skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your argument is that Microsoft Office is not thriving because of institutional knowledge, then you proceed to prove that it is institutional knowledge that makes it a valuable tool.

If your arguments are:
1) Most users can pick it up easily due to familiarity.
2) Excel is a general tool usable by many disparate groups in the organization.
3) Excel is the lingua franca of manipulating data within the organization.

Then it seems to me that these would fall under the category of 'institutional knowledge', and you are in effect arguing that it is thriving because of institutional knowledge.
I can't speak to the definition but I think I've always seen comparative advantage covered in micro textbooks rather than macro textbooks.
Yeah, the fact is, if an algorithm has a page on Wikipedia, it probably has a package in R.
Needs [2015] tag.
Needs (2015) tag.
F-35 has lots of problems, but it does not cost a billion a piece to build. And I'm not sure that drones vulnerability to ECM will ever be solved, so quite likely there is always going to be a role for a manned fighter.

Whether F-35 should be that fighter is another question, there is a lot of disagreement on that one among people far more qualified than me, so I have no opinion there.
New SP4 owner (never had a surface). It's well on your lap. The back angle is infinitly adjustable, so that's not an issue and the key type cover is solid so typing isn't an issue even if on your lap - I read flex in the previous covers made this tricky.
I've found the pen to be the one part of my Surface that I don't use all, maybe it's because I am left handed and it leaves OneNote registering a ton of false navigation gestures but it's basically unusable for me.

Overall, I still like my Surface (non Pro) but it's mostly for web browsing and media consumption.
Good work. With enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow.
it keeps spitting out "bad" then

.. then it's quite possible that the software is bad and not improving. Possibly in a way that will get people killed. Ignoring the quality concerns and carrying on gave us the Challenger disaster (approx 30 years ago today).
What? Part of a due diligence process is looking at internal financial statements. Cashflow issues would have jumped out immediately. GS absolutely dropped the ball on this one. Also not recommending your client put in a collar after an all stock deal? Don't know about Goldman but that was pretty much standard advice at mine.
I use Excel nearly every day at work. How am I not the user? My company has needs too, one of which is correctly editing spreadsheets and delimited files. Excel is insufficient for this.
I'm currently using one of these: http://officemaster.com/products/index.php?view=product&sid=...

It's definitely best suited for tall users (if you're not over about 6'3" you will NOT be comfortable) and is both taller and has a deeper seat than most chairs.
Upvoted because this is the first short and clear description of how the SSH bug works and why it's bad that I've read so far.
This is true for many services you buy from other companies. The reputation of a giant is likely based on the top people in that company and sometimes based on the top people who were in that company years ago. Unless you are also a giant company you are probably getting junior people brought on to feed the pyramid. If you can find a smaller practice with smart people you will usually be better off
I've not used it myself (yet), but Prose Mirror (http://prosemirror.net/) is the one I have bookmarked and has been featured here on HN in the past and seems to be very full featured and from the demos it seems flexible everything from the full WYSIWYG-style editor that some users may want to this sort of simple toolbar over a Markdown field.
That doesn't help you edit the file, though. It only helps you convert it to an Excel file. You still can't save as anything other than comma-separated without changing the language settings.
The Borg icon of Bill.

And the /. pony logo.

And the 9/11 live coverage on Slashdot, when every other news site was down, Slashdot was up and running: http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-tower... and http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1842258/our-new-pearl-har...

Ah, fond memories.
Tips on How to Focus
Conserving the USS Enterprise – restoring the original studio model
Lyra Health CTO Daniel Tunkelang Stepped Down
statistically zero rabbit-founded companies ever received funding. stop discrimination against rabbits now.
Yes. A rock that's been pleasingly shaped by desert winds is not considered art. But if we'd later find out that it was actually a man-made artifact, it would become a candidate for this label.
Very. The tolerances are very tight and it needs all kinds of lubrication and being 'massaged' while it is run.

IIRC the whole reason Babbage could not build it was because the machine shops of the day could not produce precise enough parts...
Stuff happens, and even if you test all kinds of things real failure situations always can work differently, with partial failures etc. Just takes one important subsystem hitting an unforeseen edge case, and going completely down is in many cases better than risking running in a state that destroys data or does other bad things. Same for taking your time to go back online.

The cases that work are not the ones you hear about. Best practices and testing reduce the risk of making the news, but can't guarantee success.
That's your interpretation - definitely not something I aim for.

We'll leave it there.
useless against enemies like China or Russia

Those are nuclear powers. The only possibilities of F-35s shooting at Chinese or Russian jets is "accidents" like the Turkish border incident. In the event of actual war they'll be destroyed on the ground by ICBMs, along with everything and everyone else.
Facebook Audience Network Opens Up to Mobile Web
Thanks! I just can't get over how much like a Brooklyn gangster he sounds. I think I much prefer reading his lectures, where I can mentally substitute a proper cambridge accent. The knowledge seems to be absorbed better that way. Also, he walks around too much: this tends to dissipate the focus. But, I do like the antics with his hands/body and facial expressions!
The 97% you see on the status page is for the past 24 hours. That doesn't include any of the outage being discussed here.
Chinese DDoS? Somehow I don't buy power going out at a server farm.
>I used text-to-columns to very nicely parse pipe-delimited files.

Sure, but you still can't edit it and save it without losing data. I use Excel nearly every day as well, and I get more and more frustrated the more I use it. My coworkers hate it as well. Just because you haven't personally experienced any problems doesn't mean they don't exist.
yes, it went down to 89% or something just after the problem.
> Cool maybe, but what would be the use case for this?

Less stuff to carry around. Since it's brand new there isn't a lot of utility there just yet. Honestly, even though Windows Phone may be dead, I really think this is the future of computing. I mean why bother having a desktop or laptop if you can use your personal device, plug it into different things and get the full experience as if you had a laptop or desktop?

You could go to an airport, plug your phone in and use it like a desktop at one of their tables. Get on the plane and plug it into a screen.

Ultimately I could even see the phone part disappearing and it's a small object you keep on your person that can then connect to various types of devices maybe even wirelessly. This is a great use-case for, in 80 years or however long it takes, when we have computing devices embedded into our bodies. Then we simply touch a screen and we can visualize the data we're carrying.

I stay awake a night thinking about how cool this could be :) (seriously, I even started sketching how to create this type of universality myself but it's such an undertaking and difficult to succeed that I never actually wrote code for this idea but it's certainly one of my favorites)
> being subject to a wall of glowing bitten apples staring at you

Remarkable imagery.
> I suspect once it becomes acceptable to not work a whole lot of people will be perfectly happy smoking pot and playing video games. It won't take that many to break the system.

If the system is constructed so that increasing defections from taxable-income-generating activity (which isn't just work -- capital income, after all, is taxed as well) decrease the real value of UBI (and, thus, the attractiveness of forgoing such activity in favor of other pursuits), then this tendency will be controlled and constrained within the ability of the productivity of the active economy to support.

As discussed in other subthreads of this thread, this kind of negative feedback is actually quite easy to build into a UBI system.
Didn't Serbia have a massive civil war just few years ago?
Your old console ran the same code for years on end with no updates and no new features. Your phone's updating all the time. Thus, software TTL is much lower. (Software TTL for your console is determined by how long your cartridge serves up good data.)
What do you wish to gain by being painfully pedantic? Black women are 5-6% of the population, but 0.01% of funded founders. That is a rounding error, effectively zero. Why not focus on the actual point of the post instead?
Pretty good analogy but magnetic fields don't discriminate whereas one enduring reason for Facebook's success is that a large portion of that critical mass is particularly adverse to change.

I guess if you wanted to get ridiculous with the analogy, you could make the "balls" of different materials, some of which are very strongly attracted to the magnet and others which take a lot less force to pull away.
Show HN: Decorators and type checking from ES2015 classes and template strings
Yesterday I was being a bit of an ass to a few people about how "the whole point of using git is so that we can do decentralized code management and why these dependencies were being pulled from our private github if the could be sent point to point yadda yadda yadda". Then they proceeded to go over the list of package managers and dependencies we used and I had to shut up. Even when we host our own Docker Hub and package managers (we do), if you dig far enough, you can find some dependency of a dependency of dependency that relies on GitHub. Brew/npm/build script/whatever. It is crazy how everything has changed so much in the past few years. GitHub went from something that was really nice to have to a core requirement for complex systems that rely heavily on open source.
Medium Blocked in Malaysia
Then come to China and talk to these workers. Ask them if their living conditions have been vastly improved. Ask them if their life has been greatly better than years ago. Ask them if they are grateful for the government and Communist Party. The answers to all these will be a resounding yes.

People in the developed countries do not understand what real poverty and despair is. If you had lived the lives they have, pollution would be your least concerns.
The only way you can build fault-resilient systems is to frequently test fault injection scenarios. Netflix is pretty mature in this regard, perhaps Github can learn from their example.

That said, it's possible that github may have considered that this particular style of outage is rare enough that they don't want to make their design tolerate it. Though if that were the case, I'd wager they'd re-evaluate the cost/benefit right around now. :)
Developing markets where the only computer you have is a phone.
If I ever get a tablet, it will be a surface. Simply because so much of the work I do resides in spreadsheets, and Surface is optimized for excel and productivity.
Are you people high? "Statistically" doesn't mean "12 == 0". It means "Effectively zero"
Like always with adsense it will depend on your typical user and thereby on the advertisers. Advertisers targeting more sophisticated users will rather provide SSL enabled ads than advertiser targeting the "get rich quick" audience for example.
I'm going to try to take the kids this weekend.
"excel sheets require nowhere near the manpower required for your alternative. That factors into a cost-benefit analysis that may not favor real development."

Not to build, but to maintain and constantly clean up the errors by using the wrong tool for the job. I know form experience having wasted countless hours because my organisation insisted on using it as a tool to upload data to our database, and using it as the database before that.
Never isn't from a policy but a physics standpoint. If the chutes are already there, then it makes sense to use them. They are lighter/cheaper than hauling a full backup rocket system.

From what I've seen, it looks like SpaceX plans on using the rockets to cushion a landing already under chutes, like the russians do today. That allows for much smaller chutes and faster landing. If the rockets fail then the landing with be rough but still survivable, with the re-usability of the craft being written off.

The propulsive landing of booster stages makes sense only because you already have giant engine/fuel reserves, which aren't going to orbit. And since there are no humans around you don't need any sort of abort option.

Also, if you are going to have a potentially rough landing, would you rather do so sitting 6" from a box containing a parachute, or 6" from a tank of rocket fuel?
Heh, that quote always amuses me. People hated it, but it actually does make a lot of sense.
Microsoft only sold 4.5 million Lumia devices in the recent quarter, compared to 10.5 million at the same time last year. That's a massive 57 percent drop. Even a 57 percent increase wouldn't be enough to save Windows Phone right now.

Of course not. It would need a 133% increase to get back to the old quarter's numbers. :>
Concepts are useful because they help us discriminate - between that which falls under the umbrella of the concept and which doesn't. An attribute that applies to every possible thing equally is redundant, and can be ignored without loss of information.
Show HN: Medium for programmers
From the article:

"While I am happy to share data with those that request it, I will summarize by saying that most restaurant customers that use OpenTable abhor it (for a few different reasons)."

His company, TableHero, is a competitor, so "most" may be an exaggeration. He's probably identified a few weaknesses in Open Table to capitalize on.
Various date/time formats across the world bringing me to the knees.
If 1/28 outage was _that_ rough 2/28 would be twice as bad and 28/28 would feel like armageddon maybe?
Some thoughts and questions here.

Should we in the tech industry feel obligated to spend energy on these social movements? Are we wrong and selfish to not?

Honestly, I'd rather not. I'd rather get technical things done, and let policy makers and influencers focus on those issues. If you're in on something with me, great AWESOME, I honestly don't care who you are. Things like race and gender don't matter to me as long as you can get work done. However, I do understand that being able to get work done in this industry is stemmed from a privileged advantage. -- Yes that sucks and is unfair, but how do we as a technical industry even change that when we need to focus on getting work done?
This is more an argument for caching or vending dependencies than anything else.

If the ability to make builds is critical to your org, making your build process depend on the availability of third-party services over which you have no control is going to end in tears.
This project has struggled because the concept is fundamentally flawed, and when those fundamental flaws started causing problems the program kept cutting corners, ignoring reality, and making bigger and bigger bad bets.

From the start there was the idea of one aircraft for three services with a STOVL requirement and stealth was a huge gamble. Then, inexplicably the DoD decided that instead of providing detailed requirements for the platform like they usually did, they would let the contractor write many of the requirements since 'they have the expertise in building warplanes'.

Then, on top of that they decided to implement concurrent development, where they'd be doing testing and verification of the aircraft in parallel with production. In theory this would save time but in practice the reason you do testing and verification before production is to avoid expensive retrofits when problems are identified. Of course, many expensive retrofits have resulted.

On numerous occasions performance requirements have been lowered, deadlines blown, and the cost is tracking to be so expensive that it's making the F-22 look like a bargain.

Then there's the fact that production of parts of this program are spread out over 47 states, meaning every Congressman has incentive not to stop this runaway freight train of waste and negligence.
I use my smartphone for some core functionality (maps, email, browser, messaging, e-books), but most of that is built in to the OS. I can't imagine that I'm too much of an outlier in my usage patterns. Maybe I should have tried a Windows phone.
Money has been close to free for years. As the interest rate ticks up everything will change. It's already starting to. More expensive borrowing, less leverage, and better places to put dollars than venture.

The one thing I really agree with though is the funny thing that happens here with the word "engineer". If you can make a website you somehow qualify for the title software engineer. By Bay Area standards, I myself am director level engineering talent—and I get offers for such all the time—and yet I don't even remotely consider myself an engineer. Because I can make a website? Because I know a little python, ruby and node? Come on. I've never written anything that lives in a real production environment and you want to hire me as your director of engineering? Are you mad?
When I am doing multi million dollar financial models, I like correct and predictable.
I don't suggest playing with that version much as it's being completely replaced by experimental/cardwiki in the next month.
And people give me shit when I argue that open source projects should include 100% of dependencies.
I like others am confused by this common sentiment. Github is the remote repo, but the version control is distributed so everyone has a copy. I'm pretty sure I can fill a few hours or more with work needing to be done on my local repo. FYI I'm not a professional software developer but I would like to know.

The things that come to mind: issue trackers, messaging, not being able to see latest pull requests.

Update: Now i'm starting to understand the build dependency issue. Still, why do you need to rebuild all dependencies from GitHub repo to build the application? Can't the currently available version work?
iPad: 7.1B - doomed category
Surface Pro/Books: 1.35B - super impressive, categories of the future!
Show HN: A lightweight, JavaScript free* blog engine
After last week post on HN:

>> Show HN: CMS.js – Fully Client-Side JavaScript Site Generator
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924533

I was spurred into finishing my own blog and releasing it on https://github.com/Malcx/DamnSmallBlog/ .

The amount of extra data being sent just to display text is getting crazy these days and ends up excluding vast numbers of browsers, users and devices. OK these users might well not be your target audience and can be ignored, but for simple thoughts on paper there is no need.

There are still a few issues and tweaks needed to make this production ready, but ship early and ship often!

*js is optionally used by Google Analytics.
Actually, slightly rephrased, it's a reasonable thing to consider for any non-trivial interaction: "What are your stakes here?"

Even with the best of intentions, people are complex and complex transactions between two or more of them are complex-squared. Taking the time to make sure both parties understands what the other does and doesn't bring to the table is important for success.
> if you're not regularly cutting power to your data center, you're not building resilience to such a thing happening

Would love to read examples on who is doing this and how? Reminds me of Netflix's Choas monkey, only applied to electricity. :p
it seriously makes me lol that people are upset, or surprised, that an internet service went down for a couple of hours. a couple of hours! get some perspective please. go for a walk, get a tasty burrito, try a new brand of hot sauce.

"why didn't they do X, Y, or Z"

the answer in every case is it's extremely expensive, or extremely hard to do, or both. you want a reason, there's the reason. maybe they'll fix it. maybe they won't. next question.

make your own backups and redundant systems. "but github is so critical!" -- even more reason to have a backup. bad shit happens in this world. even to good people. prepare or suffer the consequences.
Make sure you read through Chris Granger's response at the bottom.
The transparency of who actually is good. The talent in companies ebbs and flows and the scores will reflect the work they are doing now, not what they did in their best or worst days.

There are many boutique companies that are excellent, but don't have a fair share at the market.

Companies that are 'all things to all men' tend to have quality issues over time... like the big security giants of the last decade. Eventually people get tired of it and look for specialists. That's where this will help.
So you're redeploying one binary instead of another binary. You still need to deploy something.

In fact, what about just switching connections to freshly launched VMs?
It's a bit strange. Usually Chinese companies don't play well with open source. And now this ? is there place for suspicion?
Machine uptime as a service
Er, Medium is the Medium for programmers. How does this differentiate?
`comm -1 -3` (http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/co...) is practically made for quickly finding who is a member of all involved groups.
Adding to "Don't run bower/npm install/update on production" - a lot of package managers have a local mirror available and you can point your build server to it. This gives you some redundancy if the public mirror goes down, and also faster downloads within the network. Bandersnatch mirrors all of pypi, there are some others that will just mirror the parts of pypi you need and fetch new packages as you try to pip install things that don't exist in its local cache.
I am surprised it does not come with a "left handed" setting! (Even if not two pen container compartments)
I always wondered why I saw many dozens of references to the Wayland project (from writers who think it might be a good idea to replace X) and no references, until today, to the idea of turning ChromeOS into something more like a regular Linux-based desktop/laptop OS.

(ChromeOS does not rely on X but rather has its own windowing system developed by Google.)

Writers hopeful about Wayland love to talk about how Gnome or KDE already supports of will soon support Wayland, despite the fact that for a desktop/laptop OS, support from one of the major browsers is much more important than support from Gnome or KDE. (Yes, I know that Gnome includes a web browser: that browser will not work however with all or even most of the sites a typical user needs to visit.) And it is far from certain whether any of the major browsers will ever run on Wayland (without XWayland or some other large X-compatibility library that relies on X) whereas of course one of the major open-source browsers already runs reliably on the windowing system and low-level graphical libraries in ChromeOS.