skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While everything, including the Wikipedia definition of SQL defines it as tied to relational databases, one of our industry's biggest flaws is not realizing that the basic concept of a Structured Query Language is that it can handle nearly all types of structures, including non-relational ones.

Take a look at the most recent versions of the SQL standard, say SQL:2016, and you see it handles document type data (JSON) pretty well too. The syntax isn't what we're used to, but it works pretty well.

I know that SQL can do more when you separate its conceptual foundation from relational databases. It's an expression language, an interface language to structured data.

I used to work on a platform that could translate SQL into NoSQL databases and SQL databases alike, it involves translating the expression into something that fits the native data model. For something similar look at Apache Drill, Dremio, Hive or PrestoDb and how they hide different types of databases behind interfaces that make them compatible with SQL.

I can admit, shoehorning SQL as it is onto a non-relational source (ex. Graph databases or search) isn't totally clean. But I believe it can evolve further as a standard to address that.

It requires more work in middleware to interface between SQL expressions and heterogeneous technology. And getting creative with the language constructs themselves. The power of data projection, data shaping and filtering alone, not to mention aggregation, etc. is undeniable in my opinion.

Disclaimer: I used to work for a company that built data federation software which supported SQL in front of heterogeneous sources. So what I am saying I know to be factual in most cases (although difficult!).
It's a problem of the english language. But it's stupid nonetheless.
Yep I was thinking weight.
Wow, now I know where the term 'clicker' came from.

Funny that they mention sunlight changing the channel on the original optical sensor-based systems. Even in the 80s I could change channels on the VCR by strobing a maglight across the IR receiver. I guess the flashlight emitted enough IR or the IR sensor was not selective enough about what wavelengths it received.

As a kid of the 80s (with a late 70s TV in the family), I always left the TV on '3' for the RF adapter from the VCR, and used the VCR (with its IR remote) as the tuner, to change channels. Of course, I still did most of my watching on my back, with my feet up against the VCR to change channels, and I could reach up with my leg to turn the volume knob on the TV.
A/UX had a tool like this called Commando (you can see it in the third screenshot on this page: http://toastytech.com/guis/aux3.html ).
I think that's more of a sign that most people don't need more than 4GB to 8GB of RAM, and that storage isn't about TB anymore but about speed (HDD vs SSD).

SSDs are roughly 100x faster than HDDs, so they're superior despite offering less TB. Unless you're a gamer constantly downloading new 50GB games, most people are fine with ~300GB of storage.

People want faster storage, as opposed to more storage.
I feel like there used to be more variety and weirdness in the art style. Something like Plague Spitter https://bit.ly/2PWwvyf or Stasis https://bit.ly/2ovqWdu wouldn't happen anymore. Most of the art these days feels like generic fantasy art that could be painted on the side of a van.

I will acknowledge this may be totally unfair, old-timer nostalgia.
I've been using Rails since before 1.0 and the upgrade pain has decreased significantly over time. The worst upgrade I had was 3.0 to 3.1 where there was a performance regression that caused my test suite to go from 15 mins to about 8 hours on ruby 1.8.7, so I had to simultaneously upgrade to 1.9.3 at the same time. That involved YAML parser changes which I didn't catch before corrupting some serialized data in the DB.

Since that time both ruby and rails have stabilized their upgrades significantly. The biggest issue since then was updating to strong params, and that was only an issue for apps with a large CRUD surface area.

These days I think Rails is the perfect balance of stable and flexible for a wide swath of prototypes and apps. The areas where I'd look for an alternative would be web sockets, heavy concurrency (ie. needing more than background workers), or where raw compute is the bottleneck.
>a lot of the concepts Rails supports are antiquated

Can you provide some examples? Rails is quite forward thinking when you consider Action Cable and upcoming Active Storage.
Ben Heck

Console mods, general hacks and pinball!
I've downvoted you due to the combative tone of your question.
Anything that requires auth or database access requires setup that a lot of dev will get wrong.

E.g : sqlalchemy sessions are very often badly handled. Of course you could write sql by hand, but then you loose the entire ecosystem of blueprints.
I'm not sure how it's meaningless. When we're talking about a concept such is free speech, there is no point of "within reasonable bounds... the law", at least in an ideological frame. The only bounds are those of any greater freedom, meaning do as you like as long as you're not transgressing on someone else's. Freedom of expression using ones own means is an absolute freedom that should be self-evident and self-defined.
Smartphone use is the symptom, not the cause of loneliness. Young people today are forbidden the tools used by past generations to counter loneliness. Ask an urban highschooler how often they just hung out at a friend's house, or in a public place, for more than an hour or two. Teenagers today are busy. They have homework and courses to do after school. They are supervised, chaperoned, by adults far more than previous generations. The smartphone is the place they get to chat with friends out parental earshot.

Even when they have the time, many normal activities are now forbidden. Parents don't leave teenagers home alone on weekends anymore. House parties are unheard of. Teenager-friendly places like arcades, malls, even local movie theaters are disappearing. And the personal transport, cars, that once knitted teenage culture together are disappearing. Cars are expensive, risky, and put kids in more regular contact with police than is safe. So they stay home. All of these things are replaced by the new malls: whatsapp and snapchat.

Teenagers are not being drawn to smartphones, they are fleeing to them,
I meant that as, "one of" the steps. Not that the entire thing was one step.
A few years ago I picked up a $300 Chromebook, spent $50 to upgrade the SSD size (swapped the SSD card in it) and now I run GalliumOS on it (native xubuntu but optimized for Chromebooks).

So for $350 you get a 1080p IPS panel laptop that weighs under 3 pounds and has an SD card, headphone jack and other goodies. It easily runs a bunch of Dockerized web apps without being slow.

One of the best portable computing devices I ever spent $ on. I still use it almost every day 2.5 years later.

Details can be found at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo...
Pre-Satya Microsoft had an odd combination of paranoia and blindness regarding the rise of browser applications.

Blindness: I was in a Microsoft VP’s office when he said he was downsizing the IE effort because “the browser is done”, enterprise users were satisfied, and consumers don’t generate significant Windows revenue. I think that was IE6.

Paranoia: I was present for many early-00s decisions where a Microsoft exec weakened the ability to write rich applications in the browser to avoid devaluing Win32. So they were at least scared of the idea of a “browser OS” in the abstract.

Although...at the same time, Office was pushing for browser application capabilities, which is where we got XHR, which is a big reason browser applications became practical. Sometimes you’d never guess Office and Windows were the same company.
What needs?
Oops, Apple Has Another Quality Problem
This is the same force that drives the price of Bitcoin. Thousands of Chinese businesses are trying to get capital out of China, and they take advantage of every loophole to move money out of the country.
> If the football game wasn't soldout, the NFL wouldn't broadcast it on TV

You’re missing a key part of this. It’s only “blacked out” in the local market of the home team.

If the Cowboys are playing in Jacksonville, you better believe that game is going to be on TV in Dallas (and possibly most of the rest of the country) no matter how many tickets get sold in Jacksonville.

That said, blackouts are very rare and AFAIK no game has been blacked out in about 5 years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League_tel...
You could bury it underground / in a swamp.
Nightmare is an understatement in my opinion. Unless you are completely dedicated and have lots of support it can take a bunch of tries to find the right person.

In my experience finding a good psychologist that then recommends a Psychiatrist that they have worked with has worked the best for me. The primary care physician doesn't have the time in my experience to figure everything out.
They are "lucky" that they can walk off after handing over the keys to the house even when the house value has depreciated to far below the sale price. Places like Australia, the bank has the right to chase you up for the debt AFTER foreclosure if the house value has decreased.

This is a bit like maxing out the credit card. It's tough for the children and unfortunately a lesson has to be learnt by the parents not to live like the "moviepass economy"
Yeah, but MS Office is missing transparent font embedding and cross OS file sharing (even between different versions of windows or office).

The upshot is the giving PowerPoint presentations is hit or miss / embarrassing, but gsuite presentations usually just work.

The same can be said for sharing spreadsheets, etc. Writing documents is fundamentally a form of communication, and MS Office is built with the fundamental assumption that you will share your work by printing it out. The retrofit PDF export works OK, but sharing editable documents does not, and I think they need to from-scratch rewrite the core document engine to fix the problem.
Then, would it be better to store rationals as 2 ints with understood division, and irrationals as 2 ints as understood powers?

Why are we working with these numbers so imprecisely, and with such discontinuity? When I've done math work in school, I always worked with the primitives without approximating.. 2^.5 was handled as such unless asked for an approximate answer.

I also ran across this in AutoCAD. Because they force arbitrary precision, one cannot define a sqrt length. 1.414 doesn't reach all the way on a r-triangle with 1,1 .
There are a few hacks here and there that, I assume, introduce a bit of overhead, but the real problem with 10 is the absolute disregard the Windows team has for performance.

Windows 7 has the same level of compatilibity (or perhaps even more, as I'm sure more software is compatible with it) but it's much lighter.
I actually have a few gmail accounts that are "Youtube banned" for same content ID thing but the mail/drive/whatever part of it still works.
So the "Google account wide" ban seems pretty rare and more motivated than just 3 copyright strikes.
I'm interested in Chromebooks for a different reason, the same reason that brings me to Pixel phones.

I hate software that tracks me, but if I wipe out Android and I install a self compiled AOSP, it's a superb user experience for me.

Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro?

Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to run Linux on (thanks to having just Intel components). Same for Huawei if you are willing to spend a bit more, but on that price a Thinkpad is probably the way to go.
No, it's just that the volumes are still not comparable.

Everyone at some point has had a Windows machine, including the privacy-conscious and the paranoid -- simply because, at the time, there was no realistic alternative. Once you reach 90% penetration, any special-interest group with a pet complaint will be sizeable.

That's not happened with Chromebooks and it's unlikely to ever happen. Privacy-conscious users now have NSA-hardened Linux and "won't-let-FBI-in" iPhones, they will never have to deal with Google if they don't want to. They are not forced to use any of their services, since there are alternatives for pretty much everything -- even superior ones, in most cases. The only service that used to be unmatched was Search, and sure enough, plenty of people still complain about tracking searches.
Most modern services don't anymore though. Most of them use an email address.

The ones that don't typically make a publicly identifyable string for you, like a url on GitHub or a handle on Twitter.
They showed the current methods couldn't bring it to 2. There could be another approach which gets it lower.
Yes and no. Just because they laugh at you doesn’t mean you’ll eventually win. Lots of shitty products get laughed at deservedly.
Django protect you out of the box of xss, csrf, and click jacking while providing you with a proven robust extensible auth mechanism.

When using flask, you have to be able to make decisions about those. Many devs are not able to.

I'm ok with it: not everybody has to be an expert to be a great element in a company. But flask gives those profile a false sense of easiness.
Especially now that car makers manufacture very few of the parts that actually make something a car. There is a whole network of suppliers that make wheels, brakes, control arms, struts, transmissions, differentials, basically all the bits that make something travel down the road. Car makers only really kept engines and final assembly. Engines will give way to electric motors and will be extremly easy to commoditize since they already are. The car industry shed nearly all its manufacturing due to labour costs. They assumed the high cost of starting a car company and the complex safety regulations would prevent anyone else from joining the industry.

Apple is extremly skilled at collecting a tons of parts suppliers, giving them extreme specifications while simultaneously buying up their entire output, and creating an incredibly polished product.

The final reason apple is wanting to make a car is driving experience is now largely driven by software. The basic suspension geometry has to be decent and the mechanicals can't leave you stranded, but the basic day to day interaction with your car is now all software. Apple is great at software, they are a software company. None of the car manufacturers are great at software. They have all become good enough to get by. Is there anyone out there who thinks Apple won't blow the auto industry away at simple but powerful UI?

Car manufacturing hasn't been this easy to disrupt since the original brands moved out of sheds in the early 20th century. Tesla has joined the game but is struggling with manufacturing scale, something that has always protected the big car makers. Apple is unbelievably good at manufacturing scale, they have endless cash available, and they have a ton of software components to leverage already in use by hundreds of millions of people. Sounds like a winner to me.
Any 4k 40+ inch (ideally OLED too) TV would work for me.

Split into what amounts to 4 FHD monitors, profit.
Where's the data that chromebooks have shorter useful lives than other laptops in the same price class? Other laptops on average? It's possible that's the case, but not obvious to me.
Contribute to the next IoT protocol
Not denying the amount of work gone into LibreOffice, however I'm not sure if I agree with you on the approach (this will probably be an unpopular opinion). I find the entire ecosystem of LibreOffice a bit clunky, and it wouldn't surprise me if there is a lot of technical debt that would need to be understood before we could make any sort of contribution. Don't know why, but my gut says starting afresh would allow us to build something more useful, faster. It would make sense to use the LibreOffice code base as a guide though.
> I suspect one reason for $600 devices, other than Google itself trying to reposition Chromebooks as more upmarket, is because $600 Windows laptops are still are a mess of preloaded bullshit put there by the vendor. Microsoft has tried various ways to fix this but it only tends to protect high-end models.

In the current version of Windows 10 there's a feature called "fresh start" that makes it trivial to reset to a clean OS install without vendor crap. It even automatically preserves your home directory. The only problem is that you need to know it exists, so it only benefits technical users and users with geeky friends to advise them.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-use-the-fresh-st...
I don't think that is ever a good idea. But Google does also have a reputation for getting things wrong. Plenty of their product never make it anywhere, because they don't have to. You have been able to get a cheap Windows laptop for probably almost ten years. Recently e.g. the Lenovo IdeaPad and before that there were netbooks. I think there could be merit to ChromeOS, but for now it seems like a placeholder so no one else can take that position in the market.
Don't forget The Manga Guide to Databases! I needed to have a good working to do some standard CRUD database things with SQL. The Manga Guide to Databases was the most fun and educational read I have ever had. It covered enough skills for me to create whatever CRUD feature my employer needed.
The post says that it was for CoC violations. That there were such violations is clear on its face. As just one example he labeled thousands of specific people as racists without any justification. That’s not reasonably characterized as a “mistake”.
Have you tried Wine? A lot of work has been done on it [0] with also help from the Steam devs [1] (that's mostly for games but it will have knock on benefits for Excel), and it was already reasonable back in 2010.

[0]: https://www.winehq.org/announce/3.0
[1]: https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...
On Dealing with Anxiety and Depression as a Developer
Why aren’t they in order by year?

Also, the page buttons at the bottom aren’t working for me (I’m using safari on iphone x).

Nice site altogether :)
sports betting and commodities futures could be considered types 'prediction markets' that seem to work pretty well. The reason why prediction markets have not caught on is due to regulation and that most markets are tiny and prone to manipulation and low liquidity.I also think that insurance acts as a counter-party instead of having to use a market.
I actually noped out of a contract when the client wanted to bet his entire infrastructure on firebase. Data, documents, authentication etc. Now I'm not familiar with Firebase, but I am familiar enough to know when to bow out. Their company in for a wild ride.
it is about economy. India missed the opportunity to make money compare to China where there are lots of home grown company by forcing outside not to penetrate their market
$600 chromebooks? REALLY?

It's better invest that money in new/used laptop.

They was competitive only with $200-300 prices.
This breaks the site guidelines, especially the ones for Show HN. Please follow the rules when posting here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
> On Chromebooks, Chrome's fantastic profile system is deliberately conflated with Chrome OS login sessions, which makes it harder for one user to maintain multiple independent browsing contexts than when using Chrome on other platforms. Power users on Windows can run multiple browsers, or use profile systems in browsers to keep separation, but on Chrome OS, you only get two de facto contexts (the white one and the black one with the cool spy icon), you blast the same cookies everywhere, and half your builtin applications are just hyperlinks to auto-log you into the corresponding Google product in your global white context. Applications like Hangouts (the app, not the extension) are rare, where the entire window inherits your OS login, but keeps your context entirely separate from what you're doing in the browser.

ChromeOS actually has the ability to sign into multiple accounts at the same time and fast switch between them. It's not obvious in the UI though, so many don't know about it. https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/6088201?hl=en
Unveiling OpenBSD's pflogd(8)
And if you toss the device into developer mode you can give it a root password and have an account that saves.
The iPhone was beating MS phones before Android was even a thing[0]. They were certainly way more than "2% or 3%" in the markets they operated in. I can't see how Ballmer's statement was even slightly correct.

[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2008/02/05/iphone-with-28-of-u-s-s...
>On the one side some 'bad other' could be using an undefined device to attack only American people, only in foreign lands, and for uncertain reasons.

If someone were trying to sour US-Cuban relations, then it would make sense that only Americans in Cuba were targeted.

It seems highly unlikely that 21 diplomats with the same symptoms (plus those in China) were afflicted with an innocuous medical condition. None of the doctors who wrote letters of dissent physically examined the patients. Though the specific nature of the cause may be up for debate, I highly doubt there was no adversary here.
Keeping systems isolated is an orthogonal concern. The question is weather rebooting the system is safer then shutting it off. The fact that shutting it off should be safe is a separate concern. At a minimum, shutting it off reduces your redudancy; and it the system fails again (even in an undetected way), that should be fine, because you (should) have enough redundancy to handle an arbitrary system fail in unexpected ways.
This article misses the mark completely by assuming that Microsoft still needs Windows to stay afloat.

This hasn't been true for years.

They have realized that it doesn't matter whether you use Windows, Chrome OS, Android or Linux, or anything else: everything is in the cloud now, so the OS is pretty much irrelevant.

Azure, Office 365 and heck, even Linkedin are doing great:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/19/microsoft_huge_2018...

So I very much doubt that Microsoft is sweating it about Chromebooks.