skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I'm trying to say is that with COBOL, the hard part is stasis and the reason isn't COBOL, but the legacy context in which COBOL is still present.

For years, software has been migrated away from COBOL. Starting afresh, re-implementing, manual translation, transpiling. What remains, is there because it works and no one want to touch it.

If there would exist a reliable, risk free migration path to generate Java code, I'm sure that is not the situation we're talking about. There are always risks and that's where the paperwork comes in.

I've done my share of porting Pascal to C or transpiling 4D into C++. Lua to Python.

Given the right tools, it is usually not the tedious translation task but the lack of automated tests, foreign function interface calls, archaic hardware quirks, event orders and real-time constraints that are causing the issues.

Not sure and LLM is very helpful here. Even if it's incredibly clever in producing Java from COBOL 99% of the time, the paperwork is only about the 1% of errors it may introduce. Absent a formal, exhaustive validation of the LLMs's capabilities its contribution basically comes down to a huge code review for a pull request of unknown origin.
No, you use Excel when you need a data manipulation program quickly and you want to ship it to clients without any installation or training. You just send the workbook to your client and it's done!

It's very self-contained, what works on your machine is almost guaranteed to work on the client's computer, given that they have the same Excel version. It's also very reliable, VBA apps can work for years without any maintenance or support.

Openpyxl is fine if you want to generate a report and send the results but for anything dynamic you would need to ship an interpreter, plus generate an exe, plus ship a workbook with the data, plus you probably need to write a GUI (users freak out from the cmd). This is much less reliable and requires constant support to users, VBA/excel apps rarely do.

This Python integration is a bit disappointing though as the "killer feature" of Excel is that it's self-contained and now it will rely on MS's cloud. This is yet another integration that will fail to kill VBA (we had JS and .net already but had similar issues), it seems that MS doesn't really understand how people use Excel :)
That is very sad to hear. It’s a shame how badly VBA was neglected and this is a poor surrogate if it won’t run local.
According to HN, every app in the world could be supported by a single ARM EPYC server with a SQLite backend and some weird WASM magic.
Good question. Publishing to FlakeHub makes an archive of the release, checks to make sure it evaluates cleanly in isolation, and publishes it to FlakeHub's storage.

This is to make sure that releases stay available in the long term, even through GitHub account renames or repository deletions.
Fun fact: Microsoft shipped Python code in 1996. The could do it again if they really wanted to.

http://python-history.blogspot.com/2009/01/microsoft-ships-p...
Everybody Lies All the Time: A Guide to Useful User Interviews
After 150+ feedback calls our users, I share some of my thoughts on why founders should assume 99% of people are lying — and how to get them to break from this habit and share honest feedback.
The hiring veto grants essentially the power to install a covert agent.

"We veto all your choices. But what about this guy... Relocating from Langley, VA wouldn't be hard for him."
> I've had the idea that graph diagrams (including architecture diagrams) can be paged - you show a different set of links/vertices on each page of the same graph (show the same node but different enumeration of edges)

You're describing something very similar to Ilograph[0] with its multiple perspectives.

[0] https://app.ilograph.com/demo.ilograph.Ilograph/Request
https://c4model.com/img/c4-overview.png

That's what the argument is... and I'm in favour, there used to be such great architectural tools that were mostly UML but they did this well.

I miss Visio, it was awful but everyone used it and it improved communication.

I feel Google Suite is missing an equivalent, it's now draw.io, there's a real gap here.
I think that given all of this information, they could run a very convincing scam either against you, or a service you interact with.

From what I can tell, SSN is still somehow considered a form of identification in the US.

Edit: Commented too early.
Disaster capitalism: water fights amid west Maui’s charred ruins ignite new fear
It's a start! Who wouldn't want a helpful robot like this!

Still it didn't do the whole job. Didn't empty the wastebasket; didn't even move it to clean under.

Didn't do the sink or counter. Didn't clean the mirror.

Didn't put out a warning tripod, Wet Floor!

Didn't even knock I don't think, when barging into those stalls. Imagine facing that thing!
Ah, I see; I tend to isolate all sites I trust in the same container and everything else goes in a temporary container so I mostly have one trusted container (along with one for each of Facebook, LinkedIn and Google).

To add a new site to a new container, I manually edit the file (accessed through the pencil button) and add the line with the proper syntax:

!*.sketchy-website.tld , My Isolation Container

It allows me to define that I want that for all subdomains in the same workflow. But I have to admit it is far from easy for someone who is not already used to this.
Before Agile management didn't have a hammer to swing at you in the first place.
Micromanagement required actual work.

Agile has automated micromanagement for management ...
Most rights holders were happy to look past it until Chuck Wendig started crying about people being able to read his pulp sci-fi too easily.
That's great. I hadn't noticed it's has been added to PowerToys. I can now finally retire my 7 year old script. Hopefully one day it will be promoted to be included in Windows by default.
This blog is a real gem.
> I only discovered Powershell recently, and it's impressed me how "batteries-included" it is.

Meh. Powershell, like most things windows, is just a dumbed down version of its unix equivalent to cater to its 'lower-skilled' user base. The best thing about powershell is its documentation and help section. It's far more 'detailed' and far more examples than its unix counterpart. How many times do you just wish a man page just had an example that you tinker with to get what you want? With powershell, you get that. Another thing going for powershell on windows ecosystem is that microsoft is tying powershell with their servers to make administration simpler and easier.

But powershell certainly isn't python or perl.
I believe he's referring to a Corsi Rosenthal filter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsi%E2%80%93Rosenthal_Box
Original study:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02779...
Your gunpowder and large formations metaphor doesn't hold. People aren't idiots, on the whole. Do a little more military history research.
Some are, some aren't. I happily got the NES and SNES retro consoles when they came out and I play them on a modern TV or monitor. I don't care about the CRT scanlines and artifacting. (I do care about a CRT's lagless instant response time, which is an issue for some games. I do have HDMI monitors with as low lag time as you can get.)

The old Atari consoles are common, but it's hit and miss as to whether they work well or at all, particularly the power supply and also the controllers. It's reasonable to spend a few bucks on some modern hardware if you want. I probably wouldn't play Atari games quite enough to justify it myself.
How Nvidia Built a Competitive Moat Around A.I. Chips
MLE | training data

Just writing hand wavily :)
https://archive.is/P5l07
Yes, you can totally mow your lawn while your house is burning, and it's easier to mow your lawn than put out a house fire. Therefore, let's mow the lawn instead of putting out the house fire.

> Sticking another billion dollars into fixing housing would have a negligible difference.

It would if we ... built houses.
Architecture diagrams are great and do indeed enable better conversations. They are just expensive to build, expensive to maintain and go out of date fast enough that they're practically ephemeral.
On macOS, it looks like Firefox uses native defaults. It’s very nearly identical to Chrome (same fonts, same weight, same spacing; Chrome might more aggressively aligning verticals to pixel boundaries, but that’s hard to tell on a Retina screen).

Safari for some reason is rendering everything at different sizes than Chrome or Firefox, I don’t know why.
Why is M2 Ultra support missing? I'm curious more than anything--lack of developer hardware? Something technical?

"The Khronos website lists all conformant implementations, including our drivers for the M1, M1 Pro/Max/Ultra, M2, and M2 Pro/Max."

Edit: Interesting that so many people are downvoting this. I'm not complaining; I didn't know, so I asked a question. Seems like the answer is that it's too new, especially with the 30-day conformance review period on top.
> Neither is your tired and boring ccp nonsense

Again, this isn't an argument.

There are credible questions regarding ByteDance's independence from the CCP [1][2][3]. They have a track record of censoring anti-Chinese content, e.g. regarding the Tianamen Square massacre [4][5]. Anyone claiming claims of CCP infiltration into ByteDance are "nonsense" is operating outside the window of evidence.

[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/03/24/problem-tiktoks-claim-in...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-bytedance-executive-clai...

[3] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/doj-investigating-tiktok-own...

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49826155

[5] https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21366488/bytedance-censor...
Remote areas like the rural countryside can benefit greatly from novel tech like 5G. Rural areas are notoriously a lot less connected than urban areas, for obvious reasons, and typically rely on a patchwork of repeater routers all coming from a single 3G/4G mobile router, and shared with multiple neighbors.
I've walked across SF multiple times, it is fun, but maybe doesn't qualify being not even 10 miles. A fit person can easily run it.
"...the target’s credit header. This is personal information that the credit bureaus Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion have on most adults in America via their credit cards. Through a complex web of agreements and purchases, that data trickles down from the credit bureaus to other companies who offer it to debt collectors, insurance companies, and law enforcement."

...

"“Of all the entities that are the root cause of this data, “the credit bureaus are number one,” Shavell added. “They are the ones that should be subject to the strictest compliance and ultimately be held to a higher privacy standard by the federal government and by state governments than they are being,” he said."

TLDR: People are using social engineering attacks to gain access to data brokers' tools that tap credit bureaus' profiles of everyone. There are no incentives for the companies in this supply chain to perform adequate due diligence before granting access to the data.
While working at a big corporation we had a velocity initiative supposedly aimed to lead the company toward continuous integration.

"How long a PR stays open" was one of the KPI in a dashboard.

I said: "Be careful with that!"

People started to close PRs and reopen new PRs with the same code.

Middle managers and sometimes the person in the division that was the point of contact for the velocity initiative were asking to do that.

The script measuring this KPI was improved to look at the branch and the diff of the code. Result? people changing branch and EOL encoding in the new PR

Learnings?
B and C players with questionable ethics screw companies quite rapidly.

If you do not have an outstanding company culture, KPI and aligning them with company values is futile.
> AI that can replace humans at most tasks within a couple years of R&D hasn’t happened before.

We've seen absolutely massive automation in manufacturing, and as you noted even in farming. And no massive unemployment as a result. I just won't believe that AI will do anything more than hugely increase productivity until I see the unemployment. People have predicted massive unemployment with every new technology advance. They were wrong every time.

> The ones unionizing are the labor producers, so not a valid analogy.

They are also the consumers. How are the wealthy supposed to get that way or even stay that way with no consumers?
Your characterization (originally due to Cover, I think) is a strong one because it concretely ties KL divergence to nature. I also like Sanov's theorem for this.

I have sat through many frustrating anti-explanations of the following sort:

>What is KL divergence you ask? Why, it's simply a quantitative difference between distributions. The further away distributions are, the higher KL divergence is... It's like a distance-squared between distributions... but it isn't symmetric and it doesn't obey any usual triangle inequality, so this analogy isn't helpful for analysis... Pinsker's inequality gives a useful lower bound. A useful general upper bound is, uhh,... uh...

This class of answer is totally uninformative (and discrediting if given, IMO) because it does not provide a useful, unique characterization of KL divergence, only fundamentally inaccurate descriptions of it.
Exceptionally more, personally.
Little google search I found this guy.

https://www.exploringtheproblemspace.com/new-blog/2018/2/18/...

To conclude that, Jon Kabat-Zinn, the "scientist" quoted in the article is just pure pseudoscience.
RE: profiles: pro tip: you can use `about:profiles`.
Could you share which computer is that?
Ubiquitous keyboard software puts hundreds of millions of Chinese users at risk
It's a bit more nuanced than that, as detailed by AndyKelley (andrewrk@) on github[1].

As I understand it, C/C++ interop and support in the build system is not going away; instead it might be accomplished via a separately maintained clang package. (Aside: for an example of this kind of thing can work, see ffmpeg[2] converted to use the Zig build system which pulls in nasm[3] as a Zig package; presumably the clang solution would be a bit more integrated than that, but it serves to show that it can be done).

Zig will still support compilation using LLVM, but instead of directly linking to LLVM and using LLVM's IRBuilder API, it will directly output LLVM bitcode instead[4]. The build system will then handle linking this into an executable, possibly by calling out to the LLVM linker.

The idea seems to be to reduce dependencies of the main executable, while keeping the build system flexible enough that it does not impact existing use cases.

I'm not affiliated with the Zig project in any way, so my understanding of this may be off. I'd recommend reading the GH issues and comments I've linked below to get a better idea of it.

[1]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/16270#issuecomment-161...

[2]: https://github.com/andrewrk/ffmpeg

[3]: https://github.com/andrewrk/nasm

[4]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/13265
Last time I tried it was impossible to get Chrome on linux to use the system font rendering settings. There's no way to tell Chrome to:

a) Don't hint/grid fit.
b) Don't use cleartype color fringing.

That's reason enough to avoid Chrome for me. Compound that with Chrome's low quality image rescaling algorithms (and the absolute boneheadedness of their bug triaging, where any reports about it will invariably get filed under the wrong component and be closed before anyone who can actually understand the problem will look at it) and oh so many SVG rendering quality issues. I really hope Firefox can survive the current leadership and remain a strong alternative for decades more to come.
It's a failing of the article that they didn't mention it, however it is not true that they do identical things, and some people need / live in those differences.

The Firefox UI for profile management is just awful. If it were as good as the MAC UI it wouldn't be a point of contention.
> I have used Chrome with a personal and a work profile, both of them tied to different Google accounts.

You guys have two Google accounts? I didn’t know that this was even possible.
Presumably Byte Dance is already required to respond to NSLs and warrants. LEOs don't want to have to sift through raw dumps of raw data -- they want nice search interfaces. Intel agencies, on the other hand, almost certainly want raw data, but would prefer continuing feeds over one-time or occasional dumps, so getting to "examine TikTok’s US facilities, records, and servers" doesn't seem all that interesting.

So my take is that “agreement would let agencies examine TikTok’s US facilities, records, and servers” is specifically to enable the audits also mentioned in TFA.
Use the tools you know and all that, but PowerPoint seems like a roundabout/hard way of doing that to me - I'd just make the base in whatever diagramming tool I'm using, then add the colour/dot/whatever variation for each frame (cf. PowerPoint slide), rendering/saving each image, and then look up the args for `mogrify` to combine them into a single animated gif. Or there's probably a dozen SEO'd ad-chucking websites that'll do it too if you prefer (& it's not sensitive).
My initial reaction to your comment was a smug "Hah! I know what CompuServe was!" followed by the realization that I'v been over 40 for a couple of years now.
Ugh; that original joystick was not comfy to use. If this uses a standard connector I'd try find an old Wico or similar.

Website says "joystick with serial port connector". Do they mean the original DE-9 connector, or is this something different?
This says more about the kind of places you've worked than anything else.
Three ex-Bose employees are resurrecting the Sleepbuds
Ahh, I didn’t realize it was now a top level comment, but I understand now. Thanks for clarifying. Wanted to make sure I’m adjusting my behavior if necessary.
I think that you slipped some decimal places.

Propane has a thermal energy content of 13778 watt-hours per kilogram [1]. That's (25000 * 10^12) / 13778 = 1,814,486,863,115 kilograms, or 1.8 billion tons. 3.6 billion tons of propane if you recover electricity at 50% efficiency. That would make the 300 million ton underground storage equivalent to one month of global electricity demand. That's still a lot of storage, of course.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_chemical_rea...
If you've not looked at it I really recommend othello gpt. That is an experiment explicitly designed to tackle this kind of question, has it just seen enough moves that it knows what should come next?

> Why doesn't it tell me how much air it displaces under what circumstances?

You can ask it and it'll answer.

> If the fix is better training data does that mean it's reasoning or regurgitating?

More training data helps with things you can just bring to the fore, same as a lot of learning. More useful training data though can also help reasoning, which makes sense - deliberate training of people helps improve their logical reasoning capabilities. I know that doesn't guarantee that's what LLMs are doing but humans benefit significantly from both more teaching and better teaching.

> Very impressive, but is it any more original than classic search engines' old trick of regular expressions to figure out if I mean the currency or weight when I ask "1 pound =" with the contexts USD or kg after "="? Does it understand the input, or are there just enough discussions in the training data to make it look like it is?

I'd be interested to know any requirements around this to clearly show the difference. I tried asking what if I filled a balloon at a childrens party with a gas made of atoms that have 1 proton and 100 neutrons: https://chat.openai.com/share/71224df4-5c6c-45f7-88fd-eec316...

(tl;dr: "In the context of a child's birthday party, introducing such a balloon would be a grave mistake.")

It identifies:

* Whether it would float or not and why
* That it would be radioactive, and likely types of radiation from it
* What that would mean to the balloon
* How people would react and the likely consequences of releasing it in a room of children

This is an element that does not exist, in a setting where nothing like this has happened before, with details ranging from types of decay, consequences and human emotional reactions to something like this. Yes, there are real things you can use as a base (e.g. how do people respond to events that kill people), but I feel it's an example of where it's beyond a search engine summary.
> I support a domestic ban on TikTok

I don’t use any social media, so apologies if this is a dumb question. What is TikTok doing that other ones like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook isn’t? The only difference I am seeing is that the parent company is China. Misinformation is omnipresent across all those channels too. So on what basis should we ban them?
IMO KPIs are metrics to optimize (if they are objective). A set of values is already encoded in them by the specific formula being chosen.
Once again you forgot to even hint what evidence you’re talking about.

It’s like you’re eager to win an argument, you want that reward, so you’re posting, but you’re too lazy to actually make an argument. So you kind of keep posting half way and declaring yourself a winner because “everything around” proves you right about… something. It’s kind of funny.
Does the UN matter at all? Their track record is quite poor, especially recently. They seem to have branches and offshoots that have opinions on absolutely everything, these opinions are invariably so predictable an AI could have written them, their impact is small and when they do have impact there's a long list of other people signing up to point out major holes in their work.

Honestly, these sorts of international NGOs increasingly come across as legacy code that should just be deprecated for removal. They date from a time when people thought that if only you held enough international conferences and delegated to enough technocrats, eventually everything would be wonderful. That hasn't worked out because the enlightened technocrat wise enough to govern the entire world is essentially a myth, something found in Star Trek and 1930s utopian storybooks. The sort of people who are good at things generally don't want to work for talking shops like the UN (or the WHO, or the IMF, or the ...). And when it comes to the internet, none of them do. ICANN, ARIN and the rest are right: governance by mailing list has worked well so far and there's no reason to change, nor much chance of it happening short of a massive and coordinated global legislative "conspiracy".
I did a two year technical program, it was called "Information Systems and Data Processing"; this was maybe two or three years before this book was published ('94-'96 maybe?). It wasn't an apprentice program but all of the people teaching the programming classes had worked with the language professionally. It made a big impression on me at the time, I think it prepared me (somewhat) for the big empty spaces that you don't really notice until you start working on a project.

It's clearly no replacement for a computer science degree, but I think there's a real benefit to spending time with people who have done the work professionally.
The language is in flux at the moment, so unless the projects are updated to use master (and are being built with master), one tends to run into incompatibilities not infrequently.
Chronic Pain: Finding Relief with the Benefits of Cannabis
Well if you want to just complete tasks then go ahead and do that. If you want your business to succeed it’s pretty important that the task-doing is producing positive results for the business overall (which is what KPIs imperfectly try to measure).

“Ha, you want a brake and a steering wheel? Those are annoying and distracting, do we push the gas pedal or not?”

Yeah it’s complicated but all these components are necessary.