skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. Those are great products, if you have the staff to support and use them, but this is rarely the case. Every time I see a company implement them, they think it's going to be a silver bullet to reporting and analytics, and most of the time it just causes a mess, because no one really knows how to properly use them, or if someone does, that person doesn't have the bandwidth to keep up with the entire organization's needs. Excel is amazing, it's relatively easy to use, has immense power for dealing with calculations and graphs, and it is cheap. An organization's problem isn't excel, its the fact that they keep 20 copies of the same data and no one is keeping track of which is the source of truth.
Sugar Industry Long Downplayed Potential Harms
Well that's the thing, it seems that only a few types are actually used because of technical advantages. Phillips heads should have been super niche, and we should have just standardized on a happy medium of "not too expensive to make, not too bad". Instead, we have all these thousands of types, most of which are minor improvements on previous types.

Relevant XKCD of "now there are eleven standards".
That sounds really bad for the SF Bay Area (unless you have some equity or something).
Amazon launches new cloud storage service for U.S. spy agencies
I’ve worked in many large companies, and I have never seen one using SAP or other large tools as single sources. It always has been excel. From my experience due to 3 reasons

- excel is much more flexible, I can add a column, delete those I don’t want etc

- speed: many of those large corporate systems are just damn slow, maybe because of stupid configurations, but still often very slow an annoying

- analysis: It's easy to do some basic analysis without studying CS
Dell Outlet [1][2] typically has offers over and above their usual array of discounts. I'm holding off on a laptop purchase until tomorrow (Thursday) when their deals are announced. They had an email signup page for BF deals but I can't find it right now.

[1] Dell Outlet Home: http://www.dell.com/uk/dfh/p/

[2] Dell Outlet Business: http://www.dell.com/uk/dfb/p/

(Disclaimer: not affiliate links, I have no connection to Dell, their products or services.)
From the article: "After Uber’s disclosure Tuesday, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman launched an investigation into the hack, his spokeswoman Amy Spitalnick said. The company was also sued for negligence over the breach by a customer seeking class-action status."
Google Promises to Push a Software Fix for Its Pixel 2’s Audio Call Bug Soon
On the Role of Text Preprocessing in Neural Network Architectures
Yeah, but we have 100 years of theory (backed with evidence) on market failures, so we know what to regulate.
The issues raised in this article are far less about failings of Excel but rather typical failures of business to plan long term and put effort/resources into comprehensive solutions.
>Digging Linus's actionable feedback out of the ad-hominem attack can be challenging.

They're not really that separate. He's being totally disingenuous and still letting his own fragile ego get involved.
So what are you saying? Surveyor pay is booming now, or no surveying is needed any more? ('Needed' as in, people are actually paying to get it done, not 'needed' as in 'people theorize that it would be useful')
What a weird example. Steve Jobs wasn't a coworker or had any position of power over her, he just gave a lecture she attended. Sounds perfectly compatible with rayiner's position.
Ask HN: Learning Unity for mobile game dev in 2017
What are the best resources for learning Unity for game dev? Most of the tutorials, courses and articles seem a bit dated.
nice idea and execution! well done.
Congratulations, you're passive-aggressive here without any reason to be.

Explains the downvote flood pretty well.
The sad part about Mercurial is that it is losing the battle against git because it was the better tool at the outset.

The well-documented shittyness of the git user experience was the key to its success because it forced the creation of shiny wrappers and integrations to hide the abomination within. And this combination of gloss and peer pressure now manages to convince people that git is "good".

Worse is better indeed...
A combination. The actual API Reference is using a documentation CMS the other stuff is home-brewed.
For safety-critical systems, resetting on a fault is very much factored into the worst-case response time and expected behaviour.

PANIC on fault is exactly what you design into the systems.
This article somewhat blew my mind. I always thought everyone sees this visual noise and kinda assumed it's like a digital camera in the dark...
Why Russia is sending robotic submarines to the Arctic
> You can socialize without bringing sex into the equation

Of course. This is the safest policy for men in the workplace, for sure.

> (which is how guys interact with each other).

Well, not really? Even assuming no attraction, some guys in all-male social settings bring sex into things fairly frequently, both in general conversation, and in teasing each other. The latter of these is even intended to cause discomfort, and that often happens among friends.

I think it's a really bad idea to say to men: just act the way you would if there was no sexual attraction. That's a good way to guarantee a relatively high perception of sexual harassment, even where none was consciously intended. It's not enough to avoid intentional sexual harassment. Men must not even come close to anything we see as a line not to be crossed. If there is a power imbalance, the line seems to blur for a lot of people, meaning that men must then restrict their behavior near it to continue to be clearly on the non-harassing side.

Good news, though: the vast majority of the behavior that is being called out in the last few months seems so clearly on the harassing side of the line that a bit of caution would seem to go far in keeping clearly on the non-harassing side. For the most part, I assume these men were not surprised that they were seen as harassing. I don't think we're at the point where men have to go full Pence to avoid perceptions or accusations of sexual harassment.
I found it still creates those addictive little dopamine hits that prevents you from really being able to easily disengage, slow down, and think deeply. It keeps the addiction alive. It's useful for times when you need to respond quickly to messages, emails, and such, like during big deals or launches, but otherwise, I throw my smart watch in the drawer in favor of a mechanical one. I also aggressively uninstall apps that attempt to grab my attention, rather than waiting for me to call on them. Couldn't be happier with these decisions.
> Further, Microsoft engineers have said that hardware overlays are coming, in which the graphics card pulls content from the windows as it's sending the video out the port, rather than taking an extra frame time to paint the windows onto a composited surface.

So they are copying the Xerox Alto.
Because Linus hates them? Make Brad Spengler the primary maintainer of the Linux kernel and we may actually get self-driving cars that don't kill us when they get hacked in 5 years.
Why do you think they're actually trying to follow it?
Mastodon is one technical solution -- it makes me think of space exploration through Lagrange points. But have you figured out how to make it an actual solution?
Every email reply becomes an independent fork of the data inside the spreadsheet. The issue is storing and sending the file locally, and the solution is storing it in a centralized location. Cloud storage is often used towards this end, but on-premises file shares work very well too.

This is one of those solved problems that companies inexplicably keep working to solve again.
I swear, if 00s and 10s Silicon Valley ruins the freedoms enjoyed by the computing industry by being short-sighted, it will be the greatest grudge I hold in life.
5 USES OF OCR THAT INSTANTLY IMPROVE USER EXPERIENCE
Ask HN: Does any body work on a huge (and old) code base that is not a mess?
Longer Version Of My Question:
Is there anybody who works for a company where there is a huge code base that has been around for a few years and is NOT a mess to deal with? If your code base is NOT a mess, what are you doing to keep it that way (functional programming, OO, training)?

Still Longer Version:
I am trying to understand the state of the industry.

Systems will always get more complex. There is no doubt about that. But I am interested in knowing if there is something that teams are doing to ensure that years after working on a code base, new changes "feel easy".

"Feel Easy" would be explained as: A new change comes along and it is clear and apparent that they just have to add a function somewhere and they are good to go. (Things like TDD help with giving confidence. But, TDD does not catch it all. So, even with TDD we still have to cross our fingers.)

"Not Feeling Easy" is when a new change comes along and it feels like: "Okay, to make that work, I am going to have to go check X and Y. Then I will cautiously make the change and hope that nothing else goes wrong."

Design Principles In OO are supposed to give this to us. But what is the reality in the wild? Does everybody feel like they have delivered on this promise? Or do changes still feel difficult to deal with?

Is this an inherent problem to code/programmers/human nature. Or maybe it is not a problem. Maybe there are teams and companies where the above does not happen. (I have not seen any. I have been in the field for quite a bit. But is it my exposure that is lacking? Or is this a problem everywhere?)
Your disagreement is worth the price of NetFlix subscription that you canceled when NetFlix caved. Oh wait, you have not canceled it. So your disagreement is worth zero, which means that you do not, actually, care.
This is a key point. It's easy to branch data, but painful to merge it.
Hard to know what goes on behind the scenes in any particular case but I think this "discrimination" goes both ways.

For content like that to be a first-class citizen on iOS/tvOS, the providers (Spotify, etc) would need to expose the relevant metadata, APIs, etc to Apple.

I know that on Apple TV, there were a lot of providers who balked at providing that information, preventing Apple from fully implementing relevantly simple features like system-wide content search.

I certainly don't blame the providers, because they wanted to maintain more branding and autonomy rather than being a faceless Yet Another Source of Content on AppleTV, because at that point they'd be essentially faceless interchangeable.
Joy and frustration of putting 34,000 lines of Haskell into production
I wonder how practical it would be to automate all the rodent handling/experimenting? Because that seems like it'd be the only way to properly remove such unaccountable influences, like people smelling of cat/giving off different smells and thus influencing the reactions of the animals.

Couldn't it also be possible that rodents reacting like that is the result of established practices? I.e.: Rodents get only handled by females, rodents adapt to that female smell while reacting differently to the male smell due to its unfamiliarity?
I agree with those 3 reasons, but I wouldd add a fourth: easy to create your own version of the truth.

I'm not implying this is due to nefarious reasons (though sometimes it is): sometimes the official version of the truth is just not adequate.
JS was drafted in a week.

Node is a band aid on top of a tech stack that webdev is stuck with.

Node was done with concurrency in mind, JS wasn't.

Compare apples to apples:

How does Erlang's ecosystem stack up when it comes to concurrency? How does it compare to Node? Do you even care given your prejudices regarding JS?
That's a hard question to answer and depends on your size and what you really need.

For small companies, Excel may really be all that you need. But at a certain size, you might want to use something like PowerBI instead since it will also pull directly from the database and you can share the dashboards you create very easily. Large companies like the article are referring to might be able to get by with PowerBI (Microsoft would certainly argue there are still plenty of places where it works) or ERP/HR tools more specifically designed for certain uses.
Linus: Do no harm! Except against security people. I'd like to harm them a lot!
Stack pointer manipulation is the entry point for an extremely large subset of security issues.
> You should maybe also remind yourself that some people are not in the position to move around the country.

After living years in Syria and then in Peru, I can say that small towns folks most likely to leave to big cities are not the ones that are well off but the poorest one on the contrary in order to find a job to sustain them. So yeah, I would say it's mostly rich people that can afford to stay in small towns, the rest move to bigger places where there is more chance in finding people willing to invest in them even for low skill workers.
> you also need to guarantee that fst (0, ⊥) returns 0 rather than ⊥

Why guarantee 0 instead of ⊥? I'd say it's due to a general agreement that ⊥ has the lowest desirability: if we have the option of returning ⊥ or something else, we should pick that something else. Non-strict evaluation strategies are the most extreme choice, but most languages consider the desirability of strictness to be stronger than than the undesirability of ⊥.

I don't think exceptions are so simple though. Imagine a situation like this:

getUserById :: [UserDetails] -> UserId -> User
getUserById db id = MkUser id (getName details) (getDOB details)
where details = head (filter ((== id) . getID) db)

On one hand, we may want this to fail fast: if `head` throws an `EmptyList` exception, we want to propagate that to the whole expression. Since getUserById might throw, we can wrap it in exception handlers and deal with missing users appropriately.

On the other hand, we may want to ignore exceptions in sub-expressions that we don't care about, e.g. having `fst (0, Exception)` reduce to 0. This seems trickier for `getUserById`, since we might do a bunch of processing which only needs the ID, and end up triggering the `EmptyList` exception far away, deep in the heart of a pure-looking function. I can think of three solutions to this:

- Wrap exception handlers around the subsequent steps. This smells funny, since those steps might be completely pure.

- Jump back to the original exception handler. Such non-local jumps may be very hard to understand, plus the handler would need to work in arbitrary contexts; all it can really do is return a different value of the same type (e.g. some predetermined default), or throw a different exception (which just defers the problem) or produce ⊥.

- Mark potentially-exceptional values somehow, so we can track their propagation through the program, and handle them if needed. That doesn't seem any different than `Maybe` or `Either`, perhaps modulo some lifting.

Of course, the situation becomes even more complicated if an expression contains many different exceptions!

> Automatic parallelisation of functional languages is academic.

Note I said "attractive", not "automatically solves all problems" ;) Even with "manual" parallelism, like `par`, map/reduce, etc. it's nice that these don't alter the semantics.

It also simplifies compiler optimisations, and helps programmers reason about when they will/won't fire.
Google has been tracking Android users even with location services turned off
How to remove fake profiles on dating websites
Demysitifying pandas and numpy filtering
Which witch-hunt? The only people being accused seem to have been obviously over all reasonable limits. A side discussion about workplace relationships, without mentioning any names, is not a witch-hunt.
For safety-critical systems, resetting on a fault is very much factored into the worst-case response time and expected behaviour.

PANIC on fault is exactly what you design into the systems.

What you find is that the truly safety-critical portion of the system is running on a microcontroller and the UI (which is not safety-related) can run on Windows or Linux.
The Future of Languages in Visual Studio – Language Server Protocol in VS
> Keep running your app although integrity corruption within the application happened is putting user data at risk.

If user data is continually backed up to a remote site it's not going to be at risk from a local bug is it? Bugs exist in all software, Users are going to be be more visibly frustrated from their Apps frequently crashing then the extremely unlikely scenario where a detected bug corrupts their "3 days long presentation". They're going very unhappy if the cause of their frequent data loss was due to a user-hostile setting to hard crash on the first detectable bug.

> Microsoft have invented "Application Recovery and Restart" exactly for this purpose.

From Microsoft website:

> An application can use Application Recovery and Restart (ARR) to save data and state information before the application exits due to an unhandled exception or when the application stops responding.

- https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/cc9...

i.e. restarting Apps due to "unhandled exception or when the application stops responding" in which case the App is in an unusable state and ARR kicks in to try auto recover it for minimal user disruption. The focus on providing a good UX, not a miserable crash-prone experience where users use their devices in fear that at anytime anything they're working on can be terminated abruptly without warning.
>China does not have net neutrality. Almost everything coming into the country from outside is utterly filtered to hell and back.

The UK does have net neutrality. The UK internet is still loosely censored. I understand that a monopoly might mean a non-neutral net could be privately censored, and therefore functionally similar, but this is a distinct issue from state censorship.
It's such a bizarrely difficult uphill battle. We have Office 365, with a damned good web editor, and the ability to save directly to OneDrive/Sharepoint from the desktop client, with the versioning that that supports, and we still end up with shit emailed all over and files with version-12.xlsx and -$DATE.xlsx saved here, there, and everywhere.
Apple is more of a lifestyle brand than a hardware company.

Edit: I was beat to the punch.
It's not really a dystopia if we can already free ourselves from blobware (well, with old enough processors that is).
We use Netlify and find there are quite often (every few weeks) outages and caching issues.
AT&T is rapidly becoming what it once was...

I'm more and more convinced that this was always the plan. The primary effect of the Telecom Act of 1996 has been to extract hundreds of billions of dollars from investors. All of the CLECs and other competitive types of telcos that sprouted in the spring of that law's optimism have gradually been wound back into the monopoly. Ma Bell (still for the moment two "Daughters Bell") has paid pennies on the dollar for equipment, marketing, vendor agreements, customers, etc. as these erstwhile competitors have gradually succumbed to the monopoly's failure to substantially abide by (and regulators' failure to enforce!) any of the pro-competitive measures in that law.

In retrospect, it was inevitable. Therefore, it was planned from the beginning. Telco executives and bankers have personally extracted billions from all the mergers. Generations of citizens have swallowed the fiction that we ever tried telco competition in USA. Strictly regulated POTS has been replaced with totally unregulated "information services". Perennially-unprofitable operations like FairPoint and Hawaiian Telcom have been unloaded to fools like Carlyle. The inconvenient wall between local and long-distance is gone. The expensive nerds at Bell Labs got sold, so the world can look elsewhere for subsidized progress in basic technology. All in all, a pretty good deal for Ma Bell! Since it happened over the course of decades and Americans have short memories (and since the media that could remind us doesn't want to cross her), we didn't even notice it.
Oh, that. I always just call that AP. I'm glad you guys & gals got quality libraries on the other side of the pond. I can't speak for EU but here in NL they're dwindling both in quality as well as in size and amount. I find that problematic, as there are two big interest groups who benefit from public libraries: the poor, and the elder.
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Dude, my whole point revolves around the fact that the most prevalent
behaviour for a given OS is OS-specific, which is a fucking tautology. What
kind of feedback you expect me to accept from somebody who tries to make me
believe the tautology is false?

Not to mention that the somebody tries to imply that I don't have enough
knowledge about topic I'm quite sure I have, without ever pointing any error
on my side, beside the tautology thing above.
I'm French (and we're not exactly puritan about sexual undertones in the social context) and I guess it all boils down to whether or not the huggee actually wants to be hugged by the hugger.

Hugging by itself is harmless, but when you're physically embracing someone and forcing a hug on them (especially if you're in a position of power) you're basically robbing them from their chance to exercise free will, which is of course problematic.
it's not always actionable, but the insight gained by actively analyzing/questioning/doubting the messaging from upper management is useful for a. keeping one's sanity, b. scheduling an exit, c. meaningful discussion, d. identifying opportunities within the organization, and e. entertainment value (stories to share with SO).
Maybe. But if you are using PyCharm it will be hard to get used to Emacs. It takes a while to get to a place where Emacs makes more sense than a good IDE. PyCharm is very good at what it does.
Anecdote about a bad case: I was in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress a couple years back and Google insisted I was in Milan, because the rental wifi was from there (I assume).
Teach people how to use excel properly:

- treat inputs and outputs separately

- always use simple tables for input (no breaks, first lines are titles, basic vlookups for relationships, etc.)

- use pivot tables to summarize the tables, and build reports on top of the pivot tables.

EDIT: BTW, on a personal level, I've moved to CSV/Jupyter Notebooks combo, but I have no hope that my fellow non-tech workers will do the same...
Vim-material: Vim colorscheme inspired by equinusocio's Material Theme
Macroscopic superpositions require tremendous measurement devices
The End of Net Neutrality as We Know It
> ...allows entities with deep pockets to find loopholes that don't exist for normal citizens.

The biggest "loophole" is employer payed benefits are untaxed while the same benefits payed out of pocket by the employee are taxed. The political prospects for changing the law here seem bleak.

You can see this played out in the current tax reform debate. Most of the added/eliminated taxes fall in the "eliminating loopholes" category. Here on HN, the proposals have been criticized on the whole.