skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is great that Microsoft is investing in Office again. I just got upgraded at work from office 2007 to 2016 (we like to take our time, I was on WinXP not so long ago), and I can barely see the difference. They changed some colors, there are menus that open in a panel instead of a modal box. I don’t think a single user cares about these changes (and they seem to have carefully preserved the bugs). And the problematic UI (for instance the tiny non resizable modal when you click the fx button) have not been updated.

But there are still massive pain points or improvements that could be added. For instance:

- linking between excel and powerpoint. Almost anyone who will show an analysis, whether in a bank, accounting firm, consultant, etc will prepare some table and charts in excel and will want to use them in powerpoint. The link between the two is unstable, screws the formatting, or requires lots of manual steps.

- Microsoft should really look into Apple’s take on excel, with a sheet being a canvas on which you can add tables, charts, the tables have scroll bars if they overflow. Instead of the rigid single grid per tab, where if you show two tables one over the other you need to align the columns even when they have different data types.

- VBA hasn’t been updated in 20 years and it clearly shows. There needs to be a more modern scripting language. I have heard rumors about javascript. Not convinced it’s a great choice, but that would still be better than VBA.
For these people, Chromebooks would be best, I think... But I wouldn't dare suggest them with Googles track record of decommissioned services and devices.
Cook's version here is significantly stronger than Jobs'. Not that Jobs was wrong as far as he went, but merely being informed that you're about to be punched in the face doesn't actually make being punched in the face acceptable.

What we're missing today is the option to use normal products and services without any of this data sharing and telemetry going on when they aren't necessary for the normal functioning of the product or service, which the kinds that upset or concern people almost never are. We need to sever the ties between using everyday things and participating in data-based schemes that make the suppliers more money but are otherwise not necessary for what the customer was buying. Clearly the market has failed here and is in a race to the bottom, and that is the point where regulation/legislation should step in.
McAfee Central America Travel Guide
You gotta admit, if you don't think too hard about it, it is pretty weird how many flights there are over the arctic when there aren't any (at all!) over the antarctic.

Have you tried explaining/performing Eristothanes experiment with them?
https://astronavigationdemystified.com/eratosthenes-proved-t...

edit: didn't mean to sound like a flat-earther! please stop downvoting!
That upsets me too. They hope I'll forget what i wanted and use a recommendation but I'm left confused and leave the app.
> it's just barely good enough to have avoided being replaced

The probability this is true for any system in use (software, natural language, tax code, home appliance...) asymptotically approaches 1 with its age in years.
Increasingly with life these days, I feel like I am an actor in a play where the producer sees less and less of a role for me in the production as the curtain keeps raising on increasingly chaotic scenes - so I end up feeling disconnected and distant from something that I was immersed in and enjoying, and am now just an increasing befuddled and alienated observer.

The uptick in flat earth theories among other things is central to that. I made the mistake of clicking on an anti flat earth Youtube channel once (SciManDan for reference [0]) and now get others videos in that channel as 'suggested videos'. I try not to click on them, but... I do. And each time I do, a little more of me dies on the inside when I see what the pro F/E pundits are putting out there, AND see their followers applauding it as 'truth'. The globe earth model is now apparently just a 'belief system' and not science any more. o_O

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRtsZ5Iak9wSLsQLQ3XOAeA
Some get it for free, like certain T-Mobile customers.
Startups that are still searching for product/market fit don't really do much A/B testing - the user populations are too small for anything statistically relevant. They rely more on intuition, or as some would call it, blind luck.

In some ways, what an entrepreneur does is very coarse-grained A/B testing anyways. If you launch 50 different startup ideas and they all get zero traffic, and then you launch the 51st and it has 100 users sign up over a weekend, then there's a good indication that you should go with the 51st idea.
Race for the Galaxy. Wonderfully deep and strategic card game. Learning curve is quite steep but once your in you’ll never get bored.
Ask HN: How to Help Inexperienced Operations Staff to Grow?
Hello HN, I am hoping some people on this fine site can share some wisdom on a problem that has recently been highlighted for me.

I work remotely with an operations team which is tasked with various sysadmin responsibilities.

Some new work has popped up that requires research of new applications and technology, prototyping, automation via Chef, and extensive documentation creation.

The problem the team has run into is that the operations staff aren't very comfortable researching new technologies, writing simple code, or thoroughly documenting the steps they've taken during software installs.

Several incidents have brought this situation to the attention of management. One involved 2 people manually installing an application on a windows server, disabling most security settings on that host, then installing multiple non-standard unapproved applications that caused security audits/approval to fail, making someone else take on the task. Another incident involved people performing manual installations of software that was supposed to be automated, and doing a sloppy job with very little relevant documentation. Another issue is that other people were receiving warning emails from a system, but because they didn't know what that system was, they didn't do anything about it.

Currently the team lead would like to try to bring these people up to a higher standard, and that is what I'm hoping people here can help with. We recognize that these are good people who just don't have the experience and training that they need to really shine.

What experiences have you had with instilling professionalism into inexperienced people? How do you go about helping IT people to gain the confidence to try new things? How do you help them to really care about doing a good thorough job with attention to detail and a meticulous nature? How do you help them to feel comfortable about raising issues with unknown systems, or asking questions when they don't understand something?
Quite simply - there is much more land mass in the Northern Hemisphere, and flights, say from Moscow to Anchorage or Reykjavik to Toronto have great circle routes that traverse the Arctic circle.

The Southern Hemisphere on the other hand, has no large land masses near it, and even the southern most points of Australia/New Zealand and South America are too far away for any great circle routes to cut through there without being a greater distance than any other routing.
Sqlite.
They ask every few episodes.
Let me guess: It has proved to work well for retention.
The author, having been home schooled by Jehovah’s Witnesses, waxes somewhat unsurprised at this reflection, and takes it in stride.

To be honest, having weird family members isn’t really all that weird. Beyond a certain age, when they can no longer embarass you, and you no longer depend on them as guardians, parents transform themselves into quasi-grandparents, even if you don’t have children. Growing up, half my grandparents were cooky, debilitated by age, and not exactly inspiring or heroic.

Old age is kind of terrible, and people mostly don’t improve after 50. So, things could be worse. Abuse and turmoil at younger ages is way more traumatic.
did you ever resolve your moral dilemma? having done a very similar thing for another company, i felt the same way. ultimately i decided it was probably a net neutral, or possibly a slight minus, which definitely weighed on me. but the real reason i quit was because i decided it was incredibly lame. its so easy to find something thats an unambiguous plus, why even bother with questionable jobs? curious where youve landed, thinking wise
It's not the "nothing to hide" folks you fear, its the general crowd who couldn't give two shits that their tech is phoning home all the time until something they find private gets leaked and causes them embarrassment.

I'm not sure that's a fair criticism. Among my non-technical friends, several have expressed concern or even active disapproval about things they know are happening in this area. They just don't see that they have any alternative. How do you buy any modern phone or participate in any modern social networks or buy any modern car -- all things most regular people need to integrate with society and live a normal life today -- without surrendering huge amounts of your personal privacy and potentially security?
How do you disconnect? As a solo guy charging retainers for support, etc. how can you take a couple of weeks off? Do you always have to check your emails even when you're on holiday or do you have someone else who can hold the fort?
now get others videos in that channel as 'suggested videos'.

FWIW, you can always remove that video from your history, so you won't get those recommendations anymore. Well, assuming you were logged into a Google account when you viewed it. Visit https://www.youtube.com/feed/history and use the smaller search bar to find any "questionable" videos and then you can delete them from your watch history.

Another option is to click the little 3-dot menu on the suggested video, click "not interested", then click the "tell us why" link, and there should be an option like "I'm not interested in recommendations based on (SOME VIDEO)". You can check that checkbox and submit, and you should stop seeing those recommendations.
It would only make sense to fly over the antarctic if you were traveling from one Southern hemisphere city to another. But most of the developed world is in the Northern hemisphere.
While the author of this post focuses on the idea of a flat earth conspiracy leading to their conclusion that people believing in conspiracy theories don't have much influence over our everyday lives and that they're "fun", I can't help but disagree with an example that he even mentions shortly in the post: Anti-vaccination. The WHO has named anti-vaccination as a top 10 global health threat. Right now in Clark County Oregon there's an evolving problem with the spread of measles. I can understand the author's attempts to reconcile his parents' weird beliefs, but I can't agree with his conclusion that they're mostly fun and harmless. People who deny climate change enact that belief in the way they vote and in their every day consumption. That's not just a fun point to argue with. It's affecting everyone's lives.
Btrfs is battle tested?

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Gotchas

We use a box with 2x2TB mirror zpools. It runs Nas4free off an 128GB SSD. Initially we wanted to use Freenas but ir needs 16GB of RAM, while Nas4free works fine with 8. It also does SMART monitoring sending emails when something is up.
Watching Netflix can be beneficial. There is really good educational content there. It is awesome for humanity and can help people in different situations. I am really surprised to hear that one can ask themselves if it is bad for humanity
Probably causes some customers to watch into some of the crappy search result titles, to see if it's the thing they wanted. Hence, the "hours watched" metric goes up.
Price shouldn't be based on the cost of production, but rather the value derived by the buyer. As a consumer, I don't care at all what the manufacturer paid to make the thing. I only care what I get out of it and whether the money I gave is worth the value get out of it.
I have used Linux for some time (I do not remember how many years), and it works very well. I uninstalled the desktop environment (I don't use it (but I do use X, with a window manager, which is not the same as the desktop environment); I use the command shell to start programs and for almost all other purposes too). It is much better than Windows!

Someone mentions restoring a Ubuntu system after a hard drive replacement. I used a live CD, to run tar with --numeric-owner and other options I do not commonly use, and gzip, to make backups onto three DVDs, and then to set up the partitioning and boot loader on the new hard drive, and then to restore all of the files. And then the new system just worked fine when booted, with no problem (actually the first time I misconfigured the boot loader, but after I corrected that, it booted fine).

Some people are disheartened to see how much you still need the command line to do some very basic things. I rather see, is good that such thing can be done by command line programs; you don't need the GUI to do so many thing like Windows needs.

But if you don't like Linux, you do not need to use it; there are other systems. But I find Linux is good.
Pharma companies don't do their own R&D anymore, for the most part. The documentary, Drug$ (2018) does a tough takedown of the industry. Pharma companies acquire drugs from indie or academic researchers. What pharma companies do is get the drugs FDA approved then market them, and at the highest price the market will bear (meaning that some people can't afford them). In other words, there are no R&D expenses. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7394770/
It's more like a screen saver. You haven't interacted with the app in X amount of time, it suspends loading the next episode until you confirm you're still there.

No more nefarious or creepy than a screen saver.
Perhaps make it respond progressively slower. It won't be broken but will encourage movement.
Ideal maybe, but if they want to maximize revenue they need to optimize around the marginal customer. Marginal customers most likely exhibit strong correlation between hours watched and retention.
I usually only put technologies I have used for work I was paid for, or at least was reasonably public.

I.e. I learned haskell at college, but I never put it in my CV. I have clojure in there, because I actually worked on a small clojure project (while doing QA at RedHat). I did put C++ on my CV, even though I only used it when writing my thesis, because I considered the project large enough. And I did put a sys-admin on there, despite the fact that the work I did with my friends to maintain a community server (I think we had like a forum and a church website there?) was not paid.

In general, I am trying to avoid blank statements like listing an alphabet soup of technologies, and just list various projects I have been part of, scope of my involvement and the technologies I used there. I am not sure if this helps me (mostly been hired through friends), but when I was on the other side, reviewing resumes, I really liked the project-based approach, rather than a list like {java: expert, python: intermediate, haskell: beginner} :D
I sometimes forget about that limitation then get bummed out when I remember it.
Probably not so much toward retention (I'd have quit over this were I not getting it free) as toward redirecting you to content they already control at little or no variable cost.
People are bad judges of value. Companies push subscriptions because people always over-susbcribe for the value they get. But even if they don't, just by virtue of a prepaid subscription, the sunk cost makes people consume more than they would if it were a metered service.

In fact the addition issue is tightly related to the subscription model. For Google and Facebook it's because the "subscription" is free. For Netflix and other consumptions it's because it's paid upfront. If every piece of content required a conscious decision of paying, people would automatically value their consumption properly and stop using.
How do flat earthers explain that the other planets are round and we see different sides of them all the time? Is earth flat and the rest of the planets are spheres??? Even in their bizarre world of logic this seems unassailable.
It also has to do with a lack of options, if technical difficulties are encountered. The threshold for error and malfunction is much, much more extreme.

While planes fly over mountain ranges, Antarctica is similarly dangerous, but without good reasons to attempt overflight.
After reading the documentation for 15 minutes, I still don’t fully understand what your framework can actually do and why one should use it.

I had a lot of trouble understanding your example code. In your framework, everything is built upon the m$, _$, and $ objects (or is the $ actual jQuery and not part of your library?). Maybe, instead of starting by showing us much code, you should explain what these symbols can do and what the most important methods on them are. Just by looking at your code, I could not create a mental model of what each of these symbols is capable of. Without this explanation, it seems a bit like magic.
interesting point. the problem is that no interaction means no data. and along the motto "if you can't measure what's important, you make important what you can measure" a more concrete metric needs to be used. even if - ironically - the optimization is opposed.
More relevantly, this scheme doesn't address the prescription side at all.

Doctor: I judge you to have [medical condition]. Here is a prescription for [expensive on-patent drug].

Patient: I would prefer to take this less expensive drug, which a computer program thinks might be equivalent.

Doctor: Hmm. Doesn't look like there are any clinical studies for this analogue drug. Since I don't want to risk a malpractice lawsuit, I'm not going to prescribe it. Without a prescription, your insurance won't pay for the analogue drug either, so it'll have to be cheaper than your copay in order for it to make sense for you.
What's your strategy to avoid future work from such clients? I've thought the contract should include creating documentation for maintenance (e.g. login details to various services to update payment information or software versions or whatever) that the business can keep secured and that while you can be reached to perform certain kinds of maintenance at some fee you aren't obligated to. I had a friend in freelancing who self-hosted everyone on his own servers and charged an ongoing fee, though if I were a client I'd be nervous if the freelancer decided to raise their fee for the understandable reason that maintenance costs can increase.
I think the success of these off-kilter theories is strongly connected to many people's lives becoming off-kilter.

This society has increased both social isolation and material poverty over the last twenty years. Moreover, most people depend on the relative sanity of others to balance their own impulses and so a decline in rationality can have cumulative effect.
Indeed.

That is a true statement. However, the scope of applicability for alcohol is fairly well understood compared to that for cannabis.

Given we make a statement like this, with the intent of better normalizing use of things we've criminalized, yeah. Great! More research plz. We all will benefit.

If it's to somehow better promote the well over promoted booze? Meh.
Let's watch educational content and chill!
Security bugs are fundamentally different than quality bugs
This only covers one feature of SQLite, but I recommend it nonetheless:
https://www.sqlite.org/queryplanner.html
When I was 11, I was writing 6510 machine language. Within a year after, 68000. Of course I started all this when I was merely 9.

To this day I've been able to use my knowledge about low level hardware features from those days, like IRQs, timers, DMA and such. So why wouldn't it count?
Pushing Left, Like a Boss – Part 5.5 File Uploads
I'm sure I believe some things that are wrong (everyone does)...but I hope my kids have the decency not to trash me in a blog post when they're older.
This idea seems to be done before and seems copywrited as well: https://qlocktwo.com/en/
We're heading to the apocalypse quickly.
Ask HN: Legal for SAAS product
I am thinking about starting a SAAS product. What are some good providers of legal documents like privacy policy, terms of use etc?
Dash is awesome, frankly so is most of the work Plotly does. Chris, Dash's primary maintainer makes it better literally every day.
By "transcend time" do you mean "remembered and respected"? None of what you listed there is anywhere near the height of its original popularity, not even close.
It's important to understand that FE has nothing to do with finding the "truth" and everything to do with belonging to a club that gives you access to privileged secret knowledge. It's no different from any other religion or cult.
Note that units are implemented in F# : https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/units-of-measure/
But in a competitive market, the price should converge toward the cost of production, or there would be arbitrage. At present, the price of digital goods is set by IP monopolies which are almost certainly mispricing them. But the alternative, due to the free cost to copy (vs. cost of production), would be zero.

The proper way forward should involve an IP protection regime where the period of protection is somewhat correlated with the time to produce rather than something arbitrary and fixed.
> This society has increased both social isolation and material poverty over the last twenty years.

Can you please support this claim with credible data? Sincere question - I'm just reading a book recommended by Bill Gates that claims that the world is way better today than it was 20 years ago.
Don't feed the troll :-/
There is some money in doing more custom things. I.e. a friend of mine earned few thousand EUR by writing a website for a local conference, including registration, e.t.c.

I think that for the really small businesses, your lunch will be eaten by i.e. SquareSpace.
No different than what would have happened if you had Windows and all of them were working with Macs and its office suite. You would have had to buy a Mac. It's not an OS issue.
He's only 36. pfft.
Case in point: 'Netflix and chill' is now a relatively established term. You don't become part of people's vocabulary if you're not an ingrained part of culture.
ETOPS and jet streams

Flying Joburg to Sydney once we went pretty far south and skimmed Antartica, could see ice outside the windows

you can see it in this video:

https://youtu.be/i_a4WGxu62c?t=669

It depends on jet streams and if you're in a twin-engine or four-engine jet
Great! More data. Useful right?

Well, will it be so useful when plots of drivers speed become somehow available?

Secondly, what about using that data to reconsider speed limits? That's probably a good thing.

Will we get both?

I sure don't want mail in tickets. Yes, I speed. Most people I know do. Many are generally resonable and prudent, and that's not always the speed limit, nor always in excess of it.
Looks interesting. Have you enrolled in any course in the past? Any other resources you could recommend? Thanks!
https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html#special-m...
I have no opinion on Brexit, but I imagine this will shift more corporate resources out of the EU and into the UK. For the stability aspect alone. Business tends to hate uncertainty as do investors and this seems rather insane.
According to the Author , it uses one of those particle IoT MCU modules which connects to WiFi to sync to the world clock.
that depends on the validity and accuracy of your test metric.
Or just keep the regular scrolling and have the second (and third, fourth, etc. if they fit) begin on the next line that would be off-screen in the previous column. This would be a great browser plugin that could be flipped on or off.