattle is very different from Miami. It was definitely like that in 2022 here, and I haven't carried cash in my wallet since I returned from china in 2016 (where, ironically, I had to use cash for everything because you needed a Chinese ID card to use WePay).
The distinguishing features between 5 and 8 from my point of view.

Windows are not ventilation. Ventilation must be measured so mechanical ventilation is required. Guaranteed mechanical ventilation ensures a certain quality of life.

Sprinkler system is required for a building made out of brick and has no furnace or gas appliances. The reasoning is egress. The Sprinkler is the worst part because I installed a mechanical thing that could flood to help in case there is fire.

Vertical lift to connect 2 hallways with a 4' height difference. This maybe Massachusetts specific but... When I was shopping for the vertical lift if I lived 15 west in New York State or a mile north in Vermont. I could purchased a used unit on ebay for under $7,000 and wheeled it into place. Massachusetts requirements ended costing $40,000 and every 2 years around $2,000 for inspections.
All units need to accommodate modifications for ADA compliance. Meaning that don't need to be equipped but they must able to be retrofitted.

Do your research nothing can be considered logical or straight forward. Everything sounds crazy but it is a responsibility to provide shelter to others and most things are valid if costly.