skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are lots of things that I would rather do for fun than program in COBOL.

I have programmed in COBOL on ICL and IBM computers. You don't just program in COBOL, you need to learn SQL, JCL, TSO, CICS, etc. Maybe it is simpler with MicroFocus (or similar) COBOL on Linux, haven't ventured there.
It'll be a shame if that happens to my account, as I lurk on Twitter every day (but never tweet or like), but I value privacy of my phone number more than I value the enjoyment I get from it.
It sounds more like Mafia: pay us or else.
I'm with you on the idea that mainframe COBOL is typically only part of the actual program. But COBOL not being Turing complete sounds...not right.
I think some people attempted to get us out of this Wild West during the 20th century, with people like Margaret Hamilton trying to turn software engineering into "real" engineering. I don't really know why we seem to have reverted back to this stage nowadays, I suspect the boom/burst cycles of tech, especially 2001, might not have helped.
With respect, I think it's cost prohibitive for the government to provide a free and unlimited service.

Your physical mailbox -- from which you get your paper spam -- has a fixed size, and every day (maybe once a week) you have to empty the box.

If we extend that into the digital realm, it makes sense for the post office to provide a similarly limited post box in the free tier, from which you can use POP to download your messages to your private mailbox for permanent storage.

For truly poor people who can't afford a personal server, they can use a web interface to access email, but they should delete emails (throw out the spam) to keep space in their mailbox.

If you want more storage, you pay for more storage. Right now storage on gmail feels free because Google are scanning your mailbox and building your advertising profile. The government has no ability to get advertising revenue, so you'd pay for it instead.

Finally, there is no requirement for citizens to use the government provided mailbox. Set up a mail forward to your favorite provider and you're done.
While much-maligned, what JCL (and software like CLISTs and REXX for interactive processing) brings to the table in the mainframe world is a STANDARD way for programmers to not only decouple code and the data resources the code will process, but also a wealth of other functionality, including job accounting, priority, job classes, network routing of jobs & resources, conditional execution, run-time library management, resource caps, output management, catalog management & file disposition, real temporary files, file versioning (GDGs), storage & device management including tape, procedures, includes, symbolic variables, checkpoint restarts, etc.).

In non-mainframe realms, while the good news is that there's no JCL, the bad news is that individuals and companies have pretty much reinvented the JCL wheel over and over again, creating their own hodgepodge of unique, non-standard efforts to deliver smidgeons of similar functionality hacked together from a mix of shell scripting, environment variables, YAML, JSON, other config files, manual prompting, third-party libraries and software, and even hard-coding resources in programs.

Grass is always greener, as they say. :-)

https://www-40.ibm.com/servers/resourcelink/svc00100.nsf/pag...
For comparison, Amazon has been doing in-video shopping for some time, [1] although the result feels to me more like a panoply of cable television home shopping networks, than organic social discovery platform.

[1]: http://amazon.com/live
> You can say that there is no such a thing "state of particle 2" there is just the "entangled state". But this, in turn, invites the discussions of "physicness", "realness", etc of "states" and "wavefunctions". Which seem to be sidestepped due to the overwhelming success of the theory.
I mean, we could sidestep it, but it's a fundamental part of the formalism of quantum mechanics. It's even worse if we consider quantum gravity: is the spacetime also in a non-separable state?

I'm not sure about local non-hidden variable theories though, to be honest

> If not too bothersome, could you discuss possible (EDIT: possible consequences that impact) experimental results of this?

There are none
How do exit nodes factor in? This seems to operate like hidden services thus no exit nodes needed.
How difficult did it make finding a new job?

I mentioned it to a recruiter I'm dealing with and she agreed that it would significantly complicate the search.
Note that this article is about NYC trying to add the exact same thing for Manhattan roughly south of Central Park (so incorporating the Midtown and Lower Manhattan CBDs, but not including Upper Manhattan).
> Those numbers are included above

The comment you're responding to is asking for bird deaths / W (power output). This,

> 0.27 avian fatalities per GWh for wind, 9.4 avian fatalities per GWh for coal.

Is birth deaths / J (energy output), essentially. It's not accounting for that there's roughly 30 times as much coal generation as there is wind generation. I've put a comment elsewhere that computes the /W numbers: coal is slightly better than wind at not killing birds. The core comment stands — the issue with wind is blown out of proportion — but the stats justifying it should account for the amount of generation.

Edit: no, maybe I'm wrong here. I've not had the morning's coffee yet. While the unit is funny choice, … it should be fine. But the math doesn't check out with the first article's numbers. Table 1 from your article with the GWh numbers should contain the data I need, but the site is broken such that I cannot access table 1. So, like, these either grossly contradict the article … or something's amiss.

Edit 2: yeah, I think you do want GWh; you have to involve time somewhere, as it's a rate of bird deaths that's calculated. I think the first article's per-annum deaths is what is giving me a headache here, since it's sort of an implied rate in a lot of the writing. So /GWh works … but the math still needs to check out, which it does not appear to.
Firefox?

Android WebView got patched so there's that.
Agreed. I have limited time in my day. If I spent too much on things nobody else cared about, I would be wasting a lot of time.

This would translate to other more important tasks not getting done.
Yes. Same. Microservices are a horrible solution to problems better solved by different means for most cases I've seen.

Ever looked up Orleans? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/orleans/

Actor model for .NET

There's also AKKA.NET
not a big fun of newsletters, but this one looks pretty interesting.

I'm giving it a try. subscribed.
I appreciate this a lot. I've had https://wiki.tilde.institute/w/firefox-address-bar-tips as my new window homepage in firefox for some time. It has changed how I use bookmarks and history alongside OneTab to keep track of the might-be-interesting-later pages I need to return to. This feels like the next level of the same!
Coal use as a percentage of total generation is down and Wind has taken off so your intuition is wrong here. In 2022, 7.5% of the worlds electricity supply came from Wind vs 35.7% from coal so 30x easily makes up the difference.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-wind?ta...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-coal?ta...

PS: Coal was 40.5% in 2014, so the drop is only 12% in 8 years which isn’t massive but it is still significant.
Serious question: what is threshold at which the number of these turbines sufficiently disturbs normal wind to induce climate change?
>performance isn’t the goal, privacy is

I agree, but if performance gets bad enough, people will look elsewhere and to possibly less-private solutions. It's parallel to the whole idea of a tradeoff between convenience and security that I've had to deal with for a big part of my career (and personal anecdotes aside, why adoption for tools like PGP never picked up, at least in part).

Anyway, my original comment's mostly moot as an argument (though I'll keep it around for discussion's sake) -- the founder replied and it sounds like they're working with Tor to make sure the network stays healthy, which is all I really care about.
The issue with just citing bird kill counts is that not all birds are equally endangered or of equal conservatory value. The birds people are worried about are predominately large birds like raptors. House cats kill lots of sparrows, but they're not killing California Condors for example. A more useful analysis would need to focus on impacts of different sources specifically on endangered birds.
I still despise Microsoft but I'm old although I'm old but I think most people on here too. They do make some good development products VSCode and Github in particular but I'd still rather avoid them as much as possible.
tangential: scryer prolog just made a wasm based playground (IIUC) https://play.scryer.pl/
> Second, a 20-minute stop is much longer than pit stops I make. It takes 3 minutes to fill my gas tank, and then I can go for another 400 miles.

Don't do this. It's extremely bad for your health, and it also results in degraded and more dangerous driving quality. The worst thing is you probably don't realize it. Unless you're a professional driver, you should take a break every 2-3 hours for at least 15 minutes (which is coincidentally about what charging requires.)
> The idea of a pocketable thin client model of computing where you basically take your PC with you wherever you go, and plug it into accessories including displays and input devices that can work with any wherever you need, has been around for a long time. But an iPhone 15 sporting a full-featured USB-C port with the capabilities of the latest Thunderbolt spec has no technical barriers toward making it actually happen.

So in theory someone can make an iPad sized touchscreen that connects to your iPhone via USB-C and you'd have no need for an iPad? Or course such a screen could be shared within a household, etc.

Desktop in my pocket would be fan-fn-tastic, obviously. But even a simple larger (than my phone) touchscreen would be a handy step forward.
Yeah this is a great example of what’s wrong with all our robots: their perception is garbage.

Reasoning is actually pretty good now. An AI can compose a sonnet on electron degeneracy pressure no-problem but ask it where the red ball is - and really inspect its localization of that red ball and it’s way off. Orders of magnitude of imprecision.

A modern AI can reason through the trolley problem and millions of variants. But it can’t see the person on the track with very high confidence, or be sure that the trolley is going to hit the person or not.
Isn't it because it was tied to Windows? My impression still is that the ecosystem is not as well supported outside of Windows.

Similar problem with Swift even though it started out as an open source project. The ties to Apple OSes are hard to break and ignore.
Some COBOL stories caught my eye recently around here:

Learn COBOL in a day

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37388560

COBOL gets new life in the cloud thanks to Watsonx and AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37277191
Oops. 2010*
In the United States alone, outdoor cats kill approximately 2.4 billion birds every year:https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/
> Interesting, you can purchase support for 1.1.1x between 15,000 -- 50,000 USD per year.

Nitpick, from the announcement, only the Premium contract ($50K per year) provides for extended 1.1.1 support:

Another option is to purchase a premium support contract which offers extended support (i.e. ongoing access to security fixes) for 1.1.1 beyond its public EOL date. There is no defined end date for this extended support and we intend to continue to provide it for as long as it remains commercially viable for us to do so (i.e. for the foreseeable future).
100% remote. If the work has an office in my city, I might go from time to time, or even regularly, but on my terms.

I quit my previous job because I had 3 days a week remote, and I wanted to bump that to "unlimited but I can come whenever I want". Funny thing is that I would probably have come 2 days a week anyway most of the time. What I really want is to be able to work from home a few weeks in a row if I feel like it. Just decide as an adult if I want to come to the office or work from home. Maybe something like "10 mandatory office days" a year would have worked too. Or 3 mandatory office days a month, something like that. "Week" is the wrong granularity level.
> many people have different responses to stimuli…

My favorite example of this is from figure 2g of [0]. It shows the time series of blood glucose levels from two participants after eating a cookie or a banana, and they have nearly the opposite responses to each other. It was the thing that convinced me that a ton of modern nutrition that isn’t personalized is basically useless.

[0] https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)01481-6
I imagine there is a clause in the support contract that prevents the disclosure of source code? I am wondering if we will need a community supported fork. I have said it for months that this transition will be a mess, so many distribution LTS and packages are built for 1.1.1
How does the author make the logical leap from "it'll use Type C" to "it'll have Samsung DeX equivalent"?

I think it's too much of a gimmick for Apple to even try, plus Apple is really not known for giving a damn about making their products work well with third-party peripherals.
Yes, "it depends". If you're building something internal and Desktop-only then maybe a Modal can be OK. But for a mobile-first app, you will never be able to test it on all the devices people use so consistent UI/UX is impossible.
If you have ever done any "in the wild" usability testing with older people with older devices (think iPhone 8 form factor) Modals often break the UX. Seen it happen many times, it's super frustrating to the person trying to use it. :-(
Even chunks are checksummed. Or at least they are in third party implementations. [1]

One thing that happens is some games keep config files in their game directory instead of using a host OS user directory and thus those games will fail validation after any configuration change.

Combine that with mods that break games, but the mod files aren't in the manifest and thus invisible to validation, can create scenarios where users are doing repeated full validations and still having issues.

[1] https://github.com/SteamRE/DepotDownloader/blob/master/Depot...
MAUI is the inheritor of Xamarin.

What underlying tech does it use for rendering on Windows?
If you're building Windows software, then you might find it easier to use the Windows-native stack.

If you're not, then I'm not sure what the appeal would be.

I work for a company in the former space. We have no intention of supporting nonWindows clients or nonWindows servers or even nonSQLServer DBs. It's not worth doing from a commercial perspective in our particular market. Consequently, it's C# and .NET.
The title, the preamble, and the content of this article feel so click baity and unnecessarily elaborated.
It can be used however you want. There's no difference compared to something like the shield
Analyzing r/gaming and r/science through an LLM-based survey simulator
I don'[t think it's reasonable to kill birds in the name of questionable science, just because it's not one of the primary killers, and I think we have a responsibility to do everything possible to limit the number of deaths.
Ah yes, I remember how Tony Soprano would always threaten small business owners with endless stream of ads if they did not pay protection fees
Retraction Watch Database becomes open
I do think the punishments in singapore are much stricter than most other countries
Show HN: Build Local-First Apps(WASM+SQLite)
Hey, everyone!

SkyAlt is a browser and SDK for Local-first applications at the top of SQLite files.

One and half months ago, I started working on the idea of rebuilding some software as services I use into local-first apps. SkyAlt is a combination of SQLite(storage), WASM(app binary) and JSON(settings, communication).

I decided to build my own 'browser', which has around ~10K LOC and has nothing to do with WebKit(HTML/CSS/JS) or Chromium. Apps use immediate mode GUI to draw and communicate with Skyalt. The layout is a flexible grid.
Apps are written in the Go language. Right now SDK is only for Go, but it should be simple to add more languages(which compile into WASM), when apis() settle.

I built a few example apps(7Gui, Map, Calendar, Table/DB editor). My approach is to build more apps across different use cases and add new features to current ones, which leads to better SDK, browser and developer experience.

For app development, you can use any IDE and debugger(or print to a terminal). When you make an app, you compile the app into binary which has a TCP socket into SkyAlt. For final shipping, you compile into WASM(portability & sandboxing) and the TCP socket is replaced with WASI(WASM IO). This accelerate development alot because You can use tools you're used to and can iterate quickly(go compiler is ~1sec vs tinygo(.wasm) is ~40sec).

You can find more information and 100% of code(Apache v2.0) in Github repo: https://github.com/MilanSuk/skyalt

What do you think? Let's talk about Local-first future!
What you're missing here is the numbers game. The size of the operation vs. the tolerance for worker injuries has a massive impact on this stuff.

When you run a shop with five experienced people, if each of them has a 1-in-a-million chance of getting seriously injured on any given day, each year you have a 1-in-548 chance of a serious injury. Any sane person would call this risk acceptable.

If you run a shop with 5000 people of equal skill level to those five above, you're talking a couple of deaths or permanent disability injuries per year, just from the numbers. Any rational person would say hey, that's the same risk, why are you mad? But society isn't rational and if any legal entity no matter how large kills or maims a couple of workers a day, there's an outcry and executive heads will roll. So yeah, they try to do better. At this point maybe 'hire smarter people' works?

Now imagine you're running a multinational company with 500,000 people. If you operate like that original shop you'll see a couple of hundred deaths in your first year and then get sued into oblivion or lynched, and remember those were skilled experts. There aren't 500,000 skilled experts available for hire, and most of these jobs are ahem less skilled anyway, so you're hiring people with much higher rates of personal injury. To operate at this level you need to do stuff that seems dumb to the uninitiated, like relying on layers of subcontracting companies for everything while implementing byzantine and ever-shifting safety regulations that each subcontractor must commit to following. Sure, it costs an order of magnitude more, but it's worth it for the severability.
Saying Microsoft "makes" GitHub is quite a stretch. Microsoft owns GitHub. They did not make it.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/079/173/ed2...
Late stage capitalism via China. Didn’t see that one coming.
Appreciate your point as there's solid numbers about avian deaths of birds from cats vs turbines.

There's a fair point about larger birds of prey who have smaller populations (and quite possibly longer breeding times).

I think it's a valid point, vs the isolated number of birds killed by turbines used as a reason against wind resource.

Also have to factor in the amount of deaths caused by air pollution, humans or otherwise.
I grew up (in US) thinking blackcurrant was a variety of black tea. I had no idea until I got older that it is a berry.

Similarly, I thought elderberry was just a silly word that Monty Python made up to be funny.
It's also, typically, nailed into studs 16" apart. Just not a lot of room for flex in that case.
Because ecosystem is less fragmented which makes day to day job pleasant

C# has best tooling on the market, by far.

Btw. C# has huge oss community
Until a dog can take the stand and be cross examined, their "testimony" should not be allowed as the basis for a search. At least with instruments their source code can be subpoenaed and reviewed.
> "Remarkably", "perhaps unintuitively", "convention states", "a striking consequence", "a surprising result",

are very different to "You may not believe this,"

because they don't say "you" they state it in a general way which is ambiguous about weather it was e.g. "remarkable" for them or many they know

so they don't make assumption about every specific reader, instead they make assumptions about themself and/or readers in general

The examples you state all are different and in my opinion miss the point. In no case do they say "you ..." or anything close to this. It's always in a genericway. In other words "even experts will find it peculiar", "theories of this kind are erroneous", "he - as in a generic scientist - needs to consider something".
I'm not saying that you should host your own email though. Or that you shouldn't, for that matter. All I'm saying is that people should keep the option of switching email providers when things go wrong. Using your own domain is a requirement for that.
To put things into perspective, it sounds like most of your complaints are mostly from the point of view as a consumer, but what you like about them is that they enable you as a creator, being given access to modify FOSS, making it easy to create apps or as a responsible member of society, not complying with CCP, allowing ad blockers.

If you ask me, the latter are infinitely more important than the first thing.

Now, I will grant that Google also does a lot more to complain about.
Nostalgia aside, the PC was (and continues to be) a far easier machine to clone. For an electronics hobbiest, this is a fun project. For programmers, it is a challenge to see what can be done with a platform that was rarely pushed to its full potential (hardware upgrades and compatibility were more important in the PC world).

Contrast that to the Amiga. The custom chipset makes it harder for the electronics hobbiest (unless they're using original hardware) and I get the impression that the demoscene has uncovered most of the potential for software development.
At $14/month, $50 gets you about 3 months. I'm not sure I'd qualify that as life changing.
Not just the US. Here in the UK, I recently went to a follow-up appointment regarding a non-healing ulcer and the NHS doctor took the dressing off and said "It is healed" despite the fact that:

1) the ulcer is deep enough that you can see the muscle below the skin fat layer (she said it no longer needed dressing!)

2) it has looked that way with nearly no change at all for nearly 3 months[1] (expected heal time is roughly 7 weeks)

3) there is a large area around the wound that is still red and inflamed (ulcers are not even regarded as healing until the inflammation is gone)

I've had to go for private care and I am currently scheduled in for minor surgery to see if a foreign object caused the ulcer and is still present, preventing it from healing. Probably no surprise to you, dear reader, that I am pursuing a case of medical negligence against the doctor.

[1] When I pointed this out to her, she said she "didn't have a crystal ball, so [she doesn't] know what will happen in the next week or month". Literally nonsense due to being a non-sequitur. I was informing about the past, not asking about the future.
Ad blockers are free. On mobile you can patch the applications as well
The new Apple apps and WhatsApp and Adobe Fresco use WinUI. Arc browser’s upcoming Windows version uses WinUI.
Could be an issue when it stops spinning though.
Sth like this:
https://vortexbladeless.com/technology/

Or this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaneless_ion_wind_generator
There was a good discussion just yesterday, "Why did Visual Basic die?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37470318

That might be a place to start looking.

It basically comes down to:b they could take development in any direction and the community of users is powerless.