skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article appears to be about how senior leadership wants to pay people that are not financial analysts to create reports that can then somehow be used by financial analysts (probably after exporting to CSV so they can work in Excel?)

This sounds great if you know exactly what reports you need and have the resources to build them, but I'm not really sure how this kind of initiative means "stop using excel". This article is advocating for a solid API / data management / data catalog program from what I'm reading.
If eBay is doing poorly after her departure, is it really on her?
I am mostly just disappointed and disgusted with so many of my peers going off to work in exploitative industries (attention-tech being one of them), making huge gobs of money, gentrifying Brooklyn, and pretending like they are still socially conscious. Just like their closet-racist parents back in the suburbs.
I wonder if companies, like Apple, will segment their tech stack to extract areas where one could argue that it’s not ethical to have an intellectual advantage. Perhaps pedestrian detection is one such area.

If two autonomous car companies are competing, it makes sense to fight on many feature sets. It feels wrong to compete on “ability to detect a bike rider.”
Make an appointment to meet with them in person. They're probably home for the holidays.
Is there any link to that talk?

Edit: yes at the end of the article https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iffTJ1vPCSo&list=PLbzoR-pLrL...
Meta: Who, and why, flagged this comment? What rule exactly Slavius breaks here?

On topic: I can't recall now the details, but I read a paper once about a system which had no shutdown procedure at all, the only way to exit it was to crash it somehow or just shutdown the computer. The system made sure to save everything often enough and made sure to store the data in ways which allowed for restoring possibly corrupted parts of it on the next startup. This design produced a very resilient architecture which worked well for that use case.

The paper was from '80s or '90s, so it's not like we need to be in 21st century to design that way. I'll try searching for the paper later.
Net neutrality is the status quo. No one is talking about adding complex new regulation here but you.
Only when they're hot.
Since PowerPoint was proven to be Turing complete my bet is on it and not Excel being the most commonly used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8
Nanosys Wants Printing Quantum Dot Displays to Be as Cheap as Printing a T-Shirt
Thats quite off topic. The point is, by speaking less of insecurity people feel more safe.
Then why the hell are we fighting for net neutrality when the real problem is that ISPs are monopolies? Net neutrality won't do anything to fix that.
I'll join in with a bit of show-and-tell of my own, if I may.

I'm working on a plugin for Excel for dev's and other technical people. It lets the user use SQL and C# in Excel, connect to various types of databases and move data in either direction, and provides a runtime for automation.

The idea is basically to let tech users use their existing skills to make life easier. Main areas of use are:

- process (live) data in Excel via SQL and C#/linq

- move data between Excel and databases

- fetch data from various sources using .net (e.g. get data from a AD, file system, REST etc. in a few lines of code)

- replace VBA with C# and .NET for automation

It's also very useful for prototyping. Business logic goes inside C# scripts, and Excel takes care of user input, displaying results, data binding (formulas and graphs) and data storage.

It's commercial but freemium, the url is http://www.querystorm.com.

I posted about it a few times:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15670030
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583488

Here's an intro video: https://vimeo.com/242216594
Things I like about Fossil:

* Single file repository with proper transactional semantics (it's an SQLite DB) rather than a "pile of files" implementation. I can trivially and safely copy the repository, send it as a mail to a new collaborator, etc.

* Fossil is a single executable. Unlike Git or Mercurial, that makes installation trivial.

* The whole system is remarkably clean, simple, and lacking in cruft. This also makes it easy to explain and get people started.

* Fossil has a well thought-out system for tags and named branches; they are persistent, but can be renamed. This is different from Git, where history tends to be largely a soup of anonymous objects, and Mercurial, where it is impossible to rename branches.

* It comes with a built-in wiki and distributed ticketing system. If you want to self-host rather than rely on GitHub/Bitbucket, that's already a very useful feature.

* `fossil undo` is very useful, even though it supports only one level of undo.

* The ability to store and share unversioned files is often very convenient.

Things I don't like about Fossil:

* The console interface is sometimes too simplistic for some commands (`fossil timeline` is one of the biggest offenders); it errs in the opposite direction from Git and relies on a GUI too much for basic operation (though I'd still prefer it over Git, but not necessarily other VCSes). That said, you can script it fairly adequately either with the JSON interface or even through direct SQL queries if you don't mind investing the time.

* The workflow for external contributions for contributors without commit access is more cumbersome than necessary; in principle, `fossil bundle` serves that need, but it lacks some features (you can't bundle non-commit artifacts, for example).

* Commit messages all get squished into a single line of output. You could argue that wiki pages or technotes are the proper way to document more complex information (so you don't have to sift through commit messages), but it's difficult to relate them to a specific commit and they aren't supported by `fossil bundle`, as mentioned above. There's some unfinished work on attaching remarks to commits [1], but this work seems dormant.

* Scalability is even more of a problem than with other distributed version control systems if you're dealing with really big repositories (not that those other systems necessarily cover themselves in glory, either), though the situation has improved in recent years.

[1] https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/timeline?r=remarks-on-...
When I search for salary data for tower crane operators online, it says the salary is around $30k per year.

It sounds like you have to network hard and get very lucky to get that 500k per year salary and it probably doesn't last forever.

I've heard several stories from older people who said that they were earning ridiculous amounts at some point in their lives but it only lasted a couple of years and then their salaries dropped back to average ranges once their contract ran out and started working for normal companies again.

Salaries don't necessarily keep going up based on experience.
> Is called cash :) It's accepted everywhere.

Surprisingly, it’s not!

A non-Swedish friend studying in Sweden recently told me of a situation (I forget the exact details) where she could not pay with cash. They only accepted payment via Swish[^1] (mobile payment system).

At the time she was with a Swedish friend which was the one to pay for both of them, with my friend paying her friend in cash.

[^1]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/04/sweden-cash...
This is true, but, I also clicked because of the title. Well baited trap.
Bosnia & Herzegovina. Serbia also doesn't (but their government uses other mechanisms for online disruption, including DDoS, bot armies, and breaking into websites it doesn't like). And neither does Montenegro. I can't guarantee that the same is true for Croatia as well, but I think that's the case there too.

That doesn't say that they don't want to block anything, it's just that they are fighting what they don't like on the Internet using different means.

To elaborate on that with one specific example from Bosnia, there was a case in which a government wanted to cut the access to a site spreading ISIS propaganda in a local language. They've successfully shut down a top level domain they were using, after which they've switched to a *.wordpress.com domain. That lasted a really long time (years I would say), but a court order managed to shut down that one as well (individual reports to WordPress, including mine, did not). And after all of that, they've arrested the founder of the website.

EDIT: Here's a screenshot of WordPress' response to me when I reported the website: https://i.imgur.com/suHPZeF.png
The freedom to run GPL-ed software, for instance (the APP store terms of service are incompatible)
In the end why was she pushed out? Was it a loss of credibility? Investors were probably happy about splitting the company. Did she lose internal credibility because she said she wasn't interesting in Uber (when she was)?
You clearly have limited view on application bugs. Let me elaborate a bit on bugs causing application dissatisfaction and UX frustration without crashing much, much worse than a simple error message along the lines: "OS has terminated application X because it has performed an illegal operation."

Data corruption - reading or writing corrupted data - files cannot be read, saved files get corrupted, API calls from/to external applications/systems fail or pass incorrect data
Rendering problems - corrupted images, incorrect colors, improper content encoding, visual stuttering, audio deformation, audio skipping
Input/output lags - unregistered kaystrokes, missed actions and responses to external events, mouse stuttering and misbehavior
Improper operation - inconsistent results - repeated rendering yields different results (html), formulas/calculation results in data is inconsistent (excel, DWH)
Access violation - access gained to invalid or protected areas - unprivileged access, license violations, access to areas protected by AAA, data theft (SQL injection, database dumps)

and others. If I figure out the application I'm using (web-browser) allowed a hacker to steal my data he would not have otherwise access to I would be more pissed off than if it crashed and I found an error about it in system log.
Where is the closest gas station? "Within the Solar System".
That's quite cool, thanks for the link. Tables seem to be a more popular model for finance and similar, but it's always interesting to see new data models like this.

This could allow for more interesting things like gathering fields from records into a meta-table from a relational DB, that would definitely be a valuable next step.
GDPR is pretty much the thing that will - if properly executed - mean the end of these things.

As CEO, former engineer and customer I really hope this gets some serious traction. IMHO if you are making money from customers, it should be mandatory to follow compliance regulations and protect all data.
Blade Runner and the Synthetic Panopticon – Modern Mythology
President of Estonia about digital citizenship
This is what screwed me over as a herbarium curator (a herbarium is a type of natural history museum for plants):

Excel completely corrupts dates before the year 1900. It just boggles the mind -- if your spreadsheet has dates for 10,000 years from now that works fine, but if there are any dates from the 19th century or earlier, it can cause big problems.
I don't think we should trust any of the big tech companies with our data. We should instead accept that anything we share with them is not necessarily private.

Despite Apple positioning itself as the privacy minded company righteously protecting your personal information, they still share it with 3rd parties to implement products like Siri. They're very secretive and don't talk about that fact and they only begrudgingly admit it when something like a data leak occurs. Do we have any transparency into those companies that Apple is sharing data with? What standard does Apple hold them to with regards to protecting that data? No one knows because Apple won't say.

Apple's stance on security and privacy is as much theater as it is truth. They're in the business of selling you a product and to make it appealing.

The sad fact is they could tell you the new iPhone 11 allows you to fart rainbows but only if no one is looking and people would believe it.
We could build something revolutionary: how tech set underground music free
HN was actually pretty pro-crypto 4-5 years ago, I think the tech world in general has started to see crypto and ICOs as a bubble within the last year or so.
Why I Removed Google Analytics from My Website (2013)
Try reposurgeon
A few more guidelines that seem obvious to me, but which I see broken all the time:

1) If an API value can be changed any time, it should probably be a plain object property

2) If an API value can be changed but there are side effects, it should probably be a "setFoo" method

3) If an API value can be specified, but not changed after init/instantiation, it should probably be an argument to the constructor or init function
Feels like an ad
> It is not feasible to come up with the schema, write a software based on that schema and then give it to the non-tech people.

Would it be feasible if you only had to write the schema and the software were generated based on the schema?
No actually, whether certain behaviour or moves are acceptable or not depends entirely on the individual. Sales people and socially awkward people are told to reach out and touch people on the shoulder and such, for example; I don't like people touching me, but apparently it should be socially acceptable. I could make it a battery or sexual intimidation case if I wanted to.

Then there's people that actually like being touched, especially by close friends which, yes, can be colleagues, and can be people above them in the chain of command.

TL;DR it's a minefield, best to do nothing and stay away from people.
Some CI setups benefit from a one-repo-per-service approach, as it makes it easier to figure out when an individual app has changed. In orgs where everything is in one giant repo, it can be difficult to establish what subset of your applications needs to be rebuilt when a commit is pushed.

I personally don't have a strong opinion about either way - they both have tradeoffs.
Ruins of the Buran space shuttle left abandoned in the Kazakh steppe
Show HN: Build a Python REST API in 5 Mins with Flask and Arrested
Dash Robotics Acquires Bots Alive for Clever, Affordable Robot Toys
> does that mean the ISP gets the automatic right to fuck over everyone left because they didn't move?

The fact that they refuse to invest money they will never get back doesn't mean they want to "fuck you over". Have you ever thrown money out of the window just for fun? Well now you understand these ISPs' point of view.

> Should water utility not be provided to them because they didn't move?

If there's only one person left in town, should a billion dollar installation still be maintained for that one person? What if it's 5 people or a couple of hundreds? Isn't it selfish too to demand a whole billion service industry (internet, water etc) to invest and work just for you and run their business as a loss just because you refuse to move? Western countries are running with trillions of dollars in debts because of these kinds of "investments", not sure if this is sustainable (surely hope so but doubt it). I would personally love to live in the middle of nowhere in beautiful Peru with high speed internet, clean water and top infrastructure, I would never demand anyone to pay for it for me however.
AppLovin tweaks Chinese takeover deal after U.S. pushback
Never store money on an exchange. Once you are done trading, get it out of there.
In case you see this and feel like the code base you work on is also a mess, then I think it would be a good idea to post something like: "I work at XYZ, and the code base is a mess." (Maybe leave out the company name if not comfortable. Just a size of the company will help.)

I am urging you to do so, since atleast then we can move ahead and accept that this is the state of affairs. If we don't do that it will not be clear weather this is a problem or just an un-interesting discussion.
I'd argue that is still the case. As long as people working at bars don't earn a fair wage and as long as tipping culture remains a thing, I won't trust anyone's kindness over there as genuine, and more as a tool to get more tip money.
Tech as We Know It Would Not Exist Without Immigrants
Was minorly obsessed with this a couple of years ago. Is very interesting but ultimately lacks a lot that could make it useful
Maybe it's because I'm not in the US, but I find this concern overblown.

For the most part, we're not talking about perfectly innocent things suddenly shifting into unacceptable. We're talking about behavior that was merely tolerated from people in positions of power. And 20 years ago most of these were probably already covered in sexual harassment advisories. As far as I'm concerned, the change took too long, not the other way.

Who do you see having been fired for stuff done 20 years ago and that was completely acceptable back then?
I need less conference aggregators and more conferences that revolve around
something else than writing dynamic WWW.
Concurrently running container-based and VM tests in Travis-CI
I've submitted a comment on the site but I'll post it here as well:

I think this looks neat. However, last time I implemented something like this, I ran across a few elements/attributes that didn't behave in the simple way I expected.

I can't remember the full list (and can't find my old code), but some things like the "class" attribute, and the "type" attribute of <input> don't like being dynamically changed, at least in all browsers. I think something strange happened with tables as well, and maybe <title>.

So, I ended up needing some special handling for these attributes/elements, in some cases creating a new node with the right attributes and swapping it in.

I don't see anything like this in the Emerj code, so I wonder if it has the same awkward corner-cases. I might go digging to see how DiffDom or DOMDiff or whatever it's called handles it...
Wow, thank you - I've never heard that argument before.

I'm not sure I know of an intelligent right-leaning person who thinks monopolies of any kind is a good idea, but I can see the argument being used in a "stepping-stone" sense towards a Republican ideal less regulated environment that would "naturally eradicate" monopolies.

I can see it used like that, but I've never heard of it. Of course, that might be because I'm not from the US.

Also, I don't necessarily agree that ISPs are closer to the state in most places, but that's not worth talking about because as far as I can see, neither of us agree with the argument anyway, you only enlightened me to its existence.

But like you said yourself, how this is linked to populist anti-globalism is not clear.

The original poster said,
> "It goes along with the Trump political theme of anti-globalization."

So that's really the question at hand. At this point, it feels to me like the original poster is just virtue-signalling, which baffles me.
> Unless it knows what the previous disadvantages were, and has fixed them to the satisfaction of developers

All programming languages have disadvantages. They don't need to be "fixed" in order to be useful and accepted. You think Java, Python, and JavaScript are perfect? How about Go, Kotlin, and Swift?
Just like precision without accuracy, but if you get accuracy you know you have a problem, but with only precision you are hopelessly misled.

If it was a strict trade-off, I would agree that the answer was somewhere on the middle. But it isn't. Most of the things that give you precision will also give you accuracy. The few things that let you exchange one for the other look too much like cheating, and seem to always have much greater impacts on accuracy than on precision.
Github may be what you say, but I definitely prefer it over the bad old days of sourceforge.
Even automation would not solve this issue. If these results are scent related, then it is quite possible that different automation methods would produce different scents, or even the same method, in a different environment / location.

This is a fascinating issue.
Depends on the speed/latency of the interface. Although you could probably say the same about the scanning matrix too.
I have a LG 27UD68-P (and just ordered a second one) and have found it pretty good for programming. Here in Europe they come with a swivel stand. The only real disadvantage compared to the Dell is they don't have DisplayPort daisy-chaining, but they support HDMI 2.0 so you can use that for 4k60.
A Dive into MuddyWater APT Targeting Middle-East – ReaQta
Would it be any better if the genders of the actors were reversed?

"mansplain" is a gender-biased criticism of behavior. It implies that the gender of the participants is the problem, rather than the attitudes or behavior.

But apparently the mice in the study react to the gender, so maybe it's germane...
The internet is not a single "connection" for an ISP that fans out to all the customers, unless your ISP is only able to get transport from a single peer/provider.

The big ones back-haul to a major hub and then enter in to several peering agreements. Depending on what service/site you use the "best" path will be over one of those peers.

However, this means that there is usually a middle-man-network in between you and the service you want and neither you, your ISP, nor the service can directly control the quality or speed of that network. If Netflix, Hulu and Google all end up with a "best" path on a single peer its going to be bad during prime time even though other services connected on other peers may operate normally.

One version of a "fast lane" (like the one that Comcast and Netflix negotiated) is to remove that middle man and directly peer with the service. This is only available to large services because they need a presence in these major hubs as it usually requires a direct physical connection between edge routers.

Now, no matter how congested their peers get, the "fast lane" service is working well. They have probably also agreed not to charge the actual "market" rate on that link's bandwidth as it is mutually beneficial and the ISP should pass those savings to its users by not counting the service against any data caps etc.

From the outside, this looks like extortion. The reality though is that both sides pursue these kinds of deals all the time because it benefits their customers and therefore their bottom-lines. ISPs push harder for them because services, like Netflix, are incentivized to find the lowest cost transport peer which is usually not the highest quality. When that peering link is bad, customers blame the ISPs not Netflix.

Netflix used to brag about how cheap and cut-rate their cost per gigabyte was. How do you think they got such a good deal? It wasn't by purchasing the best connection to their customers. It was become some sales exec at a tier 1/2 internet transport provider oversold their poor service. We should be just as upset with the overselling of transport over peers as we are about ISPs throttling but, most of the internet citizens don't understand how that works.

Another note, most of the times when people use VPNs to "prove" that their ISP is throttling network capacity for a service, they are simply routing over a different peer (the one that connects to their VPN). In ideal circumstances this is traveling over a sub-optimal path and should suffer a little bit. However, in times of heavy congestion it is like being routed around a traffic jam. It is "very hard" with current routing protocols on the backbone to do this kind of "flow around" for congested paths in real-time for everyone. Single users are manually implementing it by hitting VPNs.