skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can do crazy shit in excel. After someone opens an excel sheet - download a webpage and save it to disk? no problem. Lets load other excel files in memory and run their scripts too! Don't worry about your computer fan - while we scan your disk for stuff. Just state "On Error Resume Next" and start scanning hardware. Company email accounts are stuffed with one off sketchy excel attachments.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27419804/vba-excel-downl...
I think all the features he listed as reasons to switch away from excel are in excel. IMHO the issue there may be more training, process and good data management.
We released Arrested (https://arrested.readthedocs.org) a few weeks. This is a follow up post covering the basics and marks the beginning of series of weekly posts covering lots of different topics relating to RESTFul API design in Python.

If you have any questions please ask!
I wish I knew more about wireless/WISP? There has to be a way to provide reliable 1Gbps service to residential areas. If I could find a way to provide such a service, I would certainly look to do it and provide NN myself.

Maybe I could even strike a deal with Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/etc and try to do my own double-play/triple-play sort of thing.

Does anyone have any resources regarding getting 1Gbps bandwidth to the masses?
Exploiting a CSRF in Grammarly to steal private documents
Author of the referenced wiki post, and of SQLite and Fossil here...

The other day, I had 60 minutes of free time between events and so I brainstormed a few ideas for improving Fossil while sitting in a Starbucks, and those unedited, spur-of-the-moment notes trigger a big discussion on HN... Yikes! I do appreciate the feedback. Seriously. Your comments are very, very helpful. But let's not attach too much weight to my musings over coffee.

Should I interpret the response here to mean that there is latent demand for a new-and-improved VCS in the world. Does this mean that Git is ripe for disruption?

Some Issues I Have With Git

(1) A Git repository is a pile-of-files and/or a bespoke key/value store (packfiles). The format of the repository is underdocumented. (Proof sketch: try to write a utility that reads content out of a git repository without first studying the git source code.) The repository format is also brittle, as evidenced by the difficulty the Git developers have had trying to add support for hash algorithms other than SHA1.

(2) The key/value design of Git limits the information you can extract from the repository. Example: It is difficult to find the descendants of a check-in in Git - so difficulty that nobody ever does it. You can find ancestors easily, but finding all the descendants of a check-in is very hard. In addition to depriving the user of useful information, the inability to find descendants of a check-in leads directly to the "disconnected head" problem. That one deficiency is a show-stopper for me. And this is but one example of the limitations imposed by the key/value design of Git.

(3) For people who don't want to put their trust in GitHub, setting up a Git server is way too difficult.

(4) Git requires the user to remember too much state information. Git users should be cognizant of (a) the current check-out, (b) the "index" or staging area, (c) the local head, (d) the local copy of the remote head, and (e) the actual remote head. The more mental power users must to devote to keeping track of Git, the less there is available to work on their own code.

(5) Git only allows one check-out per repository. (I am told there are resent extensions to git to try to address this deficiency, but I am also told they do not work very well.)

(6) Git does not do a good job of remembering branch history. In particular, branches are unnamed in Git.

(7) Git is for file versioning only. Other important project information, such as bug tracking, must be handled separately.

Fossil is an effort to address the problems above. I do not claim that Fossil is perfect, just that it is better than Git. I am keen to make Fossil even better. Your feedback is appreciated.
On Windows [Alt] shows menu bar still, [F10] too. Try [F10] on your system.
There are upsides to excel in cases like that…

The health insurance people of various sorts who use this setup are the ones with domain knowledge. With an excel program, they can (1) understand how it works (2) add to it, modify it (3) create a copy and break it (4) debug it (5) have ideas about how it could work differently…

I’m not saying that excel is the tool for the job (sounds like it is definitely not), and those advantages erode as the setup gets more complex and/or has more people using it. But, there are reasons excel gets used this way.

The alternative is often rough. Software projects like this have high failure rates. Getting “requirements” out of users’/clients’ heads and into programmer’s is difficult. It means the standard (natural?) gap between domain knowledge and programming knowledge is restored. That has costs.

I’m going to repeat again that I am not advocating health insurance companies run policies and claims in excel. It is a bad idea, almost certainly. I am saying that we should be curious at why they are doing it this way. I think it’s a “good” question in that it leads to interesting places.

If the excel team was blessed with a plague of inspiration tomorrow morning, Is there a way they could make it so that excel is the right way to manage an insurance business?
The iPhone 8 looks quite dated as well, though.
None of the centralized systems with even the slickest web GUIs can match Excel's capabilities.

You can very easily use Excel as a client to a central database and get the best of both worlds.
Show HN: Super-Sunshine – A ray-tracer for easily generating beautiful images
As "michael" points out in the comments on the article, this has already been invented, it's called a macro and has been available for decades in various LISPs. Wikipedia lists a number of other languages [1] that support macros.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_(computer_science)#Synta...
Hi everyone!

This year I embarked on a quest to learn as much as I could about computer graphics.

I initially focused on building small applications using OpenGL, but after completing a few of them, I couldn't stop feeling that I did not fully understand how they worked. OpenGL was simply hiding too many details from me.

Hoping that building something from scratch would give me more insight, I started working on this ray-tracer. The whole experience quickly devolved into a ridiculous passion project. I built the ray-tracer from the ground up, starting with the API used to perform operations with points, vectors, normals and transformation matrices. I also read Scott Meyer’s “Effective C++” book while I worked on it, which really helped me improve my C++ skills.

Once I finished it, I challenged myself to explain everything I had learned as clearly as I could. For that purpose, I designed and generated all the images and animations you see in the readme (except for the ones of the Stanford Dragon and the human head). Most of the images started out on paper; I would draw them, break them down into triangles, and figure out the coordinates of each vertex. I found it very satisfying to generate images in such rudimentary fashion. I feel that the constraints imposed by my ray-tracer just push one to be more creative!

I now believe that building a ray-tracer is the best way to start learning about computer graphics. The whole experience is simply illuminating.

I hope you enjoy the readme!
Yes, life-long learning is a major issue in AI, but there's also the problem of sparsity of training data (especially in learning relations between objects) and the fact that it takes too many examples to learn something. Another problem is that of explainability, and another problem is that of compressing massive neural nets to work on small devices.

So there's life-learning, sparse-learning, fast-learning, explainable-learning and efficient prediction to name just a few of the major ones.

What we can do besides launching challenges like this one is to collect massive public datasets, make simulators (which are like dynamic datasets), and endow researchers with enough compute and Amazon turk credits.

Companies are short-term focused, you can't run a fundamental research project with shareholders behind your back. This part needs to be addressed by the government and academia.
Paper should last longer in a firesafe than most digital devices and is quite a trustworthy device. Paper has an autoignition temperature of 450 degrees F, so a UL class 350 rated fire safe should keep your paper documents safe, but those temperatures might ruin digital storage devices.
I don't know, a lot of the stuff Uber has been doing under Stark seem pretty Skrull-y to me.
Though, it would seem like data in general is more commercializable now than it was a century ago.

I certainly don't want to be the person to have to draw a line in the sand between "non commercial data" and "commercial data".

Then again, maybe I want to sell access to brain scans of people using hardware I made to a 3rd Party in the future… :P
I've worked with customers to setup support units specifically for Excel, helping their organisations develop and validate Excel spreadsheets and consider migration to more robust solutions when the time is right. As much as I dislike the general use of Excel there is an inescapable fact, Excel is a great source of bottom up innovation and ideas from non programmers which we should endeavour to capture and not just forbid.
If you enjoyed that, you might also enjoy Dmitry Vasyukov's "Happy People" documentary about the people living in the Siberian taiga. It's on youtube [1].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbhPIK-oBvA&list=PLcHbZZPce_...
Hmm.. this is the first time I heard of it. Maybe I will give it a try. After all LineageOS does not work on Pixel yet I think
> “I don’t want financial planning people spending their time importing and exporting and manipulating data, I want them to focus on what is the data telling us,” Mr. Garrett said

This!

I know this is reality in so many companies that don't have technically educated staff to tell them about more suitable ways to do it. So the teams get data from one department or system, manually transform data (in the editor via search/replace), and if they are "very sophisticated" they save it in MS Access, join tables, connect the dots, export back to Excel, analyse the data via Pivot Tables etc. And they do these steps repeatedly, every week. Without stopping and asking if there might be better solutions out there. (In German IT curriculums they call this "Medienbruch" = "media discontinuity"?)

I have seen this in so many companies and thought to myself: This is an excellent case for a consulting pitch. And I could literally transform their work.

And I am not talking about selling data warehouse solutions with ETL processes and the like.

Twenty years ago I realized I could do all these preprocessing and transformations with Perl. Now I do these kind of things with Python and Pandas etc. So there are so many solutions that are a huge improvement. Still these departments do it with Excel/VBA/Access.
What happens when a woman translates Homer's Odyssey
An Open Letter to the FCC
> No one is talking about adding complex new regulation here but you.

If you follow a bit about what happened the past 100 years of new government agencies rules is that they have _always_ yes, _always_ grown into thousands and thousands of regulations each year. But yeah, I'm sure this time it won't happen...

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0MCZ3FJXJJs/UA7zeOEIanI/AAAAAAAAFl...
I was there a couple of years ago. The people we talked to seemed pretty content with the arrangement. We took a tour of the mine and learn all about it.

Nearby there is also (one of ) the Ice Hotels where you sleep inside a building made of ice with beautifully decorated ice sculptures. Tip: if you go get one if the suites with a bathroom attached.
Lisp: The language of the future. Always has been. Always will be.
Because net neutrality is an important issue on its own, that's why.

You don't close fire departments left and right just because they don't fix
poverty or world hunger.
But the retina is curved too, so I am not sure there is even a way to convince flat-earthers?
I worked at nPower, in MIS, they used to link about 16 spreadsheets together because they "didn't like" SQL. These are one of the UKs big six energy companies.
Drowning in garbage
What Causes Cascading Power Grid Failures
FreeSync only helps when you're running a GPU heavy game that can't keep up with the monitor's refresh rate (dips below 60/120/144/whatever Hz). All desktop compositors definitely can and do render at your monitor's refresh rate :)

Vulkan wouldn't help much. It has less overhead (no validation in production, etc.), but GL/GLES are plenty fast for any compositing tasks. The difference might be completely negligible.
What the Repeal of Net Neutrality Means for Digital Marketing
So who else would you not want to breed? You can tell us, we won't say a word regarding your eugenic ambitions. After all it was all the fashion in the 1920s and 1930s with acclaimed intellectuals and personages such as Alexander Graham Bell, John Maynard Keynes, HG Wells, GB Shaw and the socialist Sidney Webb. The list is long and thought-provoking for some of today's fashionable ideas.

http://www.conservapedia.com/List_of_people_who_supported_eu...
I have two things- a constant, quiet hissing noise that doesn't bother me (can only hear it when things are completely quiet). And another, which happens sporadically- it will feel like a rapid pressure change in my head followed by a high pitched noise that gradually decays. Annoying, but not critically so.
The author is absolutely right that theres's a ton of data from languages/open source projects that if analyzed could prove massively useful.

But I'm not sure that the metrics in the referenced article have much to do with language design. Most of what they are measuring (their conclusion says as much) are people copy pasting files and entire projects. JS by their stats is the worst about this but JS is a language that reduces duplication more than Java (also measured with less copying).

Seems to be a social or dev skill issue rather than language design. Honestly most languages have an excellent tool for reuse - the function/method, which isn't used enough to remove all duplication as is.

We presented an exhaustive investigation of code cloning in GitHub for four of the most popular object-oriented languages: Java, C++, Python and JavaScript. The amount of file-level duplication is staggering in the four language ecosystems, with the extreme case of JavaScript, where only 6% of the files are original, and the rest are copies of those. The Java ecosystem has the least amount of duplication. These results stand even when ignoring very small files. When delving deeper into the data we observed the presence of files from popular libraries that were copy-included in a large number projects. We also detected cases of reappropriation of entire projects, where developers take over a project without changes. There seemed to be several reasons for this, from abandoned projects, to slightly abusive uses of GitHub in educational contexts. Finally, we studied the JavaScript ecosystem, which turns out to be dominated by Node libraries that are committed to the applications’ repositories.

Reading the conclusion again, they're capturing the existence of node_modules/, which has nothing to do with language design.
I mean, I use autocomplete for work in python, ruby, golang, C/C++, JavaScript, coffeescript, CSS and probably more in enacts.

The trick is the setup, but I've only had problems with minor edge cases (like coffeescript 2). Either way I'll spend an hour and use Elisp to fix it. Really nothing I've found is even close to as robust
Full stack dev. ~7 years of working experience, ~$35k + $1k benefit (year) in Italy
It is amazing how many simple tasks at a company can be done with Excel that as programmers we often write custom code for. When all you have is a hammer...

At the same time. I have seen banks transfer money between branches by literally FTP transferring an Excel file. At some point there has got to be a better way. At least use SFTP :)
Storing Light Waves as Sound for Energy-Saving Acoustic Memory
I don't see the argument above as casual vs. hardcore or indie vs. AAA.

It's about designing games primarily to empty your wallet with microtransactions rather than providing you with fun. Games that encourage addictive, even compulsive behavior that may seem fun for a while but will quickly turn you into a dopamine rat seeking for your next fix. If you're an addictive nature, which is whom the games industry are targeting with predatory practices. The whales that pay the bills.
> The electorate chose this. Freely and willingly.

I disagree with you.

In political systems that aren't effectively two party systems, parties that listen to what the population wants and needs emerge and get their share of the votes. These parties then get together and form a majority representing these needs in many ways. This makes listening to the population a winning strategy.

The US system is how much can you accommodate corporations held up against how little can you listen to the population and still get away with it. In a two party system, that is a lot.

I could write an example-scenario with two frozen pizza companies vs. 8 frozen pizza companies and which choices you'll end up with for dinner, but I think you get point.

It's called fair competition and America seems to have forgotten its benefits for the general population, both in politics and in business.

Pointing out people as idiots is not a solution. Pushing for systems that work, is.
> Big name founders, from eBay’s Pierre Omidyar to Elon Musk, are immigrants. If you count the first-generation offspring of immigrants, the number grows.

We should actually calculate the ratio of immigrants vs total population and compare it with the ratio of immigrant founders vs total founders. But it's something the article doesn't bother doing.

Obviously, if comparison was found to be not in favour of immigrants, I would expect a barrage of excuses, like "They didn't have had access to certain privileges! How can you expect them to have success at the same rate!", which defies the point of this article.

> Innovation is bred when diverse viewpoints intersect, and that only happens if you can get all of those diverse ideas in the room

only? We are now at the point where there can be innovation ONLY if there is diversity? :D
I find (given enough time for it that is), more and more, that if code is duplicated or bad or both, that I can rewrite it into some (unexisting) DSL that makes it elegant. Then when trying to rewrite it to the language at hand, it becomes (a lot more) inelegant again. So is low hanging fruit there an Alan Kay strategy of writing DSLs for specific domains (which would put languages like Lisp, Ocaml or Haskell in a good place) or should language designers find ways to make the language itself better for these kind of problems (and is that possible, for instance; advanced types OR elegant macros?).

The other comment about Django (which would also work for Rails); a lot of times, big enough libraries/frameworks written in a language, are actually DSLs which would suggest we lean toward the 'Alan Kay' 'make everything a DSL' solution. The mathematician/CS person in me wants the 'improve the language' solution. But low hanging fruit for language design I don't see here.
The fact that this is labeled as "low hanging fruit" tells us that the author has never designed or implemented a language.
What a nightmare. I'm sure there are use cases for a setup like this, but this is not the system I'd like to maintain. I use Jekyll because of it's simplicity. I edit my site in my favorite text editor and rsync to shared hosting.
I think there’s a much easier way to do this with Jekyll and s3_website. I describe the setup here: https://www.cannon.codes/static-site-generator-evaluation/
And the post, as advised, is not supposed to be accessible on the website, only by search engine
This article has the word "evil" in the title. It is explicitly painting the industry as malevolent.

To me, disruption is about trying to find better and more efficient ways of doing things. Not disparaging or scapegoating the people already in that industry.
Are you actually implying that my making a joke is evidence of some deep dark secret about my sexuality?
No, sorry, I don't get it at all. Stop trying to read "signals" and get people's actual consent before touching them. It's not difficult or complicated.
There are buildings that go higher than 1,800 feet^. There are many kinds of vehicles that could complete this mission, with some available for charter at very affordable rates. This is all part of why this project is fantastic. It's nonsensical in an exciting way. I really hope he launches (and doesn't die). Hell, I hope he proves the earth is flat.

^ He does plan to go higher in future missions, just to be fair. This is not passive flat earthism. He's starting a flat earth space program, not being trapped on a disc forever.
I like the idea of this, from a practical point of view maybe the first step is sharing datasets ...
Cool! I could see why this would work well for teams and collaboration.
Here's my hugo+aws pipeline for my personal blog.

Do editing, with hugo in server mode so I can WYSIWYG edit my pages. Then run a bash script:

#!/bin/bash

# build site from markdown + template
hugo ~/sitedir/

# post to S3 bucket which is a file storage service
aws s3 sync ~/sitedir/public s3:sitedirbuckket --recursive

# invalidate CDN distribution so content delivery is nice and fresh!
aws cloudfront create-invalidation --distribution-id XXXXXXXXXX --paths /*

echo -e "All done"
Out of curiosity, what's missing from it ? I've been meaning to use it but still haven't found actual uses, I'd love to see what others do with it.
This feels a lot like a submarine ad.

Also if this guy thinks he's going to escape silos by putting everything in the cloud, he's quite mistaken. The cloud is just code running somewhere else. It does not change fundamental computing paradigms.
People won't do that it's not good for their company's public image.
Been there done that.
PowerPoint, while popular, has no where near the widespread use of Excel. In most businesses, PowerPoint is the sort of thing you use once a month, once a week maybe if you are doing a lot of meetings. Excel gets used daily or even hourly by members of almost every department in businesses large and small.

I would agree with OP that Excel is the most-used programming environment of all time
> You’re a beekeeper in the making

Or just redditor.
I do like puns on reddit. I am not a native English speaker so those are some additional language fun.
Github Pages is missing a couple of features, namely:

* Build systems besides Jekyll

* HTTPS for custom domains

...but the second problem can easily be solved with Cloudflare and the first one can be solved with a git subtree push. Beyond this it's pretty fully featured.
> ISPs are closer to the state in most places

Depends on the structure, but a lot of them are inheritors of telcos, which were often nationalised and/or subject to state control, surveillance and censorship. I was thinking particularly of BT and its heir Openreach, which owns all the wires. While they may be privatized the oversight is a lot closer than that of SV startups.

Owning a lot of physical infrastructure and needing to dig up roads requires having a good working relationship with the authorities, at least. Whereas to be Facebook you don't even need a local presence in the country.

Or there are the various US telcos which effectively lobby for either direct monopoly grants from cities or laws against city-level broadband. This kind of thing: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-al...