skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm in that category of people the regularly have to unwind the web of Excel or deconstruct the Access databases that grow to rival SAP in terms of intricacy...

... I actually agree with the overall premise that these tools do let non-tech types do real work and I think department power user types should have these things.

But we must also recognize that these tools are a bit like a black hole, too. Not unlike many applications created by professional developers, these users will tend to continually add features and bells and whistles until they pass the event horizon that exists between good judgement and bending these tools to be what they aren't (the most common is turning Excel into a database). On one side of that horizon you can pull back and reasonably find better technology to implement sophisticated capabilities and on the other you start to reduce efficiency as results as the errors and issues with the misuse of these systems overwhelming the benefits. Worst part is... you never really know when you've passed through that horizon... until you're spaghettified that is...

So in-house technologists need to be aware of these things and give good support, and then also provide the technical judgement on when these approaches start to break.
I've seen bitter, demanding and unpleasant 20, 30 and 40 somethings. Also some of the most brilliant minds I've met are grey haired. Age does not matter.

I hope you meet someone compelling enough to trigger you to rethink your bias. Good luck.
I love spreadsheets. They are many people's first experience with programming. Cells are essentially a functional programming environment.

People have a much easier time learning basic functional programming and spreadsheets help a lot.
> I don't understand why people seem to have it out for Purism. Did they wrong you? Are you a competitor?

I love Purism. I mean no sarcasm here.

But you have to know history and learn from previous mistakes, and try something different. If Purism's approach is the same as to what Openmoko was, it is not going to end well. I hope they will try something different.

But, so far, they do exactly same thing as to what Openmoko was doing. I loved Openmoko, I bought their phone (and a debug board), but I was never able to use it as a phone. It did make calls. Due to limited resources (and all small companies have limited resources), they could never master native UI. I still don't believe that a small company can make all-encompassing software apps for a phone, thus I suggested to try something different: use existing web apps, don't spread already thin resources on "porting" native apps yourself.
> Socialism, as with capitalism refers to ownership, not payment mechanism:

From your link:

> any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods

The distinction in this case being the distribution of goods. When you have the ability to say that you don't want something and you're not going to pay for it (and then go buy as much as you want from someone else), it's not socialism.

> Ad-funded media is indirectly paid just as tax-funded healthcare is, though side effects differ.

The difference again being that you have a choice. You're not trading cash for access to YouTube, but you're trading something, and if you prefer not to make that trade then there is no law requiring you to make it.

> I agree that scale affects accountability, but again, that's orthogonal to ownership.

Nobody said otherwise. The point wasn't that nationalizing an industry doesn't imply government ownership, it was that it does imply national rather than local control, which is generally neither necessary nor beneficial.

> And locally owned (or operated) services can be extraordinarily unresponsive to (at least some) local needs:

Even in that case, the local government was responsive to the local majority, the problem was that what the local majority wanted was dastardly.

But even that case proves why local control is better -- if one locality wants something you don't, you patronize another one. You buy from the Sears catalog instead of local racists, or move to the North.

What do you do in prior years when the national government is overtly protecting slavery and passing things like the Fugitive Slave Act?

The best case for nationalizing is a little better but the worst case is much worse.
Poker sites mainly detect bots based on their login times, number of tables, time per action, etc.

A successful bot shouldn't get caught for "playing like a bot" because the moment it's actions are that predictable it would presumably no longer be effective.

But it will get caught for operating like a bot. So, don't run it 24hrs a day. Sites also randomize things to keep bots at bay, even card imagery.

If your performance and success drops whenever they randomize something that gives the bot false inputs, then you might get caught.

Inputting all of the poker events manually would be really tedious I'd imagine.

Of course, if you're winning millions, they can interview you about your poker history and how you got so good.

It sounds like easy money, but probably not.
Yeah, I meant that they're not right in your face and ready to be used. I know it's hard to force people to use new methods, but if anyone could do it, MS / Excel could.

It's all possible though, if you know where to look (I think excel even has table sheets now?)
Really cool! Thanks also for taking the time to take photos and add figures.
It is hard for me to balance this reality with the general fear and paranoia Americans have about everything, especially in another country, especially when that other country is China.

I know your experience is the most likely, but telling people that they most likely wouldn't be subject to civil rights abuses that they think China is all about is almost akin to stepping on their ego.
Yup, that’s the hardest part for sure.
I'd say its better than most modern phones with their stupid flat UIs. I use KDE on the desktop for its featured richness, but gnome is still much more 3d and I envy its appearance. Buttons very clearly look like buttons and text boxes look like text boxes and the whole thing just looks 'nice.'
The problem is that twitter forces you to add a phone number, and once that phone number is added it will automatically be able for 2FA. If you don’t believe me then remove your phone number and wait. Eventually you’ll login and get a message saying your account is suspicious and you need to add a number.
I second the "right training" part. I think any organization working with any kind of data should invest in making all their office employees Excel power users.

Wrt. right tools, I think Excel is the right tool. It may lack safety affordances, but it does its job cheaply and efficiently (and you already paid for it since you probably need to open Word documents anyway).

As for "harder problems addressed by specialists" part, it happens, but I'd argue not that often. Are they using Excel to half-ass CFD sims of their rocket engine nozzles? Sure, they probably could use a proper software for that. Are they doing their own specific munging of customer or process data? Their workflow is probably too specific and too fluid for it to be shoehorned into a "serious" application without a tremendous loss of productivity.
Those days of yore are when computers did things and we wrote programs that satisfied immediate needs. There was also a social element to it when there were multiple users per machine.
I lived in Taipei for a while - I am a white blonde woman - and everywhere I went kids yelled HEY WHITE LADY. It was, as you describe out of shock as there were few other white women there. I saw none in my time there. I have never felt so safe as I did there, and, because I am a woman, having people stare or comment was nothing new. What was new was that most of the attention was positive and coming from women and children who wanted to come and look at me up close. It was very instructive for me, especially upon return to Toronto. The white men I know who have traveled to Asia all complained/were shocked by the attention because they are not used to it. In this context, alongside the current trade/media-war going both ways, I expect more and more stories like this to counteract the stories of Chinese folks in America being treated differently, tho I would argue they are nothing the same.
Um, what? The article doesn’t do this at all. This is straight from the 2nd paragraph:

“The “bystander effect” holds that the reason people don’t intervene is because we look to one another. The presence of many bystanders diffuses our own sense of personal responsibility, leading people to essentially do nothing and wait for someone else to jump in”

It’s clearly talking about individual behaviour in the presence of a crowd. You basically restated this exact point, then claimed the article didn’t make it!
A lot of us like this post, because we can run through it and not be offended by any of it.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of people will run through it and will be happy ignoring the one or two on the list that they seriously subscribe to.
If you can stand the smell, neem oil is very effective. I use low concentrations in a spray bottle, and spray my windows, they generally don't come in..
Elon Musk’s Neuralink to livestream special project update on July 16
Identifying Risky Counterfeit Intel Gigabit CT Network Adapters
They completely disregard bus waiting time, and assume wildly optimistic bus walking time (10 minutes per day). Not to mention bus transfers and extra bus distance due to route not going directly from home to work.

I don't know about bicycle analysis, but I would not trust bus analysis at all.
"The technology being developed by Neuralink would theoretically allow us to integrate with computers to access and process information just as well as our AI counterparts. Essentially, our brains will have our very own AI in a cloud that our brains can synthesize with as needed. We already interface with our computers on a regular basis, so the jump from an external device to an internal one would seem to be a natural progression.

Musk also suggested memory functionality as an area for Neuralink to focus on, specifically for issues around Alzheimer’s, during his discussion on Axios. “It’s incredibly sad when a mother forgets her children, and that can be solved, too,” he noted. This concept is in line with marketable technology for therapy use that Musk has hinted at before during his discussions with Tim Urban. “We are aiming to bring something to market that helps with certain severe brain injuries (stroke, cancer lesion, congenital) in about four years,” he was quoted as saying.

Perhaps this therapeutic research will be included in the July 16th event. Or perhaps we’ll see something pulled straight out of science fiction, as he seems to have indicated last year. Both?"
WLAN sync is only available in the subscription version though, you can’t use it with the standalone licence. Quite bizarre since the standalone licence is the one more likely to want it.
What is the likelihood of seeing another macbook with no stickers compared to the one with the exact same stickers as yours arranged in the exact same way? I think that should address the issue with your argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda
wouldn't EC2 be an example of paying to never hit cold starts?
This isn’t freeware. Previously we paid for a standalone licence which cost more than the current yearly recurring licence cost.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20199143
Yeah, it's not that something like that could never ever happen w a CT scanner but Therac-25 was intended as a Radiation Therapy device. The vast majority of CT scanners are strictly diagnostic. So the magnitudes of dose that could even be produced are limited. [1]

I encourage concerned customers to ask for their dose report. IMO it's mildly interesting on its own. It's more interesting if your physician or surgeon prescribes follow up tracking to see if tumors return/grow. In that case you have repeated scans over a period of many months to track lesions/tumors and the accumulated dose at the same body location becomes worth more concern.

The prescribing physician should balance the harm of dose with the diagnostic concern/risk being evaluated, but there's nothing wrong with advocating for yourself. In general I think the cases where you have repeated scans it's because something terribly serious has been diagnosed that far outweighs the impact of the dose.

Also if you're concerned about dose you might be able to use CT scanner dose features as a tool when evaluating different outpatient imaging options. Feel free to debate this with your physician and not necessarily go to the one that they get a kickback from.

[1] For a stunning counter-example to my claim here, you can look at the case where the CT tech completed MANY repeated cranial CT scans of a toddler (scanner was mfd by Picker IIRC) -- https://www.diagnosticimaging.com/articles/california-blames...
thats not just sad, it is debilitating.

thanks for the free advertisement for Bitwarden.
The V8 runtime itself is pretty secure. However every npm package has total access to your filesystem and network i/o.
This is by design, the author of node himself has apologized for it and admitted that nothing can be done now because it'd basically break the internet.
This means any package ( i.e. eslint), dependency, anything that has code from just one malicious contributor can grab away all your API keys, ssh keys(if you still use those), environment variables, crypto wallets of your users( this has actually happened a few times now at scale).

With something like aws-amplify you just go on their site and put your environment variables there, instead of keeping them on your own machine.

Now you don't have to worry about using sketchy docker images, or your junior devs using their work laptops on a malware infested gaming cafe while still running their localhost server.

Aws and gcp can afford to have way better internal security and regular pentesting of their containers and infrastructure, so now wrapping those protecting layers around node, express, etc... is their problem.
You just push your code the production or testing branch and they handle all the provisioning, builds and deployments in 3-5minutes.
You mean https://observablehq.com/?
FolicileRX Review
There are also infections that can cause men and women become bald like ringworm, diabetes and others. In this kind of situation, a specific cure for each disease is required to continue hair growing. However, medications must not be used abusively because this can also be another cause of baldness.Every individual has encountered this kind of problem, most of them are men. Our hair grows approximately one centimeter per month with the normal cycle of growth but if hair is growing slowly or not growing at all it is the main cause of baldness.

https://healthadviserpro.com/folliclerx-review/
> The only surviving plan for any Linux-phone: make it web-centric. You have to port ONE app: Firefox.

You are aware of the failure of firefox OS right?

> Purism just have shown that they wasted precious time on badly looking GNOME Clocks, Emacs, Password manager, a game, a half-baked music player, Torrent client (on a phone!), and Drawing app made with their native UI.

They haven't wasted time, pretty much all of these are existing apps, you can run most of them on a gnome desktop.

> Focus on releasing the hardware

That is what their doing and what differentiates them from most previous efforts like sailfish, they are a hardware company making a phone the runs linux, others were trying to re-create android and leave the hardware for others.
New Podcast on Successful Ecommerce Entrepreneurs
Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (1962) [pdf]
Did you not see my reply to your email? Users flagged that post. Moderators didn't touch it or even see it.

It looks like you have been using HN exclusively to do battle about this issue. That's against the guidelines, and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of what you're battling for. We have to, because battle is incompatible with curiosity and this site exists for curiosity. Please stop doing this—we've already had to warn you more than once.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Priority notifications aren't rolled out? I have it on my company computer install, no one uses it though.
My interest was piqued enough by this post to go clicking around the IndieWeb site for more information on Webmentions, and I was amused to see, on the page where they discuss an earlier spec that attempted to do the same thing, TrackBack (https://indieweb.org/Trackback), a link to an essay I wrote 14 years ago critiquing the thing that ended up killing TrackBack -- its complete lack of spam-proofing. (This one: http://anthillcommunities.com/archives/001653.html)

I guess somebody actually read it! Huh. In unrelated news, now I feel old :-D

I was curious to see how Webmentions sets out to avoid the same problems, since they should be more obvious today than they were when TrackBack was created in 2002. The answer appears to be one of your classic "good news/bad news" situations.

The good news is, it appears some thought has been actually been put into spam-proofing this time around. The Webmentions spec lays out a verification process that incoming Webmentions MUST pass in order to be accepted as valid (see https://www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-webmention-20170112/#webmenti...), which is good.

The bad news is, assuming I'm reading the spec correctly, that verification process boils down to "do an HTTP GET of the page that supposedly linked to you and parse its HTML to make sure there actually is a link to you in there," which doesn't seem like much of an anti-spam speed bump. All your spammer has to do is send all their Webmentions from the same URL, and then publish an automatically-updated list of links to all the URLs they've spammed over the last six hours at that URL, and boom, they're valid, right? Or is there something I'm missing here that makes this more spam-resistant than it first appears?
That’s how 1Password worked back before it got Dropbox/server sync support. You’d sync your Mac client with the iOS client or vice versa over WLAN.

The problem is that it isn’t a seamless process. You have to initiate a sync on one client or the other. Do you have situations where you might be on your phone and not have the latest database from your laptop or desktop — or two laptops could be out of sync if they aren’t on the same network.

OK, so you set clients to sync at specific intervals in the background — this can work but still might miss things and you’ve now got a client that is constantly polling another.

The reason for the external server is access continence, because any good password manager will keep the databases encrypted regardless of where they are stored. I mean, you want the server the database is on to be secure too — not to mention any browser extension that might exist — but the database itself is the most important part.

A YubiKey or a portable version of KeepassX is probably the best option for the paranoid, IMHO, over local sync (especially something like Bluetooth). Of course, for mobile access you’ll need to be able to plug a USB key into your phone. That’s probably not a problem on Android and hopefully with iOS 13, it’ll be a better iOS option too.
We (https://sheetjs.com/) almost exclusively deal with those types of complex applications built in spreadsheets

> they could be improved a lot with minimal changes

They can be improved for very specific use cases at the expense of others.

> Making them more database-like and making table data first-class (at least you can make named tables in excel on windows) could be used to push people a bit more towards organised data, without changing how anything works.

There are "database functions" like DAVERAGE, PivotTables and other systems for dealing with more structured data. Getting users to use them is a challenge outside of the scope of the tool. "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink"

> Half of the mess that makes excel hell comes from the fact it's too easy to put two tables of data + some random constants on a single sheet and refer to them by H3.

Half of the reason Excel is so popular is the loose structure and the power that it enables.

> Now it's hard to add more data, hard to move anything, and hard to create space which expands to the next row with existing formulas.

Most of the hairy workbooks start as a solution to a problem at hand and eventually accumulate cruft after people try expanding it, not too dissimilar to other forms of software development.

> Airtable (and Access) implements this idea, but unfortunately sacrifices the generic, free-form spreadsheet along the way.

You either enforce the constraints and weaken the platform, or you give users the power to do what they want.
On the same hardware, with the same table, Excel in Windows 7 does a cross-tab faster than MySQL in Ubuntu does. Indeed, MySQL chokes if there are more than a few hundred columns, but Excel just keeps going. And it uses all CPU cores.

Edit: In case anyone is wondering why I did that, I wanted a simple visualization of ping-location results for thousands of IPv4 from several hundred ping-probe locations. So that meant aggregating (getting minimum rtt for) millions of observations, and displaying min(rtt) in a IPv4 by probe location cross-tab. MySQL did a great job at the aggregation, but choked (as in, errored out) with several hundred numeric columns. Even if I converted them all to SMALLINT.
> On GOV.UK alone, we found 31,121 files with spreadsheet extensions (like .ods, .xlsx or .xls) and 19,251 CSV files, many of which were not in the suggested tidy, tabular data format.

Ugh. The linked wikipedia page [1] is bizarre. The "wide table" form is far more practical than the "one possible tidy version": if you want to actually compute something for each maker based on observations, you can do so easily. And they don't describe at all why one might think the "one possible tidy version" is superior. No wonder many of these files are not in the suggested format; it's stupid.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tidy_data&oldid=9...
Yes, looks really cool!
That's what Excel Tables are for.
You get a table within your spreadsheet and instead of using cell references like =Sum(C2:C7), you can use structured reference like =SUM(DeptSales[Sales Amount])
Is what we're talking about any different from declarative programming? That term has been in use for several decades
> sure its better than not having 2FA but only a little better

Only if the provider doesn't decide to be "helpful" and start allowing password resets via SMS on your 2FA number.
In my experience earplugs/headphones are real effective for low frequencies but somewhat less for high pitched sounds.

Thinking about it, it's probably related to the material used for the plugs, I think I've only used foam type earplugs...
I use KeePass and sync the database using Google drive / dropbox.

It's free.
I'd recommend watching this YouTube video; it's only one person's take on the right way to use Excel, but Excel has many ways to handle these issues:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
Can I ask, what is "critical infrastructure planning"? Googled it, but wasn't sure as it appears to transcend many contexts.
I suppose it will be exchanged via HTTPS, so the risks are minimal...
So what protects you from accidentally doing “DELETE TABLE users” on prod?

In traditional design, there will be pre-commit code reviews and staging env with limited access. But looks like Dark get rids of all of this?