skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
XLS and XLSX are neither clear nor unambiguous and I would take 12 CSV formats over either any day. I actually haven't ever met anyone who seriously had to extract data from XLS/X frequently that didn't revile it for its ambiguities. Not to mention the ways that the application munges the user input prior to saving it, leaving the biggest ambiguity of all, what the heck is ACTUALLY in that cell.

EDIT: I will add that EXPORTING to XLS/X is usually quite straightforward and makes users happier than getting a CSV often times. Until they start wanting to get crazy with template design and then you get into Excel styling application and you're back to hating it all over again.
I also expect self-driving cars to substantially reduce the size of vehicles on the road. We typically buy cars for the max capacity we intend to use them for. Self-driving Smart (the brand) cars may be the new norm.
I'm currently enjoying a book called It's All In Your Head by an Irish neurologist called Suzanne O'Sullivan - review at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/07/all-in-your-he.... Summaries of some of the clinical stories themselves are at https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/16/you-think-im...

It's mind boggling (no pun intended) how far psychosomatic illness can go, even as far as resulting in blindness, seizures, and paralysis. I was never familiar with the idea of repressed memories and psychological trauma causing physical illness before and initially dismissed it as arm-wavey pseudoscience, but the amount of evidence is striking even if our level of understanding is poor. This also explains why so many people with undiagnosable pain disorders seem to get referred to psychiatrists here in the UK - people misinterpret this as doctors thinking their illness is all imaginary, it's not, but the cause of it often well can be.
Why not talk a little about what tools/languages you used, tutorials you read, videos you watched, etc.
no, just no. This was a terrible film. Does not compare at all to the book or film of The Road
Investigatory Powers Act – devil in the detail
Folks in upstate New York hate NYC for the water supply. Much of the economy of the "southern tier" region is crippled by the requirement to keep water quality pristine (NYC being one of few cities that doesn't significantly process incoming water), and to manage water flows (including that of the Delaware River itself) to optimize the reservoirs, at the expense of fisheries and stuff.
A late career change. I used to work with NGOs, with fundraising. Then with startup, with marketing and growth, once a founder.

I decided to become a professional software developer mostly for two reasons: i) I really enjoy coding - the few times in my life I dedicated myself to learning and creating small things with software I always had a very good feeling and ii) it is a more defined, employable career than my current very heterodox, weird, mixed bag CV experiences of social sector + startup founder + generalist digital marketing.
I use it to encrypt messages to friends / customers via Facebook messager, Slack, or public forums when I'm dealing with sensitive data.

A few of my friends use this (which I wrote): http://lettergram.github.io/AnyCrypt/

You may ask, "when do you really deal with sensitive data?" My answer, is a lot more often than you think... The cool part about encryption, is I can use it over an insecure line to communicate. For example, I can post encrypted text here and only people I wrote it for can read it.
Curious what stack you use for development? how do you find working on Windows?
Figured I'd make something for people (like myself) that want more sourced information, but are frustrated with the signal to noise ratio these days. Would be surprised if it reached people who regularly fall for fake news (at least at first).
Yes, Fury Road was the first one to mention that. It's basically a retcon of what the proper Mad Max films have established.
It's certainly part of it, but there are other possible contributors. For example, the original Nexus 7 suffered from severe NAND degradation over time, as have some other devices.
Just so you know there is a Vim OrgMode extension.
https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode
> While the energy costs of rockets are individually huge they're still not a significant percentage of our global energy consumption.

The limiting factor for chemical rocket propulsion is not the total energy consumed, but the specific impulse (the "mileage", i.e., efficiency). This is because rockets have to carry and accelerate all their fuel with them, leading to the size of the rocket growing exponentially with the speed you want to reach. For nuclear propulsion, it's still exponential, but the exponent is much smaller.

Furthermore, electricity generation using solar panels quickly becomes infeasible with growing distance from the sun.
> Knowing his name is hardly a prerequisite for working in this industry, unless this guy happens to work at Paypal, in which case yeah it'd be weird not to know.

I'd venture to guess that employees at any of the PayPal Mafia[1] companies are reasonably likely to recognize the names of most PPM folks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia
Finish on time and under budget
First of all, macOS power manages devices too aggressively: I've noticed that if I ssh from another computer into my MacBook Pro (booted into macOS and connected to wired Ethernet), the connection becomes unresponsive after a few seconds of inactivity. I have to ping from the MacBook Pro to a machine on the LAN to make the ssh connection responsive again. It looks like macOS suspends the BCM 57765 Ethernet controller and doesn't resume it upon reception of packets from the LAN. Apple seems to consider macOS purely a client OS from which one ssh's to the outside world but not the other way round.

Second, there's no proprietary battery magic in macOS, as stated in the article I already achieve 10.5W idle power consumption on my Ivy Bridge MacBook Pro with discrete GPU, Thunderbolt and AirPort suspended, wheras macOS achieves 7W. I've noticed a GPE in the ACPI tables for the Firewire controller which presumably signals hotplug when the controller is asleep. We're not using that on Linux yet, we keep the Firewire controller active all the time. Adding that would probably save another 1W.

So we're inching ever closer to macOS levels of battery life, and I think eventually we may be able to surpass it because of the sophisticated CPU pstate management that Intel developers continue to tweak with every new release.
Or any number crunching application?
From what I learned in my microbiology class... the genes which confer resistance to antibiotics are present in bacterial populations, but not necessarily every individual bacterium. Additionally, through a process that is sort of like the bacterial version of sex, called Horizontal Gene Tranfer, one microbe can transfer the genes which confer resistance to antibiotics to another bacterium on plasmids, which are basically small circular rings of DNA.

So basically, it takes energy and resources to turn that gene into the proteins which will deactivate the specific antibiotic, so if the bacteria is never coming into contact with the antibiotics, there's not really a reason to keep that gene around. But if suddenly a bacteria population were to find itself in a hospital environment, where surfaces are being disinfected very frequently, not only is it extremely beneficial to keep the antibiotic resistance genes around, but also they are being actively selected for, since all bacteria without those genes are being killed off.

Horizontal Gene Transfer can happen between bacteria that are not even the same species. So for example, the Hero Bug that this article is talking about, if it were present in the hospital environment, might be able to send over a methicillin-resistance plasmid to a possibly pathogenic bacteria like Staph, and create MRSA. But if the pressure to remain resistant to methicillin was removed from the staph populations, by no longer using that antibiotic to treat the infection for several years, the staph cells would eventually mostly "forget" how to resist that antibiotic by no longer ensuring that the resistance gene is included in every bacteria in the subsequent generations. Probably about .01% of the bacterial cells would keep the gene even if it was not required for their survival, and once we start using the antibiotic again a few years later, wiping out most of the bacteria is usually good enough to help the immune system take care of the ones that are left.

This idea of holding off on using a specific antibiotic for a while is called antibiotic rotation. Here's a paper where they tested the efficiency of the idea: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17693828

Here's the wikipedia article on horizontal gene transfer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer

Plasmids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmid

And antibiotic resistance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_resistance

tl;dr: The overuse of antibiotics can lead to bacterial populations developing resistance to those drugs, but since the chemicals in "natural antibiotics" have been around for a long time before we started using them, the genes to counteract them already exist, but are not always expressed.
Why do you do that? Why do you work much more than you have to?

Are you afraid that you'll get fired? It's not like you will have a hard time finding a new job these days as a developer.
Yes. Your phone is limited. Most of the phones max the VM's to something like 128 MB. For a while you couldn't easily move to a large, per app memory size. Even today the apps you run are probably doing so with just 128 MB caps.
> I used to be a commercial pilot, and I could not believe the amount of disinformation and outright ridiculous theories being bandied about by so called 'reputable' news sources.

This is what I hear from real experts every single time their subject is dealt with by the news. I've experienced it first hand myself with certain technology-related news where I've been heavily involved in the real thing. So when they report on economics, health or anything else I'm not an expert in, I assume that the real experts are shaking their heads just like I shook mine.
why wouldn't you stay where your at and saturate your initial market. Seems like a lot of trouble to start practically from scratch.
Installing Adobe Reader.

I'll see myself out.
it'd be easier to push ads on-to the app (or the app to load the news article as a webview with ads in it).

^ more views, more money and probably more profits.
This may be above your budget but I have this one and I'm extremely happy. Retina quality is superb and comparable to my Macbook Pro's retina screen.

https://www.amazon.com/Dell-Monitor-P2715Q-27-Inch-LED-Lit/d...

It's about $150 more than your budget allows but I made a liberal interpretation of your "$300-ish".
> But reasoning with functions is a specific level of abstraction.

Excellent point. The level of abstraction is a fundamental concern, not just in modeling but also in reasoning about systems. And state machines (as used in TLA or otherwise) add temporal abstractions to the mix of abstraction mechanism. To add to its power, it does not lead to any loss of generality; since any program in a language with well-defined operational semantics can be modeled using state machine (transition systems with infinite state space to be little more precise).

> In TLA, bisimulation and trace equivalence are the same, and
simulation is just trace-inclusion.

There is a fundamental difference between (bi)simulation and trace inclusion(equivalence); the former is a branching time notion and the later is a linear time notion. In fact if one it is easy to show if A is a simulation of B then A is also a "trace inclusion" of B. And this difference has some practical ramifications as well.

The branching time notions of refinement also has (not so famous) the completeness result.

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/pete/pub/charme-refinement-branc...

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.02942v1.pdf

This has some practical ramification as well: the refinement map in Abadi/Lamport is a projection function, while in branching time it can be arbitrary function. The former is intuitively clear but often difficult in practice. The flexibility has been exploited to efficiently analyze correctness of several non-trivial systems like pipelined processors.

> So there is no such thing as two machines, one implementing the other, that cannot be expressed in this way.

To drive home the point what the completeness result means is
that one can always reason at the level of abstraction that was use to specify the system: state and their successors. This is what we are after in type-based reasoning: reasoning at the level of functional abstraction.
They didn't reply, unfortunately.
For a deeper dive into the history of ARPANET cartography, check out this paper (many more maps inside!):
Fidler, B., and M. Currie. “The Production and Interpretation of ARPANET Maps.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 37, no. 1 (January 2015): 44–55. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2015.16. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7057559/?arnumber=705755...
Steals the question: I have to get a new monitor for dev work. I work from home so the office also houses my personal gaming/photo editing rig, meaning this screen will be both my home and work screen.

This means I want to get something that can also do games and photos, but on the companys dime. I want it to be IPS and it should be 1440+ (27"+ or a WS 34") and it would be nice if it could do e.g. 75hz. I don't need 4k.

The important issue though is I don't want it to look to my boss as though I'm buying really expensive monitor just for my gaming - Ideally I'd like to buy a product that works for gaming but isn't called "republic of gamers predator yada yada" if you see what I mean. So which are the "sleeper" gamer IPS monitors out there? Perhaps something with freesync, or a WS 34 that can overclock or something.
AMD Enters Deep Learning Market with Instinct Accelerators
I want to extend thanks to the diligent developers and engineers doing work on this. I'm running Arch on a 2012 Retina MBP with a GNOME desktop, and ignoring the shortened battery life -- which in my situation is generally possible -- this is an amazingly streamlined and refined experience.

I'd gladly contribute to the work being done if I had the background, (which I'm currently working on)!
Nick Coghlan's Python Notes
Often it already is. Export from here, import to there. SaaS is more and more common, so the glue needs to get better.
Only if you have the right warrenty. But when you do, they take care of you. I had a defective touchpad, but it was usable with a mouse. The technician arrived at my work, and while I was in a meeting, he switched it. Done. My coworker had his screen replaced the same way. The cost of not having a machine for even just a week, means it makes more business sense to simply buy a new machine, so this next-day onsite warrenty, is worth every penny unless you have a lot of machines and can realistically buy more machines as spares and come out ahead.
What do you have now? Mine's S3 Lightweight witha hard top that was on RAF Kinloss for its service life.
I touched on it at the site's "about". But basically is made using NodeJS+ExpressJS+MySQL hosted at Heroku that I learned at www.freecodecamp.com and trysparkschool.com.

Videos don't work for me, so these two courses are a great fit.
Reactive subscriptions with Apollo and React
I cut sugar for 40 days in April and lost weight, too (having normal weight). After a while, I was back to old habits. Thought about trying the same thing in mid-November. Worked alright. Then came December and while I'm eating a cookie here and there, it's way less than previous years.

I think the struggle just goes on, right?

To some extend: Yes. But something flipped in my head this time. The struggle is less serious. Heck, I even prefer an orange over the cookie now.
To Build a Better Ballot – An interactive guide to alternative voting systems
By "updated" I assume he means a new generation, which has happened about 4 times almost 11 years. Updating your computer every 3 years doesn't seem unreasonable if you use it for professional purposes:

original: Jan 2006, unibody: Oct 2008, retina: Jun 2012, touch bar: Oct 2016.

Kind of puts things into perspective: the jump from original to unibody was pretty significant, and the jump to retina was also a massive change.
Jurassic Park was also fiction.
You hit the proverbial "nail on the head." Before 24/7 news channels and online access, the rush to "scoop" another newspaper still had a 16-hour cycle due to daily print runs. The infamous incorrect front page presidential election result made editors back up and double check things before rushing a story, but it didn't last long. Many years later, Dan Rather lost his job for not fact checking before reporting something he wanted to believe.

When television news first appeared in the US, some claimed the death unfiltered information, which was already filtered, while others claimed the death of newspapers. The first didn't change much and the second barely changed.

24/7 cable news was already in vogue before Dan Rather's incident, who I believe claimed the high road, which helped remove Dan Rather. All that changed when the revenue sources changed.

What I personally find hypocritical is the different standard for "breaking" news versus "regularly scheduled" news. Bryan Williams was excoriated for honoring veterans and having a normal, human memory. Breaking news and special updates are blatantly suspect and misleading, feeling line "spray and pray", with minimal or no fact or source checking, and there appears to be no consequence. I believe the Rather case was egregious and the Williams case trivial.

I have a link to a study I need to find and post relating to the amount of international news viewing by country. More international news generally means more sources, purportedly meaning more viewpoints and balance.

It feels like P. T. Barnum is running much of today's media outlets. Sensationalism combined with instant gratification gets more views = more ad revenue. "Always follow the money." as told to Bob Woodward in _All The President's Men_.
FLOPS/$ is better on AMD afaik. double speed fp16 is only on gp100 and I don't know if any framework supports fp16 training yet. But yes AMD need to add 2x fp16 too.

The main reason people don't use AMD for deep learning is lack of fast libraries, and AMD's inability to provide a CuDNN equivalent optimised for their hardware
I've used a tv as a monitor before, but it was tough because it lagged pretty badly (around 80ms from when something "happened" to when the monitor showed it). What is the input lag like on this?
In the events that this have happened I have directly, as diplomatically as I can be, explained that (1) MD5 is not a cipher, but a hash function that does not provide confidentiality. And (2) It is not a hash function one should use . Ever. Never. In a million years. Or more.

And at this stage start to enquire what security the customer think their system/product/service needs and try to move forward from that point. And we usually also talk about MD5 and its brokenness. Than if a secure hash function is needed, there are several good ones to choose from. And if they really don't need a secure hash function, there are others, much faster hash functions to use.

The point is that sometimes things need to be handled directly and up front. This for me is one of those things.
just out of curiosity - the value that your customers see...is it actual cost + your fee? (hence you can collect the fee even if the actual cost reduces?)
For a deep learning machine with LIDAR , there's only small difference between animals, indian traffic, bad drivers, and narrow/unlit/poor roads.

It's just a question of more training(altough a recent NHTSA? regulation says the planning stage cannot use black box techniques like DNNs).

And once self-driving is a business, i suspect we'll find ways to get said training data for cheap enough and fast enough. For example Tesla/Uber drivers as trainers .
I have to imagine the only way to really get nukes dropped on you, is to have nukes aimed at someone else... or have a large standing army. Or basically be a threat in some way.

It's not like someone says, "I want to kill all the humans..." they presumably just want to destroy their enemies and threats to their safety.

With that in mind, these nations are probably fucked... but that's only a fraction of nations.

* List of states with nuclear weapons - Wikipedia || https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_we...

Russia has, generously, an 8k nuclear arsenal (but only about 2k of those are considered active). If they sent everything they had ever built at Texas, they'd still barely be able to drop one bomb per every 30 square miles... Assuming they were all Tsar Bombs... that might take out one state.

* NUKEMAP by Alex Wellerstein || http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

I think there are a lot of rural places in the US that would be mostly safe from being directly targeted and potentially far enough away to also avoid fallout. And also... like all of Canada. Who's going to waste nukes on Canada?

* US States: Area and Ranking - EnchantedLearning.com || http://www.enchantedlearning.com/usa/states/area.shtml

And let's not forget these are all government contracts to build the nukes were awarded to constituents as kickbacks or were built by the lower bidder -- and many are very old at this point. I have to think the failure rate is more than 0; so unless they're doubling up likely there will still be places targeted and still left unscathed due to delivery or ordinance malfunction... or just human malfunction, "Golly Gee, Sarge, I meant to target New York, but I typed in New Braunfels instead because of the auto-complete."

Just for fun:

* Tom Lehrer - Who's Next - with intro - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRLON3ddZIw
Writing an Interpreter in Rust
Before this generation of Apple products, I found their product shortcomings so minor that I wouldn't consider switching. I think I'll always favor apple products but I'm definitely loving them less than I always have.

- If you buy a new macbook and a new iPhone, you can't physically connect them

- If you buy standard aux headphones, you have to keep track of the tiny dongle

- You can't charge your iPhone while using wired headphones

- No more Macsafe chargers which have saved me so many times

- A touchbar that I'm sure I could get used to, but haven't seen a compelling use case yet

Unlike some others, I'm not pushed to the point of leaving Apple. I just don't want to buy the new gen and hope that they can refocus on creating great experiences that doesnt involve friction like the above changes do.
I get the same effect from eating "something with cheese on top" that I do from eating sugary stuff (makes me want to eat more, makes me feel less full). I always assumed it was the lactose...
I don't talk about XLS or XLSX, I just say Excel and give them SpreadsheetML files.