skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK... but where are decent user-friendly tools to manipulate, manage and share data and insights? Really, the problem is that to this day data in Corporations is a mess. The moment you step out of the standard warehouse systems you find yourself navigating a mess of spreadsheets, word docs, power points, all showing sometimes the same data in different formats. You duplicate data every time you send an Excel file by email... this data needs to be in sync and when not people get screamed at or fired. That means a lot of work goes into manually maintaining thousands of different files to make sure they tie to the overall picture. It's a mess. The bad part is that nobody is looking into this, everybody is focusing on analytics or reporting, which by now are the easy part.

Then you have ancient tools like HFM or BPC that try to "enhance" spreadsheets and spreadsheets consolidations. They don't work. They are barely reliable and they cost a lot of money for no reason (they are simple SQL databases, they can't even be compared to much more complex software like salesforce or similar).

Then Corporations are now being sold this all "big data" thing, which is old by now for tech audiences, but it's just new for most of the big companies nowadays. Unfortunately, while big data has a lot of potential, it further moves away investments on good old small data where probably there is much more ROI to grab simply because solving this problem is not that difficult and not that expensive if you want to actually fix it.

Then now everybody wants to do Predictive, but Predictive won't beat saving hundreds of employees thousands of working hours by improving the efficiency of how we handle data and data insights. You can literally create a new workforce out of the many hours you would save with better efficiency in this area. Without even considering that on top of efficiency, you get much better, more fact based, decisions driven by the overall increase in transparency which you lose when insights are spread around thousands and thousands of files.

There is some light at the end of the tunnel. Software solutions like Tableau go in the right direction, but they do not provide the much (more) needed tools to properly manipulate and manage data and, especially, consolidations and integration. The only way to get out of this mess is to control the data flow but especially to have 1 and only 1 data flow. That means once your insights are approved and locked, every other view should read this data, there should be no manual intervention any more. If the locked data is wrong, it will be wrong for everybody, which is a good thing compared to having multiple copies of the same and then people fighting on which one is the right one.
CBT: A New, Intuitive Build Tool for Scala by Christopher Vogt
There used to be a program called Teleport Pro, which can download an entire web site.

I used it rather extensively to download interesting sites for local storage, so i got a large selection of pages, a lot of which do not exist any more.

Then i moved from dial-up to something faster around 2007, and the habit to download the sites gradually died out. Most of them are pre-2009, and the latest one is from 2014.

I suppose making a new/free program like that might be of use today - the old one can't parse modern sites too well, i.e. Wikipedia.
Downvotes? lol whatever. It was demonstrable fact.

It took 15-20 years in court before banks stopped always blaming the customer and stopped claiming their systems (computer and otherwise) were infallible. A position they've generally returned to, despite holes in chip and pin and internet systems.
The biggest problem with this path would be passing the anti-doping drug tests, since they rely on bodily functions the robot doesn't possess.
I made my 'stupid' game - "Penguin Walk"[1] an year back over a period of three months. Like the author, there were periods of "I don't feel like working on it" but in the end, I pushed myself to finish it. Huge chunk of my time was wasted in resolving timing errors as I built it from scratch which could have been a better had I used a Game Engine.

[1]: http://shubhamjain.github.io/penguin-walk/
Surprisingly, the best feature of Wire has been audio quality. Security/privacy is a welcome bonus.
Trump and Putin. Yes, It's Really a Thing
I think this is not OT at all. This is the answer to most job related should-i-stay-or-should-i-go or what-should-i-do questions.

It. Is. A. Job.

If you can't accept that you're in a job and the feeling of entitlement shines thru, that would just be whining in my book. And yes, HN, lots of that in here.
Start using https://adnauseam.io/ "clicks ads so you don't have to". Make them sorry and pay.
fracking - 70 to 140 billion gallons anually

animal agriculture - 34 to 76 trillion gallons anually

at least we know what wastes a lot of water, the solution is simple, but is not as tasty.

as for heating, yes, it's quite a problem.

withouthotair.com is a great resource for the approximate numbers.
I don't care which systems you use, unless I have to write an app that works everywhere, in which case I have to make it work one way for the whole world and another for the US and Liberia.
Brutalism: One of the world's most popular architecture Tumblrs has been hacked
Briar – Next Step of the Crypto Messenger Evolution
Number one has already kinda been done: https://github.com/rastapasta/pokemon-go-mitm-node/blob/mast...

For number 3, it would depend if that data is sent by the server. I'm guessing that it isn't
Thiel Fellowship
R-Squared is the most commonly used indicator of how good a model fits some data. The author discusses why this indicator can be misleading in some cases and shows an example. There is nothing interesting for people unfamiliar with R-Squared values or model fitting.

But in fact, it is not complicated. If you feel curious, feel free to ask any specific question you have.
- How much do I pay per year if I choose the monthly, quarterly or yearly plan? What is the actual saving?

- Why do you say 7,8 Euro instead of 7,80 Euro?

- How long is the contract period?

- I'm sure restaurants want to buy (or find out) how much it costs to buy 5 or 10 buttons and the total setup and running cost for a year.

- The "no setup fee" is misleading because to setup I need to install a 119 Euro software.

- What are the shipping cost? Especially since the FAQ says I will receive a new bell button whenever a battery runs low. I'm in <random country very far away>.

- What is the maximum distance the buttons work?
Very nice! I made a similar ones with LEGO Mindstorms in three dimensions:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=blYpo2qB_LI
Interesting article and I find it current for some problems I'm working on at the moment.

I would add a few challanges. The example is a bit a of a strawman - a log(x) function has unique properties that make the Xmax-Xmin vs R^2 work like that. In real data, rarely does a single-variable 'true model' fit as well as the example either.

Context is needed as well - depending on the use of the model, a linear or quadratic fit may be sufficient even for what is clearly a log dataset. The real failing on only for small values of x, maybe 5% of the range of total values. For this case, a bilinear model could fit quite well for the lower 5%, then the existing model for the upper 95%. It depends on the application. I like this phrase:

"When deciding whether a model is useful, a high R2 can be undesirable and a low R2 can be desirable."

Too often statistics are dominated by 'cutoff' values that people apply blindly to all situations.

What do you think of robust regression methods, where obvious outliers are down-weighted?
Show HN: Automatically import or install modules when they're needed in IPython
So the solution the author proposes is both absolutely correct and absolutely useless in practice?
Well, Scala-Native should of course be much faster.

The last time I looked at this was a awhile back; maybe it was 0.3 seconds and I misremembered it.
>I find that lack of any kind of rigorous testing of whether they are effective or whether they are having unintended consequences in other areas of cognition quite troubling. //

Indeed, depression medication appears to be done on an individual trial-and-error basis. You go to the doctor and say, you think the medication is screwing you up and they give you something else to try, rinse and repeat. Seems lacking in rigour.
You're right. It shows on that page but doesn't show on the browser tab. I don't know maybe cache problem.

It's just small problem that don't have to worried about.
> you know that everything you can write down is parametric. This eliminates almost all side conditions on most definitions in category theory

That's interesting. Can you give an example of a side condition that parametricity would allow you to avoid?
HSBC started trying that - asking customers withdrawing large unusual sums what it was for, and suggesting those customers be aware for scams. It got quite a lot of pushback from people saying "It's my money, I can do what I want with it".

That's a shame, because giving people warnings about common scams when they're transferring large sums of money might reduce the amount of successful scamming.
> ... some obscure group (Markit) ...

Looking up Wikipedia[0]:

Markit Ltd. is a global, financial information
and services company with over 4,000 employees,
founded in 2003 as independent source of credit
derivative pricing.

Revenue US$ $1.5 billion

Scarcely a fly-by-night "unknown" group.

Further, the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS) seems to agree with them. This was reported in the press:

The abrupt and large fall in both orders
and output reported by IHS Markit and the
CIPS clearly makes a recession in the
second half of 2016 a real risk. Similar
results for August and September would
suggest a 0.4% contraction in the economy
in the third quarter. It only takes two
successive quarters of contraction to
constitute a technical recession. [1]

Further, these "flash PMI readings" have been used for decades and are generally regarded as good indicators, albeit possible that they are just blips and may need revision.

However, it's really not looking good. I personally know of lucrative contracts that have been cancelled, terminated, or delayed.

By all means feel free to regard all this as scare-mongering, but don't hold that attitude by default way past the point where the trend becomes obvious.

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

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/22/post-brexit...
HUGE FASHION and BEAUTY GIVEAWAY
I've seen the app load something (and hang up while doing that) between pokeball throws. That seems like evidence that it's asking the server about something after each throw / once every n throws.

Checking if a throw resulted in a capture server-side would be weird, I don't see why it couldn't be done on the client. It could be querying for the players inventory, to see if they have enough pokeballs? It'd still be better to just sync that once before the fight...

My best guess is, the conditions for a Pokemon running away involve something only the server knows. A weak example: maybe it considers other players in the area - pokemon might be more likely to run away if the area is too crowded? So every once in a while the client asks the server how many players are there nearby, or something.
TAKE a PEEK INSIDE THE BEST CELEBRITY CLOSETS
Kindly take a look at this prototype
Hi guys, Can you please take a look at this prototype and tell us what you think. Any kind of feedback is appreciated. willitspark.com
Many people working the API are skipping over the steps and just making maps, hah - https://jz6.github.io/PoGoMap/
Why is that unfair? Perhaps the fairest system would
remove corporate taxes entirely and recoup it from income tax increases. That way rich shareholders will pay at the maximum tax rate, while ordinary savers who's mutual fund happens to invest in a corportation pay at a lower rate.

There could be practical reasons against such a scheme, Maybe it would be easier to game than the current system. But the point is, fairness consists in distributing the tax burden among people -- abstractions like "corporation" are neither here nor there.
Access had a database gui wizard since when? 97?
>They're also in violation of the ToS I believe //

Only if they signed up to it ;o)

If you're reverse engineering an app and someone else is using the device with the app installed there's no need for you to have submitted to a contract of obligations to the app provider. Depending how you orchestrate things the signee might be guilty of giving their credentials away. It would probably come in as unauthorised access of a computer system with respect to USA/England&Wales legislation.
By the time C++ has a working module system it will be as relevant as Fortran is now.
The FarmBot Genesis Brings Precision Agriculture to Your Own Backyard
This would be a privacy nightmare and probably exactly fit their business model.

I wonder why they aren't doing it.
I can see your concern, but I think your overthinking it. It's a high level report. We can argue how important any one is for well-being, but that isn't necessarily the point. The point is, in this case, that if you have a certain amount of growth and multiple of these areas get better then you're converting growth to well-being better than a country in which fewer of these areas get better. Which I, while it doesn't tell the whole story, wouldn't consider controversial.
This. Armchair software architecture is so easy when you can gloss over the details that make a product great.

Also routing, ETAs, geocoding/search, etc.

WebGL visualizations and such are probably overkill, but if it makes the company more fun to work for then it probably breaks even, at worst.
https://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2009/05/18/ruby-on-rails-and...
Yeah, CSP is awesome.

The traditional thing to do here is to use immutable data structures; because they can never change, you don't need locks to access them, which means you can pass pointers between threads willy-nilly. And if you're sending a message to a process that doesn't share memory, you can fall back to serialisation.

Bear in mind that you can still get race conditions and deadlocks with CSP --- consider a process which provides `get` and `set` messages, and then two other processes try to do `c.set(c.get() + 1)`.
I am just happy to see that the API has "trading" as a concept, looking forward to that feature.

Overall it's sad that most game mechanics of the original games didn't make it into Pokemon Go. Does anyone know how much time they had to implement it?
Distributed Real Time Stream Processing: Why and How by Petr Zapletal
I had to go through the goldcard process to flash my first Android phone, it took a while to get the right microSD card and you also had to install the Android SDK to use their flashing utilities, which wasn't the easiest thing to get up and running at the time.

I got there in the end, and I'm pretty sure most newer phones can be flashed in far easier ways.
> Battery electric vehicles are still limited to a maximum of about 200 miles of driving before a recharge is required, and charging up can take time — four hours or more in some cases. Batteries are also heavy, which presents challenges for powering larger vehicles like trucks or SUVs.

I had not considered the weight disadvantage of Li-on. Perhaps we'll have two technologies side by side: batteries for smaller, more centrally-located vehicles and hydrogen for larger and more remote ones.

The energy-intensity of enriching, packaging and distributing hydrogen looks less daunting in a duck-curve [1] characterised solar future. One could simply generate hydrogen when rates drop below a threshold.

[1] https://www.caiso.com/Documents/FlexibleResourcesHelpRenewab...
If its updating without your consent to upgrade in the app store then its a webview youre looking at and they are just updating the webview.
He's not proposing a solution as far as I can tell. He's simply using the E^2 statistic in order to illustrate the problem.
Or the motivation, I guess as botted users start claiming gyms it becomes a problem but until they implement trading each user is silo'd by the game mechanics
> When in reality the facts are still uncertain and there is no consensus.

And sometimes there is a consensus and it still doesn't prevent people from finding studies to back up their point of view. Take climate change for instance. When people aren't intellectual honest or have an agenda (e.g. politician), it's not even worth arguing.

That being said, I noticed that while it's pretty easy to find studies about anything, it's more difficult to assess the pertinence of those studies or to know what the current scientific consensus is.
Wouldn't a pig farm fall under different regulations than a residential plot of land?
Predicting the Popularity of GitHub Repositories [pdf]
-1 Master Balls
I just read the original referenced story about the woman who got defrauded.

It definitely couldn't happen with my former main bank - they will not allow any kind of ID aside from in-person photo ID or 2FA, to the point where my parents are actually locked out of their account since the battery ran out in their 2FA device, they never set up a mobile app 2FA, and they live abroad so they can't go into an office. The bank actually told them "tough luck, you're going to have to fly across half the planet to get the 2FA device replaced". My parents are obviously upset, but I thought it was pretty impressive.
JITWatch: Log analyser and visualiser for the HotSpot JIT compiler
Linkedin seems popular for small companies. What is your location?
Not to mention targetted ads that try to exploit your psychological traits.
src: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTeDaM3CC1I @inline and @specialized: What do they do? Should I be using them? - by Chris Birchall
Yet that's what has to work well to beat the competition, which is taxi dispatchers with paper maps, phones, and radios.

Taxis are a only part of the picture.

Logistics is where the money is. Logistics is where network effects are important.

FedEx doesn't use paper maps.
What's the evolutionary pressure to optimise that channel?
Saying "use immutable data structures" here assumes garbage collection though.

If you didn't have garbage collection, when would you release the memory for these structures? That would bring you back to refcounting.
My last mission (paid day job) involved writing a scripting engine (for a testing framework for programmable logic controllers). I'm no expert in language implementation, and it took much, much more time than expected (oops).

My first hello world involved handling arbitrary primitives. This one just printed "Hello, world!\n" without any parameter. Took me 2 months I believe.

My second hello world came a couple weeks (days?) after that. I had string literals, and a `print` primitive that could print any string. Yahoo!

I had to tackle choice and iteration at some point. They were completed 4 months into the project. Finally, user defined functions. I completed them 1 week before we shipped…

Cool, I now have 3 days to implement 2 critical features! (filtering with user-defined predicates, and non-blocking wait). Good thing I could do anything, now that I had user-defined functions.
I am from Germany too. Yes, sometimes we have negative prices for electricity. But that does not mean, it pays for investments for facilities, which only make sense with low or negative electricity prices. And it is a rather temporary phenomenon. With the transition from coal to gas, it becomes much more feasible to switch off power generation to avoid surplus electricity.

Long term, with enough battery powered electrical cars on smart grids, charging will be synchronized with the electrical power levels. And then we are back to electrolysis using 3x the electrical power.
I don't think it's that simple. The distinction between "code" and "data" is somewhat arbitrary. I'm sure Uber could get away with a rules engine that supports the cases the parent comment is talking about.
>because of the one thing it does well.

This "one thing it does well" business is then presented as : "using the right tool for the right job" and it's difficult to argue against that because the counterpart can easily deride you as a fanatic of some technology, someone not objective enough, etc...

It is however interesting that we used relational databases for virtually everything for decades even though SQL is suboptimal at most things if we take them in isolation. Some will argue that people are now realizing their mistake, but the truth is these companies were successful and we were all getting our paychecks. (PS: I choose to use NoSQL for virtually all my projects)

The real driver shouldn't be the one thing it does well. Many times - if not most of the time - it's preferable to use a tool optimal for the most important parts and suboptimal for the rest. I personally prefer to provision two more instances, than to add two more technology stacks.
Others have spoken about Vagrant & Puppet. Here's another option.

One tool that I love (and happily recommend) in my daily workflow of Linux Virt/Infra development is `virt-builder`[1], it is part of the libguestfs project. Once the compressed image (250MB or so) is cached, it can spin up fresh template VMs (`virt-builder --list` to check the distribution list) just under 40 seconds.

In my workflow (also with headless VMs), I have two qcow2 disk images (& several others on disk) on my devel laptop. They're built / used this way:

Build a minimal disk image:

$ virt-builder fedora-24 -o f24.qcow2 --format qcow2 --size 60G \
--root-password password:secure-pwd

Then, import it into libvirt (NB: despite the tool's name 'virt-install',
it is not installing anything here, but merely importing the disk image):

$ sudo virt-install --name dev-vm1 --ram 4096 --os-variant fedora-24 \
--disk path=./f24.qcow2,format=qcow2 --nographics --import

(The above will be QEMU, if you have hardware virt extensions, it will be a KVM guest).

You could then manipulate it with `virsh`, libvirt (Virt API through which you could manage KVM/QEMU/Xen) shell, to manage snapshots, & other guest life cycle activities.

FWIW, I wrote a bit more verbiage (which also adds a quick note about snapshot management, so you could revert to a known sane state, if something goes haywire) here[2].

You can do far more interesting things with 'virt-builder', by supplying it to install packages you need, trivially creating secure new 'clones', etc.

[1] http://libguestfs.org/virt-builder.1.html
[2] https://developer.fedoraproject.org/tools/virt-builder/about...
Basically, it was a way to partition users as some form of horizontal scaling. See these two Quora posts:

https://www.quora.com/How-did-Zuckerberg-code-Facebook-so-fa...

https://www.quora.com/In-what-order-did-Facebook-open-to-col...
I would might agree if worked as advertised on the label, however it does not hide ads as a vanilla ublock, at least for me (FF). Also, I had to do all kinds of testing, it is not clear whether you use it with other content blockers e.g. installed after adding ublock, or as a standalone extension.
First of all, one needs to see how much weight a hydrogen based solution could save at all. With a fuel cell vehicle, you still need a battery to power the car (the fuel cell cannot handle the peak powers, it can only recharge the battery at a constat rate), you need a high pressure container for the hydrogen and of course the fuel cell itself. So this does not leave much weight advantage vs. a pure battery vehicle.

And just a couple of days ago Elon Musk announced that Tesla would introduce battery powered Trucks and Semis even. Seems he thinks that the weight is not a big problem.
18F is not tied to the white house, so there should be no changes when the next administration arrives, no matter who it is.
Ghaah, this fells like Flappy Bird! It's fair, but in a brutally unforgiving way.

Couldn't resist a couple minutes of playing. Good job.