skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is why HN is cool. You see a Microsoft knowledgebase article documenting an obsolete enterprise software's bug and its workaround, then an anonymous account takes credit for it. This is what I come here for.
I think water proofing generally is done via some sort of wax like secretion, so perhaps it saves weight?

edit: or at least I think leaves have wax?

edit 2, citations!: I don't have access, but this link looks promising, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v214/n5085/pdf/214318a0...

also, http://blog.galapagosecolodge.net/2014/03/frigate-birds-of-g... paragraph 4

tl;dr birds have the Uropygial gland which secretes preen oil which most birds then rub over their feathers to keep the water out (the mechanism through which this keeps water out sounds somewhat contested, see wikipedia). The frigate bird has only a vestigial gland for this (sounds like the nature article suggests that the gland shrank due to behavior changes, rather than vice versa. Also sounds like the behavior changes may be due to the prey they feed off of and their habits?)

Uropygial gland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uropygial_gland
Thanks for the tips! I will look into making these modifications when I get a chance.
Reminded me of "How to Quit Smoking". Interesting take on willpower.

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/13
Was it implemented before the generic CSV import was implemented?

It seems like if parsing fails it should throw an exception and fallback to regular csv parsing.

Am I missing something?
you might enjoy this classic then:
http://www.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/LinearLisp.html
Jeez, how many SLYK files out there? I venture to guess there is an order of degrees more attempts at opening CSV files with ID as the first header than attempted opens of unconverted SLYK files in excel.

When I admire Microsoft, it's most often because despite nearly 4 decades of bloat to support, they still can ship reliable software to millions.
Yes it's a large cluster of stars. At the very center of the galaxy you will also find a supermassive black hole.
Remember that they are choosing an orbit that allows Juno to keep facing the sun as well.
You would think that the author would have learned his lesson after all the bad experiences with the (Amazon) cloud, but no: his solution is to go to another cloud provider. And even then, GCE? If the author requires insight into system performance and the ability to debug, then Joyent is the place to go to, not GCE or anyone else.

I do not understand these people, nor do I purport to: a half-decent, 32GB of memory, 4 TB internal disk, octo core intel system (made by intel) costs around $1,800 USD, that is a one time cost, plus recurring electricity costs. Meanwhile, the author's company pays $1,500 just in monthly reservation costs. What ever happened to "keep it simple, stupid!" UNIX principle?

From the article:

"We have to comply to a few regulations so we have a few dedicated options here and there. It’s 10% on top of the instance price (plus a $1500 fixed monthly fee per region)."
You can convey provincial language through different diction, and a different frequency of usage of certain words, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence-final_particle
Add new-package-should-not-package-python2-module tag
Is there a name for that super massive black hole? (serious question) Just curious to learn more.
It's amusing to think about, really. A person getting rich and fame for finding creative ways to manipulate air vibrations in certain patterns, because these patterns give some special sorts of mental tingles to people who experience them.
Some people can't make the front with a webapp that takes 3 months to create.

Github gets on the front with re-ordering issues ;)
Turret – A Responsive Front-End Framework for Accessible and Semantic Websites
> But central authorities are also now worried about any regional languages (which it insists on calling dialects) among the Han majority

It's not as clear cut that variations of Chinese are languages and not dialects as the economist makes it out. This is very similar to arabic.
Wikipedia for instance also calls them dialects. This is very different from Uighur and Tibetan which are pretty clear cut separate languages, but which are intermingled here in this article.
Definitely! My own favorites are the tonkotsu ramen broth and chocolate chip cookies. (And yes, there are massive, in-depth posts about making the noodles and the cha siu pork belly to accompany the ramen too).

http://www.seriouseats.com/2012/02/how-to-make-tonkotsu-rame...

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/12/the-food-lab-best...
But it is not about what theory is most likely. If two theories or models generate exactly the same predictions, they are equally true. Occam just says that in this case we should chose the simpler.

But if the theories produce different predictions, then it doesn't matter which one is simplest, the one which most closely match reality is the truest.
Are Hackers the Future Lawyers? Maybe They Are
Don't sweat it. You're on hackernews where circlejerk is more important than facts and useful information.
The mortality gap between white and black Americans still exists, but has closed dramatically in recent decades.

Mortality rates are still far worse for men than women though. But particularly, that poverty affects male mortality far more than poverty affects female mortality. E.g. Mortality rates for financially disadvantaged white males is still very significantly worse than for black women (where as black male mortality is still worse than for either - but dramatically less worse compared to white males than it was a couple of decades ago).

http://voxeu.org/article/mortality-inequality-good-news-coun...
Exactly how is Dodd-Frank paying off now? Most investors have seen US markets as the safest for at least a few decades, if not longer. Dodd-Frank may have expedited the decrease in the number of listed companies (through the imposition of large fixed costs which hurt small companies), but I see little evidence that investors feel any 'safer'.
Most people don't really know css that well, because you can quickly open a browser tab and fiddle around till you get it right. If it took half an hour to compile between changes I'm sure people would know CSS far better.
there is no need to worry about the operational overhead of managing a DB (backups, clustering, recovery etc) when you just consume it as a service;

Except that that is technically impossible! Even if it were somehow magically true, all of that magical infrastructure would be completely useless without an application which could run her own instances in parallel, and do synchronous updates of global data state from all nodes at once. This is a non-trivial computer science problem which has not been reliably solved to this present day, so the entire premise is flawed.

There is no getting away from good old fashioned UNIX system and database administration, and in this day and age of distributed applications, the stakes are even higher, as now there is no getting away from system engineering. Incidentally, that includes administering and servicing hardware, but even more importantly, it includes engineering fault tolerant, distributed infrastructure. There is no getting away from that: you learned how to program, now in order to use that knowledge, sooner or later, you will have to learn how to administer systems and databases, and then you will have to learn how to engineer entire systems.

Computers used to be fun when you had a Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, or an Atari ST in front of you and you were a single user on a single system; now they are just complex and hard, and if you want to write a highly available, fault tolerant application which continues to operate correctly even in the face of severe hardware and software failures, there is no getting around learning how to administer and engineer systems.
Hi mckoss, awesome to hear one of the main Excel architects is here on HN!

Any interesting stories to share? I think we'd all be interested.

Mind if I ask a question directly related to one of my comments a few days ago? I was lamenting the fact that the ASCII codes 29, 30, 31 (Group, Record, and File separators) never really became widely implemented, as these were specifically designed to delimit data. Ie, one could easily include commas, new lines/carriage returns, etc in data cells without clashing. But instead CSV seems to be the most common standard for tabular data.

Were these ASCII codes ever considered for tabular files?

Thanks.
In other words, Excel has all the information to decide that this is not a SYLK file but a CSV, but just throws an error, because fuck you. Great UX.

That's way up there with the "you can't drag stuff here, should've dragged it a few px further" from Win98.
That said, black Americans are relatively more likely to be financially disadvantaged in the first place (which skews the weight of attention warranted I guess).
I guess I've just been assuming any Roman characters are English, some definitely might be Pinyin. I generally try not to stare at peoples screens for too long haha.
I did an intro to Chinese (Mandarin) class a few years ago so I'm aware of Pinyin but have forgotten almost everything (except some of the bits I found particularly interesting like word order for times and places, how numbers are represented and a few other things).
Take high school physics, where you assume that there is no resistance, cows are spherical, gravity is exactly the same everywhere, and so on. Assuming all that, you can make a much simpler model than when you don't.
Washing Machine History and 8 Interesting Facts (Part I)
Is there an explanation of the memory allocation used?
There seem to be a GC (https://github.com/eriksvedang/Carp/blob/master/src/gc.c), maybe used in the compiler only, coupled with lifetime analysis (https://github.com/eriksvedang/Carp/blob/8665a7f9a19d9347cc0...), which as far as I know is used once (https://github.com/eriksvedang/Carp/blob/6107e619d4f632acace...) in the compiler. This analysis seems tied to the manual "reset!" special form which apparently frees any existing data bound to a symbol. So, what happens when lifetime analysis cannot determine lifetime? what about stack-allocation? What should I worry about when programming in Carp w.r.t. memory?
Not really, but close. Picture is 1.5 billion pixels and features 100 million stars. So it’s about one star per fifteen pixels.
Why thanks!
Actually the law is better translated as: "More things should not be used than are necessary."
I'm currently reading "The Dream Machine" [1], about the first evolutions of computing. At the moment it's describing the period during and immediately after the Second World War, with computers like ENIAC. It blows my mind that in the space of around 20 years, we progressed from computers that were programmed by turning shafts and ran computations using systems of wheels and mechanical relays [2] to the Lunar Module Guidance Computer with its pre-emptive multitasking and automatic pilot.

Sometimes the rate of technological advance is just staggering.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Co...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I
That was an old one but really fun to do. The french fry recipe is a little out of hand in terms of the time and effort it takes to make them. Works better if you batch them and keep them in the freezer.
> In all sicilianness, the author just wanted an excuse to binge on home-baked pizza.

Fact.
Excel is useless with csv and utf-8.
when I need to export to csv, which I regularly do, I always use Libre Office.
You're welcome. Unfortunately, LibreSignal was shut down due to: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco....

I wouldn't pin too much hope on having a high quality PR written and integrated back to Signal soon. It doesn't look like a top priority for them. OWS also like the telemetry that Play gives them for diagnostics and have stated they won't be looking at FDroid unless someone can replace that.
Another Tesla Allegedly Crashes While in Autopilot Mode
As far as we can tell, all writing systems with independent origins started out as logographs that where stylized representations of the words, and then they started to change by adapting the rebus principle--basically, puns based on homonyms rather than their abstract representation. Egyptian, Sumerian, Mayan, and Japanese all made translations thence into syllabaries, whereas Chinese remained primarily logographic. Egyptian was borrowed into Phoenician as an abjad (like an alphabet, but no vowels), whence the Greeks added vowels as separate letters, and the Indians readded vowels by modifying the base characters (known as an abiguda), and further complicated the system by stacking the consonant clusters on top of each other.

Chinese can represent phonetic systems by a similar rebus principle. One crucial difference is that syllabaries and abigudas tend to work on having one character per consonant-vowel pair, which works poorly on languages like English where consonant clusters can get atrocious (strangsts: 1 vowel, 8 consonants). Many languages tend to limit themselves to CV or CVC (which can be handled by special rules like C₁V₁ + C₂V₁ really means CVC, e.g., Mayan), so it's not so much a problem unless you're trying to transliterate completely different languages. Of course, Latin script has its own problems in transliteration: it's atonal, it relies on voiced/voiceless distinctions (Chinese uses aspirated/unaspirated primarily!), and good luck if you have languages that have four sounds we'd analyze as "h."

I'll point out that Chinese script has been used to write other languages--most notably Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian, none of which are related to the Chinese languages.

Another problem with Chinese is that, because you can write the same sound many different ways, you can make mere phonetic transcription a political deal. A transcription might happen upon the character for "small" or "stupid" or "backwards," which might not go over well if it's someone's personal name.
You're welcome. Edited for clarity.
Well... I did used to work for Cook's Illustrated so it's not a huge stretch to say it's a major influence!
In practice we are often in situations where multiple hypothesis explain the data we observe but diverge from each other on data that we have not yet observed and it may be difficult to create the necessary situations to tell between them. In these cases we may still wish to choose a hypothesis to make predictions from.

There are an infinity of possible models to choose from, with most of those models containing no less information than the phenomenon they seek to model. Predictive power is what is important for models; a model that has enough dials to be adjusted to work with any new piece of data might be 'correct' but it is not useful. My favourite example of this is the fact that when the heliocentric model of the solar system was being developed, the geocentric model was providing much more accurate values for the positions of celestial bodies for a long time because it had had years of being tweaked to do so. Initially, it was the simplicity of the heliocentric model rather than its accuracy that was appealing.
So why is that misogynistic? Is girly a bad trait?
I'm sure you have a reason for saying that but everyone I've know from Kiribati pronounced the final two letters with an 's' sound
This is an ignorant question, but when you zoom in full, is every light dot a star? Or is it noise, like you get with a poorly lighted photo?
I still get the error in Excel 2016, so I guess it's not fixed yet.
Embedded knowledge like this, is why guys like us can never retire...
It could be that our universe's state can be described by the initial input '1234567', 1 page of differential equations, and an amount of time T to simulate.

An inner universe's state could have an initial input of some string describing all of human history up to T in the outer universe, the same differential equations, and the same amount of time T to simulate.

One might say that the inner universe contains more information, because the smallest unambiguous description of it is larger than the smallest description of its parent universe. However, the outer universe is able to simulate the inner universe.
Using the zoom tool recommended in the article really provides perspective. Especially when you see those stars clustered close together when each of them are really millions of miles apart (aside from the binaries) with possible planets orbiting them. Now consider the billions of galaxies out there. I'm positive there's an Alien or two there as well.
> Finder is garbage

Try PathFinder: http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/

It can be used for free until you decide to buy it.

> alt tab is broken and non configurable

Cmd+Tab? What exactly do you find annoying?

Try Missing Control (F3, or set a mouse hot corner in System Preferences -> Mission Control) to quickly see all windows (for all process, or Ctrl+F3 for current app, Cmd+F3 for desktop) and just raise the one you want.

Also try TinkerTool: https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html

> brew, compared to dnf or apt, is not good.

Try nix: https://nixos.org/nix/

> The programs from Apple are all terrible.

Which ones, and how, exactly?
> It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice.

You'd be surprised. It's easy enough for a writer to distinguish dialog spoken by a country bumpkin vs a sophisticated urbanite or between a ruler and a peasant because they have a different set of vocab and there are Chinese characters for most of the vocab that the different speakers will use.
Ditto, two days ago.
Your friend is Paulie Gee, or the pizzaiolo at the new Paulie Gee in Chicago? Either way, get your butt in there because Paulie is the MAN. He was a regular on Serious Eats for years before he opened up his first pizzeria. He was in a totally different field but loved making pizza in his back yard. He did tons of research, got amazing at his hobby, then finally took the leap, quit the corporate world, and opened up one of the most successful pizzerias in Brooklyn, now in a few other cities as well. Such an inspiring guy - so much so that he actually inspired a former Serious Eats editor (Adam Kubam) to open his own pizzeria as well. He makes some incredible bar-style pizza at Margot in NYC.
That's probably how it has been fixed. I cannot test right now, but since the article doesn't apply to newer versions of Office, I guess they are no longer susceptible to that.
"Birchbox Inc., a startup that sells subscriptions for personalized beauty samples...."

In what alternate universe is that a "tech startup"?
Thanks for the comments! I'm all for improved readability. I definitely wasn't aiming for much performance wise, at least initially. These were two areas (of many) that I felt could do with some improvement (especially the file IO). I will look into making some modifications like those suggested when I get a chance.
If anything, it argues you are less likely to be in AMT with RSUs:

"In years when large blocks of RSUs vest, your ordinary income tax will usually exceed your AMT due to the additional ordinary income. As long as that’s the case—you’re not in AMT—you can use state income tax and property tax deductions to reduce your ordinary income tax liability. If you’re likely to be in AMT next year (say, because you’ll have fewer RSUs vesting), ...."
It is homoiconic, because the data structures used to describe code are also data structure provided by the language. However, brackets mean that you pass arguments as arrays instead of lists: there is little reason except aesthetics to have this distinction in source code. I prefer parenthesis everywhere, but some people really dislike that.
WiFire uses the new iOS 9 NEHotspotHelper APIs so it's a very slick experience right from the Wi-Fi settings screen on iOS.
You should try hot-reloading, then it'll work on the first try... kinda.
"Rant – Java 8 streams are too little, too late"
Specifically the competitive aspect of getting inside an adversary's OODA loop
Bay Area 2050: The BART Metro Map
At least in the US, there are certainly circumstances where the government can compel speech, though in most cases they can't. There is a lot of case law on the subject. It's mostly in the commercial realm (think cigarette labels) but not entirely (think Jehovah's Witness school children who don't want to salute the flag). I'm not aware of a compelled speech case balancing national security interests against first amendment interests as this would be.
BMI is so bad.

I'm 6'0 and the last time I was under BMI 25 I was a triathlete. The only way I could be <25 would be to exercise 3 hours a day and eat 1200 calories. F-off and die

I did quit smoking though:

- Really wanted to
- Picked a good mental argument against it ($100k CAD over 20 years)
- Picked a quit date
- Patch + zyban + nicotene lozenges

If you live in British Columbia, the government will pay for your patches or lozenges (hint: ask a friend)
I just hope you work at some gaming company or another place that doesn't deal with really important decisions.
Endnote X7 Crack and Product Key Full Free Download
This is so funny, I was literally fixing this bug last night. Still applies to office 2013
Product Requirement Documents Must Die
This is why my estimates are often really optimistic. For most tasks I can visualize the entire piece of work in just a few moments, but I forget to adjust for how long things actually take. I can picture having to do each piece of the task, but I forget that those tasks have to exist in real time, and that I will have to think and re-evaluate as I go.

I am getting better at it, but I have to be conscious of it, lest I estimate for superman by accident!
I know Sweden and Norway are the same, but your point probably stands, as they are very similar to Danish.
This is so interesting. I'm jealous on the awesome research project you got to do. :D
7 Traits of Great Software Tester
My Dad quit smoking when I was little, back in the days when people "chain smoked" (i.e. They used a lighter once a day, and just kept lighting new cigarettes with their butts). He credits his success with this tactic: He loudly told everyone he knew that people who can't quit smoking are pussies. Fear of total public humiliation was enough to keep him from relapsing, or so he claims. He never did relapse that I saw though. He also told us this story often enough that none of us kids ever touched a cigarette.
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~nahum/w6998/papers/ton97-timing-...

In somewhat of a defense of "Implementing Software Timers", the code seems to be for an embedded system in 1990, as hinted at by the disabling of interrupts. Chances are it will not have hundreds of timers, and that code size may be more important than efficiency.
ON LANGUAGE; Sic 'Em (1993)
Quite a few of these "mental models" are just a definition of terminology like "botnet". Come to think of it, the complete list is just definitions..
Related: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-calle...
Starting Node.js with C# Development Background
They are all stars as far as I know
Nothing about the process is fair, and neither outcome in Clinton's case would change that. The government needs to stop classifying material indiscriminately, and stop treating all whistleblowers like criminals. And that's just for starters.
ŞİRİN SAHİL BALIKÇI KASABASI FOÇA -HAYAT GEZİNCE GÜZEL
I kind of wish I could just use a version from a decade or 2 ago. The (4 year old) versions of word and excel that the uni site I work for use are so clunky to navigate. I loved using word in pre OSX says - I wonder how much of that is rose tinted nostalgia.
I'd say the thing with Occam's razor is that its easier to disprove a simpler answer with less assumptions, thus its easier to place more thrust in it if it does hold up to the same scrutiny as answers that have more assumptions and complexity.

Also, i like Hanlon’s Razor. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Generalizing here, but people _are_ stupid.