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Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
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What I'm wondering: Are the salaries high? Not just because you've been employed at the job for a long time with regular raises, but because it's hard to find developers.
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Cloud migrations
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Rewriting things in Java? Or maybe running Cobol in the cloud directly? A mainframe has a number of properties of the cloud, in a sense.
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I've had a bunch of recent projects reverse-engineering old COBOL code, in financial services. Mostly to figure out the best way to replace the old systems with something newer, so not really as a "COBOL dev", though.
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Bank.
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Maybe the COBOL devs aren’t here.
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HN is a place where everyone is, so it's reasonable to assume that some Cobol devs may also lurk here.
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I knew a guy who wrote a lot of 360 assembler back in the day, never a COBOL programmer.
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I met a dev who's mom had been working on legacy banking systems her whole career. She had started in the eighties and she still did some urgent jobs at a crazy rate despite officially having retired.
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My stepmom who retired five years ago, did COBOL dev as part of her banking job until 2002ish and then she was full-time management track. In her bank, most of the work had been integrated with Java, and the Java was done by outsourced Indian teams. At the time she retired she felt the Indian teams had been failing for years to meet objectives, and finally management was seeing it. Additionally everybody who knew the cobol side of things was retiring at the same time as she was and she did not want to know what the system would look like in five years.
Ask HN: Do you use Caps Lock?
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No: I uninstall the CapsLock key cap from my keyboards (along with the insert key, any keys between Ctrl and Alt and the entirety of the ten-key pad).
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Good to know - thx for the reply
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I don't tend to use Caps Lock at all - I know a lot of people remap it to be escape, just like OuterVale has mentioned, but for me it's just a key that I never use. Then again I no longer use home, end, page up and page down keys either - I switched to a split keyboard that doesn't have them as separate keys and you need to press a Fn key with another key to get them and as I live in the terminal for all my real work I just switched to using the CTRL key combinations instead.
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That interesting that your keyboard doesn't have them to begin with.. I agree having something like caps lock be a shortcut instead of having a separate key for it makes a lot more sense
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The new windows laptops have replaced the right-side CTRL key with a stupid co-pilot key. Sooooooooooooooooo annoying. I need to remap it in windows.
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Lol yeah on Mac they have you press the command key twice so it doesn't take up a whole new key at least
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I use caps lock probably 4 or 5 times a week for certain data entry tasks. Often enough that I wouldn't remap it to do anything else.
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That makes sense, data entry is one of the reasons I have heard people use it.
Caps lock, Screen lock, Print screen are the least used keys on my keyboard (not a full 102 key one). I could work without them. Mapping them to something else makes sense. I'm surprised default MacOS doesn't at least map the screen lock and print screen to something automatically.
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Yeah I agree - those three often appear in least used lists - remapping all of them would be so cool
i use capslock if i need to type more than one capital. i dont know why. it just happens...
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You're not the only one!
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That's interesting - for some reason I just hold down the shift key even for a couple words - probably out of habit
Personally, I've had my Caps Lock key bound to Escape for quite a few years now. It has been lovely and fits perfectly with my keyboard-driven workflow. Pairs great with Colemak-DH, which is my layout of choice. I haven't found myself ever missing the Caps Lock key's original functionality, and my blank laptop keycaps mean I can have it bound without mental annoyance. Some good discussion: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hPLvZsNZGsQSLfMee/remap-your-caps-lock-key
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Thanks for the link! That is along the lines of what I saw in my research - just like the first couple minutes of this video - https://youtu.be/XuQVbZ0wENE?si=ddSniQLcaP_Tuvmm Caps lock has an amazing spot without being useful enough to deserve it. I think like another comment mentioned - having a shortcut for locking caps might be better than having a whole key for it..
lsr: ls with io_uring (tangled.sh)
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This was more interesting for the tangled.sh platform it's hosted on. Wasn't aware of that!
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There used to be lsring by Jens Axboe (author of io_uring), but it no longer exists. This is more extreme than abandoning the project. Perhaps there is some issue with using io_uring this way, perhaps vulnerabilities are exposed.
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I am curious what would happen if ls and other commands were replaced using io_uring and kernel.io_uring_disabled was set to 1. Would it fall back to an older behavior or would the ability to disable it be removed?
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Really interesting, the difference is real though I would just hope that some better coloring support could be added because I have "eza --icons=always -1" command set as my ls and it looks really good, whereas when I use lsr -1, yes the fundamental thing is same, the difference is in the coloring. Yes lsr also colors the output but it doesn't know as many things as eza does For example .opus will show up as a music icon and with the right color (green-ish in my case?) in eza whereas it would be shown up as any normal file in lsr. Really no regrets though, its quite easy to patch I think but yes this is rock solid and really fast I must admit. Can you please create more such things but for cat and other system utilities too please? Also love that its using tangled.sh which is using atproto, kinda interesting too. I also like that its written in zig which imo feels way more easier for me to touch as a novice than rust (sry rustaceans)
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I wonder how it performs against an NFS server with lots of files, especially one over a kinda-crappy connection. Putting an unreliable network service behind blocking POSIX syscalls is one of the main reasons NFS is a terrible design choice (as can be seen by anyone who's tried to ctrl+c any app that's reading from a broken NFS folder), but I wonder if io_uring mitigates the bad parts somewhat.
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The link isn't working for me. For those who were able to see it: does it improve anything by using that instead of what ls does now??
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It improves the latency of ls calls.
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70% faster, but more importantly 35x times less syscalls.
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Is there a noticeable benefit of this huge syscall reduction?
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Yes I just checked it after installing strace strace -c ls gave me this 100.00 0.002709 13 198 5 total strace -c eza gave me this 100.00 0.006125 12 476 48 total strace -c lsr gave me this 100.00 0.001277 33 38 total So seeing the number of syscalls in the calls directory 198 : ls 476 : eza 33 : lsr A meaningful difference indeed!
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Hm interesting, it worked for me.
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Love it. I'm trying to understand why all command line tools don't use io_uring. As an example, all my nvme's on usb 3.2 gen 2 only reach 740MB/s peak. If I use tools with aio or io_uring I get 1005MB/s. I know I may not be copying many files simultaneously every time, but the queue length strategies and the fewer locks also help I guess.
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Poe's law hits again.
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Probably historical preference for portability without a bunch of #ifdef means platform+version-specific stuff is very late to get adopted. Though, at this point, the benefit of portability across various posixy platforms is much lower.
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One reason is so that they work in all linux environments rather than just bleeding edge installs from the last couple years.
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Link doesn’t work
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Hm, well I have replied it to some other comment too but the link is working fine for me. Currently downloading zig to build it.
Psilocybin produces substantial sustained decreases in depression and anxiety (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
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Anecdotally, I know several people who have tried mushrooms and/or ayahuasca for depression in recent years and their results are nothing like the glowing Internet reports. The worst case is a friend who became disconnected from reality for a very long time. Went from atheistic to believing in mystical ideas. He thought he was able to see and sense things that we could not, like auras and secret messages. He was getting better last time we checked but he’s hard to get in contact with now. No prior hints of psychosis or family history, just a psychedelic induced mental illness. The other anecdotes were not as dramatic, but also not as positive or free of side effects as studies like this one would make you think. Multiple stories of extended periods of derealization or anxiety attacks that started after the trip. There are similar comments here throughout this comment section. There was a time when sharing these negative stories was met with disbelief and downvotes. I think as it’s becoming more common people are realizing that the interaction between psychedelics and depression isn’t as great as it seemed for a few years when they were virtually being promoted by podcasters and social media influencers as a novel cure for depression.
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I think a lot of the negative reception to negative anecdotes were because they were often in the context of legalization. "I know someone who went crazy after trying $foo so we should still lock people into iron cages just for the crime of possessing it." Debate tends to get polarized when doors are being kicked down. Academic studies that are disconnected from culture wars don't tend to provoke such responses, probably because they don't tend to reach the general public in the first place.
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Psychedelics are basically like shock therapy. The whole ketamine thing though is even crazier at least with psychedelics there is a forced introspection and very little addictive nature.
To be fair, so did a lobotomy. I believe close attention should be paid to any unintended outcomes of a therapy that the patient themselves would no longer be able to identify due to the nature of the treatment itself.
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A patient doesn’t metabolize a lobotomy.
Psilocybin is about the 180-degree opposite of a lobotomy, just from a purely mechanical perspective. And it certainly feels that way qualitatively as well.
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organic systems seek points of equilibrium, with veering too much off in any axis being detrimental
FDA approved in 2018 for (treatment-resistant) depression? https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/compass-pathways-receives-fda-breakthrough-therapy-designation-for-psilocybin-therapy-for-treatment-resistant-depression-834088100.html ?
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https://www.fda.gov/drugs/resources-information-approved-drugs/olaratumab-lartruvo !
Why do you say the effect sizes are inflated?
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Due to a small, self-selected sample, biased toward educated, prior hallucinogen users, inadequate blinding, p-hacking via uncorrected multiple tests on 17+ outcomes, and crossover design flaws that confound long-term effects with intensive therapy. Similar psychedelic therapy claims—for LSD/psilocybin alleviating cancer-related anxiety/depression—have echoed since the 1950s-1970s, yet they've never panned out into practical, scalable clinical therapies. This alone should raise a MASSIVE Bayesian statistics red flag, due to prior discount: with decades of unfulfilled hype. At this point new evidence requires extraordinary proof to update our view. If such massive effectiveness were true, it would blow what we already have out of the water, and I would be the first to promote it to my patients. But you know what they say when something sounds too good to be true.
Figure 3 is suspicious. Even the placebo arm has much better scores for depression and anxiety from baseline?
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This happens in every depression study: Placebo effect is extremely strong for depression. You can even collect depressed people, do nothing at all, and when you survey them 6 months later the average scores will improve. This is because depression is, on average, an aberrant condition and the average patient will tend to revert toward the mean. However, psychedelic studies have a bigger problem: Psychedelics trigger false feelings of amazement and wonder, feeling like something magical has happened. This is like turbo placebo when you tell people that it’s a depression treatment. Maybe that’s a valuable therapeutic effect, or maybe not. There’s a lot to explore, but from all the studies I’ve read I’m not as bullish on mushrooms for depression as the headlines would indicate.
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Setting aside the psychedlic aspect, do you think figure 3 supports the study's conclusion?
full title Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized double-blind trial
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@dang, the OP title needs changing imo.
The study design does try to mitigate blinding issues and expectancy effects, but with half of the participants reporting past use of hallucinogens, this is not going to be very effective blinding. A majority of your low dose 1st group likely very much realizes that they're on the inactive dose.
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Or they could give them a different psychedelic to test the efficacy of psilocybin specifically would be my thought.
There's an argument to be made that traditional blinding and placebo techniques are not really relevant for interventions targeting mood or personality. e.g. anything that makes you feel better is an effective mood intervention, by definition. "blinding" in these studies is really just going through the motions to make certain authorities happy. I would be more interested in polling the close friends and family of study participants and asking them about perceived changes. Instruct participants not to tell anyone about their experience in the study (whether they think they got a drug or how much). It looks like the study tried to do something like this with "session monitors" who interviewed the participants the day after. They call it double-blind, but it's more like single-blind because the 3rd person assessment is the outcome measure.
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The issue with relying on placebo effects is not that they aren't real/don't work (everything you said also applies to e.g. a painkiller), but that they are very context-sensitive. Deploy that drug to an individual or population with a different belief framework or contextual information about the therapy or their condition, and you won't get the desired results. The design you mention is really interesting! Have you seen this done anywhere?
Sorry, but I'd be dead without mine. I'm going to have to disagree with you.
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The interesting thing with mushrooms is that you could eat a handful, realize you are already dead, and then maybe not need the other meds at all.
Is it possible to have a placebo group when doing a study on psilocybin? Would participants in the placebo not notice the lack of psychedelic effects? EDIT: In the original link it says the placebo group received a much lower dose, so that seems to be one way of doing it.
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One way is using niacin in high doses, also known as vitamin B3, as an active placebo to induce a sensation of heat and cause the skin to flush red, which is a typical reaction to tryptamines. The rest is a regular placebo. It can be a really strong thing when you are feeling hot.
Then again what if showing some funky hallucinogenic images/movies would have the same effect on some people? We surely know that people can go crazy (so have psychological effects) in cults and similar settings. What if intense visual/sonic/etc stimulation, visual distortions etc. together with messaging like "it will change your life and cure your anxieties" is the key in this therapy?
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That isn't how these studies are being done... because yeah, it'd probably confound the results.
sounds like in that case you’re not testing the efficacy of high versus sober, you’re testing heroic dosing versus micro dosing.
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There are also studies that test against placebo. There have been lots and lots of trials on these things with different designs that make different cost/benefit tradeoffs. A difficult one with psychedelics is as-mentioned: people can easily "break the blind". But if you want to eliminate that problem you can instead do a micro vs macro dose, in which case you're measuring a slightly different thing.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
15 Years If Jefit (jefit.com)
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Always appreciate seeing small teams go into bare metal hosting! (judging by the photo of them in front of HE FMT2 colo racks)
Anyone want to fix the typo in the title? Presumably “15 Years of Jefit”
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or 15 Years of Buildling Jefit
Longtime Jefit user. I respect that it the enshittifiction (e.g. locking "volume" charts behind a subscription) has been slow enough to not force me to another product. I've definitely encountered many many bugs, but only a few that have resulted in partial data loss. Lots of respect with allowing data export in a simple format like .csv Did the "recent" exercise sort get removed?
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I've been using it for a long time as well, but I'm really tired of the constant up-sell attempts. I really just want a dead simple app to track my work, and I really feel like Jefit is moving further and further away from that.
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I've been using the free tier for a few years. I want very little out of it -- really just something to say "do these exercises today". The basics work well enough. I'd just as soon they didn't lock alternative exercises behind the paywall -- if my gym doesn't have a leg extension machine, what's a good alternative? It doesn't seem a lot to ask. I'm well aware that I get what I pay for on the free tier. But I worked around it by googling an alternative and just substituting that instead. It's good enough for my extremely meager purposes.
Netflix uses generative AI in one of its shows for first time (theguardian.com)
It makes sense for short shots, I guess; think a kind of "slideshow of videos"; maybe scene-setting landscape pans, but then you need your production to conform to whatever the AI generates, because it won't conform to what you had in mind. I haven't seen a good example yet of passable scene-to-scene character coherency, so don't imagine we'll be seeing a whole-AI show for a fairly long while. That plastic man short that went viral ~2-3 months ago was not near required "conformity" (that is, the character changed too much between scenes; had too many errors). Would be pleased to see examples of it if it exists, though.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx8rMzlG29Q
Is netflix having financial troubles that mean it can't hire actual people or something?
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Not really, but film and TV production is a business like any other. You aren't just given some money and told to do whatever - there is a significant amount of capital raised and GTM plans created. It actually isn't much different from VC - I've found the mechanisms around film/TV production financing to be fairly similar.
bro discovered capitalism
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I don't think that's appropriate language for HN. We should strive for high quality content but the very least civilized discussions, ideally without sarcasm or one liners that spirals into low quality posts.
Sis already knew capitalism existed, she is also angry at companies for taking jobs away from people
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I can see your point of view and have concerns, but truly the job does not belong to the person doing it. It belongs to the employer. We are just keeping the seat warm for when someone better is available. (Capitalism)
This isn't unique to AI. Visual effects have been achievable on my desktop computer for as long as I can remember (I'm in my mid twenties). Industry standard compositing tools such as Nuke, Autodesk, Fusion, have had free educational/non-commercial versions forever, and you can replace almost all of those with Blender. Watch Tears of Steel, a short film done almost entirely in FOSS. Technology aside, I believe that the monopoly on talent, as in the hiring of talent is symptomatic of a monopoly on distribution, which means the devaluing of talent over reach is actually worse for the independent filmmaker.
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VFX doesn't have a suffice monopoly of talent - it's overwhelmingly piecework outsourced to multiple studios, and most jurisdictions give MASSIVE tax subsidises for VFX production (40-70% of total production cost). The issue for a lot of productions is the budget per episode is low. For example, the show mentioned in the article has a budget of $15M to produce 6 episodes that heavily rely on shooting on location, significant set design, VFX, somewhat high profile actors, and a significant reduction in tax incentives by the Millei government at a moment when countries like Vietnam, India, Philippines, Colombia, and China are creating a second VFX production subsidy war. Choosing to use GenAI to automate the creation of secondary scenes can become fairly cheap and is the lowest hanging fruit.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Fighting Brandolini's Law with Sampling (brady.fyi)
There is an obvious bias on the graph, that is a joke. According to that, Bill Clinton is the politician that lied the less!! Mr "I did not have sexual relations with that woman".
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The graph is from 2007 onwards. So it doesn’t include when he was president.
The "falsiness distribution" by itself is not capable of answering this kind of question. Imagine a politician who speaks just one statement, a "pants on fire" lie. They immediately reach the top liar spot. The distribution also leaves out the significance and the reach of the statements. Your statement is about as meaningful as the "fastest growing <whatever>" trick. E.g. growing from 0->1 user is infinite growth, so wins fastest growing immediately.
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If this were ESPN or similar, they would say "min 50 games" or something to sort the outliers (heh).
Well, "fact checkers" like Politifact are precisely what are considered biased themselves. Sampling from a biased dataset still shows the same bias. https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/8f9a6f3b-efd7-46f3-b4be-49fe0fb8e0c3 You may be aligned with the alleged or real partisanship of Politifact, so to you there's no problem here. But team Harris and Buttigieg lost the election. Hence these consequences (from Wikipedia): In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg announced an end to Meta's eight-year partnership with PolitiFact, claiming that "fact checkers have just been too politically biased."[62][63
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Most everything is "considered biased" by some people . In this case, Zuckerberg and the Bain employee who authored your report are indeed people -- 2 out of billions. Consider an alternative framing, "fact checkers like Politifact are precisely what are considered UNbiased" . It is at least as true (because at least 2 people consider it to be so). Given that framing, should we do anything about that situation? How do you think framing, rather than substance, affects that discussion?
This is a great example of the issue the blog post is addressing, namely: > The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. The play book is: 1. Set an impossible standard (an undefined "unbiased" fact checker) 2. When impossible standard cannot be reached, throw toys out of the pram Meanwhile, egregious levels of bullshit now go unchallenged.
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Yeah it’s just the seat belt fallacy: seatbelts are useless because people still die in car crashes. Somehow our whole society has fallen for the “unless you can point to a perfect saint who has never done any wrong, we might as well be led by active criminals” pitch. It’s so nihilistic.
Ask HN: Is Linux for laptop worth the trouble?
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what is your goal? what do you expect would be the pros and cons of linux or mac? personally, i tried macOS 2 years ago and got frustrated by all the restrictions and differences from linux. i remember wanting to uninstall the default "chess" program, searching around and learning that i literally couldn't without turning off the default security mode, just because there was an off chance that the chess program contained essential code.
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I'm not seeing any fairly priced MacBooks in the Apple store. Are you referring to second hand laptops?
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I've been running Manjaro (Arch derivative) on my System76 Galago Pro (galp5) for 3 years and it runs great. It's 14", light weight, quiet, and has a decent battery. You won't beat Mac's battery life, and if it's Mac's software that you want, Linux cannot provide that. I prefer the Linux ecosystem personally, and cannot stand Mac's interface and window management.
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Apple makes some of the best laptop hardware. Linux is the best OS. Your main choices are: 1) Run an inferior OS on Apple hardware. 2) Run Linux on inferior hardware. 3) Asahi Linux on Apple hardware. What you choose depends on the trade-offs you want to make. Sounds like some people in this thread have had success with option 3. I have tried but I have failed. I'm hoping that Asahi continues to improve. I have several laptops, I do a mix of 1 and 2.
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