skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is someone making a positive contribution to the service, for example by posting well-liked content and engaging in meaningful conversations?

Yep, because these are easily verifiable parameters that don't depend in any way on the ethical beliefs and political alignment of whoever rates users.
Yeah, having never collaborated with someone else on a project I can't really grasp how you don't get it all messed up + have others fix or maintain your code at some point. I assume style guides are nice for that, but seem a bit too much for a brand new project
Photonic Hypercrystals Are Now a Reality, and Light Will Never Be the Same
No, I don’t agree. It’s great that it failed.
None of those things have ever bothered me, but mobile phones and apps are all righthanded. The back button is hardwired into most phones (all?) and the dominant thumb cannot touch it without shifting my whole hand, sounds insignificant for those who don't experience this but try to imagine it everytime you press back.

Waiting patiently for a lefthanded phone. Getting close to a decade now.
The problem is switching would mean transitioning to a generalized system that they would have to work around. The Excel system looks like a nightmare to the HN crowd, but it was built around their business processes. It's basically a boutique app designed specifically for their job, it would be very hard to find a general product that does the job as well.

I've seen this a lot where a consultant will swoop in and tell them that they need to use Peoplesoft or something and the organization spends millions of dollars and years of retraining to get a system that has a lot more friction in their actual workflow and is never quite as good for getting the job done.

Of course there are often side benefits that can't be overlooked, like a much more sane backup solution, interoperability with other providers, etc... But in the end most of the employees will tell you straight up that the old system was better. Too much of the domain knowledge was baked into the old system and doesn't make the transition to the new system.
Can you easily integrate with externals systems via REST & SOAP? I've done some quick web searches on this topic and have never seen anything that jumped out at me.

I know Google Sheets gives you a little bit of this with Javascript embedding but I was searching for something more tightly integrated with Excel or LibreOffice.
Games are fairly inextricably linked with tech at this point in time. What devices do you play games on? What social platforms are many games tied tightly to?

Also, minuscule is perhaps not the word to use, with Activision, EA and others reporting revenue figures in the billions.
>When I consulted [...] We recommended they implement a PDM (product data management) system.

>We recommended they get a system that manages their product data

Yep, I believe you are a consultant.
The association with gambling is since you are paying for the egg but don't know what you are getting inside that is a form of gambling (this is implication of argument above, not what I think)
> A 1933 steel bicycle that I still ride.

That's an old bike.
> It's interesting to me that the very same people seem to be pro Freedom of Press/Freedom of Speech (as a German, the US Freedom of Speech is something I'm not used to, something that doesn't align with my culture/upbringing), but feel different about this subject because it involves a "market"?

That's Libertarianism. Everything done by government is bad, everything done by businesses is good. Looking at the actual effects is verboten.
Because they have been bought and paid for by the existing ISP monopolies, who stand to gain enormously from the loss of net neutrality, at little to no extra effort on their part.
Cyber Monday Software Deals for Small Business
I don't think that peer review is a very good metric in this case. Those peers could lose their jobs if rodent research is proven to be unscientific. Requiring research on the scientific merits of rodent research to be peer reviewed is like asking the plumber's union to write the building code. In many American municipalities, the code really is written by the plumbers, and the plumbers write in that water pipes must be copper, just because copper cannot be installed by a non-professional. I don't see why rodent researchers would not do the same type of corrupt and anti-truth tactic for their own professional protection.
All of the cases where I have seen Excel sheets get "out of control" are not because someone came along and decided to implement a complex system in Excel, far from it. I tend to see small, well suited, sheets being created in Excel, and then iteratively new features get added

"Wouldn't it be great to automatically get averages each month"

"Perhaps we could pull in exchange rates so we have up to date currency values"

"As we need to compare this to employees here, and because we actually have a list of employees in another sheet for holiday and sickness, why don't we put the employees into another separate sheet and cross reference it from both places"

"When we add a new employee wouldn't it be nice if these sheets automatically update"

"We want to pull in this live data every day at midnight, perhaps we can have an automated job for that"

Then when someone says "hmm, I don't think Excel is the right tool for the job" there is often general agreement, but at that point there are lots of interconnected sheets, formulas, external data being pulled in, cron jobs, etc. and the system manages a lot of different things, none of which you particularly want to be without and despite the complexities, people have been with it over iterations, so they are actually quite familiar with how it all works.

But then a couple of people with the knowledge leave, a new person takes over, and their first job is to remove Excel and come up with a much better system. They try, users complain it doesn't do certain things as well, over time in improves, somehow certain things never seem quite as good, but then new features have been added so people forget and find the next thing to complain about instead!
Kerbal Space Program doesn't take that much time.

You can be smearing green goo over the launch pad in less than 4 minutes and basically everything after that is just an extension to "smear green goo over [thing in space]". Maybe even flying back home too.
Exactly. It is clear from this who lawmakers pay attention to and it is not the people.
The problem is, what actually happened (in a previous commit) was:

The IPv6 stack does a perfectly sensible and legal thing. The hardener code misunderstands the legal code, and causes a reboot.

That it was Linus is worried about -- often it is hard to tell the difference between "naughty" code which can never be a security hole, and genuine security holes.

They should all be fixed ASAP, but making code that previously worked make a user's computer reboot, when it is perfectly fine, is not a way to make friends.
Good example! I try and apply myself to split things in self-sufficient services but can't really say it observes strict OO conventions. Also, refactoring is a newly acquired taste, and I'm not even sure I do it right. Basically just try to untangle things as the project gets bigger / more complex.

Will have a look at your link, thanks!
The "most bug-prone an exploitable" dimension is a bad one. There's probably some correlation, but it is not a good way to look at the differences.

You can push into userspace the software that work some data into some low level data. You can't push into userspace the IO of that low level data to the hardware. If your driver is mostly interpreting complex data before IO, you can push most of it into userspace, but if it is really doing IO (or calculations are interspersed with IO), you can't.
Agreed. Excel users should learn more about importing data from other sources and processing that. Excel itself should make it even more obvious.
This is almost line-for-line my setup.

I like the CodeBuild solution for the times when I'm editing on my phone or a shared computer. I push to GitHub, and CodeBuild handles:

* build (as above, plus asset processing and minification)

* deploy (s3 sync, plus some fiddling to add 301 redirects)

* ping search engines

I keep a lot of drafts and temporary notes in my local checkouts and doing build/deploy on a fresh checkout helps to ensure they don't slip onto the public website.
>easily use Excel as a client to a central database and get the best of both worlds.

Yes it seems that way but many spreadsheets exist because the centralized system is an incomplete solution.

For example, a company might have a "human resources tracking" centralized system. (E.g. Ariba, Peoplesoft, etc). It has some standard features like ingesting resumes and extracting "skills" from parsing MS Word docs, etc.

However, the company happens to use a interviewing process where the candidate must pass (1) phone interview and (2) onsite with 5 peer programmers, and (3) hiring manager.

The hiring manager wants to "capture" all of those states (phone_passed=True/False, peer interviews with 5 different numerical scores, manager_pass=True/False). The centralized system doesn't have fields that capture all that so the hiring manager creates a spreadsheet that has those extra columns. Many spreadsheets out in the wild "fill the gap" between incomplete centralized systems and custom IT programming. An adhoc xls file can be created far faster than submitting a change request to the corporate IT department to customize Ariba -- which could take months (or never) to implement.

Or spreadsheets act as the "intersection" of data between multiple systems. Again, one purpose of centralized "data warehouses" was to eliminate Excel "data silos" but again, no IT department can create data warehouse solutions (which also includes all the custom reports) as fast as someone creating spreadsheets and just emailing them around.

Having a hybrid process where Excel acts as a round-trip offline client to a central db doesn't really eliminate the fundamental reason Excel (over)use keeps multiplying like rabbits.
A quantum leap for Firefox
A handshake is a good example: when you go give one to someone, you don't actually touch them, you extend your hand and wait for their explicit (if non-verbal) consent.

As for patting backs, do avoid doing so. Many of us don't like it even if it's totally non-sexual.
CSP by API - prevent XSS by building a CSP policy specifying services you use
> He does plan to go higher in future missions, just to be fair.

True. He may have to go a lot higher, in fact. The Flat Earth Society's FAQ claim that you would have to go higher than commercial airliners "to get even a hint of curvature if earth were round": https://wiki.tfes.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#As_a_passen...
I see lot of downsides to that like for example in long run ISPs might end up offering their connection for free as Google/FB etc. are already providing their own ISP services (may be they started so because of this law!) => every large corporation move into ISP business offering their service for free instead of paying someone else!
Unless it's sarcasm, I don't know which phone you're talking about.
The "infrastructure industry" are rentiers in the classical sense: they are rewarded for holding and maintaining a capital asset which can't be easily replicated.
I prefer that story! It leaves me with a picture of Dave and Bill paddling away quickly with a boat full of oscilloscopes (even though this was after their time)
GitHub Enterprise is a different beast, as it's self-hosted. My comment was in response to the parent's mention of companies storing their source code on GitHub, which might imply external hosting. I suppose it was ambiguous.
I would expect Volvo to do something like that, and repeat what they once did with the seat belt.
Dynamic Validation with Spring Boot Validation
This is essentially the argument behind BDD, except applied at a level where the 'customer' is another developer.

Some of the worst APIs I've seen have been ones designed by a backend developer based upon some vague specifications handed down by a non-technical PO. They were often designed with half of the stuff that was necessary missing, lots of stuff that wasn't necessary and some stuff which made no sense before being thrown over a wall.

The better APIs were 'designed' by the developer who would write the code that would consume them. Even if that just meant an email or a scrap of paper with a few example URLs and snippets of JSON.
Is there a reason to believe that mobile ecosystem is more unsafe than the desktop ecosystem?

I would argue it the other way round. On mobile (Android or iOS), apps have much fewer permissions compared to on desktop. e.g., one app can't look into the data of the other app. On desktop, it is possible to write a binary which steals user cookies (e.g., https://github.com/rash2kool/cookie_stealer). For all purposes, the binary would be legitimate, and no antivirus or OS APIs would mark the binary as bad.

However, on mobile, one app can't peek into the private data of the other app. So, the Uber app can't peek into my browser cookies.
Further info about node_modules from the paper

Because the JavaScript sample was so heavily (78 out of 80) dominated by Node packages, wehave performed the same analysis again, this time excluding the Node files. This uncovered jQueryin its various versions and parts accounting for more than half of the sample (43), followed froma distance by other popular frameworks such as Twitter Bootstrap (12), Angular (7), reveal (4).Language tools such as modernizr, prettify, HTML5Shiv and others were present. We attribute thisgreater diversity to the fact that to keep connections small, many libraries are distributed as asingle file. It is also a testament to the popularity of jQuery which still managed to occupy half ofthe list.
> If fact checking were a thing CNN wouldn't have been used as an example of "left-leaning" media. CNN is fairly mainstream, which isn't to say their reporting lately isn't garbage.

CNN is left leaning but that is not the source of my gripe with them. I don't like the "hair is on fire" 24/7 style reporting they do, and I find that their quality work gets lost in a mess of exactly that kind of "everything is fucked and we're all going to die" style of reporting.

There are plenty of what people would call left leaning orgs out there that do excellent work. CNN is not among them IMHO.
That is a great point. Design Pattern and CS fundamentals are old and have not changed for 20-30 years. These are problems that have been solved ages ago. I can completely imagine what you are saying about the old C++ code bases to be true.

What do you think happened to us?

Uncle Bob says the web happened. Maybe back in the day when you had to make a program that ran on the console things were simpler. Now for a standard web application we need to worry about JS and CSS and HTTP and HTML and WebSockets. (And then the app needs to support different clients like Web, Mobile Web, Native etc.)

I am talking about this since thats the kind of software I build and I know that it is always a mess.

But there are still C++ programs written today that are not for the web. Are they also a mess? If they are then the web is not the problem.
My screen is calibrated, it's not that anything is displayed wrong. I just want it to be more obvious.

Before FF57, I was able to set the font and background color for tabs depending on their status (current, inactive, unread, etc.), and that's what I want now. IIRC, this was actually a feature of Tab Mix Plus.

It's clear that this is still possible even without TMP, but requires putting code in userChrome.css. That would be fine with me, if I could just find any documentation on what element classes (or whatever would be the most appropriate selectors) I need to reference.
my first question would be how the prices of the unlimited plan compares to the regular plans of other ISPs.

In other words, are these ‘walled garden’ plans aimed towards people who would otherwise buy a regular data plan or are they aimed at people for whom the choice is a walled plan or no plan.
Beyond plain React – Application to learn about a couple of Libraries
I used to hire temporary workers all around the country as part of my job as GM of a small travelling pro sports league.

I always found that there is some "market price" where people are decent and paying less gets you less quality and paying more tends to get you better quality.

Specific example: we needed security guards for an event in Las Vegas circa 2006.

* $150/day got us off duty professional guards who were fantastic
* $125/day got us college kids/retired folks who were pretty good
* <$100/day high school kids or people with questionable backgrounds who were usually terrible

I remember Joel Spolsky saying something like "You don't always get what you pay for but it's true enough of the time to be a useful phrase"
Swiss army knife is a good analogy. Sure, it does lots of things, but if you want to do really big work, you'll probably want a chef's knife, or a saw, or a pair of scissors, not miniature versions of each designed to fit in a small package.

That said, it's a great tool to survive in the woods :)
I've been a Firefox user for a long time and so far really enjoy quantum. It feels much faster, and I like the new design a lot. My one complaint is that it doesn't support any of the touch gestures or even TouchPad gestures that Edge does, so I'm only using Firefox when I've got my Surface Book docked with a mouse and keyboard. Any other time I miss the gestures too much and switch to Edge.

To be fair, that's a problem that Firefox has always had, but boy do I wish they'd support gestures sometime soon.
And to think that the employees have any say in the policies is also hopelessly naive.
You seem to have responded to the parent comment as if he or she was making an appeal on the grounds of ethics of animal testing. (And for some reason, people have engaged with you on this, as if that's what's going on.)

But the linked video isn't about that at all. It's about the pitfalls of using rodents for testing and trying to extrapolate meaningful conclusions from the results. In other words, an argument that is squarely on topic with regard to the original article. Or in other words further, that using rodents is "a horrible testing method"―to repeat what the original commenter wrote before you derailed the thread.

Your commenting as if this discussion is about the ethics of animal testing and the comments of you and those who've responded (including the one I'm writing now!) have been—and are contributing further—to a massive waste of effort and attention.
If the HomePod is able to play audio from local (Home sharing) iTunes libraries, I'll buy two.

Unfortunately and inexplicably, the marketing so far says it will only play songs from Apple Music. If true, I will buy none.
Lisp failing mass adoption ? Common Lisp had a large amount of adoption. Emacs lisp has a really big install base . Clojure is pretty popular also . Do you mean wide adoption ?

I agree that lisp has issues marketing itself.
In visual studio in the late 2000s, code snippets were all the rage, a new feature to allow you to write boiler plate quickly.

Since .Net 3.5 I barely use them, I really only use the built in ones for foreach and property accessors. The addition of lambdas and short-hand property accessors vastly reduced the boiler plate code in C#. I imagine the addition of async/await has also helped a lot with other certain types of code.

My round-about point is that existing languages can improve to reduce code duplication.
My humble, personal opinion that I have been reluctant to share:

This tech backlash is a projection of people's larger frustrations onto big tech.

- Social Media Addiction: You can passively use Twitter to follow "history in pictures" and "baby kitten of the day" photos. People choose to follow 500 politically charged accounts and then get surprised that the environment turns toxic. Unfriend everyone on Facebook who isn't a close friend, family member and revel in a stream of baby pics and holiday greetings. Or if your family insists on talking politics, create a second account to serve as your primary. Or just don't use it.

- Fake News: There used to be a publication called the Weekly World News at almost every check-out in the US that made claims that the Clintons were romantically involved with space aliens (http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/04/weekly-world-news-c..., the Republic withstood this rash of Fake News. That some people can't work out that conspiracy theories promulgated by "EaglePatriotNewz.PL" or "GMOTruthNow.us" aren't likely to be accurate isn't the fault of Facebook. It's a problem to be sure, but not a tech problem.

- Out-of-Touch Tech Co's: No amount of user research will protect a company from groups who are determined to take offense. Google recently added a calorie counter to its walking maps feature and was presented as an attack on people with eating disorders (https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/16/google-maps-ditches-automa...). They angered others by promoting civil rights pioneer, who happened to have complimented Osama Bin Laden supporter on their homepage (https://www.vox.com/2016/5/19/11713686/yuri-kochiyama). I don't know if these are examples of Google being out of touch, or just so large that any decision is likely to anger some subset of the user base.

- No-fun Games: Imagine a title from the golden age of gaming and you can probably find a free port on the App Store. There are orders of magnitudes more titles available today.

- Denial: I agree that tech as an industry could do many things better, but in my personal, humble estimation of the world's top problems it doesn't rank in the top 50. I don't think it's among the top ten most evil industries, but it seems I'm increasingly in the minority.
Python Hashes and Equality
> I briefly tried some of the "skills" but they're awkward as hell. You have to say something along the lines of "Tell <app name> to <command>". Yikes.

That's a little like saying "some websites are rubbish" though. IME skills don't have to have cumbersome conversational UI - I use mine (in conjunction with a Logitech Harmony Hub) as a sometime replacement for a universal remote: say "Alexa, turn on Sky/Netflix/xbox" and on come three devices, all switched to the right inputs. And in the case of Netflix, it launches my TV's Netflix app too. The phrase feels natural to me.
Trello. In the last few jobs I've had there's almost always been a developer who has their own personal to do list on a trello board, even if we had robust tracking systems like jira and rally.
I do find myself wondering why, when I was paid to develop in Lisp for ~6 years (and PostScript at the same time, but that's another story) and really enjoyed using it and frequently find myself extolling the virtues of macros, loop or CLOS that I've never actually used it on a project since then (and I do quite a few side projects just to play with new languages).

Edit: I think you're downvotes are bit harsh and as a Scot I appreciate the "king over the water" reference - people get all romantic about the Jacobites without thinking too much about what their policies might have been.
"Instead, companies are turning to new, cloud-based technologies from Anaplan Inc., Workiva Inc., Adaptive Insights and their competitors.

The newer software connects with existing accounting and enterprise resource management systems, including those made by Oracle Corp. or SAP SE. This lets accountants aggregate, analyze and report data on one unified platform, often without additional training.

Adobe switched to Anaplan early last year and many of the tasks previously performed in spreadsheets are now done in the system, maintaining “one source of truth,” Mr. Garrett said."