skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For every spot on earth there is an optimal angle of a solar panel / plane to capture the maximum amount of light (Even at any given moment in time). It is for this reason that panel for panel, the most efficient way of operating a given panel are with “duel-axis” trackers. [1]

In the absence of these, and factoring in the complications involved with an always operating mechanical component, you can have a “fixed axis” which is the theoretical best point for that place on earth.
Most racking systems assume a rigid NxN rectangular grid, so having something that is commercially out there that follows the space exactly may be tough.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_tracker
Can you explain what you mean about the risks of cold LED light? I'm unfamiliar with this problem
Have you been to US? I visited some states and I'm now living in Massachusetts for a little more than three years. I've never seen so much green in my life like see here in the US. It's beautiful. The article doesn't mention security measurements that will be taken in order to keep security levels where it is.
Political Twitter Is the Opposite of Activism
The problem I have with arguments that are bearish on food delivery is that they are all focused on supply-chain challenges and ignore the obvious massive demand for the product. Of all the problems you can have in business, the only one that cannot be overcome is a lack of demand.

Widespread 1-day delivery of retail goods would have seemed totally absurd and unscalable just 20 years ago ("What, are we gonna FedEx overnight everything? Ridiculous!") and yet here we are. When there is demand, supply will rise to meet it almost every time.

Someone will figure out the logistics to make this work and become the Amazon of food (perhaps Amazon?).
How often do other HN users get takeout and delivery in an average week?

For myself I usually grab one takeout meal a week. I haven't had food delivered in years.

The proliferation and mainstreaming of food delivery with all the food apps is one of those big trends that totally passed me by. I'm not really happy about the whole thing since it seems to only be working because of squeezed independent restaurants, low paid gig-workers, and lots of VC cash injections. In it's current incarnation, it's not really sustainable but with Covid killing off a huge swath of restaurants that calculus has totally changed.

I expect that to only last for a while though. Restaurant people are an independent and cantankerous group. Ghost kitchens might be a good place to start - like food trucks - but most will want to move on to their own place eventually.
> better for restaurants and chefs by lowering the entry barrier to start a business

Ultimately this winds up better for the owner of the CloudKitchens and worse for restaurants and most likely consumers. Already these services create their own restaurants to compete with the businesses paying them for the space.

How long before they are using the data of a successful place to create a knockoff that ranks higher? It's probably already happened.
Because most people want to import numbers as numbers most of the time. Excel detects numbers and treats them as numbers. You do have the option to import them as text. So, Excel (as usual) does what's the best for most people.
My solution to this was to set my Twitter account to private and kick out almost all my followers. So if I do get tempted to tweet a reply to something, no one will see it anyway.
I agree that seeking evidence is how issues are addressed. The problem is that evidence is being sought in a particular way, which systematically biases which evidence is available for consideration.

Edit: there is a further problem that because many interpretations of the same facts are possible if you go looking for certain things you will very likely find them. While someone with different initial beliefs will find evidence of something else. All from the same facts.
Ha, that's actually no longer the case. Stores like Best Buy do track foot traffic and it's accounted for in KPIs. My manager would have us enter and leave around the security sensors so we wouldn't inflate that number.
The writer is ex + early Uber, I'm sure he's doing fine.
Excel is quick and easy. From startup to import to calculation. You haven't imported a single line with Python or R.
Also, on the list of dumb things that make me roll my eyes at Microsoft, interpreting the string "MARCH1" as a date and trying to normalize date formats isn't exactly the dumbest.
> quietly inject ads inside Google and Bing search results

This is what Google and Bing do already, it's imperceptible to the average user.

Are these 3rd party ad extensions any worse than Google or Microsoft? They all vacuum up your data and show your ads.
Wow this is really great! I was literally looking for something like this just a few days ago.
Does it handle payments for a backer?
Each instance of it isn't necessarily malicious, but the way they all end up causing harm to the same people makes the system as a whole act as if it were malicious. Especially when combined with a proportion of people who are actively malicious, and when any attempts to address the systemic issue are dismissed.

When it comes to us in particular, we can each truthfully say "it wasn't my fault and I didn't mean any harm". But harm happens, and Hanlon's razor becomes dull with repeated application like that. As another rule goes, "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action".

The solutions to systemic problems aren't simple. They certainly include rejecting the people who are outright being malicious. They also include a willingness to say, "Gosh, I keep using this didn't-mean-anything excuse. Maybe I need to start instead meaning to not do it."
What's the benefit for humans and why can't it be done any other way?

I'm not a big fan of encountering insects. Very weird to see someone would actually want to protect them in cities.

> Light traps for insects are to be banned outdoors

So you won't be able to kill mosquitoes outside?
How did this escape my attention till now? Thanks for the link! :)
Some items like fresh fruits & vegetables are usually loose & sold by weight. How are things like this handled without scales?
Show HN: Fly through 170,000 works of art organized by Deep Learning
Search for wildflower seed bomb mix, you shouldn't get in trouble for this. My mom used to do this every year when I lived in Germany, looks pretty and zero maintenance.
By default you're not guaranteed the exact same output in two compiled binaries. There's a lot of variable bits[1] that make into binaries from C and C++. Different languages/compilers have different levels of variable bits.

[1] https://blog.conan.io/2019/09/02/Deterministic-builds-with-C...
Only Reconciliation Can Cancel Transgressions
I understand that Excel allows for a quick glance, but I'm not sure how R does not offer the same visual cues? Assuming that the data originates from some csv/table structure, Excel requires some GUI clicking and R needs a read.csv() call.

I would say R is a lot more useful for a quick check on whether all columns have one data structure, contain NaN/NA's, are of equal length, etc.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/10/leds-good-prizes-bad...
That's a good way to get in trouble, and rightfully so. We're not having streetlights because we want to kill insects, we have them for safety reasons. You do not want to travel in absolute darkness in a city with cars around.

Trying to interfere with that because you're too lazy to buy a black-out curtain is a terrible idea.
Why should Excel change? Most people mean March, the first, when they enter march1.

Researchers should use other, more appropriate tools, or at the very least specify the column type when importing data into Excel. It's not that hard.
Why hasn’t the field standardized around another tool? Is the list of excel plugins that something libreoffice couldn’t replace it, where they could just make add the options they need? My guess is the field is mostly lacking people interested in working on tooling like this?
Insects are kind of vital to us. Without them, you can't have crops or fruits, no agriculture. The drop in population is already concerning.
NeRF in the Wild: reconstructing 3D scenes from internet photography
Even before COVID there were a lot of trends supporting food ordering among the working class: depression, anxiety, car-lessness, weed legalization, etc. I'm not happy about the volume I've been hitting ranging from maybe 2-5 times a week.
Germany: Time to ‘Get Out Now’?
Are you suggesting that journalists should follow white supremacists as part of their general truth-seeking without people assuming they endorse the white supremacist's message?

Or are you suggesting that white supremacists should not be shunned as a matter of course in normal interaction/conversation?
If I use those words a lot I will consider changing from YAML since it might be the wrong tool.
And Myst the game was made with it (and plenty other's from the Miller brothers)
Technically you don't need to touch the naked wire, you only need to remove (carefully) the outer insulation and have the two (still insulated) wires separated for a few centimeters.

Then there are splitter clamps.

The most common ones are used (low voltage) on cars and motorcycles, they look like these:

https://www.mesconnettori.it/index.cfm/it/ricerca/?flbr=ruba...

But there are professional ones, suitable to 110 or 240 V example:

https://www.techno.it/en/products/all/thb-370-a2a/
But they don't, and that's a problem. It's an education problem: everybody automatically defaults to Excel, even when it's not the proper tool. People need to learn about better tools.
Snapchat adding features to help young people vote in the US election
Except AWS and Apple can and do recompile the ocean, even over to ARM. AVX512 free chips and gutting legacy X86 are worth it, perhaps an x86_64_2020 target?
My router has a built in word filterer. So I just added-

analytic, adservice, pixel,doubleclick, googlead,facebook, applauncher, Xiaomi,track, taboola and outbrain.

This only applies to subdomains and domains(due to Https).

So adservice.google.com is blocked but google.com/adservice is allowed.
Ask HN: 2020 state of the art baremetal provisionning?
With the explosion of virtualisation, cloud, container, it seems baremetal is suffering from loss of interest. But still baremetal racking and provisioning are essential to provide hardware support, cpu and storage to any kinds of upper layers.
From an opensource perspective, and editor free, what are the best 2020 solutions to manage thousand of baremetal servers in multi data centers, distro agnostic ?
Are we still stuck with bootp/tftp kickstart or preseed? What if I want to masterise servers as agile as popping a VM in a cloud service ?
Are most company managing thousand of thousand of servers using homemade solution ? Or does an on the shelve solution exist?
I'm in no place to recommend technologies to chose (I'm no expert) but the documentation argument is a good one. There are a lot of articles from the past few decades introducing different odds and ends with PHP. Additionally, PHPDocs are great but they're nothing in comparison to the tutorials and examples provided by things like ReactJS' or Vue's official docs.
Also in the piece, "Jonathan Rochelle, the lead product manager for Google’s suite of collaborative tools from 2005 to 2013, said that he and his team found that having more than 25 to 50 editors on a single document made it hard for people to collaborate effectively."

The technical limitation is 2-4 times what the former product manager believed was a human limitation already. Scaling beyond that doesn't seem like a priority.
Better stuff?
I know jokes are frowned upon in this forum, but I will take a chance on this one because I think it is relevant and is food for thought:

A Venn diagram. Left circle is "Excel", right circle is "Incel", intersection is "incorrectly assuming something is a date".
This reputable enough for you?

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...
How long before Apple has even 1 proprietary extension to arm64 without which macOS won't run? As soon as hw without that extension is EoL, no more hackintoshes.
> Rosetta uses an MSR to switch the memory model

Even if you give up on Rosetta, there’s all the other MSRs you’ll need to patch–there’s not a huge number of these, but since EL0 has direct access to at least one of these you can’t just patch the kernel.

> PAC, not a big risk factor, trap once and then patch to the non-PAC variant at worst for instructions that aren't in the NOP space.

You know, I don’t think Apple really uses the backwards-compatible encodings at all. Probably since they don’t need to?
Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but perhaps a site trying to seriously discuss bias against Breitbart shouldn't use :ok: as a favicon.
> Has there ever been an influenza/coronavirus-like infection with less than 0.1% fatality rate in working-age people (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/singapore/) that caused lasting disability in a significant proportion of the population?

I've read that the low fatality rate of Singapore is due to mostly foreign, younger, healthy workers being the "cases" who were infected. Assuming that, the statistics of Singapore is not in any way inconsistent with what is observed in other locations. We already know that the older people have an order of magnitude higher probabilities to die while infected, or even two orders of magnitude when old enough.

Note that the "fatality rate" in this context then says absolutely nothing about the permanent damages of the people's organs. The fatality rate is just "who promptly died after being detected positive." We don't know how many of Singapore cases remained with worse health after being infected, or even if some died or will die later, after being declared virus-free, and it's not probable that we'll know, them being the foreign workers.

Therefore, it seems that citing Singapore in this way is irrelevant while talking about the known and reported cases of people with damaged health in, for example, the U.S.

We need other statistics.
Absolutely true, and I’d probably feel the same about using Windows. For some reason interacting with the Windows UI causes my hand to cramp up.

I have, and do use Linux semi regulary, but I customize NOTHING. I don’t want to manage my computer. The defaults in macOS is sane enough.
Well as I have posted before, my neighborhood went full LED last year with street lights and so every night is like a full moon. This has become widespread not just in subdivisions but everywhere as people see LED lighting as free.

Perhaps they were a bit oversold.
A google form that inserted the links into a public but read-only sheet would have performed fine I'm guessing
yup, that's it. i couldn't recall the name for the practice, so thanks for that!
Wait till you throw a package.json with "type": "module" in there.

Everything used to work until Node 12.15, then 12.16 started throwing when trying to require type:module packages with `require` (which is what `esm` does)

https://github.com/standard-things/esm/issues/868
My backyard in Louisiana has zero, zilch, nada. However; when I lived in NYC, I would see them all of the time on riverside.
Essential Toolbox for the Web 🧰
LibreOffice Calc is free and doesn't corrupt data. It also has full support of UTF8
Will you increase your rps limits? Surely they are a big blocker for larger organizations.
It would probably not have shipped in that case, but the amount of product managers actually using their own products sadly isn't at the saturation you'd expect.

Same with all the white labeling and supply chain and integrators in between; the disconnect between all of the stages and the contracts that can bind a bad product to be delivered and sold anyway can't be fixed on just one end of the process.
I've listened to this conversation several times without looking it up, so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly#Conservation

"Firefly populations are declining worldwide, for a variety of reasons.[25] Fireflies, like many other organisms, are directly affected by land-use change (e.g. loss of habitat area and connectivity), which is identified as the main driver of biodiversity changes in terrestrial ecosystems.[26] Pesticides and weed-killers have also been indicated as a likely cause of firefly decline.[27]"

"Finally, since fireflies depend on their own light to reproduce [28] they are also very sensitive to environmental levels of light and consequently to light pollution.[28][29] Multiple recent studies investigate deeply the effects of artificial night lighting on fireflies.[30][31]"

[25]: https://www.firefly.org/
For surveying-type requests you should probably be using a Google Form which links to a Sheet (with limited access control). You shouldn't be giving everyone simultaneous edit access to the document.
I personally dislike this behavior in Excel, as I'm accustomed to working with plaintext data and using pandas/strftime to get datetimes as I need them. But I also figure that my situation as a technical user is likely in the minority, compared to people who are using spreadsheets every day to do manual data entry.

That said, I completely agree with the tangential issue of U.S. dates being misleadingly different in format compared to non-U.S. Always an issue when teaching data/spreadsheets to a class with at least one non-American – but also a good reason to teach them the value of ISO8601 :)
To be fair, they do say upfront that only nation-state-level attackers are likely to attempt this. It reminds me of a quote from James Mickens[0]:

> In the real world, threat models are much simpler. Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good pass-word and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@virus-basket.biz.ru. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.

[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thisworldofo...
The reasonable default should be not to change existing data. If the user wants to, by all means do it, but not before. If you want to be smart about it, offer a popup asking if a particular column or field should be interpreted as a number or date, but by default, keep everything a string.
You would hope not, but given the number of stories these days that are just, “hey look at this Tweet!”, I don’t think we can expect that much.

https://youtu.be/mpHiDsnqOSA
Hope it happens for all sites going forward. Alongside everyone supporting prefers-color-scheme for dark modes.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...
This is awesome , I wish more countries did the same. Also good news for stargazers, you see more stars at night when city lights are dim or use protection to avoid light pollution.
It doesn't take being an expert at Excel to understand how Excel autoformats. It takes a few days of actually working with data or an introductory class that's today taught in American primary schools.
> As with any new technology,

Not a technology.

> the naysayers have already published conclusive takes on why this is an episode from Black Mirror

This is a fairly dismissive treatment; it's quite reasonable to raise concerns about this sort of new business practice.

All in all, a strange, low-content article.
What did Dark Sky use? Their source was always very accurate for me.
In grad school I had a friend that was doing olfactory (smell) research on rats with tetrode drives (wires in their brain). He was looking at the neuronal response to smells that they gave the rats and had a few signals to match up. There was the signal from the arduino running the scent gates, the amps that reported the weak neuronal currents, the nose lasers that gated the ardunio, etc. He was having a hard time getting through all the data in his MatLab code and I offered to help for some beer.

After the 11th nested 'if' statement, I upped the request to a case of beer. I'm not certain he ever got the code working.

To the larger point, scientists are not programmers. They got into their programs to do research. What keeps them going is not the joy of programming, but the thrill of discovery. Programming is nothing but a means to an end. One they will do the bare minimum to get working. Asking hyper stressed out grad students to also become expert coders isn't reasonable.

And yes, that means that the code is suspect at best. If you load the code on to another computer, make sure you can defenestrate that computer with ease, do not use your home device.
I feel like Sheets should gracefully fail much better than it does under load, especially for supposedly being Google-scale. With more users, instead of not loading at all, or starting then failing to load, it would be nice to see the most recent change in read-only mode, and show an edit timeline like the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine UI shows archive occurrences on a calendar. Just a couple ideas for how Sheets could break down gracefully while retaining usability.
Are journalists not supposed to have friends? Is Twitter use indicative of a person's entire communication pattern? Perhaps Twitter is best used as a tool for communicating with close aquaintences than with the broader world. Everyone is a dickhead on Twitter, so how can you blame anyone for muting/blocking the hell out of everything on there?
Site exposes personal data on 115,000 Covid-19 quarantine exemption applicants
Fun fact: they started to care (only), because it's going to affect people. The drop in insect populations has become concerning. Without them, no crops, no fruits, no agriculture, which isn't that great a prospect for humans.
> If you mean 'liberal young open-source company' then say that! Because that absolutely isn't what 'Silicon Valley' means.

I didn't say that. I am a different person asking a different question. I recognize that it's a bit silly to call Red Hat a "Silicon Valley company" because they are not in Silicon Valley. Just like Microsoft isn't a Silicon Valley company.

My original question was in regards to this exact quote of yours:

> The Carolinas seem as far as you can get from Silicon Valley, culturally

And my question was:

> Why do you think that?

So far you have offered that "The Carolinas" are politically Republican and California is politically Democratic. However, (a) North Carolina's governor is a Democrat and (b) your original comparison was between Silicon Valley (a small geographic area) and "The Carolinas" (a much larger geographic area) — which does not seem like a fair or meaningful comparison.

Basically, due to the uniform nature of American culture and cities I think you'd be hard-pressed to identify many meaningful cultural differences between e.g. Raleigh, North Carolina and Mountain View, California. So I'm wondering if you have any unique insight to offer there or if you're actually just talking flippantly about something you don't actually know anything about, which is fine too.
If people are just looking at the spreadsheets then wouldn’t the cells interpreted as dates not be a problem? It seems like it would only be a problem if you’re doing computation on the cells.
Tentative paper in the Lancet about it.

Quite why there is so much objection to something that is likely a good thing in any case makes you wonder what the issue is with it.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...
How to access physical addresses from user space in Linux?
This is the second story on the front page about the weakness of modern spreadsheet software. It could be cool if someone stepped forward and showed us how to do spreadsheets using everything we now know, like what git did with source control back in the mid 2000s.