skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there's room for both worlds. People have certainly done as you describe - just picking examples from the micro:bit ecosystem that I know well - Microsoft MakeCode is an example of something that takes a "block" world and maps to either JavaScript or Python. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/makecode or as an example http://makecode.microbit.org/. Edublocks does similar for Python (or specifically MicroPython) https://edublocks.org/.

When you start working directly with kids watching them use programming environments, though, it's often amazing how quickly things like the details of parallelism, events, sequencing, start having an impact on programs and making simple things feel 'broken'. I can quite imagine that when trying to achieve specific goals in education, the details and semantics of a language can get you into trouble. Sometimes in order to ensure kids don't get frustrated early, it's necessary to pare back some of the complexity until their understanding of computing is developed enough to bring complexity back... (have a look at https://makecode.microbit.org/device/reactive as an example of how MakeCode deals with this on the micro:bit).

Another example that comes to mind on this topic is https://stride-lang.net/ - this is very Java-derived, but as I understand it form their publications, the changes away from Java were necessary in order to allow some of the graphical/scaffolding features to work well without entering an 'uncanny valley'.

Hopefully some of the MicroBlocks team will also chime in on this though!
I'm honestly hoping to see someone respond to you with why that would be a bad thing. Given my experience with TypeScript and how it makes my life easier, I can't see why anyone would have issue with it, but I know it must exist.
I hadn't heard of this till now, but I'm fascinated by projects like this.

Others in this thread have said that there are leadership issues currently, leading to some kind of stagnation or decline. You said in another comment that Paolo was controlling in terms of the vision, and it needed multiple visions to succeed.

1) Can you expand on that? i.e., what would it take for Arcosanti to have succeeded? Just Paolo letting people run with it?

2) What, if anything, would it take to "revive" Arcosanti today? Money? Visionaries? Kicking people out?

3) Why did you live there? Why did you leave? Any interesting stories?
Excel is not fundamentally suited, but it's fundamentally used.

I wish you luck, but I long ago declared defeat against Excel. I can't prevent everyone from using it. I have come to accept that whatever Excel does is what I have to live with, because someone, somewhere out there hasn't heard the anti-Excel gospel yet.
For Germany this converts to the first of Feb, and this way of entering dates is just so convenient, as you can type the whole date just using the keys from the num block. We do actually support this format in our app for date entry, simply because it's so convenient.
thank you very much for this official resource, I just knew djb's copy. There's also the predecessor in german reading "Die Software Explosion" https://darknet.mro.name/1994-wirth-explosion.txt

IMO a great read for everybody interested in long-term reliability or sustainability.
Journalism as a public media profession is highly dependent on social currency for professional prospects. It’s one of the -last- professions that can risk being associated with the wrong tribe, in the current context of culture war.

And I see little evidence that journalists are anything but bought-in.
Some ideas have been tested, there was an entertaining talk a few years back at DefCon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bpX8YvNg6Y
There is also the extra helpful hub: https://github.com/github/hub

It is a wrapper around git (you can alias it to the git command) that adds GH-aware things, like checking out a PR by URL or number, or opening up the repo page with `git browse`.
Life, part 29
Of course there's a Wikipedia article for it. With a concerning amount of listing.

"A truck carrying dynamite and 4.5 tons of ammonium nitrate caught fire early in the morning of August 7, 1959. "
I read the article and parent is correct in part. However, equally the article touches on the fact that many people may use a spreadsheet and not all will be correctly trained to use their complex tools properly, in order to ensure data integrity.

I consider this a failing not in software or Excel, but in education and professional standards. Scientists can be expected to understand and use their tools correctly, since not doing so will taint their data.
>I'd actually like to see HN try this for a day.

Meh, HN already has hidden functionality that they don't tell users about, and honestly it feels like psychological torture. For example, all of my posts lose points after posting. For a long time, I thought a bot was following me and downvoting me. No, I was just being tortured by dang, feeling like I was crazy for all of my posts receiving down votes. Unless I consistently only post things that subscribe to the norm, I will be in a points deficit. I will never be able to downvote posts and participate in the community at large. I've effectively been cancelled, mostly for having different opinions and partly for responding to trolls in an unhelpful way. I'm working on the second part, but I don't think that's the problem.

I'm not interested in trying to psychologically harm people, especially in a time when social activities only really exist on the internet.
Well, everybody should set up their own, custom script powered favourite DB of course.

Ok, seriously, it would be nice to te able to recommend a alternative. I heard LibreOffice Calc is not really equivalent?
You mean like https://github.com/RoaringBitmap/CRoaring ?
Maybe because the VM needs to run on rather limited hardware, not capable of running any of those "real" languages -- that might be the reasoning behind it. On the other hand, ESP32 and similar boards can run not only Lua and JavaScript, but even ClojureScript, so it depends on where you draw the line.
> Today their research is focused on new mechanisms to improve scalability and enable offline digital currency transactions.

I'm a bit lost here about offline digital currency transactions, I have no clue on what concept can make it possible, can anyone enlighten me please?
> the number of people with crippling long-term effects is minimal

The thousands of of reported "long haulers" is troubling. While not crippling, feeling tired and feverish every day for months does not sound pleasant. It also raises awareness that viruses in general (not just Covid) could potentially help explain long term lingering health issues.
> Excel is fundamentally not suited to analysing *omics data

you are 100% correct. and yet it will continue to happen.
>However, the caveat to that is that journalists are on Twitter, pay a lot of attention to Twitter, and report it as reality. Getting dogpiled on Twitter may not matter, but having it reported in newspapers may make it matter.

And how many people read newspapers?

The only thing that matters to a business is when people show up with placards in front of the business, or the CEOs house. The cases where that happens are so few and far between that by ignoring everything a newspaper writes you improve your business's performance by the simple fact you're not paying someone to waste time. The rest of it can be summed up as "don't get caught putting babies in blenders".
Article linked from:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/aug/06/clive-ponti...

Which clarifies it was originally published in The Observer in July 1985, having being leaked by a British civil servant. Some information about the case is on wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cauldron

And more information about British biological warfare tests, post-WWII have been published, e.g. by The Independent (2015):

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/how-the-briti...
Thanks, Coach
Also you can single quote ‘MARCH1 to keep it as string. This is safer as when you share the file you don’t know if the next person has the same settings change you described. Either way, it’s only 27 genes they had to rename. Seems like a good choice on their part to just rename them. Hopefully they’re doing this check during the naming stage for new genes.
The fact is, and it may sound like a paradox, that, for more than one reason, it is the humans themselves that is the biggest danger to their own existence in the long term.
Do you mean the code in http://www.netlib.org/fp/ under dtoa.c? (for strtod)... It appears from https://lemire.me/blog/2020/03/10/fast-float-parsing-in-prac... that he doesn't even claim to have had the idea for the floating point conversion code... What is the connection?
In practice, this makes a noticeable difference; it's why you can't buy paracetamol in significant quantities in the UK, why the suicide rate fell when the UK switched from toxic coal gas to natural gas, and so on.

Suicide motivation is usually understood as "depression", but antidepressants aren't entirely reliable in this case. It's very hard to reach inside someone's head unless they're willing to tell you. Neither of the two people I knew who killed themselves left notes. Both were on antidepressants.
As a bioinformatician I'm not too fond of this shift. Software should be sculpted around our needs, not the other way around. It's basically submitting to the fact that we've stubbed our toes hundreds of times to the exact same rock and never learned.

But then again, I use Excel rarely, usually only at the very end of some analysis (even then I prefer R/Python libraries for visuals). So I do have sympathy for wet-lab researchers who rely heavily on Excel.
A national radio system was in use by 1942.

I don't think it was common in the 1920s however. There was the 30s + Depression era, which could have resulted in losing some knowledge by the 40s as workers shifted jobs.
See this Exchange thread [0]

I personally use Table Tool for the most basic editing/collection.

[0] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/15946/free-csv-tex...
I tried this, and it seems very useful, but there's no documentation and the CLI help command doesn't work. Why make a tool and then not tell anyone how to use it? It's frustrating. No combination of `glab help command` or `glab command --help` works.
It’s been a while since I fooled around with that. I’ll give it another look.
Show HN: SameTunes – A Music Compatibility Platform for Spotify
And what are the alternative's silent pitfalls, areas of common misunderstanding et al? Replacing a tool because it is not used properly is just asking to receive another tool to be misused.
New Students Show Diversity of U.C.’S Freshman Class
How Big Is Opera Software?
>based on its glorified bugs

If someone types MARCH1, DEC1, OCT4, SEPT1 into a column, why should Excel not treat these as dates? Probably 99.999% of users would prefer this auto-understanding. To make users have to then select cell formatting and select date is a terrible UI decision.

It's odd to call such a useful feature a bug.

>Excel is fundamentally not suited to analysing *omics data

But it's excellent for a massive range of basic analysis and especially for a unified platform to share results, which is why everyone uses it. It's good for publication or proposal steps of creating graphs from data output from other more specialized systems, that usually lack the flexibility and widespread use that Excel has.

If my group uses some specialized, often in house, analysis software, my results cannot be spread to others unless I put them into a more common and accessible format. And nothing in the genomics and wider scientific community has anywhere near the widespread availability as Excel.

You might as well complain they also use word docs instead of Latex or troff. Not everyone wants to spend days fighting software instead of doing work.
The problem is that your average business user of Excel thinks type safety is a bug, not a feature. If Excel enforced types instead of guessing on your behalf, a lot of people would complain.

And it would be really hard to explain why it is sometimes useful to have constraints to someone who normally sees Excel's flexibility as its main strength.

I don't think I've ever seen a non coder use Excel in a sensible way: maintainable, easy to change, consistent meanings of entities, simple to understand. It's always a ball of spaghetti, even for pretty small projects. Loads of VLOOKUPs, external DLLs, buttons everywhere, vba files galore. Plus they lay out the cells haphazardly.
> This is a somewhat pessimistic outlook on humanity, first off I would say that those who are most commonly at risk are those with trade secrets. Patented tech and investment intel for example.

Can you provide any evidence at all of police or "thugs" (or anyone, really) kicking down doors to get at trade secrets being a common problem? Because there are countless news articles of police raids seizing computers to stop child porn[0].

I speculate any tool billed as "anti-forensic" will be used for immoral purposes more commonly than moral purposes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Fogle#Child_pornography_...
> swap to a long network cable fast enough that TCP sessions probably didn't time out

I'm just picturing the networking equivalent Indiana Jones swapping the idol with sand in Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
I work in excel every day and, if this is true, you needed to spend like 30 seconds on google to find a half dozen solutions to this. Turn off auto-calculations, delete pivots, write fewer vlookups, etc...

It's roughly the equivalent of saying "whenever my C program gets too big the 'core dumps,' whatever that means - a totally useless language"
Have you taken a look at Wizard?

https://www.wizardmac.com/support.html
Suggest an SEO Agency
Is there any SEO agency you are working with?

If so, what kind of benefits did you see?

Is it better to work with an SEO agency or is it to use any SEO tools like Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush?
I don't disagree completely with this, but just want to point out that it's kind of a bad smell to have computational biologists who are - as someone in the article puts it - computationally illiterate. I have met lots of these types over the years, and usually their methods are kind of a gong show. If you can't properly sanitize your data inputs on your column headers, why should I trust that you've treated the rest of your data properly?
Most countries will not extradite their citizens to other countries for act that aren't crimes in their own country. This was a crime in both Costa Rica and the United States.
Imagine that this is the group of people your adult life hangs by a thread with. How can you be expected to respect their decision on a very technically complex crime when they can't even setup a zoom call...
For those of you interested, there's a great book about play called Homo Ludens, from Huizinga.
Astatine proton beam mystery solved
I thought GP was talking about 'knowledge of the possibility'
I wish there were polls for black bars.

I wish there were more transparency on who gets one and why.
I would assume that within unsafe you could simply do the same kinds of shenanigans you would do in C++, e.g. you have a fixed size struct that is just the "header", it's only created on the heap, and it's immediately followed by the variable amount of data which you get access to by casting. If you couldn't do this in unsafe rust this seems like a pretty huge limitation.
I would imagine that's thermite and not termite ;)

If the latter, the server would probably be okay, and it would take a very long time for the termites to damage the surrounding room enough to be a security deterrent.
Even if you correctly format a column, excel will ignore that if it sees something that looks like a date. That's part of the problem: this isn't just automatic formatting, it's very aggressive and hard to turn off. Plus you cannot revert the changes excel has made: turning 01/02 is converted to an ibt in 46000 range. So reformatting the cell doesn't get the original input back, it just lands you with a bunch of ints.

Back in the day I actually wrote a function that would undo this for some sheets that people kept breaking...
How Twitter Fuels Anxiety (2017)
Yes, a lot more goes into it than that.
My point still stands. Reddit is way more diverse opinion-wise by nature of allowing more diverse topics and less moderation.
Ask HN: Any personal dashboards that you use?
Am looking for a dashboard tool where i can configure tasks, twitter feeds, few stocks and news integrations, any suggestions?
Havent read the article, but come on. Tools should serve us, not the other way around. It'd be enough just to change the affected cells' type.
Facebook removes Trump post over false Covid-19 claim for first time
I don't actually follow anyone on twitter. I just got to three or four specific pages to see what content they've posted. Usually they share an interesting selection of tweets, which gets me exposure to more than just those specific people.

I don't really understand what the purpose of following someone is
But why?

When making bold statement make an effort to give a reasoning behind it.
... and wha' if Earth jus' 'splodes one day... (takes another sip)
He designed the music amphitheater for his wife, who had passed away before I met Soleri. We talked about the slow uptake of people wanting to live in low-resource communal living areas like Arcosanti - that was a disappointment to him.

I like the idea of low-energy and environmental impact living at places like Arcosanti but my wife said no way!

If you search for his work, he did some awesome stuff.
Ah yes, the classic answer. Ironically proven wrong in the post you've commented on as a group of boomers are about to throw away the rest of the life of a kid who literally did know far more than them for exactly that.
Yep, they removed it

"Beginning from Firefox version 23, Firefox web browser from Mozilla has removed the UI to disable and enable the JavaScript (JS) on web pages from “Content” tab of web browser’s Options menu."

https://techjourney.net/disable-javascript-in-firefox/
That doesn't mean it isn't spurious. Spurious just means that there isn't a causal relation between the two variables (in either direction).

Check the wiki page; there are some examples there that will make the argument about as eloquently as HN comments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurious_correlation
They produced a few low volume 10nm laptop parts so they could say 10nm has finally shipped. They can’t produce enough volume to move their whole product line over.
Interesting broad look but what if Greeks die from lack of hospital care more ? (non biased question, I have no agenda)
Give Me a Break Day – Building SaaS #67 · Matt Layman
I wonder if the pulse oxes in China are calibrated for Chinese skin or White skin? Many people are buying pulse oxes straight off of Alibaba and they might be getting readings that are too low if the calibration is off.
Covid-19: Not all patients develop protective antibodies
I spent 30 minutes today convincing a Data scientist why she shouldn't use excel to store her interim data and that even an untyped data forms such as csv or json would be a better medium compared to an excel document.
Excel datetime functions are garbage. you have to explicitly, manually tell it not to format things as dates, the most destructive data type, but it doesn't act that way for other formats (e.g., $ doesn't turn things into accounting format).

That said: every datetime function I've ever written is also garbage so... glass houses, I guess?
It's still a decent amount of overhead to even make the request for those bytes.
I’ll be surprised if they are calibrated at all.
That's because CSV is an untyped data format.

Why don't people use the import options available to them? You can select the precise data type of each column if you know the format anyway.

While the default choices that Excel makes are questionable at times, they're both known and can easily be overridden.
For the same reason why Canada regulates a whole array of things you might find mundane. To ideally benefit society.

For example, in Canada it is illegal to sell unenriched flour. Flour sold in Canada has to fortified with things like folic acid, riboflavin, and thiamine. Why? Because this helps contribute to Canada having one of the lowest birth defect and infant mortality rates in the world. This kind of thinking extends to regulations around food prep in restaurants, car safety, pharmaceuticals, etc...

Given the single payer health insurance that is pervasive in Canada, the government(s) are incentivized to ensure proper delivery of services and care as efficiently as possible.

Canada is far from nor will it ever be some libertarian hellhole.
I got deep into sqlite json handling recently and its actually has really powerful json support out-of-the-box. I thought I was going to have to move to Postgres for some of my parsing/querying but haven't had the need so far.
Thanks! I'll give it a try this weekend. I tend to isolate, so social gaming is not my comfort zone, which is why I like to play Minetest on my local machine by myself. I do play with my kids in the same game on one computer though, so there is hope ;)
This was a plot device used in the TV series Mr. Robot Season 2, Episode 3, about 27 minutes in.
> what tradeoffs did companies
> what made companies adopt it

Which companies are you referring to?

> Why did everyone leave PHP?

When did that happen? If everyone did "leave PHP", what will happen to all those websites:

https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php

> What made Postgres become popular?

It's good. People know about it. Other reasons.

Here's an article you may find interesting:

https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/nov/30/bye-bye-mongo-h...

> Does there exist a chart with maybe

A chart like this does not exist.
And other fields are probably stuck with bad word processing papercuts.
Daniel Piker: Design exploration through minimisation. Part 2
Any possibility of using mmap?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mmap
Is the simple renaming of 27 genes a good solve? I think it is. Any time you expect people to be trained, you’re planning for failure. Even a trained person can make a mistake or forget to do the manual steps. This eliminates the possibility.
Lancet is one of the foremost medical journals. Peer review does not filter out 100% of bad papers.

For very understandable reasons, there's a huge pressure right now to get information about CoVID-19 out to the public (and to the medical community) quickly. That means that more bad papers are going to slip through right now.

But what's the alternative? Would you rather that critical results about CoVID-19 be withheld for longer, in order to more thoroughly vet results? That's reasonable, but it involves a trade-off, and the Lancet would no doubt face criticism in the opposite direction if they withheld papers for longer.
Very informative post
https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/06/whatsapp-web-scan.html?m...
> Indonesia has turned out the best of the bunch?

I've got a hunch the up to 1 million dead might say differently.
This accords with my experience.

When I worked in clinical trial design/analysis, no one did their analyses in excel, but for initial data formatting and clean-up? /everything/ went through excel, even if the final cleanup was a python script.

You’re not going to have the same ease of eyeballing your data in SPSS or SAS or R.
This is an important issue to consider because as we are witnesses a Cambrian Explosion in 'new tech' (and by the way, in 'new' we can include evolutions of 'current') ... we need to grasp that 'a new piece' is is just going to be 'one of many pieces'.

My first instinct these days is how that funky new bit of Lego fits with all the other bits of Lego.

When you start there, it's becomes easy to understand just how incumbent C++ and javascript are, even with all their necessary spells and arcane witchcraft.