skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could you get a little more specific? Are they managing inventory through spreadsheets? Or looking at financials?
Solar Power Is Burning Bright. But It’s Hardly Twilight for Fossil Fuels
Someone on this thread mentioned EasyMorph, a visual (low-code) tool for excel/db/etc data munging. I can't find that comment now but I thought it looked interesting.

Resubmitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16773686
Nice work! I did the 3 associate certs over about 3 months last summer using ACG. I've been in the industry for decades but never bothered to get a cert. Starting a new role and wanting to get into AWS was the impetus to learn; I figured a formal class was a good way to do it, and I might as well set the certifications as my goal.

Really enjoyed ACG and found it quite helpful.
Why don't you try your theory about it being impossible to prohibit photos/videos by wandering into a military facility with a camera and explaining to the angry men with guns that they can't legally interfere with you?

I'll wait for you to report back on how that goes.
Whoa!!! This sounds nefarious and also highly problematic. If employees can arbitrarily change names, how can anyone trust that they wouldn’t be able to change entire conversations, posts, media, etc., and shame someone (at best) or implicate someone as involved in a heinous crime or plotting one? It’s so bizarre if these are possible and have no oversight, policies and punishments.
if you work with contractors long enough, you learn to write snippets that you expect will get copypasta'd everywhere.

the incentive for them is not to make something great, but to just pump out whatever "works" as quickly as possible.
Ethnicity seems to me to be a sort of taxonomic hierarchy. Some ethnic groups are more closely related to each other than others. Ethnicities can be grouped together into families of closely related ethnicities, which in turn can often be further grouped into broader families of less closely related ethnicities; ethnicities can often be further subdivided into sub-ethnicities. Are Jews a single ethnicity, or a family of related ethnicities? You could ask the same question about the Han Chinese, or about Italians; it is somewhat arbitrary, and the question is influenced by politics – Italian nationalism emphasises the notion of a single Italian ethnicity, separatist movements such as Sicilian nationalism or the Lega Nord emphasise regional ethnic identities instead.

You want to focus on subjective questions of identity, but it isn't clear to me that all Jews have the same subjective sense of identity. Does a secular Zionist in Tel Aviv have the same subjective sense of identity as a Satmar anti-Zionist in Kiryas Joel? Certainly their "subjective sense of identity" has completely different ideological foundations. They likely wouldn't agree on who is a Jew either, since their different ideological foundations would lead them to different positions on issues such as conversion standards and patrilineal descent.
Lots of people simply do not like self serve. I get that companies want to cut costs, which is why we got endless telephone menu trees, then support web sites with crappy search, then automated telephone agents, then chat bots, and on and on. And the public has devised all these various tactics to skip that crap. I just want to talk to a damned human being rather than spend 10x the time navigating your poorly thought out Customer Avoidance Systems! Sometimes I need a drone and sometimes I need an expert. I have yet to see an automated system that could successfully determine which tier support I needed.
I disagree. I believe that the core of these problems are carbohydrates. Insulin spikes from carbohydrate consumption cause fat retention. Sugar doesn't create satiety, so it compounds eating.

The "it's an over-eating problem" fallacy keeps getting introduced by sugar companies. It happened in the states, then moved to South America, and is currently hitting India [1]. It's a playbook by the sugar industry that echoes of the tobacco industry's old tactics.

Suddenly, societies that have maintained healthy BMIs for thousands of years are having obesity problems as sugar gets introduced. They didn't develop gluttony overnight - it's a sugar problem.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/health/india-diabetes-jun...

Edit: Sugar is basically weaponized carbohydrates.
How you can get more out of AI research
All right, but apart from Vitamin D, magnesium, zinc, B12, K2, iron, iodine.... what have supplements ever done for us?
No, let them dig their own grave. The more they monitor, the more users will abandon them. Once they've lost enough users to limit the network effect their decline will be like that of Myspace. Facebook the company will probably survive due to their other assets - Instagram, Whatsapp and whatever they manage to buy in the mean time - but Facebook the product is destined for the graveyard where it should be buried in unconsecrated ground with a stake through its heart.
I am "conveniently" leaving it out because it is a vaguely worded "appears..." piece of journalese
which contradicts the rest of the article and established fact. Nobody has disputed that SpaceX contacted NOAA first, there's no dispute that they process 40-odd applications every year, no dispute that the policy of licensing remote sensing has been in effect for a long time, amended more than once and that recent moves in the legislature (recent as in a couple of years ago, so SpaceX really had time to notice) have been proposals to relax it rather than to strengthen it.

And yeah, also no dispute that the government grants missions planned by its own agencies a remote sensing license - can't imagine why you would expect it to be otherwise tbh? But agreed, enough indents :-)
Yeah this article is very confusing. I said it in an earlier comment, it wouldn't surprise me if another government agency (DoD, NSA, CIA) saw what SpaceX is doing, saw they didn't have a license, and got NOAA in trouble, and now they are trying to do their due diligence and got caught in a cross fire.
Volvo does it too, but nobody seems to be complaining about Volvo.
The perception of a culture problem on SO seems quite strong with a few people here. I'm sure bad things happen but it always seemed a) fairly rare and b) a price worth paying.... Without it, it would be like the Qlikview forums in no time! ;-)
There is something on the order of 10^100 (~2^300) bits of storage available at the Universe. Is the box larger or smaller than that?
I was so overwhelmed by the web page itself that I forgot to read the content first time round. Truly a thing of beauty.
Boy oh boy oh boy do I.

I was transitioning between teams and needed something to do in the meantime, so I got put on a testing and validation team for an internal product. I was to collaborate with our overseas IT team and figure out why their tests weren't catching bugs in production.

After two weeks of wrangling, hand wringing, and bad vibes, I finally got them to send me their test automation code and a link to their Jenkins where they were running their tests.

The Jenkins was in a sorry state: disk overflowing with garbage, 10+ releases behind, and not tied into our corporate LDAP (it was using local admin-everything accounts instead). But that didn't hold a candle to the test automation code itself.

It didn't compile.

No seriously, I spent two more weeks just trying to get it to compile on my laptop, and I could not make it work. Mind you, this was a pretty bog-standard setup (Python unittest-based suite, Selenium for frontend testing, and an in-house [but not terribly unusual] integration test library written in lua).

I never once got it to compile, all the while their engineers insisting that I must be doing something wrong because it works fine on their Jenkins server, as evinced by their test reports being generated every night.

Turns out that wasn't true either, though: they had built a series of obfuscations such that the Jenkins job scanned the written tests, marked most of them as passing, and randomly failed the rest. This had been going on for over a year and a half and apparently no one had noticed. They were faking test results and slowing down developers because no one could figure out why tests were failing randomly.

The worst part is, when confronted with the problem, their defense was that they were worried no one was reading their reports, so they did it once a year ago and forgot to turn it off. Problem is that the report generation was fairly sophisticated with quite a few special clauses to handle specific tests which had to "pass" or "fail" in a particular way. So they clearly invested some time into it.

They finally admitted they were in too deep a couple weeks after that initial confrontation, and fired from our team. But because they're the favorite consultancy of another manager at the company, they continue to this day to consult for the company. It's really sad.
> The driver had about a second to see that and correct.

And if there had been a crash, Tesla probably would have said that the driver had an unobstructed view of the barrier for several seconds before impact (conveniently omitting at what point AP started to swerve).
PeoplePerHour’s Organic Search Strategy, indexable internal search results
No, not even close to that. English has 2 strengths very hard to overcome: it is both "cool" and useful. And those strengths are increasing a lot, compared to other languages.

There is an huge amount of pop entertainment convincing kids that English is the "cool" language to learn. Before it used to be just pop music and Hollywood crap. Now is YouTube, memes and software. Also, it is the language of "cool" brands from Nike to Starbucks. No other language comes close to this brainwashing.

And then there is English usefulness. It used to be the lingua-franca for just business, international relations and science. Now it is a lot more than that: it is the language of international social networks and forums such as HN and Reddit. For any kind of culture, technique or know-how someone would want to learn English. It is probably even more useful than math. In most countries, people will earn substantially more money if they know English. Hint: do you know any non-english programming language? Even those created outside of English cultures (e.g.: Python, Ruby, Lua, Coq) are written in English.

Edit: an anecdote that helps understand this. Portuguese and Spanish are "sibling languages", very similar to each other. It would make sense for people knowing one of these to learn the other, since it would be both easy and useful. However, all over Latin America or the Iberian peninsula, people put more money and effort into learning English than their other sibling language.
Your story/writing is more amazing for me than IDE itself. Awesome man and sorry for your breakup.... Didn't feel good about it.
Google App Engine has worked really well for me as a Heroku replacement. Check it out if you haven’t.
Somewhat similarly, I once hired an employee who didn't have the skills we needed but said he was motivated to learn, seemed like a good fit from a personality standpoint, and had really great communication during the interview process.

We spent a year trying to bring him up to speed, waiting through all sorts of excuses, and worse, all of his communications were terrible (bad spelling, inability or unwillingness to use a spell checker, bad grammar). It was so bad that we eventually made him get any communications that went to clients (~30% of his job) be reviewed by a coworker before they were sent out.

At the last "PIP" meeting we had I asked him: "I went back and looked at all of the e-mails we exchanged during your interviewing, and they didn't have any spelling or grammar or punctuation problems. How did you do that?" "Oh, my wife wrote those."
Yeah, I have a recent Subaru with those features. It beeps when I'm backing out of the garage and there's someone driving or biking up the road before they even come into my sight lines.

It can help keep me in a lane, either by beeping or nudging the steering wheel if I drift - I only turn on active lane assist on long highway stretches, it is more of a security blanket than anything else - just in case I space out for a sec, here's another layer of defense.

Adaptive cruise is also great. Between the two, in long road trips I can put the car in a travel lane and just go. I still have to attend to my surroundings, but it is a lot easier to focus on that when I'm not worried about accidentally creeping up to 90 mph because suddenly there's nobody in front of me.

I also had the auto brake feature activate once when a car in front of me stopped unexpectedly. I was in the middle of braking, but the brake pedal depressed further and there was a loud alarm beep.

None of these are autopilot, and honestly I wouldn't want autopilot until it is legit reliable. Instead, these are defense in depth features. The computer helps prevent certain mistakes as I make them, but never is in primary control of the vehicle.
Same here. Devs can't even mount thumbdrives. Which is fine for us, we don't need them, but it prevents some funny business should one of our laptops get stolen.
That has the big disadvantage that if you switch from AWS to Google Cloud, you need to notify all of your customers about the changed policy and ask them for consent again. I have not seen any Privacy Policy yet which lists the service providers.
did it make money?

how did it interface to the poker-playing site? was there an api, or were you masquerading as the client?
I remember that too, there was a brief time between the comp.lang.xyz usenet groups and SO where the google cache for EE was a great resource for me.
Hey! I scan the entire contents of the table. I have a cache layer in memory anyway so that works quickly. If you have multiple types in the same column, it just treats the type as "object". If you connect, and start entering various types into your columns, you'll notice in the object explorer that it updates the type information.
There's been quite a bit of open source work in this space. https://github.com/dinedal/textql runs queries against CSVs on the command line. http://sheetjs.com/sexql/ runs queries against excel files in the web browser.
Does Tesla actually do this? They should detect hotspots of people deactivating Autopilot (like in this video) and make Autopilot deactivate itself a few miles before

First we had the barrier crash. Then there was the video of someone reproducing the barrier crash and manually emergency braking. Now we have this video. One thing I've learned in my software career is that if one of our customers reports a bug, 10,000 others have encountered it but not bothered reporting it. So why hasn't Tesla rolled back the software yet?!
I drive a lot with my GPS (TomTom) on and it rarely gets the lane I'm in wrong, usually that only happens in construction zones.

So even if the error can be large in practice it often works very well.

It would be very interesting to see the input data streams these self driving systems rely on in case of errors, and in the case of accidents there might even be a legal reason to obtain them (for liability purposes).
There’s something particularly creepy in what Zuckerberg said and what the folks in Myanmar claim.

Zuck says “we detected”, whereas the folks in Myanmar say they explicitly tried to raise the issue.

Having a ‘report and moderate’ capability seems like one thing but from the above, it seems FB believes in constant monitoring and (presumably) censoring — which is something else entirely. Combine that with a country where “Facebook is the internet”, and it’s quite scary.
Great points. The very existence of the placebo effect proves that "inert" substances do, in fact, work for some people, even if the effect is purely psychological.

Some vitamins do work for some people. And science is about finding what works.
I hope Microsoft gives you a ton of money and hires you to make Excel like this. VBA is so crap. And this looks amazing.
I'm actually fine with that

It will end up being in tonnes of films, articles, everywhere. So long as it's pervasive people will just end up learning it naturally, it doesn't matter what the origins are or what it's called

So long as communication increases and barring conflict, we'll all eventually find a happy medium for inter-communication
Those are interesting but they're rare exceptions. IBM do these amazing things on super high end chips that very few buy, but the commodity chips that power the PCs and the datacenters of the world (stuck at a little faster than 3GHz, give or take) just don't rely on that stuff very much.
Slow Growth Is Becoming a Human Trend Too
Grand Renaissance Dam Official Website Launched
In order to view an answer on Experts Exchange, you had to subscribe.
> Like phone taps, electronic bugs and good old fashion in-person surveillance? How is that "dark" exactly?

There was a time even before telephones and electronics.

I'm much more comfortable with law enforcement having to go back to using electronic bugs, in-person surveillance, and physical evidence gathering. Those things don't scale and don't have the security implications of their desired backdoors.
It's the old problem that the people who are best at answering questions are not best at moderating. Two completely distinct skill sets that SO conflates, so they don't have to bother with either moderating it themselves (which would probably be impossible) or find a better working mechanism. It's the same problem Wikipedia has, which makes them loose new editors all the time.
An accretion disk is not a black hole. Current physics have no other explanation for the disks, but it does not mean that the black holes are really there.

There is also some lack of precision on the LIGO experiment that does not invalidate all reasonable alternative explanations.

As people already said, the evident is overwhelming on the side of black holes existing. But we don't have any definitive measurement of them.
Right yeah -- that's actually one of my main issues with Stripe right now. Hopefully they add it soon.
Comparing your insides to other people's outsides (the dark side of LinkedIn)
> It also has a 'bug', where at a certain location the lines on the road trigger the emergency braking feature, every single time.

Ouch. That's really harsh on following traffic. Now, obviously they shouldn't be following closely enough for that to be a problem but in practice I'm pretty sure if I stomped hard on the brake a couple of times per day with regular traffic following it would not take long before someone would ram into the back of my car and if not then the one behind it.

It's also a great way to start traffic jams.
All of my CentOS rsync mirrors are public on purpose. Are those files being counted too?
Thanks and congrats to you too!:)
I've had colleagues believe bitbucket is a replacement for git.

I had to explain there's a quite big difference between the two. I assume he had mixed up github with git and correctly deduced bitbucket is an alternative to github.

Also, I got way too excited over the git news to notice that it was github publishing ...
Rules/purity oriented folks (what you call "The Pedant Police") do make it harder to use . . . for askers and a little bit for answerers. But they make it a lot easier to use for people who want to find already-written answers to their questions. As Jeff says in TFA, that's the tradeoff they want to make:

> Most importantly, we realized that each question is asked by one person but the answers are seen by thousands of people who found it through a search. So we decided to optimize everything to be useful for the thousands, not the individual. We literally have 1000 visitors for every person who asks a question. That’s why we sort the answers by votes. It’s also why we optimize for questions and answers that will be helpful to other people, later.
Introducing CryptoHygiene
Unless of course, the research is promising and can be integrated into the product somehow.
You can escape an asterisk by separating it with spaces like this: * . Then it won't appear as cursive, even if you use * several * of them.

The HN formatting rules are really minimal: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
Correct, and excess carbs only exacerbate the problem for people who can't process them properly.

You can eat a high calorie, low carbohydrate diet and still gain weight and develop related health problems.

Likewise, some people can eat a restricted calorie diet, but if they still eat a lot of carbs, will develop health issues.
This might be a dumb question (I spend most of my days in Ruby), why can't this compile with gcc and make? It's all just C (and a few files C++) right?
Has your site been hacked? The top trending articles are things like "Making $125,000/Month Selling Hacker TLDs", "How To Create Squeeze Pages The Stupidly Simple Way", and "Why Invest In Gold? There Are Several Reasons…". It looks like there's a big problem with spam there.

I would contend that trying to get Twitter followers with content like that is going to go quite badly.
Ahem. That is purely semantics -- ABS makes the car perform more like what you are conditioned to expect (under normal driving conditions). That's the whole success of ABS; it saves lives precisely because it conveys the illusion of you still being 100% under direct control when in fact you would be careening out of control otherwise.
Just so enjoyable to watch the progress. And the use of a 5.25" floppy, well, was something (don't let that fool u, just an aside.)
See point 3. At least in CS, at least for the moment, there's insane demand for CS educators. Maybe not research track at top 20 R1, but definitely requires a PhD.
Experts Exchange used to cost money to use. (a subscription)
From a "lurker" perspective who often stumbles on SO after a web search it's really a great resource.

On the other hand I never actually contributed anything to the website... because it won't let me. One day I stumbled upon a question regarding some problem I had, the accepted answer had a C code snippet that contained an error. I thought I'd be a good netizen and decided to create an account to submit a correction. It turns out that it wouldn't let me make an edit that was less than 6 character long (why? It was just a one character typo). So I decided to add a comment pointing it out, hoping that somebody would be able to fix it for me. You can't comment without a certain reputation threshold.

So basically if I get it right if you have a new account you can only ask questions or answer them. Except if like me you only end up on SO from your search engine and generally end up on already-answered questions (or questions you don't know the answer to since you're looking for them) then there's nothing for you to do. I'm sure they must have done a lot of testing to end up with this system but it basically means that I'll probably never contribute anything to their website.
I don’t think there’s any sauce you could pour over a chain gang of immature programmers to make them palatable.

When building teams, I deliberately aim for a mix of developers of more and less experience, as that is a more realistic sustainable steady state than a half dozen superstars.
Dunno what's proposed but hashing personal data doesn't work in terms of anonymity, due to the small space of the said data.

In the days of crypto currencies, brute forcing the hashes (imagine names, day of birth, city) is a trivial task.
Brain connectivity reflects human aesthetic responses to music (2016)
It's interesting to see all the negative comments about the SO culture here. I just hadn't really noticed it but maybe it is a problem for beginners. I generally find what I'm looking for and when I post a question I try to research first to avoid spam. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?