skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Every other way of buying groceries if one limits themselves to buying from well established entities that are big enough to support it, which is a much smaller subset of those who could supply food now.

No, its not. Even independent groceries (and independent convenience stores that have grocery items) take EBT. There’s essentially no place you can buy groceries where you can’t use EBT. There may be a minimum viable scale, but its apparently very close to the minimum-viable-retail-operation-with-any-grocery-items scale.

Uber is playing catch-up, not establishing an edge (much less an edge protected by a moat) compared to other ways of getting groceries.
I believe that's JSON5.

https://github.com/json5/json5

It's my preferred configuration file format, it fixes all the problems I have with JSON (trailing commas, comments) without turning it into a mess full of gotchas like YAML.
How in the world it is OK, that is such integral part of sovereign country infrastructure is sold to another country on a different continent ? This is a way to shoot yourself in the foot, and seems like Germany is sold by pieces to U.S.
yes of course.

> I can never remember which brackets to use

and that is patently untrue, as you just demonstrated.
I think the verbosity is not a problem. For example if you compare

["string1", "string2"]

to

<list>
<e>string1</e>
<e>string2</e>
</list>

then each element has about four bytes overhead (<e> instead of " and </e> instead of ",) plus some overhead for the list itself that may be offset by putting the name of the list itself into the element.

However, the issue is that you have to write a custom parser. There is no direct mapping between your data structure and the XML file. This developer ergonomics is a big win for JSON and consequently YAML.
Still struggling with Dark Mode 5 years on
I agree with all that, with the one small caveat that more than anything else I think what is most important about security is a strong security culture at a company. All the checklists and compliance frameworks in the world are doomed in the face of a poor security culture. On the flip side, a strong and constantly reinforced security culture can help protect against the occasional muppet.

One example: years ago I started work at a tech company (a fintech no less), and shortly after starting I asked the head of customer service how I could get an account to access an internal admin portal (I was an engineer and needed to understand some of ops processes). "Oh, you just log in with my account, and the password is <CompanyName><Year> - all the reps just use that shared account" I got an immediate sinking, sinking feeling of despair.
This is the literally the first thing you should check for on a new codebase, particularly because modern build tooling recognizes the need and makes it easy. When you have a.js depending on b.js depending on c.js and on and on, the latency on each network request (just to get the 304) really adds up and can drastically affect perceived speed. Indeed, if most of your users are on speedy connections, the difference between a 500 byte 304 response and a 50 kb re-download is pretty much immaterial compared to the latency of making the request in the first place.
The easy response: What about disabled people?

> therefore ensuring its eternal permanence on democracy

I assume you would prefer a different system?
Generics made Java’s type system unsound due to an unanticipated edge case. The Go team got a bunch of top-class type theorists (e.g. Phil Wadler) to make sure that Go’s generics implementation doesn’t introduce a similar problem.
> “test this against Go 1.20” ... It interprets that as Go 1.2

No... it doesn't...

What the heck is this misinformation?

num: 1.20
str: "1.20"
str2: Go 1.20
str3: "Go 1.20"

These all parse as strings except the first one.

TOML also parses the following as number:

num = 1.20
Ah, gather 'round, me dear friends, and let ol' Uncle Colm regale ye with a software engineering tale that'll have ye chucklin' and admirin' the wonders of technology!

'Twas back in the early days of the internet, when dial-up connections ruled the land and floppy disks were the height of data storage. I found meself workin' as a young software engineer for a company that aimed to revolutionize the way folks communicated. They called it "email."

Now, ye might think email's as commonplace as a pot of tea these days, but back then, it was like magic. Me team and I were tasked with creatin' the very first email client for personal computers. We had grand ideas, but, oh, the challenges we faced!

Our office was a chaotic mix of wires, half-eaten sandwiches, and programmers hunched over their keyboards, with cups of strong coffee never more than arm's reach away. We'd spend hours debuggin', tweakin', and scratchin' our heads, tryin' to make sense of the code.

But there was one particularly ornery bug that had us stumped. Every time a user sent an email, a gremlin in the system would gobble it up, and it never reached the recipient. We dubbed this foul creature the "Email Bandit."

We tried every trick in the book, but the Email Bandit remained elusive. The boss was near despair, and me colleagues were ready to throw in the towel. But ye see, I had a plan. A plan so bold, it was downright cheeky.

I reckoned that if the Email Bandit was stealin' our precious messages, maybe he had a hankerin' for a particular type of email. So, I composed a message that read, "Dear Email Bandit, we've got a special treat for you. Please don't eat this one."

We sent that message out into the digital wilds, and we waited. Lo and behold, within minutes, the Email Bandit struck! He gobbled up the message and vanished into the ether.

Now, remember, we engineers are a clever bunch. We'd embedded a little tracker in that email, and it led us straight to the Email Bandit's hideout – a rogue line of code that no one had noticed before.

With the Bandit cornered, we rewrote that line, patched up our software, and celebrated like we'd won the lottery. From that day on, our email client worked like a charm, and we'd slain the Email Bandit once and for all.

So, me friends, never underestimate the power of a bit of creativity and a dash of cheekiness when it comes to solvin' software engineering conundrums. And remember the tale of the Email Bandit, a reminder that sometimes, the most elusive problems have the simplest solutions, hidden in plain sight. Sláinte to the world of software engineering!
Searching is hard: OpenStreetMaps' Nominatim is not very good, but some products built around it like Mapbox's search is very good. Don't know what they add exactly, but there is a big gap.
Articles that do not reference profit margins are clickbait garbage. All of the above companies have sub 5% profit margins, for many years. If you think you can operate a successful business on even lower profit margins, good luck.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSN/tyson-foods/pr...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/JBSAY/jbs-sa/profi...

https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/MRRTY/financials

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SEB/seaboard/profi...
I think we fit in that bucket [1] - open source, self-hostable, based on OpenTelemetry and backed by Clickhouse DB (columnar, not time-series).

Clickhouse gives users much greater flexibility in tradeoffs than either a time-series or inverted-index based store could offer (along with S3 support). There's nothing like a system that can balance high performance AND (usable) high cardinality.

[1] https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx

disclaimer (in case anyone just skimmed): I'm one of the authors of HyperDX
Why must this be true?
Read the story before complaining.
VW opened a car factory / exhibition space in the city center of Dresden 20 years ago [0]. It was already connected with tram tracks, so they built a freight tram that would run through the city to deliver parts to the factory [1]. It was always quite a sight to behold when they passed in front of the baroque architecture of the Zwinger.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_Factory

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CarGoTram
If there are items you don't believe poor people should be allowed to eat then speak to your legislative representatives.

All the items you can buy on food stamps are explicitly reviewed. That's the point.

People are bitching because poor people can buy anything on UberEats, and this is not true.
Microsoft sunsets their stuff all the time. It's just that they're competing with Google and Apple now, so they're actively trying to push this line to differentiate where they can.

Try to use only a ten year old printer driver sometime. It's a pain. Linux executes 20 year old code with no problem, as long as you kept all the pieces. How do they do it? Never merge anything that breaks known user space. Easy in theory, hard work in practice.

If you want to run applications from the 90s, you're likely to have more success with dosbox or wine than with a plain Windows. Didn't Microsoft completely give up on backwards emulation a few years ago and started virtualizing it instead, with mixed success?

Of course, if you really want something famous for backwards compatibility, look at OS/400 and z/OS. It's all layers of emulation from the hardware up in order to guarantee that an investment in that platform is future proof. It's all expensive in the end of course, as someone has to pay for it, but they live well on the customers who value such things. Running 50 year old code there is commonplace.
Using Probabilistic Data Structures in Redis
He’s not telling the whole truth.

It’s not his being a cancer researcher allowing full understanding of the risks and possible benefits that is important. It’s more that being a well-known and well-connected cancer researcher enables him to quickly access the contacts and have the discussions necessary to access unusual treatments.

The shame is that doctors (and hospitals, and nurses…) and the care they offer are like everything in life: on a spectrum of quality. Most people diagnosed with a serious disease (such as cancer) simply don’t have the knowledge, skills, time, and resources necessary to drive themselves further along this spectrum from the median towards excellence.

The system is such that to achieve optimal medical outcomes for oneself requires an understanding of the medical system, and an ability to work effectively within (or manipulate) it, to your own benefit. And it’s easy to understand that a well-connected doctor would be able to do that better than most.
that is a very interesting question to raise. thank you, we'll consider it!
Times have changed. We didn't have laptops in classes ... laptops didn't exist.

And I wrote my PhD in TeX. Not LaTeX ... that hadn't been invented.
Both trains and cars have their place in the transportation landscape

It's only ironic because Musk has been so openly hostile towards trains.

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-t...

“I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time.”

“It’s a pain in the ass,” he continued. “That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.”

When the audience member responded that public transportation seemed to work in Japan, Musk shot back, “What, where they cram people in the subway? That doesn’t sound great.”
That's a great point, and I'm conscious of it. I try to take a first-principles approach to building.

For instance, a few people have requested "pinned posts." I personally don't want the same post stuck at the top of my screen forever, and upon digging in deeper I find that people really want a "Welcome" post that all new users see and can access. So, I'm exploring some ways of accomplishing that without pinning - such as a dismissible post for new members.
Erlang/OTP 26.1 Released
> No, I can use EBT at most corner stores.

> What's your point? That large, established chains can't accept EBT?

Corner store is already way more overhead than needed in some cases when a seller can market their product online and can communicate with any would-be buyer over any messaging channel and drive it to you while handling their periodic activities that may have them already out and about.
More ironic than ships that move cars? Or cars that moves cars?
In this context it makes sense, but the context is false. Ever-deferring problems to class warfare just demotes this actual thing into a conspiracy theory.

E.g. British security services unlawfully collected citizen data for 17 years[0]. They started doing so 4 years into Labour's reign, and it eventually got stopped under the Conservatives.

The "nerd harder" decryption stuff comes up across the aisle, because both sides of the aisle are populated by non-technical people keen to avoid looking as though they're soft on child pornography.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20161018003035/https://www.thegu...
You don't see that card in commander because if anyone would put it in his deck the rest of the table would look at him irritated, complain a lot and probably scoop. You don't see it in other external formats because there are better things you can do for 4 mana. It's a card limited to cEDH mostly.
Also very interesting to consider!

Why do you think it matters if the information is stored in completely different IT systems.
So a hippie boomer held some hippie boomer belief, then after speaking to people affected by it, he realized he was wrong and changed his mind. And this is a problem because?

I'm more likely to donate to the FSF than to any of those bland, soulless American "we hecking love corpo-FOSS" HR drones like the OSI and the other vultures who tried to take him out a couple of years back. If Stallman is replaced by a fake corpo-drone, I'd never donate, just as I stopped for Mozilla.
Actually no, it’s something called jsonc.

It’s without a spec

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/100688

https://github.com/microsoft/node-jsonc-parser
Where one can learn more about this (using books)? For instance, if I would like to learn more about processes and TLBs and context switching, I know I can learn about it from the Tanenbaum's book, from the OSTEP book, from the "dinosour book", etc. But I have no idea which book provides the fundamentals about Linux interfaces for virtual networking.
It is a ton easier to make a game in unity than in these (having done both multiple times). And a lot easier to get artists and designers to work inside unity than with three.js.
I experience it as fast compared to traditional, pre-SPA-era web forums; the use of JavaScript speeds up a lot of interactions that would otherwise require a full page load. The live Markdown preview is also a heck of a lot better than having to click “preview” and wait for a page load to see your BBCode rendered. Having live updates for new posts/edits without having to refresh contributes to a snappy feeling. And I think the visual theming is nice and clean.

Still, compared to a good email client, it’s not so fast. Which is why I personally read Discourse forums mainly via email, only visiting the actual site for long threads or when I want to reply. It’s not perfect, since Discourse allows editing posts but doesn’t notify email users of edits. But it’s fine. I actually like it better than real mailing lists, because I prefer Discourse’s composing interface.
I took one look at the abstract and I completely understood it. No. Seriously does someone understand the abstract and is able to summarize it in readable English?
Sure, but if your default is to use FAT based something needing to use something else will cause confusion.

I thought the post was saying to use NTFS for their drives normally, but I'm probably mistaken after thinking about it.
I've worked with several senior people ("Principal Enterprise Architect", etc...) who were music majors, and as a rule they were terrible at their jobs. They just... didn't care about anything even vaguely related to computers. Without exception they got into their positions through nepotism, ass-kissing, or dirty politics. None got there through talent.

People who like computers do it as a hobby. They learn programming at a young age, they get a CS degree or a hard science degree, and then they spend their spare time on tech forums like HN.

People who don't like computers play music, learn painting, or do something else. They get degrees in the arts or humanities. They spend their spare time playing music at the local pub, or whatever.

PS: One of the worst programmers I had ever met is also one of the best musicians I had ever met.
But these wouldn't be trials in a useful sense if patients can self-select. The economics might not pan out unless you get to gatekeeping similar to current trials.

And that assumes it would be all bona-fide substance providers.
IMO, email and RSS are the universal APIs of the internet. Booklet already supports email, and I'm considering adding private RSS feeds.
> Accessibility. Screen readers are guaranteed to work

I wonder how useful screen readers are in curses-style applications (I don't have any experience with screen readers)? Sure, it can probably read it, but applications like this is essentially just a screenful soup of character blocks. It sounds like it'd make for a very tedious screen reading experience.
I was obviously being rhetorical.

"Fixable in practice" is really not a sufficient rebuttal when the people tasked with actually building this stuff have given clear and specific reasons why building this stuff safely is impossible.

That the government think it's totally fine if the government have the power to listen in on everything is not especially surprising. The problem is most people don't actually trust the government with this power.
Most roadmaps I've seen are usually a wishlist of features written with no consultation with the people who have to implement it, and shared with customers already.
That's where JSON shines, it's a properly "dead" format that can be trivially opted into allowing logic with the old console.log JSON.stringify, without even touching the unaffected lines (and all the git history they might be associated with). Certainly more trivially in some environments than in others, but I suppose it's close enough to the sweet spot of "adding logic shouldn't be too easy/shouldn't be too hard" wether the project is already nodeish or not.

The only downside is that if the objects in question happen to be properly documented in typescript, you will never want to go back.

If only there had been a formalized side by side from the start between JSON, the clean serialization format, and the JSON superset for human authoring (comments and quotes anarchy) that people have been informally reinventing hundreds of times...
Wait what? Governments don’t mind noncompliance, they need a little and if we look at legal cases involving tech companies where they are being regulated we can see that tech companies are often noncompliant. Not to mention the whole police and judicial infrastructure.

The Military also expects noncompliance which is why there are military equivalents.

What both need is majority consent and general noncompliance is only a symptom of that being removed. Authoritarian regimes often force compliance even without consent.

I also expect that it would take an awful lot more than regulation like this to get anyone in a western country to rise up enmasse to replace the government. The mess that is this regulation being created just demonstrates how bad the current UK government is at governing.
I think the reason they didn't opt for this approach is that putting stuff in a {} block creates its own scope, so any variables declared within that block are inaccessible from outside said scope.

The $: label syntax is valid JavaScript, but allowing scoped variables to be accessible outside of scope is very invalid JavaScript.
Depending on country the OSM data might be better than the Apple/Google. And they dont integrate everything.
For example there is Mapy.cz which is Czech map app that uses OSM plus their data and specifically for hiking or cycling around europe its way better than anything apple/google. Apple maps are really bad in mosts part of europe.

Dont forget that most european state mapping projects get integrated into OSM and the data is often better than what Google has. Their only upside is all the tracking data so they know where people currently dont drive. Something open source apps (and most likely even commercial european ones) wouldnt dare to gather.
That's crazy talk. JSON is very simple. The irreducible complexity of JSON is lower than irreducible complexity of XML, and irreducible complexity of XML is lower than YAML.
You have a low bar for config languages. I'd also like one to not be overly verbose, not be clearly intended for markup instead of object storage and not have security issues until you configure the parser just right (though that's often not an issue with configs). XML fails all of these, and YAML isn't much better.

If we're limiting ourselves to just JSON, INI, XML and YAML as potential choices, I get why people cling onto one of these suboptimal choices and then fiercely defend it, but there are other options. There's libconfig, JSON5, Dhall, various interpreted languages...

Sadly these alternatives are far from mainstream and have no support in standard libraries, so I think most developers will continue to pick whichever common option's issues they can deal with.
The media's very busy dealing with the Prime Minister announcing a policy that'll be reversed before it's ever implemented.
> There is no direct mapping between your data structure and the XML file.

i think that's by design tbh.

it's only a big win for JSON (and YAML) because the default case works OK - but every time someone has a problem parsing numbers in JSON (because the value is bigger than Integer.MAX in the host language), this is the cause.
Thank you! Didn’t know that!
requiring closing tags to repeat tag name is one of the issues and is not tree related, but is the fault of the format
Better than culture is enforced guarantees, nobody can store the database password on an NFS share if it's not available to them.
XML is a data exchange document.

It's born out of being a mark-up language, but it's true strength is as a data exchange format that can be self-documenting and human-readable at the same time.

Yes, it has a tendency to make people's eyes bleed with how verbose it can be. But if you were to open an XML file without knowing its format, or what each entry is supposed to be... it is likely you will understand (or be able to suss out) the purpose of the data being exchanged.

Schemas are very powerful, well-documented, and can be used to validate that an XML document is well-formed. People who tend to hate XML and Schemas tend not to understand how or why this is needed.

Contrary to the article's one point about config: I believe one of XML's strength is as configuration documents. It's better suited to configuration that is meant to be shared between different projects or platforms. If you only need a configuration file for a few keys and values - you're probably going to be fine with anything else.

But if you need to dump a configuration file into a document to be read by another program or exchange, then you're better off using XML because that format is more tolerant and can be well-documented by using Schemas. You can version those schemas, and use XSLT to convert the configuration document into another format that is far more readable.

That said, XML is not an be-all and end-all format for everyone. I believe, more importantly than anything, in using the appropriate tool for the given task. XML is simply not the best tool for every task.